Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  The officer stretched his lips in a flat imitation of a smile but, for a moment, couldn’t seem to speak. Don Claudio didn’t turn his eyes away. The kinder officer walked toward the front of the bus, tossing a word back to his partner. A very long quarter of a minute, during which Don Claudio imagined every horrible outcome. Still, he didn’t waver, didn’t surrender. The officer tossed the papers on the floor at his feet, turned, and walked to the door.

  On the last ten minutes of the ride to Mezzegra, Don Claudio sat very still, gazing out the window at the lake, bathed in a sweet epiphany. It seemed to him then that, finally and at last, he’d broken free of a demon that had clung to him for most of his life. It wasn’t fear so much as the shame he felt at being afraid, the way it caused him to despise himself, the last thing God wanted. He realized at the same time that Rebecca must have carried a similar shame around her neck from the moment she discovered she was with child. He could picture her, walking through the streets of the town with her eyes cast down, waiting for a real or imagined insult, reading the minds of the people she passed, the women and men who went to Mass every Sunday morning and felt superior because of it.

  The bus stopped; he thanked the driver and stepped down. The late-afternoon sun had weakened. A mercy. He was hungry. The stores were closed, the restaurants not yet open for dinner, and he’d spent too much money in Milan in any case, so he stood there, fingering the Saint Jude statue in the pocket of his robe and looking east, across the lake. There was nothing to do but stop at Masso’s, make his belated delivery, and then endure the long, hard climb to his rectory with an empty belly.

  He wasn’t looking forward to what he would find there—loaded rifles and a pistol!—but it didn’t matter so much now; one part of an enormous weight had been lifted from his spirit.

  Forty-Nine

  Luca slept deeply in the inn’s sagging bed but was awakened, just as dawn broke, by a terrifying dream. He was in a small boat with a man he couldn’t identify. Both of them were looking down into water. There, not far below the surface but unreachable, he could see Sarah’s face. She was opening and closing her mouth as if speaking to him. No bubbles, no sound: the water might as well have been a thick sheet of glass. And then there was only blackness between them, and he opened his eyes.

  He thought, before anything else, of Scutarro—the intellectual, the Bolshevik, the traitor . . . if he were, in fact, a traitor. He supposed that, if he had to trust one of the men he worked with now, it would be Masso, his father’s friend, Don Claudio’s friend. Still, the whispering doubts would not go silent.

  The ceiling of the room sagged above him, the plaster stained and cracked. He could see a dozen ants crawling there in single file, and he wondered what they ate and what difference the war made to them. No difference, probably. Even so, he imagined they lived always in fear of their lives. It seemed to be a rule of this troubled, beautiful planet that nothing survived without killing something else. Don Claudio had said as much once in a sermon when Luca was young and still a churchgoer. He thought of the priest now, a man he’d come to know well, a brave man, yes, but someone utterly incapable of anger or violence. How would he ever survive in this shark-filled sea?

  Luca washed his face in the sink and looked at himself in what was left of the broken mirror. He wanted, more than anything, to be a father his child could be proud of, a leader not a follower.

  Trying to hold on to the optimistic thread, he went downstairs and paid for his room, accepted a cigarette from the owner, found the girl who took care of the donkey, and pressed a coin into her hand. He wrestled with Masso’s stubborn beast for the better part of fifteen minutes before he had it hitched up to the cart and on the road again. Only then did it seem to understand its place in the world. And only then did its temporary master realize how strange it was that the three men in the barn loft had given him nothing to take back. No message at all—a first. Were they all traitors, then?

  Luca lit the precious cigarette and tried to smoke it in a leisurely, confident way, listening to the music of the clopping hooves and squeaking axles, smelling the hay and the earthy scent carried back to him from Culillo II’s hindquarters. One or two cars, another farmer’s cart, and a short line of Italian military vehicles passed him, headed in the other direction, but all he could think about was what might be happening with Scutarro, if it had been a mistake to hand over Sarah’s passport, to mention the lepiota, to have gone to Dubino at all.

