The Villa Triste (33 page)

As if in answer, the road twisted, then straightened. The big car accelerated, and for a second the horizon was filled with jagged peaks, their teeth sharp and white against the pale winter sky.

The Borgo, where they eventually stopped, was nothing more than a cluster of dark stone houses, a bus stop, and a tiny church set back from a widening in the road. Signora Grandolo parked beside what might once have been a fountain, or perhaps more likely a watering trough. Across the street there was an old shuttered building that looked as if it had been a coaching inn, a last chance to change horses or get a bed for the night before starting the long trip over the mountains and down to Bologna.

Pallioti lifted the second white box off the back seat of the Mercedes. Signora Grandolo locked the car, and started to lead him across the road. They stopped as the taxi that had been behind them chugged into view, its engine straining with the climb. It slowed as if it were going to stop, then disappeared around the next corner. The sound of its engine died. There was no noise from any of the houses, no ringing of telephones or chatter of lunchtime voices. The wind blew a plastic cup that danced in front of them, escorting them towards a narrow opening in a high stone wall that had a small yellow arrow of the kind hikers use stencilled on it.

As they got closer, Pallioti saw the ghostly letters of the old inn’s name bleeding through a thin coat of dirty whitewash.
Il Buon Riposo
. The Good Rest. He wondered if the SS had a sense of humour.

The old drovers’ path was narrow and cobbled. Beyond the wall it led steeply downhill for a few yards before twisting across the slope and evening out. Here the trees were older, their branches more generous, as if they were remnants of the primeval forest that had once crept down to the city. Beech and chestnut leaves rustled under foot. They walked in silence, Signora Grandolo apparently as absorbed in her own thoughts as Pallioti was in his. She obviously knew the path well. The sound of her boots didn’t falter on the worn stones. Pallioti wondered what shoes Isabella had been wearing. Had she stumbled and been righted? Helped by the strong hand of the officer who was holding her arm, polite to the last, proud of his treatment of pregnant women?

The monument stood at the side of the clearing. It had been kept open, the narrow stumps of saplings recently cut back. In the spring, the slope below it would be an undulating wave of green, new growth transforming even the scraggy litter-ridden forest they had driven up through.

The old bouquet had been rained on. The ribbon was bedraggled. Brown threads of rot ran through the unopened ivory buds of the roses and wilted the white trumpet faces of the lilies. Putting the box down, Pallioti picked up the dead flowers carefully and moved them aside while Signora Grandolo removed the lid and lifted out the new arrangement.

This one, too, was white. Its bow was crisp, the buds tight and creamy. She laid it at the base of the simple gravestone and stepped back. There was no sign now of the trench, or of rusted spades. No echo of shots. Just the words:

Caduti per Italia Radio JULIET
15
Guigno,
1944

They walked back slowly. Pallioti carried the box with the old bouquet in it. As they climbed the final slope back towards the high crumbling wall, Signora Grandolo turned to him.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For coming with me.’

‘It’s been a pleasure.’

That shouldn’t have been the right word to use, on a grey chilly day, visiting a memorial, but it was. Signora Grandolo was good company, not least because she had little difficulty in keeping quiet. Companionable silence, Pallioti often feared, was something of a lost art.

He looked at the box in his hands. A piece of bedraggled white ribbon had escaped. There was a card dangling from it. The name of the florist, printed in discreet gold letters, was one of the most expensive in the city. Signora Grandolo reached over, plucked it off, and tucked it into his coat pocket.

‘For your lady love,’ she said, smiling. ‘I recommend roses. Every time. Tell them I sent you.’

Seeing the expression on his face, she laughed. ‘Oh, it’s an extravagance, I know, for the living. And for the dead, an irrelevance. At least that’s what my daughters say. But they indulge me. It’s one of the perks of being very old. And of being a banker’s wife.’

‘I’m glad you do it.’

Pallioti thought of the five pale, perfect buds, like dots of snow, against the hard stone wall of the building in Via dei Renai. Of the lilies, their tiger faces opening to children who ran back and forth through the shiny glass doors of the school.

‘I’m glad someone does,’ he added.

‘Yes.’ She looked at him for a moment. Then she said, ‘Yes. So am I.’ And led the way through the gap in the wall.

