The Light in the Ruins

  “Who is torturing us now?” she heard Francesca murmuring as her sister-in-law sat forward on the chaise. She was wearing a straw hat, movie-star sunglasses, and a pair of red slacks that were far too tight to be matronly. Massimo and Alessia were playing in the dry grass near the chimera, using both his lead soldiers and her cloth dolls. They had apparently concocted a game in which scale and historical authenticity were irrelevant: the dolls were at least three times the size of the soldiers.

  “Is Father expecting someone?” Cristina asked. She was feeling a pang of nervousness, and the apprehension grew worse when she heard the sound of heavy boots crunching along the white stone path from the front of the house.

  But her breath caught in her throat and she found herself reaching for a towel on one of the wrought iron chairs when she saw who it was. And then—emboldened in the same strange way she had been at the museum, first inviting Friedrich to join them in Arezzo and then sitting beside him at the café—she resisted that urge and stood perfectly still in her wet bathing suit, leaving the towel on the headpiece of the chair, as the German lieutenant limped with care along the uneven stones toward the pool. She had wondered in the bath just last night when she would see him again. She had heard his voice in her head when she had slipped beneath the water, and felt acutely the weightless tingling she had experienced when his left leg inadvertently had brushed against hers under the table. She was at once impressed with what she imagined was the bravery that had cost him his foot and the intellectual rigor that had led to a posting at the Uffizi. She had not dreamed of him—at least that she could recall—but she had thought of him in bed before falling asleep and immediately upon waking. She had thought of him as she had ridden Arabella that morning. And now here he was.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said, and he stopped walking only when he had reached her. Abruptly Francesca rose to her feet and strode over to them. She grabbed the towel Cristina had left on the chair and foisted it upon her young sister-in-law. Pushed it with unexpected urgency into her hands. A little defeated, Cristina wrapped it modestly around her waist; she knew if she didn’t Francesca was likely to embarrass her.

  “I was retrieving some paperwork and a painting in Siena,” Friedrich continued, “and I realized how close I was to Vittore’s home. And so I had my driver make a short detour. I thought perhaps I could see the Etruscan tombs that so dazzled Colonel Decher and Major Lorenzetti.”

  A sentence formed in Cristina’s mind: No, she thought, you have come to see me. But because Francesca was beside them, radiating anger and protectiveness like a hot oven, she kept the words to herself.

  “You’re a resourceful soldier,” she said instead, a quiver of nervousness in her voice that she hadn’t expected.

  “And a good student. I want to learn,” he told her. His hands were clasped behind his back and his heels were together. His posture was so erect that she almost wanted to laugh, especially since his eyes were so incongruously playful. She decided that his officer’s belt, wide and black and sinister on some men, looked more like part of a pretend uniform or costume on Friedrich.

  “So you were ransacking a painting from Siena. You must be so proud,” Francesca said to him, her voice acid. “Which picture?”

  “One of Martini’s. A minor work.”

  “There is no such thing as a minor work by Simone Martini. Did you pillage it from the Duomo?”

  “It came from the gallery,” he answered, offering her a small smile. “And it will be returned. It needs some restoration work, that’s all.”

  “You must be parched after your drive,” Cristina said to him. “What can we get you?”

  “Water will be fine, thanks.”

  She recalled that he had preferred sparkling water when they were in Arezzo. “We don’t have sparkling water here. Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, laughing. “Really, I don’t want to be an imposition.”

  “You’re not,” Cristina said. “I’d be happy to show you the tombs.”

  “Thank you. That’s very gracious of you.”

  “But we will need candles,” she went on, the giddiness in her voice surprising her. Given the reality that he had but one foot, she considered suggesting that he wait here by the pool while she retrieved the candles up at the house, but that would also mean leaving him at Francesca’s mercy. And so she continued, “Come with me to the villa. I think you’ll appreciate the view of Monte Volta. The granary towers, especially against the sort of sky we have today, look like something by Perugino.”