  Skin prickling every time someone swung even with him in the left lane to pass and every time he went through one of the lakeside tunnels, he brought the cart back through Dubino, picking up two empty wooden crates at the market as he went. He traveled south through the side streets and then rejoined the busier statale in the direction of Mezzegra. He had some money for Masso from the sales of his produce, a bit of news to share with Don Claudio. If anyone stopped him, he had papers to show and the empty baskets, some with remnants of tomato stems in them. An ironclad excuse. Even the Germans couldn’t see into his brain.

  Good with your hands, he thought. Yes, he always had been, in every way it was possible to be, even though one of those hands had half the strength of the other. As the donkey clopped along, Luca wrestled with the idea that had come to him during the meeting, an errant thought, different, surprising: instead of passing the money to Mentone on his next trip, he could use it to somehow buy Sarah and Rebecca and his mother and Don Claudio, and perhaps even himself, safe passage to Switzerland. No doubt there were people he could bribe, false documents he could purchase. Surely he could find a way to make it up to Masso, maybe even be of more use to the partisans from abroad, start a network of sympathetic Swiss and exiled Italians.

  He tossed aside the last of the cigarette.

  The day had turned hot and humid, and the road was suddenly much busier. As he guided the cart along one side of it, Luca heard grumbles of thunder ahead of him, to the south and west. He thought of his mother—it seemed as if the storm must be near Mezzegra—and wondered if she’d be frightened. She’d never liked lightning, always been afraid the house would be struck or that her husband, working in the yard or fishing out on the lake, would be killed. This far north, the sky was overcast, but there was no rain yet, no flashes to be seen.

  Just in front of him at the side of the road, he saw a line of German military vehicles pulling artillery guns with their long, heavy barrels. Motorcycles with their sidecars. Trucks with officers in them. A single plane droning overhead. They were entering a new stage of the war; he could sense it.

  A pregnant Jewish girlfriend, a brave, lonely mother risking her life. Were those reasons to leave or reasons to stay and fight? Where would the regrets lie later on?

  A truck backfired just ahead of him; he flinched. The more he thought about Scutarro’s plan, the more suspicious it seemed: sure, get him and Sarah out in a boat, alone, in the middle of the night. A freedom fighter and a Jew. What better way to make them disappear?

  Fifty

  After the stormy night—great booms of thunder in the hills—Sarah made herself a late breakfast and went out and sat on a fallen tree that was drying in the sun of what had once been a back field. She had her small notebook of poems with her and a sharpened pencil. In addition to Luca’s visits, it seemed to her now that her writing and the promise of motherhood were the only forces keeping her sane.

  For a while, she ran different ideas back and forth in her mind, and then she scratched out seven lines:

  Da questo mondo

  È sfuggito il buonsenso

  E questo film

  Senza fine

  Fatto nella luce grigiastra

  Passa come una vita persa

  Una vita tristissima e persa

  From this world

  All good sense has fled

  And this film

  Without end

  Made in grayish light

  Passes like a lost life

  A life unbearably sad and lost

&n
bsp; She read over the lines. È sfuggito il buonsenso—all good sense has fled. True enough. But she realized, looking at the page, that she wanted more for the world now than simply a return to sanity. The new life growing inside her had given her the sense that she had to do more than survive, more than simply wait for the end of the war.

  It could be two or three days before Luca came back with the false papers, if, in fact, he could even do that. If, in fact, he would do it. When she’d mentioned the idea, she’d seen a shadow fall across his face. And something else, too. Dismissal was too strong a word, but it had been something like that. He simply wanted, she supposed, to be the heroic one. And he wanted the two of them—soon it would be three—to have a life like his own family had enjoyed. If the war hadn’t come, they’d probably be married by now, renting a small flat in the center of Menaggio or Argegno, he making money with his stonemasonry, she buying, growing, and cooking food; writing her poems; translating articles; preparing the house for children. That would have been perfectly fine, each of them making a contribution. As it stood now, though, he was doing something essential, feeding people, fighting for freedom, and she was . . . waiting.

