The Garden of Letters (36 page)

Her memory did not fail her. As soon as she alighted the train, she began to maneuver through the streets toward the Wolf’s apartment. She entered the city through the Piazza Sordello, down the cobblestone street past Saint Andrea. But with so few pedestrians on the street, Mantua now seemed like a ghost town.

As she walked, she noticed three German soldiers smoking cigarettes outside of a local bar. One of them called out a leering remark to her. She maintained a face of neither disgust nor amusement, but one of indifference, as if his crude words were just another particle permeating the air.

When she arrived at the Wolf’s apartment building, she found the large wooden front door slightly ajar. A small boy had just come in with his mother, and they were looking through their mailbox. They didn’t even notice the girl with the cello who slipped in behind them and made her way up the stairs.

She knocked twice at his door. When no one answered, she turned the doorknob and, to her surprise, found it unlocked. Elodie walked inside.

A flood of memories from the last time returned to her. The long, narrow hallway. The wooden pedestal table with unopened letters stacked high. But unlike her first visit, there was no music floating through the apartment. The only thing she heard now was her own footsteps against the tile floor.

It was in the white room in front of the music salon that she first realized something was very wrong. The room had always been pristine when she had visited before. But now the sofas were sliced open, their stuffing pulled out and strewn on the floor. The glass vase that she had admired previously was shattered into pieces. The coffee table had been overturned, and the Oriental carpet that had first enthralled her was no longer there.

By the time she walked into the music room and put down her cello, Elodie was shaking. What she saw then was even more shocking than she could have ever imagined.

The peacock-blue walls looked like a desecrated tomb. The silk panels were slashed and cut open. The strings of the grand piano had been severed and brutally pulled out like weeds. Elodie looked at the wall where the painting of the girl in the kerchief had once been. But that, too, was gone.

Around the Wolf’s desk, papers littered the ground like snow. She knelt down, her hands fumbling to neaten the scattered papers.

Her heart was racing. Every sound she heard, every creak in the rafter, every rustle of paper, sent a wave of panic through her.

Nearly everything about the apartment that she had once found so beautiful had been either confiscated or torn apart. And the Wolf? What had they done to him? She felt a terrible lump in her throat as she tried to imagine his fate.

The desk was filled with traces of him: a small red lacquer pen, a tin of pastilles, and a wand of half-melted sealing wax. Against a ceramic lamp, there was a framed photograph of a young woman, which Elodie had not noticed before.

The black-and-white image was of a young woman seated at a piano. She couldn’t have been older than twenty in the photograph. Elodie studied her as though she were looking at herself. The woman’s posture was as straight as a razor, her gaze unflinching. She was dressed in a simple, white sheath with her legs neatly crossed. Her eyes, dark and fierce, looked as though they knew something the photographer did not. They radiated an inner intelligence and a certain preternatural wisdom she was content to keep to herself.

Her hands, which were folded on her lap with long, slender fingers, showed clear evidence that she was a musician. The two middle fingers had loosened from the woman’s clasp. Elodie could almost hear them tapping against the woman’s skin. Beneath the tight smile and the crossed legs, Elodie could see what no one else except the Wolf probably saw, that music was clearly dancing through her head.

Elodie sat down at the desk and pulled out the center drawer. There she found something else unexpected: handwritten sheets of music. As she read the notes, she could hear the melody and feel the urgency and undulations of emotion contained within the score. Almost immediately she realized that this was the music the Wolf had been playing when she arrived at his apartment for the first time.

They had taken everything of value. And they had destroyed anything else of any beauty. But they could neither see nor understand the hidden treasure that sat resting inside this simple wooden drawer.

She had not heard music in her head for several days, not since before she left to go to the mountains and Luca. Even after she returned home and was ensconced in the living room where she had played her cello ever since she was a small child. But now the score, written by a woman she never met, penetrated her entire body. Elodie felt as though it was composed solely for her. She could hear the sadness contained in the notes, as if the composer was writing her own requiem. She heard the grief. The longing. But in between the valleys of notes, a legato of light and hope ran throughout.

She took hold of the score and instinctively placed it in her cello case.

Elodie walked quickly back toward the train station, still carrying her beloved cello. She had failed to sell it to the one person she knew who could fully appreciate it. But she was returning to Verona with something that transcended monetary value; the music composed by the Wolf’s wife. Like her cello that once belonged to Enrico Levi, a man whom she had never met, she felt this music was also now entrusted to her care.

Over the next week, Elodie and her mother sell Pietro’s violin and piano to a friend from the conservatory. Orsina also quietly sells her gold necklace and the black beads that had been her mother’s. For all their trouble, they now have just enough money to get to Venice and live there for a few months.

Orsina now calls Elodie “Anna.” They memorize their new birthdays and repeat their new last name over and over. Into her red valise, Orsina packs to begin her new life, while Elodie packs to forget her old one. Her mother folds her dresses and her black skirt with care. She takes her cotton summer dress that even in her now middle age sets off her narrow waist and toned calves. She packs a single silk flower for the sake of beauty, and the wedding portrait of her and Pietro for the sake of love.

Elodie’s suitcase contains only dark blue and gray clothes. In her rucksack, she packs the music she has taken from the Wolf’s apartment, carefully placed in a paper folio and tied with a leather cord. She does not wear the medallion from Luca, for it is the amulet of a soldier. She instead tucks that into a small pouch and drops it into her bag. And among her other belongings, the bar of soap, the toothbrush, and her cherished copy of
The Little Prince
, it sinks like a small pebble cast into the sea.

“Where will we stay?” Elodie asks her mother the night before they leave.

“There is someone I know who will give us shelter,” Orsina assures her daughter. And so they leave. Elodie holding a single suitcase and her cello, her rucksack on her back, Orsina clasping the same red valise she had carried when she had left Venice years before.

At the Verona station, German soldiers stand guard near every platform. The green uniforms, the metal helmets. In one corner, there is a woman in a black coat clutching the hand of a young child. Her face is frozen and pale. One German is shouting to another that she is a Jew with false papers. His language slices through the air, brutal as a blade of steel. Elodie’s blood runs cold just hearing it.

She does not dare alter the direction of her eyes, even though she wants to stop and help them, as she knows Lena surely would have done.

Elodie walks symmetrically, one hand carrying the cello, the other her suitcase. On her back, she wears her rucksack. In the past three months, she has perfected her public walk and now she moves slowly and methodically, as though she were incapable of distraction.

Orsina does not move like Elodie. She does not understand the movement of stealth. She is slower and more easily distracted than her daughter. She does not know how to focus her eyes straight ahead, to avoid turning around if she hears the slightest noise or others speaking. To ignore everything around you except getting to the place you need to go.

The two-hour train ride to Venice takes more than five hours. In the compartment, the men and women sit tightly on the third-class benches that are hard and offer little comfort. Women unwrap heels of stale bread from handkerchiefs and drink water from canning jars used to store summer tomatoes.

Elodie and Orsina hand their papers over when asked.
Yes, we are Anna and Marie Zorzetto
, they say to every German officer who questions them along the way.
Yes, she is a student
.
Yes, we have family in Venice. Yes, thank you.
Danke
.

Elodie does not ask Orsina where they will go to once they arrive in Venice. Instead, she intends to do nothing but blindly follow her mother. She remembers her mother telling her that Venice is a maze, and Elodie closes her eyes, counting the hours until they arrive and she can finally become lost within it.