The Demon Catchers of Milan (11 page)

Someone clapped a hand over my mouth. Francesco—I saw his eyes glint toward me in the dark. He pulled his hand away as soon as I got hold of myself. Only Anna Maria flicked her
head impatiently. Everyone else was too busy looking upward.

She was seated in a chair, her head nodded to one side. Her old, tired hands hung over the armrests. I remembered a lame documentary from history class about the oracle at Delphi, seated on her tripod, breathing vapors from a vent in the earth, ruled by a force far greater than herself. They did a horrible, cheesy voice-over to make the oracle sound awe-inspiring.

But Signora Galeazzo, slumped in her chair, ruled by a force far greater than herself—that was just plain terrifying.

“Nonna,” breathed Paolo.

Her head jerked up. She spoke with a voice that could not possibly have come from her throat, a voice stopped with earth, a voice that came from all the lost places. She didn’t speak to us; she spoke only to herself, coldly, like a madwoman talking in the street. Gradually the angry muttering started to rise in pitch, accompanied by whistling gasps.

She began to sing something in a minor key. Paolo stepped back beside Francesco and me and whispered, “What language is that?”

“Hebrew,” Francesco replied quietly.

“She doesn’t know Hebrew,” whispered Paolo. “She’s never spoken anything but Italian, like a good Catholic.”

“This is not uncommon, for a possessed person to begin speaking or singing in languages they don’t know. It’s part of how we know that someone else is inside them,” explained Francesco.

Giuliano had moved forward, placing his open case on a table near the center of the room. Emilio and Anna Maria followed.
They conferred too softly for me to understand them. I whispered to Francesco, “What are they doing?”

“Deciding which ritual to use. I know Emilio and Giuliano have been talking about it since they found out she was coming, but I guess they hadn’t figured it out yet. Sometimes you have to change, anyway.”

He shrugged, glancing nervously over at Paolo. But Paolo wasn’t paying attention. He was looking up at his grandmother, working his palms against each other, squeezing and knotting his fingers. Now I knew what people meant when they used the phrase “wringing his hands.” Francesco reached over and laid one hand over Paolo’s.

“You’re tangling up the web,” he whispered to Paolo. “Take some deep breaths. She is in good hands—my great-uncle is the best.”

“I hope so,” Paolo whispered back.

Giuliano had set out a small, yellow candle in a silver holder. Emilio had taken a black leather book from his case. He showed his grandfather a page, and Giuliano nodded. Anna Maria held a round, silver bowl, hardly bigger than the hollow of her hand, seated on an equally small, red cushion. In her other hand, she held what looked like a little, silver stick, wrapped with red cloth. They looked up at the floating woman and held very still.

I wondered what they were waiting for. Obviously not to figure out whether she was possessed.

Giuliano nodded at Anna Maria. She set the tiny bowl on the table and tapped it with the silver stick, bringing forth a surprisingly big sound for such a small object. She struck the
bowl three times, letting each peal fade before she struck again.

The old woman on the chair above us stopped singing on the second stroke.

Moving as if she wasn’t quite sure how to use her head, she rolled it down to look at us, and I was surprised to see, as well as I could see in the dark, that she looked content. She certainly looked more peaceful than any of us. I started to feel bad. We were upset over nothing. She was fine. Why were we here?

“Well,” she said, still in the harsh voice from the lost places, “I’m back, anyway. I expect Ludovico has made a mess of everything, hasn’t he? Hopefully I can make a start on the depositions. I need to get back to work, it will help. Straight back to work.”

Of course she should. Emilio raised his book; I saw his hair glitter in the dark as he lifted his head, before his grandfather laid a hand on his arm and stopped him.

“Work is good, always good—provided you don’t work too hard,” Giuliano said to the floating form above him. He sounded as if he were chatting with an acquaintance in the street.

“Provided you don’t have useless, lazy assistants and an equally useless husband,” she said, adding bitterly, “People who have good help can afford not to work hard.”

“That’s the truth, isn’t it?” said Giuliano, smiling at the terrible creature who hung above him. I couldn’t believe he could smile at her.

“True as the soil,” she agreed. “Inevitable as winter.”

