A Soldier of the Great War (20 page)

"Everything," Ariane said. She was only sixteen, and though she understood everything Alessandro understood, she had not formulated it. She was in no way glib, except when coasting on the seas of her many languages.

"Like what?" Isabelle asked.

"My mother," Ariane answered.

Knowing that Ariane had lost her mother, Jeanette and Isabelle realized that they had come to a dead end.

They kept walking, all three desperately trying to think of another line to follow, not least Ariane. Her love for her mother had welled up, as it often did, and made her conversation that evening, her walk around the fountain, her gown, her aspirations, ambitions, and all that she wanted in life, a betrayal. In an accidental test of loyalty, she was filled with love and blinded to everything around her.

She felt the world fall away, as she knew someday it would entirely, and she felt nothing but love for the woman who had died when Ariane was twelve years old, for the woman who, in dying, was broken and tortured because she was leaving her family forever, but happy that it was she who was dying and neither her husband nor daughter.

Alessandro had been pacing at exactly the speed of Isabelle, Jeannette, and Ariane, hidden from them by the plume of the fountain as perfectly as the speculative planet on the other side of the sun, the twin to earth, that cannot be seen. But then, as the songs of the three singers met in the air to create a fourth, more beautiful even than the others, arising as if by magic, he had turned on his heels and begun to walk counterclockwise.

He looked up. Standing before him was a young girl, in tears.

 

I
N
J
ANUARY
of 1911, in the library in Bologna where Alessandro did most of his work, it was often cold enough to see breath turn
white. One afternoon, an hour or so before darkness, only a few scholars were in the reading room, which was so enormous that a large woodstove heated only a shallow layer of air near the ceiling. With his legs pressed together to conserve heat, and his collar buttoned up around his neck, Alessandro was bent over half a dozen volumes spread out on a long table. He often read six books at once, not because he enjoyed it, but to check one against the other and to compare arguments and accounts. The truth was often great enough to cover in its self-contradictory expanse at least six points of view, and where one was weak or incomplete the others continued the narrative. Alessandro examined the books as if they were witnesses, and despite having to turn pages back and forth almost continuously to bring various incidents into alignment, he employed this technique to considerable advantage, for the compilation of accounts seemed to yield a product rather than a sum.

But to read six books at once he had to study very hard, and no time was left for social affairs. He had few friends, and, when not forgotten, he was considered eccentric. In fact, he was always at the brink of being asked to leave the university. Never had he hesitated to challenge a professor, for he believed that the only authority was what was right. "The best chance you have, if you want to rise," his father had said, "is to give yourself up to loneliness, fear nothing, and work hard."

"Are you Giuliani?" someone asked from across the ancient table where Alessandro was working, but he had whispered so softly that Alessandro hadn't heard.

"Giuliani?"

Alessandro looked up. Sitting across from him was someone who looked English but who spoke in unaccented Italian.

"Yes?"

"Do you know Lia Bellati?"

"Yes."

"It's more than that."

"More than what?"

"Never mind what I already know. In Bologna, someone with whom her family is acquainted is in trouble. Will you help? He has very few friends, and he could use one now."

"I don't have many friends, either," Alessandro said.

"That's perfect."

"I don't know who he is, and I don't know who you are."

"I came to see you because I heard that you once fought two
carabinieri.
"

Alessandro put down his pen. "They chased me."

"They fired, and you kept going?"

"Do you see that as an accomplishment?"

"Most people would have stopped dead."

Alessandro turned up his hands. "What do you want from me?"

"You have here quite a few students who are monarchists."

"Of course we do. They don't study—they march, put up posters, and fight duels. I confess that I don't understand them, given that we already have a king."

"They want to make him into a god."

"He's too short."

"That won't stop them."

"Maybe not, but because of all that interbreeding, I think, he looks like a Calabrian hill dwarf. They have their work cut out for them."

"And they'll make a lot of trouble on the way."

"So?"

