With Michal’s work complete, the little boy takes the stick that has been used to stir the mortar and draws pictures in the dirt, but the pastime is brief. The distracting smell of food draws him inside the house.
Stefano uses the opportunity to gain some time alone and slips through the woods to the river. Sitting at the edge of the embankment, he lights a cigarette—a habit he took from Fedor—and watches the sun sinking lower behind the trees downriver. When he is finished smoking, he unwinds his loosened bandage and strips off his clothes. He sinks into the water, feels the icy tentacles spread across him to remove the grime and dust, and imagines the girl on the wall, Rosalind, and Georg playing here in the river.
He swims a short way out, floats on his back, then heads again to the side. As he steps up the embankment, Rosalind greets him, holding a tray of small rolls and water.
She looks at his body briefly. She has seen the scarring and looks away modestly to put the tray on the ground. There is no point to covering the hand again with the bandage. He could be accused of vanity, but it is more the explanation that he cannot bear, the lies to cover what really happened. He pulls on his trousers.
“Thank you,” he says, sitting once again on the riverbank. She sits down and places the tray between them.
“The boy is sleeping on the couch after I filled his stomach. I thought I would let him rest and bring yours here.”
“These are good,” he says, his mouth full of bread with jam, though the rolls are flat and hard.
“I don’t normally bake, but then I don’t normally have visitors who work for me for nothing,” she says. “I discovered that Oma had kept one jar of elderberry jam hidden inside an old kerosene tin on the top of the shelf. I’m not even sure whether she remembered it was there. Maybe she did. Maybe she left it for me to find. I will never know now.”
She looks away briefly as he eases into his shirt.
“How is your leg?”
“It aches a little, but it is still holding me up.”
She turns back as he finishes buttoning his shirt. He is glad she doesn’t mention the scars on his body. Instead she talks briefly of the river, of the current, and of someone she knew who nearly drowned there. Of the year her Opa died and her Oma was left to live alone.
This release of her guard gives him pause to study her longer. She is thin, her clothes oversized, revealing nothing of the body within. She might be unnoticeable in the street, with her dull-blond hair and pale-blue, sometimes-colorless eyes. But she is prettiest in this moment, thinks Stefano, with her expression more open and less suspicious, and her eyes wider with curiosity. He stares back at her, and it is he who drops his eyes this time, her sudden interest in him making him more conspicuous than he wants to be.
When they have eaten all the crumbs from their plates, Stefano stands to stretch out his aching leg.
“I think you should stop work for today,” she says. “And I should check your leg before you go.”
She looks upon his face longer than she has before, studying him. He is suddenly a patient, someone who needs attention.
“Do you always wear your nurse’s cap?”
“Yes, it was hard to leave it behind.”
“You should be there still.”
“I can’t go back,” she says, looking in several directions before her eyes return to his leg. “Forget the wall for now. Come back to the house, and I will check your injury . . . see if there is something more I can do to stop the ache.”
He nods. There are perhaps two hours left of daylight, time enough to finish, but he is looking forward to rest. He follows her back to the house to find that Michal has just woken, dazed and recovering from his dreams.
“I can see you now,” says Stefano, about his washed face.
“It was a challenge to wash his hands and face, but the promise of jam finally made him compliant. But he refused to have a bath. Would not move when I suggested it,” she says. “I had to compromise. I am used to washing soldiers who were sometimes difficult. Now I realize they made it easy for me in comparison. The child is quite stubborn!”
She is unused to children, and the lack of affection in her tone reflects this.
“He does not like strangers touching him,” says Stefano. “I think he has been let down too many times.”
Rosalind is quiet then, watching the boy wistfully, perhaps seeing part of herself in him as well.
“Anyway, I am better with injured soldiers,” she says to recover.
Rosalind instructs Stefano to sit down and roll up his left trouser leg. She disappears to the other end of the house, near the room where he believes she sleeps, then returns with a bag that contains medicines and crouches down in front of him. There is no shyness or awkwardness now. She is not afraid of injury. To her, he is just another patient: someone else to heal. A duty. But he doesn’t mind the attention.
“Turn a little to your right and stretch out your leg,” she commands in a different voice, sterner, than she has used before. He imagines she was direct as a nurse, less frail than she appears.
He does so obediently, and she places her small cold hands around his skin, a slight pressure only, while her thumbs probe the hardened tissue to feel the damage underneath. He winces inwardly, the area still sensitive, and she releases the pressure as if she hears everything that is inside him as well.
The bullet entered through the back of his leg beneath the knee and lodged in the muscle.
“The bullet was removed quickly, yes?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says.
“It could have been worse,” she says, frowning in concentration. “They could have blown off your kneecap. You have a leg to walk on, not like others.”
He nods more somberly. “I suppose I should be grateful then.” He means it to some degree, but there have been times when he wasn’t grateful, for anything, not even his own life.
She concentrates on massaging and soothing the area. He is no longer a person. She is connected only with the affliction now.
“You have nurse’s hands.”
