That’s how it had been, once.
That’s how it should have been, still.
Looking at Rosina was a pleasure, even with the poison in my veins, and the anger. But with whom was I angry? Not her. Not Enzo. Not even Keller.
“I’m just going to close my eyes,” she said, releasing my hand before she rolled away. Could she really fall that quickly from frantic passion into unguarded sleep? But perhaps more time had passed than I realized. Yet more time passed as I listened to the soft, uncertain sounds outside and stared at the bunched sheets, the sensual slope of her robe-draped hip. My shirt and belt were flung across the stool, but I was still wearing my unbuttoned trousers.
“Stupid dog,” I whispered, though the bark was so irregular, so faint, it was bothering no one.
“Will you turn down the lantern?”
“Must I?”
“You can stay,” she said sleepily. “But don’t forget the light.”
“Rosina—” I began. But what more could I tell her? What more could I ask? And anyway, she was already nodding off. “I’ll move to the floor later. Cosimo will be looking for me just before dawn.”
She didn’t care what Cosimo thought, so why did I say that? Perhaps to cloak my own lack of performance in chivalry. I had spared her and her reputation. She had not asked to be spared. And still, she gave off warmth, and forgiving softness, which I found in the dark and curled up next to, wishing that sleep itself were unnecessary.
It’s hard to remember how deeply a child sleeps, how deeply and without care, but that’s how I had slept once. Deep enough not to hear arguments, or the radio, or a barking dog, or neighbors coming and going, slamming the doors, even on a hot summer night with the windows open. I used to fall asleep with the smell of dinner cabbage in my nose and not wake again until there were different smells—a combination of bleach and potatoes that meant my mother had been scrubbing floors and making breakfast well before the rest of us awoke. In between were hours of safety and ignorance, which I had nearly always slept through, without complaint.
So my father’s hand was already on my shoulder when I awoke in the near dark. He was pushing hard, pinning me to the bed. I thought at first he was falling onto me, that he had consumed a few too many beers and had been ejected from my mother’s bed and had come to share mine—because that had happened two or three times, when I was even younger and his own belly wasn’t quite so stout, when it was possible, just barely, to share a narrow mattress.
But this time I was sixteen years old, and though beer was on his breath, he wasn’t anywhere near losing consciousness. In fact, he was strong. He pushed so hard on my shoulder that I thought it might dislocate. I tried to squirm away and felt the pop of my pajama button flying off—a comical sound, a comical feeling, except for the ache at my collarbone and the knowledge that more was coming.
A moment of suspense and paralysis, next, as my mind located itself, clearing away the cobwebs of sleep: here was the room where I’d never feel comfortable again, the room I had to myself, slightly bigger than Greta’s, though she was older; a room I would have shared with my brothers if my mother and father had ever had any more sons—but they didn’t. I was his only hope, and his greatest disappointment. Across the room was the wallpaper patterned with pale blue and silver leaves that glinted in even the faintest light, leaves that turned into slim fishes, swimming under the surface of night; fish that would break the surface for many nights to come because I would never sleep as soundly again.
I felt the fabric of my opened nightshirt bunching oddly beneath my armpit, followed by the strange, hard, flat pinch of something cold pressing against my bare rib cage. The pinch became a burn, and when I recoiled and cried out, he sat down on my right leg, pinning me even harder to the mattress. When I twisted my head to look, I saw the knife in my father’s hand, and the shaky, inexact surgery he was attempting to do.
It hurts and it doesn’t hurt, when it’s your own flesh and you’re seeing the damage done, at close range. The hurt comes later. The nausea and lightheadedness come first.
I always told myself later that it was because he was my father, mein Vater, someone I must obey. But maybe I would have been paralyzed by anyone cutting into me unexpectedly like that, as something wet spread across one side of my rib cage, the warmth turning immediately cold, as if I’d had a nighttime accident.
