Restoration

by Olaf Olafsson

  “How many children are there on the farms?” she asked him after they had gone.

  He didn’t know but asked the fattore who guessed that there were around fifty.

  “They’re illiterate,” she said. “We must educate them.”

  She set to without delay. The outbuildings on the other side of the road were rebuilt, tables and chairs were installed in the newly painted rooms, and maps were pinned to the walls beside the crucifixes and obligatory photographs of the king and Mussolini. The teacher’s desk was equipped with globe and gramophone, scissors, ruler, and slide rule. She herself provided the first books for the shelves behind the teacher’s desk: Kidnapped and Rob Roy for the boys, The Secret Garden and Little Women for the girls, as well as several volumes of fairy tales. She appointed a young man from Pienza to the post and bought him a bicycle. His name was Signor Grandinetti, a short man with delicate features and bright eyes.

  The children were collected in the mornings and driven in horse-drawn carts to the school when conditions were good, but when the weather was bad and the roads all but impassable, oxen were harnessed to the wagons. Their route took them down the hill past the main villa and on down the road. Alice used to go out in the mornings to await their arrival. She would hear them long before the carts appeared, their bright, cheerful voices accompanied by the jingling of the harness.

  She converted the old barn by the courtyard into a clinic for the usual ailments and injuries and arranged for the nurse who had attended her stepfather when he was ill to move up from Florence. This did nothing to improve relations with her stepfather and mother, but the nurse was delighted at her escape. She was English, a native of Birmingham, Signorina Harris.

  In summer we eat outside in the garden under the trees. Just before the sun dips behind the mountains, its last rays are swallowed up by the sea of leaves, the light turns a deep blue, and fireflies come out like little stars among the trees. The nightingale sings and I place my hand in yours under the table.

  We live on a farm in the south of Tuscany. I never want to leave.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN SAW THE BUILDINGS ON THE hill rise and fall in waves, sometimes disappearing altogether. She stopped, put down her suitcase, and rubbed her eyes, wiping away the sweat and dust as if cleaning an old painting.

  The man who gave her directions in the little village just outside Chiusi had said it was less than ten kilometers to the valley where the English lady lived. That was the day before yesterday. He offered her a room for the night, showing her the bed that had belonged to his son who was killed in April when the Germans had surrounded the village and sniffed out the partisans who used it as a base. He said they had shot them in the square and hung their bodies from the lampposts as a warning to others.

  “I cut him down when it was dark,” he said, “and took him home.”

  There was a photograph of the boy at the head of the bed where she rested for a while but could not sleep. It was late when she said good-bye to the man and continued on her way. He pressed her to stay the night but she was in a hurry to keep going.

  The stitches she had received after the bombing of the train had begun to tear. Sometimes the pain stopped her in her tracks. It was constant now, but she had made it; the buildings undulating on the hill above her fit the description she had been given.

  She stopped frequently on this last stretch, putting down her case and wondering if she should leave it behind when she set off again, lighten her load by taking only the essentials. But she never did; she hadn’t the energy to open it.

  Throughout the journey from Rome she had paid the price for being so badly prepared, and she rebuked herself for her stupidity. Losing her wits, running off like that without thinking, letting panic guide her. She was not accustomed to acting like that. She was not accustomed to behaving as she had done recently.

  She had grabbed an empty lemonade bottle before running away from the burning train, and had filled it as she went along, in rivers and streams, in half-ruined houses, from companies of soldiers who took pity on her, and at the field hospital where they stitched up her wound. But now the bottle was empty, and she was too weak to hobble down to the river Orcia, reduced to a mere trickle in its meandering, rocky bed. The buildings faded from view when she looked up and refused to reappear when she rubbed her eyes. Her strength was gone.

  She remembered them bringing the cart down the hill. She remembered being lifted onto it and the face of the young man nearest her, his big eyes. The clatter when the horse’s hooves slipped on the stones, the snorting, the silence of the men. Then nothing.

  The clinic is white: the walls, ceiling, curtains, and the sheet that covers her. The sun shines on a blue water jug by the sink. The window by her bed is open, and when she turns her head she can glimpse an unchanging, cloudless sky. There is a sound of hammering from outside. The screen beside her bed blocks her view of the rest of the room, but she can hear that she is not alone. A man coughs, then heaves a sigh.

  She is lying on her back, but when she tries to turn over, the pain in her leg prevents her. She lies back, drawing a deep breath.

  She is unprepared when he addresses her.

  “Are you awake?”

  She is flustered. No matter how she wrestled with the dilemma on the way from Rome, she had been unable to decide what reason to give for her journey. Now she feels she can’t say anything until she has worked out a plausible explanation, because one thing leads to another, and words that initially seem harmless can later block off countless avenues of retreat.

  “I can tell you’re awake,” he says. “I can tell from your breathing. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. Signorina Harris too—the nurse. And the Marchesa. She came here this morning with Signorina Harris. Then she came back alone. She stood by your bed watching you. She watched you for a long time.”

  He is a local, she can tell by his accent. Probably in his early twenties, like her. His voice grates on her nerves, perhaps because he is asking questions to which she has no answers.

