The Light in the Ruins

  “I’m sorry,” Beatrice told him. “When the Germans left, they took our car.”

  He glanced down at the girl. “I gave her the last of the morphine,” he said, sighing. “When she wakes up …”

  “She might not wake up,” Beatrice told him.

  In the distance they heard the murmur of artillery, and on any other summer night Cristina would have assumed it was merely an evening thunderstorm arriving from the west. “Is she your sister?” she asked Enrico. Then she looked down at Teresa. “Or yours?”

  Enrico stared at her for a long moment. It was as if he were noticing her for the first time. “No,” he said at last. “She’s not my sister. Nor is she my sister-in-law. But she’s like a sister. She’s like a sister to both of us.”

  “What happened?” Cristina asked him.

  Instead of answering her, however, he said, “Tell me your name.”

  “Cristina.”

  “You’re the marchese’s daughter?”

  She nodded.

  “We were fighting in Trequanda and there were more of them than we expected. And they had incendiary grenades.” He motioned with his eyes at the girl on the floor. “Her clothes caught on fire. Her head, her hair. The whole room was on fire. When we pulled off her clothes, we made it worse.”

  “Was anyone killed?”

  “Three of us, including my cousin.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. What happened to your hands?” he asked.

  She hadn’t realized he’d noticed the blisters. “We had to bury a horse.”

  Teresa looked up from the floor. “Today?” she asked.

  “Yes. Today.”

  Cristina spied Massimo in the doorway and wondered how long he had been watching. Enrico saw the boy and gave him a small salute with two fingers. The child ducked behind the frame and then raced across the front hallway and up the stairs to the nursery, where his mother and his sister were trying to stay out of the way.

  “Is he your brother?” Teresa asked her.

  “He’s my nephew,” she answered.

  From the other side of the kitchen she saw her father approaching, shambling from exhaustion and loss. Enrico turned toward him. They had seen each other a few moments ago, when Antonio had returned to the villa with Beatrice and Cristina, but the two men hadn’t spoken. Beatrice had instantly gone to the wounded girl.

  “So you’re the marchese,” Enrico said. He stood a little taller, extending his hand, and Antonio shook it. But then Enrico didn’t release his grip. “The villagers tell me you were a … a very good host to Captain Muller.”

  Antonio shook his head. “The Germans …”

  “The Germans what?”

  “They took what they wanted. They came and they took.”

  “And before Muller? The villagers also told me you entertained the Gestapo. You had parties.”

  “I had no choice. And the last few weeks? My family have been prisoners here.”

  Finally Enrico let go of Antonio’s hand. “So you’re not going to miss your Nazi friends.” His voice was quiet, almost sultry, but still tinged with irritation.

  “I was no Blackshirt,” Antonio said, defending himself. “No. Of course not. No one was.” He collapsed back against the wall by the pantry and coughed once. “God, I’m tired,” he muttered. Leaning beside him was his rifle, and almost sleepily he rested his fingers on the muzzle. When he saw Cristina watching him, he said, “It’s a sniper rifle. British. All our weapons are British.”

  Somewhere Cristina heard the rumble of trucks. She thought they might be on the switchback hill that led up to the estate, and so she grew alert.

  “My daughter-in-law might have a little face cream the Nazis didn’t bother to steal,” Beatrice said. “I might, too. And there might still be a little olive oil. But this girl needs a hospital, Enrico.”

  “We want her to live,” Teresa said, standing. “She’s the last of her family. She’s all that’s left.”

  “Of course you want her to live. But I don’t see how she will without doctors.”

  Enrico grew watchful, his eyes darting to the side. Now he had heard the groan of the trucks, too. They were getting nearer. Suddenly one of the other partisans ran into the kitchen from the terrace. “They’re coming back,” the young man said, a little breathless.

  “Germans?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive. Definitely not British. There are six, maybe seven trucks. They’re bringing back the howitzers, too. I saw them starting up the hill in the moonlight.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” Enrico said, and he knelt down to lift the girl off the tile, but Beatrice put her hand on his shoulder and stopped him.

  “You can’t take her with you,” Beatrice told him. “How can you move her again?”

  “Well, we can’t leave her here,” Enrico said, brushing her fingers off him as if they were flies. Then he lifted the girl in the sheet over his shoulder, hoisting her as if she were a burlap sack because he didn’t dare try to carry her under her back and knees, as if she were a bride. “Where can we hide?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  “No, you can’t hide here,” Antonio said. “I forbid it.”

  “You forbid it? Think again, old man. We can and we will hide here. Because if you don’t find a place to hide us, we’re all dead—you, too.”

  “But there is no place!” Antonio barked. “There’s nowhere to go!”

  “Oh, I’m sure there is. Think. Now!”

  Before her father could answer, however, Cristina spoke up. “The tombs,” she suggested. “You can hide there. I can show you where they are.” Then, even though the soles of her feet ached from the shovel, she started through the doors to the terrace and out into the night air. She paused by the balustrade and glimpsed the peaceful summer moon, so at odds with the way her heart was racing. When she heard the growl of the German trucks as they struggled up the hill, however, she continued on into the grass. She walked quickly but carefully, glancing behind her as she entered the path along which the lavender once flourished. She wanted to be sure that the partisans were following her. They were.