As they stepped onto the edge of the road, an engine growled on the hill above. Out of sight beyond the corner, it surged and coughed as the driver shifted gears. Signora Grandolo stopped by the old inn, waiting. Pallioti joined her. As he did, he looked instinctively towards the Mercedes, parked in front of the church across from them, and saw something pale move in the porch.

He looked again. The church door, which had been closed when they arrived, was open. A figure was standing just inside. A woman in a belted coat.

Pallioti felt a flash of anger. He was about to step forward, stride across the road, when a truck, a big eighteen-wheeler, snaked through the corner. The gears ground again as it straightened out, tarpaulin flapping, and gathered speed, juddering past the front of the Albergo Buon Riposo. Looking down, Pallioti realized that Signora Grandolo was holding his arm.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s—’ He shook his head as the truck passed, the sound of it withering down the hill. When he looked again, the church door was closed. The porch was empty except for shadows. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Really, nothing at all.’

Chapter Twenty-One

2 July 1944

I became obsessed with finding out what day it was. I counted on my fingers, trying to understand how much time we had lost in the Villa Triste. I wanted to know what day Papa died. I wanted to know when I last saw Mama, but every time I thought I had worked it out, that it was a Friday, or a Sunday, or a Wednesday, it slipped away from me, ran like water through my fingers. So, finally, I asked a guard. They come when they feed us. I chose an older boy – they’re all boys, but some are barely more than children, and they make me nervous, because they are afraid and clutch their guns. I simply stepped up to him, and smiled as if I was still pretty, and said in my best German, ‘Excuse me, please. But could you tell me what day it is?’

It was absurd, really. We might have been on a crowded street. Or in a cafe. I might have turned, held out a cigarette, and asked him for a light.

For a moment, he looked so startled that I thought he was going to hit me – or issue an order for me to be dragged away, shot there and then for daring to speak to him. Then he made a little bow, and said, ‘Donnerstag, Juni, zwanzig-zweitens. ’ Thursday, twenty-second of June.

I wanted to run away. I wanted to snatch this morsel and scurry back to my cot, hoarding it so no one could steal it from me. But I didn’t. I was very careful. This time, I didn’t make a mistake. I said, ‘Vielen Dank.’ Thank you very much, as polite as could be. Then I turned, and walked away slowly, and did not look back.

When I sat down I was shaking, coddling this tiny piece of civility, holding it like a moth in the cup of my hands, feeling the flutter of its wings and trying not to crush it. Finally, I turned to Issa. She was sitting with her back to me, holding a piece of bread that had been handed out in the line.

‘I know what day it is,’ I whispered.

She did not turn around. I leaned close to her, smelling the hot, sharp smell of her skin – there is little water here, not enough for washing.

‘It’s Thursday, the twenty-second of June.’

I gave it to her like a gift, but she didn’t even look at me. I was so angry I didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day.

It was a few days after that that the new women arrived. They were not more than a handful, twelve or fifteen. They came late at night. Doors opened. There was the sound of feet and some shouting. I had been dreaming – the same dream I always have now, of my own footsteps, slapping on the pavement, walking too fast towards the house on the Via dei Renai. Sometimes Mama is with me. Sometimes Carlo. Sometimes they all follow me in a line, blindly, as I lead them down the street, and turn a corner, and see – not the house, nor even the open scullery door – but a clearing in the woods. And spades. And a trench.

My heart juddered as I sat up in the dark. There was light near the open door. Then it went away and in the silence that followed, I could feel other eyes, many of them, like mine, staring into the dark towards the figures that stood there. They huddled together, and suddenly reminded me of the trip Papa and Mama had taken us on when we were children, to Venice. There, in the corner of Saint Mark’s, Papa had shown us the sculpture of the Turkish soldiers, all huddling together, terrified because they found themselves in an enemy city.

The women moved, finally. They crept to a corner and lay down on the floor. Even though there were empty cots, they did not claim them, because they did not know where they were supposed to be and which would be safe to take.

