“You are a doctor in the making, Angelo,” he said seriously, wrapping the squalling infant, who hadn’t much liked the inspection. Eva took him, cooing and laughing at his outrage, and left the room to feed him. Angelo watched them go. He still hadn’t lost the wonder. He still couldn’t believe what had transpired. He turned to Mario and addressed the compliment.
“I actually considered it. But I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want anything more to do with death, my friend. Camillo always said we are on earth to learn. I think I want to teach. I want to teach history so that the world doesn’t have to repeat her mistakes. Eva’s journey across Germany has me convinced that there are many good German people too. They are just as afraid and damaged as the rest of us. Italians have no room to judge. Italians fought for Hitler too. Maybe people had no choice, but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice had made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?”
Mario nodded. “We’ve all been at Hitler’s mercy. I’m sure it’s the same for many of the Germans. He and his minions have lied to the world, and no one will know the whole truth, no one will even be able to believe the truth, until the conflict is truly over.”
“Hopefully, it won’t be much longer,” Angelo mused. He didn’t know if he could bear leaving Eva again, but his division was pulling out, and he was obligated to go with them.
“Dr. Prior told General McAuliffe your story, Angelo. You and Eva will be going back to Rome just as soon as she and the baby are fit to travel,” Mario said, smiling. Angelo sagged in relief and brought his face to his hands.
“Thank God. Will you be coming too?”
“I hope it won’t be long until I can join you, but they won’t let me leave yet. They need doctors too badly, and I volunteered. When I signed up, I committed to seeing this through to the end. This war is going to end sooner than later,” Mario said. “And I want to see the truth for myself. I have to.”
As the rubble and debris were cleared away from the collapsed aid station, one of the soldiers found a violin case—horribly scratched, dented, and white with ash—and looked it over, trying for a moment to figure out what he’d discovered. He managed to open the bent clasp and found that the violin inside was completely unscathed.
“Hey, doesn’t that belong to Father Angelo?” someone shouted from below. The soldier shrugged and shut the clasp before passing it down to the man who’d spoken up. The soldier loped off to the reassembled aid station, knowing exactly where to find the priest who had carried a violin on his back for the last five months.
The day waned and the fires were lit, and as the 20th Armored Division and the 101st Airborne prepared to roll out on the morrow, sweet music lilted through the destroyed thoroughfare and soldiers stopped, cocking their heads to listen. A melody, haunting and pure, was coaxed into existence by a woman who hadn’t held a violin in nine months, not since she’d played for a room full of German police and been exposed as a Jew.
Eva stood in the middle of the street, bundled against the cold, and played unceasingly, one piece after another, and the war-torn town was liberated again, freed by music, soothed by her song. It was her gift to the men who’d brought Angelo to her, to the everyday heroes of a never-ending war. Christmas hymns and lullabies, sonatas and symphonies, warmed the frigid air. The whispers began as some of the men realized who she was and started gathering around, making a loose circle in the town square.
“She’s the girl Father Angelo was looking for.”
“She escaped the Germans.”
“He found her, here in Bastogne.”
“It was her violin he was carrying!”
“It’s a miracle.”
With one awed whisper after another, the story of Eva and her violin spread through the crowd and down the streets. It trickled into the fields and among the soldiers who were halted, listening to the sweet tendril of music that filtered through the icy mist, and the Ghost Front became a little piece of paradise, if only for a little while.
Angelo watched Eva playing from an upstairs window in the apartment that overlooked the street, his son in his arms, his ears peeled, not wanting to miss a note. It was a miracle. There had been many, and before the war was over, there would be more. He lit a candle and watched it flicker, its light reflected in the cross that hung on the wall. And he listened to Eva play.
EPILOGUE
3 August, 1955
Confession: August makes me think of Maremma.
We’ve never been back to Grosseto or the beaches of Maremma. Maybe someday we will take our children there and show them the tide pools and let them watch the pink flamingos. We will swim in the clear waters and gather pinecones from the maritime pines that line the white beaches and climb the craggy cliffs. But I don’t know if I can.
Now we go to Cape Cod every August, joking that it is just a smaller boot. We stay in a cabin, and we eat pasta and lobster, and I play my violin. Angelo’s skin turns black and his eyes look bluer than the ocean, while I do my best not to burn or dwell on faraway places that linger in my mind like endless long notes in the wind.
We look for pearls and steal kisses and sneak away to make love as if we’re teenagers in the abandoned fish shack all over again. August at the seashore hurts me a little, but it is a sweet kind of pain, a necessary agony. It is the anguish of existing, of feeling joy, when so many cannot. Sometimes I smell Babbo’s pipe, and I hear Chopin from somewhere in the distance, as if Felix is reminding me of who I am.
I still dream of the train, as if my subconscious knows I never arrived. I jumped, cheating death, and still I’m forced to keep jumping. I hate those dreams and always wake with the stench of blood, urine, and gunpowder in my nostrils. Angelo never asks about the details. He knows. He just gathers me in his arms, and I bury my nose in the hollow of his throat, breathing him in and breathing fear out, because August makes me think of Auschwitz too.
Babbo left me in August. According to records, which the Germans kept with meticulous care, he was gassed the day he arrived at the camp. Most men over forty were, and Babbo was fifty-two. Uncle Augusto and Aunt Bianca were gassed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz too. Levi and Claudia made it through the initial selection but were given the option of riding in a truck to the camp, which they were told was ten kilometers away. This was a lie told to further weed out the “lazy.” They were gassed alongside their parents. Of the roughly twelve hundred Jews deported from Rome in the October roundup that the Sonninos and I narrowly escaped, over eight hundred were immediately gassed. Of those who were admitted into the camp, one woman and forty-seven men survived. Forty-eight people out of twelve hundred.
Pierre’s mother, Gabriele LaMont, didn’t survive that final winter in Bergen-Belsen, though she held on for eight months, which was almost unheard of. My son and I would not have survived that long. I doubt my baby would have survived my womb. Sixty thousand prisoners were interned there by the end of the war, and typhus was rampant. Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British in April 1945, giving the world its first real glimpse of the horrors that no one had believed possible. I made myself look at the photographs. I owed it to those who didn’t have a white angel to hide them, those who hadn’t found the strength or opportunity to jump, and those who hadn’t been able to hold on.