The Road Beyond Ruin

by Gemma Liviero

  “Send a message immediately to my wife. Tell her that I have moved and that I will send further word later. Then send a car to pick me up to take me north.”

  “And who is the replacement?”

  “It is you for the time being. Do not advise Berlin.”

  He did not tell his lieutenant that he was not coming back. The mood in the camp had been more somber, the sound of bombing and air raids constantly sounding in the dead of night, and the reported losses of men growing daily. The lieutenant looked uncomfortable with this order and hovered unsurely.

  “I will send word. Out now! Follow your orders.”

  “Yes, Herr Commander.”

  Erich pulled out papers from the desk, threw them in the fireplace, and watched them light. Evidence now was the newest enemy. Nothing to say what he’d done, what his wife had done. He then walked to his car, choosing not to call for his driver.

  Reaching Verona late into the night, he drove along the streets, scouring the addresses of those messengers who had been to see him, who had been paid for work by the Germans as informers. They had not only been reliable but had offered other services, too. He stopped at a house, knocked, and waited outside. Two men appeared, and he told them what he wanted and negotiated a price. He didn’t haggle. There was no time. In less than a month, they would be his enemy. The men left on foot, and Erich killed some time by driving around the streets. By then Monique would have received the message. She would feel safe, relieved. He eventually stopped the car.

  He walked up the stairs casually and unlocked the door to his apartment. Monique was there, face flushed. She wore a dusky pink satin dress, as if she were about to go to dinner, and forced apart the lines between her eyes to smile. She was not pleased to see him. He knew that immediately.

  “Erich!”

  “You are surprised.”

  “Of course! I just received a strange message that you had gone.”

  “I had to come here first before I left Verona. I had to see Genevieve.” But it was not the only reason.

  The curtains were closed at the back of the room. He walked through and opened them. The room had not changed, though there were medicines on the sides and washed bandages. There was also a smell of disinfectant and blood, but there was also something else: a faint leathered, earthy odor of men returned from battle. He had lived with that smell for years.

  “Have you been hurt? Was Genevieve?”

  She had followed him into the room. “Oh no, Frau Russo called by, and as she left she tripped and cut her foot on the edge of the radiator. I treated her, and she rested for a while.”

  “It is a lot of medicine.”

  She looked at him, put her hand to her throat, and shrugged. He left the room and surveyed the kitchen and dining area, the plates and cups. There was nothing remarkable to note, except for her dress and the fact she was wearing perfume.

  “Is anything the matter?” she asked, the frown reappearing.

  He took a deep breath. “Of course not. I just haven’t been here in a while.” He did not say that he had no plans to see it again. “Where is Genevieve?”

  “In her room. I will get her.”

  “No, I will go to her.”

  He walked in and saw that she was sitting in the corner of her cot. She crawled across toward him, her tiny face exploding into a grin as she pulled herself up to stand. He felt the back of his throat thicken, and his heart beat unsteadily at the sight of her. He must not weaken, he told himself in order to do what he was about to.

  “She has been walking,” Monique called out. “I have to watch her all the time now when she is out of her cot. It is a shame you weren’t here to see her first steps.”

  He bent down and kissed her downy hair, while breathing in the sweetness of her. It wasn’t just Genevieve he was absorbing but the memories of his siblings. It was one reason to be away from her. He marched from the room.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She fidgeted with her fingers and watched him uneasily, unable to meet his eye when he turned to stare.

  “Is there something wrong?” she asked.

  “Monique, it is becoming dangerous. I’m not sure if . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, to say that Germany was losing. “I will send word when I reach Germany, if I think you should leave here. It might be wise to take Genevieve to your grandmother’s soon. It might be safer there.”

  He looked behind him as if there were something he hadn’t done, something that was still not right about the place. Had he missed anything? His senses said that he had. He looked at her, at her shoulders, at her crimson-colored lips. His beautiful wife, as she was referred to. But he could never see what others could. Her mouth was open slightly. She was breathing rapidly, perhaps a mixture of fear, of the unpredictability, and all he could do was feel relief that he was on the threshold of leaving.

  “Goodbye, Monique,” he said, but he was thinking of the name Noelle that she had called herself. It suited her. He could have called her by that name to let her know she was exposed, but it would be a clear warning. She was intuitive and quick thinking and likely to find a way to protect herself from what he had planned.

  At the bottom of the stairs he stopped to look up and down the empty street. Two men, the ones he had met with on his way here an hour earlier, waited just inside the entrance to the building.

  He did not make eye contact with the men. He put on gloves to walk outside in the cold.

  “Kill her,” he said, “but leave the child.” He did not know what would happen to Genevieve. It was a small regret that he wouldn’t see her again, that he was leaving her care to chance.

  He had hired local men rather than ask members of the SS to arrest and then kill her. It was better not to have an official order or interrogation record that would link him to the embarrassment that was his wife. Better to eradicate the problem swiftly to make it look like a senseless murder of a lonely woman, who perhaps brought men into her apartment. The dress she was wearing would suggest it. Perhaps a jealous lover, some might say.

