After Gaia and Raffiano’s return, the first three or four episodes appear without much rancour from the Reich office in response. I’m aware Cristian is monitoring them as I see him reading week by week, tucking the extra sheets in a pile on his desk, but I question whether he’s actually showing them to Breugal or not. It seems the general has his head buried in the wider war arena, as new acts of partisan sabotage occupy his time and his troops. With each week though, I try to draw in elements of Resistance news we’re receiving and weave the lovers’ reactions to mirror what Venetians might be feeling; the mood of the couple undulates with anger and despair, physical hunger and a zeal for victory.
The bloody summer gives way to autumn and the cooler weather, a breath of misty chill in the mornings across the lagoon. That in itself is a release, but my heart sinks at the thought we may have to endure another winter skulking about in the snow in our own city. The Allies are forging on, as is the line nudging into Northern Italy, but our liberation still feels so far away, the miles and the time stretching ever more, like the yawning wait for Christmas I remember as a child.
Something has to give, and in my small orbit it’s Mama. Vito is still in hiding, although I suspect he takes part in small acts of sabotage. All I can do is report that he’s alive, since that’s as much as I know. But Mama is used to having him near – perhaps because of his disability she has always mothered him a little more. She has stopped questioning my sources as long as I can give her reassurances, but she bows under the sadness of his absence. Papa cajoles her to eat as she pushes a meagre amount of polenta around her plate, the skin stretched across her prominent cheekbones. It’s her heart that shrivels next and I get the message I’m dreading but half expecting – that she’s in hospital. I rush to find her looking washed-out and thin in a ward bed, my father bent over in a chair next to her, the life almost sucked out of him.
‘Oh Stella,’ he sighs, ‘when will it all come right?’
I can tell he’s contemplating losing almost all of his family not to any one battle, but to the long and drawn-out consequences of war. One medic tells me he thinks Mama is genuinely nursing a broken heart and shrugs his shoulders as to any physical cure. I think if she could just see Vito, touch his face and hear his voice, it would be the medicine she needs, but it’s far too risky in the heavily guarded hospital. Papa looks grey with worry as we visit Mama almost daily, and it’s one more link I need to fit into the overburdened chain of my life.
And then one of the chains that keeps me together is well and truly severed.
28
Seeking and Waiting
Venice, December 2017
Luisa taps her foot anxiously, scanning the morning crowds for Giulio as clusters of people move through Campo Santo Stefano, heads down, scarves wrapped snugly around their necks. At eight a.m., most are Venetians on their way to work, with only a few obvious tourists up and about early to make the most of their day. It’s bright but the café she sits outside is in shade and the cold keeps her alert. Still, she would rather sit out here with her coffee and pastry, watching the colourful stream of life alongside, even if she can make shapes with her breath.
She sits poised with her notebook and map, hoping Giulio will send her off on a trail she can pursue. Despite another lovely meal, and a long vaporetto ride circling all of Venice, wrapped tightly in her coat against the wind and lulled by the boat’s motion and the twinkle of the shore lights, the previous evening had seemed long. Giulio indicated he couldn’t give her much detail over the phone, and his evening was already full, so Luisa would need to wait until the next morning for any sliver of hope. Once in the apartment, she’d spent her evening emailing Jamie and a few friends, before watching a truly dreadful Italian game show, and downing several glasses of wine, which had the opposite effect of making her sleep. The tart, thick coffee in front of her is both good and necessary.
‘Signora Belmont!’ Giulio appears from the crowds and a smile emerges as he unwinds a woollen scarf. Their misty breaths entwine as he gives her a typical Italian greeting, both cheeks touching.
‘Luisa, please,’ she says in a virtual echo of his words the day before.
He orders a coffee in his smooth, lilting accent and rummages in a well-worn leather satchel for several photographs.
‘Here,’ he says, with a broad beam, the dog who has uncovered his bone. ‘I think this is your grandmother, no?’
