“A peace offering,” Cosimo said, handing me the straw-filled burlap bag, a rough, pathetic imitation of a pillow. “Buona notte.”
Cold toes and stiff legs. A hip wedged painfully against the hard floor. A piece of straw, as sharp as a porcupine quill, poking directly into my cheek. The memory of my father’s voice: “You haven’t felt cold until you’ve slept in a wet trench in November. You have no idea what discomfort is.”
There’s no way to sleep, I thought, trying to rearrange my jacket over my shoulders. The temperature in these hills was surprisingly cold once the sun was down, even in summer. No way even to nap, I thought, no way . . .
And then it was morning. Warmth heating up the metal floor of the truck. A crack of bright light alongside the bottom of the retractable door.
I sat up suddenly, squinting into the light. What had happened to our early start? What had happened to dawn? I rarely managed to sleep through a night at home, and this was when insomnia finally took its vacation, on a night when I should have stayed alert?
I scrambled to climb out of the truck, still trying to orient my senses while telling my bladder it could wait just a moment, seeing as it had made no effort to get me up any earlier.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” I demanded of Cosimo, who was pacing the road’s shoulder, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lip. “Where is Enzo?”
“It is light two hours already.”
“Precisely!”
“Something is wrong.”
“Yes, something was wrong as soon as Enzo decided to run off last night.”
“No. Something is more wrong.” He rubbed a hand against the bristles sprouting from his jaw. “Maybe last night I should have told you. When we traded jackets, Enzo said to me, ‘Don’t worry. Just go along.’”
“Just go along? Well, that’s precisely what you did. You didn’t even argue.”
“I am afraid there is more. I have been thinking about it all morning. I’m afraid it is worse.”
I prepared for our debate: drive north and leave Enzo behind versus drive toward Monterosso and wake the young Romeo from his blissful and irresponsible slumber. But Cosimo was in no mood to argue. He walked to the truck cab, and I followed several paces behind. He started the ignition before I slammed my passenger door.
“The back is secure?”
“Yes, but you may not make any decisions without me.”
“It is not a decision. There is no choice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I had a dream, early this morning.” He was struggling with the words that had been haunting him since before dawn. “It was a dream about my brother. He is lying down, looking peaceful—”
“I think we know that he is lying down.”
“But there is tall green grass all around him, and he is alone. He is not in any bed. And he is saying, ‘I am sorry, brother.’”
“That’s all?”
“‘I am sorry. Look in my pocket.’”
PART II
CHAPTER 6
A rusty, pale blue Fiat slows down alongside me and a local man in a black wool vest and a matching billed cap rolls down the window, startling me out of my reminiscences. He asks whether I need a ride into town, still several kilometers away. I tell him grazie, no, the weather is fine, I really don’t mind walking, I’m in no rush. It’s only when he catches my accent that he leans back into his seat, upsetting his cap, which he pats back into place with a quick, embarrassed tap.
“The shops close in less than an hour.”
I try to smile. “That’s not a worry.”
“They stay closed for most of the afternoon,” he says, as if to discourage me from walking into town at all. “If you plan to go to a shop or a café, you may be disappointed.”
“Not a problem, thank you. I will walk until they open again.”
Who knows what an accent like mine means to him, where or under what conditions he might have last heard it, how close or distant, how forgotten or eternal the war that ended three years ago seems to him now.
He takes a while to engage his clutch and drive past, watching to see whether I really mean it—whether I am to be trusted ambling past these rural fields and modest vineyards, whether I am really enjoying my walk. I feel like a fraud, trying to inject some lightness in my step, when just moments ago I was strolling furiously, head down, overwhelmed completely by my memories—by memories of memories, really, a paired set of mirrors in which one could get lost and never return.
