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Lidia accepts Schramm’s help, and doesn’t release his hand as they pick their way back through the forest. “They know about San Mauro,” she whispers.
“It was a message,” Schramm says. “We know where you are.”
Mirella, a few steps ahead, holds Rosina close. “Yes, cara mia, those were bad airplanes, but they’re all gone!” she soothes. “You’re such a brave girl! Everything is fine now.”
The hunchback’s house is still standing, and the ramshackle barn no worse. Schramm collapses onto his chair. Lidia sits next to him, equally drained. They watch, slack-jawed, as Mirella swoops the baby through the air.
“What noisy airplanes!” Mirella cries. “Wasn’t that fun?” she asks a doubtful Rosina, whirling until the baby’s short, sharp terror begins to yield to her mother’s insistent merriment and her own su
“Extraordinary,” Schramm says, shaking his head when Rosina repeats her mother’s “Flying!” with increasing conviction.
Lidia extracts a handkerchief from her apron pocket, presses it against a flushed and dirty face. Eyes sidelong, she considers the winded German beside her while dabbing at the trickle of sweat slipping down her crepey throat.
Schramm looks down the gravel path that leads toward San Mauro. “Someone’s coming,” he says.
“It’s Don Leto!” Mirella shouts joyously, swinging Rosina around and around. “That means Babbino’s in San Mauro, cara mia! We’re going to see your babbo again, and your big brother!”
A black-clad figure is hobbling hurriedly up the gravel path, and there’s something familiar about the man, but— “That’s not Don Leto,” Schramm says. “The limp is wrong.”
Lidia shades her eyes with both hands. “Old as I am,” she notes drily, “there are occasions when I am forcibly reminded that I have not yet seen everything. That’s my son. In a cassock.”
Renzo waves to them briefly before Mirella reaches him. Hands on her shoulders, he speaks quietly and at some length. Mirella puts the baby down, and sits heavily on a tree stump. Rosina babbles. Mirella sketches a smile, her face crumpling as Rosina crawls off to play.
“Her husband,” Schramm supposes.
“Poveretta,” Lidia whispers.
Leaving Mirella, Renzo approaches, limping heavily. “Schramm! You’re looking less cadaverous! And Mamma.” He kisses the thin-ski
She reaches out to grip his hand. The long, uneven breath he exhales is the only sign of the dread that drove him to sprint the last half kilometer up this mountain. “Iacopo?” she asks.
“Arrested. Just bad luck: he was raked up with forty other hostages.” Still trying to get his breath back, Renzo unbuttons the cassock and tosses the sweaty woolen garment over the laundry line. “Mamma, exactly how bored are you—?”
“Don’t move,” she says.
Schramm and Renzo follow her stare. Half-buried in the soft soil of the garden, the bomb’s stablizing propeller rotates slowly in the breeze. Straddling it, arms wide, Rosina makes buzzing noises with her lips. “Airp’ane!” she a
Lidia fastens a clawlike hand on Renzo’s arm. “She doesn’t know you. I’ll go. Keep Mirella away.”
Mirella hears her name, sees Rosina, rushes toward her. Renzo blocks her path. “No!” she screams, struggling as Renzo lifts her off her feet. “Rosina, no!”
Lidia moves steadily through the garden. When she is close enough to hear ticking, she glances over her shoulder. Schramm and Renzo have manhandled Mirella behind the hunchback’s house. Bending at the knees amid feathery carrot seedlings, Lidia points toward the sky. “Rosina!” she says. “See the airplane?”
The baby looks up. Lidia seizes the child under the arms, steps over the bomb, and starts for the stone barn. The ticking pauses. The baby is heavy but Lidia hurries, thin old legs stumping along decisively.
They’re just inside the door when the blast lifts her off her feet for a weird, short sail through the air. There is no sensation of impact, only the need to keep Rosina in her arms. Her shoulder goes numb when she hits a bale of hay, but she hangs on, curling around the baby while they’re pelted by stones and dirt.
Straw is still falling when the others reach her. Schramm stoops to feel along Rosina’s limbs. The baby is crying, but there’s no blood, and she’s safe now in her sobbing mother’s arms. Ears ringing, Lidia reads Schramm’s bleached, anxious face, his moving lips: She’s fine. She’s fine! Are you all right? “Yes, I think so,” Lidia says, faintly amazed by the whole experience. She will be badly bruised, no doubt, but she’s too keyed up to feel pain.
Renzo helps her stand, holds her briefly. Schramm looks more shaken than she feels, and says something. Lidia taps her ears and shakes her head. “I can’t hear you!”
They make her sit on a hay bale. She paws bits of straw from her hair while Schramm examines her. Renzo spots her spectacles, straightens the frames, and puts them on her face. Still laughing, she catches sight of the view beyond the barn, and her face loses its shape.
The garden is a crater. The chairs she and Schramm sat in a minute ago: vaporized. The laundry posts have remained upright, the rope bizarrely in place. Renzo’s cassock lies twenty meters away, unscorched, in the weeds. Diapers smolder nearby. Smoking-hot chunks of metal are everywhere: jammed between the stones of the house and barn, embedded in trees, littering the ground. “A miracle!” she says, stupefied. “A miracle.”
Werner Schramm has witnessed the phenomenon in others many times: the buckling knees, the helpless weeping. Under fire, your training takes over. When the danger’s past, the shaking and crying begin. Renzo stands behind Lidia, his hands on her shoulders, both of them taking in the devastation. Mirella’s forearm makes a seat for Rosina’s bottom. Her other hand cups the back of her baby’s head, fingers lost in red-gold curls. So ordinary. So normal. But they might have died half a minute ago…
Schramm wipes his eyes, ashamed of going to pieces. “Cataplexy,” Schramm tells the others, tears spilling. “It’s nothing. Reaction. Truly. Just reaction.” But the recoil intensifies as he looks from face to face. Lidia. Renzo. Mirella. Concerned. Understanding. Sympathetic. The faces blur. He knows who they are, but he ca
Sinking in a heap on the packed dirt of the barn floor, he gives himself up to the weeping, until he hasn’t strength for more. Finally, exhausted and empty, he pulls himself together and sees two adolescent boys. Out of breath from their long run, they stare at what’s left of Mirella’s garden. Lidia goes to them. A hurried conversation, and she points to Schramm. They come toward him, their anxious faces pinched by shock. They take his arms, lift him to his feet, pull him toward a path that leads to the Cave of San Mauro.
“You have to come!” they are saying. “We need a doctor!”
The sun has dropped behind the mountains on the other side of the valley when Renzo emerges from the hut with the household’s sole remaining chair. He settles it onto a patch of level ground, making a courtier’s sweeping gesture, and Lidia accepts the seat. They are alone. Rosina is napping, Mirella beside her. Schramm, depleted by the events of the day, has sent word from the cave that he’ll stay tonight with the San Mauro Brigade, which has sustained its first casualty.
Renzo shakes a cigarette from a package of Nazionales and offers it to Lidia. “What happened to that silver cigarette case?” she asks.
“Sold it.” He leans over with a match. “I sold Zia Elena’s credenza, too.”
She dismisses the news with a queenly wave. “All that carving! Made me think of skin diseases.”
Cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth, he lowers himself to the weedy ground, using his hands to ease his knees as he stretches out. She holds her own breath until he leans back on his elbows and his face relaxes. Smoking in companionable silence, they watch a flock of swallows dive murderously through clouds of insects.