It is. Unmistakably. The monochrome image cannot relay the pink cheeks and rosy lips of Luisa’s memory, but it’s there in her eyes, and the way she’s showing just a little of her teeth in posing for the camera. Her hair is dark, and falls onto her shoulders and, despite the tiny edge of a swastika in one corner of the picture, she looks happy. Luisa’s heart swells with satisfaction.
‘Yes, it’s her,’ she breathes. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘It was in our archives,’ Giulio says. ‘Easy enough to find her once I had a name.’
A name too! A real, Italian identity – pre-peace, pre-England. Luisa can hardly believe her luck.
‘I found several Stellas in our computer archive listed as Resistance members,’ he says with pride. ‘I thought there would be more, since it’s an old Venetian name. But fortunately not too many – it was simply a case of eliminating them one by one. Of those who survived the war, there was only one not listed as living in Venice after 1945.’
‘And?’
‘Stella Jilani,’ he says, and pulls out a photocopy of a wartime document, some form of identity card. The face is there again – not smiling this time, but the full lips are unmistakable. Underneath, it says ‘Venetian works department’; it dates from October 1941.
‘There’s little I can find of her after 1943, but I tracked her first registration in England as 1946, so it’s possible she was still in Venice until the liberation in ’45, or even longer.’
Luisa senses Giulio is in his element; hopes his expression means there’s something else, like a child who’s holding onto a secret, but only just.
‘Anything else?’ she prods.
His lips spread and the surprise breaks through. ‘I think I’ve found someone to talk to, here in Venice,’ he says. ‘It may be that their parents knew her.’
Luisa’s face immediately lights up and Giulio puts up a hand in warning. ‘I said may, Luisa. Please don’t get your hopes up. It’s a fairly slim link, but so far it’s the only lead I have.’
Again, he has to attend to work at the Institute, so the earliest Giulio can accompany Luisa is late afternoon. She contemplates heading there alone – with her map, she’s confident she can find it – but soon realises her hastily learned Italian is simply not good enough. She could only hope to pick out a few words in a conversation between Venetians, who generally speak at a hundred miles an hour.
It’s hardly a punishment but Luisa is forced to while away hours in the most beautiful city on earth. It seems as if she’s treading water on the lagoon, and not forging forward. Time feels as if it is rapidly running out, with only a mere tincture of Stella Jilani and her past. Still, Luisa now has a name: Stella Jilani. It sounds exotic, a writer’s name undoubtedly. She wonders why her grandmother didn’t revert to that name once in England. Grandpa Gio’s surname was Benetto, and yet she still wrote under the name of Hawthorn. Another layer to the mystery. One tier at a time, Luisa tells herself. Let’s find Stella Jilani first.
Throughout the morning, wandering in and out of shops, she feels the excitement fizzing like champagne bubbles inside her. Then, sitting in a café watching other tourists meandering and taking photographs, Luisa steps back and, for the first time in months, looks outside herself. These holidaymakers are here to see what is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Relishing something that’s alive. She is here with the sole purpose of raking up a dead past, to find the shadow of someone she can never possibly speak to. Why? For the first time, she understands Jamie’s largely disguised bafflement at her motivation,
spending their precious money on a search for a ghost.
Despite this realisation, Luisa can’t shake off the truth – that she needs it. Her mother’s character – her lack of zest for life and family – seems destined to remain a mystery, but her grandmother, Stella Jilani, is now accessible. She’s here, somewhere. Luisa might finally discover what makes her own self tick, the origin of her own love of words and writing, something to pass on to her own children one day. She wants – needs – to know that she is less like her mother and has more in common with her grandmother, who was perhaps a true hero. Stella may be dead but, through Luisa, she can come alive again.
There are those bubbles again, and she cannot force them to be still.
Giulio has anticipated Luisa’s zeal needing to be kept at bay while she waits and he’s compiled a list of places the Resistance used as handover points, where Staffettas and their contacts might meet, invisible to prying eyes. As ever, Luisa is grateful for the distraction and his efforts.