She shakes her head, perhaps shaking away the distraction.
“You don’t want to continue in that work in a new city perhaps? Away from Berlin?”
“I think perhaps I am destined for something else.”
“I think you underestimate yourself. I just don’t think people have thanked you enough. It perhaps won’t be as bad now, without an enemy to blow up your hospital walls.”
She pretends she isn’t listening, but the redness on her cheeks tells him otherwise. She takes a bandage out of her bag, applies it with gentle pressure, and pins it together.
“Do you need painkillers?”
“No,” he says, glancing at the collection of various medicines she keeps in her bag.
“That should help for today, but I think it would be wise to finish the work tomorrow,” she says. “I am certain now that there will be no rain today. The air is too cool, too dry. The geese are quiet.”
“They can tell you.”
“Not always, but they are mostly right.”
“Moni is in the river,” says Georg. He has walked into the room and stares at Rosalind. It is difficult to know if he has noticed Stefano at all. But he has noticed Michal, and he stares at the boy, who looks uncomfortable and gets up to stand near Stefano at the table.
Rosalind sighs and snaps the bag shut.
“Georg, go to your seat outside.” He stops for a second as if waiting for more, then walks out the front door.
“There is no need to send him away on my account.”
“It is not on your account,” she says curtly. “It is for him. He likes to stare into the woods at the sun at this time of day. He likes to watch it before it sets.”
Any softness that he had seen earlier seems to have vanished.
“Does he not know that Monique never returned?”
“My husband knows very little, but he remembers my cousin fondly. They had a good time together.
They were close, like brother and sister. It seems these are the only memories he has now. He talks of the river often. That’s where his memories seem to be.”
Stefano knows the emptiness of loss. First his father and then, like a torrent, came more.
1942
He had woken from a blast, his head numb, his ears ringing. Through the smoke and dust, people were scrambling to reach a ridge of sand for protection. He climbed over the bodies and found one of the men alive. He bandaged the soldier’s open spleen and listened to him cry for his mother, beg for a bullet, change his mind and ask to be saved. Stefano had no more morphine shots. He ran for the medic who was too busy pressing a towel against a neck wound and blocking against a fountain of blood. By the time he returned, after the enemy had paused the shelling, the soldier was dead. He made the sign of the cross, then stepped over other bodies, looked at faces, tried to recognize and remember their names to report back at base. After this, he returned to a savaged and shrunken base camp. The regiment was pulling out. The campaign was over.
It was disgustingly hot, the sun large. Flies buzzed around bloodied bodies carried from the battleground. The stench of scorched metal and flesh pervaded the air and made it difficult to breathe. Tan-colored dust clung to his skin and bedded down in the wrinkled furrows of worn-out men. Stefano had been injured slightly, a gash to his upper body and leg, his shirt torn open, the edges reddened from his blood, which looked worse than the wound the uniform still managed to conceal.
He had written only yesterday to Teresa, telling her that bullets seemed to steer away from him. He should never have put it in words, he thought. He had asked for it. He said not to tell his mother or Nina. They would not cope with this kind of news. It was better they only received letters about the men, and their personal stories and descriptions about the colorful bazaars, with ceramic bowls painted in rich blues and reds and yellows, that he visited on arrival at Tunisia, and the scent of jasmine that carried through the streets. Teresa coped with news. She and her brother weren’t close, not in the sense that they shared their emotions, but she understood the nature of things better than most. She could accept his injury and the war as if they were expected and did not think too hard about the future. If her brother lived, she was grateful. If her brother died, it was not unexpected. She loved him, cared for him, from when he was small, but she had a core that was harder than steel. And in some way he loved her for it.
At camp, he expected Beppe to greet him like he always did, but no one had seen him. The cousins had been separated early by a mortar shell that had split the group into two, and on either side of a wall of fire and smoke, men ran for cover in opposite directions. The fierce battle began. Then after hours of warfare, the expressions of the soldiers, vacant and bloodless, told the story.
“Where is he?” he asked his friend.
The man shook his head. Stefano turned to go, back to the scene of battle, but someone grabbed his arm.
“There is nothing there. There is nothing left of him. You won’t find any trace.”
Stefano didn’t know whether he had heard correctly. He studied the dusty field strewn with burned things, a graveyard of tanks and bodies, some that did not resemble soldiers. Where he had just come from, the reality that he had survived, was sinking in. He stood in the middle, mind numb, a lone silhouette. It was not until later that the gravity of the moment had sunk in, of what they had all endured, and he had grieved properly. But all he could feel was rage toward his own country, toward the leaders who led innocent soldiers to their deaths.
While he’d been gone, Stefano had learned in a letter from Teresa that Nina had eloped with Toni. When Stefano read the letter aloud, somewhat offended that his sister had not warned him of her plans, Beppe had laughed. But now Stefano would give anything to hear Beppe’s laugh again. His cousin had the ability to put everything into perspective. “It is the best news you will get this year!” Beppe had said. “Worry about the big issues, and let someone else waste their time on the small ones.”