Back in Munich, I’d thought of my 1938 trip so often that it had seemed more vivid than the present. But even so, more than I realized, some of the details were lost after all, only recoverable here, where the light and the smells and a thousand other things I cannot name bring so much more back: perhaps the scuff of my shoes against the warm, chalky path underfoot, or the slim shadow thrown by a cypress rising up toward a heartlessly blue sky. Now I pass a hand along a low stone wall covered with a trailing, woody plant that looks like rosemary. And yes, rosemary it is—there, pungent and undeniable, but quickly fading from my fingertips—and I am struck by both the power of the scent memory (I remember in a flash what I have allowed to remain forgotten for so long: the desire to be rid of a revolting smell and to replace it with something cleaner and more sweet) and the fact that I am now a different person, unable to entirely reinhabit the past, unable to step into the same river twice.
Aside from the later smells that the rosemary effortlessly conjures, what I remember most clearly from that morning of our second driving day is a sense of self-recrimination, perhaps for all the wrong reasons (a narrowly defined duty, a refusal to face certain facts), but self-recrimination nonetheless. It was my fault we’d gotten into such a mess. I had lost my focus. I had become sentimental, allowing Enzo to retrieve the ring. I had failed to keep Enzo and Cosimo dedicated to our task. And then, somehow and suddenly, Enzo had left, forcing us to go in search of him—a detour resisted but not denied.
As Cosimo steered the truck around each switchback, white dust rising and spreading behind us and painting each passing olive tree a duller silver, the present moment’s worries insisted upon yoking me to other worries I had hoped to leave behind. I did not want to think about Gerhard. I did not even want to think about Enzo. The quickening of my heartbeat and the sour weight in my stomach reminded me of my intolerance for suspense—a poison that my system was no longer capable of handling.
I hadn’t always been so high-strung, I recall thinking that summer morning, as we rolled along, slower and slower as the road became even rockier and steeper, as the sun beat down on our arms and faces and our eyes burned with the dust, the heat, and the tense effort of looking for something—someone—I didn’t fully expect to find.
There had been a time, eight or nine years earlier, when to be poised in the starter position, with the full track ahead, was to be ready and eager for an explosion of joy. That anticipatory moment was so exceptional that even after my own serious athletic prospects were irreparably damaged in the summer of 1930, I still wanted to run. I recovered my health. I bided my time over the winter. And that following spring of my seventeenth year, I joined a track team again.
I remember the first race day, when I took a small spade in my hand and started digging the holes in the cinder track—the little starter holes we used, instead of starter blocks. I pushed the toes of my thin-soled running shoes into the holes, got into position, and prepared myself for the starter pistol, which for some reason was slow in coming, as it sometimes was. Then—suddenly—even before the shot came, a plug was pulled. The happiness drained away.
I looked to my left at the boys who were stronger than me, who had spent the winter staying in good shape. I looked to my right at the boys who would beat me. I told myself it didn’t matter, I would run just to run, just to enjoy my own relative speed and returning health—but I had lost something, some kind of mental steadiness. I told myself it was the starting position, that my body had simply chan
ged, that I’d lost a little muscle and gained a little fat. But that wasn’t it at all. It was my mind that had changed. Now, the anticipation was nearly sickening. And when the pistol went up, I reacted jumpily, like a person afraid of being ambushed—which is indeed how I had felt ever since the previous summer.
Which is all a long and unwieldy way of saying that I did not like surprises anymore. Ohne Zwischenfall, without incident—that was the preferred state. I did not like waiting and wondering, the strain of not knowing, most forms of conflict or novelty which are essential aspects of many things—competition, for one. Love, for another. The only kind of passion I had managed to sustain was my passion for art, itself a substitution for other losses. And yet it remained to be seen if that passion would itself be my undoing, and if there would be nothing left to hold onto, if even the most carefully carved marble would prove itself to be inconstant, insignificant, ultimately worthless.
It was a month after I’d quit track altogether, a year after the incident, when I showed up at the library one late afternoon in my seventeenth year. The old man behind the desk was seated with his face just in the shadows. What I could see best were his hands, folded on the desk, underneath the bright glow of his desk lamp. My request was a little odd and I felt out of place, so I concentrated on those hands: soft and powdery white, ribboned with blue veins like tunneling worms.
