In answering her, the friar spoke in fluent Italian, but his voice was high-pitched and had a distracting nasal resonance, an effect of the cleft palate. While speaking, he had to continually wipe saliva from his mouth, drainage from an open nasal cavity. He seemed unselfconscious, though, and flourished a white handkerchief as if for emphasis. And emphasis there was. The Franciscan monastery was itself a center for relief, the distribution of food and medicine, the rescue of the desperate ones. The friar knew whereof he spoke, and his handkerchief fluttered as he became more agitated. Jasenovac, hah! The rumors about Jasenovac were lies, Bolshevik propaganda. The friar had never heard of a camp at Sisak, and insisted that in areas controlled by the Ustashe government, children were being well cared for. He had been to every refugee camp in Croatia and was certain that conditions were as positive as was humanly possible.
In the Serb-controlled areas to the east, the priest said, the story was very different. “The Serb Communists are beasts,” he snarled, with a sudden pitilessness that dismayed her. His account, which contradicted everything Carlo had said, confused her. For Marguerite, his authority as a priest was near absolute. Robes like his, belted with a triple-knotted cincture—one knot each for poverty, chastity, obedience—spoke of righteousness. The saliva, eluding the handkerchief, dribbling pathetically from his chin, somehow added to his credibility.
When she returned to Vranjak, Carlo sharply rebuked her for having gone to Zagreb. When she told him what the priest had said, he only stared at her. His contempt could not have been plainer. “What priest was this?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know his name. His face was deformed—his mouth. I never—”
“Vukas.”
“What?”
“You spoke with Vukas!” At that, Carlo turned on his heel and left her. She didn’t see him again until the hour of the wolf the next morning, when he came to the hut where she was sleeping. He had never come to her before dawn, in the darkness, nor had he ever entered without that soft knock of his. But this time he was above her, shaking her awake. “Come,” he said. It did not occur to her not to do so.
They set out into the hills. Marguerite had to hurry to keep up with him. He strode ahead, certain of the trail. He carried a rifle, and across his shoulder was slung a leather bag. The forest was frighteningly dark, but as they moved the sky brightened, and before long they left the woods behind, ascending above the tree line. Mist rose from the gnarly grasses. It seemed to Marguerite that she and Carlo, trekking across the wild terrain, were its only living creatures.
From behind, she watched as Carlo’s bobbing dark hair took on its familiar red hue, as if dawn came first to him, the pirate’s privilege. They crested the peak of a high hill just as the upper edge of the sun cracked the far horizon. Like a hunter hiding from that light, Carlo threw himself on the ground, and Marguerite imitated him. He pulled binoculars from his bag, peered through them, at what she could not tell. But then, in the shadowy valley below, she made out the structures of a small hamlet centered on the cupola of a church, the snake of a road, and the gash of a river that cut the landscape in two. Beside the river—then she saw it. The large oval of a racecourse, a dirt track defined by fence rails running all the way around. Inside the oval was an expansive shantytown of shacks and tents. The sun had yet to illuminate the valley, but without being told, she knew what she was seeing.
Sisak.
Carlo said nothing. They waited. The mist evaporated. A glacier of sunlight crept down from the far hills, bringing the valley to life. People began to stir in the shantytown. An approaching truck appeared on the distant stretch of road, followed by another, and another. This convoy swooped into the scene, followed by a pair of large black autos. Suddenly all was bustling at the racecourse. Carlo leaned on his elbows and put the binoculars to his face again. After a time, he handed them to Marguerite, with the single word “Selezione.”
With the added clarity of the binoculars, Marguerite was able to see that the racetrack was strung around with coiled barbed wire, off the razor edges of which bounced the first rays of the now unfettered sunlight. At the center of the track stood the dominating figure of a brown-robed friar. Beside him, joined to his arm by a leash, was a tall, lean dog. Even at that distance, Marguerite could sense the ferocity of its snarl—a Doberman pinscher. Each time the friar snapped the leash, the dog lunged forward.
