Stones in Water

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Roberto wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d been feeding the girl for more than a week. She looked stronger, maybe, despite the fact that she slept on the ground in the pen. Her sister looked stronger, too. The little girl’s lips were no longer swollen and red, though the scabs hadn’t fallen off yet. And neither of them had been beaten, so far as he knew. Beatings of the Jews were erratic and random. The girl and her sister had been lucky.

  And Enzo seemed to have grown accustomed to eating the raw eggs. He still didn’t like them and he assumed that Roberto didn’t like them, either, so he worked hard to make eating them a kind of game. He’d tell Roberto to concentrate and listen closely—and then he’d describe a wondrous feast, and they’d eat fast while the vision was fresh in their heads. Enzo ate two raw eggs at breakfast and two more at dinner. Roberto did the same. It wasn’t a bad arrangement. Roberto, Enzo, the girl, her little sister—no one was starving.

  Enzo seemed to thrive on it, despite his disgust. He just kept moving in stride, even last night, when Roberto had made the mistake of taking eggs out of nests on the top shelf of the chicken coop. Roberto worried that if he took from the same nests all the time, the farmer might notice that that hen wasn’t laying as many as she used to. So he was careful to take from different nests. He had already taken from every nest on the middle and bottom shelves. That’s why he started on the top shelf.

  Roberto and Enzo cracked the eggs open last night, only to find tiny chicks curled up, just days from hatching. Enzo popped a chick into his mouth whole and chewed hard, his lips pressed together tight. Roberto wanted to do the same, but even with his eyes closed, he couldn’t bring himself to put a chick in his mouth. To Roberto the difference between a raw egg and a raw chick was the difference between the sun and the moon. But to Enzo they were equally disgusting. So Enzo ate all three of them, spitting out the tiny beaks and feet.

  At breakfast the next morning, this morning, Roberto was careful to pick from nests on the middle shelf. He would never raid a nest on the top shelf again.

  Roberto wondered now if the formed chicks somehow held more nutrition than fresh eggs because Enzo seemed to work even better today than usual. Oh, Roberto and Enzo were the two hardest workers among the boys, no matter what the job was. They cut more wood; they dug deeper holes; they swung picks without slowing hour after hour, day after day. But right now Enzo walked ahead of Roberto faster and stronger than Roberto had ever seen him, as though nothing could tire him out. They carried boxes from the trucks that had rolled in yesterday afternoon over to the shed the boys had built. Tonight or maybe tomorrow night a plane would come and they would load the boxes from the shed onto the plane. They had finished the first truck’s load and made decent headway on the others.

  Arbeiter shouted and the boys lined up to be dismissed for a short break. The sun was high. Shade would be welcome.

  For no reason, Roberto looked over at the pen. A few of the people were walking around. The girl was one of them. And she was looking right at him. When their eyes met, she straightened her ripped shirt, so that it covered her properly. Her modesty made his cheeks hot and his throat hurt. He was ashamed, ashamed for all these German soldiers, ashamed for himself.

  The girl walked up to the wires and stooped down. Then she walked away without a glance backward.

  Roberto went over to where she’d stooped. He picked up a stone. It was flat on one side and rounded on the other. Like a hemisphere. It was completely free of dirt in all its little fissures, as though someone had painstakingly cleaned it.

  A heavy hand landed on Roberto’s shoulder. He jumped around. Arbeiter said something to him. He took the stone from Roberto and turned it over in his hand. He said something again. Quick and to the point—whatever it was, Roberto knew looking at the ground wouldn’t get him out of this one. Oh, please, let Arbeiter not have seen the girl put the stone there. Oh, please, please. Let it only be Roberto who was in trouble.

  Roberto reached into his pocket and pulled out another stone. He handed it to Arbeiter. He said, “It’s my collection.” None of the soldiers had ever given any indication that they understood Italian, but maybe that was just an act, to fool the boys into saying dangerous things. Roberto took a third stone out of his other pocket. He pointed to a discoloration on one side of it. “See, if I knew anything about rocks, I could tell you what that was there. But I don’t know anything. I just collect them because I need to. If you were me, you’d collect something, too. It helps.”

