How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  The pain in my bad knee flared up. I staggered back to the table and fell into the old, creaking chair.

  “You hurt?” the skinny Italian American asked.

  I broke the bread with unsteady hands. It was hard and bitter, too salty. “A goat,” I said. “My last one.” I held up a finger and shook it. “I tried to milk the stupid animal and she kicked me. I got so mad, I killed the ungrateful beast with a stone to the head. My last goat. I never ate so well again.”

  He translated my lie for the others, and the man with the medic’s armband craned around the table to get a look at my knee.

  I waved him off. “I’m fine,” I said. “I just need to stay off my feet for a bit.”

  “Let him take a look at it,” the Italian American said.

  “This,” I said. “This is nothing. Don’t waste your medicine on me. You’ll need that where you’re going.”

  The medic sat back in his chair. There was no need to translate. He understood enough. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered one to me. I declined but the others each took one. Soon storm clouds of smoke hung over our heads. The Italian American nosed around the room. There wasn’t much: a wood stove, a sink—no running water—and a pair of rough-hewn wooden cabinets. My soldier’s pack was in the bedroom, stowed under the cot. If he found it, they wouldn’t kill me right off. No, that would come later, after the interrogation. Maybe they would do it here, a bullet to the head, or maybe I would die from some unknown disease in a prisoner of war camp, packed with other prisoners like sardines in a can, marinating in our own oils.

  The Italian American leaned on the frame of the open bedroom doorway and poked his head inside. “You live alone?” he asked. Flecks of ash fell from his cigarette with each word.

  I could take the medic with the bread knife on the counter, maybe one more, before the Italian American shot me. If I was fortunate, he would miss, but I was not a fortunate man.

  “Wine,” I said to him. “In that cabinet over there. Please.” I rubbed around my kneecap. “Bring the bottle and some glasses.”

  The wine was just this side of vinegar, but the men did not complain. Together we finished the bottle, and when they left, I watched each of them in turn get swallowed up in the long shadows of the low evening light. Then I shut the door and barricaded it with a chair. By candlelight, I sewed a pillowcase from the bedsheet, large enough to hide my pack.

  I spent the rest of the night on the thin naked mattress, one hand inside the pack inside the pillowcase, clutching my pistol. The wolf locked in the jaws of the hunter’s trap. I could wait for the end to come, or I could chew my paw off and hobble away, the way I’d always done.

  I was the troublemaker I’d told David about that time on the Ferris wheel. I was a poor student and a terror, always stealing and fighting, always misbehaving. My parents, they couldn’t handle me. My youthful crimes made priests blush. You had to make boys like me respect you. That was the first thing I learned in the Balilla. They beat some sense into me, their black shirtsleeves rolled up in virtuous labor. You see, I was nothing but formless, delinquent clay, and with their fists, they molded me into finest marble-chin high, shoulders straight, right arm held out and up, leading the others in singing the Fascist anthem “Giovinezza.” Hail, O people of heroes, hail O immortal fatherland, your sons are reborn with faith in the idea.

  But boys got their strength from their mothers. This was the one truth the Balilla swept away. After David lost his mother, I read to him each evening, the way mine did for me before I turned my back on her. I read some of my favorite stories from Greek and Roman mythology, and I took requests. David loved hearing the story of Persephone trapped in the underworld, reuniting with her mother on Earth for a few months out of the year, and how that reunion made spring bloom.

  When I’d stand at the door and turn off the light, he’d ask me in a voice muffled from under the blankets to leave the light on. Please, Enzo. And I’d turn on the light, say, See, there’s nothing there. Nothing to be afraid of. But I didn’t see what he saw. I couldn’t see, not with my eyes. But his young eyes saw the movement of monstrous shapes in the shadows, the kind that crept out at night from closets that were left even a little bit open. So I’d sit with him until he fell asleep. I was the same at that age-all boys are-until the Balilla made a man out of me.

