Tomorrow's Vengeance

SIX

‘The Italians are extremely lax in their treatment of Jews. They protect Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and won’t permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David.’

Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries,

December 13, 1942.

‘In the years before the war, my family and I lived comfortably in Rome, in Trastavere,’ Izzy began, stirring a generous portion of cream into her coffee.

‘Trastavere! I know it. The old Jewish quarter, right?’

When Izzy nodded, I told her, ‘Paul and I vacationed in Rome a couple of years ago and we stayed in Borgo, near the Vatican. Several evenings we strolled along the Tiber to Trastavere for dinner. There are some wonderful restaurants there. I remember, oh, what was it? This marvelous fried artichoke dish; it looked like an exploded sunflower.’ I demonstrated with my hands.

‘Carciofi alla giudia,’ Izzy supplied. ‘Artichoke in the Jewish style.’

‘Yes, that’s it. Crisp, nutty. Totally delicious.’

Naddie passed me the sugar. ‘We should put it on Raniero’s list.’

‘Absolutely.’ I sipped my coffee. ‘What did your father do, Izzy?’

‘He owned a small art gallery which was popular with local artists, but he made most of his money restoring paintings for larger galleries like the Vatican Museum.’

I set my cup down. ‘Wow.’

Izzy smiled sadly. ‘I was too young then to be impressed. Abba worked primarily in the Pinacoteca, specializing in fifteenth-century restorations. When he began, the museum had been open only a few years, and many of the works had been in storage since 1815 when they were returned from Paris, so there was much work to do.’

Paris? Then the penny dropped. ‘Napoleon took off with them, I suppose.’

Izzy nodded. ‘Years later, when Bruno and I visited the galleries, I found myself looking closely at the paintings. This Fra Angelico, that Raphael, a glorious Bellini… searching for any small detail that could be by my father’s hand. The halo of a saint, a Pope’s ring, a cherub’s toe.’

‘Bruno was your husband?’

She nodded. ‘But Bruno’s part of the story comes much later.’

Filomena materialized at my right elbow, creeping up on us so quietly that I was startled. ‘Biscotti? We make them here.’

‘Yes, thank you, Filomena,’ Naddie said as the catering manager set a silver tray carrying an artistically stacked pyramid of biscotti down on the table in front of us.

‘In Argentina, we call these cookies cantuccini,’ Filomena said.

I loomed hungrily over the tray, as if I hadn’t just eaten a monster crab salad and a crème brulee. ‘That was very thoughtful,’ I said, selecting a chocolate-covered cantuccini dotted with almonds. ‘I hope we’re not keeping you?’

Filomena waved away our concerns. ‘No worries! Stay as long as you like.’ Then she disappeared as quickly as she had come.

Izzy selected a biscotti for herself, dunked it into her coffee and held it there. ‘After the war began, my father believed we were safe because he had joined the Fascist Party, and was even active at their meetings.’ She bit into the soggy biscotti, chewed, then continued. ‘In those days everybody in Italy was a Fascist, at least on paper.

‘Until the Manifesto della razza in 1938, that is. That was when Mussolini’s Fascist government forbid Jewish children from attending schools. Mother taught my little brother and me at home, but in the forties the persecutions got worse. My father was forced to sell his business to Aryans at fire-sale prices, and we lost the gallery that had been in our family for three generations.’

The unfairness of it, the cruelty, stung me. ‘How awful,’ I said. ‘I heard about the persecutions in Nazi Germany, of course, but Italy?’

‘The racial laws took everyone by surprise,’ Izzy continued. ‘The Jewish community of Rome goes back to the second century BC when the Roman Empire had an alliance of sorts with Judea under the leadership of Judah Maccabeus.’ She shrugged. ‘I think the government wanted to prevent people like my father, who had quite a bit of money, from transferring it out of the country. Father continued working for a while – his work at the Vatican offered him some protection – but when the Germans occupied my country in 1943, they came looking for us.’

I’d forgotten my biscotti; my coffee had grown cold. ‘Good Lord.’

‘My mother spoke five different languages, Hannah. The Nazis said they wanted to employ her as a translator but that was a lie. Instead, they sent my parents to Risiera de San Sabba, a rice mill on the outskirts of Trieste, but it was really a concentration camp. From there, they were taken to Auschwitz.’

I swallowed hard and put down the biscotti I’d been nibbling, no longer particularly hungry for it.

Naddie reached out covered Izzy’s hand with her own. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘That was before the Nazis installed a crematorium at Risiera to save themselves the trouble of shipping undesirables out of the country,’ Izzy said bitterly. ‘I never saw my parents again. The Nazis took everything from us. Everything.’

