Several cupboard doors sit ajar, the contents taken. Empty sacks lie on the floor. He shines his light across the kitchen and examines what is left. In a teapot lie the remains of tea and a coating of green-and-white bulbous mold.
A large fabric sofa beneath the only front ground-floor window is threadbare, its pastel floral design vanishing under decades of light. A square table divides the kitchen stove and sink from the living area, but there are three chairs at the table, one of which is broken. On the table are two empty plates with cutlery. Traces of food remain on the plates, now dried and unrecognizable. The house is empty of recent memories.
A faint shuffling from near the back door forces Stefano to turn the torch sharply. He spies nothing at first, but as he moves toward the sound, the boy appears, eyes squinting from the light now in his face. Stefano puts his finger to his lips to signal him to be quiet, though inside he is exasperated that the child did not wait as told. He directs him toward a small alcove under the stairs, and the boy follows this instruction. The child is used to hiding in houses, but he is too afraid to stay near the darkening river alone.
Stefano walks up the narrow stairs to the top level and checks behind him to make sure there is no sign of the boy. On the top floor are several rooms. The door casing of one small room is splintered, the door hanging to the side, as if flung so hard it has been torn from its hinges.
He opens the second door of a room that overlooks the side between the two properties. Lace curtains hang without damage, and a small table is marred only by a layer of dust. A plush rug on polished wood appears to have also survived unscathed, but a mirror on the wall is cracked and unusable. The bed looks inviting, but he has already decided that he can’t sleep here. It looks too personal. Though seemingly uninhabited, the room appears to be waiting patiently for its former inhabitant.
With the glow of the sun almost completely gone, Stefano steps cautiously up to the window to view the other house opposite and the river just visible through the small woods to his left. The neighboring property looks well tended: the back lawn has a boxed area for growing vegetables, and the small patch of tiles leading from the back door is swept of leaves. A large barn sits on the far front side of the other house, and beyond that, thick woodlands run parallel with the river. Directly in front of both houses is the shallow wood that separates the houses from the water.
Just inside the entrance to the third room on this floor are drippings of dark stain across the floorboards. He bends down to rub at the stain, and the smell of rust lingers on his fingertips. It is blood, of course. He knows it well. He walks first to the window—partly covered by one curtain, striped in yellow, gray, and white—that overlooks the woods and the river beyond. He should stay here, he thinks, where he can best view anyone who enters the bend in the track that leads to the houses.
There is a metal bed with springs, its mattress leaning against the wall, the insides torn and gushing out of its belly like entrails. He moves his torch across the mattress to see the remains of a red-brown stain in the center where most of the violence against it has taken place. Something crunches underfoot, and his light then reflects pieces of glass, blues and greens, an ornament perhaps, scattered, then kicked untidily to a corner of the room.
Stefano lifts the mattress up onto the springs, damaged side facing down, disturbing its musty fumes of time. The mattress itself, with its evidence of rage, should be something that warns him away, but the thought of something soft beneath him is an unexpected blessing. It is bed he craves now, and he imagines a full night’s sleep before commencing the next stage of his quest.
It is mostly silent outside, though every so often there is the groaning of supply trucks, the change of gears, and the squeal of brakes in the distance.
He collects the boy from downstairs and leads him to the mattress. It is barely nightfall, but they are both weary, and Stefano plans to be up before sunrise. The boy doesn’t wait for instruction but climbs on top of the bed, its springs squeaking, and rolls on his side to face the wall. Stefano looks at the space that is left for him, at their close proximity. He shared unbearably cramped sleeping spaces with others in times of little choice, but this is different. He needs his space around him. He needs the space to think. He will have to give the bed to the boy.
Stefano visits the second room again at the front end of the hallway to take the rug that is there, and he drags it to the center of the room where they will rest for the night. He lies down, thinks about putting his satchel under his head, but pushes it to the side instead.
“Michal,” says a small voice from the gray.
“Is that your name?” he says, startled by the sound of the boy who has spoken for the first time. His voice is tiny like him.
“Ja,” he says in German.
“Do you only talk in the evenings?”
“It is safer in the dark,” he whispers.
“Is that what your mother told you?”
He is silent.
“And your father? Did you leave him behind?”
He doesn’t respond. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Stefano is not sure if the boy is German, since he detects something different about the accent. Perhaps he was in a camp; perhaps he only learned some German there. In any case it gives him pause to think about the mother, to wonder if she was foreign to this country, and to speculate about the reasons why they may have been traveling to Berlin.
But Stefano is silent now for other reasons. And it is soothing, the gentle, heavy breathing of a sleeping child that has begun so suddenly. Stefano is glad that someone at least is at peace for now.
Stefano reaches one arm to the floor beside him and fishes inside the lining of his satchel to retrieve a photo. Turning on his back, he places it inside his shirt to rest above his heart. Arms then behind his head, Stefano listens to the rain as it taps the river and pats down the earth around the house, the noise swaddling the house like a warm blanket. It might be pleasant if he were somewhere else, but there is too much to think about, too much inside his head, to enjoy the sound. He shifts several times to find a comfortable sleeping position. He keeps the torch in his hand; it is habit to check the time throughout the night.
Stefano closes his eyes, imagines the cold water of the Mediterranean, and pleads to the air for good dreams to come.
CHAPTER 5
ROSALIND
Tiny droplets of water splatter the window, and Rosalind is transfixed by the glass, lost in the rattling sounds as rain pelts the metal pails outside. The barn doors near the wood bang suddenly in a torrent of wind, the noise pulling her from her reverie.
With electricity to the area yet to be restored, Rosalind ignites one of the lanterns hanging by the front door, and then strikes a match to light the candle on the kitchen table. Candles feature vividly in the earliest memories of her grandmother’s place, when she was small, before there were several electric lights installed around the walls. The flames, the smell of wax burning, and the shadows were comforting back then, but now she feels suffocated, the rooms shrinking under the candle’s dull-yellow glow.