  The pistol was slick in my grip, night sweats and I had not even slept. We should’ve ground the world under the heel of the Italian boot, like the filthy butt of a cigarette. All those men who never made it to Messina, did they still believe, still fight even in their graves? What song would their bones sing to us, ground up as they were under the heel of the world?

  The fighting dragged on. By October, the Allies controlled southern Italy. Their advance slowed by German defenses and heavy rains in the unforgiving terrain of the Apennines. In those mountains with winter coming, the way north would not be safe for a long time.

  It was June 1944 when the Germans withdrew from Rome and the Allies captured the city, and I finally returned home. I don’t remember how long I walked under the summer sun. That scorching heat beat down and ironed the shirt on my back-dripping in sweat-the darkened cuffs rolled up at my elbows, the collar stained. My feet blistered in dirty socks with holes at the toes and heels, and the soles of my boots worn through, with breaks in the leather along the seams. I didn’t know the time of day or the day of the week when I stood in the road-lined with the wreckage of German legions-waving down an American military convoy that rumbled past. The last truck in the line stopped and I pointed north. “Rome,” I said and the driver handed me a canteen and thumbed me into the truck bed. I sat between stacked crates of supplies, savoring the metallic taste of the warm water.

  When I set foot in the deserted streets of my old neighborhood-the working-class neighborhood of San Lorenzo-leaflets fell on the city from gray-bellied planes overhead. It looked almost beautiful, like snow, if not for the sporadic gunfire in the distance, the bombed-out railroad yards at Stazione Termini, the scorched and damaged houses, the shells of buildings standing in the rubble of their own guts, and the ruined facade of the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le mura-the Basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the walls.

  I walked past the playground-the field burnt and littered with debris-and, further out, down a little cobblestone street the bombs had missed. I stood at the end of the block of shuttered three-story houses. The block where my parents had raised me up, where I’d scraped my knees as a boy. In the twilight, this place looked like the picture in my head. But the picture in my head had sounds, it had life, laughter, bickering. The quiet here unnerved me, as if the street itself was in mourning. I limped along the pavement. I picked up my pace. I wanted to see my parents again, eat a home-cooked meal, and sleep in my own bed.

  A dog barked from inside one of the buildings. “Fico,” an old woman said. “Be quiet, Fico.” And then I saw her, backing away from the first-floor window, half the shutter broken and hanging from the hinge.

  When I turned back from the woman at the window, I noticed a break in the row of houses. The muscles in my jaw tensed. The image my eyes showed me blurred for a second. And in that second, it was as if I fell out of this world into a nightmare where someone replaced the house I grew up in with this charred stone frame standing in front of me, three stories of burnt bones in the middle of a quiet block.

  A hand touched my shoulder and a gentle voice asked, “Are you okay, Signore?”

  “I was born there,” I said.

  The voice belonged to a beautiful young woman with long black curls. She cradled a paper bag in one arm. A long loaf of bread stuck out from the top.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This war has been a curse on us all. Is there anything I can do? Do you need a place to stay? Some food?”

  I remembered that I hadn’t eaten all day. And I searched deep within myself for some sign of hunger, a grumbling stomach or a light-headed feeling, but found none. “No,”
I said. “Thank you for the offer.”

  “The city is still dangerous,” she said. “Please take care.” Then she hurried away, her heels clicking on the cobblestone street. And as she rounded the corner, I wondered what losses were behind the sadness in her voice.

  Inside the house, the floors above ground level had collapsed. And with the roof gone, I looked up at the leaflets floating down from the sky. I snatched one from out of the air. Rome is yours! it declared. Your job is to save the city, ours is to destroy the enemy. I dropped the paper, looked at the flyers all around the rubble. I got on my knees and sifted through broken furniture and dishes, burnt hardback books of poetry and novels, the curled and coal-black pages crumbling to ashes in my hands. I thought of the people who had lived here-the bickering old couple on the top floor, the poor widower who kept to himself on the first-and I thought of my family’s pictures on the walls, the bedroom where I had dreamed as a boy, my father’s favorite reading chair, my mother’s prized kitchen. How she loved cooking for the three of us, sharing conversation and good wine. I missed her cooking. I missed them both.

