The Light in the Ruins (28 page)

“This wasn’t Volkssturm. This was a Panzergrenadier division. This was the battle for Budapest.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. I’m puzzled. Cristina Rosati’s Romeo—her desperate first love—might very well be dead. In fact, he probably is dead.”

“But …”

“But I don’t believe he was ever in Budapest in 1945.”

1943

CRISTINA REACHED THE barn on the estate and dismounted. She rubbed Arabella’s long nose, savoring the aroma of the field grasses that clung like perfume to the animal, and then walked the horse into the shade. It was early September. She stretched her back and gazed toward the fields, where she saw Ilario and another, much older field hand repairing one of the irrigation channels in the distance. They were working with their shirts off. Ilario looked up and saw that she had noticed them, and so she smiled and waved. Then she bent over to unstrap the saddle. As she was lifting it off, she saw that Ilario was jogging toward her.

“You don’t need to stop what you’re doing,” she said when he reached her, assuming he wanted to help her hoist the saddle onto its shoulder-high prongs in the barn and sponge down Arabella. “I can do this.”

He paused and looked a little confused. Apparently this wasn’t why he had come over at all. “No, I …”

“Go on.”

“I didn’t know if you’d heard. I just learned myself.”

“What?”

“The British have landed! Americans, too, I think. They’re in Salerno. Right this minute, they’re fighting in Salerno. Maybe tomorrow they’ll be in Naples.”

She tried to focus. Everything was happening so fast. “And you know this for a fact? It’s not rumor?”

“No rumor. The BBC.”

She said nothing, wondering where Marco was. He had been among the soldiers who had been ferried across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the boot in mid-August, an evacuation of over one hundred thousand Germans and Italians, but they hadn’t heard another word from him or about him in the three weeks since.

“I thought you’d be happy,” Ilario said, his tone rippling between disappointment and disgust.

She had recurring visions of what it must have been like for Marco when the battleships had started shelling the island, based on the little—very little, actually—Friedrich had told her of his experiences in France and Russia.

“But you’re not happy,” Ilario was saying. “You’re thinking of that Nazi you’re in love with, aren’t you?”

She looked at him. Why in the world had she ever thought there was something attractive about him? “No,” she answered, correcting the farmhand. “I was thinking about my brother. But of course now I am thinking of Friedrich, too.”

“Soon the Allies will be here, and he’ll be gone.”

She didn’t understand why he would say that—why he would be so cruel. So hurtful. She couldn’t see why he wanted to make her suffer. Her instinct was to lash out, perhaps remind him caustically that yes, Friedrich might soon be gone, but Ilario would be here forever, caring for sheep and propping up the sides of irrigation channels. But she kept her composure, telling herself that she was a marchese’s daughter and there was no need to lodge a dagger in this … boy’s heart.

“I need to cool down and brush Arabella,” she said evenly. “The Allies may be in Salerno, but that doesn’t mean all work here has to stop.”

Vittore was kneeling before a statue of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in a badly lit storage room in the Uffizi basement, trying to read the inscription that had been carved four hundred years earlier into the base. He was grateful to be working down here in the
cool dampness this morning. The outside air was heavy, and he had found himself sweating as he had walked along the Arno on his way to the museum. When he heard someone running down the stairs and then racing along the corridor, he sat back on his heels. In a second he heard Lorenzetti’s voice behind him and turned around.

“We’ve made peace with the Allies!” Lorenzetti told him breathlessly.

Slowly Vittore stood and brushed the dust from the floor off his pants.

“Aren’t you listening to me?” Lorenzetti asked, his eyes giddy. “The war’s over!”

“No, it’s not.”

“It is! We’ve surrendered!”

The Allies had taken Sicily and were fighting south of Naples. Clearly they had no plans to leave Italy. But, Vittore knew, neither did the Germans. “All that means is we’re going to have to fight a different war,” he said, rubbing at his temples. He wondered what this meant for Marco, and worried.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” Lorenzetti asked.

“The Germans.”

“The Allies will be here any moment. We wouldn’t have surrendered if there weren’t a … a deal.”

