The Golden Hour (23 page)

I did not dare look up. My ears flushed hot, my scalp prickled, and my hands went cold. “Why…not?” I asked the question slowly, deliberately. “The reason, Father,
why not
is that those things have been ruthlessly taken from innocent people they have
arbitrarily sought out, wrenched from their homes, and sent God knows where. Those are stolen goods, Papa.”

“Oh, come on, Giovanna. You don’t know that. You have no idea where they came from. They might be from people like the Lazzatos, who left fair and square, went to the United States and left their belongings behind—things they’ll never need again.”

I rose, balling the locket in my hand, making an effort to control my voice. “Then I think you’d better think about it a little longer, Father, maybe just drink a sip or two of the blood of your industry colleagues while you’re at it.” I walked behind his chair and dropped the locket into his wineglass. “You disgust me. You really do.” I turned my back and left them there, slowly climbing the stairs to my room and shutting the door behind me. What my father said in response I did not know and did not care.

This was when I felt the earth crack. It groaned and heaved, and a deep crevasse widened between me and my parents. I couldn’t leave home. I knew that. But I also knew that it would be different from now on. They were still my parents, after all. I would live with them, even love them. But I wasn’t under their power anymore. Not in the same way. I knew I had to begin to assume responsibility for my own actions and even for theirs. I felt emboldened and oddly free.

W
ith Mario on the mend, things began to change in the winemaker’s cottage. Mario had energy now, and staying in bed was out of the question. But, for security reasons, he couldn’t leave or even venture into the front rooms.

A few days after my birthday, I came to visit him. I was still reeling from my father’s gift, and I was considering bringing Mario into my confidence. I found Serena kneeling over her herb garden, pulling out weeds with passionate concentration. She waved me into the cottage with barely a hello, so I went straight to the storeroom. When I opened the door, I was face to knees with Mario, standing on his head.

“What on earth are you doing?” I laughed out loud.

He grinned. “I can’t get any exercise in here, so this seems to shake things up, get the blood moving. You’d be surprised how it calms you down. I’ve worked my way up to ten minutes. I’m about ready to move away from the wall. You ought to give it a try.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m too scared. And besides, it
doesn’t really work when you’re dressed like this.” I looked down, smoothing the folds of my skirt to my thighs.

“Oh, no! Whatever was I thinking? How rude of me.” He grinned even more broadly, his eyes, even upside down, shining with a new twinkle. Slowly he lowered his legs to the floor. Then he turned and sat facing me, his arms resting loosely on his bent legs. He looked very directly at me, not smiling. “Hi, Giovanna. It’s good to see you.”

I felt my face flush. “Your arm must be feeling a lot better.”

He lifted the still-bandaged forearm. “You know, it really is. It barely hurts at all anymore. But the main thing is, I’m just feeling like my old self. I’ve got too much energy just to sit in here all day.”

“We’ve got to get you out of here. Serena and Guido are getting really worried that you’ll be found—and about what that would mean for them. We owe them their own safety.”

“Come sit down, won’t you?” He patted a place on the floor next to him. “Tell me what you’ve been doing while you were gone. I need to hear about the outside world.”

There was so little space that was not already filled with the bed, the chair, and various boxes of stored food that when I did sit down, I was toe to toe and knee to knee with him. I breathed in the oddly comforting aura of perspiration, soiled laundry, and sleep that hung around him. I was so close I could have leaned my cheek down without stretching and laid it on the wiry black hair of his good arm.

“It was my birthday this weekend,” I said. “My eighteenth.”

“Really? Happy birthday. I wish I’d known.” He grinned and looked up at the ceiling, leaning his head against the wall.

“Why? You wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.”

“No, but I could have been thinking of you in a different way.”

“Were you thinking of me anyway?”

He nodded; then he looked straight at me again with a little smile. “I usually am.”

That embarrassed me, so I quickly began telling him about Saturday’s
birthday dinner. I left out no detail of the setting or the menu, but then, when I got to the presents, I told him only about the dress.

