Our Darkest Night

by Jennifer Robson

  She sat on the bed and turned her back, and as he changed out of his work clothes he told her what to expect.

  “To start, the service is in Latin, not Italian, so hardly anyone there truly understands what Father Bernardi is saying. It’s all memory—we just say the words in the order we learned them when we were little.”

  “That’s a little bit like services at home. I only understand a bit of the . . . well. You know. Where will I be sitting?”

  “With me. Men and women sit together in Catholic churches. So it will be easy for you to watch what I’m doing and parrot it as best you can. When it’s time for Holy Communion, you’ll follow me to the front and we’ll kneel at the altar rail, and when Father Bernardi comes near you’ll open your mouth so he can put the host on your tongue. Then you’ll make the sign of the cross—forehead to navel, left shoulder to right shoulder—and we’ll go back to our pew.”

  “Won’t I get in trouble?” she asked, her apprehension growing anew.

  “From who? Father Bernardi? He’s the one who said you must come to Mass. If it were for any other reason I would discourage you. But in asking you to do this, Father and I are the ones committing a sin, not you.”

  She was trying to be brave, but so much had been taken from her already—her family, her home, even her true name. And now her faith was going to become another casualty. Never mind that she had never been very certain in her beliefs; they were precious to her, and she could not, would not, give them up for anything or anyone.

  “Maybe I should stay behind,” she suggested. “You could say that I’m feeling unwell.”

  “For every Sunday that you live here? That won’t work. You need to go to Mass, and you need to take Communion, because if you don’t people will notice, and they’ll gossip about it, and that will put your life at risk. If I’m to keep the promise I made to your father, you need to do this. Tell me you understand.”

  “I do,” she admitted, for she, too, had made promises to her father. “I’m sorry for fussing.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry about anything. I only wish I didn’t have to ask it of you.”

  The bells in the campanile began to ring; it was time to leave.

  “Are you dressed?” she asked.

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  He was wearing a dark suit and tie, and though the shoulders were a little tight on his jacket, and the collar of his shirt was beginning to fray, he still looked very handsome and respectable.

  “You look very well.”

  “As do you, Signora Gerardi. Now let’s introduce you to Mezzo Ciel.”

  It was only a few hundred meters back up the road to the church, not long enough to run into more than a few of their neighbors, but as soon as they entered the piazza she felt the force of dozens of eyes upon her, all wondering and judging and possibly finding her wanting. This was more than usual curiosity, it seemed, for there was an avidity to those first assessing stares, and it only grew more noticeable when they entered the church.

  The interior of Santa Lucia was far plainer than the Scola Spagnola her family had attended for generations, and there was no women’s gallery, only a central aisle with flanking pews where men and women and children all gathered together.

  She ought not to have been surprised, for Nico had said she would be sitting with him, but it was a shock all the same. In the scola at home, the women sat in a gallery high above the sanctuary; the stairs were a daunting obstacle to all but the fittest and youngest among them, and there were some who complained. Never her mother, though. Mamma had always insisted they were lucky to have such a view of their magnificent scola. “Only birds on the wing could hope to see as well as we do up here.”

  Nico led them to one of the left-hand pews about halfway down the aisle and gestured for her to go in first. “Signora Rossi behind us is deaf,” he whispered in her ear, “and the pew in front is broken, so no one ever sits there. Just remember to copy what I do.”

  He took a cushion from its hook on the pew in front and knelt upon it, so she did the same, and then, as everyone else bent their heads in prayer, she looked around discreetly and tried to make sense of the church’s strange interior. She would remember every detail, and one day, when she was again at home with her parents, she would be able to tell them all about it.

  There was no decoration to speak of, apart from a series of wall plaques in high relief, their paint badly faded, and several oil paintings so black with age that their subjects were impossible to discern. At the front was an elevated area, separated from the rest of the church by a low wooden rail; at its center was a table draped in an embroidered cloth. Candles in tall brass holders flanked the table, and to the side, in a sort of alcove, was a rather alarming statue of a dying Christ on the cross, larger than life size and naked apart from a small cloth around his midsection, his painted blood flowing from an abundance of wounds. Directly ahead was another elevated statue, this one almost exactly the same as the one in the parlor at the house, only here the woman had a golden crown, and there were rows of candles in a tiered metal frame at her feet.

