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“What exactly… is my fault?” her father gasps. “The war, Claudette? The Alps? Am I responsible… for how hard… rocks are?”
Santino says something. Reluctantly, Claudette looks to her father for an explanation. “Save your tears, miss,” Albert translates. “You may need them later.”
His own dogged momentum broken, Albert, too, sinks onto the bald stone. There’s been no water since noon, when the path last snaked past a spring. His toenails feel as though they’re being pried off his feet. His swollen fingers look like bratwurst. The ring finger that shrank in last night’s cold now throbs like a second heart, and the word “gangrene” flickers through his mind. Oh, Paula! he thinks, worn out with being the object of their daughter’s frightened peevishness. I should have taken the boys and left Claudette with you.
To make peace, he holds out his puffy hand so Claudette can see how awful his finger looks. “You were right,” he offers. “I should have forgotten about the ring.” Her shoulders relax a fraction, and Albert puts an arm around her. “I miss your mother.”
“I even miss David and Jacques,” she sobs, and laughs at this evidence of extremity. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “They had it easy, sitting with Mama on that train!”
“After the war, you can brag to them. They’ll be sorry they missed this adventure.”
They cling to each other until Albert realizes with his body what his mind has resisted for some months now. She’s nearly grown, and he has no idea what she does and doesn’t know. Shuddering at the idea of such a conversation, he watches a little group tramping down a slope, one gully back. The Brösslers, he realizes. Steffi rides on Duno’s shoulders. Liesl has slowed the family down— too big to carry and too small to climb well. Frieda Brössler could speak to Claudette, Albert realizes. I’ll ask her when we get to Italy.
A few feet away, Santino has hunkered down on the slanting rock face, glad to rest while the Blums pull themselves together. The sky is vast, Mado
He looks up, trying not to grimace. An officer told him that the Pass of Aurelius was popular with serious mountain climbers from Italy and France, before the war. The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.
“How much farther?” Signor Blum asks.
Santino makes two mountains of his fingers and gestures a short distance over the space between them. “Not far,” he guesses vaguely, “but a lot of climbing first.”
And the mountain begrudges every step. By late afternoon, Claudia has slowed to a crawl, and Signor Blum’s lips are blue. Altitude and sun glare off granite have given Santino a fierce headache made worse by hunger, but he hasn’t complained aloud. The Blums probably think he’s stoic, or naturally quiet. Truth is, Santino’s mother tongue is a Calabrian dialect. He learned basic Italian during his four years of compulsory school. His working vocabulary consists of curses and obscenities, picked up in the army. He does not wish to slip and offend a refined gentleman like Signor Blum with bad language, and yet the moment has arrived: his unhappiness demands expression.
Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower, whom Santino holds responsible for this disorganized retreat and who is, without doubt, at this very moment engaged in contracting enviable diseases from shameless women who rouge their lips.
Recognizing the sentiment, if not the words, Signor Blum holds up a bruised and bleeding hand. “Santino, you tried. This’s impossible. Leave the valises.”
Santino hates to do it, but shrugs philosophically. The only thing worse than dumping the suitcases now, after lugging them so far, is falling off the side of this stinking mountain while trying to carry them over the pass.
Kneeling awkwardly, Albert Blum opens first one bag, then the other. He removes the Giovanetti passports, a photo of Paula with the children. Both toothbrushes and the can of tooth powder. His razor, the remaining squares of newspaper. His tefillin. All these he wraps in his prayer shawl, making a vagrant’s gu
Giggling like a schoolkid, Santino flings one suitcase after the other into the sky. They tumble through the air, bounce against the rock face, and sail off into an abyss while the three of them cackle like chickens, witlessly amused. Someone far below yells angrily, but not even Albert can make himself feel ashamed, and Claudette is convulsed by the barrage of echoing Yiddish curses aimed at them like mortar shells.
Squinting into the sun, they sit to share their tiny meal, breaking into helpless laughter whenever one of them remembers the way the suitcase flew, or how the angry man shouted. When they’ve finished licking crumbs from their hands, they move with new energy, no longer away from capture but toward freedom. Lightweight and more nimble than either man, Claudette takes the lead. Hooking her fingertips into small crevices and pushing upward with her legs, she begins to understand why mountain climbing is a sport, and she scales the wall like a lizard, her nose so close to the hot stone she can smell the rock dust—
The sneeze is completely unexpected. Its spasm loosens her grip. Time slows.
The mountain seems to fall away, lazily tipping eastward while she herself remains suspended in air. I’m going to die, she thinks with a strange detached clarity. I should scream, she decides.
Her shriek shocks time back to its accustomed pace, and before its echo can return, Santino’s hand shoots up to support her trousered hip. In a single balletic move, he reaches for a hold and lifts himself, forming a wall behind her with his body.
“Coraggio,” he whispers, his mouth so close it brushes the fine down of her cheek. He can feel her heart pound through her back, but keeps his own breath steady. “Courage,” he says again. She looks at him out of the corner of an ocean-green eye. When she whispers, “Grazie,” her breath is like a kiss.
Four meters below, Albert calls anxiously, “Claudette, what happened? Are you all right?”
“I sneezed and lost my balance,” she calls back. “Santino caught me.” She still can feel the shape of his square palm, the outline of his short, blunt fingers on her hip. Santino draws back, but before she moves on, their eyes meet once more.
An hour later, the trail levels, widens, hairpins sharply. An abrupt decline reveals a blue infinity of uncountable peaks diminishing eastward toward the darkening horizon. For an endless moment, the three stand silently, between two summits. Santino breaks the spell, stretching into a long, deliberate stride downward. He holds out a hand, steadying Signor Blum as the older man joins him. Then, like a storybook courtier, Santino offers his arm to Claudia.