“Yes, I do. Is he there? With you?” She would give anything to see him.
“No.” Babbo shook his head. “He is not with me. He is there, with you.”
“Where? I am on a train! I am being taken away.”
Her father touched her face. She could feel his hand, long-fingered and light against her cheek. “Angelo is inside you. His flesh is now your flesh, his branch is your branch.”
“No, they killed him. They have killed everyone. And they will kill me too.”
“Eva, listen to me. All your life you have had a dream. A dream of this moment. You know that, don’t you? You recognize the dream.”
Eva nodded, and the fear returned like a deluge, flooding her veins and turning her fingers to ice.
“You have to jump, Eva.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. What do you have to do first?”
“I have to climb to the window.” She didn’t think she could fit through that opening. And there were bars, dividing it. She couldn’t remove the bars.
“You climb up to the window. And then what? In the dream, what did you do next?”
“I breathed in the cold air.”
“Yes. You breathe and gather courage. And then what?”
She shook her head stubbornly, resisting. She remembered that wicked relief. That sweet poison of letting go, of giving up. It had released her, temporarily, and she wasn’t ready to care again. “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t want to. I’m so tired, and I’m so alone.”
“But you must do it. You are the last Rosselli. You must jump, Batsheva. Because if you don’t, you will surely die, and Angelo will die too.”
“Angelo is already dead.”
“You must jump, Eva. You must jump. And you must live,” he whispered, his breath a kiss on her wet cheek. He was so real. Just like the dream that was no longer a dream.
When Eva woke, her father was gone, and her brief respite from trying was over.
In the morning, sore, but able to get around, Angelo packed the books in the small valise Eva had brought with her to Rome. He folded her clothes and put them in the bigger suitcase, clearing out the room because he couldn’t stand for anyone else to touch her things. He made her bed, folding the covers neatly, even though he knew one of the sisters would strip them off when he left and wash them. He wanted to take the case that covered the pillow and ended up folding it and tucking it inside the valise, unable to part with the physical reminder of her scent merged with his. He couldn’t manage to summon any guilt for taking something that wasn’t his. He’d already taken something that wasn’t his, and she’d instantly been taken away from him.
He started to shake, the grief and disbelief making him wonder how he was ever going to go on. Movement hurt, thought hurt, breathing hurt. And none of it was because of his battered body. He welcomed that pain, because it distracted him. He made himself walk down the stairs, juggling Eva’s things.
Mother Francesca saw him and rushed to his side, scolding him fiercely and trying to remove the cases from his arms.
“What do you think you are doing? You have to rest. At least for a few more days!” she clucked.
“I’ve been in bed for three days. That’s enough rest,” he answered softly. “I will take these things home.”
“You can’t go home! Monsignor Luciano came here. He delivered some of your things. You’re to stay hidden until the Americans arrive. If everyone thinks you’re dead, they won’t be looking for you. You’ll be safe as long as you stay here and stay out of sight. He said Monsignor O’Flaherty has been conducting all of his meetings on the steps of St. Peter’s to avoid arrest. When he leaves the Vatican he has to wear a disguise! There have been attempts to grab him right off the street. Someone even tried to pull him across the white line the Germans drew on the ground. If they pull him across, he is no longer under Vatican protection and can be arrested. Someone got wind of the plan and turned the tables. The man hired to kidnap the monsignor got a good pounding!”
Mother Francesca’s eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed, and Angelo found himself smiling slightly at her obvious excitement over the “pounding.” She’d had more excitement in the last few months than she’d probably ever had in her whole life and would ever have again.
But the news put a wrench in his plans. He couldn’t sit in Eva’s room and wait for the war to be over. If he didn’t keep working, keep moving, he wouldn’t survive. He would be the next casualty of war’s hopelessness. He would be the one walking in front of the streetcar, or throwing himself from a bridge, or inciting a German to shoot him. He felt it in the black despair that coiled in his stomach, threatening to strike, to sink its venomous teeth into his chest and stop his heart.
There was work to be done, and he was going to do it. He would just take a page from O’Flaherty’s playbook.
