by Greg McGee
Two nights later, Bepi dressed warmly after dinner and disappeared into the darkness. At midnight, he returned with news of a plan. Joe would be supplied with a train ticket from Gemona to Monfalcone, a town to the east, not far from Trieste. There a group of Slovenian partisans in the hills above the town would lead him and others to an English command in the mountains, who in turn would get them across the border to Switzerland.
‘Sloveni?’ asked Joe.
‘Comunisti,’ said Bepi. ‘Buoni.’
An Italian guide named Arturo would meet Joe and other prisoners of war when they arrived at the Monfalcone railway station, though Bepi wasn’t sure who Arturo was or how Joe would be recognised. The plan seemed to lack a bit of detail but Joe was in no position to complain.
Two nights later Joe said goodbye to Paola and Leo and they sang two verses of ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ in almost word perfect English. Downstairs he hugged Marisa and Nonna, then shook hands with Gigi, who gave him one of his berets.
Next morning, Donatella stayed home from school and helped Nina to prepare Joe for the trip. The scar was a problem. The women did their best to cover his cheekbone with pancake make-up but with limited success. It was autumnal enough for Joe to be wearing Gigi’s beret with Bepi’s scarf and coat, which Nina pinned so Joe didn’t look quite as lost in it.
Joe remembered one Sunday morning when Agnes was excused the weekly expedition to the basilica because of illness, she and Ida had used Joe as a tailor’s dummy for dressing up in Molly’s clothes. When she got back and discovered her wardrobe in disarray she’d gone to Malachy, who’d demanded the truth, then berated the two girls for ‘perverting the boy’. Joe was given a beating, but it was one of many and the memory of it had faded: what had stayed with him was standing in a trance of pleasure as the two girls fussed over him.
Nina and Donatella told Joe he might pass for an Italian as long as he didn’t speak. If he was questioned, Donatella thought it safest if he pretended to have a terrible stammer. That way, people would probably finish his sentences for him and at least he would be understood. She encouraged him to practise his stammer, but when he did, she laughed so hard she had to hold her belly, while Nina tried to hide her smile with a tragic expression, and said, ‘Poveretto.’
When it came time, Nina hugged Joe as if she’d never let go, with many poverettos. At the arch by the side of the road, Bepi looked as if his eyes were about to fill as Joe and his daughter set off on foot for the railway station.
* * *
Joe and Donatella had to skirt the lower reaches of the town before joining the street that crossed the valley floor to the station. As they entered the lower alleys of town and crossed the first piazza, Joe recalled Don Claudio’s warning that ten divisions of Germans were about to pour down into Italy. The cobbled streets and narrow footpaths were disconcertingly full of men in uniform — German soldiers and officers, Republicans in grey and carabinieri in dark blue.
Joe feared that he stood out like a dog’s balls until he realised that the eyes cast his way were focused on Donatella. Clearly accustomed to the attention, she kept her head up and her eyes ahead while she gripped his elbow and directed him through the maze of skinny streets and onto the strada leading down to the railway station, a grand two-storey building with many chimneys above shuttered windows and stuccoed arches. Back in Oamaru the townsfolk were very proud of the wooden station where Joe and the other volunteers had boarded the train for Burnham, but this looked like the house of a prince. There were many vehicles parked outside, military and commercial. Gemona was obviously an important stop on the line down through Austria, and the main platform was full of people, most of whom seemed to be in uniform.
Donatella had told him that they would time their arrival so that they didn’t have to wait long for the train to Udine, and indeed there was a train pulling into the main platform as they arrived. To reassure herself, she checked the departure board. Right beside this, visible to almost everyone on the platform, was a glass-fronted notice-board that featured the poster of Joe and Harry.
Joe went weak at the knees and Donatella must have felt his dismay. She turned him away from the poster, took his face in her hands, hiding the scar on his cheek, kissed him on the lips and whispered, ‘Coraggio, ragazzo. Ci vediamo.’ During the embrace she tugged the beret further down over his temple and pulled Bepi’s scarf higher up his cheek. She put his ticket in his hand, closed his palm over it and held his hand for a moment in both of hers. ‘Ti voglio bene.’ Joe watched her make for the exit, his fear overtaken by the shock that he would never see her again.
He kept his head down as he boarded the carriage and found a seat on the polished wooden slats against the window, opposite an overflowing woman who kept up an incessant monologue to a sullen child sitting beside her. His scar towards the window, he let his fingers brush his lips, which could still feel Donatella’s kiss.
Joe knew it had been a gesture born of necessity, but the kisses he’d been given by his sisters who were his aunts had never felt like that. Then there were Donatella’s last words, which he knew meant something like ‘I think well of you’ or ‘I wish you well’. But the important thing was not so much what she said as how she had said it: for the very first time, she’d called him tu, not lei.
The train began moving, and Joe relaxed in the warm balm of his thoughts of Donatella. He looked at the ticket that she’d pressed into his hand. Bepi had told him that Monfalcone was just a stop or two before Trieste. When he looked up he could see a group of German soldiers at the front of the carriage talking loudly among themselves as if they owned the space. They seemed happy enough, maybe because they weren’t going to the front, wherever that now was.
