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Authors: Chris Bohjalian

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BOOK: The Light in the Ruins
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“And you know what else?” Alessia asked.

“Tell me,” she murmured.

“At night, when no one’s there, the dancers and the musicians on the walls come to life and there’s a glamorous ball. Sometimes their lights are so bright I can see the glow from my bedroom.”

Outside the open window, Cristina heard her mother and father speaking with Francesca on the terrace. Francesca was telling them about the visit from the two soldiers and Decher’s unwillingness to wait for Father’s return to inspect the ancient burial vault. Beside her, Alessia chirped happily that her grandfather and grandmother were back and raced downstairs. And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renaissance painting. Her mind wandered far from the villa and the ruins and her unshakable sense that her world was about to change.

Beatrice Rosati, the marchesa, had not yet grown round with middle age. She was, like her daughter and both of her sons, willowy and tall. Statuesque. Still, she had often worried as her children were growing up that her boys appeared sickly and Cristina looked frail—and that her daughter was too slender to be pretty. Now in her two grandchildren, Marco and Francesca’s little ones, Beatrice saw the same thing and had the same fears: They were tiny. Their legs were sticks, their arms were twigs. Moreover, Massimo was a scaredy-cat, no match for his younger sister. Their grandfather assumed they were small because their diet the last year had been spotty. Even at the Villa Chimera the family had not been spared the privations that came with a ration card, and so much of what they grew and their animals produced was confiscated by the government.

Nevertheless, there was also a part of her that rather enjoyed the idea that her grandson and granddaughter were so easily portable. Her husband, Antonio, could still lift one in each arm and carry them around the farm like two baskets of olives. When Marco was home on leave from Sicily, he spent long hours with them in and around the swimming pool, the children either using his shoulders as a diving platform as he stood in the shallow end or being pitched by him into the deep end as if they weighed little more than the firewood he might toss into the shed. Alessia could still disappear behind the statue of Venus off the loggia; Massimo could hide behind the columns atop the temple steps in the family cemetery. Neither looked a match for the chimera in the garden.

Now she and Antonio sat alone in the kitchen, each nursing a glass of red wine from last year’s vintage. In the distance their remaining Chianina cattle were grazing, the animals’ hides so white they glistened when the light was right. Once the estate’s herd had rolled across the whole meadow, and from afar one might have supposed that the ground was blanketed by snow. Now all but a dozen had been confiscated, the herd winnowed three and four at a time by the government.

“Perhaps I should go to Florence,” Antonio was saying. “Ask Vittore why he thinks those two officers were here today.”

“I’ll go with you. I want to see Vittore, too.”

“I find it so typical of the army to just descend on us with no warning, not wait for me to return, and then disappear into the night like common criminals.”

“From what Francesca said, when they returned from the tombs they were unimpressed. It sounds like they were not even especially civil.”

Antonio shook his head and stared for a long moment at the translucent film the wine had left in his glass. “Nothing,” he said finally, “is ever civil when the Nazis are involved.”

The shade from a great statue of a horse fell upon the face of the archeologist like a beard. He leaned against the pedestal and watched the crowd mill about the piazza. A breeze blew across the square and the young man leaned into it. He had wandered outside to escape the Germans who had arrived earlier that week, half a dozen architects and amateur art historians who seemed to have nothing in common but the fact that none of them had more than a tourist’s knowledge of the Renaissance or Italian history. Most were officious and condescending, especially Erhard Decher—not quite a decade his senior, but already a colonel—and Vittore Rosati knew this batch was going to pose far more serious problems than its predecessors. Those men had been more dabblers than bullies. Moreover, Italy then had viewed itself as a partner with Germany, and the Nazis had at least given lip service to that notion. No more. As it had become clear that it was only a matter of time before the Allies would invade Italy, and Germany would (once more) have to bail them out, the Nazis had grown more vexing. More annoying. More arrogant.

Now Vittore slid a Nazionali from his cigarette case and broke it in half so the pack would last longer. He lit the stub, inhaled
deeply, and closed his eyes. He might not have opened them for a long moment had he not heard his name. He recognized the voice. It was Decher’s adjutant, an overly eager young pup whose last name was Strekker. The fellow was twenty-three, just about three years Vittore’s junior, and he seemed to have no interests other than the army. Vittore couldn’t imagine how he had wound up in Florence instead of Russia or Africa or garrison duty in someplace meaningful. He was insufferable in a way that was different from the other Germans: it was his enthusiasm that was exhausting, not his disdain.

“I love how hot it is here,” Strekker was saying. “You have no idea. Where I come from, sometimes we get snow in April. One year it snowed in May.”

“And that is where?” Vittore asked. Out of necessity, he had learned German over the past three years, but he didn’t especially like the sound of the language, and it seemed almost blasphemous to be speaking it here in the shadows of the Palazzo Vecchio.

“Oh, you’ve never heard of it. Kesselsdorf. Just outside of Dresden. My father works at the museum there.”

“In Dresden.”

“Yes. It’s considered the Florence on the Elbe, you know.”

“No, I did not know,” Vittore said. He restrained himself from asking which part of the museum or what the man did there. But it didn’t matter, because in a moment Strekker was telling him anyway.

“He’s a curator,” the German said. “His specialty is dinnerware. Silver. China. Stemware. You’d like him.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“You’re being sarcastic. But you two have more in common than you realize.”

