Ja, Tedeschi, the officer says, ein jüdischer Name.
On their way home, Ada says to Haya, Let’s get some ice cream, while there still is ice cream to be had, while it is still Italian. And she also says, You can’t run from your name. Behind every name there is a story.
The Italian troops in Albania are now entirely out of favour. Former friends who are called Allies in wartime are arresting and killing soldiers. Some soldiers surrender, others flee, many die. The Tedeschi family move again, this time to the centre of Tirana, and prepare for departure, which is called repatriation. It is September 1943. Life dribbles by. Paula and Orestes go off to the abandoned palace of the fascist ministry in their neighbourhood, where they roller skate on the spacious marble floors, shrieking. For Paula and Orestes life is a thrill. The Nazis are stepping up their raids and searching flats. From a window on the third floor Haya watches a scene, as if from a movie. Later she faints. A young man in a yellow shirt with a hole on the right shoulder sprints towards her building, while across the street a Nazi lounging in an open-topped car lines him up in his sights. The barrage of bullets from the machine gun catches the young man two metres short of the front door. In an instant the yellow shirt grins red.
In un momento
Sono sfiorite le rose
I petali caduti
Perché io non potevo dimenticare le rose
Le cercavamo insieme
Abbiamo trovato delle rose
Erano le sue rose erano le mie rose
Questo viaggio chiamavamo amore
Col nostro sangue e colle nostre lagrime facevamo le rose
Che brillavano un momento al sole del mattino
Le abbiamo sfiorite sotto il sole tra i rovi
Le rose che non erano le nostre rose
Le mie rose le sue rose
P.S. E cosí dimenticammo le rose,*
whispers Ludoviko from Valona, while he watches Haya search for a lost earring in the sand by the sea, imagining himself to be Dino Campana and her to be Sibilla Aleramo, with their last dusk running out; and Haya (at the time), the goose, has no idea what he is mumbling.
The boy vanishes into Haya’s entranceway; she thinks she can touch him. The Nazis go from door to door, banging and shouting. As if the boy has been swallowed whole. The next day Haya ventures out to buy cornbread mixed with chaff, and on the square she sees more than a hundred neatly stacked bodies, some in civilian clothing, some in partisan uniforms. The passers-by do not look; they move quickly past with rubber tread. The men lie there as if sleeping, as if tired of war, as if they were tree trunks for a building project. There is no smell. There are no flies. The shops are open, banners snapping, the shutters on the windows are shut.
Ludoviko is not among those who were killed.
Koffler the banker is not released from prison. They take his wife Angela to the madhouse, because she yanks her hair out and bangs her head on the windowpane. For practically nothing, the Tedeschi family sell what little property they have acquired. Florian’s colleagues sail out of Valona, but do not reach Naples: the ship is bombed by British aircraft and sinks. The only survivor is a clerk named Leone Romanelli, who swims for three days to reach the shore, then arrives in Tirana to tell Florian all about it. He, too, loses his mind. His wife and three children are back there, on board, or rather in the sea, on the bottom of the sea. It is not wise to have many children. Then Leone Romanelli is placed in a madhouse. To keep Angela Koffler company. For ever, Haya believes.
Escorted by German soldiers, the Tedeschi family leave Albania and travel for three weeks to Italy. Behind them they leave their physical stench and dead armies, whose generals, Italian and German, lugging maps, registers, medical and army records, dental records and data on medical histories, dragging along with them a priest or two, wandering through the remote mountains and sandy coves of the land of eagles, come back twenty years later, through the mud and rain, the summer heat, regardless, looking for mouldering bones over which crops or skyscrapers have grown.
At the border between Albania and Yugoslavia columns of Italian Wehrmacht prisoners of war peer frantically about and beg for a crust of bread, while digging in sub-zero temperatures, seeking their way under mounds of snow, looking for a path, an exit. In thin voices that crack with the cold, they call to their loved ones and send them messages. Here, at the border whose encirclement ruptures, making it a passage, an exit, the Tedeschi family, with hundreds of civilians and soldiers on their way to Budapest, clamber into a railway car, never dreaming, not even wanting to know, what is happening just a little further north, what journeys there are, and to what end. Traversing Montenegro, Hungary and Austria, Florian and Ada and their four children arrive in Italy just before Christmas 1943.
The train stands in Budapest for several hours. Off it leap neatly pressed German soldiers, well fed and freshly shaven. The Hungarians toss portions of goulash, bread, milk and little bottles of rum in through the windows to the other passengers. Not three months later, from this same platform at Keleti station and several other smaller train stations in and around Budapest, other train carriages, locked freight cars, cattle wagons, with a hundred people in each, with a bucket for piss and a bucket for drinking water, will depart for a walled-in station, a blind track leading to a cosmic twilight. From early spring to early summer 1944 the crematorium at Auschwitz will work at full capacity, and daily it will vomit up the remains of 6,000 people, murdered, who will float away like gray eiderdown into the sky. And so it is that in two and a half months 400,000 Hungarian Jews will leap on board the “messianic timetable placed on the Index by the new order”, in a “wretched reworking of the antediluvian evacuation, this landlocked, earthbound reprise of Noah’s ark”, which was written for them by an unknown man in long black tails, in a shirt with a “stiff celluloid collar, yellowed like an old domino, the headwaiter’s tie with a bohemian knot, swinging his cane high in the air, swaying on his feet like a ship’s mast, staring into space”, a gentleman by the name of Eduard Sam, a gentleman who, with a glance at his watch “with a dial and Roman numerals showing the exact time”, steps out of the “frame of the drama and farce of which he is writer”.
The way lives interweave yet never touch, only to collide in mutual destruction, inconceivably distant in their simultaneity. In 1944 the former senior inspector of the state railways, by then a “retired senior railway inspector”, author of a timetable, Eduard Sam, steps along in a “column of the miserable and the ill, among horrified women and terrified children, going with them and alongside them, tall and bent over, without his spectacles, without his cane, which they had taken from him, staggering along with uncertain steps in the queue of the sacrificed, as a shepherd among his herd, a rabbi with his flock, a school teacher at the head of a group of school children…” So Eduard Sam moves towards the trains, towards the train carriages, whose departures and arrivals he has so often calibrated, checked, supplemented, coordinated, perfected, and now, as he walks, the times of train departures and arrivals, of routine departures and arrivals, run in his head like a refrain, like a ditty, much like the clacking of wheels, in close harmony with his broken step, like a song that will determine his fate, and to himself he repeats those arrivals and departures of trains, those routine departures. And, while Eduard Sam strides to his finality, high-level Nazi officials in Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, everywhere, the perfect bureaucrats Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, State Secretary of the Reich Transport Ministry, and his superior, S.S. General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s personal adjutant, obediently apply the special, newly composed timetable to the new order. S.S. official Dr Albert Ganzenmüller, without a trace of malice, earnestly, with devotion and meticulous attention, crosses out, annuls Eduard Sam’s timetable of trains, of special trains, which had been honed for years, and in the serenity of an airy office composes his own Fahrplanordnung 587, Fahrplanordnung 290, and so on, special timetables of trains, of special trains, on which he stamps the official seal of annihilation.