The sharp upper edge of Maria’s brazil-nut heart had been digging into the bottom of her throat from the inside. She swallowed, but it kept pricking.
‘I don’t know either,’ she had managed to say. Then she had discovered that she did. ‘Let me go to Italy,’ she had said.
She sank back into herself. She had fought so hard. She had threatened to sabotage the rest of her exams, to run away. She had bargained and shouted. She had made them let her come. To be sitting here on a foreign train by herself. Alone.
She looked out of the window. Yellow and green fields dotted with farmhouses the colour of peaches. Blossom-laden trees. An old tractor, and a dog with a squashed black face, wearing a red collar, tied to a gatepost. She thought of her mother running along beside the train at Victoria, her stricken white face bobbing.
Good, she had thought. Now you know how it feels.
She clutched for that sensation of triumph but it eluded her. I wish, she thought, but couldn’t finish. There was nothing to wish for. It couldn’t be undone. Once something was known, it couldn’t then be made unknown.
FOURTEEN
The bedroom is bright with moonlight, and something is awry. Chiara’s first thought is for Cecilia, because Cecilia has taken to wandering in the night. Twice Chiara has fetched her back from Nonno and Nonna’s old room across the landing where she stood, swaying in the middle of the sagging floor, her arms held out, as if on a tightrope in the wind. Chiara wonders whether it is her medication, if it needs adjusting. Another time it was Nonna’s cries that had alerted Chiara. She ran downstairs and was less astonished somehow to find Cecilia uselessly rattling the doorknob, her eyes open but unseeing, than Nonna and Daniele sitting up in bed next to each other, wide-eyed and vaguely guilty, like an illicit couple caught in flagrante. Now, though, her sister is fast asleep beside her, just a lump under the bedclothes.
She gets up and goes to the window, lifts the curtain. The moon is full, making the steep field and hillside look like slopes of ice. The olive trees scattered about the grove are etched black against the silver. It is an other-worldly scene, but nothing seems out of place. There is no disturbance.
She turns back into the room, holding the curtain up to let in the silver light, and looks at her sister, her face soft and peaceful. She listens to the movements of the house, the faint creaks and stirrings. The hiss and puff of air down the chimney, the sighing of old soot, the faint coo of a night-time bird, the scurrying of little clawed feet up in the roof. Nothing untoward.
She returns to the window. Her eyes are drawn to the edge of the grove, where the olive trees are replaced by oak, sycamore and ash, and the tree-line thickens. There stands the most ancient tree of all, the Mago, that she had described to Daniele on their train journey. Near the bottom of its gnarled and twisted trunk there is a hollow big enough to fit a person, or two small ones at a squeeze.
She pulls on her shoes, wraps a blanket around herself like a cloak. It is the coldest night yet. She carries the lantern out onto the landing and lights it there so as not to awaken her sister. She swings the lantern ahead of her down the stairs, casting strange shadows on the lumpy white walls. She steps close to the bed and holds the lamp aloft. Daniele’s nest of blankets is piled up next to Nonna, who breathes soft and low, with a faint whistle on the out-breath. Chiara does not need to poke the blanket pile to know it is empty.
The front door is still locked and bolted. In any case the bolt is too heavy for Daniele to open unaided. And she has the key upstairs with her. Without moving, she sends her mind around the whole of the downstairs, testing the windows. She lights her way the length of the room to the kitchen, pushes the pantry door open and peers in. The high little window is swinging open, and a stool has been pulled underneath. She climbs onto the stool and sticks her head out into the courtyard. She can see how the woodpile stacked against the wall below the window might provide a sort of landing point halfway to the ground.
Gently, she slides open the bolt of the front door and steps out into the courtyard. The air is sharp, and a night wind rustles through the few remaining leaves on the fig tree, rattling the fruit that still hang like spent lanterns on the leafless persimmon tree, stirring up a crackle among the new fallen leaves. She tucks herself against the stone wall in behind one of the buttresses. They were added after an earthquake shook the house loose, stone props to nail the building into the hillside. She feels the weight of the house at her back, sensing the temptation lurking within its ancient stone and crumbling mortar to call it a day now, to collapse back into rock and rubble, to slide down the hill in its own miniature avalanche, taking with it the woodpile and the outhouse, the lower vegetable patch and the barn, rolling and tumbling, snagging on trees and tussocks and old stone walls, gathering pace before it crashes into the stream at the bottom of the hill.
