“When do we leave for Venice?” Elodie was so weak that she could barely manage to get the words out. All she wanted to do was crawl back into her childhood bed and sleep.
“We’ll leave as soon as you feel strong enough.” Orsina hesitated for a moment. “But after you left with Luca, I started to wonder how we could manage to make a new start there.” She took a deep breath. “Your father gave us such a good life while he was alive, but we have to think how we’ll find money to live without his income from teaching.”
Orsina scanned the room. “There are a few things we could try to sell. The dishes, the silverware.” She stopped herself mid-thought. “But who would even buy them? No one has extra money to spare now, and they’re not of any real value . . .”
Elodie was barely listening to her mother. She cupped her face in her hands and began to sob.
“Luca’s dead, Mamma.”
Orsina’s face turned pale.
“A group of German soldiers discovered his brother’s camp. We . . . We . . .” She was trying to find her breath through her tears. “We had just scouted a new location and were returning to tell the others when the shooting began . . .” She knotted her hands together, her knuckles draining from pink to white.
“He insisted I stay hidden in the bushes . . . I begged him to stay . . . but he wouldn’t.”
Orsina wrapped her arms around her daughter. Elodie’s cheeks were so wet now that Orsina could feel the tears soaking through her blouse and onto her own skin.
She continued to hold Elodie for several minutes until her daughter’s tears stopped.
“I want to leave here, soon.” She was trying to regain her breath and peeled herself away from Orsina’s arms. “I have our new papers.” She stood up, went to her bag, and fetched the new identity cards. “One of the partisans made these for us, only a few hours before he was killed.” She handed Orsina’s over to her. “We’re Anna and Maria Zorzetto now.”
Orsina took her new identity card and studied the new name.
Elodie tried to smile. “Seriously, Mamma, you must remember this . . . It’s important in case we’re ever questioned.”
Orsina closed her eyes and etched the new date into her mind. “Your memory comes from me, carina. I will remember it.”
Elodie touched her temples with her fingers. Her face was streaked with red from crying. “I wish I didn’t remember so much . . . I can still see Luca’s body . . . his fingers blue . . .” Her voice cracked and she stopped.
Orsina came over and embraced her, but Elodie pushed her away.
“I just want to leave here and forget everything.”
Orsina tried again to soothe her daughter. She searched for her fingers and squeezed them. “We will make a new life in Venice. We will drown our painful memories in the lagoon and start anew.”
“It’s strange for me to envision us picking up everything and going to Venice.” Elodie bit her lip and searched to focus on her mother’s eyes. “It’s so close by train but you and Papa made it seem like it was a door to a city that it was best to keep closed.”
Orsina became quiet. A strange light came over her face.
“As much as I love Venice, I’ve associated it with death. I buried my parents there, I lost my first pregnancy there . . . So after I had you, and your father and I made a new life in Verona, I just could never manage to return.”
“Then why now?” Elodie was trying to understand her mother’s inner mind.
“Because Venice is a maze. It’s a place where you can both lose yourself and also reemerge. Especially for those who know it well.” She took a deep breath. “And it’s not safe for you in Verona anymore.”
Orsina reached to pull back Elodie’s hair. She wanted to see her daughter’s eyes and anchor herself to them. These were eyes she had watched since the moment the girl had come into the world. She had seen them transform from innocence into maturity. Now even through her daughter’s grief, she saw the strength within them.
“You’re right, though. We will need money, Mamma.”
Orsina nodded in agreement. “Yes. We must figure out a way to sell what we can.”
Elodie lowered her eyes. “Father did leave me something valuable.” She reached for her mother’s hand. “But it never really belonged to me. It’s now time for someone else to continue its story.”
She turned her head and looked at the cello resting in the corner. Its red varnish was glimmering.
Orsina shook her head. “No. I won’t let you. It hasn’t come to that yet.”
“I have a buyer in mind,” she said, her decision already made.
She briefly imagined herself without her cello and felt a crushing sensation inside her chest. But perhaps she needed to rid herself of everything she had before she arrived in Venice. To let the lagoon she had yet to see swallow her whole and then spit her out, new and transformed.
The next morning, Elodie woke up and held the instrument one last time. She unwrapped it from its yellow scarf, stroked its long neck, and ran her fingers up and down the strings.
She had no doubt who the right person to buy the cello would be. She needed someone who knew its history and appreciated its provenance. She also wanted to be sure that the new owner would take as great care of it as she and her father had. Only one person she knew fit this description, and she knew exactly where to find him. She just had to hope that he was still there. And so the next morning, Elodie, or rather Anna Zorzetto, was on a train to Mantua to see the Wolf.
She boarded the train to Mantua and found a seat on one of the third-class wooden benches. Holding her cello closely between her arms and legs, she scanned her fellow passengers. Everyone had the same weary expression. Blank faces that conveyed only the simplest message to anyone who pondered them for a moment too long: “I know nothing. I have nothing of value. I only ask that you let me travel undisturbed.”
