Nine men, unshaven and half-dressed, sit morosely in close quarters. Stripped of their uniforms, given dirty peasant trousers to wear, they were brought here blindfolded, shoved into this little cell. Each has a story of ambush or attack. They’ve had no food for twenty-four hours. The water jug is nearly empty, the slop bucket nearly full. No one expected to live through the night, so they count themselves lucky when they awaken to hunger and the stench of their own waste.
Beyond their prison cell, an argument rages. “They are prisoners of war! The Geneva Convention—”
“—is a crock of shit! They are murdering civilians. They’re war criminals.”
“Which is what you’ll be if you shoot them!”
The shouting gets louder. A new voice ends the dispute. The language is Italian, the accent Teutonic. Kunkel boosts young Meisinger up, to peer out a small high window. “I see a German,” Meisinger reports excitedly. “Standartenführer Reinecke must have sent a negotiator after all!”
Regaining some dignity and bearing, the Gruppenführer stands, and urges the others to do the same. They wait, clawing straw from hair and rubbing at teeth with their fingers.
The wooden bar scrapes back and the heavy timber door is dragged open. The clouds are low and gray, but the captives blink in the dull light pouring into the dim cell.
“Herauskommen!” a blond man orders.
Von Thadden addresses the Aryan, whose tone indicates that he does not realize to whom he is speaking. “Guten Tag, mein Herr. I am Gruppenführer Erhardt von Thadden—”
“Shut up. We know who you are.”
Shoved toward the center of a small castle’s piazza, their protests rewarded with blows and curses, the prisoners have no choice but to obey. A mob of men and boys with reddened eyes glare, shout and spit at the captives, but make way with deference and respect for the blond. He sits at a table crudely lashed together from fallen branches, folds his hands with an expression between contempt and satisfaction. Before him are nine small piles of documents weighted with pebbles against the breeze. Identity papers, personal items, snapshots. “My name,” the blond begins, “is Jakub Landau—”
“I knew it!” a captain named Grittschneider says, thirst-swollen lips curling with distaste. “Jew dog!”
The rat-faced little Jew who shot Schmidt in cold blood snarls, “Shut your filthy mouth, Nazischwein!”
There are shouts, threats. Someone drives a rifle butt into Grittschneider’s belly. Landau raises a hand. Order is instantly restored in silence broken only by the sound of Grittschneider coughing.
“I shall read the indictment in German for the prisoners,” Landau announces. An interpreter repeats this in Italian. “During the past few weeks, three battalions of the Second SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment, Twelfth Waffen-SS have engaged anti-Fascist forces in the Valdottavo district,” Landau begins. “The Third, Fifth, and Sixth Brigades of the Committee for National Liberation repulsed attacks on their positions, inflicting enemy losses of eighty-seven killed or wounded at a cost of fourteen casualties to our own forces.”
Without turning, Landau pauses. The interpreter’s voice is flat, unemotional and familiar, though Erhardt von Thadden has never before heard this man speak Italian. He who was always immaculately turned out when visiting the Palazzo Usodimare is shabby now, and hollow-eyed, half his face pitted by scars. “Mein Gott,” von Thadden says. “Ugo Messner.”
“Sometimes,” Messner replies. “Not recently.”
“You—you sat at my table. You danced with my wife!”
“You occupied my country.”
Landau’s voice cuts through, continuing the indictment. “Unable to defeat combatants, German forces surrounded and yesterday destroyed the following.” There are groans, roars, cries of grief as Landau reads a long list of towns and villages razed. “A thousand families have been burned out. We have received reports of over five hundred civilian casualties. Nearly three hundred were burned alive in the church of San Mauro.”
“This is absurd!” von Thadden says. “We were in your custody while that was happening!”
Jeers drown Messner’s emotionless translation. Again Landau gestures for silence. “In that case,” he says, “explain these.” He draws photographs from one of the nine stacks of documents, and spreads them out on the table so the prisoners can see them. Grittschneider looks away.
“Scheisskerl!” Kunkel snarls at Grittschneider. “You’ve killed us! Why would you carry pictures like that?”
