by Joanna Scott
The obvious truth being that Amdu would have been better off dead. The bullet that had grazed his shoulder should have killed him. Or the fuel tank that had fallen from the sky should have crushed him. At each turn he’d made a mistake and so had ended up at this wrong place. From here there was no turning back and no going forward into the remarkable story of his life. He could only run away.
Two soldiers had rushed from the shed and were coming after him. Run, Amdu, before they cut out your tongue! And don’t bother clinging to any tired notion of punishable sin. A fair god would have cracked open the heavens and rained fire. Instead, the liberation of this rotting island continued, crimes would remain unpunished, and there was nothing he could do about it.
At least Amdu could outrun anyone he challenged to a race. As the voices of his pursuers faded in the distance, he ran this way and that, along dirt paths, through pine groves and fields, up rocky slopes, down rocky slopes, along paved roads and gravel drives and back to a narrow strip of beach. When he wasn’t running he was staggering—away from a barking dog or the sputter of a jeep. Or he was leaping into the air like a startled gazelle. He stayed alive, thanks to no one but himself. He hated himself for wanting to survive. He had no right to survive. He and everyone else deserved to be dead. Life designed for the destruction of life made no sense. The liberation made no sense. The rising sun made no sense. Warm, sweet, foul air of morning. Pebbles beneath his soaked boots gave way to a sandy belt lapped by the sea, where splinters of quartz, iron, amber, mica, glistened in the sunlight. Stupid sea. Stupid sky. Stupid wall separating Amdu from the private lives of the islanders. He and they, whoever they were, everyone everywhere sharing the capacity for enacting the unimaginable. Monsieur, tell Amdu who started this fooking war anyway. And tell him where those fooking planes flying overhead were going to dump their fooking bombs. Here? He’d rather be not-here. There. Somewhere. The other side of the wall would be preferable.
NORMALLY, the two layers of the pleura slide over each other, allowing the lungs to inflate and deflate smoothly, passing inhaled air via the trachea into the branching bronchioles and through the thin alveolar walls into a network of tiny blood vessels. Normally, the heart rate for a healthy sedentary adult averages seventy beats per minute. The diaphragm flattens as the intercostal muscles contract, the heart pumps blood through the arteries and arterioles, the ten thousand million nerve cells in the brain receive their fuel, and the mind keeps producing complex thought.
On the train between Rahway and Penn Station, on the stretch through the Kearny Marshes, Mrs. Rundel is busy thinking, her mind focused on the task of identifying the source and significance of her discomfort. Breathing in is difficult. Breathing out feels better, she discovers, and she is able to control her panting by extending the exhalation. Should she be worried? Is it, in fact, an extreme situation that would require her to seek immediate help? Is she experiencing a disorienting introduction to an unusually potent influenza? Or could it be that the premonition of illness has produced symptoms that have no actual physical cause? At this point of calm, her cerebrum observes the misfirings of brain stem activity with skepticism. She is having difficulty breathing. But she knows she could do herself real harm by translating the possibility of an illness into a psychosomatic reaction.
Whatever the actual basis of her condition, she doesn’t want to involve anyone around her. She has ridden this train for twenty years and rarely has she exchanged even the mildest greeting with other passengers. Non parlare a stranieri—don’t talk to strangers. It was a lesson her children grew tired of hearing from her, and it is counsel her mind summons to consciousness now that she might be in need of aid.
It’s not that she’s uninterested in the lives of others. Just the opposite—she is full of curiosity. But any stranger—the man in the seat beside her, the people in front and back—might be a swindler. Hai capito? Un’imbroglione. She can’t explain why she suspects this, since she’s never been a direct victim. Maybe she gleaned the danger from the novels she read when she was trying to improve her English. Or maybe the need for caution came to her through intuition. Whatever its source, the possibility that she’d lose something of value to a fast-talking American has haunted her since she arrived in this country. Without a proper introduction, she will work hard to stay aloof.
