The Golden Hour - Margaret Wurtele

by The Golden Hour (epub)

  “Well…” I drew a slow line with my toe in the gravel. “Why not. Okay, why not? I’m too idle lately. And just to work alongside you would make me happy.” I hugged her and smiled. “When do we start?”

  We began meeting quietly with twenty young children a couple of weeks later. I reveled in Sister Graziella’s proximity, and I did my best to stay out of Sister Elena’s way. The children were, well, children, but they were gone in the afternoons. Then one morning in January, I saw a lorry pull up noisily in front of the school. A dozen or so German soldiers piled out and began milling around the sidewalk, while one of them walked boldly up and hammered his fist on the school entrance.

  Sister Graziella and I stood next to each other in the hall, blockading the children behind us, while Sister Elena, her stiff back held erect, slowly drew back the bolt and opened the door. There stood a sandy-haired officer who looked to be in his mid-twenties. He was slender, and—if it weren’t for the Nazi uniform—he looked approachable, almost kind. Elena fixed her icy stare on him. “Yes?”

  “I am Lieutenant Klaus Eisenmann, officer in charge of preparing this area for defense against the Allies,” he said in surprisingly fluent Italian. “My fellow officers and I will direct the construction of tunnels and bunkers, the work on bridges, and the storage for ammunition. We claim this school as our administrative headquarters, and now we are planning to occupy this building.”

  Sister Elena drew herself up to her full height. “Well, I have news for you, Lieutenant.” The words grated like metal on stones. “My colleagues and I are busy constructing young minds here, and we have no intention of moving.”

  The two of them argued, and I have to admit I admired Sister Elena’s courage, her staying power. In the end, they negotiated a compromise. The officers would take over most of the school except for a classroom off the courtyard and one small office in the rear of the building, so that the tutoring program could continue. We would use the playground in back and have some access to the kitchen.

  “And naturally we will expect you to keep your distance from the children,” Elena stated finally.

  After they left, when the three of us were alone again, Elena grabbed my wrist and hissed into my ear, “And I know I don’t have to remind you, young lady, that I expect you to keep your distance from those soldiers.” Where did that come from? It made me burn with shame, and I had no idea why.

  The Germans were running the country, driving confiscated cars and motor scooters. I heard that they were even living in Italian homes. I wished I could understand their language, that scratchy, angry sound that had become so much a part of our lives. I was getting tired of being careful, of easing my way around my own life like a cat sneaking past a sleeping dog. I was getting impatient, too, with the politeness that was expected of me all the time, the effort it took to make room for so many brash foreigners in our midst, and it had begun to have an odd effect on me. Their presence secretly emboldened me. Instead of seeing them as a vast, uniformed mass of occupiers, I had begun to see them as equals.

  All that winter and into the spring, we worked next to those soldiers, and the walls of the school began to encase me in a separate world, one that was part of the war but at the same time a kind of refuge from it. We began to get used to the comings and goings of the specific officers who worked there, our soldiers. There was Lieutenant Eisenmann, Klaus, of course, the one who had first come to the door. Then there was big Otto and the German shepherd. I have always loved dogs—and Panzer became a sort of a mascot. There was Heinz, who whistled incessantly, and Willem, whose allergies acted up in the Tuscan air, making him wheeze and spit with abandon. They were rough and loud. They were angry and impatient. But within the school, our two factions had worked out a kind of peaceful routine that allowed each of us to attend to the tasks of the day. At noon every day, for example, the officers gathered in the cafeteria while the children and I walked home for the midday meal and the sisters returned to their convent for a couple of hours during the heat of the day.

  One morning Hans, a stocky blond officer with wire-rimmed glasses and a pronounced limp, showed up in our office, where I was meeting with the sisters while they planned the next day’s lessons. “We have extra sausage here,” he offered. “If you’d like to take it home, be our guests, please.”

  We took the meat, knowing that it was highly unusual, a complete turnaround from how the Germans habitually helped themselves to whatever produce or supplies they found in the stores, in the fields, even in people’s homes.