She makes her way to a small campo behind the celebrated opera house of La Fenice. Giulio’s scribbled instructions are to look for the lion’s head – one of many thousands in a city whose emblem is the lion – and then to the nearby covered walkway, or sotto. The lion is obvious enough, its stone expression protruding majestically from above the door of a one-storey building. But a few steps away the meeting point would have been out of sight from anyone in the square. Under the gloom of a walkway leading to a small canal, a single drip of water creates an eerie atmosphere and Luisa tries to imagine waiting in the furthest corner, completely hidden. How would she feel if it was after dark, coming upon her contact? It would likely be pitch black. A body might emerge from the shadow that could be a friend, a fellow partisan, or very likely a foe – a fascist spy, of which there were plenty in disguise. Was her grandmother ever here, waiting with her heart in her throat, not knowing if it would be her last contact? Both the thought and the lack of sun in this dark corner of the jewelled city cause Luisa to shiver.
She looks at her watch. A few hours until the light perhaps shines on her search again. Much as she imagines Venetians did in wartime, she is investing a good deal in pure hope.
29
Sorrow
Venice, October 1944
I hear Mimi’s sobs before her knock at my door. Friends for years, we’ve mostly laughed together, but wept also – over boys, broken hearts, tricky exams. This, though, is different – a tone of true despair.
Mimi folds herself into my arms the minute I open the door – she can barely get the words out, great gulps of sadness heaving at her lungs. I steer her towards the sofa and lower her down, my shoulder soon wet with the tears.
‘Who is it, Mimi? Who is it?’ In war, people no longer weep about lost land, houses, or fickle possessions. Only lost people incite such emotion. ‘Is it your mother, your father?’ Mimi has a sister, too, living in Turin, also in the Nazi sightlines.
Mimi recovers herself enough to speak. ‘It’s Vito,’ she sobs, wiping at her swollen, red eyes. ‘He’s been arrested, on the causeway. They’ve accused him of passing papers. He’s in Ca’ Littoria.’
Instantly, I feel sick – for Mimi, Mama and Papa too. My best friend’s love – my brother – is unlikely to emerge from the fascist headquarters without lasting damage, if he emerges at all. The torture rooms are notorious, and those that bear testament also bear the life-changing scars. Mimi and I both know the gravity of Vito’s perilous situation.
Equally, I know his character and that he wouldn’t have been content to sit idle in a safe house for long. It’s likely he volunteered for the mission, perhaps took it on without his lieutenant’s knowledge.
Clearly, wrapped up in my own double life over recent months, I’ve underestimated the deepening love Mimi feels for Vito, how it’s grown so intently in the hothouse of war. They were to be married soon, Mimi reveals, her eye straying down towards the waistband of the skirt she is wearing, and I understand the ‘soon’ all too well. I try to hide the shock and disbelief from my face, and yet I still can’t be angry with them for indulging their love – it’s life. It’s war.
‘Now he may never see us at all,’ she wails, dissolving again into tears.
‘Oh Mimi,’ is all I can say, wrapping my arms around her and absorbing what despair I can while feeling the nausea rise in my own body. How will I tell Mama and Papa? Should I even try? It might be the last straw for Mama’s shrinking heart.
Eventually, Mimi’s sorrow gives way to exhaustion and she falls asleep. It’s dusk and I walk over to Paolo’s alone, feeling I need to share it with someone who I can trust. He’s not heard of Vito’s arrest yet but I sense his shock, too, and he promises to send out feelers for information.
‘You know, if he’s in Ca’ Littoria, it’s not good,’ he says gravely, passing me a large glass of brandy. He might not be so blunt with anyone else, but this is me, Stella, he’s talking to. Paolo is as close to me as Vito himself, and he hugs me like I’m family and sets a warm plate of soup in front of me, urging me like Mama to eat. Again, I’m flooded with the vision of telling her and Papa and the toll on her health. I toy with the hot liquid under my spoon and the danger Vito is facing hits me suddenly; the thought of my own brother facing torture is unbearable. An image of him in a cold, dank cell flashes up, his natural optimism being beaten out of him, and the toll on his already thin body. I know Vito has stamina, but how will he stand up to their merciless brutality? I retch dry despair into my bowl and wonder how on earth we can escape this horror.
