The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  Lena looked up to the sky, as if anticipating the buzz of airplanes, the threat of bombs. “I hope so. You’ve always been the optimistic one between us.”

  Elodie smiled. “Optimistic? I’ll take that . . . better than being called naive.”

  Lena embraced her friend. “You are not naïve, you are stronger than you appear.” She pinched Elodie’s slender arm. “Good-bye, warrior, and good luck!”

  At half past eight, Elodie walks onto the stage with the rest of the orchestra. She is seated closer to the front, near the conductor, so the audience can see her when she plays her cadenza in the Boccherini concerto and then her solo in the piece by Saint-Saëns.

  She notices a slight shift in the breath of the audience as she appears. The sight of a beautiful young girl with a long swanlike neck, dressed in dark taffeta, and carrying her cello causes a stir through the audience. Elodie hears the gasps and feels a slight tremor run through her.

  The musicians take their seats and focus their eyes on the conductor and his baton.

  Marin Marais’s “Bells of Geneviève” begins in perfect rhythm. The music is meant to simulate the ringing of church bells, both persistent and full of longing, rising to a crescendo. Elodie plays with increasing fury. Orsina sees that Elodie has yet to open her eyes since the piece began. The boys who play alongside her use their bows like swordsmen. They play with precision, but Orsina senses that they do not play like her daughter. Elodie is playing as though she has become one of the church bells. She is swaying back and forth, her body like a pendulum, her arms striking passionately with her bow. Still, Elodie’s eyes remain closed. She does not look at a single face in the audience; she dances with the music alone.

  When she finishes, the audience claps, some even stand and yell “Brava!” before they return to their seats and resettle themselves. After a small wave of silence returns to the theater, the students in the orchestra pick up their bows again. But a strange feeling overtakes Elodie. Within the first few rows of the theater, she sees Luca’s face, his eyes radiant and shining, his complete attention focused on her on the stage. His smile curling like a cat’s tail at the sight of her lifting her bow.

  The orchestra begins the Boccherini and the music sweeps beneath her. Her fingers play the notes, but Elodie is not connected to the score. Her bow moves with perfect precision, but the sight of Luca’s face is like a floodgate, a dam breaking inside her. She is seized by the images of the night before. His hands sliding over her; his fingers searching for her. She cannot stop the reel inside her head. It is as if he has taken possession of her mind.

  Time and space suddenly fall away. She hears herself playing, but the notes are not what she wants. Her memory of the written score has taken control. The Grutzmacher cadenza, the one her teacher wanted her to play, emerges from her cello, and the small space she had to insert the code evaporates into midair.

  No one but Luca and the Wolf—whom she cannot see, but whom she knows is in the audience—can detect her error. The cadenza was played perfectly, without a single note missing, but Elodie has failed her mission and she is seized with terror over her mistake. Her stomach is turning into tight knots. Her mind is racing. While moments ago her mind had temporarily been taken over, now every part of her is rushing to find a way to rectify her error. She wonders if she can add the code at the end, but she knows that it would sound out of place and set off an alarm with the others. If only there was a cadenza in Saint-Saëns’s “Dying Swan.”

  She does not look again into the rows of the theater. She keeps her eyes on the floor, her cello firmly placed between her legs and her bow at her side. Part of her wishes that she could vanish from the stage. She does not want to find the searching eyes of Luca. She does not want to see the confusion or the disappointment on his face. Nor can she bear the thought of the Wolf’s eyes. She imagines them bloodshot and furious, incredulous over her ineptitude.

  Elodie tries to push the thoughts of both men out of her mind. She tries to imagine her mother instead. Orsina would have no idea that Elodie had failed at her debut. Elodie straightens her neck, even as her gaze remains fixed on the ground. She can feel her mother smiling at the thought of her daughter becoming the swan.

  After the applause dissipates, a harp is wheeled onto the stage for the final performance of the “Dying Swan.”

  The harpist, Francesca Colonne, arrives on the stage, glorious in a long red silk dress, her hair piled like a cornetto on her head. Elodie is thankful that all eyes are no longer on her but on the exquisitely delicate Francesca.

  Francesca sits down at her harp, the tall instrument with its gilded scrolls and heavenly strings, and begins to seduce the audience into a dreamy sleep. She plucks and strokes the strings with exquisite and celestial beauty. Elodie raises her head, her long, white neck stretches from her blue neckline, and it is she who channels the beating wings of the swan, its heart on the cusp of breaking.

  When Elodie enters her own solo in the piece, there seems to be no difference between the imaginary white bird she is evoking and her own death. She plays like a dying bird, her cello weeping with every note. When she is finished, she has collapsed at her cello, her white arms wrapped around its wooden body, her head hanging over its neck.

  She hears Francesca whispering to her to get up to take her bow, her fingers gently pulling at her arm. But although Elodie hears Francesca’s words in her ear, and feels her grasp trying to bring her to her feet, Elodie is so distraught over her own failure, she cannot move.

  After the clapping has finally ended and Francesca has taken her bows, Elodie’s wrapped fingers are pried from her cello’s neck, her instrument is taken from her, and she is lifted onto her feet.

