Warburg in Rome (4 page)

She reached for the left wall faucet and turned it. The tap sputtered, ran cold at first, gradually offering tepid water, and then, to her amazement, hot. Scalding. Only then did she lean into the depth of the tub to plug the drain hole with a fist-sized lump of cork. This would be her first bath in weeks. Waiting for the enormous tub to fill, she fell back onto the bed, as if for a languid reverie. She let her arms and legs swing, as if trying to stay afloat, as Carlo’s face broke into her mind.

The ache came screeching back. What were those first feelings of hers? The single-minded woman for whom he had been only the exotic Savoyard, with his mountain-man tangle of red hair and beard; how drawn she’d been by the political defiance that had made him a fugitive, the fire that she had taken to be all courage and virtue; her beau ideal of the responsible life in an age of wickedness—where was the unchastened woman of such perceptions now? Once, with her eyes closed like this, she could pretend that the fingers between her legs were his, as she had in the beginning imagined eventually giving herself to him. But the beginning was a lie. Who was she to have believed it?

This was no dream. Days before, she had left Trieste without Carlo, hidden in the stinking hold of a fishing boat that took her to Ancona.
Remember, O most blessed Virgin Mary
. . .

That she was changed forever by what had happened in these months since she’d fled Rome, after the Nazi occupation, was the base fact of her new condition—yet still an astonishment. She opened her eyes. At the window, the first glow of dawn had come. At this moment, in the rough hillside hut above the village of Vranjak, would come the soft rapping on her door as she lay in a shepherd’s bed of quilted furs. Carlo’s habit was to wake her at just this hour—since she was the sunshine, he always said. She knew that he had come this early at first hoping to make love to her. She had let him kiss her, had kissed him fiercely back, but no more than that. Marguerite had never been with a man. Until him.

Now the intolerable weight of hurt and guilt might have nailed her to the bed, but the tub was soon to overflow. Again she got up, this time stripping off her underwear and the soiled red bandanna she wore at her throat. She used the kerchief, despite his having given it to her and despite what it meant, to hide the hideous bruises there. Yes, despite. In her nakedness, there was no hiding the purple marks on her face, shoulders, and arms.

She slid into the trough, stifling a yelp at the heat. She stretched almost fully out. Down, the tide lapped at her clavicle. Her small breasts floated. Holding her nose to go under, the water swamped her, which was all it took to release her gasping sobs.

Leaving Rome months before, Marguerite—despite what she had already seen—had in no way been prepared for the mass of lost and desperate people she’d encountered as she moved through towns and villages.

As she’d hoped, her blue uniform and embossed Red Cross visa secured passage through German checkpoints and gained her access to the improvised camps that kept springing up. Her woman-and-child survey became real. She’d lost count of the hollow-eyed wives whose husbands were dead or forcibly taken off to labor camps in Germany; of the children alone, or doggedly holding hands; grandmothers clinging to a rosary. Despite the German occupation, desperate refugees were streaming into northeastern Italy from Slovenia and Croatia, where conditions, apparently, were even worse. Using a code of her own devising, she compiled lists of names and noted the locations of the camps, and the monasteries, convents, and schools that had been given over, in particular, to Jewish refugees. Always, she moved north. Geneva had become a fantasy destination, and the Red Cross headquarters where she would make her report drew her like the magnetic pole.

But the onset of winter had made passage into Switzerland impossible, and then, in Vicenza, an industrial city between Venice and Milan, Marguerite was caught in January’s Allied bombing raids. Night after night the waves of roaring aircraft came, reducing whole neighborhoods to rubble—and reducing her sense of the great world to the narrow streets and hurt buildings around the Villa Rotonda, a decrepit Renaissance palace that had long served as a school, but was now a discreetly ad hoc hospital, where she found refuge.

Situated on the crest of a low hill, the villa was licensed as a sanitarium for lepers and syphilis sufferers, and was rumored to harbor victims of plague, which was why nearby Wehrmacht contingents left it alone. Actually, there were only a few actively infected patients in the place, and their afflictions, their skin lesions and blisters, were a kind of feint. The whispers about plague were manufactured. In fact, the Rotonda was devoted to caring for Italian resistance fighters for whom Vicenza was a center. Stymied through February and March, Marguerite found herself working as a nurse’s helper, and that was where she met Carlo. It must have been the sustained madness of the bombing terror that so blinded her to what else marked him besides exotic charm.

