by Irma Joubert
“Very well then,” said Mr. Rozenfeld.
The following week the Rozenfelds boarded the railway bus, taking all their belongings with them. Marco went with them, carrying only a backpack.
A week later, when the railway bus returned up the hill to the village square, the Rozenfelds were on it, bag and baggage.
“France isn’t an option. The Jews are leaving in droves. And Switzerland has closed its borders,” said Marco, running his hand over his dark hair. “They have been flooded by refugees from France and Italy, Germany and Austria, and countries as far away as Poland and Russia. Only the wealthiest can still buy their way in.”
Worry had etched deep lines into Mr. Rozenfeld’s ruddy face. Mrs. Rozenfeld shook her head, dazed, and Rachel’s usually rosy cheeks were pale. Her younger sister, Ester, had eyes puffy from crying.
The next morning Rachel unlocked the shop door as if they had never been away. The women bought flour and coffee and darning cotton, because supplies at home were low.
Life went on, the way it had for centuries.
On June 10, 1940, Mussolini declared war against England and France.
When the French capitulated, the villagers in Italy threw up their hands in dismay. It was a good thing the Rozenfelds hadn’t gone to France, they told one another. Where the red and black swastika was raised . . .
The rumors about the fate of Jews grew in magnitude, now also including Jews in France, Holland, and Belgium. Jews were living behind barbed wire in ghetto camps, like livestock.
“We must hide you,” Marco urged Mr. Rozenfeld. “If only one of the houses had a secret room, a cellar, even . . .”
But the homes in the village were small and simple. Only the baron’s villa had a wine cellar. And everyone knew about it.
A garrison of soldiers, Mussolini’s Blackshirts, pitched camp on the outskirts of the village, on the sunset side, in the shadow of the old Roman bell tower.
That night Maria said, “Marco, Papa and I talked. The Rozenfelds have to get away at once. It’s become too dangerous.”
“I know.” Marco gave a deep sigh and ran the fingers of both hands through his thick hair. “I just don’t know where to take them.”
She looked at him earnestly. “You do realize, Marco, don’t you, that associating with them could put you in great danger?”
Marco’s expression was every bit as serious. “I know, Mama, I know.” He turned to his father. “But I also know there’s no other way.”
Giuseppe nodded. He understood.
“I’m worn out thinking,” said Marco. “I wondered . . .” But he didn’t say what he had wondered.
“Th-th-the m-m-mountain,” stammered Giuseppe.
Maria turned her head sharply in his direction. “Giuseppe?”
“It’s what I also thought,” Marco said, nodding, “but I’m not sure.”
“It’s cold up there, and winter is coming,” Maria protested. “You can’t—”
“N-n-no other p-p-place,” said Giuseppe.
“Papa is right,” said Marco. “It’s the only solution.”
“But it’s dangerous and—”
“Mama, I know the mountain like the back of my hand. I grew up on the mountain. Papa taught us. There are many caves where you can survive a cold winter if you know what you’re doing. A man, an entire family can vanish up there and wait out the war.”
Maria pressed both her hands to her face. “Oh! This war!”
“It won’t be long.” Marco comforted her, putting his arm around her shoulders. “It’s just a temporary arrangement, until everything returns to normal.”
Giuseppe nodded. “G-g-go,” he said.
Marco bent down and kissed his mother’s cheek. “I’m going to speak to the Rozenfelds,” he said and walked through the door.
The next morning, for the first time since the Rozenfelds’ return on the railway bus, Rachel didn’t unlock the shop. The doors and windows of their home remained shut as well for an entire week.
Marco quietly left for Turin and returned with bags of supplies. At night the women brought pickled vegetables and dried tomatoes, olive oil and polenta flour and wine, and Marco and Giuseppe carried the heavy bags up the mountain, to an unknown destination.
The last evening Marco said, “I’m just up there, Mama.” He hugged his mother tightly. “From time to time I’ll be coming to the village to fetch provisions. At least once a month, I think.”