  The audience is full of exclamations about the passion of her playing. “Incredible,” several people shout. “She was the dying swan!” another voice bellows from within the crowd.

  Orsina rushes from her seat to find Elodie, who is sitting on a small wooden chair near a vanity room, damp with perspiration and shaking.

  “Elodie!” Orsina immediately takes the shawl that Elodie had dropped to the floor and wraps it around her daughter’s shoulders.

  “What happened? You gave me such a fright. I felt as though I was witnessing your death in front of me. You were delving into a river of blackness, and I wanted to leap from my chair and save you!”

  Elodie pulls her shawl closer around her body and stares blankly at her mother. Elodie is so distraught she cannot mouth a single word.

  “Elodie . . .” her mother says again. When her daughter doesn’t answer, she swings around to the other performers and their parents.

  “Can I get a glass of water? Please, somebody. Elodie is unwell!”

  A glass of water is quickly fetched, and Orsina tries to get Elodie to take a few sips. She strokes Elodie’s cheeks and tells her that she has played with not just perfection, but with incredible emotion. She tells her daughter that her father would have been so proud.

  But those words have the opposite effect on Elodie. From the moment she says them, the anguish on Elodie’s face only intensifies.

  “Proud? Proud? He would have been furious with me, had he heard what I played . . . or didn’t play.”

  She cannot think of her father now. She is imagining the Wolf furious over her mistake, and Luca needing to create a new means to convey the code in time.

  But neither of the men appear backstage and Elodie surrenders to her mother, allowing her to take her from the theater. They push past the throngs of people who want to tell Elodie how extraordinary her performance was, the people who thrust their programs in front of her hoping for an autograph from a musician they expect to soon be starring throughout Italy.

  Orsina lifts up her arm like a shield as she takes Elodie outside the Bibiena, pushing them into the darkness, until it’s just the two of them in the back of a third-class carriage on a night train bac
k to Verona.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Verona, Italy

  SEPTEMBER 1943

  On the train ride back to Verona, Elodie does not utter a single word. Orsina tries to rouse her from her waking sleep, reminding the girl of her beautiful playing that evening, how she played with such emotion and how proud her father would have been. But nothing can bring Elodie out from her trance.

  As the train arrives at the station and the other passengers disembark around them, Orsina offers to carry Elodie’s cello for her. But her daughter clutches the instrument so tightly to her chest that Orsina cannot free it from her embrace.

  “Elodie, please . . .” She leans forward and puts her hands on her daughter’s narrow shoulders. “You won’t give me your cello, but I don’t have the strength to lift you. We need to get you home.”

  Elodie rises like a wraith, all the while clinging to her cello, and walks down the carriage’s steps to the platform below.

  Orsina laces her arms through Elodie’s and begins to steer the two of them through the cobblestone streets until they are safely inside their apartment. There, she unbuttons the beautiful dress and pulls a white nightgown over Elodie’s body. Elodie lays her in her bed and brings the bed linen and blankets up to her chin.

  She wants Elodie to close her eyes, but all her daughter does is stare at the wall.

  Orsina cannot understand why her daughter has become so distraught. She wants to blame it on the music that evening, surmising that perhaps Elodie has connected Saint-Saëns’s “Dying Swan” with her father’s death to such an extent that it caused her to virtually collapse on stage.

  All Elodie can think about is that she has failed. She is afraid she has endangered all of the men in the Resistance trying to fortify themselves in the mountains before the Germans invade. She is ashamed that the Wolf will think he made a major mistake relying on her with such an important mission. But most of all, she is despondent over what Luca must be thinking about her right now.

  Her sense of failure is immobilizing. She cannot lift her arms or legs. Her entire body feels as though it’s been weighted down with a sack of bricks. Orsina pulls a chair close to Elodie, takes her daughter’s hand in her own, and grips it tighter than she should, wanting Elodie to feel the intensity of her grasp. And then she begins to sing.

  What Orsina sings, Elodie cannot quite understand the words, for it is in the dialeto del mar, the old Venetian dialect of the sea. But she can feel the depths of the saltwater lagoon; the pull of the tide and the scroll of the fog.

  And although Elodie could not reveal the true source of her anguish, she allows the ancient melody to enter her like water, permeate her skin and travel through her veins. It was a language she didn’t speak, but Elodie still understood it somehow, like a rhythm that flowed between her and her mother. These Venetian melodies, songs of distant longing belonging to a mystical place, where ancient pathways, palaces, and dreams all floated. As she hears this music traveling through her ears into the fabric of her soul, Elodie closes her eyes and dreams of Luca.

  When Elodie awoke the following morning, Orsina was still asleep in the chair. Elodie quickly washed her face and dressed herself in trousers and a blouse. There was no time to fix her hair, which was now half-undone from the night before.

  Elodie quickly left the apartment, took her bicycle from the first-floor landing, and rode furiously in the direction of Luca’s store.

  It was only 8:00 in the morning, but she suspected he would already be there before the shop opened.

  When she arrived, he was in the front. He opened the door. He looked grave.

  “Elodie . . .”