  Arbeiter just looked at the discolored stone.

  Roberto dared to take the girl’s stone from Arbeiter’s hand. He replaced it quickly with the discolored stone. He held up the girl’s stone in front of Arbeiter’s nose. “It’s flat on one side as though it’s only half of something. Only half. I like it, don’t you?” He kept an easy tone. Maybe he could soothe his way to safety. He thought of Arbeiter plucking the barbed wire when the little girl was holding tight. It happened so fast, Arbeiter couldn’t have planned it. Cruelty was instinctive with him. There was no way anyone could soothe Arbeiter. Roberto tensed up to be ready to take whatever penalty might come. “It’s just a collection.” He spoke without emotion, though the tears pressed inside his eyes.

  Arbeiter looked at Roberto. He held the two egg-shaped stones in one hand and picked his teeth with the other. Then, with one hard, fast move, he threw the stones at the people in the pen. One smacked the dirt. The other hit a woman on the shoulder. She fell forward on her hands and knees. Something rolled from her skirt. A man snatched it up and stuck it in his mouth as he stumbled away. Arbeiter said, “Tier,” and walked off.

  Roberto stood stock-still, his heart beating violently. He watched the woman move slowly to a sitting position. She kept her eyes on the ground and she didn’t stand up. But he told himself it was because she didn’t want to. She was resting. With one hand she smoothed her hair—newly graying hair, like Roberto’s mother’s hair. Slowly she lifted her chin. Slowly, slowly her hand moved again and again on her hair, with a deliberation that made Roberto want to scream. Just scream and scream and scream. He looked away. He didn’t want her to see him watching. The tears behind his eyes had disappeared, leaving a burning dryness.

  It was a piece of Brot that had rolled from the woman’s skirt; Roberto was sure of that. That’s why she never looked up to see who had taken it. Anyone could have. Anyone would have. They were starving.

  Roberto slipped the girl’s gift stone into his pocket and squeezed it as hard as he could.

  At dinner Roberto gave the girl his potato and wurst. He was too hungry to wait, so he ate his Brot standing up halfway between the chicken coop and the pen. Enzo was already sitting by the chicken coop, chewing his Brot carefully and watching Roberto. The moment felt heavy and ready, like a late-fall apple. The slowness of everything suddenly filled Roberto with frustration and longing.

  Roberto didn’t even look around. He walked quickly past Enzo, straight into the chicken coop, as though he were invisible. Food, he said to himself, food was everyone’s right. No one should starve. He had collected three eggs and was about to reach under the next hen for a fourth egg when he heard a scraping noise. He turned around.

  Wasser stood in the doorway.

  Roberto stopped still. He was caught. Finally. Everything seemed to stop. Every little noise, every little movement. The dust of the chicken coop made his eyes sting. It dried the inside of his nose. He sneezed.

  Wasser didn’t speak. He gestured with his chin for Roberto to come on out.

  Roberto slowly looked at the eggs in his hands—the evidence of his crime. He turned to put the eggs in the closest nest, but the hen on that nest pecked at him and squawked. Stupid hen. Stupid Roberto. Dumb and slow and heavy and stupid. Both of them too hot in this coop—too hot to breathe.

  Wasser pulled him by the arm backward out of the chicken coop, still holding the three eggs in both hands.

  Roberto kept his eyes on those eggs. He stumbled along with Wasser pulli
ng him. He put all his concentration into making sure the eggs didn’t fall. If the eggs stayed whole, maybe nothing terrible would happen. He knew this was magic thinking. He knew it was crazy. But he had to keep those eggs whole. The butt of Wasser’s gun stuck out of the holster. It was shiny and smooth. Like an eggshell.

  Wasser walked him over to the driver of one of the trucks. They talked and pointed at the eggs and talked. Wasser laughed. Then he pushed Roberto ahead of him to the first truck, the only one completely unloaded. He gestured for Roberto to climb into the back.

