The Metal Heart

by Caroline Lea

  Gino grins. ‘You are his favourite now. When the chapel is finished, perhaps you will marry Major Bates.’

  ‘Careful. There’s too much sharp metal in here for you to mock me.’

  The floor is littered with scrap pieces that the prisoners have salvaged from the half-sunken boats in the harbour, or scavenged from the barriers. There are shards of corrugated metal that will help to reinforce the concrete altar, spools of barbed wire that Cesare is shaping into a statue of George defeating the dragon, and old beef tins that he will make into candle-holders.

  As Gino walks back towards the camp with him, Cesare looks up at the stars and wonders what his family in Moena can see. He wonders if they’re still alive.

  Gino pokes him in the ribs. ‘I saw your girlfriend today.’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Cesare says, and then, too late, he adds, ‘Who do you mean?’

  Gino gives a low laugh. ‘She left some metal near the chapel. A huge chunk of it – looks like it was part of a ship once. She said she’d found it on the beach. I told her she should give it to you, but she wouldn’t stay.’

  ‘You scared her off with your ugly face,’ says Cesare, but it is a struggle to laugh, a struggle to conceal his worry: Dorotea has been avoiding him, ever since he held her hand in the fog. She hasn’t answered his letter and he doesn’t want to go to her bothy again; it doesn’t feel right to pursue her.

  Occasionally, he has caught a glimpse of her in the camp, near the infirmary – or perhaps it is her sister – but he won’t approach her.

  Instead he has thrown himself into building the chapel. Along with the plasterboard on the walls, there are sections of metal that Cesare will be able to shape into a screen. There are sheets of glass that he will paint to look like an expensive stained-glass window. When he imagines the sunlight shining through, onto the walls and the floor, the thought is transporting. He is, for a moment, no longer a prisoner. His muscles do not ache, his stomach does not gripe. He is a free man, standing in a church in his own country. War and death are things that happen to other people, in other places. The chapel will be a place of peace.

  Now Gino reaches out and stops Cesare, breaking him out of his reverie just before they get to the camp. There is a guard on the gate, standing in the shadows, and both of them wait to see who it is. Now that they have shown they can be trusted, the Italians are given a little more freedom to roam, but that is no consolation if Angus MacLeod is in charge. Twice now, he’s seen Cesare returning to the camp late, and has given him instructions to come to the quarry the next morning, rather than going up to the chapel.

  Tonight they are in luck: the guard is young and nervous. Although he keeps his hand on his baton, he lets them past without stopping them.

  Back in his hut, the rest of the men are asleep. Cesare is cold, as he climbs into his bunk – he is always cold in this northern land, but he prays to distract himself. He prays for the skill to make the chapel as beautiful as he imagines it; he prays for his family’s safety. He prays for the chance to be able to hold Dorotea’s hand again. To be able to tell her that he is sorry for whatever he has done to hurt her.

  Some nights, he prays for the war to be over, but then he tries to imagine returning to Italy, leaving Dorotea in this place; everything he pictures is a gaping blank. Without her, returning home would be a descent into darkness.

  In the morning, late frost rimes the inside of his hut. The winter has been long and Cesare has almost forgotten the feeling of waking up warm. Now, his muscles are stiff with cold, but he feels no reluctance at getting up. The chapel calls to him, as it does to all of the men in his hut. They grin at each other and dress quickly before starting up the hill in the weak sunlight.

  Cesare walks alongside them, feeling comfort and ease, as if he’s known them for years. It is strange how this place has brought them together and made them into something new. Before they came here, they were strangers from different parts of Italy who had joined the fight for different reasons: some liked the idea of defending their country, and others were so poor that the regular meals and pay were impossible to ignore. A very few were Fascists, who scrawled Il Duce into the rocks on the quarry walls and the metal sides of their huts. But most were just ordinary men, who wanted to make sure their families were safe – safe from this nameless, faceless enemy. And now they are here, and their differences don’t matter because they’re building something together. And the enemy has a face, but it isn’t the face they expected. The enemy is MacLeod with his baton, but it is also Major Bates’s kindnesses. It is the nurses who care for them. It is the twin girls with their long red hair and their anxious smiles.

