The Children's Train

by Viola Ardone

  When they line us up to form a choir, I find myself right next to a kid with jet-black curls combed back with gel. I almost don’t recognize him.

  “Amerì, is that you? You look like a movie star!”

  “Stop teasing, Tommasì. How much salami have you eaten? You’re as fat as Pachiochia.”

  On the other side of the piazza I spot the man with the mustache, who had picked him out, and his wife, who has muscled arms and big breasts. There were two older brothers there, too, who also had mustaches and looked just like their father. Tommasino’s babbo waved at him as we were singing, and for a moment I thought Tommasino was beginning to look like his new father, too.

  Luzio is two rows in front of me in the choir, and he turns around and looks back every now and again out of curiosity. Usually he’s the one who knows everyone, and I don’t know a living soul. But now it’s the opposite. I see the short boy with black hair, the blond one with gaps in his mouth, whose teeth have now grown in, and lots of other kids who were on the train with me. Except that now they are all well dressed and healthy-looking, and it’s hard to tell who comes from down south and who was born up north.

  Tommasino and I reckon Mariuccia must be in the crowd, too, so we go off to look for her. We’re looking for a thin little blond girl with hair as short as a hatchling’s, but she isn’t there. After a while, we sit on a bench near the sandwich bar. We ask a partisan Befana witch to pour us some orange juice and watch the other kids playing tag. Luzio comes and sits with us, and after a while, Tommasino starts telling him about us painting the sewer rats. But luckily, at that very moment, Mariuccia suddenly appears. She’s walking between the parents who had picked her out on our first day here, holding their hands on each side. Her hair has grown into long blond curls like an actress in a movie poster. Her face is round, and her dress is dark pink, like her cheeks. She has a waistband made of woven flowers and a garland of the same flowers in her hair. Mariuccia has turned beautiful!

  When Tommaso and I see her, we’re paralyzed. Neither of us is brave enough to call her name or show our faces, but as soon as she recognizes us, she hugs us really tight. It’s just Mariuccia, but it feels different somehow; to Tommasino, too. I can see.

  “How’s it going?” Mariuccia asks, in a strong local accent.

  “Màma, Babbo,” she says to the blond lady and her husband. “These are my pals from down south.” That’s when I understand that Mariuccia will never be going home, because she’s found her family here.

  Before going back home myself, I want to finish up all the things I still need to do here. I have to build a secret hideout behind the animal pen with Rivo and Luzio. I have to train the new calf that they called Amerigo in my honor. I have to learn to play the violin with Maestro Serafini. When I first started, I was convinced it was not going to be my strong point. My fingers hurt, and instead of making music, I sounded like a cat in heat. From Alcide’s workshop windows, I would watch the other kids throwing snowballs, while I spent hours and hours with my violin teacher, practicing my scales. Then, one evening, after all that practice, the violin stopped screeching and meowing, and I finally heard music. I couldn’t believe I had produced it with my own hands.

  Another thing I need to do is help Derna organize communism, because she gets tired doing it all alone. She works a lot; after a day’s work, in the evening she picks me up at Rosa’s house. Then she sits in bed with me, we talk about our day, and she reads me a story about animals, who are always either good or bad. There’s a fox, a wolf, a frog, and a crow. Every two or three pages, there’s a color picture. Every now and again, Derna puts her finger under the words and says, “You read now.” Or if we’re really tired out, she sings me a song to send me to sleep. Since we realized she didn’t know any lullabies at all, she sings other songs that she does know, like “Bandiera Rossa,” which is about a red flag that triumphs and brings freedom. When it comes to the last line, I change the words from “Evviva il comunismo e la libertà” to “Evviva Derna, Rosa e la li-ber-tà!”

