The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (30 page)

“Yes,” Vlado said. “Perhaps if we showed her the photo. The one that I have.”

“I'm not sure. Maybe it is too soon.”

“But it will gives us some credibility.”

“Or maybe it will just shock her. She's an old woman. Perhaps we should leave her in peace.”

“I'm afraid it's too late for that. If she finds out somehow that Barzini is still alive—and let's face it, he'll end up in the papers, one way or another—do you think she'll be in peace then, wondering if her husband might have lived as well?”

Torello frowned. “Okay, then. Go ahead.”

Vlado pulled the photo from his bag, knowing he was about to rob this woman of part of her history, a loss he knew acutely. He handed it facedown to Torello, who presented it to Lia DiFlorio. Her expression changed immediately, from stubborn skepticism to alarm.

She and Torello exchanged words in Italian, then she looked quickly at Vlado with wide eyes, a look of wonderment.

“She wants to know where you got it,” Torello translated.

Then the woman spoke again, and this time Vlado understood every word.

“Where did that come from?” she asked. Her language was Serbo-Croatian, and somehow Vlado wasn't a bit surprised. Now it was Torello's turn to feel left out, but as he opened his mouth Vlado silenced him with an upraised hand.

“I'm Slovenian,” she said, still facing Vlado. Slovenia, yet another ethnic fragment of Yugoslavia that had come loose in the recent upheaval, forming its own state to the north of Croatia and escaping virtually all of the fighting. But that hadn't been the case in the previous war, of course. “From near the border,” she continued. “Not far from Trieste.”

“So that is how you met . . .” Vlado stopped short, having nearly said “my father.” “That is how you met Giuseppe DiFlorio. Because you spoke his language?”

She shook her head. Quite gravely, Vlado thought. She'd set her lips in a tight line. “No. When I met him he was known as Josip Iskric. He was a guard, and I was a prisoner. At the Jasenovac camp, during the war. You know of it?”

“Yes.” Vlado swallowed hard, his throat gone dry. “I know of it. But you should tell me your story. Then I'll tell you mine. I think we have a few things in common.”

“What's going on?” Torello asked. “She speaks your language?”

“Things are very complicated,” Vlado replied tersely in English. “I hope you don't have any urgent appointments. We may be here awhile.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

"We weren't at the camp long,” she said. “Only about a month in all. We must have been some of the last arrivals. Just one busload from some of the fighting in the east. My family had been moving to another village with about twenty other people when the Home Defense Army picked us up. They didn't have the stomach to shoot us, and I don't think they knew what else to do with us. Things were falling apart so much by then, anyway. And by the time we got to Jasenovac everything was crazy there, too.”

They were seated in Lia DiFlorio's dining room. As soon as Vlado had filled Torello in on the rough details of her disclosure, they'd agreed to take a short break, partly because she insisted that they have something to eat before another word was spoken. She needed fuel if she was going to talk about those days, she told them, and said they would need it, too.

Vlado doubted he'd have an appetite, but once they sat down before the platters piled with noodles and sauces, his stomach reminded him that he'd missed lunch. By the time Lia returned to her story, he'd finished the better part of the meal.

“They'd sent most of the women off to labor camps, in Germany and Austria,” she said. “Slave labor in munitions factories. The ones who were still around knew all about it. But now the Partisans were coming. The Russians, too. The trains had stopped running north, and no one was going anywhere. So only the killing was left. They were going as fast as they could, especially with the men. They would take them out in the morning and shoot them, beat them, stab them, butcher them like pigs. Toss them in a hole or just throw them into the river. At night they burned the bodies in big piles. I'm sorry, I know you are eating, but if you want to hear the story, I will have to tell it my way.”

Vlado nodded, transfixed. He'd put down his fork and hadn't touched his food for several minutes. Torello, not understanding the language, watched blandly as he swallowed another bite of pasta.

“I could see some of it from the corner of the compound. Before, in our village, we'd always heard these things were happening, but I don't think any of us had really believed it. They'd taken some Slovenians earlier to Rab Island, a camp the Germans ran offshore. Nobody was sure what had happened to them, so this was all new to me, and I will never forget what it looked like. If I'd stayed there much longer, I'm not sure I ever would have recovered.”

She seemed to retreat for a moment into her thoughts, and Vlado wondered what images were playing out in her head.

“She's telling me about life in the camp,” he told Torello in English. “Her family was there the last month of the war.” Torello nodded, still chewing.

“Some of the guards were pretty new, too,” Lia continued. “They seemed almost as scared as us. Josip was one of them.”

So here we go, Vlado thought, steeling himself for the worst while hoping for the best.