She shakes her head to dispel the image, and her breath plumes ghostly white in front of her face. She looks towards the gate from where she would be able to see up into the olive grove but stays where she is. The gate is spotlit by shafts of silvery moonlight pouring down over the tops of the trees. To stand there would be to reveal herself to the child and deny him his secret. She imagines him crouched in the hollow, bathed in moonbeams.
Let him be, she thinks.
Her bare feet on the cold stone are freezing. Her urge to spy on him dissipates. She needs only to know that he is safe. She hurries back inside and bolts the door. By the light of the lamp, she takes a look at her sleeping nonna. She is the real buttress, and while she is there, quietly breathing, the lungs of the house, it will hold. She blows out the lamp and retreats up and around the bend of the stairs. She waits.
Eventually she hears him scrabbling at the wall outside and his panting breath as he tugs himself through the window, then a clatter as if he has knocked the stool over and fallen. She holds her breath. She thinks she can hear stifled gasps, but he does not cry out.
This child will break my heart, she thinks.
She waits, straining to hear. She is about to go down again to investigate when she hears the pantry door shutting and, a few seconds later, the thud of his shoes being kicked off, his snuffly breaths, the creak of the bedsprings.
She creeps back up the stairs and slips under the covers. She is moved to formulate some sort of prayer and knows it will not be valid from the comfort of her bed. She needs to suffer in some way.
She climbs out and lowers herself, lifting her nightdress away so that her bare knees meet the hard cold floor.
‘Let him, dear Lord, please,’ she mumbles. Whatever he has wished for, she wishes it for him too.
On winter mornings scents are fewer but more pungent and they seem to carry a greater distance. Chiara wakes to the aroma of coffee wafting up the stairs and the noises of Nonna moving slowly about below. She can lie in her bed and identify Nonna’s different activities from the sounds. The rattle and scrape as she adds some logs to the stove and gives the fire a poke, the clank of the oven door, the chink of china as she sets out two cups on the table, the gurgle of the coffee rising.
Sometimes Chiara opens her eyes and looks at the yellow curtains at the steamy window, smells the coffee and experiences a moment of pure joy. Cecilia is there beside her, safe if not sound. She has even, finally, started to make new clothes for the child. Or, at least, she has taken him into their bedroom for fittings more than once, although there is as yet no sign of any actual clothes. He doesn’t like the fittings. He likes being out roaming the land.
The child and Nonna are downstairs. Gabriele is out there somewhere, sniffing the air to find which way the wind is blowing, mending the fences, tending the animals. She has to be careful with their supplies, but they are not going hungry, not yet. Goffredo has been replaced by a succession of different men on the run–Paolo, Luigi, Sergio, two Marios, Filippo and a stream of others. They come and go, blur into each other. One way or another, before she sends them onwards, she gives them each some love.
Today she is brimming with joy as she lies for a moment, listening to her grandmother clattering about below. She doesn’t know why, and then all of a sudden she remembers the child’s night-time escapade. To make a wish, she reflects, there needs to be hope. The child is hopeful.
Soon, with Gabriele and perhaps with Daniele too, they will sow seeds for spring.
In a way, life has never been so simple. It is a question of surviving, doing the best she can in the circumstances, looking after her charges. In the mornings, when she has the most work to do with baking and cooking, washing and cultivating the vegetable garden, Daniele runs free or accompanies Gabriele. In the afternoons they sit at the kitchen table and she reads out loud to him from the only three books in the house (apart from the copy of Keats’s letters in English and the old picture book they brought with them): the Children’s Poetry Compendium from 1913 that had been used to prop up the rickety table and has to be returned to its place after each session: Nonno’s bird manual; and the bible. She gets him to copy out sentences and is surprised by how quickly he acquires the skill. He is only seven and he can’t ever have gone to school, because the race laws were introduced in 1938.
