He rose and followed the others, dashing across the road. His feet splattered the mud, telling him he was not yet invisible, which meant problems, too. Invisibility meant life but problems. Visibility meant being seen and shot. There was no way he could win. Bishop trotted over, and he and Train huddled together in the bushes and peered at the church, which lay beyond Stamps and Hector, who squatted behind boulders on either side of the road ahead of them.
The church lay in the middle of a tiny piazza. From their vantage point, the men couldn't see any object stirring about it. Debris was piled up in front of the church, the pews had been burned, obviously there had been some sort of firefight. The four men were approaching slowly, in a crouch, spread out by ten feet or so, on either side of the road, when Sam Train spotted St. Anna.
Her likeness was set just above the church doorway, which overlooked the tiny piazza, her face jutting out about three feet. The eaves shielded her from the weather. She was just a bust, not an entire statue. Train stared at her, mesmerized. He had never seen a white person so expressive in all his life. He glanced at the head of the
Primavera
statue in its webbing at his side, then back to St. Anna. They looked so different, yet both were so beautiful. They stirred something inside him, the two of them, easing him into solace, opening the pad-locked door of his heart. Train suddenly felt happy, and warm, the two of them together bewitching him with sudden comfort. This second statue was a sign. It had to be.
Without thinking, Train stood up, unaware that he was exposing himself to enemy fire, and slowly staggered forward in the rain as if in a trance, holding the shivering, pale boy in one arm. As Train walked forward, an odd and sudden chill hit him and the smell of fresh death crashed against his nostrils so hard he could barely stand. He suddenly felt like weeping. He tried to turn around and run but could not. His rifle slipped off his shoulders to his waist, and the statue head at his side bobbed and suddenly felt heavy. He covered his face with one hand, still holding the boy, and staggered through the muddy piazza toward the bust of St. Anna. He walked with a weaving motion, as if drunk. He ignored Hector, Bishop, and Stamps, yelling at him to come back. He couldn't stop himself.
Train stood before the bust in the pouring rain, hypnotized, staring up, then felt himself rise, floating, until he was face-to-face with St. Anna. He gazed at her quizzically. Her expression was a mixture of sadness, knowledge, wisdom, and joy all at once. Her sedate marble eyes gazed back at him, and it was as if she could see through him. Suddenly, he felt invisibility again. All of the millions of pieces of knowledge and the truths he'd known, and some he could never know, flowed behind his eyeballs: the secrets of plants, why rivers flow north to south, the arithmetic of dams, why dinosaurs walked the earth. He saw cities under water, seas that parted, where wizards live. He understood why steel ships float, the magic of pyramids, the shaping of the mountains, each and every one of God's miracles. And as each revelation flowed by, it paused for a moment, allowing him to examine it mentally in the tiniest of detail. Train shuddered and gazed at St. Anna again in awe, and as he did, the saint's head tilted slowly to one side. He watched in disbelief as a large tear formed in one of her eyes and slowly made its way down her face. He reached out to wipe away the tear and found himself standing on the ground, touching Bishop's face.
To Train's horror, he could not remove his hand. It remained, frozen, stuck to Bishop's face. Bishop, all 210 pounds of him, also seemed frozen to the spot, transfixed, staring at Train with a look of shock and compassion, fear, and even understanding in his eyes. They stood, the two soldiers, in the open piazza at dusk, the rain pouring down in goblets, the giant Negro with the child clutched to his chest gently touching the smaller man's face. Train suddenly recoiled in horror as Bishop, as if under a spell, snapped back to himself and flung Train's hand down. “Get your wrinkly raisin paws off me, you wobbly nigger! Get the fuck off me! What's that smell? Christ!”
Train tried to stammer an apology, but Hector cut him off. “Look over there, man! There's somebody over there!”
All four soldiers dropped to a crouch and followed Hector's pointing finger. Atop a hill on their right, several yards beyond the burned pews in the piazza, a lone figure stood with its back to them, staring out over a ridge, the wind blowing its pants against its legs. The figure appeared to be a man, and from a distance, appeared to be unarmed. The soldiers fanned out and approached him.
There were ten feet off when Hector shouted at the man, “Hey!”