  Bowing her head, Nina tried to arrange her thoughts into something resembling prayer, but she couldn’t find it in herself to concentrate. It was silent in the church, but only superficially so, for around them a constant chorus of whispers and shuffling rose and fell, the counterpoint an occasional deafening sneeze from an older man standing on the opposite side of the aisle.

  “That’s my zio Beppe,” Nico whispered. “His hay fever starts in March and doesn’t let up until November.”

  Nico had just bent his head again, likely to whisper another diverting comment in Nina’s ear, when a pair of sharply hissing voices pierced the imperfect silence.

  “That’s the one. No, over there. The one who persuaded him to abandon the priesthood.”

  “She’s not much to look at. What was he thinking?”

  “I know. All those years of work and study just gone, and for what?”

  “Poor thing. Of course, Rosa will carve her into little pieces.”

  “That she will. Oh, to be a fly on their wall!”

  That’s when Nico turned around. He didn’t say a word, but Nina could feel the weight of his pinioning stare.

  Facing forward once again, he bent his head to whisper in Nina’s ear. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fine. I’m impressed at how quickly you quieted them.”

  “It’s one of the first things we learn in the seminary. How to scowl at people who whisper during Mass.” And then he nudged her shoulder, just a little, to show he was joking. Or only mostly joking.

  It ought not to hurt. Nico wasn’t really her husband, and he hadn’t truly abandoned anything for her. When the war was over, and she was safely home, they would be free to tell the truth about the fiction they’d concocted, and Nico would continue with his life, seminary or no seminary, on his own.

  What hurt rather more was the gossips’ belief that she was incapable of doing her fair share of work on the farm. She’d completed every task Rosa had given her yesterday and she hadn’t complained, not once. She was smart, and strong, and she would fit in.

  She would make those gossips eat their words.

  “Nina,” Nico whispered. “The bells have stopped. Mass is starting.”

  Everyone stood and began to sing, but without a cantor to lead them the resulting chorus wasn’t particularly tuneful. Father Bernardi passed by, followed by a troop of little boys about the same age as Carlo, and the following hour was an unnerving blur of standing and kneeling and sitting and kneeling and moving her lips like a ghost.

  When it was time for the Communion part of things she followed Nico to the front and knelt at the altar rail, her heart pounding like mad because surely the other churchgoers would see that she didn’t belong. She did remember to open her mouth, just in time, and Father Bernardi placed a dry little cracker on her tongue, and after she’d swallowed it and traced a cross with her hand she followed
Nico back to their pew and knelt until it was time to sit again, the taste of the Communion wafer still bitter on her tongue.

  At last the Mass was done. As they waited for their turn to file outside, Nico touched her arm and bent to whisper in her ear. “We’ll stop to say hello to Father. I know he’ll make a show of welcoming you. That will go a long way to quieting the village gossips.”

  The church was full, so it was a few minutes before they reached Father Bernardi, who stood at the steps and greeted everyone who passed by name.

  “Good morning, Niccolò. And good morning to you, Signora Gerardi. My sincere felicitations on your marriage. We are so happy to have you here in Mezzo Ciel.”

  “Thank you, Father Bernardi.”

  “You are settling in well?”

  “Yes, Father. Everyone has been very kind to me.”

  “Good, good. Niccolò has been singing your praises for months now. Needless to say, I am delighted that he has chosen such a lovely young woman to be his wife.”

  And that was that. Father Bernardi had announced his approval in front of the entire village. And Nina had survived her first Catholic Mass.

  They went home to lunch, which Rosa prepared with the help of the girls, steadfastly ignoring Nina’s offers to help, and then Nico took her on another walk, this one leading them up into the fields above the farmhouse.

