The Detour

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Di Luca was nearby—I recognized the padded cover under my blindly groping fingers—but even with better light, the book wasn’t what I needed. What I needed to see—and what I was at the same time afraid to see—was directly in front of me.

  I pushed my fingers into a narrow gap between the slats, halfway up the crate. I pulled out one piece of straw after another, pushing hard with my fingers to get deeper into the crate, scraping my knuckles as I pulled out more, thinking all the while that they hadn’t used enough straw, hadn’t packed it tightly enough, and I should have been there, on time, in Rome, to oversee things. The packing job had been insufficient. A truck hits too many bumps and ruts. A train at least travels a more smooth and predictable path. To trust a masterpiece to this kind of handling was insanity! But then again, of course—how many times did I need to remind myself?—Keller had not expected it to be on the road for long. Just the first day, just until Monterosso, and then it was meant to be intercepted and sent back. No wonder it wasn’t packed adequately, and no wonder it was being carried in a truck that lurched and shimmied all over the road.

  I pushed my hand in so hard between the crate’s splintering slats that several times I nearly got my fingers stuck, but still I pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled, my fingers tender and damp with blood I could not see, working my hand in just to the knob of the wrist bone, where it could go no further.

  Near the body, against one wall of the truck, I located Enzo’s tool kit. Inside, there was a claw hammer. Moving back to the crate, I stood cautiously, barely maintaining my balance, and started working a board free. Some were too tight, and working in the dark, I was wary of pulling too hard and whacking myself with a flying board or a slipping tool. Shoulder height was no good because I didn’t have purchase. I lowered myself to my knees and tried working another board free until it gave slowly.

  I held the lighter up to the gap and peered in: glowing marble, a pattern of shadow and light.

  Squinting into the dark crate, I could make out just a few illuminated inches, bare of straw: perhaps the triceps of the left arm at first, the lowered left arm. But no, the crate was turned the other way. It was the right hip. It was the right hip, and above that, the belt of muscle that bulges just up and over the statue’s right hip and down across its groin. The beautiful iliac crest.

  Few men are so perfectly proportioned, such the right mixture of muscular and slim, to have that kind of perfectly sculpted definition. The Greeks covered themselves with oil and exercised in the nude, scraping away the grime with a strigil when they were finished, their tanned bodies on full civic display—a testament not only to athleticism, but to a deeper kind of vitality and purpose. My own fellow countrymen, in search of answers and purpose and power, could find no better symbol than that kind of body, that kind of athleticism. “The Germans have joined anew the bond with the Greeks, the hitherto highest form of man.” Someone had written that—Nietzsche—or I had heard it in speeches at the Königsplatz, or most likely both.

  But philosophic mottos were nothing compared to what stood in front of me now, even if it stood in dark shadow. This was it. This was he. I was not disappointed; I was relieved and grateful, much as a religious person in desperation would be grateful for any sign or miracle that suggested something larger and more meaningful than his own wretched insignificance. I knew these centimeters of perfection better than I knew my own body. I loved this body more than my own body. But that was an easy comparison to make, when my own maturing body had brought me increasing grief, day by day.

  The smell came back to me in the back of the truck as I slept. First, the nameplate on the door, DR. SCHROEDER, and then the wafting antiseptic smell.

  I was fourteen years old. Greta, then seventeen, had been told nothing at all and made to stay at home. My father knew where we were going, but not what it cost, and Mother had not wanted him to know, because as much as he wanted the problem eliminated, he did not approve of spending any more than absolutely necessary.

  In the aromatic waiting room, my mother sat at my side, gripping my hand, while I tried to read the ornate calligraphy on the certificates and then to count the tongue depressors and cotton balls I could see in jars on a far shelf. But Mother’s hand kept squeezing and relaxing, a dying fish on my lap. When my fingers started to tingle, I looked up to see she had locked eyes with the woman opposite her, a woman who had arrived ahead of us with her son, an overweight, towering fellow who walked with a limp. Despite his height, he had the face of a boy, fat cheeks stained with tears. He was directed into the examination room, alone.