“So,” he continued in the same easy voice, “where have you been?”

There was a rushing, roaring sound, as if all the little light left in the room were being sucked out of it. We were left in a darkness so complete that I could feel my skin itching. When the voice spoke again, it was a dreadful, enraged hiss.

“If you dare send me back, I will kill her. She won’t survive me. You can’t make me go back.”

In the dark, with nothing to go by but the breathing of Francesco beside me, I felt as if I were back in my old room, with the voice coming out of me, the candle flickering in front of me, the longing in my heart to fly—

Something brushed against me. At that moment, Signora Galeazzo began laughing in triumph.

My whole body cramped, and I went down on my knees. The smell of bitter almonds filled my nostrils again, this time overpowering, suffocating; I knew if I could not breathe fresh air I would die. I gasped for breath, clawing the rug.

“See how you like that,” snarled the voice, rattling the old woman in her chair.

Paolo and Francesco were holding me. Giuliano stood with his back to me, facing her. Didn’t he care that I couldn’t breathe? Or Emilio, holding his book before him, or Anna Maria, ringing that damned bell?

“Steady, steady,” said Francesco, but still I couldn’t breathe. I felt my lungs cramping.

“Yes! Yes!” shrieked the voice. It seemed to boom even deeper, as if it came from far inside the earth. “
That’s
how it feels. She knows how it feels. If I kill her, if she dies with it in
her lungs, she will understand before she dies! And you, you will know what it is to lose what is precious to you! To lose the ones you love. I didn’t come all this way so that you could send me away! I didn’t come all this way not to be listened to, after all this time!”

She was shrieking now, thundering. Her words pounded in my ears and then faded, as if someone were turning the volume up and down. I felt like I was about to vomit, but I felt sure that if I threw up, I would choke on it. I understood the smell of almonds outside too well now.

Then: peace. Snow was falling on my face.
Thank goodness I’m awake, at last
, I thought. I stood up but it was hard, as if I had forgotten how. I looked down and saw myself lying down, another snowflake settling in my hair.

My face was not my own, and yet I knew this was me. I bent down to look, and I saw that my skin had sunken into my cheeks, that my eyes remained open and bloodshot, but that instead of being red, the blood was turning brown, and my lips were blue, with no breath parting them. In the moment I understood that I was dead, I noticed another still hand resting beside my own, already dusted with snow. Raising my eyes slowly, I looked out across a patch of ground covered in bodies, all still, all quietly kissed by the snowflakes, one at a time. The only sound was of wind in pine branches—I was not on a plain after all, but in a broad forest clearing.

Then I could hear the rumble of boxcars in the distance and, incongruously, the sound of music—a little orchestra of violins,
violas, and flutes. These sounds, though I did not know why, filled me with terror.

Oh, God
, I thought.
Oh, Santa Maria
, as the horror soaked into me and seized my heart.

“Majdanek,” I whispered, and the wind rose in the pines; “Majdanek,” I repeated as my eyes opened. It sounded like the name of a demon.

My cheek was pressed against Signora Galeazzo’s rug. In the dark, I could feel all the spiky bits of hard Persian wool pushing into my cheek, could smell dust and dirt. My whole body was covered in cold sweat.

“There, you see,
she
understands,” said the terrible voice above us, rasping in its borrowed throat. “
She
knows. I knew she would.

“We thought they would never come and take us, you know. We were Italian. Besides, Mussolini was busy with other things. My people have been Milanese citizens these five centuries. But we heard from friends, from relatives; we heard whispers about what was happening in Germany, and of course we were allies.

“So when the Germans asked the officials, the officials would say, ‘Jews? Oh, I don’t think we have Jews here, do you? Have you seen any Jews lately? Not me. We don’t have the proper forms, anyway. Can’t get them, it’s wartime, you know.’ Nobody can drag their feet like an Italian bureaucrat!” she said, sounding proud. “But then came the bombs, and after them, German soldiers, with their terrible black eagles, their terrible
ideas. Then, when you heard the boxcars in the night, it was the most frightening sound.

“I think that nosy bitch down the street told on us. She never liked us. But it might have been the boy next door, who kept finding ways not to starve.

