‘Remember, Cecilia must have a spoonful of her medicine every night,’ he said to Anna Lisa.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said and left the room.
‘Are you frightened,’ her father said to Chiara, ‘to be in the room when she has the fits?’
And Chiara said, no, she wasn’t.
He told her she was a good, brave girl. He said if it happened when he was away, she was to fetch Anna Lisa rather than Mamma, because Anna Lisa was more like a nurse. He hadn’t seen, as Chiara had, Anna Lisa crossing herself when she passed Cecilia and muttering an invocation under her breath to keep the devil away. That was when Chiara knew. No one else was going to protect Cecilia. It was down to her.
The sky is darkening when they alight at Orte where they must change trains. They wait on the platform, along with about a dozen other passengers, and it starts to rain again, the same murky drizzle of the day before, as if some pot of waste-water is being tipped out. They step back under the overhang, but the wind still gusts the rain at them. Cecilia is humming under her breath. The boy stands next to Chiara on the other side from Cecilia, with them but not. He is silent, as he has been the whole journey.
‘I’m going to tell Nonna,’ Cecilia says.
She has removed her gloves and is tracing circles on the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other. Her hair is pinned up under the felt hat. Her raincoat hangs over her arm. She is easily the best-looking, the most stylish woman around.
You wouldn’t know from looking at her.
‘What are you going to tell her?’ Chiara says gently, placing her hand over Cecilia’s.
Cecilia looks confused. ‘Nothing,’ she says.
A railway official appears, flanked by a soldier. In the half-light, Chiara cannot distinguish the soldier’s uniform to discern whether he is Italian or German. Either way he is their enemy.
She drops to one knee and adjusts the boy’s coat. ‘Remember,’ she says, ‘your name is Daniele Gaspari.’
He gives no indication that he has heard, as if the silence in which he has encased himself works both ways. Fear presses on her heart. She stands.
There’ll be no more trains tonight, the guard announces. The line has been commandeered because troop reinforcements are coming through.
The soldier walks past them up towards the end of the platform. It is the distinctive crunch of his heels, as if something is being ground to powder underfoot, that tells Chiara he is German.
They could have caught the regional train from Roma Tiburtina that follows a different route. She had been in two minds, but Tiburtina had been damaged in the San Lorenzo bombing back in July, and she had imagined the main line from Termini station would be more reliable. Termini, anyway, was easier to get to and meant they could avoid seeing again the rubble and ruin where their family home used to be.
Rubble, Chiara thinks, and the devastation of San Lorenzo fills her head. There is the mountain of debris, the dust rising up like smoke. The gaping hole where their old apartment building had been, the shock of its absence. The dreadful smell, people scrabbling through the rubble with handkerchiefs over their noses, and others just standing staring or with their heads bowed.
Chiara rubs her aching jaw. She reminds herself again that their mother refused to move with them when she and Cecilia took over their grandparents’ apartment in Via dei Cappellari. That no one foresaw the bombardment. She must not let her mind stray there now.
She looks up and down the platform. If they had left yesterday, straight after lunch as she had intended, they would be safely at Nonna’s by now. She should not have delayed. She had thought she might discover a safer place to take the child. If she hadn’t spent yesterday afternoon cycling around in the drizzle, asking the wrong people the wrong questions, they would already be there. Coming this way has stranded them here, on what turns out to be the German army supply route.
A few of the passengers leave by a turnstile gate at the far end of the platform and disappear into the dusk. On her own, or in daylight, she might have taken her chances out on the road. Watching them leave, she feels the spirit within her reach out longingly in their direction with a yearning for that level of freedom, to be on her own in the dark, to hide in a ditch or a roadside barn, to hitch a ride with someone or beg a bed for the night, to rely on her wits and with only herself the loser if she took a wrong turn.
She snaps it back. They must stay here for the night and make the best of it.
‘Come on. Let’s get in out of the rain,’ she says, as if this rather splendid idea had just then occurred to her.