I dabbed at my eyes with my napkin, trying to take in the enormity of it all. Like millions before me, I’d had a teary, gut-wrenching visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but I’d never known anyone who had personally experienced the Holocaust. Those who had survived, like Izzy, were now in their eighties and nineties, and I hoped that testimonies like hers were being recorded before it was too late.

‘How did you and your brother escape the Nazis when they came for your parents?’ I asked after a few moments of respectful silence.

‘When rumors reached Rome that the Germans were coming, my parents sent Umberto and me to live with family friends in the country, the DeLucas, but even there we were not safe. One day, the German soldiers came looking, but the word had gotten around, so the DeLucas hid us under the floorboards under a bed.’

‘Someone had turned you in?’ Naddie asked.

‘Exactly. In those days, it was dangerous to put your trust in anybody. After the soldiers went away, the DeLucas quickly arranged shelter for us in a convent just outside of Rome. My father’s connections with the Vatican made that possible. If it weren’t for that…’ She shrugged.

‘I wore the habit of a novice,’ she continued. ‘The Nazis were watching the convent, I know, and soldiers knocked on the gates from time to time, but even the Nazis wouldn’t mess with the Reverend Mother Francesca Louise!’ She managed a smile. ‘Oh, she could be a terror!’

‘What was it like, living in the convent?’ Naddie asked.

‘What I remember most is being hungry. The nuns shared what food they had with us, but we were always hungry. And the flour had weevils in it.’

‘Ugh,’ I said.

Izzy’s mouth twitched. ‘Extra protein, Reverend Mother used to say.’

‘And your brother? What happened to Umberto?’ I asked.

‘He got typhus,’ she said simply. ‘He died.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, feeling lower than a snake for even bringing it up.

Izzy shrugged. ‘When the fever came, the nuns did everything they could for Umberto but there was no food, no medicine. I blame that on the Nazis, too.

‘Anyway, you can imagine how happy everyone was when the American soldiers came and Rome was liberated!’ She leaned forward over her coffee cup. ‘I stayed at the convent, though, because I had no place else to go.’

Filomena had sent a server out from the kitchen with a carafe of fresh coffee. I was already on a caffeine high but asked the young woman for a refill anyway.

‘This is where Bruno Milanesi comes into the story,’ Izzy said after the server had returned to the kitchen. ‘Bruno, he was a corporal with the U.S. 5th Army. The army had taken over a scuola secondaria that was near the convent and, even though the war was over, food was still scarce. My Bruno – only he wasn’t my Bruno then, of course – comes over with fresh eggs. He says in broken Italian – he didn’t speak good Italian at all, being an American boy – that he works in the kitchen, and would we like some eggs?’ Izzy rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, those were the most delicious eggs I had ever tasted! Bruno brought us eggs and cheese and sometimes apples. Later, when I got to know him better, I found out he was trading the cigarettes in his rations for food. He’d bring us the used coffee grounds, too. So wasteful, the U.S. Army. The nuns could always squeeze some more coffee out of those grounds! “Practically fresh,” Reverend Mother used to say.

‘One day, Bruno comes to the Reverend Mother and tells her he wants to marry me. There weren’t many Italian boys left, and I think the nuns saw it as an opportunity to get rid of me!’ For the first time that afternoon, Izzy laughed. ‘Bruno and I had fallen in love, of course, but I was only fourteen and too young to marry. Luckily one of the nuns had a brother who got me false papers. He was a printer who had helped hundreds of Jews escape the Germans. I didn’t have a passport, but this man provided a birth certificate for me that said I was born in 1928, not 1930. We used the certificate to get a passport saying I was sixteen so that we could get married and I could go back to the United States with Bruno as a war bride. I had to go for blood tests at the Red Cross, and present that certificate and other documentation to his captain in order to get permission to marry.’

‘What kind of papers did they want?’ Naddie wondered.

‘Some of the soldiers had what you would call “a wife in every port.” The army wanted to make sure Bruno wasn’t already married! But I knew he was an honest boy because he took my picture to send to his mother in Boston so she would know what her new daughter-in-law was going to look like.’ She laughed again. ‘I often wonder what she thought, Bruno’s mother, of Bruno’s “Little Bella”. I was a tiny speck of a thing back then, you can imagine, after so long with so little to eat. We had rations, like half a pound of bread a day, but if that’s all you have to eat it’s not much. I weighed ninety-eight pounds.