Carlo Capra was the most dramatically beautiful man she had ever known, with his fiery red hair and beard, deep-throated laugh, eyes that caressed whatever they fell upon. He was shorter than she, but his limbs were supple, and, as his wound healed and he took his exercise in the solarium off the ward, she saw him return to a native feline grace. Bringing him trays, changing his bed linens, sitting with him as he slept and ate, she had never experienced such easy intimacy with a man. She was not prepared for the feelings he stirred in her, nor for rediscovering her own inbred wit—the playful, unselfconscious girl she once again became in his presence. “Our Socialist Barbarossa” she called him one day.

“Not Frederick Barbarossa!” Carlo countered. “Not the emperor who held the Pope’s stirrup!”

“Redbeard, then,” she shot back. “The pirate.” He was delighted and reached for her. She skipped away from him, almost a dance move, a serving girl in a dockside tavern, and they laughed. How long had it been since her step had been so light?

Afternoons, they sat together with late-winter sunlight slanting in through the white curtains of the solarium, she in a narrow, straight-backed chair, he in a wicker love seat. In that otherworldly room she confided what she had experienced since Rome, both the suffering in the camps and the paradoxical lightness of feeling that came over her when she could somewhat assuage the pain of others. With needy children, she told him, she was spontaneous again. They readily took to her, and when she offered comfort, she felt comforted herself. Their wary mothers trusted her. On the road, practically a fugitive and surrounded by danger, she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare.

Carlo understood. He knew suffering, and he knew danger. And he knew that functioning in the midst of horror, and surviving it, can bring a strange kind of joy. Having met her at that level of recent feeling, he then took her deeper, into the well of past feeling where their bond of intimacy was even stronger. Marguerite was able, for the first time, to turn inwardly back to her late father when Carlo told her the story of his, a Turin labor organizer, the editor of a Socialist newspaper who had been tortured by the Fascists and later killed in Rome’s notorious Regina Coeli prison, the very place Marguerite’s father had been held for a time. She’d had no idea, until she began to speak of it to him then, that her own parental grieving was so unfinished. Unknowingly, while talking, she moved from her chair to sit beside him in the love seat.

She told him of her recurring dream—how it was given to her to speak the mystic word that would bring her father and mother magically back to life, but then, before working the trick, she always woke. She could never remember what the magic word was. From the time that dream began, her parents’ being dead was her fault. She prayed the
Memorare
—
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary
—again and again but all she could do was forget and be forgotten.

And she spoke to Carlo, most astonishingly, of how grief can be marbled with rage. It was a surprise to her, that afternoon in the solarium, when she found herself weeping as she talked, and equally surprising that he had been holding her hand. The first man ever to do that.

More than once, as she spoke to him of her father, it seemed Carlo was finishing her sentences in speaking of his own father. Yes, rage! When he confessed that a kind of lust for vengeance was what had taken him into the hills as a
Partigiano
, she was not appalled. That he seemed in that moment dangerous made her feel close to him. She was dangerous, too.

Carlo was at the Rotonda for the five weeks it took the badly infected flesh wound that had brought him there to begin to heal. In that time, once their bond of trust was established, he spoke to Marguerite of what he would return to, his Partisan unit based near the Sava River at the border of Slovenia and Croatia, territory that had been under Mussolini’s control until Italy’s capitulation in 1943. Since then, Germans had moved into the region, but the pressing conflict was with the Ustashe militia of the Nazi-friendly Croat state under the “petty Hitler,” Ante Pavelic. Carlo could not pronounce Pavelic’s name without a sneer.

It was when Carlo described the Ustashe death camp created expressly for children that Marguerite first imagined going to Croatia with him. She had heard of the Jasenovac concentration camp, where Serbs, Jews, and Roma had been gathered since early in the war. That many were being routinely murdered there was assumed, but now she understood who the murderers were. Still, she had not known of Sisak, the nightmare sub-camp Carlo described, saying it was a few dozen miles down the Sava from his base, in what he called the Partisan Fourth Zone. That evil Sisak could have sparked an impulse in her she was too guarded otherwise to admit—the impulse to be with Carlo—seemed shameful to her now.

