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Inside

SHE REMEMBERS HEARING SHOES SHUFFLING, HICCUP OF her mother’s stifled sneeze, water trickling down a pipe, soft breathing, whispers like pages of a newspaper blowing across a deserted piazza, the neighbor’s dog barking in the field, grunt of a curse, click of her teeth on her thumbnail, rattling of rain or water boiling or bicycle wheels turning, creak of a chair as whoever had been leaning back replanted its front legs on the floor, crackling of gunfire across the harbor or maybe someone had thrown a fistful of pebbles in the air, “ssss” in place of stai zitta, “ssss” in place of silenzio, strike of a match, her uncle clearing his throat, three quick coughs, suck of a cigarette, murmur of prayer.

What time is it now, now, and right now? Huddled in the cabinet beside the kitchen sink, she cared about nothing else but the time. If only she’d known the exact time, she could more easily have endured the night. She pressed her fingers between the hinges of the cabinet door and stared into the darkness. Even without any trace of light, she persuaded herself that she could see the outline of the door. The more intensely she stared, the more transparent the darkness became. A soft glow began to pulse through the crack between the hinges—she imagined that this was the motion of time. She’d made herself forget that the lamp on the kitchen table had been put out. And then she realized her mistake.

Understanding everything and nothing. She didn’t even know what questions to ask. She didn’t know why the Germans had come without warning and bombed Portoferraio in September or why a week later a submarine had torpedoed a ferry full of islanders on their way home from the mainland or why the bombs had fallen again one day in March. And now again.

How easy it would have been to knock on the cabinet door and ask for the time. And how stupid. They had already spent half the night up in the orchard—or had it been less than an hour they’d sat wrapped in blankets while planes strafed the ancient port across the bay and gunboats poured fire onto the coast east and west of La Chiatta? At one point there had been a great thud of an explosion that lit up the southern sky, then a grayish, bitter-smelling haze spread inland across the island, shrouding the moon. The steady pounding and crackling of artillery had continued in the distance, but eventually the aerial assault had ceased and the planes disappeared back out to sea. Once the sky overhead was quiet, Adriana, with her mother and their cook, Luisa, had returned inside. Amazingly, she had managed to fall into a deep sleep. How long had she slept before her uncle had arrived from Portoferraio, and her mother yanked Adriana from her warm bed and dragged her into the kitchen and stuffed her into the cabinet?

Her uncle had made it clear that any noise would be the end of them all, so Adriana only pretended to hum, holding a finger against her lips to feel them move in the darkness while she imagined treating her ears to a trace of a melody, her voice too quiet for anyone else to hear. They could go on assuming that she was a good girl doing just as she’d been told. You mustn’t make any noise, Adriana. You must stay inside the cabinet until it is safe to come out. When would it be safe? Only when her mother said it was safe. Sooner or later it would be safe. Unless the Germans made her mother and uncle and Luisa disappear, just as they’d made General Gilardi disappear last September, and Adriana would be left to rot inside the cabinet. This was a possibility that her mother hadn’t considered. Weeks would pass, months, until one day Lorenzo’s Angela would at last come to clean the kitchen and unlatch the cabinet doors in search of rags, and out would fall Adriana Nardi’s dusty bones.

Didn’t it occur to anyone to ask her how she was faring? She was thirsty and hot and had done nothing to deserve such misery. She wanted to remind her mother that she would be eleven years old in two weeks. Eleven years—undici anni. Undici, undici. It was a number that deserved a melody. Music was always a good way to pass the time. She imagined singing all the songs she’d been taught in school. Caress the music with your voices, ragazze. Not too heavy down below, not too reedy on top. Do not sweep between two notes. Balance the tone. Now sing. Color the sound with memory. Every note signaling the passing of another second. She imagined humming the songs she couldn’t sing aloud. She hummed silently to keep herself from asking what her life would be worth if she were to be killed before dawn. The dives she’d been perfecting off the rocks at Viticcio. How could her life end before she’d become a champion diver?

Her grave a cabinet beside the kitchen sink. Her mother and Luisa and her uncle Mario keeping watch in the kitchen of La Chiatta. Each world inside another world. The music she was hearing in her head matched the music she would make if she’d been humming aloud. It was as real as the fact of her growing. Luisa had predicted, judging from the size of Adriana’s grandissimi feet, that she wouldn’t stop growing until she had reached two full meters. She was growing continuously, irreversibly. As she grew bigger, the cabinet grew smaller, and her knees poked against her chin. She was like a hen packed in a hatbox. She couldn’t stand it. Either she had to stop growing or she would suffocate. Hiding from the fighting wouldn’t do her any good at all if her confinement made it impossible to breathe.

What, she wondered, could be worse than death? She was old enough to be able to imagine a multitude of brutal endings. The worst, she’d been taught, was Christ’s suffering on the cross. A crucifix was a reminder that dying wasn’t easy. She didn’t want to die. There was nothing she wanted less to do than to die. What could surpass the misery of dying?

Whatever it was, it seemed to be something that could only happen to children—to girls, in particular, of a certain age. Only she’d been hidden in a cabinet. The adults were sitting comfortably in chairs around the kitchen table as though they’d just finished a meal and were waiting for visitors.

Deep inside her growing body, inside the cabinet, inside the kitchen, inside the walls of La Chiatta, she let herself consider what could happen. She could guess that it had to do with the advantages of strength over the stupidity of innocence. Adriana Nardi wasn’t stupid. She’d always considered herself exceptionally knowledgeable and didn’t find it difficult to surmise at least a part of the truth from which she was being protected. It had to do with young girls and soldiers and how, if a girl’s growing body was too little for their pleasure, they had to make it bigger. Even as she was wishing to fit more comfortably into the cramped space of the cabinet, she imagined expanding like a balloon. She thought about how the soldiers would make this happen.

She was a girl, worthy enough to be hidden in a cabinet. Yet no matter what might be done to her, she couldn’t imagine choosing death. Having long been assured by her mother that there was no such place as hell, she could believe that even the worst suffering wouldn’t last forever. When the suffering ended, she wanted to be alive. She was as deserving as any child and had a right to live past tomorrow. She’d rather have faced a hundred Barbarossas than end up dying in an effort to hide from them. Was it really necessary for her to stay where she was? Did her mother think that death was preferable to defilement? Did she realize that her daughter was desperately uncomfortable?

“Mamma,” she whispered through the crack in the door. Actually, she didn’t even whisper. She made the sound of blowing out a candle flame, and her mother couldn’t have heard her. And she made the sound of z, for her zio Mario, and the murmur of Luisa’s name. Didn’t they understand that Adriana wanted to be with them?

There was a muffled, rhythmic knocking, maybe of someone nervously tapping a shoe beneath the kitchen table. The smell of cigarette smoke seeping into the cabinet had the coarse sweetness of automobile exhaust. The adults, unable to come up with anything better to do, must have passed a pack of cigarettes among themselves.

Tired of her troubled thoughts and the necessity of hiding, Adriana let herself feel angry at all of them for treating her as though she were some sacred vestment being hidden from the Turks. Let me out! She tried to think the demand forcefully enough for them to understand. But still no one bothered to check on her or offered her as much as a sip of water.

And then, abruptly, all activity seemed to stop, or at least the sounds of activity ceased. Adriana prepared to emerge into the open space of the kitchen. But for some reason she was not released. The darkness remained absolute, and the adults didn’t move from their chairs. She wasn’t sure whether it was after dawn or still the middle of the night. She listened for some evidence that the danger had passed, if only temporarily, but all she heard was the silence of inertia. The adults, having abdicated all responsibility, could do nothing else but sit and wait for someone to tell them what to do. Adriana would tell them what to do if they’d just let her out.

She was preparing to bang on the cabinet door, but right then she heard the far-off sound of the piano, notes of a fifth played separately, a tinny A and E, then E and B, then the slam of a chord.

For God’s sake, why had the piano tuner come now, in the middle of the fighting? Adriana wasn’t insane. She was the only sane one left in the world. The island was burning, soldiers were prowling for young girls, and the adults were sitting around the kitchen table while Rodolfo tuned the piano.

It didn’t occur to her that she was asleep. As far as she knew, her eyes were open, and she was a good girl doing just as she’d been told to do while everyone else went mad. Pazzo Rodolfo, go home. Someone let her out. Mamma, what is going on?

