Angelo groaned, the memory making his stomach twist. Oh, the irony. Oh, the incredible, terrible irony. He too had risked everything, and he may have lost the only thing he would trade his immortality for.
As dawn started to creep into the eastern sky, pale light falling over spires and campaniles onto the Eternal City, Angelo finally reached the gates of Santa Cecilia. The bells of Lauds began to ring, as if to welcome him back, but Angelo could only cling to the iron spires and pray that, by some miracle, Eva waited for him inside.
Mother Francesca discovered him a few minutes later, sitting with his back against the gate as if he’d been propped there by Satan’s henchmen. She must have thought he was dead, because she cried out in horror, crossing herself as she ran for assistance. Angelo was too tired to reassure her.
He watched through swollen lids as Mario Sonnino appeared above him, checking his pulse and crying out instructions to several others to carry him inside.
“It’s not safe.” Angelo struggled to speak. Mario was not safe outside the gate. Mario was not safe inside the gate.
“Someone could see you,” Angelo tried to warn him, but the words were sloppy on his lips.
“Take him up the stairs to Eva’s room!” Mario commanded.
“Where’s Eva?” Angelo asked, forcing the words out, needing to know.
No one answered him. They took the stairs quickly, and Angelo cried out as his ribs protested the motion. He was laid carefully on the bed, and Eva’s scent rose up around him.
“Eva?” he asked again, louder this time. He peered through the eye that wasn’t completely swollen shut, trying to see, but the shapes were blurred and the people were ominously silent.
“We haven’t seen her for three days, Angelo,” Mario finally answered. “The Germans took her.”
24 March, 1944
Via Tasso
Confession: My name is Batsheva Rosselli, not Eva Bianco, and I am a Jew. Angelo Bianco is not my brother but a priest who wanted only to protect me from the very place I now find myself.
The first time I met Angelo, he was a child. Like me. A child with eyes that had known too much disappointment for someone so young. He didn’t speak for a long time after he arrived in Italy. He just watched. I thought it was because he was American. I thought it was because he didn’t understand. It makes me laugh a little to think of it now, how I would act things out and speak so loudly, as if there were something wrong with his ears. I would dance around him, playing my violin and singing little songs, just to see if he would smile. When he did, I would hug him and kiss his cheeks. There was nothing wrong with his ears or his comprehension. He understood me perfectly. He was just listening. Observing. Learning.
Camillo, my very patient father, would tell me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t. I realize now how the pattern never changed. I danced around him for years, trying to get his attention, wanting only to see him smile. Wanting only to be near him, wanting only to love him and be loved by him. I was rebelling even then, pushing back against the fear, though I didn’t recognize it. Rebellion was always my biggest ally, though sometimes I hated her. She looked like me and hurt like me, but she wouldn’t let me give up. And when fear took my reasons for fighting, rebellion gave them back.
My father told me once that we are on earth to learn. God wants us to receive everything that life was meant to teach. Then we take what we’ve learned, and it becomes our offering to God and to mankind. But we have to live in order to learn. And sometimes we have to fight in order to live.
This is my offering. These are the lessons I learned, the tiny acts of rebellion that kept me alive, and the love that fed my hope, when I had nothing but hope itself.
Eva Rosselli
1929
CHAPTER 1
FLORENCE
“Santino has a grandson. Did you know that?” Eva’s father asked.
“Nonno has a grandson?” Eva asked.
“Yes, Nonno. Though he isn’t really your nonno. You know that too, don’t you?”
“He is my nonno, because he loves me so much,” Eva reasoned.
“Yes, but he isn’t my father, and he wasn’t your mamma’s father. So he isn’t your grandfather,” her father explained patiently.
“Yes, Babbo. I know,” Eva said crossly, not at all sure why he insisted. “So Fabia isn’t really my grandmother.” It felt like a lie to say such a thing out loud.
“Yes. Exactly. Santino and Fabia had a son, you see. He left Florence and went to America when he was a young man, because there was more opportunity for him there. He married an American girl, and they had a little boy.”
“How old is the boy?”
“Eleven or twelve. He is a couple of years older than you.”
“What’s his name?”
“His name is Angelo, like his father, I think. But, please, Batsheva, listen for a moment. Stop interrupting.” Eva’s babbo only used her long name when he was growing impatient, so she listened and held her tongue.
“Angelo’s mother died,” he said sadly.
“Is that why Nonna was crying yesterday when she read her telegram?” Eva had already forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to interrupt.
“Yes. Santino and Fabia want their son to bring the boy to Italy. He has had some medical problems, an issue with his leg, apparently. They want him to live here. With us. At least for a while. Santino’s older brother is a priest, and they think the boy can go to the seminary here in Florence. He is a little old to start, but he was in a Catholic school in America, so he won’t be too far behind. He may even be advanced.” Her father said this as if he were thinking out loud, rather than communicating anything Eva actually needed to hear. “And I will help where I can,” he mused.
“We will be friends, I think,” Eva said. “Because we have both lost our mothers.”
“This is true. And he will need a friend, Eva.”
Eva couldn’t remember her mother. She died of tuberculosis when Eva was little. Eva had a vague memory of her lying very still in bed with her eyes closed. Eva couldn’t have been more than four years old, but she could still remember the height of that bed and the elation of success when she pulled herself up and over the side while clutching her tiny violin. She had wanted to play a song for her.
She had crawled to her mother’s side and touched her feverish cheek, the high, red color of a consumptive making her look like a rouged doll. Her mother had opened her lids slowly, her eyes glazed and drugged, furthering the comparison. It had frightened Eva, the almost lifeless figure with glassy blue eyes staring up at her. Then Eva’s mother had said her daughter’s name, and it crackled and broke between her lips like old paper.
“Batsheva,” she had whispered, the word followed by a cough that had racked her frame and made her body shake. The way she said the name, the rasping whisper, the way she sighed through the syllables like it was the last word she would ever say, had made Eva hate her name for a very long time. When her father would call her Batsheva after her mother’s death, she would cry and cover her ears.
That’s when her babbo had started to call her Eva.
That was all Eva remembered of her mother’s life, of their very short life together, and she had tried to forget it. It wasn’t a memory she cherished. She would much rather hold her mother’s picture, pretending to remember the lovely woman with the soft brown hair and porcelain skin, holding Eva in her lap, sitting next to a much younger Camillo, no gray in his black hair, his face serious beneath smiling brown eyes.
Eva had tried to remember being the infant in the frame, the tiny girl who sat in her mother’s lap and gazed up intently at the woman who held her. But hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember that woman. Eva didn’t even look like her mother. She just looked like her father, Camillo, with paler skin and rosier lips.
It was hard to love or miss someone you didn’t even know.
Eva wondered if Angelo, Santino’s grandson, loved his mother. She hoped he didn’t love her too much. Loving someone and then losing them would be much worse than not having them at all.