“Yes, you must!” said Beppe’s father.
Julietta looked at her son, Stefano, and he could read the fear. She would rather go herself than send her only son. But Stefano was tired of being the baby. He was tired of his mother always wanting to protect him, wanting to know where he went. Always fussing about the way he was dressed, putting him in trousers and starched white shirts for church. He wanted to be a man like Beppe was allowed to be, who seemed to have the freedom to do as he wished.
“Then I will fight, too,” said Stefano.
Beppe laughed, but his laugh was not spiteful. He patted him on the head. “You are too young. One day when you are big, but now you must stay here and look after your mamma.”
And Stefano resented this, that he was the only male in the family, old enough to be the one who must stay for his family, but still too young to go to war.
Julietta closed her eyes and said a prayer. She didn’t believe in war either. Stefano saw it all the way back then: that the two sisters were so very different. And later when loyalties were tested, he would remember the heat on his back from the glass behind him; he would remember the moment. If they had stayed there, if they had never moved north, his losses may not have been so great.
Present-day 1945
The back door is partway open, and Stefano pushes it back farther on its bygone hinges that faintly squeal. Old leaves that had remained peacefully undisturbed on the threshold scatter at the intrusion.
The air inside is pungently stale as he enters a narrow hall between a small storage area and a bathroom, before the front room opens up to reveal a living area, the kitchen, and what appears to be a bedroom at the far end of the house. The rooms are unable to catch the remaining light from the horizon, and Stefano switches on his small torch to survey in detail.
The front room is sparsely furnished, and there is more wreckage on the wooden floor, as if it has been dragged from the pile of burned rubbish outside. Shattered crockery along the perimeter of one wall suggests that items have been thrown against it. A painting that has been shredded still hangs on the wall. Stefano takes a moment to examine it, but the subject of the picture cannot be determined.
Several cupboard doors sit ajar, the contents taken. Empty sacks lie on the floor. He shines his light across the kitchen and examines what is left. In a teapot lie the remains of tea and a coating of green-and-white bulbous mold.
A large fabric sofa beneath the only front ground-floor window is threadbare, its pastel floral design vanishing under decades of light. A square table divides the kitchen stove and sink from the living area, but there are three chairs at the table, one of which is broken. On the table are two empty plates with cutlery. Traces of food remain on the plates, now dried and unrecognizable. The house is empty of recent memories.
A faint shuffling from near the back door forces Stefano to turn the torch sharply. He spies nothing at first, but as he moves toward the sound, the boy appears, eyes squinting from the light now in his face. Stefano puts his finger to his lips to signal him to be quiet, though inside he is exasperated that the child did not wait as told. He directs him toward a small alcove under the stairs, and the boy follows this instruction. The child is used to hiding in houses, but he is too afraid to stay near the darkening river alone.
Stefano walks up the narrow stairs to the top level and checks behind him to make sure there is no sign of the boy. On the top floor are several rooms. The door casing of one small room is splintered, the door hanging to the side, as if flung so hard it has been torn from its hinges.
He opens the second door of a room that overlooks the side between the two properties. Lace curtains hang without damage, and a small table is marred only by a layer of dust. A plush rug on polished wood appears to have also survived unscathed, but a mirror on the wall is cracked and unusable. The bed looks inviting, but he has already decided that he can’t sleep here. It looks too personal. Though seemingly uninhabited, the room appears to be waiting patiently for its former inhabitant.
With the glow of the sun almost completely gone, Stefano steps cautiously up to the window to view the other house opposite and the river just visible through the small woods to his left. The neighboring property looks well tended: the back lawn has a boxed area for growing vegetables, and the small patch of tiles leading from the back door is swept of leaves. A large barn sits on the far front side of the other house, and beyond that, thick woodlands run parallel with the river. Directly in front of both houses is the shallow wood that separates the houses from the water.
Just inside the entrance to the third room on this floor are drippings of dark stain across the floorboards. He bends down to rub at the stain, and the smell of rust lingers on his fingertips. It is blood, of course. He knows it well. He walks first to the window—partly covered by one curtain, striped in yellow, gray, and white—that overlooks the woods and the river beyond. He should stay here, he thinks, where he can best view anyone who enters the bend in the track that leads to the houses.
There is a metal bed with springs, its mattress leaning against the wall, the insides torn and gushing out of its belly like entrails. He moves his torch across the mattress to see the remains of a red-brown stain in the center where most of the violence against it has taken place. Something crunches underfoot, and his light then reflects pieces of glass, blues and greens, an ornament perhaps, scattered, then kicked untidily to a corner of the room.
Stefano lifts the mattress up onto the springs, damaged side facing down, disturbing its musty fumes of time. The mattress itself, with its evidence of rage, should be something that warns him away, but the thought of something soft beneath him is an unexpected blessing. It is bed he craves now, and he imagines a full night’s sleep before commencing the next stage of his quest.
It is mostly silent outside, though every so often there is the groaning of supply trucks, the change of gears, and the squeal of brakes in the distance.