  “I’m sorry again for those women in church. You will tell me if anyone else is unkind to you?”

  “I will,” she promised, although she had no intention of doing any such thing. “Doesn’t it bother you, though? Having people gossip about you that way? As if you’ve broken some kind of law?”

  They’d come to the banks of a stream, and he now sat down, his long legs spread out straight before him, and beckoned her to join him.

  “Why should it bother me?” he now asked. “They can’t see inside my heart.”

  “But they said you’d wasted all those years of work and study—”

  “What do they know of it? It wasn’t a waste.” And then, grinning, “I’ve only forgotten the boring bits.”

  “I’m trying to be serious,” she protested, though she was tempted to answer his smile with one of her own. “By helping me, have you closed a door you might wish to open again one day?”

  “Not in the least. If anything, it’s set me free. I was so young when I left here.” He paused, and it seemed as if he were considering how best to explain. “When Father Bernardi first asked my parents if they’d let me go away to school, it felt like I’d been given this wonderful chance for a life beyond Mezzo Ciel. But the longer I studied, the less sure of myself I became. And the longer I was away, the more I wished to come home.”

  “And what if you change your mind?” she pressed.

  “About you? The best wife I’ve ever had?” They both smiled at this, but she couldn’t ignore what he hadn’t said.

  “Had you hoped to marry one day?”

  He nodded, his smile more tentative now. “I had.”

  “But my being here—”

  “Is good. It is. You may not be my wife, but you are becoming my friend. And for that, Signora Gerardi, I am truly thankful.”

  Chapter 10

  27 October 1943

  How was it possible that she’d spent the first twenty-three years of her life with no real notion of where the food she ate was grown? Of the labor that went into its cultivation and harvest? It had simply appeared in shop windows and on market stalls, sorted and washed and neatly displayed, and she had handed over a few coins and never once stopped to think of the true cost of bringing it to her doorstep.

  She understood now.

  She’d been in Mezzo Ciel for barely more than a month. So little time set against the span of her life; but now, thinking back, she found it hard to remember how she had once filled her days.

  She hadn’t been idle, not exactly, for she had helped her father, she had studied, she had done the marketing each day and had helped Marta with some of the chores—though not, she could now admit, any of the really difficult or disagreeable ones. Certainly she had never scrubbed a floor until her knees and back were aching, or stripped the feathers from a still-warm and very freshly dead chicken, or picked the pebbles from a pan of dried lentils until her eyes burned.

  And she did so little work compared to Rosa, who never seemed to sit, who went to bed after the rest of them and was up again before sunrise, who kept them fed and did the laundry and cleaned the kitchen after every meal and, in her idle moments, baked bread, canned vegetables, made soap, and mended their clothes.

  Dominating everything was the harvest, which wasn’t so much a finite period as a steadily swelling tide of work that soon consumed every waking hour. First was the haying, with Nico and Aldo swinging the scythes and everyone except Rosa, who was kept busy in the kitchen, raking the felled grasses down the hillside until they lay in great golden drifts to dry in the sun. Nina had done her best, but the wooden rake had blistered her fingers and she’d been so much slower than the others that Carlo had been bidden to help her.

  Next they’d all worked to cut and bundle the drying stalks from the cornfield, then they’d lifted the potatoes, then they’d gathered the last of the carrots and onions, turnips and cabbages, apples and pears and pumpkins, all to be stored in the cantina beneath the house. And still there were vineyards to be weeded and bare fields to be turned and sown. Nor was there any respite from their everyday chores, with Nico and Aldo rising at four o’clock every morning to milk the cows, feed the animals, and muck out the stalls and pens. When they and the older boys came home after sunset each night, all four were silent and hollow-eyed with exhaustion.

  Each day brought new lessons for Nina and new mistakes, too, some of them costly: dropping a pan of shelled beans in the mud, tripping on the stairs while carrying down the chamber pot from the boys’ room, letting the milk scorch when Rosa had asked her to mind it.

