Dammit, girl, he said. Just do it and get it over with and we can go. I’m dying here. I feel like a fucking beehive was set loose in me. Just do it. Then we’ll never talk about it again and we can reach civilization and I can have a fucking drink.
Viktor grabbed Frank by the collar and shoved him up against the wall. Frank struggled to breathe, his vision blackening from the edges. And then, saying nothing, Viktor let him go and Frank slid to the ground and wheezed there sullenly for a long time, watching the straw before his eyes dance with his breath, watching Bern at the far end of the room as she combed and combed her hair like a cat licking itself calm.
HE WAS IN THE GARDEN in Fiesole eating figs and Cinzia was there, her hair short like a boy’s and blown by the warm wind. She opened her mouth, about to say something — Lucci’s very limbs tingled, waiting for her voice — when Parnell sat up beside him, shouting incomprehensible words. Lucci sprang up in the darkness of the donkey-smelling barn, his heart splitting in his chest.
Oh, he cried. Viktor lit a match.
In the spit and flare they saw Parnell’s face, seized by fear. Then he was weeping. No, he said, No, no, no, and Bern was beside him, holding his face, saying softly, Parnell, wake up, wake up, it’s okay, sweetheart, it’s a dream, and Frank scrambled to the wall, and Lucci sat down again, wearily, and the donkey kicked, and Viktor lit another match when the first burned out in his fingers.
Parnell rested his head on Bern’s shoulder until he stopped weeping, until his breath came naturally again. He told them what he had dreamed: ranks of soldiers, black as beetles, marching in lockstep down the Strand, a child swung by its heels against a wall so its brains splattered out. London burning. Bombs falling like hailstones on the Houses of Parliament.
I want to go home, Parnell said. Please, Bern. Just let us go home.
See, said Frank from the wall, where he sat, shuddering. See, Bern. You’re hurting all of us, you know. Your morals, he said, are hurting all of us.
Viktor moved toward Frank, but Lucci stepped between them. Frank’s ill, he said quietly, and he knows not what he talks. Viktor glowered down and for a moment Lucci steeled himself for a blow, wondered if it would kill him, but Viktor turned and sat, abruptly.
When they settled again, Lucci could no longer sleep. In his mouth he could still taste figs. He could almost smell Cinzia’s hair. He thought of her as she would be now, if she were alive, in the camp at Bolzano. Probably gaunt, no longer pregnant. Still as fierce as she was as a partisan, going into the night, doing what she needed to do. All that time Lucci had tried not to worry, stood under his red bulb, pulling images from the baths, but growing more frantic as their child began to show. And one bright afternoon he watched as, down a street too long for him to run to her, she was hustled into a dark car.
Now the Germans were coming, perhaps only a few miles down the road. A great ugly inkstain on France, spreading. And when they overtook this barn, who’s to say where the journalists would go. Perhaps Lucci would walk into the camp and see Cinzia look up from whatever work it is they make women do; sewing, or weeding, and she’d blanch, be furious with him for being caught. Wishful thinking, Lucci knew: more likely he’d be killed on the spot. Journalism was no impediment to evil. And only the willful say they do not know what’s happening in Europe anymore.
Yet, he thought, there are still people like Bern, and this is good. White-hot people. Lucci had met Bern long before the war, when she was a debutante visiting Europe on the arm of some man. They’d met at a nightclub and she charmed him. That night, Cinzia, in the presence of a woman so beautiful, was dazzling herself and danced the way that only Cinzia could dance. Bern turned to Lucci in the dim flickering light and brilliant bleat of horns, and said, Giancarlo Bertolucci, your wife is spectacular. And he said, This I know, Bernice, and she laughed her smoke-filled laugh. Later, in his despair with Cinzia gone, when he took the job to photograph the looming war, they met up again in Czechoslovakia. When one night he knocked on her door, she opened it a crack and said, Oh, Lucci. Oh, darling, no. I make it a point of honor not to see the husbands of women I adore. He said, I understand, but it is probable I am a widow. And she said, Widower. And don’t think that. Never Cinzia, she’s a strong one — you can’t let yourself think that. She opened her door a little wider and gave him a long, soft kiss on his mouth. There, she said, now I know she’s alive, and she closed her door.
They were going to die there, in the barn. Starve. Already, they were at the end of the water in the donkey’s bucket and he had seen Parnell try to eat the oats. A terrible shame to die now; it made him want to weep for the glorious world out there, weep that he would not be able to see it grow healthy again. To find Cinzia, or to avenge her. Now, in the bleak night, he hoped his heart would break and kill him before the Germans did.
Lucci heard a scraping at the door and sat up. Probably rats; still, he crawled over to see. It was morning but still dark, and he pressed his eye to a crack and saw the teary old woman creep back across the yard and close the cottage door with exquisite care. Lucci was heartened; perhaps there was still good in the world. Then he smelled a smell that made him heady — crêpes — and he could isolate each of the ingredients as he never could before: butter, sugar, flour, milk, even a little rum. He felt the ground until he found the plate, and pressed his fingers into a soft stack two inches high. If he were Frank, he would eat them himself. But he wasn’t Frank, so he said, loudly, Excuse, and the others grumbled in the hay. Chaps, he said, and they sat up. Breakfast is served, said Lucci. Courtesy of Madame Lachrymose.
It was enough to keep them alive, not enough to satisfy, and by dawn they were starving again. Nicolas came early to take the donkey to the fields and recoiled at their smell. My cabbage, he called to Bern, Have you come to any new conclusions? But Bern sent a scathing stream of curses in French at him and Nicolas chuckled and led the donkey into the light and locked them in again.
Frank and Parnell sat together by the wall and conferred quietly. Lucci did not like this. He stroked Bern’s hair, telling her little tales that his mother had told him as a child so that she would not have to see the others in their low discussions. Viktor paced. Lucci wasn’t looking at him when Viktor suddenly, around noon, turned pale, sank to his knees, and fainted.
Though Frank looked close to death, he was quick enough as Bern knelt over Viktor. He stood over her and shook her shoulder roughly. Listen, he said. You don’t have to prove anything to us, you know. You’re the most courageous woman we all know.
The most courageous person, rather, called Parnell from the wall.
I’ve seen you with my own eyes, said Frank. I’ve seen you kick a wounded man from a door so a cottage full of women could escape. I’ve seen you walk through brains and guts and viscera without gagging. If you could do those things, you could sleep with Nicolas to set us free. It’d only take an hour. One hour of courage and then we can go.