The hammer hitting the string, again, beat of two notes, and then another note, and another. Trill down, trill up. The strange sounds of human ingenuity. With this that our ancestors have made for us. Pianos. Bicycles. Books and microscopes and airplanes. Bombs and vaccines and grammar and ink and radios. The challenge is figuring out what makes sense in the long run. Never knowing whether the most fundamental expectation will prove reliable. Unable to estimate what is happening simultaneously. She being a young girl wanting merely to assure herself that she would survive the war and be blessed with a good long life but knowing all the while that she couldn’t even guess what would happen or what was happening elsewhere, no more than she could see through the door of the cabinet. Thinking of something while something entirely different occurred. Listening to the imaginary sounds of the piano while the Allied troops spread out across the island, following the road beside the Fosso Galeo toward Procchio, from Procchio to Portoferraio. Not seeing into the future or even into the recent past. Not seeing anything but the dim form of herself and the drainpipe. Not knowing that the soldiers had taken turns with the fourteen-year-old daughter of Sergio Canuti, whom they’d dragged from her home on the outskirts of Marina di Campo, and then they’d finished the job with bayonets, so by the time other troops had reached the Ambrogi estate next to La Chiatta and shot one of Lorenzo’s pigs, Sofia Canuti was already dead.

She could only be wrong if she tried to wager a guess. But at least she could vaguely sense the confounding scope of what she couldn’t know, and even as she dreamed about Rodolfo tuning the piano, she had a dim notion that beyond the confines of her perception almost anything was possible.

In the mysterious night surrounding La Chiatta, the war raged on, and in her sleep clever Adriana Nardi knew not to be surprised by what she didn’t understand. It was a lesson she’d begun learning when the Germans had bombed Portoferraio back in September. After that first attack, Adriana had found a woman’s slipper when she was sweeping behind the men clearing the rubble from her school. She didn’t understand what the slipper was doing there, since the bombs had fallen when the school was empty. And there was more: her friend Claudia had found the crushed carcass of a cat, and two boys claimed to have found a finger, though they dropped it and lost it when they were running to the office of the carabinieri. They reported that the finger still had the indentation of a ring encircling it, although the ring was gone. Adriana believed them.

She believed many things. She believed that there were diamonds on Volterraio. She believed in God. She didn’t believe in hell, but she believed in the devil, and she blamed the devil for the fact that the sea was full of the souls of the dead. When she was swimming in the sea and her hand brushed up against something that felt like a spiderweb, and when afterward she found that the back of her hand was streaked with red, that meant she was almost caught by the souls of the drowned. If they ever got a firm grip on her, they would pull her under. And then she would have to do the same to others.

She remembers wanting to stop believing everything she was told. But how did she know what to believe as long as anything was possible? It was possible that the war would never end. It was possible that she would never see the light of day again. It was possible that the entire island would be blown to pieces during the glorious liberation.

When she was a young girl hiding in the cabinet, she didn’t yet know that it would be called the liberation, nor would she have understood what was being liberated. She’d come to think of the Germans who had occupied the island for nine months as tourists—untrustworthy, to be sure, known in particular to have such a fondness for silk shirts that they would steal them right off the clothesline. Adriana had only seen the German soldiers from afar, though she often dined on their rations, since her mother sent Ulisse into Portoferraio to trade with them: eggs, dried figs, and cured olives in exchange for canned beans and salt. And occasionally Uncle Mario would arrive with a huge beefsteak—a gift from a German officer he’d befriended—which Luisa would cook in a stew to make it last for a week. Life may have been more dangerous because of the Germans, and it was even more dangerous if you were a partisan or a Jew. But there weren’t many partisans left on Elba, as far as Adriana knew, and there definitely were no Jews. Anyway, visitors never came to the island to stay. They left when they grew bored, usually when the autumn rains started.

The first night of the Allied liberation of Elba would turn out to be only the beginning. The night she spent hiding in a cabinet beside the kitchen sink. Let me out! Cracks of light graying the darkness. Hating to be where she was but grateful not to be somewhere else. Where?

Shrieks of a dying pig. Intake of breath. Thudding rush of blood in the ears, reminding her of the few times she’d cut her finger and sucked the wound: she imagined that lemon mixed with the pulp of a rancid tomato would taste like blood. How disgusting! Ragazze, attenzione! Ah-eh-ee-oh-oo. Please, Mamma, when would Rodolfo finish his work and go home? The sound was giving her a headache. Try to sleep, Adriana. She couldn’t sleep. She was asleep. She didn’t hear Sofia Canuti screaming. Of course she didn’t.

She imagined hearing the gurgle of milk spilling from a bottle tipped over by a cat. She imagined hearing the snapping sounds of someone gathering kindling. And Rodolfo playing scales. She thought about all the sounds that a violin could make in a half step. Once upon a time she’d wanted to learn to play the violin. But her mother had insisted on the piano.

She thought about the sweet smell of bonfires. She thought about a flip book she’d bought at the market last week showing a man blown from a cannon to the top of the Tower of Pisa, his weight bringing the leaning tower crashing down. What about all the good jokes she’d retold? Or climbing up to the rocky summit of Monte Capanne? Or the restless tapping of a pen on blank paper?

She remembers imagining that all the fighting going on across the island was just a ruse and the explosions as harmless as fireworks. She remembers feeling irritated by the inconvenience of it and angry at her mother—why had Giulia Nardi chosen to live in a place where war would come? Why hadn’t she had better foresight? What, exactly, was happening? When would it be over?

The Germans would have left on their own eventually—that’s what the Elbans thought. Instead, the French Colonials, with a backup of British Royal Marine Commandos, had to force them out, and by the end of the first night, everyone who wasn’t alive was dead. Only hours into the invasion, Sofia Canuti was dead, the Signori Volbiani were dead, six Senegalese boys were dead, fifteen Germans were dead, nine British commandos were dead, and seven troops of the Bataillon de Choc had decided that the long drive between the road and the villa of La Chiatta was too long, so instead they went to La Lampara and killed a pig while Adriana, not knowing much of anything about anything, past, present, or future, dreamed about crazy Rodolfo the piano tuner, who had to make the piano sound better than perfect and always stayed for hours.

Forgetting in her sleep to hope that eventually the sun would rise, the door to the cabinet would open, and she would tumble out into her mother’s arms, more confused than she’d ever felt in her life, joints aching, mouth parched. Only after she’d been revived with a cup of water would she consider it her right to demand from her mother proper recognition for her hardship. But Luisa would scold Adriana for this. She would tell her to give thanks to God for protecting her during a night when so much had been lost.

Not guessing what would be involved in the many stories she’d have to hear before she really understood what had gone on that night and through the following days around the island while the savage fighting continued up in the mountains. It would be three days before the Germans surrendered—and longer before the interim government secured a reliable peace and demobilized its troops, ending officially what the French would call Operation Brassard, the Italians would call La Liberazione, and the British Royal Marine Commandos would call a bloody little sideshow.

SIXTY YEARS LATER, the woman known to others as Mrs. Rundel is riding on a train through New Jersey. Mrs. Robert Rundel—with her cap of hair a blend of gray and white and streaks of satin black; her face fitting neatly inside the frame of her curls; dark pools of flesh completing the circles of her wide dark eyes; her right eyebrow raised at a sharp angle, pushed upward by a chronically swollen lachrymal gland; her overlapping front teeth hidden behind the beak of her mouth—this is who she has become, a woman who is convinced that she will always, everywhere, be perceived as a foreigner.

The truth of her own future would have shocked her when she was a young girl if a Gypsy had told her what was in store, though after decades of the same routine there should be no surprises. She is on the train heading into New York. Today is no different from any other weekday. She is staring indifferently out at the factories and warehouses, the parking lots, the FABCO sign, Shakey’s Garage, the ninety-nine-cent value promised at Shoppers World, the power station, the graffiti on the concrete wall below the flyover: “Leo DaMan,” “JJ Excavator,” and “I Luv Pedro.” Her mind drifts to her husband and children, their faces and voices, and their gathering the previous evening in celebration of her seventieth birthday. She thinks about how this need to mark the passing years seemed strange to her as she raised her glass in a toast. So she is officially seventy. Seventy! She’s not the only one who finds it hard to believe.

She’d like to indulge her pride—how often she is complimented on her vigor!—but she is distracted by the slow sharpening of a new awareness. She felt fine just a moment ago, but in the time it takes to clear her throat, she feels less than fine. She wonders if the feeling has something to do with the memory of last night’s dinner and the conversation with her family, the stories she told and retold at their urging. Could it be that despite all she said, she didn’t say enough? There’s always plenty left out of any account. Still, she might have missed an opportunity. There wasn’t enough time. There is never enough time. Why didn’t she understand this before it was too late? Too late for what?

