Page 52 of Daughter of Genoa
‘Not immediately,’ Massimo said. ‘They hid with friends nearby for a couple of days, and on the third day… I can scarcely believe it. Theywent back. Just to pack up their things. Achille stayed with their friends – he thought it was men the Germans were after, men they could draft. But the others, Margherita and Lia and Claudio, they were at the hotel when the Fascists came looking.’
‘Oh, Massimo.’ I was filled with horror: for them, for him.
‘When Achille came back in the morning and found them gone, he turned himself in.’ His voice was bleak. ‘He couldn’t have done otherwise. He couldn’t have lived with it. The news reached me and I was frantic. I didn’t want to leave Genoa until I knew for certain what had happened to Margherita and her family. I knew that there were people at the Curia who were helping Jews – I had friends who had friends there – I went to ask them to help me. I managed to talk to a priest who told me that he could find something out and report back the very next day. I was overcome,’ he said. ‘I cried out: “But this is a miracle!” And he looked at me, this serious little priest with his funny round spectacles, and he said that the miracle, the real miracle, would be if my loved ones ever came back to me. He knew something, Anna. I swear they all do, him and the archbishop and maybe even Father Vittorio. They know more than we do about what the Germans are up to, though they’ll never say it.’
He hung his head, and for a moment we were both silent. ‘There was news when I went back,’ he said quietly at last. ‘Margherita, Achille and the children had been taken to Florence and put on a train heading for the Brenner Pass. My darling, you have to go,’ he said, and he looked up now and fixed me with haunted eyes. ‘You want to stay and keep working, I know. And I want to keep you – I want you with me day and night, but you must go. You must.’
‘But what about you? Won’t you come to Switzerland, too?’ It was a desperate hope, because I knew him, just as he knew me. But I still had to try. ‘I shan’t go,’ I said. ‘I shan’t go anywhere unless you go with me, and bring your daughter. I’m quite serious. If you want to save me, then you’ll have to save yourself and her as well.’
‘My daughter is safe where she is,’ Massimo said, ‘and that’s well away from me. And I have to stay in Genoa. I’m bound up in all this, and I have been since the first day I went to the Curia. Too many people depend on me now. You ought to understand that.’
‘No, Massimo, I don’t understand. You’ve told me yourself that you have all these high-up contacts: in the questura, the Red Cross, the church. And some of them value you especially, because you were once valued by a man they admire. You’ve persuaded them to help others, but you won’t ask them to helpyou. And why shouldn’t you? You’re in far greater danger than any of them.’
‘You know that isn’t true. The Germans—’
‘…will treat anyone as a Jew who helps a Jew. I know that. And I know they’re all taking risks, but we’re not talking about ordinary people here, like Silvia and Bernardo. These are powerful men who have their own protectors, institutions, networks they can hide behind. You don’t have any of that, so you have to start protecting yourself. It’s foolish not to do so, but it’s more than that. It’s morally and ethically wrong,’ I said, with all the conviction I could summon. ‘It’s unforgivable, and I won’t forgive you.’
Massimo shook his head. He was so composed, so sad, that my heart ached because I knew that I had lost. ‘Everything you say is perfectly true. If you don’t want to forgive me, then I shan’t ask you to. But I still don’t know what happened to Margherita, or whether I might ever get her back, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t leave until I do. Besides, nobody does anything properly unless I’m around to run things – people mean well, but that isn’t enough, and you know it. Mistakes end up being made, and those are infinitely costly.’ He reached out and touched my face, ran his thumb across my cheek. ‘My work will be harder without your help, darling Anna. I trust you as I can trust very few people in this world. But in another way, it will be so much simpler. I know how that sounds,’ he said as I closed my eyes and stifled a wave of pain. ‘I do know. But it’s easier if I have only myself to worry about. And I can keep going if I know that you are safe – that if I survive, and if this ends, then I shall get to see you again one day. Please don’t deny me that one assurance.’
It was unarguable, all of it. And I’d turned down a lifeline once before, the one my mother had offered; I knew, deep down, that I mustn’t do that again. ‘Then I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to, you’re right, but I’ll go. Thank you. Thank you for helping me.’
Massimo pulled me into his arms. ‘Oh, thank God.’ The catch in his voice made my throat hurt. ‘I love you. In case you hadn’t gathered,’ he added with a shaky half-laugh, and pressed his lips to my cheek.
‘I love you, too,’ I said. And I clung to him, as though he might be torn from me at any moment.
35
Vittorio
Silvia was right about the tonic. After just two days, it’s relieved the insatiable exhaustion and finally allowed him to sleep deeply and well, with a satisfaction he hasn’t felt in months.
The problem is, that’s all he wants to do.