That first slice of morning, when she and her grandmother are drinking their coffee, and the boy is asleep still in the big bed, is when Nonna is at her liveliest.
‘I told the little man to hop in and keep warm when I got up,’ she always says, maintaining the pretence of separate beds.
They will both look at the child, ensconced in blankets, tumbled into a heap on the edge of the bed as if he has been dropped there from a height, and Nonna will reminisce about Chiara’s father when he was a little boy, Alfonso and Daniele sometimes merging.
‘Do you remember?’ she will ask about events that happened thirty years before Chiara’s birth. Time has concertinaed so that yesterday for Nonna might be a yesterday of fifty years ago but it shines more brightly than more recent days.
Afterwards, Chiara helps her grandmother wash and dress. She brings her a bowl of warm water, and Nonna dabs at herself under her woollen petticoat, which she refuses to remove.
‘I don’t want to take things off. I want to be putting them on,’ is her refrain as Chiara wraps and bundles her into her layers as if she were swaddling a baby.
This morning, when Chiara comes softly down the stairs, she catches Nonna peering at the sleeping child.
‘He has bad dreams,’ is all she says.
They take their coffee beside the stove, standing up.
‘Putting off the moment,’ Nonna says. Once she sits down in the armchair, as a rule she doesn’t get back up, except for visits to the outhouse.
‘Are the buds late this year?’ she asks.
‘No, Nonna, it’s only December.’
‘Is it? I thought it was later.’ And then, ‘If I’m still here in the spring, I’ll take my petticoat off then.’
Chiara looks at her and smiles, assailed by a brief image of a bizarre celebration where old ladies dance naked among the green shoots.
‘Where else would you be but here?’ she asks.
Her nonna takes one clawed old hand from the coffee cup, and points down at the flagstone floor. ‘Under there,’ she says.
‘Oh, Nonna,’ Chiara says. ‘Don’t.’
‘Look after the little man for me, won’t you. I do worry what he’ll do without me.’
‘He doesn’t have to do without you,’ Chiara says.
‘I’m not long for this world,’ Nonna says. ‘It’s all in the cabinet in my bedroom.’
‘What is?’
‘All the papers, documents of ownership, my will. I’ve left it all to Alfonso, but he’ll see you right. You and Ceci. Why doesn’t she like him? Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her stray into sin.’
‘Who, Nonna? What sin? I’m not following you.’
‘In the cabinet. Go and check.’
‘I will, but what sin?’ Chiara says.
‘Ooh.’ Nonna shakes her head, turns it to look towards the far end of the room, twists her furrowed lips into a deeper furrow. ‘One of the deadly ones, I expect.’
And then, before Chiara can get to the bottom of any of it, can unpick what is sense and what is nonsense, what was then and what might be now, Nonna calls out, ‘Good morning, little man,’ and there he is, sitting up in bed with the blanket pulled up to his chin like a bib, fixing them with his dark, unfathomable eyes.
And Chiara wonders, as she often does, how long he has been there, silently watching and listening.
Chiara drains the big pan of chickpeas that have been soaking overnight, picks out the brown and grey ones from among the mound, adds fresh water and puts it on the stove to come to a boil. A dark shadow, two shadows, pass the window, and she glances up, misses seeing whoever it is, but something–the clack of the boots on the cobbles, the shape of the helmeted heads, or perhaps a belated awareness of having heard a distant engine sound not long before–kicks her into motion, and she is hurtling the length of the room, a bulb of garlic clutched in her hand, knowing only that she has to get to the door before them.
Silently, agonisingly, trying to avoid the screech it can make, she pushes the bolt home. They bang at the door. Daniele–sitting at the table, copying a picture from the bird book, his feet dangling, his left big toe like a wrinkled yellow chickpea poking out of a hole in his sock–looks up.
‘Hide,’ she says.
He slides down, stands bewildered, casting about.
‘Not in the house,’ she says. She makes a motion towards the pantry and, soundlessly on stockinged feet, skidding across the flagstones, he is gone.
‘Open up,’ the German voice outside bellows. Another rap.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she shouts, ‘the bolt is stiff.’
