The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  She visited La Toletta bookstore as often as she could. Every time she sat with Pelizzato, she asked if there was news about the Wolf or whether there was some way she could again help in transmitting a code. Every time, Pelizzato shook his head, no.

  Then one afternoon, he nearly leaped from his chair when she walked through the door.

  “Finally, you’ve come!”

  He bounded to the door and turned the sign on the window to “Closed.”

  “We do need you, now.” He guided her into the back of the store.

  “Some things I didn’t want to say earlier, because I was waiting for more details. But today, just today, I got the word.”

  She pulled the scarf from her hair and sat down. “Yes . . . what is it?”

  “The Wolf is in Genoa now. He fled Mantua just after the concert at the Bibiena . . .” He paused, pondering the right words. “. . . After you didn’t transmit the code.”

  She felt a flicker inside her as if he had burned her with his cigarette. The wound was invisible, but it singed her all the same.

  “I did not want you to blame yourself, so I didn’t mention it before. But the Gestapo ransacked his apartment shortly afterward. He’s still active throughout the north, though, moving information through different channels as best he can. As of yesterday, he was working for the Genoa command.”

  She took each piece of information as though it were small bits of bread that nourished her. She had been so worried after she had seen the state of the Wolf’s apartment, and now she knew, at least, that he was alive and unhurt.

  “We have essential information for him that must get to him by Tuesday, but we’ve been struggling to find the best way to transmit it. When he learned I had made contact with you, he requested that you play the message col legno.” He smiled at her. “I’m not a musician, so I’m not even sure what that means . . .”

  She smiled, knowing exactly what it meant. “It means he wants me to play with the wood of the bow, instead of with the hair.”

  “Ah, I see.” He smiled. “So the Wolf basically wants you to tap out the message for him, as though it’s a Morse code.”

  “It seems that way. But you’ll need to give me the beats.”

  “Yes.” He stood up and came back with a book. He opened it up to the center.

  “The code was written by a violinist. But he says it will be easy for you to transmit.”

  Elodie smiled. “So I’m not the only musician working for you . . .”

  “No, but certainly the prettiest . . .”

  She laughed at him.

  “All right then,” he said, his voice regaining its focus. “Let me see what it says: ‘Two beats, then one. A pause, then four quick beats, a longer pause, then one beat followed by three short and louder strikes.’ Do you have that?”

  “Yes. I have it.” She repeated it verbatim and then tapped it out on the counter with her hand. He smiled.

  She repeated it one more time with her hand, so that he could hear that she had indeed pressed it into her memory. “Not that my bow is going to like it . . .”

  “Well, it’s for the greater good, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling.

  “Good.” He appeared satisfied. “Your story, if you’re questioned on the train, is that you’re auditioning to be a music tutor for a wealthy family in Genoa.”

  She nodded her head to show she was listening.

  “This is your cover. The family’s name is Fiorello. They’re at nineteen Via del Porto. The Wolf is being put up there secretly. But he will come out and listen to the code when you arrive.”

  She nodded, absorbing the address into her memory.

  “You just need to get yourself from here to Genoa without being questioned. That’s the dangerous part. Your papers are good?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been stopped a few times, and no one’s seemed to suspect they were false.”

  “Perfect. Go get yourself ready. Pack just a few things in a rucksack. Anyone who travels with a suitcase these days attracts suspicion. There’s a ten A.M. train tomorrow leaving from Santa Lucia. Can you be ready by then?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you remember the address?”

  “Yes. I’m positive. You needn’t worry about my memory.”

  “The Bibiena was an aberration, I take it.”

  Just the mentioning of it caused her to feel a stabbing pain. “Yes. I have nothing to distract me now,” she said as she pulled her scarf up around her face. “I’ll look forward to seeing you when I return.”

  “Travel safely,” he said. As the bell hit the door as she left, she felt as though he was channeling the words of Luca.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Portofino, Italy

  DECEMBER 1943

  “You need to tell my brother before Christmas,” Vanna tells her. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Elodie nods. She is sitting on the sofa with a spool of white yarn in her lap and two long knitting needles that Vanna brought her a few weeks ago, hoping to give her something to do to pass the time.

  “You hide it well, but in a few weeks’ time, it’s going to be quite clear there’s a baby growing inside of you. Trust me.”

  “I know,” Elodie agrees.

  The knitting has been good for her hands. Her fingers have felt stiff since she arrived. Even in Venice, she pretended to silently play her cello, her fingers moving across the strings, her bow lifting and swaying without ever touching the bridge. But everything changed in Genoa. She shudders just thinking about her last hours before she caught the boat to this village, which seems to be the only place in Italy to have evaded the war.

  “I will tell him this week,” she promises Vanna.

  Vanna looks at her with compassion. “Somebody sent you here for a reason,” she says as though she’s looking at an angel or a saint. “You didn’t know what Angelo was like before his wife died. He walked around the village as though he had swallowed the moon. He glowed like starlight just at the mention of her name.” Vanna shakes her head. “When she died, he went dark. There was nothing that could bring the light back inside him.”

