Early One Morning

by Virginia Baily

  ‘Eat up your food, Cecilia, or you won’t grow big and strong,’ their mother says, for the hundredth time.

  Cecilia is constantly admonished thus. She must be nine or ten years old, Chiara thinks, after the onset of her illness but before that summer when a spate of uncontrollable seizures damaged her brain irrecoverably. As their mother comes to the table, Cecilia grabs a hunk of bread and stuffs the whole piece into her mouth. To show willing, perhaps. Her jaw clicks. She cannot move it to masticate and cannot get the huge unchewed lump down her throat. Her eyes are popping. Her face is going red. If she were a snake with a rabbit in its jaw, she would throw back her head and her powerful neck muscles would take over the business of swallowing. But Cecilia is not a snake. Her little neck cannot expand. Then Mamma is there, banging Cecilia’s back, which doesn’t work, then sticking her finger into Cecilia’s mouth and hooking the mush out, which does.

  Chiara uses the dustpan handle to hook the papers out of the stove. She lays them out on the floor, unpicks and loosens the wad, then starts again, tearing the sheets into smaller scraps, stoking the flames. Their mamma was a demon for physical intervention in their maladies: greased fingers up the bottom for constipation, vigorous chest massaging with oil for colds, tincture of iodine slathered over cuts, methylene blue for sore throats. If poking and rubbing and the application of unguents, ointments and poultices didn’t work, then you were malingering. If the malady continued or worsened beyond denial, then it was to the priest with you. She didn’t believe in doctors.

  Chiara is making progress. The stove is burning at full capacity, and she starts to warm up. Steam rises from her clothes. As she gets into a rhythm of tearing, shredding, burning, poking, she shuts her mind to the intermittent roars, to what might be going on outside. She is like an engine driver, stoking her little train, thundering down the rickety track. She needs to get to her destination. This is her job.

  She clears the pile, sweeps up the debris and tips it in. She watches as the last scraps are consumed and then remembers the other stack in the stinking cupboard. The stench hits her anew when she opens the door. She lifts most of the pile of papers, which are pulp in her hands. When she stuffs them into the stove, a heavy, noxious smoke billows out. She wraps her scarf over her nose and mouth, soggy fragments of newsprint sticking to her fingers and catching around her wrists, and works at the damp mass with her improvised poker, forcing it to fragment. She coaxes a flame, then another. It catches fire.

  She goes back to check she has cleared the cupboard. She peels a leaflet from the cupboard base and seems to see, for a fraction of a moment, two little green lights, instantly extinguished. She leans in, clutching her scarf around her nose, and the lights reappear. They are the eyes of a cat. A black cat with white paws, lying at the back of the cupboard, four or five tiny kittens at her breast. To one side, stiff and lifeless, lies the runt, the tiniest of creatures. Chiara sees that she has destroyed the cat’s newspaper nest, her refuge, the home she has found for herself and her offspring. Now she pulls the last pamphlet out from under the family and takes their bed. The emaciated cat makes a sound, attempts to stand but lacks the strength.

  Chiara picks up the runt’s body with the last remaining leaflet and chucks it in the stove. She returns to look at the cat. She allows herself to contemplate the cat’s life: running from dogs, skulking, roaming the city’s ruins, scavenging for scraps. The brief wild moment when these babies were conceived. She ponders leaving the cloth bag as a bed for the animals. The cat is patently starving.

  People are going hungry.

  It is only a cat.

  She wipes her face and hands with the end of her scarf and goes through to the bar. There are no customers. Gennaro has raised the blinds and set some tables and chairs out on the street, in the rain. Chiara looks out at the people there. She has never seen human beings being herded before.

  ‘Coffee?’ Gennaro says.

  Chiara wants to go now, but she is overcome by a wave of nausea and her legs tremble. She steadies herself against the bar, turning away from the sights beyond the window.

  ‘Please,’ she says.

  She stirs sugar in, three spoonfuls, and becomes aware that Gennaro is talking to her, telling her some tale. He is saying he didn’t notice anything strange when he first arrived at the bar at five o’clock this morning. He had cycled in as usual from his home on the other side of the river. All the way, nothing strange, except that the river was swollen with all the rain. On Garibaldi bridge the rain had intensified, and he had paused to pull up his hood and adjust the bike light. He had been cycling slowly because his brakes didn’t work very well.