The partisans pass the snapshots from hand to hand. On the back of each someone has methodically recorded dates and locations from 1941 to 1944, from Russia to Italy. The backgrounds vary—forest, grassy wasteland, a stone bridge, a blank wall—but the same heavy-set man is in each. His uniforms document a rise from second lieutenant to captain. Behind him, dangling from taut ropes: as few as three, as many as twenty, people hang. Mostly men.
“They were criminals! My duty was to establish order in those towns,” Grittschneider declares. “Those executed were thieves, drunkards. Murderers!”
A young woman approaches, holding out a photo. “Name two.” Guileless green eyes fix Grittschneider with an unwavering gaze. “If they were guilty of crimes, there must have been a trial. Name two of the convicted.”
“Claudette!” Duno cries. She does not turn. “That’s Claudette Blum!” he tells Landau.
“It was a long time ago,” Grittschneider says, dismissing her. “They were criminals! Justice was done.”
Landau stands to face the partisans. “Justice! The very thing we seek!” he says, theatrically amazed by the coincidence. He turns to the Germans. “I will be merciful. You may all live . . . for as long as this man can recite the names of those he hanged.”
“It was a long time ago!” Grittschneider repeats. “I don’t remember—”
“I only wanted to drive a car!” Meisinger weeps. “I didn’t do anything!”
Landau pounces, mimicking the boy. “I didn’t know! I didn’t do anything!” he whines. “That’s what they say, comrades! But there are ten thousand places where the fascisti kill like this. Everywhere the Nazis go, they murder. They build factories for nothing but killing! Bigger than Fiat, bigger than Olivetti—huge factories, comrades. Thousands of people go every day into these factories—not to work, to die! Children, women, old people. Jews, Gypsies, Slavs—anyone the Nazis call Untermenschen. The bodies are burned. You can see smoke from twenty kilometers away! They give the ashes to German farmers—for fertilizer! I have seen these things with my eyes, and now you, too, see what they do!”
Landau points at Valdottavo blanketed by a brown haze. “Comrades! The fascisti have burned our houses, our villages. They have killed my family, your family! Will these men live?”
From three hundred throats, a single word.
Nine men are beaten to their knees, shoved facedown into the damp stone cobbles of the castle’s courtyard.
Blood spatters, fountains, pools. A slaughterhouse stink joins the cordite. The shooting goes on and on, until the guns are emptied, the rage is sated, the silence broken only by crow calls and wind.
“That was wrong,” Renzo says raggedly. “What was done here was wrong.”
“Yes,” Landau agrees. “It was a waste of bullets. Next time, we use rope.” Focusing for the first time on the green-eyed girl, Landau frowns. “Who are you?”
“You know her,” Duno Brössler reminds him. “She was in Sainte-Gisèle. She’s—”
“Capable of speaking for herself,” Landau says. He comes closer and asks again, “Who are you?”
She meets his eyes, then looks past him to the others. “I am the widow of Santino Cicala, and I have come to join you.”
Hours later, one man sits alone on a crude wooden bench, his back against a stone wall, an empty bottle in his hand, talking to the blood, diluted now by steady rain.
“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks.<
br />
“Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”
November 1944
VILLA MALCOVATO
NEAR ROCCABARBENA
Paradise, Mirella thought when she first saw this place. A large farm, fifteen kilometers from the nearest train station, five from the nearest village. The main house on a hillside, with a wide prospect of the broad valley, a small wooded mountain beyond. Patches of sloping cultivated land: wheat, corn, alfalfa, olives, vines.
“In the summer, it’s dry as dust,” Suora Corniglia warned her, “and hot! You can barely breathe! The riverbed becomes a desert—nothing but stones, with a little muddy trickle down the middle. But when it rains, the whole countryside comes to life. Everything has color again. That’s when the work is hardest, but it’s so beautiful . . .” The nun came to herself and cleared her throat. “There is a small school for the farm children. Your husband will replace a teacher who . . . is needed elsewhere. You’ll run the kitchen and the ambulatorio—a sort of clinic for the peasants. And everyone helps with harvests. You can trust the padrone without reservation. His name is Massimo Malcovato.”