The friar conducted the selection as a maestro does a concert, waving with his free hand a white handkerchief, like a baton. Figures tumbled out of the backs of the trucks, and others lined them up. They were children, some very young, some teenagers. They were being put into rows by adults, some of whom were dressed in brown robes, other Franciscans, and some in the black uniforms of the Pavelic militia, with the telltale red-and-white-checkered crest emblazoned on their shoulders, on the peaks of their caps. Ustashe. The children were channeled toward a makeshift table, over which the large friar presided as if it were an altar. Marguerite adjusted the focus wheel on the binoculars, shifting to his face. The fissure in his mouth beaded with saliva. Vukas. The priest from Zagreb.
She lowered the binoculars, but Carlo pushed them back toward her eyes. “No,” he commanded. “Watch!”
Vukas directed the traffic, more policeman now than maestro. Each child was presented to him. First Vukas jerked the dog’s lead, sending it with flashing teeth at the child’s face. When the child responded with horror, the friar pulled the dog back. It seemed a test, a way of measuring the child. The friar then bent forward, performed an examination of some kind, seeming perversely to chuck the chins of the little angels. With a wave of that handkerchief he sent the child off one way or another—toward the shanties inside the oval or back onto the tarp-covered bed of an adjacent truck. Terrified of the dog, the children bolted away. From the distance, the priest, except for his dog, seemed almost to have a kindly air. Onto the heads of some he placed a hand, as if in blessing, but then Marguerite saw that those were the ones pulled aside and loaded again into the trucks. What, were the selected ones chosen by the blemished priest for being unblemished?
The death race. Three trucks. No, four. Loaded with boys and girls, toddlers, teenagers. Soon the canvas rear flaps of each truck were stitched tightly closed, the cords fixed with rods. A length of firehose was attached to the exhaust pipe of each truck and fed into the bed.
Still staring, Marguerite said, “Can’t you stop this?”
Carlo replied, “I am stopping it. That is what I am doing.”
But not this morning. Not this race. When at last the trucks lined up on the track, Vukas held his arm aloft, now using the handkerchief as a starter’s flag. His head fell back in laughter, and from his twisted mouth a great uproarious cry of triumph must have come. The flag fell and the trucks leapt forward, gunning up to full speed. Vukas let his dog go, and it began to chase after the trucks, to devour them. Because of the intimate view through the binoculars, it seemed Marguerite should have heard the roaring engines and the howling dog, but she did not. Indeed, the rigid silence from across the span of distance—the trucks, the laughing, the dog, and God knows what sounds being emitted by the throats of children—lent the scene its ghostly unreality.
Around and around the trucks raced. At each pass, Vukas and the knot of his underlings could be seen to cheer like students at a football match. A soldier appeared with a tray of earthen-gray beer steins. Vukas seized one and held it aloft. All did the same, foam splashing. Vukas cried out some ritual phrase, and the others echoed it in reply. And all at once, maestro again, he began waving that white handkerchief, as if this were a rathskeller and the time had come for drinking songs.
The friars’ brown robes swayed in time to the music, countered by the metronomes of rosary beads hanging from their cinctures. Ein Prosit, ein Prosit! As the trucks thundered around the deadly circuit, the priest and his cronies drank and sang. Laughed, drank, and sang. The dog, at last, collapsed at Vukas’s feet, and the friar bent down to pet it, Go
od dog.
Later, in a clearing in the forest where they’d stopped to rest on the way back to Vranjak, Carlo said, “I am sorry. But that is your priest.”
Marguerite nodded, but, awash in anguish, as in night terrors, she had nothing to say.
Carlo solemnly untied the knot of the red bandanna at his throat and removed it from around his neck. She did not resist as he put it around her neck, saying, “Now you are one of us.” He tied the kerchief for her and adjusted it as if it were an item of apparel, nothing more. “The red,” he said then, “in Red Cross.”
Marguerite’s eyes filled. An abyss had opened inside her, and she was falling in it. The feeling was, she would fall forever.
Carlo touched her cheek. She touched his hand. As if that were the signal he’d been waiting for, he kissed her. She was defenseless against him. No, she was defenseless against herself. She returned his kiss, and then, momentarily, matched the press of his body with her own as he pushed her down onto the grass. But when she closed her eyes, the feeling of falling gave way to something else, and Carlo assumed it was desire, what he had been waiting for. “Ora!” he whispered urgently. Now!
