The Light in the Ruins

  Friedrich and Bayer stood perfectly still and watched the spiraling ash, too, suddenly oblivious to her and the fact that Bayer had just shot a healthy, beloved horse and one of his soldiers was down. But Schreiner, the private with at the very least a broken arm, managed to sit up. The other private looked at him and then went to stand beside the two lieutenants.

  It was Bayer who spoke first. “How the hell is the one still standing?” he asked. It was as if, in the numbness that seemed to envelop them all after the blast, he had forgotten that he and Friedrich had been fighting.

  “I gather the plan was to bring them both down?” Friedrich asked.

  Bayer nodded. “Do you have any field glasses?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” Bayer said after a moment.

  “What is?”

  “These days,” Bayer said, “the Italians can’t do a damn thing right. But seven or eight hundred years ago? They could build a fucking granary we still can’t blow up.”

  Friedrich turned away and knelt beside Cristina. Schreiner was looking down at the way his arm was hanging limply by his side.

  “I’m sorry,” Friedrich said to her, his anger subsumed by his grief. He was aware of how small and impotent his words sounded.

  She realized she was shaking. Her whole body was trembling and she couldn’t stop crying. But she continued to gaze across the narrow valley that separated the estate from the village because she was afraid to look down into the eyes of her horse. The animal’s head was dead weight in her lap. She thought of the uncountable hours she had spent riding and brushing her. As the marchese’s daughter, Cristina had grown up in a rarefied and profoundly insular cocoon. She had not been friendless, precisely, but her world would have been far more lonely had it not been for Arabella. Likewise, the horse, Cristina knew, had trusted her. The horse had trusted her absolutely. And now? Now it had come to this. She felt Friedrich’s hand massaging the back of her neck where it met her shoulders, and she turned her attention from the smoldering remains of the granary to Bayer. Then she looked down and noticed Friedrich’s holstered pistol. A wisp of a thought came to her, vague but hungry, and she leaned against him, ducking beneath both his arms, and in one single, swift motion unsnapped the holster and pulled free the Walther pistol. He tried to grab her hands and stop her, but she was too fast. She rolled away from him and stood, aiming the gun at Bayer.

  “You killed my horse!” she shrieked at him. “Your people took my house and you killed my horse! I hate you! I hate you all!”

  Friedrich rose to his feet as quickly as he could, but it still took him a moment. By the time he was standing, already Cristina had switched off the safety and retreated two steps away from him. “Cristina,” he began, extending his arm toward her, his palm open. “Don’t do this.”

  Bayer glanced back and forth between Friedrich and Cristina, and Friedrich thought he looked nervous—but not nervous enough. Cristina was hysterical, covered in horse blood and at the moment capable of anything. “Rein in your girl, Strekker,” he said, and there was just the tinest hitch in his voice.

  Friedrich didn’t give a damn if Bayer was shot dead; some people deserved to die. He didn’t care if the two privates were killed, too. But he didn’t want Cristina to shoulder that responsibility if she lived. And so, calculating how his tone needed to straddle a plea and a command, he murmured, “Cristina, give me the gun. Don’t make this worse.”

  “Worse? Damn you! Damn you all! This can’t get any worse! Look what you’ve done!” she yelled. “Look!” she ordered them, and she waved the gun for the briefest second between the smoke in the village and Arabella.

  “I know,” Friedrich agreed, and he hoped his voice didn’t sound like he was only trying to mollify her. But he feared that it did. From the corner of his eye, he saw Schreiner watching intently from the ground, but the second private might be able to inch his way behind Cristina. He wished he could will the idea into the fellow’s head. “But it can get worse. I know this as well as anyone. Things can always get worse. There is …”

  “What!” she screamed back at him, sobbing. “What!”