Forget about it. She has to concentrate on breathing. Her body longs for a saturating inhalation, yet for some reason she can only take quick, shallow breaths. Panting like her daughter’s little terrier on a hot day. In her flustered state she imagines that she is on the verge of drawing attention to herself. Really, the inconvenience of it is appalling.

The sensation of mild heartburn seems to spread backward, gripping the thoracic vertebrae, causing her to stiffen in her seat. She presses her right hand against the plastic armrest, though at the same time she is seized by the desire to lift her arm and curl the fingers into a tight fist. But the plastic has turned to glue, binding her hand in place.

She reminds herself that she has felt worse on other occasions. In her seventy years she has survived whooping cough, pneumonia, and malaria—all this after surviving the war. It occurs to her that she talked about the war with her family last night. What part of the story did she forget to tell? What is she trying to remember? All the reasons not to panic. She is admirably fit for her age, according to her doctor. Surely this disorientation will pass in a few seconds. The dizziness could be attributed to . . . She doesn’t bother to finish the thought. It’s enough to have confidence that her condition could be attributed at all.

Outside, beyond a band of junipers, brown smoke hangs motionless between the chimneys of a foundry and the sky. If she’d noticed, the scene would have added to her mistaken sense that the world had momentarily paused to accommodate her, like traffic waiting for an old woman to cross against the light. Then be quick about it, Mrs. Rundel. Avanti, svelta! Had she been on her feet, the momentum would have caused her to stumble. She can’t stumble, not here. She must get to the other side and can’t risk even a quick look back. All her concentration must be focused on getting the air she needs into her lungs, from her lungs into her blood. The brain is hungry—breathe, Adriana! Memory needs oxygen. Breathe. She will not panic. Breathe.

The confusion at the Newark Station—passengers spilling out of the train, passengers trying to get on—keeps others from noticing that the elderly woman in a window seat is having difficulty breathing. Even the man who occupies the seat beside her doesn’t notice. He’s got his ear pressed against his cell phone and the newspaper folded open to the front page of the Business section. Across the aisle from him a woman is absorbed in a thick report on freshwater resources: water stocks and flows, desalination, international watersheds. Beside her by the window another woman is refreshing her lipstick.

“It had something to do with the anchor on the service door,” the man in the seat directly behind Mrs. Rundel is saying to his companion. “No one would explain what was wrong, but we sat there on the runway for three hours. . . .”

A college student in the seat in front, exploring the brown-bag lunch his mother has prepared for him, groans, “Liverwurst again!”

Two seats ahead, a man whispers into his phone, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Hubbub of lives lived by strangers. . . . It was like, like, it was so incredible the way you said there on the runway what is called I said it doesn’t have to be this way if you she they . . .

Mrs. Rundel doesn’t notice them, and they don’t notice her. That’s good. She wouldn’t want to give anyone a reason to stare. In another state of mind, she would have recollected past occasions when she inadvertently drew attention to herself, such as when she lost an earring while waiting for the crosstown shuttle to take her from Times Square to Grand Central or screamed curses in Italian at a newscaster on the television screen above a bar. Really, Ma, her daughter has said, can’t you be a little less impetuous?

If like the time, you know, if you’d listen to me when I it would if he she having been advised concerning arsenic poisoning of Bangladesh groundwater if only.

ALTHOUGH THE FIGHTING continued elsewhere, the sounds around La Chiatta were ordinary again—leaves rustling, roosters crowing, gentle waves sloshing against the rocks outside the back gate. But because Adriana had a faint notion that something terrible had happened the night before, the ordinary sounds were newly ominous. What had happened, exactly? Paolo would explain. While Luisa was brushing Adriana’s hair, Paolo, Luisa’s nephew, skidded on his bicycle into the courtyard. He was fourteen years old and small for his age, with handsome features but skin so marred by blemishes that it seemed tinged with a perpetual blush. Adriana laughed whenever she saw him, even in the middle of a war, even now, as he bumped through the doorway into the kitchen. She laughed into her cupped hand, and Luisa tapped her lightly on the ear in admonishment.

Paolo had ridden his bicycle across the island to bring the news that Marina di Campo had already fallen to the Allies and the German antiaircraft batteries had been bombed into oblivion. Luisa’s sister and her family were safe, he said, but the daughter of Sergio Canuti, a girl who never did what she was told, had opened the door when the African soldiers came knocking, and they’d dragged her away and killed her. Luisa collapsed into a chair, her exclamation of “Madonna!” escaping like air from a bellows. Sergio Canuti—who was that? Mario asked what Adriana was wondering. Sergio Canuti, Paolo explained importantly, was a grocer, and his daughter, Sofia, who everyone always said would come to a bad end, was dead. How exactly had she died? Adriana wanted to know. Paolo didn’t bother to reply. He said that the forest on Monte Bacile was burning and that the French flag had been raised over San Martino. He said that he’d seen an unexploded shell half buried on the beach at La Foce. He said that he’d passed Lorenzo’s Angela on the Santa Clara road, and from her he had learned that the Ambrogi family and all the servants at La Lampara were unharmed—they’d spent the night up in the hills and saved themselves from an encounter with roving soldiers. But Belbo the pig had been killed and left to rot in the yard.

When Luisa heard about the pig, she stopped genuflecting, wiped her eyes, and said they must send for the carabinieri. “Ma che,” Mario said. Think about it: What good were the carabinieri in a war? he asked. Or priests, for that matter? Adriana wanted to add. Either you were spared or you weren’t. Either you were Adriana Nardi and the soldiers didn’t bother to walk down the long drive to La Chiatta to torment you or you were Sofia Canuti from Marina di Campo and you were dead.

How did she die? No one would explain it to Adriana. She shouldn’t even ask the question, her uncle said. But she understood enough to know that what she’d imagined had been confirmed. First one soldier taking advantage, then another and another. There were African soldiers involved, apparently—Moroccans and Senegalese. After spending most of the night inside the cabinet, she was not afraid to imagine it: soldiers taking turns while the girl just lay there with her skirt up to her neck.

She watched the bump in Paolo’s throat slide up and down beneath his thin skin as he gulped a cup of water. It occurred to her that in general skin was an inadequate surface. For that matter, the whole human body was needlessly vulnerable. All a soldier had to do was plunge a bayonet into that bump in the throat. It was far too easy. Maybe those who were still alive were simply lucky. Lucky for Paolo that he had survived. He’d ridden his bicycle all the way from Marina di Campo. Would Adriana have had the courage to do that?

Mario lit another cigarette while Paolo stood with his hand on the shoulder of his aunt, who was bent in her chair whispering a prayer. Giulia, sitting beside Luisa, looked helplessly at the table, as though recalling that once she would have been able to find an answer there. The question they couldn’t ask themselves was what to do next. It was clear to Adriana that beyond what information Paolo had brought, none of the adults knew anything worthwhile.

She left them, wandered out of the room, and quietly unlatched the door to the courtyard. The inland breeze slipping past her already carried the warmth of the midmorning sun along with the perfume of jasmine and an unfamiliar tangy residue. Somewhere someone was chopping wood—the distant clacking of the ax was reassuringly steady. And the buzzing of a lone plane passing overhead was as serene as the chortling of the doves. Adriana heard the birds but did not see them, though she knew they liked to tuck themselves beneath the roof or hide in the palms.

There were many places to hide around La Chiatta—in the walled garden, in the bushes at the edge of the fields, or between the rows of vines. How could she be sure that soldiers weren’t hiding in the vineyard now, crouching behind the thick tangle of wires and leaves, waiting for an opportunity to jump out and seize her and carry her off and do to her what the Africans had done to Sofia Canuti? The glint of a metal pail at the end of a row made her think of a soldier’s helmet. How many soldiers were hiding in the vineyard? Merely to contemplate it gave credence to the fear, and fear gave irresistible power to her curiosity. What would happen if she were as brave as Paolo and ventured out alone? she wondered. How does God reward courage?

She set her bare foot tentatively on the stone step, as though testing its strength. She was so prepared for the sound of a voice calling her back that for a moment she actually thought she heard the sharp command to return—Adriana, vieni qua! But no one called, and she broke forward, skipping lightly, surprising herself with her convincing performance of ordinary cheerfulness. An ordinary girl on an island lit with the creamy sunshine of a perfect June morning, the fields still damp with dew, the sky a tranquil blue, everything in place and everything that was dangerous either elsewhere or nearby and invisible.