Chiara, Cecilia and the boy follow the other remaining passengers across the track and into the waiting room, which smells of paraffin and warmed-up dust. People are claiming places on the benches and spreading themselves out, but Chiara leads her charges to the back of the room, to the space between the farthest bench and the wall, telling them quietly how she will make a nice bed for them on the floor, how this is a good place, out of the way, where they won’t be disturbed by people moving about.
She keeps up a murmured, running commentary because she can feel that Cecilia is skittish at her side. She ushers them into the narrow area, first Cecilia, who puts her case down in the corner, then the boy. She lifts the cloth bag from his shoulders and tugs out the blanket. It is a patchwork of knitted squares that Nonna made a long time ago.
Daniele stands staring out at the room, his gaze unfocused, his fists clenched at his sides. From outside there comes the rumble of another train slowing as it enters the station, and Chiara whips around to face the door. Perhaps the guard was wrong and there will be an onward connection. Or perhaps it is the troop train and they are going to disembark here. Hordes of them are going to march in, with their boots thumping and their round metal helmets glinting. She clutches the blanket to her chest.
Another batch of passengers, twenty or more, comes piling in, complaining and muttering. She lowers the blanket and shakes it out. Cecilia looks across at her, uncomprehending.
‘Unpack your blanket,’ Chiara says. ‘We are staying here. Just for tonight. No more trains today, dearest. But it will be fine. We’ll get an early one in the morning.’
The boy has shrunk back against the wall. Chiara reaches over him and pats her sister’s shoulder.
They watch the newcomers, who did not want to come to Orte either, who were on the way to Rome or further south. Their train has been rerouted, and they have been dumped. They fill up the spaces on the benches and the floor. Those who had already stretched themselves out are obliged to sit up. The waiting room becomes noisy and animated as people negotiate for space. A man among the new arrivals, the only adult-but-not-elderly male, wants an explanation, information. Brandishing his ticket, he blusters out of the waiting room to demand answers. In his absence, its inhabitants adjust, accept and start to settle.
Cecilia doesn’t want to sit. The floor is dirty, she says. It will stain her clothes. She wants to go home.
‘Well, we’re going to Nonna’s,’ Chiara points out, ‘so it’s like going home, isn’t it?’
She fishes out her handkerchief and crouches down to wipe a space clean. She is flicking the handkerchief about when the boy, all of a sudden, sits down on the floor next to her, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest and his hands clasped around his shins, hugging them in. She sees he is utterly exhausted. The invisible wall he has tried to construct around himself is caving in.
‘I’m going to make you a nice little bed here,’ she says softly as she unrolls the colourful blanket onto the space she has swept, ‘and tomorrow morning, early, we will catch the train that goes up into the hills, and after four stops we will get off.’
She glances up, aware of Cecilia looming. Her sister is glowering down, her face contorted, the way their mother used to hang over them when they were in bed, staring at them as if they were strangers, and they would pretend to be asleep until she went away.
‘That’s my blanket,�
�� she says.
‘Yours is in your case.’ Chiara strives to retain the same even voice she is using with the boy. ‘Remember, you packed it yourself. This is a spare one.’
She turns back to her bed-making and her tale.
‘There will be a man with a horse and cart at the station,’ she says, ‘and he will give us a ride along the ridge to the higher village, and from there we will walk or, if we are tired, we will send a message to Gabriele to come and fetch us.’
An image of the shepherd Gabriele comes to her, emerging from among the trees, his face, which might have been hewn from one of them, the colour of the fallen leaves.
‘Good old Gabriele,’ she says, twisting to smile up at her sister, but Cecilia seems now to be absorbed in examining a poster on the wall.
‘There,’ Chiara says, smoothing out the blanket and turning to the boy, whose head has lolled forward. She lowers her voice. ‘When we go down the track through the wood, we come to a bend from where you can see into the next valley, and halfway down that slope is Nonna’s farmhouse. You can’t actually see it from there.’ She shakes her head, even though he has obviously fallen asleep. ‘Because there is a steep drop on the far side of the olive grove, and that hides the house, but sometimes you do see the smoke from its chimney.’
