The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  “Levi was a kind man. A generous soul . . . He was Mantua’s best dealer when it came to fine, rare instruments. His showroom was just a few meters from the town center. A small door that once you entered, you could smell the scent of varnish and wood. Violins hung from the ceiling. Bows were pegged to the wall. Behind the glass, he kept his cherished Stradivarius violin. I once was at a salon where his son played the Strad and he played your Gofriller. To hear the two of them play! My God, angels were in the room that night!”

  Elodie could almost see and hear the music wafting from the salon room he described. And, as much as she wanted to appear unmoved, she couldn’t help but smile.

  “I wish I could have been there,” she said softly. Her hands, without her knowing it, were still covering her cello protectively. “I suppose you don’t think I do my cello justice,” she said to him.

  “No, I don’t think that at all . . .” He narrowed his eyes slightly, as if to absorb her into his mind completely. “Something about you reminds me of my wife. She was older than you when I first met her, of course. But she had that same gaze. That fire underneath her eyes. So focused she was . . .” His voice cracked slightly. She heard him take a breath as if to fortify himself.

  “When was the last time you heard from her?”

  “It’s been over six months,” he said. “I begged her not to leave Italy. She was arrested in France trying to help her parents and was then deported—I’m told to somewhere in Poland.”

  Elodie winced. She had heard from Zampieri that there were members of the French Resistance who were arrested by the police and sent to work camps in Poland. No one ever heard a shred of information about them after that. It was a big, vast hole.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I heard you play her music the last time I was here, and it lingered inside my head for days. That’s how good it was.”

  “She was a talent beyond words,” he replied. “She played three instruments, traveled throughout Europe to perform, and composed much of her own music. I was a pedestrian next to her.”

  Elodie was about to offer another morsel of sympathy for him, but he suddenly grew conscious of the fact he was revealing too much of himself.

  “Well, that’s enough of me bellyaching to you. You are here for a reason, Dragonfly. What am I listening to today?”

  “Boccherini,” she said. “Cello Concerto in B flat Major.”

  “Boccherini, eh? I prefer Haydn.”

  She laughed. “Me, too, but it’s a good piece for a cadenza.”

  “Well, begin,” he said. He pulled up the pleats to his pants and sat down.

  Elodie lifted her bow, closed her eyes, and regained her focus. She forced everything he had just said to her out of her mind.

  The music was lighter and faster than the Haydn concerto she had played the last time. This time when she shifted the key into the cadenza and did the triple-stopped whole notes, her bow plucked like a fiddler.

  There was a strange levity to the sound of the notes, which she knew contrasted with the importance of the encoded message.

  She saw the Wolf’s eyebrows lift when she got to the cadenza, his head nodding slightly as if giving his approval to the plan.

  When she was done, she handed him the score.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Portofino, Italy

  NOVEMBER 1935

  As Angelo prepared to report for duty in Ethiopia, Dalia’s pregnancy was confirmed. She had missed two periods, and terrible bouts of morning sickness soon overtook her. Angelo’s mother brought her simple broths and loaves of bread to soothe her poor stomach, but Dalia could keep none of it down.

  She wanted to enjoy as much time as possible with Angelo before he left, but she could hardly walk without vomiting. Pale and exhausted, she spent most of her time in bed. To be close to her, Angelo brought novels to her bedside.

  The sound of him reading was still a sweet melody to her. He always kept his hand on top of hers, only taking it away when he needed to turn a page. Sometimes she would close her eyes and try to envision the characters with her and Angelo’s faces. Every romantic kiss depicted was one of theirs. Any mention of a small child evoked images of the baby who grew inside her womb. She imagined being just like the maternal character in a story, tying the strings of the embroidered baptism cap, or cradling the baby in her arms.

  She was so grateful to have this educated man who had brought her into the magical world of books.

  And now that she could read with great fluidity, the words were no longer an impossible code she could not understand. She had learned so many things she never knew existed through the novels he brought to her bedside.

  She particularly adored the latest serialized novels in libri gialli, which introduced her to the first translations of authors from abroad, their stories exposing her to entirely different landscapes beyond her small fishing village.

  “You will never be lonely with a book at your side,” he told her as he tucked his blooming wife into bed. From the collar of her nightdress, her breasts, now slightly swollen, peeked through. He had to do everything in his power to control himself, as he knew how fragile she was in the early weeks of pregnancy.

  “Limonina,” he whispered to her. “I think we’ve had enough reading today. Why don’t you try and get some sleep?” He took his hand away from hers and placed both of his palms on her belly. She wasn’t far enough along for him to feel even a soft bump let alone a kick, but just the thought of their baby growing inside her warmed his entire body.

  “I’m going to miss you beyond words,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

  “I will write you every day, just as I did when I was in medical school. Did I break my promise then?”

  “No,” she said. “You sometimes wrote me twice a day, didn’t you?” A small smile found its way to her lips and she giggled.

  “Yes, so now that you’re my wife, I will probably write you three times a day!”

  “I can paper our bedroom with your letters,” she said wistfully.