He doesn’t meditate, or examine his conscience, or pray the Liturgy of the Hours. He doesn’t work in the library. He doesn’t wash himself or shave. He can only pick at the meals don Francesco has sent up to him on a tray; he rarely remembers to drink, and even more rarely uses the lavatory. He stays cradled in sleep, waking only in extremis: when his bladder irks him, when his joints hurt, when his father looms large in his dreams. Then he wakes with a start and a gasp, and lies there staring into the dark while his pulse races and patterns dance before his eyes. Sometimes the dream lingers like a miasma, and he feels that his father is actually in the room with him, a glowering presence at the end of his bed. Vittorio knows it isn’t real – that the brain plays these tricks sometimes. But he still has to say a prayer against evil before he can sleep again.
On the third night, his father is there more and more. On the fourth night, he won’t leave. Vittorio prays endless decades of the rosary; he begs St Michael the Archangel to protect him; he turns over and presses his face into the mattress, clamps the pillow over his head, but the vile angry Thing is still there.Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, why have you forsaken me?
When the morning bell rings, he washes, shaves and dresses and goes out into the corridor. The community is silent. The priests are silent, of course: that’s the order of things. An hour’s private meditation before the day’s business can begin, each in his separate room. When was the last time he observed that rule? Vittorio can’t remember. He isn’t very sure what he’s going to do now, for that matter. He knows only that he needs air, and light, and to be away from his room and that sickening presence. He gets into the elevator and goes down to the ground floor, to the door at the back of the church.
Outside, it’s quiet. Via San Lorenzo is lined with German cars, but the Germans themselves are scarce. Curfew is barely over and they clearly don’t expect trouble, not at this time of day. Only a small group of soldiers, loitering together outside the Palazzo Ducale, cast him an uninterested glance as he begins to walk down the road towards the seafront. Because it’s that he needs to see; he knows that now. He knows it’s been destroyed, reduced to rubble by bomb after bomb after bomb – from the air, from the sea – and the Marinaio shipyard must surely have been destroyed too. Perhaps if he canseethat it’s gone, his father will stop haunting him and he’ll have some peace.
The old port is ahead of him. He can’t see the sea yet – there are buildings in the way – but he can smell it. He should really turn left down dark, narrow via Chiabrera, cut a few minutes out of his walk, but he wants to stay out in the open and look at the water. That’s something he missed in Rome and London; even in Genoa, he doesn’t get enough of it. And so he keeps on walking until he reaches the arched gallery of piazza della Raibetta, and he turns left and follows the ravaged line of the seafront; pausing for a moment when the flat, silvery sea comes into view, letting himself take it in. He walks and walks, following the railway tracks until he reaches the point where Marinaio e Figli should be, but there’s nothing. No bombed-out buildings, no broken signage or abandoned hulls. The only sign that this was ever a shipyard is a right-angled slipway that extends, ruined and half-submerged, out into the water.
Vittorio stands and looks at the empty place that once housed his father’s pride, and he waits to feel something: relief, perhaps, or compassion, or triumph. But he can’t feel anything except a rising nausea. He’s aware, standing here in the pale morning sun, that he hasn’t eaten or drunk since the previous afternoon. The sickness keeps coming; his head swims, and the ground beneath him starts to tilt and sway like a boat on rough waters.
Someone grabs his arm. ‘Easy, son,’ a voice says – his father’s voice, the voice of his nightmares. Vittorio stumbles back, but the Thing has hold of him. His free hand goes to the rosary that hangs from his cincture, seizing the crucifix with shaking fingers, pressing the Lord’s agonised body into the clammy flesh of his palm.
It’s looking at him, the Thing. It’s looking him right in the eye. It’s older and stouter and pinker and whiter than the Thing that haunts his room, but it’s still his father, and its grip feels solid and strong. He tries to pull away and it pulls him back again, its fingers almost crushing his wrist, and he knows that this is something worse than an apparition.
‘Calm down, won’t you?’ the commendatore says, and rolls his bloodshot eyes. ‘Christ’s sake, you’d think I were the Devil himself.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Vittorio asks. There’s a tremor in his voice that he can’t still.
‘Same as you, probably. Looking at the wreck of your lost inheritance – and yes, I know you didn’t want it; you don’t have to tell me again. Will you stop that?’ he says irritably as Vittorio squirms in his grasp. ‘I’m just trying to keep you upright. I don’t know what the Jesuits have been doing to you, but you look half-dead. Come and sit down.’
Still gripping Vittorio’s wrist, he guides him to where a pile of shattered stonework and broken girders has been assembled, ready for clearing. He settles Vittorio onto one of the girders and looks around for a place to sit himself, finally perching on a flattish piece of concrete.
‘Now, you stay,’ he commands, and takes out a flat silver flask from inside his jacket. Silver flask, English tweed. Like Fulvio, butheisn’t like Fulvio at all. He unscrews the cap and thrusts it under Vittorio’s nose; the florid smell of brandy makes his gorge rise.
