Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “The Jews killed Christ,” the man said forcefully. He was using the German word—Juden—not the Italian—ebrei.

  “All killing is wrong,” Don Claudio intoned, but the phrase sounded stilted, almost ridiculous, even in his own ears. He could feel his breathing change, sweat on his palms.

  The German laughed. More dust and stone, this time of scorn not heresy. “And all sex is wrong, too, correct, Father?”

  Could the man possibly know? Could his sinful thoughts have shown in his eyes, his voice? “Not all.”

  “You don’t like sex?”

  “We take a vow of celibacy.”

  “And you’ve always kept it?”

  “Yes,” Don Claudio lied—and then, to soften the sin, “to the best of my ability.”

  “Ha! Even with yourself? Celibate? All these years?”

  “Let us talk of your sins, my son.”

  “Why? You have someplace to go?”

  “I am hungry.”

  The officer shifted position, bumping his nose against the screen. He burped quietly and took a breath. “We have a woman who cooks for us; did you know that?”

  “No.” Another lie.

  “We do. This Maria. You know her, I’m sure. She cooks. A woman. Middle aged. Not unattractive in a certain way.”

  “Married,” Don Claudio hastened to say.

  “But with a husband far off, like my own wife. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never come back; I’ll never come back.”

  “We don’t know what God has in store for us.”

  “So this Maria. I made her, you know . . .”

  There was a long pause. “I don’t understand,” Don Claudio said, but he felt a horrible idea crawling through the screen now, a film, a scum.

  “A kind of sex . . . You know. I forced her to, and that is my confession.”

  For an instant, there seemed an actual note of regret in the darkness on the other side of the screen. Don Claudio was suddenly nauseated, bile squirting up into his mouth. He listened hard, hoping it was some kind of ruse, the man’s twisted fantasy, the dark play of his imagination, a horrible practical joke. But then the German began to go into great detail.

  “Stop. Enough!” the priest told him too loudly.

  “Good. Make it so I’m forgiven, then. Just in case.”

  “You must never, ever do this or anything like this again! She is a married woman, a good woman. This is a violation of all human decency, surely a great sin against God. You must ask forgiveness sincerely, do penance, and never bother her again!”

  A vicious silence now. Don Claudio felt he could hear the man smiling. “Our beliefs are different,” he said. “I have a stronger god now, and the strongest god rules, that’s all. I came here just . . . I don’t know why . . .”

  “Christ is strongest of all. You’ll face eternal punishment. Is that what you want?”

  “I’ll face it when I face it,” the man said calmly. There was another long pause. The sound of breathing. The smell of alcohol.

  Before he could say anything else, Don Claudio heard the word sbaglio—mistake—then the curtain being pushed aside. He listened to the sound of the man’s boot heels on the marble floor and then, after a moment, the squeak of door hinges. The priest put his face in his hands and began to sob quietly, rocking back and forth in the dark cubicle with the crucifix beside him and the ancient wooden seat crying out beneath his shifting weight as if it were alive.

  Fifty-Seven

  At the well behind her house, in a miserable trance, Maria washed out her mouth again and again. It did no good. The shame could not be washed away. The feeling of abject humiliation. And now that the man was gone, taking the fear with him, her anger leaped into flames. It wasn’t anger; it was fury—she was shaking with it. And they would want her to cook for them again in another two hours!

  No doubt, she thought, if they found a young beauty like Luca’s Sarah, it would be a thousand times worse than this. A dozen men upon her. Even if they let her live, she’d be ruined for life, a beautiful blouse that had been dragged through the manure and slop so many times that it would never be clean, never be worn. She’d never be able to marry Luca after that, never have children after that. She’d be seen walking the statale in ragged clothing, talking to herself, her hair hanging in dirty strands like the local woman they called “The Genovese.” Who knew what had happened to her? Maria realized she’d never thought about it, always just assumed The Genovese had been born crazy, and too often turned her eyes away in disgust.

