Страница 50 из 109
March 1944
FRAZIONE DECIMO
VALDOTTAVO
“Where is the other lady?” Schramm asks when the young woman appears two days in a row.
She sets a basin filled with warm water onto the floor, pushes the hayloft shutters fully open, stands outlined by the sunshine. For the first time since they arrived here, the breeze carries no knife. “Signora Savoca took advantage of the weather. She’s down in San Mauro for a few days.”
“The signora is your mother?”
“Stefano’s. The man who brought you here?” she prompts. “Stefano Savoca?”
“He said his name was Renzo.”
She calls herself Marisa. Lovely, even if it’s not her real name. He knows almost nothing about her except that she is gentle, and he is half in love. A weakened man. A pretty nurse who is not contemptuous of that weakness. The situation is banal, and she counters it by making herself sisterly: casual and matter-of-fact in caring for him. Staying windward, she pulls his blankets off and airs them over a laundry line strung between the house and barn. Returning to his bedside, she makes a move for the sheet. Well enough to be startled, he snatches it back.
Dipping a rag into the water, she wrings it out. “Herr Schramm, you are in Italy,” she reminds him, washing his face, neck, chest. “No country on earth is more densely populated by male nudes. Nuns in Florence know more about reproductive anatomy than whores in Marseilles!”
He stares.
“Sometimes I forget you’re German. That was a joke,” she says, resoaping the rag. “Should I have applied for a permit before I told it?” He smiles, and she hands the washcloth to him. “You’re well enough to do the parts that make nuns blush.” She leaves the hayloft with his chamber pot. “How old is your baby?” he asks when she returns.
“Rosina?” Marisa pauses to count. “Six months! Imagine that!” She busies herself, using a clean handkerchief over her hands to collect the dirty ones she’ll boil. “No blood for three weeks!” she notes. “Signora Savoca is right. You’re going to live.”
“Life is full of missed opportunities.” It’s her turn to stare. “A joke,” he says.
“Next time, get a permit!” Marisa stoops to give the washrag one last swish, twists it nearly dry. “I’ll bring soup later,” she says, flinging washwater out the window. The clothesline pulley squeaks as she reels the line in.
“I should begin to walk a little. Tomorrow perhaps.”
She pauses, a blanket over her arm. “Why not today?”
That afternoon, she brings him a paisley robe that must have been Renzo’s and helps him to the edge of the bed. Spent, he sits, rests, then manages a few steps on shaking legs. After his soup he tries again, and with Marisa’s encouragement, he crosses the hayloft to a chair and back before they hear the baby’s waking wail.
“Mamma’s coming, cara mia!” Marisa calls. “If the weather holds,” she tells Schramm, “I’ll open up the house tomorrow. You can come down for a visit.”
The clouds pile up overnight, but the temperature stays warm enough for rain, and a change of scenery is a powerful incentive. With frequent stops, Marisa guides him across the sloping covered passage that co
“Terra nova!” she says. “Do you feel like Columbus?”
A pedal-powered sewing machine sits on a sturdy worktable under the window, where the pale winter light is best. An oil lamp hangs from a metal chain in the center of the ceiling. Suspended from a tripod in the open hearth: an iron pot. The fire’s been built up, to counteract a chilly breeze through the open door. A cupboard holds a jug of olive oil, a bottle of wine, and three slumping burlap sacks— cornmeal, dried chickpeas, and chestnut flour. Rafters, posts, door, and windowframes— all retain the shape and color of the branch or trunk from which they were hewn. The house is simple, but beautiful in its way. Long ago, someone plastered its thick stone walls, and these have been adorned with trompe l’oeil windows that reveal summer landscapes or the sea—
“Mirella,” his hostess says firmly.
“Scusi?”
“My real name is Mirella. The other lady is Lidia.”
“Grazie,” he says, touched by her trust. He lifts a hand toward the walls. “Are you the artist?”
“More artisan than artist. My father was a stuccatore—a specialist in fresco restoration. He started me on forced perspective when I was very young. My son’s age, now that I think of it. Angelo’s almost eight.”
“I have a boy that age! And another, of six years. They are Klaus and Erwin. Where is your son?”
“In a boarding school. He was safer there, away from the bombing. My husband couldn’t leave his work. He’s still in Sant’Andrea.”
“And this is Rosina,” Schramm says. Her cradle is on the floor, near the fire and as far from the sick man as it can be in this tiny house. Arms flailing, legs pumping at a restraining blanket, she is practicing B’s: “Bub, bub bub.”
“You must miss your family, Herr Schramm.”
“Yes. As you do, no doubt.”
They glance at each other, and Mirella clears her throat. An unspoken agreement is reached: they will not speak of absent family. The emotions are too raw, tears too close.
“Trompe l’oeil is very common in Liguria,” Schramm observes.
“Painters are cheaper than masons and sculptors.”
“It’s also cheaper to employ relatives than strangers, I think.”
She smiles. “My father had me bagging pigments when I was four! I loved the blues: lapis lazuli, cobalt, ultramarine. All I have here are pastels, but the colors please Rosina.”
“Signora Savoca has not returned?”
“No, and I expected her back by now.”
“She hates me, I think.”
“Bub, bub, bub. Bub!” the baby shouts, thrilled by her own volume.
“Signora Savoca lost children to influenza in 1918.” Mirella picks Rosina up and bubs back at her for a time. “She thinks Bayer aspirin was poisoned. Her theory is that Germans were exacting revenge for their defeat in the Great War.”
“That’s absurd!”
She smiles at the baby. “Two of her older girls took the aspirin. They died. The youngest children didn’t. They lived.”
“Coincidence.”
“Probably.” Mirella plants noisy kisses on chubby cheeks, her eyes on Schramm. “Distressing to be hated because of lies, isn’t it.”
He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Especially when there are so many legitimate reasons to be hated.”
“You people do keep starting wars,” she says tartly. “Every family in Italy has lost men because of Germany, and this occupation isn’t helping your reputation.”
“I imagine it would make a nice change if we tried tourism.”
She laughs, genuinely amused. “The Allies aren’t especially popular here either. They leveled Monte Cassino a few weeks ago.”
“For God’s sake, why?” Sitting on a hill between Naples and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery was the jewel of medieval Italy.
“The Americans said the Wehrmacht was calling in artillery strikes from the abbey. The Germans deny it. Either way, it’s gone.” She jounces Rosina on her knee. “The Allies are still south of Rome. On the other hand,” she reports cheerfully, “the Russians have pushed your panzers all the way back to Poland! And there’ve been huge bombing raids on Berlin and Cologne— Dio mio, I’m so sorry! Do you have family there?”
“They are in Freiburg.”
“Then they’re all right,” she says, awkwardly.
“Probably.” Schramm turns his attention to a hand-carved crutch hanging from a hook by the front door.