  Nothing is as they expected.

  The sight of the chapel, on the breast of the hill, never fails to take Cesare’s breath away. Although it is only half covered with cement, and looks like some weather-ravaged rock formation, he can make out the beginning of the façade of a church: he can picture the pillars around the doorway, which will welcome weary travellers; he can imagine the pointed arch with its pediment, its cornice. They will paint it white, with flashes of red. It will be visible from miles away; far-off sailors will see it in war and in peace. Cesare will embed a sculpture of Christ’s face above the doorway. It will remain on this island long after he is gone.

  I can’t leave without her. By winter, the barriers will be finished.

  He shakes off the thought, instructs Gino and Marco to continue mixing the cement for the front of the chapel. All the men begin to work happily, and much faster than they ever have in the quarry. Cesare goes into the chapel and continues painting the grey plasterboard white. In some places, he paints over the pencil marks where he has sketched out faint designs. He covers the outline of a hawk, a lion and a crow. There is no purpose in having the images there without coloured paints.

  The concrete altar will be finished today – Alberto and Aureliano are hunched over it, smoothing layer after layer of cement over the surface. They flash quick grins at Cesare, and return to their task. Both men are utterly engrossed in creating something beautiful. Far off, from the direction of the quarry, comes the boom of another explosion.

  Above the altar, there is a pencil outline of a woman’s face. Her expression is serene, but her eyes are fierce. And in Cesare’s mind she has long red hair. He puts the brush of white paint to the image, ready to cover it, but stops himself. How can he paint her out, as if she never existed? She is somewhere on this island. Perhaps, sometimes, she thinks of him.

  Later, after Alberto and Aureliano finish pressing the last layer of cement onto the altar, Father Ossani leads all the men into the chapel.

  Cesare has put lanterns under the altar. From a distance, they look like the most intricate decorated boxes, with beautiful patterns carved and etched into the metal. Cesare has crafted them carefully, so that the light from the candles casts flickering patterns up the whitewashed walls. It is only by examining them very carefully that you might guess that, until yesterday, these decorations were empty beef tins.

  The men file in silently, all jokes forgotten as they watch the yellow light licking the clean white walls. The altar itself is still grey, the cement still wet, but the scalloped edges are delicate, curving like the inside of a seashell; it rests upon two fluted cement columns, just as Cesare had imagined. He glances across at Alberto and Aureliano: their faces are flushed, their eyes shining.

  Back home in Italy, churches may be collapsing, the land may be burning, but here, in this desolate corner of the earth, they have made something sacred.

  Father Ossani stands. As one, the men kneel.

  The cement floor is hard and cold under Cesare’s knees. He doesn’t care – he barely feels the pain. Candlelight falls on the men’s faces; they raise their eyes, basking in the glow of it.

  Father Ossani begins to recite the praise to God that marks the opening of Mass, the familiar litany a balm of dew in the desert. Cesare puts his head back and recites the words he has known s
ince childhood, the words that acknowledge Christ’s conquest of death, and speak of Cesare’s own hope of eternal life.

  Behind Father Ossani’s bowed head, the pencil sketch of Dorotea seems to shift in the flickering candlelight. And, in this moment of exultation, Cesare cannot stop himself feeling despair.

  He walks forward with the other men and kneels again to accept the bread and wine that Father Ossani has brought to the chapel – a scrap of bread each and a dribble of watered-down wine.

  In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

  Corporis et Sanguinus Domini.

  Body and Blood of Christ.

  It is somehow warming, this old bread and weak wine. Somehow filling and strengthening. When Cesare glances at Gino, there are tears on his face. His own cheeks are wet. Father Ossani’s voice quakes; his hands quiver as he makes the sign of the cross over Cesare’s face.

  Body and Blood of Christ.

