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Now the single only good thing in Angelo Soncini’s whole life is when he gets to go to Signor Brizzolari’s office at the Palazzo Municipale. The secretary has candy, and she gives Angelo some if he behaves. Behave means you have to sit right next to Babbo, and no talking or fidgeting. That’s hard because it’s so boring, but today it’s even worse than usual, because his mother had to come to Signor Brizzolari, not Babbo, and Mamma always gets all huggy in front of people. Angelo hates that.
“But Signor Brizzolari, what are these families to do?” she asks. “How are they to live without bread? Without milk for their children?”
Sure enough, she rests one hand on her big fat belly and reaches out to place the other on Angelo’s hair. He squirms away. “I’m not a baby,” he says. “I’m going outside!”
Serafino Brizzolari has children and grandchildren. He ca
“But surely there’s something you can do! Signor Brizzolari, a man of your compassion? Your importance! If you can’t help us, who can we turn to?”
Like so many Italian women whose menfolk hide from German labor roundups, Mirella Soncini has been thrust into the public sphere despite her advanced pregnancy. She’s put together a classic combination of flattery and supplication that would normally bring this little drama to a satisfying conclusion, which Serafino does not fail to appreciate. Nevertheless…
Stalling for time, he passes a white linen handkerchief over a heavy round face damp with sweat. Ordinarily he carries his great weight and his responsibilities well, but this breathless September heat is hard on him, and today he feels more burdened than usual by his body and his position. He removes his spectacles, rubbing at the sore spots they make on the bridge of his fleshy nose. “Signora, I am powerless.”
“Signor Brizzolari, you can’t mean it!” she says, begi
“Signora, you must understand my position—”
Angelo steps back into the room, frowning as he chews. “Mammina, isn’t he going to give us the ration cards?”
Easing to the edge of the wooden armchair, the rabbi’s wife uses both hands to push herself up, and when she speaks, the i
Alone in his office, Serafino Brizzolari shifts his weight to ease the ache where a buried chunk of Austrian shrapnel lies too near the femoral artery to remove. When the rabbi’s wife walked into his office, he had braced himself for tears, for outrage, for pleading. Nothing would have been more formidable than the grave and manly gesture of a small Jewish boy, shaking the hand that Serafino studies now.
For twenty-six years, Serafino’s own clean hands have had the power to shock him, so certain was he once that he’d never be free of the mud and stink of the Great War’s trenches. His white cuffs are immaculate, his suit freshly pressed and spotless. His shoes gleam. His feet, once foul with wet rot, are dry and sweet, even in summer, even if he must bathe twice a day to keep them that way. All these years, and he’s still jolted awake at least once a week by shrieks and shell blasts. The dreams are so real that for a few moments after waking, he dares not breathe for fear of mustard gas.
When he left his mother in 1916 and marched away to war, Serafino was a cocky kid, indestructible and convinced of his own courage. Bravado quickly withered under fire, but pride took its place. Determined to drive the Huns from his homeland, he was wounded twice for Italy and the king, but when he limped home from that bloodbath, he was spat on by Bolsheviks, jeered at by trade unionists. The king was a puppet dancing on capital’s strings, they said. Soldiers like Serafino had been duped by speculators who’d grown fat as ticks on labor’s blood.
Stu
Benito Mussolini changed all that. “Better one day as lions than fifty years as sheep!” il Duce cried, and Serafino is still grateful for the pride Mussolini restored in the soldiers who came home from the Great War and were made to feel ashamed. Even so, Mussolini has a great deal to answer for. Three hundred thousand Italian casualties in Greece, Yugoslavia, Libya, Russia. The nation occupied by Germany, invaded by the Allies. The king in exile, the economy in ruins. And Mussolini himself is the principal marionette in a puppet government Berlin has named the Republic of Salò.
Early this morning, there was a call from Salò: il Duce’s representatives will be in Sant’Andrea this afternoon, accompanied by German authorities. Serafino was reminded that he has prospered in government service, that his family has come through this war secure, well-housed, well-fed. The only thing required to ensure the continuation of this good fortune is a simple change of political label, from Fascist to Republican.
My sons are petty tyrants, he thinks. My daughters are vain, my wife is cold and house-proud. My mistress is a grasping slut. And I? he asks himself. I am a fat, powerless bureaucrat in a vassal state, taking orders from an Austrian corporal’s lackeys.
Mirella Soncini and her son are already past the mezzanine when Brizzolari shouts. Standing on the landing outside his office, he waves the rabbi’s wife back, then changes his mind. “Stay there,” he calls, and reappears a minute later with a large and bulging envelope.
He knows he is elephantine and graceless but feels lithe as a leopard descending the long marble staircase. Beckoning, he directs the rabbi’s wife into a recessed doorway in a deserted corridor. “So many have left the city because of the bombing,” he observes airily. “Who knows where they are now? In the mountains? Dead?” He lowers his voice. “If anyone comes back to claim these, I’ll think of something. Sell them for cash, signora. Use that on the black market.”
Mirella presses the package of ration cards to her breast and beams at her small son. “You see, Angelo? I told you he’d find a way to help! Signor Brizzolari, I don’t know how to thank you—”
He raises a clean, dry hand, swallowing nervously. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got them!” he pleads. “It’s a capital crime to aid enemies of the state.”
Enemies of the state? Mirella shakes her head, refusing to believe it. Did Serafino Brizzolari just call us enemies of the state—
“Mamma?” Angelo digs his heels in. “Mamma! You’re not listening!”
She stops and looks around, amazed to see how far they’ve walked. “I’m sorry, Angelo. What did you say?”
“I said I don’t see why we have to help the refugees anyway. They talk fu
“I know, Angelo. I am, too.” Tired of the war, of being pregnant, of sleep broken by air raids and a crowded bladder. And, yes— tired of strangers trooping through her home. For the past three years, Scuola Ner Tamid has made a place for Jewish refugees who’ve somehow found their way to Sant’Andrea. The Germans are cultured and urbane, but O Dio! The Poles… Bearded men with bizarre side curls, dowdy women with awful wigs. Thoughtlessly conspicuous, regally unconcerned that Sant’Andrese Jews must bribe officials like Brizzolari to keep them out of the camp for illegal aliens at Ferramonti. They refuse to enroll their children in Talmud Torah because Italian boys and girls study together to become b’nai mitzvah. Iacopo says Hasidic theology is the bel canto opera of Judaism: gloriously ornamented, astonishingly elaborate, breathtakingly beautiful. To Mirella, Polish Jews seem obsessed with cutlery and dishes. And they’re scandalized that Mirella dresses like any other stylish Italian woman. Are Polish men so oversexed that a glimpse of a woman’s hair can plunge them into ungovernable lust? It’s absurd.