Although she knew she was supposed to stay inside, where, if necessary, she could be stuffed back inside the cabinet within a moment’s notice, she craved the freedom to prove to herself that there was nothing to fear. Either there were soldiers hiding in the vineyard rows or there weren’t. Either they would try to catch her or they wouldn’t. The only way to confirm the truth was to go see for herself.

Maybe the bleating horn of a ship in the harbor was signaling that the world was safe again, or maybe not. Maybe the Germans had already surrendered, or maybe not. What would happen if she padded in bare feet across the courtyard, where the cobblestones were furred with moss, the cracks yellowed with tile dust, and if she crept along the first grassy row of vines, keeping close to the wires, using her hands as though to propel herself through water? How much would she risk in order to know the truth? She should probably figure out the real value of truth before heading off in pursuit of it. But already she was moving with the ease of a snake slipping through grass. No one would suspect that she was there. Where? Here in the second row. Here in the third row, where she just missed stepping on a pair of rusty shears—a useful weapon, a gift of coincidence or divine grace. Which was which? How did anyone ever tell the difference? And would the difference matter if she were compelled to make use of the shears, plunging them through the paper-thin skin of an enemy soldier?

One element of the truth was that Adriana Nardi couldn’t distinguish enemy from ally. Last year the Germans were said to be friends. Last month they moved among the Elbans like guards among prisoners. Last night the French Colonial troops killed everyone they found. Who could be trusted?

Adriana was better off stuffed inside a cabinet—then she wouldn’t have to find answers to unanswerable questions. Short of that refuge, she could crawl through the vineyard, and now and then she could squat on her haunches and sniff the air for the scent of a predator.

The pale green grapes were tiny and hard—she slit one open with her thumbnail and dropped the shreds in the dirt. As she peered through the vines she let the velvety underside of a leaf brush against her face. That felt good, along with the sunshine warming the back of her head and the crumbled earth beneath her feet. The freshness of the morning was a comfort not quite sufficient to distract her from her search. She was looking for the soldiers who had killed Sofia Canuti, in order to prove that they couldn’t do the same to her. She was armed with rusty shears. She was stealthy and agile and would vanish into the thicket of vines as soon as she inflicted the necessary fatal wounds. Wasn’t vengeance as fair as consequence was inevitable, after all? Maybe, or maybe not.

“Madonna!” That was Luisa’s common exclamation of surprise, and Adriana borrowed it only sparingly. She used it now, or at least part of it, dropping the shears as Luisa’s nephew, Paolo, came up from behind and caught her by the wrist.

“Paolo, tu sei un’idiota!” Sneaking up on Adriana like that and startling the breath from her . . . But Adriana was a troublemaker of the first order. A young girl shouldn’t wander off at any time, and especially not during a war. Now come inside, Adriana. And keep your head down in case there are snipers nearby looking for a target.

So far, the war hadn’t bothered to come to La Chiatta. The war had passed them by. Adriana couldn’t admit that she was secretly disappointed not to see more evidence of the invasion in the vineyard or the olive groves—a trampled path, for instance, or empty shells. Or a corpse. With all that she’d witnessed in the ten years of her life, she still had never seen a corpse.

Had Paolo seen the dead body of Sofia Canuti? Adriana asked, but he didn’t answer. He just trudged ahead, his back to her, his shoulders hunched in a pretense of impatience, as though he had to let her know that he had better things to do than to go chasing a silly little girl through the vineyard.

“Guarda, Paolo”—look at that. But he didn’t look. He ignored Adriana and didn’t see what she saw: the group of planes in the sky, each the size of a hummingbird, so high up that she could barely hear the sound of their engines. They were heading inland toward Marina di Campo, flying in an even V. Maybe they were carrying bombs or maybe not. Maybe more people would be dead in a few minutes or maybe not.

Adriana squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed the sunblind from them. She blinked and purposefully stared at her grimy toes to regain her vision, then raised her eyes to scan the hectare of vines extending toward the seawall, looking just in time, as though in expectation, to see what at first she took to be the peak of a powerful wave. No, it was a man—he had clambered up the opposite side of the wall and was heaving himself over the top. A shirtless man, shrunken by the distance, his dark back glistening like the quartz-speckled granite in the mountains, plummeting toward the ground, disappearing into the weeds.

She stared at the place where he had been, expecting to see him pick himself up and run. Vaulting the wall, he had given the impression that he was running for his life. Amazingly, he’d gotten as far as the Nardi vineyard, yet surely this wasn’t far enough. Get up! Run! Without considering the sentiment, Adriana wanted to cheer for him. He’d been trying to escape. She wanted him to escape. But the scene remained absolutely still, devoid of even a ruffling breeze. The solidity of the wall and the pristine line of its top edge made action seem an impossible concept. Nothing moved or would move again.

Adriana would have been the first to concede that images were easily mistaken at such a distance. She thought she’d seen a man running for his life. She could as easily have seen a bird, a heron, perhaps, or a cormorant, more likely, plunging from the top of the wall to carry food to nesting chicks. Or else she’d seen the shadow of a plane.

She turned to Paolo for confirmation—he would tell her what she’d seen. But Paolo wasn’t there. So eager was he to return to his duties as messenger that he hadn’t even noticed Adriana was no longer following him, and he had gone on ahead. There’d be a great clamor as soon as the adults greeted him in the kitchen and he realized that he’d left the girl behind. The door would swing open, Giulia would rush out to fetch her wayward daughter, Mario would stand glaring in the doorway with Paolo behind him and Luisa behind Paolo. Until then, Adriana would watch and wait, but the vineyard would refuse to give up its secret, leaving her with no choice but to conclude that she’d seen nothing.

WHERE HAD HE ARRIVED, and where was here in relation to there? Here wasn’t clay baked underfoot and coated with dust. There wasn’t terraced with vineyards and olive groves. Here piles of kelp rotted on the rocks between the water and the beach. There he had to check his boots for centipedes. Here he was told to check his boots for snakes. There the rising sun melted like wax over the metal roofs. Here the sun rose like a plump orange from the sea. There he would stand outside the lycée and listen to the teacher playing piano and think that if only he were given the chance, he, too, could play the piano. There he had talent for everything. Here if they caught him they would kill him slowly. He’d been warned: whatever happened, he mustn’t get caught. He knew of soldiers who carried poison in their pockets. But he wouldn’t swallow poison in self-defense. He’d rather defend himself by running away. He was not afraid of being called a coward. Whatever story was told about him, he could tell a better one.

In this current story he, Amdu Diop, wasn’t fleeing from pursuers. He was running toward the next chapter of his life. He was good at slipping away unnoticed because he didn’t begin like other boys his age with a noisy burst of speed. He scuttled like a centipede out of a boot, across a rocky slope, behind a house, and onto the path paved with pieces of broken pottery.

He imagined an angry wife smashing all this pottery, casting one plate after another onto the ground after her husband announced that he had spent what was left of her dowry. He’d learned from listening to conversations about the people of this country that the women preferred to save money and the men liked to waste it. Also, they sat for three hours at their midday meal. Also, they wept over every holy transubstantiation as though from one Mass to the next they’d forgotten about the truth of miracles. Also, they didn’t know how to hide during a night of war. Please, madame and monsieur, do not stay in your houses with the shutters closed. Try instead a cave in the mountains. Or better yet, leave the island altogether and go to some uncontested place, like, say, the Fouta Djallon highlands, and live in peace.

In all operations, Amdu was assigned to the rear. But when the rear was a beach and the only retreat possible was into the sea, he had no choice but to go forward up the hill toward the dark village, where the residents were hiding inside their houses like birds in the tall grass, like little mangemil birds after they have mauled the peanuts. These people were as guilty as the mangemil. They were guilty because they’d tolerated the German occupiers instead of joining the Resistance. But they weren’t the enemy and they didn’t deserve to be destroyed.

While the air assault on Portoferraio was under way, the British admiral T. H. Troubridge directed naval operations from an infantry landing craft in the Golfo di Campo. He had begun by ordering a unit of commandos to capture a German gunboat, and he had watched helplessly from the bridge when a stray German shell hit the gunboat and touched off its ammunition. With the cold ferocity of a man who knew he couldn’t make up for his losses after that, he had sent off the Colonials in their rubber boats across the sandbars, wave after wave of them pushing forward through the storm of fiery shrapnel. Jumping from their boats into the water, the troops had made what the admiral would later describe as “a curious humming” that could be heard even amid the thunder of exploding shells.