He collects the boy from downstairs and leads him to the mattress. It is barely nightfall, but they are both weary, and Stefano plans to be up before sunrise. The boy doesn’t wait for instruction but climbs on top of the bed, its springs squeaking, and rolls on his side to face the wall. Stefano looks at the space that is left for him, at their close proximity. He shared unbearably cramped sleeping spaces with others in times of little choice, but this is different. He needs his space around him. He needs the space to think. He will have to give the bed to the boy.
Stefano visits the second room again at the front end of the hallway to take the rug that is there, and he drags it to the center of the room where they will rest for the night. He lies down, thinks about putting his satchel under his head, but pushes it to the side instead.
“Michal,” says a small voice from the gray.
“Is that your name?” he says, startled by the sound of the boy who has spoken for the first time. His voice is tiny like him.
“Ja,” he says in German.
“Do you only talk in the evenings?”
“It is safer in the dark,” he whispers.
“Is that what your mother told you?”
He is silent.
“And your father? Did you leave him behind?”
He doesn’t respond. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Stefano is not sure if the boy is German, since he detects something different about the accent. Perhaps he was in a camp; perhaps he only learned some German there. In any case it gives him pause to think about the mother, to wonder if she was foreign to this country, and to speculate about the reasons why they may have been traveling to Berlin.
But Stefano is silent now for other reasons. And it is soothing, the gentle, heavy breathing of a sleeping child that has begun so suddenly. Stefano is glad that someone at least is at peace for now.
Stefano reaches one arm to the floor beside him and fishes inside the lining of his satchel to retrieve a photo. Turning on his back, he places it inside his shirt to rest above his heart. Arms then behind his head, Stef
ano listens to the rain as it taps the river and pats down the earth around the house, the noise swaddling the house like a warm blanket. It might be pleasant if he were somewhere else, but there is too much to think about, too much inside his head, to enjoy the sound. He shifts several times to find a comfortable sleeping position. He keeps the torch in his hand; it is habit to check the time throughout the night.
Stefano closes his eyes, imagines the cold water of the Mediterranean, and pleads to the air for good dreams to come.
CHAPTER 5
ROSALIND
Tiny droplets of water splatter the window, and Rosalind is transfixed by the glass, lost in the rattling sounds as rain pelts the metal pails outside. The barn doors near the wood bang suddenly in a torrent of wind, the noise pulling her from her reverie.
With electricity to the area yet to be restored, Rosalind ignites one of the lanterns hanging by the front door, and then strikes a match to light the candle on the kitchen table. Candles feature vividly in the earliest memories of her grandmother’s place, when she was small, before there were several electric lights installed around the walls. The flames, the smell of wax burning, and the shadows were comforting back then, but now she feels suffocated, the rooms shrinking under the candle’s dull-yellow glow.
After the Russian soldiers left, it took several hours for Rosalind’s unsteady legs to find solid ground again. She has heard from some that visits by the military can be volatile. Many people were killed or imprisoned in the months after the war. But more recently, there has been less arbitrary policing and more international monitoring. The world is watching as they dissect Germany and share it among the Allies. But it is still too soon to tell whether it will remain this way: silent, motionless. There is still so much hatred for Germany, its sins too vivid and raw to allow the country yet to move on.
Rosalind turns her attention to the photographs on the living room wall: family photos, several portraits, her grandmother, her parents, a large portrait of Monique, and one in particular she wants to hide away. There are three people in the photograph: Georg, Rosalind, and Monique. Georg’s wide-smiling mouth and chin are his only features visible beneath a large floral hat—borrowed from Rosalind’s grandmother for the purpose of amusement—that shades his face. She wishes it contained only the two of them. She has thought often of cutting Monique out of the photo, but there would of course be consequences.
Georg can do up his shirt buttons, arrange things obsessively; he can remember timetables of trains that no longer exist, and how to set a table. He can’t remember that she is his wife, but he will notice that a photo of Monique is missing. It is not worth the risk. His mind is mysterious to her. With a missing photo, he might speculate, he might rage, or, worse, it might help him remember things she wants buried.
One time Rosalind put the portrait of Monique out of sight, but Georg had seen straightaway, as if the portrait were something he depended on seeing each time he woke. He had punched the wall, the spot where the portrait had hung, and damaged his hand. Rosalind hung it back up again, covering the hole.
The barn doors bang again, this time more aggressively. She crosses the room to peer through the front window toward the blackness of the trees and the barn nearby. Its large doors are open and flapping in the river wind. Her conviction that she latched them is quickly followed by doubt. She has been preoccupied lately.
Rosalind opens the front door, and a cool, damp wind pushes past her, pressing the skirt of her dress flat against her legs. On the earth outside, the rain maps out tiny rivers of water that trickle menacingly toward the lower side of her house.
The two properties are secluded here and spaced a short distance apart. Across the track the shallow woodland separates Rosalind from the river. From the doorway of her cottage, during daylight hours, Rosalind can view the water between the trunks and branches. A light mist hovers across the river and lurks in the shadows of the trees that hang above its edges. To the right the wood becomes thicker for several miles along the edge of the river. It was a place she and Monique and Georg would explore as children.
