Erich returns to Georg’s house. He does not want to come back if he can help it. There are traces of him here still that he must get rid of. He opens the door below the stairs to see the box of Monique’s letters.
The letters are enclosed, but there is something different about them. The ribbon that holds them is not tied as tightly as he remembers, the letters not evenly together, as they were. Someone has touched them. It is unlikely to be Rosalind, since she would sooner burn the house down than enter it, or Georg, who is aware of so little.
He puts the letters in the fireplace and with matches sets them on fire. He should have destroyed them sooner. Monique had hidden them there, and he had found them. He is not sure why he kept them, perhaps to remind him of her treachery, justification that led to what he did.
Outside the front door, he looks across at Rosalind’s house.
There is nothing there for him anymore. He and Stefano had made a connection. An unspoken alliance, or so he thought. But they are not the same after all.
And there is something about the day that feels wrong. Stefano still in Germany, Michal, an orphan randomly plucked off the side of the road and brought here, Rosalind in Stefano’s arms, and Erich here, away from the people that matter. Everything is shifted, and no one is where they should be.
He looks up the hill and beyond that to a tall clump of trees that blocks the morning sun, and he heads that way, past the small grave of Rosalind’s baby, until he reaches Monique and sees the mound of earth that has been disturbed by the rain, and small piles of earth clumped around the grave. He would not have left it so untidy. He would have cleared every last grain of loose soil. And then he sees it in the trees, a piece of color, of stripes, faded gold and blue, billowing in the breeze, haughtily, taunting him. He walks toward it, to the curtain, and sees the dark stains that litter the cloth as if by the flick of a paintbrush, a work of art on display.
He turns back to the earth and with his hands digs at the soil, compacted now with water, but he doesn’t care that his pants are covered in soil, that his arms are stained and streaked with black earth, and he digs down and down, and there is nothing, no body, no Monique.
He senses danger.
Vehicles sound in the distance, the revving of their motors sounding urgent with the speed at which they are coming. From the ridge, he can see them faintly in the distance. He remembers the time that trucks came to his house; there was urgency then also.
He is tempted to dig up the tin, but there is no time; he cannot afford to be caught with the documents if his suspicion is correct. He will have to come back for them later. First, he must return to the town, to Genevieve, to his mother, and then he will return to deal with things here.
CHAPTER 23
STEFANO
Stefano can smell a faint odor of smoke mixed with the citrusy scent of Rosalind’s hair. He can feel her slender body beneath the light robe. She had trusted him, and yet it was a trust that he wasn’t expecting and did not want. So many people trusted him, and it is a weight of responsibility he now finds hard to bear. During the war, the responsibility of caring for those he loved had proved too great.
He climbs out of bed, careful not to disturb her, checks the watch in his bag before spying Erich through the curtain. He is standing at the front of the other house looking toward the woods before turning briefly to look at Rosalind’s, in the direction of her room. Stefano puts up his hand, but Erich does not acknowledge him, instead turning toward the track that will take him back to the town.
Stefano must stop him. He must bring him back. He wonders now if Erich saw him with Rosalind, if he has got the wrong idea.
He throws his satchel over his shoulder and opens the door to hurry toward Erich, but Georg appears, blocking the doorway. He is like a cat, prowling in the night but always returning to be fed. It is perhaps by instinct now, and that likely saved him from doing anything final. But he looks crazed, as if he could still do something dangerous. He is shivering, but not from his damp clothes. He is falling from a great height, coming down from drugs.
Not now, thinks Stefano. He must get Erich.
“Georg,” he says, “I told you to stay there until I came.”
But Georg bangs his head on the doorframe, and Rosalind now stands behind Stefano, disturbed from her sleep. They watch Georg fall to the ground in front of them.
Stefano looks toward the track through the window by the door, but Erich is no longer in view. He helps Rosalind carry Georg to the couch, and Rosalind disappears into her bedroom, to find the drug that will sedate him, that will send his mind to ignorant bliss.
“I tried to find her, but I couldn’t,” Georg says.
Stefano doesn’t ask. He already knows.
There is a part of Georg that is still there, strong and able, the part of the brain that stubbornly won’t let go of life. It is filled with memories, vivid ones that drown out the silent functioning ones, the result of his brain injury combined with the sickness from the drug. It is hard to tell the extent of the damage, what he is really like beneath the chemicals.
“I’m sorry you can’t find her,” says Stefano, trying to pacify him, but preoccupied with other thoughts. He has lost his only chance with Erich. He has failed.
There is red and purple bruising on the top of Georg’s cheekbone from the fight the previous evening, and he turns his bright yellow-green eyes, boyish and innocent, on Stefano.
The gaze falters, and Georg grabs at his head suddenly. He is tortured, Stefano realizes. He cannot unblock whatever it is that stands between his rational mind and the blurred world that has taken over.
January 1944
He had convinced his mother to go south with Nina and the baby, but his older sister refused to leave. Teresa felt it disloyal to be anywhere else but with Serafina and Enzo in northern Italy.
It was the night before his family would leave for their old house in Amalfi, and after they were dispatched, Stefano would go north to help the resistance. His mother knew nothing of his resistance plans. Nina would reveal them only once they were safely stationed in the South. His mother would not leave if she thought he wasn’t following quickly. Since the war started, lying had grown easier.
He met Teresa at their mother’s house, and when informed of the plan, she had looked at him with disbelief, before trying to talk him out of it. She had argued that his loyalties were wrong, that to unify Italy again they must stay on the winning side. That people were probably watching them. But she did agree, in spite of her dislike for the South—an opinion she had taken from her aunt and uncle—and in view of her sister’s and mother’s safety, and Nina’s closeness to Stefano, that it would be in their interest to leave. Even Teresa did not like that threats to family members of the resistance were a tactic the Nazis were using to lure back any resistance members who had found sanctuary elsewhere. There were instances of family members already killed by the time the underground fighters turned themselves in.
“Then when they come looking for you,” said Stefano to Teresa, “you must say I’m a traitor and you have turned your back on me. That you no longer want anything to do with me. That you have no idea where I have gone . . . Do that for me and take care of yourself. It is dangerous here, Teresa. Even for you.”
He had always had a fondness for Teresa despite their differences. They had grown up together, and they shared a past. But their futures lay in very different directions. In the past week, Teresa and Nina had grown closer, perhaps with the knowledge that they would soon be apart. Teresa had also grown fond of her baby nephew.
“Little brother, I can take care of myself,” she said. “It is you I am worried about. If they capture you, they will kill you. And I hate you for that.”
“You can never hate me,” he said with a grin.