He passes another group of women, the Trümmerfrau, the rubble women. The Allies have assigned them the task of cleaning up the city. They collect the fallen bricks and place them in a barrow that is already overflowing. An elderly man wheels it away, disappearing down a street between the ruins. The women wipe their foreheads and rub their weary backs before bending down to retrieve more bricks to place in another empty barrow that has just arrived, wheeled unsteadily by a small boy.
Two children scoot past Stefano from the opposite direction. They converse between themselves and accelerate when one points to something ahead, toward a pile of scrap, another playground. Two small girls carrying sacks walk confidently across hills of broken things, every so often bending to examine something shiny, something of value to them that they place in their sacks. One stops to push some hair from her face with her grimy hand. She catches sight of Stefano, smiles, and waves. This simple gesture confuses him at first, as he is unaccustomed to children who are readily accepting of change, who rise quickly above setback. By the time he raises his hand in response, her attention has been diverted, one tiny arm reaching deeply into the rubble for something she has spied.
One woman shakily wheels a pram filled with bricks before it finally tilts and falls on its side. Stefano wants to walk past, to leave it, but it isn’t in his nature. Even now. He stops to help, and she matches his pace, brick for brick, returning them to the pram. When he is nearly done, the woman stops to rest, to view the man who is helping her.
“Danke!” she says, and then she looks down at his left hand to the bandage that has come unwound. There is no trace of repulsion at what she sees underneath.
“Do you want me to fix the bandage for you?” she asks, her eyes darting several times between his face and his hand, and then to the numbers on his arm.
He shakes his head.
“Ein Konzentrationslager?” she queries.
“Yes.”
“I had a son your age,” she says. “It would be good to have him here now.” She returns to her work, uncaring whether Stefano responds, whether he might be curious about her son’s fate. Such questions are pointless now, and he leaves before he feels compelled to do anything else for these people.
He wears the new shirt and trousers the Allied administration gave him, and shoes that fit well. Over his shoulder Stefano carries a satchel that contains a tin of meat and beans, several military chocolate bars, a flask of water, a spare shirt, an extra pair of socks, a torch, some money, a map, and a watch that belonged to a dead German. But most importantly he has a document that says he is free.
On the south side of the city, a truck is waiting where he was told it would be. He is relieved that he can see the end of the city’s destruction and open landscape ahead, but beyond that is an interminable postwar chaos.
He steps up to the window of the truck, shows his paper, then climbs into the back. Inside, several faces look at him vacantly, a sign they are used to changes, to strangers. There are mostly children—washed faces, borrowed clothes—and mothers. Polish refugees, he thinks, from the look of them, the fairness of them, and from the fact they have no homes here. He does not converse with them during the trip, and partway into the journey as the sun begins its descent, the vehicle stops and the driver taps the side of the vehicle to signal for Stefano to climb out.
“Do svidaniya!” calls the soldier.
“Do svidaniya,” he replies.
He watches the truck veer west at the intersection and head toward a displacement camp; then he turns southeast in the direction of Dresden and, beyond that, to a Mediterranean winter above the cliffs of Amalfi.
1932
Stefano woke to the sound of boat motors and the slapping of waves against the rocks below. Summer brought many fishing and tourist vessels to his Mediterranean doorstep. The house was not yet hot, the sun not yet high, but the water was already reflecting its silvery surface onto their white sandstone walls and through the windows into their living room.
Agatha, who had been on his bed when he fell asleep, was missing. Stefano stretched out his arms across his bed, eyes not staying open willingly, and he felt blindly at the end of his bed. With hair tousled and his eyes still puffed with sleep, he pulled on trousers that would soon be too small for him and his fast-growing body. As he had done every morning, he rubbed his finger across the top of his lip. Already he felt some soft hair growing and prayed daily that he would soon have a handsome mustache like his father.
His sisters were quiet from their bedroom. The younger, Nina, would not rise for at least another hour. His older sister, Teresa, would be up soon to order everyone around. It would do him well to be out of her way when she first rose. She was always looking for reasons to be angry.
The crunching and scraping sounds of sand and gravel led him down the steps from their terraced balcony to a garden below. Beyond the garden was a cliff face with more steps down to the sea.
His father was mixing cement, and beside him was a pile of white bricks; also beside him on the grass, Agatha watched. Nicolo had commenced constructing a small square structure. Agatha wagged her tail, happy to see that Stefano had joined them. She was a small black-and-white dog that Stefano had found as a puppy. After two years with the family, she was still mischievous.
“What are you doing, Papa?”
“I’m building a little house for Agatha.”
Stefano studied the bricks and the careful way his father was spacing them apart before the kindness of this action suddenly struck him. That his father would do this for his dog was another reason to love his papa.
Though, in Stefano’s heart, he knew that Agatha was just as much his papa’s dog as she was his.
“What will it look like?”
“About this high,” said his father, his hand stretched flat and placed level against his hip. “Though at the back there will be a long, narrow window so Agatha can look through and see the sea to make sure there are no marauders heading our way. And she can bark and warn us.”
Stefano looked out to sea, then back to his father, whose mouth had stretched into a grin. His wide smile, so genuine, with his mustache reshaped into a long, thin line, had always been infectious, and Stefano couldn’t help but smile, too.
“There are no marauders, Papa,” said Stefano, and his father stroked his head roughly with affection. Stefano liked his father’s playfulness, but he liked even more that Agatha was about to have her own house also. “But why can’t she sleep with me on my bed?”
“Because she pees on the floor, because you sleep so heavily you don’t hear her whining to get out. Besides, she loves to contemplate the Mediterranean. She loves to see the colorful tourists on their large yachts.”
His father was right. Agatha loved her perch at the balustrade to watch people and the water below and afar. It was the perfect vantage for her watchtower.
Stefano gave Agatha a hug and rubbed his cheek against her fur. She rewarded him by licking his arm.
“Can I help you, Papa?” asked Stefano.
“Of course.”
They worked all morning. Stefano helped his father mix the cement, then passed the bricks to his father to position. Sometimes they would swap roles, but Nicolo would straighten Stefano’s row of bricks without him seeing.
By the time they finished, it was just after lunchtime, and they dived into the sea to cool down—Agatha, too.
When they came back up the rocky climb, and the many stairs up to the ground floor of their house, his mother greeted them with chilled lemon water, and the three of them sat on the terrace to watch the boats. These were the moments that would stay with Stefano through life, the rafts he would hold on to when he was sinking.
The following year his father fell from the roof of a laboring job and died on the way to the hospital. Agatha barked for weeks from the terrace and for several days did not use her little brick house at all. And the anchor that had been his father was hauled up and buried with him.