  When she was organizing the Epiphany Partisan Festival, she asked my advice on how to decorate the stockings, what games to play, and which songs to make the orchestra play. One evening, though, after the final meeting to organize the festival, Derna came to get me at Rosa’s with a dark expression on her face. Rivo, Luzio, and I were playing with the wooden building blocks Alcide had made for us. Usually, Derna would stop awhile in the kitchen and drink a glass of red wine while we went on playing and shouting that we didn’t want to stop just yet. But that evening, she didn’t even take her coat off, and she took me home immediately. Derna didn’t say a word. I thought it was my fault. I must have given her some wrong advice, and now she was angry with me. When she took her hat off, I saw her cheek was bright red, as if she’d had too much sun or gotten too cold. When we sat down at the kitchen table, she burst into tears. I’d never seen her cry before, so I started crying, too. Mamma Antonietta never cries, either. For as long as I’ve known her, at least. We sat there, like two idiots, at the kitchen table, weeping into our bowls of pasta in broth. She didn’t want to tell me what was wrong. She said it was nothing. We went to bed, with no animal stories, or songs, or anything.

  The next day was Saturday. While I was playing hide-and-seek with Luzio, I heard Derna talking to Rosa. I heard her say that a big-shot comrade had come to the meeting. He had no complaints at all about the organization of the festival, because she and the others had done a good job. Then the big shot had asked to speak to her on her own. She had explained to him everything she’d done for the union and the election campaign, and he’d told her that she’d be better off concentrating on children’s parties and charity for the poor. I had found a hiding place in the kitchen, wedged between the wood stove and the larder, so that I could listen to them. Derna had told the big shot that there were plenty of women who had fought alongside the partisans, who had used rifles, and had won medals. I remembered Maddalena Criscuolo’s medal and her saving the Sanità bridge from being blown up. The big shot had asked her if she wanted a medal, too. Derna had answered that many women deserved a medal just for sticking with the Party. That was when he had given her a hard slap on the cheek. She hadn’t cried, she told Rosa. I stayed down in my hiding place. I didn’t know what to say. Mamma Antonietta would never have taken a slap without striking back. She would have given the comrade at least two slaps back. But Derna hadn’t done anything. She’d just started singing the song about women not being scared if they’re in a union: sebben che siamo donne, paura non abbiamo . . . Since it was one of the lullabies that she often sang to me before going to sleep, I decided to come out of my hiding place to sing it with her. When Derna and Rosa saw me they both clasped their hands to their breasts from the fright and screamed. There was no more singing and I never heard another word about the big-shot comrade.

  The partisan Befana witches herd us into a long line and cover our eyes with a blindfold. We’re instructed to try to hit an earthenware pot strung up on a pole with a big stick. If we manage to crack it open, we can have the candies inside.

  “It’s a pignatta,” Luzio says. “Did you have them down south?”

  “We had half of it,” Tommasino says.

  “What do you mean?” Luzio says.

  “We had the sticks but not the pots.”

  When it’s my turn, I grab the stick with both hands. Derna blindfolds me. As I’m preparing to thrash out at the pot, I remember the first day here, when I was the only one left before she came to get me.

  She seemed so strong and grown-up then, and now it’s as if she’s shrunk. Derna knows lots of things, even a bit of Latin, but she knows less than a kid about the important things in life. If I’m not with her, who’s going to look out for her?

  I picture that big shot’s head and smash it with all the strength in my body. The pot cracks with a sound like broken glass. The kids are screaming for joy while candies rain down on my face.

  25

  C
HRISTMAS HAD PASSED, AND SO HAD EPIPHANY. The apple Mamma gave me when I left has been on my desk all this time. I wanted to keep it to remember her by but, day after day, it has dried up and gone brown. It’s inedible now.

  “Rosa,” I say one day after school. “When will I be leaving?”

  Rosa stops shelling the beans and sits there in silence, looking pensive.

  “Why? Don’t you like it here? Do you miss your mamma?”

  “No, yes, well, just a little . . .” I say. “It’s just that I’m scared that if too much time goes by, I won’t miss her anymore.”

  Rosa gives me a handful of beans to shell.

  “Can you see how many beans there are in each pod? There’s room for lots of them. Like in your heart.”

  She opens one and shows me.

  “Count them!” she says.