  “I know,” Elodie answers.

  “So then, you’ve seen the room . . .”

  “Yes,” Elodie tells her. “When he was out . . . I didn’t mean to, but I entered it by accident.”

  “So then you know how he’s kept everything intact.” Again, she shakes her head as if her brother’s tragedy never gets easier to talk about. “I imagine the letters must be yellowing and cracking like bits of old parchment by now.”

  Elodie nods. “Once inside, it’s like you’ve entered an ancient tomb. I felt like I was violating him by being there. Even talking about it now makes me feel as though I’m betraying him somehow.”

  “You’re a good soul,” Vanna says as she begins packing up her needles and yarn. “But he’s thirty-eight years old. He has been in mourning for eight years now. He should not sleep in a room of memories. He should be building new ones.”

  “Don’t we all sleep entombed in our memories?”

  Vanna raises an eyebrow. “I know I certainly don’t. I’m asleep from the moment my head hits the pillow.”

  Elodie looks toward the garden.

  “Some nights I feel as though I’m drowning in mine.” She takes the point of the needle and presses it slightly to her forefinger, just to feel the pain run through her.

  That night, underneath her pillow, Elodie now hides a baby’s bonnet and two booties made of pure, white wool.

  She knows Vanna is right in saying that she needs to tell Angelo about her pregnancy. But what Vanna doesn’t realize is that she is keeping other secrets more hidden than the baby.

  The simplicity of her life here, sheltered in a remote cottage, is so far removed that she could
easily erase her past and forget the war outside the granite cliffs. Angelo keeps the kommandant and his soldiers far away from his house. The only traces she hears from the war are the engines of the planes overhead.

  She knows that there are fewer Germans here than when she arrived; the officers who came for a week’s reprieve and checked into one of the colorful hotels in the harbor have since left. “It’s empty now,” Angelo informs Elodie one night when the candles flicker between them and he gazes at her with soft, kind eyes while she finishes the simple pasta dish he has prepared for her. “It’s just the locals and a handful of the kommandant’s men on patrol, now,” he says as he lifts their plates and brings them to the kitchen sink to clean. “From November until March, Portofino is finally allowed to sleep.”

  The ability to sleep deeply eludes Elodie and she thinks of Angelo’s words wistfully. It would be a gift to be able to forget, to sleep unfettered by fear or nightmares, but her mind refuses to. Elodie closes her eyes and wonders how long it had been since she left Venice for Genoa. On her fingers, she counts out seven weeks. The memory of her departure that day still makes her blood run cold.

  She had come close to death in Genoa. That morning, as she quickly placed a few belongings in her rucksack, including the sweater from Luca, his amulet, and the music she hoped to return to the Wolf’s hands, her mother had begged her not to make this journey. Orsina suspected that it was another mission that was taking her daughter away for a few days.

  “Please,” Orsina had pleaded with her. “We are finally safe here. We can make a new life, and no one will know about the Piazza delle Poste. Here you will simply be the daughter of a Venetian.”

  Elodie took her mother’s hands in her own. “I will always be the daughter of a Venetian and I will come back to you, but, in the meantime, a friend needs my help . . . and it’s very important that I go.”

  Orsina shook her head. “Do you not hear the airplanes overhead? Do you not see the Nazi brigades walking the streets?”

  “They are virtually all I see, Mamma.” She pulled the drawstring closed on her rucksack and went to reach for her cello. “And that’s why I’m going.”

  Valentina stood there without speaking, understanding the position of both women. She held out a quiet, unornamented hat for Elodie to take on her journey.

  Elodie took it and walked out the door.

  She took the vaporetto to the station and bought herself a third-class ticket to Genoa. She looked like the simple music student she had been before the onset of war. Her white blouse and navy skirt revealed no skin. Her instrument gave her a certain air of seriousness. And under the brim of her hat, her eyes shone like sharpened steel.

  On the train, she slipped into her new role as Anna Zorzetto. She held her papers in her pocket, and her rucksack and instrument sat beside her. She could hear the tapping of the code in her mind. Her bow would once again play with precision for the Wolf. She would redeem herself and also help the Resistance. She would honor the memory of those this war had so cruelly taken from her.

  Before the war began, the train from Venice to Genoa would have taken close to six hours. But now, with all the delays caused by constant security checks, she was told by Pelizzato it could take more than ten. She put her head against the window and tried to get some sleep until the conductor and the German customs agents again passed through the train carriage.

  It was when the train stopped in Verona that she first felt herself panic. The platform was filled with what looked like nearly a hundred people, all hoping to board.

  “We’re going to be here for some time, I’m afraid,” she overheard the man next to her say to his seatmate.

