Home > From Sand and Ash(6)

From Sand and Ash(6)
Author: Amy Harmon

“Madonna,” Angelo breathed, the word sounding like a curse instead of a plea. They walked in silence, both of them lost in helpless fury.

“What will you do instead of school?” he asked finally.

“I wanted to teach music. But there will be many Jewish teachers looking for work now that they can’t teach at the regular schools.”

“You could teach private lessons.”

“Only to Jewish students.”

“Well . . . that’s something, isn’t it?” He tried to smile encouragingly. Eva frowned back at him.

“Maybe I will marry a nice Jewish boy and have fat Jewish babies and live in the ghetto! And maybe we will be run out of our country like the Schreibers were run out of Germany, like my Grandfather Adler is being run out of Austria, like Uncle Felix is being run out of Italy.”

“What are you talking about? Who are the Schreibers?” Angelo tipped his head in question.

“The Schreibers! Remember? The German Jews who came to stay with us?” Eva couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, things started to go very badly for Germany’s Jews. Laws had been passed, just like the laws being passed in Italy.

Eva stopped walking, her stomach churning. They had thought it couldn’t happen in Italy. But they were just like the Schreibers. They were just like all the refugees that Camillo had opened his home to. For two years, they had had people in the guesthouse. Different families. All Jews. All Germans. And none of them stayed long. The Rosselli villa was a place to regroup before permanent plans could be made. All the refugees were quiet, and they kept to their rooms.

The Schreibers had a daughter who was Eva’s age and one a little older—Elsa and Gitte. Eva thought they could all be friends—she spoke German—but the German girls never came out of the guesthouse. Eva complained in the beginning that they might as well not have guests at all. To her, having guests meant entertainment. Fun. Camillo explained that the refugees were tired and afraid, and none of this was fun for them.

“Afraid of what? They are in Italy now.” Italy was safe. Italians didn’t care if someone was Jewish.

“They have lost their homes, their businesses, their friends. Their whole lives! Mr. Schreiber isn’t even Jewish.”

“So why did he have to leave?”

“Because Mrs. Schreiber is.”

“She is Austrian,” Eva retorted, so sure of herself.

“She is an Austrian Jew. Just like Mamma was. Just like Uncle Felix is. It is illegal under the new laws in Germany for a German to be married to a Jew. Mr. Schreiber was going to be sent to prison even though he was married to Anika long before the laws were passed. So they had to leave.”

The Schreibers were the first. But there had been many more. A steady stream, actually. Some were more open than others, relating horrors that seemed impossible. Uncle Augusto had even scoffed at some of the stories. Privately, of course, and only in conversation with Camillo, who grew increasingly gray during those two years. What couldn’t be denied was that most of the refugees they took in, even if for only a short time, seemed to be in varying states of shock, and there was an ever-present nagging tension among them, as if any moment, the local authorities would swoop in and arrest them.

“I don’t remember them, Eva,” Angelo said softly. “But I do remember there being strangers for a while.”

“For two years, Angelo! Then they just stopped coming. Babbo said they couldn’t get out of Germany anymore.” Eva hadn’t really understood what that meant. She had just shrugged and life went on. But there were no more skittish Jews at the villa. Until now. Now their villa was full of skittish Jews.

Eva clenched her fists and stopped walking, needing every ounce of strength to keep her tears behind her lids. But they seeped out the corners and dribbled down the sides of her face. She turned and blindly walked the other direction, looking for someplace to let them fall without an audience. Angelo followed, a silent shadow, his slightly uneven gait oddly soothing. Eva walked without realizing that she’d known her destination all along.

She found herself just outside the San Frediano gate on Viale Ludovico Ariosto, standing at the entrance to the old Jewish cemetery. Her mother wasn’t buried there. Her Rosselli grandparents weren’t buried there either. The old cemetery had closed in 1880, almost sixty years ago, long before they died.

The tall cypress trees that lined the path leading from the entrance made her feel safe. They always had. Her father had brought her there once, long ago, and showed her where his maternal great-grandparents were buried. They were Nathans, and he was proud of the name. He said Nathan was a Jewish name with an impressive history. Sadly, Eva didn’t remember it. But she loved the cemetery and had come back alone many times, setting her smooth stones on those Nathan headstones, vowing each time to ask Camillo more about her ancestors. But she never did. Very few stones decorated these headstones now. Sixty years was a long time to carry memories and leave pebbles in their place.