  What began to happen then, as spring settled in, really took me by surprise. I started watching the officer Klaus all the time. I was fascinated, trying to decide why he seemed nicer than the others. The corners of his blue eyes had deep smile lines, and in his casual way of looking off to one side, there was an openness that made me want to penetrate his inner shell. I learned to recognize his voice at a distance, and when I heard him nearby, I found any excuse—“the little black-and-white cat needs a bowl of milk,” or, “I must get some water to moisten the bougainvillea next to the door”—to leave my worktable.

  I could feel his eyes on my back and knew he was following my every move. I noticed little things, too, like the way he lifted his jacket to put his left hand in his pocket, and the habit he had of hitching up his pants, which emphasized how slim he was compared with the others. I wanted to know more about him, whether he had a family and how he ended up assigned to the School of Santa Maria.

  It was new to me, this thinking all the time about the officer Klaus. I knew boys my own age, of course, but I was self-conscious. I was short, big breasted, and a little heavy around the hips; my hair stood out in a wiry halo around my head, even when I tied it in a ponytail. I was never one of the girls the boys tended to flirt with or tease in a friendly way, and I pretended I didn’t care.

  One afternoon, I was sitting alone at a long table in our classroom with a pile of papers in front of me. It was warm and humid, and a hummingbird buzzed beneath the open window behind me. I could see straight through the open door into the courtyard as the soldiers crossed, going in and out of their offices. Klaus passed by, laughing loudly, his heavy boots clunking along the wooden porch until he reached the sand.

  I bent my head to the stack of papers, but instead, I found myself moving the pencil dreamily across my own empty tablet, the one I kept to take notes. In simple cursive, imitating that of the seven- and eight-year-old students, I began to write: My papa’s name is Klaus. He is big and tall and very handsome. He has soft hands and when he puts me to bed, he sits next to me and holds my hand….

  “What are you doing, signorina?” My hand jerked, and I looked up to see Klaus leaning against the frame of the door, as if he just wanted to pass the time, to relieve the tedium of his duty. He smiled. “You are writing to yourself, no?”

  I panicked and moved my arm quickly over the tablet to cover up what I had written. “I am just correcting the children’s papers,” I said, looking past him into the bright afternoon light.

  “But no, I was watching you. You write,” he said. He started to move slowly toward me, his arm reaching out, his fingers beckoning in a teasing kind of way. “Show me the paper.”

  I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed and leaned in across the desk, conscious that my sundress strap had fallen off my shoulder in the motion. “No no, signor, really, they’re just children’s papers. Here, I will show you.” I shifted the rumpled compositions onto the top of my own tablet and began handing them to him one at a time. He was smiling, but his blue eyes narrowed. He leaned in, so close I could smell stale cheese on his breath. He held my arm down and slid the tablet out from under the pile. He slowly picked it up and studied the carefully written lines. I stared at the table, not daring to breathe. After what seemed like forever, he looked down at me.

  “How old are you?” he asked slowly.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Old enough,” he said.

  “Old enough for what
?” My voice quavered.

  “Old enough to wish for soft hands.”

  The hummingbird buzzed again, and there was a scent of jasmine on the breeze. “I was pretending to be one of the children…. It was only a game.” I looked down at the floor, rested my eyes on his heavy boots. Then he set the tablet down, turned his back, and left the room.

  I sat frozen, my ears flaming. It felt like the week before in the kitchen, when I’d dropped a lit match on the hem of my skirt. There was a split second, just before I brushed it off, when I was tempted to leave it there, to see if it would burn.

