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“Oh, for the love of God, Claudette! Will you please shut up!”
Claudette whirls, ready to shout, “Mama told us never to say ‘shut up’!”
The words die in her mouth. For an instant she sees a dimly remembered grandfather: Zeide Blum, pallid and pasty under a gray stubble, his lips as blue as his eyes. Something’s wrong, she realizes. Not like before. Something else.
“This is stupid,” she mutters. “It’s not the Germans.”
Ignoring her father’s strangled shout, she sets off through beeches that glow like gold, their yellow leaves filtering the autumn sunlight. Dirty hair slapping at her neck, she stumbles and slides through glacial gravel and thin crumbly dirt, suffused with a reckless confidence that does not waver until she nears the shadowy edge of the woods.
The ground drops away abruptly. She ca
She reties her father’s oxfords, crouches slightly, sucks in a nervy breath. Giving herself no more time to think, she explodes from the forest, sprints through the meadow, vaults a fallen tree trunk, dashes through clumps of high, stiff autumn grass. “It’s not the Germans! It’s not the Germans!” she huffs, but she veers and ducks like a cinema cowboy dodging arrows, knees lifting high. Suddenly the shack comes into view. She alters course, sprints straight toward it. Mouth open, lungs bursting, she skids to a pebbly halt.
The apples are gone.
She groans, crumpling with disappointment. Hands on her knees, she bends to ease the cramp under her ribs, and sees two pears and a good-sized chunk of pale cheese wrapped in white muslin, on a makeshift plate of leaves. “Santino!” she shouts. “Hello? Anybody?”
Nothing. Not even birdcalls.
Working quickly, she gathers a loose bouquet of hardy wildflowers still blooming near the hut and swaps this token of thanks for the fruit and cheese. “Molte grazie!” she says loudly, just in case, and scampers up the wooded mountainside, laughing with excitement.
“Whoever it is, they decided we don’t like apples!” she yells when her father comes into view. “And they know there are two of us,” she says more quietly when she sees his face.
Hand trembling, he points with a combination of fury and relief. “Don’t you ever do that again!”
“But Papa, they left us food.”
“The people in these mountains are illiterate peasants! They’re ignorant, Claudette. Priests have been filling their heads with Christ-killer lies all of their lives!”
She bites into one of the pears and moans. “Oh, Papa! Oh, this is beautiful! This is the best pear I ever tasted!”
“They think we poison wells! They think we murder babies and use their blood to make matzoh! They hate us—”
“Name two.”
Albert blinks.
“Whenever we said ‘they,’ Mama told us to name two.” Claudette divides the lump of cheese, handing half to Albert. “Mama said if you can’t name two actual real people, then you’re just being prejudiced. So name two peasants who hate us.” She takes another bite of pear, holding his eyes with her own: ocean green and guileless in a dirt-smeared face. “Mama said.”
Albert sighs. “All right,” he says, capitulating to hunger, and to a heart-deep weariness, and to the ethical precepts of a wife whose face is more difficult to conjure as each day passes. “All right, but just this once.”
There are pears again the second day, and more of the glorious creamy cheese; tomatoes and crumbly yellow bread the following morning; a jar of milk and a pile of wild mushrooms next. Claudette pays for each small meal with a fistful of wildflowers, and on the fifth day, there is more than food.
“Papa, look what they left last night,” she calls, lugging a thick woolen cape of military green up the mountainside. “Pity it rained last night, but it didn’t get too wet.” Without waiting for a response, she flaps the blanketlike cloak and snugs it around her father with a practical dispatch that has begun to feel natural. “I saw footprints in the mud this morning,” she reports, using the handle of her toothbrush to spread the soft cheese over the cornbread’s rough surface. “It’s a child, I think, bringing us things.”
Their anonymous benefactor has been miraculously faithful, and Claudette has found windfall apples and even raspberries to supplement their diet. They have water from a little creek, but there’s never enough food. They’ve both had awful diarrhea. Her father is thi
Claudette tucks blue-nailed fingers into her armpits in a useless effort to warm her hands. “Papa, look at me!” she pleads softly. “Papa, are you sick again?”
“I–I saw Germans in that town down there,” he whispers through cracked lips, stiff with cold. “Soldiers, taking people away. The war’s not over… I— we won’t survive the winter up here. I don’t know what to do.”
She is, for once, speechless. He raises the army cape with a trembling arm so she can snuggle in beside him. For a long time they stare in silence at the river: a man of forty-nine, a girl not quite fifteen, weighing bad choices.
“We have to trust someone,” Claudette says quietly. “Whoever’s bringing the food— even if he’s only a child, he wants to help us. Let’s go down, Papa. Not all the way to the town. Just to the shack.”
“All right,” he says finally. “All right. If you think so.”
They gather their few belongings, and Claudette leads the way along the path she’s worn through vegetation crisp with frost. Often, as they descend on numbed and clumsy feet, Albert puts out a hand to steady himself on his daughter’s shoulder.
After days in the open, the ramshackle hut seems palatial— warm and windless and dry. Carefully Claudette lays a fire with plenty of tinder to catch the flame of their last match. “The war can’t last forever,” Albert whispers as she pulls the cloak around him. He is asleep before she can reply, his chest rising and falling in great heaves, laboring for breath even at rest.
All her short and willful life, Claudette Blum has tried to make her father listen to her, and now he has. Whatever happens next, she thinks, it’s on my head. She swallows hard and settles down to wait. Save your tears, she tells herself. You may need them later.
NEAR FRAZIONE GORE
Herrma
“The partisans can survive in the mountains,” Duno shouts back. “And I’m going to join them!”
“You’re still frightened of bees! You’re going to be a soldier now?”
Hugging herself with thin arms, Frieda Brössler takes no part in the argument. She does not notice the mule that snorts and shifts uneasily in the stall below. She does not listen to her husband or her son. The voice she hears is her mother-in-law’s. “De optimists, dey died in a vork camp…”
When Rivka was widowed a second time, Frieda and Herrma