Warburg in Rome (9 page)

Into the chapel from the courtyard outside came noises of girls and boys at play, amid milling clusters of perhaps two dozen figures whose presence, as she’d passed them, had registered as a low hum of talk. They were refugees, having just come out of the monastic crypt—free. The sound of laughing children should have been an antidote to what drove Marguerite here, but was not.

Inside the vacant Romanesque chapel, all was otherwise quiet, solitary, and cool. The windows were narrow and high, with glass in mainly violet hues, leaving the space perpetually dark but for the flickering red altar light and the blue candles at the feet of the Madonna and Child. On this prie-dieu, Marguerite had once known the consolation of prayer. But now the Madonna seemed indifferent to everyone but her Son.

From behind Marguerite came the faint rustle of the priest taking his place in the confessional booth. A moment later, she rose and crossed to the penitent’s kneeler. “Bless me, Father,” she whispered in Italian.

“Vi benedica, Signorina.”

Through the screen she could make out the priest’s profile, still the most familiar face in the world. His hawkish nose and dramatic brow, the protruding jaw of a friendly wolf. “
C’est moi, mon père
.”

He brought his head around to peer intently through the shadow. How his eyebrows still met above his nose, one solid bridge of bristly hair. But having not seen him in almost a year, she was startled, even in the dark, by how old he seemed. And indeed, a man in his seventies, he
was
old. Time was being harsh with him. “
Ma princesse?
”

“Oui.”

How naturally the French came to her. He was known as Padre Antonio, but she knew him as Père Antoine. That the sisters of Casa dello Spirito Santo had French origins, and a French chaplain, was what had first drawn Marguerite’s mother to their school, she herself being French. The priest had been Marguerite’s tutor. On Tuesdays and Thursdays for most of a decade, she had come to his cottage. Not tutorials in the beginning, only chocolate and easy chatting about everything from the birds of Provence to the heartbreaking
Vol de Nuit
, the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which had made its real impression when she saw the film version, starring Clark Gable—her father’s treat during an Easter holiday. That she had returned to Spirito Santo to discover that Père Antoine had himself seen the movie—and approved of it—had seemed miraculous to her.

But the talks between girl and priest had become burdened after the car wreck. Through that year and the year after, Marguerite had desperately wanted to transform her status from boarding student to postulant, entering the convent as a nun. If that was not being good, what was? At first it had mystified her that Père Antoine discouraged this holy inclination. For a time she thought he considered her unworthy. Only gradually had she understood that he was right. Hers was an impulse of pure flight—a
vol de nuit
if ever there was one. Père Antoine continually insisted that she was already good. And he was there to remind her of who her real father had been—the great Angelo d’Erasmo—and that his Red Cross was what, in fact, she had always wanted for herself. The priest, her second father, returned Marguerite to her first. The Red Cross was her vocation. If the organization could not be an actual home, that was all right, since its purpose was to help the homeless ones. Her wound had become her strength.

And now—after Quirinal, Sisak, an alcove in an alley—here she was again: flight and grief,
vol de nuit
.

“I have sinned, Father.”

He did not reply, but faced away, showing her his profile once more. If she had come to him like this, on her knees in the ancient shadow, then he would display the confessor’s impersonality. As she wished.

She had closed her fists and was pressing them against her sore mouth, so that when finally she whispered again, “I have sinned,” the sound was stifled at her knuckles.

Tears coursed down her face.

“My child,” the priest whispered, “you must speak.”

But her silence was broken only by the quick, moist intake of breath at her nose. After a long time, Père Antoine whispered, “What happened to you?”

She shook her head, but he did not see.

Lionni pushed his bicycle into the same courtyard less than two hours later. In the enclosure now were perhaps a dozen pale-faced Jews in various poses of relaxation—smoking men, kerchiefed women, a finger-sucking girl, a pair of boys kicking a wadded-up rag as if it were a ball. They were sitting on hay bales or the old wagon, or lounging against stacked mattresses that had been brought from the crypt to be aired out. These released fugitives who owed Lionni so much did not recognize him. For his part, Lionni was so taken with the sight of the old priest standing at the threshold of his hut that he let the bike drop and ignored his charges to run with his broken gait to the white-robed old man. The priest stood with arms wide open, hair flowing back from his face like a prophet of old. But prophets were not known to grin as Padre Antonio was grinning. Lionni banged into his embrace, jolting both of them, with the priest clasping his arms around the small figure as if to squeeze the air from his lungs. “My friend, my friend.”