But what he had described, how it cried out to be exposed! Thousands of children being held, as young as the age of three. He said they were being put to death in gas vans that made endless circuits on a huge former racetrack, a rubber hose channeling exhaust fumes back into the closed trucks crammed with little ones. He said that Ustashe guards had turned the gassing into a raucous game, with two or three of the tightly sealed vans roaring around the oval at the same time, as if it were a Grand Prix event. The winner was the truck all of whose young captives died first.

Sisak was not on any Red Cross list Marguerite knew of. Nor was any concentration camp anywhere in the German Reich, or in occupied Europe, known to be devoted only to children. If she were to make a report to Geneva, how could she not take along evidence of that? So she went with him.

Across those weeks, beginning in early April, moving from Italy into Croatia, Marguerite had left behind her pretense of Red Cross neutrality to assume, if not a formal place in Carlo’s band of Partisan fighters, the role of fellow traveler, witness, helper. Carlo’s men maintained one of the hand-along points in the fugitive chain for those fleeing the Balkans, helping Jews or Serbs or Gypsies or downed Allied pilots or simple deserters to make their escapes. From Budapest to Zagreb to Sobota to Ljubljana to Trieste, and then by boat to Ancona, Pescara, Bari, or other ports in the Allied-controlled south of Italy. Knots of frightened people arriving in the dark, departing in the dark, carrying bundles, the men in long coats, the women wearing babushkas. Few, if any, children.

Where was Sisak? She wanted to see something of it for herself, but Carlo said it was too risky. At one point, against his wishes, she made her way alone to Zagreb hoping to contact the Yugoslav office of the Red Cross—her colleagues. What did they know of the death camps? But all she found at the appointed address was a bombed-out ruin.

She approached a woman in the street, but the woman spoke neither Italian nor French. Marguerite mimed the acts of eating, sleeping, an inoculation in the arm. She displayed her Red Cross credential with its insignia. At that, the woman led her to a Franciscan monastery off the city’s main square. There, a timid, brown-robed friar took her into a parlor, where she waited. After what seemed a long time, a man of authority came, another friar, but large, brusque, and with a face whose features were organized around a dramatically pronounced harelip. The notch at his mouth went all the way to the base of his nose, splaying his nostrils. The deformity drew Marguerite’s sympathy.
Whatsoever man that has a blemish
, the Scripture says,
he shall not approach the altar
. She had never seen a lame or disfigured priest before, and instinctively grasped with what dogged will he must have pursued his vocation. That facial badge of suffering reinforced the trust she’d have felt toward any priest. She was direct with him.

In answering her, the friar spoke in fluent Italian, but his voice was high-pitched and had a distracting nasal resonance, an effect of the cleft palate. While speaking, he had to continually wipe saliva from his mouth, drainage from an open nasal cavity. He seemed unselfconscious, though, and flourished a white handkerchief as if for emphasis. And emphasis there was. The Franciscan monastery was itself a center for relief, the distribution of food and medicine, the rescue of the desperate ones. The friar knew whereof he spoke, and his handkerchief fluttered as he became more agitated. Jasenovac, hah! The rumors about Jasenovac were lies, Bolshevik propaganda. The friar had never heard of a camp at Sisak, and insisted that in areas controlled by the Ustashe government, children were being well cared for. He had been to every refugee camp in Croatia and was certain that conditions were as positive as was humanly possible.

In the Serb-controlled areas to the east, the priest said, the story was very different. “The Serb Communists are beasts,” he snarled, with a sudden pitilessness that dismayed her. His account, which contradicted everything Carlo had said, confused her. For Marguerite, his authority as a priest was near absolute. Robes like his, belted with a triple-knotted cincture—one knot each for poverty, chastity, obedience—spoke of righteousness. The saliva, eluding the handkerchief, dribbling pathetically from his chin, somehow added to his credibility.