  Marco wanted only to hug his children, swing them one at a time in the air, and then hold on tight to his wife and feel her fingers kneading the back of his neck. He saw himself leaning against her, his head pressing against her brow. Instead, however, he was crouching in the dark in the high grass beside the tortuous gravel road that climbed up the hill to his family’s estate, watching nervously as the last German truck rumbled past him on its way to the villa. He was no more than two hundred and fifty meters from the house. When he had first heard the vehicles, he had hoped they were British. He had assumed they were British. Weren’t the Germans retreating north? Weren’t they streaming away from the Val d’Orcia and the Val di Chiana? In the afternoon he had heard the fighting—he had seen the billowing black smoke from the artillery—and it was up toward Arezzo.

  When the last of the German trucks had come to a stop at the summit and shut off its engine, he could hear the officers yelling their orders. And it all began to make sense. These soldiers were cut off. The British were already behind them and so they were going to create a perimeter and make a stand here.

  He glanced down at the broom, its yellow flowers almost colorless in the moonlight. He hoped his family—Francesca and the children, his parents, Cristina—had fled. Here he had escaped the Germans and trekked all this way, constantly fantasizing about the reunion at the estate and the war’s end for the Rosati family, and now he was praying that no one was home. He had seen firsthand what happened in battle, how mortars and missiles killed indiscriminately, the way shrapnel ripped apart flesh.

  He considered retreating himself. Walking back toward the village and finding refuge there. Surely someone in the town would shelter him.

  But what if Francesca and the children were at the house? Before he did anything, he had to know. He wondered how close he c
ould get to the villa.

  Since the German officers had taken the family’s last remaining candles, Francesca could not even read to her children that night. And so she told them fairy tales to try to calm them—and, she understood, to try to calm herself. The reality was that Massimo and Alessia had seen these German soldiers tromping across the estate for a month now. Certainly Alessia was more annoyed than frightened; she didn’t understand that a fight loomed when the British came to dislodge the soldiers. Mostly she was exasperated by the idea that once again tonight she would have to share her bedroom with the rest of the family. It was one thing to climb into bed with Francesca and Marco on those rare and wondrous occasions when her father had been home; it was quite another to be jammed together like jarred olives with her mother and brother and grandparents and aunt.

  Meanwhile, Francesca worried that one of her children might accidentally mention the partisans who were hiding in the tombs. Massimo, who had been the first to see them and who had watched his grandmother examine the dying girl, clearly felt he had a sacred, secret knowledge, which, like any little boy, he was liable to blurt out at any moment.

  “I’m hungry,” Alessia whined suddenly.

  “Shhhhh,” Francesca said. She had expected that she and her mother-in-law would try to find something to feed the children as soon as Antonio and Beatrice returned from burying Cristina’s horse. Instead, however, the partisans had arrived, and then the Nazis. As a result, her children hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime, when a young German private had given them the hard crackers and canned meat from his ration kit before climbing into the back of a truck and speeding off. Francesca knew the private thought she was pretty, which she guessed was the only reason that he had been so generous to her children. But you never knew. Maybe he had siblings Massimo’s or Alessia’s age.

  “I won’t be quiet,” Alessia whimpered angrily, and she curled up on her side on the bed and made her hands into fists. She punched the wall once. “I’m hungry!”

  “I am, too,” Massimo told his sister from his spot on the floor. He was sitting with his back to the bed. “But there’s no food left. So grow up.”

  Francesca stroked her daughter’s forehead. Outside the window the men were shouting and grunting as they unhitched the big cannons and dug trenches and firing pits. She wondered if she could find that young private. She wished she had thought to ask him his name. “Maybe when they’re finished working, I can get you both some more crackers and sausage.”

  “That wasn’t sausage,” Massimo said.

  “You know what I mean,” she said softly. She heard jackboots pounding up the stairs to the second floor and saw a light moving along the hallway. She braced herself.

  Cristina was just emerging from the path near the swimming pool, moving carefully in the dark, when a soldier grabbed her by the arm and threw her onto the ground. She screamed and tried to roll away, but he took his rifle off his shoulder and pointed it at her.

  “Who are you?” he yelled in heavily accented Italian.

  “Cristina Rosati.”

  “What are you doing here?” His face was black with dirt and his eyes were a little manic. But he was not much older than she was, and he was angry and scared. He wasn’t about to rape her.

  “I live here,” she told him, gathering herself.

  He seemed to think about this. Then he said, “You live here.”

  It was a statement, not a question, but nevertheless she nodded. She realized he suspected she was a partisan and so she added quickly, “I’m the marchese’s daughter.”

  “What are you doing outside right now?”

  She paused, her mind strangely frozen as she tried desperately to find any explanation that was better than the real one.

  “Now! Tell me!” he ordered.