Over the years, I tried imagining a different response: reaching up with a hand to dislodge the knife. Reaching up with two hands to push him off. Turning hard on one side, bumping my hip to his, rolling out from underneath him, using my greater youth and clearer mind to escape. Obviously, I was at the peak of my own strength and health. Obviously, it should not have been hard to get the better of him. If I had only reacted quickly enough, before my body and my brain shut down. If I had worked it out ahead of time, somehow. I imagined these scenarios so many times I must have burned them into my consciousness. I know I became a less sound sleeper, tossing and turning, practicing the escapes all too late.
But what was done was done. He wanted it gone, and it was gone—the flesh on my side, the singular anomaly and patches of previously unblemished skin above and below, cut to ribbons. The blade had stayed mostly flat to my rib cage. It hadn’t pierced between the bones into any organs. As it happened, I simply lost a lot of blood. Later, I would acquire an infection from the dirty knife and the infection would do more damage than the quick surgery itself, and the memory would do more damage than the infection.
My mother came rushing into my room as soon as she heard my confused whimpers. He fled to the living room where he collapsed into a chair, the knife still in his hands and the rambling excuses ready on his lips, justifying himself with every trembling syllable: “Now, he can join any team, any squad, any platoon. No more hiding or covering up. It was for him I did it. For him!” Greta dressed and ran to a neighbor’s home to use a phone, to call and wake a doctor, who came and found me wide-eyed in my bed, clammy and confused, every bit of color run out of my face and into the sheets and onto the floor.
“Will you come to the funeral?” I asked Gerhard seven years later.
“Of course.”
“You understand, I don’t love him.”
“Shhh, mein Junge, you don’t need to say—”
“I’m not sorry he’s gone.”
“That’s all right. But he isn’t gone. You’ll see. Fathers never are.”
CHAPTER 13
I’d been caught off guard once, but never again. This time, I was ready. So when something bumped the foot of the bed, when the electric torch clicked on and swept across the bedclothes and into my eyes, I reacted quickly. My hand thrust sideways to the nightstand, where at home for months after the incident I had kept a heavy volume of Aesop’s Fables—innocent-looking enough, but a weapon of last resort. Discovering no book, not even the electric lamp with a railcar-shaped base that I’d had since my tenth birthday, I kicked out with one leg and heard an answering expulsion of breath that confirmed contact with a doughy stomach.
But that didn’t send him away. It only made him angrier, and I felt his hands wrap around my leg, just above my knee, pulling me off the bed and onto the floor. I felt his hands around my waist, pulling me sideways, tackling me to the ground. The torch had gone flying, its illuminating arc catching a flash of silver before falling to the ground. I fell back, rolled, and got to my knees—reaching, reaching, in this room that was bigger than it should have been, bigger and unfamiliar, until the fragments of reality slid into place: a rough wood floor, not the polished planks of my childhood bedroom; the iron-looped handles of a clothes dresser, not my own; a smell that was not cabbage or bleach or beer, the pedestrian smells of my childhood home, but an aggressive and somehow familiar cologne. I evaded the grasping arms and crawled forward, one hand patting everything I could reach, finding the side of the dresser, the right angle with the wall of the barn.
Rosina, meanwhile, was shouting in the dark and scuffling around
on the other side of the bed—trying to get under it, I thought at first, until I saw the light come swinging again, the found torch held in her shaking hands. “There’s a knife! Ernesto, I saw a knife!”
Another desperate reach and I had something long and thin in my hands: a stick, no, the trowel-like, steel-ended truffler’s vanghetto. When the hands grabbed my bare calf, nails pressing into the flesh behind my knee, pulling me back with surprising force, I turned toward the groping. There was no question. There was no confusion. I knew what I needed and wanted to do, and when I felt the hands on my waist again, I twisted and leaned back, raised the tool, then pushed it in a downward motion with every bit of energy inside me. The steel made contact, cut, and separated from the shaft, but I lifted and thrust again.
