“Wait a minute!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Maybe it’s a Hebrew date or some sort of gematriya equivalent.”
“Gematriya?” Nicola asked. “What’s that? I’ve never heard of the term.”
“Well,” Bruno explained, “gematriya is an ancient Greek word that describes the substitution of letters of the Hebrew alphabet for specific numerical values, so that the numerical equivalent of the letters would be . . . let’s see . . . ‘5, 200, 50, and 2.’
“If this is supposed to be a year in the Hebrew calendar—which, according to Jewish tradition, dates from the time of the creation of the world—then it would be equivalent to the year 5252. Maybe that’s when the yad was fashioned,” he reflected out loud.
“But that would be ridiculous,” he said, frowning. “That’s centuries after these catacombs were excavated and in active use. There must be something here that I just don’t understand. Some sort of symbolic meaning that I’m just not picking up on.”
He placed the object back into the narrow slit between the bricks and turned to Nicola, his brow furrowed in thought. “Unless,” he said slowly, his voice tinged with disbelief as he turned toward her, “unless we convert the Hebrew year to its secular calendar equivalent. Which would be 1492—the year of the Spanish Inquisition.”
“But that’s impossible. It makes no sense,” Nicola countered. “No sense at all.”
“I know. What would an object dating from the 15th century be doing in this catacomb?”
Chapter Ten
The sun was still shining brightly outdoors, in glorious contrast to the dankness and gloom of the catacombs, and Bruno proposed that they spend what was left of the day along the Via Appia Antica. As they drove towards a nearby outdoor café, they passed a series of villas that were set back from the road behind tall brick walls and heavy iron gates, for maximum privacy. Lush fields dotted with a riot of wildflowers bordered the estates, surrounded by crumbling walls of rock and mortar, ancient relics of the imperial Roman Empire. The cylindrical tower marking the tomb of the Roman matron, Cecilia Metella, could be seen a short distance away.
“By the way, Nicola,” Bruno remarked, “not everyone aspires to live in one of these villas. The municipal property taxes here are so high that some of the owners actually rent out their grounds for weddings and other large parties, from time to time, just to ensure a means of extra income to cover the cost of la dolce vita along the Via Appia.”
“Are you serious?” Nicola asked. “That’s unbelievable. But I can see why people would find this area an unusually picturesque setting for a celebration.”
Bruno now eased his car into a small parking space, just before the roughly cobble-stoned area of the Via Appia Antica began. “A friend of mine once tried to drive his car—one of those jeeps actually, with four-wheel drive—along the road and blew out all of his tires,” Bruno explained as they left the car. “So this is as close as we’re going.”
They entered the patio of the café, which was surrounded by tall pine trees, and sat down at a small table shaded by a striped umbrella and overarching pergola. A few minutes later, a stocky silver-haired man in sunglasses, apparently a tourist, sat down at a table to their left. He gave the waitress his order and began to peruse a copy of Der Spiegel before he was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He took the call, speaking briefly in barely audible Swiss-German. Between sips of his espresso, he glanced casually at Nicola and Bruno several times and then returned to the reading of his newspaper.
Sensing that someone had been watching her, Nicola put her menu down. She looked at the stranger and frowned in puzzlement, wondering what he found so interesting about her and Bruno. But then she decided that he was probably just enjoying a respite under the rustic pergola, whose softly scented flowering vines filtered the strong sunlight.
An hour later, refreshed by this respite—and by several badly needed cups of espresso and ciabatta sandwiches—Bruno suggested that they drive over to the nearby Ardeatine Caves. Though Nicola had been to the Via Appia on countless occasions, she had never actually visited the caves, though she was aware of their history and significance for most Italians. Her attention had always been drawn by the ancient archaeological highlights of Rome—crypts and basilicas, churches and museums—not by more recent historical monuments to the dead. In fact, she had passed by the Fosse Ardeatine many times, but had done nothing more than take a quick glance, noting their location for future reference, when and if she could make time for them.
