Seppe pushed open the chapel door. The chapel was at the far end of the camp, looking over the barracks. It had been mostly built by the time he’d arrived and he’d never fully understood where the POWs had got the materials from. He’d asked Frank once and Frank had just shrugged. ‘People need to build things, don’t ’em?’ Foresters didn’t worry about resources the way people did in the city or in the desert. If it was there, and you had a use for it, it was yours.
Candles flickered inside the chapel and illuminated the ‘stained-glass’ windows, shining ruby and emerald and sapphire with paint ‘borrowed’ from the same benign sources. Seppe had largely avoided the structure until now but every morning and evening it was full with those more devout than him.
Sometimes the camp choir practised in here, tenor versions of ‘Ave Maria’ feathering out across the barracks, but tonight it was quiet. The space commanded quiet. Seppe walked automatically to the front of the altar, genuflected to the crucifix, then looked around for Fredo. There he was, huddled into a corner against a wall, all edges and defences gone. Still Seppe couldn’t help it: his breath caught and he had to force himself towards Fredo. What if this was just another ruse?
‘Seppe.’ Fredo half rose, then crumpled again. ‘It is all gone. All gone.’
‘Perhaps people got out before the bombs fell.’ He forced himself into the sentence, at the same time praying the sentence could never be true. He pulled himself in, away from his own words.
Fredo’s face was buried in his knees and Seppe had to lean forward to hear him at all. ‘My war was to protect Livorno. I have failed. Failed my city, failed my family.’ His voice tailed off and Seppe took a deep breath. Nothing was making sense any more, none of it at all. Fredo was in sure danger of bringing him to tears, this man who had been his nemesis for years now. And the real threat was gone. The certainties that had walled his life for as long as he could remember were toppling, one by one, and he was vertiginous with the changes expected of him.
Seppe raised his hand to pat Fredo on the back, couldn’t make himself do it. ‘You will be OK, you’ll see. You’re a survivor.’ Seppe couldn’t come into God’s house and tell lies, no matter how great the provocation and small his religious belief. But he could cite facts.
Fredo was sobbing now, really sobbing. Seppe sat down beside him, the bench glacial and knowing. He folded his hands into his lap and waited. The bench grew harder. There was nothing he could do here; this initial virus of grief would rampage and later, when Fredo needed to talk about Livorno, Seppe would find a way to neutralise his feelings, to find the response that sat between fear and joy and which the majority of his campmates surely experienced. All he needed was to find someone to sit with him, to hear him out as he was doing for Fredo.
It jolted him with the same precision that those Allied shells had hit the port stables. He patted Fredo on the back, forgiving himself the wincing, and left, pulling the doors shut behind him. Would he get out of the camp at this time of night? It wasn’t quite curfew, but the sky was a dark hood over the perimeter, had been for hours. He would try it.
Ern was the duty guard. Seppe quickened his pace. Ern wouldn’t mind him leaving the camp briefly.
‘What are you up to, this time of night?’ Seppe heard the echo from his early days of illicit training and his heart lifted enough for the response that would ease his passage.
‘I am going to see a girl about a tree.’
Ern laughed in recognition, pushed open the gate. ‘Go on, then, but make sure you’re back by ten. My shift finishes at half past and that surly bugger Alf Green might not take so kindly to the likes of you gallivanting around.’
‘What blessed time do you call this, lad?’
Amos, rumpled and heavy with sleep.
‘I need – I need to talk to Connie.’
‘What, now?’ Amos read Seppe’s face. ‘Wait here.’
The door clicked shut. Seppe stamped his feet, fists tucked up into armpits.
When it opened, it was to Connie.
‘Seppe! What’s up?’ She shivered, reached up behind her and lifted her greatcoat off the peg, slipped outside, a shadow. ‘We’ll have to talk out here – Joe’s only just got off.’
Seppe looked at Connie, shadows on her face changing its planes, now softening, now strengthening it. A deep ache pulled words into his mouth. But not the real ones, the important ones; those he couldn’t bear yet. ‘Walk with me?’
He didn’t know what she saw in his face but she frowned, anxious, then nodded, took his hand.