“What kind of deal? The Hermann Göring Division is going to part for the British and the Americans like the Red Sea? The Germans have been streaming south for months. All we are now is an occupied nation.”

Lorenzetti leaned back against the cold wall. “You’re wrong. You have to be,” he said.

Vittore felt the pockets of his uniform pants, wishing he had even a stub of a cigarette. He didn’t. “Have you seen Decher this morning?” he asked.

“No. Should we go find him?”

“He’ll find us.”

“If you’re right, Vittore—and I’m not saying you are—where do you think that leaves us?”

He honestly didn’t know, and so he said nothing. He tried to outline his options in his mind and didn’t really like any of them.

Erhard Decher felt an exhilarating rush of adrenaline when he read the order. This wasn’t combat, but at least it was confrontational. It was work that actually mattered. He was being sent a dozen men from the Florence garrison to round up and disarm the Italians in his group. Then they would have a choice: they could either pledge an oath to the new Italian government the Germans were propping up or become—and Decher rather liked this term, because it meant the Italians were not prisoners of war, precisely, and thus lacked protection under the Geneva Convention—military internees. Decher speculated that a gutless recreant like Giancarlo Lorenzetti would vow allegiance even to Hitler if it meant he’d be spared, but Vittore Rosati? He was less sure what Vittore would do—and he was less sure what he wanted Vittore to do. If the fellow knuckled under, he’d lose respect for him, and the truth was, Vittore was among the few Italians for whom he had any admiration. It would also mean that his adjutant would continue to sleep with the fellow’s slatternly younger sister, and no good was ever going to come from that relationship. On the other hand, if Vittore showed a little spine, he would have to arrest him, and that, in turn, might result in Decher’s having to forgo the pleasures of the Villa Chimera. And the colonel was fast growing accustomed to the charm of Antonio Rosati’s estate. Besides, he liked taking people there; he knew it helped his career.

He looked out his office window and gathered himself. Then he barked out his door for Strekker to join him. When he didn’t hear the lieutenant slide his chair back from his desk or the fellow’s annoying limp, he shouted for him again. Irritated, he strode to the
doorway to demand the young man’s attention and was surprised to see that he wasn’t at his desk. He shook his head, trying to recall what errand he or Voss must have sent the lad on.

But the Allies were stalled at Salerno. Penned in for weeks.

Every day that September, Francesca studied an antique map of Italy that hung behind glass in the villa library, waiting for news of Marco or news that Naples had fallen or news that the British and the Americans were on the road to Rome. She waited, unlike Cristina, for news that the Germans were leaving Italy.

But that news never came that autumn. Naples was officially liberated on October 1, but it was clear that the Nazis were going to stand firm along the river Sangro, well south of Rome. The western edge of their defense would be particularly formidable: a chain of mountains anchored by a place Francesca was told was called Monte Cassino. Erhard Decher did not know or would not share all the details, but one night when he was dining in Monte Volta, she overheard him and an SS colonel—SS, she thought, galled, in the dining room of the Villa Chimera—boasting that the Germans had fifteen divisions along the line.

Meanwhile, Cristina continued to see Friedrich in Florence and here in the country, basking in the idea that she had a lover and in the particulars of the young man who had placed an emerald along the small of her neck. The children continued to romp in the swimming pool until it grew too cold, and then they took their dolls and toy soldiers to the quiescent grass along the hillsides above the Etruscan tombs. And Antonio and Beatrice watched the estate shrink—the harvests were smaller to begin with, and the Germans quickly absconded with whatever was grown or butchered—but still they entertained what was now an occupying army whenever the Nazis in Florence wanted a night in the country.

And while the Allied planes flew overhead with increasing impunity, no one took seriously the talk that the Germans were
going to bring an antiaircraft battery to Monte Volta and set up the guns atop the medieval granary towers.

Now, the November air damp and the twilight falling early, Francesca once more turned from the map in the library and pulled tight a shawl around her shoulders. This was, she realized, neither heaven nor hell, and she recalled a canto from Dante.
My family
, she thought with disgust,
is commingling with the cowardly angels. We will pay. We will all pay
. It was only a matter of time.