The Garden of Letters (6 page)

And if that wasn’t enough, his alliance with Hitler, passing over the Jews he had previously promised were safe. He betrayed these men and women and their children, too. Orsina knew it all, even if Pietro thought she was ignorant.

In truth, Orsina sympathized deeply. She knew several Jewish families who were struggling to make ends meet. She never told Pietro that she often made extra tortelli for Anna Bassani’s family. Whenever she arrived with her basket of food, she marveled at how Anna still managed to keep her household so calm even with everyone living in such close quarters and under so much stress.

But at the same time, her daughter’s change in behavior was a new source of fear and tension for her. And perhaps Pietro didn’t notice this change in Elodie, because his own behavior mirrored their daughter’s. Orsina detected the same agitation in his playing that she had heard in Elodie’s. They shared an impatience with their bows, as if they couldn’t wait for it to strike hard on the strings.

The following evening, Orsina tried her best to bring harmony back to her household. Hoping to erase the memory of the previous night’s outburst, Orsina cooked a full Venetian banquet of Pietro and Elodie’s favorite dishes: baccalá with polenta, a risotto with squid and shrimp, and a cake seeped in honey. After dinner, their stomachs full and their appetites sated, Elodie and her father went to the living room to rehearse. Midway through, however, they were forced to stop their playing because the Fascist youth battalion in the square was so loud, their cheering and drums rolling overpowered every other sound.

Pietro walked over to the window, where below he could see more than twenty grade-school boys dressed in their
Balilla
uniforms singing “Giovanezza” and other Fascist songs.

“Agh, mini Fascists!” Pietro’s voice was filled with disgust.

Elodie walked over and peered down at the square as well. She could see the boys dressed in their uniforms, nearly identical to the grown-up Fascist police: the eponymous black shirt, the fez with the fasces emblem, the gray-green shorts and the bright blue kerchief, which was knotted around their necks.

They were Mussolini’s little army, happy to have a chance to leave their homes for a few hours and make some noise.

“I can’t hear a damn thing!”

“I know,” Elodie said, placing down her bow. “How can they continue with such stupidity? Crying at the top of their lungs. ‘Duce! Duce!’. . .”

Orsina stood in the middle of the living room, her hands fingering to untie her apron strings. “These boys should be in bed sleeping. Where are their mothers?”

“Their mothers?” Pietro laughed.

Orsina shook her head. She was grateful that she had a daughter. Every boy in Italy had to be enlisted in the
Balilla
, then onto the
Gioventú Fascista
. It was a governmental decree.

Elodie and her father tried to resume their playing, but the noise was unbearable. “I can’t take it anymore! It’s bad enough they’ve ruined the Liceo Musicale, now they’re poisoning these children, too!” Pietro stood up and walked over to the record player. Underneath there was a small stack of records. He reached for one and pulled a black disc from its sleeve.

He placed down the needle and turned the dial to increase the volume.

The chorus “Va, Pensiero” from Verdi’s
opera
Nabucco
began to play.

“It’s too loud,” Orsina reprimanded him.

“Which do you prefer?” replied Pietro. “This or the sound of the
Balilla
downstairs?”

“You know the answer to that!” Elodie said confidently.

Pietro smiled. Then he dialed up the music even louder.

The next day, Pietro did not return home at his usual hour, and Orsina continually glanced at the clock near the dining room table.

“Your father is never late,” she said to Elodie. “I’m becoming worried.”

It was true. Her father was like clockwork. He had his coffee in the morning every day at the same time, left the house one hour later, and returned home each evening by six o’clock.

“I made his favorite risotto, and it will be ruined if he doesn’t come home soon.” Orsina stood by the pot and added one more cup of stock. She lowered the flame.

“I’m sure he’ll be home any minute,” Elodie said, trying not to share her mother’s alarm. “He probably got stuck talking to someone outside school.”

Forty minutes later, Orsina was sure there was something wrong. She had turned the stove off minutes earlier and the risotto was now a sticky mass.

“He shouldn’t have played the record player so loudly last night.” She sat down at the table and placed her head in her hands. “It was defiant. What if someone reported him?”

“I don’t think someone would do that, Mother. It was only some opera music . . .”

Elodie saw her mother’s back stiffen. Her face was so visibly strained with worry that she looked like a bridge of an instrument, with strings pulled to the point of breaking.

