and the leader was strong. It was a wonderful time to be Italian. In fact if there was anything wrong for him it was that he was always slightly distracted by the possibility that his gratitude for being released from the ghetto and left unbothered might not have been adequately expressed to the authorities concerned. But then his optimism would burst through – left unbothered? Ha! No, you are part of it … You are part of it!
He was looking forward to next year, 1929. The Duce had taken to Parliament the proposal to drain the great swamps south of Rome, the Agro Pontino, and Parliament had accepted it. Next year they would start the clearing and levelling. Left unbothered! Far from it – he would be joining in!
The train scooted on. He could smell some late stubble burning, over the metal smell of train. They should be ploughing by now, he thought, looking out over the framed land. We’ll make so much more farmable land. The ditches and canals we’ll dig, the roads we’ll lay, the lovely fields and homesteads and little towns … He knew the stories about the Agro Pontino, of course – the snakes as long as a man, the quicksands, the bandits, the treacherous tangled forest and scrub. Stagnant pools and backwaters, seasonal riverlets with nowhere to drain, ghosts and wicked spirits, streams drying out, nothing but frogs and eels and mosquitoes can live there, malaria, malaria, malaria … And it wasn’t consistent: from one dip to another it would shift and trick you – and it changed with the seasons, and the weather: lush with green weed one week, underwater the next, mud the month after that. Putrid clay-clad pools that never dried out. Islets and strips of land that might look secure, but only a fool or a drowned man would dare to step on them …
This swampy chaos was to be mapped and divided and controlled. To the north-east were the Lepini Mountains. To the south-west lay the Tyrrhenian sea. Between them lay two long parallel sections of disparate marsh, separated by the ghost of the coastline of hundreds of thousands of years ago: a long long dune, more or less parallel with the coast and the mountains between which it reclines, known as the Quaternary Dune. This dune made a barrier just high enough to keep inside it all the water from the mountains and rivers around: it all ended up there with no way over the dune to the sea, trickling about aimlessly on the flat, flooding the whole plain each autumn, leaving all the silt and mud it brought down with it, vaguely making its way forty kilometres south-east to Terracina, solidifying a little as it dried out in the summer, before welcoming a new season’s rain and silt. This was the plain of Piscinara. Outside it, between the dune and the new coast, lay the second sweep of marshes. Nero had dug a canal through the Quaternary Dune to drain Piscinara; it had silted up. Napoleon and Garibaldi and Leonardo and countless Popes and Prussians and speculators and aristocrats had tried and tried to drain these places. And failed.
Aldo was smiling as the train drew in. He’d stared down at the marshes from Sezze and Cisterna. The surveyors were ready, maps and designs on their way.
We’re going to dig a bloody great canal from the top of the plain to the sea, and all the water will drain into it, the mountain streams and the rivers, the Fosso di Cisterna, the Teppia, the Fosso Moscarello … all the rain, all the snowmelt, all the sludge. We’re going to bring electricity from Cisterna in giant cables, blow up any rocks that get in our way, dig and dig and dig.
Next year, Aldo thought, with a little shiver of pride. He had been having ideas as well for the other end of the project: how about mosquito netting; lovely little netted-in verandahs on the front of each house, so people could still sit outside but have an extra layer of protection? Just until we’ve wiped the cursed insects out …
What a job! What a wonderful job!
Next year, he thought, I’ll invite the English down to see how we’re doing.
Susanna Norsa had spent her early life praying, sewing, and listening politely to her aunts and their friends as they prayed and sewed. She fully expected to spend her entire life in variations of this scene: moving up in role from niece to aunt, from aunt to great-aunt, perhaps; to mother and grandmother, if her father arranged things so. She hadn’t thought much beyond it. There was no reason to. Nobody had ever suggested it. And she loved to embroider. And outside was quite dirty.
One of the aunts, a tiresome dissatisfied Aunt Rebecca, given to sighing and wishing for things, told her one afternoon behind the white linen curtains, in the shaded hush of siesta, that there was a painting, in a church, of their ancestors. Susanna could hardly believe her. Church was nothing to do with them. Why would Christians have a painting of Jews in their church?
‘Our ancestor Daniele did something very wicked,’ Aunt Rebecca whispered, toxic and gleeful. ‘He and his son Isaac. I don’t know what so don’t pester me asking about it. You will never know. It is forbidden. It is the church on via Monteverdi. Santa Maria della Vittoria.’
Susanna asked her father. She was not afraid of him.
He – bearded, arch-browed, a man unchanged for generations – said: ‘It’s the way of things that we are tolerated, not welcomed. It’s always been thus. If we are quiet, all is well.’ She did not press. She had never felt the need for her own wisdom, and she liked quiet.
The year Susanna turned fourteen, a quick and vicious surge of something incomprehensible rose in her, and she found her customary logic and her habits of obedience quite unsatisfactory. For absolutely no reason, coming home from school one afternoon, she turned away from the route, removed her headscarf, tucked in her white collar, and strode off, guilty feet striking the street, to via Monteverdi. There was a church: white, stucco, its portico the gay shape of a woman curtseying in a long skirt, holding up the cloth. It was not that one. It was naked brick, tucked into the corner, small and imperturbable. Her pause at the door was brief. It had to be, or she would never dare enter. She entered. She did not burn up like a dead leaf in a fire. There was a painting, and another … she found her ancestors. Two men and two women, in a row, on a panel alone at the bottom of a painting of someone else’s glory. The younger man would be Isaac.
Susanna’s rebellious surge did not last long, but she retained this one small act of independence: going without permission, in clothing as un-Jewish-looking as she could muster, to the church where the painting hung, to look at Isaac’s handsome face, full of ritegno, a holding back, a dignity. She developed and bore, on his behalf, a rich prideful resentment which gave purpose and value to the dappled shadow of shame that her name, in that town, had carried for hundreds of years. When she learnt the complex story, of how Daniele had whitewashed over a fresco of the Virgin Mary on the wall of his house, and paid a dozen punishments for it, it simply made her prouder of Isaac. He had stood by his father, suffered alongside him. She felt the blessing of not being alive at that time, four hundred years ago, when a Jew could be fined and tormented over and over for doing something he’d been given permission to do. When she visited Isaac, she talked to him. Soon enough she came to love him. She prayed for him when they prayed for the dead.
When she met Aldo, the handsome engineering student, he looked to her like Isaac Norsa – only with the ineffable advantage of being alive. Aldo knew and loved the past but his talk was all of the future. To him Trent was not ancient anti-Semitic scandals about who had accused who of making matzohs with the blood of a small boy in 1475, but Italian land redeemed, finally, from foreigners by the blood of Italian soldiers, including a little of his own. He had served on the Isonzo, he had been one of the straws whirled on the vast chaotic floodtides of Caporetto.
When Aldo spoke of the new Italy; of the sacrifices made, of the need for discipline and cleanliness and order and common sense, Susanna’s rather weary young heart lit up. Hers was not a fancy family; not wealthy, not ambitious. All that was required was respectable survival at a level which permitted charitable donations and decent marriage prospects. Had Susanna’s