She’s determined at this moment to keep others from involving themselves in her predicament, though if she were home she would stumble from her chair and make her way to Robert’s study and throw herself into his arms. He would take care of her. It is reassuring to remind herself of this. Just as she would take care of him if need be, he would take care of her. His concern would be hidden behind a tranquil mask—the sweet crescents his eyes make when he smiles, the thick skin buckling into wrinkles, the gray bristles muffling his chin. Dear Robert, who came into her life nearly fifty years ago in a café on the Île de St.-Louis in Paris, bumping her table as he was trying to pass and then lingering to apologize. He stretched his apology into courtship, courtship into marriage, and she’s been Mrs. Rundel ever since.
But she doesn’t have the leisure to remember their beginning right now. On a train bound for Penn Station on a morning that started out like any other weekday morning, she’s not thinking of their past together. She’s not thinking about that time he startled her, catching her by the arm while they were crossing the Place des Vosges. She’s not thinking about how he brushed his lips against hers and then pulled back with an expression of surprise on his face, the intimacy confounding him for a hundred different reasons, so she slipped her hand around the back of his neck and eased him toward her. Both of them runaways. The luck of finding each other in the crowded world. Good luck marking these two individuals with an identical and permanent impression, a shared relief that would even have a gradual physical effect, so that over the years those who knew them would note an actual resemblance, as if they were siblings or cousins. And who can say for sure that they are not related by blood? He was born the youngest son in a large family and has so many relatives he never bothered to learn all their names. She was a foundling—an English word she came to love for its fairy-tale conjurings and abhor for its meaning: a baby deserted by unknown parents . . . and found, and claimed, when no one else would have her, by Signora Giulia Nardi of La Chiatta.
But she’s not thinking about any of this on the train to Penn Station. She’s not even thinking about what she’d been trying to remember a moment earlier. She’s not considering the influence of memory upon consciousness and doesn’t contemplate how her past experiences will affect any decision she might make in regard to seeking the help of strangers, nor does she have any idea that because of her years of smoking, her platelets are sticky, making her vulnerable to hypercoagulability and deep vein thrombosis. She’s not thinking about how it has started to rain. She is not wondering how the brokenhearted man talking on his phone will end his sentence—“what I’m trying to say is what goddamnit I’m trying to say if you’ll just listen to me so I can say what I’m trying to say is that”—or what happened to the man sitting behind her, who is still complaining about the delay of his flight to his friend, a software designer heading into the city to look for a new job. She is not interested in the issue of water as a human right—the subject of the chapter being read by the woman across the aisle. She is not concerned about the college student’s disappointment over his liverwurst sandwich. And she is certainly not wasting her time wondering what she’s not thinking about.
All she knows during this clarifying action of an extended exhalation is that she needs her husband and would call him at home if she could find her own cell phone, but as usual it is hidden in the mess in her purse. Here are her cigarettes and lipstick, her checkbook, her wallet, a pack of tissues, a pack of gum, old receipts, her address book, paper clips and Post-it pad and mints and nail file and pens and aspirin. But she can’t find her cell phone. The rain, invisible in the air, splinters on the window, and she can’t find her ce
ll phone. Her husband is at home, and she can’t find her cell phone.
She can’t see what she can’t find. She can hold her cell phone in her hand and stare at it and still not see it, and then toss it back into her purse and continue searching, oblivious to the fact that she just found what she’d been looking for because the effort has already struck her as futile. Useless desire. What is happening is happening, the embolus is stuck in an artery, and if she can’t find her cell phone, she can’t find her cell phone. It all makes irritating sense. There is nothing to be done, no way to translate effort into success and find what she assumes is lost. Her husband could be seated beside her right now instead of a stranger, and Mrs. Rundel wouldn’t see him.
AFTER THE FIRST NIGHT of the liberation, during the quiet stretch following a pranzo that consisted only of cheese and bread because they had no meat left and Mario advised them not to light the stove to heat stock for soup, Adriana was at the piano rocking her hand between the opposite notes of chords in an attempt to mimic the sounds Rodolfo had made in her dream. Now that the bombardment had stopped, the war seemed very far away, though the fighting was said to be continuing as close as the alleys of Portoferraio as well as across the island in Porto Azzurro and the forests around Marciana Alta. The adults were still unsure who would emerge as victor.