Ahead of the main body of the Ninth French Colonial Division, the Bataillon de Choc crept single file up the slopes, but they couldn’t locate the German gun positions in time, and soldiers of the Thirteenth Regiment of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais climbing directly behind them were forced to scatter when the top of the slopes began to flash with interdicting artillery fire. That’s when Amdu found himself alone.

He was known for being useless—he’d killed no one in the battles on Corsica and had managed to lose his regiment more than once, returning only after the fighting was over. Each time he’d been forgiven, not only because he was by far the youngest soldier in the Ninth French Colonial Division, the unofficial mascot who was thought to bring good luck, but because he was the grandson of the great General Jean-Baptiste Diop and was forgiven for anything.

His belt snapped as he ran, spilling the attachments. He grabbed his canteen but left the sheath knife and extra magazines where they lay. Call him crazy, but he had no intention of reloading. Beyond the town he made his way into a dense pine grove, where he stayed until he could count to one hundred between the bursts of gunfire. One hundred and one, and he walked through a meadow in the direction of the sea. One hundred and two, he was flat on his belly, eye to eye with an immobile gray toad the size of an apple, while a plane passed low overhead. One hundred and three, he was on his feet again, scrambling along a muddy gully in search of better shelter.

In this story, he wanted to find a waterfall like the Felu, where he had once traveled with his family. He wanted to fall asleep to the roar of cascading water and then wake and find a monkey squatting next to him, picking burrs from his hair. And then the monkey would surprise him by talking in French and telling him his future.

In the future of this story, he would play lovely music on a piano, and a boy whose name he didn’t know would listen through an open window of the lycée. Many years later the boy would remember Amdu’s music at a moment of indecision. The memory would cause him to choose the path leading to happiness instead of sorrow.

This pleasant story occupied Amdu’s thoughts while he made his way to the end of the field. The moon, bright behind the haze of smoke, silvered the bristles of high grass. He heard the distant sound of an engine, though he couldn’t tell whether it was a motorboat or a motorbike. His father had promised him a motorbike when he returned from the war—this would be his reward for staying alive. Of course he’d stay alive. He didn’t like to speak of it to others, but he knew God had planned an important life for him and through these difficult times would offer absolute protection.

He headed down a road that turned to dirt and led to a row of concrete bungalows perched on the edge of a steep, rocky slope above the sea. Amdu guessed the inhabitants were huddling inside their homes, trying to keep their dogs from barking and their children from crying. The silence was the sound of their fear. They had every right to be fearful, given what the general had told the captains to tell their men at the outset of Operation Brassard: tout est permis. Anyone found by troops of the Ninth French Colonial Division was at risk of being humiliated—or worse. But they didn’t have to fear Amdu, who had been in the war for almost a year and still hadn’t fired his rifle at anything alive. He made no secret of the fact that he would never kill a living creature. He considered himself as close to a saint as he could come without actually communicating with God. At the very least, he was a good man—a seventeen-year-old man with noble aspirations and swift legs. Despite his reputation as a coward, he was liked by everybody who knew him. Even the people hiding in their houses would have liked him if they’d known him. He had come to their island to help them and make friends. But he had no way of declaring his good intentions.

A toad—slightly larger than the one he’d seen in the field, its gray skin blotched with charcoal patches—hunched lazily on the step of a lopsided well. The toad blinked at Amdu. Amdu blinked at the toad. He wondered what the toad knew of the war. He wondered what had happened to his comrades. He hoped that the German battery had already surrendered and his friends in the Thirteenth Regiment were having a good long smoke now that the invasion was over.

Feeling a sudden urge to participate in victory, he fired his rifle at the moon. He liked to fire his rifle at the moon. It was an irresistible action, though he would always regret it once he remembered that he couldn’t predict where the bullet would come down. But he enjoyed the kick of the grip and the sound of the shot melting into the night air and returning with the loud snap of an echo. It was fun to shoot a rifle without the intention to kill. Yet a soldier should always have a reasonable target—a coffee can across the yard instead of the moon. See what could happen? The falling bullet could hit you in the eye. Fortunately, it didn’t hit Amdu in the eye. It grazed him on the shoulder, stinging like a thorn stings with a quick sharp pain followed by an aching. His own bullet. Except it wasn’t his own bullet. It was the glancing bullet from the rifle of a sniper on the roof of one of the bungalows, though Amdu didn’t realize this until the man fired a second shot, which sent up a spray of gravel as it embedded in the ground beside his boot.

Run, Amdu! Of course he would run. But first he’d slip off the sling of his rifle and grab it by the barrel and send it plunging down the well. Why for heaven’s sake did he do that? Because it wasn’t fair to shoot an unarmed man. But why throw the rifle down the well? Because the well was there. There was not here. Here was where he had to run from, the place where God had failed to protect him.

Amdu, God fails in nothing. Of course—he knew this as surely as he knew his own name. But how do you explain . . . ?

War is war is war. To be alive during a war is to be guilty. Amdu was as guilty as the residents of this island. Amdu was as guilty as his fellow soldiers. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. Be broken, you peoples, and be dismayed. Be wounded in the shoulder. Be bloody and afraid.

Amdu was afraid and would make no secret of this fact to anyone watching, but at the same time he was grateful for his many abilities, especially his ability to run so quickly that he was out of the line of fire and was heading down the steps leading to the beach before whoever wanted to kill him could locate him again in the rifle sight.

Under the hazy moon, the pebbles on this island were as smooth and round as duck eggs and were covered in a yellow film that seemed to radiate a dusty phosphorescence. Amdu was grateful for the moonlight, since it enabled him to see his way. To his right was a small wooden pavilion and to his left was a jetty extending into the sea. He headed in the direction of the rocks, clambering up and over and splashing along the edge of the water.

He was grateful to be able to move among the concealing forms of the huge boulders. He was grateful to find himself alone and far away from the fighting. He was grateful that the pain in his shoulder was no worse than a toothache, and once he’d taken off his shirt, he saw that the blood was hardly oozing at all. The bleeding would soon stop altogether beneath the cloth he’d ripped from his undershirt and twisted around his upper arm. He was grateful to be alive and had faith that whatever happened would be necessary and just. And he was grateful to find a reward for his faith in the form of a rowboat wedged against a grassy point bar. A boat! He could take the boat and row himself back to the ship that had delivered him to this island, the same ship, anchored offshore, that would take him home. He wanted to go home now, please, and take up the important work of ministering to his people. He’d seen enough of war to prefer to avoid it.

Everything was supposed to make sense, even in the absence of understanding. So when Amdu saw the giant toad perched on the bench in the boat, a gray wrinkled mass just sitting there as if it owned the world—by far the largest toad he’d ever seen, bigger than a full moon in the night sky—he took it as a sign of prohibition. If the toad could have spoken, it would have said, Do not take the boat, Amdu! All right, he wouldn’t take the boat. He would keep walking in the direction he’d started, away from all that he wanted to leave behind and toward wherever, scrambling over the rocks and through the shallow water of the estuaries, and when a single plane swooped low between the bordering peninsulas and dropped some sort of cargo into the water—a bomb, Amdu assumed as it was swallowed by the sea, no, an extra fuel tank—he would know for certain that he had been right not to take the rowboat, for if he had taken it he might very well have been floating in the middle of the inlet directly beneath the jettisoned tank. He might very well be dead by now.

He couldn’t know how to interpret in any reliable fashion the mysterious evidence of fate, but so far he hadn’t made any obvious mistakes. The best anyone could do was pray for wisdom and trust lessons learned from past experience. Just as a good farmer will plant millet one year, peanuts the next, and then let the field lie fallow, Amdu, depending upon the situation, would enjoy the company of his family, listen to the stories of his friends, or run from danger. Family, friends, danger. Millet, peanuts, fallow. Yes, everything made sense if you had faith.

He was alive because he had faith. Yet he was being tested. Which way was the direction of happiness? He could keep following the coastline, but this would take him farther away from his regiment. He could retrace his steps and try to make his way back to the well, but this would return him to the bungalows. The only other option was to cut inland and try to find a road leading to the marina where he and his fellows had landed. In all likelihood there would be troops stationed in the central piazza, and they would tell him how to make himself useful.