  His friend nodded. “I heard that the partisans hijacked one of the trains in Genoa last night. They shot fourteen Germans and took all of their munitions. They’ll be extra vigilant on the trains today . . .”

  Elodie looked out the window and feigned sleep. Her fingers clasped her cello, but she felt as if she had just swallowed ice.

  The train stopped and started, and she fell in and out of sleep. The nausea sometimes welled inside her so intensely that, at times, she feared she might become sick in front of her fellow passengers.

  Every smell bothered her immensely. Things that never disturbed her before, like the scent of tobacco or garlic, now made her feel ill. She took Luca’s sweater from her bag and tried to find his scent somewhere buried inside the wool. But all that did was to make her ache even more for him.

  She tried to imagine herself in front of the Wolf again, pulling out her cello and redeeming herself in his eyes. She would hand him the music written by his wife and tell him that she had discovered it in his apartment when she went to look for him.

  She pictured in her head every scenario of playing for him now in a room in Genoa, whose address she had of course memorized. She heard the code beating inside her head. She saw his white hair, his glacial-blue eyes.

  What she had never imagined was what she actually found when her train finally pulled into the Genoa station. That was something she could never have foretold.

  As she managed to get herself off the train, hoisting her rucksack over one shoulder and her cello over the other, Elodie heard a large commotion close to the train platform. As the other passengers pushed past her, some dragging small children, others towing large trunks and valises for the next part of their journeys, Elodie could see in the far corner of the platform a large group of men.

  German soldiers were forcing a parade of manacled prisoners, each of them shackled by handcuffs and linked together by an iron chain. They were being pushed toward a cattle car on one of the tracks. The Germans, in their green uniforms and with rifles draped over their shoulders, were shouting obscenities to the men and telling them to move faster toward the cattle car.

  Somehow Elodie sensed that she knew one of those men.

  And so she drifted, as if by instinct, closer to the chain gang rather than toward the station’s exit signs.

  As the men walked with their heads down, and their feet shuffling slowly beneath them, her blood suddenly went cold and her feet became frozen to the station’s floor.

  She noticed his trousers first, the expensive wool of the tweed fabric and the tear at the knees where it looked as if he had been forced to kneel. His pants contrasted with those of the men on either side of him, who all wore the overalls or dark canvas clothes of factory workers. And this man’s shoes were those of a gentleman. Not the industrial black boots of the other prisoners, but shoes that were handcrafted, their color, the shade of a fine cognac.

  Her eyes scanned from his shoes to the cuffs, traveling upward until she saw the man’s pale blue shirt, which was torn and covered with blood. She could see that his face had been beaten, with one eye swollen shut. So by the time he fully turned to face her, she instantly knew who he was.

  It was, without a doubt, the Wolf.

  She looked at him wide-eyed. And, suddenly, as if he felt something shift in the air, he, too, looked up and saw her. They then each, almost instantaneously, tried to look away from the other. But by then it was too late.

  Out of nowhere, she felt a painful clamp on her arm as a tall officer in full German gear pulled her nearly out of her shoes.

  The last she saw of the Wolf, he was being pushed with a rifle to his head onto a cattle car, which was already crowded with poor, starving Jews.

  What happened next was so brutal and terrifying that even when she recalled it weeks later, it felt like a violation, one that penetrated her body with a terrible force.

  She remembers the German’s face. His flint-colored eyes. The waxen skin. The hands that gripped her like an animal being taken to its slaughter.

  He leads her to a small room within the station and tells her to sit down. She notices the desk with its stack of papers, the cloudy water glass, the lack of light except for the single bulb dangling
from the ceiling.

  He looks at her papers. “Well, Anna Zorzetto from Venice, you knew that old man, didn’t you?”

  She does not answer him. So he comes so close to her that she can smell the cigarettes on his breath.

  “I don’t feel well,” she tells him. “I might be sick.”

  He smiles at her; his teeth are the color of newsprint. His hands are eerily white; his fingernails, meticulously groomed.

  “I’m not afraid of sickness . . .” he says. “Do you know how many people I’ve seen vomit just before they’re pushed in front of the firing squad? Too many to count.”

  She feels her body becoming almost weightless, as if she no longer senses her feet in her shoes. As if her body is not connected to anything except her cello now wrapped within her arm.

  “Where were we?” he starts again. “So that man, in the manacles . . . you knew him?”

  Again she doesn’t answer.

  “Empty your bag.”

  She places her cello against the wall, goes back to the table, and unlatches the buckle on her rucksack. One by one she begins taking out its contents: the slender copy of The Little Prince from Luca, his sweater, the pouch with his amulet, the tin of toothpaste, and her brush. The extra pair of underpants and clothes. And finally the sheets of music.

  He walks over to examine her belongings. He lifts the sweater, opens the tin of dentifrice, and snickers slightly when he touches her flimsy underclothes.

  She is about to return to her cello, feeling as though she’s somehow left it vulnerable by leaning it against the wall, when she sees that the German officer has already started toward it.