With her face hidden in the crook of her left arm and her right hand tapping sound from single notes, Adriana thought about what she knew. She knew that she could trust her mother to protect her and to find her enough to eat, even during a time of scarcity. She knew that her uncle would continue to tell her what to do. And she could assume with good reason that when the war finally had gone elsewhere, shutters would still be painted green, stucco would be chipped, stone steps marked with smooth grooves, pistachio berries would be red, the caps of acorns brown, and the Scoglietto lighthouse would still be standing.
C, G, she played. C, G; D, A. How easy it was to predict, abstractly, the sound of the note she was about to press. And yet she couldn’t really hear music before she played it, just as she couldn’t experience morning in the midst of the night or smell a rose in her imagination. What had she been hearing during the night? What had happened? Uncertainty was like an itch she couldn’t satisfy by scratching—this was a good comparison and it deserved to be shared with her mother, along with other things, including how, though she knew a little about a little, every passing minute seemed to erase a piece of memory.
Giulia Nardi sat across the room, chain-stitching a scroll on a linen napkin. Luisa was snoring downstairs in the kitchen, having fallen asleep in her chair. Mario had gone to La Lampara with Paolo to find out what Lorenzo knew about the situation. And Adriana was at the piano, trying to re-create the sounds of last night’s dream.
Quiet, lazy pausa. The air felt both buoyant and restrictive, the world muffled by inertia. Today was . . . what was today? The eighteenth day of June in the year 1944. Just another afternoon in a villa surrounded by olive groves and vineyards, midway between Magazzini and San Giovanni. Just another war in the history of an island.
A, E; C, G. That Adriana had noticed the fuzz on her legs darkening in the same week in September that the war had come to the island seemed more of an insult than a coincidence. Her body’s changes would have been hard enough to accept—but coinciding with the German occupation, they became unbearable. Everything that was happening was happening without the consent of those most deeply affected. Everywhere was occupied territory. Was resistance absurd? Was she really supposed to accept the fact that everything familiar would gradually be modified? Or worse, she could paint her nails and lips and smile at soldiers of any nationality. She could use the war to her advantage and do what she’d heard adults talking about when they thought she wasn’t listening.
But these were ridiculous thoughts. Infantile, girlish thoughts. War was one thing, and growing up something else entirely. That the fighting on the island would continue for days or weeks or months had nothing to do with the fact that she would grow up. And if she couldn’t meet the challenges of life with courage, she might as well take back the porcelain doll she’d given away to Paolo’s little sister. Of course she wouldn’t do that. She was through with dolls, and someday she’d be through with cartwheels, handsprings, and her amazing dives off the rocks at Viticcio. She would grow up willingly and would be as beautiful and superior as her mother—a woman who knew how to stay in control of her life.
Other mothers were shrill in their worry, with voices that rang morning to night with admonishments. Not Giulia Nardi, with her dignified demeanor that was just short of severe. Other mothers were subordinate to their husbands and had little interest in the world outside their homes. Not Giulia Nardi, who had traveled widely, spoke French and English fluently, and never bothered to marry. Giulia Nardi was the woman Adriana expected to become—unmarried but never alone, clever with numbers, regal, stoic even during wartime, setting the example for others.
But it was true that she hadn’t remained entirely stoic during this current invasion. The clatter of bicycle wheels on the drive made her gasp. Her daughter’s absence made her frenetic. Do not go outside without your mamma’s permission, Adriana!
As the afternoon wore on, there was nothing to do but roam the shuttered rooms of the villa and stay out of Luisa’s way as she swept the stone floors or rubbed copper pots with wood ash and lemon juice. There wasn’t even the interesting sound of gunfire in the distance to remind her that she was living in history. Occasionally she could hear the buzz of a plane passing overhead, but it seemed to be a leisurely sound, like the sound of a bee drifting from flower to flower.
Her mother encouraged her to read a book. But there was no book that could hold her attention. Then she might draw a picture. She didn’t want to draw. Then she should practice the bagatelle she’d been learning, fill La Chiatta with music, and ignore what she couldn’t affect.
