From Sand and Ash

by Amy Harmon

  “I will take care of my family,” Mario said firmly, but his eyes found hers and held. “Thank you, Eva. Don’t worry about us. We are the lucky ones today. Do you have your pass?” She nodded, knowing that he wasn’t referring to the papers that labeled her a Jew. He was referring to the fake ones, the ones that claimed she was Eva Bianco from Naples.

  “Mamma?” a sleepy voice said from the bedroom doorway. “Are we playing hide-and-go-seek? I want to count.” Little Emilia was rubbing at her eyes and yawning widely, completely oblivious to the terror of the morning. Her parents laughed quietly, and the laughter broke into grateful tears as they clung to each other and to their small children.

  Eva slipped out then, letting the young family have a moment together, her mind on what remained of her own family, and the danger they all faced.

  CHAPTER 11

  TRASTEVERE

  The alley leading out onto the Via del Portico d’Ottavia was eerily quiet, the four cramped blocks wedged between the Tiber and the Teatro di Marcello gutted of their inhabitants. The dome of the church in the nearby piazza peered down at Eva, making her feel exposed and small. She wanted to run from doorway to doorway, from tree to bush, hiding herself in spurts, but she made herself walk at a leisurely pace.

  It was early, but not terribly so, and the streets were filling with Romans going about their day. It was as if the terror of the predawn was just a strange mirage, shimmering in and out of focus. She saw a single German truck, thick flaps obscuring its cargo. She didn’t duck her head or slink. She walked, telling herself that running would only draw attention, even as her stomach twisted more tightly with each step. She walked across the Garibaldi Bridge and down the wide Viale di Trastevere, too unfamiliar with her surroundings to duck onto side streets. It took too long, and when she finally turned onto the narrow street lined with palms and little stores, she was numb with fear. The street was too quiet, just like Via d’Ottavia, and she finally started to run.

  She was almost to their building when strong arms wrapped around her from behind and dragged her back. When she cried out, a hand clamped around her mouth as she was pinned between a man’s chest and an alcove wall.

  “Eva, shhh! Be still.” It was Angelo. The relief was almost as great as the despair as she turned and wilted against him.

  “Grazie a Dio!” he cried, and pressed his sandpaper cheek against hers before pulling away so he could cradle her face in his hands. Angelo had failed to shave, a testament to the kind of morning it had been, and his blue eyes were wild beneath the unruly black curls drooping dejectedly over his brow. Their eyes clung, gratitude and relief giving way to a baser need, a need for affirmation, even celebration, and suddenly his mouth was on hers, kissing her fiercely, desperately verifying that she was indeed safe, present, and accounted for.

  Eva froze beneath the onslaught, but only for a heartbeat. Her hands rose to his face, her mouth opened beneath his, and in those few stolen moments, there was euphoric frenzy. Lips, teeth, and tongues that tasted truth and reaffirmed life. The dam broke, and there was only unbridled feeling, stripped of duty and civility, of pretense and propriety. There were no lies between them, no space.

  But the suspension of time could only last so long. Eva pulled back, gasping for breath, and with oxygen came remembrance.

  “Angelo, the SS are coming,” Eva cried, hands gripping, lips pleading. “I have to warn my uncle.”

  Angelo still held her face in his hands, his relief and lust slower to dissipate, and he forced his gaze from Eva’s lush mouth to meet her pleading eyes. She immediately began to shake her head, refusing the dreadful compassion she saw in his face.

  “I know. I know, Eva. The SS are everywhere. All over the city, they are rounding up Jews.”

  “Oh, no. No, Angelo. Oh, please, no.”

  “I went to the apartment, Eva. I went there first. When the nuns said you never came home last night, I thought you must have been caught. I thought I was too late. I thought they’d taken you too.” His breath caught and he swallowed back the black nausea, the horror of that moment so fresh he could still taste it.

  Eva closed her eyes, as if closing her eyes would protect her from what he knew.

