No Country: A Novel (40 page)

My father had only been a story in my life, never entering the blood of my existence. In this home, I suddenly felt I would not be surprised if my father were to walk in here, any moment, as if from within a story. I sensed here the deep sediment of tradition on which I stood now, like a tree seeking roots to hold it in place. The old man patted my hand. “Welcome home,
kind,
” he whispered. “We are all the things we have lost.”

“
Kind
?” I asked, after a while.

“
Kind
: child,” said the elder with the short pipe. “You’ll pick up Yiddish as you stay with us.”

“I have a
kind
, a boy,” I said, feeling my tears rising.

“Gut, gut,”
said both men, genially.

Josephine came up to me solicitously. She had rolled up her sleeve, and I could plainly see the welt on her arm and her cheek. I knew my own face also looked a sight. “Come through here,” Josephine said, leading me through the long, narrow apartment.

“Wash first, before applying the tincture of iodine. It will sting, so use the salve, like last time,” Julius called out after his daughter.

“Yes, Papa,” Josephine sang out as she prepared to bathe my face from a bowl of cool water. I marveled that the old men were not in an uproar. I tried to imagine my mother, Maeve, and what a furor there would have been had I walked in bruised, leading a battered stranger home to our farm.

When we returned, the heap of papers and books had been moved to the corner, and four plates lay on the table. A deep tureen of soup sat amid various bowls, filled with beets, peas, and sour cream, and a large blue-and-white china platter with a side of roast beef on it. Next to it sat a large round loaf of bread, rather like a puffy dome without much of a building under it. I looked at it, bemused, and Josephine, catching my eye, whispered, “Babka,” under her breath. I loved the sound of it. I was ravenously hungry.

•  •  •

T
HE NEXT DAY
when I woke with a fever, and Josephine’s father insisted I rest. Josephine went off to work, as did her uncle, Arthur, who worked in a hotel, keeping accounts. He left wearing a brown suit, carefully adjusting his homburg before the small hallway mirror, while smoking a cigarette. Old Mr. Julius Grunwald stayed home with me, shuffling about, arranging papers, then settling down to read for four straight hours, chuckling or snorting occasionally, while I slept.

The day after that was a holiday, and I had revived. My face looked better, and Josephine and I stepped out to find Frankie. I had a lurking fear of Ijjybijjy Malouf, but Josephine strode with such a brisk air that her vigor dispelled my dread. The sun shone overhead, and I felt full of hope.

We crossed Washington Square Park and turned at street corners I now recognized by day. When she smelt fresh baked bread, Josephine called out, “Wait here a moment, Bibi. I’ll get a loaf of rye bread. And some markowitz for Uncle Arthur. He loves poppyseed.” She ducked into Fischell’s Bakery, while I stood on the sidewalk, looking about impatiently. Up and down the narrow street were signs of many shapes and sizes, even some at street level, for many shops were in the basement: Kriegel’s Shoe Repairs, Bialystok Bread Shop, Rosen’s Patent Medicines, Heidt’s Watch Repairs, Levin & Schlossberg’s Kosher Meats.

Wondering what was taking Josephine so long, I turned toward the basement-level bakery, and ran smack into a young man. The oranges he was carrying fell and began rolling away on the sidewalk. Chagrined, I picked up as many as I could to hand them over, with an apology, but I stood rooted when I looked closer at the slender young man, his unruly pale hair under his yarmulke, fringes of his prayer shawl trailing on the sidewalk as he trapped his runaway oranges. He stood up, a shy smile indicating his thanks. A ringlet of hair tendriled down the side of his face. But what riveted me were his eyes, pellucid blue, dark around the pupils. I felt an inexplicable tug within my heart. Holding his clutch of oranges as best he could, he continued down the street. I stared after him as he turned the corner, leaving my life. “I have met Jakob Sztolberg. I have met my dead father,” I whispered, “and he has come, young again, from Poland.” My eyes filled with tears, and I did not notice when Josephine had returned.

“Where did you get that beautiful orange,” asked Josephine, “in this season?” She looked about for the peddler, seeing none. I clutched the orange, unable to reply, my heart choking with love in the midst of that busy street.

