IV. CHANGE OF SEASON

‘That of all people he turns out to be a Casanova. One-fifty is nothing I’d recommend!’

In the nurses’ room, they are letting their tea cool in the small, calcified cups, ordering aprons and caps and desperately chirping among one another in the hopes of finding some kind of explanation.

‘The invalids, I’m telling you, the invalids,’ one warbles.

‘Well, two of them have found each other,’ another one adds.

‘But who did he find? Eugenia or her sister?’

‘No, no, she’s too attractive for him, that won’t turn into anything.’

‘But isn’t he back in Eugenia’s room again?’

‘What’s he got to tell her? Nothing goes on here. Not a thing.’

‘He’s in her room but guess who he came with.’

‘You can’t be serious!’

‘Indeed, indeed.’

‘Something fishy’s going on! The Party’s behind it,’ one of them says, spilling cold tea in fear. The others look at her and her chubby cheeks grow red, a red the hollow faces of the patients could never turn, not even if they had fevers.

‘Indeed, indeed.’ The oldest breaks the silence. ‘That’s how it goes. The invalids. They play by different rules.’

All of them nod, relieved, pour themselves more tea, and the clatter of cups and spoons and voices again fills the room. They, the nurses from Silver Wood, know it better than the people outside: in the end, the softest hold out the longest. Their intellects are transparent for feelings, something they have in common with the mystics alone, and their misty presence draws everyone’s eyes but their true paths remain unknown. Invalids are never completely present anywhere, but they are never entirely absent either, with their hazy corporeality they manage to penetrate there where for other people are only walls, and that is why they remain irreplaceable for the Party. They build, if not the spine, then the fine nerve pathways along the vertebrae that, once clipped, bring the whole system down.

‘I don’t know, but this gnome scares me,’ Vera starts up again.

‘He’s better than the two bearded ones, that’s for sure,’ Polina says.

‘No, no, they’re harmless, they only want their soup and to play cards.’

‘You can’t trust the bearded ones at all,’ Polina says definitively.

‘What they want is to eat and to sleep and perhaps a woman. Or what they understand to be a woman,’ Anastasia counters, and Anastasia should know. Her grasp of what goes on in Silver Wood is better than all of theirs. She knows the patients’ and personnel’s and even the visitors’ dispositions, she knows their stories and even the rumours that they bring: in summer, it had to do with the lack of nutrients in the food, that is, if you could even get any food around the corner. Now, in winter, it’s the burnt leather breaking apart in all their ovens and shrinking since, due to a lack of wood, they’re burning furniture and books too, soon they’ll be burning air and the cold itself.

‘And what’s he got to do with Lenin?’

‘The little guy? He’s on the executive committee.’

‘Eugenia and Lenin. I’m telling you. Eugenia and Lenin. The Sardinian is simply their little plaything.’

When there’s a knock at the door, the nurses break into nervous laughter. They don’t know why. Anastasia sips her tea. Sofia orders her clothes another time. Vera opens the door. Gramsci. He is standing there sheepishly, a pair of pine branches in his hand.

Did they perchance have a vase?

The nurses rush to the door, Polina and Anastasia and Darya, even the hulking Sofia gets up from her chair. Gramsci looks from one to the other. Light reflects off the edge of his glasses. When you look him in the face, you forget how small he is. But other than his height and his eyes, what is there to say about him with any certainty?

Hardly a thing.

 

Eugenia awaits him with the same severity with which he left her behind in her Silver Woodian bed. She is sitting there as if he’d only been gone a few minutes, and perhaps that’s how it is here in Silver Wood, a safety zone which gives time but doesn’t take any while all around in the new Russia things are happening thick and fast.

But here too things have happened, Gramsci learns from Eugenia while trying to affix tiny candles to the fir branches. Head physician Reverend has disappeared like a fugitive landowner who all of a sudden has no past. And a small rebellion has begun, up on the top floor in the room of the two bearded men from Novograd who, since being admitted, have just sat there playing cards, neither of the two ever win, neither of the two ever lose, they simply quit as soon as one of their fortunes takes a turn for the worst and then start reshuffling the cards like mad. They are uninterested in the nurses or the garden paths, in the woods or in the food they receive three times a day.

‘Three times a day, but always at the wrong time,’ they’d mumble together in one voice.

While the Red Army was busy pushing on towards Novograd, the two were sitting with a sour soup of leftovers, hot beet-coloured water in which they placed their spoons and pulled out giblets, but they did not know whether they were of plants or animals, nor did they know what they thought about the Bolsheviks. Better than the tsar, worse than peace. Or the other way round. They didn’t know. The soup was only halfway gone when the cobbler from across the hall was standing in the doorway, his shop window empty a week now. Up until yesterday, there were twelve pairs of uninhabited shoes on his shelves, but now they had been plundered. They didn’t protest, they just left, were recruited, like the soup, that’s just what everything looked like in war. ‘Red giblets,’ they say.