  After Father Ossani has touched his fingers to Cesare’s forehead and blessed him, Cesare remains kneeling. He hears the other men rise, one by one, hears them leave the chapel, hears their voices fading as they walk down the dark hill towards the camp and the mess hut, where their dinner will be waiting.

  He can’t make himself move. This moment feels like a miracle. How have they built a house of God on this island? How have they begun to craft something so exquisite, when the world is raging and folding in on itself?

  To Cesare, it seems that if one miracle can happen, then another must be possible. He bows his head and thinks of Dorotea. He doesn’t know what he wants, but finds himself repeating her name again and again – at first in his mind, and then aloud, in a whisper, like a prayer, his whole body full of a longing that feels like worship, a longing that feels almost idolatrous.

  He presses his hands to his face and tries to steady his breathing.

  A scraping noise from the doorway, like a boot shifting. His breath stops in his throat and he sits up.

  ‘Gino?’ he says.

  The sound of an intake of breath, and then of footsteps retreating down the path. Cesare stands, runs, his own footsteps echoing around the empty chapel.

  ‘Fermare! Stop!’ he calls, as he reaches the door. But no one is there. Just the black, blank mouth of the gathering night and, in the distance at the bottom of the hill, the glimmering lights of the camp. He feels as though the surrounding hills are a dark sea, and the chapel is the only thing keeping him afloat.

  ‘Dove sei?’ he whispers. ‘Where are you?’

  The night replies with silence. He must have imagined the footsteps. Maybe it was some creature, a wild animal.

  But as he turns to go back into the chapel, where he will blow out the candles, something on the ground catches his eye.

  He crouches down. Three small jars, each filled with something.

  He picks them up – they are warm as freshly laid eggs. On the altar, he opens them and, in the flickering candlelight, he sees three paints. A dark yellow, a bright red and a vibrant blue.

  His instinct is to kneel, again, to thank God for this marvel. But he remembers the scrape of boots, the indrawn breath, the light footsteps running away.

  Dorotea.

  And as he holds the jars of paint against his lips, he turns around in the chapel, imagining the walls glowing with bright colours, imagining the creatures, brimming with life. And the central picture, above the altar, will be the face of the Madonna, surrounded by angels, her defiant gaze focused on the miraculous Child in her arms.

  The night is cold, but Cesare doesn’t feel it as he begins to paint, starting with the blue cloth that surrounds the cherubs.

  If one miracle can happen, then why shouldn’t everything be miraculous?

  He knows, from the lectures of the artist in Moena who helped him decorate the church, that blue was once the rarest colour. Il blu oltremare was made by grinding precious lapis lazuli into a powder. It was so expensive that Michelangelo abandoned his painting The Entombment because he couldn’t afford the blue paint.

  And yet here, incredibly, in this chilly northern wilderness, Cesare holds a tiny pot of blue.

  If one miracle can happen . . .

  He brushes it onto the plasterboard gently, delicately. The whole wall lights.

  He is trembling. He must find a way to talk to her. He must find a way to thank her. He must find her.

  Orcadians

  16 April is St Magnus’s Day. Nearly everyone in Kirkwall flocks to St Magnus’s Cathedral to remember the murdered saint. The red sandstone building has rarely been so full, even before the war and certainly not in recent years. Outside a light mizzle dampens the air, and as the minister recites the Lord’s Prayer, steam rises from the wet clothes of the congregation and ghosts upwards, towards the rose window.

  ‘We remember our fallen sons,’ the minister says, ‘and those who are lost. May they be returned to us.’

  ‘Amen,’ the congregation intones. A few people sneak glances at John O’Farrell, whose son, James, is an aircraft engineer and was reported missing in action last month. Along with the pity that everyone feels, along with the horror at the thought of one of their own having fallen, there is an undercurrent of relief.

  Not my son. Thank God, it’s not my son.

  John keeps his head bowed – his hair is even greyer than before, his face more lined. There have been stories about prisoners being sent to German camps. No one knows what happens to them there; no one likes to talk about it.