A roil of activity surrounded us. A vendor was selling hot
wieners; another, fresh fish from a wagon. Soon we stood in front of the building where Giuseppe lived. Across the street I saw the familiar sign painted on a shingle: Torquato Lepore, Photographer

We went up the flights of stairs to the apartment and knocked on the door.

•  •  •

T
O MY ASTONISHMENT,
Giuseppe indicated that he had been expecting me.

He stood at the door he had opened, his vast bulk completely blocking it, smiling and motioning us to enter. It took a moment for him to realize that he needed to stand aside. He had the shy man’s problem of not quite knowing what to do with his hands, clasping them and then letting them hang limply by his side, then gathering them together again. He looked back and forth, between Josephine and me.

Finally, with great diffidence, he chose Josephine and ventured, “Miss Bibi . . . ?” It was clear that English was not his forte. I pointed at myself, and he smiled and nodded with relief. My heart was singing.

“Is Frankie going to be here soon? Where is he? Does he know I am here? Why has he not been in touch?” The questions tumbled out of me, unruly, jostling each other, and finally the one which had troubled me most:
Was he already married?

Giuseppe looked at me helplessly. He made as if to speak, then stopped and rubbed his forehead, straightened up, and then slumped again. “Miss Bibi,” he started, and then his voice petered out. I did not know what to make of this, but Josephine took
over. She reached out her hand and touched Giuseppe’s clenched palms.

“Giuseppe, mi chiamo Josephine,”
she said, a little hesitant about the unfamiliar language.
“Dov’è Frankie?”
It was as if a cloud lifted from Giuseppe’s face. He smiled hugely and broke into a rapid torrent of Italian.

“Piano . . . rallentate, prego, Giuseppe,”
soothed Josephine, slowing him down.
“Può ripetere, per favore?”
I was impressed that my new friend understood Italian, but she caught my look of surprise and casually explained, “Union work is mostly with immigrants—at least half of them Italians.” Then she turned to Giuseppe and asked him in Italian if he knew Nino Tancredi, whose pamphlets I had seen at her home.

“Everybody, they know Nino,” laughed Giuseppe, now very much at ease, and continued to tell the news. Once in a while, she would stop him, and ask,
“Che?”
or
“Quale?”
Giuseppe would explain, sometimes pointing animatedly.

I could tell that many of the things he related were sad, even grim. He faltered at one point, overcome by emotion. He had a lot to tell. Then he got up and went to a bureau against the wall, bringing back an envelope on which were pasted several colorful stamps. He took out the pages and read something from one of them. Josephine listened intently, her head slightly cocked as if to indicate full attention.

When he stopped speaking, she asked him a number of other questions, which he answered, some in detail, a few in monosyllables. Then she asked him a final question, which he answered, pointing at me, saying what sounded like
“sua mama,”
and
“lettera.”
Josephine’s brow was knitted, while Giuseppe kept pointing emphatically at his letter.

“Addio, Signore Giuseppe. Mille grazie
.” Josephine said, getting up. I stood up too, and looked first at Giuseppe, who beamed at me, and then at Josephine.

“I will tell you in detail on our way,” Josephine said. “It’s not all bad news.”

I climbed down the familiar stairs with Josephine, oblivious of the children who dodged up and down, between us. We walked past the men sitting on the stoop, soaking the late sun as it slanted between the buildings.

We entered a small shop around the corner that sold blintzes, pierogies, bread, and black tea. Its damp air smelt strongly of food. A woman in a soiled apron brought hot tea and placed a plate of sugar cubes before us. Josephine put one between her teeth and sipped her tea, a frown on her face, focusing her thoughts.

“You said it was not all bad news,” I whispered, unable to keep still.

“Yes,” Josephine said, as if I had suddenly switched on a light in a room where she had been sitting alone. “Yes, in a way, it is not completely bad news.

“In the April of 1906, the weather was beautiful,” she began, “and people were out, as usual, working in the vineyards around Boscotrecase, which produced white grapes for the wine, a local specialty. Wildflowers and broom bloomed in vivid patches by the side of the mountain, which began to shudder, and a devastating eruption began. The top of the mountain crumpled, and swift river of lava poured in a torrent down the slope as if emptied from a vast ladle toward the village of Boscotrecase.”