She shivers, not from the cold. She has seen many boats travel the waterways, but she has seen other objects floating in the river also: pieces of houses, broken things, broken bodies. She feels a sense of dread whenever she spies the riverbank at the bend of the river where items are snagged and whenever she sees something in the water that she can’t identify. In the months after the war, it was not unusual to see bodies floating down the river, and pieces of their lives—tins, suitcases, sodden paper, the remains of books—following after them. Private, treasured things that belonged to the dead were discarded in the river in the cleanup after the war. Those things, now useless, travel far away with the current.
1934
The barefoot youths walked to the sharp bend, then veered off the track to enter a clearing of yellow grasses stretching all the way to the embankment. On either side of the clearing, two stretches of wood ran several miles parallel with the river. The trio, the owls of Elbe as they called themselves, had come from the direction of the two houses nestled among the trees where the track went no farther. An endless ceiling of blue above the clearing, and the reach of water behind them, would have made the trio appear insignificant—specks of color on the landscape—if it weren’t for the bustle and zest they brought with them.
Georg broke from the group, running on long, bony legs and shouting over his shoulder that he would reach the river first. Each summer, he appeared to grow infinitely upward, tall and nimble and seemingly built for soaring through the clouds. He shouted to the others as he ran, marking the start of a race that the girls, who accompanied him, had been unaware of until then. Georg was someone who filled large empty spaces with his confidence. Most who met Georg thought that he was likely to exceed life’s high expectations, but he was unaffected by this, and found the lives of others equally important as his own. He was everything that his peers loved and despised at the same time. He could command the room and divert attention from others, yet make those around him feel greater than what their own abilities would ever allow.
He ran the length of the grass in several easy strides, bare feet crushing the grasses that had barely had enough time to replenish after the last time the group had been there. The embankment eased down to the water, and Georg perched on the edge then to slide down the low wall of brown-gray mud. He wore blue shorts that became stained and slimy by the time he entered the water.
Monique ran toward him, wavy brown hair escaping a bright-orange ribbon, tearing at her clothes that were now a hindrance, and discarding them to the breeze. Her figure was shapely, feminine, though her legs were tanned and muscled like Georg’s, and her laughter that reverberated between the walls of wood had the rich, throaty timbre of a man’s.
Georg was home from a boarding school outside Berlin and he had been craving this time with the girls who spent the summers with their grandmother. The previous year he had forged a close relationship with Monique, based on their shared quest for adventure; their dares were becoming longer, more dangerous, and more exciting. He had dared Monique to climb the tallest tree, jump from the barn roof, dive deeper into the river to catch a sinking pebble, and she would always meet the challenge. It was the thrill of living to every inch of their young lives that drove them closer. At the river there were no homework due dates, no crowded trams to catch to school, no separate sets of rules for boys and girls. There were no barriers to hold them back from living wild and free. Days and nights ran blissfully into one another.
Rosalind watched the others run to the river. She assessed the strength of the current on the water’s surface, decided that it was safe enough, and followed, just not as quickly.
The previous year, Monique had nearly drowned because she was not thoughtful like Rosalind. She did not measure things as well or try to understand the importance of inspection. Monique just did. Rosalind had saved her from being swept away downstream, Monique screeching and
resisting any attempts at help as she was dragged from the river, sodden and miserable. Her dismay was more from the fact she had to spend the rest of the day inside with her grandmother. That she could not return to the water until the following day.
Rosalind grabbed the edges of her skirt and bunched it tightly in front of her as she stepped carefully down the slippery incline to feel the water temperature with her toes. By the time she had taken her foot out again, Monique and Georg had already swum to the middle. She hated that they didn’t wait for her.
“Watch the current!” Rosalind called out to them. Though there was little chance Monique would nearly drown again. In the year since her watery near demise, she had grown robust and capable, and as confident in water as a fish. She was everything that Rosalind wasn’t.
But they ignored Rosalind’s words of warning. They were too busy laughing, too busy with each other. They had stopped swimming now to tread water, and Monique was busy trying to push Georg’s head below the surface. Rosalind watched the scene develop into a frenzy of splashing.
She stepped back onto the grass, unzipped her skirt, and folded it neatly in place near the embankment. Underneath her clothes Rosalind wore a new swimming costume that she had received for her birthday. At fifteen her body was still sticklike, and Rosalind wished for a more womanly shape to emerge. She watched the others ignore her while she unbuttoned her blouse to rest it with the skirt, then stepped carefully down the mud again to enter the cool water five inches at a time.
She swam evenly toward them. Georg grabbed her as she arrived, and he attempted to push her deeper into the water.
“Don’t!” said Rosalind, though she loved it all the same. Loved the way that Georg was so strong and so dependable. And Rosalind loved and hated that everyone loved him. She wanted to possess him even back then. She wanted him all to herself.
The Road Beyond Ruin Page 4
