The Lost Catacomb

by Shifra Hochberg

  He covered her small hand with his own and then brought it to his lips, kissing it tenderly and enfolding it in both of his hands, which he pressed close to his chest. She gazed steadily into his eyes and, coloring slightly, whispered the words he had nearly despaired of ever hearing.

  “I’m ready, Tom,” she said. “I’m ready to be your wife. Your real wife. I’ve been ready for a long time. I just didn’t know it until now. I love you,” she murmured softly as she leaned against him, her arms now encircling his neck. “Ti amo. Now and forever, my most precious Tom.”

  And she raised her face to meet his lips in a lasting pledge of love, a pledge so hard won by both of them. He kissed her over and over again, until, lifting her into his arms, he held her close and carried her down the hall to the deep and long awaited comfort of his bed.

  The Present

  “Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.”

  ~~T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

  Chapter One

  Tears filled her eyes as Elena ended her narrative. “I’m sorry that I’ve shocked you, Nicola,” she said weakly. “But I wanted you to know. Finally. Before it’s too late.

  “I'd considered confiding in you after Grandpa died,” she faltered brokenly, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now I’m not so sure how much time I have left. Not after what’s happened to me during the past twenty-four hours.

  “So many secrets,” she sighed. “So much that I’ve kept to myself. I’m sorry, cara, truly I am. It just hurt too much to share.”

  “I know,” Nicola said as collectedly as she could, trying to soothe her grandmother, though in fact she could barely keep her own feelings in check.

  At the first mention of Rostoni’s name, Nicola had turned white, and a whispered, nearly choked, “Merda!” had escaped from her throat. But Elena, submerged in painful recollection of the past, had neither noticed nor heard anything.

  My God! Nicola had thought, her pulse racing as her grandmother spoke. Was it possible that someone who had lusted after Elena—to the extent that he had engineered the murder of her lover—was it possible that such a monster could have taken holy orders? After all, commitment to a life of celibacy was a cornerstone of the priesthood. Was it possible that the Mauro Rostoni who had denounced her grandfather to the Fascists was the same Cardinal Rostoni for whom she and Bruno were working?

  The thought was both appalling and frightening, that—if it were in fact the same Rostoni—that someone who had reached the highest echelons of power in the Catholic Church might be responsible for so many deaths—Niccolò’s, his parents’, and those of Elena’s entire family. And those were only the deaths she actually knew of. Perhaps there were still others. The circumference of Rostoni’s revenge might have extended beyond her young grandfather’s immediate family to include aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  I must stay calm, she told herself. I can’t let her see how shocked I am. Maybe the name is just a horrible, horrible coincidence.

  She took a deep breath and, stumbling over her words, finally said, “I do understand, Nonna, I do. But . . . I just . . . I just can’t believe that Grandpa Tom wasn’t my real grandfather. My biological grandfather, I mean. It doesn’t seem possible. Did Mom know who her real father was? Or did you keep this from her as well?”

  “Si, cara,” Elena admitted with a tired sigh. “Your mother had no idea that Tom wasn’t her biological father. None whatsoever. He was a true father to her, though, just as he was always your real, your only grandfather.”

  There was a pause, as Elena shifted against her pillow and tried ineffectually to blot the tears that slid unchecked down her face with the edge of her blanket. Nicola handed her a tissue and then asked gently, “What about my name? I must've been named for poor Niccolò. It can’t just be a coincidence, can it? Please, Nonna, please tell me,” she begged.

  “When you were born,” Elena explained sadly, “I told your mother that I loved the name ‘Nicola,’ and I begged her to call you that. She asked no questions and seemed happy to gratify this silly whim of mine.

  “Obviously, when Julia herself had been born, I couldn’t name her for Niccolò, out of deference to Tom. But by the time you came along, Tom and I were so happily married that he actually suggested it. That’s the kind of person he was. So loving, so kind, so generous. I miss him so much.”

  “I know, Nonna, I know.” She stroked her grandmother’s hand tenderly, and then said, hesitating slightly, “I hope you don’t mind my asking—I know how difficult this is for you—but did you ever make any effort after the war to find out what happened to your parents and Giulio, or to Niccolò’s family?

  “Maybe they didn’t all die. Maybe your father and brother were eventually released from prison after the Allied victory,” she offered. “And, who knows, maybe Niccolò’s parents somehow survived. After all,” she added, thinking of Bruno’s family history, “there have been documented cases of people who managed to escape from the Fascists and Nazis under the most unlikely of circumstances.”

  Elena looked at Nicola, the tears still glistening in her eyes. “I was never able to find out where my family was taken or what happened to them. Grandpa Tom tried to pull strings and use every contact he had, but to no avail. He searched the records at Fossoli di Carpi, the labor camp in Modena, and at San Sabba, the extermination center on the grounds of the old rice factory near Trieste.

  “He tried everywhere. Everywhere. I assume that they died, either in prison or on a train en route to a labor camp. Or maybe they were shot in some dark alley after they were taken away. We never found any traces of them after the war.