In these times to be left undisturbed was truly a gift. So when the German pass-kontrol barged into the train compartment, demanding papers and scrutinizing identity cards, it caused nearly every heart on board to stop momentarily.
Elodie watched the woman next to her let her toddler suck on a piece of stale bread that was no bigger than her thumb. Everyone looked so thin, their hollow faces ghostlike and grave.
The woman seemed to find Elodie and her instrument a curious addition to the compartment. Her eyes slid over the curve of the case and the lock of Elodie’s fingers around its middle.
“It must be heavy,” she finally said.
Elodie nodded. The child reached to touch the case, his tiny fingers gently caressing its inner curve.
Elodie heard his little voice above the din of the locomotive’s wheels. “What is it?”
She felt his finger graze against her own, its warmth cutting through the chill that had run through her since Luca’s death.
“It’s a cello, carino,” she said quietly. “And it makes the most beautiful music.”
Since the Germans had arrived, it was impossible to travel on the rails without any significant delay. A typical forty-minute trip from Verona to Mantua could now take over two hours.
As Elodie looked out the window and saw the outskirts of Mantua, the city majestically rising in the distance, she felt as if she were traveling back in time. She could see the church bell tower and the medieval walls, and she tried to remember how long it had been since she was last in the Wolf’s apartment, playing the encoded cadenzas within those peacock-blue walls.
It had been nearly three months. Even in that short time period, so much had happened. Her father had died. She had failed her mission at the Bibiena. The Germans had invaded Italian soil. There had been the bloodshed at the Piazza delle Poste. Lena and Beppe were murdered. And now the heartache of losing Luca. Elodie wrapped her arms around the cello case even more tightly and shut her eyes.
She wondered what the Wolf would say when she arrived at his apartment. Whether he’d greet her warmly, or say he wanted nothing more to do with her after she had bungled the code at the Bibiena. She tried to imagine him instead bringing her into the apartment, sitting her down calmly, and asking why she had come.
She practiced in her head how she would ask him whether he would be interested in buying her cello. She would never forget the sight of the Wolf’s eyes when she first pulled it out of its case. He looked as though she had walked in with something more valuable than gold.
As she exited the train and made her way toward Mantua’s central square, she told herself that this would probably be the last time she would hold the instrument in her arms. She stiffened under her sweater, her spine as straight as a rifle. She wanted to feel like stone, to no longer feel the river of grief that flowed just beneath her bones. In her life, she had held two things that she loved more than anything else: her cello and Luca. And within the next hour, she knew the last of these would be gone.
Her memory did not fail her. As soon as she alighted the train, she began to maneuver through the streets toward the Wolf’s apartment. She entered the city through the Piazza Sordello, down the cobblestone street past Saint Andrea. But with so few pedestrians on the street, Mantua now seemed like a ghost town.
As she walked, she noticed three German soldiers smoking cigarettes outside of a local bar. One of them called out a leering remark to her. She maintained a face of neither disgust nor amusement, but one of indifference, as if his crude words were just another particle permeating the air.
When she arrived at the Wolf’s apartment building, she found the large wooden front door slightly ajar. A small boy had just come in with his mother, and they were looking through their mailbox. They didn’t even notice the girl with the cello who slipped in behind them and made her way up the stairs.
She knocked twice at his door. When no one answered, she turned the doorknob and, to her surprise, found it unlocked. Elodie walked inside.
A flood of memories from the last time returned to her. The long, narrow hallway. The wooden pedestal table with unopened letters stacked high. But unlike her first visit, there was no music floating through the apartment. The only thing she heard now was her own footsteps against the tile floor.
It was in the white room in front of the music salon that she first realized something was very wrong. The room had always been pristine when she had visited before. But now the sofas were sliced open, their stuffing pulled out and strewn on the floor. The glass vase that she had admired previously was shattered into pieces. The coffee table had been overturned, and the Oriental carpet that had first enthralled her was no longer there.
By the time she walked into the music room and put down her cello, Elodie was shaking. What she saw then was even more shocking than she could have ever imagined.
The peacock-blue walls looked like a desecrated tomb. The silk panels were slashed and cut open. The strings of the grand piano had been severed and brutally pulled out like weeds. Elodie looked at the wall where the painting of the girl in the kerchief had once been. But that, too, was gone.
Around the Wolf’s desk, papers littered the ground like snow. She knelt down, her hands fumbling to neaten the scattered papers.
Her heart was racing. Every sound she heard, every creak in the rafter, every rustle of paper, sent a wave of panic through her.
Nearly everything about the apartment that she had once found so beautiful had been either confiscated or torn apart. And the Wolf? What had they done to him? She felt a terrible lump in her throat as she tried to imagine his fate.
The desk was filled with traces of him: a small red lacquer pen, a tin of pastilles, and a wand of half-melted sealing wax. Against a ceramic lamp, there was a framed photograph of a young woman, which Elodie had not noticed before.