“Yes, Bruno,” she said. “I would like to see them. I’m kind of embarrassed that I never really made the effort before. Thanks for suggesting it.”
As they got up from the table, Nicola noticed that the stranger was still seated at his table, now sipping a glass of wine absently, his bowl of pasta largely untouched. He signaled the waitress and asked for his bill.
Chapter Eleven
Nowadays, the Ardeatine Caves resemble a large, impressive park on the grounds of a well-tended country estate. Its grass is tidily groomed, its lush shrubbery pruned with infinite care, and a wide, white-pebbled courtyard stretches out to welcome visitors.
A massive gate of black ironwork, like heavy lace—or perhaps a symbolic crown of thorns—encloses the property. In the courtyard itself a sculpture of heroic proportions, on a massive pedestal, dominates one corner. Three men, larger than life, in pale concrete finish, are chained together—separate, yet forever linked. In their unusual solidity, reminiscent of the bulk of Botero sculptures, they are unlike the tortured, starved figures in so many other Holocaust memorials.
One represents an artisan, another an intellectual, and the last, an adolescent—for the youngest victim of Nazi brutality here had been only fifteen years old. The figures face outward, as if they would somehow stride away from this scene, which they have been fated to commemorate for all time, detained here against their will.
To the left of the caves, an open air vault houses the victims of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, buried in orderly rows of flat identical tombs, with bouquets of flowers in metal vases attached to the foot of each grave. Of the 335 bodies that were found in the caves, 322 were ultimately identified by a forensic specialist, Dr. Attilio Ascarelli. Thirteen victims, however—thirteen men whose families would never know for certain how or where they had perished—remain anonymous to this very day.
Once a year, on March 24th, municipal officials in Rome honor the dead—335 innocent victims murdered by the Germans on the orders of Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler as retribution for a partisan attack on a group of SS soldiers on the Via Rassella in the heart of Rome in 1944. Ironically, the so-called German soldiers who had been killed by the Resistenza were actually troops from the southern Tyrol area, a section of Austria that had at one time been annexed to Italy, a fact that was conveniently ignored by the SS.
In a typical Nazi revision of mathematics and the logic of accountability, Kappler had ordered that ten people be killed for every dead German. Massive retaliation and collective responsibility—those were the keystones of Nazi policy. Kappler’s victims, seventy-nine of them Jewish, were taken without prior warning from where they languished in Regina Coeli prison and the torture cells of Gestapo headquarters at the Villa Wolkonsky, many of them already the victims of bad luck, denuncia, and the random misfortunes of war.
The name of the prison, “Queen of Heaven,” which had once been a monastery, was an ironic misnomer, for conditions there were fearsome and harsh. But even it was preferable to the fate that awaited the victims of the massacre. For those among them who were Catholic, the Queen of Heaven, the Holy Virgin, would not intervene to save them, and for their Jewish compatriots there would be no salvation either.
Under the efficient command of Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, who had been handpicked to implement Kappler’s orders, the prisoners were chained together in groups of three and taken deep into the caves, where they were given the Nazi “pill,” the final cure for all ailments
and ills—a bullet in the head or neck—and left to die. Assisting in this hideously conceived enterprise were Hauptsturmführer Erik Priebke and Standartenführer Karl Hass.
The reprisal was carried out at exactly 3:30 PM, on March 24, one day, to the minute, after the partisan attack on the Via Rassella had taken place. With typical German precision, exactly sixty seconds were allotted for the execution of each victim. The bodies were then piled on top of each other in layers and the entrance to the caves carefully dynamited to destroy all evidence of the carnage. And so this monstrous Nazi secret was safe for a while.
Now that Nicola was actually here, she felt a surprising twinge of guilt over her lack of effort to see the caves on any of her previous visits to Rome. It was as if she had somehow failed to come up to the mark, to some sort of collective or universally acknowledged standard of empathy that should have been there as part of her innate moral, and even emotional, awareness.
