The Garden of Letters (27 page)

When Elodie enters her own solo in the piece, there seems to be no difference between the imaginary white bird she is evoking and her own death. She plays like a dying bird, her cello weeping with every note. When she is finished, she has collapsed at her cello, her white arms wrapped around its wooden body, her head hanging over its neck.

She hears Francesca whispering to her to get up to take her bow, her fingers gently pulling at her arm. But although Elodie hears Francesca’s words in her ear, and feels her grasp trying to bring her to her feet, Elodie is so distraught over her own failure, she cannot move.

After the clapping has finally ended and Francesca has taken her bows, Elodie’s wrapped fingers are pried from her cello’s neck, her instrument is taken from her, and she is lifted onto her feet.

The audience is full of exclamations about the passion of her playing. “Incredible,” several people shout. “She was the dying swan!” another voice bellows from within the crowd.

Orsina rushes from her seat to find Elodie, who is sitting on a small wooden chair near a vanity room, damp with perspiration and shaking.

“Elodie!” Orsina immediately takes the shawl that Elodie had dropped to the floor and wraps it around her daughter’s shoulders.

“What happened? You gave me such a fright. I felt as though I was witnessing your death in front of me. You were delving into a river of blackness, and I wanted to leap from my chair and save you!”

Elodie pulls her shawl closer around her body and stares blankly at her mother. Elodie is so distraught she cannot mouth a single word.

“Elodie . . .” her mother says again. When her daughter doesn’t answer, she swings around to the other performers and their parents.

“Can I get a glass of water? Please, somebody. Elodie is unwell!”

A glass of water is quickly fetched, and Orsina tries to get Elodie to take a few sips. She strokes Elodie’s cheeks and tells her that she has played with not just perfection, but with incredible emotion. She tells her daughter that her father would have been so proud.

But those words have the opposite effect on Elodie. From the moment she says them, the anguish on Elodie’s face only intensifies.

“Proud? Proud? He would have been furious with me, had he heard what I played . . . or didn’t play.”

She cannot think of her father now. She is imagining the Wolf furious over her mistake, and Luca needing to create a new means to convey the code in time.

But neither of the men appear backstage and Elodie surrenders to her mother, allowing her to take her from the theater. They push past the throngs of people who want to tell Elodie how extraordinary her performance was, the people who thrust their programs in front of her hoping for an autograph from a musician they expect to soon be starring throughout Italy.

Orsina lifts up her arm like a shield as she takes Elodie outside the Bibiena, pushing them into the darkness, until it’s just the two of them in the back of a third-class carriage on a night train back to Verona.

Verona, Italy

S
EPTEMBER
1943

On the train ride back to Verona, Elodie does not utter a single word. Orsina tries to rouse her from her waking sleep, reminding the girl of her beautiful playing that evening, how she played with such emotion and how proud her father would have been. But nothing can bring Elodie out from her trance.

As the train arrives at the station and the other passengers disembark around them, Orsina offers to carry Elodie’s cello for her. But her daughter clutches the instrument so tightly to her chest that Orsina cannot free it from her embrace.

“Elodie, please . . .” She leans forward and puts her hands on her daughter’s narrow shoulders. “You won’t give me your cello, but I don’t have the strength to lift you. We need to get you home.”

Elodie rises like a wraith, all the while clinging to her cello, and walks down the carriage’s steps to the platform below.

Orsina laces her arms through Elodie’s and begins to steer the two of them through the cobblestone streets until they are safely inside their apartment. There, she unbuttons the beautiful dress and pulls a white nightgown over Elodie’s body. Elodie lays her in her bed and brings the bed linen and blankets up to her chin.

She wants Elodie to close her eyes, but all her daughter does is stare at the wall.

Orsina cannot understand why her daughter has become so distraught. She wants to blame it on the music that evening, surmising that perhaps Elodie has connected Saint-Saëns’s “Dying Swan” with her father’s death to such an extent that it caused her to virtually collapse on stage.

All Elodie can think about is that she has failed. She is afraid she has endangered all of the men in the Resistance trying to fortify themselves in the mountains before the Germans invade. She is ashamed that the Wolf will think he made a major mistake relying on her with such an important mission. But most of all, she is despondent over what Luca must be thinking about her right now.

Her sense of failure is immobilizing. She cannot lift her arms or legs. Her entire body feels as though it’s been weighted down with a sack of bricks. Orsina pulls a chair close to Elodie, takes her daughter’s hand in her own, and grips it tighter than she should, wanting Elodie to feel the intensity of her grasp. And then she begins to sing.

What Orsina sings, Elodie cannot quite understand the words, for it is in the
dialeto del mar
, the old Venetian dialect of the sea. But she can feel the depths of the saltwater lagoon; the pull of the tide and the scroll of the fog.

And although Elodie could not reveal the true source of her anguish, she allows the ancient melody to enter her like water, permeate her skin and travel through her veins. It was a language she didn’t speak, but Elodie still understood it somehow, like a rhythm that flowed between her and her mother. These Venetian melodies, songs of distant longing belonging to a mystical place, where ancient pathways, palaces, and dreams all floated. As she hears this music traveling through her ears into the fabric of her soul, Elodie closes her eyes and dreams of Luca.

