From Sand and Ash Read online

  “I don’t care. It’s their loss,” Eva said defiantly. Her chin was high and her eyes were bright. She obviously did care. But Felix cared even more. The news was yet another, very personal blow to the teacher who had spent years molding her into a classical violinist.

  Felix wasn’t adjusting well to any of the laws. He’d been in Italy for thirteen years and had become a citizen after five. But his citizenship was revoked with the new laws. Camillo had managed to get him an exemption. Angelo didn’t know how, but he knew it usually had to do with money and bribes, which Camillo had gladly paid. For the time being, Felix was safe, though his father was not. His father’s precarious fate in Austria and the continual insult of the Italian Racial Laws had made the handsome forty-five-year-old Austrian look sixty. His blue eyes were heavily shadowed and his light-brown hair had turned almost completely gray. He was gaunt and quiet and spent far too much time in his room.

  “I was the best they had, by far,” Eva said again, her eyes on her uncle Felix. “I don’t need an orchestra to be a violinist.”

  “You are already a violinist. No one can take that from you,” Felix said stiffly. But his posture belied his words.

  Eva watched her uncle retreat with helpless anguish written all over her face, and Angelo had to bite his inner cheek to keep himself from cursing out loud, condemning the outrageous laws and the constant strain on the family he loved.

  “Let’s go, Eva,” he said suddenly. “Let’s walk. You need air, and I need gelato.” He didn’t need gelato. He needed to kick someone, to throw rocks through windows, something. He thought about the shop he’d seen along the main piazza the previous week.

  It was an apothecary shop, one he’d frequented before. They sold a salve that soothed the ache and protected the stump of his right leg from being over-chafed when he wore his clumsy prosthetic. It was painted a cheery, welcoming yellow. But it didn’t welcome everyone. A sign in the window said, “No Jews Allowed.” And next door another shop upped the ante. “No Jews and Dogs Allowed.” As if the two were synonymous. Angelo had swallowed back the bile rising in his throat and opened the door. A tinkling of bells alerted the shopkeeper of his entrance.

  “Buongiorno, Signore,” a woman had called out from behind a row of shelves.

  Angelo hadn’t answered, but retrieved the salve he liked from its usual spot and set it on the counter, waiting for the woman to ring him up. She had eyed him warily, his failure to reply to her friendly “good morning” apparently noted.

  “How can you tell?” he had asked, unable to help himself.

  “Scusami?”

  “How can you tell whether or not someone is a Jew? Your sign says no Jews allowed.”

  The shopkeeper blushed and her gaze slid sideways. “I can’t. And I don’t care. I also don’t ask.”

  “Then why the sign?”

  “There is a certain amount of pressure, you know. The Fascisti leave us alone if the sign is on the door. I’m just trying to protect my shop.”

  “I see. And the shop down the street? Do the Fascisti have something against dogs too?”

  She snickered, as if he were making a joke, but her smile faltered as he glowered down at her.

  “I have shopped here for years. But I won’t be back unless that sign is taken down,” he said softly.

  “But you are not a Jew, Signore,” she protested. His black seminarian robes and broad hat made that clear.

  “No. And I am not a dog. Nor am I a fascist pig.” He’d left the salve on the counter and turned to leave the shop.

  “It is not that simple, Signore,” she had called after him, and he’d glanced back at her crimson face. He had embarrassed her. Good.

  “It is exactly that simple, Signora,” he said. And it was. With all his heart, he believed it was. Black and white. Right and wrong.

  “I need to be back before sundown. It is Shabbat,” Eva said quietly, pulling Angelo back to the present, but she grabbed her hat and gloves with an eagerness that betrayed her own need to escape for a while.

  They meandered purposefully, stopping to purchase their favorite gelato in huge portions, determined to forget the world around them for a moment, needing to laugh, needing to forget, needing to pretend that their lives were sweet and simple, if only for an hour or two.