Grandpapa Brendan had given me a childhood full of stories when my head filled with images rising beyond the words themselves. “Vesuvius!” I blurted, remembering the picture on Giuseppe’s wall.

Apparently it had been so unexpected, so eerily swift, that as the sharp smell of sulphur and the drizzle of ash descended on the startled village, it was virtually surrounded by streams of lava, widening, joining up, squeezing shut. Dead tree stumps and live trees erupted into flame as the incandescent streams reached them. Few people got a chance to escape. Those who did were out in the fields, for one reason or another, and had a chance to run for their lives.

“Everyone in Frankie’s family perished,” I told her. “I know. Frankie told me.”

“No, there is more,” Josephine interrupted me. “Giuseppe said that Frankie’s brother, Michele, was with this man Italo Spinelli, a vineyard owner, and he was taking Michele Talese on his horse-drawn cart to Terzigo when they heard the mountain explode. They saw the smoke, the flying boulders, and felt the earth shaking violently. The horse panicked, upsetting the cart and ripping the traces, and bolted. Both men were thrown clear, but unhurt. They saw an enormous fist of cloud opening out over Boscotrecase, its fingers erasing the light, turning into a black wave. Almost blinded by a fine mist of ash, they glimpsed Michele’s little sister, Lucia, running beyond the olive trees, outside the village for the first time in her life, her feet bleeding, her mouth foaming like a colt’s. She was shrieking. They had never heard her voice before. The earth underfoot seemed to undulate like a shaken blanket. The broken carriage jerked back and forth, as if startled into life.”

Michele swept up his sister as if she were an infant, with Spinelli hobbling after them, as they ran from Boscotrecase in the direction of San Giuseppe. He shouted to Italo that his sister Daniela was visiting Boscotrecase with her family, but they both realized there was now no way to reach them. They could see the mountain slope on fire, the lowering clouds of ash, the orange
explosions and the volleys of boulders, and off in the far distance the smoke and rubble of what had been the villages of Striano and Boscotrecase. A few trees with smoking leaves lay uprooted by the tumult, like women with their hair on fire.

Michele ran with his sister in his arms, terrified by the thrumming of the earth, until they reached the village of San Giuseppe, with Italo gasping and lagging after them. Michele managed to drag his sister into the courtyard of his master, the builder Giacomo Miale, while Italo collapsed there, wheezing.

A steady patter of small, porous lava stones and soft ash winnowed down from the sky which now had the look of a collapsed cloud. A sulphurous stench hung in the air.

Michele, seeking shelter, spied the church at the end of the small piazza, beckoned to Lucia to follow him, but she refused to move, crouching, her eyes dilated in fright.
I’ll come back soon,
he gestured to his sister and Italo before limping across the small piazza. As Michele pushed open the heavy wooden door of the church, Italo sat near Lucia, catching his breath. From where he stood, he could see that the vaulted darkness of the church was full of little flames, for it was packed with villagers who were on their knees, holding candles.

As Italo continued to peer at the church, he was startled to see that a filament web of embers flew off the neighboring roofs and coalesced, a fiery Milky Way. As the wind rose and fell, the net of fire descended—as if cast by an invisible celestial fisherman—over the roof of the church. It was followed by a terrible patter of hard, smoking stones. With a wrenching sound, the roof began to buckle. People stampeded into the piazza, trampling over the fallen. But once outside, many were struck down by the new onslaught of stones from the sky. Flying ash continued to swirl above the traces of the church, collapsed under the hail of death.

Italo Spinelli fully regained consciousness a couple of days later. He had been taken by cart, he did not know by whom, to Napoli. He returned to a devastated Boscotrecase a month later. He heard that Michele was dead, as were Daniela and her family. So, he had been certain, was Lucia.

A widower who had lost his home, vineyard, everything, Italo finally decided to come to Boston, with the small number of surviving Boscotrecase neighbors who were migrating here.

•  •  •

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a surprise for Giuseppe at Boston, recounted Josephine. Nicolina’s grandfather Enzo had stubbornly stayed on after the loss of his house in Boscotrecase. He had escaped because he had gone to Napoli to see a notary, and watched the disaster from across the bay, awestruck. His wife’s brothers told Giuseppe that their grandfather Enzo had finally been persuaded to come to America from Napoli. Italo Spinelli had sailed with him.