  She was convinced beyond a doubt that the child growing inside her body was a girl, and she wanted two things for her daughter: first, that she’d be born in freedom and peace not war and fear, and second, that the girl would be able to choose the life she wanted, a life not bound by religious codes, political rules, or the unspoken social commandments that made certain kinds of behavior acceptable for a woman and other kinds not. Her own mother had lived beneath a blanket of continual embarrassment—pregnant, no lover in sight or even named. She’d made a meager living for them working in the silk factories in Como at first and then, later, weaving scarves and blankets and sewing patches onto clothes—work even a disgraced single mother was allowed to perform. She’d lived in a constant state of shame in a simple house in the Lenno Flats. Rats in the walls, too cold in winter and too hot in summer, and the smell from the nearby fishing boats year-round.

  But it wasn’t the physical hardships that had bothered Sarah—she was a child, after all, and had been used to nothing better—it was the feeling she read in her beautiful mother’s posture and eyes every time they went out into the world. Sarah herself had grown up in the shadow of that feeling, that disgrace. Illegitimate—what a word! Jewish, too, in a Roman Catholic nation, on top of everything else. Luca’s friendship had legitimized her, at least in the eyes of the locals. And Luca’s mother had never for a minute treated her with anything but respect. Now Maria was hiding her own mother. In the attic, Luca had said. Living on scraps. Shitting in a pail. Kept from sunlight and fresh air. Worrying about her daughter and wondering when the Germans would open the attic door, arrest and torture her or send her off to the camps they’d heard about, where Jews were worked until they were no longer able to work and then left to starve or freeze to death.

  The day was clear and mild with breeze enough to keep the insects away, but Sarah felt as though a swarm of biting flies was circling her, dropping down to nip at her skin and eyes, clinging to her hair. She couldn’t get the image of her mother out of her mind: the attic would be baking hot in the day, cold at night. She’d be sleeping on boards or rags, wearing the same clothes week after week. Hungry and thirsty. The whole day with nothing to do but worry.

  She sat there for a long time, holding her pencil but unable to write another word, wrestling with a radical notion. She knew how Luca would feel about it. Two months had passed since she’d been seen in public. In that time, from everything she’d heard, the German occupiers had enforced the racial laws more rigidly than even the Blackshirts had enforced them. Luca, kind, uneducated Luca, had somehow foreseen that. He’d been right to take her away from the house and to warn her mother. It had been his idea for Rebecca to go to Maria’s for help, his idea—the young atheist—to have her mother go see the priest, Don Claudio, who’d been so wonderful to her for all her life. Luca moved out of the house so there would be more food for their mothers and so he could spend more time with the young Jewess he loved. So it was out of kindness and care that he wanted her to stay here in the safety of the remote cabin, insisted on it, in fact.

  Still, the urge to see her mother had grown and grown over these two months, and on this day, for some reason, it overwhelmed every other consideration.

  Sarah fought it as long as she could, made a trip to the spring and washed there, ate another small meal, shook out the blankets and sheets, paced the cabin, sat, and, even though it wasn’t the proper hour, recited the lyrical Shabbat prayer she loved, the Ein Keloheinu. At last, in midafternoon, she couldn’t bear it any longer. She left Luca a note in case he returned unexpectedly early, wrapped her hair in a kerchief, put book and pencil in a basket, and hooked the basket over her left arm as if she were an ordinary housewife in ordinary times, going into town to buy something for dinner. And then she set out on the stony path in what she believed was the direction of Mezzegra.