“Books—about bodies,” I muttered to the librarian. He scooted a little closer so that his face came into the light. He looked up over his glasses, noting my age, my blotched adolescent skin, my clear discomfort at stating my interests clearly.
“What about ‘bodies’?”
I had no idea how to put it into acceptable words. “Variations?”
Here he laughed—only slightly, and with forgiveness, but his mirth was plain. “Between the genders?”
The librarian closed the book he’d been reading and removed his reading glasses. “You don’t mean reproductive systems, do you?”
“No,” I assured him. “Not that.”
He waited.
“Perhaps diseases,” I ventured. “Rare ones. But not the kind you catch.”
He would have waited all day, but I had no more clues to impart, so he loaded my desk with some impressive medical tomes. I’d never encountered such thin onionskin paper or such small, dense type. Much of it in Latin. No photographs and only a few illustrations of concepts too general to be useful: circulatory systems and skeletal charts.
One might find my curiosity strange, now that my father’s erratic actions had solved one problem for me (replacing it with another, that summer of infection, the subsequent year of healing), but yes, I was still curious. Even more so. Though he had attempted to remove the small proof of my difference, leaving me scarred in the process, I was even more driven now to discover how deep and permanently within the human body flaws are marked. I wanted to know what remained after he had removed the surface flaw from my flesh.
I was nearly ready to leave that day, my fingertips dirty from the endless turning of pages, each tired breath moving my ribs, evoking the little twinge from my bandaged side. The librarian showed up: the soft, white hands again, under the light of my own study carrel. No wonder Gerhard would seem familiar to me when I would meet him some five years later: he had the same soft, white hands.
The librarian saw my finished stack of books. “Did you find your variations?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps we have begun from the wrong end of things. Perhaps we are being too technical. You know, when I was your age and interested in the human form, in its most ideal and masterful depictions, I began not with modern science but with the Greeks and Romans . . .”
He had lost me entirely. But he was speaking from his own memories, with evident pleasure. “And best of all—yes, why didn’t I think of it sooner?—they provide us with something more than text; they provide us with images. After all the reading you’ve done, you might find some pictures to be a tonic. Wait here, young man.”
He returned with yet larger books, opening them to show me illustrations of the great Greek and Roman statues. “There you are. I’ll stop back in half an hour, and then I must collect these and set you on your way.”
He disappeared tactfully back into the shadows, leaving me to puzzle over these naked forms. I’d seen the occasional classical illustration, of course, but I’d never had the privacy to make a thorough, close-up inspection. Rather than glancing quickly—at a small penis centered over a scrotal sack, or at the lines and curves where the secrets of womanhood remained hidden—I could stare now until my eyes had had their fill, then follow the graceful lines of chest and pelvis, thigh and calf, bicep and forearm, belly and breast.
In these pictures I found no clue to my own strange variation, but I found something else: a fascination that would grow during the many library visits to follow. The classical artists had captured perfection—athletic, aesthetic, even moral perfection—and perhaps if I understood perfection I would understand its opposite. I would know which flaws were only minor details, which were deep and ineradicable. I was completely unfamiliar with genetics at this time—my school was about fifty years behind in its teaching of science—but I am not sure genetics would have provided the answers anyway, not in a form that spoke to my own athletic background, my own respect and regret for the minor aspirations I had set aside. Yes, I recognized that wonderful dark line running along the back of a tensed hamstring. Yes, I recognized the commanding realism of The Spear-Bearer by Polyclitus, an ancient Greek statue of a muscular man walking with a spear over his shoulder, one leg just beginning to lift from the ground. Yes, I recognized the calm, focused faces of the athletes—who, much more than gods or unlikely heroes, offered real insight into the human condition.
