Eleven in the morning and already it was stifling hot outside. Barely a breeze blew as they walked through the streets, took one of the few trams running, and then caught a ride from a friend of Uncle Albert’s who’d managed to find petrol.
Pino would remember little of the journey. Milan, Italy, the world itself had become unhinged for him, disjointed and savage. He watched the scarred city as if from afar, not at all a part of the teeming life that was beginning to return after the Nazis’ retreat.
The car dropped them in front of the cemetery piazza. Pino felt like he was in a dream turning nightmare again as he walked toward the Famidio, the octagonal-shaped memorial chapel of the Cimitero Monumentale, and the long, two-story, arched and open-air colonnades that jutted off the chapel left and right.
Cries of grief echoed from the colonnades before rifle shots sounded at a distance, followed by the deep rumbling exhale of some larger explosive. Pino didn’t care about any of it. He welcomed a bomb. He’d hug one and smash the primer with a hammer if he could.
A dump truck honked. Uncle Albert pulled Pino out of its way. In a daze, Pino looked at the vehicle as it passed. It was like any other dump truck he’d seen until it got upwind. The stench of death poured out. Stacked like cordwood, corpses filled the vehicle’s bed. Blue and swollen bodies stuck out the top, some clothed, some naked, men, women, and children. Pino doubled over, started to dry-heave and then retch.
Michele rubbed his back. “It’s all right, Pino, with the heat, I knew to bring us handkerchiefs and camphor.”
The dump truck did a 180-degree turn and backed up to the lower arches of the western colonnade. A lever was thrown. A hundred or more bodies spilled out of the bed and flopped onto the gravel.
Pino stopped and gaped in horror. Was Anna in there? Buried?
He heard one of the drivers say that there were hundreds more bodies coming.
Uncle Albert tugged Pino’s arm.
“Come away from there now,” he said.
Like an obedient dog, Pino followed them into the memorial chapel.
“Are you looking for a loved one?” asked a man standing inside the door.
“My cousin’s son,” Michele said. “He was mistaken for a Fascist and—”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but I don’t care why or how your cousin’s son died,” the man said. “I just want the body to be claimed and removed. This is an extraordinary health hazard. Do you have masks?”
“Handkerchiefs and camphor,” Pino’s father said.
“That will help.”
“Is there some order to the bodies?” Uncle Albert said.
“The order they came in, and where we found a place to lay them. You’ll just have to search. Do you know what he was wearing?”
“His Italian Air Force uniform,” Michele said.
“Then you should find him. Take those stairs. Start on the lower eastern colonnades and work your way out to the rectangular series of hallways off the main galleries.”
Before they could thank him, he’d already moved on to tell the next distraught family how to find its dead loved one. Michele handed out white handkerchiefs and fished the mothballs from a paper sack. He put the camphor into the center of the handkerchiefs and tied the ends to make a pouch, showed them how to press it to their lips and nose.
“I learned to do this in the first Great War,” he said.
Pino took the pouch and stared at it.
“We’ll search the lower galleries,” Uncle Albert said. “You start up here, Pino.”
His mind was barely functioning as he went out an open side door on the east side of the chapel and out onto the upper floor of the colonnade. Parallel open arches hemmed the gallery some ninety meters to an octagon-shaped tower that marked a triple intersection of passages.
On any other day, these halls would have been largely empty save for the statues of long-forgotten Lombardy statesmen and members of the nobility. Now, however, the length of the colonnade and the galleries beyond were part of a colossal morgue taking in nearly five hundred corpses a day in the wake of the Nazi retreat. The dead bodies were lined up on both sides of the open-air halls, feet to the wall, faces close to a meter-wide path that ran between them.
Other Milanese walked the galleries of the dead that morning. Old women dressed for grief held black lace shawls across their lips and noses. Younger men guided the quaking shoulders of wives, daughters, and sons. Greenhead blowflies had begun to gather. They whined and buzzed. Pino had to swat at them to keep them from getting at his eyes and ears.
The flies swarmed the nearest body, a man in a business suit. He’d been shot through the temple. Pino looked at him no more than a second, but the image seared in his brain. The same happened when he looked at the next corpse, a woman in her fifties, dressed in her nightclothes, a lone curler still clinging to her iron-gray hair.
Back and forth he went, scanning the clothes, the sex, the faces, trying to find Mario among them. Pino moved faster now, giving no more than a glance at the naked couples he figured for once prosperous and powerful Fascists and their wives. Portly. Older. Their skin had turned pallid and mottled in death.
He walked the first gallery to the octagonal intersections of the hallways and took a right. This colonnade, longer than the first, overlooked the cemetery piazza.
Pino saw strangled bodies there, hacked bodies, shot bodies. Death became a blur. The sheer numbers were more than he could handle, so he focused on two things. Find Mario. Get out of this place.
A short time later, he found his cousin lying among six or seven dead Fascist soldiers. Mario’s eyes were shut. Flies danced on his head wound. Pino looked around and saw an empty sheet across the hallway. He got it and laid it over Mario’s corpse.
Now all he had to do was find Uncle Albert and his father and leave. He felt claustrophobic as he ran back toward the chapel. He dodged through other searchers and got there out of breath and brimming with anxiety.
He went through the chapel, barreled down the stairs to the lower colonnades. A family was shrouding a body on his right. When he looked left, his uncle was coming toward him from down the gallery, his lips and nose pressed into the camphor and his head shaking to and fro.
Pino ran to him. “I found Mario.”
Uncle Albert dropped the camphor pouch and looked up at him with piteous, bloodshot eyes. “Good. Where is he?”
Pino told him. His uncle nodded, and then put his hand on Pino’s forearm.
“I understand now why you were so upset last night,” he said hoarsely. “And I’m . . . I’m so sorry for you. She seemed like such a fine young lady.”
Pino’s stomach cored out. He’d tried to tell himself Anna wasn’t here. But where else? He stared over Uncle Albert’s shoulder and down the long gallery behind him.
“Where is she?” he demanded, trying to push by.