“Elodie . . .” Orsina said in the faintest whisper. “People would report their neighbor for a few extra grams of butter.”

Elodie looked down. She felt a wave of shame wash over her. Shame that she had been so naïve to dismiss her mother’s worry so quickly. Shame that she had not joined Lena in a group that was trying to eliminate the fear, which had now penetrated her own family. And shame that she was now helpless to find her father.

She found herself walking around the apartment like a trapped animal that didn’t know how to make use of its nervous energy.

“You need to stop moving around so much, Elodie.” Her mother’s voice strained to emerge politely from a web of fragile nerves.

Elodie tried to bring a small measure of comfort to her mother by making some coffee. She heaped two spoonfuls of the chicory and added the water. But when they each sat at the table, their hands around the small porcelain cups, neither of them could manage a single sip. They sat there like two cats staring into the air, each taking up space in the same room without uttering a single word.

She and her mother sat at the dining room table for what seemed like hours. They didn’t eat. They didn’t drink. The only movement between them was when they both turned their heads to watch the clock.

They fell asleep where they sat with their heads on their arms, both waking at dawn with no sign of Pietro.

“I’m calling the police,” Orsina said, shaking her head. She looked out the window to the piazza; the first light of the morning flooded through the room and Elodie squinted. “Something terrible has happened! I just know it.”

Elodie didn’t know how to respond. She was just as weak and as worried as her mother.

Orsina reached for the phone and dialed the exchange for the police. Elodie heard the excruciating sound of her mother’s plea for someone to listen to her, desperately begging for more information.

“They told me nothing. They insulted me and told me to check the bars or the whorehouses,” she said in tears.

Elodie reached to embrace her mother. “I just know he’s going to come through this door any minute, demanding breakfast.”

Her mother shook her head. “I pray you’re right.”

Two days later, after Elodie and her mother were besieged with worry and had received not a shred of information from the police, there was a faint rapping at the door.

When Orsina went to answer it, she discovered a very badly beaten Pietro, with one arm draped over the back of their neighbor, Giacomo.

It was clear by the way his right leg dangled that it was broken.

“Oh my God,” Orsina gasped, covering her mouth with one hand. “Pietro!”

Giacomo helped bring him into the living room.

“I found him outside your apartment just a few minutes ago. They must have dumped him there and sped off.”

“Who?” Orsina said in disbelief. She couldn’t believe anyone could do something so savage to her gentle husband.

Pietro looked up at her with his swollen eye and bloody lip.

“Four Blackshirts in the
Squadrisiti
confronted me outside the music school as I was on my way home. They told me I was under investigation and took me to a place near the Roman theater. I think it was somewhere on Via Redentore where they interrogated me.

“They bound my wrists and covered my eyes. They called me a Communist. They said I had no loyalty to my country . . . that I’ve never worn a Fascist party pin on my lapel.”

“This is sheer craziness!” Orsina cried. She looked to Giacomo and Elodie to agree with her, but both of them were transfixed on listening only to Pietro recount his story.

“I told them my only sin was that I played a record. I tried to tell them it was by Verdi . . . one of Italy’s greatest composers.” His tone, even through his wounds, was unmistakably sarcastic.

“I insisted I was not anti-Fascist. That I was only a musician, just trying to listen to my record.

“But whatever I said, they ignored my reasoning. They just kept beating me, and kept smashing me in the ear every time I mentioned music . . .”

“They are nothing but bloody savages!” Orsina cried.

“Orsina, please . . .” Giacomo whispered. “We don’t need them knocking on your door again. Or heaven forbid, mine . . .”

Orsina tried to regain her composure. “No, of course not.”

“You should call a doctor for him,” Giacomo suggested. “Do you have one you can trust?”

“Yes, yes. Of course. We’ve used Doctor Tommasi for years.”

“Good,” he said. “Call him and take good care of Pietro. Maria and I look forward to hearing him play his violin again soon . . .”

“Giacomo, we are indebted for you bringing him home to us. What can we do to thank you?”

“Nothing, Orsina. Just keep him safe and keep him away from the record player.” He kissed her on both cheeks, then squeezed her hands in his.

“I must get back to my family now.” He shook his head and lowered his voice. “This is not the country of my childhood . . . to beat an innocent man like this makes me sick to my stomach. I fear for myself and my children now.”