  He did not think about how they would do it. He had hated the sight of blood since he was a child, but he had hidden this fact from the soldiers and SS that he worked alongside. It would be seen as a weakness. Perhaps it was a variation of the same weakness he had inherited from his father. Horst had not thought his son to be a soldier, as someone fit for battle. He hated his father for this, and for leaving him, for failing to fight also. And yet he loved him, too, for being right, for knowing his eldest son better than anyone.

  He would eventually go to his mother and siblings. He was looking forward to speaking with his mother, who balanced the world around him. Who kept the floor beneath him solid.

  Erich drove all night and most of the following day past broken train tracks, and houses and empty fields braced for devastation, guided by road maps and flashes of light in distant skies. He arrived the next day at a military base in Germany and requested a transfer to one of the units. The captains didn’t ask for his reasons, too haggard and uncaring to query his motives and desperate for reinforcement; any recruitment protocol had been forfeited by their heavy losses.

  Erich slept briefly the second night on a cot alongside other men who had lost the desire to speak, who no longer noticed his badges of superiority, and he was woken early to climb on the next truck that would ferry him to the front. He was given a military pack recovered from someone dead, since no new ones had been issued recently, then was squashed between used and weary soldiers. As he neared the battalion’s base camp, the sky above him grew dark with battle dust, and streaks of fire lit up the horizon.

  He was led to an area where officers rested between battles. He was so close he could feel the vibrations of heavy vehicles and ground fire, in smoke that smelled like melting iron and burning fat.

  He asked after Georg and found him in a tent alone, frazzled, thin, and sunburned. He did not have the ski
n for the sun, but under the redness, the cuts, and the dirt, he was still dazzling. He had always been so unlike anyone else, so capable, and someone who looked to no one else for support. It was perhaps these qualities that Erich drew strength from, which he was attracted to. But there was a hardness about him then that Erich had not seen before. He was distant and seemingly indifferent to Erich’s sudden appearance.

  Beside him on the floor were Georg’s medals for bravery, for valor. Erich felt a small resentment then; these were medals he did not have.

  “Congratulations on your latest medal! I hear you have done extraordinary things . . . saved many of your men on the field.”

  Georg said nothing. He was lying back on the bed with a cigarette in his mouth. There was a new confidence about him, or an old confidence like in the early days before that one time, in the river hut, when things changed for them forever. That one time Erich had tried to forget but couldn’t.

  “I wanted to see you, make sure you are all right.”

  “As you can see, I am,” he said, and drew back on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling, finding an anchor there that might hold him away from Erich’s gaze.

  “Georg—”

  “I have a war to fight. I have a wife to get back to, a baby on the way. And you have a family, too. There is nothing to discuss.”

  Erich was surprised at the coldness, though it was little wonder. After that last summer together, Erich had left without a word. He wanted to forget. He could not have that hanging over his head, not with the future he had laid out for himself. Georg wore the signs of battle weariness but not only in the eyes. He was wired but wary, perhaps even a little paranoid. It would be pointless talking to him, and then Erich also had to wonder. Would he say something? Was he dangerous? With a few words he could undo everything that Erich had ever accomplished.

  Georg was drugged up, fueled for battle, with something that had been used widely, stopped, and was now passed around the soldiers as their last line of defense. Generals turned a blind eye, especially when soldiers showed little fear of dying.

  Georg sat upright and jumped up off the camp bed. “I have to go. You should probably go interrogate someone else. Maybe a little Jewish girl, or an old man who is handing out a funny cartoon.”

  He walked away, carrying his helmet under his arm.

  The insult was felt. Georg was the better man, he was saying.

  Anger exploded inside of him, and Erich took off the rifle that was flung over his shoulder. He lifted it and aimed it at Georg’s head as Georg walked toward the group of soldiers ahead, marching to the front line.

  Shots rang out from elsewhere, close, and the soldiers ducked and slammed their helmets on. No one could see Erich in the tent with his gun aimed at Georg. No one would hear the shot; it would be lost among the other sounds. He kept his finger there, on the trigger, his hand trembling. He could end it right now. One bullet and Erich would kill the one piece of the past that he’d found no rational place for in his head. The gun followed Georg’s unusually disordered movements as he rushed forward, broke in a different direction, then stopped. Erich had not killed anyone in cold blood before. He had ordered executions but never actually pulled a trigger on a man, woman, or child.

  Georg turned to look back at the tent as if he had sensed him watching. Erich wanted to hate him, and yet he couldn’t. There was something so defiant about Georg, something unbreakable and decisive, more qualities that he needed, that he might need again, that he hadn’t been able to get from any other relationship.

  Erich relaxed the trigger. He felt himself weaken. He couldn’t kill the only person who had ever truly understood him. And there was no need to kill the past. The past would die naturally in war, would disappear among the consequences, like everything else.

  There were more gunshots, louder now. The fight was too close.

  Someone yelled that they needed everyone out on the field, and his father’s tanks roared over tracked and trampled earth. He put the gun down to watch the machines, to remember the images on paper, the excitement on his father’s face when he received his first tank commission. Only yards from Erich, in the space between him and Georg, a grenade exploded, shaking the ground and spitting fire and earth into the air. The German army was being driven back. From his pack he raised the binoculars to see whether Georg was all right. Many were running through the smoke, and it was difficult to see. And then he was there in his vision, and Georg, perhaps aware that Erich was still watching him, turned at that point, again in his direction.

