The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  He lifts his chin in the direction of the sun streaming through the arched door that leads to the garden.

  “But I think you spend too much time indoors. It’s not good for your health. You need some fresh air and sunshine.”

  She smiles. Since she left her mother, no one has been concerned for her care.

  “Shall we go to the garden? I can read to you there.”

  He senses her hesitation like a silent movement that changes the air within the room.

  “It’s private. No one will see us there. Think of it as therapeutic, if nothing else.”

  She nods, and Angelo feels as though he’s accomplished a small victory as Elodie follows him.

  In the sunshine, she finds herself squinting. Angelo is right, she hasn’t been outside since she arrived, and the light striking her eyes and face is almost blinding.

  She inhales the scent of gardenia and the now-familiar jasmine, and detects the sound of seagulls circling above. Below, she sees the stretch of the ocean and the port from where she first arrived. Viewed from high above the hills, it’s now just a tiny spot.

  As he lifts the book and takes a finger to the page, she remembers with gratitude how he pulled her out from the crowd and saved her from the German with the prying eyes.

  “Where should I start?” he asks her.

  “At the beginning,” she says.

  He nods. “As you wish. My wife used to like me to begin at the end of the books I read to her, so she knew if she had to conserve her tears.”

  Elodie ponders this for a moment. A card has been dealt, a revelation about his late wife.

  “I have no more tears left now,” Elodie says, looking out toward the sea. “With me, you can start from the beginning.”

  “As you wish, Anna,” he says, and he turns back to the first page of Il Piccolo Principe, The Little Prince. “Allora . . .”

  The hour passes between them quickly. He slips into a voice that sounds low and soothing. He reads about the little prince journeying through the first planets, where he meets the king, the vain man, the drunkard, and the man who makes maps. But he stops before her favorite part: the taming of the fox.

  When her eyes close, he studies her in those quiet, stolen moments like a connoisseur of displaced persons. She is more complicated than the others that have come through his door. Simon, the Hungarian Jew, who arrived with a single diamond sewn into his pocket and stayed with him for only a few days before heading farther south. Guido, the eighteen-year-old soldier, who arrived at the port dressed as a seminary student after running away from his post, but who gave himself away by the military boots he still wore. It had been fortunate that the Fascist control at the port hadn’t noticed them as well, but luckily they were distracted by an impressively large-breasted girl who had arrived on the same boat.

  Angelo often recalled the first night Guido spent with him in his home. After drinking one too many glasses of vino santo, the boy could barely control his emotions. He insisted he wasn’t a coward and that he loved his country, but he couldn’t die on frozen Russian soil, where his papers ordered him to go. He would have preferred Ethiopia to Russia, the boy sobbed over his drink. At least there it was warm. Angelo winced. Thoughts of Nasai came flooding back to him. He felt the boy in the room like a ghost.

  When he drank, Angelo’s private hauntings returned. The two people he had abandoned were the ones who had most needed his protection, Dalia and Nasai. The midwife had insisted she had done everything she could to save her, but she wasn’t a doctor. He couldn’t help wondering where his predecessor, Doctor Pignone, had been when Dalia died? Drinking wine at his favorite café, or taking a nap in his hammock under the fig trees? He certainly was not with the midwife or his mother and Vanna as they struggled to save Dalia’s life.

  He would never show this boy, nor any of the others who came through his door, his room with the papered walls. Every night, he looked up and saw the words he had written to his pregnant bride, and he would sleep surrounded by the shadow of those letters. It wasn’t the words that haunted him now, but the two hands that had cut them and pasted them to the walls with such devotion.

  When Guido went down the hall to take his bath that night, Angelo noticed the boy empty his pockets onto the desk in the spare room, revealing a small rope cord with an amulet of San Giorgio. Angelo remembered so many of his fellow soldiers wearing a similar charm around their necks when he was in Ethiopia. The image of Saint George on his horse, a sword grasped to his side, was the gift so many fathers gave to their sons to protect them. Here in Portofino, one could see San Giorgio everywhere. He was the patron saint of the city.

  Angelo had never been one to believe in superstitions or rituals even though he had grown up with his mother believing in the powers of saints. She prayed not only to San Giorgio but also to Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen. And when Angelo had left for school, she added prayers to Saint Luke to protect her son from harm.

  So he could not deny that things like amulets and good-luck charms gave people comfort. But Angelo certainly did not believe these objects themselves held any special powers, but only connected people to the person who had given them. For him, it was the touch of his palm against his patient’s skin that created a seal between them.

  He had watched countless times in hospital wards, even in the tents of Ethiopia, how a human touch could heal in a way that medicine alone could not. And so at night, when Angelo lay tormented by thoughts of Dalia, he often wondered if things might have been different had he been there to hold her hand.