‘Then, we found out that Bruno was being shipped to Germany, and then back to America to be discharged, and the army doesn’t give a hoot that he has a fiancée in Italy. So I was thinking I’d never see him again. But, life goes on. I got a job working part-time in an alimentari. Then, one day months later, Reverend Mother came with a letter from Bruno. He’d gotten a two-week furlough.’ Izzy looked from me to Naddie and back again. ‘Everything was destroyed by the war, you understand. Everything. There was no electricity, no telephone, no railroad. It was very cold that winter, but Bruno hitchhiked from Monte Castello, where the army was helping the Brazillians push back the Germans, all the way to Rome! We got married right away. I didn’t even have time to rent a wedding dress. The next day we walked to the Red Cross where he signed me up as a GI wife so that I could get benefits, and then he had to leave and I didn’t see him again for almost a year. I got his letters, though. Every week he wrote me, although I’d get the letters in batches.

‘But then, time passed and I hadn’t heard from Bruno for several months. I was worried he’d forgotten about me when the Red Cross sent a letter telling me to go to a certain hotel where I would wait with other GI brides for a boat to take us to America. There were maybe five hundred war brides and over one hundred children all crowded together on that ship. Some of us were seasick for the whole ten days, but all the hardships flew straight out of my mind when we sailed into New York harbor and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. I stood on the deck and bawled my eyes out.’

I scrabbled in my handbag, looking for a tissue. ‘Now you’ve made me cry,’ I sniffed, then blew my nose.

‘Bruno was there to meet me, and his mother, too. She was a wonderful woman! She’d sent me a dress to wear for my “homecoming.” Other than that, I really brought nothing with me.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Except for…’

We waited expectantly, but she didn’t finish the sentence. ‘Except for what?’ Naddie prodded.

‘Before Abba was forced to sell, he saved one thing. It’s a portrait of me, painted when I was around four, holding my kitten, Merlino.’

I was astonished. ‘How on earth did you get the painting out of Italy?’

Izzy smiled. ‘Abba carefully removed it from the frame, wrapped it in a special canvas, and my mother sewed it into the lining of my suitcase. The painting’s hanging in my living room now. I’ll show it to you sometime.’

‘I’d love to see it,’ I said.

‘It’s lovely,’ Naddie said. ‘I never knew its history. Fascinating.’ Turning to Izzy, she asked, ‘Is the painting valuable?’

Izzy shrugged. ‘It’s priceless to me, of course. I remember sitting for the artist, a flamboyant and rather scary woman named Clotilde Padovano. In the early part of the twentieth century, she was very much in demand as a portrait painter to the well-to-do. I don’t follow such things closely, but I read in the Times that one of her portraits was recently sold at auction in New York for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.’

I whistled.

‘I’ll never part with mine, of course,’ she said.

‘Nor would I, if it were mine,’ I said. ‘Not even if I were reduced to selling umbrellas on street corners.’

Izzy laughed then picked up her handbag, preparing to go. As we got up to join her, I turned to Izzy again. ‘Izzy, I have a rude question.’

‘Yes?’

‘For lunch just now, you had calamari. Isn’t squid a non-kosher food, treif?’

Izzy laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘I learned a long time ago, Hannah, that it is never safe to be Jewish. Maybe it was the years of living on the edge of being found out. Maybe it was the hours of kneeling on the cold floor of the convent at matins and prime. But, after I married Bruno, I converted. I’ve been a practicing Catholic ever since.’

I accompanied my friends to the entrance of Blackwalnut Hall, hugged them both goodbye then headed off in the direction of the parking lot to collect my car.

As I rounded the corner of the building I noticed two men squared off on the concrete apron outside the service entrance to the kitchen, looking for all the world like boxing bears. One had to be Raniero Buccho; nobody else at Calvert Colony had hair that impossibly blond. From his black-and-white uniform and the argument I’d overheard earlier, I guessed the other was probably the hapless kitchen staffer. I was too far away to hear what the men were saying, but from the way Raniero’s arms were flailing about I could tell he was giving the other guy a sizable piece of his mind. Raniero’s adversary stood his ground, his chin thrust forward, unflappably defiant. Curiosity aroused, I briefly considered moving to within earshot of the pair, but when I checked my watch I knew I had to hustle. I was due to pick up my granddaughter, Chloe, from her ballet lesson at three, and if I didn’t hurry I’d be late.

It was none of my business anyway, I thought as I climbed into my ancient LeBaron and slotted the key into the ignition. Raniero had a short fuse, no doubt about that. He was as likely to clobber someone over a dropped serving platter or a misplaced twist of lemon peel as he would, say, over a diner’s complaint about finding a hair in the vichyssoise. Besides, I thought, as I pulled out of the parking lot and into the drive, the other guy seemed to be giving as good as he got. I smiled. Poor Raniero.