The last time she visited was in early springtime. She thinks of the mint-green of the new growth on the trees in the foreground and the pewter-blue of the farthest line of hills where they melt into the softer blue of sky, and all the shades of blue and green between, as if they were a wide silk ribbon with which to bind them together, she and Cecilia and the little boy.
She rocks back on her heels. ‘Now, of course,’ she says, ‘it’s autumn, and so the colours will be different. The hillside opposite is covered in trees, thick with all sorts of them, and it will be a mass of red and gold and orange.’
She swirls her hands in front of her face to demonstrate the flaming palette of the forested slope opposite her nonna’s house. It might be too early in the year for the leaves to have changed colour. But, autumn or not, there will be the blue and the green, the bright green of grass and the silver green of the olive leaves, and that faraway blue might be more muted, but it will be there, framing and holding the rim.
The boy’s grip loosens, his legs tumble apart and his head sinks between them so that his knees, bony little buffers, cradle his head.
‘What I wanted to tell you,’ she says quietly, ‘is that the view from that bend in the track is the loveliest in the world.’
She has been hesitant about touching him, conscious of her earlier roughness and instinctively respecting somehow the pathetic cloak of silence in which he has swathed himself, honouring the illusion of his impenetrability. But now, rising onto her knees, she inserts her hands into his armpits and, with a quick movement, hoists him sideways onto the blanket. He stirs but doesn’t wake, and she remains crouched over him, inhaling the warmth of his breath. His eyes are not totally shut.
‘Daniele,’ she says to test the depth of his slumber, but sees he is utterly gone and cannot hear her.
She glances up. Cecilia seems to be spelling out the words on the poster. Her mouth is moving. Chiara cranes back to see better. It is an advertisement for the previous year’s Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. Cecilia had been taken to it by one of her clients, a woman whose husband had worked with Chiara at the ministry before their department was closed down. The wives of Chiara’s colleagues are the main users of Cecilia’s dressmaking skills.
This particular family had treated Cecilia as a sort of pet, taking her about with them in a condescending manner that set Chiara’s teeth on edge, but which Cecilia didn’t notice. Mussolini had actually been present at the exhibition the day they’d visited, and Cecilia had been personally introduced. For a while it was the Duce this and the Duce that, and when his hectoring voice came on the radio, she would simper as if he were speaking to her. And though that soon wore off, and Cecilia confessed to Chiara that he smelt of boiled beef and that spittle shot out from his mouth when he spoke, ever since, whenever she said, ‘Duce,’ she would briefly incline her head the way their mother used to do when mentioning Jesus.
Chiara turns back to the child, examining his sleeping face, his straight little nose with its faint scattering of freckles that continue onto his cheeks and then peter out, the eyelashes that are fairer at the tip than at the root, the downturned curve of his mouth and the pucker of his soft, pink upper lip. The way his thick hair–which when she first saw him on the lorry (was it only yesterday?) was parted on one side and decorously smoothed down–is now mussed and unruly. On the back of his right hand there is a brown stain. She touches it with her forefinger. It does not rub off. The skin there is not raised, only a different colour. A horseshoe-shaped birthmark. Gently, she lifts his hand and tucks it under the blanket.
So absorbed is Chiara in her contemplation of the child that she only half realises that something new is going on in the waiting room, that the door has opened and banged shut again, and the sleepy atmosphere has been banished. There is a bristling, a sighing and a muttering. As she becomes aware of the change and gets to her feet, a shiver goes down her spine, despite the fuggy warmth.
‘Papers,’ the guard says, ‘show them your papers and state the purpose of your travel.’
There are three soldiers with him now, two German and one Italian. One of them grips the arm of the self-appointed spokesman, who has lost his swagger. The soldiers fan out, and there is a rustling and a shuffling. Some people are shaken awake.