“He was in charge of the women in my group. About a hundred of us. He would march us out to the fields where we were helping with the planting. It was April, and some of the farmers had asked for hands. But every day we were watching the horizon, the roads to the west, to see if the armies might be coming. There were all sorts of rumors, so of course we were all hoping we'd be rescued.”

“What were his duties?”

“Josip's?”

“Yes.”

“Giving us orders, mostly. Keeping track of us. Most of the time it was nothing complicated. Just telling us to march. Halt. Keep moving. Count off. That kind of thing. But on the very first morning I saw him looking at me, and I could tell he thought I was pretty. And so I encouraged that, trying to look back at him the same way. Not because I thought he was any different from the rest of them—I would have killed him if I could have—but because I needed to feel like I was doing something to survive. Anything, even if it was just flirting with a guard. Because every morning they made him pick out three or four of us to be sent with a detachment to the river, and all of us knew what happened there. The ones who left never came back, and once the planting was finished we knew they wouldn't need
any
of us. So we tried to work as slowly as we could.”

“He had to choose?” Vlado asked, gripping the edge of the table.

“Yes,” she said. “He would do it quickly, without thinking too much. He'd pick some of the older ones, or the ones who were coughing, or sick. We all hated him for it, of course. He was the most powerful man in our lives. The moment he pointed his finger at you, you were dead. Our executioner. So I kept smiling at him, all that I could. Little smiles, so the other women wouldn't notice. For all I knew there were others doing the same. But so many of them were just skin and bones by then. I was nineteen, and healthy, and wanted to be the last one on his list. He would always pretend he hadn't noticed, but I knew he had. And then, later, of course, I forgave him everything. After what happened on the last day. When he helped us escape.”

Vlado's heart leaped. He tightened his grip on the table, feeling that a dam was bursting. Steady, now. “He . . . he helped you escape?”

Even Torello seemed to sense something momentous in the air, because he had gently placed his fork on his plate and was watching them both intently.

“Yes. He and some of the other guards, the newer ones. It was a few weeks later, and we knew the Partisans were closer because you could hear the shooting, all day long now. The guns and the Russian artillery. Sometimes we'd see a plane, flying low, Russian markings on the wings. But the killing went on. They were almost in a frenzy about it by then. Finally one morning there was a riot. In the men's section. Everyone knew that freedom was so close but that the killing might come quicker, so some of the men rushed the guards, then the shooting started. The reaction on our side was immediate. Suddenly everyone was running, and all the guards were shooting. Except ours. It was strange. I think we had the only group that didn't fire. They shouted at us instead. ‘Run!' they said. ‘Toward the back! Run! We'll cut the wires.' And like idiots we listened, because for all we knew it was a trick. A way to shoot us in the back. But we ran, and they came with us, and cut the wires, and when we were through the opening they were still with us. There must have been six guards in all, and they seemed as desperate to get away as we were.

“Not everybody made it, of course. The other guards saw us and fired. There was some shooting back and forth and everybody running. I think only twenty of us got clear, maybe a few more. And only two of the guards. Josip and another. A guy named Dario who looked about fifteen. We'd all hated him, too. But now he was running like everybody else.”

“What about the rest of your family?”

“They were killed.” She said it without changing her tone, but her eyes were looking straight at Vlado. “My mother made it through the fence, but she was shot. I saw her on the ground behind me. I didn't look back again. My father must not have made it out. Later I heard that the Partisans arrived after another two days, but he must have been dead by then. I don't know if he died that morning or not, but I never saw him again. It was a miracle, really, that any of us lived.”

“Where did you go?”

“We were walking for three days. Going north and, later, east. We wanted to get away from the fighting. Josip got rid of his uniform, his papers, but he kept his gun. By then we knew he wasn't going to hurt us, but I think he wondered if we might do something to him. After a few days there were just six of us left. The others had gone in other directions, trying to get back to their villages. Some were Slovenians, but most were Bosnians. Two weeks later we crossed the border into Italy. Half starved, but we made it. Some British soldiers picked us up and put us on trucks. A week later we were in a DP camp, in Fermo.”

“Why didn't you go home?”

“There was nothing left to go back to. Our village had been burned and my family was dead. My brothers were off in the war—I didn't know where—and we hadn't heard from them for more than a year. I thought about going to Ljubljana, to look for an aunt, but I didn't know what the situation was there, and I was too afraid to travel alone. And by then I was with Josip. I know it sounds insane. Being with your guard. But he had freed us, too. And he'd looked out for me on the road. By the time we got to the DP camp we were traveling as husband and wife, not because I was in love with him, but because things went easier for you if you were married, part of a couple. If you were unattached, they might leave you in the camp forever. With a husband you were resettled sooner. And Josip was worried they'd find out he'd been working at the camp. As long as I was with him, no one would be suspicious. But it was because of Josip that I met Rudec, or Matek, as he was already calling himself. The one who later called himself Barzini.”

