From Sand and Ash(59)

Angelo raised his hands the way she had done, palms up, curling his fingers toward his chest, so he could see the light reflecting in his nails. He would never have the hands of a scholar, though he supposed he qualified as one. They were large and rough. They looked as if they belonged to a peasant, not a priest. They were his father’s hands, he realized suddenly, the memory rising from somewhere in his past. His papà was wrong. He could have been a blacksmith instead of a priest. He had the hands to prove it.

“Fire purifies,” he said softly, looking at the dirt on his palms. The floor in front of the cross obviously needed a good scrubbing.

Eva nodded. “When we wash our hands and say a blessing in the morning, we pour the water with our right hand over our left, which signifies kindness before might. When we wash we are also remembering the close of Shabbat and the flame or power that purifies.”

He shifted his raised palms so they were no longer tipped toward the candle but tipped toward her.

“I keep reaching for you too, Eva,” he confessed. “I keep trying to grasp what isn’t mine.” He dropped his hands and tried to rise, his bad leg making him awkward and clumsy and his exhaustion making it worse.

Eva rose with him.

“I have always been yours, Angelo,” she said, echoing the very words he’d thought while he prayed. She was his. “But you have never been mine.”

It was true. She had always come second. But now? Now, instead of coming second, he was simply being torn in two. The priest and the man warring with each other. The scripture about serving two masters flitted through his head.

“Angelo?”

“Yes?”

“Life is hard,” Eva whispered, so softly he strained to hear. Then she laughed without mirth, just a quiet huff of disbelief. “Life is hard. What an understatement! Hard is too mild a word for the trouble we’ve seen. Life is hell shot with just enough heaven to make the pains of hope all the sharper. Life is impossible. Ugly. Agonizing. Inexplicable. Torture.” She stopped and he waited, and when she spoke again, her voice was no longer a whisper. She still spoke softly, but there was steel in her words, and he heard her conviction.

“But there are some things that don’t have to be hard, Angelo. Loving me doesn’t have to be hard. Being with me doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to long for me and fight thoughts of me. You don’t have to beg God for forgiveness day after day and pray a dozen rosaries because you’re in love with me. It doesn’t have to be hard, Angelo. It can be the easiest thing in the world. It can be the only thing in our lives that isn’t difficult. If you stop being a priest, no one will die. No one will lose his soul. In fact, there is not a single person on this planet who will suffer at all. You can be mine. I can be yours. And it can be easy.”

Her words clanged through his head and his heart like the old parish priest of the Church of the Sacred Heart was ringing in Lauds, seven hours early. He shook his head in disbelief. No. It couldn’t possibly be easy.

“What about God?” he asked.

“God forgives.”

“What about my vows?”

“God forgives.”

“You are so sure about the nature of God?” Angelo’s voice was mild, even mocking, but his eyes were troubled, his brow furrowed.

“Angelo, there are only two things I know for sure. The first? I love you. I’ve always loved you. I love you now. I will love you in fifty years. I love you. Second: No one knows the nature of God. Not you, not me, not Monsignor Luciano, not my father, not Rabbi Cassuto. Not even Pope Pius XII. No one.”

Angelo’s lips twitched, and he began to laugh. He laughed soundlessly for several minutes, the pressures and the pain of the day giving the laughter a manic flavor. But still he laughed, and Eva, smiling slightly, waited for him to get control of himself. He did, eventually, sighing and wiping at his eyes.

“And what about the people who are depending on me right now, my beautiful prophetess? The Curia, the parishioners, the Jews I am hiding, the network we’ve created? Do I just take off my robes and run away with you?”

“You continue on. I continue on. Until it’s done. Until the war is over.”

“So you will pretend to be a Catholic, and I will pretend I am still a priest?”

“No. I will pretend I am not Jewish, and you will continue to pretend, at least in public, that you aren’t in love with me. Just as you’ve always done.” Eva smirked at him impishly.

“Ah, Batsheva,” he said tenderly, and leaned toward her and kissed her forehead, hardly trusting himself to do even that. “I don’t know whether you are wise or just devious.”

She stared up at him for a long time as if she were thinking it over. Angelo was too tired to put up any walls. Too raw. Too afraid of losing her to forces that were beyond his control. The world was raging all around them. And he couldn’t stop spinning.

“I am neither wise nor devious. I just don’t have the time or luxury for a moral dilemma. There is truth, and there is self-deception. I suppose we all have need of both. Good night, Angelo.” She turned and walked toward the little door to the left of the apse that led to the basement room.

He could only watch her go.





25 November, 1943


Confession: I am a spy.