by Joanna Scott
Audible through the walls is a distant groaning, recognizable as the sound of the thick spindles of the bower capstans turning, drawing up the dripping cables. The ship is weighing anchor. Half of the Ninth French Colonial Division is leaving Elba. The second ship with the rest of the troops will soon follow.
In his bunk, surrounded by thick bodies just like his own—bodies sweating and murmuring in sleep, bodies turning, bodies resting, bodies recovering from the night’s celebration—Amdu is feeling pleased with himself. He is pleased that he wrote the letter he intended to write. He is pleased that his ship has ample ammunition, though he’d prefer that it wouldn’t need to be used. He is pleased that Operation Brassard is officially over. He is pleased to be the grandson of General Diop. He is pleased to be a citizen of Senegal and a resident of Dakar. He is pleased to be so amiable. He is pleased to imagine that the steel bolts are Andromeda and Pegasus, and the rust streaks are comets flying close enough for him to reach out and touch. He is pleased to be where he is. He is pleased to know that he doesn’t necessarily have to repeat his mistakes. He is pleased by the depth and diversity of the colors of the spectrum. He is pleased to have to struggle to keep himself from laughing aloud, and at the same time he is pleased with his capacity for solemn wisdom. He is pleased to be a Roman Catholic. He is pleased to be a brother to his sisters and a son to his parents. He is pleased to be a young man with advantages. He is pleased to think about the children he will father. He is pleased to hum a marching tune—softly, so as not to disturb his comrades.
He is too absorbed in his pleasure to bother devising a reasonable hypothesis to explain why the rumbling of the anchor chains has turned into a distant booming that quickly is growing louder. He doesn’t trace the sound from the initial explosion that pierces the armor casing of the midship bilge keel and ignites the ammunition in a handling room, which then collapses the center girder and blows open the floor of the lower deck, sending pieces of steel plates into the combustion chamber, where the boiler explodes. Amdu, along with every other infantryman in the cabin, feels the vibration of the booming simultaneously against him and inside him. He is shaking and shaken, his muscles are useless, solidity dissolves, the boundary he has just been appreciating no longer exists, there is no edge to himself, no surface, no difference between Amdu Diop and the world. Before he can begin to understand what is happening, everything turns to liquid.
At the dinner in honor of her seventieth birthday, Mrs. Rundel paused and coughed briefly into her napkin. Her family remained silent while a waiter refilled their water glasses. When the waiter was gone, Anna asked if the soldier’s body had ever been identified. After hearing from her mother that as far as she knew, his body hadn’t been recovered, Anna asked if she could really be sure that the soldier had been on the ship that was blown up in the Golfo di Campo. Couldn’t he have been on the second ship? Maybe he went home to Senegal and was absorbed back into his life there and that’s why she never heard from him again.
Another waiter arrived at their table and distributed dessert menus. When he received no reply, he offered to return in a few minutes. Mrs. Rundel sipped her water and watched over the lip of the glass as he walked away.
“I did not need to be told what happened that night. I just knew. It is strange, I admit it is strange, but I knew.”
“How did you know?” Anna asked.
“Era impossibile, lo so, ma sapevo tutto.”
“Oh, come on, Ma . . .” protested Max. He understood Italian but didn’t have the patience to listen to his mother speak it when the subject of discussion was important.
“Okay. I’d been lying awake in bed for hours. I couldn’t fall asleep that night, so I was humming to myself, just, you understand, mmmm hmmm. Luisa used to call it my habit of humming. It was the way she kept track of me, she liked to say. Even if she could not see me, she could hear me. I think she exaggerated. And she was wrong to insist that I stopped humming the night I spent hiding in the cabinet. She mixed up the dates. I stopped humming the night the Fasci blew up the Allied ship. I heard the explosions from across the island. It was like the sound of fireworks, but I knew it couldn’t have been fireworks. And then there was a silence like the silence inside the cabinet—my room became so still and quiet, and I could do nothing but wait. I didn’t have to wait long. In a moment I heard our neighbor’s dog howling in the field. The night was perfectly silent, and then Pippa began to howl and didn’t stop. Poor Pippa. I remember thinking of a bow sliding back and forth across a single string of a violin. But no one was playing a violin. It was Pippa howling. That’s how I knew what had happened. Because of the dog.”
The waiter was back, standing behind Anna’s chair. He hovered with a pinched smile until Mrs. Rundel stopped talking, and then he asked if they were ready to order dessert.
“Sì, sì, sì, siamo pronti, we are ready, now or never,” Mrs. Rundel said, picking up the menu and shrugging a couple of times to indicate that she had finished with her story.
From the portico in Marina di Campo, the explosions inside the Allied ship were less than spectacular. For an hour or more, the men had been watching the boats transporting the Africans from shore, but when they heard the first detonation followed by the series of booms, they weren’t even sure which ship was involved.