Between the line of the sluggish surf and the fields were boulders stacked steeply, with jagged footholds. Even without the full use of his left arm, Amdu could climb slowly to the top lip and from there look out over the empty expanse of the inlet. Other than the circle of foam still floating over the spot where the fuel tank had disappeared, there was no sign of life—no sailboats moored offshore, no planes overhead. He knew that the marina was hidden behind the far peninsula and figured that he could reach it by traveling a wide arc up and around the bungalows and past the meadow. As long as he moved furtively, he would be safe.

Family, friends, danger. Millet, peanuts, fallow. Folly is a joy to him who has no sense, but a man of understanding walks aright. Amdu walked aright through the low grass and onto a dirt lane that led directly uphill between halves of an old orchard. The grass in the field was waist high, and vines webbed the neglected fruit trees. Puddles of rotten peaches filled the night air with a sweet, foul fragrance, giving Amdu the impression that the yield of this land was excessive. The soil was too fertile, the sea too calm, the people lazy.

He thought about his own land—there instead of here. The warmth of fine, silky sand beneath his bare feet. The smell of fresh rain on the streets of Dakar. Riding the train between Dourbel and Kaolack—looking across the compartment at his father, who was reading a book. Wasn’t his father always reading a book? His face hidden behind the pages, his thoughts as far off and unfathomable as the action of Operation Brassard. What was going on, and where? Amdu could only make his way slowly toward the place where the action had commenced. The beginning of a plan following the sequence of thought, one idea leading to another, logic supported by belief in logic, belief in logic supported by faith in God, faith in God reaffirmed in an unfamiliar setting.

He was somewhere on an island, somewhere in the night. And at the same time there was something calling or crying, a shrieking sound—he couldn’t tell whether it came from an animal or a person, but the plea conveyed by the sound was easily perceived. If help was needed, danger was present. And what do you do in the presence of danger, Amdu? Run!

He ran. But in order to escape danger he first needed to identify the scope of it, so instead of running away from the awful shrieking sound of pleading, he ran toward it. He ran toward chickens being slaughtered, cats being swung by their tails, beached whales, and warthogs being devoured by hyenas. He ran toward monkeys gabbling in French. He tore through bramble wheels, damp from the previous night’s rain, stumbled over the broken cylinder of an old wasp nest, kept running through the orchard toward a shed, where whatever had been calling for help, calling directly to God’s servant Amdu Diop, offering him the chance to do a good deed, had already fallen silent.

Amdu gazed through the broken window of the shed, through the pane on the lower right. A flashlight propped across the rim of a wheelbarrow lit up the aftermath of the show. Amdu’s fellow soldiers crowded inside—four or five of them from another regiment in the Ninth French Colonial Division. He recognized at least one, a captain he’d seen conferring with General De Lattre de Tassigny en route from Corsica. Now he was talking to his own men, muttering something in his own language, and they were muttering back, arguing about who and what while at their feet, with her bare legs spread at the thighs but crisscrossed at the ankles, lay a young girl, naked and ribboned with fresh blood.

Don’t look, Amdu! Too late. He was a dark face at the broken window, looking and seeing. Too late. He couldn’t unsee what he couldn’t deny was beyond the general’s liberal directive of tout est permis. Surely this act wasn’t covered by tout est permis. Anything goes . . . except this. This was not war. This was something else, unworthy of a witness. Amdu wished he’d remained with his own regiment. Too late. And what would have shored him up under other circumstances—the Lord delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders—only reminded him of his mistake, which was to have lived long enough to have seen too much and then to stand there stupidly until he was seen, drawing one by one the attention of the men, their gazes locking, the captain the last to notice Amdu but the first to react, slowly shaking his head, mouthing what Amdu interpreted as a description of what would happen to him if he ever dared to speak of what he’d seen.

The obvious truth being that Amdu would have been better off dead. The bullet that had grazed his shoulder should have killed him. Or the fuel tank that had fallen from the sky should have crushed him. At each turn he’d made a mistake and so had ended up at this wrong place. From here there was no turning back and no going forward into the remarkable story of his life. He could only run away.

Two soldiers had rushed from the shed and were coming after him. Run, Amdu, before they cut out your tongue! And don’t bother clinging to any tired notion of punishable sin. A fair god would have cracked open the heavens and rained fire. Instead, the liberation of this rotting island continued, crimes would remain unpunished, and there was nothing he could do about it.

At least Amdu could outrun anyone he challenged to a race. As the voices of his pursuers faded in the distance, he ran this way and that, along dirt paths, through pine groves and fields, up rocky slopes, down rocky slopes, along paved roads and gravel drives and back to a narrow strip of beach. When he wasn’t running he was staggering—away from a barking dog or the sputter of a jeep. Or he was leaping into the air like a startled gazelle. He stayed alive, thanks to no one but himself. He hated himself for wanting to survive. He had no right to survive. He and everyone else deserved to be dead. Life designed for the destruction of life made no sense. The liberation made no sense. The rising sun made no sense. Warm, sweet, foul air of morning. Pebbles beneath his soaked boots gave way to a sandy belt lapped by the sea, where splinters of quartz, iron, amber, mica, glistened in the sunlight. Stupid sea. Stupid sky. Stupid wall separating Amdu from the private lives of the islanders. He and they, whoever they were, everyone everywhere sharing the capacity for enacting the unimaginable. Monsieur, tell Amdu who started this fooking war anyway. And tell him where those fooking planes flying overhead were going to dump their fooking bombs. Here? He’d rather be not-here. There. Somewhere. The other side of the wall would be preferable.

NORMALLY, the two layers of the pleura slide over each other, allowing the lungs to inflate and deflate smoothly, passing inhaled air via the trachea into the branching bronchioles and through the thin alveolar walls into a network of tiny blood vessels. Normally, the heart rate for a healthy sedentary adult averages seventy beats per minute. The diaphragm flattens as the intercostal muscles contract, the heart pumps blood through the arteries and arterioles, the ten thousand million nerve cells in the brain receive their fuel, and the mind keeps producing complex thought.

On the train between Rahway and Penn Station, on the stretch through the Kearny Marshes, Mrs. Rundel is busy thinking, her mind focused on the task of identifying the source and significance of her discomfort. Breathing in is difficult. Breathing out feels better, she discovers, and she is able to control her panting by extending the exhalation. Should she be worried? Is it, in fact, an extreme situation that would require her to seek immediate help? Is she experiencing a disorienting introduction to an unusually potent influenza? Or could it be that the premonition of illness has produced symptoms that have no actual physical cause? At this point of calm, her cerebrum observes the misfirings of brain stem activity with skepticism. She is having difficulty breathing. But she knows she could do herself real harm by translating the possibility of an illness into a psychosomatic reaction.

Whatever the actual basis of her condition, she doesn’t want to involve anyone around her. She has ridden this train for twenty years and rarely has she exchanged even the mildest greeting with other passengers. Non parlare a stranieri—don’t talk to strangers. It was a lesson her children grew tired of hearing from her, and it is counsel her mind summons to consciousness now that she might be in need of aid.

It’s not that she’s uninterested in the lives of others. Just the opposite—she is full of curiosity. But any stranger—the man in the seat beside her, the people in front and back—might be a swindler. Hai capito? Un’imbroglione. She can’t explain why she suspects this, since she’s never been a direct victim. Maybe she gleaned the danger from the novels she read when she was trying to improve her English. Or maybe the need for caution came to her through intuition. Whatever its source, the possibility that she’d lose something of value to a fast-talking American has haunted her since she arrived in this country. Without a proper introduction, she will work hard to stay aloof.

She’s determined at this moment to keep others from involving themselves in her predicament, though if she were home she would stumble from her chair and make her way to Robert’s study and throw herself into his arms. He would take care of her. It is reassuring to remind herself of this. Just as she would take care of him if need be, he would take care of her. His concern would be hidden behind a tranquil mask—the sweet crescents his eyes make when he smiles, the thick skin buckling into wrinkles, the gray bristles muffling his chin. Dear Robert, who came into her life nearly fifty years ago in a café on the Île de St.-Louis in Paris, bumping her table as he was trying to pass and then lingering to apologize. He stretched his apology into courtship, courtship into marriage, and she’s been Mrs. Rundel ever since.

