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He bids her good day and stumps away, with one last errand to perform. “Pierino!” he calls, entering the barn.
Tercilla’s son appears, silent as a ghost. Leto sets his backpack down and pulls out an oiled rag wrapped around something heavy. “A gift from the milkman. Unfortunately, it’s air force issue from ’35. I don’t know what ammunition it needs.”
Pierino takes the Beretta.
“How many are up there now?” Leto asks.
“T-t-twenty-one,” Pierino says.
“What about food?”
“P-p-people b-bring it. N
“But enough.” Leto puts a hand on the veteran’s shoulder. “Moses was halt of tongue as well, figlio mio. Be proud to share his burden. Does your missing arm ache in all this rain and cold?”
Pierino shrugs noncommittally.
“Think of our Lord, who suffered on the cross. He knows your pain, figlio mio. So do I.” Struck by a thought, he says, “Pierino, did you hear? Last week, the Valdottavo postman was caught in a German labor sweep.”
Pierino nods but frowns: Yes. So?
“A postman with one arm,” Leto suggests, “would be of no interest to the Germans. A veteran of the war against the Soviets would be above suspicion among the repubblicani. Such a postman could travel anywhere in the valley.”
Pierino nods again, this time with a grim smile.
“I’ll speak to the district officials in Roccabarbena. It will be my honor to recommend a hero who sustained grievous injury in the service of our nation!” Leto lifts his chin toward the mountain. “There’s another recruit waiting for you up at Santa A
Pierino grabs a jacket with one sleeve amputated, its extra fabric undoubtedly harvested for other use. When the priest has helped him into it, he asks, “A b-b-blessing, P-padre?” Leto makes the sign of the cross and uses his own left hand to shake Pierino’s.
“Spring will come, figlio mio!” Leto calls, lolloping away. “We’re both alive, Pierino, and we’ve got three limbs apiece! God is not done with us yet!”
Cadenza d’Inverno
Winter 1943–44
One way and another, on every continent, a war has raged for three thousand years. Mummies, twisted by Pott’s spinal variation, have been found in Egypt’s looted graves. In the Dark Ages, the wolfish lupus gnawed at skin. When neck glands were attacked, the enemy was known as scrofula, or the King’s Evil— defeated, French peasants believed, by the touch of King Clovis, who lived briefly and died without passing his tactics on. White death, the British call it, but unlike its cousin leprosy, tuberculosis is not white. It is the Chartres blue of Robert Koch’s methylene stain, the brilliant red of arterial blood.
The field of battle is commonly the human lung, but any organ can be affected. The enemy infiltrates, takes up a defensible position, waits for weakness. Once inside the body, the bacillus is indestructible, its waxy carapace resisting the assaults of drugs and prayer. Attack and retreat, parry and riposte. Stalemate alternates with all-out offensives. Not Blitzkrieg then, but a war of attrition, often dismissed in the begi
Nineteenth-century poets, capable of romanticizing anything, adopted as fashionable the high-necked collars originally worn to hide lesions caused by strumous glands. They made consumption a sign of genius, sensitivity, refinement. No popular novel was complete without a pale young person, delicate and languid, prone to fainting fits. Prima do
Schiller, Keats, Shelley all lost their private battles. Chopin, Thoreau, Balzac, Paganini were among the famous casualties. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Anton Chekhov— physician, dramatist— died of it as well. He once coughed blood for three days and three nights, but decided the hemorrhage was “a burst artery in the throat.”
How could a doctor have missed the diagnosis? Werner Schramm once wondered, but he understands it now. He has seen starving men chew shoes and eat rats raw when the reward for survival was just another day of ceaseless labor and pitiless beatings. He himself fights for breath after agonizing breath, hating each moment of pain but desperate for the next. The soul craves hope, as the body hungers for food.
In November, he left Sant’Andrea in a coffin, dead drunk but not quite dead, packed with a decaying pigeon whose nauseating odor discouraged inspection of the coffin’s contents. “Taking him home… the family plot,” he heard Renzo say when the truck’s movement stopped. Troops at checkpoints saw a young mother who wept while an old one sat dry-eyed next to the box. Soldiers manufactured details on their own. A bereaved widow, a fatherless baby. A mother who never liked the dead son-in-law. “Sì, certo, signori. Your papers are in order. Move on.”
Schramm remembers little else from the jolting ride, beyond one short conversation, overheard. “Renzo,” the old woman said testily, “I will never understand why I let you talk me into this.” “Mamma,” her son replied, “I’m paying a debt to a surgeon who was killed in Abyssinia. He can’t collect.”
“And this surgeon can?” the younger woman asked. Renzo must have nodded.
All winter, that nameless surgeon’s beneficiary lies bundled against the cold beneath layers of wool and fur, marking time by the light on a mountain visible through a hayloft’s unglazed windows. On windless days, Schramm gazes at the peak— thoughtless, motionless, waiting for the next storm. Sometimes the snow is so fine and weightless it fills the air like fog or smoke. Twice blizzards have struck like hurricanes, lightning exploding within clouds so heavy with snow they seemed to press the air from his rattling chest.
Sweating through fever dreams, he awakens now and then to frost on his dampened blankets, and to the old woman’s hard, thin face. The young mother is like the distant moon, filling his sky briefly, at long intervals. But he knows she is near, in the small house co
You’ll spoil that child, he thinks. And then he sleeps again.
Northwestern Italy
1944
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