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Concentrating, Duno hardly hears the shout of pain when he slices through the bruise. Two more passes through granulated blood, and the blade strikes lead. “Hold as still as you can,” Duno says, using the knifepoint to midwife a slug through his incision. The man gasps, shudders convulsively, goes limp.
“Just as well,” Duno remarks, popping the bullet out. “Easier to sew when they’re unconscious.” He cleans the entry and exit wounds again, painting them with iodine, suturing. “This isn’t so bad, really. I’ve seen bullets pulverize the bone, rip the arteries, blow big chunks out of the meat.” Duno glances up. “Sorry, Rabbino. Put your head between your knees.”
With the leg bandaged, Duno starts digging grit out of the face, hoping to be done before the man comes to. It’s tedious work. “Somebody told me this is la no
“He is,” the rabbi says. “Was. She’s dead.”
Duno’s hands freeze. He looks down, and realizes that the wounded man is awake beneath his fingers. “How?”
“Cross fire,” Renzo Leoni says. “Finish wha’ you’re doing.”
They move him twice, maybe three times. Always at night. The moon is quartered once, gibbous the next time. For a while, he’s hidden in a wine cellar, where cool, moist air does battle with a fever that threatens to burn him to the ground. Iacopo seems never to leave his side.
“Where’s Mirella?” Renzo asks.
“Suora Corniglia found a place for her and the children. She sends her love. Drink this. Then rest.”
“Go home. Go… wherever they are. Leave me alone.”
An outdoor bivouac, next. Shards of sunlight shattered by twisting leaves, falling like glass into eyes emerging from bruised lids. The Austrian boy comes and goes. Once Jakub Landau visits with a delegation from the CNL, hoping to recruit la no
Days become weeks. She sends her love. Mirella? Or Sister Dimples…
He hears conversations. Actions taken, casualties sustained and inflicted. Now and then, an adolescent comes near, pats his shoulder, and says, “I got one for her, comrade.”
By August, he can walk with a crutch. They move to Castello Rita
One day Schramm appears in a stone doorway, comes close, kneels at Renzo’s side. The German is professional at first. “Straighten the leg. Good. Flex it, so… Yes. Excellent.” Fingers probe the wounds. Renzo’s face is turned from side to side, its pitted, livid surface inspected. “The boy did a good job.” Schramm rocks onto bony haunches. “I am sorry about your mother, my friend. She was a remarkable woman.”
What is there to say?
September 1944
FRAZIONE SANTA CHIARA
VALDOTTAVO
16 SEPTEMBER
The first time she saw the blood, she thought that she was dying. Her father was still alive then, and Claudia ran to him, weeping, but he turned away from her distress. Tercilla Lovera rushed from the henhouse to see what the trouble was. Albert Blum elbowed his daughter. “Tell her,” he mumbled, and hurried off, embarrassed.
Tercilla listened, wiped her rough hands on a worn apron, and put horny palms on either side of Claudia’s wet cheeks. “Cara mia,” she said, “nobody ever dies of a nuisance.” That was the good news. The bad news was, it would happen every month, over and over. For years. “If it stops,” Tercilla warned, “you’re going to have a baby.”
Wonderful, Claudia thought while Tercilla taught her how to fold the rags. War isn’t enough? I have this to worry about, too?
A day or two later, Pierino brought home a set of safety pins he bought at Tino Marrapodi’s store. The pins made things easier, but Claudia couldn’t look Pierino in the eye for a week.
From then on, when she and Bettina walked down to barter cheese for pasta at Marrapodi’s, old men looked up from their cards or touched their caps when Claudia passed. Sometimes if she looked over her shoulder, she saw them measuring her hips with their eyes. “You’re a woman now,” Zia Tercilla told her. “Like Caesar’s wife, you must be above reproach, or men take advantage.”
The month her father died, Claudia herself was so sick with typhus that the bleeding didn’t come. Bereft, feeble, wretched, she sobbed, “I don’t… want to have… a baby. Papa’s gone! And I’m… too young!” So Zia Tercilla explained the rest. “Is that all?” Claudia demanded with soggy resentment. “Are there any other little surprises?”
“Wipe your nose,” Tercilla said. “The surprise is, it can be nice, if you have a good man like my Domenico.”
By late spring, things were back to normal, and while Claudia wasn’t exactly glad, she welcomed evidence that she had her health back. Kneeling now on a broad, flat rock at creekside, she weights her rags with stones and lets the water start her work. Washing them is a distasteful chore, but she’s gotten used to it. Like squatting on a pair of planks to relieve herself above a public cesspool, the nuisance and mess are simply part of life in Valdottavo.
It’s a life she’s made peace with, a life she feels ready for. She’s worked beside Tercilla and Bettina for nearly a year, kneading bread dough, sorting dried beans, beating flax, spi
There’s time, Claudia tells herself firmly. I’ll learn what I need to know.
She and Santino will always be different— a Jew, a Calabrian. They will be without blood ties in the valley, but they won’t have a legacy of grudges and suspicion to overcome either. After the war, Santino will be a sought-after mason. Claudia is already a member of the community: Tercilla’s honorary niece, cousin to Bettina and Pierino. People on Pierino’s postal route say, “Ei! postino! Send your cugina Claudia to write for us!” Pierino can read, haltingly, the rare letters he delivers— you don’t need a right hand for that— but Claudia does the writing.
The letters are nearly all the same. “Dear Son, we have no word of you since 1942. It’s summer, so we don’t worry now that you have no blanket. We pray to the Mado
Parents nod gravely when Claudia reads their words back to them and watch solemnly as she folds the letter into its flimsy envelope, inscribing it with the last known address of their missing boy. In return for the paper, the ink, and her trouble, they give Claudia an egg or a bit of cheese, and offer prayers for her fidanzato Santino. Claudia, too, has a man at risk.
She worries about Santino, naturally, but in a way that feels pleasingly adult and serious, and anyway, the war will be over by Christmas; that’s what everyone says. Sitting back on her heels, she lays a sliver of soap next to twists of cloth, stacked like cordwood on a dry rock. “Ecco!” she says to no one. “That’s done for another month.”
The skin beneath her breasts is greasy with sweat. She looks around, listening, but hears only the raucous rattle of cicadas. Satisfied that she’s alone, she quickly strips off her blouse and leans out over the creek, still slightly amazed by her own body. She scoops cool water over her breasts, onto her face, down her neck, into her armpits. Hiking up her skirt, she squats to soap between her legs. This is why Mama went to the mikveh every month! she realizes. To feel clean. To start time ticking again.