‘They were mistrustful of everything,’ Eugenia says and sceptically observes the candles wobbling on the branches. ‘But most of all of Reverend. They just could not accept having someone like that dictate to them how to live. Someone like that who had not been in the war.’

Eugenia’s shoulder bone stands out beneath the fabric of her blouse, a small bight for a gun barrel. Gramsci is always embarrassed in her company, for while he was sitting in Turin writing his essays she was busy watching firefights and death between besieged forests and empty shoe-repair shops. And he cannot even decorate a fir branch.

‘And then all of a sudden it turns out he had been in the fight,’ Eugenia says. ‘It’s just that he was on the wrong side.’

‘With the White Army, really?’ Gramsci wants to be sure but then Giulia is standing in the doorway and the bearded men, the White Guards, even the candles, become unimportant. She smiles at him shyly and then looks at her sister.

‘Did the concert go well?’ Eugenia asks.

‘Yes, it . . . they were very happy.’

She lays the violin case on the table, opens it and checks something on the strings. He sees the light down on her neck, her tied-up hair—bent as she is over the case—fall across her cheek. He would like to take her in his arms, kiss her skin which smells faintly of pears and wood.

‘It must have been outstanding,’ Gramsci says. Giulia turns back towards him. She is glowing and he wonders if it’s only because of the Christmas concert she has just given, the patients’ applause, the appreciative nod of the new head physician that the Party has sent.

‘Everything that Giulia does is outstanding,’ Eugenia says, a bit too loudly. ‘Giulia herself is something rather outstanding. No? That’s what Papa always said.’

Gramsci and Giulia look at each other furtively.

‘We could light the candles,’ Gramsci suggests.

‘We will light the candles,’ Eugenia decides.

The room has cooled thanks to the cracks in the ceiling, the frost has spread across the windowpane and shares the view with its white crystals. Gramsci wakes up next to Giulia. Her whole body is visible, her ribs, her spine, the whole derelict, wonderful terrain, barely covered by a sheet, she should have woken up a long time ago on account of the cold but she continues to sleep with unbearable tenacity. Gramsci runs his hand carefully across her back, lays his hand in hers, her fingers soften, she lays sprawled, appears to wake, but then her breathing turns deep and even again.

He gets up. All at once having this woman so close to him seems strange. Unlike a few weeks ago, the overpowering sensations no longer make him nervous, the sense of distrust that everything could be a dream, a hypoglycaemic slip of his brain that, back in his student days, made him hallucinate an enormous spider on the ceiling. No, this here is, if anything, no hallucination. This woman has been involved with him too long already, stays by him even though he sends her away in his letters, constantly sends her away, makes terrible accusations when they see each other and no matter how harshly he shoos her off, she always comes back.

He quietly paces back and forth, looks at Giulia so harmlessly asleep, her too-beautiful face, her too-smooth body, her too-soft skin. She’s not here because of me, Gramsci thinks. That kind of woman doesn’t fall in love with a man like me.

Coming into her guestroom in Silver Wood’s visitors building, he found her under a blanket, her cumbersome bustier wedged into her chest. He had not turned on the light, had quietly gotten undressed, hung his suit over the back of the chair, his underwear, lifted up the blanket and crawled into bed next to her. She turns her back to him. With raw fingers he undoes the loops of her bustier, stops himself, kisses her shoulders, nestles up against all the lace and eyelets, it finally gives way, Giulia’s chest expands, he can still feel the incisions on her skin, she turns onto her back, looks to the wall. With his arm around the middle of her body, his thumbs stroke her stomach, circle her navel, her thighs open slightly. Giulia’s eyes are closed as he kisses her forehead, her temples. He rolls down her scratchy woollen stockings, moves his hand up her thighs, runs his fingers through the short, curly hair. He moves along the edge of her lips with his tongue, comes up against her teeth, then the tip of her tongue and deep and soft her mouth. He lays on top of her, Giulia winces when he enters. Her faint, fierce, compacted breathing. He grabs her hands, moves inside of her. The numbness in his head subsides. His body is no longer wrong, but collapses into a single point.

Giulia’s hands on his shoulders. She bites her lower lip, leans her head back. He remains on top of her, feels the throbbing of her body, raises himself on his fists and looks into her face. Her eyes are still closed. He slides away, lays down and hears her begin to cry. Every time she has to cry. Because everything’s there again, she says. Because she can see again. Because she once again knows what she has seen. Because she once again is alone with the huge and horrific world.

