Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

“Heard the news?” Mario asked quietly—the way they all spoke now—but in a tone of muted excitement.

  Don Claudio sipped his espresso—weak but passable—and shook his head. Isolated in his church at the top of the hill for days at a time, saying Mass to his four elderly women, reading no newspapers, hearing no radio, he sometimes felt completely cut off from the outside world. It was not an unpleasant feeling.

  Mario ran his eyes in a loop around their dark corner of the bar—one other group of customers, two couples, unfamiliar—then out at the street windows, suddenly ablaze in sun as the rain clouds parted. “Il Duce . . . gone.”

  “Gone? How, gone? To Berlin?”

  More headshaking. The others joined in, barely above a whisper. “People are saying the king deposed him. Three days ago.”

  “Deposed? How deposed?”

  Mario looked around the circle of friends, held on to the information as if keeping the last glass of a fine bottle of wine for a late-arriving relative, and then, in a low voice, “Gone. No one knows where.”

  Don Claudio hid his mouth behind the rim of the espresso cup. Perhaps, through the love affair and the years of pretending that had followed it, God had been training him for the work he now did. The ability to keep secrets, to deceive. The chance to overcome an old cowardice it seemed he’d been born with and had carried like a hideous birthmark all his days. This time, though, there was no deception, except perhaps to hide a measure of his joy: he’d heard nothing of this and still only half believed it.

  Mario and the others were happy about the news—they were, of course, all of the same politics—but, even there, even among friends, it was best to bury one’s true feelings. The Germans had ears in the soffits, eyes in the window mullions. And it wasn’t just the Germans or the OVRA or the Blackshirts. Even after all that had happened, Mussolini still had his defenders among ordinary Italians. They remembered the days before he’d taken power, the violence, the chaos, the strikes, the marauding gangs, the sense that anything could happen. Full of doubt themselves, they’d been seduced by his exaggerated self-certainty. And their egos weren’t immune to his promises to bring Italy back to greatness.

  Orlando came and served them a dish of stale croissants. “The best I can do,” he said. Kind as the bar owner was, he had a quiet, almost secretive demeanor, and the men did not speak openly in front of him. No one knew his politics, not exactly, not with enough confidence to bring him into their circle when certain subjects arose. When he’d returned to his kitchen, Mario said, “Now the war is over.”

  But Don Claudio was already wandering the dark avenues of a different calculation. He didn’t think the war was over, couldn’t let his hopes stretch that far. The men sat and chewed the stale pastries, sipped at their coffees as if they’d been brewed with the last available water and beans on earth. Their priest tried to puzzle out what the news could mean. The majority of Italians had never been fond of Italy’s entrance into the war. Of late, with the losses in North Africa, especially the defeat at El Alamein, that sentiment had only grown stronger. Naturally enough, they blamed Mussolini. His little-boy admiration of Hitler, his alliance with the Devil. During the previous week’s card game, Mario had told him there were massive strikes in the factories in Milan and that the Alpini—Italy’s best fighters—were rumored to be singing songs about il Duce’s demise. If Italy had ever been a solid pillar in the Nazi house of terror, it was clear to everyone Don Claudio knew that the pillar was badly cracked now, shaking, perhaps about to collapse, leaving Hitler’s house tilting sideways. It only made sense—again, as the rumors had it—that the Führer was pressing Mussolini to cede all military control, to let Field Marshal Kesselring and the other savages give orders to Italian troops. Now, if it were true Mussolini was gone, that would certainly happen. Any Italian soldiers left in the fight would have Germans at their backs, machine guns pointed. Or they’d mutiny and force a civil conflict, brother against brother. No, he thought, no, the war is far from over. But he couldn’t bring himself to say those words aloud.

  When they’d sat there for several hours, his friends—too old for military conscription, thank God—collected their cards and tallied up small victories and losses, sums that would never be paid. One by one they sighed, stood, thanked their host, shook hands or embraced, and took their leave.