  I had no relatives, no other family, and couldn’t think of where to go. I cleared debris from the floor, curled up on my side, and slept like a baby in his mother’s womb. And in the night as I slept, Raphael came to me. We used the pages of some book for kindling and made a fire of a mound of collapsed floorboards. He spoke to me in the flickering light, but he made no sound. Or I could not hear the words.

  The next day, people spilled out of their homes and mobbed the streets, welcoming the American army with flowers and hugs and bottles of wine. The sun hurt my eyes. I stayed in the shade of shop awnings and avoided the cheering crowds and the columns of marching soldiers, the parade of tanks and trucks towing big guns, all heading north. I found an abandoned first-floor apartment in an alley and washed the soot from under my fingernails. A message scrawled in dried blood on the mirror read: You die, you disappear. The soot whirled down the drain. And I felt hollowed out, like some nameless beast had gnawed away at my insides, picked the bones clean.

  7

  That evening, I found Silvio Rosi-a friend of my father’s-at his little café tucked away on a quiet, narrow side street. Two round mosaic tables fit into the tight space to the left of the smashed door-length window where the old man stood with a dustpan and broom, sweeping up the glass. He had a horseshoe ring of gray hair around the sides of his head, and he looked thinner than the picture I had of him from my memory.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He turned around and his face went white. His mouth fell open. And the broom dropped from his hands. “Enzo,” he said. “Enzo Giordano.” Then he hugged me and kissed my unshaven cheeks. “You’re the spitting image of your father,” he said.

  I took a seat and he sighed and said, “You’ve seen the house.”

  “What happened, Silvio?”

  He wiped his brow with a hand towel hanging from his back pocket and sat opposite me. “The Germans,” he said. Then he spit into the street. “The Fascists,” he said, spitting again. “They accused your parents of harboring partisans. Can you believe that?”

  I buried my face in my hands, not sure if I could hear any more.

  “I don’t know,” Silvio said. He waved a hand in front of his face as if swatting a fly. “I don’t know if it was true or not. Your father, he denied it, of course. And the soldiers, they searched the house three times. That last time your father came to me. Right here at this table a few hours before curfew.” Silvio tapped a finger on the tabletop. Then he looked over his shoulders, leaned in closer, and said, “He told me they were leaving the city, him and your mother, that it wasn’t safe anymore, and that they’d be back as soon as possible.”

  I lifted my head from my hands. “He didn’t tell you where they were going?”

  Silvio lit a cigarette and shook his head no. He blew smoke out of his nostrils and said, “That night the apartment building burned down.” He reached out and patted my hand on the table. “We searched the place. Everyone from the neighborhood pitched in. But your parents, well, they must’ve got out in time. I’m sure of it.” Then he slapped his hands on his thighs, stood up, and said, “I have a room upstairs. It’s tiny.” He held out his pinkie finger. “But a bed is better than nothing. You can work off the rent in the café. They’ll come back. You’ll see.”

  The café stood in eerie silence in the hours before dawn. By the time Silvio arrived-around seven in the morning-I had already unlocked and pulled open the folding steel gate, put the two tables and chairs outside, and received the delivery from a black-market courier, a ten-year-old boy on a bicycle. He delivered one loaf of bread, a tin of olive oil, a box of spaghetti, and four cans of ground American coffee. I paid him with money from the shoebox under the loose floor tile behind the counter, then I brewed a fresh pot of coffee.

  Silvio and I sat together, sipping our coffee until it got cold, dipping in crusts of stale bread left over from the day before. We waited for the morning rush that never came.

  At lunch, we ate the spaghetti with the olive oil and bread. Then I wiped the tall, round tables and stools that lined the walls all the way to the counter in back. Silvio swept the black-and-white tiled floor for the second time that day, and he straightened the pictures of his family that hung on the wall-his wife and two unmarried girls, his father and mother and in-laws. Then he dusted the frames with a worn cloth.

