The Garden of Letters (32 page)

They walk over to a pitched tent, which contains a table with a small wireless radio. Giorgio walks out, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Falcon, meet Dragonfly. A friend of my brother’s and one of our
staffette
.”

He extends his hand. “
Piacere.
A pleasure.”

“She’s brought the photographs for the new documents. Can you do it now? She won’t be staying up here with us very long . . . unfortunately.”

“No? What a shame.” Giorgio smiles. “I think Jurika needs a little female company. That little blonde teacher who arrived the other day doesn’t seem to be taking a shine to her.”

Rafaelle lets out a big laugh and slaps Giorgio on the shoulder.

“Give him the photographs, Dragonfly.”

She hands them over, and Giorgio takes them back into the tent. “Shouldn’t take me too long,” he says, winking. “Why don’t you sit down?”

She watches as Giorgio withdraws two identity cards from a metal box. The Fascist seal is on their covers. He strikes a match to light a gas lamp and begins to work.

Elodie is sitting quietly. She begins to hum an Albinoni piece to distract herself from thinking about Lena and the upheaval of the previous few days. Elodie senses Luca’s arrival before he walks into the tent.

He places his hands on her arms, and she feels herself grow warm just from his touch.

“Thank God you made it here safely,” he whispers to her. “The
Germans are everywhere, like flies.”

“Take it outside,” Giorgio grumbles. “I can’t work with all your chatting! This has to be exact, or your girlfriend and her mother are going to get a bullet through their eyes.”

“Yes. Yes, I’m sorry,” Elodie apologies. “I’m so grateful for what you’re doing, Falcon.” His name catches on her tongue like a nail caught on a piece of cloth.

Giorgio grunts, and Luca waves for her to join him outside the tent.

“Once he’s done, I want you out of here. I want you on the next train to Venice.”

“How will you find me there?”

“There is Resistance in Venice. Let your mother find a safe place for you both. And then wait for us to find you. Don’t worry about anything else. I will find you. I promise.”

They are still talking when suddenly three partisans arrive in the camp. A sense of commotion erupts.

Luca turns. “It’s Rita and the others. They seem to have news.”

Elodie turns and sees a blonde woman with two other men conferring with Rafaelle and some other partisans. The woman is young, in her early twenties, with a round face and small features. She, too, wears a bandanna around her neck and carries a musket that seems nearly as large as she is.

Elodie has never heard the name Rita Rosani before. She looks around to see if Jurika is close by, but doesn’t see her in the group and assumes she is now out on patrol.

“We shot two Germans just some distance away. They’re approaching. We need to get ready.” She is breathless; her adrenaline lifting off her skin.

Elodie whispers into Luca’s ear, “Who is she?”

He still has one ear listening to Rita, as he whispers, “She’s a schoolteacher. Jewish. Family moved from Trieste to Verona. She just arrived in the mountains with a band of three other partisans who call themselves the Eagle.”

Elodie looks at Rita’s face and sees the Slavic features typical of people from the Trieste region.

“She was a schoolteacher?” Elodie can’t contain her surprise. She looks at this young girl now draped with a musket rifle, and tries to imagine her instructing little children.

“She’s a natural fighter, like our Jurika. She took out three Germans in Valpolicella. Let me introduce you,” Luca says as he ushers Elodie in Rita’s direction.

“Glad to see we have another woman joining our troop,” she says to Elodie. She pushes her rifle over her shoulder and extends a handshake.

“She’s not joining us,” Luca interrupts. “She’s just waiting for the Falcon to finish up with her papers.”

Rita looks at Elodie to see if this is her decision or one that’s been made for her. “Is that right?”

“Yes.” Again Luca speaks for her. “Dragonfly has already completed several missions for the Resistance.”

“I see,” Rita says looking her over.

Elodie is about to say something when Giorgio walks over and hands her the two new identity cards.

“I present you with two of my best masterpieces. Dragonfly, you are now Anna Zorzetto from Venice.”

Elodie studies the cards; she can’t begin to tell them apart from the real ones. They are masterful. He has applied the embossed seal over her and her mother’s photographs. Orsina is now Maria Zorzetto.