  Then another bomb, followed by the sounds of gunfire, and Erich saw blood burst out from the side of Georg’s head before he fell.

  Present-day 1945

  He is slapped hard across the cheek, but he is not roused fully from the fog inside his brain until water is thrown across his face. Erich opens his eyes a fraction and spies the green diamond-patterned linoleum on the floor of his mother’s bedroom. His chest jerks suddenly as a kick lands hard between the shoulder blades. He coughs and then gags, and pain extends down his back and through his legs. He is on his side on the ground, and his wrists are bound tightly behind him.

  Stefano pulls him roughly upright and slams him back against the wall. He can picture where he is even before he opens his eyes. Erich’s head hangs forlornly to one side as he assesses the pain, deals with the discomfort. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see drops of blood on the floor and part of the split rope that once held Stefano.

  He raises his head slowly, unwilling to see the person who has finally beaten him. Stefano is sitting in front of him, cross-legged, dangerously tranquil. He has tricked him. It was the first thing the SS thought of, to take off the shirts and trousers of prisoners, and everything else that wasn’t anatomically connected, to search the body thoroughly, so they had nowhere to hide weapons or riches. He feels anger mostly against himself, for this failure of procedures, and wonders in the same instant whether, deep down, he was hoping that Stefano was his equal, hoping still for time in Italy, or elsewhere, a reprieve until he returned.

  “I suppose you want to know what happened to Monique,” he says between small coughs. His voice is hoarse, his neck sore.

  But Stefano says nothing. His dark look makes him appear like a madman, and Erich looks away briefly, to gather his thoughts. He can feel the tightness of the ropes on his wrists and feet. Stefano’s gun is on the table, far from reach. For the first time in his life, there is no plan. He is the prisoner now.

  “I can tell you that she’s not coming back,” he says more firmly. “Whatever you had hoped to find with her, she’s not here.” He thinks of the grave interfered with, perhaps by Stefano, and waits a moment for a reaction that doesn’t come. “But I am more than certain she wasn’t your only reason. You came for both of us.”

  “Tell me what happened to Nina Della Bosca, the wife of Antonio Venturi,” says Stefano, who stands up suddenly. Erich’s heart beats rapidly from the sudden movement. He casts a glance to search for the silver wire, fearing that it will be used again. “They were in a house you had burned down in Verona. The woman and her baby were taken by the Germans.”

  Erich remembers them.

  “Is that why you have come to find me? To avenge?”

  Stefano doesn’t answer. He stands, moves to the window, in profile with his hands together, as if in prayer, staring at the shadows of late evening that Erich’s parents once enjoyed.

  “You were never on Germany’s side,” says Erich. “Admit that you fought for the resistance.”

  “I don’t have to admit anything to you,” he says, still looking out the window. “But I will tell you this: I was never in any concentration camp. I was never caught. I lied about that and most things, except Monique. I knew her. She told me all about you.”

  The conversation is too casual. It is unsettling. It is what he was like himself. They are alike, and this thought that once drew him disappoints him now and fills him with apprehension. He knows it will no
t end well. He underestimated an opponent. He has lost, caused by an emotional reaction at the mention of Georg. He knows everything, he thinks. Monique. The traitor.

  “If you promise to kill me quickly, I will tell you everything you need to know.”

  Stefano lowers his eyes but doesn’t respond.

  “I can tell that you are a man of honor,” says Erich, encouraged by the silence. “I also believe that without the baggage of war that we were forced to carry, we would have been friends.”

  Stefano turns and paces thoughtfully before he sighs and looks at him directly. “I will be merciful, but only if you give me everything I want.”

  Erich tells him then, about entering the house, about making Antonio and the others stand against the wall, about several women and several men and a baby screaming. Erich told one of the men to get the baby, while the mother begged that her child be kept alive.

  Then the SS had found some maps but nothing else. They decided to shoot all but Nina and her baby. They took them in the car. If anyone had all the information, it would be the wife of one of the partisans. And if anyone was likely to give up information, it would be the mother, for the life of her baby.

  But she had surprised them. She knew what was coming: a fate far worse than the bullets she had seen used on her husband and friends. And she knew that any information must die with her. But her mistake was to believe that they would not kill an innocent baby, only her. She grabbed a gun from one of the soldiers and shot herself upward through the chin before the car even got to the prison entrance. She knew it was pointless to shoot the officer driving; she was outnumbered, and her baby would most likely be killed in front of her. Nina was quick thinking and clever. Erich had admired her for that.

  Erich had been in the car behind her when it happened. The first vehicle stopped, and Erich went to inspect inside. The baby was crying next to its dead mother in the arms of one of the officers. Erich hated dead ends. Everything must have an ending, good or bad, his father used to say, a completion. And with those words ringing in his ears, he had ordered the immediate death of the baby, then had its body tossed over a fence. They died, all of them, but the task that evening was not completely unsuccessful. They had hoped to find a list of other cells, but they had at least killed one of them.