  Another journey. The thought exhausted him. Roberto looked at the three eggs, still intact. They couldn’t help him. Nothing could help him now. He held out the eggs to Wasser. Wasser shook his head. Roberto placed the eggs gently on the ground. Wasser shouted at him. Roberto picked them up. If he put the raw eggs in his pockets and tried to climb into the truck, they’d probably break. He opened his mouth wide and put one egg inside each cheek and the third on his tongue. He climbed into the truck and sat with his back against the cab, looking at Wasser.

  Wasser laughed again.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Wasser turned around.

  Enzo stood there. He stood tall, his shoulders squared. He was only a head shorter than Wasser, but he had half his girth. “I stole eggs, too.” He gestured the act of reaching for an egg, then popping it in his mouth. “I did it, too.” His voice grew louder and trembled slightly. “I’d rather die than let my friend take the punishment alone, you big lump of pig dung.” His face was expressionless and he spoke in a monotone. He pulled the Saint Christopher medal out from inside his shirt and ran it back and forth along the chain. “As this saint, whatever his name is, is my witness, I stole eggs, and I’d like to puke them all over your fat head.”

  Roberto sat immobile in the truck. He was stunned. It made no sense for both of them to get in trouble. And he couldn’t believe Enzo had called Wasser names. Enzo, of all people, could never afford to be reckless, even for a moment. All the remaining energy went out of Roberto’s body, as though he would collapse. As though he were the woman hit by the rock, who wouldn’t stand up again. This was it. Everything was over.

  Wasser barked at Enzo to get into the truck. Then he walked off, while another soldier watched them both.

  Roberto took the eggs out of his mouth and set them in his lap. “Why did you do that? Why did you tell him?”

  “If you left, I’d slowly starve. Whatever happens to us now, it can’t be worse than that.”

  It was true. Roberto put his hand over the lump in his pocket—the lump that was the stone the girl had given him. She would starve. Her little sister would starve. How could he have let himself get caught like that?

  And now anger welled up—anger at himself and at Enzo. “Why did you call him names, on top of it? If he understood, everything would have been much worse.”

  “The other Italian boys can’t even understand Venetian dialect when we speak fast, so how can he understand us?”

  Roberto still shook his head. “He could have been pretending not to understand just so he could hear us say secrets.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Anyway, what did I say that was so bad?”

  “You said you wanted to puke on him.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” Enzo’s voice was full of wonder.

  Roberto nodded.

  “I do. I want to puke on him.” Enzo took a deep breath. “It’s a good thing it was Wasser and not Arbeiter. Arbeiter would have killed you, for sure. And me, too.”

  A shiver ran through Roberto. Arbeiter was probably suspicious of him after the incident with the stones today. He probably watched Roberto carefully whenever he happened to see him. Arbeiter was the one who was most likely to have caught Roberto in the chicken coop, but it was Wasser who did. Wasser.

  “Wasser actually thinks he’s nice to us. He’s just a dumb jerk, but Arbeiter’s a real sadist.” Enzo shook his head. “We’re still alive because of Wasser.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe someone else saved us.” Roberto touched the medal around Enzo’s neck. “His name is Saint Christopher. He watches over travelers.”

  Enzo looked solemnly at Roberto. Then he took an egg and held it up high. “To Saint Christopher,” he said.

  Roberto raised an egg. “To Saint Christopher.” They cracked them together, and raw egg ran down their arms.

  Enzo licked his off. “Might as well not waste them. Who knows if we’ll ever eat again.”

  Roberto licked his off, too. Raw egg was actually close to delicious mixed with the salty sweat on his arm.

  Wasser came back. He looked at them and laughed. He handed them each a wurst. He said something. He gestured for them to eat up.

  Roberto took his wurst and looked quickly at Enzo.

  Enzo took the wurst. Then he grabbed the third egg from Roberto’s lap and dropped the wurst in its place. “I prefer eggs,” he said to Wasser. “Eggs, you dumb goathead.”

  Roberto put the second wurst in his pocket. He ate the first wurst.

  Enzo ate the third egg.

  Wasser shook his head at Enzo, but he didn’t say anything. And in that moment Roberto realized Enzo was right: Wasser felt benevolent toward the boys in his charge. He didn’t see them as prisoners. He had no sense of their homesickness or hunger. The enormity of Wasser’s stupidity left Roberto aghast.