She hardly has time to thank him before she hears gunfire. Rafaelle orders the group to disperse in different directions.

A musket is thrust into Elodie’s hands and Luca, now swearing, pulls her by the arm into the cover of the woods.

Portofino, Italy

O
CTOBER
1943

Elodie has been a guest in Angelo’s house for ten days. At night, she sleeps in the white room, the blue coverlet pulled to her chest. She dreams of people who are no longer beside her: Luca in the forest, his hair black as bramble, and her mother’s voice floating from the bath. She also dreams of her cello, silent and pleading, desperate for her to bring out its song.

She feels the nausea lifting. The crippling fatigue has lessened, freeing her ability to move.

Angelo calls her Anna, and she feels her body stiffen. She lifts her head and meets his eyes. She wonders if he can read her like a map, or a sheet of music, knowing that this is not her real name. That somewhere beneath the skin and bone, her blood belongs to a girl named Elodie.

He notices her spine straighten. Her eyes flicker. She is like a cat, suddenly on guard. He wants to show her that she is safe here; that his offer to give her shelter is without obligation. He wants to tell her that it gives him comfort to help the person who is too scared to ask. That he’s doing a form of penance for leaving behind the woman he loved, the child he longed to hold. He wants to tell her not to be afraid.

He sees that she is drawn to his books. He sees how she glances at the titles when she thinks he’s not looking, and how she secretly tries to touch a cover, or trace a finger over a deckled edge. His Dalia had loved books, too. The paper, the smell, the texture, even the placement of the words on the page, all were forms of beauty to her. And he knew one thing: A woman who loves books has a dreamer’s soul, with each story she has read woven into her own.

As she stands in the living room staring at the books, he pulls out two from the shelf.

“Do you like Moravia or Dante? Stendhal, or perhaps Fitzgerald?” He smiles, as the title
Gatsby Il Magnifico
slips from his lips. And, suddenly, with his list of names, Elodie feels as though she is back in Luca’s bookstore.

“I have a favorite book,” she says softly. “
Il Piccolo Principe
.”

“
The Little Prince
,” he says. “I know it very well. One must have experienced love to understand its hidden meaning.”

She smiles. “Yes, I have my own copy with me.”

She is surprised by how openly she answers him, but she finally wants to tell him at least one truthful thing about her.

“Do you?” he says. “May I see it?”

She walks back to her room and takes the book out of her bag. She sees the cover with the boy clutching the parachute made from birds, his feet lifting from the moon, and the sight of it makes her want to cry.

She returns and hands it to him.

He smiles, and the kindness on his face is overwhelming to her. “Come, let’s find a place to sit. Zaccharia has a fever, but he’s just down the street. Francesca has a broken leg, but I’ve already plastered it and she won’t be going anywhere for several days. Gherardo is ninety-two and has a headache, but he’s had it for the past fifteen years.” He lets out a small laugh. “Plus there’s the
kommandant
, of course, who needs an insulin shot . . . but he likes me to wait until five o’clock after he has his schnapps to dull the pain from the needle. A brave German he is, obviously.” He smiles again. “So, I can certainly take a few moments and read to you, Anna, before I have to go.”

He lifts his chin in the direction of the sun streaming through the arched door that leads to the garden.

“But I think you spend too much time indoors. It’s not good for your health. You need some fresh air and sunshine.”

She smiles. Since she left her mother, no one has been concerned for her care.

“Shall we go to the garden? I can read to you there.”

He senses her hesitation like a silent movement that changes the air within the room.

“It’s private. No one will see us there. Think of it as therapeutic, if nothing else.”

She nods, and Angelo feels as though he’s accomplished a small victory as Elodie follows him.

In the sunshine, she finds herself squinting. Angelo is right, she hasn’t been outside since she arrived, and the light striking her eyes and face is almost blinding.

She inhales the scent of gardenia and the now-familiar jasmine, and detects the sound of seagulls circling above. Below, she sees the stretch of the ocean and the port from where she first arrived. Viewed from high above the hills, it’s now just a tiny spot.

As he lifts the book and takes a finger to the page, she remembers with gratitude how he pulled her out from the crowd and saved her from the German with the prying eyes.