  She washed out her mouth again. Went into the house and ate a piece of stale bread but immediately spat it into the sink. If he came home alive, her husband would kill the man. But what were the chances of him coming home alive? And of the bald Nazi still being here if he did?

  Her thoughts spun and spun, replaying every moment. Again, again, again, buckets of gasoline thrown on the flames. She couldn’t stop it. Time was passing; soon they’d want her to walk over there and prepare the meal. She leaned on the edge of the sink and lowered her face to the backs of her hands. Between sobs, between agonizing stabs of memory, she remembered the mesh bag Luca had brought her. Lepiota. Poison of poisons.

  “A gift from God,” she whispered to herself. Un dono di Dio.

  Fifty-Eight

  When Don Claudio was at last able to stand and leave the confessional, the notes of the German’s words rang in his ears like an evil symphony. He kept seeing Maria, assaulted . . . in her own kitchen! He tried to banish the image. It would not be banished.

  In the midst of this torment, he was overcome by a wave of hunger. Fists clenching his intestines. It had always been this way, even as a boy. In times of emotional stress especially. He’d be upset about something—his parents arguing, trouble at school—and he’d eat and eat to soften the bad feelings. There was no stopping it. His father cursed him for the expense and for the embarrassment of having an overweight son; his mother cooked and tried to make peace. His brother and sister were thin as stalks of corn, but it seemed the Lord had given him this cross to bear. He was fat. It had, he supposed, been part of what had led him to the priesthood, because women weren’t attracted to a fat man. Most women, at least. When he’d been single and not yet ordained, at least. Then other things had happened. He’d discovered there were some women who didn’t care so much about a man’s appearance, who appreciated sensitivity, warmth, compassion. A good heart rather than the physique of an Olympian.

  He wouldn’t think about that now. He would eat.

  On the way to his kitchen, he had to pass the cloakroom. He was tempted to go in. But the hunger pushed him past the door, past the thoughts of what he’d just heard in the confessional. He’d find a way to comfort Maria. God would give him the words.

  But something else churned inside him, below that thought. “We have a stronger god,” the man had said, and in such a sure voice! It sounded again and again in his ears, the chant of Satan. “We have a stronger god.”

  On his shelves, he found a tomato and a half-rotten peach. Breadsticks, stale but edible. The barely drinkable wine. He sat alone at the kitchen table, once the scene of so much pleasure for him. When Elisabetta, the rectory cook, had been living here, she’d prepare the most sumptuous meals, and he’d often invite Masso or his friends from the card-playing group at the Bar Lake Como to join him. They’d sit here for two or three hours, beginning with a small antipasto—vinegar peppers, olives, a bit of cheese or some sardines, perhaps fresh tomatoes from the rectory garden with oil and salt and slices of soft bread. Elisabetta might bring out a soup, a small bowl of chicken soup with vegetables and a bit of egg white, and then, always, some kind of pasta—with anchovies and onion, with pesto and shrimp, with a rich tomato sauce spiced with goose or oxtail. Then meat—sausage, veal, rare beef—and finally a slice of Gorgonzola and a piece of fruit, coffee, grappa. Elisabetta would sit with them. He’d always suspected that she and Orlando—the owner of the bar—enjoyed a love relationship. There would be
laughter, stories from the old times, once in a while a bit of political banter.

  Political banter. In the early days of Mussolini, the situation in Italy had seemed . . . not quite innocent but distant, something far from their lives in these elegant hills near the lake. People who’d traveled around Italy, even around the world, said this was the most beautiful place in the whole picturesque country, perhaps one of the prettiest places on earth. He and his friends had been lulled by that beauty, deceived by it the way one might be deceived by a beautiful face. Even after the experience of the First World War, they’d convinced themselves that nothing awful could ever happen here again. True, once Mussolini came to power, there had been troubles, the killing of Matteotti foremost among them. But in the early years, there was the sense that il Duce’s ego was a comical thing. He pontificated about the sanctity of family life while openly keeping a young mistress, Claretta Petacci. He bared his chest on the stage while giving a speech at the Pontine Marshes. He stuck out his chin, shouted, boasted, waved his fists, made promises about bringing Italy back to the greatness of ancient Rome.