This personage arrived at the convent in a huge car. Painted in the Vatican’s yellow and white, it was driven by a liveried chauffeur who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Don Osvaldo Tomitz. The children were thrilled by the grandeur of riding in an automobile, but their parents were more dazzled by the ease with which the vehicle sailed through roadblocks and checkpoints. Osvaldo slowed and stopped just long enough for Malcovato to declare, “Ich bin ein Diplomat des Vatikans!” Carabinieri asked no further questions. Even Germans waved the car on.
Wounded three times in the Great War, Malcovato retired a major, and he is still il maggiore to everyone he deals with. Wearing five Silver and three Bronze Medals for valor, he became an important food distributor under Mussolini, and to this day, he strides through Fascist Italy, greeted with respect everywhere he goes. “Officially,” he rumbled, “I am disabled by my war wounds. This status entitles me to first-class train compartments, and an attendant to accompany me whenever I must travel.”
“Il maggiore has businesses in Milan, Turin, Genoa, and Sant’Andrea, all with large Jewish communities,” Osvaldo said, throwing a grin over his shoulder at Iacopo. “And he has almost unlimited access to ration cards.”
“To be turned into cash,” Iacopo surmised, “for payoffs and bribes.”
“Gifts,” il maggiore corrected serenely. “Expressions of gratitude—as is my desire to help you, Rabbino. During the Battle of Caporetto, a soldier named Tranquillo Loeb carried me half a kilometer to a field hospital. Perhaps you knew him. He became a lawyer, and I followed his career—to its end. Shameful. Shameful! I never had any affection for the Germans, but how a civilized nation could permit such things is beyond me. I’ve done what I could since Loeb was killed. My daughter made me aware of your personal difficulties.”
“Your daughter?” Mirella asked.
“Suora Corniglia is il maggiore’s youngest,” Osvaldo said. “Renzo met her at San Giobatta. He kept in touch.”
“It was Leoni who suggested that Don Osvaldo become my attendant.”
“The fascisti were getting suspicious about the ‘doctor’ visiting so many houses in Sant’Andrea. So I’ve become a chauffeur. We’ve rebuilt the distribution network.”
“The arrangement has been quite satisfactory. Ah—we are nearly at the end of our journey. I have a house in Milan,” il maggiore told them, “but this is home. Don Osvaldo and I generally visit once a month for a few days of rest. Occasionally we may bring additional guests, but I’m sure Signora Soncini will be able to accommodate them at the table.”
Villa Malcovato proved to be a self-contained kingdom straddling the border between the mountains and the plains of Piemonte. Some six hundred contadini on fifty-seven tenant farms are scattered across seven thousand hectares, all administered from the villa fattoria, with its threshing floor, an ox-powered mill, a granary, oil presses, a dairy, carpentry and ironwork shops, a laundry and stables, poultry coops, pigpens, barns. Operating on the mezzadria system, the estate produces wine, oil, flour, pasta, bread, cheeses, meat and eggs, fruits, vegetables, and beans.
The villa itself is unpretentious: a square sixteenth-century stone and redbrick house, its loggia overlooking a garden of cypresses and ilex. “Rosina, see how pretty?” Mirella said. “Angelo, look! There are dogs!”
“Kitties, too?” Stefania asked softly.
“Every barn has kitties!” Mirella assured her. They had to take Stefania, of course. Angelo would not be parted from her, and it felt right to add a daughter that age to the family.
When the car pulled up to the back door, the older children raced off to see the animals. Iacopo went with il maggiore and Don Osvaldo to meet the factor and begin learning the farm’s operations. Left behind, with Rosina squirming in her arms, Mirella nearly swooned when she saw the enclosed privy. And the kitchen! Limestone floors, a marble sink under a window fitted with glass, not just oiled lambskin. An indoor pump for water. Glasses, plates, tin-lined copper pans. Beautifully crafted storage baskets hanging from the rafters. A long wooden table for her family, plentiful food to place before them! Paradise, she thought again, with a Shehecheyanu of thanksgiving.
