The Breach

by Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger

  The barkeep placed the glasses of aperitifs on the counter, and she tipped hers towards him. “Are you back from your daydreaming? Or do you really want an espresso?”

  “I’m sorry. No espresso. To your health.” He drank while she eyed him over the rim of her glass. “I have many things in my head. Work, that is.”

  “I heard that you’re sending out for soil samples to the Reschen Valley.”

  He caught his reflection in the bar mirror, his surprise unmasked, his disappointment just underneath. Was the game over and she would turn to business? “I did not realise it had already been made public.”

  “Minister Grimani, the state is absolutely pleased by every step in the right direction. Such news cannot be kept secret for long, especially amongst such indiscreet zealots as you have working in the ministry.” Her eyes flitted over his face, and she laughed. “Don’t look so horrified, Minister. I am only joking. My cousin works with your testing team. He was at my mother’s seventieth birthday party last weekend and told me he had to go up north. I told him he is working for a good man.”

  Angelo relaxed. “I didn’t realise I work with relatives of yours.”

  She chuckled and took another sip from her martini. “We Italians have become gypsies, flocking north to see the world. But it’s dull here, isn’t it? The Tyroleans and old Italian settlers are already such good, stoic Catholics, Minister. Such solid, upstanding citizens. If I tried to talk to the Tyrolean women up in the provinces about the duty of womanhood, I would be preaching to the choir.”

  “Where would you rather be then?”

  “Now, that, Minister, is not the right question. Not where I would rather be, but where am I most needed? Do you know where I am needed? I mean really needed?” She smiled over her glass. “Paris. Berlin. London.” She raised her glass and clinked with his. “The news trickling down from there is that there are no practising Catholics left and no decent women in those cities. Just bohemians and Communists. A true Sodom and Gomorrah.” She seemed to relish the words. “That’s where I am needed, Minister. I’m afraid I will just waste away here. You see, I’ve converted the most important women involved in the suffrage movements and the socialist movements except for…well.” She raised the drink to her lips, but her eyes landed on the red rose on the bar. She placed the emptied glass on the counter and turned to him. “Let’s get ourselves home to our meals, shall we? Or we’ll lose ourselves in the idea that we are in Paris and need absinthe to get through our days.” She patted her hat and winked. “We have our reputations to keep, you and I.”

  Head spinning, and not from the spirits, he paid the barkeep and escorted Gina to the door. For lack of anything else to say, he thanked her for her help with the rose.

  “We must do this again, Minister.” She brushed a gloved hand over his arm. “More often.”

  She went right, and he went left, turning once in time to see the flash of crimson before she disappeared around the corner.

  He backtracked to the florist.

  “What does the coral rose signify?”

  The woman blushed and finished wrapping a bouquet for a customer. When they were alone, she said, “Lust. Desire.”

  Angelo lifted his hat and gave her a few coins.

  Dangerous as a forgotten fire in a dry summer. That was Gina Conti.

  At the villa, he already had his hand on the doorknob before he turned around, went to the garden at the back of the house, and stuck the red rose in one of the bushes.

  ***

  T he sun had not yet come over the peaks of the Rose Garden range when Angelo took his breakfast on the veranda. Saturday was just another working day for him these days, but today was a right horrible mess. He put a wool blanket over his shoulders and poured himself a coffee from the silver carafe. The china jangled as his hand shook from anger or lack of sleep, or maybe both. He balanced the cup on the landing as he looked out at the vineyard below, the grapes finally taking on fuller form. He heard sparrows arguing, and a crow cawed somewhere behind the house. As the first rays of dawn reached the valley floor, he saw the insects take to the vines. Below him were the white oleander bushes his mother had given them last year.

  His father was coming later, to meet with him and Pietro. Angelo considered cancelling. He needed time to prepare. To analyse. To sleep and gather the strength necessary to keep the Colonel in check, especially after last night.

  Angelo rubbed his forehead and slapped his thigh. “Damn it! Where is she?” She was at Susi’s of course. He meant, why wasn’t she home yet?