  “I was looking for mushrooms,” she lied, stammering. “I was looking for anything we could eat.”

  “In the dark?”

  “When I started, it was light out.”

  He shook his head in annoyance and slung his rifle back over his shoulder. For a brief second she thought he was going to help her up, but instead he continued on his way, running to the other side of the pool and up the stairs to the terrace.

  There were two soldiers, and the first one nearly stepped on Massimo in the dark. The soldier screamed at the boy in German to get out, to move, and then, after noticing Alessia and Francesca on the bed, he yelled at them, too. Though blinded by the soldier’s flashlight, Francesca scurried to the edge of the mattress and lifted Alessia into her arms. She had started to say something—in her mind, she was going to ask them to be careful, to please leave her children alone—when the first German took the butt of his rifle and smashed it through the half-open window, sending a spray of glass onto the tiles below. Alessia screamed and she felt Massimo grasping her leg through her skirt, his small fingernails seeming to dig their way through the linen and into the flesh on her thigh. She retreated to the doorway, her daughter’s face buried against her neck, the child’s tears running down her collarbone and between her breasts, and watched as the soldiers ripped the drapes from their mounts and tore the louvered shutters from their hinges. It took no more than half a minute. Then, as they caught their breath, one of them noticed that she and her children were still there, watching in mute horror as they destroyed the bedroom.

  Again the first soldier screamed at her in German. He took his hands, including the one with the rifle, and motioned for her to shoo, to leave them alone. Then, his eyes wide in the moonlight that was streaming in through the window, he said, “Il britannico!” and pretended to fire his rifle out toward the courtyard. “Il britannico!” he repeated.

  She nodded. Her children’s bedroom was now the high ground for riflemen. She held Alessia against her with one arm and reached down for Massimo’s hand. Then she raced across the hall and down the stairs, yelling for Antonio and Beatrice and Cristina. They had to find a place to take cover.

  1955

  SERAFINA STOOD BESIDE Paolo at the edge of the terrace at the Villa Chimera in a suitably high-collared black dress and gazed up into the late morning sun. She closed her eyes and savored the warmth on her face. At breakfast Milton had given her a gold brooch to pin to the dress: an eagle with colored beads for the eyes and the tips of the wings. It was, he told her, based on an Etruscan design and so he thought it would be fitting for the day. He’d seen it at a jewelry store and immediately thought of her.

  “This place must have been gorgeous twenty years ago,” Paolo was saying.

  “I’m sure it was even eleven or twelve years ago,” she corrected him. The two of them had made such good time driving to Monte Volta that she had suggested they stop at the Rosatis’ crumbling estate before continuing on into the village for the church service.

  “Indeed,” he murmured. He was looking back at the side of the villa that had collapsed and the small mesa of rubble where once there had been a wall. He was wearing a dark suit today for the funeral, and a gray homburg instead of his usual straw boater. “Can you show me the tombs and the paintings you saw there?”

  “Do you want to see them because you suddenly have an interest in Etruscan art or because you think it will be helpful to the investigation?” she asked.

  “Neither, really.” He smiled at her, his hands clasped behind his back. “Maybe it will help me understand you.”

  She watched a lizard race across the hot tile. “I don’t understand me.”

  He ignored the remark and asked, “The tombs are near where the marchesa and her daughter-in-law will be buried, right?”

  “The family plot is on a hill across from the entrance to them. Maybe thirty-five or forty meters away. No more than that.”

  “Interesting.”

  “The proximity?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s just a coincidence,” she told him. “The marchese’s family has been buried there since the early part of the century—decades before the family discovered the v
aults.”

  He glanced at his watch and then motioned at the village. “I don’t imagine the Rosatis or their escort have arrived yet,” he said, referring to the two police officers from Rome who were driving Cristina, Vittore, and his family to Monte Volta. In addition, Paolo was bringing a third officer from Florence, Luciano Cassini, although Cassini was going straight to the villa. His primary task would be to inspect the area near the Rosati cemetery for spots where assassins might hide. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already a few reporters at the church.”

  “I agree.”

  “So what do you think? Will there be more reporters or more of us?”

  “I give the edge to the press,” said Serafina. “After all, there will only be five of us, including the two fellows from Rome. There could be easily twice that many reporters.”

  “And the size of the crowd?”

  “Do you mean the mourners?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She recalled her day in the village and what people had said about the Rosatis. She thought about the pharmacist and the old men and Ilario. “It will be small. I have a sense that by the end of the war, the marchese and his family were not especially popular. And why should they be? They had cast their lot with the Nazis.”

  “From what you’ve told me, it was more complicated than that. The girl was only—”

  “The girl was the same age I was. And I wasn’t dating Nazi lieutenants. Besides …”

  “Go on.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking about Cristina. Really, I wasn’t. I like her. I was thinking about her father, the marchese. The way Antonio entertained the Germans. The way he used this place for parties,” she said, waving her arm behind her.

  “I’m sure a lot of the village cast their lot with the Nazis. As I recall, they were our allies.”

  “A lot of us never viewed them that way.”