Liberation

by Joanna Scott

  He arrived at the office just as Dino was letting himself out and locking the door. He accepted Dino’s invitation to join him for pranzo at the Albatros in via Roma, though Mario would have preferred to eat at Olga’s in via dell’Amore—the street of love—if only for the sake of the street’s ironic relevance to a man who has just visited his mistress.

  He was glad when they met the brothers Sergio and Marcello Pirelli outside the trattoria. “Come eat with us,” Mario proposed. He was glad to be in the company of men and glad when Alonso Benassi asked them to join him and his friends at a long table. A big, boisterous group of men—all of them, except Dino, over the age of fifty, all of them native Elbans, all of them vocally sharing their rage at the reports circulating about the random atrocities committed by their self-appointed liberators—in particular, the negri of the Ninth French Colonial Division. Sergio said he hoped Mario and Dino were pressing for investigations. Alonso pointed out that the privacy of the families involved must be respected—what’s done is done, he said, arousing loud protests from both Pirelli brothers. Sergio insisted that there could be no peace until the barbarians had been punished. Alonso believed that adequate revenge wasn’t possible during a time of war, and all they could hope was that God would enact his own forms of vengeance. Dino expressed some confidence in the Allied forces’ military tribunals, but Mario scoffed at that. The Africans were animals, he said. You can’t put a pack of monkeys on trial.

  He had meant to tell the men about the Senegalese soldier, but instead he fell into a tense silence after his last comment. If he admitted that his sister-in-law had harbored the soldier, the men would ask too many questions. It was frustrating to be trapped into secrecy. He couldn’t even admit that earlier in the week he had alerted French officials in Marciana Marina. The lieutenant had gone himself to search, but thanks to Giulia’s clever deceptions, he failed to find the soldier at La Chiatta, which made him Mario’s responsibility, or so the men would assume if he told them about him now. They’d want to know why Mario hadn’t reported the renegade to the carabinieri—or why he hadn’t asked his friends for advice. He wouldn’t be able to answer them.

  The waiter appeared with their first courses of steaming soup. For a few minutes the men concentrated on the pleasures of the meal. But as they finished their last spoonfuls, one man, Filippo, a friend of Alonso’s, cleared his throat and said lowly, “In the absence of the law, there are other methods.”

  Perhaps it was his tone that made the other men sit up and listen—his voice was almost too soft to be heard and yet remained carefully articulate. After a pause to let his audience contemplate the implications of his proposal, he went on to meditate aloud upon the nature of evil. There was no going down from where they had arrived, said Filippo. They had been dragged into the mire of humanity’s filth, to the bottom of existence, to hell on earth. And here in hell, one evil act begot another. If they sinned, it was because others had sinned against them. The worst had happened, and the worst would happen again. But this time it was up to them to choose the victims. If they matched one crime with another, if they participated in an action that they knew to be evil, it was out of necessity rather than any sense of moral superiority. They would do what they had to do.

  Filippo swished his wine and studied it through the glass, like a scientist examining liquid in a beaker. Mario had only known him from a distance, as Alonso’s friend and as a pharmacist who limited his working hours to the evening shift. He was not a homely man, though Mario found him repulsive. The skin above his beard was pale and waxy. The pink tip of his tongue kept appearing to lick away the residue on his lips. His confident attitude was so smooth that it seemed rehearsed. But his voice was mesmerizing, and he presented his plan, whatever it entailed, as a possibility that he was sure would prove irresistible. Maybe he didn’t have a plan—it was hard to tell what he was suggesting with his murky allusions. But his manner and voice suggested a ferocious intention, even if he wouldn’t come right out and explain himself.

  The waiter moved among them, replacing their bowls with plates bearing watery spinach topped with fried eggs—an image that seemed to express the unspoken meaning of Filippo’s intricate discourse. The yolks were like keen yellow eyes, like the eyes of feral cats in the darkness. Yellow eyes that saw what only Filippo knew was going to happen—evil to match evil, evil as the inevitable outcome following the events of the last six days. Soupy yolks surrounded by the gelatinous white of nothingness on a bed of overcooked spinach—this was what Filippo had been talking about. This was the only food left for consumption on their damaged island, where whatever would happen next would follow naturally from whatever happened before.

  Good and evil and the unquiet faculty of the soul, the seed going forth from itself, frittering its unity away, time breaking from eternity, hatred gathering itself in opposition until all that’s left in life is sin and despair. A man does what he has to do, Filippo was saying. In this sense, every man is a soldier on a battlefield where the smoke is so thick he can’t see his hands before his face. Groping, stumbling, he does what he has to do to survive.

  Somehow Filippo managed to give to his nonsense the force of irrefutable logic. Though the speech confused Mario, he didn’t dare ask questions. No one asked questions, and Mario had to presume that he was alone in his confusion. The other men, including Dino, nodded and murmured in agreement throughout the rest of the meal, as Filippo continued to hold forth. Mario could only conclude that the men had participated in previous discussions, and the knowledge they shared gave them the ability to interpret what was essentially a secret code—Filippo’s code, simultaneously instructive and obfuscating, like all effective codes used during a time of war.