But she doesn’t have the leisure to remember their beginning right now. On a train bound for Penn Station on a morning that started out like any other weekday morning, she’s not thinking of their past together. She’s not thinking about that time he startled her, catching her by the arm while they were crossing the Place des Vosges. She’s not thinking about how he brushed his lips against hers and then pulled back with an expression of surprise on his face, the intimacy confounding him for a hundred different reasons, so she slipped her hand around the back of his neck and eased him toward her. Both of them runaways. The luck of finding each other in the crowded world. Good luck marking these two individuals with an identical and permanent impression, a shared relief that would even have a gradual physical effect, so that over the years those who knew them would note an actual resemblance, as if they were siblings or cousins. And who can say for sure that they are not related by blood? He was born the youngest son in a large family and has so many relatives he never bothered to learn all their names. She was a foundling—an English word she came to love for its fairy-tale conjurings and abhor for its meaning: a baby deserted by unknown parents . . . and found, and claimed, when no one else would have her, by Signora Giulia Nardi of La Chiatta.

But she’s not thinking about any of this on the train to Penn Station. She’s not even thinking about what she’d been trying to remember a moment earlier. She’s not considering the influence of memory upon consciousness and doesn’t contemplate how her past experiences will affect any decision she might make in regard to seeking the help of strangers, nor does she have any idea that because of her years of smoking, her platelets are sticky, making her vulnerable to hypercoagulability and deep vein thrombosis. She’s not thinking about how it has started to rain. She is not wondering how the brokenhearted man talking on his phone will end his sentence—“what I’m trying to say is what goddamnit I’m trying to say if you’ll just listen to me so I can say what I’m trying to say is that”—or what happened to the man sitting behind her, who is still complaining about the delay of his flight to his friend, a software designer heading into the city to look for a new job. She is not interested in the issue of water as a human right—the subject of the chapter being read by the woman across the aisle. She is not concerned about the college student’s disappointment over his liverwurst sandwich. And she is certainly not wasting her time wondering what she’s not thinking about.

All she knows during this clarifying action of an extended exhalation is that she needs her husband and would call him at home if she could find her own cell phone, but as usual it is hidden in the mess in her purse. Here are her cigarettes and lipstick, her checkbook, her wallet, a pack of tissues, a pack of gum, old receipts, her address book, paper clips and Post-it pad and mints and nail file and pens and aspirin. But she can’t find her cell phone. The rain, invisible in the air, splinters on the window, and she can’t find her cell phone. Her husband is at home, and she can’t find her cell phone.

She can’t see what she can’t find. She can hold her cell phone in her hand and stare at it and still not see it, and then toss it back into her purse and continue searching, oblivious to the fact that she just found what she’d been looking for because the effort has already struck her as futile. Useless desire. What is happening is happening, the embolus is stuck in an artery, and if she can’t find her cell phone, she can’t find her cell phone. It all makes irritating sense. There is nothing to be done, no way to translate effort into success and find what she assumes is lost. Her husband could be seated beside her right now instead of a stranger, and Mrs. Rundel wouldn’t see him.

IV>

AFTER THE FIRST NIGHT of the liberation, during the quiet stretch following a pranzo that consisted only of cheese and bread because they had no meat left and Mario advised them not to light the stove to heat stock for soup, Adriana was at the piano rocking her hand between the opposite notes of chords in an attempt to mimic the sounds Rodolfo had made in her dream. Now that the bombardment had stopped, the war seemed very far away, though the fighting was said to be continuing as close as the alleys of Portoferraio as well as across the island in Porto Azzurro and the forests around Marciana Alta. The adults were still unsure who would emerge as victor.

With her face hidden in the crook of her left arm and her right hand tapping sound from single notes, Adriana thought about what she knew. She knew that she could trust her mother to protect her and to find her enough to eat, even during a time of scarcity. She knew that her uncle would continue to tell her what to do. And she could assume with good reason that when the war finally had gone elsewhere, shutters would still be painted green, stucco would be chipped, stone steps marked with smooth grooves, pistachio berries would be red, the caps of acorns brown, and the Scoglietto lighthouse would still be standing.

C, G, she played. C, G; D, A. How easy it was to predict, abstractly, the sound of the note she was about to press. And yet she couldn’t really hear music before she played it, just as she couldn’t experience morning in the midst of the night or smell a rose in her imagination. What had she been hearing during the night? What had happened? Uncertainty was like an itch she couldn’t satisfy by scratching—this was a good comparison and it deserved to be shared with her mother, along with other things, including how, though she knew a little about a little, every passing minute seemed to erase a piece of memory.

Giulia Nardi sat across the room, chain-stitching a scroll on a linen napkin. Luisa was snoring downstairs in the kitchen, having fallen asleep in her chair. Mario had gone to La Lampara with Paolo to find out what Lorenzo knew about the situation. And Adriana was at the piano, trying to re-create the sounds of last night’s dream.

Quiet, lazy pausa. The air felt both buoyant and restrictive, the world muffled by inertia. Today was . . . what was today? The eighteenth day of June in the year 1944. Just another afternoon in a villa surrounded by olive groves and vineyards, midway between Magazzini and San Giovanni. Just another war in the history of an island.

A, E; C, G. That Adriana had noticed the fuzz on her legs darkening in the same week in September that the war had come to the island seemed more of an insult than a coincidence. Her body’s changes would have been hard enough to accept—but coinciding with the German occupation, they became unbearable. Everything that was happening was happening without the consent of those most deeply affected. Everywhere was occupied territory. Was resistance absurd? Was she really supposed to accept the fact that everything familiar would gradually be modified? Or worse, she could paint her nails and lips and smile at soldiers of any nationality. She could use the war to her advantage and do what she’d heard adults talking about when they thought she wasn’t listening.

But these were ridiculous thoughts. Infantile, girlish thoughts. War was one thing, and growing up something else entirely. That the fighting on the island would continue for days or weeks or months had nothing to do with the fact that she would grow up. And if she couldn’t meet the challenges of life with courage, she might as well take back the porcelain doll she’d given away to Paolo’s little sister. Of course she wouldn’t do that. She was through with dolls, and someday she’d be through with cartwheels, handsprings, and her amazing dives off the rocks at Viticcio. She would grow up willingly and would be as beautiful and superior as her mother—a woman who knew how to stay in control of her life.

Other mothers were shrill in their worry, with voices that rang morning to night with admonishments. Not Giulia Nardi, with her dignified demeanor that was just short of severe. Other mothers were subordinate to their husbands and had little interest in the world outside their homes. Not Giulia Nardi, who had traveled widely, spoke French and English fluently, and never bothered to marry. Giulia Nardi was the woman Adriana expected to become—unmarried but never alone, clever with numbers, regal, stoic even during wartime, setting the example for others.

But it was true that she hadn’t remained entirely stoic during this current invasion. The clatter of bicycle wheels on the drive made her gasp. Her daughter’s absence made her frenetic. Do not go outside without your mamma’s permission, Adriana!

As the afternoon wore on, there was nothing to do but roam the shuttered rooms of the villa and stay out of Luisa’s way as she swept the stone floors or rubbed copper pots with wood ash and lemon juice. There wasn’t even the interesting sound of gunfire in the distance to remind her that she was living in history. Occasionally she could hear the buzz of a plane passing overhead, but it seemed to be a leisurely sound, like the sound of a bee drifting from flower to flower.

Her mother encouraged her to read a book. But there was no book that could hold her attention. Then she might draw a picture. She didn’t want to draw. Then she should practice the bagatelle she’d been learning, fill La Chiatta with music, and ignore what she couldn’t affect.

The hours passed slowly. Finally, Mario and Paolo returned with Lorenzo Ambrogi, who sank into the chair across from Giulia and announced that the Germans had retreated from the central regions of the island into the forest on Monte Capanne. This was good, they all agreed, except Mario, who was not convinced that an Allied victory would be preferable. “Senz’altro”—without a doubt, Giulia insisted. Without a doubt it would be preferable. “Senz’altro,” Mario echoed coldly. What did Giulia mean by preferable? he wanted to know. Was what the African soldiers had done to the daughter of Sergio Canuti preferable? And what about the Signori Volbiani, who were caught hiding in their barn in the hills outside of Procchio? This was news Lorenzo had already shared with Mario and now was obliged to repeat for Giulia and Luisa. The Signori Volbiani of Procchio had been killed, slaughtered like animals, like goats, their throats slit when they were found hiding in their barn. Sofia Canuti had been killed. Corpses of soldiers were scattered in the woods. And Belbo the pig was dead—shot in the snout.

If it was already this bad, then it should be worse, Adriana wanted to say, though she knew that the adults would consider her foolish, so she kept her mouth shut. But she went on thinking it. If people were killed brutally for no reason, then the killing should happen elsewhere. If there was no place left on an island that would serve as a refuge, then there should be no refuge left on earth.