  And as Don Claudio had admitted to the Austrian on the train, Mussolini had done some good for Italy—even those who despised him said as much. The sanatoriums for sick children, the aqueducts bringing water to places that hadn’t seen clean water in a millennium, the agricultural communities and grand building projects, the trains running more efficiently, the insurance benefits for those who’d lost husbands and fathers in the first war. There had been that side to the man, and for a long while, many in the country were proud of him, despite the foolishness, the violence, the ego.

  And then Hitler came into the picture. Mussolini mocked him at first, reportedly even referred to him as “that clown from the north.” But Hitler courted him like a lover, invited him to Germany on countless occasions. Mussolini refused and refused, his pride wanting il Duce to be the strongman of Europe, not some vegetarian lunatic with a peculiar mustache. He refused multiple times, and then, finally, he relented, went to Munich wearing a uniform designed specially for the occasion, and there Hitler put on a show for him. A parade of military might and discipline.

  Then everything turned to darkness. The military adventures—lives lost in Greece, of all places. What did Italy care about invading Greece? Horrendous things had been done there, just as horrendous things had been done to the Ethiopians five years earlier, in 1935—he’d heard it all in the confessional; he knew more than the newspapers reported, more than what people learned from the state radio broadcasts.

  All this on top of the sinful foolishness of the racial laws of 1938. The idiocy of that. Rebecca, Sarah, another family in Mezzegra, the Manganellis—people who’d been neighbors for years and years, for generations, and now, suddenly, enemies not allowed to hold a job, earn a paycheck, have property? Why? Because of the Satan to their north! And because, instead of resisting him as most of the rest of the world had tried to do, Mussolini embraced him, signed the so-called Pact of Steel. What insanity had caused him to do that? Now look: Italy at war with the world, fighting for what? To keep Jews from owning property? So Hitler could invade and conquer Russia, along with Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia? So German soldiers could assault middle-aged Italian women simply to be dominant, to torment, to feed the evil beast within themselves?

  Maria, Maria, Maria! His thoughts were overtaken by an image of her with the German, the man grinning, holding a pistol to her head. What kind of human being did that?

  He swallowed a last sip of the wine and said a string of Hail Marys, asking that Maria’s mind be purged of the horror. Asking that, impossible as it seemed, she’d be given a miracle, the blessing of forgetfulness.

  In the morning, he would go see her.

  And say what? he thought. And say exactly what?

  And then, an honest man at heart, honest with his own failings, at least, Don Claudio realized he was putting off a visit to the cloakroom to see what had been left for him there. Now, especially, now after his torment in the confessional with the tall Nazi, he was afraid to embrace his assignment, his small rebellion against the satanic forces. As he stood up and brought his plate and glass to the sink and rinsed them, he realized, too, that he was clinging to a thin thread of belief that the German might have been lying.

  But he knew in his heart that it wasn’t so. As he left the kitchen, the images flooded his mind again like the overflow from a polluted river. Don Claudio shook his head violently. Maria, of all people. Almost fifty now, a mother, the wife of someone who’d spent the winter fighting for those same Germans in the ice and snow of Russia. It sickened him. He felt a fiery ball of fury growing in his big belly. The anger propelled him toward the cloakroom. He went along slowly, remembering his one brave moment on the bus. He touched the handle and pulled open the door, expecting to see a secret arsenal laid out there before him, and saying a prayer for courage.

