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“The last tenant was a hunchback,” Mirella tells him. “Tuberculosis of the spine, I think you’d call it. People around here are still frightened of the house. It’s been empty for years.”
“I am probably not contagious anymore, but are you not concerned?”
“My uncle died of tuberculosis when I was fifteen. He lived with us when I was a child.” She sets the baby back into the cradle. Astonished, Rosina produces a scowl of imperial displeasure, large brown eyes following her mother’s move toward the iron pot hanging in the open hearth. “X-rays show spots on my lungs, but they’re encapsulated.” Mirella tucks her apron between her legs, to keep the fabric away from the fire, and ladles thin soup into a thick pottery bowl. “Renzo explained about keeping the windows open and so on. And Rosina is upwind.” She brings the bowl and a wooden spoon to him. “The soup’s very bland, I’m afraid. Salt is like gold these days. Your Italian is quite good. Did you study Latin?”
“Yes, in school.”
“And your accent is Florentine.”
“I spent a year in Florence when I was young. Words come back to me. I worked hard last fall to remember the grammar.” She steps to the window. Light from the setting sun makes a nimbus of her hair. “It must be close to the equinox,” he remarks, waiting for the broth to cool.
“Yes— it’s March already! Friday, the seventeenth, I think. Easy to lose track up here.”
An experimental howl issues from the cradle. Mirella takes an oil lamp from the top of the cupboard and puts it next to the one already on the table. She doesn’t light either, though it’s getting dark. Rosina begins to wail. Mirella stoops to lift her.
“Don’t pick her up!” Schramm says sharply.
“Why on earth not? She’s probably hungry.”
“She should wait. It’s good for her.”
“I can’t imagine how. She’s not a prioress fasting her way into heaven.”
“You should put her on a feeding schedule,” he insists, eyes averted as Mirella tosses a cloth over her shoulder and unbuttons her blouse behind it. “If you pick her up, she’ll cry for what she wants.”
“German babies submit their requests in writing, I suppose.”
Rosina snorts and gulps and snuffles before settling in to nurse steadily. Schramm, too, concentrates on feeding himself. By the time he pushes the empty bowl aside, the spoon feels as heavy as a shovel. Leaning on the tabletop, he gazes at Mirella. “You look so familiar…”
Wryly, she strikes a pose with Rosina. “Have you been to the Staatliche Museum in Berlin?”
“That’s it! The Botticelli—”
“Mado
Looking at her, Schramm realizes the full genius of the painter, who captured the ordinary tiredness of a pretty mother who’s breast-fed for six months, and whose Son still wakes up most nights. “The resemblance is strong,” he says.
“It’s a lovely story, but…” She shakes her head.
“Inheritance halves each generation,” Schramm agrees. “There would be little continuity over four centuries.” He had forgotten the pleasures of conversation. “So! You don’t like Germans. You don’t approve of the Allies. What are your politics?”
In a singsong voice, she tells Rosina, “Mamma thinks politicians are frauds at best, and tyrants, given half a chance, cara mia, but kings can be decorative and useful!” She smiles at Schramm. “Renzo calls me an anarcho-monarchist.”
“Are you the one who wouldn’t marry him?”
“He told you that?” She seems surprised. “It was a long time ago.” The sated, sleepy baby quiets, and Mirella lays her in the cradle, humming softly. Standing at the window, her back to Schramm, she buttons her blouse. “Sun’s almost down!” she says, shivering.
“I should get back to the barn so you can close these windows.”
“Prego. Stay awhile more.” She brings a loaf of chestnut bread from the cupboard to the table, and then a bottle of local wine and two small glasses. “The bread’s overdone. I haven’t quite grasped the nuances of baking on a hearth.” Snapping a straw from a broom by the fireplace, she presses the end on a coal, then uses it as a match to light the two oil lamps. A tendril of smoke rises when she blows the straw’s flame out. Without a word of explanation, she closes her eyes and holds her hands before them. “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheynu melech ha-olam…”
Friday. Sunset. The unfamiliar language. “You’re Jewish!”
Her eyes open. “Sì, certo! Didn’t you know?”
“I thought you must be Catholic. Renzo said you didn’t marry because of religious differences.”
Mirella shakes her head as though to clear it. “I married a rabbi. That could be construed as a religious difference,” she says, pouring the wine. “Ordinarily, the husband says the next blessing, but these are not ordinary times.” Another chanted prayer and she hands Schramm a glass. “Loosely translated,” she informs him, “that one means, Thank God grapes ferment.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he says.
“A moment longer.” She places her hand on the bread and sings a third prayer before breaking the loaf into pieces and giving Schramm a share. “L’chaim!” she says, raising her glass. “To life!”
Schramm reaches gingerly across the table to clink glasses. “If you’re Jewish, then why didn’t you marry him?”
She chews and swallows before answering. “Have you ever read Svevo? Like Balli, Renzo loves women very much, but all of them equally, and only when he’s in the mood.” She sips the wine. “I wanted a more settled life than he was likely to provide. Now look at me! On a mountaintop, in a hunchback’s cabin, with a German officer. Not the bourgeois domesticity I envisioned.” She breaks off a smaller piece of bread thoughtfully. “And when Renzo came back from Abyssinia, he was… different. Herr Schramm, do you understand why he drinks so much?”
Schramm puts his glass down. Looks away. “Yes,” he says. “I believe I do.”
The storm that night is silent but relentless. By morning the entire valley is enveloped in the peculiar hush of deep spring snow. With Rosina and Schramm still asleep, Mirella is happy to lose herself in small tasks. She swings the pot of soup back over the coals, and nudges a kettle of water closer to the heat. She did as many chores as possible before sundown last night, but she has to tend the fire or they’ll freeze. The Polish Hasidim would be scandalized, but Mirella suspects that in ancient times women never had a genuine day of rest.
Thanks to Renzo’s contacts, she has real coffee beans and a grinder. She pours boiling water over the grounds and steeps them like a Turk. While they settle, she hurries out to the privy, shuffling through the snow to clear a path. When she returns, the full fragrance greets her, and she pours carefully, savoring the quiet. Thank God for simple gifts, she thinks. I am alive and well rested, with a cup of coffee to warm my hands and raise my spirits.
For nearly a week after Renzo brought the four of them to Decimo, Mirella was all but unconscious. She slept, woke to nurse Rosina, and slept again. A husband, three pregnancies, small children: there was a time when Mirella Soncini could count on one hand the nights of sound sleep she’d had since 1935. When the war began, things got worse.
Screamed awake by sirens, she and Iacopo would leap from bed, grab the children, and run to a shelter. When the all-clear sounded, her relief at seeing her own home intact was always blighted by others’ losses. Iacopo would hurry off to comfort the bereaved, leaving Mirella to face the tedium of clearing away the dust and grit and ash blown in from the harbor, again and again and again.
Even if there was no attack, she had to be up early to do the marketing before everything was gone. Her youth has been squandered in queues, shuffling forward step by step to claim a kilo of greenish potatoes at one store, the children’s milk ration at another, the family’s bread ration at a third. The only thing she could predict was the shortage of something basic: oil, sugar, eggs, salt, pasta, rice. Three meals a day to get on the table, and every one a struggle.