  He had no idea that she would take this sentence to heart. That would come much later, only after he had returned.

  Angelo left for Ethiopia the following week with little more than an army bag and his doctor’s kit. In the latter, which he had purchased just out of medical school, he carried two sets of scissors, a roll of tape, a stethoscope, and a small hammer. He knew the doctors would be given more supplies once they set up camp, but he felt he needed to carry this bag with him to give him greater credibility with the soldiers.

  Dalia had promised herself she wouldn’t cry when Angelo left. But seeing him standing there in his army uniform, grinning at her, tore her apart. And even though she was still weak from the morning sickness, she took all the energy she had inside of her and ran to embrace him one last time.

  When his first letter arrived a few weeks later, she felt as if she had stepped back in time and was still the young girl waiting for a letter to arrive from her love, away at medical school. But now she was a married woman with a child growing inside her, and the letter felt more precious than ever to her. She studied his careful penmanship on the envelope and the colorful stamps from Africa. She took her finger to the strokes of ink and tried to feel his energy coursing through. After a few moments to savor the anticipation, Dalia took the envelope to their bedroom, sat down on the coverlet, and began to read slowly.

  My dearest Dalia, my limonina,

  Every day, every hour, I think of you. We have just arrived in Tripoli, and will be moving toward Ethiopia in the next few weeks. I am keeping my spirits up thinking about you and our baby.

  I have been keeping busy tending to small wounds, blisters, and infections. The men in my unit are an interesting bunch from all over Italy. My bunkmate, Carlo, also has a pregnant wife. We cross off the days on our calendars to reinforce that we are both one day closer to
returning home.

  I go to sleep, darling, dreaming of you. I imagine your belly growing bigger every day, and I wish I could place my palm on your skin and feel not just one heart, but two.

  I love you.

  Angelo

  Dalia held the letter in her hands and closed her eyes. She could feel his presence through his words, and the distance between them fell away. In that rare moment of peace, Dalia suddenly knew exactly what she was going to do. She would make her passing remark to Angelo a reality. She stood up and placed the letter on the bed. Then, with newfound energy and a sheer will of determination, Dalia went into the kitchen in search of some flour and water.

  The kitchen had many ceramic bowls. Dalia eyed each of them before settling on one no bigger than the size of her palm. With a few deft steps, she made a simple paste out of some flour and water, stirring until the consistency was pliable and sticky. Then with a small pastry brush in hand, she returned to the bedroom.

  Dalia knew immediately where in the room she would begin. She kneeled on the mattress, and there just above her nightlight, pressed Angelo’s letter onto the wall, its back now sticky with glue.

  Every day, Dalia waited for a new letter to arrive. When she had finished reading it, she took scissors and carefully cut around the edges to create small, unusual shapes. Sometimes, two or three of them arrived in one day. Each one she cut and then glued, so that eventually, a beautiful vine of love letters grew along her wall.

  After several months, she had nearly covered the bedroom walls. She made small bursts of clouds with some of the letters and even a patch of flowers to accompany the vines. But she still left a few distinct pockets within the walls and ceiling, as if these were the moments of breath or heartbeat, that rested between them like two sleeping souls separated by the continents. In these patches of space, she took a brush and dabbed in bits of mica dust from the crushed stones of her village of San Fruttuoso, the one she kept in a jar beside her bed.

  The bedroom was her special secret, for Dalia closed its door whenever family came to check in on her. She instead always received visitors on the terrace or in the little dining room near the kitchen.

  Dalia was treated like a queen by everyone around her. To all those who gazed upon her, she was a beautiful woman with a life blooming inside her. She was told not to lift anything or strain herself in any way. If she expressed a craving, it was accommodated almost as soon as the mere suggestion of the food came from her lips. If she mentioned a cannoli, there would be an entire tray for her the following morning. If she wanted chicken, it was promptly prepared three different ways for her liking.

  The coastal superstitions also applied in full force. No one was allowed to touch her face, for fear it would cause the baby to have an unseemly birthmark on the same place. And an amulet was waved in front of her belly to predict the child’s sex.

  She had seen this attentiveness to pregnant women throughout her own childhood. It enabled Dalia to spend the day doing as she pleased. She spent a few minutes each day pasting Angelo’s most recent letter and also enjoyed crocheting with her mother-in-law for the newborn baby’s clothes or helping her with the cooking for the extended family.

  Her most cherished part of the day, however, was once she retired to her bedroom for the evening. There she felt as though she were reconnecting with Angelo, even though he was now thousands of miles away. She savored lying on her bed and seeing his words everywhere. She knew if she rolled to her right, she could read his first letter, which was now just above the discussion of his travels and days in the desert. The letters near her headboard talked about a boy who had come to live in the camp and had become a special friend to Angelo. To the left of her bed was a poem he had written, one that never ceased to bring tears to her eyes:

  You sleep with life inside you, your brightness illuminated in your eyes.

  I dream of your face, your smile, the clasp of your hand.

  You are the waters between us, gentle, your own harmonious tide.

  I am in the clouds, the wind that kisses you every night

  A whisper of breath that hovers just above your sleeping lids.

