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She’s still appalled by the necessity of dropping her pants and squatting, but she’s already learned the first lesson of Alpine hygiene: face uphill. This time, the relief is so exquisite, she forgets to be embarrassed. “That’s really not so bad,” she says, returning to the campsite.
Santino is already back, and he puts a finger to his lips, glancing at her father. Albert chants Shakharis, bowing and swaying, eyes closed. Claudette puts herself to work, preparing a meager breakfast for the three of them.
“That’s Jewish praying!” Santino exclaims when the chant is complete. “What are those things— those little boxes?”
Claudette meets her father’s eyes. This is not a subject she has ever heard discussed. Jews know; goyim never ask.
Unwrapping the long laces of his tefillin, Albert summons his Italian. “The Torah— la Bibbia vecchio, sì? It tells that we should love God with tutto cuore—” He taps on the left side of his chest.
“Tutto il cuore,” Santino corrects solemnly, accepting the little cube of cheese Claudette offers.
“Sì. Love God with all the heart, and tutta l’anima—all our spirit. E tutta la forza—all our strength. The Bible also tells us to bind— legare, sì?—bind these words on our hands and in front of our eyes, so we remember them always.” Albert shrugs. “Who knows what that means? How do you bind words in front of your eyes? So we write the words about tutto cuore, tutta anima, tutta forza, and put them inside the little boxes. Then we tie the boxes to our hands and foreheads when we pray.”
Chewing, Santino nods repeatedly, mouth turned down in thoughtful consideration. “È bello,” he decides. “That’s a good prayer.”
“The Torah says we must put those words by the doors of our houses and on our gates,” Albert adds, waving toward the forest. “No more house. No more gate. Tefillin are all I have.”
“The boxes look like little houses,” Santino points out helpfully. “Is that why they’re shaped that way? What’s wrong?”
Albert is staring at his left hand. “My wedding ring is missing.”
Swallowing her second, and last, mouthful of dry bread, Claudette shifts to German, too. “Are you sure you were wearing it?”
“Of course, I was wearing it— I never take it off!” He combs through low vegetation and dry leaves with his fingers. “Don’t just stand there, Claudette! Help me find it!”
“C’è male?” Santino asks.
“Mein Ring,” Albert says, unable to remember the word in Italian. “Mariage,” he says in French, and then “Moglie!”— wife— in Italian. Albert points to the place where years of constriction have compressed the small muscles of his finger, and makes a circling motion. Santino’s face lights up, then darkens with dismay. Dropping onto all fours, he joins the search.
When a few minutes of scrabbling through the stones and twigs produce nothing but scratches and ski
“Claudette, I don’t expect you to understand, but I do expect you to—”
A loud, unresonant crack! not one hundred meters away startles him into silence. The three of them freeze. Crouched to run, Claudette looks to Santino, who listens, still as a deer. When they hear someone speaking Polish, Santino picks up a branch and mimes breaking it. Smiling reassurance, he gestures for Claudette to resume the search, but she folds her arms across her chest. “That could have been the Germans, Papa!” she insists in a tense whisper. “It’s just a ring, Papa!” Terrified now, clutching her father’s arm, she tries to pull him to his feet. “Papa, let’s go! This is stupid!”
In one motion, Albert Blum straightens and slaps his daughter’s face. “It’s not just… a ring!”
It is the home he and Paula made during sixteen years of marriage, his children’s baby photos, mementos of his own youth. It is his orderly office, and meticulously cared-for wardrobe, the reputation he built as an accountant, accurate and scrupulously honest. It is everything that was, and is no more. He’s barely slept, freezing and miserable on a rocky mountainside. Every muscle and all his joints ache from yesterday’s awful climb, and God knows he’s as frightened of capture as Claudette. But months ago, he left his wife and two young sons on a train platform, expecting to see them a few days later. Now they have vanished, like everything else, and Albert Blum ca
“It’s not just a ring,” he says again.
Claudette stands. “Fine,” she says, refusing to cry. “Let the Nazis catch us. Let them send us to a camp! See if I care!”
Full sunlight bursts over the mountain and finds its way to the ground. Santino lies flat, resting his head on forearms thick with muscle. “There! You see?” she cries, in tones of furious vindication. “Santino thinks the ring is stupid, too!” She wants her father to be humiliated. She wants him to admit he was wrong to care about the ring, wrong to hit her. She wishes the Germans would smash through the trees and arrest them all, this very moment! She’d rather be right than free.
When the slanting light reveals no telltale glimmer in the leaves, Santino starts to rise, then stops, struck by a thought. Reaching for the socks Albert used as mittens during the night, he shakes one, then the other. A small, bright object falls out. “Ecco, signore! Here it is!”
Hand trembling, Albert takes the ring from Santino’s cupped palm. The soldier smiles at Claudette, who glares resentfully and stomps away. He shrugs, unconcerned. “I have sisters,” he tells her father. “Girls are like that sometimes.”
Santino hefts the suitcases and trudges up the trail behind Claudette. Albert wipes damp eyes, blows his nose, makes an awkward fist with his thumb over the ring. “My thanks I place before you, O Lord,” he whispers, and continues his assault on the unseen summit.
The Alps are not the impregnable fortress walls they seem. Ha
They’ve all added to the ancient layered repository of possessions that seemed essential at sea level. Treasured books, silver kiddush cups, and heavy brass candlesticks now come to rest above long-buried cuirasses and pikes. Iron kettles rust atop heavy clay pots. Carved stone deities, who might not be so helpful on the other side of the mountain anyway, overlie flint tools and traces of rush baskets that carried dried fish and red ocher. The trail across these mountains has been in use for seven thousand years.
Time after time, the path crests a rise only to descend sharply before ribboning over an even steeper slope beyond. Chestnut and beech give way to pine and fir, which themselves become dwarfish and gradually disappear. Above the treeline, ancient ice has carved a bowl of rock between two peaks. Barren of all but lichen, its surface is scoured yearly by stones and ice, rain and wind. Stumbling exacts an increasing toll.
The back of Claudette’s neck feels charred by the sun. Her muscles are rubbery. Too often, she loses her footing in her father’s slick-bottomed city shoes, coming down hard on hands and knees already bloody. Finally she crumples where she stands, waiting for Santino and her father to arrive at her side before bursting into angry tears. “I can’t go any farther! I never should have worn these stupid shoes! This is all your fault, Papa!”