Joe hadn’t heard any news of the Allied advance since he’d been with the Bonazzons. He hoped that their progress was rapid so that the war would be over before he could be thrown back into it. Maybe he’d be able to come back and thank Bepi and Nina and Donatella. She’d said, ‘Ci vediamo’, which was their way of saying, ‘We’ll be seeing you.’
While the mother opposite prattled on to her son, he said nothing and stared at Joe with a spoilt-brat confidence and a child’s pure curiosity. Joe feared the boy was on the verge of saying something to him or about him. He could sense that Joe was somehow different.
Joe knew he couldn’t survive any serious attention from Italians. Most of the German troops shared the English arrogance and didn’t speak Italian so he had a chance with them. His Italian was much better and by necessity he’d learnt a bit of dialect, but it wasn’t nearly good enough to pass himself off as Italian to Italians. He didn’t want to have to test his stammer.
The train stopped at a couple of small towns. Joe was encouraged by the absence of uniforms on the platforms. He tried not to look at the boy, but every time he did, the unwavering stare met his. Joe managed to present his ticket to the guard without having to say a word. He was an emphysemic old fellow, whose coughing and spluttering made any response from the passengers redundant. Joe tried to ignore the boy and focus on what was happening outside the window.
The train slowed as it entered Udine. This time, as at Gemona, the platform was full of soldiers. To Joe’s relief the boy’s mother got to her feet, retrieved her bag from the shelf above and pulled the boy towards the exit, past the Wehrmacht soldiers. The child, twisting to look back at Joe, almost swung into a tall priest getting onto the train. ‘Scusi, Padre,’ said the mother. ‘Sia lodato, Gesù Christo.’ The priest nodded acknowledgement and stepped aside.
Joe stared resolutely out the window, breathing slightly easier. He could hear several muttered greetings from the passengers as the priest came down the carriage towards him. Then he was aware that someone was sitting right beside him. In his peripheral vision he could see a black cassock falling over bony knees. Then he felt the priest lean towards him, his mouth close to Joe’s ear.
‘
Dog’s balls,’ he whispered.
Joe didn’t trust himself to look at the powder blue eyes or teasing smile.
‘Bit of a turn-up for the books,’ murmured Harry.
Treviso 2014
24
Renzo had come to get her from the small polizia locale office near the station. He’d been directed to the woman sitting weeping in the corner by a stout, truncheon-bearing signorina in short sleeves, who was as mystified over what to do with Clare as the older male officer who’d retreated outside for a smoke.
Renzo didn’t say much as he walked her back to the hotel and she said nothing. When they arrived at reception to ask for her key, she winced with embarrassment but the sallow young man apologised to her for calling the police. ‘I didn’t realise it was you,’ he said.
Her room was a mess, brogues, boots, ballerina flats and sandals scattered across the bed and the floor. Renzo made a good pretence of finding it unremarkable and suggested she have a shower, then they’d go for a walk. She took a change of clothes into the bathroom and tried to wash away the deranged, red-eyed woman in the mirror. By the time she’d showered and changed and covered as much as she could with mascara and shadow, Renzo had paired all the shoes and placed them in a row on the floor right around the bed, just under the edge, only their heels poking out. The room looked almost normal.
She told him she wasn’t sure she wanted to go out.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s just walk.’
‘Walking is out,’ she said.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean.’
She was past debating. They left the hotel, crossed the Ponte Martino past the most discreet McDonald’s she’d ever seen, then turned left and right and two hundred metres later she was lost in a maze of old stone and coursing water. Renzo showed her wrought iron statues of horses dancing on the water, walls of roses falling into it, how it flowed under buildings and drove greater and lesser waterwheels, floated dinghies of flowers, made an island of the fish market, provided inspiration for Dante at a little bridge where the Sile and the Cagnan met. He told her the water came from a spring so its flow hardly varied, all the way to the Venetian lagoon. ‘In the old days, my grandfather ran a barge and took fresh produce from just downriver to the markets in Venice. These days the only cargo on the river is tourists.’
She looked down from the bridge and the water seemed so clear and unhurried. Renzo leaned over the parapet and wafted air into his face. ‘Although it’s water,’ he said, ‘it brings oxygen to the town.’
Near the fish market, he asked her where she thought the centre of town was, the Piazza dei Signori. ‘Left?’ she guessed.
‘Left is right,’ he smiled, ‘and so is right. And straight head is also right.’
He asked her the same question at Dante’s bridge. She had no idea but said right.
‘Right is good,’ he answered, ‘but so is left and straight ahead.’
When she asked him how that could possibly be, he shrugged and said that Treviso might mean three faces and that might be how it got its name.
Renzo knew a lot of people who had to be hugged and kissed and introduced to ‘my friend from New Zealand’. She didn’t really want him to do that but was gratified at the way the faces lit up. Quite often there was mention of the All Blacks, which surprised her. Renzo said that Treviso was a rugby town with a team in the Heineken Cup.