The splintered end of the vanghetto sank into the man’s chest, hit an obstruction, and sank a little further before I leaned too hard and broke the shaft in two. But it had done its work. The torchlight swept and stopped. Blood bubbled out of his parted lips, darkening the tips of his shaggy mustache.
“I know him,” I managed to say.
This only confused Rosina more. She was whispering to herself frantically, crouching down on the other side of the bed, searching for the missing knife and a dress to pull over her shivering body.
“Opportunist,” was all I could say, indicting us both.
He wore pin-striped trousers, a white shirt and tie, and polished shoes that glinted in the sweep of the torchlight. Between the folds of his fleshy neck, his Adam’s apple kept working, up and down. His left leg kicked out weakly, the motion pushing up his pant leg, revealing the knife holster wrapped around his upper calf, the knife gone missing—somewhere on the floor around us, having just missed its mark. The leg finally stopped, but the Adam’s apple wouldn’t, even after his shirtfront was stained black.
“He’s still alive,” Rosina said from beyond the far side of the bed, head and shoulders peeking just above.
“It takes a long time.”
Eight years, in fact. Eight years of poor sleep, until I finally woke in time to fend off the ambush that had waited for me, interrupting my sleep all that time.
His eyes remained open, unblinking.
And suddenly, he was only Keller. Which was bad enough, but still, only Keller. What had I done? I put my head in my hands and got sick on the floor just next to him.
This was the end of one thing, finally; the beginning of another, but not the beginning of anything I would have desired most. The day of individual happiness had passed. There was no such thing as a small, quaint, rustic farm where a couple might hide away for years, sketching still lifes and playing old phonograph records of nineteenth-century operas. There was no such thing as a city life of books and statues and index cards—not really. Not anymore.
Keller had not moved for several minutes when we crept outside, scanning the darkness for any sign that he was traveling with a companion, but there was no sign, only the oblivious insect noises of deepest night.
“I’ll run up to the house,” Rosina said, one hand nervously raking her bare neck.
“Yes—wait. But how did he come? If there is a car … perhaps he walked in … if there is someone else out there, waiting …”
“It can’t be far.”
“It can’t be far,” I repeated, unable to locate my own thoughts. “He wasn’t much of a walker.”
We proceeded together, silently, staying to the side of the road, ducking under branches overhanging the natural berm that flanked one side. Just around the first curve, not even a quarter of a kilometer away, there was the little red Zagato Spider in which Keller had arrived, keys still in the ignition, and a valise and crumpled map on the passenger seat. During the last stretch, at least, he had traveled alone.
I started and restarted the engine a few times before I managed to shift into the proper gear and drove slowly up and around the back of the barn, then a little farther, up and over the grass toward the pigsty, leaving a light track of flattened grass and tire-printed dirt. All the while, I kept the headlamps off, as if Rosina and I were still sneaking around, trying not to let Keller hear.
Even without lights, the sound of the car had alerted Cosimo. He came out of the main house in pajama pants and no shirt just as we were approaching. Rosina fell into his arms, trying to explain. Gianni appeared, fingering his tousled hair. After a moment, he disappeared around the side of the house and returned with a shovel in his hands, blade up and poised to strike.
“I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting Rosina. “I did it.”
“Yes, we know,” Cosimo said, trying to move past me on the path, to see the scene for himself, with Gianni just behind him. “You’ve said that several times already.”
“Have I?”
Cosimo asked his sister, “Only one man? One car? You’re sure?”
“I don’t know.” I reached for Cosimo’s arm.
“It was self-defense,” he announced. “And we must keep defending ourselves in any way we can.”