“You haven’t visited the Glyptothek?” the librarian said to me one day, after my weekly library visits had become routine. “Your parents have never taken you there?”
My father? “Never.”
“Oh, my boy,” he said, deeply apologetic for having failed to mention that we had our own excellent museum of classical art in Munich. “You must go. You know, of course, where the Königsplatz is?”
Nearby, at 45 Brienner Strasse, the Nazis had already built their party headquarters, the Brown House. In years to come, the party would choose this location for some of their enormous rallies. But once I came to associate the Königsplatz with art, with the Greek and Roman masterpieces and the magnificent Glyptothek itself, nothing would ever convince me that the heart of Munich could be anywhere else. Even if this part of the city became the heart of something else, too. Even if one couldn’t walk thirty meters without being expected to offer a verdammte salute.
Meanwhile, Germany was facing the currency crisis, bank failures. Here I was, entranced by old bronze and stone, oblivious and increasingly unemployable. Perhaps if I had attended a more rigorous secondary school, I might have gone on to a university such as the one in Erlangen, where that same year a student committee made a request to the Ministry of Culture for the creation of a chair of race science. Some subjects were deemed worthy of national support, even with a failing economy. But I didn’t dare dream that, in a few more years, art history would be deemed worthy of public support as well. It doesn’t always hurt to have a failed artist as Führer, many art lovers might have reasoned in those early years—before life became more complicated, before reason itself was left behind.
When I graduated from secondary school in 1932, the jobs I managed to find were low-paid and sporadic, though I was happy to get them. On weekends, I worked as a sports club trainer because nationalistic sports clubs were booming in Munich. Even in my unexceptional condition, and even though I had a reputation for being reserved and for keeping my distance from the boys in general and from the changing room in particular, I could still earn a few marks conducting warm-up exercises and running drills.
During the week, I worked as an assistant to a small-time art dealer and
auctioneer named Franz Betelmann. This second job was much more important to me. I kept records for Franz and helped him evaluate and catalog the ancient statues, many of them with a Trojan theme, inspired by German archaeology being conducted then in Asia Minor. They were just copies, of course, and were being sold as such—nothing particularly valuable, only objets d’art to grace some city dweller’s chilly entrance hall. But Franz wanted to elevate himself. He wanted to appear better educated than he was (as did I; as would anyone who had attended a Realschule instead of a Gymnasium) and he was eager to absorb what I had already assimilated.
He expressed no embarrassment that someone my age would be lecturing to him on the significance of the contrapposto pose in classical sculpture. He’d smack his leg, delighted, the pince-nez he wore for effect falling from his face: “So there’s a name for that! I always thought those Romans looked tired, leaning on one leg.”
I worked for Betelmann on and off for three years, for diminishing pay, as his own accounts became more irreconcilable. I enjoyed learning and sharing my increasing knowledge of art with my employer, and even with the customers. I sketched on the side, not with any artistic ambition, but only to develop my own eye and memory and appreciation of famous objects. My father wanted me to work for the German Labor Service—yet another unpaid job, and this one promising only toil, but one he thought might lead to some paid job when the economy improved. I put it off as long as I could, but in the summer of 1935, the six-month labor stints were made compulsory. So at the age of twenty-one, I joined thousands of other secondary school graduates. We were each given a bicycle and a spade, and a brown uniform symbolizing the earthiness of our pursuits, and on the uniform—this struck me as funny, somehow—was a cap patch featuring a spade and a special belt buckle featuring, ah yes, the spade again.
They were serious about this spade business. So serious that they made us carry the spades, drill with the spades, keep them shiny and clean, and present them for inspection when requested. I think we all knew what this was preparing us for—not just future employment as construction workers or assistant engineers. No matter what the Treaty of Versailles said, no matter what limits had been placed on our standing army, thousands of us were being whipped into shape, taught to follow orders and get along, to carry heavy wood-handled implements over our shoulders as we bicycled or marched. And all while singing the typical group-unity drivel:
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