The Golden Hour - Margaret Wurtele

by The Golden Hour (epub)

  “Off to the market, dear?” she asked, eyeing the basket.

  “Oh, you know supplies are short everywhere…” I answered, leaning into the sentence, trailing my unspoken need before this woman’s abundance.

  “I’m sure your garden at the villa is overflowing.” There was no sign of comprehension.

  “How is Andrea?” I thought maybe this reference to her son might jog her memory if she knew about Giorgio.

  “His wounded arm is healing well, thank you,” she said. Then she moved closer. “Not too fast, we hope, because you know what that would mean. They’d be after him again.” She adjusted her dark head scarf and rolled her eyes. “Such a nasty business, this war.”

  The conversation petered out with no mention of Giorgio, no sign that she knew what I was after. “I’ll see you soon,” I called to her, and hurried off, my mind churning. I wished I knew more about everyone’s politics, that I had a better feel for our neighbors. But in the face of my ignorance, I had to opt for silence and utter discretion.

  I stopped by two other gardens, but at each, I lost heart. I stood looking over the stone walls, eyeing the profusion of snap peas dangling from their trellises made of orchard prunings, the fava beans with their long, lumpy pods, delicate yellow zucchini blossoms, and artichokes bristling on strong stems. But the day was too bright, the land too open. At another, a brown-and-white shepherd dog prowled the perimeter. What if I were caught stealing? Some people might forgive me without another thought, but there were others who might force me to explain and threaten the whole venture.

  At Saturday breakfast, Father was unusually cheerful. “How about some tennis this afternoon, piccola? It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  “Sure, Papa.” I waited, took another sip of coffee. “I promised Catarina I’d stop by this afternoon. So maybe we could play this morning instead.”

  He frowned at me, setting down his crust of bread. “Sometimes I think you spend more time with the farmers than you do with your own family.” He finished chewing, then swallowed. “What is the purpose of all your education if the only people you associate with are the peasants?”

  “Enrico,” Mother interrupted. “Personally, I think it’s a sign of good breeding that she’s kind to the people who work our land. That’s a quality I’ve always hoped she would have. Besides, she’s been such a source of comfort to Catarina since Pietro died. You know that.”

  “Well, just see that you remember your place in the scheme of things, young lady,” he growled, not looking at Mother. “Now change your clothes.” He shoved back from the table. “I’ll meet you on the court.”

  I left the house after lunch, bound for Catarina’s with a large market basket over my arm. Violetta had given me two pairs of pants—from an English soldier—and a French jacket that was much too warm for this time of year. I’d kept these hidden for a couple of days in the drawer of my dresser, and now they were flattened in the bottom of the basket, covered by a dish towel.

  “I’m a complete failure,” I moaned, setting the basket on the table with a thud and collapsing into a chair. “Now what will Giorgio do? What will he think of me? I’ll probably lose my chance to help.”

  Catarina, with a little smile, raised her eyebrows. She beckoned me over to a corner of the kitchen. There on the floor was a lump hidden by a colorful tablecloth. “Tonino’s in the orchard,” she said, “but keep an eye out in case he comes back. I just haven’t wanted to tell him yet.” She pulled back the tablecloth. There was the army green duffel bag, unzipped, with some of its contents spilling out. Catarina began pulling, moving the things from the bag to a pile next to it. There were two men’s shirts, several sets of underwear, a pair of boots, and some extra laces. There were two loaves of bread, a tied handkerchief full of dried beans, and—best of all—a gunnysack with three heads of lettuce, some tiny new potatoes, baby carrots, and fistfuls of peas and fresh beans. “I raided my own garden,” she said. “Thank God it’s growing well this year.”

  “Oh, Catarina. I love you!” I hugged her tight. “This is perfect. Can you keep it hidden until tomorrow?” I added Violetta’s clothes to the bag.

  “Whose are these?” Catarina asked.

  I sobered, wondering how much to tell. “They belong to two young men who no longer need them. And their mothers are far away.” I held Catarina close again. “I’ll be back tomorrow, right after lunch.”