  “Maybe they were warned. Maybe they left before the SS arrived,” Eva said hopefully, her lips trembling around the words.

  “They’re gone, cara,” he said gently, unable to keep the truth from her. “I saw the truck. I saw the truck drive away, Eva. I saw your uncle climb in. I think he must have been the last. And he saw me.”

  Eva’s legs wobbled, and Angelo was there, wrapping his arms around her, bracing her as her tears began to flow and her strength left her.

  “Where did they take them?” she cried, the wail only a whisper against the wall of his chest.

  “I don’t know. But we will find out. We will find out, Eva.”

  He smoothed her hair with a trembling hand and kept her locked in his embrace. It was several long moments before either of them had the ability to say more, stricken into silence, as if a meteor were jetting toward them, promising certain annihilation, and no matter where they turned, where they hid, the results would be the same. So they stood, waiting for the world to end, wrapped in each other’s arms, breathing, unable to process thoughts into words. But after a time, brain function returned, and with it, a terrible realization.

  “The gold. All that gold that was gathered . . . the gold they insisted upon. It was a lie, wasn’t it? They wanted to make us think we were safe,” Eva said.

  Angelo stepped back so he could meet her gaze. Then he cursed angrily, one of the American words he’d taught her to say more than a decade ago. He dropped his arms from around her and gripped his hair, repeating the ugly word over and over. His eyes were bright with outrage. “Yes. It was all a lie. They are pulling our strings, watching us dance.”

  The Jews apprehended in the daylong Roman roundup were transported to the Italian Military College and held there, under armed guard. People had gathered outside, a substantial crowd—curious bystanders and horrified neighbors who had witnessed the arrests, gawking and gossiping as people are inclined to do. They watched as truck after truck unloaded terrified prisoners into the college courtyard, SS guards pushing and shoving them with shouts and directions that almost no one understood. Twelve hundred Jews, more than half of them women and children, many of them in their pajamas without food or blankets, were told they were being sent to labor camps in the east. Eva’s uncle, aunt, and cousins were among them.

  The Pope could have looked out of his window and seen the crowds, the military college a mere six hundred feet from Vatican City. Angelo even hoped that the Pope might intercede. After all, he’d known about the gold, even offering to make up the difference if the fifty kilograms wasn’t raised. And these were mostly Roman Jews, protected by Italian law. But there was no Italian law anymore. There was only the Führer’s law. And the Führer wanted all Jews deported. The Führer wanted Judenrein—a world clean of Jews.

  Angelo and Eva had wound their way back to the Church of the Sacred Heart, gathering information on their way. Angelo knew everyone, and everyone knew the young father. He gave comfort and instructions as they went, sending people scrambling for this or that, listening patiently, acting quickly. He was a natural leader and a good priest. It suited him. Eva stayed with him, and no one seemed to think it odd or unseemly that they were together. War made a mockery of convention.

  When they arrived at the church, Angelo had deposited her firmly in a basement room recently vacated by a janitor killed during the air raids that had left portions of the city in rubble. He’d been running through the streets, terrified. They’d found him shoeless and minus an arm, sitting against the church doors, seeking sanctuary he wouldn’t find. The entrance was still lightly stained with his blood, and his rooms weren’t much more hospitable. A mattress on an old spring frame, an oddly ornate yet faded Victorian-era chair, and behind a small partition, a little sink, a cracked oval mi
rror mounted on a bare joist, and a toilet.

  “You will be safe here, for now. The bedding is clean. The bathroom too. We knew we would need the space before long. I will tell Suora Elena you are here. She, or one of the other sisters, will bring you something to eat. I don’t want to bring you back to the convent until I know for sure they weren’t visited during the roundup.”

  “Almost no one knows who I am. No one, Angelo. I don’t need to hide here. I could come with you to where they are holding my family. I speak German! Maybe I can help in some way.”

  “No. You have to stay far away from all of that. All it would take is someone pointing you out, recognizing you, and you would be inside the college with the others. All it takes is one, Eva. One person telling the wrong person. And I may not be able to save you.”