“At Fermo?”

“Yes. He was from Josip's village, a little place in Herzegovina, and they saw each other in the mess hall. Josip told me Matek had been at Jasenovac earlier—he didn't want to tell me much about what he'd done—but that he had been transferred to Zagreb not long before my family arrived.”

Of course, Vlado thought. How else would Matek have ended up in the convoy going north with all that gold? The clever opportunist had found the easiest way out once again.

And it was Matek who engineered their way out of Fermo, too, Lia told him, a clever way of keeping Iskric indebted to him, she believed. The first thing he did was get travel documents for all three of them, shedding his old name of Rudec in the process.

“He never said how he'd done it. He just showed up one morning at our barracks with all the papers and told us to make sure and attend a mass that Sunday to meet a Father Draganovic, who would take care of us.”

After that, she said, things moved quickly.

“We went to Rome next. Josip wanted to go back to Yugoslavia, but Matek always had some plan, some scheme, and he always knew how to make Josip do as he said. And one morning Matek showed up with more papers for us. Passports from the Red Cross. He said we were moving here, to Castellammare. So now I was Lia DiFlorio. Before I had been Lea Breza. Lea with an
e
. Josip was now Giuseppe, and Matek was Piro Barzini. I didn't know what it was all about, of course. I just knew that by then I was in love with Josip and wanted to be where he was. So we came here, and for fifteen years we were happy, even though we were never able to have children. Or as happy as you could be, I guess, knowing that you still couldn't go home, or that at any time someone might find out who you really were. And there was always Matek, too, of course, who still had his plans and his schemes. Right up until the night when they left in a boat. He said they would be gone only a few hours. But they never came back.”

“In 1961?” Vlado asked. Lia looked at him sharply, as if wondering how he knew the year. Very soon he'd have to tell his own story, and he wondered how to best break the news to this old woman with the shimmering eyes. He realized now that she'd probably never heard the name Enver Petric, that Matek and his father must have kept that identity a secret all along.

“Yes, 1961,” she said warily. “On a clear night with a calm sea. The authorities concluded they'd drowned, but no one ever found their bodies. There was only the boat, which washed up later. But by then”—she shrugged, as if spent—“I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed. But I've always wondered if they really died. If they ever really went into the boat at all. And now I have a feeling I'm going to find out. And that the news isn't going to be very happy. Is that right?”

She gazed imploringly at Vlado, who wanted to spare her feelings yet knew he couldn't. He also had already given her an answer of sorts, because his eyes, too, were shimmering now. The woman had given him a tale of redemption that he hadn't thought was possible, but all he could offer in return was the knowledge of a betrayal. He took a deep breath, her eyes still on him. Then he began—slowly, deliberately.

“There are three things you should know first. One is that Pero Matek is still alive, and may well be here. Right down the mountain, in Castellammare di Stabia.”

She took it without flinching, as if she'd expected no less.

“The second thing is that Josip Iskric lived until 1983. He reached Yugoslavia that year, probably after Matek gave him no choice but to return, and also to keep quiet about it. They crossed the Adriatic, and he became Enver Petric, and he settled near Sarajevo.

“The third thing . . .” Vlado paused, feeling short of breath, as if there was hardly enough air left in the room for the three of them. “The third thing is that I am Enver Petric's son, his only child.”

Lia placed a hand on her heart, seeming to falter. But her eyes were again dry. She rose unsteadily from her chair, stepping toward Vlado, who realized that he had already stood to receive her. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she looked into his eyes, then slowly embraced him, tentatively at first, then tightly. Vlado hugged back, feeling an odd mix of emotions. She wasn't his mother, but she was something almost like it, the only thing close to a relative he had left from his father's side, except Aunt Melania. He felt her sob against him, a quiver that shook his breastbone, and he reacted as if that had been some sort of signal, finally letting go. A tight ball of heat seemed to melt in his chest, and his tears fell, released from the brimming pools in his eyes. Torello, still seated, wiped his mouth with a napkin and coughed, looking off toward the other end of the room. There was no sound now but Lia's light gasping, like a weary swimmer who had just come up for air.

After a few moments she released him, backing away unsteadily. Vlado slowly dropped his arms to his sides, his shirtfront damp. She dipped a napkin into a glass of water and dabbed at her splotchy face, then at his, her wrinkled hands moving tenderly, almost in a caress.