Angelo let himself in through the big gate. It wasn’t locked. He would have to scold his grandfather. The days for open gates were long past. He walked across the silent courtyard of the place he had once called home, a place where he and Eva had played in the fountain and broken a few windows when he’d tried to teach her American baseball. He was pleased to see the villa looked the same. His grandparents had taken care of it. The flowers still bloomed in riotous color, and the walks were neatly swept with no debris or sign of the calamity that had gripped Italy in its fist. The heat had eased, and the September air was balmy and the skies a brilliant blue. The beauty made him uneasy, as if the mild weather and the soft breeze conspired with the Nazis to lure them into complacency.
Angelo wondered if his grandparents’ tender care of the palatial home would simply make it a bigger target. A property in the heart of the city, easily accessible. It rose up behind a high wall on a main thoroughfare. Beautiful. Well maintained. Irresistible. Just like Eva and the wall she’d built around herself. But walls wouldn’t be enough. It was time for her to hide. He had to convince her to leave Florence. Eva and maybe his grandparents too. They would be better off out of the city, away from the property that could only bring them unwanted attention.
Camillo had been gone for almost three years. Three years and no word whether he lived or died. The only word they’d learned was Auschwitz. It sounded like a sneeze. Harmless. But when it was whispered among the fearful it became something else, the Grim Reaper come to call, the Black Plague. There were only rumors, but the rumors were enough to make some Jews flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs, looking for a hiding place. It made others cower in their homes, hoping that the plague would somehow miss them, spare them, and pass over, as it had once, anciently. But so often it didn’t.
The wisest ones hid. Camillo Rosselli had not hidden. He’d been so confident his Italian citizenship would protect him. Camillo had been sent to Auschwitz. And that was all they knew.
Angelo raised the knocker and let it clatter against the burnished red door. His eyes fell to the right, to the place where the mezuzah had once hung. He remembered the day Camillo took it down. It was 1938, and his shoulders had been set, but tears streaked his face. He’d transferred the home from his name and given it to Santino and Fabia to protect it from the Racial Laws. When Angelo had asked him why he cried, he told him he was ashamed.
“I remove it because of fear. A better man would fight for his God. But I am not that man. It shames me to say, I am not that man.”
The door opened slowly, and Fabia peered out into the afternoon sun, shading her eyes and squinting up at him.
“Angelo!” she gasped, dropping the hand that shaded her eyes so she could clap her own cheeks and then his. She pulled him forward by the face, her arms stretched to reach him. She was even smaller than he remembered. Or maybe he had grown.
“Angelo, my beautiful boy! Santino, look who’s here!” Fabia called over her shoulder into the dim foyer, its cool expanse drawing Angelo’s eyes. But it wasn’t rest and refreshment or even his grandfather Angelo sought, but Eva.
“You are so big,” his nonna exclaimed, drawing his eyes back to her wrinkled face. “So handsome. Mamma mia! You look like your father.” Fabia promptly burst into tears, which hadn’t changed. She couldn’t talk about “her Angelino,” his father, without crying. It had been so long since she’d seen him. Angelo suspected they would never see him again. The thought bothered him more for his grandparents than for himself.
His grandfather tottered from the back of the house on bowed legs, clapping and calling Angelo’s name. His white hair was unchanged, thick and waving back from his sun-browned skin. His blue eyes, the eyes Angelo saw staring back at him from the mirror each day, were bright and relieved.
“You came home! You came home, Angelo. Tell us you can stay a while. We have missed you.”
Angelo kissed Santino’s cheeks and bent to hold him close. Unlike his eyes, Angelo’s height was not something he’d inherited from his nonno. When he straightened and stepped back, his gaze moved to the figure descending the wide marble staircase that rose grandly from the formal entry.
Eva wore a dress of deep blue that made her skin look like cream, pale and smooth against the sapphire hue. She was thinner and her dark hair was shorter, brushing her shoulders in smooth curls as was the fashion. She used to wear it longer. Maybe age had made her more aware and careful, more mindful of the opinions and attention of others. He hoped so. It would make her safer. Eva greeted him with a soft hello, her lack of enthusiasm contrasting noticeably with Fabia’s tears and Santino’s clapping.
He greeted her just as soberly, wishing he could embrace her like a sister, wishing he could convince himself that was all she was, all she would ever be. His eyes clung to hers briefly, looking for forgiveness and finding none. Eva’s eyes were guarded. She was young, only twenty-three years old, but she wore the same vibrating tension he had observed on so many others he had helped and sheltered throughout the last few years, and it made her seem much older than she was.
But she was still the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.
She reached the last stair and approached him, holding out her hands. He clasped one of hers in both of his.
“Is that how it’s done?” she asked softly. “Is that a priestly greeting?”
He felt a flash of anger at her mocking tone and immediately rose to the bait, pulling her into his arms and embracing her tightly, albeit briefly.
He felt her jerk, as if she hadn’t expected the contact, and her gasp tickled his neck before he stepped back from her. She still smelled like the jasmine that Fabia grew in pots beneath the windows. It mingled with a subtle hint of something new, as if the sadness she wore gave off a scent of its own. Her grief had grown stronger since he’d seen her last, but then, life had delivered some heavy blows, and Eva had absorbed them all. Her jasmine-scented sadness was justified.
It had been too long. He should have come back sooner. But he’d been trying to move on, he’d been trying to let her move on. He wondered if they would have to start over from the very beginning, and if they did, would they manage to find common ground, a place where a Catholic boy and a Jewish girl could be friends, even family, once again? There’d been a time when she would have followed him anywhere. He wasn’t sure she would follow him across the street anymore, but he was going to do his best to convince her.
The evening meal was meager—nothing was plentiful in wartime—but Eva brought out a bottle of her father’s Austrian wine and there was laughter and reminiscence, even if it was flavored with forced levity. Eva participated, but her quick smile had slowed considerably, weighted down by strain. In fact, it wasn’t present at all. The sparkle in her lustrous eyes was more nervous than mischievous, and there was a wary tilt to her head, as if she were listening for calamity to strike. Eva had always been grace in motion, as if the music she created on her violin was just beneath her skin. Now there was a stillness in her posture as if she were poised to bolt. He hated it, and his own tension increased considerably.
There was talk of what came next. Fabia was sure the old Racial Laws, the laws inspired by Mussolini’s desire to placate Hitler, would be revoked now that Mussolini had been toppled and Germany was no longer Italy’s partner in the war.
“It’s going to get worse for a while, Nonna,” Angelo said softly.
“Worse?” Fabia cried, likely thinking of the losses Eva had suffered, the food shortages, the deaths of thousands of Italian young men on the Russian front and in North Africa, all for a war and an ideology most of the country didn’t support.
“You have to come back with me, Eva. To Rome. That’s why I’ve come.” Angelo turned to Eva, ignoring the stunned faces of his grandparents.
“Rome will be no safer than Florence,” Eva protested immediately.
“It’s farther south, closer to the Allied line. And no one knows you in Rome. You have false papers, yes?”