Orsina nodded as she thanked him and said good-bye. Once Giacomo left, she took a deep breath and quickly locked the door.

Verona, Italy

M
AY
1943

Since his return, Pietro remained bedbound. His foot was encased in a plaster cast and propped up on pillows by a diligent Orsina. He spent the majority of the day sleeping.

“He seems to sleep more than ever, Mamma . . . Shouldn’t we be concerned he’s not trying to walk around more? Doctor Tommasi even left crutches for him, but he never attempts to use them!”

Orsina shook her head. “Who wouldn’t be tired after receiving such a beating? If a body is tired, it should rest.”

Elodie was not convinced. “I know if I go two days without playing, my hands feel stiff. I think he needs to get up and move around.”

“Let’s give him a few more days, Elodie. It’s only this week that those terrible bruises on his face have started to fade. Once he gets more strength back, we can get him on his feet.”

Elodie nodded. “Maybe tonight, we can see if he can play his violin a bit. He doesn’t need to stand to play. We can adjust his pillows and then do a small concert for you.” She smiled and went to hug her mother. “It will be good for his spirits to get him playing again.”

Elodie looked sideways to see her father sleeping in his bed. It was true that his bruises had begun to fade, but the brutality of Fascism was now more evident than ever, leaving permanent marks on her family’s once-idyllic household.

Although she tried to remain as calm and helpful as possible to her mother, since her father’s return, Elodie knew that she had been forever changed by this event. The sight of her gentle father being carried home by a neighbor, his body beaten beyond recognition and his leg dangling like a broken marionette—this was not something she could ever erase from her mind.

So when she saw Lena outside Guido’s Café, Elodie seemed to have lost the meekness she exhibited the first time Lena had invited her to a meeting.

“When is your next meeting?” Elodie asked, unblinking.

“You’re ready to join us now?” Lena questioned in turn. She was now staring at Elodie intensely, trying to gauge her sudden change in spirit.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve never been more ready. Just tell me when and where.”

The next morning after she finished her coffee, Elodie did what she thought was impossible: She looked into her parents’ eyes and told them her first lie.

“I will be late today, so don’t wait for me. I don’t want you to worry,” she said, hoping that her parents would not ask for further details.

Orsina was still in her nightgown. A long black braid, with wisps of gray, fell over one shoulder. Even after a full night’s sleep, she still looked tired.

“Of course I will worry, when you see what sort of animals are on the streets these days. What is going to keep you?”

Elodie took a deep breath.

“I need to practice a concerto with Lena. She’s having trouble with her timing, and Professor Olivetti will have our heads if we don’t get everything just right for the spring performance.”

It was a complete fabrication on Elodie’s part, but still something that seemed plausible enough. She looked at her mother to see if she had detected her transgression but Orsina seemed to have found the explanation credible.

Orsina sighed. “Don’t stay out too late. And please, please be careful.”

Elodie nodded and shifted her gaze. It had been easier to lie than she imagined. Perhaps too easy.

“Yes, Mamma. Of course.”

Orsina glanced over at her husband, hoping he would express his own similar thoughts on their daughter’s safety. But his injuries were so severe, he clearly hadn’t even heard her and Elodie speaking. There had been a time, she thought, that he heard every breath, every whisper. But now he hardly seemed to hear anything at all.

That afternoon, Elodie and Lena leave their instruments at the school. They are dressed nearly identically: navy skirts and white blouses. Shoes with T-straps. Hair pinned behind their ears.

Lena tells her the meeting will occur in a small bookshop on Via Mazzini. It’s a store that Elodie never even knew existed. The exterior is nothing but a small window front lined with books. Above the door hangs a black sign with the word
Libri
in gold letters.

Elodie wishes she had the security of her cello to comfort her. She is so used to her heavy armor that she hardly knows what her body feels like without it, almost as if she is missing a limb. She feels strangely weightless and her other senses are heightened. She hears everything around her: the sound of footsteps on the pavement, the sound of the birds in the air, the rustle of the leaves.

