Transient Desires (Commissario Brunetti #30)(39)

A key turning in the lock of the front door pulled him back from the wanderings that often resulted from his reading. At first he thought it was Paola, because she could always fit the key into the lock without repeated trying. But he waited for the way the door closed. Too loud for her. And then the first heavy footstep.

‘Ciao, Raffi,’ he called out in welcome.

His son appeared at the door, almost as tall as Brunetti, with a mass of dark hair he said he was too busy to get cut, now so long that the top of his backpack pushed at it. Suddenly, Brunetti saw him with new eyes, and saw that his son was handsome. No sooner had he thought this than he searched for a way to alter the thought and judge him as no more than not bad looking, anything that would avert whichever jealous spirits might be waiting to hear words of praise.

They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, talking about the business of their day. Raffi explained that he had decided to come home to write an essay for his Italian History class instead of having dinner with his grandparents. He talked about the teacher of this class, a vocal member of the Lega that had once wanted a separate Northern Italy, to be called Padania, but had now taken the other compass points under its all-encompassing wings.

The teacher and Raffi had already differed on a number of points, including the Italian presence in Abyssinia before the Second World War, which the professor presented as a golden age for Abyssinia. When Raffi mentioned the use of poison gas, dropped from planes, during what he chose to call an ‘invasion’, the teacher denied it. ‘The people threw flowers at the feet of our soldiers,’ he insisted.

‘Why does he dismiss everything I say? Even if I tell him where I found the information?’

Brunetti felt the desire to lean over and ruffle Raffi’s hair and tell him to calm down. Instead, he stretched out his legs and put his feet on the table in front of them. ‘There’s no use in trying to reason with him, Raffi,’ Brunetti said in a soft voice. ‘He’s decided what’s true and what isn’t, so anything you say in argument against him will only provoke him.’

‘But he’s a teacher, Papà. He’s supposed to tell us what happened in the past and where to find the evidence.’

That was true enough, Brunetti thought.

‘Your grandfather was there,’ he said suddenly.

Raffi turned towards his father, mouth open in surprise. ‘What?’

‘My father. Your grandfather. He was there during the occupation.’

‘I never knew that,’ Raffi said.

‘Well, he was.’

‘How do you know?’ Raffi asked urgently.

‘My grandmother had his service record,’ Brunetti explained. ‘She needed it to claim her widow’s pension.’

‘Didn’t he have a pension already?’ Raffi asked, confused. ‘From the army?’

‘He was awarded one,’ Brunetti said, then quickly added, ‘but family legend always said he refused to take it.’

‘But your family was poor, wasn’t it?’ Raffi asked, as though he’d heard something about such a situation and thought he knew what it meant.

‘He told them he wouldn’t take it,’ Brunetti said.

‘That’s crazy,’ Raffi objected, but seeing Brunetti’s sudden glance, added, ‘If they were poor, I mean.’

Brunetti shrugged and smiled, as he so often did when talking about his father’s side of the family. ‘He said it wasn’t right to take money for doing what he did there.’

‘So he didn’t have a pension?’

‘No, not for going to Abyssinia, but he did accept one for being wounded and held as a prisoner of war. He thought it was right that the state paid him for that.’

Raffi rubbed his hands across his face and back through his hair. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘He was a soldier just the same, wasn’t he? Both times.’

‘Yes, he was,’ Brunetti answered, suddenly uncomfortable at the fact that his son hadn’t instantly perceived the difference.

‘So why wouldn’t he take the pension?’ Raffi asked.

‘Did you ever read about what our soldiers did in Addis Ababa? After the attack on Graziano?’

‘He was our general, wasn’t he?’ Raffi asked.

‘Yes,’ Brunetti answered and left it at that, not eager to enter into a discussion of the General or his behaviour.

‘What happened?’

‘Bombs were thrown at Graziano. At a meeting. And he allowed the troops to . . . well, to punish the people of the city.’

‘How?’

Brunetti thought about how best to answer this and finally said, ‘Any way they chose.’

Raffi’s face went blank and grew minimally paler, so much so that Brunetti saw clearly where the moustache and beard were growing.

Raffi leaned against the back of the sofa and folded his arms. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said after a long time.

How strange this scene was, Brunetti thought: usually it was the sons and daughters who came to their parents with the revelation that their nation’s history had not been made by saints and angels, that it too had done the dirty jobs that are part of history, and it was the parents who tried to explain that times had been different then, people had thought in different ways, valued other beliefs, other lives.