“We’re going to take the car and drive to the mountains,” Agnese announced.
“But, Aggie, they won’t let us buy gas. If they stop us, we’ll be put in jail.”
“The trains are too risky. I have plenty of money. We will bribe our way across Italy until we get to the Cabrellis’，” she schemed.
Speranza did not argue with her. They drank their hot milk and espresso and ate the day-old bread in silence. When they were finished, Agnese asked, “Are you ready?”
They went through their home a final time. Agnese quickly straightened the bathroom and bedroom. Speranza carried their suitcases to the door. Agnese joined him in the kitchen.
“Why are you locking the cupboard, my love?” Speranza asked his wife.
“Because I always do.”
Speranza closed the shutters on the window overlooking the canal and swung the latch, locking them shut.
“Why are you closing the shutters on the windows?”
“Because I always do.” Speranza took his wife into his arms and held her close. “Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe when we return, everything will be in place, including the mice. Where is your ring?” He kissed her hand.
“I gave it to Signora Potenza.”
“She’ll hold it for you until we return.”
“She said she would.”
There was a loud pounding on the door. “Ebrei” was followed by more pounding. “Ebrei!” the men shouted.
Agnese looked at the locked window to escape. Speranza thought about climbing to the roof, where he and Aggie could jump from one rooftop to the next until they reached the aqueduct. Instead he did the thing he had done since he was a boy in school. Speranza faced the bully head-on and opened the door.
Two young Blackshirts stood on the stoop of their home, facing the Speranzas through the sights of their gun barrels. They were teenagers, sixteen, seventeen years old at the most. Speranza did not recognize the boys as Venetians. When they spoke, Speranza detected a Bari dialect from the south. They’re recruiting from afar, he thought to himself. They’re already short of troops. That’s a good sign.
The Blackshirts yanked Speranza out into the street, even though he offered no resistance. Agnese said nothing and followed her husband with their suitcases, one for each of them. She looked up and saw the familiar faces of her neighbors in the windows on the street where they had lived for thirty years. They had shared sugar and flour and their lives, but now they did not acknowledge Agnese. She did not expect them to; she did not acknowledge them either.
Agnese and Speranza were herded onto a transport truck, a military vehicle, with a tarp roof. There was no place to sit. The bench around the perimeter of the cargo bed was also overflowing with people. There was not enough room for two more passengers, but the group shifted to accommodate them anyway.
The Blackshirts lifted and slammed the rear gate shut and locked it, trapping the Speranzas inside with the others. The soldiers jumped on the sideboards of the truck as it moved through the piazza to collect more of their fellow citizens.
The House of David was burning in Venezia, but there was neither smoke nor fire.
The train on the first leg of their journey had seats, but upon transfer in Germany, the prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars. Agnese observed a passenger train moving slowly in the opposite direction, back to Venezia. Just three years earlier she and her husband had been on that train, after a holiday in Germany. Agnese could see the pressed white table linens through the windows of the dining car. There were silver flutes with a single pink rose in each window. On their side of the tracks, there was no music or fine dining; there was only fear, muffled weeping, whispered conversations, and hushed prayers. Speranza held his wife’s hand, which soothed him. He closed his eyes because the expressions of terror on the prisoners’ faces were too much for him to bear.
When the train pulled into Berlin, Nazi soldiers separated the women from the men. Agnese was stoic and pushed her husband’s hand away when he tried to hold it. She knew if the Nazis saw they were together, they would separate them to be cruel. They might have a chance to come out on the other side of this if they showed no connection to each other.
Speranza was called off the line by an officer, not a high-ranking one, but he had enough seniority to have acquired new boots. Speranza would not have noticed the boots, but Agnese did. Agnese’s mother had taught her to pay attention to a man’s shoes. A man’s shoes tell you everything about the person wearing them.
When Speranza looked at Agnese, she looked away, but she placed her hand on her heart so her husband knew that it belonged to him.