by Joanna Scott
And what was his name? She could say that in French: “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
“Amdu,” he replied, his tone polite, even a little shy. As she started to ponder the name, wondering what it indicated about its bearer, she saw him blink in a sleepy way that reminded her of a cat lying in the sun. She thought that he must be filled with trust if he was allowing himself to give in to fatigue in her presence, and his trust made her proud of her own steadfast attention. Any other girl would have been afraid. Not Adriana. Che coraggio! Any other girl would have stayed at home.
She wanted to be sure the soldier named Amdu knew that she was different from other girls her age. She hoped he would come to Viticcio to watch her dive. Having concluded that he was a nice boy, better than most, she wanted to earn his admiration. She’d already earned his trust. Come along, then, Amdu, and Adriana will introduce you to her mother and Luisa and Paolo and Ulisse. Come to La Chiatta and sleep in a proper bed, and before you go back to your home, Adriana will take you to Viticcio, where, to impress you, she will leap from the highest rock and twist backward into the sea.
But while she was trying to think of some way to prove that she was worthy of admiration, Amdu sank into the tent of his blanket, slumping forward onto the ground, his head tilted so only the fuzz of his hair was visible. Adriana didn’t know whether to feel offended or concerned. She had thought they were in the middle of a conversation, but he’d gone and fallen asleep on her! Didn’t he know there was a difference between blinking and actually falling asleep? Even if he was exhausted by his ordeal, there was no excuse for just falling asleep in the middle of a nice conversation! Except he wasn’t asleep—not completely. His body twitched beneath the blanket, rousing Pippa, who started to bark excitedly. No, Pippa, stop! The barking was confusing Adriana. Or maybe the soldier named Amdu was the source of confusion. Maybe he wanted to fool her into thinking that he was dying. Or maybe he really was dying.
Wake up! He was supposed to live, not die. “Amdu!” His bundled body jerked in tremors. “Amdu!” She wished Pippa would stop barking. She wished Amdu would sit up and tell her that he was only joking. Boys played awful, stupid jokes sometimes. They lied; they snuck up on you and pulled your hair; they pretended they were dying. Stop pretending, Amdu!
The whole point of the adventure was to keep this boy alive, not to watch him die and certainly not to hear what sounded like the rattling of gunfire resume up in the fields. The war was supposed to be over. Was it possible that the war had just begun—or was beginning all over again, as wars will do? A boy was dying. Someone was spraying the field with a machine gun. And was that the faint crackling of fire? Maybe. Possibly. Most likely. Where there was war, there would be fire. The fields were burning and would always be burning.
With some bitterness she recalled her mother’s promise of never again, though she felt betrayed not by her mother’s exaggeration but by her own vanity. She had only herself to blame. She had come to the ravine simply to prove how wonderful she was. And now she had to decide either to stay or to leave. Weren’t those always the two choices? She would stay if the soldier named Amdu chose to live. But she didn’t want to stand there waiting for him to die. If she couldn’t do anything for him, she wanted to be someplace else, someplace far enough away so she wouldn’t be expected to save him.
Halfway up the path she ripped her skirt trying to free it from a patch of thorns, and as she struggled on she found herself looking forward to her mother’s annoyance and Luisa’s scolding. Even as she pushed herself over the lip of level ground into the battle that could have been the beginning of the end of the world, she imagined the eloquence of her apology. And though she’d offer to repair the skirt, she knew that Luisa would insist on doing it herself.
It felt good to predict the effects that would likely follow a particular cause, just as it felt good to feel the rain on her face. A predictable future meant that any previous change had not been too severe. And the rain meant that she’d mistaken the sound of a storm for war. There was no battle raging around her—no spray of a machine gun or bazooka blasts or pinging of mortar. There were only thick gray clouds overhead and rain falling in sheets that churned like metal blades across the grass.
