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Footsteps. Voices. At the other end of the long corridor, the jailer jabbers apologies, explanations, excuses. Another man growls ill-tempered rejoinders. Schramm clambers to his feet, drags a handkerchief from a pocket, wipes his eyes, blows his nose. He feels as though he has drained a swamp of sin, but there is no time for contemplation.
A tall man with a lantern jaw and a luxuriant mustache flings the half-closed door wide open. Schramm points to Tomitz. “You are responsible for this?”
The bastard’s head tilts back. Arrogant, unashamed. It would be so easy, Schramm thinks. One in the body, one in the head. Send this hound to hell, and step over his corpse without a backward glance.
Go, said Jesus to the harlot, and sin no more. There is hope, Suora Marta said, even for a pig like you.
“I
Blinking in the sunlight, he gets his bearings and looks for the quickest route out of town. He’s hardly walked a block when the quiet is broken by explosions, gunfire, screams. Civilians around him cry out, clutch children, race for cover. Schramm grabs a ski
She points, shouting half-coherent directions, and breaks away.
Schramm asks twice more before he finds the place. A harried nursing sister in the midst of a crowd sees his uniform and snarls. “No, you don’t! Not here! Not in this hospital!”
An ambulance team pounds by, carrying a stretcher with a wide-eyed old man who holds a shaking hand over a ragged gash in his forehead. Schramm unbuttons his jacket, tossing it into a corner. “I am a doctor, Suora! I want to help!”
Maybe it’s because he’s speaking Italian. Maybe there is something in his face that convinces her he is not there to kill. She shows him where to scrub. Their first patient is lifted onto the table. An eight-year-old boy, breathing in short, grunting coughs. “One gunshot,” another nun reports. “Hit from behind in the left shoulder. The exit’s just below the right nipple.”
Schramm taps the chest with the tips of his fingers. Below the left clavicle, the chest resonates like a drum. Lower down: a dull sound, like tapping a stone. The second sister hands him a scalpel and murmurs to the little boy: this will hurt, he must be brave. Quickly Schramm slices through the resistance of the exquisitely sensitive pleura, ignoring the child’s shriek as he widens the knife track. The wound bubbles. Schramm holds out his hand. A drain appears in it. He pushes seven centimeters into the cavity. Blood gushes through the chest tube into a bowl held by a nun.
The child gasps and coughs in the cold sweat of agony. The basin overflows. An orderly mops it up. The nun co
In the hallway, a temporary receiving station is set up to assess serious cases and assign an order of treatment. Occasionally the triage nurse has a case stretchered directly into surgery, hoping immediate intervention might save a life. Hour after hour, Schramm digs out shrapnel, opens abdomens, sews up perforated bowels, removes crushed limbs. Time stops. There is only the flesh beneath his fingers.
When the last patient has been carried off, Schramm is lightheaded from dehydration. Exhausted, but exhilarated. He pulls off his gory shirt and trudges to a sink to wash away the blood, lifting handful after handful of water to his face, head, shoulders, chest. Drying off, he asks the nurse, “Is there someplace I could stay, Suora?”
She doesn’t answer. He lowers the towel from his face. The nun is as white as her coif. A Wehrmacht officer stands in the scrub-room doorway, imperious in full if filthy uniform. “There is a German doctor here.” He frowns at Schramm. “You?”
Startled, Schramm stammers, “Sì— jawohl. Yes, sir. I was cut off from my unit—”
“You’re needed. We’ve got casualties.”
There seems to be no choice. Schramm tosses the towel aside and shrugs into his uniform, a soldier again. “Are we going to the front, sir?” he asks as they climb into an open staff car and head north.
Gray in the face, the other officer looks blank. “Going to the front? Scheisse, man! Where do you think you are? We’re pulling all the field hospitals back. The Allies have broken through.”
April 1945
VILLA MALCOVATO
NEAR ROCCABARBENA
Werner was the first to come under her protection. Then Simon Henley, nearly frozen. Young Claudia was next, and Mirella hoped the girl would stay, but two days after tiny Alberto was buried, the staffetta left to rejoin her brigade.
A destitute old woman with five small grandchildren arrived at the villa that afternoon. Mirella took them in. On that signora’s rundown heels: a Moroccan soldier, completely lost. Nobody understood a word he said. Mirella gave him a meal, and after looking at a map, he went off happily to whatever fate awaited him.
The following week brought a bewildered Sicilian draftee, terrified and begging to stay. The owner of an antiques shop in Genoa, who offered to pay for a meal with a Renaissance figurine carved from ivory. A farmer’s son, desperately ill with pneumonia. A man who’d worked for an English businessman before the war: denounced by one neighbor, warned by another, on the run. Mirella kept the farmer’s son in the villa’s small clinic; the others moved on.
Lavinia Costa-Valsecchi was next. A ninety-year-old contessa, dotty in furs and diamonds, she was dumped at the villa by her chauffeur, who drove off to join the partisans with her auto and its petrol as his dowry. Then a little girl with an even littler baby boy on her hip knocked at the kitchen door. Their mother was dead. The girl heard that Villa Malcovato still had a milk cow. Could they stay here?
District by district, the Germans steal anything of value as they pull back. They burn whatever they can’t carry away, shoot anyone who protests and many of those who don’t. Allied air raids are destroying what’s left. The Germans are hated and Allied bombardiers cursed, but true loathing is reserved for the Italian SS volunteers, and for informants who buy favor with neighbors’ lives.
Civilians are of no consequence to anyone but themselves, and tell stories of pointless destruction and casual cruelty to anyone who pretends to listen. Kindly, naive people arrested for giving a meal to a stranger. A little boy hit by a staff car, deliberately run over by the tanks that followed. Bombs falling on four children herding some geese in a field. A fifty-year-old man tortured for three days before the fascisti realized their prisoner was Giuseppi Pesce, not the Giova
Villa Malcovato’s population doubled, and doubled again, filling the house, the stables, the barn. A dozen peasant families burned out of their homes. Twenty-three children, overflow from Mother of Mercy, itself inundated by orphans. Exhausted evacuees from Genoa, Sant’Andrea, and Savona, many in a sort of walking coma, speechless and trembling.
Mirella shares her bedroom now with four other mothers, thirteen children among them, and shares the bed itself with Angelo, Stefania, and Rosina. Before falling into stuporous sleep, she takes brief comfort in the way they snuggle around her, warm and sweet-faced, smelling of compost. Each morning she awakens to find another little group of famished people waiting for her attention in the courtyard.
With two hundred or more to feed and shelter, she tells the factor and his men to dig up the last stocks of cheese and flour, oil and salt, buried for safekeeping last fall. She puts older girls in charge of younger children, or sends them to help in the garden. The boys work in the barns or care for livestock hidden in secret clearings. The women cook, spin wool, knit baby jerseys. They make diapers from old sheets, sew children’s clothes from scraps of worn-out fabric, cobble shoes from wooden soles and strips of carpet.