“When they came for us, I was almost relieved; now the worst has happened, I thought. They took us to that cavernous underground railway at the Stazione Centrale. There were dogs.… I still couldn’t believe that they weren’t just imprisoning us. Even after all the pogroms and the burnings my family has lived through, I couldn’t believe, you know? The dreadful trains rumbled north, to a place we had not heard of.”

Her attention had drifted into her story, and I could feel my lungs loosening.

“Auschwitz, Auschwitz!” she growled, turning to me again, and the thunder came back into her voice.

“You cannot imagine it! You cannot, you cannot, you who remain! They made some among us, the musicians on the trains, pick up instruments from the dead and play them, an orchestra to soothe us as we came off the boxcars. Can you see it? They took trouble over their cruelty, they wrote it down, they made lists and plans and came up with schemes like the horrible, sad orchestras.

“I wasn’t going to take it, was I? We planned work slowdowns. We fought. But they found out which ones were the troublemakers, and they sent us East, to another camp, a camp they said no one ever left alive.… Majdanek.”

“Majdanek,” I repeated, understanding.

“But even there, we never gave up. A few of us, we planned an escape, and some of us made it. Me, I’ve taken longer to come back.… Longer …”

She began to laugh, heaving, gasping, Signora Galeazzo’s throat wheezing with the effort.

“Majdanek,” said Giuliano, and turned to look upward again.

He walked back to stand by Emilio and Anna Maria.

“I will not go back,” she whispered in that lost voice, filling the whole room with sound.

“We will not make you go back,” he said gently.

He said it again, and again, and again in the same soft voice. Sometimes she raged at him, and sometimes she whispered. Giuliano repeated himself so many times that Emilio had to send Francesco for a glass of water for his grandfather’s parched throat, leaving me to lean against the wall.

At last she fell silent. The chair jolted lower with a nauseating jerk. The head rolled up again.

“You won’t?” she asked.

I fought the urge to laugh hysterically.

We sat in the dark, so I never knew if the others were crying like I was. Sometime around three in the morning, she and Giuliano finished talking. He had helped her to understand that whatever long and painful journey she had taken, she had yet another one before her, one that we all hoped would lead to peace.

“We could banish you out of this body you are in,” Giuliano told her very gently. “We could put you in a place where you would remain until transformed. But this thing I would not want to do. It would be better for you to set out on your own.”

“But where am I going? What comes after?”

“I do not know,” Giuliano replied. For a moment, I saw the abyss of death in my mind, of not being, and it was as lonely as her voice.

I leaned against the wall and slipped in and out of a haze of exhaustion. Giuliano, Emilio, and Anna Maria seemed tireless, patiently turning the spirit’s thoughts toward leaving Signora Galeazzo’s body. I had to struggle to stay awake and focus on what was happening, so much so that I didn’t realize that Signora Galeazzo’s chair had nearly floated to the floor.

When the voice finally departed, it didn’t flee out of Signora Galeazzo’s throat like an avalanche, as my demon had left mine. It expelled itself softly, on a sigh. The chair landed on the floor with a scrape and a thump, Signora Galeazzo’s rigid body falling limp, her head and chest slumping. Giuliano and Emilio ran forward at the same time to keep her from sliding out of her seat.

“Bed is best, now,” Giuliano said to Paolo, who nodded and showed them the way.

I noticed that there had been a lamp on in the room the entire time we had been there, yet somehow the gloom of possession had prevented it from illuminating anything at all. Now it gave out a small pool of yellow light, warming the walls and
the stately old furniture. I used it to find my way to a chair (not the one Signora Galeazzo had been sitting in), feeling tears starting again in my eyes. Francesco sat down beside me. Anna Maria stood at the table, packing her tools away in their case. She clasped it shut and began on Emilio’s, turning to us to say, “I have a shoot in four hours, and all I want to do is lie down and sleep.”

Francesco ran his fingers through his wild hair and replied, “Can’t you take a bunch of drugs like the other ones do?”

She snorted (again I was reminded of my grandfather). “Been there, done that. It just makes you ignorant. Anyway, I can’t afford a habit.…” She gestured to the air where Signora Galeazzo had been. “I need to keep my wits about me,” she added fiercely.