  I run my fingers over each bean.

  “Seven,” I say.

  “You see?” she says. “That’s all of us: Alcide and me, Derna, the kids, and your mother. You can keep us all together.”

  I like helping her with the beans, splitting the tough pods with my thumbs and popping the moist white seeds out. I like the sound of the beans as they ping into the earthenware casserole dish, and the sight of the speckled shells piling up higher and higher on the kitchen table.

  Rosa turns her head and gazes through the window.

  “It will be time to leave when the fields have turned yellow, and the wheat has grown high.”

  I give a quick glance to see how high the wheat has grown, but there’s no sign yet. The air is cold, and the countryside gray.

  A week later, the weather turns warm. One evening, Derna comes to get me after work and says, “Tomorrow we’re all going to Bologna on the bus.”

  I run to the window to check the fields, but the wheat isn’t high yet.

  “Are you sending me away already?” I ask. Our secret hideout isn’t finished yet.

  “When he plays the violin, we need to put plugs in our ears,” Luzio teases.

  I’d like to answer that this isn’t true anymore, because my violin teacher says I’m learning fast and that I have great talent, but then I realize he’s probably just saying it so I don’t get sent home.

  Derna says it isn’t time yet. We’re going to Bologna because there’s a surprise.

  The next day, we all jump off the bus, dressed in our Sunday best. We walk to the building where we were first entrusted to our new families. When we get there, all the tables are laid like that day, and the band is playing. I cling to Derna for fear they’ll take me away, because everything looks exactly the same as that day, like a journey back through time.

  When the band starts playing, Derna climbs up onto the wooden stage and I’m left alone again. I want to tell her to come down and not to sing, because I’ve never told her, but she sings a little out of tune. Luckily, she only has to speak. She says we have an important guest, an intelligent woman who doesn’t have any prejudices and who has come in person to see how the children who came up on the trains are doing. She says this woman has just endured a long and tiring journey to take news back to our mothers. There is a roll of drums from the band, and a short, squat woman with her hair pulled up in a bun and a red, white, and green sash across her breast joins Derna on the stage.

  I’m stunned. I can see Tommasino in the front row with his new mustached babbo. I push through the crowd and say, “Let’s run: Pachiochia has found us!”

  He can’t hear me because, in the meantime, Pachiochia has picked up the microphone and started to shout into it. She says how happy she is to be here in person. She says that, to tell the truth, she harbored some doubts about the train transports to begin with, but now she is here and she can see how well fed and well dressed we are, she feels a little bit Communist herself, even though she is devoted to our king and will always be a monarchist. She smiles her toothless smile, and people start cheering. Pachiochia bows her head a little, like a singer at the Piedigrotta Festival.

  Derna has gotten down from the stage and comes to stand next to me and Tommasino.

  “How did she find us?” I ask.

  “We invited her,” Derna said. “To prove to everybody that you still have all your hands and feet in the right place, and that none of you have been taken to Russia.”

  “So she’s not going to take us back then?” I ask, just to make sure.

  Tommasino turns to me, pokes me with his elbow, and sticks a horizontal finger over his upper lip.

  “Pachiochia did the right thing to come here,” he says. “Everyone up north has a mustache.”

  Pachiochia is taken around the room, and the mayor offers her little tastes of all the gastronomic specialties of the area. She eats, drinks, and talks constantly. I see her going up to every kid, asking which quarter they are from back home, who their mother is, who their father is, how they are, if they are doing well in school, and so on. All the kids say practically the same thing: that is, at the beginning they missed home, but now they have gotten used to it and are better off than they were. Tommasino and I go up to her and tug at her dress.

  “Donna Pachiochia, Donna Pachiochia,” we chant in chorus. She doesn’t recognize us at first. Then, when she does, she bares her gums at us.

  “Have you noticed? Here there is dig-ni-ty!”

  She tries to give me a hug.

  “Come here, my beautiful boy,” she said. “Goodness me, how you’ve grown. Antonietta will hardly recognize you when you come home. Come here, give me a kiss.”

