The Light in the Ruins (11 page)

CAPTAIN MARCO ROSATI, an engineer before he was mustered into the army, stood in the sun on a limestone hillock that overlooked a Sicilian beach beside Gela, staring out at the Mediterranean Sea through binoculars. The Allied ships were out there somewhere. Marco was sure of it, as confident as he was that centuries ago Aeschylus had sat on these very rocks, gazing at the waves and pondering murder in the Oresteia. These might not be the very ships that would lead the invasion of Sicily, but they were out there, splitting in half the sea waves.

There was a myth that Aeschylus had died here when a great bird dropped a turtle on his head, mistaking his bald skull for a rock. In Marco’s opinion, this was unlikely but not inconceivable. The bearded vultures of Sicily were known for dropping turtles onto stones, hoping to crack open the shells. And it seemed that this island had at least as many vultures as soldiers. So, as odd as the story sounded, it was at least possible.

Unlike Aeschylus, Marco had a thick mass of curly black hair, making it improbable—so he told himself—that he would ever be felled by a falling turtle. Besides, there were far greater dangers here.

On the beach his men were laying mines. There were eight of them, local Sicilians, and they were working with their shirts off and bandannas tied around their heads. They were working carefully, laying the mines in jagged rows that began at the very edge of high tide, moving away from the water as if they were painting
a floor. This was the fifth consecutive day that their assignment had been land mines, and they had the drill down to a well-rehearsed dance. Today they were laying antipersonnel mines; yesterday they had been planting the ones that could disable a tank.

Still, the task was endless. The beach was endless. How did you defend the whole shoreline of Sicily, much less Italy? Marco found the question unfathomable. When they had finished with the mines, they would have to unspool the barbed wire, massive coils that would stretch for kilometers. And then there were the wires that would trip the magnesium flares and turn the night into day. And the bunkers and firing pits to construct in the hills. And finally there was that pier. It was a thousand feet long, and when the time came they were going to blow the damn thing up.

It was a waste. What was the point of defending the island if the defenders themselves were going to destroy it? His son, Massimo, would love that pier. Alessia might, too. The local children had been diving off it before they had been evicted by the soldiers.

He sighed. More than anything, he missed his children. He missed them even more than he desired Francesca, and he desired her a lot. He had not been home to the Villa Chimera since a brief leave in February. He had, he feared, missed more of Alessia’s childhood than he had seen.

Behind him, he heard someone running along the ridge, and he turned. It was the engineer named Moretti, a stout, meaty fellow with round eyes and a champagne cork for a nose. He had a red forehead and he always looked a little overwhelmed.

“It’s over!” he was crying, a little breathless. “It’s over!”

“What’s over?” Marco asked, but he knew. They had surrendered in Africa.

“The battle in Tunis! The whole Italian First Army is gone!”

“Gone? Or in captivity?” For a brief moment, the word
gone
had him fearful that the Germans—psychotic, all of them—had convinced the Italians to fight to the last bullet. That was, it seemed to Marco, the sum of Nazi military strategy these days. In his mind he saw Italian corpses piled in the desert like dunes.

“Surrendered,” Moretti said, and he bent over, his hands on his knees, his broad back rising and falling from running.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Marco told him. “You look like you’re dying.”

Moretti lifted his head and scowled, but his eyes were so doelike that even when he was angry he appeared only startled. “It means we’re next, you know.”

“We always were next.”

“Unless the Allies bypass us. I would, wouldn’t you? Why waste your time on Sicily? Or, for that matter, on Italy? I would go straight into France. I think there’s a chance of that, don’t you?”

Marco shook his head. The Americans and the British were methodical, and this was for them a war of territorial liberation. Soon there would be Allied battleships pummeling them and Allied aircraft bombing them and Allied paratroopers falling amid them. And waves and waves of Allied soldiers storming this very beach. He presumed they would be younger than he—closer to Cristina’s age than to his. And it wouldn’t matter how many hundreds or thousands were maimed and killed by the land mines that were buried in the beach like turtle eggs, ten times that many more would survive and take Sicily. And perhaps maim or kill him. And Moretti. And those eight peasants carefully placing the metal disks in the sand.

“Marco?”

He looked back at Moretti and shrugged. He stared up into the sun and tried to imagine what was occurring that moment at the estate in Monte Volta. Whether his children were napping. “There’s always a chance they’ll go elsewhere,” he said finally. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”

The group from the Uffizi left in two large staff cars, but they hadn’t segregated the Italians in one vehicle and the Germans in another. They did that sometimes, Friedrich Strekker had noticed. He attributed their decision not to today to a combination of the
prosaic and the profound. The prosaic? Colonel Decher wanted to ask Vittore about the relics from the burial vault at the Villa Chimera. The profound? After the fall of Africa, they were all being slightly more gentle with one another, more brotherly. They were all a little scared. After Tunisia, Italy was next. Suddenly the war was looking as bleak in the west as it was in the east.