"They have a fencing club. The twenty in the club have found a Jew in the Faculty of Law."

"Considering how many Jews are in the Faculty of Law, that isn't very impressive, is it."

"They talk about killing him."

"Why?"

"He's from Venice. His mother is German. They think he's disloyal."

"To what?"

"To Italy."

"That's almost impossible. Is he?"

"No. He's apolitical, and if he were political he would probably be quite unexceptional."

"Why don't
you
help him?"

"If one Jew comes to the aid of another, it won't matter."

Alessandro was puzzled. The cloud of his breath died in the air.

"They can always outnumber us, and they know it, but a Christian ... My friend lives on the Via Piave, number sixteen, top floor. Tonight they're going to push him out on the street and beat him."

"What about the police?"

"I went to them. They knew about it already, and they didn't care.

"How is Lia connected to this? You know her, and he knows her, and you all seem to know each other.... She's a Jewess?"

"Yes. Our friend's name is Raffaello Foa. They think that his father is a banker in league with the Austrians."

"Is he?" Alessandro asked, closing his six books two at a time.

"He's a butcher."

"So why doesn't this Rafi tell that to the monarchists?"

The other student smiled with a bitterness that Alessandro had never seen in someone so young. "It would make no difference," he said.

The park was silent but for the slow burn of gently falling snow. Not far from where he lived was a gunsmith's shop, and Alessandro had often stared at the pistols, shotguns, and hunting equipment in the window, and he had once seen the gunsmith draw a pistol through the protective iron bars without troubling to unlock them.

In the dark, the streets were deserted and the shutters were shut. The snow had driven everyone inside, and wood fires from a
hundred chimneys made the air sweet with the smell of soft-woods from Finland and Russia.

Alessandro was too scared to take much in. His peripheral vision had fled and his heart was running away with him when he raised his leg and kicked the glass with the heel of his boot. The window collapsed with a sound that Alessandro thought would be heard in Naples. He pulled a pistol through the bars and put it in his coat.

"Walk calmly," he whispered to himself. No one came.

As he vanished into the park he was still frightened, but now he knew he had a good chance of protecting Raffaello Foa, who should have either gotten his own gun or stayed in Venice. It would soon be over, and then, if he were lucky, Alessandro would go home and bury himself under his down quilt for at least fourteen hours. The next day, the sun would have melted the snow and would be evaporating the small streams that trickled over the cobblestones.

Number 16 Via Piave was a dark building with not a single light visible through its shuttered windows. As Alessandro stood silently before it he heard a distant thunderstorm. Thunder hardly ever came in snow, and the thought of lightning bolts striking blindly through cold gray air made Alessandro look up. The sky held no flashes, but only the rumble of thunder, and everything rattled. Alessandro felt his chest vibrate with each concussion, and though he would hear them many times again, lashing out from hidden places in the snow-choked air as if they were calling him and his generation to things so stunning and unexpected that no one had even begun to imagine them, the concussions were so far away and so unworldly that they seemed not to be real.

He felt his way to the stairs, and as he walked up the four flights cracks of thunder shook the skylight. The higher he rose, the lighter it got, and at the top the whitened glass, brushed by snow and vibrating like a snare drum, lit everything in its glow.

The door was answered by a tall young man of Alessandro's age, whose cheekbones were so high and eyes so slanted that it made Alessandro think of Tamerlane. The very height of the man (he had to bend his head in the doorway) and his expression made Alessandro wonder why he, Alessandro, had presumed to protect him, for he looked the match of all the monarchists and anarchists in Italy.

"Are you Italian?" Alessandro asked.

"Yes, I'm Italian. Are you?"

"You look like one of the Golden Horde," Alessandro told him.

"Magyar," Rafi Foa answered, "and some German, and some Russian, and all Jew, if that's what you're driving at, or even if it isn't."

"I wasn't driving at it."

In Rafi's room a wood fire burned in a small terra cotta stove. Books and notebooks were spread out between two kerosene lamps on a tremendous library table. A bed was in one corner. Apart from a bookshelf and a chair, the room held nothing else.