The forest was a different place in moonlight; enchanted. Mercury beams of light caught and twisted silver limbs as Connie and Seppe ducked under the oaks. Seppe, not daring to speak yet, led Connie down tracks that sparkled in the moonlight as its beams refracted the stones glistening amongst the leaves.
They pushed through a thicket and stumbled down a grassy bank. There in front of them was a lake. Its surface, flat as death, reflected the trees that lined its shores, upside-down branches sweeping into the water as if to scoop it up, feather it out.
In the centre of the lake, as if by accident, was a tiny island. Illuminated by the moonlight, moss clung to rocks, softening them. Trees grew here too, their roots twisting and curling back onto the outcropping, forming its topography through decades of stubbornness.
Connie gazed around her, the moon an alchemist, rendering the quotidian unrecognisable. Seppe found a pebble, no bigger than a button, and threw it in. The ripples circled outwards from where they sat, backs up against a tree, the bark buttered with rime. Connie hadn’t asked him anything yet. For all her talking, she knew when to be silent, something that the other timbermen often missed about her. Even though she felt things deeply, she simply wore life lightly, didn’t need to interrogate every last little element. Maybe that was it. And I wear life as if it were a lead overcoat.
‘Connie, I have a question.’
He stopped again, gathered a scattering of pebbles this time and lifted them high, arcing them into the lake. The water responded like wood to gunshot, splintering and dividing. The mood was broken, the shimmer of before sharded by the scattershot outbursts.
‘So.’ He bit down hard on his lower lip. Blood filled the gap like sap in a broken twig; bitter, inevitable. He sucked down hard, kept his face open and bright. The bitter night air found the wound, pierced it with every inhalation. The night shadows cast freckles on what he could see of Connie’s face, her brow furrowed, calloused fingers making a stick dance. He counted the twig through her fingers, watching it roll from little finger to ring finger, from ring to middle, and onwards, ad infinitum.
When it gets to the end of the final ten, I’ll say something. But he couldn’t.
Another ten.
Halfway through, she fumbled the twig. It dropped between her middle and fourth fingers, joining the others on the damp ground. Talk, Seppe. Say something.
‘My city. It is bombed.’
Connie turned away from Seppe, looking out towards the island.
He waited. There was nothing else to do.
‘Where your family were?’ Connie twisted back towards him, eyes bright with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Seppe.’ She sniffed and he foraged in his pockets for a handkerchief.
He concentrated on the trees clinging on to the rocks. They had flourished where nothing should flourish, branches spreading out over the water, claiming the space where no tree had ever before entered.
That’s what you need to do, now there is nothing to stop you.
He handed her the handkerchief. ‘But this is the problem. I am not sorry.’
His words curled white in the night sky, visible, irrefutable. He felt sick, but his truth was out.
Connie was quiet for a moment.
Then: ‘Nobody can tell you how to feel. Your dad was rotten, wasn’t he? I’m not surprised you’re happy to be shot of him.’
Across the lake, a scuffle in the copse. They listened. A fox after a rabbit by the sound
of those squeals.
‘In Campo 61 there is another prisoner, from my city, and he is broken by this. But not me. Italy is not my home now. Italy has not been my home for a long time. I wish that it was, but it cannot be so. I think – I think maybe I am a monster for not behaving as Fredo does, for not caring about my home.’
‘But your home wasn’t happy – you’ve told me that. We can’t help how we feel about home, none of us can. You cared about your sister, didn’t you? And your mam, from what you’ve said. It was only your pa.’
‘This is true. He was not a good man. But I am a coward, and that is worse.’
Seppe shuddered, but the memory flooded in, and this time there was no evading it. The cold of this English night shrank people to the core of themselves; all that remained was the crystallised truth.
Thirty-Seven
Livorno, 1942
THE MAJOR, FULL OF righteous indignation and red wine tonight, roars into the house after the meeting. Seppe, woken by the noise, comes to the banister, looks down through the gloom.
‘What is it this time – she’s a useless whore who betrayed him, or she’s the passive martyr preventing him from greatness?’