  “I don’t know Perugino,” Friedrich said, and he offered Cristina his arm. Despite Francesca’s glare, she accepted it.

  “You work at the Uffizi and you don’t know Perugino?” her sister-in-law grumbled, shaking her head in disgust. “So this is what it has come to—we have Germans who don’t know Perugino or Martini deciding what’s art. What a brilliant use of resources. No wonder we’re losing the war.”

  At first they walked in absolute silence, and once they could no longer hear Massimo and Alessia splashing in the pool, the only sound Cristina was aware of was their feet—especially his odd tramp—as they walked along the olive grove. On the opposite hill she saw the teenage boy Ilario moving the sheep onto the western slope, and she waved. Ilario was one of the younger farmhands. He saw her, she knew that, but he pretended to ignore her and didn’t wave back.

  Initially she moved a little more slowly than usual to accommodate Friedrich’s disability, but he seemed to walk at a spirited gait, as he had in Arezzo when they had gone to the café. He really had no trouble keeping up. The sun warmed her skin and she could not imagine the soldier was comfortable in that gray-green uniform with the cap and boots. She had donned a white linen blouse when they had gone to the villa for candles, and even that felt to her a bit like a quilt in this heat. Occasionally the cypress trees were bent ever so slightly by a breeze, and in those moments the jasmine became more pronounced and she inhaled the scent deeply.

  Only as they were nearing the stone crevice that led to the vault did he break the silence. He told her that he did not believe how fortunate he was to have been transferred to Italy. As handsome as he found the landscape in his corner of Germany, nothing could compare to the countryside here. He said—and for a second she wasn’t sure she heard him correctly—that he hoped peace came to Italy before the invading armies did. Before there was real damage. It was a comment that hinted at defeatism, something she never expected from a German officer.

  And so she said, “But there already is real damage. I’ve seen Arezzo firsthand.” She recalled the perfectly rectangular field of cadavers.

  “I don’t want to see your country endure what Russia has. Or Poland. I don’t want it to become another battlefield.”

  “And you think it might?”

  “If people don’t come to their senses? I do. My mother used to get so frustrated with my father. He was a veteran from the earlier war. She used to tell him that if there was a peaceful way to an end or a violent one, people, especially Germans, would always choose the violent route. And that was years before this war began. Years!”

  “You loved your mother very much, didn’t you?”

  “I did. But what makes you say that?”

  “You’ve mentioned her twice in the two times we’ve been together.”

  “It’s probably because you have the same name.”

  “And I look like her?”

  He chuckled. “Not in the slightest,” he said, and she was relieved. Francesca had once joked that weak men always tried to marry their mothers. Vittore had been present and had murmured in response, “Well, that means my brother must be very strong.” It had been a small dig, but Francesca had let it go.

  “What did she look like?” Cristina asked now.

  “A bit like a wild boar,” he said, his voice completely earnest. “A very pinched face, a long nose. A snout, really. And I hate to admit this, but I think she could have
grown very thick whiskers if she had wanted.”

  “You’re horrible!”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And I know you’re exaggerating.”

  “I am—ever so slightly. But yes, I loved her. Even if she was as homely as a fairy-tale creature. She might have resembled a boar, but she certainly didn’t have a boar’s temperament. She was sweet and loving and very, very smart. And I remember that she had a voice like an angel when she would read to me as a little boy.”

  “Is your father …”

  “Homely?”

  She nodded, laughed once.

  “Odd-looking. A little feminine. But some women find him attractive. The older women and the younger widows who live near the museum all think he’d be quite a catch.”

  She focused on the word widows. “Are there that many?”

  “Widows? Absolutely. I’m sure this village has seen its share of death.”

  She thought about this. Monte Volta had been fortunate. It was a town of perhaps eight hundred people, and she knew of only three families who had lost a husband or a son. Her mother had spent time with the grieving families because she felt a distinct noblesse oblige as the marchesa. But Cristina herself had been spared even this responsibility so far.