  She started to follow him out of the basement room. “Maybe we can find a back entrance, an unlocked door. Maybe we can get my family out. There has—”

  “No!” Angelo’s roar was so enraged, so full of fury, that Eva stopped midsentence and stared at his livid face. Her eyes immediately filled with frustrated tears, but Angelo pushed her back, as deep into the minuscule space as he could get her, pressing her against the back wall, his arms braced on either side of her head.

  “No, Eva. You avoided arrest twice today. Twice. God smiles on you, Eva, in so many ways, but I won’t let you do this. I will go. I will do everything I can to save as many as I can. But if you insist on coming, I will tie you to that bed. I will tie you up, and neither of us will leave this room.”

  “You act as if you aren’t in any danger!” Eva put her hands on his chest and pushed him back, angry because he was angry. “But I know better. Priests have been tortured, shot, hung from bridges, shipped off in trains loaded with the Jews they’ve tried to help. In fact, non-Jewish Italians caught helping Jews are sometimes worse off than the Jews themselves.”

  “The only thing that matters to me, the only thing in this whole world that truly scares me, is something happening to you. Do you know that? I think I could face anything, endure anything, if I knew for sure you were safe and well. I cannot serve the way I need to serve, I can’t be the kind of priest I need to be, and be full of fear. My faith is being drowned by my fear for you. You aren’t the only one who has lost their family. Your family is my family, Eva. I’ve lost them too! And I can’t lose you. Please. Please, Eva. If you have any feelings for me at all, you will stay here until I come back for you. You will let me do what I need to do, knowing you are out of harm’s way. Please.”

  Eva could only nod, shocked at his vehemence, touched by his sentiments. She sat down on the thin mattress and nodded once more.

  “I will wait. But you have to come back here. No matter what happens, no matter how late it is. You have to come back, Angelo.”

  Eva lost her battle with sleep, making the hours of waiting easier to endure. She wrapped the thin blanket around her shoulders and pulled her knees into her chest, pretending that she was an oyster in a shell, a maker of glass, and nothing more. She fell asleep to the drip and creak of the basement walls, a prayer on her lips and the echo of cries and gunshots from the morning still haunting her thoughts.

  When she awoke she was afraid, caught in her old dream, the one with the crowded darkness and the need to escape, to jump, though jumping was almost as terrifying as staying put. She opened her eyes, trying to convince herself that the darkness was empty and she was stationary. No one grabbed at her clothes and pulled at her legs. The light that flickered was not from moonlight penetrating the cracks in her consciousness. It was an oil lamp, turned down so low it glimmered without lighting the space around it.

  “Angelo?”

  The wick was lengthened, the flame danced, and the light grew, casting a glow over Angelo in the odd Victorian chair, sitting in the dark like he didn’t want to wake her.

  She sat up and reached for the water Suora Elena had brought her. There was bread too, and she split it in half and brought it to Angelo, insisting that he eat. He relented and they ate in silence, the bread doing little to fill the empty dread in both their bellies. When they finished, Eva made him drink. Then she crouched in front of him and peered up into his face.

  “Tell me.”

  Angelo was silent. Eva took his hands in hers, giving him something to hold on to.

  “Tell me, Angelo.”

  He answered with a deep breath, as if it required courage to speak.

  “I walked around the perimeter of the college. I even found an unlocked door, just like you said. Being a priest, with Vatican City so close by, I was sure I could simply keep walking or come up with a plausible excuse if I was caught.” He paused, then added quietly, “I saw Levi.”

  Eva’s heart leaped in her chest, hope giving her a fleeting smile. But Angelo’s grave face in the lamplight stole it from her lips, and her heart resumed beating with a despondent thud.

  “He and several other boys had already discovered the unlocked door. They were standing near it, arguing among themselves. I beckoned to them, whispering that there was nothing to stop them. The back was completely unguarded. They would have been able to slip away, Eva.”

