The Garden of Letters (23 page)

The cello welcomes her mourning. The sorrow it carried from its last owner joins with hers.

She closes her eyes as she plays, and sees her father. She feels him in her heart and in her cello.

“You are like me,” he had once told her as he grasped her hand. She remembers the feeling of his fingers wrapped around hers, the way he traced her expansion, and how his palm had enclosed her hand. The pain of his absence softens. He had given her the gift of music, and as Elodie plays her cello, that gift and her connection to him feel eternal.

The September concert at the Teatro Bibiena is now a week away.

Elodie meets Luca at the bookstore, where he informs her that the Wolf will be coming to hear her play. “He says it’s too dangerous to have you come play in his apartment now. He fears the neighbors are watching him. He wants you to play someplace public where he will remain unnoticed.”

Elodie looks at Luca puzzlingly.

“We have promised him a message. We just received new information and it needs to be transferred to him as soon as possible. It must be delivered in your solo.”

“That’s impossible,” Elodie tells him. “It’s already been established that I’m playing the Grutzmacher cadenza for the Boccherini cello concerto. They will never let me play one that I wrote on my own. My professor decides what I have to play.”

“I wouldn’t ask you unless it was critical, Elodie.”

“I need to think about the consequences of this. It’s one thing to play an atonal code in the privacy of the Wolf’s home. It’s quite another to do it in a public theater.”

“You will not have to play more than three unscripted chords, I promise you. The information will be transferred so quickly, no one will know but you and the Wolf.”

“Why can’t we meet in Mantua’s Istituto Musicale? Can’t the Wolf, with his many friends, organize that?”

Luca looks at her and shakes his head. “I wish I could tell you why. I myself don’t fully know all the details. I’m only telling you what I’ve been told. The Wolf is one of our senior commanders. He knows things that even I don’t. We need to do what we’re asked, Elodie.”

Elodie cannot sleep. The silence of the apartment is unbearable. She finds herself alone in the living room at night. She sits there with the bow on her lap and the instrument between her knees. She sees shadows on the floor, an impatient, invisible audience stretching before her. But she can’t think of any notes to play.

She remembers listening to her father playing alone into the night and wonders what anguish had plagued him when he dove into the music like a phantom.

She goes to bed thinking of her father. She sees him at the kitchen table dressed in his robe, his body weak but his eyes burning into hers. She sees him mouthing the word
courage
to her.

And when she sleeps, she feelts her father’s strength flow through her. His voice whispering to her, just as he did when she was beginning her studies of the cello, to reach down and find her fire.

The next afternoon, Elodie goes to the bookstore.

She is wearing a red sweater and black trousers. Her hair is pulled back and the angles of her face look as if they’ve been cut with glass.

“Luca,” she says.

He is at one of the bookshelves when she approaches. She stands in front of him, before he’s even had a chance to react to her voice.

“I will do it.”

Her eyes focus on his.

She looks at him with conviction, her mind now full of the notes that had evaded her the night before. But it’s the melancholy pull of strings. Rather, it’s the clarion call of brass.

“I’m glad you’ve changed your mind.” It is as if a layer of skin has been peeled away and now she is burning in front of him like a flame.

“We can discuss the code the day after tomorrow,” he whispers. “But tomorrow I must leave for Monte Comune.”

“You’re heading out to the mountains?”

“Not to stay. It will just be a day trip. I need to get a few things to my brother and his men.”

“I want to go, too,” she says.

“Your skills are better served on your cello. I’m not wasting them on a trip to the mountains.”

“The fresh air will do me good. I’m the only
staffetta
who hasn’t used her bicycle yet!”

Luca laughs. “Such a complex girl wrapped up in such a tight package. But don’t you have school?”

“I only have a morning class. I can meet you straight after.”

“Well, then, if you’re dead set on going, there is something you can do to help me . . . I need you to pick up a package that we’ll take to the mountains with us. Go to Zampieri’s studio on Via San Guisto first thing in the morning before your class. He’ll give you the package and instructions where to meet me later on.”

“Okay,” she says.

The light has changed in the bookstore’s back room. From the small, narrow windows, Elodie remembers the words in French that her mother told her long ago.
Entre chien et loup
, meaning between a dog and wolf, the fleeting world of twilight. When light surrenders into darkness, or when innocence slips into danger. When one stands at a threshold between the calm and the call of the wild.

The next morning, Elodie arrives at Berto Zampieri’s art studio, and Brigitte answers the door.

She does not greet Elodie by name, but rather gives a faint smile and ushers her into a large room where several sculptures are on display. In the corner is an abstract rendering of a woman reclining. Elodie looks at the figure’s sharp hip and hollow pelvis and senses immediately that it’s Brigitte.

She is standing alone with the smell of damp clay and plaster dust on the floor when Berto walks out to greet her.

“This is for you,” he tells her. She glances at his hands grasping a canvas bag. His hands are clean and without traces of clay.

“No, I’m not sculpting,” he says with a laugh. “No time for that right now . . . I have more pressing things to attend to.”

Elodie smiles, embarrassed that he’s read her mind so easily.

“Luca will meet you at the intersection where the two roads meet at the base of the Monte Comune. There, you will hike the roads together until you get to the camp. Take this package with you.”

Elodie takes the bag from Berto’s hand.

“I understand.”

“Good. Your work has not gone unnoticed, Elodie . . .” He squeezes her arm. “And Luca told me about your father’s recent passing . . . I’m so sorry.”

She stiffens slightly at the mention of her father. The grief is still raw inside her. “Yes, thank you. This is a good way to channel my energies.”

Berto nods.

Elodie takes the bag and looks down at its contents. On the top is fabric for sewing, but it is so heavy that Elodie knows something more important lies beneath.

“Don’t worry, it’s not anything that can explode.” He looks at Brigitte in the corner and smiles. “It’s only some fresh food. If anyone stops you, just tell them you’re going to a picnic.”

Elodie places the parcel in her basket and begins pedaling. She travels through Verona’s narrow alleys, past the Porta San Giorgio until the city streets become country roads and the farms and olive groves overtake the landscape. She stops midway, hot and sweaty from the day’s unseasonably warm weather, to peel off her sweater. Beneath the layers, she has on a linen sundress. She places her sweater on top of the package in her basket and resumes pedaling. After nearly an hour, she comes to the intersection at the base of the mountain. Luca is already there.

He does not say her name, but merely watches her silently as she gets off her bicycle and hits the kickstand with her foot. She takes the package from her basket and walks over to him.

He reaches into his pocket to find a cigarette and lights it, blowing the smoke into the air.

When she approaches him, he feels the air escape from him. The white sundress and crisscross back reveal Elodie’s smooth, round shoulders and slender arms. He has never seen so much of her skin before. Every time she comes to the bookstore, she always wears clothes that befit a serious music student: prim blouses and long skirts that cover her knees.

He wonders to himself, how many times can she transform in front of him. He had seen her morph from one creature to another when she played the cello. He had seen her as recently as yesterday, with her red sweater and black trousers, her eyes fierce as a lion’s burning into his. And now, as she walks toward him carrying the package, she no longer seems like a lioness or an innocent young girl; she is something in between, and perhaps more dangerous. A beautiful, young woman.