  Chapter Two

  Everything was quiet in the courtyard. It was after five in the afternoon. Klaus and Otto had just left, calling auf wiedersehen to each other. I got up from the tall pile of compositions that Sister Graziella had left for me to correct to watch them leave, making myself invisible at the very edge of the window. The dust settled back onto the ground in a fine layer of rusty red, and the drone of bees in the butterfly bush took up residence in the back of my brain. I sat down and rushed through the rest of the papers, and as I headed toward the office to leave the work on Sister Graziella’s desk, I found myself almost tiptoeing. The creak of the individual floorboards seemed to echo in the silence. At the door of the classroom where Klaus spent his working hours, I paused, midstep, and was looking in when Sister Elena’s raspy voice made me jump. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

  My heart began to pound. It took me back to when I was fourteen, when Violetta and I tried to sneak out of school early, close to the end of the term in May. We were ready to run for it, crawling out from behind the hedge to head for the gate, when we bumped straight into the folds of Sister Elena’s habit.

  “You little rats, you agents of the devil,” she snarled as her fists closed around our uniforms at the backs of our necks. She kept us in her office for an extra hour after everyone else had gone home, and we had to sit there while she worked. One of us would make a hilarious face behind her back, then the other. We both almost wet our pants, but we managed to keep from laughing out loud.

  I looked at her. “Sister Graziella gave me some of her own work to do,” I lied. “It’s taken me until now to finish. I’m just going to return it to the office.”

  “I do not want you here alone and unsupervised. See that you leave right away, and don’t let this happen again.”

  “Yes, Sister.”

  I stood there, not moving, watching her figure like a leaning flagpole clip-clop away down the hall. After putting the papers on Sister Graziella’s desk, I waited until I heard the courtyard gate close behind Sister Elena. I listened to be sure I was alone, and when everything was quiet, I made my way back to Klaus’s office. His desk was covered with dusty stacks of papers and files, and on top of the typewriter sat a light blue envelope. A hot breeze cooled the back of my neck and blew a wisp of hair into my eyes. I tucked it behind my ear. Then, ever so slowly, I stepped toward the desk.

  Achtung! Privat! was stamped in red on some of the papers and reports piled across the desk. There were pages of German words that had obviously been typed on the old typewriter. There was a peel from half an orange drying there, as if it had been left for several days, and a sprig of pink bougainvillea that must have been wilting for just an hour or two. I looked down at the light blue envelope, which had a folded piece of matching paper sticking halfway out. The writing on the envelope looked spidery and thin. It had to have been written by a woman. I took my index finger and slid the paper sideways out of the envelope. My heart began to pound like a drum and my breath was fast. I opened the letter. Sonntag, am morgen was scrawled in the upper right-hand corner. Then, Klaus, mein leben, below it on the left. I couldn’t read the German, but the writing was careful, exact, with hardly a correction. The whole look of it was comfortable and familiar. I turned it over and skimmed down to the bottom. It closed, Ich liebe dich, Mathilde.

  This has to be from his wife, I thought, or a lover who’s waiting back in Germany.

  My hand shook as I refolded the letter. As I parted the envelope to slip it back in, I caught sight of something else inside. It was a small photograph, a brown-toned portrait of a woman sitting on a tapestry-upholstered bench. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, with curly blond hair and round, full cheeks. She was not overweight, but she was ample, her arms comfortable- and soft-looking. In the photograph, she held a baby wrapped tightly in a blanket, looking somberly straight at the camera. The woman’s gaze was fixed on the baby, and I could see she loved it with all her heart. Maybe this is Klaus’s baby, I thought. I stared at the picture until a worm of envy started turning in my stomach.

  I was just about to slip the letter back into the envelope when I heard what I thought was the click of the front gate. I tucked the photograph quickly into the pocket of my skirt. To take it home for just one night, I thought as I hurried away. What could be the harm in that? Only to be able to look at it over and over before I went to sleep.

  I was relieved when I finally arrived at the thick stucco wall that surrounded Villa Farfalla. I shouldered open its heavy wooden gate and headed up the gravel path that ran alongside the orchard toward the main house. Keeping my hand on the photograph in my pocket, I veered off to walk in the shade under the olive trees. Tonino, who looked after our orchard, was perched on a ladder, carefully pruning limbs from the center of one of the trees. While the interiors of the trees were kept open, the outer limbs were allowed to arch out and down, so the workers could reach the branches. Now they were covered with tiny pale yellow flowers that were, in those exuberant long days of late spring, beginning to be replaced by countless baby olives no bigger than capers.