“Papa will bring extra blankets as soon as we get them,” Maria said through her tears. “He says he’ll leave them in the second cave, you know where it is. He says . . . you’ll manage.”
“Yes,” said Marco. “Papa knows the mountain better than anyone else.”
“Go safely, and come back safely,” Maria said, crossing herself.
That night the Rozenfeld family disappeared. Along with Marco Romanelli. The darkness swallowed them, and the next morning the mountain had wrapped itself around them.
chapter
FOUR
The ascent was painfully slow. Step by step they felt their way up the mountainside. It was a dark night. The stars were distant in the pitch-black sky.
Marco led the way, holding Mrs. Rozenfeld’s arm, virtually dragging her up the mountain. The narrow path wound up the steep incline. They frequently stopped to rest. At times they were forced to crawl on all fours.
The plump little woman at Marco’s side leaned heavily on him, gasping and panting. “I can’t go any farther,” she sobbed after a while.
“We must get to the first cave under cover of darkness,” Marco said. “Once we’re there, we can stay for the rest of the night.”
The rope around Marco’s waist stretched tight every time someone behind him stumbled. “I can’t see a thing,” Ester complained. “It’s crazy, climbing these cliffs in the pitch dark.”
“It’s the only time it’s safe. We can’t risk being seen by the garrison’s men,” Rachel said behind her. She was panting as well. “The moon will be up in a while. Then it should be easier.”
“It’ll probably only be a half-moon,” Ester grumbled.
When they stopped to rest, Marco handed out chunks of cheese and chocolate, and sometimes a few raisins. “Drink enough water, even if you don’t feel thirsty,” he said.
In the small hours the moon made its timid appearance over the mountaintop, its pale glow a source of comfort rather than light as they struggled on.
They reached the first cave just after sunrise, after walking for almost ten hours. Even at night, Marco and his father had done it in less than four hours. “We’ll spend the day here, then go on,” Marco said.
“Won’t we be safe enough up here?” asked Mr. Rozenfeld. His face was pale, and he was mopping his brow despite the cool breeze. “My wife . . . I don’t think she can stand another night’s walking.”
“This cave isn’t safe. The goatherds sometimes come up here,” said Marco. “And the young boys exploring the mountain know about it. But we can rest here for two days before continuing.”
Almost a week after they had left their home, they reached the cave Marco had picked out. He had been there only once before—about five years earlier, when he and Antonio had stumbled upon it by accident. “I think we must be the first humans ever to enter this cave,” Antonio had exclaimed at the time.
The last day had been the hardest. It was the only day they had climbed in the daytime, as not even an experienced mountaineer would risk descending the steep cliffs after dark.
Marco took Ester down first, firmly attached to a rope. “Why are we going all the way down again?” she complained.
“We’ve come a long way east, moving diagonally, first up, then down again,” said Marco. “Now we must go down this ravine. The cave we’re heading for isn’t much higher than our village, which means it won’t be quite as cold as it would be farther up the mountain.”
Marco returned to fetch Mr. Rozenfeld. “My wife won’t make it,” he said, pale and perspi
ring. “She’s afraid of heights.”
“I’ll blindfold her,” said Marco.
But when he went back up, Mrs. Rozenfeld flatly refused to go down the steep cliffs. “I’d rather die up here. At least I won’t be dragging you into oblivion along with me,” she said.
It took a lot of persuasion from Rachel and many reassurances from Marco to finally get her to climb down. “You’ll have to bury me here,” she said when they were all together again, “because there’s no way I’m going back up these cliffs.”
“This gorge is our salvation,” said Marco. “The cave I have in mind is up ahead, hidden in another gorge, its mouth completely concealed. No one will find us there.”
And it was true. They were right in front of the cave when Ester cried out, “Here’s another cave! You’d never guess!”
The mouth of the cave was a cleft in the rocks, no more than three feet high. Ester crawled in on all fours.
Despite the bright sunshine, the cave was dark inside. The floor, sandy near the mouth, sloped slightly upward to a reasonably level rocky ledge. The roof was too low for Marco to stand up straight, but the Rozenfelds had no trouble.