Foolish child. War made all children foolish. And at the same time that it left people dead, it made dogs bark. Lorenzo’s dog, Pippa, having followed her master through the fields, was barking in the courtyard. Luisa told Paolo to go see why Pippa was barking. Adriana asked to go with him. “No, assolutamente no!” Luisa said over her shoulder as she left the room. The other adults continued arguing. When Adriana followed Paolo to the ground floor and out into the courtyard, no one noticed, not even Paolo, who quieted the dog and then went back inside to hear more of the important talk.

What was so important about talk? Talk, talk, talk. Adults talking during a war were like dogs barking. Sss, Pippa, silenzio, and come with Adriana! “Vieni, sss.” There was something Adriana wanted to check, and she would feel safer with Pippa along. Quick, veloce! Back along the grass corridor between the two halves of the vineyard, hurry, hurry, to the wall extending from the gate along the edge of the field, to the stretch of stone netted in ivy, through the briars, to the patch of weeds flattened by a falling nothing.

Veramente, nothing had fallen over the wall. Nothing had scrambled through the briars and run away. Nothing could interrupt the serenity in this far corner of La Chiatta’s vineyards. There were no footprints or bits of torn clothing to be seen, nothing more than a few twigs broken either by some animal or by the most recent rain. All Adriana had seen earlier that day was a dark nothing spot of sunblind.

Having confirmed what she’d believed, Adriana knew she should hurry back inside and station herself at the piano bench before anyone noticed that she’d left. She couldn’t afford to cause more trouble. But she was distracted by the interesting show put on by the natural world. She watched a pair of kestrels plunge one after the other into the grass, probably in pursuit of a snake. The swallows overhead curled in a design as intricate as the scroll in her mother’s linen. Above the swallows, a single gull glided in a wide arc. Unseen beyond the wall, the sea splashed against the rocks. What else wasn’t she seeing, she wondered? She looked around, trying to take in everything. Pippa sat smiling, panting, her tongue lolling. She gave a little whine of impatience. Yes, Pippa, it was time to go. But a quick motion in the grass caught Adriana’s eye—a nice, plump cricket had hopped onto a broken twig. She cupped her hand in anticipation, since it wasn’t possible to see a cricket without trying to catch it. She even had a cage waiting for it in her room—a house of wire and painted wood made by Ulisse, La Chiatta’s gardener. He had given the cage to Adriana when she was six and had shown her how to sneak up on a cricket and catch it in her hands. He had instructed her on how to feed it lettuce leaves. If before the end of three days it sang for her, he said, the Nardi family would have good luck. If it didn’t sing, life at La Chiatta would go on as before. Either way, the cricket must be given its liberty at the end of three days. But if the cricket died in captivity, Adriana would have to find a witch to undo the curse.

None of her crickets had ever died, though not all of them had sung for her. But this one looked as if it could be coaxed to sing. La Chiatta needed good luck right then. The insect seemed to know that it was under inspection and might even have been enjoying a moment of vanity as Adriana drew closer to it and prepared to catch it. She was quick, but the cricket was quicker—with a triple set of hops it was off the twig, out of reach, and hidden in the grass.

This was a disappointment—good, cleansing disappointment, like a bucketful of cold water thrown over a floor and then swept away with a broom! It felt fine to be disappointed by a cricket and to forget, momentarily, about Sofia Canuti and the Signori Volbiani and the corpses of soldiers in the woods. If a cricket’s escape was the worst that could happen, then war was really just a confusing idea to be debated by adults over cigarettes and coffee. There was only the here and now and the feeling of being in the world. And as though to reaffirm the value of immediate experience, the cricket, hidden in the grass, gave a long, pleasant chirp.

Sunshine. Cricket songs. The faded petals of a primrose. The unreal reality of war. Adriana would have liked to wander the little labyrinth of box hedges in the garden right then. Or she would have liked to slip through the gate and wade in the shallow water along the beach. But there was a war going on, and she was supposed to be sitting quietly with the grown-ups. Vieni, Pippa! Pippa was a good dog—usually. She had wandered off to sniff around the gate and the boathouse, and when Adriana called to her, she gave a yelp and ran in the opposite direction. Pippa! The dog ran up the aisle between the rows of vines, not in pursuit, as Adriana would have expected, but rather in flight, chased by a small calico cat whose loping gait made it seem as though the pursuit was just a game to her.

Cricket songs and yelping dogs and predatory cats. Yes, this was the patch of the world that Adriana was pleased to call home. But this bright thought provoked its grim opposite. What if the fires spread or the bombardment resumed during the night? What if La Chiatta was destroyed? The possibility aroused a childish anger. Who turned the idea of war into reality? Who invited the soldiers to the island anyway? First the Fascists, then the Germans, then the Africans. The war had been going on longer than forever, with one army arriving on the island with its bombs and guns, forcing the occupying army to retreat. As they passed across the land they left behind corpses and ruins. They burned the olive groves and let their fat horses graze in the wheat. In memory she heard Luisa’s exclamation: Madonna! And her mother’s voice: Adriana! She really should go back inside. Luisa would be serving supper, and the adults would be deciding what was safest for Adriana: her bedroom or the kitchen cabinet.

She watched the cat turn proudly back toward the boathouse, its tail standing high in victory. Adriana approached it, chucking softly, stretching out her fingers, but the animal growled, and its fur rose in a spiny ridge. In response to the growl came a soft mew from behind an old dinghy propped against the boathouse—the mew of a kitten, a puffball that Adriana caught and held in her cupped hands, a prize even better than a cricket! As small as a peach and the color of sponge cake soaked in wine, it was the best treasure Adriana had found in weeks, worth the risk of hiding in her bedroom, she thought for a moment, but decided against this when the mother cat began pushing against her ankle, bumping her head and haunches. Certo, Mamma Gatta, the little one belongs to you. And if there was one kitten, there must have been others. After a brief look around the outside of the boathouse, Adriana pushed the door, already open a crack, and, with the kitten still in her hands and the mother following at her heels, she stepped inside.

Somewhere amid the buoys and rakes and ropes, the oars and the tiers of terra-cotta pots was a cat’s den full of kittens. She listened for their mewing. She looked for a flash of tawny fur. A slice of fading sunlight fell across the center of the boathouse, but the rest was hidden in deep shadow. Everything was in place, and yet as she stood poised on the threshold, she sensed the solitude give way to a strange feeling that she recognized from her dreams. It was the feeling of standing on stage in a dark theater she’d thought was empty and slowly realizing that the audience was in the seats, waiting for her to speak her next line. It was the feeling of running down an alley and hearing footsteps behind her. It was the feeling of being watched.

No sound. No movement. Who’s there? No one. Nothing. Spot of sunblind. Blackness surrounded by light. Adriana, come along now—any minute your mother will notice that you’ve gone missing again. Chi c’è? Tiny thorns of kitten claws on her wrist. The mother cat was stationed behind her, waiting. Waiting for what? Cat’s pupils expanding to absorb the light within the darkness. What if Adriana died now, right here, on the threshold of the boathouse, age ten? Paura: the only suitable expression for this feeling of being afraid, the breathy stumble of the letters mimicking its meaning. La paura. Ha paura. The dream of seeing footprints in white powder on the floor. There were no footprints in the boathouse. The dream of finding herself alone and not alone at the same time. What did she really know for sure about anything? Help: aiuta—another good word. But to speak it aloud would be to invite danger into the open. The dream always ends before you die—until the last dream, which would be just like this: standing on a threshold, unable to go forward or back, locked in place by the eyes of someone hidden in the darkness.

And then she would wake up. The kitten would fall from her hands with a squeak and bounce against her ankle and land unhurt on the floor and scramble ahead of its furious mother beneath a tarp thrown over barrels. A kitten. A cat. A boathouse. A dream, no, a sudden recollection of watching sixteen oxen pull a wagon loaded with a block of marble across a piazza in the mainland village of Avenza. Why did she remember Avenza now? Would this be her last memory?

No, not if she could help it. She would give herself the chance to remember running up the grassy aisle between the vines toward the courtyard and La Chiatta—a foolish girl running from nothing, which was even more absurd than a big dog running from a little cat. A ten-year-old girl—almost eleven—who understood the war either as an abstract idea that made adults angry or as a monstrous something hiding in the boathouse. True, she hadn’t seen it, she hadn’t heard it, but she knew it was there in the darkness because she’d smelled it—a smell she recognized only in afterthought as the sweat of oxen.

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