I hadn’t been preparing to offer an excuse. I had been preparing only to thank him, to apologize, and to surrender myself if it would make his life any easier. He could drive me into the village right now, into the village where the local polizia were perhaps beginning to roll in their beds, to groan and stretch, irritated by the ridiculous hour the visiting German Gestapo agents had asked to meet for this emerging investigation. I felt sure they were unaware that one man had gone ahead without them: the eccentric German liaison from Rome, eager to sniff things out for himself on the pretext of looking for any sign of local corruption, ahead of the local polizia whom no foreigner should trust, when perhaps he saw this as his last chance to make a deal and cover his tracks, simultaneously.
“You wait here,” Cosimo said, stopping Rosina at the doorway to the barn. When I tried to follow, he stopped me, too.
“It’s my doing. I want to help.”
Gianni handed me the shovel, blade up, but I fumbled, my hands shaking so badly that I dropped the thing onto my foot.
“Sit down,” Cosimo ordered, pointing to the stone stoop. “Put your head between your legs. Was he still moving?”
I assured them he was not. But Cosimo muttered something to Gianni, who picked up the shovel and gripped it close to the blade, ready.
The sound of dull blows came from inside the barn, continuing even as Gianni came out, pacing several times before going back in. Perhaps it wasn’t so easy to kill a man, through and through. I had forced Cosimo to finish what I could not, to finish what he had threatened the morning we’d found Enzo, though I had never believed him.
They came out several minutes later with the inert body slung between them, grasped at armpits and knees—a drunken reveler hoisted by two friends out of a tavern, one would have liked to pretend. Rosina turned away.
Cosimo, struggling against the large German’s weight, jacked up his end with a shrugging motion. “We’ll need someone to burn his clothes. Ernst—”
Rosina objected. “Don’t leave me here alone. Someone else might be coming. And what about the car?”
Cosimo reconsidered. “Stay together, then. Cover the car with anything—a blanket, branches. Scuff up the tire tracks. Check for personal belongings and hide them, but quickly. Then return to the barn, push everything back into place, clean up and wait.
“There’s no hiding what I’ve done,” I said to Cosimo’s departing back.
Forty minutes later, Rosina and I were sitting on the tidied bed together, hands washed but still shaking, catching a pungent smell of smoke, not a smell bad enough to explain how they are disposing of the body itself. I left it to Cosimo, who, in his line of work, probably knew ways I couldn’t imagine. The surrounding landscape, in my horrified mind, became a map of morbid options: an algae-covered pond here, a collapsed cellar, a sty full of hungry pigs. That last image was the hardest to shake, even as I felt Rosina’s hand on my back, tracing light circles with her fingertips.
“Bit
te,” she said, and I realized it wasn’t the first time she had said it. I’d been hearing it faintly without apprehending.
Ja.
Bitte.
Ja.
Then silence as we traveled down a path we had begun to travel before, but this time without banter, no attempt to study or adore, to hurry or delay; no references to past or future, or to any people other than ourselves. The consequences of what I’d done were rushing toward us, but strangely, I felt a sense of release. The worst had already happened.
I closed my eyes without any thought of vigilance or scrutiny. I shed each layer without any thought of self-consciousness. We stopped kissing long enough to turn the covers down, but carefully, as if we were only preparing the bed for someone else. Of course, this is what we should be doing now. Of course, this is what we must do.
And how beautiful her body was, how soft and how singular. We took our time, and there were no interruptions or regrets and no awkwardness or shame, as if we’d made love a dozen times before, as if we’d always been lovers. How fortunate I felt, and how ready, once we were finished and I had dressed again and rolled up each sleeve with meditative care, to accept whatever would come next.
Sitting on the bedside later, fully clothed, I laced my fingers with Rosina’s one last time as we watched the sky outside the barn’s one small window turn from black to gray to lavender, dark hills cleanly divided from lightening sky. “Now we wait for Lady Fortune. That’s what Enzo would say.”
Rosina looked skeptical. “He never understood that she is bad fortune as well as good. Fickle and unlasting—the symbol of the turning wheel. Attracted to displays of youthful violence, some say.”
A moment later, I asked, “Maybe you could sing something for me?”
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