  Mario left the restaurant with the pack of men but separated from them on the street. He didn’t know whether to feel resentful for his exclusion or excited by the prospects contained in Filippo’s obscure words. He didn’t know what those prospects entailed. There seemed to be a general consensus that something momentous would soon occur, and that whatever would happen, set in motion at an earlier point, could now proceed accordingly, thanks to the approval of all who’d been sitting at the table.

  Mario imagined that his confusion was similar to that of an illiterate peasant who has just come from voting in an election. He couldn’t clearly explain who would be involved or what the final outcome would be, but whatever it was, he knew it would be significant. Dino, Sergio, Marcello, Alonso, and his other friends—they all agreed with Filippo that a man must do what a man must do. And Mario, by not raising his voice in objection—how could he have objected to such vagueness?—had essentially cast his vote, making it unanimous.

  SHE IS IN BED, that’s where she is, in a hospital, with tubes in her nose and needles in her hands and monitors attached to her chest and fingertips. She doesn’t actually remember the period when she was unconscious or much about the activity focused on her for the past hour, but she is aware of the relief saturating her body. Mysteriously, the embolism has partially disintegrated on its own without traveling to some new precarious juncture; her lungs are pumping greedily; her heart is glad to welcome the Coumaden that helps to thin her blood. She has been promptly measured, analyzed, and diagnosed by a pulmonary specialist. Soon she will be subjected to more extensive tests in order to determine further treatment.

  It seems as if only a minute earlier she was looking out the window at the graffiti on the warehouses while she listened to the murmur of the other passengers on the train to Penn Station. She remembers in particular the prominent voice of a man sitting behind her. He was talking about the inconvenience of a flight delay, she recalls.

  Lying on the stiff hospital bed, stable and blissfully unattended while the nurse is off tracking down her family—her daughter in Queens, her husband in Rahway, her son in Port Jervis, whoever can be reached first with the telephone numbers Mrs. Rundel has been able to provide—she remembers feeling cheated. No one warned her that her life would
be over before she could finish saying what deserves to be said.

  She remembers that on the train she had put aside her newspaper to rest her eyes. She remembers feeling a tightening sensation throughout her body even before she was aware of any discomfort. And at the same time she felt a strange fatigue, as if she knew beforehand that she wouldn’t be able to resist what was about to happen. Communication seemed imperative. She remembers looking for the cell phone in her purse. She was desperate to talk to Robert, if only to tell him that she needed to talk to him.

  Without her phone, she couldn’t get in touch with her family. She remembers feeling a brief surge of envy when she realized that the man sitting beside her on the train had his cell phone. Now she wonders if he used his phone to call for help. She wishes she had a way to contact him or anyone else on the train so she could find out what happened in the blank space between then and now.

  She watches from a distance as a male nurse enters the cubicle and checks the fluid level of the IV. After he is gone, Mrs. Rundel continues to ponder the puzzle of her situation. What can’t she remember? She can’t remember what she can’t remember.

  She comforts herself by reviewing the reliable facts of her existence: the presence of her husband and children in the world, wherever they are at the moment, the friends she will see again, the sensation of air touching her skin, the fresh smell of oxygen, the stale, pervasive stink of antiseptic, the steady pattern graphed on the monitor, the anticipation of a full glass of water, and the time of day: only 10:23, if the clock on the wall is correct.

  Which corresponds to 10:32 on the watch of the woman who helped save Mrs. Rundel’s life. She routinely sets her watch ahead to keep herself from being late for work. She’ll be late for work today. But what an excuse she has! She can’t wait to tell her boss. He has his own cholesterol and blood-pressure problems, so he’ll appreciate the fact that his secretary had the wherewithal to perform CPR and he won’t blame her if she’s absent for his first appointment. She can take her time getting to the office. Although she already ate breakfast at home, she can stop at a café and enjoy a coffee and croissant. Surprisingly, she is ravenous.

  Unlike the financial adviser, who in his office on the seventeenth floor looks out the window at the building across the street and is physically revolted by nothing more than the dark outline of a block of filing cabinets visible behind the tinted plate glass. He can’t imagine ever feeling hungry again.

  Or the student sitting in the back of his forensics class. Although he purchased a bagel at the train station, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to eat it. He keeps thinking about the swampy liquid that spilled from the mouth of the drowned man he tried to revive.

  Or the adulterous husband who left his former lover a long message, a message he knew would never be answered. He has no early meeting and is taking his time getting to work. He wanders along Seventh Avenue thinking about love and loss and the enviable release of death.

  The software designer, waiting to be interviewed for a job he desperately needs, is too nervous to be thinking about the incident on the train. Nor does his friend the lawyer, in his office five blocks away, give Mrs. Rundel another thought. He has just learned that a trial for which he has spent months preparing has been indefinitely postponed.

  Meanwhile, across town, in a committee room at the United Nations, the Polish woman finds that the experience on the train that morning makes any issue concerning basic human sustenance that much more relevant. When it’s her turn, she speaks in a low, precise voice, with burning passion.