  By the last month of her pregnancy, she had papered all four walls of the room with six months’ worth of Angelo’s words. Dalia looked up at the ceiling and decided to decorate that as well. With her taut stomach now as large as a dome, she slowly made her way onto a ladder and began to glue Angelo’s latest letters on the ceiling. She knew it was dangerous, so she moved as carefully and as slowly as she could. When she had also filled the ceiling, Dalia felt a sense of completion that welled inside her and fed both her own spirit and that of the baby. For all she had to do now was lie in her bed and look to any part of the room and there was Angelo’s love. Written as if it were torn pages from a novel, spread like wings across every inch of their room.

  In Ethiopia, daily life was more brutal than Angelo had let on in his letters to Dalia. The camp he was stationed in was several hundred miles outside Addis Ababa, in the middle of the desert. The air was hot and the dust storms were brutal on the men’s eyes. Although he had only done a bit of surgery when he was in medical school, these skills were quickly and repeatedly put to use, as removing bullets and shrapnel kept him busy. Men were carried in on stretchers with their flesh shattered from the impact of bullets. He learned through trial and error how far to dig, or how much morphine they could spare. On the days when supply shipments were delayed, the men were strapped down and forced to chew on a strip of leather while he extracted the bullet.

  He rarely left the camp, and spent most of his days in the surgical tent.

  They were a motley group of men. As most of them were uneducated, they at first kept their distance from Angelo, thinking his advanced degree and medical training made him different from them. But over the weeks, the close quarters of their cots, the poor food, and their mutual longing for their wives and girlfriends helped forge a camaraderie among all the men. Nicknames were soon doled out. But out of respect, everyone always called him Dottore Angelo.

  One day, two months into their encampment, there was a call for Angelo from one of the soldiers.

  “Dottore! Dottore!” Tancredi cried out for him. Angelo sped outside the tent to discover a tall, emaciated African carrying a boy in his arms.

  The man could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He carried his son, equally famished, like a broken kite frame. The skin on the boy’s torso was as tight as stretched canvas. His white bandages were soaked brown with blood. The ebony of both father and son’s skin was camouflaged by a thick coating of body paint, and from underneath the stripes of pigment, the father’s eyes were dark and wet like river stone.

  Both Tancredi and Angelo ran out to meet the man, who collapsed as the others reached him, the boy’s body sliding weightlessly to the ground.

  “Help me lift him,” Angelo ordered Tancredi, and together they raised the boy onto the stretcher that two other men had quickly brought to the scene.

  “We’ll need to turn him over,” Angelo instructed. They flipped him onto his back and the boy let out a small, muffled groan.

  With deft hands Angelo placed one hand on the boy’s scapula, and with his other hand, traced his finger across the bullet wound. A grape-sized entryway into the flesh of his shoulder was now crusted with blood and pus.

  “Infection has already set in,” Angelo said, more to himself than to Tancredi. He touched the boy’s forehead. He was burning with fever.

  “Go get the translator to tell the father we need to operate immediately,” he instructed Tancredi. Angelo immediately followed the stretcher into the surgical tent, and within minutes he was preparing to operate on the boy. The instruments were sterilized by one of his assistants, and he had just begun to pull the morphine into the needle when Tancredi returned.

  “Did you tell him?” Angelo asked. He did not bother to look up, his e
yes instead firmly set on surveying the boy’s wound, which now looked like a dark-ringed bull’s-eye.

  “I couldn’t.”

  Tancredi looked pale.

  “Why’s that?” Angelo was impatient and just about to inject the boy with anesthetic.

  “Because . . .” Tancredi stood there for a second like he had a stone in his mouth. “Because, Dottore . . . Because he was dead.”

  Angelo continued staring at the boy’s shoulder and didn’t answer Tancredi.

  A great gust of wind entered the tent and lifted Angelo’s surgical coat. He didn’t move from his position.

  He simply took out his scalpel and cut into the boy.

  The boy survived the operation, but when he recovered, he had no one to claim him. The sight of the dying father—who had survived long enough to reach their campsite with his wounded son in his arms—was hard to forget for the other soldiers. They didn’t have the heart to abandon the boy now that he was alone.

  They learned his name was Nasai from the cook, Amara, who always made sure the boy was well fed. When other Ethiopians occasionally arrived, the men would always introduce the boy in a vain attempt to see if a distant relative could be found. But none came forward, and none were ever discovered. So Nasai remained with the Italians.

  Grateful for the doctor who had saved him, Nasai dedicated himself to Angelo. He learned how to assist Angelo in the medical tent. He organized the instruments, folded the bandages, and helped clean up and disinfect after the surgeries. He always slept outside the tent, even though Angelo had offered him a cot. Some nights, Angelo would awaken and go outside the tarp only to discover the young boy, crouched like a protective lion, a small stick and flint blade in his hand.

  Nasai learned to speak some broken Italian, to play cards with the men, and even to drink their coffee. But as many times as the men told him he could share a tent with them, he insisted he needed to sleep outside with the sound of the wind and the light of the stars.