  Fifty-Nine

  After hurrying away from the window of Maria’s kitchen, Sarah climbed as far as the place where she’d left her basket—at the tree that had been split by lightning—and then almost immediately realized she was lost. The path, visible at first, had simply disappeared in a tangle of roots and dense underbrush. Her sense of direction evaporated in the quick mountain dusk. She tried going a little way right, then left, then straight forward, but saw only stones and roots and brambles. She stared up at the sky, but it offered no clue, and though she knew the stars would appear before too long, she’d never learned to read them and couldn’t even imagine how people used them to navigate. There were two options then: sit and wait until morning, when she’d most likely be able to find the path again in the light of day, or go back down the hill to Maria’s house, make her presence known—assuming the German was gone—hold Maria and then her mother close, and see what she could do to help. She had run away in a panic, that was clear enough . . . and she wanted to be a partisan fighter!

  But what else could she have done? Go inside and attack the German soldier with her fists? Bang on the window? Throw rocks?

  If Luca returned early, he’d read the note she’d left in the cabin and worry, but she decided her best option was to head back down the hill. She was thirsty and hungry, and in another hour, even this frail light would be gone.

  It was almost worse than going up, with all the roots and rocks, the slippery stretches of loose gravel. She was on a path, yes, but was it the correct one? Her legs were shaking like the tops of trees in a storm.

  By the time darkness fell, she had reached the bottom of the steepest part of the hill. She could no longer see the path, but a frail vaporous light shone above the town—starlight reflecting off the lake—so she was able to go along slowly and knew she was close. When she came to the edge of the trees and looked out, however, she saw not Maria’s house, as she’d hoped, but the back side of the church. Sant’Abbondio. One outbuilding and a small empty lot lay between her and the church; the road was thirty meters away. As if sending her a warning signal—wait, be careful—the bells from a church closer to the lake rang the nine o’clock hour.

  The problem was that, because of where she’d ended up, she’d have to walk a fair distance through the trees in order to reach Maria’s house or step out onto the road in full view of any passing German patrols and simply hope they didn’t stop her and ask for papers. It was true, as she’d told Luca in earlier arguments, that she didn’t look any more Jewish than he did—whatever that actually meant: it wasn’t as if all Jews looked alike. Even so, she had no papers on her person and, if stopped, wouldn’t be able to say where she lived or what she did for work or who lived with her. For a long while, she stood behind twin tree trunks, staring out at the shadows, trying to focus her thoughts.

  It occurred to her that she might be able to spend one night in the church—though it would cause Luca so much worry if he returned to an empty cabin. Surely Don Claudio would welcome her. No doubt he’d even hide her for a day or two if she asked—which she
wouldn’t. Too great a risk for him. And what should she say about what she’d seen? What could Don Claudio do about that? The priest had been unbelievably kind and generous to her and her mother, buying them food, giving them gifts, arranging for her to have transportation to Bologna for her college exams, paying for her to come home on vacations. She wondered sometimes if he felt a twinge of guilt at the way certain Catholics treated Jews in this land of Christian mercy or if he was just a particularly kind man and knew how difficult her mother’s life had been.

  Remembering his warmth and desperately needing some of that now, she kept in the trees but angled down toward the church. She drew close, stopped, waited. Just when she was about to step out into the open and move toward the back door, she saw a figure stand up from where he’d been sitting, on the ground beside the church’s north wall. For a minute, the person leaned against the wall for balance, then started walking—stumbling, really—along the side of the building. As the dark figure came closer, she saw that it was a man. A man in uniform. A German uniform. Tall. Hatless. Bald. He was moving along slowly, still in shadow. She wondered if it could be the same man she’d seen in Maria’s kitchen. She crouched on her haunches, slowly, silently, and watched the dark figure struggle with the door handle, curse, then swing it open so forcefully that it was nearly torn off its hinges.

  Sixty

  The church’s cloakroom had no windows; only a little light trickled down the hallway from the kitchen. Faintly, through the open cloakroom door, Don Claudio heard the bells sounding one after the next from the larger church down by the lake. San Domenico. The sound had always given him comfort. Even in wartime, Don Giuseppe, the pastor there, had ordered the bells rung at seven in the morning and nine o’clock at night, moments to pause and say an Our Father in gratitude for the given day.