“Come inside,” Lena whispers to her and points to the door. The small shop is lined from floor to ceiling with books. Bricks of color, Elodie thinks, as she looks at the walls. The spines protrude in an array of different shades. The leather volumes in red and brown, a few in forest green. The gilt letters of their titles glimmer like distant stars. A young man of around twenty stands behind a counter. He is tall, almost gangly, with a thick mane of black hair. His irises are deep amber. She has never seen an eye color like that before. Elodie immediately thinks of the gypsies who thread amber into necklaces, the prized pieces like fossils with bits of life trapped within. His face is beautiful and well chiseled, and Elodie reads it quickly like a sheet of music, taking in the angles and curves, memorizing the heights and plateaus.

The bookseller’s hands rest on his desk. His long fingers are smudged with ink.

“Luca, I’ve brought a friend,” Lena announces with confidence. Luca stares at both girls, but longer at Elodie. He says nothing at first, sizing her up with his eyes. Finally he wipes his hands on his smock and gestures for them to follow.

He takes them to the back room, and Elodie is first struck by the smell of fresh ink and damp paper. There are hundreds of pamphlets in tall piles. Someone is filling small satchels with them. The room is crowded, with at least thirty young men who all seem to know one another. They eye Elodie with suspicion as soon as she enters.

“She’s my friend,” Lena indicates right away. “She’s a cellist, with a memory like you’ve never seen.” She looks everyone straight in the eyes. There is a low grumbling in the room. Elodie hears it and begins to shiver. “You can trust her,” Lena says without flinching. “You have my word.”

Three women are in the room; one is unmistakably Brigitte Lowenthal. The sharp features, the expensive blouse. She scans Elodie quickly when she walks into the room and then turns her head to focus on something more interesting that concerns her. Elodie notices how she places an elegant hand on Berto’s thigh. He has an artist’s face, a sculptor’s hands. In a flash, she can imagine with ease Brigitte naked on a daybed, Berto re-creating her flesh in smooth contours of clay.

Another woman is in the corner. Elodie hears the name Jurika mentioned. She is dressed in trousers and a button-down shirt. She looks at the two girls with even more suspicion than do the men. It is clear from Lena’s body language that she has never seen this woman before, either.

“You should go over to the Catholic coalition, if you’re interested in helping,” she tells them. “I don’t think this group is for you.”

Lena stares back at her. “I have already begun fulfilling my duty here. Most of these men are happy I can deliver anything they give me.”

“Lena’s a good
staffetta
, Jurika,” a tall student in dark colors says in Lena’s defense.

“And I’ve never seen you at a single meeting before,” Lena challenges.

“I’ve been in the mountains in France scouting, you little mouse.” She stands up and seems to draw the breath from the room. “I don’t suppose they teach you how to hold a gun in music school?”

Elodie can feel herself shaking, but Lena remains undeterred. On the other side of the room, Brigitte turns a long, white neck in their direction. She pulls out a cigarette, which Berto quickly lights. Elodie sees how her eyes turn from boredom to amusement within seconds.

“No,” Lena says as a smile spreads over her face. “But since you seem to be the expert, why don’t you come teach it there?”

The tension in the room instantly dissolves and everyone, including Jurika, begins to laugh.

“I like you,” Jurika says, as she stands up. When she rises, she is like a torch; her powerful energy fills the room. The girls bask for a moment, pleased they’ve amused this female leader.

The girls are given satchels filled with the Communist papers for distribution. Luca walks them to the door.

“We’ll see you two next Thursday at the same time. Now, get home to your parents.”

“We’re not little schoolgirls,” Lena snaps. “We’re old enough to be married!”

“And how old is that?”

“Nineteen,” Elodie replies for her friend.

“Nearly twenty,” Lena shoots back.

“Well,” he says, smiling at both of them. “You now have two jobs then: Give out those papers and then go find a husband.”

He walks over to a huge stack of flyers and lifts them, his arms stiffening from the weight. There is a flicker, like a branch of blue lightning, that runs through the veins of his neck.

Elodie and Lena open their arms and receive their parcels.

“Tell me,” he says, “which would be a heavier responsibility? This or a husband?”

Lena is the first to respond.

“A husband, of course!” She let out an enormous laugh. “At least we can give these flyers away and then be done with them!”

The three of them continued to laugh until Elodie looks up and sees Jurika walking toward them. She says nothing to Luca, nor to Elodie or Lena.

With a quick, deft movement, she reaches into her pocket and withdraws a cap, which she immediately pulls over her eyes. Without a trace of femininity in her look or in her gait, she turns from them and walks out the door.