  Chapter Five

  War hung over us like an insistent fog. It was always there, clouding everything, separating us from one another under a blanket of secrecy and fear. Sometimes I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if I were fighting for air in the atmosphere that infected my relationship with my parents, with Violetta, with the sisters at school. As for the partisans, everyone knew they were hiding out in the woods and hills that surrounded us, but no one talked about it. Most people were on their side, hoping they would be able to slow the Germans down and do what they could to help the Allies’ progress. People like me, or like the wheat farmer’s wife, had family members who were among them, but they were silent on the subject.

  Occasionally we would hear about a night raid on someone’s garden, root cellar, or barn, in which some rifles or a radio were stolen. Even though it was for a good cause, it annoyed those particular landowners and frightened them, since they knew that the Germans might learn of it and punish them for aiding the rebels. I felt as if we were all in some sort of play, acting out our roles in daily life, but our real selves were hidden away. What burned inside and kept me going was a sense that in deciding to help Giorgio I was doing the right thing, working toward a higher purpose despite the impostor I had become.

  On Sunday morning, I went to church with my parents. I wasn’t sure where God was in all this, but I was pretty sure He wasn’t cheering the Nazis on. I prayed hard that God would forgive me for all the sneaking around and the lying, and that He would keep both me and Giorgio safe until I could deliver the duffel bag later that afternoon. As for Klaus, I thought that he had a good soul locked inside. I believed he was a decent man, simply playing the role expected of him as a German soldier. Was there a difference between his mining bridges and my keeping Giorgio’s activities from my parents? I kept the communion wafer on my tongue without chewing it at all. If it dissolves of its own accord, I thought, I’m doing the right thing. By the time we heard the dismissal blessing, the last bit slipped down like a spoonful of oatmeal.

  Catarina had stowed everything in the bag and hidden it in a remote corner of her garden under a hedge. That allowed me to give Tonino a quick hug when I arrived and for Catarina and me to head casually for the garden without attracting attention.

  I gave the duffel a trial lift. Not too much weight at all, but the bag looked suspicious. We decided to take out the long gunnysack that held the vegetables in the bottom and stuff the clothes and loaves of bread in on top of them in layers. The result was a lumpy hemp bag that looked as though it held an afternoon’s worth of garden harvest. I hoisted the heavy load over my shoulder and trudged through the woods to the gazebo. Another Sunday afternoon. No farmers in view, no soldiers at all.

  When I arrived in the clearing, there was no one there either. I heaved the bag onto the marble base and sat down heavily, leaning against a column, the moss underneath it seeping moisture slowly up through the layers of my full skirt. It was quiet except for the occasional rat-a-tat-tatting of a woodpecker on a dead tree and the breeze stirring the branches over my head. It smelled sharp, like mildew.

  As I waited, I began to worry. I had no idea how many people Giorgio was living with, but when I pictured the small fistfuls of peas and beans I had brought lying on tin plates, I realized they wouldn’t go far. He could probably finish off those two loaves of bread in one sitting. Could they cook? Did they need pots and pans or dishes? Two things I’d figured out by then: I’d have to work a lot harder to find enough clothes and food, and I wouldn’t ever be able to carry enough to make Giorgio happy.

 
; As I was mulling these things over, I heard the crackling of twigs and low male voices. “Giovanna. You made it.” Giorgio and another man, one whom I did not recognize, came out of the woods. The man was taller and older than my brother, maybe forty or so, and—like Giorgio—he had a growth of beard shadowing his lower face.

  “Giorgio!” I cried, running up to him and slipping my arms around his waist.

  “No.” He put his hand over my mouth. “Forget that name, okay? I’m Hermes, and this here’s the Fox. We’ve left our old lives behind us now. You have to remember that.”

  I studied the man’s reddish hair, his close-set, beady eyes, and his long pointed nose. Yes, clearly the Fox. I thought I could remember that one. “Why Hermes?”