Paolo woke in the doorway with a parched mouth and an aching head. He drew his arms inside the short sleeves of his shirt to protect himself against the rain. Then he discovered that there was no rain. He pushed himself to his feet and walked groggily to the portico, where he found the group of men standing in a row, as though watching football from the edge of a field. It seemed to him that the French officers and the few dozen Africans who hadn’t yet boarded the boats were the players of competing teams, shouting and running frantically back and forth along the sand. But there was no ball to kick and there were no goals marked. Watching them, Paolo felt stupid, as if he’d forgotten the rules of a familiar game.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
At first, none of the men bothered to answer, though Sergio was kind enough to offer Paolo what was left of his cigarette.
“What happened?” Paolo repeated after awkwardly tapping off the long ash.
“Justice,” said Sergio.
It was then that Paolo noticed the thick cord of smoke pouring from one section of the ship and the orange flames flashing inside a gaping hole in the hull. Smaller explosions were still following in quick succession, almost like the rattle of machine-gun fire. From this distance, he couldn’t tell whether the forms falling into the sea were men or pieces of the ship.
“What is justice?” he asked.
Two of the men—Sergio and his brother—let out a grumbling laugh. Paolo knew what they were saying with their laughter. They were saying, Go ask your mamma. They were saying, Grow up.
In her hospital room, Mrs. Rundel recognizes the quiet urgency of her husband’s voice as he identifies himself to a nurse out in the corridor. When he appears at the door, she smiles weakly to reassure him. His exclamation upon seeing her comes out as a puff of an “Oh!” She hears his Manchester childhood in that simple syllable, his education, the long-ago past, as well as the love that prevented him from ever adequately preparing for her death. This man who has shared her bed for almost fifty years. Neither one of them would survive long without the other.
He steps toward her and leans over. Just as she expected, he kisses her, pressing his lips to hers beneath the oxygen tube. It is a long, desperate, loving kiss, a kiss containing fifty years of kisses, from the first kiss in the Place des Vosges in 1956 to the kiss in their first shared bed in that filthy hotel room to the kiss on their wedding day to all the routine kisses—hello, good-bye—kisses of congratulations, kisses of clever seduction, reviving kisses at the end of a long day, kisses of apology, kisses of gratitude, kisses of celebration, quick pecks in passing, kisses enlivened by the action of their tongues, kisses filled with foreboding, kisses of relief, kisses t
o make up after an argument, easy kisses, tender kisses, grinding kisses, kisses before intercourse, during, after, wet kisses, dry kisses, kisses to comfort, kisses to persuade, kisses to punctuate a joke, kisses interrupting stories that would prove impossible to finish.
She reaches out for him, misses his hand, and instead grabs his wrist.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“You’re fine,” he echoes.
The sergeant who carried the case containing Amdu’s letter had just finished loading his landing boat with his final group of drunken infantrymen when the explosives were detonated. When other explosions followed, the sergeant thought that the Germans had returned. The soldiers in his boat must have thought the same, for they were already jumping out into the shallow water and running off in search of cover. The sergeant followed them, leaving the case in the boat and the boat to drift back out to sea.
The next morning the landing boat was found by a fisherman floating offshore of Capo Stella. The fisherman towed the boat back with him to the beach at Lito, where he pulled it ashore to examine it. He found a pistol, two left boots, and the field glass case. He unbuckled the case, saw that there was an envelope inside, and was about to open the letter and read it when a group of young boys came running across the sand to see the boat. The fisherman set the case on the sand and let the boys climb inside the boat. He tried firing the pistol to entertain them, but the trigger was jammed.
The next day the boat was returned to the French Colonials in Marina di Campo, but the black case sat unnoticed on the empty beach at Lito. The case remained there just above the waterline for three nights and four days, until it was found by a girl who had come with her brother to the beach without their mother’s permission. They were intending to go for a swim, but when the girl found the case, she decided she wasn’t interested in swimming anymore, to her brother’s disappointment.
The girl brought the case home, and the next day she gave it to her cousin in exchange for a comic book. She kept the letter. After she discovered that it was written in French, she put the sheet of paper back in the envelope and hid it beneath her mattress because she didn’t want to have to tell her mother where she had found it. Months passed before her mother discovered the letter when she was turning the mattress. By then, her mother didn’t care that the girl and her brother had gone without permission to the beach at Lito. She did care, however, that the girl had opened an envelope that wasn’t addressed to her. For this crime, the girl’s punishment was to deliver the letter herself, by hand, to Signora Nardi of La Chiatta.
She sat on the handlebars of her brother’s bicycle all the way across the island. The journey took more than three hours. Once they arrived at the villa, the girl was too frightened to face Signora Nardi, so instead she set the letter on the sill outside the kitchen. She called hello through the open window and turned and ran as fast as she could after her brother, who was already wheeling his bicycle down the drive.
On a bright fall day in the year 1944, in the quiet of the midday rest, a woman’s hand reached from the dark interior of La Chiatta and caught the tip of the envelope between her forefinger and thumb.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Scott is the author of seven previous books, including The Manikin, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance, which were both finalists for the PEN/ Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe and Tourmaline. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, she lives with her family in upstate New York.