  He had stopped to buy some coal, and the chap there, whom Gennaro had known for years, a real busybody of a man who had his finger in a lot of pies, a lot, had told him that he had heard this great noise during the night, coming from the ghetto. A cacophony, he called it. Round after round of gunfire and explosions. Shouting and bellowing, just like they had been doing on the street when Chiara arrived. It had gone quiet again at about four in the morning.

  Anyway, this bloke, Federico, had told him there wasn’t any coal, and he didn’t know when supplies would next come, so Gennaro had bought a bundle of firewood instead. It was a bit damp because of being tied on the back of his bicycle and that’s why it was so smoky in the back room when he had first lit the stove. It wasn’t even seasoned wood. But you had to take what you could get these days.

  ‘Where do you get your coal?’ Chiara finds herself asking, as if that is a more pressing subject than the night-time noises or what is happening outside in the street. ‘Do you go to that place off Viale Trastevere?’ She imagines for a moment that she is interested in the answer, that she will change her coal supplier.

  A young man enters the bar. A soldier accompanies him but stops at the threshold, neither in nor out. Gennaro greets the man by name. Alberto. He puts his fibre suitcase down beside his legs and orders an espresso. The case is tied shut with a blue dressing-gown cord. His black scarf is neatly crossed at the front and tucked into the upturned collar of his shabby coat. His hair is flattened from standing in the rain. His face is pale, broad, unshaven. His cheeks hang slack, his full-lipped mouth slightly open. There is no conversation while Gennaro prepares the man’s drink. The cup rattles against the saucer as he lifts it. He has to use both hands. His fingernails are dark with oil or dust.

  Chiara’s thoughts have become a case of ball-bearings, skittering and careering. She thinks about the treat she is going to take home to Cecilia and wonders whether perhaps Gennaro has something squirrelled away that she might do a deal on. Some biscuits perhaps. Or whether, if the buses are running, she could get up to Tor di Nona where the black marketeers trade and see if there is cheese to be had, or a tin of tuna or beans.

  She tries to stay with these thoughts. They are comfortable. But then the flames licking at the kitten’s lank fur are in her head and she questions whether it was actually dead. She is horribly present in this room, now, in this moment. It is as if the damp seepage that, despite the heat of the flames, persists in the hollow of her back, is not rainwater but something else, some residue from a deep pool of human pain. She has been dipped in it, and it coats her.

  The man swallows noisily, puts his cup down on the counter and runs his hand along the wooden surface. He leans forward and, in a quiet voice, he asks Gennaro a question. He says, ‘What are they going to do with us?’

  Gennaro shakes his head.

  The man looks around him, his gaze lingering on the tables and chairs. Chiara feels his eyes on her, but she doesn’t meet them. The soldier at the door calls him. He picks up his bag and leaves.

  Chiara follows him as far as the doorway and watches as he is escorted back into the line of people being herded along the street to the waiting lorries. The population of the ghetto–the old, the young, babies in arms, people on crutches, women and children–all shuffle towards the trucks in an almost-silent procession. Some of
the very smallest among them are crying and griping, the way babies do, but the adults and the bigger children, the ones capable of speech, do not speak. There are some young men like the one who came into the bar, but not many.

  ‘Where are the men?’ she asks.

  Gennaro comes to stand next to her. ‘It’s tobacco ration day,’ he says. ‘They’ll have gone to get their ciggies.’

  She glances sideways at him. ‘What?’

  His face is solemn. Streaks of soot remain in the creases of his jowls, accentuating their droop, as if he’s been made up to look doleful. Can lives hang on so little as a packet of cigarettes? Chiara wonders.

  ‘Yes,’ Gennaro says as if she’s spoken out loud. ‘That’s how it is.’

  Some of the people still have their nightwear on underneath their coats. Most are carrying bags or have bundles strapped to their backs. They are being nudged along with the points of guns. On the other side of the line, two officers lean against the wall, chatting and smoking.