Chiara glances at her sister, still strangely absorbed in the poster, then down at the sleeping boy. She has literally backed them into a corner. The soldiers are speaking to each other over the heads of the obedient people proffering their papers.
Did they say Jew? All day she has been hearing that word, or imagining she hears it, first in Italian and now in German, swinging her head towards the sound each time, not sure where it’s coming from or what form the threat will take, but certain each time, for a foolish, lurching instant, that they have been found out.
With her toe she flips the blanket over the boy’s face. She places herself in front of him. Just a bundle on the floor. Perhaps they won’t notice him. She thinks she hears him cough. Suffocating him is not the answer. As she bends to uncover him, he coughs again and flings off the blanket. His eyes are wide open. He stares up at her and she has the sensation of falling. She grips the back of the bench and straightens as the boy scoops himself into a seated position.
The soldier on their side of the room is now working his way along the occupants of this last bench. It is routine, this checking of documents, but thorough. The soldiers have nothing better to do until the troop train arrives and they want to show who is boss. That is all. It cannot be a concerted search for stray Jewish children. But still.
‘Cecilia,’ she says in a loud, clear voice, ‘you have Daniele’s papers, don’t you?’
It is farcical but it is all she can muster to imply somehow that each thought the other had the boy’s papers and so they must have been left at home. How Chiara can carry it off without Cecilia’s complicity or understanding, she does not know. Cecilia, oblivious, is still facing the poster on the wall in the corner, muttering. Chiara reaches over the boy and yanks at her sister’s arm. Cecilia turns, her mouth working and indistinguishable sounds emerging.
‘What is it?’ Chiara says, but all of a sudden she knows what it is, and in her head there is a white storm.
The soldier is upon her, tapping her shoulder. She turns to face him and for a blinding moment she thinks it is the same soldier from the day before, but this one is younger, big-jawed, with blond stubble on his chin. Behind her, Cecilia’s mutter becomes a snarl. It is the very noise that made their mother believe her elder child was possessed by the devil all those years before, a low and bestial sound that cannot possibly emanate from this delicate creature and yet does.
Chiara clut
ches at the soldier’s arm.
‘Help,’ she says as Cecilia lets out a blood-curdling growl from behind.
The soldier pushes Chiara aside and raises his pistol, pointing it at Cecilia in the corner beyond.
‘No, no,’ Chiara shrieks, ‘it’s an epileptic fit,’ and then, wildly, wailing, ‘Help, help,’ she moves to dive under the soldier’s arm.
But someone is holding her back, and her arms are pinioned. The soldier barks an order, and Cecilia barks back, something guttural, vaguely Germanic. She advances towards the soldier, intoning her menacing, meaningless words.
‘Acker hoch,’ she says.
‘It’s a fit. A fit. An epileptic fit,’ Chiara is shrieking over and over again, pulling uselessly against her captor.
Cecilia’s hands flutter up, she clutches at her face, her eyes roll back in their sockets and she keels over backwards, falling onto the patchwork blanket.
There is a sudden hush in the room in which Chiara doesn’t know, cannot tell, whether, in among the clamour and her own shouting, a shot has rung out, whether the trigger was indeed pulled. Her sister’s prone body almost fills the length of the narrow space between the wall and the bench. Then Cecilia’s feet start to drum at high speed on the floor, her back arches, her head twitches, thumps once, twice, and she lies still.
The soldier lowers his gun and turns round, and Chiara, released, catches a look of bafflement and scorn on his big face as she moves past him. She kneels at her sister’s feet, tugs the navy skirt, which has ridden up, down over her knees. Cecilia’s mouth is ajar, her breathing shallow but unobstructed. Chiara clasps Cecilia’s slender ankles and continues to kneel there, as if praying. The German soldiers are having a discussion in the otherwise silent room, and another voice, speaking in German but with an Italian accent, joins in. If she hears the click of the pistol, she will fling her body over her sister’s. One bullet will do for both of them.
Early One Morning Page 7
