A Harvest of Secrets(10)

“You stay, Signorina,” Paolo said to her, using, as always, the formal Lei instead of the familiar tu. “Enrico and I will unload. Help me, Rico.”

Her brother and Old Paolo carried the first two cases through the gate, clasping the wooden boxes to their chests, bottles clinking. Up the walk and right past the officer they went, disappearing through the front door. The Nazi stepped aside but didn’t so much as glance at them. He was staring at Vittoria, and she sat still, feeling his eyes on her, praying silently, already cursing her father for making her take the trip. When the sixth and last load of cases was being carried in, the officer trotted down the steps, strode along the walk, through the gate, and came up close against her side of the wagon.

“Che bello donna,” he said in his mutilated Italian. The sunlight reflected off his thick lenses at such an angle that she couldn’t see his eyes. “My name is Tobias,” he said, and Vittoria thought, As if I care. He reached out a hand and rested it on top of her right thigh. She slid sideways, but he held on, massaging the muscles through the cloth of her dress.

“My brother will kill you,” she said, but, twisted by fear, the words came out in a squeak.

“Really?”

“Really.” She jerked her leg sideways, away from him. “With a pitchfork,” she said. Con un forcone.

The officer was grinning. He squinted at her—he didn’t know the word—then turned the corners of his lips down as if admiring her courage, or mocking it. “Every time now you come? With the wine?”

She shook her head side to side.

“I visit you then. In your house. Where the famous wine is made. SanAntonio Vineyard. We know it.”

Paolo and Enrico were coming down the walk, approaching the left side of the wagon. The German, standing on the opposite side, took a step back, and she could see his eyes now. He winked at her and turned away. Paolo and Enrico climbed into their places, and, as they were starting off again, Vittoria felt the contents of her stomach rising into the back of her mouth. She leaned over the side and vomited onto the stones.

“You’re sick, Vita!” Enrico exclaimed. “Mama was sick! Now you!”

She reached behind her and put a hand on his head, then pulled him close against the back of the bench for a moment and circled his neck with one arm.

“Let them die,” Old Paolo said between his teeth, too quietly for Enrico to hear. The fury in his voice surprised her. “Let every one of them die. Let them burn in hell.”





Seven

When Carlo regained consciousness—with no idea how much time had passed, hours, days, a week—he was staring up at the face of a woman. Coal-black hair; kind, dark eyes; a lovely smile—for the time it took his thoughts to reassemble out of the fog of unconsciousness, he thought it must be Vittoria.

But no. Too young. A girl, not a woman. Or someone between girlhood and womanhood. The girl was smiling down at him, one of her front teeth chipped at an angle. Not Vittoria. A wave of pain rose up and over him, shaking him from skeleton to skin. He closed his eyes against it, let it pass. Something wasn’t right. The strange girl, the pain. He could feel a piece of cloth across the left side of his face, and the pain there was like nails being hammered into broken bones. His left shoulder hurt, too; at first, he couldn’t seem to move more than his fingers and toes on that side.

“You’re awake at last,” the girl said.

A Sicilian accent. Not Vittoria.

Carlo blinked, stared at her.

“Are you in pain?” she asked. Sente male?

Her voice was a line of lavender sky beneath steely dark clouds.

Carlo tried to nod but managed only a twitch of his neck muscles. He closed his eyes and felt something against his lips. A sponge. The girl squeezed it, and a few drops of liquid squirted into his mouth. Wine, it tasted like. Bitter wartime wine. And then another squeeze, different sponge, tepid water.

Very slowly, minute by pain-wracked minute, he began to form an understanding. Above him, he could see rough-hewn roof rafters. He could smell hay, hear the bubbly clucking of chickens. But it seemed the world had been cut in half; only one eye was working, the other covered by coarse cloth. The girl moved her face so that it was directly above him, strands of her hair falling across his bare chest. He closed his eyes again and remembered climbing out of the foxhole with Pierluigi, forcing himself forward into the terror. Avanti! Avanti! Then a crashing sound, then nothing.

He tried to speak and couldn’t. The girl pressed the sponge against his lips. “Wine for the pain,” she said quietly in her velvety voice. Vino per il dolore.

Carlo swallowed, lost consciousness again for a few minutes, adrift below the ocean in a dream world with the black clouds visible through a wavering prism of water, high above. He surfaced, took a breath, blinked. There was the girl again, steady as sunlight, and here came another wave. “It’s many days you haven’t been awake,” she said. And then, blushing: “My mother and I washed you.”

The accent, the beautiful smile. Working his lips and dry tongue, Carlo found at last that he could produce a word. “Grazie.”

The smile stretched. “If you sit up, you could eat,” she said. “You must be very hungry. The Germans are gone. The Americani, too. We have a little food. Tomatoes. Grapes. No bread, but some milk from the goat.”

She put a hand behind his neck and lifted gently, and though the pain was like nothing he’d ever felt, throbbing in the bones of his face, in his teeth and neck, he flexed his stomach muscles and, with her help, managed to sit up. Holding him with one hand, she dragged something up behind his back with the other. A bale of hay. He could feel it scratching against his skin, and then she leaned his upper body farther forward and lay a piece of cloth or a towel between the hay and his skin and rested him back on it again.