‘We have all seen things,’ he chides her and sits up. ‘Think about the ones who fought for us in the Civil War, you’re not the only one who’s close to the abyss, our times are challenging us to the very last, that’s how it is.’

She doesn’t answer, he just hears her soft, even sobbing. He would prefer to push Giulia away. She breaks too deeply into him and he wishes he could go back to the time when he only lived in his mind, in his first years in Turin when he never laughed but never cried either and believed everything could be overcome through work. Back then, he had lived so far removed from reality, outside of the world.

At last, Giulia opens her eyes, her gaze is glassy and absent as if her whole being were retreating, clotting around the last warm beat of her body. Gramsci turns his face away and stands up.

She never loved me! he thinks suddenly. It comes to him in an uncomfortably clear, simple and logical way. He walks up to the window, close to the cold, white January morning. She just couldn’t. One cannot fall in love with a man like him. He’d always known it. And this here, the fact that she was lying here, that she has kissed him and slept with him, this is all a sham, an enormous fraud. He should never have allowed her to come close to him. He sees Eugenia standing at the fence, their first meeting and how interested she was to learn he had never been in love. Why had she asked him about that? And why had he, hardly knowing her even an hour, answered?

He feels how cold it is in the room, but the sweat is streaming down his chest. Giulia has a purpose here. He knows it, how could he think for so long it was anything else? She does not fit into his life, between those houses eaten away by the salt and humidity, those open hillsides that emerge a marshy green. Sorgono, a tiny burg in the middle of nothing, where as a child he hunted little animals. On those late autumn days that hang mild and melancholic across Sardinia, he hunts hedgehogs and sits out in the fields under apple trees, quiet and hungry, sits there until the darkness falls between the houses with such a vehemence that the soup spills onto the plates and the sheep become mutinous in their stalls. He scurries home through the shadows, a dwarf, a cripple, a wisp through the landscape, and the quicker he runs the more he resembles a beetle that has fallen from a tree and is scuttling confusedly through the area. In the distance, the light from a house, forgotten halfway between one village and another, and that is Gramsci’s mother. Peppina presses herself against the walls of reddish lava rock, she’s always in the shadows, always on the lookout for glances, she does not want to be seen, she is ashamed to be the wife of a prisoner, not even drunk workers walk through the town at that time of day, there was nothing there but farms, pastures and a land-registry office that measured the size of the pastures. One slept when one found the time. The county seat was responsible for everything else.

She drags her escaped son home by the arm, she curses him in a hiss, was she supposed to go looking for him everywhere? He’s sent to bed without anything to eat. Then it is quiet, Peppina picks up a piece of needlework, bends over the thin light of an oil lamp in order to have somewhat of an idea of what she is sewing. Something is always broken, stockings, shoes, a chair leg, and she can no longer keep up with repairs. There is no money for anything new. Ever since his father has been in jail, their income has been blocked for the unforeseeable future. After an hour her eyes hurt, she is so tired that her hands tremble. Before going to bed, she looks at herself for an endless second in the bedroom mirror. Seven children. The oldest fourteen, the youngest still in nappies, in-between one who is growing into his breastplate. Both Peppina and his siblings are watching the metamorphosis, they don’t speak about it but their eyes betray the disgust they feel when they touch him by accident.

That was a long time ago. He survived it all.

This, here, he will not.

Gramsci thinks about Eugenia and how well she understands Lenin, she is almost on intimate terms with him. Giulia’s face turns into the pillow, her lips lightly spread, he thinks he can hear her inhale and exhale. Her naked shoulder protrudes from the blanket, he had just had his hand stretched out upon it, yesterday had told her—body to body, head to head—about his worries. By now what Gramsci thinks, what he really thinks, goes through all of Lenin’s offices long before he speaks before the Comintern. From now on he will be calculable. And that is essential for the survival of the Party. At any point the whole thing can start to crumble. With any comrade. Someone has to hold the thread. Someone. Giulia lolls about and her pale body slides even further out of the blanket.

Oh, let her sleep. He takes her hand, bends over her and kisses her fingers. He had not been able to get what was going on around him under control either. On 30 December, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be founded, Lenin, paralysed and with a weak voice, announces. The new world order, this standing-on-its-head, will stretch from Samar to Odessa, from Kamchatka to Yerevan. No one knows what is to come, what will happen with the brand-new republic, this delicate web of communistically subjugated countries, people still believe that something is arising and not about to go down. History has not come to an end, it has not even reached a new level but will run amok for a few decades. Gramsci feels Giulia’s shoulder on his chest. Slowly he sinks into a brief, far too brief, sleep.