In the morning, we crowded around them. They looked stunned and very dirty, even more dirty than we are. But they had news. They had been moved from a prison outside Livorno, where there had been very heavy bombing. On the way to the trains all they saw was rubble. It looked, one said, as if a monster had come, gnashing through stone and brick, destroying anything that lay in its way. We formed a cordon around them, keeping out the women we do not trust, those who hand out the food for the Germans, while they whispered, telling us they had heard that the Allies were somewhere south of Siena, that the line was inching forward, that the Germans were being pushed back but only with massive effort. There was heavy fighting. And terrible stories. Of all the divisions, none are feared more than the Hermann Göring Division, and any of the Waffen SS, and the Fallschirmjäger – the Hunters who Fall from the Sky. Women and children have been herded together like sheep, and shot. Bodies have been hung from lamp posts. Half a village that had sought sanctuary was burned alive in a church.

Even when they finally stopped talking, we refused to leave them alone. We made them repeat everything. We peck, peck, pecked at them, like hens starving for kernels of news.

Issa did not join in. She lay on her cot and merely blinked when I told her what I had heard.

This went on for two more days before I understood – and when I did, I was so ashamed of myself. I did not see what was before my very eyes. And I should have. Because I have seen it before.

Last winter, in the hospital, we had more and more people, usually women, who would stop eating. Who would just sit and stare. Or hug themselves and rock. At first, we would try to make them move, stand them up and make them walk, up and down the halls, or around and around the cloister. Some got better. Some began to look about, to ask a question, respond, reach for a spoon or a cup of water. But others didn’t. And finally, the Head Sister made us move them. She ordered beds to be set up in a cramped little room of their own, behind a closed door, where no one could see them. When, with another nurse, I protested, she listened to us. Then she fastened us with her small dark eyes and asked us which we thought was more dangerous. The Germans, the influenza, or despair?

She looked at us. ‘You are too young to understand this,’ she said, her voice still hard. ‘But despair, that is what will kill you faster. More efficiently than the flu. More completely than a bullet. And it is contagious. Very contagious.’ She shook her head. ‘You think me cruel,’ she said, ‘I know. You think me far from God. But I cannot risk hopelessness spreading through my patients.’

So they were locked away, out of sight. Amongst ourselves we called their room the corsia degli perduti. The ward of the lost.

Now I looked at Issa and saw what I should have seen before.

That night, there was soup. There was cabbage in it, and some potato, and it was even warm. I had to stand in line for a long time, and I could only fill one cup. The woman with the ladle didn’t look at me, her eyes didn’t look at anything as she slopped it over my hand and over the rim. I turned away, then I stopped and bent to lick the back of my hand. I looked at the soup in the cup. In three swallows I could have drunk it all. Issa wouldn’t care. She didn’t want it anyway. I took a breath, then I held the cup carefully in both hands and walked back to her.

She was sitting up, on the side of her cot, staring at nothing. I sat down next to her.

‘Here,’ I said. ‘It’s good. It’s even warm.’

She didn’t move.

‘Take it, Issa. Please.’ I could hear the wobbling of tears in my voice. ‘If you don’t eat, you’ll die,’ I whispered.

She turned and looked at me.

‘Good,’ she said. And I slapped her.

The soup spilled onto the mattress. The cup clattered to the floor. My palm hit her cheek so hard and fast her neck snapped.

‘You!’ I jumped to my feet. ‘You are the most selfish person who has ever lived! I didn’t want to be a hero, Issa,’ I said. ‘I did it for you. Because you asked me to. I’m here because of you, and you can’t even be be bothered to try to live. You have everything!’ I shoved my face down, so close to hers that our noses were almost touching. ‘You have a baby,’ I hissed. ‘Don’t you think that I would give my left arm, my life, to be carrying Lodovico’s baby?’

She stared at me, her eyes wide, but I couldn’t stop.

‘Carlo died.’ I spat the words at her. ‘Yes. But at least you had a chance to be with him. And he did everything he could to keep you alive. Who do you think told them you were pregnant? This is how you repay him? By letting his child die? He saved your life, Issa. You don’t know what love is!’

I whirled away from her but she caught me by the hair. Even without eating, even in despair, Issa was stronger and quicker than I was. She yanked my head backwards. She was reaching, trying to claw at me, when two other women pulled us apart.