  “Well, he was the messenger, was he not? That seems to be my role, time and again. I like to keep moving, and I’m kind of a go-between. I convinced you to get involved, didn’t I?” He opened the top of the bag that was lying on its side. “Let’s see what you’ve got in here.”

  Giorgio began rummaging around inside and pulling out the items one by one, setting the clothes on one side, the food on the other. “These look like English army pants!” said the Fox in an odd, lilting Italian.

  “Two pairs,” said Giorgio, holding up the others. “The Fox is English. He was shot down a year ago, and after he recovered, he was unable to reconnect with his regiment or penetrate the German lines. So he’s joined up with us, working with the guys up here.”

  When he got to the bread, he handed one loaf to the Fox. They tore into them with gusto, tearing off piece after piece, stuffing them in their mouths and swallowing them without chewing.

  “Okay.” Halfway through his loaf, Giorgio stood back and surveyed the meager piles. “Giovanna, this is a great start, but we’ve got to help you understand what we’re dealing with here. Sit down.”

  I perched on the base of one of the columns and leaned back against it, looking up at the two of them. They continued standing, pacing back and forth. Giorgio did most of the talking. Now and then the Fox, who I noticed had a slight limp, would add a few words of emphasis or correction.

  There were fifteen men in their loosely affiliated band. Most of them were local, men from western Tuscany, from villages not too far from Lucca, who were known to one another vaguely or were friends of friends. Some were soldiers who, like Giorgio, had deserted from the Italian army. Some were recent recruits; others were older, veterans of battles in Northern Africa, Sicily, or even Russia, who had refused to continue fighting under German occupation. There were civilians, anti-Fascists, who were too old or too young to serve, who had joined with this group to do what they could to fight the Blackshirts, harass the Germans, and pave the way for Allied victory.

  “There are groups all over northern Italy,” he went on. “Some are really organized, almost like military units, according to the ranks they held in the army. They’ve got good guns and regular supplies. Others are looser, like ours.”

  “How do the organized ones get their supplies?” I wondered whether I could learn from their techniques.

  “They’ve got good walkie-talkies and radios, and so they get regular signaled parachute drops from Allied planes.” That explains some of those low-flying planes, I thought, the ones that don’t seem to be bombers.

  “Where are you living?” I asked.

  Giorgio looked at the Fox. “We can’t tell you exactly where, but we’re based in one of the old carbonari camps. Remember how Tonino and his cronies would go off for a few weeks every year?”

  A couple of years earlier I was in the village one afternoon and saw Tonino return from one of these outings. He was helping to pull a two-wheeled wagon piled high with gunnysacks of charcoal. He and the other guys had been wearing the same clothes for two or three weeks, and their shirts and pants, their hands and faces, were covered in a thick layer of black charcoal dust.

  Charcoal making—before modern briquettes came along—was one of our local traditions. A group of villagers would leave their families and hike up into the thickly wooded hills. They cut sticks and small branches with a razor-sharp cutting tool, stacking them high in a tepee-shaped pile. Then they covered the whole thing with a layer of dirt to keep out the air and set the wood on fire. It smoldered, maybe for a week or more, while they worked on building new piles. Eventually, they would remove the layers of dirt and find the sticks underneath transformed into charcoal. We used it for cooking and exported it too.

  “Those guys left campsites like the one we’re using. It’s near a stream and flat. And the good news for us is that it’s completely inaccessible to motor vehicles.”

  “So do you cook?” I asked.

  “We can,” he answered. “And that’s what I was coming to. We don’t have any way to chill fresh food, so what we really need is more dried beans and pasta, hard cheese, onions, salami—even eggs—things that keep for a while. And the bread is great if you can get it.” He popped the last of his crust in his mouth and grinned.

  “The problem is this.” I turned my back to them, because I didn’t want to disappoint them in any way. “I can’t carry very much, Giorgio. And I can’t really get away during the week. What I need is a place closer to home where I can add the supplies little by little, someplace you can get to without my help, maybe during the night.”

