Page 43 of Daughter of Genoa
I wrapped my arms around him and kissed his cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘What for?’
For making you relive it. For everything that’s happened.‘All of it,’ I said. ‘I’m just sorry.’
‘Well, you oughtn’t to be,’ he said. ‘Damn little you can do about it. Nice of you, though,’ he added, and returned my kiss.
I didn’t want to, but I glanced at the clock and saw that our time was nearly up. Along the corridor, Silvia and Bernardo were squabbling about something or other, his quiet bass mingling with her aggrieved alto.
Massimo sighed. ‘That’s my cue to leave. And now I’m sorry.’
‘I wish you could stay longer,’ I said. ‘If I’m quite honest, I wish you could stay all night.’
‘Do you? I don’t.’ Before I could react, he drew me closer and went on in a soft, low voice: ‘Because if I could, if it were safe, then I’d ask you to come home with me instead. And I’d hope desperately for you to say yes.’
I was beside myself with longing. I thought I might never sleep again. ‘I would,’ I said. ‘I’d definitely say yes.’
‘One day, then,’ he said; and I shan’t ever forget it, because Massimo never usually said things like that. He was too pragmatic, too sensible, too much like himself to talk about a future that may or may not come.
I smiled at him and he smiled back at me: that beautiful eye-crinkling smile that I loved. ‘One day,’ I said.
27
Massimo and I didn’t waste any more time with imaginary walks after that. We did our work, processing as many false documents as we could in tense but companionable silence; and in the leftover minutes we sat close together and talked. Never about anything very sensitive – the door, after all, was almost always open – but about the kind of minor, inconsequential things that assume colossal importance when you’re in love. I salted everything he told me away in my memory, along with every touch and every kiss. I knew it all by heart. I still do.
He loved music, and liked to sing in the bath. He’d failed to finish his degree (‘with only one exam left to take,’ he said with a grin, ‘just to make a truly awful job of it’). He was used to having a moustache, and felt odd without it. Left to his own devices, he’d sleep until noon. These were a few of the more innocuous things he told me; I’ve kept the rest for myself.
But sometimes we strayed into painful topics, as you might brush against an open wound. In late May, on the eve of Shavuot – I was quite oblivious to the Jewish holidays, which my father never observed, and would never have known had Massimo not mentioned it – he happened to tell me that his own family was not very religious. He himself had only ever attended prayer services when they were a man short of the ten required for a minyan; someone or other would run across from the synagogue to ask him to join in. ‘If I was at home,’ he said, ‘I’d usually go. It’s not that I cared much for the ritual, but I liked the people involved.’
When he told me about that, I felt sick. All the distressing images, the fragmented bits of information I’d managed to gather about the raid on the synagogue flooded in at once. ‘Then you live nearby,’ I said.
Massimo hesitated. ‘I used to, yes. Right next door, in fact.’
‘Were you there when… when the Germans…’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No, they came looking for me, but I wasn’t at home. I was lucky. I’ve moved elsewhere now, further away.’
‘But you know what happened?’ I was desperate to find out more, to gain some coherent picture of the event that had haunted me over the last months.
He was watching me, just like the first time we met. ‘I’ve pieced it together,’ he said after a moment. ‘More or less.’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘If you can bear it. Please.’
And he put his arms around me, pulled me close and began to talk in a gentle, matter-of-fact voice. I listened, and terrible images filled my mind: some familiar, some new. The caretaker’s children held at gunpoint; the caretaker, Bino Polacco, forced to telephone every member of the synagogue and ask them to come to a meeting the next morning. The Germans lying in wait for those who trusted and came; Rabbi Pacifici, dragged to the temple and beaten until he was bloody. The rabbi and his wife, Wanda Abenaim, had been among those arrested, imprisoned and deported: more than 250, by Massimo’s estimate. I now know the exact number: 261, of whom just twenty returned.
‘That’s all there is,’ Massimo said at last. ‘I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know any more. I don’t…’
His voice trembled and failed. I was helpless, numb with anger and despair. All I could do was hold him, rubbing his back as his shoulders shook and his tears trickled into the collar of my blouse. ‘Sorry,’ he said after a while, into the crook of my neck. I shook my head and held him tighter.
The curfew broke us apart, as it always did. Massimo let go of me, dried his eyes, blew his nose, cleared his throat. He rose, a little unsteadily, and picked up his hat and coat while I fussed around gathering the cards for packing. Then he gave me a kiss and went out, his head bowed. We never mentioned religion again.
*
I didn’t hear the full story of the raid until after the war, and not from Massimo, but from a priest friend of his who was involved in DELASEM. Don Francesco, a sweet man in round glasses and cassock who reminded me painfully, at first glance, of Vittorio. Massimo, he said, had spent the night before the so-called ‘meeting’ hiding from the Germans. The SS had come to arrest him – they had found his name in the synagogue registers – and he had narrowly got away from them, running upstairs and out through the door that led to the uppermost terrace of his building. He listened to the cars and trucks moving in the dark and he knew that the raid was imminent. ‘Because he had no doubt it was coming,’ don Francesco said. ‘He was sure it would happen from the moment they raided the ghetto of Rome.’
As soon as morning came, Massimo walked downstairs and out into the street as if he had nothing to fear. He went from bar to bar and telephoned everyone he could think of, telling them to stay away from the temple. He must have saved some lives that day; as did his Catholic neighbour, a woman called Romana Rossi Serrotti, who ran out on her balcony and warned the approaching Jews to turn back and flee. For that simple kindness she was arrested and held in Marassi prison. But neither she nor Massimo nor anyone could save Rabbi Pacifici, who was in hiding in a place allocated to him by the archbishop’s office. He, too, had received an invitation from Bino Polacco: this time to meet in secret at the Galleria Mazzini, where the Germans were waiting for him. Don Francesco had tears in his eyes as he spoke of the rabbi, whom he’d admired.
When I first heard all this, I was taken aback. Massimo hadn’t escaped the SS by mere luck: he’d acted quickly, and he’d risked his life all over again in the hope of saving others. Of the many secrets he’d kept from me, that one made the least sense. If you had been so courageous in a situation like that – if you had managed to warn even a few people – then why would you hide it? What was there to lose?