  But they would have had to walk with their eyes closed. The world was not sweet or simple anymore. The proof of it was all around them, and neither of them was blind.

  “We don’t look like that, do we?” Eva said around a spoonful of ice cream, staring down at the weekly paper someone had left behind near the park bench where they sat to eat their treat. She slid her foot over the pages to keep it from flapping in the breeze. A cartoon labeled “Race Defilers,” depicting a Jewish man with exaggerated features carrying an unconscious Aryan female into his private office, was front and center. Eva picked it up and studied the cartoon thoughtfully. Then she looked up at Angelo and squinted her eyes.

  “That looks more like your nose than mine!” She was trying to laugh it off, her voice light and purposely unaffected.

  “I have a Roman nose.” Angelo tried to laugh too, but his stomach churned. He’d seen too much of that kind of mockery and “humor” in the Italian press. It had been an ongoing campaign, worsening with the “scientific” manifestos on race, and the blame for all the country’s problems that was constantly focused on the Italian Jews who made up less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

  Angelo read all the national newspapers, a habit he’d cultivated when he felt homesick for America. If he was to be an Italian, he had to understand Italy. And he’d tried. But even as a twelve-year-old boy, painstakingly reading the politically charged La Stampa, he wondered if the papers represented Italy or just the government.

  “He looks a little like Mussolini,” Angelo said, wishing he could make Eva laugh like she used to.

  “Yes. Mussolini . . . and Signore Balbo, who conducts the orchestra,” Eva added drily, and Angelo crumpled the piece of newsprint in his hand. He thought about the picture he’d seen in a newspaper of an Austrian woman sitting on a bench that said, “Nur Für Arier”—For Aryans Only—and he wondered how long it would be before Eva was not allowed to even sit on a bench in her own country.

  “You never used to observe Shabbat,” Angelo said, not because he cared, but because he needed to change the subject.

  “Yes. I know . . . funny, isn’t it? I never really thought about being Jewish until I started to be persecuted for it. Babbo’s always celebrated learning above everything else, but we decided that we’d better see what all the fuss is about. We’re becoming devout.” She winked at Angelo and shrugged.

  She had grown up in the last year. She still kept a few men on a string, but the string was getting longer, the dates fewer and further between. When she wasn’t teaching violin lessons to Jewish children for little or no money, she was at home, practicing. Her life had narrowed dramatically to her music, her family, and a few Jewish friends who were as watchful and reticent as the Rossellis had become.

  “And what have you learned?” he asked, sounding like Father Sebastian. He smirked to soften the effect.

  “A great deal. But I haven’t learned the most important thing.”

  “No? And what would that be?” he asked.

  “Why do people hate us so much?”

  “They’ve taken my father,” Felix cried. “He’s been arrested.”

  “How do you know?” Camillo asked, his face pale, his hands extended toward Felix.

  Felix held up the letter. His hand was trembling like he was stricken with a disease, the paper flapping like he was shaking the terrible truth from it.

  “The maid. It is illegal for her to work for a Jew, but the German commander living in my father’s apartment needed a housekeeper, so he hired her to cook and clean for him. She cared about my father, and I think she’s watched out for him as best she could. She said she would have called me, but she was nervous about spea
king freely. There are always listening ears on the phone lines. But she thought I should know. When she arrived at the apartment on the fourteenth—two weeks ago!—my father was gone. When she asked the Kommandant where he was, he told her ‘it was his turn.’”

  “Where have they taken him?” Camillo pressed.

  “She doesn’t know for certain. She writes that the whole building was cleared. There are no Jews left. The officer told her soon there would be no more Jews in Vienna.”

  “I read that some of them are just being relocated to Jewish ghettos.” Camillo started pacing, trying to remain positive, his thoughts scrambling for solutions.

  “The maid thinks he will be sent to a work camp. Her brother works at the train station, and he told her that every day the trains leave early, before the sun rises, so the people of Vienna won’t see them leave. He says they are loaded with Jews. He says the trains have been going to a place called Mauthausen, near Linz.”