  Guido stayed with Angelo in his home in the terraced cliffs of Portofino for nearly two months. He helped the men in the family on the fishing boats, learning to repair their nets and their engines. Angelo was sure the boy was safe in Portofino, that no one had come looking for him among the lemon trees and ancient village roads that overlooked the sea. But then one morning, when Angelo woke, he found the boy was gone. He had disappeared without even leaving a note of good-bye. But he had left his treasured amulet for Angelo, placing it next to the carved-wood lion from Nasai.

  The girl who calls herself Anna is now sitting across from him in his garden, her eyes closed, the wind slightly moving her hair. She didn’t remind him of Dalia. No, his wife had been a book of abundant fresh pages, with eyes that were always hopeful and full of light. This girl was different. She reminded him of an old secretary desk he had once seen in his professor’s office in Genoa, with its tiers of small drawers, its veneer like an intricate puzzle created out of an inlay of several different exotic woods.

  Even her torso, which she always protects with two folded arms, was like a cabinet of secrets, brimming with stories yet untold. He already suspects why she covers her belly, and why she has no appetite in the mornings and sleeps for much of the day. That was an easy diagnosis for him, one he had concluded within her first few days at his house.

  But there was something far beyond this feminine vulnerability that drew him closer to her. It was as if he felt not like a doctor, but rather like a watchmaker who wanted to open the back of the dial to reveal all the mechanisms, where he knew the true beauty and intricacy lay.

  After she has been with him at the cottage for a few weeks, he begs her not to call him Dottore, but by his given name Angelo. They no longer move through the house as strangers, but as two quiet souls who have grown to understand each other’s rhythms.

  When his sisters questioned Anna’s arrival, he insisted that she was a daughter of one of his old friends from medical school, another one like Simon or Guido who temporarily needed shelter during the war.

  It was Vanna who was the most suspicious of Anna. One afternoon in November, she stopped by the house to find her brother gone. Anna was sitting alone in the living room, her blouse untucked from her skirt and her gaze focused on her belly. Within an instant, Vanna felt certain about what she had suspected for
the past two weeks: that the girl was pregnant. She was so thin in her arms and legs, but with each passing week she seemed to grow thicker in the middle.

  Elodie heard the sound of Vanna’s footsteps on the tile and looked up. Immediately she tried to tuck in her shirt and smooth down her skirt. But Elodie knew that Vanna had already seen her.

  There was a part of Elodie that no longer wanted to lie, and with every day it became more difficult to conceal. She had been reading one of Angelo’s books when she felt the first fluttering inside her. That was why she had untucked her blouse and placed her hands on top of her belly. It was so faint, so gentle, almost like a butterfly’s wings caressing her from within, but she felt it and it took her breath away.

  So when Vanna had caught her in this moment of discovery, Elodie soon gave up her efforts to conceal her pregnancy and simply rose to stand before the woman.

  “I’m sorry,” Elodie said, her eyes glassy with tears. “I just felt a flutter for the first time.”

  Vanna, who was between the age of a mother and an older sister to Elodie, remained silent for what seemed like several minutes. She looked at the girl standing in her brother’s living room, her hands now covering her belly, and it awakened her own maternal instincts to protect someone vulnerable. Elodie was pure despite her condition. And so there was no judgment in Vanna’s voice when she came closer to Elodie and whispered, “I know.”

  Vanna had birthed three children herself and knew well the marvel of having a life growing inside you. It was hard to believe that it had been nearly fifteen years since she gave birth to her first child. Since then she had watched as her brother returned from Ethiopia, his heart broken, and wife and child already buried in the cemetery on the cliff overlooking the sea.

  It would have been easy for Vanna to dismiss the young girl in front of her as a fallen, as someone who had no right to ask for shelter from her all-too-giving brother. But Vanna had seen the effect the girl had on Angelo. For the first time in years, he had begun to smile.

  “Anna,” she said, “how many months are you?”

  “A little over three.”

  “So you have your energy back now?”

  “Yes, too much. I want to clean everything for Angelo and show him how grateful I am for letting me stay here.”

  “And what about the father?”

  Vanna could feel a shift in the room as soon as she asked.

  “I see you don’t have a wedding ring . . .”

  Elodie shook her head.

  “I have no ring.” Her voice quivered. “I have many things from him. I have his sweater. A medal on a chain. A book with his words inscribed into it. But I have no ring.” She paused. “And I won’t be getting one.”

  She lowered her eyes and then raised them to meet Vanna’s. She knew she should feel ashamed by this fact, that it revealed her immodesty, her lack of religious fortitude, and her inability to control her own desire. But how could one be ashamed for carrying something inside them that was conceived solely by love?

  Vanna nodded and kept her face neutral and without judgment. She scanned Elodie to discover the girl’s eyes flickering again. Without needing to ask, Vanna knew immediately that Elodie had felt another kick.

  Vanna smiled and walked closer to Elodie. It made her feel young again to see this girl experiencing all the wonder and beauty of carrying her first child. Vanna had never stopped being amazed by every stage, but those initial movements were the first symbol that a mother and child were eternally entwined.

