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Corniglia smiles. Renzo stands, groaning when he gets up. “I can’t promise to bring your parents to you,” he says, “but I can promise I will try. Before I go… Angelo, take Stefania over to the bicycle and look in the other bag.”
The children race off. “That was beautiful,” Corniglia says.
“It’s midrash: a story behind a story in the Torah. My oldest sister told me that one when she left home to get married. She was killed last October, trying to get to Switzerland.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Chocolate!” Angelo shouts, dancing with a candy bar. “Chocolate, Suora!”
Renzo looks over his shoulder. “Angelo, you little savage! Offer Suora some!”
“Just share it with Stefania!” she calls.
“Thank you,” Renzo says quietly, “for taking care of them.”
They are not my children, she thinks, but they are a son and daughter for my use. Renzo looks at her so searchingly that she turns away, her veil shielding her eyes. “You’re not a bad fellow,” she hears him say, “for a nun.”
She glances at him. “And you’re not a bad fellow, either. For a fake priest.”
Once again, a slow grin transforms the mournful Renaissance face. Pleased, but aware that she is skirting sin, Suora Corniglia regains custody of her eyes, and keeps them on the path as she strolls with him toward the bicycle.
“Angelo,” Renzo asks, “do you have a message for your mammina?”
Angelo scrunches up his face. Teeth brown with chocolate, he looks at the monastery wall, at the ground, at the arbor. At Stefania. He squints up at his neighbor. “It’s a secret.”
Renzo leans over. Angelo rises on tiptoe, putting grubby little hands around the man’s ear. “That’s a good message,” Renzo says, when the whispering ends. “I’ll tell her that.”
Below them, at the school-yard gate, Suora Ursula rings the brass bell. Well trained, the children race down the hill, knowing the day’s outing is over. Suora Corniglia returns to the bench and retrieves Stefania’s doll, forgotten in the excitement. “You, too,” she tells Renzo, coming nearer. “Get going!”
Not caring if anyone can see them, the black-gowned Jew takes her hand and kisses it, watching her reaction. Challenged, she refuses to pull away and meets his eyes, unflustered. Vanquished, he clutches at his heart and staggers backward, as though struck by an arrow.
“Pagliaccio! Clown!” she says with affectionate reproof, as though he were one of her eight-year-olds. Hiking up the cassock, he throws a leg over the bicycle seat. While he’s busy fitting a clip around his pants leg, she impulsively removes her rosary. “To complete your disguise,” she says.
He holds out his hand, and she drops the plain black beads with their simple silver links into his palm. After a long moment, he says, “Take care, Suora Fossette.”
“I’ll pray for you, Padre Pagliaccio.” She watches him push off, her rosary in his pocket, bicycle tires grating on gravel. “Don’t get arrested!” she calls. He raises a hand without looking back, and disappears over the crest.
THE HUNCHBACK’S HOUSE
FRAZIONE DECIMO
Drying laundry snaps in the breeze. Ravens squabble in the treetops. The garden is green with seedlings. Content in his high-backed chair, Werner Schramm turns his face toward the late-spring sun. The women wear faded cotton frocks, and though he himself is wrapped in woolens to guard against a chill, he feels remarkably well. As long as he doesn’t raise his arms, there’s no chest pain at all.
He’s begun to take short walks, an ambition little Rosina now shares. Plump hands in her mother’s firm grasp, she lumbers with baby industry between Mirella’s legs. “You shouldn’t make her walk too early,” Schramm advises. “Her legs won’t grow properly.”
“Nonsense! She loves it!” Mirella bends to kiss her daughter’s silky curls, and returns undaunted to her topic. “Anyway, you don’t have to be Freud to work it out. All those stiff, raised arms. All that talk about how hard he is. He’s covering something up!”
“You’ll have to excuse Signora Soncini, Herr Schramm.” Lidia pops peas into a bowl and drops the pod into the apron stretched across her lap. “Like everyone who takes Doktor Freud seriously, she seems to have only one thing on her mind. Thank God, her husband will be visiting soon.”
“Babbo’s coming, cara mia!” Skirt ballooning, Mirella swings Rosina up and around. “He’ll see how you go flying!” she cries, delighted when the beaming baby repeats, “F’ying!”
Halfway down the mountain, a church bell tolls. Sunday Mass is over, but the parish choir is rehearsing for some saint’s festa. A polyphonic hymn floats up through air so clear and light so true, Schramm dreams again of painting. Lidia’s dark eyes in their spiderweb of parchment-colored skin. The crescent curls of Rosina’s red-gold hair. Mirella’s cheeks, like ripe peaches beneath freckles she earned planting their kitchen garden. Focus on the near, forget about the distant. War becomes a memory, a rumor, a myth…
“Admit it, Werner,” Mirella says. “Doesn’t the Führer seem sort of— I don’t know… prissy?”
Werner blinks and straightens. “He isn’t married, but there is a woman. She is never spoken of in public—”
“So every girl in Germany can dream that the Führer would choose her,” Lidia says ca
Schramm knows these two women better than his own mother or his wife. After months in this isolated house, no topic is off-limits. Female combativeness no longer shocks him, but he still hasn’t decided if it is an Italian trait, or Jewish, or simply Lidia and Mirella. His own wife, Elsa, is a bland, blond memory, but he wonders now if he ever really listened to her.
Looking up, the baby buzzes her lips like an airplane. “Airp’ane, Mamma!”
“Say prego!” both women correct reflexively, and when she does, Mirella rewards her with another swoop through the air.
Rosina is tiny but seems startlingly precocious. She can already tell birds from planes. “My boys didn’t speak so well until they were two,” Schramm says.
“Girls talk early.” Lidia hands the baby a pea pod to gum, to give Mirella a rest. “Renzo had almost nothing to say until he was almost two and a half. He’s made up for it since.”
Refusing to be sidetracked, Mirella asks, “Has Hitler’s secret woman had any secret children? Are there any little Überkinder fathered by the Führer?”
“No,” Schramm admits, “there are no children.”
“Heavens!” she says archly. “He denies his own superior germ plasm to the nation, when it’s every good Aryan’s duty to breed?”
“I think what you suggest of him is not quite correct,” Werner says delicately. “But all his energy is—” He makes a gesture suggesting a fu
He swells, Schramm thinks. He grows tumescent— larger, more powerful— before your eyes. Your heart and soul open to him, like a girl’s legs. He fills you. Nothing in the world exists but this man, his words, his voice, his power to make you believe, to adore him, to let him do as he pleases with you.