So I study that photograph with the same attention to detail from which I imagine she created it. I squint at the children’s faces and their clothing. Though the photograph is black and white, I can tell they’re standing in front of some Arctic habitat, like the one in the Bronx Zoo. An animal stands behind the little girl. It has white fur, and it’s preparing to slide into the water. A polar bear.
I set the photograph back down on the nightstand and walk to the hallway closet, where I pull down the suitcase from the uppermost shelf.
Iris
June 1940
Rome, Italy
Since the day Iris had returned from her week with Sasha, the tenth of May, the radio remained switched on almost permanently—except when Ruth and Iris were asleep—blaring out tinny news bulletins from the BBC that turned worse and worse as the days went by.
Ruth was so depressed by the news, she spent the first few days in bed, reading newspaper after newspaper, calling for endless cups of tea, and when she finally rose, she said enough was enough, it was time to book passage home while they still could. Iris said she wasn’t going home until the government ordered her to, but Ruth had bought her a ticket anyway, second class, for the SS Antigone leaving Civitavecchia on the twelfth of June. The tickets sat in the desk drawer. Iris refused to open it.
To make matters worse, she’d hardly seen Sasha at all. He worked all day at the embassy, sometimes sleeping there overnight, and Iris missed him the way you would miss breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they were all taken away from you at once, as if she’d stuffed herself at a banquet and been told the next day she couldn’t eat again, ever. In the beginning, he wrote her a couple of tender notes, but since then he hadn’t sent her so much as a postcard, let alone telephoned her.
To be fair, she did warn him that Ruth’s work had dried up and he shouldn’t try to telephone, because Ruth rarely left the apartment except to buy food and newspapers. Iris had never held a job, anyway, which she now regretted because she hated all this spare time, and all the war talk had turned Ruth into a bundle of nerves, snapping at whatever Iris said or didn’t say. The tension grew worse by the day. Iris felt this inarticulate scream in the air between them. To escape, she’d taken to wandering around Rome with her sketchbook, filling page after page with shadowed, moody drawings of policemen and beggars and soldiers, or else the ruins of civilizations past, the Colosseum or the Forum. She would sit on some ancient stone and contemplate arches and columns that once teemed with civic life, and the idea calmed her. What did Gertrude say to Hamlet?—Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die, passing through nature into eternity. Why rail against the tragedy of the human condition? Wars came and went, they destroyed and then created anew. What difference did her small, inconsequential life make among all these dozens of generations, all of them living and loving and fighting and grieving?
One day in early June, she sat in a café near the Palazzo Venezia, drinking listless coffee, while a pair of Fascists argued at the table next to her. Iris took out her sketchbook. Until now, she hadn’t paid much attention to those men in their angry black shirts. She would have liked to pretend they didn’t exist, and anyway she felt no connection to them at all, like foreigners from a country she’d never heard of. Today she studied them from the corner of her gaze. She’d learned some Italian over the past several months, and she could pick out certain words, but the truth was, she didn’t really care what they were saying. She didn’t understand the Fascist creed to begin with; politics had never interested her. Still, they were people, weren’t they? They were men who, for reasons of their own, believed certain things so passionately they were willing to fight for them. In that respect, were they so different from Sasha? Each believed with his whole heart that he was doing the right thing, making the world a better place. Iris took out her sketchbook. She filled in the two men with quick, bold strokes of her charcoal. She tried not to glance at them too often; she stamped the images on her mind and drew from that memory as long as it lasted, and then she dipped for more.
She was nearly done with the drawing when one of them caught sight of her catching sight of him and nudged his friend. They turned to stare at her, at the sketchbook in her lap, the charcoal poised above the page.
Iris flipped the sketchbook shut and looked around for the waiter. Before she could find him, a shadow fell over the table. She glanced up just as one of the Blackshirts snatched the sketchbook from her lap.
“Hey!” She lunged after the book and fell right out of the chair. In an instant she was up again, but the man was already ripping the pages from the book, two at a time, flinging them into the air. The white leaves fluttered and scattered and littered the sidewalk. Iris yelled, Stop, you can’t do that, somebody help, but the other people in the café glanced over their shoulders and turned swiftly away, and the passersby pretended not to notice anything at all, although they took care not to step on any of the drawings.