  And inside Bloomingdale’s, the thief is trying to decide between a blue suede suit and a black silk jacket. Why not both?

  Outside

  SHE’S NOT THINKING ABOUT THE WAR. SHE’S NOT REMEMBERING the night she spent hiding inside the kitchen cabinet. Rather, she’s thinking about how her husband will appear at her bedside any minute, and he’ll plant a kiss on her mouth, pressing his lips against hers with the force of gratitude and relief and a tinge of desperation that will extend the contact beyond a routine greeting, husband and wife, old man and old woman, Robert Rundel welcoming Adriana—Dree, as he calls her—back to life, assuring her with a kiss that he will love her forever and at the same time asking for her impossible assurance that she won’t let death steal her away from him, kissing her to demonstrate that he depends upon her to be there, in time, alive and responsive, just as she depends upon him.

  With Robert’s arrival imminent, she’s too full of anticipation to be thinking about a Senegalese soldier named Amdu Diop. She’s not remembering the last time she ever saw him that morning in the boathouse, when, as if to hide his embarrassment, he pulled the tarp back between the barrels to cover the den full of mewing kittens. She’s not remembering how even as she searched for some sign of him in the fields outside her bedroom window, she already knew that he was gone. She’s not thinking about missing him, and how later that same day, six days after the launch of Operation Brassard, word spread across the island that the two warships belonging to the Ninth French Colonial Division had been ordered to depart for the mainland.

  Wired to monitors in a hospital cubicle, she’s not dwelling on something that happened sixty years earlier. She’s not puzzling over the information that accumulated in the aftermath. She’s not considering how in the days and months that followed the liberation, she was repeatedly surprised by what she hadn’t even thought to ask. When she was a young girl, she couldn’t adequately appreciate the fact that what she called knowledge was based in large part on assumption. But then, one by one, so many of her assumptions proved wrong. She was wrong about the people involved. She was wrong about methods and backgrounds and motives, along with all sorts of details of varying significance.

  And she was probably wrong about what had never been disproved. For instance, she liked to imagine that after the soldier named Amdu left La Chiatta, he had been driven in a jeep to the piazza in Marina di Campo, where members of his regiment were stationed, and when he stepped from the jeep he was greeted with cheers. At some point she assigned names to Amdu’s friends—Moussa, Alioune, and Khalam—as though she were naming the kittens in the boathouse. She even convinced herself that she could have understood what they were saying in their own dialect.

  She imagined them cursing Amdu, praising him, ridiculing him, calling him a coward and a hero. She was sure, though, that they listened soberly while he told them that he couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d had to do to survive, though he knew he was lucky to be alive—see here, he’d say, showing them the scab where the bullet had grazed his shoulder.

  Praise the God of Abraham.

  Praise Allah.

  Praise your own good luck.

  But tell your brothers, Amdu: why didn’t you hear them calling your name when they sent out a search party for all those who were missing? Were your ears stuffed with manure? Six days you were nowhere. Everyone thought you were dead. But you’re not dead. Lieutenant, come see what the tide washed in! Our ugly little mascot boy, dressed like a clown.

  Adriana didn’t ask herself whether the Senegalese soldiers even had a word for clown. Or whether they were all from Dakar and shared the same dialect. In the scene that she repeatedly imagined through the years, Amdu Diop, wearing her grandfather’s clothes, was teased because he looked like a clown.

  Don’t you know, he’s back! Brother Amdu has decided to return from his vacation. Oooeee, crack him on the head. Here’s one from your mother!

  No one ever told Adriana what really happened when Amdu was reunited with the French Colonials. She could only guess that it was a joyful reunion. She pictured the soldiers lifting Amdu above their heads and carrying him across the piazza while others gathered to hoot, mocking him, she presumed, only because they were too proud to express their relief. The boy they thought was dead had come back to life. Their favorite little brother. How could he not be everyone’s favorite?

  Although she never learned the exact tru
th about Amdu’s return, she did find out that the troops of the Ninth French Colonial Division were treated to a feast that night—their last night on Elba. Though most Elbans chose to stay at home, those who did attend the celebration later described how some of the Africans used jerry cans as drums, others danced in their bare feet, and a brave musician from Fetovaia, who called himself Pino Solitario, played the accordion. The troops drank beer and whiskey—only the officers filled their glasses with sweet Elban aleatico. There was plenty of bread and spaghetti, and down on the beach the French cooks were frying squid in huge vats of oil over open fires.

  Those present later reported that the Africans could leap as high as the top of the Torre. Adriana imagined that Amdu was one of the dancers—the one who jumped the highest and stomped in dizzying circles around Pino Solitario. Sometimes in her dreams she was there, standing at the edge of the crowd, watching Amdu dance and beating time with her hands.

  Her husband will arrive within the hour, if the traffic isn’t heavy. When he comes he will kiss her and then pull up a chair, and they will talk about her ordeal. With his prompting, she will try to trace the sequence backward from her current situation to her departure from the house that morning. She will try to describe everything she remembers, up to the moment when she fainted on the train. At some point it might occur to her to mention that she’d been thinking about the story she’d told the previous evening—the story of the war.