SHE’S STILL HERE, THOUGH SHE’S NOT DOING MUCH THINKING. The ventricles of the heart are still contracting, the valves are working properly, and blood is being pumped. But somewhere between the right ventricle of the heart and the capillaries in the lungs, midway along the pulmonary artery, a clot has formed, impeding the circulation of blood and the diffusion of oxygen into Mrs. Rundel’s needy tissues, causing the third cranial optic nerve to weaken and at the same time disrupting the signals from the vagus nerve to the thoracic cavity, so after the last exhalation the intercostal muscles don’t contract, and the lungs don’t expand.
The train is five minutes from Penn Station, and the other passengers are gathering their belongings in preparation for arrival. Ordinarily, Mrs. Rundel would do the same. She would glance at the ghost of her reflection in the window, smooth her hair, and take her place in the aisle. When the doors opened and she joined the crowd on the platform, she would consider the tasks awaiting her.
With her vision registering only the absence of light and her brain focused on the breach of contract between her lungs and her heart, Mrs. Rundel hasn’t even had a chance to admit once and for all that she has reason to panic. But somewhere within her is the awareness that she’s Ma to her grown son and daughter, and Ma, however coarse the sound, is the person her body wants to protect. Along with her desire to fall into her husband’s arms, she feels an urge to continue the conversation begun the night before and say what deserves to be said. Even if she can’t articulate it, her body senses that she has unfinished business. When the family is gathered again around the dinner table, Mrs. Rundel will pick up where she left off.
Not that any recounting of events is ever sufficient. For instance, she likes to tell her children about how she and Robert met in Paris in 1956. But she has never adequately explained why she left Elba. Or why in 1971, following her mother’s death, she sold the estate of La Chiatta for far less than it was worth. Or why on a summer’s day when she was forty years old, alone one afternoon in her house in Rahway, she stared with eyes clouded by useless tears at a Formica counter upon which sat a yellow felt marker missing its top, a bent lid ripped from a cereal box, a plastic pony, a plate spotted with dried ketchup, a list of phone numbers for her daughter’s classmates, and the comics from the local newspaper. And then the banging of doors, children squabbling, her husband’s mediating voice, Mrs. Rundel reaching for the ringing phone, holding it up so whoever was on the other end could hear the chaos in her home, and then hanging up the phone without even saying hello while her family stared at her, appalled.
They’ve never understood why she hung up the phone, though she tried to explain—that and more. Why she is who she is, mother, wife, daughter, bouncing from island to mainland to a kitchen with a television on the counter. They know her opinion of American talk shows. They know her likes and dislikes, her habits, her dreams. Over the course of her long life, she has said everything that deserves to be said. And yet she feels that she wants to say it all over again, to say it correctly. In the face of the possibility of an everlasting silence, everything deserves to be repeated and refined, beginning with whatever she’s just been thinking. But she can’t remember what she’s been thinking until her body receives an adequate supply of oxygen. And she can’t get adequate oxygen without medical help—which depends upon the ability of the other passengers to act decisively.
The man beside her, no longer absorbed in financial reports, is already standing in the aisle behind the student with the brown-bag lunch. The woman who refreshed her lipstick is waiting for the woman who’s been reading about water resources to put away her report and close her briefcase. The man who absorbed himself and his companion in his complaints about his flight is quiet, except when he offers a pert gezundheit
in response to his friend’s sneeze.
Mrs. Rundel has slumped in her seat, her head falling over the armrest that she shared with the financial adviser, who glances down at her with impatience. His first conclusion is that the old woman is in distress. His second conclusion, which he prefers, is that she’s drunk. There are plenty like her on the streets and subways of New York. It’s a pity—the waste of potential. But a drunken woman can be expected to take care of herself.
He takes a step forward, bumping against the student, who rotates his shoulders to reclaim the space around him. But just then the train jerks to a halt on its approach to the station, and at the same time that the financial adviser stumbles, shoving the student forward, Mrs. Rundel rolls from her seat.