"You can sit in the chair," Rafi said after they had introduced themselves.

Rafi had heard nothing of the monarchists, and though he took note of what Alessandro said he was neither frightened nor surprised.

"Do you know him?" Alessandro asked, referring to the go-between. "He had blue eyes, straight brown hair, and a red face. He looked English."

"I don't know him. Perhaps he's a monarchist."

"How do you know Lia?"

"I met her brother a few years ago, when he was stationed near Venice. We included him in our
minyan
—prayers. I stayed with the Bellatis in Rome, once when he was there and the other time when he was in Sardinia. These military people get around."

They heard the sound of people coming up the stairs.

"What are you going to do?" Alessandro asked. "I have this." From his coat he withdrew a hunting pistol with a long barrel and a heavy handle. "It isn't loaded, but they won't know."

"Unless they happen to have one, too," Rafi said. "Take it with you. Go to the stairs that lead to the roof."

"What about you?"

"God will protect me."

"God?" Alessandro asked in amazement. Whoever was on the stairs had almost reached the top floor, too close now for Alessandro to escape unseen. "They think your father is in league with the Austrians."

"My father?"

"Yes. They think he's a banker."

From a drawer in the library table Rafi took a prayer shawl that he threw over his shoulders. Except in engravings, Alessandro had never seen a Jew at prayer. For him it was as startling as the approach of the monarchists.

"My father is a butcher," Rafi said, "in league with the housewives of Venice."

"Aren't you going to fight?" Alessandro asked.

Rafi opened a prayer book, stood to his full height, and kissed it. Just as they banged on the door, he began to pray, and as he started to sway back and forth Alessandro stepped behind the curtain that served as the door of the closet.

Shattering the cast-iron latch, five young men broke into the room. Flanked by the flickering kerosene lamps, uttering his prayers, looming over them, Rafi frightened them more than they frightened him, but they had come with a plan, and would overcome their fear, seize him, and strike him down. "Are you Raffaello Foa?" they asked, as if his confirmation would justify what they were going to do. Continuing in his strange prayer, he refused to answer.

Alessandro knew that they would attack the material before they would touch the flesh. They would strip him of his prayer
shawl and cap, and when he was like them and they were no longer afraid, punish him for having made them fear.

They scattered the books and tore them in pieces. Before this was over, someone had grabbed the shawl and ripped it away. Rafi refused to look at them even when they began to hit him. They held their breath and punched him as hard as they could. They battered his chest, his arms, and his head.

He remained standing, repeating one phrase over and over. Propped against the table, he refused to go down. His face was covered with blood, and when they hit him the blood flew off him and spattered against the walls. They hit him in the back, the kidneys, in his ribs, his genitals. They kicked his legs. But he refused to go down.

"Jewish bankers run this country!" one of them shouted. "But no more, no more."

Rafi was still muttering, his eyes closed, when one of the students who were beating him took from his coat a sheathed saber and began to strike him with it as if he were hitting a canvas bag hung from a beam in a fencing atelier. Rafi twirled, spitting his own blood, and fell over the table, where he lay between the lamps, still moving and still muttering.

As the student with the saber grasped it with both hands and slowly raised it, Alessandro emerged from behind and hit him on the back of the head with a sideways stroke of the pistol, opening his scalp and knocking him to the floor.

With the pistol in both hands, Alessandro backed around the table. When he cocked the hammer, the click echoed from the walls and ceiling.

He thought they would leave, but one of them slowly opened his coat, put his hand inside, and took out his own pistol. Alessandro didn't know what to do. The thunder was barely audible and the wind had come up just enough to shriek a little in the cracks of the windows. He held.

"The Jews are allied with the..."

"Shut up!" Alessandro shouted, tensing so that he looked as if he were about to fire. "The problem with the Jews, isn't it, is that they aren't allied with
anyone.
"