and the carefully polished glasses.
But to Susanna, here was a man with passion enough for two. Yes, he lectured. But so he should! He knew so much, and he shared it. He knew about Daniele and Isaac – and he knew about the future too. She listened carefully, head down, ears wide open. ‘The regiments who let us down at Caporetto – do you know who they were? They were full of the munitions workers from Turin – the ones who had been rioting. Yes! Sent to the middle of our campaign as a punishment. Not the most intelligent bit of planning. And everyone knew they were going to give themselves up. Why would people like that have any loyalty to their country?’ Susanna could not answer. She knew nothing. But that was all right, because no answer was required. ‘They made no secret of it. Their officers locked themselves in at night, in fear of their own men. They didn’t even consider themselves to be in the army! Some of them refused their tobacco and charity socks – they said they didn’t qualify to receive them – tell me, Susanna, how can good Italians be brought to this treachery? To plan in advance to surrender, and for nobody to notice that?’
She shook her head sadly in agreement, and glanced up at him. ‘For our generals,’ he would continue, ‘to put these revolutionaries, these communists, right in the middle of this most important battle – ah, my dear, don’t you think we can do better? Aren’t we the oldest civilisation in the world? Can’t we save these misguided men from the tempting garbage they hear from the communists? And give them back their pride?’
Her adoration transferred as easily as a leaf falls. Leaving Mantua with Aldo, she chose to leave behind there her respectable relatives alongside the ancestral innamorato and all that he entailed, and devote herself instead to the future, to faith and trust and the glorious light of the sun, and to the beautiful Italian children she would have with this adorable, important man.
Of course it had not been quite like that. But he worked hard, he kept the family well. And he was so sweet. When he was playing the guitar and Nenna crept up on him and stole his hat, and put his box of cigarillos and matches in it, and sneaked it back on his head and in the joy of playing he didn’t notice, until ten minutes later he would take the hat off and everything would fall out – oh, he made them laugh.
And what had he seen in her? A beautiful girl, who didn’t say much, who adored him. As for so many men, that was enough.
Both Aldo and Susanna considered themselves to be very lucky Jews. They’d met a foreign Jew once who didn’t even believe they were Jewish, because they were so Italian. That amused Aldo very much. He said, in all his travels he’d found that most Italians hardly knew what a Jew was. It made Susanna a little nervous though. To laugh about being taken for a gentile! Things change so fast.
Rome, 1929
Kitty, Tom and Nadine went to Rome again the following year, and the one after, and the one after that. All the previous pleasures awaited them, freighted with the added delight of now being familiar. A person could think, this is what I do, because they had done it before and would quite possibly do it again. They could perhaps think, this is where I stay, when I am in Rome. This is the fruit stall I go to. The signora greets me.
Kitty announced that she was Italian. Challenged by Tom, she said, ‘Well, I have eaten lots of Italian food, and breathed lots of Italian air, and drunk lots of Italian water, and I have had lots of Italian lessons to help me talk Italian, so I am made of Italian things, so I am Italian. Partly.’ It made perfect sense to her, and she was annoyed when everyone laughed.
Aldo was working south of Rome, ‘where new cities are rising from the swamps’, Nenna said. Kitty thought of a city like a dinosaur, dripping weeds, lurching up, until Nenna explained. ‘Everybody dies who spends a night in the swamps,’ she said. ‘Papà is draining them, so the poor people can live. Drain the swamps, kill the mosquitoes, build the cities. He has to take a pill every day so the anofele don’t give him malaria.’
One morning, going over to the bakery in Via del Portico d’Ottavia, Kitty observed as if for the first time the great number of churches in this Jewish area. Nenna said: ‘At every gate of the ghetto there was a church, to be easy for Jews to convert.’
Tom asked why they would have to convert.
‘Christians want us to,’ Nenna said. ‘It’s what they most want from us. So they can all go to heaven, I think.’
‘And why does a ghetto have gates?’ asked Kitty.
‘A ghetto is walls,’ said Tom, with one of those looks that made her feel stupid.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought it was a place.’
‘All the Jews had to live inside,’ Nenna said. ‘Didn’t you know?’ And she walked Kitty and Tom along where the walls had been. She showed them two buildings abutting: one had been inside the ghetto, one outside. They were the same height, conjoined, part of one long wall of buildings along the side of an alley. But the one outside had tall stone-mullioned windows, yellow stucco, and three storeys; the one inside had unframed windows, bare brickwork, and six storeys. ‘The wall was across here,’ Nenna said. ‘Big houses and nice tall rooms out there on Piazza Mattei, low ceilings and people packed in, inside.’
Kitty gazed at it, imagining the wall opening up like her doll’s house, revealing the different levels of floor, the cramped ceilings, the poor families on the left hunched over, ragged and numerous; the rich families on the right swanning on pale carpets beneath chandeliers way above their coiffured heads. Just a wall between the two lives. On one side paintings hang on smooth stucco. Cracks split the other side.
‘It’s not fair,’ said Kitty.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kitty, not quite sure why.
‘Why? You didn’t do it. And you are Jewish too. Your mother is Jewish.’
Kitty got the little dizzy feeling which happened when that topic came up. It was nice to say nothing about the parent situation, and never think about it, just laugh blankly if the matter of hair colour was mentioned, or resemblance (lack thereof). Nobody really expected a child to say or think much anyway.
She looked to Tom. These were their shared secrets, family mysteries which a girl could not address unilaterally. They were not hers to give away.
‘Nadine’s not our mother,’ Tom said. ‘We don’t talk about it much.’
Kitty thought: Nenna might not want to be my cousin any more now.
Nenna said: ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ and waited.
‘Our actual mother ran away and got ill and died, and our father is still a bit sick from the war.’ Tom said it bluntly, amazing his sister. He glanced at her – a flash. ‘We can tell you,’ he said, ‘because you’re like family, and we trust you.’ At this Kitty nodded. ‘Also you’re a foreigner and you probably won’t tell anyone we know at home. At home,’ he said, rather fiercely, ‘it seems that only our family has anything wrong with it. Everyone else seems to be terribly all right. Though of course they may all be covering up too.’
Nenna
