“I saw other foreigners in town.”
Stefano can tell that Erich is unconvinced.
“Why did the Germans arrest you?”
“It was confusing, chaotic. Since I was Italian, they couldn’t tell which side I was on. Prisoners were sent east, some west.”
“Either way, Italian deserter or traitor to Germany, they would have shot you on the spot.”
“I guess I was one of the lucky ones. Perhaps they were saving bullets.”
“Amusing, but it will do you no favors to continue playing this game.”
“Look, I don’t know why I was sent away on a truck full of Allied prisoners. Why they spared me. Perhaps the soldiers were feeling happy that day, high on the smell of gunfire. As I told you earlier, I was shot by your friendly soldiers as we were marched away from the camp. Then I pretended I was dead. Then I was picked up by the Russians and taken back to the same camp and asked a whole lot of questions again, but they saw the tattoo and eventually let me go. I have been a football to kick around between other nations. The whole of Italy has been.”
“Why Sachsenhausen?” he queries again. “Why were you so special? Why not one of the camps in the territories?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think to question the German who held a gun to my face,” he says, coldly this time, some of his former hostility creeping through.
Erich stares at him. Stefano is aware of interrogation methods. He is aware of the silences performed to threaten, to weaken, to make him speak, to make him accidentally give something away to fill the void. The German asks him more questions: dates, times in Berlin, details of the camp, Italy, the campaigns. He answers everything. He has the responses all stored. He has been prepared for this moment, for the time when he would be questioned. And Rosalind returns, standing back slightly, reporting ashamedly that the boy has gone, and guilty that in some way he was her responsibility.
“You are wrong about me,” says Stefano. “I don’t know you. I don’t even know if Erich is your real name. All I know is you don’t live here. That the two of you hate each other. That Rosalind would kill you if she had the chance, but she owes you for the drugs you feed her husband. That you also lie about going to work. That you live in the city.”
Erich gives nothing away, but Stefano knows that the last part has cut him, that he expected more loyalty from her.
“You have read me wrong,” continues Stefano. “I know some Russian. They wanted to see my papers. I was making polite conversation. I was about to tell them my plans for home when Georg ran from the house.”
“No, no, no!” says Rosalind, returning to stand close by. “There is something not right about him. I told you first that I was uncomfortable he was staying here, and you wouldn’t listen—”
“And then it was you who fed him, who took him to your bed,” Erich says louder, steady, and in full control. She shrinks a bit. Perhaps she has seen this other side of him before and knows what might come.
“I trusted him,” she says, weaker. “It was not like you think—”
“You can trust me still,” Stefano says more forcefully. “All I want is to go home. I wanted to catch that train home. I want to be gone. I can leave now and walk.”
“You must make him tell the truth!” she says to Erich.
“This is what I am doing!” barks Erich, his face reddened with anger.
“Please . . . The war is over,” says Stefano. “Rosalind says you have a daughter. Please just go to your family and let me go to mine.”
Erich turns toward Rosalind’s look of bewilderment.
“I never told him that,” she says. “I never said anything. He knows you. He must have known that from before. He is lying about everything.”
But Erich is calculating; Stefano can tell. He trusts neither of them now.
“You had too much to drink,” says Erich. “Perhaps you don’t remember. You’ve had a lapse in memory before.”
“No! I remember everything!”
“If I am the person you say I am, what is it that I am supposed to be doing?” asks Stefano. “I had plenty of chances to kill you. And if there are so many secrets, what is it about you that I don’t know?”
“Whether you are telling the truth is irrelevant . . . You know things now,” says Erich. “You know I am on the run—”
“Which you just told me!”
Erich reaches for something inside the pocket of his trousers and tosses the contents onto Stefano’s lap. The paper is crumpled, and the image on one side is not visible, but he doesn’t have to see it to know what it is.
“There is more of course,” says Erich, “that you need to explain.”
10 August 1944
Dear Papa,
It has been more than a year. Where to start? Perhaps at the end. I am in Verona, Italy. What began with an abhorrent event has now become my beautiful accident.
Erich was sent here at the beginning of the year to help the Gestapo. It is his role to help keep the order, to seek out those usurpers, after an opposing government staged its unsuccessful coup last year.
It was not an easy transition for me, unfortunately. Almost the moment we were taken to our new apartment over the piazza, I was left alone again in a strange city. It was even lonelier here than when I was in Vienna. At first, people did not view me as a friend. Few officials here have brought their wives. But because I was carrying Erich’s child, he thought it best to be near, perhaps because it would not look so good leaving me in Austria with no one. And I do not think he trusts me in Berlin—I might once again show my disquiet. Perhaps he is right about that.
A child was not something that I had even considered, and the relationship now with Erich is difficult to explain to you. Sometimes it is just too painful to give it any thought, to explain the distance, yet explain in the same sentence how it is that I carried his child. It does not make sense even to me at times. But she is here now, small, not robust, like some, but she is here. She is five months old and lies beside me as I write. She keeps her mind occupied. She is a little thinker, always watching what I am doing and studying me.
I have a book of Italian phrases, which I practice on the shopkeepers. When I first came here, to pass the time I would walk to the piazza in the front of my building and sit on the edge of a fountain there. Sometimes I would take a sketch pad to draw the buildings. But always someone seemed to be looking at me as if I were not welcome, a pariah with a German accent.
One day I ordered some coffee, but a woman refused to serve me. Her husband saw this and yelled at her and sent her away to the back of the kitchen. He gave me my coffee, but there was no kindness in the café owner’s service, only a reluctant tolerance. There are some here who are not loyal to Mussolini still and even less loyal to Hitler. He knows I could have reported him. That is why he served me and covered for his wife. Of course, I didn’t report him.