  “The wounded and the maimed were everywhere when I was last home on leave. As common as children,” he went on. Then, trying to lighten the mood, he added quickly, “I fit right in!”

  She peeked down at his feet. The glance had been an impulse and she wished that she had been able to restrain herself, because he had noticed. He brought his fingers underneath her chin and gently lifted her face toward his. “It was a joke, because it doesn’t bother me,” he told her. “And I don’t want it to bother you either. I mean that.”

  “All right,” she said, her voice softer than she would have expected. Then she watched him close his eyes and lean into her, and so—much to her surprise—she found herself closing her eyes, too, and parting her lips for his.

  The next day Friedrich ambled along the cobblestones beside the Arno and watched the crowd before him on the Ponte Vecchio. Though any moment now the Allies were likely to invade Sicily or the mainland itself, there was little panic in Florence. Food was growing scarce, but it had been all year. Fruit was getting hard to find, despite the season. So were most vegetables. A chicken demanded hundreds of lire, and a black market ham might go for a sterling silver place setting. But the wealthy and the Blackshirts and the Germans were still shopping (he, in fact, was shopping), and they were drinking their ersatz espresso in the cafés. They were sunning themselves in the city’s great piazzas.

  Nevertheless, despite the apparent normalcy he saw all around him in Florence, it took only a few moments of conversation to get a sense of the unease that flowed just below the surface here. Everyone was a little anxious, a little wary. A little hungry. Things could not continue as they were.

  Now he stared into the window of the jewelry store on the bridge and wondered what sort of necklace would look best on Cristina. Against that spot on her collarbone where her slender neck started to slide into her chest. He gazed at the gold and silver, at the diamonds that he could not afford, and at the amethyst that he could. He saw a pair of delicate gold earrings that were shaped like bunches of grapes. In the midst of each was a green stone the size of a peppercorn. An emerald or a peridot. The earrings were small, and so, unlike a necklace, he might be able to afford them. A lot would depend on the jeweler and his feelings toward the Germans. He might loathe Friedrich on sight or he might see him as an ally. Or—perhaps his best hope if he wanted to leave the store with the jewelry—the owner might be frightened of him. Friedrich would prefer that he did not have to intimidate the fellow, but he was prepared to narrow his gaze and stand a little taller if he had to. He wanted those earrings.

  It was interesting that Vittore thought he was such a child, when Vittore had never killed a man. Friedrich, of course, had. He had killed men and he had commanded men. He …

  Quickly he cleared his mind of Vittore, literally shaking his head. The fellow had no interest in being his friend; that was fine. There was no reason to be angry right now.

  Arguably, this whole errand was insane. He was buying a piece of jewelry for a woman he’d seen twice in his life and spent four hours with, total. But three of those hours were yesterday, when they had wandered alone around her family’s estate and held candles up to the ancient paintings on the walls of a tomb. As, afterward, they had kissed for the first time, and then sat holding hands in the shade of a beech tree at the edge of the vineyard.

  He ventured inside the store, the bell on the door tinkling like a wind chime, and he saw an old couple hunched over the counter with, Friedrich assumed, the owner. Friedrich guessed the jeweler was somewhere between his age and theirs. He was forty-five or fifty, a slight man with dark skin, wide ears, and thinning hair that was just starting to turn from black to white. All three of the Italians turned toward him when they heard the bell, and he knew instantly that he was going to be satisfied with whatever he took away with him when he left the shop. The jeweler and his customers seemed to think a hungry lion had just crossed the threshold, and they all shrank a little in stature at the mere sight of his German uniform. Still, he smiled at them, unblinking, and asked if he was interrupting. They seemed so intent on their transaction. As he shambled over to the counter, he understood why. The elderly couple was not buying something this morning; rather, they were trying to sell jewelry they owned. Their clothing—her floral print dress and shoes, his blazer and trousers—was tired and shabby. There were small tears in the seams of his jacket, and the hem on her dress was starting to sag. They were thin and gaunt and their skin had grown sallow. They needed food.