“Padre, the Messiah has come. The Messiah has come!”

“I thought it was only the Americans, Jocko!” The priest jostled Lionni with affection and relief.

“No, Padre. The Messiah, I swear.”

“The Messiah, you say?” Padre Antonio clapped the smaller man’s shoulders. “Good! We can ask Him if He has been here before. If He says no, I’ll be first to cover my head with the
tallit
and blow the
shofar
. If He says yes, I’ll baptize you myself.”

“Ah,” Lionni said, “but what if he refuses to answer?”

“That means He’s a Buddhist and we are both in trouble.” They hugged again.

From the courtyard, the priest ushered Lionni into his house. The larger of the priest’s two rooms served as oratory, parlor, kitchen, and one-man refectory. In its center stood a scarred deal table below a suspended oil lamp, which now, in midafternoon, was unlit yet still stinking of kerosene. Aged biscotti tins were spread out on the table, arranged, as Giacomo Lionni had routinely arranged them months before, in alphabetical order of the surnames inscribed on nearly a thousand index cards. Each of a dozen tins held about a hundred and fifty cards, and each card contained the name, age, and coded location of one person.

At the sight of the tin boxes, Lionni gasped and fell to his knees. Before the Torah scroll in the catacombs he had knelt also, but this vision was just as sacred. When, in October, the Gestapo had descended like locusts on the streets around the Great Synagogue, they had used the addresses of the rabbi’s tithing roll to locate Jews. When Lionni had then learned that the Germans were looking for him, his nightmare was that the refugee lists he had compiled would somehow help the Nazis. Desperate, he hauled the boxes here to Casa dello Spirito Santo.

The priest said quietly, “Yesterday, when I learned of the Americans, I brought your boxes out of the stable. I knew you would be coming for them.”

Only now did it hit Lionni what he had asked the priest to risk. If the Nazis had found these boxes, they would have killed the old man. Or, rather, they would have killed him after he refused, under torture, to decipher the cards. Lionni’s group was called the Delegation to Assist Hebrews, and this was its archive. The priest had become the de facto manager of the Jewish network of hiding places and escape routes. Updates, changes, hastily arranged transfers, new places of refuge, old ones suddenly unsafe—the flow of information had come here, to him, him alone. Across Rome, the parish priests, monks, nuns, and schoolmasters who protected Jews necessarily knew little of each other, but all knew of Padre Antonio. He was perhaps the most dangerously committed man in Rome. And here he was, alive.

Lionni came to his feet, then let his hands drift reverently above the tins as if blessing them, or as if drawing a blessing from them. “This will enable us to know who is missing still,” he said. “We can know who survived, and who . . .” He let the sentence hang, unfinished. “By tomorrow I will have the beginning of a list of those who are showing themselves. Praise God, Padre! From all over the city they are coming out. I have seen it!” Lionni let an arm sweep back toward the courtyard, the crypt dwellers released. Then, once more, he embraced the priest. “By keeping their names alive, you kept
them
alive. Thank you.”

“It is me who thanks you, Jocko. For
your
being alive. For being here.”

“You are good, Padre. You are good.”

“No. No.” Like one bursting with a secret he could no longer conceal, the priest abruptly said, “In the winter, I concluded that one of the convent serving girls was preparing to betray us, to inform the Nazis that we had Jews in the cellars here. On the street, repeatedly, I had seen her cozy up to a blackshirt, holding his hand. A Fascist thug, I thought, sent, no doubt, to pump her for what she knew about those in hiding.”

The priest’s agitation made Lionni interrupt. “Padre—”

“No. Listen. Listen! Just as I was about to confront her, she brought the young man to me, now wearing peasant rags. He was not a thug but her brother, and he had just deserted
la milizia
. She had told him he could trust me. He asked me to help with his escape. Of course, I did. But Jocko, Jocko . . . here is the truth.” The priest went to a box in the corner, opened it, and withdrew a long chef’s knife. The blade glistened as he held it up. “I stole this from the kitchen. I had decided to kill the girl because I suspected her treason. She who trusted me. I was going to kill her with this knife and dump her body in the river. That simply, I had become like the Nazis. If I am not a murderer, it is only an accident.”