  Don Claudio felt light-headed. Lack of food, he told himself. He stepped into the sunlight and stood on the sidewalk in front of Orlando’s bar and tried, again, to make sense of it all. Il Duce gone. Il Duce gone! For a long time, he didn’t move, returning the greetings of neighbors and friends by reflex, running various scenarios through his brain, trying to see into the future.

  Hitler would never allow Italy to be lost. If Italian soldiers mutinied—and surely now many of them would—they’d be replaced by better-trained Germans with no sentimental feelings whatsoever toward Italian life, Italian women. Mussolini’s laws—a violent assertion of Italian manhood—would be replaced by those of an even more vicious and insecure devil.

  As he was standing there, an SS officer he’d never before seen came walking along the sidewalk toward him. The man was short and barrel shaped with jowls, a long nose, and large ears, and he was carrying a riding crop in his right hand. What a strange race of men they were!

  “Buongiorno, Padre,” the German said with a thick accent, stopping beside Don Claudio and running his eyes from the priest’s hairline to his plain brown shoes and back again.

  “Buongiorno.”

  “I wonder if you could help me. My colleagues and I have noticed an increase in ‘accidents’ in this area. Broken telephone wires, damaged roadways. Sabotage, we suspect. I wonder if you might know of the person or people behind such criminal acts.”

  “I haven’t heard any of this,” Don Claudio said.

  The man was pursing his lips and staring hard into Don Claudio’s eyes. “No?”

  The priest shook his head, even dizzier now.

  “We have food.”

  “I’m glad you have food. You should share it with the people of this town. That’s what Christ would want of you.”

  The officer laughed. “Food for you, I meant, in exchange for information.”

  “I’m a priest, Officer. I have no information except that which pertains to eternal judgment.”

  “No local secrets? From your confessional, perhaps?”

  “None.”

  The German stared at him without blinking. “We are not unlike your Christ,” he said at last. “A kind people, if you obey us. If not, we exact a punishment like the burning in hell.”

  It was everything Don Claudio could do not to look away. The man was surrounded by a vapor of the purest evil. He could feel the soles of his feet trembling. “I know nothing of these accidents, Officer. No one speaks of them. I haven’t seen them with my own eyes. The first I heard was—”

  “Fine, Padre. But if I discover you are lying, I’ll have my men tie you to a chair, and I will pull out your teeth, one by one, with a pliers.”

  The shaking had moved up into Don Claudio’s legs. He looked away, then back. “I am not a brave man, Officer. A priest not a soldier. Faced with such a threat, I would surely tell you if I knew anything.”

  The officer turned and spat, then slapped the riding crop against his own leg once and walked away.

  Don Claudio turned to watch him go—the ridiculous jodhpurs, the riding crop—he was a short, ugly caricature of a man who, by virtue of his führer’s insanity, had been given a terrible power over other men and women. The power had ruined him spiritually. Don Claudio believed that without any doubt. Still, his whole body was shaking, and he could not take his eyes from the man’s back.

  If Mussolini was, in fact, finished, then these were the new masters.

  Twenty-Two

  By the evening on which Maria made her grim hundred-meter walk to the Rossos’ back door for the fifth time, everyone in Mezzegra had heard the news. Mussolini was gone—no one knew where. R
umors whirled around the lakeside towns like flocks of frightened birds: that il Duce had been flown to Berlin to plan the cessation of northern Italy and to form, with Austria, a massive German state; that the German language would soon be taught in schools as far south as Naples; that Catholicism would be outlawed; that the Americans were already in Rome and marching up the peninsula unhindered; that Hitler was dead in a suicide pact with il Duce. The Italian imagination took them on endless voyages, she thought, but the only reality was this walk past her olive trees and across the empty weed-strewn lot where the Rossos had once raised goats in a fenced-in corner and planted cabbages and tomatoes and fennel and eggplant, this bottle of oil in her hand, the growling hunger in her belly, a friend in the attic, and the song of terror that played in their ears night and day.

  Familiar with the ritual now, Maria stepped through the back door without bothering to knock and began her preparations. As she worked, she could hear the men carousing in the dining room, but the redhead came and stood not far from her in the kitchen. He had a glass in his hand, the sour-smelling beer they seemed to prefer, and as she cut up one of their fine, firm onions and set the slices in a pan, he watched her carefully. “You brought your own oil,” he said in a friendly way, in his understandable but mangled Italian. “A new bottle.” You brung you the oil, was the way it sounded in her ear. She thought: They rape our women; they mutilate our language.