  “But Linz is not too far from Vienna. This is good!”

  “This is not good, Camillo! None of this is good. He will die.” The certainty in Felix Adler’s voice made Eva wince and Camillo collapse onto a chair. He looked completely defeated.

  “They wouldn’t let him bring his violin. The German officer was looking at it when the maid arrived for work. He told her he’s going to send it to his son in Berlin. He’s going to send my father’s violin to his son,” Felix repeated, suddenly enraged, and he swept his arm across the table, upending the lamp and the radio they weren’t supposed to own.

  “What are you playing, Eva?” Felix Adler sighed from the window overlooking the garden. “I don’t recognize that. It sounds a little like Chopin, but it’s not.”

  “It’s Chopin mixed with Rosselli, sprinkled with Adler, and doused with anger,” Eva murmured, her eyes closed, her chin gripping her violin.

  She expected him to scold her, to tell her to “play what is written!” But he was silent. She continued playing, but she opened her eyes, watching him as she let her bow flit over the strings like a bee flirting with a flower. His hands were clasped behind his back, his feet together. It was the way he stood when he was deep in thought or when he was listening.

  She and Uncle Felix had had a love/hate relationship since he’d arrived in Italy in 1926, two years after her mother’s death. She had been only six years old and was not prepared for the maestro that was Felix Adler. He had come to Italy with the express purpose of molding her into an Adler violinist, and he had come to Italy out of love for his sister, which he reminded Eva of frequently. It was her dying wish. He’d acquired other students, and he’d played with the Orchestra della Toscana, but his focus had been Eva.

  Eva had challenged him at every turn. She was willful and distracted, easily bored, and known to disappear when it was time for lessons. But she had a gift. She had a remarkable ear, and what she lacked in discipline, she made up for in musicality. She loved the violin, she loved to play, and Felix had eventually learned to forgive her for the rest, though it was forgiveness bestowed grudgingly.

  It had taken him a while to realize that she wasn’t really reading the music he put in front of her. She was listening and copying. If she didn’t understand something, she would ask Felix to show her. After a few demonstrations she could play bar after bar from memory.

  Teaching her to read music had been torture for both of them. She’d hated it, he’d hated it, and they’d hated each other half the time. He made her do everything she despised and rarely let her do what she loved. Long notes and scales and sight-reading, day after day.

  “I don’t want to practice long notes! I want to play Chopin.” Eva would stomp her foot.

  “You can’t play Chopin.”

  “I can too! Listen.” Eva immediately launched into a Chopin nocturne, complete with every variation he’d purposely played, just to test her.

  “You can’t. You are parroting. You are not reading. You are listening to me and playing without looking at your music and seeing the music as you create it.”

  “I see the music in my head. And it doesn’t look like little black dots and lines! It looks like rainbows and flying and the Alps and the Apennines. Why can’t I just listen and play?” she had whined.

  “Because I won’t always be here to demonstrate! You have to be able to read the notes and turn the notes into music, both in your head and on your instrument. You are composing, but the greatest composers can see the notes when they hear music. They don’t see the Apennines! And you will never be able to record your compositions if you don’t understand how to read and write music.”

  She had learned, eventually. But she still relied far too heavily on her ability to mimic, to embellish, to adapt.

  The word adapt made her think of her grandfather, who hadn’t been able to adapt after all.

  “Uncle Felix?” Eva lowered her violin and bow, interrupting her reverie and her freestyle composition to stare at her uncle’s rigid back.

  “Please keep playing, Eva,” he said quietly.

  “What would you like me to play, Uncle?”

  “Play whatever you wish. Something else mixed with Rosselli and sprinkled with Adler,” he said, and his shoulders began to shake. She’d never seen her uncle cry, and in the last months, he’d cried twice. She didn’t know what to do to comfort him. So she played. She played Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major because it was hauntingly beautiful, but she drifted off into her own arrangement and ended up playing something that didn’t sound like anything she’d ever played before. When Eva finally lowered her violin, Felix had sunk into a chair and dried his eyes on a handkerchief he still held wadded up in his hand. He met her gaze, and his eyes were so sad her heart ached in her chest. But he smiled at her with tenderness and began to speak.