But she stopped him. To his “Now!” she said simply, “No!” Her eyes were once more wide open, seeing everything, including how the obscene violence at Sisak had sparked his erotic desire for her. The authority of her abrupt recognition was absolute. When she had firmly shut her eyes, the face she had seen in the dark was not Carlo’s, as it should have been, but the grotesquely twisted visage of a rabbit’s lip. Vukas. The devil priest. That he, not Carlo, was the man inside her mind carried the jolt of a slap. Vukas was the meaning of her “No!”
Carlo, unaware of all this, pulled back, rose quickly to his feet, snatched up the rifle and bag, and strode off, resentful. He was apparently indifferent to whether she followed. Follow she did, but in a fog of confusion that had yet to lift. Marguerite d’Erasmo had glimpsed her fate. Wrong about a priest, she would be proven wrong, in another brief and ugly interlude, about the only man she had yet imagined loving, when he was shot dead—not by Fascists, but by her.
She came up from under the water, choking.
The man on the bicycle lunged out of the rampant foliage and down the narrow path from the Villa Borghese, the vast Roman park looming above the northern margin of the ancient city center. Giacomo Lionni had been a named fugitive on the Nazi list for seven months, since October 1943, and on that verdant plateau he had survived. The German occupiers, apparently spooked by the Borghese throng of riffraff, had left its precincts alone. But now the Germans were gone, as he’d seen for himself the day before. Gone! Yet he rode like one in danger of being caught.
An unwelcome glow of first light low in the sky emphasized the last of the night’s shadows, and, on his bicycle, he clung to them—all but invisible. As Lionni sped down to the Piazza del Popolo, his sudden impulse was to let go of the handlebars—no hands!—as if he were a boy instead of a half-lame man nearing fifty. The heavy canvas roll slung across his back made balance a more delicate project than usual, but this was a flight of pure joy. The Germans are gone!
The two-wheeled conveyance was its own delight this morning, since the German occupiers had outlawed bicycles. Partisans had used them to hit and run. Therefore, Biciclette Proibito! How Romans had snorted at the Fritz hysteria, even while obeying.
The piazza’s central fountain was dry, and no cars were passing through, not because of the early hour but because of the gas shortages. Yet the plaza was far from vacant. Ghostly figures had preceded him down from the overgrown acres of the Villa Borghese with its tents, tin shanties, and open fires. In these first mists of dawn, the otherwise silent piazza hummed with the deep, plaintive moan of the specters’ collective longing. Their apparently aimless circling was in fact purposeful, for they were in search of food.
Soon market trucks and carts from what few vegetable plots remained within reach of the city would be crossing the plaza toward the center of Rome. With luck, well-placed members of the plaza throng would be able to snatch a potato or a round of bread. Or perhaps a merciful farmer might toss down an overripe melon, a bruised cabbage, a handful of beans.
This was the second day of the Americans’ arrival, and housebound Romans could begin to believe that the horror on the other side of the window was gone. The SS and the Gestapo, the black uniforms, knee-high jackboots, lightning bolts, death’s heads, eagles, swagger sticks, red armbands, and broken crosses—all gone, replaced by a quite different breed.
American and British soldiers had stormed into the undefended city like bearers of bread, circus ringmasters—that was their mood. Straw-haired farm boys riding tanks like tractors, straddling gun turrets like jockeys, declared their supremacy by hitching their helmets at their belts, bareheadedness a victor’s boast. The GIs offered Lucky Strikes and Hershey bars in return for straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti, embraces, and what they’d already learned to call baci—kisses. The honking of jeeps, the clanking treads of flower-bedecked half-tracks, and the whoosh of double-propped P-38 Lightnings—would it not all be music to which Romans could dance as if they had never cheered Il Duce?
As Lionni wheeled into the Via del Corso, a church-lined boulevard that ran from the Piazza del Popolo to the base of the Capitoline Hill, his mind went, as it often did, to the stories his father had told him about this street. Because it ran straight as an arrow for more than a kilometer, the Corso, beginning in the Renaissance, had been used as a horse track during Carnival—hence its name, for racecourse. But for several hundred years, the climax of pre-Lent Corso festivities included the sporting event Romans most loved: the punitive footrace of the Jews. They were outfitted in conical hats and clownish robes and forced to compete against one another, up and down pavement littered with horseshit from the earlier races. Eventually one staggering Jew was declared the winner, and wrapped in purple. His prize was the privilege of kissing the Pope’s shoe. The fucking Pope!