  On a piece of felt on the counter he saw a string of pearls, a pair of diamond earrings, and a collection of silver bracelets that reminded him of the ones his mother had worn. She had been wearing them when she had left for the hospital for the last time, though not when she had come home. She had survived that final cancer surgery, but just barely, and then his father had brought her home to die. Most of the time she was either sleeping, thanks to the morphine, or in excruciating pain. Her last words to him? Go. Just … go. She was not quite conscious, and he was a boy on the cusp of adolescence. Her skin had grown pale as paper and looked to him a little like candle wax. Her bracelets were sitting on the nightstand like coasters.

  “Can I help you?” It was the jeweler speaking to him. Already the fellow had whisked the old couple’s jewelry off to the side of the counter.

  Friedrich said he was interested in the earrings with the green stones in the window. He said he hoped they were peridots.

  “Emeralds,” the jeweler answered.

  “That’s a shame,” Friedrich murmured, trying to affect a tone balanced perfectly between disappointment and subtle pressure. “I can’t afford emeralds.”

  “But you want something green?” the old woman asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it that specifically. I just liked the earrings.”

  She reached into a fraying velvet bag and pulled from it a slender gold necklace. At the center was a lustrous green stone. It was shaped like a rectangle, the corners tiered as if it were a miniature picture frame, and it must have been the size of the nail on his pinkie. The edges had a beveling that reminded him of the shapes on the pedestals he had seen in the tombs on the Rosati land, and of the bands of geometric shapes—specifically, two rows of L’s—that had bordered one of the images that remained on the tufa stone wall. It was even a little reminiscent of a necklace that had been painted onto one of the dancers he had glimpsed by candlelight in the ancient vault.

  “It’s an emerald, too,” she said, as her husband looked away.

  Instantly Friedrich could envision it around Cristina’s neck, the stone against the skin on her chest. He could imagine the way it would accent her lovely gray eyes. But he also knew he couldn’t afford it. There was a lot of gol
d and a lot of rock there. And so he said to the woman that it was beautiful, but it was even further beyond his means than those earrings.

  She looked at him, studying him with her rheumy eyes. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “I would have guessed that. We have a grandson who is twenty-two and a granddaughter who is twenty-four. They left Florence when they were teenagers—when our two sons moved to America.”

  “Are they in America now?”

  The woman nodded. “They are all in New York City. Thank God. They left Italy in 1936.”

  Friedrich put his hand gently but firmly on her arm. He knew well that people—not only Vittore—often mistook his outward implacability for naïveté. He had used that perception to his advantage in the past, and he thought he might here. “Certainly they’ll be safer there,” he said, trying to smile sincerely. He thought again of the unsettling power of his uniform. “Your grandchildren, too.” He took his fingers off the woman’s arm and offered her husband his hand. “My name is Friedrich. Friedrich Strekker.”

  The old man hesitated ever so slightly, but then he accepted it. “Stefano,” he said. “And this is my wife, Nicoletta.”

  The woman picked up the necklace, and Friedrich worried that she was going to place it back in the small bag. Instead, however, she held it out to him. “It’s for your wife home in Germany, yes?” she asked him.

  “No, it’s not. It’s for—” He broke off, unsure how he wanted to describe Cristina. And so he summarized their relationship as simply as he could. “I have an Italian associate at the Uffizi. And he has a younger sister. I was looking for something for her.”

  “You want to marry her?”

  He laughed. “I barely know her.”

  “But she is pretty?”

  “Oh, she is. She is very pretty.”

  “And you work at the museum?”

  “I do.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Go on.”

  “Have you ever done something you were ashamed of? Something you would be sure someday you would never, ever tell your daughter?”