  The woman waited behind, clenching a handkerchief that appeared yellow next to the gray-white skin of her thin, tensed hand. From the next room came the sound of feet on the floor, the deep-voiced boy arguing with the doctor. The door began to open, then closed. The woman stood, her face pale, torn between going to help her son and staying put as she had been told.

  “Change places,” my mother whispered to me, and moments later she was holding a quiet and sympathetic conference with the woman next to her.

  “… yours?” I heard the woman say.

  “Just a very simple procedure, I’ve been told.”

  “That’s what I was told, before,” the woman said, twisting her handkerchief. “A simple examination. I brought him in last month with a rash.”

  “It couldn’t be treated?”

  “Yes, easily. But the doctor got to asking me questions, discussing the future, and then …”

  My eyes flickered to the poster above a desk on the far left side of the room. ANTHROPOMETRY, it said at the top, and there was photo after photo of a man in his underclothes being measured from every angle by a white-coated doctor.

  Across the room, a second poster shouted in blocky, self-assured capital letters: HEALTH, A NATIONAL RESOURCE. If health were a resource that a nation needed desperately in order to survive, then the healthiest of its citizens were heroes. The unhealthy were bad people, the kind we heard about so often on the radio: saboteurs. I looked back at the anthropometry poster, suspiciously eyeing the doctor’s large black calipers, long and curved like the back end of an earwig.

  In response to my mother’s well-meaning inquiries, the other woman responded, “It’s better this way.” She smoothed her skirt and patted her loose bun, which was sprouting black bobby pins that looked like tiny, electrocuted snakes. “It would only be harder in a few years, and that might be too late to hold off troubles.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And anyway, he doesn’t understand it.”

  “Do you understand it, dear?”

  “Well enough.”

  We were made to wait a long time. When the woman was finally allowed in to see her boy, I moved back to the seat next to my mother. “What doesn’t he understand?”

  “He’s being sterilized.”

  “Is he covered with germs?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  The surgical room was open and we could see the doctor and the mother trying to help the wobbly boy to stand and proceed to a secondary recovery room in the back. But whatever anesthesia they had given him was still coursing through his veins, and the mildly degenerate young man—if that’s what he was—kept collapsing back onto the table. With every thump, I felt my mother’s grip tighten on my sleeve, and I finally understood her fear: that this eugenically minded doctor, full of new ideas and politically astute aspirations, was a danger to us, though I still didn’t quite understand why.

  “Hurry,” my mother said, dragging me by the arm, gesturing toward the way out.

  “But why?”

  “I want to leave.” The tension had finally overtaken her. Her face was damp and drops of tears were collecting at the tip of her red chin.

  “But I’m not being”—I searched for the word—“sterilized.”

  “No, you’re not. We came for our own procedure.”

  “But are they going to do it?”

  “Not now. Let’s go.”r />
  I wasn’t entirely relieved. I was confused. Because a part of me did want this done and finished—“a simple procedure,” my mother had been whispering in my ear all week, preparing me to be brave. A part of me was already looking ahead, thinking of the group hikes and swims I’d be able to attend later in the summer and feeling how much easier it all would be from this day forward. But there was also something about the smell in the air, the drunken stagger of the man-boy, and my mother’s own sudden loss of confidence that all merged into an unspeakable dread.

  Until this point, the problem had been a matter of surfaces and emotions—no small things, of course. My difference was a humiliation, but in some school circles, wearing the wrong outfit and hairstyle were nearly as problematic. But what if it went deeper? What if this thing, whether left in place or surgically removed, was a sign of something else, and that something required further treatment or quarantine? On the way out, I looked at the anthropometry poster again, and at the large calipers that the doctor in the picture was holding tight to the patient’s head. He was only measuring, I told myself. Not clipping, crushing, or rubbing him out.