  “As for Niccolò’s parents, it was the same thing. Bureaucratic dead-ends wherever Tom looked. It’s not like today, where lists of victims exist in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Or in Israel at their museum, Yad VaShem. I never had the strength, the emotional strength, to look into it again. Not after all these years.

  “But maybe some day you will. You’re stronger than I am, Nicola. I raised you that way. Or at least I tried to. No one will ever rob you of the ones you love. Promise me that,” she pleaded.

  Nicola pressed her grandmother’s hand soothingly. “I promise, Nonna,” she said, wiping away the tears on Elena’s cheek.

  “I’m tired now,” Elena said. “I need to rest. Some other time I’ll tell you more. This is enough for now. Ti amo. Don’t be angry at me for having kept this from you until now. It was just too hard. Too hard to share.”

  Nicola brushed her grandmother’s forehead gently with her lips. “Don’t worry, Nonna. I understand. I’m not angry. Just a bit shaken. But it’s all right. I’m glad you told me. Rest now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  She sat down and waited until she was sure that Elena had dozed off. She was tense with the effort of restraining her emotions and found it difficult to sit still, not when she’d just heard the most horrifying things about her family—things that shattered the very foundations of her own identity. And of course, she worried guiltily that she might disturb her grandmother, who was finally resting peacefully.

  Now leaving the room as quietly as she could, she walked in the direction of a small lobby at the end of the hall, where she spotted a sofa and sat down to think. Think?! She was reeling with shock, overwhelmed by an entire spectrum of emotions.

  Anger at Elena for never having told her any of this before, especially when Elena had seen the letter of invitation from the Vatican and had undoubtedly made some sort of connection between the surname of its sender and the vicious neighbor who had orchestrated the death of her lover so many years ago.

  Anger at the historical forces—for what else could she call them?—that had robbed her of her entire family back in Italy. Anger at those who had killed her relatives. Sorrow for young love that had been blighted. Loss and pain for the relatives she had never known. And the sudden, terrifying reali
zation that had she grown up in Italy at the time of the war, she would probably have been rounded up as a Jew and sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.

  She didn’t know much about the Racial Laws or how the Nazis had determined who was Jewish enough to be wiped off the face of the earth. But she did know that her own mother would have been considered mischling, or half-Jewish, even though, technically speaking, her mother would not have been Jewish according to orthodox Judaism. Religious affiliation, as far as she knew, was based on that of one’s birth mother—the logic being that you could know, definitively, who’d given birth to a specific child, but you had no way of really knowing who the father was, at least not in pre-DNA-testing days. This much she knew from her college roommate, whose father was Protestant, but whose mother was Jewish.

  My God! Her own mother could have been ripped out of Elena’s arms shortly after birth and delivered to the Nazis had Elena not left Italy when she did. She herself might never have been born. And her grandmother would probably have been deported and killed simply for having loved a Jew, for having borne his child. It was too horrible to contemplate, and yet the thought obsessed her with relentless ferocity.

  In fact, she realized now that she had even more in common with Bruno than she’d previously thought. They had a whole shared history—not merely that of the sufferings of all ordinary Italians during the war, but of the Jewish population specifically. She was part of a long history of persecution and had never known it.

  For some reason, she found herself thinking about a passage from the Haggadah, the book read at the Passover Seder she’d been invited to at her college roommate’s house years ago, a passage whose stark reality had apparently lain dormant in her memory until now—“Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”

  While the passage had referred to the apocryphal evil son, who refused to recognize the hand of God in the redemption of the Israelites from Egypt and hence would not have been saved, her girlfriend had said that it always made her think about the Holocaust and whether or not she would have survived had she lived during those terrible times.

  Nicola recalled that her friend had even mused aloud at the Seder table, to the embarrassment of her parents—given the presence of several gentile guests—that she wondered if anyone would have hidden her in an attic or basement. If anyone would have risked his life to save hers had she been born in Europe sixty years earlier. Nicola had considered this somewhat paranoid and far-fetched at the time, but now that evening haunted her. It wasn’t so implausible or irrelevant a notion after all.

  Her thoughts now turned to Grandpa Tom. My God, she even felt disloyal to Grandpa Tom! He'd been her grandfather. He’d raised her after her parents had died. He’d loved her so much, and she had loved him. And yet she’d had another grandfather—whose name she bore, whom she’d never known, whom she’d never guessed had even existed, and whom she would have loved dearly—the grandfather who would forever be younger than she was now. The grandfather who would always be a young man in his prime, a young man in love. The grandfather who didn’t even have a grave she could visit and weep over.

  A grandfather of whom nothing remained but her.

  And yes, despite earlier rationalizations of her grandmother’s behavior, part of her still didn’t understand why Elena had never told her any of this before. She was an adult, not a ten-year-old child. She too had been an orphan, just like Elena. That too had been an unspoken bond between them that could have been strengthened even further if only Elena had shared the truth about her past.

  But then, Nicola was forced to admit, she’d read somewhere that keeping secrets of this sort was normal behavior for Holocaust survivors or people like Elena, who weren’t actual Holocaust survivors but part of the so-called collateral damage of the war. They kept these things inside, repressed them, and didn’t confide, even in their own children, because it was just too wrenching to relive the pain of their losses. She guessed that in all fairness to her grandmother she should be happy, not angry, that Elena was finally sharing this with her.

