improved and Annabelle re-mounted her bike to cross the piazza. At least with no cars it was easy to cross the great expanse in front of the station, though it was wise to be careful of Nazi trucks and fascist militia vehicles because these days they owned the road and never looked out for cyclists or pedestrians.
Thinking of that, she narrowly avoided running into the rear of a cart with a horse between the shafts. Laughing at herself for the near miss, Annabelle’s good humour was restored. It was not as if she could be spending Saturday in the country or at the seaside. The sky was clear. It was steamy, not unbearably hot, though to the north, heavy clouds were gathering. Was that a roll of thunder? A storm would clear the air. She pedalled faster, as she had not brought a raincoat.
The low grumble of the B17s was audible long seconds before the bombs fell. The planes came out of the north and out of the clouds and filled the whole world with their rage. The air rippled and trembled and the ground vibrated. Annabelle’s bicycle reared beneath her and threw her to the ground. The hot stones of the pavement scorched her hands and knees. In the seconds it took her to scramble to her feet, the scream of the bombs warned her the storm was upon them. Annabelle had never seen bombers before. She abandoned her bike and turned to run back towards the centre and then the bombs hit. There must have been thousands of bombs because they went on falling and falling and falling. Would they never stop? A curtain of noise and dust came down on the scene between Annabelle and the station. She could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing.
She was lifted off the pavement and thrown sideways against the walls of the cloisters of SM Novella. For long moments she lay immobile, blinded by the dust and unable to hear because … why could she not hear? She was deaf! Don’t panic, don’t panic, she said loudly. She could feel now, and what she felt was terror; her heartbeat was louder than the crashing stone walls about her and she did not seem to be able to get enough air. She shook her head from side to side and beat her ears with her hands. But no, she was not deaf. The streets were filled with sound and she could suddenly hear it all – screaming of bombs and screaming of people and running feet and moaning. By now her lungs were working again. She could see too. The horse lay still, between the shafts of its overturned cart. Was it dead? The driver was nowhere to be seen.
The predator planes droned off to the north, leaving the dead in their wake. Annabelle pushed herself straight and sat against the wall. Her chest was heaving and she could hear a sobbing that must be hers. Carefully, she prodded her arms and legs. Nothing broken. There was a large egg on the side of her head where she had hit the wall, but when she got to her feet she was not dizzy and she could walk. By now, the police and ambulances added to the noise. It was still impossible to tell what had happened as the dust was too thick, but it looked as if the bombs had fallen to the rear of the station. People ran back and forth with little idea of what to do, and an elderly man sat weeping in the gutter before her, his face a mask of dust, etched with wet runnels of tears. She touched him on the shoulder but he stared right through her. He was not wounded.
I wonder where my bicycle is, she thought, then, I must get home. Mamma, Mamma, she thought, or did she call it? Stumbling, she caught her foot in the hem of her skirt, which was torn and hanging to the ground. She bent and ripped at the material, tucked the hanging bits into her belt and kept walking. Keep walking. Keep walking. All about her was hell – a swirling storm with people at the centre. The air was sulphurous. She tasted blood in her mouth.
Not thousands of bombs, said Enrico, the next day. But certainly dozens, perhaps hundreds. There were thirty-odd aeroplanes. They were American, he said. B17s sent to bomb Bologna, but the cloud cover was too heavy so they decided to unload their bombs on the shunting yards of the railway station in Florence, but their aim was poor and they only hit some of the target and lots of the population. More than two hundred people dead, hundreds more injured. Until then, apart from an air raid a couple of weeks ago, Florence had largely been spared the destruction of the rest of Italy. People said it was because the Allies respected Florence as the centre of art.
‘Balls!’ said Enrico. ‘You watch. Once the Allies begin to move up, the bombs will fall like rain.’
It was three weeks since they landed at Salerno. The Americans will be here in no time, Anna Maria said often, unsure whether that was a good thing or bad. Annabelle was not confident. The grip of the Nazifascisti tightened every day. The streets were plastered with posters, proclamations, orders and deportations. The Germans, they’re not all bad, you know, said the local greengrocer. Yes, they are, Annabelle thought. She had no inclination to see Germans as people.
After breakfast, she set off to retrieve her bicycle. The walk along via Panzani to the station was familiar and normal but her heart rate escalated with every step closer to the piazza. Her hands were sweaty. She came to a halt at the back of SM Novella and had to steady herself against the same wall she had been thrown against yesterday. Her breathing was ragged – she did not know what she had expected but the sight of the horse’s body, covered in dust and flies, gave her an electric shock. She edged around the corpse, trying not to see the flies crawling in the horse’s nostrils and open eyes, to where she had fallen from her bike. It was gone. Someone would be glad of it. There was no damage apart from loose stones, the horse and the overturned cart. The horse must have died of shock. The bomb damage was all to the rear and the side of the station.
She turned down the road to the west of the station and tumbled into another world. Mounds of rubble filled the street where people scrabbled and scavenged among the bricks and stone and plaster, for small treasures from the life they lived before yesterday. The air was already thick with the smell of death and escaping gas. In the middle of a street reduced to a slag-heap, a single wall of three stories stood alone, doors and windows open, on the second floor, an iron balcony with a chair, the cupola of the Duomo framed in the vacant windows. Houses were open to the street, their secrets exposed, entire walls missing, many with rooms still decorated as if their residents had just stepped outside. It was embarrassingly intimate, like an old woman in her underwear, without her teeth. There were no stairs: curtains fluttered limply at windows onto nowhere and sofas hung at oblique angles to the road. It reminded Annabelle of the open-fronted dolls’ house she treasured as a child, now stored in the attic, but there were no figures in the rooms here – no-one sat to read beneath the ruched silk lampshade. No-one dreamed beneath the embroidered covers of the beds. No-one ate from the bowls still sitting on tables. On the walls, portraits of Il Duce hung askew. From time to time, the portraits, or pictures of mountain scenes, or photographs of grandchildren or calendars for the twenty-first year of the Fascist Calendar or crazed mirrors released their hold on the cracked plaster and fell, crashing into the debris with explosions of dust. A child’s rag doll spiralled from the tilted edge of a bedroom to the bricks below and lay still.
To her left, a team from the Misericordia worked with shovels and picks while behind them, an elderly woman stood rigid, her face impassive and her eyes fixed on some distant point, as another, younger version of her sobbed and beat her fists against her temples. Poverina, said a man to Annabelle, her baby is under the rubble. Annabelle wanted to turn and flee but her legs would not move. Farther down the street, a whole palazzo lay on its side. The bodies of the dead and the wounded had been removed, but only those on the surface. Beneath the debris lay others, frantically sought by teams of family and friends and city workers. They worked silently, so as to hear any call from under the wreckage. But no call came. Finally she turned and wobbled away.
Annabelle’s centre of gravity tilted sideways with the bombing. She developed a tic at the side of her mouth that twitched constantly. It was as if some part of her were damaged, though there were no external wounds. She would never feel safe again – there had been no air-raid warning, there were not enough shelters, not enough rescue-workers. There was not enough food and even less faith. She had stopped asking Enrico