Three months of relentless labor have sweated the romance out of country life. Since her first rapturous day in the kitchen, Mirella and two housegirls have rolled out highways of pasta, scrubbed mountain ranges of potatoes and carrots, ground swamps of basil, garlic, and oil for pesto. Dio santo, the bread alone is a full-time job! Thirty loaves a week to fill those pretty baskets—bread made by hand from standing grain to flour to kneaded loaves. Fifteen kilos of dough at a time, baked in a wood-burning oven fueled by cuttings from grape vines and fruit trees.
Rosina alone is exempt from work. Like all the estate’s children, Angelo and Stefania pick tomatoes, shell beans, and glean a second harvest from the wheat fields after the men have gone through with mechanical threshers. Tanned and barefoot, the two of them have shot up like the weeds they hoe out of the kitchen garden, making up growth lost to hunger.
“You came at the worst time, signora,” one of the housegirls tells her as they wash dishes together. “Winter is easier. It’s all handwork then. Knitting, sewing.”
Before that promised respite, there will be the grape and olive and chestnut harvests, but Mirella smiles briefly, grateful for Giovanna’s encouragement. Her feet are swollen, her back aches. The window above the sink reflects a woman who’s begun to understand why peasants age so quickly. At least I’m not pregnant, Mirella thinks. At the end of the day, Iacopo trudges in from the barns, more worn out than Mirella. They go to their bed limp with fatigue, wanting no more than to sleep side by side, too tired to muster so much as a kiss.
You can wear out or you can toughen up, Mirella tells herself sternly, and under the circumstances—
Twin beams of light slash through the darkness. Drying her hands, she feels the rush of anxiety provoked by anything unexpected, but relaxes when she recognizes the yellow-and-white auto. The major’s visit is two weeks early, but that’s hardly a cause for panic. “Iacopo!” she shouts like the contadina she’s becoming. “Il maggiore is here!”
Mirella sends Giovanna upstairs to put the children to bed. She herself prepares a platter of thin-sliced sausage, tomatoes, cheese, and bread. Carries the tray to the library, where the men always meet. Nudges the door open with her hip, and stops, frozen.
“I—I thought they were Africans!” Don Osvaldo’s voice cracks. “I thought, There can’t be Africans in San Mauro. Rabbino, they were burned black! Fused together by the heat—hundreds of them. Hundreds!”
At Osvaldo’s side, Iacopo looks up and sees his wife. “There has been a battle in Valdottavo, Mirella. Don Leto is among the dead.”
Mirella cries, “Oh, Valdo. How terrible!”
“There’s more bad news,” il maggiore says, pacin
g in front of the fireplace. “The Germans arrested most of the Milan network last week, and in Turin—”
Iacopo takes the tray from Mirella’s hands. “Go to bed,” he says in his velvety baritone. “I’ll join you later, cara mia.”
The men talk far into the night, but when Iacopo comes to bed, Mirella is still awake. He slides under the covers, and she puts an arm over his chest, giving comfort, seeking it. Silent, he lies on his back, his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling. She holds the sheet to her breasts and sits up in the darkness. Waiting.
“The Waffen-SS and Gestapo have begun a coordinated campaign to root out Jews, partisans, and anyone who helps them. Mirella, they’re arresting priests—someone must have talked.”
Hardly breathing, Mirella closes her eyes.
“There’s no choice, cara. We have to consider—”
“No, Iacopo!”
“Osvaldo is doing the work of six men.”
“I won’t listen to this. You risked your life for months. You were arrested twice. For God’s sake, Iacopo—you have a family! You have children!”
“How can I hide here when other men—”
She shakes her head stubbornly, eyes brimming, chin trembling. “I have never said no to you before. Never! But I do now. No, no, no! Promise me you will not do this!”
“Mirella, I can’t—”
“Promise me!”
He turns on his side, his back to her. She bites her lip, determined not to cry, and after a long time, lies down next to him.
Merely a handsbreadth of lumpy mattress between them, but they are each alone.
Christmas, Mirella tells herself, like everyone else in Europe. It will be over by Christmas. If we can just get through a few more weeks . . .
Cadenza d’Inverno
Winter 1944–45
Rome changed hands two days before the Normandy invasion, and just like that, the Italian campaign dropped off the world’s front page. A sideshow, newspaper editors decided. Barely worth a mention. Four hundred thousand men, forgotten.
A Thread of Grace Page 40