The man turned and they flattened, rifles at the ready, save Train, who ducked behind a tree, clasping the youngster.
The man squinted at them through the dark, driving rain, then turned his back to them and looked out over the ridge again, his hands in his pockets. He began pacing back and forth, talking and gesticulating, his feet splattering the mud as he paced. He appeared to be arguing with someone who was beyond the ridge and beneath him, moving his hands as if trying desperately to prove a point. Whoever he was talking to in the approaching darkness was out of their sight line.
“Let's cut outta here,” Bishop said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“Watch my back,” Hector said.
Train, Bishop, and Stamps watched the surrounding trees and hills as Hector approached the man cautiously. Five feet from him, Hector called out again, “Hey!” The man stopped talking and turned to face Hector, who crouched, ready to fire. The man waved a hand absentmindedly and said something to Hector that was lost in the wind and rain, then turned away and began arguing again with the person beneath him, below the ridge.
Hector addressed the man in Italian. The man ignored him, laughing and pacing as he talked, gesturing openly with his hands as if to say, “You see what I mean?”
Hector slowly crept forward, until he was standing parallel to the man on the ridge, about five feet away. He pointed his rifle at whoever was beneath the ridge, then motioned with his head to the others that it was safe to come forward. They trotted forward and looked down.
There was no one there.
The soldiers turned their attention to the man, who had stopped pacing and was staring at them. Up close, the man looked ragged and spent. His jacket was split and torn. He had only one shoe on. He was filthy and completely drenched. His face was unshaven, with two front teeth missing and several others blackened by cavities. The black teeth together with his rail-thin limbs and the jawbones that jutted from his flattened cheeks gave him the appearance of being a walking skeleton. He glared at them for a long moment, then began pacing again, jabbering in high-speed Italian as he walked back and forth, arguing with the ridge below.
“What's he saying, Hector?” Bishop asked.
Hector's face creased into a puzzled frown. “I don't know. He's a little cracked, I think.”
Stamps said, “Ask him can we sleep in the church.”
Before Hector could speak, the man stopped pacing. His face suddenly contorted into a mask of outrage, and he poured forth a barrage of words at Hector, pointing over the ridge. Hector blinked nervously at the fury of it.
Stamps could make out
“tedesco”â
the Italian word for “German.” That was all.
“Well?” Bishop asked.
Hector shrugged, his face troubled and bewildered. “Something's wrong with him.”
“What's the gist of it?”
“Dunno.”
“I thought you spoke Italian.”
“I do but . . . He said something about divine truth and the miracle of a female chicken.”
The man pointed over the ridge again, and once again the four soldiers looked down at the sloping landscape. The hill ended at a patch of pasture about a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. They could see now, in the last glimmers of dusk's light, that the pasture was not a pasture at all. It was freshly dug earth. Several crosses and flowers lay atop it.
“Let's take the tall timber outta here,” Bishop said. “The Germans done come and gone.”
Train silently agreed.
Hector gave it one last try.
“Tedeschi? Tedeschi?”
he said, pointing at the pasture below.
Suddenly, the church bell behind them began to toll in loud, deafening gongs, and the man, who had turned away from them, wheeled and faced them with such rage in his face that the four of them, armed, backed away, blinking. He opened his mouth and roared, and what with the church bell booming behind him and his screaming fury, his voice had the power of a ship's blasting bullhorn.
They turned and ran, through the stinking church square, past the statue of St. Anna, past the church, past the graveyard, across the curving road, over the precipice, and down the muddy path that led to the town below, the man's voice ringing in their ears like a ghost's battle cry.
8
A SIGN
In a tiny house just beneath the church of St. Anna, in the town of Bornacchiâa town that had sat there for nineteen hundred years before a Negro ever set foot in itâa poor old man named Ludovico Salducchi heard the ringing of the bell at St. Anna's and ignored it. It was just one of the sisters at the convent behind the church giving the all-clear, the signal that there were no Germans around. Ludovico didn't care about any Germans, anyway. He had a bigger problem. He had been cursed by a witch, and tonight he was going to get rid of that curse once and for all. He had made up his mind.