  ‘What will they do with them?’

  ‘They’re probably taking them to a labour camp up north,’ Gennaro says.

  ‘Babies and old ladies in a labour camp?’ Chiara says.

  But now Gennaro is saying something about his mother having warned him not to open a bar in the ghetto, and how it used to be a pawnbroker’s, and who was going to come here now, and how it will be blighted, and then, mid-sentence, he stops speaking and stands there, shame-faced. Then he starts jabbering on again about nothing strange, he noticed nothing strange earlier, and again he stutters to a halt.

  ‘They’ll be back one day,’ he says eventually. ‘When this war is over.’

  They watch as the last person in the line passes. Nonna Torta brings up the rear, swaying and muttering. She is in her nightdress and slippers with her pinny on top. She has no bag.

  Across the way, the two Nazi officers are still talking, their backs resting against the stonework, each with the sole of his left foot, encased in its knee-high boot, flat to the wall in a disquieting but almost reassuring symmetry.

  Gennaro is crying.

  ‘Did you know you have a hungry cat and some kittens in your storeroom cupboard?’ Chiara says.

  ‘A cat?’ he says. ‘I’ll take her some milk.’ He goes back to the counter and bends down, rooting about. ‘Got some little biscuits she might like,’ he says and disappears into the back room.

  Chiara steps out into the street and joins a small group of bystanders. She places herself at the rear beside a woman with unkempt grey hair who holds both hands to her cheeks as if she is resisting covering her eyes. Chiara too knows that she has to watch this whole spectacle. She has to bear witness. Then when she has borne witness, she can perhaps walk away; she can go back to her life. She can gather up her sister, and some rations and clothes, and she can leave this city and take refuge in their grandmother’s house in the mountains and wait for the Allies to arrive.

  Her mind flies away to the sheep in the meadow behind her grandmother’s house. Always, all of her life, this field, the feel of it–the smell of the grass and the wild oregano that grows in the hedgerows; the clearness of the air, fresh and sparkling and brighter than the air in the valleys; the view of the other hills, the way they undulate away in all directions–all of this has been a comfort to her. The cleanness and the safety of hills: she longs for them.

  The inhabitants of the ghetto have been corralled into a hollow in the road in front of the Theatre of Marcellus where the ground has been excavated. Elsewhere, from the direction of the river, comes shouting and the crack of gunshot, but these people, who stand waiting among the ruined, broken pillars, are hushed.

  The tarpaulins on the sides of the lorries have been rolled up, and this now-homeless throng are made to climb aboard. The gap between the witnesses and the rounded-up Jews is widening. It’s as if she is watching them across a swelling river.

  A young family catches her eye. They are already on the back of one of the trucks and have managed to stay together. The father is intent, serious, handsome in his shirt and tie, suit and coat. He has a high forehead and his curly hair has been dampened down. He is the sort of man who might smoke a pipe, Chiara thinks, as her own father had done. And who might stick it in his mouth and suck on it while he was pondering a difficulty, then remove it to make a pronouncement. The sort of man who is not hasty in his judgments. Now he is trying to find a way of being the man of the family, of retaining some dignity. In his arms he holds a curly-haired girl, chubby-faced, with fat little wrists protruding from her big-buttoned coat, eyes sparkling as if this is an adventure. In between the husband and wife stands another, bigger child, a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old. He is clutching the sleeve of his mother’s coat.

  It is the woman who draws Chiara’s attention. She holds a toddler, whose mouth is turned down, as if in parody of the looks on the faces of the surrounding adults. The woman is better dressed than most and gives the impression of having chosen her outfit with care, not hurriedly throwing on whatever she could find in the frantic minutes before they were forced out of their homes. This woman wears pearl stud earrings and a dark-green hat on the back of her head. Her coat is also dark green, tightly belted. It is like a going-away outfit.

  Perhaps, when the terrible hullabaloo was taking place at four this morning, she didn’t retreat fearfully into the nethermost recesses of her apartment nor pull the blanket over her head, but dared to look out and saw the Nazi soldiers running amok. And when they interrupted their mayhem, instead of thinking it was over and going back to bed, she made her family get up and get dressed. She fed them bread and a hot drink. She packed their bags, one for each of them. This family, Chiara thinks, had been going to run, but they didn’t do it fast enough.