  He turned his thoughts to last night. Chiara and he had gone, arm in arm, to Senator Tolomei’s rally. It was the first time since he had accepted the ministerial position that she had gone with him to a political event. Still stinging from her calling him a sheep in wolf’s clothing, he had hoped that by going together, they could form some sort of public allegiance. Look at me, Minister Angelo Grimani, on the arm of my progressive wife. We both have an interest in Italy’s unification. We are the ideal couple, working together.

  It had been a mistake. He should have just given her the rose.

  What was supposed to have been a harmless speech by Tolomei became a nightmare. The theatre had filled up, not with people from Bolzano, but from specially chartered trains from Trentino. Senator Ettore Tolomei reenacted the Bolzano Fair of 1921 and Mussolini’s march on Rome. When Chiara also realised who was showing up to Tolomei’s rally, she had looked at Angelo as if he were hand feeding her to her feared wolves. Only when they had found her friends in the crowd had Chiara regained her composure.

  Then instead of giving a speech about how he appreciated being made senator, Tolomei introduced a thirty-two-point measure for the eradication of German culture in the Alto Adige. Before Tolomei had even finished, the theatre erupted into a thunderous ovation save for the drowned-out booing of Chiara and her progressive comrades planted about in the wings.

  “I hope you’re happy now, Minister,” she had said to him, her arm long gone from his. “Tolomei is about to clear the path for you and the Colonel. The Grimanis will have a new street named after them in every major town.”

  She had left with Susi, Peter, and Michael, and she still was not home. He pictured Michael. Dark, sullen, intelligent, and distant. A visual victim to an oppressive government with his frayed cuffs, his newspaper articles and notepads, his cigarettes and hazy smoke. A romantic hero in the making.

  “Damn it,” he cursed, and two birds burst out of the oleander bush.

  As if she were right there, Angelo suddenly heard Katharina’s voice teasing and shy.

  “Damn it, Herr Grimani. Damn it. Die ganze Zeit nur, damn it.” Always with the damn it. Despite himself, he chuckled, surprised by the fondness. By the wrenching twist to his heart.

  Why was he thinking of her now? He glanced at the breakfast table. Angelo’s copy of Popolo d’Italia was folded neatly next to the breakfast plate. He sat down, cracked his egg, cut off the top, then opened to the front page of the paper. Tolomei’s photo was right in the middle, with his grey handlebar moustache, the dark eyebrows over scholarly spectacles, daring someone to contradict him. It could be said that the former inspector general of schools and well-known nationalist had single-handedly obtained the Alto Adige for Rome, and now he was going to finish Italianising it. All the points from last night were listed on the next page. Trentino would become the capital of the Alto Adige. The Italian borders would be closed to those whose Italian citizenship had not been conferred. Chiara’s friends would officially have to register themselves as Italian if they wanted to travel to their relatives north of the border, because one of Tolomei’s points was that visitors from Germany and Austria would have Tolomei’s hurdles to jump in order to obtain visas.

  Point seventeen decreed the removal of the statue of Walther von der Vogelweide from Walther Square in Bolzano. Angelo snorted. Tolomei was not missing a thing. How was that going to do anything other than make the Tyroleans feel degraded? Well
, there was his answer. He kept reading and remembered how Michael had turned to him, giving him a curt nod: point nineteen introduced measures to facilitate the purchase of land, and immigration by Italians. Next, an extensive railroad infrastructure construction program connecting rails from the south with those of the north. Increased troop strength. Tolomei had finished by encouraging foreign countries to maintain a policy of noninvolvement in the Alto Adige.

  “Tug of war, Michael, was it? And you’re losing indeed, but keep my wife out of it.” He put the paper down and closed his eyes.

  Only after the sun had seeped over the veranda’s railing did he hear the sound of a motorcar. He leaned forward to watch the taxi pull away. Chiara was home. Finally. In the hallway, he heard Marco’s laugh and turned in time to see him running down the hallway towards the front door, his nurse right behind him.

