From Sand and Ash(14)

“I was the best they had, by far,” Eva said again, her eyes on her uncle Felix. “I don’t need an orchestra to be a violinist.”

“You are already a violinist. No one can take that from you,” Felix said stiffly. But his posture belied his words.

Eva watched her uncle retreat with helpless anguish written all over her face, and Angelo had to bite his inner cheek to keep himself from cursing out loud, condemning the outrageous laws and the constant strain on the family he loved.

“Let’s go, Eva,” he said suddenly. “Let’s walk. You need air, and I need gelato.” He didn’t need gelato. He needed to kick someone, to throw rocks through windows, something. He thought about the shop he’d seen along the main piazza the previous week.

It was an apothecary shop, one he’d frequented before. They sold a salve that soothed the ache and protected the stump of his right leg from being over-chafed when he wore his clumsy prosthetic. It was painted a cheery, welcoming yellow. But it didn’t welcome everyone. A sign in the window said, “No Jews Allowed.” And next door another shop upped the ante. “No Jews and Dogs Allowed.” As if the two were synonymous. Angelo had swallowed back the bile rising in his throat and opened the door. A tinkling of bells alerted the shopkeeper of his entrance.

“Buongiorno, Signore,” a woman had called out from behind a row of shelves.

Angelo hadn’t answered, but retrieved the salve he liked from its usual spot and set it on the counter, waiting for the woman to ring him up. She had eyed him warily, his failure to reply to her friendly “good morning” apparently noted.

“How can you tell?” he had asked, unable to help himself.

“Scusami?”

“How can you tell whether or not someone is a Jew? Your sign says no Jews allowed.”

The shopkeeper blushed and her gaze slid sideways. “I can’t. And I don’t care. I also don’t ask.”

“Then why the sign?”

“There is a certain amount of pressure, you know. The Fascisti leave us alone if the sign is on the door. I’m just trying to protect my shop.”

“I see. And the shop down the street? Do the Fascisti have something against dogs too?”

She snickered, as if he were making a joke, but her smile faltered as he glowered down at her.

“I have shopped here for years. But I won’t be back unless that sign is taken down,” he said softly.

“But you are not a Jew, Signore,” she protested. His black seminarian robes and broad hat made that clear.

“No. And I am not a dog. Nor am I a fascist pig.” He’d left the salve on the counter and turned to leave the shop.

“It is not that simple, Signore,” she had called after him, and he’d glanced back at her crimson face. He had embarrassed her. Good.

“It is exactly that simple, Signora,” he said. And it was. With all his heart, he believed it was. Black and white. Right and wrong.

“I need to be back before sundown. It is Shabbat,” Eva said quietly, pulling Angelo back to the present, but she grabbed her hat and gloves with an eagerness that betrayed her own need to escape for a while.

They meandered purposefully, stopping to purchase their favorite gelato in huge portions, determined to forget the world around them for a moment, needing to laugh, needing to forget, needing to pretend that their lives were sweet and simple, if only for an hour or two.

But they would have had to walk with their eyes closed. The world was not sweet or simple anymore. The proof of it was all around them, and neither of them was blind.

“We don’t look like that, do we?” Eva said around a spoonful of ice cream, staring down at the weekly paper someone had left behind near the park bench where they sat to eat their treat. She slid her foot over the pages to keep it from flapping in the breeze. A cartoon labeled “Race Defilers,” depicting a Jewish man with exaggerated features carrying an unconscious Aryan female into his private office, was front and center. Eva picked it up and studied the cartoon thoughtfully. Then she looked up at Angelo and squinted her eyes.

“That looks more like your nose than mine!” She was trying to laugh it off, her voice light and purposely unaffected.

“I have a Roman nose.” Angelo tried to laugh too, but his stomach churned. He’d seen too much of that kind of mockery and “humor” in the Italian press. It had been an ongoing campaign, worsening with the “scientific” manifestos on race, and the blame for all the country’s problems that was constantly focused on the Italian Jews who made up less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

Angelo read all the national newspapers, a habit he’d cultivated when he felt homesick for America. If he was to be an Italian, he had to understand Italy. And he’d tried. But even as a twelve-year-old boy, painstakingly reading the politically charged La Stampa, he wondered if the papers represented Italy or just the government.

“He looks a little like Mussolini,” Angelo said, wishing he could make Eva laugh like she used to.

“Yes. Mussolini . . . and Signore Balbo, who conducts the orchestra,” Eva added drily, and Angelo crumpled the piece of newsprint in his hand. He thought about the picture he’d seen in a newspaper of an Austrian woman sitting on a bench that said, “Nur Für Arier”—For Aryans Only—and he wondered how long it would be before Eva was not allowed to even sit on a bench in her own country.