The best way to hide, Eva had said, was not to hide at all. Angelo pulled on a worn pair of trousers and a work shirt that he still had from his time in the hillside parish. Priests were required to wear a cassock when they left their homes, but there had been plenty of work to do inside the crumbling rectory and the ancient church, and he’d worn out a pair of trousers and several shirts in the process. He removed his prosthetic and pinned up the trouser leg so that it was obvious to anyone looking at him that it was missing. Monsignor Luciano had delivered his crutches with his possessions, and with his sleeves rolled, a cigarette hanging from his lip, three day’s growth on his jaw, and a worn-out black cap, he looked like a young soldier, aged by war and injury, who had paid his dues and asked only to be left alone.
He would draw attention, and it would be met with either sympathy or a quick averting of the eyes. The Germans might ask for his papers, and he had some he could use, but more likely, he would be ignored. He put his cassock and his cross and a change of clothes in his satchel and looped it over his back, stuffing his real pass in one pocket and his fake pass in the other. He’d need the real one to get into the Vatican.
The majority of the Jews in the cattle car spoke French. French had been required in school, but Eva was rusty and she had to listen closely to understand. But she didn’t need to speak fluent French to know what the man named Armand was attempting. He’d climbed up the side of the boxcar and was sawing at a bar with Eva’s gold file. Through everything, the days at Via Tasso and the week at Borgo San Dalmazzo, Eva’s file had never been discovered. When the man had asked if anyone had something that might work to cut through the bars, she’d offered it to him.
Armand had been at it all day, trading off with a boy of twelve or thirteen named Pierre who was with his mother, a woman named Gabriele. Gabriele had soaked her scarf in urine from the bucket in the corner, and when the men weren’t sawing, Pierre worked it back and forth over the bar, using the corrosive liquid to weaken the metal where the man had attempted to cut through with the file. Armand braced his feet against the side of the car and pulled, with all his weight and strength, against the bar he’d been laboring to weaken.
“It’s going to break! I can feel it!” he yelled, triumphant. With a mighty yank he bore down and the bar came free at the top. He grabbed the severed end and hung from it, bending the bar back, creating an opening about a foot wide and a foot tall. He was a very thin man, but he was going to have a difficult time getting through.
“They shoot at the first jumpers,” Eva heard the man telling the boy who’d helped him all day and all night long. “So I will go first.”
“You can’t do this! I am responsible for everyone in this wagon.” The protester was a heavier-set man with a bolero perched on his head. “If you jump, I will be punished. We will be punished.” The man spread his arm to include everyone else, and a woman spoke up from behind him.
“You will die! Someone jumped when we were being shipped to San Dalmazzo. His clothes caught as he was jumping, and he was pulled under. We saw the blood and the strip of fabric hanging from the window when we got off the train.”
“We are going to Bergen-Belsen! There is no need to take this risk,” another man argued.
Armand could only shake his head in disgust.
“Bergen-Belsen is a labor camp,” Armand argued. “Hard labor! And we have done nothing wrong. You act as if being sent to a work camp is our due.”
The voices of protest rose again, urging him to think of others.
“No! I am jumping. I would rather die now than die slowly,” he shouted. He scrabbled up the side of the car once more, and Eva watched with all the others as he squirmed and wiggled through the small window, trying to get his shoulders to fit. He had just managed to clear his upper body when the sound of shooting commenced. People screamed, and Armand’s legs jerked wildly and then went limp. He hung, still wedged in the hole he’d worked so hard to create.
Another man pulled him down. A portion of Armand’s head was missing, and the rest was covered in blood, obscuring his face entirely. He was dead. One woman began to weep, but most of the passengers lapsed into silence, careful not to look at the man who had risked it all and died for his efforts.
“Where are they shooting from?” Eva spoke up quietly. “The Germans. Where are they? We are on a moving train. I don’t understand.”
As much as they would like their prisoners to believe it, the Germans were not all powerful. They did not look down from on high, from the heavens, plucking lives from the earth like God. Instead of scaring her, the shooting made her angry.
“They have a lookout, a guard, and a roving spotlight on each end of the train, in the engine and in the caboose. Wait until the light passes over and then push yourself out. Feetfirst. Not headfirst.” The woman named Gabriele spoke up.
“So if you can wiggle through the opening quickly enough, you have a better chance?” Eva hoped she was asking the question correctly. She garbled some of her words and put a vowel on the end of everything—she was italiana, after all, but they seemed to understand.