  “But they wouldn’t leave,” she whispered knowingly, seeing her cousin in her mind’s eye, insisting that he couldn’t leave his family.

  “They wouldn’t leave,” he confirmed. “One boy argued that if they left, others might be punished.”

  “So they stood by an unlocked door, and refused to use it,” Eva moaned.

  “Can you blame them? What would you have done, Eva?” he said softly. “I know I would not have been able to save myself if I couldn’t save you with me. They wanted to stay with their families.”

  “They are all going to die,” Eva whispered.

  “Maybe not,” Angelo protested, his voice just as soft.

  “They will be sent to camps. You’ve heard the reports. You’ve heard, Angelo. You know. They are death camps.”

  “Some still say those are rumors, British propaganda.” He didn’t want to take her hope from her.

  “Angelo, you know!” Eva’s face crumpled and she covered her tears with shaking hands. “You heard what the soldiers said. They’ve seen the crematoriums. They’ve seen the mass graves.”

  “We got some out, Eva,” he offered, needing to give her something, anything, to hold on to, needing to rid his mind of the images her words evoked.

  “Some of the Jews had Italian names. Non-Jewish Italian names. We convinced them to line up with the non-Jews who were arrested by mistake. One of the prisoners spoke German, and he was keeping everyone calm, translating for the Germans, telling people what to do so there would be no reprisals.

  “The Germans said if anyone lied they would be killed on the spot. But bravado won the day. The officers let all those insisting they were non-Jews go. I vouched for several of them, swore they were my parishioners.” Angelo stopped talking and Eva wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him to her, horrified by the risks he’d taken and moved by his courage.

  “It was awful. They confiscated their belongings. The guards told them it was to provide for those who couldn’t work when they arrived at the labor camps. Those who were too sick, too old, or too young. But I saw the most valuable items being pocketed by the officers. And there was a woman giving birth, Eva. Right there on the concrete floor. They wouldn’t take her to a hospital! She gave birth to a healthy baby girl.” Angelo’s voice broke, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. He had wanted to give Eva hope, and he’d lost all of his. His arms moved around her, embracing her as she was already embracing him, and he buried his face in her hair.

  “The more I see, the harder it is to believe in God. What kind of priest can I be if I don’t believe in God anymore?” he confessed, his voice thick. “Some days it hurts too much to believe.”

  “It hurts more not to believe,” Eva whispered back, stroking his hair. “I’m starting to think God is the only reason any of us are still alive
.”

  His arms tightened desperately, and his voice was a harsh whisper against her neck.

  “I have to get you out, Eva. I have to get you out of Rome. But I don’t know where to send you, all alone as you are. I don’t know where you’ll be safe, and I’m afraid if I can’t see for myself, every day, that you are alive and well, I will lose my mind.”

  “There is nowhere that is safe, Angelo. I am as safe here as I am anywhere else. I left Florence but I won’t leave Rome, and I won’t leave you,” she added gently. Seeing his devastation made her want to be strong, if only for him. It made her long to be honest. When loss was a constant threat and a terrible likelihood, there was no time for pretense. She held him as he held her, neither of them speaking, finding a temporary peace and comfort in each other, if nothing else. She fell asleep with her head on his shoulder.

  In the inky dark, always blackest before dawn, Angelo walked to his apartment, only a few blocks from his old parish and the Church of the Sacred Heart where he’d left Eva for the second time in twenty-four hours. When daylight came, she would be safe enough, with her false papers, to walk back to Santa Cecilia on her own. The nuns had not been visited in the daylong raid, making Angelo breathe a little easier. None of the convents, churches, or monasteries where he had refugees hidden had been included in the razzia by the SS. His people, Jews and Catholics alike, were safe for the time being. And after today, there would be so many more that needed to hide.

  Angelo needed to sleep for a few hours, and then he would return to the Italian Military College and see what more could be done for the Jews being held there.

  He let himself into the modest flat, leaving his cane and his hat by the door and unbuttoning his cassock, eager to be free of it, to wash himself and fall face-first into his bed.