  Fifty-One

  Much as he liked to see the young man—he considered him a friend and might one day look upon him as a son-in-law—Don Claudio had been advised to limit Luca’s visits to his church. So instead of face-to-face meetings, when the priest needed to pass on money or a message from the archbishop, he went to Masso’s house and left the object or the note or the money in a large ceramic jar on Masso’s back porch. This worked well, because Masso’s property extended from the main road far back into the hills. It was easy to make it seem that, after stepping off the bus from Como, the priest was simply enjoying a late-afternoon social call with one of his older friends. And then easy enough for Masso to take the package or note and bring it to the far back end of his property, where another ceramic jar had been stationed in the trees, and leave it there for Luca.

  If Masso were at home, Don Claudio would stop for coffee and a snack (the farmer had an abundance of food and was generous in sharing it) and sometimes even get a sit-down meal and a ride up the hill in Masso’s truck or his donkey-drawn cart.

  On this evening, however, the farmer was nowhere to be seen—strange, considering the hour. No food, then, and nothing to do but make the delivery and hike up the long hill on his two sore feet.

  But for some reason, this time, the idea of depositing the Saint Jude statuette there in the ceramic jar gave Don Claudio pause. Not because of the amount of money it contained—Masso’s integrity was beyond question, and the farmer’s back porch was most likely safe from thieves—but because of a strange intuition, a feeling that straddled the border between mystical and superstitious. He’d been holding Saint Jude in his pocket for a full day by then, and it seemed to him that the gold-laden statue had become a kind of talisman, a source of courage. Look at the way he’d behaved with the German officers on the bus! Foolish, of course, to attribute anything supernatural to a piece of hardened, painted clay. Still, he felt reluctant to leave the Saint Jude there, unattended. He knocked a second time—no answer—then succumbed to the embrace of the odd mood. He’d hold on to the Saint Jude and hand it to Masso in person or to Luca the next time he saw him. The archbishop had said nothing about the delivery being urgent.

  His decision made, Don Claudio sat for a while, hoping Masso might return, take the statuette from him, and offer a meal and a ride. But no. A string of Hail Marys, an hour’s wait, and Don Claudio sighed and set off on the long, painful ascent to Sant’Abbondio.

  Fifty-Two

  The arrangement had worked for a while, Maria thought, but it couldn’t be permanent. Especially with Germans coming to the house. Every few days, the redhead made an excuse to visit. At first, he’d knocked and waited; now he knocked and opened the door. Soon he wouldn’t even knock. Rebecca was starting to make more noise now, too—another sign of her weak mental state—and one of these times, she was going to drop something, sneeze or cough when the redhead was here, and then both of them would be killed. No, she’d tell her son; it was time to mo
ve her. The risk of crossing to Switzerland was no greater than the risk of her being discovered here. She’d heard that the Swiss were no longer accepting Jews, but if she and Rebecca could somehow manage to seem like two Italian Catholic women, perhaps they’d be allowed to stay; perhaps they could find a place to work, a way to feed themselves.

  As she was thinking that, she heard a rumble of thunder in the distance and then, like an answer, the familiar hard knock on her door. Five p.m., she thought, almost two hours before she was supposed to start cooking, and they weren’t even polite enough to let her have some rest. There was no limit to their rudeness, no limit to what they’d ask of her now.

  She saw, as she went toward the door, that this time it wasn’t the redhead, as she expected, but the tall one with the head as bald as a bocce ball, the one who seemed to be their superior, who’d been so rude to her from the beginning. The bald man had opened the door and stepped inside her house, uninvited, another invasion. He was drunk again and grinning.

  Fifty-Three

  Although he’d pasted a smile on his face at the end of their first meeting when “Giovanni” made the comment about looking in the mirror, the truth was that Silvio hadn’t liked it very much. It wasn’t the comment per se: he probably did spend more time in front of the mirror than many people (maybe, he mused, because it was a more pleasurable experience for him than for some others); it was the fact that the bella figura half-American had been so smugly confident about what amounted to an invasion of Silvio’s apartment. True, the breach of privacy had been for an excellent cause: the delivery of the loaded Saint Jude statue along with a substantial amount of compensation. But it was an invasion all the same. Giovanni and his associates had obviously been spying on him.