She had no stones with her today. No pebbles or pretty rocks. No weight in her pockets and far too much heaviness in her heart. The timeworn headstones reminded her of a mismatched chess set—some stones were fat and curved, others tall and ornate, but most were short and tottering, like ancient pawns. Eva liked to imagine the shape of the markers was a caricature of the person buried there, and she took pride in the royal stature of her ancestors’ monuments. She wove her way to the far corner, to the little bench that someone had erected long ago to sit with long-dead loved ones. Angelo followed, still silent, but he’d pulled off his hat, as if wearing it among the graves was sacrilegious. It was ironic, she thought. Jewish men covered their heads—signifying themselves beneath God—for prayer and religious rituals, but she didn’t tell Angelo.

“What is this place, Eva?” he asked, sitting beside her carefully, his hands in his lap, his hat in his hands, his cane leaning on the bench between them. Eva fought the urge to knock it down. She was tired of things that came between them.

“It’s an old Jewish cemetery.” She kicked at the blanket of fallen leaves and untended grass at her feet and upended a little rock. Leaning down, she retrieved it, brushed the dirt from its surface, and shined it between her palms. Then she stood and placed it on the base of the oldest Nathan headstone and sat back down next to Angelo. He reached for her hand and turned it over so he could see her palm.

“Why did you do that?” Angelo took out his handkerchief and started gently removing the grime from her hands. His tenderness wiped away her anger too. Eva’s lips trembled, and she wanted to lay her head against his shoulder and cry out all her fear and confusion.

“Eva?” he prodded softly, when her answer never came. She swallowed back the feelings in her throat and tried to speak. Her voice was low, barely a whisper, when she finally responded.

“The story Babbo told me is that in ancient times it wasn’t common to mark graves with a headstone or any kind of marker. Jews did it, but they did it to avoid inadvertently stepping or bending over a grave and desecrating it or becoming impure from the body beneath the ground. I don’t know, exactly. It’s a mitzvah.” Eva shrugged, a uniquely Italian shrug that said, “I don’t know, but knowing isn’t very important.”

“What’s a mitzvah?”

“Something—a holy act or tradition—that elevates the mundane to the divine.” Again, the shrug. “So before the days of headstones and markers, every person who walked by the grave added a rock, building it up, so the monument became permanent. I guess eventually someone thought of adding a bigger rock with a name or birth date, so people would know who was buried there. And now? Now we do it as a sign of remembrance.”

“Something that elevates the mundane to the divine,” Angelo murmured. “That’s beautiful.” He was done with her hands, and he gently returned them to her lap, ever respectful, ever careful. Eva didn’t want her hands back. She needed Angelo to hold them tightly, to grip them in his and tell her everything was going to be all right. The emotion swelled again, and her thoughts were so loud, so insistent, that she pressed a trembling hand to her forehead so they wouldn’t escape. But the devastation of the day had peeled back her defenses, and she found herself blurting out all the things she shouldn’t say.

“I thought I would marry you someday, Angelo. Do you know that? I wanted to marry you. But that can’t happen now, can it?”

He gasped but didn’t answer. She finally made herself look at him, and his blue eyes clung to hers. There was awareness there—her words shocked him, but her feelings didn’t.

“That was never going to happen, Eva. In one year, I will be able to receive the Holy Orders, and I will become a priest. I am going to be a priest, Eva. My path is set,” he said firmly, but there was tension in the set of his lips, and the hand he raised to her cheek shook slightly. She pulled away in disgust, brushing at his hand like he was a persistent fly. Her feelings kept bouncing back and forth between tenderness and outrage.

“No. It can’t happen because I’m a Jew. And it’s now against the law for Catholics to marry Jews. It’s against the law for me to love you, Angelo. It should make it so much easier for you now.”

“What are you talking about, Eva?” Angelo kept his voice neutral, soft, like he was trying to calm a fretful child. But she wasn’t a child, as Angelo was well aware.

“I’ve seen the way you look at me, Angelo. You want to be a priest, but you love me.”

“Eva!” The word was like a whip, and Eva flinched. “You can’t say things like that.” He stood abruptly, his cane gripped in his hands. “We have to go. It will be dark soon, and after a day like today, your father will wonder where you’ve gone.”

Eva stood, but she wasn’t finished. “Babbo says so many boys become priests because of family pressures. Because they can get an education they may otherwise not get. He worried that you were forced into the seminary because your father and your grandparents wanted you to go and because you never felt like you had a home.”

   
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