  She bends down and I feel her whiskery lips on my face. Tommasino manages to get away. I ask her about Mamma Antonietta and Zandragliona and about life on our street. She had made such a big fuss when we were getting on the trains, and now, when I get home, I wonder whether instead of the photograph of the mustached king on her bedroom wall, I would find a picture of the bald man who looks just like the principal of my school.

  At the end of the party, they take a picture of us all.

  “Smile!” the photographer shouts as he’s about to snap. But Pachiochia isn’t satisfied.

  “Wait!”

  She turns to us and asks us all to raise both hands.

  “This photograph will be proof for the tongue waggers that your hands have not been cut off!”

  When I see the picture in the school hall, it is living proof: our teeth bared in a cheesy smile and our fingers waving in the air.

  26

  DERNA PROMISED WE WOULD GO ON THE FIRST really sunny day of the season. And the day has arrived today. We woke up late because it was Sunday. I opened my eyes and I saw a white light coming through the shutters and shining in stripes across my sheets. When I looked out the window, I saw that the fields were turning yellow, and the wheat was growing, though it wasn’t too high yet.

  I went into the kitchen and saw that Derna was all ready to go. She was wearing a lovely light-colored dress I’d never seen before. When she goes to work, she always wears a white blouse and a gray skirt and jacket. She used to wear a black suit, but then she said she was no longer in mourning, and that life had to go on. I saw him once in a photo Derna keeps hidden in her bag. She takes it with her everywhere and never lets anyone look at it. But once she showed it to me. She said he had been really brave; a real comrade. She said he had been killed in an attack against the Fascists. Then she closed her bag and said nothing else. Today, though, she has put all her dark clothes away, and she’s wearing the light-colored dress.

  The man in the photo was thin, with a happy face. Rosa said I looked like him. She said he had light hair and blue eyes, like me. Derna had met him at a Party conference. She had been giving a speech surrounded by men, with Rosa and Alcide sitting in the audience listening. At one point, a group of young men had come in and stood near the window. Derna had looked around and caught sight of him for the first time. She had blushed bright red and almost lost her train of thought. But then she had recovered and managed to get to the end of her speech.

 
The young man had fallen in love with her and wanted to marry her after the war. But he was two years younger than her, and the Party bosses didn’t want them to get married. Rosa says the Party bosses can be worse than village gossips. They fill their mouths with talk of freedom, but then they don’t allow their members to be free. Especially the women. Derna suffered the consequences.

  After the tragedy, she dressed only in black and never spoke to anyone about him ever again. She threw herself into her work and stifled her smiles. “And then you came along,” Rosa had said, combing my hair with her hands like she did with her own boys.

  Derna pulls her dress down over her hips. She looks younger today. She’s even put a touch of lipstick on.

  “Today we’re all going to the beach,” she says, filling a basket with cheese and salted pork sandwiches and a bottle of water. She has set some new clothes out for me to wear: a white short-sleeved shirt, a pair of blue shorts, ankle socks, and a pair of T-bar sandals. I’ve stopped counting points for the shoes, because everyone here has either new shoes or hardly worn ones, so there’s no fun in the game anymore. And anyhow, even if I did get to a hundred, what would I ask for since I already have everything I need?

  I feel like running. I start running around the kitchen, around the table, three times, four times, and I end up falling into Derna’s arms. I cling to her as tightly as I can with both arms. She wobbles and loses her balance, and we both roll onto the sofa. But I don’t let go of her. I hold on tight, my face sinking into her belly, and I smell her flesh. Derna is hugging me tight, and she doesn’t let go of me, either. We lie there on the sofa in our spring outfits, in each other’s arms like a couple of newlyweds.

  When Alcide knocks on the door with Rivo and Luzio, Derna picks up the basket and sets off with Rosa, who is carrying the little one in her arms. We walk toward the bus that will take us to the beach. On the short walk, we all sing the song about freedom at the top of our voices, the one I changed the words to: “Long live Derna, Rosa, and freedom.”