  She nodded, half turning her head but not looking at him.

  “Drink some,” he said after a pause. Not so friendly now.

  She turned her head farther and met his eyes. “Scusa?”

  “Drink some. Just a swallow. I have orders; I have to make sure you aren’t poisoning us.”

  She couldn’t show the slightest hesitation. She turned away from the stove and, keeping her eyes fixed on the redhead’s wide face, put the bottle to her lips and drank.

  He watched, as if expecting her to fall over dead, but after a minute, he gave her a rueful smile, almost an apology, and nodded.

  The redhead went back to his coarse friends. Maria went on with her cooking, but now, even if she had to consume it herself, she wished she’d mixed some of Rebecca’s shit in with the piss and oil. How she hated these men. Prices of pasta had tripled for Italians; the Germans had boxes of it. Decent vegetables were as rare as gold; they had a pantry full. She purposely overcooked the spaghetti, bringing to their loud table pasta so soft and lacking in flavor that even her kindly Sabatino would have refused to eat a second bite. Spaghetti, tomatoes, onions, oil. Their fresh bread, butter—something Italians never put on bread. They even had Parmesan cheese, the bastards, and grated it carelessly over their plates with their military knives, spilling some on the table. The tall bald one—their leader, it seemed—caught her looking and pressed his finger down into the yellow crumbs, then held the finger up to her. “Lick,” he said.

  She pretended not to understand and was about to turn away when another of the men grabbed her roughly by the arm. She sensed the redhead was about to say something in her defense, but he pressed his lips together.

  “Lick,” the tall one said again. “Lecca!”

  Maria hesitated, felt her forearm squeezed in a vise grip. The man let go; she went over and licked the cheese from the tall one’s finger.

  “Say thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded drunkenly, said, “Next time I make you suck,” and waved her out the door. Walking across the lot, she spat eleven times. The flame of anger in her empty belly had turned to a furnace. But were they stupid, these men? Hateful, evil, vulgar, yes, but also stupid? Did they imagine the Italians would love them for this? Respect them? Obey them? Keep from killing them if they had the chance?

  She thought of her Sabatino, forced to fight for them in Russia, and she spat again and brushed at her eyes.

  Twenty-Three

  Luca rose before dawn and was putting on his clothes when he heard Sarah stir. He saw her sit up in the shadows. Gaunt face, tired eyes, chestnut hair, still miraculously beautiful to him, even with the loss of so much of her strength and with small welts of mosquito bites freckling the skin of her neck. The vision of her in the sheets, one bare leg showing, made him think of the time he’d first seen her, walking along a corridor in middle school. Braids swinging, a smile like the sun. Their mothers had been friends forever, and they’d seen each other occasionally in town, but that was the first time he’d thought of her in a different way. It took him six years to find the courage to ask her out. Six years.

  “Luca,” she said quietly, and something in her voice made him look at her more closely.

  He knew what was coming. They’d had this conversation before. “I’ll find you another place to live now, a house,” he said. Keeping her here was selfish of him; he knew that. He risked so much, was willing to sacrifice so much, but he wanted this woman for himself. In a safe house, there would be fewer chances to sleep together—their only pleasure in life now—and he’d have to put his trust in the other people who lived there. Here, secure in the belief that no German would hike up through the brambles to such a remote place, all he needed to trust were the trees and stones and Sarah’s incredible force of will.

  “It’s not that,” she said. Her face was composed, even more beautiful now. “I’m . . . with child.”

  He studied her for the time it took to draw and release a breath, and then he went over to the makeshift bed and sat down beside her and held her. “The best thing in life,” he said into the hair above her ear, “the thing I want most in life . . . at the worst time.”

  He could feel her shaking her head against his neck. She pushed him to arm’s length and met his eyes. “The best time,” she said. “They won’t bother a pregnant woman. I’ll start to show soon. I can be a courier and help with the work you do. We can use doctors and hospitals. I can visit there with no suspicion.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Other women do it. You said that yourself.”