  After the service, the postmistress, Mary Guthrie, goes to give John her best wishes. She, too, looks haggard. At night, when she tries to sleep, her thoughts are full of the hopeful faces of mothers, who have walked to the post office for a letter from their sons. She has handed out one telegram after another, and watched her friends’ faces crumple. In the dark, she imagines the men – the boys, many of whom she has known all their lives: she dreams of their pale skin, like candlewax. Until last week, she dreamed of her own son, Robbie, who is a navigator. She didn’t imagine him dead, but pictured him, aged nine, laughing at the joke he’d told her.

  What do you call a deer with no eyes? No idea!

  He was forever telling jokes and stories. He was always prone to clowning; he had an infectious laugh. Every Sunday, from when he was fifteen, he’d got up early and fetched some decoration for her breakfast tray. Sometimes it was a rose, sometimes it was a trail of kelp or bladderwrack, but he always woke her with two slices of toast and a cup of tea on the tray he’d decorated.

  Last week, Robbie returned to her with a limp. He is thin and dull-eyed; he says barely a word. When he is supposed to be asleep, she hears him crying and banging some part of himself – his foot or head? – against the wall. She can’t imagine him laughing.

  Now, she places a hand on John’s shoulder. He pats her fingers and gives a pained smile. ‘Give Robbie my best.’ The words sound hollow; they both hear it. John’s son may be missing, but Robbie is absent too. Some vital part of him was lost in the air over Germany, when he gave directions to help set a city on fire.

  As John is leaving the church, Angus MacLeod steps into his path. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this chapel they’re building.’

  ‘Not today, Angus. Can you not find something else to amuse you? There must be someone who wants tormenting. A child, for instance, or a harmless animal.’

  ‘But have you seen the chapel? The time it’s taking. I’ve been talking to people and we agree it’s unwarranted, out of all proportion. These men are prisoners –’

  ‘I expect they know that, and I expect their families are also aware. Now, step aside, would you?’ John continues walking down the steps but Angus grabs his arm.

  ‘They’re painting it. One of the prisoners is busy decorating the walls with pictures of people and birds – I’ve seen the pencil marks. Think of the supplies they need – the paint and whitewash. Not to mention the food and drink they’ll be demanding – and for what? To build a chapel, when the
y should be working on the barriers.’

  ‘The causeways are well on their way to being finished, from what I hear. They’ll be completed within six months and then the prisoners will be leaving. And if you’ve a problem with them in the meantime, I suggest you talk to Major Bates about it.’

  Angus drops his gaze. The drizzle turns to rain.

  John gives a short bark of laughter. ‘From your expression, I’d say you’ve spoken to Major Bates already and he gave you short shrift.’

  Angus’s face twists. ‘It’s not . . . It’s not just the chapel. It’s the prisoners and the girls –’

  John holds up a hand, his expression suddenly hard. ‘You’d best not be talking to those girls – you’d best not even be thinking about them. Other people might be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve neither the time nor the patience to pretend that I trust you. You stay away from those girls, or there will be trouble. Do you hear?’

  ‘But I –’

  John steps forward, so that his face is inches from Angus’s. ‘Do not test me on this.’

  Angus steps back, then looks away.

  Around the two men, a small crowd has gathered. No one is standing close enough to interfere, but plenty have overheard.

  After they have gone, there is a short silence and then a few people go back into the cathedral, out of the rain. Some agree with Angus, that the chapel is ridiculous – a gaudy thing, it will be, full of Catholic icons. There is not a single icon in St Magnus’s Cathedral, which has stood since the twelfth century. The pink sandstone walls are heavily etched with nine hundred years of graffiti: the names of sailors and ships are scratched alongside a skull, the eyes blank-socketed. The building carries the chill and reverence of a life longer than human thought.

  ‘Their chapel won’t last,’ says Neil MacClenny. ‘It’s made of tin cans and bits of old board, so I hear.’

  Everyone nods. No one mentions the cement. No one remarks that, on some nights, if you look out over the sea towards Selkie Holm, it’s possible to make out the faint glow of a lamp burning in the darkness.