  Chiara came out onto the veranda sometime afterwards, redressed for the day in a soft beige and dove-grey skirt and tunic. The colours made her look paler despite the colour she’d put on her face, but her red hair had been freshly combed back. Even if she looked tired, she was far from finished.

  “Why?”

  “Why what, Chiara?”

  “Why do you allow yourself to be a part of this? A part of the Fascist’s agenda? You can’t possibly back Tolomei’s measures.”

  “I don’t. You know that.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because after spending time with them, it makes me feel like a better person.”

  She laughed, a short, mirthless laugh, and took her seat at the breakfast table.

  “Tea or coffee?” he asked her. “I’m afraid I have to ask for something fresh. They’re both cold.”

  “No sleep?”

  “Like you.”

  She nodded and twisted her egg cup. “I don’t want anything.”

  “You have to keep your strength up.”

  “You have a meeting today, with our fathers, about all the appeals coming in on the projects.”

  “Yes.”

  “Solutions?”

  He shook his head.

  She pushed the egg to him. “Then it’s best you eat it.”

  He reached for her hand, still on the egg cup, and managed to touch her before she slowly pulled away from him. Were you at Susi’s, Chiara? Or at Michael’s?

  “You must be tired,” he said.

  “Our anger kept us going.”

  “I was worried. The whole night. You could have telephoned.” He waited for her to apologise.

  She stifled a yawn. “Cristina and Francesca are coming with your father. We are shopping for a present for your mother. It’s her birthday tomorrow.”

  He had forgotten. “Would you like me to make the excuses for you?”

  She looked out on the garden below towards where his sisters would be coming. “I really see too little of them.”

  Angelo sighed. “Family, Chiara. That’s all we have in the end. Just the family. The rest of it does not matter.” He eyed her and waited for her to look at him. When she did, he said, “Have you thought about it? Us having another child?”

  She picked at something on her skirt, then looked over the veranda again. He imagined her trying to conjure up his sisters, and he felt a bitterness rising in him like bile.

  The breeze ruffled the loose top of her tunic. “I’m taking Marco with me,” she said. “To the shops.”

  He acknowledged that he’d understood.

  She looked at him. “I worry that it just would not be right.”

  “What’s not right? To give Marco a brother or sister? That our family continues to grow?”

  “To bring another child into the world now.”

  “There is never a right time,” he snapped.

  “There is, Angelo. There is a right time.”

  “Fine. Then we can be careful.” He leaned forward. “I want my wife, and I don’t want to wait for a gold-leafed invitation to her bed.”

  Her face rippled with different emotions, and for the first time in a long time he saw her really looking at him. He waited for her to say something flippant, to straighten up and lash him with her liberal diatribe. He waited. She said nothing.

  “I have done everything,” he said, “to keep this family together. I work hard for you, for Marco, for your parents. I aim to make the best of a bad situation. I have not denied you anything. Not your new outfits. Not the new furniture or the things you buy when you are sad or upset. I have never ordered you about. Tell me how many husbands would make the allowances I have?”

  He stood up, and she jerked back in her seat.

  “Stop it,” he said. “Stop treating me as if I were some sort of monster. I understand. You do not agree with my ways. Now accept that I know what I am doing and that what I am doing is in the best interest of my family. I’m the minister of my department now. I give the orders. Do you understand?” He stared at her pale face. “Goddammit, Chiara, it’s time I put my foot down.”

  Over the landing, he saw his sisters and the Colonel coming down the street. Chiara saw them too and rested one hand lightly on the landing.

  “I’m coming to you tonight, Chiara. I expect that you will open the door to me when I come.”

  She raised her chin but did not turn to him. “Your wish, Captain? Or your command?”

  He left her there, her eyes still on the street.

  Chapter 9

  Graun, September 1923

  T he cuckoo clock in the Stube read a few minutes before eleven in the morning when Jutta heard the doorbell ring. She finished wiping down a table before dropping the rag into the bucket just as the hanging bell above the front door clanged. Hadn’t she locked it?