The hours passed slowly. Finally, Mario and Paolo returned with Lorenzo Ambrogi, who sank into the chair across from Giulia and announced that the Germans had retreated from the central regions of the island into the forest on Monte Capanne. This was good, they all agreed, except Mario, who was not convinced that an Allied victory would be preferable. “Senz’altro”—without a doubt, Giulia insisted. Without a doubt it would be preferable. “Senz’altro,” Mario echoed coldly. What did Giulia mean by preferable? he wanted to know. Was what the African soldiers had done to the daughter of Sergio Canuti preferable? And what about the Signori Volbiani, who were caught hiding in their barn in the hills outside of Procchio? This was news Lorenzo had already shared with Mario and now was obliged to repeat for Giulia and Luisa. The Signori Volbiani of Procchio had been killed, slaughtered like animals, like goats, their throats slit when they were found hiding in their barn. Sofia Canuti had been killed. Corpses of soldiers were scattered in the woods. And Belbo the pig was dead—shot in the snout.
If it was already this bad, then it should be worse, Adriana wanted to say, though she knew that the adults would consider her foolish, so she kept her mouth shut. But she went on thinking it. If people were killed brutally for no reason, then the killing should happen elsewhere. If there was no place left on an island that would serve as a refuge, then there should be no refuge left on earth.
Foolish child. War made all children foolish. And at the same time that it left people dead, it made dogs bark. Lorenzo’s dog, Pippa, having followed her master through the fields, was barking in the courtyard. Luisa told Paolo to go see why Pippa was barking. Adriana asked to go with him. “No, assolutamente no!” Luisa said over her shoulder as she left the room. The other adults continued arguing. When Adriana followed Paolo to the ground floor and out into the courtyard, no one noticed, not even Paolo, who quieted the dog and then went back inside to hear more of the important talk.
What was so important about talk? Talk, talk, talk. Adults talking during a war were like dogs barking. Sss, Pippa, silenzio, and come with Adriana! “Vieni, sss
.” There was something Adriana wanted to check, and she would feel safer with Pippa along. Quick, veloce! Back along the grass corridor between the two halves of the vineyard, hurry, hurry, to the wall extending from the gate along the edge of the field, to the stretch of stone netted in ivy, through the briars, to the patch of weeds flattened by a falling nothing.
Veramente, nothing had fallen over the wall. Nothing had scrambled through the briars and run away. Nothing could interrupt the serenity in this far corner of La Chiatta’s vineyards. There were no footprints or bits of torn clothing to be seen, nothing more than a few twigs broken either by some animal or by the most recent rain. All Adriana had seen earlier that day was a dark nothing spot of sunblind.
Having confirmed what she’d believed, Adriana knew she should hurry back inside and station herself at the piano bench before anyone noticed that she’d left. She couldn’t afford to cause more trouble. But she was distracted by the interesting show put on by the natural world. She watched a pair of kestrels plunge one after the other into the grass, probably in pursuit of a snake. The swallows overhead curled in a design as intricate as the scroll in her mother’s linen. Above the swallows, a single gull glided in a wide arc. Unseen beyond the wall, the sea splashed against the rocks. What else wasn’t she seeing, she wondered? She looked around, trying to take in everything. Pippa sat smiling, panting, her tongue lolling. She gave a little whine of impatience. Yes, Pippa, it was time to go. But a quick motion in the grass caught Adriana’s eye—a nice, plump cricket had hopped onto a broken twig. She cupped her hand in anticipation, since it wasn’t possible to see a cricket without trying to catch it. She even had a cage waiting for it in her room—a house of wire and painted wood made by Ulisse, La Chiatta’s gardener. He had given the cage to Adriana when she was six and had shown her how to sneak up on a cricket and catch it in her hands. He had instructed her on how to feed it lettuce leaves. If before the end of three days it sang for her, he said, the Nardi family would have good luck. If it didn’t sing, life at La Chiatta would go on as before. Either way, the cricket must be given its liberty at the end of three days. But if the cricket died in captivity, Adriana would have to find a witch to undo the curse.