Seppe doesn’t want to smile, but Alessa, arriving beside him in her white nightgown, has hit the nail on the head. It’s like being a kid again, standing here with his little sister whilst they eavesdrop on their father’s tirades. He looks down at her and this time can’t help but smile. Standing there with her toes pointing towards each other, long black hair falling into her eyes, she looks very like she did ten years ago. But Alessa is married, newly pregnant; has moved back to the family home only for company when her husband returned to the front to fight this war of Il Duce’s.
‘This time it’s about me. He’s insisting I join the Regio Esercito, to stop waiting to be called up and to volunteer instead, be a proper man. He only pulls the strings to keep me out because it’s his peculiar way of making amends to Mamma. But now the war is dragging on, and I’m doing his chances no good, he says, by not being a man. Mamma is panicked about it, all those “whores and diseases”. The fighting seems secondary to her. It’s the first time I’ve known her stand up to him.’
Alessa glances up at him.
‘This isn’t your fault, Seppe. You know anything could have tipped him over, anything at all.’
There’s a ferocious rattle of pans, then a dull thud as the pan connects with something. Their mother is quiet: a good sign. The blows aren’t unmanageable, she isn’t fuelling the Major’s ire by reacting to it.
Alessa sits down on the floor, face pale and sickened, still peering through the slats at the glimmer of the kitchen. ‘I wish Bruno was here. He’d go down there and stop him, wouldn’t stand for it.’
Seppe slides down next to her, grips his knees with sweaty hands. Alessa is right: her husband is what even their father would call a ‘proper man’. Bruno wouldn’t be cowering behind a newel post, willing the noise to stop. What’s wrong with Seppe that he can’t save his own mother? His innards fold in on themselves. Interfering will only make it worse for their mother; she’s always insisted on that. He opts to believe her.
There’s a hefty crack from downstairs and a pinched scream. He fights the urge to clamp his hands over his ears as if he were five again. And then Alessa is up, tipping forward on to hands and knees, reaching for Seppe’s hand to pull her upright.
‘What are you doing?’ But he knows. The thuds and thumps are accelerating, an intolerable opera.
‘I can’t stand by and listen to this, Seppe. Not any more.’ Tears run down Alessa’s cheeks, glistening on her dark hair. She is wonderful, this sister of his, fierce and shining with determination.
Alessa is halfway down the stairs, one hand holding fast to the banister, one supporting the barely perceptible swell of her stomach.
‘Stop that! Stop, you brute!’ Her voice pierces the vacuum created by their mother’s own silence. ‘Hold on, Mamma! I’m coming; I’ll make him stop.’
Seppe can’t bear it. He wants to go back to his bedroom, to pretend none of it is happening, to put his head under the pillow as he did so many years before and wait for dawn to bleach away the horror. And he wants to run downstairs, stop his father once and for all. But he’s glued to the landing, watching Alessa disappear into the gloom of the kitchen. Now the Major’s voice lifts in pace with the beatings, and Alessa’s is raised too. He can’t work out the words over the banging of the pan, the noise of his mother shrieking and Alessa and his father bellowing, but the pace is faster and faster and there seems to be nothing that could bring this to an end. He has to go down there, has to wrestle the pan away from his father and banish him, stand up to him at last. But he can’t, he simply can’t move. His body is frozen with memories of the years of beatings it’s endured and his feet won’t carry him.
The banging stops. And with it the yelling and the shrieking. In their place comes an unearthly sound.
Seppe races down, limbs freed by the need to discover the source of this wild keening and make it stop. He skids into the kitchen, halting when his bare feet meet warm stickiness. His mother kneels on the floor, Alessa’s head cradled in her lap, one hand working the rosary beads faster than Seppe has ever seen her do them before. Blood pools beneath his sister’s head. Blood.
The Major stands at Alessa’s feet, the iron pan still dangling from his hand. He looks up as Seppe steps closer, trying to avoid the blood, unable to check.
The Major raises the pan in warning.
The Major’s eyes are flinty but his breathing is ragged. ‘It will be an accident, do you hear me?’