She saw with unexpected clarity and an unsettling sense of personal failure that each time she had passed the Ardeatine Caves and told herself that she would visit them some day—but not now—that she had failed to acknowledge, on the simplest and most conscious of levels, the legacy of pain that had produced this memorial to the dead—pain to which she should have felt some sort of link simply because her grandmother was Italian, even if she knew nothing at all about Elena's past.
What was the point, Nicola thought, of all her academic pursuits if their only goals were career advancement and what she now perceived to be perhaps nothing more than self-indulgent intellectual gratification?
What was the point of all her knowledge about frescoes and catacombs if there were no lesson, moral or spiritual, to be learned from them, no deeply felt connection between the relics of the past and the people who had created them—not merely as cultural artifacts, but as evidence of the existential meaning of their lives and deaths?
The Ardeatine Caves, she now realized, were more than a silent tribute to the voiceless dead, conceived and executed in colorless rock and cold, passionless stone. Even the tiny pebbles that comprised the approach to this place of quiet horror now seemed, to her heightened senses, to echo, somehow, the infinite smallness of man in an indifferent, perhaps Godless, universe. She understood all at once, in something strangely akin to a religious epiphany, that the catacombs and frescoes to which she had devoted so much of her professional life were more than static monuments to the history of vanished people and dead nations. There was much to learn, she realized, from Bruno's inherently felt sense of the human element that was so inextricably bound up with his country's archaeological heritage.
“By the way,” Bruno said, interrupting her reverie as they stood in the shadow of the huge concrete sculpture, “one of the executed men was actually betrayed to the Gestapo by a fellow Jew, a young woman of eighteen named Celeste Di Porto, who was responsible for the deaths of over fifty other Roman Jews. She had a Fascist boyfriend who arranged for her to receive a bounty for each Jew that she turned in.”
“That’s horrible,” Nicola exclaimed in disbelief. “Do you mean to say that she actually turned in people she knew to the Nazis—for money—knowing what would happen to them?”
“Yes, as shocking as it sounds, it’s true. In the case I just mentioned, her brother had been picked up by the Gestapo after the attack on the Via Rassella and placed on the list of those to be executed. The young man who wound up taking his place left a note which was later found in his prison cell, accusing her of denouncing him.”
“How tragic,” she said, her eyes glistening with unexpected tears. “I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible it must have been to live in Rome during the war years, for Jews or gentiles. Thank God, my grandmother left when she did. She was one of the lucky ones, I guess, to have escaped it all, though I really don’t know any of the details. And, thank God, your family managed to survive. You will tell me about it someday, won't you?” she begged.
Chapter Twelve
It was the ninth day of the Hebrew lunar month of Av, when Jews everywhere mourned the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples. For Nicola it was difficult to understand how an event that had taken place so many thousands of years ago could still be relevant, or why anyone would bother to commemorate it with a fast and special prayers in synagogues world-wide.
Bruno had thought she might find it interesting to accompany him to services at the Tempio Maggiore, the largest, most opulent synagogue in Rome, given that their analysis of the new crypt seemed to require close consideration of the ancient Jewish communities of Rome. Despite her expertise in the history of the early Empire, Nicola had to admit that she was not entirely conversant with Jewish rituals or customs stemming from that period.
He picked her up at the Villa Mirafiori just after sunset, outside the heavy iron gates, in the broad cobble-stoned driveway along the boulevard. It was a sultry evening typical of Rome, hot, with a slight gust blowing through the tall treetops that lined the Via Nomentana. As they pulled away from the curb, a motorcyclist who had been sitting idly on a Vespa across the street, his features obscured by a dark helmet, lurched out of his parking space with a sudden screech. Zigzagging through the heavy traffic, he followed them most of the way to the ghetto, where Bruno made a sudden turn as he spotted a parking space near the Teatro de Marcello and the Portico d'Ottavia, with its crumbling gray façade and ruined columns.
