A Harvest of Secrets(66)

Not one living soul was visible. Nothing except the water moved. There was no sound beyond the twittering of birds in the trees and the gentle plash of the river against the metal of the locomotive and the gray rocks. The doors of every boxcar stood open to the sky. He watched the light change, gray to pale yellow, and suddenly understood what every other survivor must have understood in the night: he had to get away before the Germans figured out where the train was and sent soldiers.

He got to his feet, slowly, painfully. The blood on his shoulder had dried, but his left sleeve was mostly torn away, and his clothes were still wet. The air felt cool against his skin, and against his eye socket. He could walk, though his knees ached. To his left, beyond the last train car, he saw a shallow rapids. He limped in that direction, made his way across. He was upstream from the bodies and so he knelt and cupped handfuls of water into his mouth, one after the next after the next.

On the far side of the tracks, he saw a different hellish scene: bodies—German soldiers, strewn in bizarre poses of death. They’d been stripped of their guns and lay in a ribbon of grass and weeds between the toppled train and a little-used farmer’s road, two dirt tracks, that ran parallel to the river. An automobile rested on the shoulder there, windshield shattered, doors pocked with bullet holes. Carlo approached it warily. In the front seat were two dead men, faces mutilated. Hell, it was. He couldn’t make sense of any of it, but by instinct he hurried along, limping, on the road at first, and then, as it turned away from the river, he realized the Nazis would have to use it when they came, and he angled immediately toward the forest. A few steps into the trees, he stopped and looked back. Again and again he ran his eye over the scene, held there by the horror of it, even as he listened for the sound of a car or truck engine in the distance.

After a minute he realized that he knew this place. As a boy, he’d fished this stretch of the river. He’d swum here. The Chiana. He recognized the cliff face on the far side. The way the river bent away from the old road and formed a deep pool before it disappeared into the trees. There was a gorge farther north, he knew that.

And he realized that he must be only about twenty-five kilometers from the vineyard, from home.





Thirty-Seven

Vittoria sat alone at the huge mahogany dining room table, holding between her hands the note her father had left her. It had been written on their own stationery: heavy, cream-colored paper with a design of one small bunch of blue grapes centered on top, and VINEYARD SANANTONIO 1887 printed beneath it. There was no salutation, only this:

Enough gas in the truck. Leaving to stay with Vito in Viareggio.

All responsibility is yours now.

U.

U., she thought. Not “love,” not “be safe,” not even “your father.” Just U. For a moment, until she checked and saw the V. on the envelope, the tone of it made her wonder if Eleonora had misunderstood, and the note had been meant for someone else. Vittoria read it over a second time, a third, then set it flat on the tablecloth and turned her eyes out the window.

A loathsome idea occurred to her then, a whispered possibility that might as well have been a viper crawling between her feet. She tried, without success, to kick it away. Her father had sent her on the delivery to the SS house in Montepulciano when there had really been no need for her to go. When she’d told him what the Nazi captain had done, he’d seemed unsurprised, unconcerned. Then, after Massimo was killed, her father had called that same captain to come and investigate, and had said nothing to her about it, given her no warning. When she returned from the nunnery and went to see him, he’d seemed surprised, almost disappointed, that she’d made it back alive. Now he’d abandoned her without warning, left her there unprotected, knowing that the captain would almost certainly return. She imagined her father being stopped on the road to Viareggio and giving the Nazi salute to a pair of German soldiers, all thoughts of his daughter and son having already been left far behind.

The idea was so gruesome that she felt physically ill. Her whole being recoiled against it, but she couldn’t seem to escape the suspicion that her own father had wanted her dead, or worse. Or, a slightly less horrible option, that, involved in his own troubles, consumed by them, her father simply didn’t think about what might happen to her and Enrico, didn’t really care.

She answered a question or two from Eleonora, then left the note and her untouched breakfast on the table and walked in a daze, in a kind of deep mourning, out of the dining room, along the hallway, and through the front door. She stood on the patio for a moment, then crossed the courtyard and climbed the slight rise to the smaller of the two barns. Her father had taken the truck and left the barn doors wide open. She went around behind the building to the place where she and Carlo had made love, and she sat down in the soft grass there with her back against the wall.

How much do you know about your parents’ marriage? Sister Gabriella had asked.

She knew a little more now. A little more about who her mother had been, and a little more about who her father was. It seemed to her that they were the perfect representation of the rift in Italian society: change, however naive and vengeful, versus tradition, however unjust and rigid. Thinking about her parents’ marriage, it occurred to her that human beings were always striving for power over one another, a murderous dominance. And that love was the only force in the universe running counter to that. She thought of Enrico, and how the last thing he ever seemed to want, the very last thing, was to have power over another person. And people pitied him!