“It sounds beautiful,” he said. “You’d look lovely in red.”

“But it’s ridiculous. Where would I ever wear such a thing? I don’t go to parties like that. My mother is living in a cloud. She just seems oblivious sometimes to the fact that we’re in the middle of a war.”

“Maybe this is just her way of escaping the reality of it,” he said. “I don’t blame her for wishing her daughter had a social life.”

“No. It’s not just that. She wishes she had a different kind of daughter. That’s what she wishes.” I was feeling emboldened now, the feelings of that day beginning to manifest all over again.

“What about your father?”

“What about him? You don’t want to know about him.”

“Oh, but I do. My father always wanted a girl. I’ll bet your father is crazy about you.”

“Oh, he’s crazy about me, all right, but mostly he’s crazy.” I swallowed hard.

“What’s the matter?”

I told him about the locket. He listened soberly, his hands folded across his knees. When I was finished, he sat for a long time, saying nothing. “I’m sorry, Mario. I’m sure that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

“No, no. I’m glad you told me. I was just wondering whatever happened to our own things. When Cecilio and I came home that day and found our parents gone, we left our house with everything in it—furniture, dishes, silver, my mother’s clothes and jewelry. I hadn’t really thought about it before. Do you think the Germans have it all?”

I didn’t respond, but my mind drifted back to our own days of packing, when we carefully wrapped and boxed all our most valuable possessions and stashed them behind a false wall in the attic.
I knew we were lucky to be still living in our own house, however cramped and uncomfortable our quarters. “Did you see any of this coming? The way they are hunting the Jews, sending them away. How long had you known about it?”

Mario leaned his head back against the wall again and stared up, away from me.

“This is going to sound crazy, but for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life, I didn’t even think about our being Jewish. It just wasn’t the main thing that defined us as a family.” He looked at me, earnest now. “Italian was the only language we ever spoke at home. I never learned Hebrew or had any religious education, really. We lived in a large apartment on one of the nicest streets in Turin. Most of our friends were Catholic. My father rose rapidly at the Banca Ovazza, and his clients included members of the city’s noble and most well-off families. I guess the richer we got, the more he and my mother lost touch with their ethnic roots.”

“We still go to church, but a lot of our friends have kind of lost touch with Catholicism too,” I responded.

“My mother’s parents lived upstairs in our building, and I remember my grandmother—she was a tall, elegant woman—observed all the Jewish holidays, but it just wasn’t that important to my parents. You know, this is going to sound funny to you, but
Italy
was their religion. My parents were Fascists. They really, really believed in a united fatherland. They were very pro-Mussolini.

“My father sent Cecilio and me to military school—you know, to Giorgio’s school. He wanted us to be great soldiers, to be part of this ‘ascendant nation.’” Mario puffed himself up in pronouncing this, imitating his father’s attitude. “I think he thought I’d run the country someday.” He let out an ironic chuckle. “There was nothing we couldn’t do or aspire to. There was a clannishness in the way our extended family and close friends—other Jews—stuck together, in the summers especially. We all went to the country together…
but it was never forced, anything we
had
to do. It was a choice.”

“There were other Jews at school? Giorgio never mentioned it.”

“Oh, sure—maybe two or three in every class. The only difference was that we went separately to religion class. That was never a big deal. The emphasis was on patriotism. Whenever Mussolini came to Turin, there was a school holiday, and we had big parades. Everybody turned out for them.

“Papa was rich enough that he didn’t really need to ally himself with the Fascist cause, but he was a real believer. But then the newspapers began promoting the idea that Jews were generally suspect—that deep down, we were all ultimately subversive and loyal to Zionist ideals. I remember my father getting just furious reading that, when he’d been so dedicated to the party.”

“But for you, when did it really change for you?” I asked.