  She had been relieved by the girl’s honesty. Had Elodie tried to lie to her, Vanna would have been unable to trust her. But now she felt her heart warming to her. She knew the Virgin herself had been unwed and in need of shelter. What this girl needed now was kindness and nurturing. Her brother’s life had already had so much sadness and loss, and she knew he was smart enough to already realize the girl was pregnant. It would be a blessing for him to have the opportunity to see life brought into the world after so much heartache.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nearly twenty.”

  Vanna smiled. “I was the same age when I had my first son.”

  The two women were now only a few feet apart. Against the backdrop of the garden, Elodie looked beatific.

  “I’ll try and help you. Anna, you can trust me. I will be your friend.”

  At that moment, Elodie wanted to tell Vanna her real name and her whole story, have it pour out of her like a stream of water that wished to run free.

  But instead, she took Vanna’s hand and placed it on the center of her belly, then placed her own hand on top.

  The two women waited in perfect silence until the sensation of a small foot fluttering inside an invisible, watery world sealed them to each other.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Verona, Italy

  SEPTEMBER 1943

  The same way she had heard music as a child was the way she remembered her last moments with Luca. It came to her like a drowning.

  She had been in the camp with Luca and the others for only two days. But within that short time, the north of Italy had exploded into war. The mountains, which had only known the sounds of birds before, were now shaking with the echo of explosions from the bordering cities. Elodie grew cold as she saw the plumes of smoke rising from the center of Verona. Even the sky had changed. The clouds were cut by the razor-sharp blades of airplane wings. And the sound of the engines was deafening.

  She had left Orsina alone in the apartment to pack for Venice. She was supposed to have come home the following evening, but the incessant bombing had prevented her return. Elodie was sick with worry. She could only imagine how her mother must have been feeling alone in the apartment.

  The first night she had slept in a small tent with Rita Rosani, on old sacks stuffed with straw. The schoolteacher’s blonde hair looked angelic, but joined to her body, like another limb, was her rifle. During the night, Elodie saw Rita’s hand reach for her musket like it was a lover whom she was afraid might leave her side.

  On the second day, Luca was told to go farther into the mountains to look for a place to move their camp. Elodie insisted she would go with him.

  She had not bathed for several days now, not since the morning after her recital, and she was self-conscious about the soot and dirt on her skin. She looked like a wholly different person from the girl who previously had been so resplendent on the stage. Gone was the taffeta silk, the tight chignon—all of the elegance of her debut.

  The others looked like time-worn partisans. Rafaelle with his broad shoulders, his brown skin, and hands that looked large enough to be weapons themselves. Even the other women, Rita and Jurika, had a solidity to them that was foreign to her. Their backs and shoulders were stronger. And their breasts, so much bigger than Elodie’s, gave the impression that they were wearing armor.

  She had not been thinking when she jumped on her bicycle and pedaled to meet Luca. She regretted not having worn trousers and a sweater, something that would have protected her skin while she walked through the bramble and thatch.

  Luca was standing next to a small fire, speaking with his brother and drinking from a small cup of boiled acorn coffee.

  “Want some?” he had asked her. “It’s awful but it’s warm.”

  She put her hand up and shook her head no.

  He walked over and wrapped a single arm around her. “If I had known that you would get stuck up here with me in this dirty camp, with the Germans swarming the area, I would never have let you come.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “I’m glad I’m here with you . . .”

  He shook his head. “Your poor mother must be sick with fear. She expected you home yesterday.”

  “My mother is strong.”

  “We need a new camp.” Rafaelle came over and interrupted them. “We’ve been here too long. Luigi discovered a G
erman bunker last night, two miles east. I want to move our camp before we attack them.”

  Rafaelle pulled out a map and showed Luca where the Germans had been sighted. He moved his finger in the opposite direction and tapped a section of the map. “Try to find a safe place over here.”

  He started to walk away, but then returned. “And take Elodie with you,” he instructed. “She shouldn’t be left alone here, it’s too dangerous. If we know about the German camp, they know about ours. I can’t ensure her safety if she stays here.”

  Luca nodded. “Yes, you’ll come with me,” he said, looping his arm around her.

  They began walking in the direction Rafaelle had indicated. There were no pathways, just spaces in between trees and vines. The smell of chestnut husks and oak leaves was heavy in the air.

  After some time, there seemed to be a clearing in the woods. “What’s that over there?” Elodie asked. In the distance, she saw what looked like an abandoned farmhouse.

  Luca nodded. He, too, saw what looked like an old house. “If it has a roof and four walls, Rafaelle and the others will think we’ve found a palace for them.”

  Elodie smiled and reached to find Luca’s hand.

  They went over to inspect the structure more closely. When they arrived, they discovered that it was nothing but a skeleton of charred beams and stone. As they moved through what must have been the living room, their feet stepped over pieces of some family’s former life: a child’s cradle, a raggedy doll, four broken kitchen chairs, and a table covered in rubble and bits of the fallen roof. They trod on a carpet made of broken pottery and glass.