Passing the stark memorial plaque to the Jews of Rome, who were rounded up by the Nazis in the rainy predawn hours of Sabato Nero, in October 1943, Nicola and Bruno walked over to the imposing synagogue along Lungotevere Cenci and the Via Catalana. A short distance away, the muddy waters of the Tiber coursed silently, as they had for centuries, along a steep embankment bisected by gray stone bridges.
Though Bruno and his family were not particularly traditional, there were certain religious holidays and customs that were part of his identity as an Italian Jew. He did not keep the Sabbath or the dietary laws of kashruth, but he had attended a Jewish elementary school as a child and knew much more than he professed to practice. He always fasted on Yom Kippur and attended services on the Jewish New Year, but that was the extent of his religious observance. In fact, it had been many years since he had been to a synagogue on the Ninth of Av.
Security was tight. As Bruno had recommended, Nicola brought her passport to avoid complications.
Carabinieri were always posted around the synagogues of Rome as a precaution against possible terrorist attacks, and on holidays and the Sabbath they were joined by special security guards employed by the Jewish community itself to question and check anyone who wished to enter the premises.
The security guards knew precisely what to look for—the bulging pockets, the capacious raincoat or jacket worn inappropriately in hot weather, the thick waistline that might hide a belt of explosives, a wire protruding from a sleeve, an uneasy manner or heavy breathing, or perhaps a nervous tic of the eye. Any or all of these, coupled with a Middle Eastern, swarthy appearance could signal trouble. The profiling here in the ghetto had paid off and had quietly quashed several incidents whose details had never reached the newspapers in Rome, let alone the ever-eager lenses of TV cameramen and reporters.
Nicola placed her handbag in an outdoor locker, and Bruno pocketed the key for safekeeping as they entered the building. It was a large, impressive structure, set back from the street in a paved courtyard surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence. From afar, its pale concrete façade looked almost like marble, with tall stained glass windows interspersed with Doric and Ionic pilasters. The building appeared to have some Iberian, or perhaps Moorish, architectural inspiration, though all the tour books Nicola had read claimed an Assyrian-Babylonian influence. Groups of tall palm trees waved their leafy fronds in the evening breeze, augmenting the exotic effect.
The high-ceilinged interior had a mosaic-tiled floor, whose intricate black and white designs were inlaid here and there with pale red and ocher. Ornate brass cha
ndeliers hung everywhere, and the dark wooden benches that filled the sanctuary were comfortably upholstered, with built-in shelves for prayer books.
As in all traditional synagogues, the men sat separately from the women. On the Sabbath, the main floor of the Tempio was reserved for the men, while the women occupied the upper balcony. Tonight, however, the women sat downstairs on the polished benches, while the men sat on the floor, in an age-old gesture of mourning, along the edge of the elevated bima, the platform on which the Holy Ark stood.
The chandeliers had been dimmed as a sign of collective grief, and now they were extinguished altogether, their faint illumination replaced by candlelight. Upon entering the synagogue, each of the worshippers had been given a tall, lighted taper, whose unlit end rested in a brown paper bag designed to catch the wax drippings. The effect was eerie, as if a séance were about to take place.
At last the service began. Bruno led Nicola to an aisle seat, making sure to provide her with a copy of the scroll of Lamentations, which had been chanted to the same melancholy liturgical tune ever since the prophet Jeremiah had composed it shortly after the destruction of the first Temple. Nicola’s copy of the text included translations into English and Italian, and to her surprise, while perusing it, she found her eyes filling with tears at the metaphoric grace of the poetry.
The incantatory melody, the glow of the candlelight, the vast, dark room in which she sat, her reflections on her grandmother’s widowhood and her deep sense of loss that stemmed from ignorance of her family’s past—all these, she realized as the tears came, had evoked this unforeseen emotional response to an ancient text, written in a language she could neither read nor understand, but which somehow sounded more beautiful, more haunting, than any translation could possibly render it.
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