  Midafternoon, we had customers. They arrived in twos and threes, and I searched their faces for my father, for the pointed chin, the patch of gray at the temples, the round glasses-the serious and studious look of my father. But I didn’t see him. I saw men walking in with dazed and haunted faces, drawn long and pained, and with just a few lire notes in their wallets. They bought one cup of coffee and nursed it for hours. At first the men stayed quiet, beaten down by a day of looking for work and finding no jobs available. But as the shadows grew longer outside, and the tables filled up inside, they began talking. They talked about where they had looked for work, and the long lines they had waited in. Their voices grew louder. Finally, they argued and made jokes and told stories. Finally, the café came alive.

  Each day that followed held the same rhythm. And as the week passed into a month with no sign of my parents, I grew more restless. I knocked on all the doors on my parents’ street, visiting people I had not seen in years, and asked them about Carlo and Anna Giordano. I asked everyone who walked into the café the same questions. I felt sorry imposing my troubles on them. They had their own problems. They’d survived the Allied bombing of the San Lorenzo district when so many others had died. And I’d heard stories from the men in the café of Germans stealing their coal for the winter, and looting the city for food and supplies. But no one had seen my parents since the night of the fire.

  8

  The night I met Sergio Romano-a partisan who had fought against the Germans and the Fascists-he sat alone in the corner of the café, smoking Lucky Strikes and dipping biscotti into his coffee. Men at the other tables whispered his name. They spoke of Sergio’s prison sentence in the late thirties for crimes against the state, the torture he endured there, and how, upon his release, he took on three Blackshirts in an alley not far from here. He stood his ground, unarmed against three armed brutes, and he won. During the German occupation of Rome, he printed anti-Fascist leaflets from his basement and led a resistance group.

  Sergio came into the café an hour before closing and stayed until all the customers had left for the night. I cleared the two tables outside, wiped them down with a damp cloth, walked back inside, and shut the narrow door behind me.

  “Stop asking about your parents,” Sergio said. He didn’t look at me when he spoke. He stared straight ahead. “That’s not smart.”

  “Do you know where they went?” I sat down at his table.

  Sergio snuffed out his cigarette in the ashtray, his head turned to the window. He checked up and down the street. Smoke curled out
from around the scar on his lips as he spoke. “Your father delivered messages for me. One of my best couriers. You should be proud.”

  I pounded the table with my fist, rattling the ashtray and cup. He never even flinched, but it made him look at me just the same.

  “Your father got careless,” Sergio said. He lit another cigarette. Then he tapped a finger against his temple. “I told him to use his head, that he risked our entire operation, but he wouldn’t listen. He had to hide some young man who had run from the Fascists.” Sergio shrugged his shoulders and gave me a blank stare. “Beh, at least he was smart enough not to give me a name.” He stood up and left some money on the table. “Your father had a good heart,” he said. “But it was too big. Don’t make the same mistake. There are still Fascists out there settling old scores. Don’t go looking for your parents.”

  In my little room above the café, I lay awake long into the night, hands clasped behind my head. My feet hung off the end of the fold-up aluminum cot, only half covered by the blanket. Silvio had salvaged the cot from a building the Germans abandoned when they pulled out of the city. The thin mattress pad sagged where he’d tied the broken springs to the frame with chicken wire.

  Yellow light from the street pressed through the window slats, cutting shadowed rungs on the plasterwork wall. The wall looked like the earth cracked from years of drought. Pictures grew from those cracks. I saw the white flowers of almond and citrus and olive orchards, the trees heavy with bloom. In the harbor of a seaside village, fishermen tied up their little boats and hauled in their fish. They brought the fish to market in carts pulled by donkeys. The fishermen had carved and painted the panels of those carts with such magnificent skill and spirit. But they had traded in the traditional bright reds and greens and yellows for lifeless black and charcoal gray. Instead of chivalrous knights and castles, there were soldiers and corpses in the rubble.