He stood abruptly, shoving the chair away behind him with both hands, and began to pace the room, going around behind Vittoria, then circling back, slapping the top of the divan as he went past, touching a hand to his forehead, straightening a pencil on the desk, making slow, nervous circles. One, a second, a third.
“They threatened to come back,” was all Vittoria could manage.
“Threatened, threatened,” her father said loudly, pacing. He switched direction and was going clockwise now, touching everything he passed as if to keep it in place. To keep his life from disintegrating, object by object. “I cannot believe they abandoned us. After all these years of feeding them.”
How much do you know about your parents’ marriage? The question echoed in Vittoria’s mind. What she knew was that the comment her father had just made was precisely the opposite of what her mother would have said. Precisely. Her father saw himself as keeping the workers alive. Her mother saw the workers as keeping the family alive. “You called them and asked them to come here, didn’t you?” Vittoria said. “The Nazis.”
Her father didn’t hear, or was pretending not to have heard. “No, no. No more,” he was saying now. She wondered if he’d been drinking—which would have been highly unusual for him at this hour of the day, but then, there had been grappa on his breath the last time.
“You brought them here, the Nazis,” Vittoria couldn’t keep herself from repeating, more loudly now.
Her father stopped between Vittoria and the desk and looked down at her. His whole upper body seemed to wobble from side to side, as if the words, or her tone of voice, were gusts of wind threatening to knock him off his feet. He blinked, watched her. “I’ll call them and tell them not to come again,” he said. “They won’t come again. I’ll call them.”
A sudden wave of the purest sadness cascaded over her, a vintage sadness, well-aged. Vittoria could feel her eyes filling with tears. There was pity again, for the man who called himself her father, but this time the pity was drowning in a vat of something else. There was no urge to get up and embrace or comfort him. None. Only a thin line separated narcissism from true evil, and she saw now that her father had crossed to the other side.
She stood, turned around, and hurried out the door without closing it. Instead of fleeing to her own bedroom, she fled to her mother’s. A coat of dust covered the bedposts and chairs. Vittoria ran her hand across the books on the shelves, making a trail with her fingertips, searching for a particular volume.
Twenty-Nine
Carlo’s pistol and knife were taken away, and he was marched down out of the field by two German soldiers pointing their rifles at his back. As if, he thought, I have the strength to run. From the direction of the apple orchard where he’d spent the night, he heard the harsh rattle of submachine gun fire—four bursts that caused his shoulders to hunch up to his ears. They weren’t shooting rabbits or deer, not with those guns. They were shooting human beings—others hiding there, perhaps, an Allied scout, or a group of villagers who’d failed to turn someone in. He wondered if he might be the someone those villagers had been falsely accused of hiding.
Step by dusty downhill step he went, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, expecting at any moment to feel bullets ripping into his back. Even before being called up to the army, he’d heard the horror stories about what Nazis did to their prisoners, heard that sometimes they’d force victims to dig their own graves before being executed, so there would be less work for the captors afterward. He’d always wondered why people would bother to obey. Why not just throw down the shovel, say a prayer, and let yourself be killed?
Now he understood. He wanted to stay alive. He wanted to see and hold Vittoria again. He clung to the hope—however thin—that the Nazis wouldn’t kill him, that someone or something might intervene. An American sniper, a merciful German commanding officer, a bolt of lightning. Something. Anything.
Step by step they marched him down the hill. At a huge, flat-topped boulder—it made him think of the stone they called l’altare on the SanAntonio estate—the path took a sharp left turn, and below them now he could see a gravel road and beyond it parallel ranges of green hills descending to the west. A German truck waited at the shoulder, the kind of vehicle he’d been seeing on Italian roads since 1940: large cab and railed flatbed with a swastika flag flying at one corner. Except this truck was painted in mottled green and light brown. Desert camouflage. After a moment, he realized it must be a survivor of the disastrous North African campaign. Another soldier stood at the tailgate, rifle pointed lazily at the ground. Carlo saw a man in the bed. Plain work clothes, Italian he guessed. The man was sitting calmly with his back against the cab, tied hands resting between his knees, and an expression on his face that would have fit a peasant boy about to head off on an outing to the circus.