Lionni approached the Corso’s terminal point in the Piazza Venezia and its palazzo balcony—fucking Mussolini! But he was gone, too. Out of Rome’s shadows would come the zombie witnesses to all that the vast throng of Il Duce’s former minions would want to forget or deny. And wasn’t Lionni himself summoning the most damning of those witnesses? As soon as he’d seen with his own eyes the American commanding general, Clark, standing yesterday on the hood of a jeep beside the Arch of Titus, surrounded by correspondents with notepads, Lionni had rushed back to his old building to haul his now permitted bicycle out of the cellar. Thus began his frantic round from one Jewish hiding place to another, all over Rome. He knew the secret hidey-holes because he himself had arranged for most of them, beginning more than two years before. The circuit took him into the night and through it, and finally back to the Borghese gardens for his tarp, which he’d rolled up and slung on his back. Dawn had come too quickly, making him late for what he had to do next.
But the Jews he’d encountered on the Appian Way—or rather, beneath it—came back into his mind. As dusk was falling less than twelve hours ago, he had banged on the door of a neglected old wayfarers’ chapel, in the floor of which was a forgotten entrance to the ancient tunnels where fugitive Christians had once hidden from the pagan legions—the so-called catacombs. Last October, Lionni had ushered several dozen Jews down into that network of caves through this very chapel door, and he was certain they were still down there. But no one was answering. “It’s Jocko!” he called, banging so loudly the door shook on its hinges. “Jocko! Jocko!” He was not surprised that they wouldn’t show themselves after all these months, but surely they would do so if they knew it was he.
At last the chapel door was pulled slowly open, exposing a gaunt old man ready to be shot, having risked this because he had less to lose than others. Seeing Lionni, the man fell into his arms. “Jocko!” he whispered again and again, as if greeting the Messiah’s cousin. Lionni went down into the caverns, passing through alcoves and burial rooms, all th
e while saying, “The Americans have come. All is well in Rome.” Women clutched at his hands, children stroked his coat. “The Americans have come,” he repeated. “All is well in Rome.” The simple phrase came haltingly from Lionni’s lips because what he beheld in the cramped, ill-lit tunnels and cells—pale-eyed ghosts, scarecrow women, stooped men, terrified children—made him weep. Again and again the Jews embraced him, uttering blessings. In the one spacious chamber, red lanterns had been hung on either side of an improvised ark and its Torah scroll, and when he saw it, Lionni knelt. He was not a religious man, yet sobs racked him, bending him over, so that his forehead scraped the limestone floor.
Hour after hour through the night, Lionni had seen such Jews emerge pale and blinking from attics and cellars in Trastevere, cloisters of walled convents, rectories, monasteries, back rooms of shops, ateliers of the Corso, courtyards of the Via Margutta. “The Americans have come,” his mantra, repeated in Italian, but also in Yiddish, for those from across the Alps. “All is well in Rome.” And then came the antiphon: “Jocko! Jocko!”
At each place, Lionni appointed someone to make a careful list of the names of those who were emerging, the beginning of the roster of survival that he would check against the roster of hiding he’d compiled months ago, before he himself had had to disappear. Assuming, of course, that the original roster, and the one who kept it safe, had survived. All may indeed be well in Rome, but for Lionni the horror was far from over. The Nazi death machine was still grinding toward its worst, and Lionni was still looking for a wooden shoe to throw. Hence this ride on his newly precious bicycle. He pumped harder, rising from the seat for heft, pushing through the Piazza Venezia.
Slung across his shoulder and secured with ropes across his chest was the rolled-up canvas that had served Lionni as his fugitive domicile on those all too frequent occasions when, warned, he had slipped out of one basement room or another until, with the milder weather, he’d wound up in the open-air Borghese acres. But that was over now, and it wasn’t for a tent that he needed the canvas this morning.
Warburg in Rome Page 4