  The other private was going to be no help: Cristina had spotted him and moved farther back, so now she had all four of the men in front of her. But Friedrich also had the sense that the longer she didn’t shoot, the less likely it was that she would. So he decided just to keep talking. “There is always going to be bad luck,” he said. “There is always going to be war and destruction and buildings that collapse on our feet. There is always going to be someone who panics and shoots our horses. But what you’re doing right now is just lashing out, and I’m telling you, you’ll only make things worse. Save your anger and revenge for—” And then he stopped, because her eyes had moved off Bayer and him and on to something behind them. He turned and saw that Oriana had walked over to the dead horse on the ground. With her nose she was nuzzling the animal, trying to lift Arabella’s head off the grass. To awaken her. But of course she couldn’t.

  When Friedrich glanced back at Cristina, their eyes met for just a second. Then she lowered her arm and marched past him, slamming the grip of the pistol into his palm. When she reached the two horses, she collapsed onto the ground and pressed her forehead against Arabella’s and cried into the animal’s long face.

  Bayer exhaled audibly. “Schreiner,” he said to the private, “can you walk?”

  “Yes, sir. I think I can.”

  “Good.” He ordered his two men to follow him away from the stable and back to the villa. “The British will be here any minute,” he said, grabbing Oriana’s lead line roughly and pulling her away from Arabella and Cristina. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The Germans were gone by the middle of the afternoon, and Francesca stood on the terrace overlooking the swimming pool, her hands on the balustrade. The pool, half empty, was a swamp now. A cesspool, the water the color of rust. The soldiers had used it first as a bath and then, once they knew they were leaving, to clean their kits. They used it to fill the radiators of their vehicles. The last thing three soldiers did before piling into the back of a lorry was to stand on the tile along the east side and urinate into the already fetid water.

  “I’ll clean it,” Massimo said. She looked down. She hadn’t realized that her son had joined her.

  “Grandfather and I will clean it,” he went on. Then he put his pinkie into his mouth and silently sucked on the finger. She guessed he did this because he knew he was far too old to suck his thumb, and when she and Beatrice had confronted him, he had said he was merely biting a nail. As if that were really so much better. The boy had started sucking his pinkie when the Germans had arrived. She hoped, now that they had left, he would stop.

  She ruffled his hair. “Where is your sister?” she asked him.

  “With Nonna.”

  “What?” Francesca asked, unable to hide the concern in her voice. She thought that her mother-in-law was down at the stable. She thought that both Beatrice and Antonio were there. They were with Cristina. Her in-laws actually believed they could bury Arabella. A marchese and his wife, both well into middle age, digging a grave big enough for a horse. Pathetic. Pathetic and ridiculous and sad. She didn’t want her little girl either to see the dead horse or to witness the spectacle of her family struggling against the dry, rocky soil with shovels. “She’s at the stable?”

  “No. Only Grandfather and Cristina are there. Nonna is trying to find some sheets to make the beds. She and Alessia are upstairs.”

  Francesca turned and yelled up toward the row of windows that marked the second floor of the villa. “Alessia!” she called out. “Alessia!”

  A moment later she saw her mother-in-law and Alessia both peer out of one of the two nursery windows. “What do you need?” Beatrice asked.

  Francesca shook her head. “I just …”

  Beatrice looked anxious. “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to know where you were.”

 
“We’re right here,” she said, and then she and Alessia retreated back inside the room.

  “See?” Massimo asked.

  She smiled down at him. The ruins of the granary had stopped smoldering. They had not heard the thunder of artillery in more than two hours now. She presumed the fighting was over. She and her in-laws were still holding their breath, wondering if they would be occupied next by the British. But she was holding out hope that for their family, the war was now finished. The tide had rolled over them, brutalizing them, but they had survived. She had her son by her side, and her daughter was upstairs helping her grandmother try to make the villa habitable once again. The battles would now be to the north. Her husband would return, and just as her mother-in-law insisted, they would start the long process of rebuilding their lives.

  Somehow she knew this. She had never been more positive of anything in her life.

