“Sit up straight. You deserted?”
“I didn’t desert. I was wounded in the first battle, at Licata. The man beside me was killed. I was unable to move for many days. A family cared for me.”
“And now what? You’re returning to your regiment?”
Carlo felt too tired to lie again. He shook his head. “Going home.”
The officer let out a short, bitter snicker through his nose. “This,” he said, “this is why we’re having the trouble we are having with our brave Italian allies. They don’t fight. They want to go home, eat pasta, drink wine, play music, have sex. Meanwhile, my men are being killed.”
Carlo shrugged, slumped again.
“Sit up!”
“I wouldn’t be of much use now, fighting,” he said. “Could I have more water?”
The officer ignored the question. “Hold your right hand on the table,” he said.
Carlo placed his hand there and the officer took it, as if in some bizarre ritual, soldier to soldier. “Squeeze as hard as you can,” he said.
Carlo squeezed. In spite of everything—the exhaustion, the hunger—he hadn’t lost all his strength, not in his hands, at least. Fifteen years of scything and shoveling and clipping vines six days a week had made them into steel tools. The officer was clearly trying to break his hand, but Carlo squeezed back, squeezed back, refused to surrender or cry out, and held eye contact, as if the very last bit of pride inside him was making a final stand. After a full minute, the Nazi grinned and let go. “You won’t fight,” he said, “but you still have strength. Which is lucky for you, because if you didn’t, I’d have you killed. Today. This minute. You’re strong. We heard your friend say he can cook. Lucky for both of you because we have a pile of your dead countrymen behind the building, rotting in the sun, too cowardly to fight, too weak to work. You and your fat cellmate will have the honor of building the weapons that will ensure the victory of the Reich. Say thank you, and I’ll give you water.”
“Thank you.”
The man laughed again, made no move to refill the glass, but instead called out in German. Carlo was taken back to the cell, where, through a parched tongue and lips, he gave Carmine the full report.
“No torture?” Carmine asked. “No pulling out fingernails?”
Carlo shook his head.
“What then?”
“You were right: we’re going to be sent north to work.”
“We’ll work,” Carmine said quietly. “You watch how we work. We’ll work like the old men on the benches in Napoli work. We’ll make bombs that fall apart while they’re still in midair.”
Thirty
Once all the other workers had gone, Paolo’s mind was overtaken by a frantic whirl of fear and worry. He sat at the low table in the barn and very slowly ate his tea-soaked eggs, sausages, and bread. When the meal was finished, he carried his cup out to the well—the water there so much better tasting than the water from the indoor tap or the cistern—and stood at the edge of the courtyard, taking small sips and staring at the vines. In a little while, Enrico burst out of the manor house’s side door and trotted across the gravel toward him, and Paolo could see that, magically, most of the sadness had disappeared from the boy’s face. His drooping mouth and wide-set eyes carried, again, the light Paolo was used to seeing there. The light of heaven was the way he thought of it, as if what had been taken from Enrico in the womb had been replaced with the promise of an afterlife free of pain. As if sorrow couldn’t stick to his skin for more than a day. Many times Paolo had seen it. Many times he’d been grateful to Enrico for reminding him that there was more to life than worry and duty, that there might be something to hope for at the end of these six or seven or eight decades of struggle.
“Can we work, Paolo?” the boy asked happily, coming up close beside him and putting one hand on Paolo’s shoulder in imitation of the way he’d seen men act with each other. Almost everything Rico did, Paolo thought, was a mirror of what the people around him did. He said things he’d heard other people say; he did things he’d seen other people do. That wasn’t so different from the way everyone behaved, but it was as if Enrico had a special talent for holding on to the good and filtering out the bad. He didn’t complain, wasn’t lazy, never spoke badly of anyone, was as kind to the animals as if he knew they had souls. And, no matter how his own father ignored him, Rico always greeted the man with a happy Papa!, as if he were joyously surprised to see Umberto, or as if the Signore had ever once been affectionate toward him in return.