She rattles the door once to show willing and then surges back through the room like a tidal wave, snatching up Daniele’s shoes from under the table and pushing them up the chimney onto the little ledge around the bend, sweeping his drawing, book and pencil into the table drawer, yanking out a uniform jacket from Cecilia’s sewing machine, tearing at the coarse fabric, breaking the needle. The timbre of the rapping at the door sharpens, made not by a fist but a weapon.
‘Coming,’ she shrieks to be heard above the noise and Cecilia’s frightened yelps.
She runs to the pantry, whips away the stool, pushes the window shut, runs back to the door and starts to slide the bolt, panting.
‘Coming, just a moment, hold your horses,’ she shouts and sees she has the uniform still bunched in her hands.
And she spins, literally spins, then runs to Nonna, who says weakly, ‘But what’s happening?’
Chiara thrusts the jacket at her and is back at the door, wrenching it open. There are three of them and they step immediately inside, pressing her along with them. ‘The bolt gets stuck,’ she says. ‘I have to keep it bolted because we are just three women on our own here.’
‘Just three women,’ Nonna pipes up in a shrill little voice. ‘It’s a scandal,’ she says, tugging at her outermost shawl, pulling it more tightly around herself, tucking it into an in-between layer. She has secreted the jacket somewhere about her person.
The foremost soldier surveys the room, stares at Cecilia sitting at her broken sewing machine, whimpering, at Nonna all bundled up in front of the cold grate.
‘Who else is here?’ he says.
‘No one,’ Chiara says.
He turns to look at her. His eyes are a soft blue. ‘No one?’ he says.
‘No one but us in the house,’ she says. She thinks quickly. ‘There are people staying in one of our outbuildings, a sick man and a woman who have lost their home.’
The Lombardy brothers will be out hunting and by day they leave no trace of their occupation of the donkey’s stall. For the men in the barn, she can do nothing. Only hope that they are out.
The soldier nods at the other two men. One thunders upstairs, the other begins poking round the room, in and out of th
e pantry, behind the curtains; he opens and shuts cupboards, lifts the lid of the pot of chickpeas on the stove and recoils. They show the officer their identity documents. Through the open door, Chiara sees two more soldiers coming up the lower path. They have between them the man who is staying in the barn.
She is escorted outside by all three of the soldiers.
‘Who is this man?’ they ask.
She looks at him. He arrived two days before, the youngest son of a farmer from Tuscany. Last night he told her that until he tasted their olive oil, he had thought his father produced the best oil in the land. He has a mole on his left shoulder. His big toe and the one next to it are joined, up to the first knuckle. Duck feet, he says they are. His jacket is stuffed inside Nonna’s shawl. He is Filippo Pistelli from Panzano.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘He was in your barn.’
‘In the barn,’ she gasps, and clutches her hands to her chest. ‘Thank you for finding him. There are so many vagabonds in the hills. That is why we keep the door bolted.’
‘Vagabonds,’ Nonna says. She has made her way to the doorstep, creaking on her stick. ‘They stole my sheep.’
‘It is an offence to harbour fugitives,’ the leader tells her.
‘I didn’t know anyone was in the barn. We don’t use it any more.’ She knows that there are cigarette ends, bedclothes, a lamp in there. ‘I will be more vigilant,’ she says and now she does it, for the first time in her life: she makes the fascist salute.
He salutes her in return, seems to click his heels. ‘Do you have a telephone here?’
‘No,’ Chiara says.
‘Do you have any way of notifying us if more vagabonds arrive? A child you can send to the village with a message?’
Is it his accent that makes him put the stress on odd words? She wants to protest that there is no child here. But she refrains. Only shakes her head.
‘Do you keep chickens?’ he says.
She blinks.
It was that damn chicken, she thinks. The Lombardy brothers said they found it by the side of the track. They claimed that it must have escaped from somewhere and been mown down by a passing truck. Road-kill, they said. Chiara didn’t believe them. No one, not even a German patrol, would pass up a free dinner. But the deed was done, a whole fat chicken, and she made a sort of cacciatore with it. That damn chicken had alerted them.
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