  They couldn’t bury the horse, Cristina feared, her heart sinking along with the sun. She and her father were physically incapable of breaking the earth—weeds and thistles and roots—and carving a deep enough grave. And even if somehow they did manage to excavate sufficient soil and rock, the idea of her father and her dragging Arabella by her legs into the hole made her a little nauseous. But she feared that her father was not going to stop digging until he was dead. They’d been at it with shovels and picks for nearly two hours. Every few minutes she was able to convince him to rest with her, and she saw that his shirt was as wet as her dress. Dirt and dust were epoxied by sweat to the fabric of their clothes, but when she looked down, she was relieved: Arabella’s blood was lost to the stains from the brown Tuscan soil.

  Now the two of them were leaning on their shovels, the spades wedged into the ground, and she saw that the flies once again were feasting on the deep black bullet wounds on Arabella’s face. Cristina left her shovel and, as she had all afternoon, knelt before her horse and shooed the insects away. When she looked up, she saw her mother approaching.

  “I couldn’t find enough sheets for all the beds,” she said. “Where did they go? Did the Germans steal them, too?”

  Her father smiled grimly. “You should have buried the sheets instead of the silver. Instead of that old mirror.”

  “I’m serious. Why would the soldiers steal our sheets?”

  “The medics took them,” he explained. “They’ll use them for bandages.”

  Beatrice nodded and then surveyed the insubstantial dent her husband and daughter had made in the ground, seeming to contemplate the sheer impossibility of what the two of them were doing. “You both should come back to the villa,” she said finally. “Finish the job tomorrow. Maybe we can find something to eat.”

  “Really?” Antonio asked. “The Germans took the sheets but they left us some food? How very kind of them.”

  “I’m sure I can find us something,” Beatrice said defensively.

  Cristina stood and joined her mother. “Mother’s right,” she said. “We should rest. Tomorrow we’ll be stronger.”

  “No, it can’t wait until tomorrow,” her father told her.

  “Why?” Cristina asked.

  “It just can’t,” he said stubbornly, his eyes darting briefly toward the thick brush on the far side of the barn, and Cristina understood. She understood instantly. If they left Arabella unburied tonight, tomorrow they would find a brutalized, half-eaten carcass. The wild boars would devour much, if not all, of the animal. And so with a renewed, fierce determination, she returned to the spot where she had been working and started to dig.

  “Do we have more shovels in the barn?” Beatrice asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Antonio said.

  Her mother glanced once again at the horse, and then, without saying another word, she marched into the barn to find a shovel so she could dig, too.

  Antonio and Beatrice sat down in the grass, the last of the sun a fading thin ribbon of red to the west, the sky to the east almost plum. Cristina patted the hillock of dirt with the back of her shovel. The grave was shallow, but somehow they had buried the horse. Cristina thought that her back was more sore than it had ever been in her life, and the palms of her hands were awash in blisters that already had split open. They burned. The soles of her feet had deep cuts the shape of the shovel’s footrest from her efforts, hours earlier, to break through the earth. She could only imagine her parents’ agony. Yet her father had not allowed her horse to become food for the boars.

  On the path to the villa, Cristina saw her nephew running toward them, but in the dusk she was unable to distinguish the features on his face. She presumed he was coming here because he was bored with his sister. Or perhaps Francesca was tired of waiting for all of them and of watching her children on her own and had sent the boy to retrieve them.

  When Massimo arrived, he went straight to his grandfather. Antonio made no attempt to stand but instead pulled the child down onto the ground beside him.

  “My boy,” he said, his voice unexpectedly light, “I see your timing is perfect. We have just finished.”

  But Massimo neither laughed nor took offense. “Mama told me to get you,” he said, panting. “You need to come back right now.”

  “Right now,” Antonio repeated, smiling a little bit. “What’s the big news? What could possibly have your mother so excited?”

  “Partisans!” he said.

  Antonio’s voice instantly turned grave. “What about them?” he asked.

  “They’ve come to the house! There must be five or six of them!”

  Antonio pushed himself to his feet and then extended his hand to Beatrice, helping her to stand, too. Cristina limped over to them.