  I woke in the hot dark with my hand pressed against my face and my fingers clutched around something hard and square, and the smell of antiseptic—no, lighter fluid—strong on my fingers and in my nostrils.

  “Air!” I shouted. “I need air! It’s too hot in here!

  No answer.

  “You can’t leave me in here all day, with a body! Cosimo!”

  They say that kidnappers operate most comfortably in anonymity. I had made myself too anonymous to my captor, who had known me until now only by my last name, Vogler.

  I took a deep breath and shouted: “Ernst!”

  One syllable, lost to the whine of the engine.

  “Ernst—that is my Christian name!”

  Still no reply. I waited a few minutes, listening for any sound, and then gathered my energies to try again.

  “Cosimo!”

  But he was trying his best to ignore me. When I pounded on the wall, the engine sounds rose in pitch, as if he were accelerating slightly, and in that acceleration I perceived his stress as well. He could have left me on the road. He could have taken the statue and his brother’s body and left me. But he did not, so I reasoned that he did, in fact, plan to help me still—only later. But what he couldn’t realize, because he wasn’t thinking, was that “later” would not suffice. If we weren’t at the border by Monday at nightfall, we would be labeled as criminals. Keller would claim, conveniently, that we had evaded the Roman policemen in order the steal the statue—that we had planned all of it from day one—and that’s how it would seem.

  The heat and the dark and the constant bouncing made me feel drugged, obscuring how much time was passing, or how much I had slept. I set up a rhythm of pounding my fist and calling out, followed by periods of rest, during which I listened for any signs of Cosimo’s attention. We slowed down, but it was only to make a sharp turn. We sped up later, coasting down a hill. Another steep turn, followed by another—we were zigzagging, the engine straining. A major left turn, perhaps heading west. Climbing further into the mountains.

  I banged again and again with the edge of my aching fist, counting as I went—sieben, acht, neun—and was rewarded finally with a sound: not a voice, but a whistle.

  It was tremulous and uncertain at first. Then it built, becoming the tune that Cosimo had whistled the day before at the lake. German opera. But what was that tune? Nothing epic or Wagnerian. It was simpler, lilting, and sweet. The association that came to mind was one of woods, children, a sandman and a dew fairy and angels, all watching and protecting. I could see the big old radio in our house and my mother next to it, with her hand resting on top of the wood because whenever she lifted her hand there was static. Somehow we thought it had to be her hand that was summoning music from the radio, that she was nearly magical, so Greta and I begged her not to shift. “Of course, you love this one,” she’d tell my sister. “It is named for you.”

  Or nearly so. It was Hänsel und Gretel, by Humperdinck. The opera I couldn’t quite place before.

  It was a message. Cosimo was telling me that he meant no harm. We were not abandoning the precepts of civilization; he was not a rule breaker at heart. He was only insisting on his own values, as I had to insist on mine.

  If there is something I feared as a child, while listening to Hänsel und Gretel, it was the thought of being pushed into an oven. It happened only to the witch in the end, but still.

  It took a half hour or so to build up the courage and several attempts to get the lighter started. As the smell on my fingers attested, the fluid had leaked as I slept, and now there was not enough to guarantee many more strikes. I found my suitcase and felt blindly through it, searching for something flammable. My sketchbook and my dictionary remained in the front of the truck.

  I patted my pocket, locating a large, poorly folded piece of paper: the map. I ripped it into long sections, fashioning each into a twisted horn, then applied the lighter and began to add handfuls of straw, which ignited easily.

  “Fire!” I yelled, my throat tight with apprehension until I cleared it and accepted what I had done. “Cosimo! Fire!”

  I crouched near the door, next to Enzo’s body, ready to jump out. The pile of burning straw crackled. The burlap lemon bag had finally caught, filling the truck with smoke. I started to cough.

  He shouted from the cab. “You’re lying to me!”

  “I’m not!”