While comforting Mimi, I didn’t allow myself to think it, but now I realise it could so easily be me under lock and key. While I’ve never considered Resistance work as a game – I’ve heard of Staffettas being caught and executed – somehow you never imagine it’s going to be you, thinking that you will be the one to always slip through the net, even if it’s by the skin of your teeth at times. And you have to think like that or you would never gather the nerve to do any given task – it’s nature’s balm of courage on which the Resistance thrives.
When I’m finally able to sip the soup, I ask myself: what would I be feeling now in Vito’s shoes? And how brave would I be?
30
A Low Ebb of the Tide
Venice, October 1944
I look and feel exhausted the next morning. Mimi and I have had a mixed night, she waking from a succession of vivid nightmares and bleeding her distress into the sheets, and me, but I gave what comfort I could. I have no sister, and hers lives away. Her light and laughter have pulled me from more dark places than I can remember, and the idea that her fire can be dampened, even snuffed out, feels too much to bear. Combined with my own dreams, there was little sleep to be had.
Despite my tiredness, I wake early and leave Mimi to sleep on, but before work I visit Papa at home and break the news of Vito in the gentlest way I can, though I know his heart ruptures on hearing it. It’s not often I see my father weep, and it creates a tangible pain in my chest to see his despair. We agree not to tell Mama in her fragile state. Not yet anyway.
The Reich office feels like the last place I want to be all day, but I force myself to go in and smile in all the right moments, as a way of keeping up appearances but also to glean any information – even the tiniest morsel – about Vito. Unfortunately, there’s none. I feel glad to escape on the dot of five and make my way to the waterfront and the newspaper office, though it’s with a heavy heart.
The ferry from the Zattere to Giudecca has been suspended, perhaps indefinitely, due to a lack of coal, and I’m forced to pay a boatman to row me across. I can’t tell whether it’s the choppy swell causing my stomach to churn – unlikely for a Venetian almost born on the water – or the feelings transferring from my heart.
There are more dispatches in the office about the latest cull of partisans arrested. Some of it is speculation as we have no spies directly within the fascist HQ, and I have to dance around the facts with my words. It’s difficult, too,
to scratch any good news from Venice itself to fill the paper, and we concentrate on what’s happening in the rest of Europe to lift the dreary tone.
What I feel brewing is a new instalment of Gaia and Raffiano, and its reflection of real life in Venice. Again, it pours from within me, flowing like Mimi’s tears, and I can’t banish the vision of her as I write of Gaia, and Vito too. He becomes my Raffiano, arrested and imprisoned once more, facing torture. I stop typing more than once and stare at the wall, thinking of Mimi reading the words, Arlo’s curious eyes on my back. But Mimi is a Staffetta, emotional but strong. Her love for Vito is new and raw, her sorrow at his possible loss devastating. But in the end, she understands everything is for the cause, for Venice. I feel she would applaud it, while weeping over the pages. And I can’t stop it coming. The tears, for me, will come later. For now, this is what I can do – for Vito and Mimi, and all those imprisoned. Even Arlo’s lips are tightly pursed as he reads my copy before laying it on the machine.
The effect of what I privately call ‘Mimi’s chapter’ is extraordinary. In the days following, there is an audible hum around the cafés I haven’t detected before. And then it becomes visible. Venezia Liberare is necessarily an underground paper, sold from the back rooms of small shops, passed between families who are sure of each other’s politics. Café owners, while they may harbour a stash beneath their beer taps, are guarded about copies left liberally on the tables with so many Nazi officers roaming Venice. No one is ready to advertise their alignments just yet. But I begin to notice the lone sheets of Gaia and Raffiano on chairs, weighted on tables with heavy ashtrays and fluttering in the breeze; old women unashamed at reading in public, their old wrinkled faces crimping with the imagined sorrow of the couple’s future. As I approach the copies and focus on the pages, my distinctive dropped e of the type seems less of a comfort and more of a beacon, as if it betrays the hallmark of its author. Me. The traitor to the Italian fascist state. But that’s only my paranoia rearing its head.
The Secret Messenger Page 21