  The other soldier got into the front of the truck and revved up the engine. Wasser waved. He put both hands on his belly and said something and nodded. He waved again.

  Enzo hooked his arm through Roberto’s. He sat straight, his chin high. Roberto tried to do the same.

  They could hear Wasser’s laugh as they rolled down the road.

  BOOTS

  Roberto smoothed his blanket flat. It wasn’t really a blanket; it was an empty cement sack, but in his head he called it his blanket. He wrapped it around himself, tucking it up under his armpits. It covered most of his abdomen that way. He tied it in place with a rope, which he passed around his chest twice. His blanket was his only possession besides the clothes on his body and the hemisphere stone the Polish girl had given him—he kept his blanket with him at all times. The air was cold. Eastern Europe in late fall was colder than the coldest winter days in Venice, but Roberto resisted the temptation to untie his blanket and wear it as a jacket. Without his blanket to crawl into at night, he would freeze to death. There was no doubt about that. He couldn’t risk wearing it out by poking holes for his arms and head and letting it get caught in things all day long, as some of the other boys did. Anyway, if he was lucky, they’d be working all day. Work kept him warm.

  He shook Enzo’s shoulder till he was sure his friend was awake. Roberto was an early riser by nature. Enzo wasn’t. But it was important that Enzo get up before the others and relieve himself in privacy. So Roberto woke him without fail. Now Enzo groaned and poked his face out of his blanket. He opened his eyes and looked up at the sky; then he closed them again and rolled over on the hard ground. Roberto didn’t worry; this was Enzo’s routine.

  Roberto let his eyes travel across the rows of sleeping boys. The nights of sleeping in the barn at the farm work camp seemed luxurious compared to bedding down on the open dirt here.

  A wolf howled in the distance. Other wolves joined in. That was odd. Usually the howls started at twilight, when the temperature dropped to freezing or below, and continued intermittently till Roberto fell asleep. The sound didn’t worry him, in any case. Wolves, even in a large pack, wouldn’t approach a camp with so many people; Enzo had assured him of that. He said that it probably wasn’t a big pack, anyway. Most of the wolves of Ukraine were in the forests of the Carpathian Mountains, not here in the great valleys.

  It turned out that Enzo had read a lot about nature. He was the one to spot the cyclone off in the distance a few weeks back. He said warmer weather would follow for a day or two afterward, and he was right. He was the one who named the l
ong, low, slinky creatures they’d seen racing at the edge of the woods one dusk—weasels. He could even name some of the trees: hornbeam and oak and ash. Things a boy from Venice had never seen except in photographs.

  Enzo wove these bits of their surroundings into the bedtime stories he still told every night. And he wove in their mothers and their fathers and Sergio and Memo and the canal near the big wooden bridge of the Accademia under the midnight moon and the winding staircase called the Bovolo that looked like a snail shell and oh so many things of Venice that made Roberto’s heart want to keep pumping against all odds. All good things happened in Enzo’s stories. Every child ate sweet grapes and walked in summer heat. Any threat was easily foiled. Those stories gave the only truly peaceful moments of Roberto’s day.

  Roberto took off the piece of material from his head and untied the knot and shook it out. Then he put it back in place, careful to cover both ears and his forehead, tying it behind at the nape of the neck. The material was wool, and it kept his head warm. A few weeks back, one of the soldiers had died after a fever. The other soldiers burned all his belongings in fear of disease. But a boy from Bolzano snatched the soldier’s wool blanket before it caught fire. The boys divided it up equally. Almost all of them had fashioned hats from their pieces.

  Several of the boys had died, too. Not all from fever, though. Some had coughed themselves to death—great, wet, racking coughs. And some who hadn’t managed to find sacks for blankets had frozen.

  Roberto put his hands in his armpits and made his way past the sleeping boys. One of the disadvantages of the way he tied his blanket around his abdomen was that he couldn’t put his hands in his pockets. But that was okay, too, because when he put his hands in his pockets, he felt the Polish girl’s stone. As long as he wasn’t feeling the stone, he could go hours without thinking about her, without wondering what had become of her.