  “Where are your mother and Alessia?” he asked the boy.

  “They’re in the kitchen. The leader is demanding food and medicine.”

  “Good luck finding either,” Cristina said.

  “Medicine,” Antonio repeated. “Are some of them hurt?”

  The boy nodded. “One. A girl. She’s dying, for sure.”

  Beatrice looked Massimo in the eye. “A girl? Your age?”

  “No, I mean Aunt Cristina’s age. She’s a partisan, too.”

  “Has she been shot?” Cristina asked.

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know she’s dying?”

  “They have her lying on her side and I saw her back,” he answered. “It was horrible. Alessia cried when she saw it.” Then he took his grandfather’s hand in both of his and started pulling him toward the path. Grimly, Cristina and Beatrice followed.

  1955

  GIULIA RETREATED BACK into the bedroom and pushed the door shut. Frantically she grabbed the wooden chair that sat before her vanity and angled it against the doorknob. Then she gazed at the dark room, at the shapes of her sleeping children. She tried to recall what there might be here that could serve as a weapon. In the kitchen there were knives, but she wasn’t in the kitchen. In the living room there was a wrought iron poker beside the fireplace, but likewise, she wasn’t in the living room. Some evenings she and Vittore had brought candles into the bedroom, but tonight the candlesticks were still on the dining room table. And the phone? It was on the other side of the apartment; it might just as well have been in another country.

  She guessed that she could jump from the second-story window with Tatiana in her arms, but she was sure to break or sprain her ankle. And Elisabetta? She was four. Who knew how badly she might hurt herself in the leap to the cobblestone sidewalk? Besides, then what? She and the girls couldn’t possibly elude whoever had—and she told herself she was panicking as the vision lodged itself in her mind—cut the heart from the police officer who was supposed to be protecting her and her family.

  But she could cry for help out the window. She could scream—and to protect her children, she was prepared to scream loud and long.

  She pressed her ear against the door, the wood unexpectedly cool, listening. But there was nothing, only the rapid thrum of her heart in her head. She breathed
in through her nose, trying to calm herself, and she thought she detected a new aroma in the apartment. Lemons. Was it possible? She thought she might have had a lemon in the kitchen, but why would that scent come to her? Or was it her imagination? It must have been, she told herself, because if she smelled anything now, it wasn’t citrus; it was a gas, a rotten gas. Something putrid, perhaps wafting up from the street.

  “Mama?”

  She turned and saw the silhouette of Elisabetta sitting up in bed. Giulia opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She realized she was afraid to move away from the door.

  “You should be sleeping.”

  Serafina turned and pressed the tip of her cigarette into the ashtray. She was sitting before the glass doors to the terrace, just inside their apartment. She saw Milton leaning against the wall in his pajamas. She hadn’t heard him emerge from his bedroom. “I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said to him softly.

  “No, not at all.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. She had been sitting in the dark and watching three apartments across the Arno that still had their lights on. She assumed that the people who lived in each had fallen asleep with a lamp or two on, because she had seen no movement in any of them. “Do you think there are people awake across the river?” she asked.

  He ignored her question and flipped on the sconce on the far wall. It wouldn’t be so bright that it would blind them, but it would allow him to see what he wanted. He pulled a chair around the table so he was sitting beside her. “So,” he said, pointing at the ashtray. “You’ve smoked two cigarettes.”

  “I guess.”

  “But—let’s see—there are seven matches in there.”

  Serafina sighed but said nothing. She knew where this was going, and there was nothing to say. She watched him lean over into her lap and very gently pull up the hem of her nightgown. Resigned, she put her hands on the sides of the seat for purchase and raised her hips ever so slightly, enabling him to settle her nightgown at her waist and expose her legs completely. She stared across the river at the three lights as he parted her thighs and then listened to him as he slowly counted to five. She didn’t have to look down to know what the burn marks looked like, especially once he brushed away the ash.