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Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination. She would stay at Iacopo’s side, even if that meant huddling in bomb shelters. She would give Angelo the courage to enjoy the excitement of a raid, even if her own heart pounded with fear. She would teach herself to appreciate moments of fleeting peace. The feel of her son’s cheek against her own. The taste of a fresh tomato. The weight of her sleeping husband’s hand on her breast.
Since leaving home, Mirella’s longing for Iacopo and Angelo has been keen and constant, but there are compensations here. Without the demands of congregational life, she’s been free to spend hours with Rosina, gazing at her daughter’s perfect little body, playing with her, singing to her, watching her grow. In this small, safe place, Mirella can keep order and count on a routine. For her, the solitude and silence of the mountain are daily pleasures.
Lidia, by contrast, has been as restless as a dog on a chain, and craves politics more than fresh fruit. Once or twice a month, Renzo hauls supplies up the mountain, including a stack of newspapers: La Stampa, L’Italia Libera, Gazzetta del Popolo, Avanti! As welcome as he is, Mirella dreads his visits. She herself prefers any sort of book to current events and hates the political wrangles Renzo and his mother get into.
She shivers, notices the fire, adds a bit more wood. Pulls the blanket over Rosina’s cradle and opens the shutters to reel in a few diapers, dried crinkly-stiff on the line. Back in Sant’Andrea, Mirella never thought about the peasant laundresses who came into towns and carried off huge baskets of linen. A knock on the door, a shy smile, a few lire pressed gratefully into a rough, chapped palm. A week later, jumbled sheets and shirts and underthings, soiled and smelly, were transformed into neatly folded, beautifully pressed stacks of cleanliness.
Since coming here, her cracked, red hands and aching back have taught Mirella to respect the work behind so many things city people take for granted. “Now you understand!” Don Leto said happily. “You know the people, and you know their labor! When I was young, I kept accounts for our landlord and found out how little his tenants got. The contadini raise rabbits and pigs for his table. They live on polenta. Polenta with beans, polenta with potatoes, polenta with cheese or milk, but always polenta.”
Renzo made her look at things with a shrewder eye. “Peasants aren’t stupid, Mirella. They’ve got rabbits and chickens in pens hidden in the woods. Almost everyone keeps a piglet aside— where do you think they get their sausage? Most of these houses have false walls for wine and olive oil left off the inventory.”
“The padrone steals big, the contadini steal small,” Don Leto said when she asked him about that. “When larceny and lying are a way of life, the sin is the landlord’s. You can see for yourself the effects of poverty. Children grow up stunted in mind and body. When everyone in a family must work so hard, no one can stop to think of a better way.”
Lidia is convinced that the Communists have a better way. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need. No landlords living off the misery of sharecroppers. Workers sharing equitably in the fruits of their labor. Lidia is thrilled by the courage of factory workers in Milan and Turin. Daring the fascisti to break their strikes, they mean to starve the Nazi war machine. This much Renzo was willing to commend, but when his mother praised the Soviets’ stupendous military production, he snorted. “Do you know how Stalin taught Russian peasants to show up at factory jobs on time? He had the ones who were late shot. So much for the people’s paradise, Mamma.”
What are your politics? Schramm asked last night.
Mirella answered with a joke, but the truth is that she doesn’t trust her own opinions. As a child, she reveled in the pageantry surrounding Benito Mussolini. He was as handsome as a storybook prince, and he rode a beautiful white horse. Her father believed in il Duce’s greatness and in the Fascist drive to make unified Italy a world power. She loved her father, so she believed what he believed, flattered when he talked to her like a grown-up. When someone questioned why Italian sons and taxes should be squandered on an African adventure, her father supported the Abyssinian war. “Italy’s destiny is to rule lesser nations! And let no one question our loyalty! Jews have always been and will always be a part of the national glory.”
For all her father’s political passion, when Mirella turned seventeen, it was not empire that enthralled her but Iacopo Soncini. And it was not war that frightened her but Renzo Leoni. “Mirella, there’s a sky above the sky! Let me show it to you,” he pleaded. There were currents in the ocean of air above the world, he told her. Rivers of wind carving valleys into a countryside of cloud, a geography of blue and gold and white. “One quick flight, Mirella. No barrel rolls, I swear! And I’ll land her like a kiss.”
Why did she refuse?
Above her, the roof slates have warmed. A chunk of snow slides off noisily, hitting the ground with a slushy thud. Rosina wakes up with a wail. Mirella sets her thoughts and coffee cup aside. The day begins in earnest, with all its necessary tasks, Shabbat or not. She has no more time to think while the sun is up.
Hours later, her day ends as usual. She checks on Werner, banks the fire, kisses Rosina’s forehead one last time, and crawls onto her own lumpy mattress, pulling three woolen blankets up to cover her shoulders. Ordinarily she falls asleep with grateful ease, but tonight, she watches firelight on the shallow vaulted ceiling and thinks again of the men she chose between.
Soft-bodied, soft-spoken, the scholar she married now lives like a spy in his native land. Braving checkpoints with false papers, open to denunciation at any moment, Iacopo risks his life to bring comfort and wisdom to frightened foreigners who expect from moment to moment to be found out, sold out, bombed out, burned out of their hiding places. The once-dashing pilot came home from Africa with a hero’s medal, and a thirst for grappa that seems unquenchable. Why had she heard Iacopo’s hesitant proposal of marriage more clearly than Renzo’s call to courage? Was it a failure of nerve or a triumph of common sense? If she had married Renzo, would his life be better, or her own life worse?
God knows, she thinks turning over, but God be blessed: at seventeen, I made the right decision.
BORGO SAN MAURO
“Will you look at that! And her, named for the Virgin!” Adele Toselli whispers, scandalized in gray morning light. “How could her parents let her out of the house in that skirt!”
“She probably rolls the waistband after she leaves.” Lidia moves the curtain slightly. “Watch the soldiers.”
Adele sighs. “Can you remember the last time a man looked at you like that?”
“December 13, 1898.” Lidia lets the curtain fall. “Nobody ever watches old women, and that’s what we can use against them.” When Adele hesitates, Lidia asks, “Do you know what the Germans call us? Alte schwarze Krähen—old black crows.”
Widowed before God gave her children, Adele Toselli has worn mourning and served the priests of San Mauro for over fifty years. There was gossip in the begi
“You’re sure you know what to do?” she asks Lidia.
“Cara mia, I heard more about engines at my di
Adele drums arthritic fingers on a table she has scrubbed for half a century. “Why not? Why not!”