The cave was deep enough to allow them to create some kind of privacy. “I think we should make a screen to divide the cave in two,” Marco proposed when everyone had taken a good look around. “You can all sleep at the back. The front part can be our kitchen and living area. I’ll sleep in the front.”
“To protect us from the wolves at night,” Rachel teased.
“Don’t joke. There are bound to be wild creatures up here,” Marco warned. “That’s why the goats sometimes disappear.”
“I’m more afraid of Nazis than wolves,” Ester said firmly.
During the next three weeks, Marco, Rachel, and Ester made the journey five more times to fetch the supplies Marco and his father had stored in the first two caves: warm clothing, blankets, pots and kitchen utensils, lamps and candles, a medicine chest filled with herbs and ointments and syrups. There was food as well: bags of polenta, dried pasta and flour, bottles of oil and jam, fruit and vegetables in jars, pickled meat and congealed fat, salt and sugar and coffee, even a little wine. The villagers had opened their hearts and their hands. On the last trip they brought Marco’s books and his violin.
Life in the cave began in earnest.
Rachel took over the housekeeping, arranging everything and organizing their daily routine. Water had to be fetched, and as much wood as possible—enough to see them through the long winter.
The nights were already freezing. Marco was glad of the warm coats and caps the Rozenfelds had brought from Lithuania. They would need them when winter really set in.
They fashioned a screen of twigs to separate the front section from the back of the cave. They built a second screen to serve as a kind of door at the mouth of the cave, using small twigs and pine needles to make it as airtight as possible. They hoped it would keep out the worst of the cold at night.
“We must have a fireplace where we can cook our food,” Rachel said.
“Maybe just outside the mouth of the cave—over there, in the corner of that crevice,” Marco said. “The fire will be sheltered against the wind and the smoke will be outside. But we can only light a fire after dark, or the smoke may be noticed. The people who live on the mountainside are wary of mountain fires. If they see smoke, they’re sure to send out a search party to find the fire.”
Life in the cave began to take on a fixed rhythm: peaceful, almost domestic.
By day they did the usual chores; they swept, fetched wood and water, prepared food. They read a lot. Mrs. Rozenfeld’s eyes were too poor to read, so Marco or Rachel or sometimes Mr. Rozenfeld read to her from Marco’s books. “We should have brought more interesting books,” Rachel said.
Every morning Mr. Rozenfeld ticked off the day on the calendar so they would always know what day and date it was. “Why is it important?” asked Ester.
“We must know,” her father replied.
They made music nearly every day. Mr. Rozenfeld also played the violin, and Marco taught the Rozenfeld girls the finer points of the instrument he loved so much.
One day, during what the girls jokingly called their “music lessons,” Marco spoke to them about opera music. “When I was at university in Turin, a group of us once took the train to Milan, to La Scala opera house,” Marco remembered with a smile. “It was a wonderful experience. We saw La Traviata, with Tito Schipa in the role of Alfredo.”
“La Traviata—the fallen woman?” Ester asked, amused. “What’s the story about?”
“It’s set in Paris, around the beginning of the eighteenth century—” Marco began.
“Ester, you don’t want to hear these opera stories!” Rachel said firmly. “Marco has told me one or two, and they’re the dumbest stories you can imagine. And the music is awful—the kind the doctor used to play on his gramophone.”
The evenings were harder. They were reluctant to use the kerosene and candles, saving these for winter. Marco would persuade Mr. and Mrs. Rozenfeld to tell stories: the Russian folk tales they’d grown up with, stories from the time when Russia still had a czar, sometimes stories they themselves had heard from their grandparents. They spoke about the Russian pogroms, the persecution of Russian Jews in the previous century, which had forced their parents to move to Lithuania.
Rachel and Ester told Marco about their school in Lithuania, about the things they got up to when they were younger. “Oh, I never knew about that!” Mrs. Rozenfeld said, shocked. “How daring!”