  “Other women aren’t Jewish.”

  “Some of them are. You could get me false documents; I know you could. And I’m withering away here. Look at me!”

  He wanted to lie to her. It was true that he could get the documents; he knew exactly where he could get them. But as a grayish light seeped through the window, he understood that there was another truth: he’d been clinging to a vision, a fantasy. Even with everything he’d lived through in the past three years—Mussolini’s madness, the appearance of German troops, the friends and relatives sent to die in Ethiopia, Greece, Libya, his own father on the Russian steppes—he’d still clung to a vision of this beautiful woman as his wife and the two of them raising children in a small, lovely house on the slopes west of the lake, growing food in their yard, taking the kids on outings to the mountains and the sea, making love in a soft bed on winter mornings.

  There was nothing wrong with the vision. Except that he’d never actually shared it with Sarah. He had no idea if it matched her fantasies. He’d been perfectly content to play the role of partisan hero, making trouble for the Germans in the mountains he knew as well as he knew the planes of her face, and keep her here like some kind of flower in the pages of a book. He’d seen other partisan women, yes. Two to be exact. The war had only recently come to Italian soil, and the movement was in its earliest stages. They were strong and brave and as willing to die for a free Italy as he was. Yet he’d never been able to put Sarah into that picture, and her pregnancy would make doing so even more difficult. Inside him now, as he watched the light change on her face and saw the hope and courage in her eyes, two halves of him did battle. “We’ve talked about this, Sarah. We—”

  “I can’t stay here indefinitely.”

  “I know. You’re right. I . . . But now . . . the child . . .”

  “I can’t just sit here all day, Luca, writing poems while people are being slaughtered!”

  “Yes, I know. I agree. But . . . can we talk later?”

  She
nodded. “Tonight?”

  “Tomorrow or the day after. I have to go. Do you have enough food?”

  She nodded, watched him. “Can you get me the documents?”

  “I’ll try. I think so. It might take a little time.”

  “You’ll promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t think they’re following you now, that they know what you’re doing?”

  He shook his head. “It was one man. A Blackshirt. I shouldn’t have gone to Loreto.”

  “You’ll see your mother? You’ll ask her about my mother?”

  “If I can, yes, of course, always. Please be careful. Now especially. With . . . our child.”

  “Yes, and you.” She studied his face, as if, he thought, she was looking for the killer there, the killer who would soon be a father. “I’m at the bottom of my patience, staying here,” she said, “really.” She lifted her face to his, and he thought there was something new in the feeling of her lips against his, a new hope or a different kind of fear.

  Twenty-Four

  Mussolini had always enjoyed being out on the sea at night. Even in a boat like this one—Persefone was a grumbling rusted wreck bumping along in a vapor of diesel exhaust—even with the uniformed soldiers lurking at either end, watching him while pretending not to, as if they thought he might leap overboard and swim for the coast of Sardinia, even with all that, he enjoyed the sight of the stars and the smell of the sea and the unpredictable movement of the steel deck beneath his feet. It felt like flying, like freedom, and, he thought, he hadn’t really known freedom in twenty-three years. Those years had been about service, sacrifice. Every ounce of his strength and energy had gone to his country . . . and the people had responded. They’d adored him, stood in line to catch a glimpse of him, named their sons—and even some cities—after him. He felt, now, that he was owed something for all those years of work, worry, and sacrifice. His freedom, if nothing else.

  The moon had not yet risen, and once they were far enough from the lights of the shore, he began to see stars in great numbers. A pleasant thought swept in across the bitter interior landscape on which he’d been traveling for the past twelve hours: the stars were always there, always. The same must be true, no matter what happened now, for the core of his reputation. Few men, a handful of men, really, had made history. In every case he could think of, there had been times in the lives of those men when their greatness was obscured—just as stars were not seen in the day. Napoleon had been imprisoned. Jesus Christ had been arrested, mocked, dragged through the streets. Caesar had been stabbed by a mob of supposed friends.