At one stage, near the vegetable market, they passed under an arch upon which a pair of discreet modern apartments had been built. ‘I live there,’ he said, ‘the one on the right.’ It was quite late and she was tired but he didn’t ask her in and they kept walking.
They passed skimpily dressed young girls walking alone in dark alleys with buds in their ears and eyes on their screens, not one sense alert for danger. It was their town and it was populated by their own and they felt safe. It struck Clare then that she had hardly seen a face in Treviso that wasn’t white. A group of Africans gathered at a cafe near Ponte Martino morning and evening, but those were the only people she’d seen who didn’t look as though they’d lived here for centuries.
He must have realised she was tired and he showed her to a bar beside a waterwheel. Once they were seated, the waiter put a spritz and some antipasti in front of them.
‘I thought you should eat something,’ he said.
She felt she owed it to him to explain what had happened, how she had ended up in the hands of the local constabulary, but she didn’t want to provoke an inquisition.
‘I’m in a black hole,’ she said. That might be the kind of wisecrack a physicist who’d done his doctorate at MIT would appreciate, but then as she was trying to add, ‘I can’t get out’, her tongue caught on the top of her mouth, her breath became constricted and she gave what sounded almost like a sob. She was trying not to cry but she was having trouble seeing him clearly.
‘I too have known sorrow,’ he said.
She sniffled but was too surprised to speak. His statement had an archaic formality. The same quality of strangeness as when he’d said in Venice, ‘I am entirely sincere.’ Maybe he reverted to that when he was on unfamiliar or emotional ground.
‘My wife and parents were killed on the autostrada between here and Padova.’
‘How awful! When?’
‘Five years ago. They were returning from Christmas celebrations with my grandfather in Venice and got hit by a drunken driver. The irony was that Papà had only just stopped drinking himself and that Christmas was the reconciliation between my father and my grandfather after many years of estrangement, many years of trying to get them to come together. Sofia — my wife — would still be alive if I hadn’t tried to mend fences.’
She reached across the small table and held both his hands in hers and their tears dripped onto their food.
‘We won’t need salt,’ she said, taking her hands back.
‘Enough of that,’ he said, blinking back tears but still smiling. ‘My grandfather’s seen a lot of tragedy, but he is still alive. More than ninety years old. There is hope for us.’
Remembering what he’d told her as he’d driven her and her father back to Venice from San Pietro, and how that had made her feel, she asked him to tell her another story about misbehaving particles.
He looked at her with those careful, considering eyes. Maybe he thought she might be making fun of him. Then he told her that those duplicitous particles that can be in several places at the same time can also be different things, a particle and a wave, and might be about to change everyone’s lives.
‘You know how computer bits work,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. She had no idea but nodded. ‘A computer bit can be either one or zero at any given time and that ability governs all the complicated software that enables us to do everything, from flying unmanned spacecraft to making reservations on the internet. But what if you could harness electrons and develop a quantum bit that can be either one or zero at the same time?’
‘Wouldn’t that just be confusing?’ she asked, already downcast.
‘If these quantum bits could be linked, they could do vast numbers of calculations at an atomic level: they could process information in ways that normal computers cannot comprehend. So that a quantum computer, so small that you cannot see it even with a microscope, might be more powerful than a conventional computer the size of the globe.’
That was so disappointing. She’d been looking for another story that made her feel, however insignificant, part of a grand and majestic or even chaotic universe, something to make her concerns resemble a speck in the sky that might eventually be extinguished. She said nothing.
‘Let’s stay with black holes then,’ he said.
Was he piqued? Was he insinuating that she’d rather wallow in sorrow? His tone hadn’t changed and he was still talking with that mesmeric timbre. As much as she’d been disappointed with his Amer
ican accent, she had to admit that it had a seductive cadence.
‘For hundreds of years,’ he was saying, ‘Newtonian physics has been able to explain the universe around us, then Einstein’s theory of relativity. Gravity perfectly described the motions of stars and galaxies. Gravity holds and binds the galaxy and the solar system together. If gravity were to be shut off now, the sun would explode, the earth would fall apart and we’d be flung into outer space at a thousand kilometres per hour.’
‘Yes please,’ she said.
‘Yet the discovery of black holes means we don’t fully understand anything.’
She puzzled fruitlessly over possible analogies as he continued.
‘We can’t see black holes because nothing can escape them, not even light. But we know enough about them to be able to say they are the greatest destructive force known to man. The point of no return for getting sucked into a black hole is called the event horizon. Past it, space is travelling inward faster than the speed of light, which means that even one of our misbehaving particles of light that wants to get out, can’t: it’ll be sucked into oblivion. So once past that event horizon you’re doomed, there’s no way you can ever get out again.’
Right, she thought, I’ve got it. I’m completely stuffed. ‘What a good news story!’
‘It is!’
She could already see that she’d been wrong. He wasn’t telling her this story out of pique, she was sure of that. She wasn’t sure what other motive he might have but the light in his eyes was neither anger nor frustration.