  The woman’s eyes flick from side to side, searching the crowd. If the gap between the onlookers and the Jews is now a torrent, this woman is still searching for a bridge, a raft, a piece of flotsam.

  Chiara is staring at the woman, and the woman’s restless gaze finds her. Without taking her gaze from Chiara’s, the woman bends down and unpicks her son’s fingers from her coat, pushes him away. Chiara glances at the child, back up to the woman who is still fixing her steadily, down to the boy who has grabbed a different handful of cloth. Chiara focuses on the mother’s fingers as she unfurls the claw of the child’s hand, prising him off again. Chiara’s eyes swivel between mother and son, but the woman never takes her eyes off Chiara. She grips the boy’s shoulder, says something and the boy stands clear of her, hands dangling by his sides. The boy, the only straight-haired member of the family, is neatly turned out, grey shorts, socks pulled up, one knee scabby.

  Then Chiara is shouting and pushing her way to the front of the small crowd, shrugging off a restraining hand that briefly rests on her arm.

  ‘My nephew,’ she shouts out. ‘That’s my nephew,’ pointing at the boy.

  ‘This child is yours?’ the soldier who is directing operations at this truck asks in heavily accented Italian.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘My sister’s.’

  The boy wobbles on the edge of the truck, his face stretched, intense but unfocused. He is like the child made to stand on a stool at the front of the class, singled out for humiliation.

  ‘Pass him down to me. Come to auntie, darling,’ Chiara cries out.

  Encouraged by the sound of her own voice–shrill, maternal, outraged–she keeps up the clamour, holding out her arms to receive him. Some of the people around join in. ‘Pass that boy down,’ and ‘This is his aunt,’ and even, from somewhere in the group, a man’s voice, ‘That boy is no Jew.’

  A soldier of superior rank appears and demands to see Chiara’s papers. She recognises him as one of the two that were leaning against the wall opposite Gennaro’s bar. While he unfolds her documents, the boy is handed down. He is stiff and heavy. She sets him down beside her, pulls him tight into her flank, gripping his hand. She can feel the tautness in him.

  She does
not look at the mother again. She must not see doubt. She looks instead at the officer’s face, lean and clean-shaven, up to his peaked cap, along to the tip of his revolver, down to the skull-and-crossbones collar patch. She notices the gold thread on his epaulette, and the stitching that has torn at some point and been resewn more clumsily in a different-coloured thread. The damp patch between her shoulders throbs, as if expecting a bullet. It will surely travel straight through to her heart.

  ‘My sister,’ she comments, staring at a trail of thread, ‘is a seamstress. You wouldn’t even see the stitches if she had done that mending.’

  She knows he doesn’t understand her. They are just words she sends out to try to pierce the bubble of silence that has descended on them like a solid-domed roof. A great emptiness fills her head as if she might be about to faint.

  ‘Spinster,’ the officer says, pointing to the word with his ungloved hand.

  ‘He is my sister’s boy,’ she replies.

  He looks at her and at the child. Is it enough that the words ‘of the Jewish race’ are absent from her documents? Chiara has never made the fascist salute. Even at school she managed to avoid it and has prided herself on this small act of tacit resistance. Now, though, she is wondering whether the moment has come, whether that would in some way settle the matter.

  The truck engines start up and a cry is wrenched from the boy at her side. ‘Mamma,’ he screams and Chiara snatches him up, presses him into her chest.

  He starts to kick her.

  ‘Mamma. Mamma,’ he screams again and again. It is all she can do to hold him.

  She hisses into his ear, ‘Shut up or the soldier will shoot,’ and he goes limp against her, a dead weight. ‘Can you give me my card, please?’ she says boldly. ‘I need to get him home.’

  The driver of the second vehicle shouts something. He is ready to leave. The SS officer glances over at the lorry. His eyes run over its occupants. And then he leans down and tousles the boy’s hair.

  ‘Be good for your auntie,’ he says and drops Chiara’s papers into the cloth bag hanging from her shoulder.