“No, Padre. You were protecting us.”

“From a trusting lass?”

Lionni saw what the priest was confessing—how the lethal Nazi abomination had spread, a universal corruption. Lionni fell silent. The priest lifted the knife. “I keep this now as a reminder of what I am.” He remained unmoving for a long moment, then put the knife down beside the tins. “So Jocko,” he asked at last, “where did you yourself find to go?”

Lionni laughed. “Here, there, everywhere.”

“I prayed for you. Every day. Every hour of every day.”

“The Gestapo was looking for me, and so I could not come to you.”

“I know that. Indeed, the Germans did come here, a number of times. You should have seen our holy abbess deal with them. If any males dared to so much as approach the cloister, she stormed, they would be anathema. ‘
Anathema sit!
’ she cried. It frightened the Catholics among the Germans, but it
terrified
the Protestants. And the atheists could not get away fast enough.” The priest was grinning with delight. “Luckily there were no Jews among the Germans, or they would have known how little there was to fear in excommunication.”

Lionni replied with brusque solemnity, “You know where the German Jews are.”

Of course he knew. But mostly the priest held the knowledge off. Some nights, though, it had spiraled down on him, and he would get up from his cot and go out into the cool air of the yard, across to the stable, where he would clear away the straw, only to sit with his hand resting on the tin surface of the topmost biscotti box.

Sometimes he brought his lantern with him and opened the box for the mental exercise of decoding the encrypted place names on the cards. The primitive key required transposing letters of the alphabet, plus two. Fraterna Domus . . . Santa Sofia . . . Villa Rosa. Sometimes he picked out cards at random to whisper the fugitive’s name aloud: “Alatri, Bemantani, Molari, Gargiulo . . .” He intended to pray for them, but after each name he would add “
ora pro nobis
,” as if praying
to
them. The scurrying of stable mice and rats was antiphonal response enough—his litany of saints. “Levi, Mavante, Wasserstein . . .” And, always, Padre Antonio ended his supplication with “Lionni, Giacomo . . .
Omnes Sancti et Sanctae Dei, intercedite pro nobis
.” Dear Jocko, and all ye Holy, Righteous and Elect of God, intercede for us.

But why should they? From all evil, Good Lord, deliver us. And who had delivered them, God’s elect, into the hands of this evil, if not we ourselves?

Padre Antonio—Père Antoine—had been a young priest in Paris during the time of Dreyfus, and had he not himself cheered on, if from the side, those rabid monks and clerics who spouted Jew-hating slogans?
Death to the Dreyfusards, damn the deicide people, down with the Jews!
Even as a young
curé
, Antoine understood the ways in which anti-Semitism was useful to the Church, a way to reconnect with the French masses. That he had seen nothing amiss in this—weren’t the Jews the enemies of Christ?—was now a source of wrenching shame. At last it was clear where it all had led.
In die judicii, libera nos Domine
. On the day of judgment, Good Lord deliver us.

“Seeing you, Jocko, is like seeing my brother whom I feared lost at sea.”

“After months on the raft,” Lionni replied, “the sailor is saved, but when he explains himself to his rescuers, the words come out as gibberish. He regards his rescuers as cruel for not understanding, but then he realizes they regard him as insane. Language fails, Padre—which is insanity.”

“Or perhaps silence, Jocko. Holy silence.”

The men stared at each other, a direct look, which was unusual in Rome, where for a year no one had dared look another in the eye, afraid of what he would see—or what would be seen. Yet Padre Antonio could have held Jocko’s gaze forever.

Lionni, though, abruptly shook his head. “I must talk with you,” he said. “I need your counsel.”

A few minutes later, having moved the biscotti tins aside, they were bent over the map Lionni had pulled from inside his shirt, the railroad plan for the region north and east of Modena. “Here you see, in red, the rail lines that are still working. These marks indicate rolling stock destroyed. Here you see fuel dumps, and here the yards where locomotives are repaired.”