When Elodie awoke the following morning, Orsina was still asleep in the chair. Elodie quickly washed her face and dressed herself in trousers and a blouse. There was no time to fix her hair, which was now half-undone from the night before.

Elodie quickly left the apartment, took her bicycle from the first-floor landing, and rode furiously in the direction of Luca’s store.

It was only 8:00 in the morning, but she suspected he would already be there before the shop opened.

When she arrived, he was in the front. He opened the door. He looked grave.

“Elodie . . .”

She wanted to hear honey in his words. But what she heard was fear.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. Her breathing was rapid. She had pedaled as fast as she could to the store and now she could hardly speak. “I’m so sorry . . . I’m so sorry. I became distracted . . . I swear to you I didn’t do it on purpose. I had every intention of doing . . .”

“Stop,” he said. He placed his hand on her shoulders. “I already know that.”

She paused for a second and looked him straight in the eye. There she found the words, even though they remained unspoken, that she was looking for. She knew he had forgiven her. A sense of relief flooded through her and she tried to collect herself.

“But what about the Wolf? He must be furious at me.”

“It’s not about you or me, Elodie. All of this is far larger than any of us.” He pressed his temples for a moment. She could feel his fatigue.

“Anyway, I haven’t spoken directly with him. That was the point of the coded message last night . . . but we still have to find another way to get him the information he needs.”

“There must be a way I can still get the code to him.”

“Unfortunately, things are progressing far more quickly than any of us had imagined. At most, we now have two days before the Germans arrive. To come up with a new code now, to get the message to the Wolf in time for anyone to be able to act on it, would be impossible.”

Elodie started to tremble.

“You can’t fall apart now . . . You just can’t.” He touched her arm. “So, yes, the code wasn’t transmitted. There’s a war on, things fall apart all the time. A message gets intercepted . . . or a contact is discovered and gets a bullet in his head. These things happen. You’re not the first person in the Resistance to make a mistake, Elodie.”

He reached for her cheek. “What does the Little Prince learn through his journey, Elodie? It’s only with the heart one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

She smiled. “I marked that page when I read that,” she said.

“Good. So you know that in life you must always follow your heart.”

“Yes.”

He covered his hand over hers. “There is so much to do now and we cannot lose our direction.”

She nodded and his voice filled the air.

“Beppe is out with the others at Berto’s studio now, trying to figure out what we need to do next. And Maffini and Zampieri are in Vicenza as we speak, with one of Berto’s French contacts. I know from my brother that our scouts have already sighted several Germans moving through the mountains. Raffaele is requesting more ammunition. And now the delivery of that will unfortunately be affected by last night . . .”

Elodie’s eyes flickered.

“There’s going to be war, Elodie. What’s happened can’t be changed. We need to move on and fix it as best we can, as quickly as we can. It doesn’t change what’s in my heart. Nor yours.”

Her eyes began to tear with gratitude. How happy she was that he had forgiven her for her mistake.

“It’s so mysterious, this land of tears,” he said, again quoting
The Little Prince
.

And hearing him speak another grain of truth, she couldn’t help but smile.

She follows him into the back of the store, where she discovers more guns—two boxes filled with Beretta M-34 pistols and three boxes of ammunition—than she has ever seen in her life.

“Beppe’s been helping me all night. But there is still so much work to do . . .” He uncrates another box in front of her, one that contains only books. He pulls one out and opens it. In the center, just as Luca had shown her and Lena during the first meeting she had attended, a space had been carved to conceal a pistol.

He reaches to place a pistol inside, when she intercepts his hand and takes it in her own. She holds it for a moment. She knows there is no time for kissing, or exploring the curves of each other’s body, but she still wants to feel the warmth of his skin and the sensation of his grip against her own fingers.

“We need to get all the pistols hidden into the books. I’m going to stack them on the storage shelves back here, so they’ll be ready right when we need them.” He smiles. “It’s like a loaded library.”

She laughs, but maintains her efficiency, quickly packing a pistol into each book. She’s never held a gun before, and the weight of one surprises her.

“They should create a book large enough for a rifle,” he says, as he watches her hold the pistol.

She does not particularly like the sensation of the weapon in her hand. She imagines Lena might enjoy the danger of something like that, but not Elodie. She simply places each one into a book and moves on quickly.

As she works, Luca takes each book and places it onto the shelf, occasionally looking at the clock. She knows the store officially opens by 9:30
A.M.
, so it is essential that every book is shelved with its secret weapon and that all evidence of their work has vanished by then.

Five minutes before the shop is due to open, Luca places the last book on the shelf. He picks up the empty crates where the pistols had been stored and the empty boxes that contained the carved-out books, and quickly carries them to the back alley, where he takes a hammer and breaks them up into small, nondescript pieces of discarded material.

When he comes in through the back door, he lifts an apron from one of the pegs and pulls her toward him.

“Come here,” he says, wrapping his arms around her. “We’ve worked hard enough, I deserve one of these . . .”

He takes her in his arms and kisses her. And just like the Little Prince, she feels the layers that had once seemed steeped in shadow, suddenly sparkling with light. And for a brief moment, with his lips on hers, Elodie feels surrounded by stars.