  His voice was tired, his words measured. “In my life I’ve only been good at one thing. The violin. Not as good as my father. Maybe I could have been. But I drank too much and lost my temper too often. I came to Italy because I failed in Vienna. I came to Italy because I was in love with a woman who wasn’t in love with me. And for the last thirteen years, I’ve taken it out on you. If you hadn’t been so strong, I might have broken you. I might have made you hate me. But you fought back. You shrugged me off. And now I listen to you and I am in awe.”

  “You are?” Eva asked in amazement. These were things she had never heard before.

  “When you play, Eva, I feel hopeful. They can take our homes, our possessions. Our families. Our lives. They can drive us out, like they’ve driven us out before. They can humiliate us and dehumanize us. But they cannot take our thoughts. They cannot take our talents. They cannot take our knowledge, or our memories, or our minds. In music, there is no bondage. Music is a door, and the soul escapes through the melody. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. And everyone who listens is freed. Everyone who listens is elevated.

  “When you play, I hear my life lifting off your strings. I hear the long notes and the scales, the tears and the hours. I hear you and me, together in this room. I hear my father and the things he taught me that I passed on to you. I hear it all, and my life plays on, his life plays on, over and over, when you play.”

  Eva set her instrument down and, with tears streaming down her face, knelt in front of her uncle and slid her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his thin chest. He embraced her gently, and they stayed in sorrowful silence, listening to the wind as it wailed a mournful strain not so different from the one Eva had composed, wondering if the wind would be the only witness, the only whisper, when the death in Austria came for them too.

  10 August, 1939

  Confession: I am nineteen years old, and I’ve been kissed many times. But I’ve never been kissed like that.

  It felt like drowning but not needing to breathe. Like falling but never hitting the ground. Even now, my hands are shaking, and my heart is so swollen and fat it feels like it’s going to burst, or I’m going to burst. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to bury
my head in my pillow and scream until I fall asleep, because maybe when I go to sleep I can relive it.

  I can’t believe it happened, yet I think I’ve been waiting for it to happen for the last seven years, ever since I conned Angelo into kissing me the first time. I’ve been waiting for him for so long, and for a couple of hours tonight, in a little world that was only big enough for the two of us, he was mine.

  But I don’t know if I will be able to keep him. I’m afraid when tomorrow comes, I’ll be waiting for him again.

  Eva Rosselli

  CHAPTER 4

  GROSSETO

  Angelo had been surprised when Camillo announced he was still taking the family to the beach house, considering the new set of Racial Laws that had been passed earlier that summer. But Camillo had made the reservation before the law was passed, and he stubbornly maintained that he had been renting that particular lodge from the same family for twenty years, and he would keep on renting it for twenty more. So that August, only months before the war broke out, they all boarded the train for Grosseto, confident in Camillo’s ability to make everything all right.

  The first few days of Angelo’s planned five-day retreat were spent sleeping, eating, playing checkers, and debating everything and nothing, simply because Camillo and Augusto enjoyed discussion, and Angelo enjoyed listening to them argue. In the last few months they argued less, as Fascism had revealed itself and Augusto had been proven wrong. But they still found points of disagreement and seemed relieved that they had.

  Eva walked a lot, her feet flirting with the surf, dancing in and out of the waves until she was wet and cold. Then she would lie on her big white towel and fall asleep in the sun until she was almost dry. Then she would repeat the process. Her porcelain skin had grown rosy and brown, making her look decidedly more Italian than Austrian. Her hair and eyes were dark, but her skin was unquestionably less olive than Angelo’s was. His skin turned smoky after an hour in the sun, and within a few days, he looked like he’d spent his life casting nets with the fishermen of Grosseto.