“Where should I start?” he asks her.

“At the beginning,” she says.

He nods. “As you wish. My wife used to like me to begin at the end of the books I read to her, so she knew if she had to conserve her tears.”

Elodie ponders this for a moment. A card has been dealt, a revelation about his late wife.

“I have no more tears left now,” Elodie says, looking out toward the sea. “With me, you can start from the beginning.”

“As you wish, Anna,” he says, and he turns back to the first page of
Il Piccolo Principe, The Little Prince
. “Allora . . .”

The hour passes between them quickly. He slips into a voice that sounds low and soothing. He reads about the little prince journeying through the first planets, where he meets the king, the vain man, the drunkard, and the man who makes maps. But he stops before her favorite part: the taming of the fox.

When her eyes close, he studies her in those quiet, stolen moments like a connoisseur of displaced persons. She is more complicated than the others that have come through his door. Simon, the Hungarian Jew, who arrived with a single diamond sewn into his pocket and stayed with him for only a few days before heading farther south. Guido, the eighteen-year-old soldier, who arrived at the port dressed as a seminary student after running away from his post, but who gave himself away by the military boots he still wore. It had been fortunate that the Fascist control at the port hadn’t noticed them as well, but luckily they were distracted by an impressively large-breasted girl who had arrived on the same boat.

Angelo often recalled the first night Guido spent with him in his home. After drinking one too many glasses of
vino santo
, the boy could barely control his emotions. He insisted he wasn’t a coward and that he loved his country, but he couldn’t die on frozen Russian soil, where his papers ordered him to go. He would have preferred Ethiopia to Russia, the boy sobbed over his drink. At least there it was warm. Angelo winced. Thoughts of Nasai came flooding back to him. He felt the boy in the room like a ghost.

When he drank, Angelo’s private hauntings returned. The two people he had abandoned were the ones who had most needed his protection, Dalia and Nasai. The midwife had insisted she had done everything she could to save her, but she wasn’t a doctor. He couldn’t help wondering where his predecessor, Doctor Pignone, had been when Dalia died? Drinking wine at his favorite café, or taking a nap in his hammock under the fig trees? He certainly was not with the midwife or his mother and Vanna as they struggled to save Dalia’s life.

He would never show this boy, nor any of the others who came through his door, his room with the papered walls. Every night, he looked up and saw the words he had written to his pregnant bride, and he would sleep surrounded by the shadow of those letters. It wasn’t the words that haunted him now, but the two hands that had cut them and pasted them to the walls with such devotion.

When Guido went down the hall to take his bath that night, Angelo noticed the boy empty his pockets onto the desk in the spare room, revealing a small rope cord with an amulet of San Giorgio. Angelo remembered so many of his fellow soldiers wearing a similar charm around their necks when he was in Ethiopia. The image of Saint George on his horse, a sword grasped to his side, was the gift so many fathers gave to their sons to protect them. Here in Portofino, one could see San Giorgio everywhere. He was the patron saint of the city.

Angelo had never been one to believe in superstitions or rituals even though he had grown up with his mother believing in the powers of saints. She prayed not only to San Giorgio but also to Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen. And when Angelo had left for school, she added prayers to Saint Luke to protect her son from harm.

So he could not deny that things like amulets and good-luck charms gave people comfort. But Angelo certainly did not believe these objects themselves held any special powers, but only connected people to the person who had given them. For him, it was the touch of his palm against his patient’s skin that created a seal between them.

He had watched countless times in hospital wards, even in the tents of Ethiopia, how a human touch could heal in a way that medicine alone could not. And so at night, when Angelo lay tormented by thoughts of Dalia, he often wondered if things might have been different had he been there to hold her hand.

Guido stayed with Angelo in his home in the terraced cliffs of Portofino for nearly two months. He helped the men in the family on the fishing boats, learning to repair their nets and their engines. Angelo was sure the boy was safe in Portofino, that no one had come looking for him among the lemon trees and ancient village roads that overlooked the sea. But then one morning, when Angelo woke, he found the boy was gone. He had disappeared without even leaving a note of good-bye. But he had left his treasured amulet for Angelo, placing it next to the carved-wood lion from Nasai.