The stories made the nights a little shorter.
But after a while Ester became irritable, pacing up and down like a caged animal, her frustration barely contained. The next time Rachel asked her to do something, Ester came undone. “You’re not my boss!” she shouted. “Do your own dirty work!”
That same evening, when Rachel dished up unleavened griddle cakes and a dollop of jam for supper, Ester cried, “I refuse to eat this again! It’s the fourth time this week we’re expected to eat these rocks! There’s a lot of other food.”
“Ester, we’re in this together.” Mr. Rozenfeld tried to calm her down. “Rachel is making provision for winter.”
But Ester stormed off to sulk on her sheepskin in the dark back room.
One evening after supper Marco and Rachel were sitting outside on their own. The night was icy and clear, the moon not yet up. The sky was black velvet, the stars bright and incredibly close. Marco and Rachel, wearing their coats and caps, huddled together under a single blanket they had wrapped tightly around themselves.
“It’s actually . . . wonderful up here,” Rachel said dreamily. “Not as cold as I had feared, just a bit nippy.”
“Wait until winter really sets in. We’ll need every ounce of energy just to survive,” Marco warned.
“What a pity everyone can’t enjoy it,” Rachel mused. “Mama . . . I’m worried about her. She’s listless, not interested in anything. She always used to do the cooking, but now she doesn’t even lend a hand.”
“It must be very uncomfortable for her,” Marco said.
“And Ester is totally impossible. I don’t know how we’re going to get through the winter with her.”
“Ester has just turned fourteen,” Marco said calmly. “She’s a typical teenager.”
“But she’s so selfish, and so ungrateful.” Rachel frowned.
Marco smiled. “Fourteen,” he said again. “One of our biggest enemies is boredom. We have so little to stimulate us. I think it’s part of Ester’s problem.”
“There are enough chores she can help me with,” Rachel said. “And you try to teach her, but even then she’s stubborn.”
Marco laughed. “It’s not exactly a young person’s idea of fun,” he said. “But enough about Ester. We have a moment alone, you and I. Let’s not waste time talking about other people.”
Winter arrived. The wind roared down the ravine, howling like hungry wolves around the cave day and n
ight, tugging furiously at the flimsy twig barrier at the cave mouth.
“The wind isn’t all bad,” Marco said philosophically. “If it blows like this, the smoke won’t be noticeable, so we don’t have to wait for nighttime to make a fire.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to run out of wood,” Rachel said hesitantly.
“Let’s divide the wood into six piles for the six winter months,” Marco suggested. “By the end of March we should be able to go out again. Probably sooner, but by then it should be safe.”
“End of March!” Ester groaned. “We’re going to die in here.”
“That’s enough, Ester,” Mr. Rozenfeld said firmly. “Think of the alternative and stop complaining.”
They began at once to sort the wood into piles. After a while even Mrs. Rozenfeld came to help. Some of the wood was still green. Mr. Rozenfeld arranged the greener pieces around the sides of the cave to dry out.
Sometimes the wind would change direction without warning and a flurry of smoke would blow into the cave, making their eyes water and leaving everything smelling of smoke.
Marco punched a few holes in a tin can and they filled it with hot coals. It brought a little comfort during the freezing nights.
At the beginning of October the first snow fell. Some days thin snowflakes gently sifted down. Other days brought sleet and snow crystals blustering through the ravines.
On rare occasions the weak winter sun would break through the gray cloud masses.
Their world diminished to the cave and its immediate snow-white surroundings.
As one interminable, tedious day followed another and the dark, icy nights grew longer and longer, Ester became increasingly difficult, Mrs. Rozenfeld increasingly tearful, and Mr. Rozenfeld more silent and more reserved.
Only Rachel seemed cheerful. But when they were alone, she said, “Marco, please tell me the winter will pass?”
Marco gave an exhausted smile and stroked her face. “Summer always comes again, I promise,” he said. His expression grew serious, and his voice was very deep when he said, “Rachel, I can’t tell you often enough how much I love you.”