He sat on a tiny wooden chair at a table in his living room with several villagers standing around him. They were watching Ettora the witch, the woman who had cursed him, who was also seated at the table. Across from Ettora was Ludovico's daughter, Renata, dressed in the clothing of a man. She wore trousers and a wool jacket, her long black hair stuffed beneath a man's cap. Renata's husband had been missing from the Italian army for five months, and she'd taken to wearing his clothing as a sign of grief. The priest at Bornacchi said it was sacrilegious for a woman to walk around in a man's clothing, but Renata ignored him. Like everything else here, Ludovico thought bitterly, everything, even the respect of the young has been ruined by the war.
He watched Renata clasp her hands nervously as Ettora set a plate of water on the table. Then, from a small bottle, Ettora carefully poured a large drop of olive oil onto the water. Renata's eyes followed the drop closely as it floated across the surface. Ettora said the oil would tell them if Renata's husband was coming back. If the drop moved one way, he was coming back. If it moved the other, he wasn't.
The room stared in silence as the oil slid to one side of the water. There was a gasp. Then it slid back to the other side. The room gasped again.
“Ludovico, don't tip the table,” Ettora snapped.
Ludovico removed his foot from underneath the table, ignoring his daughter's glare.
Ettora never took her eyes from the shimmering drop on the plate. “Hmm,” she said. She shifted in her chair and squinted. “My eyes are not what they once were,” she said. She was a tiny woman in a frayed red dress with bracelets that rattled like old bones on her arms, and delicate features on a pretty, slender face. Her sharp, cutting eyes were marvelous in their beauty. Ludovico couldn't stand her. He'd known her all his sixty-seven yearsâknown her parents, her grandparents even, and she his.
The fact is, he had loved Ettora at one time. When she was a girl, those daring eyes that were now going blind had seemed to hold a deeper knowledge. She had been a leader among the girls, her beauty having made her the pride of the village, and as a young boy, he had watched her frolic about in bright dresses and lead the other girls past the village walls to gather the purple and white-tipped lilies that abounded in the fields outside Bornacchi. Her beauty had attracted young suitors from other villages, and, like them, Ludovico had been drawn to the secrets behind those dancing, sly eyes, whose quick slanting glances seemed to undress to the world. He had been young and handsome then, restless. His legs had been full of vigor, his chest full and strong, his hair thick and black, his laugh hearty, and his mind full of dreams that he shared with everyone. At sixteen he had wooed her; he'd led her to the woods behind the village's olive oil pressing plant, where they'd lain in the grass by the river, she telling him all her dreams, he touching her and making her stir from the secret places inside herself. But she was too free in her mind for him. She had thoughts and ideas that were unbecoming to a woman. She wanted to learn to read. What did books have to do with them? She wanted to study the forest, different kinds of trees and flowers. For what? She wanted to know why fire produced heat and steam, why cold water froze to become ice, why chestnut trees bore fruit that could be made into flour while orange trees did not. Useless thoughts, he believed. He wanted a woman who would wash his clothes as his mother did, who went to mass every morning, who looked the other way when he exercised his little indiscretions. But Ettora's beauty was so great he held his tongue, for he was afraid he would never find another as beautiful as she. Only after several weeks of lying in the grass by the river behind the olive oil pressing plant, after she let him poke his finger into her sly hole, did he broach the idea with Ettora that women should not think, that they should wash clothing and cook wild boar for their husbands, and not waste time dreaming about books and silly plants.
Ettora had found his opinion distasteful. Everyone should think, she scoffed. There is so much to learn. Her response had made him fearfulâthat and the secrets behind her eyesâand he'd backed away, even though her willingness to allow him to touch her had been a tacit admission of her desire to marry himâand his tacit agreement to askâwhich he never did. They drifted apart, and as the years passed, the group of young maidens who followed Ettora outside Bornacchi to pick the beautiful white-tipped lilies and other plants had gradually been winnowed down to a few, then none, as they were married off to men in the villageâhe marrying one of them, Anna, who, though dry and witless, had been a dutiful wife who had washed his clothes, mended his socks, ignored his indiscretionsâof which, unhappily, there had been fewâand, before she died of fever, had borne him the one true gift he'd ever gotten from this cursed and difficult life, his daughter, Renata, who was now suffering in this obscene war like everyone else and who, like everyone else, had turned to Ettora for advice.