Seppe kneels beside Alessa, puts a hand on her cheek. Enough is enough. She’s made her point, now she needs to wake up. ‘Lessa. You’re frightening me now. Come on, cara. Time to stop playing.’ She has to wake up, has to. He gets up and pulls the water jug from the table, splashes water on her face where it mixes with the blood and sends streaks of salmon pink towards that black hair.
‘Lessa, come on. It’s me. He’s stopped now. Time to stop pretending.’ His voice isn’t his own; it’s as unearthly as the scene before him.
The water trickles futilely down from her forehead into her hairline, for all the world like a benediction.
Perhaps that’s what’s needed.
‘Shall I go for the padre?’ But his mother’s eyes widen and fright gleams. She glances towards the Major and shakes her head. She’s quiet now, her lips moving in pace with the rosary beads.
‘No priest is entering this house.’ His father’s eyes are steel. He looks at the pan in his hands and back to Seppe. ‘Do I need to make this clear?’
‘At some point the priest will need to see her.’ He can’t believe this to be true, even as he says it. Seppe’s voice cannons around the walls. Never before has he challenged the Major.
His father slams the pan down on the tiles. How Seppe longs to take his father’s face and smash it with the same force, but years of conditioning leaves him impotent. He hates himself for it, loathes himself with a passion he didn’t know he was capable of accessing after all these careful years of subjugating his feelings, being only the person his father – and thus his mother – needed him to be. What sort of man lets his sister fight their battles for him? And what sort of man then can’t avenge himself against their father? A weak one. A pathetic one. That’s what kind.
Seppe looks down again at Alessa. She is so peaceful. But her cheek is cooling beneath his palm. Surely their father can’t actually have killed her? The word looms, scarlet and torrid, in front of Seppe’s eyes. His head spins and he puts his other hand on the floor to steady himself. Things like this don’t happen. Alessa is the happiest person anyone knows. She isn’t lying broken on the tile, one hand still protecting the child that now will never live.
‘Not under my roof!’
Seppe covers his mother’s hand with his own.
‘We will call the undertaker in the morning, make the situation clear t
o him. If any priest comes, it will be to the funeral parlour.’
The Major glances at Alessa. Does Seppe imagine the flash of tenderness, of regret? Then he’s gone.
Seppe has marched the memory of this night a thousand miles, through the grit and heat of the desert, up and down the parade ground, and he can’t exhaust it. With every pinch of his blade, every stroke of the plane, the memory remains as raw and fresh as the night it happened.
Seppe and his mother half drag Alessa to the parlour, where his mother arranges a crucifix and a statue of the Holy Mother at her head. Her head … He finds a bowl, dabs at her hair until it’s trace-free, until she’s as peaceful as she can look. That blood is between his fingertips now, will never come away. Alessa is dead, and it’s because he hadn’t done anything to help her. Alessa is dead, and the unborn child with her. Mamma is moving mechanically, her thoughts inaccessible, each movement determined only by the one that precedes it. Perhaps she is seeking comfort in religion; perhaps, like Seppe, this is so unreal as to be beyond discussion. Upstairs, Mamma plucks a dress from Alessa’s wardrobe and Seppe helps her remove the bloodstained nightgown. They dress Alessa as if she’s still alive in a vibrant red dress and hat. Mamma takes her own best shoes from the cupboard, places one on Alessa’s right foot and Seppe’s breath catches in his throat. Alessa had coveted those shoes since she was in school, had begged to borrow them, but had always been denied. He takes the other shoe, tries to ease it on. But Alessa is cooling beneath his touch and he is afraid to continue.
Seppe wants to gag at this most lively of people being turned into a statue before his eyes. His sister. His sister, who used to wake him before dawn by jumping onto his bed. Who mocked him for being so quiet, for not wanting to play with the other boys, but was always there to offer him a game of her own instead. Who stood up for their mother whenever he despaired at her cowedness, reminding Seppe that their mother had always known her place to be beside her husband. He pulls out his knife and the little piece of wood lodged in his pocket and starts to carve a miniature Alessa, but his tears on the blade make it too slippery to hold. Nothing works now that Alessa is dead.
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