‘For God’s sake, for God’s sake. You’ll get us all in trouble, stop it!’

I was shaking. Tears poured down my face. One of the women put her arm around me, she pulled me away. When I looked back, I saw someone else pushing the cup aside and snatching the piece of potato.

Huddled, turned in on herself, curled like a snail in its shell, Issa cried all that night. But the next morning, when I brought her a piece of bread, handing it to her without speaking, she ate it.

That night, a woman died. No one knew until the morning, when it was light and she did not move. Did not get to her feet to jostle for water. They took her body away. I didn’t know her name. No one did. And to be honest, no one really cared. Because something was happening.

In the afternoon, they lined us all up and called out our names. I was terrified that they would begin to split us up, march us away – suddenly that awful place seemed preferable to any number of other awful places. We could at least cower here until the Allies came. Surely, I thought, they must be in Florence by now. Must be about to burst and spill over the mountains. I grasped Issa’s hand. She was standing beside me. Then I felt a flood of relief, because they weren’t splitting us up. Instead they called our names, then pinned little triangles of cloth to our clothes – on our shoulders, like medals. Yellow, red, black. Anyone who took hers off – anyone without one – would be shot.

When they had gone away again, we compared them all, trying to understand what they meant. Someone said yellow was for the Jews, and that seemed to be right. Red was rumoured to be for political prisoners. No one knew what black stood for. Issa and I were both red.

They came for us the next day, at around noon. We knew when it was because we could hear the bells. They lined us up, four abreast in our tatty, filthy clothes, like some kind of beggars’ brigade, and told us we were marching to the train station.

The guards were pleased with themselves, you could tell. They had shined their boots for the occasion and they shouldered their rifles as if they were having a parade – marching about in their idiotic step, barking orders and pointing their guns at a miserable group of half-starved women. I told one, who looked about seventeen, barely old enough to have fur on his chin, that his mother, wherever she was, was ashamed of him. I think he would have hit me if we hadn’t started just then.

I had Issa by the arm, because although she had begun eating again, she was still not strong on her feet. I was afraid that if she stumbled or fell, she’d be trampled. Or shot.

‘Stand up,’ I whispered. ‘Stand up and stay close to me.’

When we came outside, it was raining a little, not enough to make us clean, but enough to make it cooler than before. They marched us over the Ponte Nuovo, and down the Via Stella towards the forum. Despite the drizzle, on both pavements, either side of the street, there were crowds. They were silent, just staring, so quiet all you could hear was the tramp of feet. I don’t know if they were ordered to be there, or if we were entertainment, like a circus, or animals in the zoo. Perhaps they felt a sense of relief, seeing us. Or perhaps even gratitude, because any one of us could have been one of them, but wasn’t. We marched on past those blank faces, a brigade of Judas goats.

Then, as we got close to the forum, something happened. There was some kind of disturbance. The street is narrower there, and Issa and I were towards the back, so I couldn’t see, but there was shouting and our little parade slowed, then stopped completely. This upset the guards. Anything that isn’t planned upsets them. An officer started to bark orders, and one of the soldiers near us ran forward. And that was when I heard the sound – the mewing hiss men make in the street – and looked sideways, and saw them.

They were two men standing in the crowd, at the edge of the pavement. One was rather grubby, in workman’s overalls, and the other was wearing a suit. They beckoned. It wasn’t much, just the tiniest motion of a hand, but I saw it.

I don’t remember the message getting to my brain. I don’t remember a voice in my head that said, ‘run!’

But that’s what I did.

I had Issa by the elbow and the wrist, and with both hands, I dragged her.

I didn’t think. It was four, five, six steps. And I was waiting for the moment – for the crack and the blackness. But it didn’t come. Instead, I saw shoes, legs, arms. As we reached the pavement, they parted, and surrounded us, and pushed us down and backwards – parcels passed hand over hand, into the crowd.

When we were upright again, coats had been shoved onto us. The triangles had been ripped off – I saw a tiny scrap of red under my shoe that someone bent down and grabbed.

It all happened very fast, and in silence. Lire notes were stuffed into my pocket. A hat was jammed on my head. I was still clutching Issa’s hand when someone shoved me hard from behind and hissed, ‘Go.’