He thought for a while. “The summer of ’thirty-eight. I was fourteen. We were in the country and heard on the radio that Jews would not be able to continue to go to Italian schools. I couldn’t believe it. Some of my cousins had graduated from high school by then, but there I was, still in school, and I would have to be separated from so many of my friends.”

I remember listening to Mario at this point, watching his lips, hearing his words, but not quite believing it. None of this had ever been made known to me. I put my hand on his arm. “And you really couldn’t go back to your school? Why didn’t Giorgio ever tell me all of this?”

“I don’t know. It probably just didn’t affect him that much. But it was worse than that, Giovanna. That was the point at which Mussolini really changed and began insisting that Jews were not ‘Italians’—biologically—that we were a different race, and that there would have to be a set of laws that acknowledged that and dealt with us differently.”

“That must have disillusioned your parents about Mussolini.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Well, they were rewarded for it—as I said—by the ‘discrimination clause.’” He paused briefly, and I could see the memories pained him. “But that didn’t last long. By November, there were no exceptions.” Mario got up and paced the tiny floor space, then sat down on the bed. I stayed put. He shook his head.

“That was when all hell broke loose. Father kept his job because it was in a private company, but he was expelled from the party. We had to let our Catholic servants go, because Christians weren’t allowed to work for Jews. It was so sad. Those people had been with us all my life. They were part of our family, and they were forced to leave.”

I thought of Rosa and what it would mean to kick her out on her own.

“The next June, in ’thirty-nine, when we thought things couldn’t get worse, my father lost his job. The bank was owned by a Jewish family, and it had to be sold. My brother and I weren’t allowed to go to school anymore. I tell you, Giovanna…” His voice was thin and strained to the breaking point. “It was horrible. Suddenly my whole sense of myself, my place in the community, crumbled. I would walk down the street and see, in the windows of cafés or shops that we had always frequented, signs saying, ‘No Jews allowed.’

“Some of my parents’ friends went to desperate means. Some converted to Catholicism. One of my mother’s friends confessed to a fictitious affair with a Catholic to claim that her child was actually Christian. Some left. Many of our good friends and one of my uncles got tourist visas and sailed for the United States or South America, knowing they wouldn’t be back.”

Like the Lazzatos,
I thought, as a wave of nausea passed over me. “But what about your mother and father?”

“My father’s powers of rationalization were amazing. He kept
maintaining that Mussolini had no choice but to go along with the program. He assumed Germany would win the war, and then after the war, the racial laws would be repealed, everything would be normal again, and…Well, he just knew they would reward the people who had stayed loyal. Italy would be a great nation, and it was worth the kind of sacrifice he was making to one day be a part of all that.”

“That’s exactly how my father thinks too. He’s convinced we should be nice to the Germans because it will pay off after they win the war.”

Suddenly we heard what sounded like Guido’s voice outside the cottage. He was yelling something and sounded very anxious, but we couldn’t hear the words. The front door opened and closed again, and Serena burst into the storeroom. I leaped to my feet.

“Giovanna, you’ve got to leave, right now. Guido says he saw a truckload of SS headed for the convent. They must be conducting a raid.
Dio, Dio,
I’m so afraid they’ll come here. Giovanna—really, you must leave. And, Mario, get on the floor behind the bed and stay there until we tell you it is safe.”

She pushed me toward the door with such force that I didn’t have a chance even to look at Mario.

I started for home, but the more I thought about it, the more frightened I became for Elena and Graziella, for the people sheltered there, if indeed there were any. I hid my bicycle behind the hedge that lined the upper drive and moved surreptitiously around to the back entrance. I found my broom in its usual place, and began working my way, sweeping as I went, down toward the cellar and the corridor where I had once thought I heard voices.

As I descended the back staircase, Sylvia, the tall novice who oversaw my work, came clattering down behind me. “Giovanna! Oh, Giovanna! It’s so awful. They were pounding on the front door, but no one got there in time, so they shot the bolt off. They got in, and now they’re coming!”