The student, looking back at the financial adviser in annoyance, is the first to notice the old woman on the floor and the first to exclaim. Closest to the student is the husband who’s been talking on his cell phone to his lover’s answering machine—he’s cupping the closed phone in his hand, holding it like a stone he wants to throw through the window. Startled by the student’s voice, he drops the phone and immediately bends over to retrieve it. The student, watching him go down, assumes the man is collapsing, following the example of the woman behind him, and he stands there staring helplessly at the top of the man’s head.
Meanwhile, the financial adviser can’t ignore the fact that the old woman who might be drunk has fallen from her seat. Moving to help her, he notices that her skirt has ridden up above the dark line of her pantyhose. He feels embarrassed for her—or, more precisely, he is embarrassed by his proximity to this scene, and though he has already started to reach for her, his effort is slowed by his reluctance to get involved.
The Polish woman, having heard the student’s exclamation, snaps her report closed right at the point when she’s been mulling over the section about basic water requirements—including agricultural needs as well as sanitation, quantified at fifty liters per person per day. Seeing a woman’s arm extending across the floor of the aisle, she quickly rises from her seat but is blocked by the financial adviser, who is trying to position himself on straddled legs so he will have enough leverage to set Mrs. Rundel upright. But her body is jammed in the narrow space between the seats, and the financial adviser can’t lift her on his own.
The lawyer who’s been sitting behind Mrs. Rundel springs into action. But he can’t reach the aisle unless his companion moves. The companion, confused, is looking past the financial adviser at the face of the Polish woman. His confusion is matched by hers, though the difference between them is that the software designer tends to wait for an opportunity to present itself to him and the Polish woman is used to making quick decisions.
After inching forward along the track, the train is easing to a halt beside the platform. The student reaches for the man who dropped his cell phone. When he gently lifts him by the elbow, the man pulls away, clearly disgusted by the contact. Behind them, the financial adviser stumbles again and grabs the nearest headrest. The lawyer pushes his way into the aisle past the software designer, who makes an effort to get up but falls back into his seat with the jerking motion of the train.
At the same time, the Polish woman manages to slip into the aisle under the arm of the financial adviser. Having dealt with many crises in her life, she is confident that she can deal with this one. Feeling awkwardly for the carotid pulse, she concludes—wrongly—that Mrs. Rundel is in cardiac arrest, which stirs in her a jolting recognition of her inadequacy. This is the second time in the past decade that she’s been unable to help someone because she doesn’t know how to perform CPR. The first time involved a Sudanese child who had fallen into an irrigation ditch.
“Is there—is anyone a doctor here?” she calls. Her raised voice silences the chatter among passengers in the rear seats. When no one replies, she says more urgently, “This woman needs help.”
The train has stopped at the platform, but the doors don’t open. This infuriates the lawyer, who manages to pull Mrs. Rundel from the floor. Though she isn’t a large woman, she flops into his arms with unexpected heaviness. The financial adviser, comprehending all at once that the situation calls for a heroic response, sets his briefcase on the seat vacated by the Polish woman and helps the lawyer steady Mrs. Rundel in an upright position.
After understanding that the man with the cell phone does not need his help, the student whirls to face Mrs. Rundel, whose grayish lips abruptly call to mind the memory of a twenty-nine-year-old man pulled from Salt Pond last summer. The man, who didn’t know how to swim, had gone in after his nephew, who he thought was struggling to stay afloat in deep water. But the boy had swum to shore while the uncle disappeared beneath the surface. The student, working as the sole lifeguard at the time, had jumped in with his rope and life preserver, but he hadn’t been able to locate the man in the murky water. It took forty-five minutes and two divers to bring the body back to the beach.
The student turns to face the door at the head of the aisle. He wants to believe that there’s nothing he can do. But there’s always something he can do. At the very least, he can summon help. He moves into the compartment between cars and waits for the door to the platform to open. He waits and waits, knowing that his worthlessness is increasing with every passing minute. But he can’t bring himself to go back into the car, where he would have to press his mouth to an old woman’s gray lips and breathe for her. And even this probably wouldn’t do any good.