Vittore sighed. He gazed at a pretty young woman in a black skirt and a white blouse, her dark hair a little flat in the heat. She turned and he noted how her lips were parted ever so slightly, but before he could even nod in her direction or smile, Strekker continued, “Like you, he is very protective of his art. He views all
those eighteenth-century place settings as his responsibility. One time the Führer requisitioned a silver service that had belonged to Frederick the Great. My father sent him instead a service that looked like it but was really only fifty or sixty years old. It was a big risk—the Gestapo would have sent my father God knows where if anyone had discovered the substitution.”

When Vittore glanced back to find the woman in the crowd, she was gone. He was feeling generous and offered Strekker one of his cigarettes.

“No, thanks,” Strekker said. “They make me nauseous.”

“How did your father know that Hitler wouldn’t notice the difference?”

“He met him.”

“Hitler?”

Strekker raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“He really doesn’t know the Führer. But the Führer has come to Dresden twice, and my father was among the curators who guided him through the museum. The Führer views himself as quite knowledgeable when it comes to art. My father would disagree. He was less worried about the Führer discovering the substitution than someone in the Führer’s inner circle.”

“When was this?”

“A year ago. Apparently no one’s noticed. My father still has his job.”

“And you’re safely in Florence.”

“Not by choice.”

Vittore didn’t believe that for a moment, but he remained quiet. And, as he expected, Strekker instantly filled the silence.

“But I do love your country,” he said. “I learned Italian in gymnasium. I was studying the Renaissance with Heydenreich—”

“Our Heydenreich?” Vittore asked. One of the Nazis in charge of the museum was Ludwig Heydenreich.

“Yes. He was one of my professors in Berlin when the war
started. Still, I wish I were serving my country—our alliance—in a more meaningful way.”

“You’d rather be off getting shelled in the Ukraine, I suppose? Or trapped right now in Tunis? Waiting to be captured or killed?”

“I was in Russia.”

“Really?”

Strekker had been leaning against the pedestal of the statue, too, and now he fell to one knee and rolled up the trouser leg that was perpendicular to the ground. It took a few seconds for Vittore to comprehend what he was seeing, but then he understood. Where there should have been an ankle and a shin, he saw instead leather straps, a silver buckle, and a bone-white shaft made of wood.

Alone in his quarters, the sky growing dark, Friedrich Strekker unbuckled the straps that held his prosthetic ankle and foot against the stump two-thirds of the way up his shin. There were buckles where there should have been the actual joint of his ankle and another pair three inches above his knee. He was oblivious to the ones at the ankle, but the clasps above his knee chafed his skin. When tape or gauze was available, he would place a strip between the buckles and his leg, and that helped. It was not, however, a perfect solution: the edges of the buckles might still leave bruises. Consequently he was always spinning the straps and rotating the metal clips, trying to spare any one part of his thigh too much pain. The army doctors told him that once the war was over, there would be much-improved prosthetics and he should be patient. In the meantime, when he went to bed at night he would find himself transfixed by the rococo-like contusions and marks on his skin.

Usually he felt no self-pity. There were times, such as when he forgot himself and tried to run or when he realized how slowly his compatriots climbed stairs when he was beside them, but they were infrequent. There were also moments of guilt that he had been spared so much fighting and been relegated these days to an academic world of amateur soldiers and middle-aged men. To quarters
that were more cushy than a university student’s bedroom. He actually had a room of his own, and though it was modest, it was within a block of the Arno River. The mattress on his bed was plump and the handles on his dresser were finished with ivory. He had an armoire for his uniforms that was taller than he was, the wood stained the color of bourbon. Until recently the room had been part of a clean but unexceptional hotel.

It was his father, the curator, who had gotten him this post, knowing of his interest in Italy. His father had been a Party member for well over a decade and had a surprising amount of clout. He was also friendly with Heydenreich, and when the time came had reminded the scholar that his son had been studying the Italian Renaissance with him in Berlin when the war started and thus had knowledge the army could use.

Now the soldier gazed at the way his right leg ended in the gently rounded point of a club. At the scar tissue, still too pink in his mind for real skin. Today had been a complete and utter waste. Colonel Decher had him assisting Vittore catalog bits of pottery that looked no more interesting than fragments of seashells, while the colonel and Major Lorenzetti had gone off without telling anyone where. They had taken a driver, a private, who had nothing to do with their group. Friedrich had overheard Lorenzetti remarking in a tone that was somewhere between amusement and disgust that the young fellow had never set foot inside the Uffizi or even heard of the Medici family. Friedrich could not help but wonder at the secrecy. Plunder, he decided finally. That was the answer. Probably they had been commandeering some painting or tapestry for Decher’s wife or Lorenzetti’s lover. He rested his head in his hands, a little appalled by the idea. He was not uncomfortable serving as Decher’s adjutant, but he did not especially like the man, and this was a new experience for him. In combat, Friedrich had tended to honestly like his commanders. He’d respected most of them. But he didn’t respect Decher. The colonel was out of his element here. But then, fighting probably wasn’t his element either. Decher had never commanded soldiers in combat and—like many men who
had never been shot at—claimed to long for the opportunity. He’d come here from Paris.

BOOK: The Light in the Ruins
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