  She wasn’t usually so clumsy or forgetful. Before, she had taken pride in how quickly she learned, how easily she managed tasks that others found difficult. Hadn’t Papà told her that she was as bright as any of his students? Hadn’t his patients complimented her again and again on how kind and helpful she was during her father’s visits?

  Niccolò and the others made allowances, and they explained away her mistakes by telling her the beans could be rinsed, the stairs could be scrubbed clean, the ruined milk could still feed the animals. But with every new failure she grew more nervous, and less certain of herself, and Rosa’s silent disapproval grew ever more glacial.

  AFTER LUNCH NINA told the girls she would gather the plates and scrape the scraps into the pail for the chickens. There wasn’t much, only some stalks of escarole that Carlo could not be induced to eat. She’d gone to the shelf by the sink where Rosa kept the pail, and was about to push Carlo’s leavings in, when the plate was abruptly snatched from her hands.

  “You’re not wasting that on the chickens—how many times have I told you already? Give it to me.”

  Rosa went to scrape the scraps into the pot of soup already simmering away, but in turning she bumped against Nina and dropped the plate on the tiled floor.

  “That was one of my mother’s good plates,” she fumed, dropping to her knees and scrabbling for the scattered pieces. “How could you?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Did you ever do a decent day’s work before coming here? Didn’t your mother teach you anything? And now we have to feed you, and clean up your messes, and—”

  “Enough!” It was too much to bear. Too much, and she was far too tired, and lonely, and achingly sad, and more than anything weighed down by grief for her lost home, her life, and her beloved parents, to bear another word of Rosa’s unthinking vitriol. “How dare you judge me? You know nothing about me. Nothing of what I’ve lost—and it’s more than a plate. Far more.”

  They stared at one another for a moment, so shocked they had forgotten to breathe, and then Nina sank int
o a nearby chair, her legs too wobbly to hold her any longer. What had she done?

  Rosa stood, leaving the shattered plate where it was, and sat next to Nina. “I’m—”

  “Please. Not now.”

  “I was going to say that I’m sorry. It wasn’t right, what I said.”

  “The thing is . . . you aren’t wrong,” Nina admitted. “I haven’t ever worked this hard before. And I know I’m clumsy and I never seem to get things right. But I am trying.”

  Rosa sighed, but there was no anger or bitterness in it. Only exhaustion. If ever there were time for a peace offering, this was it.

  “You’re tired,” Nina said. “Let me finish the dishes—I promise I’ll be careful. And you can sit down for a minute.”

  “If I do, I’ll never get up again. But if you do the washing up I can get started on soaking the boys’ trousers. Caked in mud up to the knees, and their socks are just as bad. Nico’s are more hole than sock, too. Lord only knows what he does to them.”

  “I can darn them. I used to— I mean, I know how to darn and do the mending.” She’d almost said that she used to mend her papà’s socks and clothing, but she was meant to be an orphan. There never would have been a father’s socks to darn.

  She took over from Rosa, trying not to flinch when she dipped her hands in the scalding-hot water. There were only a few plates left, and once they were clean and dry and put away, she collected up the dishpan, using the edges of her apron so it wouldn’t slip from her hands, and carried it outside to water the rows of winter chicory and kale.

  Rosa was back in the kitchen, her attention fixed on a pair of mud-laden socks, when Nina returned. “What should I do now?”

  “The table needs scrubbing, then you can sweep the floor in here. After that’s done you can help me start the bread for tomorrow, and there’s a mountain of mending, too. You might as well get to it while there’s still daylight.”

  That night when Nina fell into bed she was worn out, and her fingers were so raw they throbbed, but her heart didn’t feel quite so heavy. It didn’t seem likely that she and Rosa would ever be friends, for they were too different, had no shared interests, had yet to have a single conversation that didn’t revolve around the work they had done and the work they had yet to do. But it was a start, all the same, and simply thinking of it helped to unravel some of the loneliness that pinched at her heart.