  Emilio Rioba and the two carabinieri he never seemed to be without, Vincenzo and Ghirardelli, stepped into the dining room. Of course. Rioba still had a key. His policemen had the same look dogs do before being released on a hunt.

  “Buongiorno, Signora Hanny,” he called.

  “The kitchen’s closed on Tuesdays.”

  He took off his fez and looked around the Stube. “Cambiano i suonatori ma la musica è sempre quella.”

  She squared herself against him. “I know that you speak my language. Tell me what you want.”

  Rioba sighed and placed his cap back on his head, then gestured to the other two. Ghirardelli hesitated a moment, gave a respectful nod, and he and Vincenzo turned on their heels to go back into the hallway. Jutta moved to follow them—they had no business in her inn—but Rioba held up a hand, blocking the way.

  “Prego, Signora. Stay here.” He looked around. “No guests?”

  “I told you already. We’re closed on Tuesdays.” She had two geologists from Munich, and they had the necessary permits to be here. She didn’t care who Rioba was or that Ghirardelli had just been assigned as police captain. They had no right to harass her customers. She stared the prefect down.

  In any other world, Rioba might have been a nice man. The curly black-and-grey hair, the distinguished features, and the intelligent eyes gave the impression of a pleasant man. He was also very fit for his age. She had often seen him walking the hills early in the morning. The days when the Italians were their summer guests and had gone climbing with people like Johi Thaler as their guide, those days were gone, but she could imagine Rioba being one of those Sommerfrischler, then coming back to the inn, refreshed, rejuvenated, hungry, and sitting down to dinner with his family with enough energy to play with his grandchildren. If he even had a family.

  From the kitchen, she heard something crash to the floor and shatter into what must have been a thousand pieces. Rioba raised his eyebrows before Jutta shoved past him and to the kitchen. The policemen were sorting through her porcelain and throwing each and every piece onto the tiles. In his hands, Vincenzo, the small, squarish brute, held her mother’s handmade water pitcher. He sneered, lifted it above his head, and slammed it to the floor. It shattered like an egg, liquid and shell. Behind her, Rioba murmured something reprimand
ing, but it sounded false in her ears. Ghirardelli looked at least sheepish, like a naughty schoolboy, as he destroyed her expensive serving platter.

  In his hand, Rioba held a stack of the postcards that Jutta kept at her front desk. He fanned them out, their backs right side up. His tone was the one she used with Alois when she had to explain, repeatedly, why she was denying him something.

  “No German, Signora Hanny. Forbidden. No tedesco, capisce? We have this discussion before. No signs in German. No dishes in German. No postcards in German. No maps in German. Solo in italiano. Siamo in Italia. We are in Italy.”

  Jutta clenched her fists into her skirt, her keys rattling. “I did remove everything. All of the crockery: for the honey, for the salt, the hot water, the lard, all of it.” Everything except her mother’s pitcher, which she rarely brought out of the cupboards, but had today because it was Tuesday. Nobody came on Tuesday.

  Rioba clicked his tongue and cocked his head. “And the postcards?”

  “These just came in. You blackened the old ones last time, and they were all sold.”

  “Sold or thrown away?”

  She gritted her teeth. “Sold.”

  Enrico was behind this. He must have ratted her out to Rioba about the new cards. She looked at the shattered dishes and the mess the police had made.

  “Do you know how much these things cost me?” she demanded. “There was not a single German word on those plates and platters. Nothing is marked on my crockery.”

  Rioba clucked his tongue and gestured to Ghirardelli, who was holding a lone, whole porcelain plate. When he had it in his hands, Rioba turned it over and pointed to the blue inscription. Augarten. Wien. Österreich.

  “Tedesco,” he said. “This is German writing. German language.”

  “This is outrageous. You’re destroying all of my porcelain because of a stamp on the bottom of the plate?”

  The prefect scanned the kitchen floor and shrugged before handing her the last plate, undamaged. “Signora Hanny, I send you a catalogue for porcelain from Capodimonte. They are Napoli’s finest. Cosa molto belle.” Rioba smiled, “Va bene?”