  “Don’t fall off that ladder,” I called up to him. “You’re too precious to lose!”

  “Ah, now at last the sun is shining!” Tonino smiled and opened his arms widely as if to embrace me in midair.

  A blue cotton work shirt split where it stretched tightly over his bulging girth like the skin of an overripe persimmon. He was like my second father. As long as I could remember, he had been there, as much a part of our gardens and orchards as the rosebushes and spreading acacia trees. He and his wife, Catarina, were tenant farmers who lived in a small house on the property. They had two sons, Pietro, who was five years older than I, and—after several miscarriages—Fello, who was now sixteen, just one year behind me.

  My brother, Giorgio, and I grew up with those boys, hiding and chasing one another, stealing fruit from the mulberry trees until our fingers were stained with dark purple juice. But now two of us were gone. Pietro had died in Russia a year and a half ago, and then Giorgio had disappeared last autumn, when the National Republican Army had called him up to fight. Since then Tonino and Catarina’s house had become my refuge, a place where I felt comfortable, where I could express my feelings and escape the increasingly chilly atmosphere at home.

  “Your papa is looking for you, cara,” Tonino called down to me.

  I hurried up the gravel walk. When I reached the villa, I could see its rough stucco walls beginning to crack and peel. I looked longingly at the front entrance with its tall arched opening. The oak of the thick wooden door was burnished, nicked, and dented with years of use, the brass knob beginning to darken from the war’s neglect. Reluctantly, however, I ducked under an overhanging branch of hydrangea and moved toward the back of the house. I opened a side door and clumped up the narrow wooden staircase to the second floor. Here, in the rear, in the five small rooms that had once been servants’ quarters, my parents and I had been living for nearly four months.

  It had been in early February, a month after Klaus appeared at the school, when my mother and I heard a hard rapping at the door. Mother opened it to find about five Nazi soldiers standing there.

  “We have official papers,” said a barrel-chested officer who towered over Mother. He held the butt of a sodden cigar in one hand, a clipboard in the other. “We must now have this villa for our living quarters, for ten officer
s in charge of the regional communications.”

  “Wait a minute!” I heard myself piping up, remembering Sister Elena’s negotiations with the Germans at the school. “You can’t just burst in here like this. We live here. This is private property.”

  “Giovanna, please!” Mother motioned me back with her arm.

  “Ja, ja, signorina.” His look was perfunctory. “We know this.” Turning to Mother, he added, “The property is very large, so the family will stay in residence here, in the back, upstairs. This is a big exception, by orders. We will return tomorrow.”

  After they left, I exploded. “How can you let them do this? They can’t just come in here and live in our house. Mother, you just gave in!”

  Papa, who had come in from the other room, would not even look at me. Holding himself straight and gripping the back of a chair, he said, “Our family is smaller now with Giorgio gone, so we do not need so much space as before.”

  “Oh, Papa, come on. They are forcing us. It is not about the space. Isn’t there something you can do, someone you can appeal to?”

  “Giovanna, please. We know so many people who will be forced to move away, to evacuate. We are lucky to be able to stay here. We must accommodate them now. We have no choice, and I will hear no more from you about this.”

  Mother held her ground, looking at me. She was tall and trim and stood so straight. She considered me steadily, with her composed, aristocratic air. Her hair was long, still sleek and dark, and held in a low bun by a simple ornament. I knew, had always known, even though she was my mother, that she was strikingly beautiful. She was dressed for that night’s family dinner in an elegant navy crepe dress with white collar and cuffs. She spoke slowly, distinctly. “Your father is right. This is not a time to display your temper. It is a moment for dignity and forbearance.”