Meanwhile, the Polish woman tends to Mrs. Rundel, pushing the hair from her face while the financial adviser and the lawyer keep her from flopping forward. Her eyes are only half-closed, with the bottom rim of the pupils barely visible. A thread of drool is drying on her lips. The Polish woman thinks of the wish she’s wished a thousand times during her travels: when she dies, she wants to be in the privacy of her own home, surrounded by her family.
Mrs. Rundel is dying in public. But she doesn’t have to die. If she could be kept alive long enough for an able doctor to free the pulmonary artery of its embolism, she could go on to live for many happy years.
The doors to the train open with a swooshing sound, and the student leaps to the platform and heads toward two transit workers who have just entered the gate. Finally, he is doing something useful. He is setting the rescue into motion.
In the car with Mrs. Rundel, to everyone’s surprise, the woman who was putting on lipstick has taken charge. All the time spent watching soap operas: here she is having some idea about what to do because of the schmaltz she’s watched on television. She directs the lawyer and the financial adviser to lift Mrs. Rundel into the aisle. The lawyer curls his arms under Mrs. Rundel’s, the financial adviser holds her ankles, and with great awkwardness they manage to lay her on her back, giving the woman the opportunity to begin performing a muddled resuscitation, breathing effectively into Mrs. Rundel’s mouth, then giving a few tentative pushes on her sternum, which, though she can’t know it, is preferable to a more accomplished technique, since though Mrs. Rundel’s respirations have stopped, her heart is still beating.
It is the same heart that began beating on the island of Corsica seventy years ago, then beat on Elba through her childhood and continued beating in Paris, London, New York, and Rahway, New Jersey. The heart that has beat steadily every weekday morning on this commuter train for twenty years and elsewhere on holidays and vacations. Lub dub. The heart that has, on the whole, been rewarded with contentment and good health and has grown so used to ease that it doesn’t willingly register distress. Lub dub.
It is a good, strong heart, but there’s only confusion in the brain, without any conscious awareness of earlier concerns. And though Mrs. Rundel would be reluctant to agree, unconsciousness is a benefit right now, for if she were awake she would be mortified by the attention. One strange man at her head, another at her feet, her neat wool skirt riding up her thighs, a strange woman pressing her lips, moist with fresh color, against Mrs. Rundel’s mouth, another woman tenderly h
olding her hand. On the platform two transit workers go in opposite directions, one accompanying the frantic college student, moving toward the train through the swell of disembarking passengers, while the other calls for an ambulance.
THE RAIN WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN, Luisa said—a sacred cleansing to wash away spilled blood. Ulisse’s boys squealed happily in the courtyard, catching raindrops on their tongues while Pippa danced around them. Luisa ran through the villa closing shutters. Giulia Nardi followed Lorenzo to the loggia. She stood with him, looking out across her land. The neat rows of olive trees, unyielding in the wind, made her think of stone columns inside a basilica. Those sturdy trees had survived a century’s worth of storms. And now she could add that they had survived a war.
Lorenzo speculated that the weather would slow the German evacuation. Giulia was certain that the storm wouldn’t last long. And though the sea was frothing wildly in the distance, the military ships would still be able to make the passage to the mainland. Signora Ambrogi, who’d been standing inside the doorway, wondered aloud where the Germans would go.
“They will come to regret ever leaving Germany to begin with,” Giulia said, her prediction saturated with relief.
The palms in the courtyard made their noisy protest—a comforting sound that seemed to express the personality of the wind. She could almost hear words embedded in the sound, the shhh of sirocco or sciroppo. The loud, syrupy, shushing wind that disturbed but never stole what belonged to her. A wind that bounced off the surface of the sea and dipped into the fields before curling up and over the mountains.
She looked toward the ancient ruins crowning Volterraio and wondered if fugitive Germans were hiding there. She wondered what would happen to them if they were caught.
