The Detour (20 page)

Across the room, a second poster shouted in blocky, self-assured capital letters:
HEALTH, A NATIONAL RESOURCE
. If health were a resource that a nation needed desperately in order to survive, then the healthiest of its citizens were heroes. The unhealthy were bad people, the kind we heard about so often on the radio:
saboteurs
. I looked back at the anthropometry poster, suspiciously eyeing the doctor’s large black calipers, long and curved like the back end of an earwig.

In response to my mother’s well-meaning inquiries, the other woman responded, “It’s better this way.” She smoothed her skirt and patted her loose bun, which was sprouting black bobby pins that looked like tiny, electrocuted snakes. “It would only be harder in a few years, and that might be too late to hold off troubles.”

“That makes sense.”

“And anyway, he doesn’t understand it.”

“Do you understand it, dear?”

“Well enough.”

We were made to wait a long time. When the woman was finally allowed in to see her boy, I moved back to the seat next to my mother. “What doesn’t he understand?”

“He’s being sterilized.”

“Is he covered with germs?”

“No, that’s not it.”

The surgical room was open and we could see the doctor and the mother trying to help the wobbly boy to stand and proceed to a secondary recovery room in the back. But whatever anesthesia they had given him was still coursing through his veins, and the mildly degenerate young man—if that’s what he was—kept collapsing back onto the table. With every thump, I felt my mother’s grip tighten on my sleeve, and I finally understood her fear: that this eugenically minded doctor, full of new ideas and politically astute aspirations, was a danger to us, though I still didn’t quite understand why.

“Hurry,” my mother said, dragging me by the arm, gesturing toward the way out.

“But why?”

“I want to leave.” The tension had finally overtaken her. Her face was damp and drops of tears were collecting at the tip of her red chin.

“But I’m not being”—I searched for the word—“sterilized.”

“No, you’re not. We came for our own procedure.”

“But are they going to do it?”

“Not now. Let’s go.”

I wasn’t entirely relieved. I was confused. Because a part of me did want this done and finished—“a simple procedure,” my mother had been whispering in my ear all week, preparing me to be brave. A part of me was already looking ahead, thinking of the group hikes and swims I’d be able to attend later in the summer and feeling how much easier it all would be from this day forward. But there was also something about the smell in the air, the drunken stagger of the man-boy, and my mother’s own sudden loss of confidence that all merged into an unspeakable dread.

Until this point, the problem had been a matter of surfaces and emotions—no small things, of course. My difference was a humiliation, but in some school circles, wearing the wrong outfit and hairstyle were nearly as problematic. But what if it went deeper? What if this thing, whether left in place or surgically removed, was a sign of something else, and that something required further treatment or quarantine? On the way out, I looked at the anthropometry poster again, and at the large calipers that the doctor in the picture was holding tight to the patient’s head. He was only measuring, I told myself. Not clipping, crushing, or rubbing him out.

I woke in the hot dark with my hand pressed against my face and my fingers clutched around something hard and square, and the smell of antiseptic—no, lighter fluid—strong on my fingers and in my nostrils.

“Air!” I shouted. “I need air! It’s too hot in here!

No answer.

“You can’t leave me in here all day, with a body! Cosimo!”

They say that kidnappers operate most comfortably in anonymity. I had made myself too anonymous to my captor, who had known me until now only by my last name, Vogler.

I took a deep breath and shouted: “Ernst!”

One syllable, lost to the whine of the engine.

“Ernst—that is my Christian name!”

Still no reply. I waited a few minutes, listening for any sound, and then gathered my energies to try again.

“Cosimo!”

But he was trying his best to ignore me. When I pounded on the wall, the engine sounds rose in pitch, as if he were accelerating slightly, and in that acceleration I perceived his stress as well. He could have left me on the road. He could have taken the statue and his brother’s body and left me. But he did not, so I reasoned that he did, in fact, plan to help me still—only later. But what he couldn’t realize, because he wasn’t thinking, was that “later” would not suffice. If we weren’t at the border by Monday at nightfall, we would be labeled as criminals. Keller would claim, conveniently, that we had evaded the Roman policemen in order the steal the statue—that we had planned all of it from day one—and that’s how it would seem.

The heat and the dark and the constant bouncing made me feel drugged, obscuring how much time was passing, or how much I had slept. I set up a rhythm of pounding my fist and calling out, followed by periods of rest, during which I listened for any signs of Cosimo’s attention. We slowed
down, but it was only to make a sharp turn. We sped up later, coasting down a hill. Another steep turn, followed by another—we were zigzagging, the engine straining. A major left turn, perhaps heading west. Climbing further into the mountains.

I banged again and again with the edge of my aching fist, counting as I went
—sieben, acht, neun
—and was rewarded finally with a sound: not a voice, but a whistle.