  She wanted to hear honey in his words. But what she heard was fear.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. Her breathing was rapid. She had pedaled as fast as she could to the store and now she could hardly speak. “I’m so sorry . . . I’m so sorry. I became distracted . . . I swear to you I didn’t do it on purpose. I had every intention of doing . . .”

  “Stop,” he said. He placed his hand on her shoulders. “I already know that.”

  She paused for a second and looked him straight in the eye. There she found the words, even though they remained unspoken, that she was looking for. She knew he had forgiven her. A sense of relief flooded through her and she tried to collect herself.

  “But what about the Wolf? He must be furious at me.”

  “It’s not about you or me, Elodie. All of this is far larger than any of us.” He pressed his temples for a moment. She could feel his fatigue.

  “Anyway, I haven’t spoken directly with him. That was the point of the coded message last night . . . but we still have to find another way to get him the information he needs.”

  “There must be a way I can still get the code to him.”

  “Unfortunately, things are progressing far more quickly than any of us had imagined. At most, we now have two days before the Germans arrive. To come up with a new code now, to get the message to the Wolf in time for anyone to be able to act on it, would be impossible.”

  Elodie started to tremble.

  “You can’t fall apart now . . . You just can’t.” He touched her arm. “So, yes, the code wasn’t transmitted. There’s a war on, things fall apart all the time. A message gets intercepted . . . or a contact is discovered and gets a bullet in his head. These things happen. You’re not the first person in the Resistance to make a mistake, Elodie.”

  He reached for her cheek. “What does the Little Prince learn through his journey, Elodie? It’s only with the heart one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  She smiled. “I marked that page when I read that,” she said.

  “Good. So you know that in life you must always follow your heart.”

  “Yes.”

  He covered his hand over hers. “There is so much to do now and we cannot lose our direction.”

  She nodded and his voice filled the air.

  “Beppe is out with the others at Berto’s studio now, trying to figure out what we need to do next. And Maffini and Zampieri are in Vicenza as we speak, with one of Berto’s French contacts. I know from my brother that our scouts have already sighted several Germans moving through the mountains. Raffaele is requesting more ammunition. And now the delivery of that will unfortunately be affected by last night . . .”

  Elodie’s eyes flickered.

  “There’s going to be war, Elodie. What’s happened can’t be changed. We need to move on and fix it as best we can, as quickly as we can. It doesn’t change what’s in my heart. Nor yours.”

  Her eyes began to tear with gratitude. How happy she was that he had forgiven her for her mistake.

  “It’s so mysterious, this land of tears,” he said, again quoting The Little Prince.

  And hearing him speak another grain of truth, she couldn’t help but smile.

  She follows him into the back of the store, where she discovers more guns—two boxes filled with Beretta M-34 pistols and three boxes of ammunition—than she has ever seen in her life.

  “Beppe’s been helping me all night. But there is still so much work to do . . .” He uncrates another box in front of her, one that contains only books. He pulls one out and opens it. In the center, just as Luca had shown her and Lena during the first meeting she had attended, a space had been carved to conceal a pistol.

  He reaches to place a pistol inside, when she intercepts his hand and takes it in her own. She holds it for a moment. She knows there is no time for kissing, or exploring the curves of each other’s body, but she still wants to feel the warmth of his skin and the sensation of his grip against her own fingers.

  “We need to get all the pistols hidden into the books. I’m going to stack them on the storage shelves back here, so they’ll be ready right when we need them.” He smiles. “It’s like a loaded library.”
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br />   She laughs, but maintains her efficiency, quickly packing a pistol into each book. She’s never held a gun before, and the weight of one surprises her.

  “They should create a book large enough for a rifle,” he says, as he watches her hold the pistol.

  She does not particularly like the sensation of the weapon in her hand. She imagines Lena might enjoy the danger of something like that, but not Elodie. She simply places each one into a book and moves on quickly.

  As she works, Luca takes each book and places it onto the shelf, occasionally looking at the clock. She knows the store officially opens by 9:30 A.M., so it is essential that every book is shelved with its secret weapon and that all evidence of their work has vanished by then.

  Five minutes before the shop is due to open, Luca places the last book on the shelf. He picks up the empty crates where the pistols had been stored and the empty boxes that contained the carved-out books, and quickly carries them to the back alley, where he takes a hammer and breaks them up into small, nondescript pieces of discarded material.

  When he comes in through the back door, he lifts an apron from one of the pegs and pulls her toward him.

  “Come here,” he says, wrapping his arms around her. “We’ve worked hard enough, I deserve one of these . . .”

  He takes her in his arms and kisses her. And just like the Little Prince, she feels the layers that had once seemed steeped in shadow, suddenly sparkling with light. And for a brief moment, with his lips on hers, Elodie feels surrounded by stars.

  Luca was right. There was no time to attempt another delivery of the coded information. That very evening, September 8, as Elodie and Orsina were eating dinner, the radio broadcast astonishing news: The king had publicly declared an armistice between Italy and the Allied forces. But even if the king’s intention was to protect Italy from a German invasion, Mussolini had other plans. In order to restore his own power, Mussolini had made a pact with Hitler allowing him to send his troops into Italy through the north.