The black-and-white image was of a young woman seated at a piano. She couldn’t have been older than twenty in the photograph. Elodie studied her as though she were looking at herself. The woman’s posture was as straight as a razor, her gaze unflinching. She was dressed in a simple, white sheath with her legs neatly crossed. Her eyes, dark and fierce, looked as though they knew something the photographer did not. They radiated an inner intelligence and a certain preternatural wisdom she was content to keep to herself.
Her hands, which were folded on her lap with long, slender fingers, showed clear evidence that she was a musician. The two middle fingers had loosened from the woman’s clasp. Elodie could almost hear them tapping against the woman’s skin. Beneath the tight smile and the crossed legs, Elodie could see what no one else except the Wolf probably saw, that music was clearly dancing through her head.
Elodie sat down at the desk and pulled out the center drawer. There she found something else unexpected: handwritten sheets of music. As she read the notes, she could hear the melody and feel the urgency and undulations of emotion contained within the score. Almost immediately she realized that this was the music the Wolf had been playing when she arrived at his apartment for the first time.
They had taken everything of value. And they had destroyed anything else of any beauty. But they could neither see nor understand the hidden treasure that sat resting inside this simple wooden drawer.
She had not heard music in her head for several days, not since before she left to go to the mountains and Luca. Even after she returned home and was ensconced in the living room where she had played her cello ever since she was a small child. But now the score, written by a woman she never met, penetrated her entire body. Elodie felt as though it was composed solely for her. She could hear the sadness contained in the notes, as if the composer was writing her own requiem. She heard the grief. The longing. But in between the valleys of notes, a legato of light and hope ran throughout.
She took hold of the score and instinctively placed it in her cello case.
Elodie walked quickly back toward the train station, still carrying her beloved cello. She had failed to sell it to the one person she knew who could fully appreciate it. But she was returning to Verona with something that transcended monetary value; the music composed by the Wolf’s wife. Like her cello that once belonged to Enrico Levi, a man whom she had never met, she felt this music was also now entrusted to her care.
Over the next week, Elodie and her mother sell Pietro’s violin and piano to a friend from the conservatory. Orsina also quietly sells her gold necklace and the black beads that had been her mother’s. For all their trouble, they now have just enough money to get to Venice and live there for a few months.
Orsina now calls Elodie “Anna.” They memorize their new birthdays and repeat their new last name over and over. Into her red valise, Orsina packs to begin her new life, while Elodie packs to forget her old one. Her mother folds her dresses and her black skirt with care. She takes her cotton summer dress that even in her now middle age sets off her narrow waist and toned calves. She packs a single silk flower for the sake of beauty, and the wedding portrait of her and Pietro for the sake of love.
Elodie’s suitcase contains only dark blue and gray clothes. In her rucksack, she packs the music she has taken from the Wolf’s apartment, carefully placed in a paper folio and tied with a leather cord. She does not wear the medallion from Luca, for it is the amulet of a soldier. She instead tucks that into a small pouch and drops it into her bag. And among her other belongings, the bar of soap, the toothbrush, and her cherished copy of The Little Prince, it sinks like a small pebble cast into the sea.
“Where will we stay?” Elodie asks her mother the night before they leave.
“There is someone I know who will give us shelter,” Orsina assures her daughter. And so they leave. Elodie holding a single suitcase and her cello, her rucksack on her back, Orsina clasping the same red valise she had carried when she had left Venice years before.
At the Verona station, German soldiers st
and guard near every platform. The green uniforms, the metal helmets. In one corner, there is a woman in a black coat clutching the hand of a young child. Her face is frozen and pale. One German is shouting to another that she is a Jew with false papers. His language slices through the air, brutal as a blade of steel. Elodie’s blood runs cold just hearing it.
She does not dare alter the direction of her eyes, even though she wants to stop and help them, as she knows Lena surely would have done.
Elodie walks symmetrically, one hand carrying the cello, the other her suitcase. On her back, she wears her rucksack. In the past three months, she has perfected her public walk and now she moves slowly and methodically, as though she were incapable of distraction.
Orsina does not move like Elodie. She does not understand the movement of stealth. She is slower and more easily distracted than her daughter. She does not know how to focus her eyes straight ahead, to avoid turning around if she hears the slightest noise or others speaking. To ignore everything around you except getting to the place you need to go.
The two-hour train ride to Venice takes more than five hours. In the compartment, the men and women sit tightly on the third-class benches that are hard and offer little comfort. Women unwrap heels of stale bread from handkerchiefs and drink water from canning jars used to store summer tomatoes.
Elodie and Orsina hand their papers over when asked. Yes, we are Anna and Marie Zorzetto, they say to every German officer who questions them along the way. Yes, she is a student. Yes, we have family in Venice. Yes, thank you. Danke.
Elodie does not ask Orsina where they will go to once they arrive in Venice. Instead, she intends to do nothing but blindly follow her mother. She remembers her mother telling her that Venice is a maze, and Elodie closes her eyes, counting the hours until they arrive and she can finally become lost within it.
The Garden of Letters Page 25