  The response came back muffled. “Imbecille! Dummkopf! Everything back there will burn!”

  But it wouldn’t. Not the statue made of marble. Ancient things have a way of outlasting us, as they should.

  If the fire were left unchecked, the wooden crate would go up next. Then the body, or rather two bodies—but it wouldn’t come to that, I didn’t think. The crate was slow to catch, but catch it finally did—not blazing yet, only smoldering. Meanwhile, I could scarcely breathe.

  “Fire! You must stop the truck!”

  At the moment I reached out a hand and made contact with something I’d overlooked in my search for flammable paper—the padded cover. Di Luca. The most important reference in my collection. But more importantly, the only thing I owned that bore my mentor’s name. Why did this matter so much if he was still safe somewhere, to emerge someday from these confused times, dignified and healthy and whole? My instincts knew what my mind refused to admit. If there was a moment of uncontrolled panic, it hit then, and I leaned over the book, its corners pressed into my chest.

  I was coughing uncontrollably when the truck braked to a halt. A moment later, Cosimo unlocked and threw open the retractable door. He ignored me, attending to the fire instead, beating it with his jacket. Briefly, I had the advantage: I could lock him inside the truck and either he would fight the blaze or fail to fight it, but either way the statue would survive. But I couldn’t do it. As duty-bound and determined as I considered myself to be, I could not do it, even then.

  Smoke billowed but there was no visible flame. Cosimo’s face was dark with grime and exhaustion. It would not have taken much to subdue him. He approached me, lumbering in a soot-covered half crouch, so disappointed and so disheartened, readying himself to jump down from the edge of the truck, both fists curled with contempt.

  He pulled the truck’s back door closed, leaving me standing as he returned to the driver’s side door. I followed, uncertain, calling out, “Someone has to be committed to the larger things—to art, to the future!”

  “Go around,” he said, stabbing a finger at the passenger door. “Get in.”

  The hour hand on my watch crept past three o’clock, and then four. I noticed the roominess of the truck bench, the gap between us, where before we’d been so crowded. I cleared my parched, smoky throat and asked Cosimo where we were, but he reminded me that I’d burned the only map. A sign pointed toward two names I didn’t recognize—Vignola and Maranello—but we continued along th
e smallest roads, always turning away from any town or larger strada. He would say only that we were heading northwest; that we had to avoid being seen; that he needed to concentrate to find his way on this indirect route he had traveled only a few times before.

  The sun was low and hot in the burnished western sky when I patted my pocket and noticed the shape of the postcards meant for my sister. If I’d remembered them before, I would have used them for kindling. I took one out, and pushing hard against my thigh to keep the script smooth despite the road’s bumps, I wrote:

  We are past Florence …

  Nothing else came to mind, until, with exasperation, I put pen to paper and scrawled quickly:

  … which is a shame. It would have been wonderful to see, though I was not prepared to see it. But perhaps for beauty, one cannot prepare.

  I read the card once and tore it up, ashamed of my own blatant ventriloquism. It would have been a gratifying notion, to think I had absorbed something from Enzo in the short amount of time I’d known him, that his impulsive nature, his gioia di vivere, had been somehow contagious. But it would not have been true.

  Hearing the sound of tearing paper, Cosimo glanced at the ripped pieces accumulating in my lap. For the first time in hours, he tried to smile: “You’re not starting another fire, are you?”

  Cosimo accepted a piece of bread left over from yesterday’s groceries, though I noticed he took one dry bite before pushing it back into the bag, his free hand pressed against his stomach. He said, “I smell something.”

  I sniffed my own sleeve. “Neither of us smells very good.”

  “Worse than that,” he said, wrinkling his brow.

  Earlier in the day, the rear compartment had been hot enough; many more hours had passed since with the sun beating against the metal, raising the temperature as we drove.

  “Something rotting,” Cosimo said.

  “The milk smell. It was on the ground. It probably splashed onto Enzo’s clothes.”