It was tremulous and uncertain at first. Then it built, becoming the tune that Cosimo had whistled the day before at the lake. German opera. But what was that tune? Nothing epic or Wagnerian. It was simpler, lilting, and sweet. The association that came to mind was one of woods, children, a sandman and a dew fairy and angels, all watching and protecting. I could see the big old radio in our house and my mother next to it, with her hand resting on top of the wood because whenever she lifted her hand there was static. Somehow we thought it had to be her hand that was summoning music from the radio, that she was nearly magical, so Greta and I begged her not to shift. “Of course, you love this one,” she’d tell my sister. “It is named for you.”

Or nearly so. It was
Hänsel und Gretel
, by Humperdinck. The opera I couldn’t quite place before.

It was a message. Cosimo was telling me that he meant no harm. We were not abandoning the precepts of civilization; he was not a rule breaker at heart. He was only insisting on his own values, as I had to insist on mine.

If there is something I feared as a child, while listening to
Hänsel und Gretel
, it was the thought of being pushed into an oven. It happened only to the witch in the end, but still.

It took a half hour or so to build up the courage and several attempts to get the lighter started. As the smell on my fingers attested, the fluid had leaked as I slept, and now there was not enough to guarantee many more strikes. I found my suitcase and felt blindly through it, searching for something flammable. My sketchbook and my dictionary remained in the front of the truck.

I patted my pocket, locating a large, poorly folded piece of paper: the map. I ripped it into long sections, fashioning each into a twisted horn, then applied the lighter and began to add handfuls of straw, which ignited easily.

“Fire!” I yelled, my throat tight with apprehension until I cleared it and accepted what I had done. “Cosimo! Fire!”

I crouched near the door, next to Enzo’s body, ready to jump out. The pile of burning straw crackled. The burlap lemon bag had finally caught, filling the truck with smoke. I started to cough.

He shouted from the cab. “You’re lying to me!”

“I’m not!”

The response came back muffled. “
Imbecille! Dummkopf!
Everything back there will burn!”

But it wouldn’t. Not the statue made of marble. Ancient things have a way of outlasting us, as they should.

If the fire were left unchecked, the wooden crate would go up next. Then the body, or rather two bodies—but it wouldn’t
come to that, I didn’t think. The crate was slow to catch, but catch it finally did—not blazing yet, only smoldering. Meanwhile, I could scarcely breathe.

“Fire! You must stop the truck!”

At the moment I reached out a hand and made contact with something I’d overlooked in my search for flammable paper—the padded cover. Di Luca. The most important reference in my collection. But more importantly, the only thing I owned that bore my mentor’s name. Why did this matter so much if he was still safe somewhere, to emerge someday from these confused times, dignified and healthy and whole? My instincts knew what my mind refused to admit. If there was a moment of uncontrolled panic, it hit then, and I leaned over the book, its corners pressed into my chest.

I was coughing uncontrollably when the truck braked to a halt. A moment later, Cosimo unlocked and threw open the retractable door. He ignored me, attending to the fire instead, beating it with his jacket. Briefly, I had the advantage: I could lock him inside the truck and either he would fight the blaze or fail to fight it, but either way the statue would survive. But I couldn’t do it. As duty-bound and determined as I considered myself to be, I could not do it, even then.

Smoke billowed but there was no visible flame. Cosimo’s face was dark with grime and exhaustion. It would not have taken much to subdue him. He approached me, lumbering in a soot-covered half crouch, so disappointed and so disheartened, readying himself to jump down from the edge of the truck, both fists curled with contempt.

He pulled the truck’s back door closed, leaving me standing as he returned to the driver’s side door. I followed, uncertain, calling out, “Someone has to be committed to the larger things—to art, to the future!”

“Go around,” he said, stabbing a finger at the passenger door. “Get in.”

The hour hand on my watch crept past three o’clock, and then four. I noticed the roominess of the truck bench, the gap between us, where before we’d been so crowded. I cleared my parched, smoky throat and asked Cosimo where we were, but he reminded me that I’d burned the only map. A sign pointed toward two names I didn’t recognize—Vignola and Maranello—but we continued along the smallest roads, always turning away from any town or larger
strada
. He would say only that we were heading northwest; that we had to avoid being seen; that he needed to concentrate to find his way on this indirect route he had traveled only a few times before.

The sun was low and hot in the burnished western sky when I patted my pocket and noticed the shape of the postcards meant for my sister. If I’d remembered them before, I would have used them for kindling. I took one out, and pushing hard against my thigh to keep the script smooth despite the road’s bumps, I wrote:

We are past Florence
 …

Nothing else came to mind, until, with exasperation, I put pen to paper and scrawled quickly:

 … 
which is a shame. It would have been wonderful to see, though I was not prepared to see it. But perhaps for beauty, one cannot prepare
.