The battles in the northern deserts of Africa had been hopeless from the start. Beppe had said that all along.
The remaining men made their way back to Tunisia with heavy losses. He did not speak to anyone on the way to the town where the soldier groups were assembled. After several days in a field hospital and several more months in the northern deserts, he was sent home.
He was not eager to go straight home, his heart still heavy with loss. Instead he disembarked at Florence to walk the cobbled streets where he had spent many nights with his cousin, sneaking out after dark and exploring the city—a journey into manhood, as Beppe had described it, and Julietta had been none the wiser. Stefano stopped at a bar, ordered pasta and several wines, and then wandered near the Ponte Vecchio to watch the river shimmer and to reminisce about the time that Beppe had jumped in on a dare.
His cousin had taken Stefano under his wing. Overly protective, he had even taken a punch for him outside a bar. He had been there always to watch out for him. He had assumed the role of father, carer, though Teresa had told Stefano plenty of times that Beppe was irresponsible. He was, but he also wasn’t. He took the role of looking after his young cousin seriously. He was sensitive and emotional, and had cried harder than anyone when his uncle, Stefano’s father, had died.
The next day, after sleeping beside the river, Stefano hitched a ride to Verona. Stefano, battle scarred and tired, found nobody at home. His mother and Teresa had gone to pray at church like they had been doing every day since they learned of Beppe’s fate.
Even though his mother was overjoyed to find Stefano there when she returned, and over coming days spoiled him, there seemed no relief that he was home. It was tense. The air clouded with unsaid words about the death of his cousin. It was miserable, even more so than in the days after his father died, because of the circumstances, because there was no body to grieve over. Serafina had now convinced herself that her son was still alive, that until they returned the body, she would continue to believe that. His mother had been with Serafina when she learned of her son’s death. Julietta told Stefano that Serafina took the loss so badly that she threatened to throw herself off the balcony of their two-story villa.
Teresa had banned Toni from their house because he and Nina had gone against Julietta’s wishes and married outside the church, and Nina had not visited recently. This news only added to the oppressive atmosphere that Stefano had come home to. Teresa, feisty and determined to remain single, was unlikely to find a husband. Julietta complained about that in spite of everything.
“What does it matter?” said Stefano.
“It matters. I want grandchildren. I want normality!”
“Mamma, while there is a war, there is no normality.”
But it wasn’t his impending childless years that caused her sudden outburst.
“I do not want to lose you like Serafina has lost her only child.”
The conversation was too deep, too soon. And the reality of his future was all the more depressing because she was closer to the truth of it. He couldn’t deal with the tears, though he held his mother. He felt like a statue in Piazza della Signoria, with no more life to give.
He decided to seek out Nina at Toni’s apartment, once shared with Beppe. Stefano smiled widely when she opened the door. Nina’s belly was round; the pregnancy had only recently begun to show.
She rushed into his arms.
“I guess I don’t need to ask what you’ve been up to,” he said fondly.
Nina cried with joy, and Stefano held her for many minutes before they broke apart.
“Why haven’t you told Mamma?” asked Stefano. “She is desperate for good news.”
“I don’t think she will think that way. And you know Teresa . . . She will have another reason to curse at me.”
“I think it will heal the broken relationship you have.”
She sat him down, and they reminisced about Beppe, and others from the neighborhood who had also
lost their lives. Several of their friends had not yet returned from various campaigns, and some were about to embark. Toni was still away in battle, and Nina worried constantly.
“He did not want to go,” she had said about her husband, Toni. “He hated working under Mussolini. He was secretly part of an opposition group, but with a baby coming, he has had to conform. Things will change when he returns. They have to.”
Stefano liked the sound of Toni. The strength of his anger matched his own. That night he stayed with Nina for dinner, and she had invited Fedor and other like-minded friends, Alberto and Conti. Alberto had been excused from war for failing a medical test. He talked of leaving Italy, bitter about losing a brother in battle. Conti owned several businesses. He was a Jew and said that his relatives had moved from Milan to a small western village after the enactment of the laws that segregated Jews from the rest of society and prevented them from continuing in their professions. Fearful of the anti-Semitism rising, especially after Italy became aligned with Nazi Germany, Conti had removed his name from the Jewish union registry, moved to Verona, and kept his background secret so that he could start his businesses.
The men had drunk until the early hours and spoke of the failed campaign, of desertion, and Stefano told how some Italian soldiers and senior officers had left their postings in Africa to switch sides and join the Allies.
“Then we must do something also to change the course of this war,” said Fedor, who had assumed the role of leader without objection. “We can’t just sit on our hands.”
And at some point in the night, when they were high on thoughts and discussion, they had made a pact to save Italy and stop the war. Though much later Stefano realized that it was youth and inexperience that gave them the false belief they could.
Present-day 1945
The boy sits across from Rosalind in the kitchen. He is absorbed in his collected items on the table in front of him and spends much time picking them up, examining them, and placing them back again in the basket on the ground beside his feet.
The Road Beyond Ruin Page 15