  “I’m Bruno,” he says. “Who are you?”

  She tries to breathe as she imagines she would if she were asleep. She has no memory of Signorina Harris or the Marchesa. All she can remember is the eyes of the young man who lifted her onto the cart. They pursued her into her dreams, reappearing there in a different face.

  The man who sat opposite her in the train compartment on the way from Rome still has his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but the eyes behind the smoke are those of the boy. They are still there when he is slumped on the floor of the compartment, lifeless. The cigarette has fallen from his mouth and lies burning beside him; his eyes are open, staring at her as if through a thin, watery film. “Out!” she hears someone yelling. “Everyone out!” She sees herself tugging at her suitcase that she has found amidst the wreckage, dragging it behind her out of the burning train. Her leg is heavy, indescribably heavy. She tries to run but can’t.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll get any ham today,” says the young Italian. “We had ham yesterday. Not you; you were asleep. Not the Englishman; he died just after you arrived. I knew he never had a chance. The Germans shot him when he escaped the camp. I could tell he was dead long before they carried him out. It was a different kind of silence. Just like I can tell now that you’re awake. But you needn’t talk to me. You needn’t say anything. If you die, I’ll be able to tell.”

  She dreamt of a swan flying over a pond. There was cotton grass in the marsh by the pond, white as the swan that left its reflection behind in the water when it flew away. She waded out to catch the reflection, not stopping even when she heard people calling her name.

  “Kristín, what are you doing?”

  The water reaches up to midthigh. She has hitched up her yellow dress, holding the skirt in her slender little hands. She is eight years old and knows of nothing as beautiful as this pond and the birds that frequent it.

  “Kristín!”

  She turns around, leaving the image of
the swan behind in the water.

  AS THE WAR INTENSIFIED, SAN MARTINO BECAME AN ideal refuge for partisans and Allied soldiers who had escaped the prison camps of the Axis powers: self-sufficient and dependent on no one. Marchesa Alice Orsini and her household baked their own bread from wheat grown in their fields, raised sheep, chickens, and geese, and grew their own vegetables; ran their own dairy, gathered honey from their hives, and made jam from fruit picked in their orchards. The ham they ate was cured on the spot, as were the salami and goat cheese. There was abundant kindling to heat the houses, as well as olive kernels that made good fuel. They made soap with the residue of kitchen fats, combined with potato peels and soda. They sewed clothes and made shoes. The clinic stocked essential medicines and surgical instruments, and nothing flustered Signorina Harris, a veteran of the Great War.

  An ideal refuge, isolated and remote from the hostilities at first. But of course that would change along with everything else.

  Before the partisans and soldiers came the refugee children from Genoa. The vehicle that drove them to San Martino, having gotten lost on the way, rattled up the road as evening fell. There was a nurse sitting next to the driver, but in the back were seven sleeping little creatures, the eldest six, the others younger. All girls except for a shy little boy from Sardinia. He reminded Alice so terribly of her Giovanni that at first she could hardly look at him.

  They carried them into the school where a fire was burning in the grate and hot food awaited them. It took them a long time to grow accustomed to the lights; they stood silently in the middle of the room, blinking and rubbing their eyes in the unexpected glare. Their faces were chalk white, their limbs spindly.

  The Red Cross had asked her to take them in. Claudio was under the impression that Alice had approached them first, and asked if she thought it was sensible to draw attention to themselves in this way.

  “Do you know what repercussions this could have?” he asked. “Don’t we have enough on our plates with trying to feed our own people?”

  Then he added, “They won’t replace him. No one can.”

  He walked away. It had snowed that morning and she stood for a long time by the window after he had gone, staring at the white-mantled pines in the garden. When the pain finally subsided, she went up to her room and locked the door.

  First the refugee children, then the partisans, then the odd escaped prisoner of war. Followed by the children from Turin, more partisans and soldiers. She couldn’t turn them away, didn’t have the heart despite being fully aware of the risk she was taking.

  When she tried to consult Claudio, he told her it was too late.

  “Why would you be asking me now? I counted three partisans in the kitchen this morning and two Allied soldiers. In addition to all the children. You’ve made sure there’s no turning back.”

  She was angry and asked him where his loyalties lay. She regretted it immediately, knowing how unfair that was. An early supporter of Mussolini, Claudio had turned against him and his government as soon as the war broke out.

  The winter was cold and wet, and as the Allies pushed north and the Germans retreated, the fighting moved closer. When spring arrived, Alice would sometimes wake up to what she believed was the sound of distant rumbling from the fleet bombarding the Tuscan coast, but gradually the shelling drew nearer, and one day in August the first bombs fell in the valley. It was after dinner; she and Claudio were still sitting at the table in the garden; the others had finished. They had continued their custom of dining with Pritchett, Nurse Harris, Signor Grandinetti, and Schwester Marie, and Alice made it a rule that there was to be no talk of the war during the meal. At first, mealtimes were awkward, but then the household grew accustomed to this eccentric habit and eventually came to welcome it. Pritchett had been telling them about a trip he had made to Rome in May, about the girls sitting on the pavements outside the cafés in their decorative summer hats, the young men strutting past, ogling them, the fountains spraying water into the air, the flowerpots overflowing with irises and roses. It was as if the hostilities had been temporarily suspended, he said. And he spoke of the children in Giardino del Lago, sailing their model boats on the lake, with the swans swimming by. Pritchett was in a good mood—he had completed the annex to the schoolhouse that day—and his story seemed to be building up to a humorous finale. But he never finished it because Claudio suddenly spoke up:

  “Yes, Rome’s always so entertaining. Isn’t it, Alice? So much going on. Too bad the war is now preventing you from spending time there.”