  Now, of course, she understood why Elena had seemed taken aback almost irrationally—or so it had seemed at the time—by the invitation from the Vatican. Had Elena thought that “Cardinal M. Rostoni,” whose signature appeared on the letter, might actually be the same Rostoni she had known? The Mauro Rostoni who had denounced her lover during the war? Or was it simply that the surname itself had stunned her momentarily, reminding her of the tragedy of her past?

  Why hadn’t she said anything?

  Nicola was amazed at her grandmother’s strength in encouraging her to leave under such circumstances of suspicion and doubt. Or was it, more correctly, irresponsibility, perhaps recklessness on Elena’s part? Until now, she had never thought of Elena as being anything but circumspect and careful. So why hadn’t she disclosed her reservations—or fears—about the trip to Nicola?

  Could Elena have thought that Nicola would refuse the commission outright had she known the facts of her grandmother’s past? Had she had felt that it was unfair to deny Nicola this wonderful opportunity on the basis of a similarity of names that was probably pure happenstance? Or had she worried that if Nicola had accepted the offer in the face of all these uncertainties, she would have difficulty hiding her feelings and been unable to function in her usual professional manner? How typical of Elena to have put her granddaughter’s interests first, before her own.

  Yes, in all fairness to her grandmother, she could only assume that Elena must have felt that she deserved this career opportunity, untainted by possibly irrelevant concerns. And now that she thought of it, how could she have expected Elena to share with her the secret of an out-of-wedlock birth—the fact that her very own mother, Julia, had been illegitimate?

  Yet despite these rationalizations and repeated attempts to understand her grandmother’s motives, the truth was that Nicola was actually furious that Elena had not chosen to confide in her sooner. Didn’t she trust her own granddaughter with even part of the story? Or at the very least want to warn her about Cardinal Rostoni, assuming that he could conceivably be the same individual?

  Of course there was no way that he could ever know that she was Elena’s granddaughter. No way for him to harm her, physically or otherwise. But still, shouldn’t she have been told?

  And if it turned out that he were the same Rostoni her grandmother had spoken of, Nicola realized, how could she continue to work for him, knowing all this? How could she possibly mask her anger and hatred? And how could she help but fantasize about avenging Niccolò’s death? Thinking of her black belt in karate and carefully honed self-defense skills, she hoped she would never be tempted to do something rash.

  Her thoughts now raced on to other related issues, things that she would need to face squarely when she had the emotional strength to do so. Though she was not an observant Catholic, she didn’t know how she could ever come to terms with the fact that the Church had been neutral, as it were, during World War II. That according to so many historians, Pope Pius had remained silent on the subject of the Jews of Rome, even as they were being dragged out of their beds before dawn, trucked off to the Collegio Militare, and then entrained within a matter of days to Auschwitz and a most hideous death.

  Dio! She remembered reading that when the Pope had been asked to help the Jews of Rome gather fifty kilograms of gold that the Nazis had said would ransom them from death, before the deportations in October 1943, the Vatican had offered a loan only reluctantly, embarrassed and under duress, when it was approached by desperate representatives of the Jewish community.

  It had turned out that good Catholics throughout Rome, ordinary citizens, hearing of the plight of the Jews and the thirty-six hour deadline the Nazis had imposed, had selflessly donated their own precious jewelry and gold coins, expecting nothing in return, eager to help save innocent lives. A loan from the Vatican had not been necessary after all.

  She remembered that Bruno had told her that the Pope had been informe
d of the imminent execution of Italian citizens, some of them Jews, after the partisan attack on SS soldiers on the Via Rassella and that he had refrained from comment, fearful of jeopardizing the Vatican’s status as a protected city. For all she knew, given the timing, her great grandfather and great uncle—Elena’s father and brother—might have been among the victims of the Ardeatine Cave massacre. Thirteen of the bodies had never been identified, even after all these years.

  No, she would never know.

  The bottom line, however, was that although Nicola was a lapsed Catholic, the religion to which she subscribed, at least formally, had in effect played a part—even if it had been only a passive one—in the death of many Italian Jews, some of whom had been her own relatives.

  She began to speculate about all those priests she’d met at the Vatican, many of whom had been young adults during the war. Had any of them had a hand in collaborating with the Nazis or Fascists? Had any of them simply shrugged their shoulders, saying that what was happening outside the Apostolic Palace was none of their business? That it was safer not to get involved?

  No wonder her grandmother had never made an issue of religion when Nicola was growing up. Yet Nicola had to acknowledge—with deep gratitude and admiration for their courage—the help that so many convents and monasteries, so many compassionate nuns and priests, had given to Jews and others during the war. Had this not been the case, Elena might not have survived.

  Nicola glanced at her watch and was surprised to see that her ruminations had taken her into the wee hours of the morning. It was now almost five o’clock, nearly dawn, and she hadn’t slept a wink, couldn’t sleep a wink, though she was totally exhausted. In a few hours her grandmother would be taken for more tests, and she would know just how soon Elena could be released from the hospital, just how much lasting damage, if any, had resulted from the stroke.