“It matters. I want grandchildren. I want normality!”
“Mamma, while there is a war, there is no normality.”
But it wasn’t his impending childless years that caused her sudden outburst.
“I do not want to lose you like Serafina has lost her only child.”
The conversation was too deep, too soon. And the reality of his future was all the more depressing because she was closer to the truth of it. He couldn’t deal with the tears, though he held his mother. He felt like a statue in Piazza della Signoria, with no more life to give.
He decided to seek out Nina at Toni’s apartment, once shared with Beppe. Stefano smiled widely when she opened the door. Nina’s belly was round; the pregnancy had only recently begun to show.
She rushed into his arms.
“I guess I don’t need to ask what you’ve been up to,” he said fondly.
Nina cried with joy, and Stefano held her for many minutes before they broke apart.
“Why haven’t you told Mamma?” asked Stefano. “She is desperate for good news.”
“I don’t think she will think that way. And you know Teresa . . . She will have another reason to curse at me.”
“I think it will heal the broken relationship you have.”
She sat him down, and they reminisced about Beppe, and others from the neighborhood who had also lost their lives. Several of their friends had not yet returned from various campaigns, and some were about to embark. Toni was still away in battle, and Nina worried constantly.
“He did not want to go,” she had said about her husband, Toni. “He hated working under Mussolini. He was secretly part of an opposition group, but with a baby coming, he has had to conform. Things will change when he returns. They have to.”
Stefano liked the sound of Toni. The strength of his anger matched his own. That night he stayed with Nina for dinner, and she had invited Fedor and other like-minded friends, Alberto and Conti. Alberto had been excused from war for failing a medical test. He talked of leaving Italy, bitter about losing a brother in battle. Conti owned several businesses. He was a Jew and said that his relatives had moved from Milan to a small western village after the enactment of the laws that segregated Jews from the rest of society and prevented them from continuing in their professions. Fearful of the anti-Semitism rising, especially after Italy became aligned with Nazi Germany, Conti had removed his name from the Jewish union registry, moved to Verona, and kept his background secret so that he could start his businesses.
The men had drunk until the early hours and spoke of the failed campaign, of desertion, and Stefano told how some Italian soldiers and senior officers had left their postings in Africa to switch sides and join the Allies.
“Then we must do something also to change the course of this war,” said Fedor, who had assumed the role of leader without objection. “We can’t just sit on our hands.”
And at some point in the night, when they were high on thoughts and discussion, they had made a pact to save Italy and stop the war. Though much later Stefano realized that it was youth and inexperience that gave them the false belief they could.
Present-day 1945
The boy sits across from Rosalind in the kitchen. He is absorbed in his collected items on the table in front of him and spends much time picking them up, examining them, and placing them back again in the basket on the ground beside his feet.
Stefano has washed up in the bathroom tub behind the kitchen and looks at the mirror, at the richer color of his skin finally returning. I can survive, he thinks. There were days when he existed on just a few vegetables, but the smells on the stove are making him hungry. Rosalind has fried some potatoes with pieces of speck, and the smell of salted pig is making him salivate. She also boils some spinach taken from her garden. She has invited him to stay for supper, payment for all his work.
“I can stay, but if I’m not home by nightfall, my mother will share her best descriptive words.”
She smiles. “You have a sense of humor. That is interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think Italians have a sense of humor?”
He can see she finds this amusing also. She tips some water from the saucepan. She has also gone a little pink, though he can’t tell if it is from the steam or their banter.
“No. I meant there has been no reason to have a sense of humor. I had forgotten what it sounded like.”
He ponders this. She is right. The Allies were dancing in the streets, but he has seen little joy among the defeated.
“Excuse me for being so casual about your generous offer since you have so little. I gratefully accept.”
“Good,” she says. “I know what it is like to go hungry. When my parents died, I was forced to make do. With few rations after the war, I would spend much time searching for mushrooms, berries, and anything I could make into meals. I became creative. But I’m afraid that meat is still a luxury, and I don’t have much of it to offer you.”
“I am grateful for anything. Where did you go after . . . ?” he asks.
“After my parents were bombed? I came here.”
“You were there at the very end.”
“Yes. The hospital was being evacuated, and the city fell in pieces around me. It was carnage, trucks full of casualties who were left to die, some still caked in mud from the battlefields, because even the medics and doctors in field hospitals were being killed. And then the last line of German defense . . . untrained and not the age for such work . . . were brought in also. We worked hard to save many but lost many, too, and then suddenly it went quiet and then noisy again as truckloads of Russians came through. I was luckier than some . . .” She breaks off.
Stefano knows the other dead that she talks about: young boys unprepared for war and the elderly too old to hold a rifle steady were abandoned with firearms and waited, trapped in Berlin for their own disposal.
“Do you have any idea where your cousin might have gone?” He takes another look at the portrait as if Monique might answer the question herself.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking toward the front door. “She married an officer and moved away. We weren’t communicating much, but in one letter several months before the war ended, she said she was trying to get back here. I don’t like to speculate. It is difficult with Monique. She may have changed her mind. She was flighty.”
Stefano has noted her use of the past tense.
In the photo, Monique sits at an angle, just her head and shoulders visible, and she is turned slightly to look into the lens. The camera loves her. He looks away. He does not want to be distracted from the relationship he is building here.
Rosalind serves up food portions, keeping the chipped plate for herself.
“So, Michal, did you have jam where you were from?” she says curtly, as one would expect from a nurse on duty.
“Yes,” he whispers.
“So, you do talk then,” she says, turning to Stefano. “I could not get him to speak earlier.”
“He prefers to talk in the dark, to whisper. It is his memories he is most afraid of,” explains Stefano, “though he is becoming more brave.” Rosalind understands. She has been to hell also.
“Do you have a big family?” asks Rosalind.
And the boy is back to silence with his things, though he is thinking, now frowning, remembering.