  Pritchett stopped talking, and the others hastened to finish their meal and leave husband and wife behind with the silence thick between them. When Claudio got up, slowly as if he were physically exhausted, intending to walk away, Alice said in a low voice, “You talk like that in front of them but when we’re alone you say nothing.”

  “I have nothing to say that you want to hear.”

  “There is nothing worse than your silence.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  She was about to answer him when the first bomb fell. She jumped to her feet and ran onto the veranda, which gave a clear view of the valley. Claudio didn’t move. She heard the planes fly away and saw the fire that flared up on the hillside above Campiglia.

  “They’re here,” she said. “The Allies.”

  He did not answer.

  “They’re here,” she repeated.

  At last he rose to his feet. He did not go to her, merely stood by the table and said in a low voice, “Where were you the evening he died? Tell me. Where were you?”

  KRISTÍN HAD KNOWN WHAT WOULD HAPPEN THE first time they met. She sensed it the moment he took her hand, adjusted the pencil, and guided it back to the paper. And yet he hadn’t uttered a single word.

  She had spent four years in Copenhagen at the Royal Academy of Art before coming south. There she had socialized with both students and artists and had chosen lovers from their ranks. These relationships did not last long, but then that had never been her intention. Something had to give way. Artists make sacrifices. Female artists especially. She had no doubt what her fate would be if she let herself be tied down.

  She was in her early twenties and sometimes reflected on how young this was as she wandered the streets of Rome, looking back over its centuries. The achievements of the human spirit were all around her—churches and museums, amphitheaters and statues, fountains and colonnades—and from these she sought her inspiration. It was possible to leave behind something that outlived the flesh.

  She headed first to Florence, where she rented a cheap little room in a side street near the cathedral and made daily trips to the Uffizi where she sat and sketched one masterpiece after another: the head of Jesus from Verrocchio’s baptism scene; Botticelli’s Venus in her shell, blown onto the beach by a balmy west wind; a bowl of fruit from Caravaggio’s Bacchus. Fragments of countless works. Hands and feet and bellies and shoulders, as her tutors at the Academy had advised her before she set out. Movement. Stasis. Light and shadow. “And don’t be afraid of the most famous works,” they had said, “don’t feel you have to avoid them. Don’t say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to be like everyone else. Everyone knows those paintings. I want to be different.’ Michelangelo, Leonardo, Lippi, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio. Draw as much as you can. You can be different when you have mastered the basics.”

  It was a tutor at the Academy who had given her Robert Marshall’s name. The two men had studied together when they were young and, as the tutor put it, “respected each other.” She found his choice of words odd but didn’t think much of it.

  “He’s an Englishman,” the tutor had said. “He’s lived in Italy for a long time and is regarded as one of the foremost experts on the Renaissance. Author of two books on the period; adviser to Joseph Duveen, the famous art dealer, who will not buy a Renaissance painting without Marshall’s blessing.”

  He wrote his address on a piece of paper: Signor Robert Marshall, Via Margutta, 118.

>   Her funds were running low by the time she reached Rome. Not that her stay in Florence had been expensive, but she had not come away from Copenhagen with much money in the first place. She had worked in a restaurant when she was a student and now found a waitressing job in a café near the Pantheon. The hours were good; she worked nights and was able to concentrate on her art during the day.

  When the war broke out, she thought about leaving but quickly put that out of her mind. There was no place for her to call home; her grandparents had both passed away while she was living in Copenhagen. Besides, the war had initially no discernible impact on daily life in Rome: there were no shortages and the fighting was far away.

  She looked him up in the summer of 1940, a few days after Italy had declared war on France and Britain. She put her tutor’s note in her pocket and walked up and down Via del Babbuino a few times before making up her mind and crossing over to Via Margutta. It was after lunch; the weather was warm and bright, her mind open, her footsteps light.

  Via Margutta is a quiet little side street and her knock on the door sounded loud. But then there was silence, and when no one answered, she rapped on the door again, more gently this time, almost with diffidence.

  The woman who came to the door listened politely while Kristín explained her business. Then she nodded, asked her to wait, and closed the door again. She returned a few minutes later with the message that Signor Marshall was not available but asked if she would meet him the following day at Babington’s Tea Rooms by the Spanish Steps. At three o’clock. Would that be convenient?

  She arrived punctually and when she mentioned Marshall’s name, she was shown to a table in the front room. There was a painting of a woman on the wall opposite and she took out her sketchpad to pass the time. She was drawing the woman’s eyes when he took her hand holding the pencil. She hadn’t noticed him and jumped although his touch was gentle. He guided her hand back to the paper and said, “Carry on.”