And so Friedrich had wound up in the front seat beside an Italian driver while Vittore sat in the back between Colonel Decher and Major Lorenzetti. The colonel had been peppering Vittore with questions. He wanted to know which pieces they were going to see at the museum, the images that were painted or carved onto them, and what Vittore knew about the Etruscans who had lived in this corner of Tuscany so many centuries ago. Only when they were approaching the outskirts of the city and were trapped in a long column of cars and trucks and donkey carts that had come to a complete halt did Decher finally pause. He stared out the window, his arms folded across his chest, his pale skin looking a little rosy in the heat. But he said nothing about Italian incompetence, as he might have another day, especially since the traffic jam was not the result of Italian backwardness: too many donkey carts or a road that was badly maintained. Last night the Allies had bombed the rail yards and a munitions factory in Arezzo, and the work crews were still trying to clear the debris from the road. Here there was no sign of the attack; there was only the long line of cypress trees on one side of the road, the edges of an estate owned by some Fascist confidant of Mussolini, and on the other the first decrepit, low-slung buildings that would grow taller and closer together as they approached Arezzo. A few kilometers ahead of them, however, Friedrich envisioned great mounds of rubble and chewed-up stucco and cement, and railroad cars that had been tossed around like small toys and mangled. He’d seen such things before.

“There will be nothing left of this country when the war is over,” Vittore mumbled, and he wiped the sweat off his forehead with the cuff of his shirt.

“We’re all making sacrifices,” Decher reminded him. “We have all lost something.”

“A foot, for example,” Friedrich said, surprising himself. It was a reflex, born of the fact that no one in the car had lost what he had, and they were all hot and uncomfortable and anxious to get to Arezzo. The black car was like an oven.

“Indeed, Lieutenant, you have certainly made a sacrifice,” Decher agreed, his voice uncharacteristically avuncular.

“Well, I’m not going to bake inside here any longer,” Lorenzetti announced, opening his door and exiting the vehicle. “Anyone care to join me for a cigarette?”

Though Decher didn’t smoke, he followed the major. Jürgen Voss emerged from the car behind them and sidled up to the pair, too. Friedrich was contemplating whether he would be more comfortable outside as well when Vittore asked him from the back seat, “Was it a land mine?”

“My foot? No.”

“My brother, Marco, spends his life mining the beaches in Sicily.” He sighed. “So if it wasn’t a mine, what was it?”

“A shell … more or less. A building collapsed. In Voronezh. It was almost a year ago now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not all bad. If I hadn’t lost my foot, I would have continued on to Stalingrad. And no good would have come from that.”

“Stalingrad. Tunis. We seem to be losing whole armies this year.”

“I know.”

“What happened?”

“In Voronezh?”

“Yes.”

How much to tell? Usually Friedrich didn’t like to talk about his foot; he wished he had kept his annoyance to himself and not brought it up. Besides, the injury had happened so quickly. One minute he was with his unit inside a butcher’s shop, abandoned
now, like everything else in that section of the city. The hooks and the refrigerator cases were empty. He was watching through the broken window as a Russian tank smoldered across the street and a pair of crows picked at the body of the gunner who had managed to climb from the burning hulk’s turret before expiring. And the next minute? The sound of screaming cats, the shrill, whining noise that signaled the imminent arrival of shells from a Katyusha rocket launcher. Immediately he fell below the windowsill and curled himself against the wall. Unfortunately, the wall collapsed.

“Katyusha rocket,” he said to Vittore. “The Russians decided the best way to slow us was to bring down half the city.”

“And some of the city landed on your foot.”

“A butcher’s shop wall, yes. Crushed it.”

“Lovely.”

“So you have a brother,” he said to Vittore, hoping to change the subject from his foot. “How many sisters?”

“Just one. Cristina.”

“And she’s coming to Arezzo for a visit this afternoon?”

He nodded. “Along with my parents and my sister-in-law and the children. The whole crowd.”

“Was it Cristina whom Colonel Decher met yesterday?”

“Francesca, too. But Cristina’s the baby of the family. She’s only eighteen. She spends her days, as far as I can tell, with my seven-year-old nephew and my five-year-old niece. Or with her horse. She’s a very good rider.”

“You’re older than Marco?”

The Italian said nothing for a moment, then smiled. “Do I look old? I must. No, Marco is older than I am. He’s thirty.”

“And he’s a captain.”

“And an engineer.” Vittore seemed about to say something more when, much to their surprise, they heard the drivers in the vehicles ahead of them starting their engines and Decher, Lorenzetti, and Voss climbed back into the cars. Apparently that single lane was just about to be cleared.

By the time Cristina and her family got to see Vittore, the shock of what they had witnessed on the outskirts of Arezzo was starting to lessen. The museum was in a section of the city that had been spared, and this added a veneer of normalcy to their visit. Still, Cristina was left with a feeling that was somewhere between unease and actual fear. It struck her as odd—horrific and odd—that some parts of the city were completely untouched while others had been destroyed in a fashion that made her think first of Pompeii and then of the newsreel footage she’d seen in the cinema of the Allied air raids on Genoa and Turin. They had driven slowly past the dollhouse cutaways of stone and brick buildings, some of the rubble still sending dry mists of pollenlike dust into the air, as well as the charred husks of the wooden structures, the stout vertical timbers and chimneys blackened and smoking like candlewicks.

Nevertheless, the image that kept coming back to Cristina was the field of corpses along the rail yard, an almost perfect rectangle. Because of the traffic jam, she had been able to count forty-eight bodies. Most were flat on their backs, but a few were on their sides with their legs curled against their chests, as if they had died while trying to hide from the bombs and rigor mortis had set in well before the bodies had been recovered. The stench was not yet overpowering, but it would be by the time the sun had set and the corpses had had a full day to bake. Most of the dead were adults, but at the farthest edge of the field there were three small bodies, the children as young as her nephew and niece. She had done all that she could to prevent Massimo and Alessia from seeing the corpses, but their car had spent so much time stalled that the siblings had started to fidget and climbed over Francesca and her mother and spied the remains from the windows. Since then they had been absolutely silent.