  We suggested various barns and sheds, buildings at the edges of nearby properties. Every place we thought of had animals nearby or people who couldn’t be trusted. Then Giorgio had a brainstorm. “Remember the old cellar behind the Santinis’? It’s dug into the ground, and there’s a trapdoor. They used to store wine in there, but then they dug the bigger caves. Someone told me he had spent the night there safely a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I remember it,” I said. “Where we used to play hide-and-seek with Luigi, right?”

  “That’s the one. You could get there easily during the week, load the supplies into it, and then we could come whenever it worked for us without disturbing anyone.”

  “And since Saturday is bread-baking day, I could bring the loaves when I come here on Sundays.” Giorgio looked at me kind of quizzically. He went over close to the Fox. They turned their backs to me and talked in low voices so I couldn’t hear them.

  “Okay, Giovanna. We really might need you for messages and special requests, so I’ll keep coming Sundays like this whenever I can, just as long as you know that now and then I might not show up.” He was distracted now, kind of nervous, looking around like they’d stayed too long. “One other thing. You are going to need a special name too. Just in case I need to leave a note or something. What’ll it be?”

  That was something I hadn’t thought about. Maybe a flower, or a famous writer? Maybe an animal or someone in history. I thought about hunting for supplies and remembered the raptor we had rescued together all those years ago. “The Hawk?”

  Giorgio looked at me, frowned, and shook his head. “I don’t think so, little sister. But you will have to carry messages and cover a lot of ground. We’ll hope this brings peace and call you Columba, the dove.” He kissed me lightly on the forehead, and they took off, the hemp bag slung over the Fox’s shoulder.

  I thumbed my teeth at his retreating figure. It should have been the Hawk, I thought. You’ll see what a hunter I can be.

  On my way home, a shot rang out north of me, echoing in the hills. Maybe it was a cannon or maybe dynamite from one of the bridge mining operations by the river. Klaus? When I neared the open fields, I saw a jeep pulled over to the side of the road and German soldiers digging in the potato field. Potatoes weren’t something we ate all that often, but the Germans seemed to love them and raided those crops before anything else. Rosa, I suddenly thought. I’m going to have to take Rosa into my confidence. She’ll have all those basics tucked away, maybe enough to share.

  Rosa had been our kitchen maid for many years. She and her husband, Geppe, raised four children on our land, living in a small apartment in the lower part of the villa.
In the years we lived in the city all winter, they would look after the main house. Three of their children were still at home. But the Germans had captured their oldest son, Gigi, only fourteen, in one of their roundups after our surrender to the Allies last September. In fact, German soldiers were still frequently driving through the villages, combing the area for able-bodied boys to send to Germany or northern Italy to work; boys were constantly on the lookout, living in fear of being snatched up. It had been almost ten months since Gigi had disappeared. Rosa was worried sick about him, but she and Geppe stayed on, working faithfully, now forced to wait on the officers living downstairs. She loved Giorgio, and I hoped that, like Catarina, this might give her something positive to focus on.

  Rosa was a tender soul, discreet and unobtrusive, who moved about with the stealth of a furtive rat. A smile rarely graced her lips, and she carried herself like a court aristocrat, her posture proud and correct. Her face was chiseled, its sharp features casting deep shadows that gave her a hollow, somewhat wasted air. As if to spite her name, her complexion was a sickly olive drab. Her waved, glossy coiffure might have been carved in marble, so consistent was its outline, so rarely a hair out of place. She wore a blue-and-white uniform starched to stiff perfection, and rubber-soled shoes that allowed her to approach without a sound, to come and go without interrupting whatever discussion or activity was happening around her.

  Her kitchen, larder, and cellars were immaculate, everything in its place—piled, stacked, stashed, and labeled so that not a square inch of space was wasted. Rosa knew to the ounce or teaspoon how much of anything she had; she anticipated the shelf life of every ingredient to the day, and she ensured their use well before they spoiled by rotating recipes. That was why I had avoided raiding our own kitchen for the first week’s supplies. Rosa would have noticed something missing the minute it disappeared. No, there was only one option now: I had to bring Rosa into my confidence, make her a partner in the enterprise.