are less visible in the cold; they remain holed up in their barracks or keep warm in several bars that have become their hangouts. For a few weeks at least, I and my fellow Staffettas feel a sense of freedom as we weave our way almost unchallenged.
I have to be careful not to feel a sense of overconfidence at work. Breugal becomes less of a prowler in the office – word has it that his wife has come to soak up the Venetian sights, as if we are still some cosmopolitan centre for the rich and bored. No doubt she will fill her time drinking real and expensive coffee in Florian’s on Piazza San Marco, and later have cocktails in Harry’s Bar, perhaps beside the sign that clearly states: ‘No Jews here’. She might parade alongside the Venetian women of a certain age who try to maintain the city’s grandiose reputation, even though these days the collars of their coats are more likely to be fashioned from rabbit or cat fur than anything exotic.
In the office, then, the atmosphere feels slightly less frenetic, although Signor De Luca continues to ensure that it runs with industrial efficiency. I note he never indulges in idle gossip or lunchtime chatter, and disappears each day at 12.30 precisely, returning exactly thirty-five minutes later. I tend to take my own lunch as he arrives back, since those precious minutes when he’s absent give me time to type frenetically while not under his watchful gaze. My position to the right of him means I can see his face as he leans over whatever document he is reading or correcting. It’s always intense, eyes tracking back and forth, nostrils twitching occasionally – which strangely reminds me of Popsa reading his daily paper. Sometimes, Cristian takes off his glasses, pinches his nose with his long fingers and draws the paper nearer to his face. If he’s suddenly distracted, he peers upwards without replacing his glasses and squints into the distance, adding to the look of a bibliophile. He’s something of an enigma to the other office girls, who find it hard to ally his appearance with the strict work rate he demands, occasionally raising his voice to quell any chatter if it threatens to slow the steady production of reports.
‘Bloody fascist,’ Marta, one of the other typists, mutters if Cristian takes her to task, although it’s under her breath and masked by the thunder of typewriter keys. Breugal appears to rely on him entirely – not least because his own Italian is so poor and Cristian’s German crisp and fluent – and calls him into the inner office a dozen times a day with a smart ‘De Luca!’ though I note it’s rarely with an irritated bark. For all their innate cruelty, their bulldozing of nations and countries, we in the Resistance realise the secret of Nazi success is that they know how to use people – via a combination of flattery, stealth or the simple and stark threat of death. With Cristian, Breugal is definitely on the charm offensive.
I have perhaps more to do with Cristian than some of the other typists, because of my role as a translator. He sometimes walks over to query a word or a phrase, and if it’s especially puzzling we both stand over the huge dictionary and work out the phrasing. He always smells nice, of soap and what I seem to recall is Italian cologne. Who can afford, or even access, cologne in wartime? Those that have good Nazi connections, I suppose. But still, he perplexes me. He doesn’t fit – a square peg in a round hole – and yet he appears snug within the Nazi hierarchy. I resolve to be wary; Cristian De Luca is meticulous and observant. He could easily be equally as dangerous as the general controlling our occupied city.
Bristol, July 2017
Back home in Bristol, Luisa flicks through more scraps of aged paper, the fibrous edges disintegrating a little more each time she unfolds the fragile notes. Some of the ink has begun to fade and she needs to hold the paper up to the lamp to make out the scrawl. Some are just letters, numbers or nonsensical phrases – and they are largely in Italian, with the occasional message in phonetical English. ‘My beard is blond,’ one says, with what is presumably the Italian equivalent below. The sometimes bizarre nature of the messages only makes her delve deeper and wonder more. She buys a cheap Italian-English dictionary and pores over the words to try to make some kind of sense of them. In the month since Luisa discovered the attic box, its content has become like the richest compost for her imagination. She finds herself racing through real, paid work, forcing herself to concentrate on its suddenly inane message, when all she wants to do is get back to her large box of intrigue.
‘Lu? Lu, it’s supper …’ Jamie calls from downstairs, in a tone of early despair. He already knows he’ll need to remind her several times to descend from her office in the smaller bedroom. In what seems like every spare moment, Luisa is engrossed in that box attempting to unravel the mysteries amid the dust within. Daisy sits alongside, humming with an impatient flickering of the screen, waiting for Luisa to continue the article she should be working on. Jamie sees that the collection of old paper and photographs has more than captured her imagination – it’s become a purpose, perhaps morphing into an obsession of late. She’s become withdrawn but not in a morbid sense, and that can only be a good thing, he thinks, given she’s just lost her mum. Except he seems to have lost Luisa too. Hopefully, it’s temporary. He has to be patient and wait for her to re-emerge, take her nose out of those dusty scraps and be the Luisa he knows and loves. Right now, it appears that might take some time.
Luisa runs a hand over the keys of the monochrome typewriter she brought from her mum’s house, which takes pride of place in her office now. On that day of discovery in the attic, she bashed out her frustrations – though was careful to be kind to the keys, in deference to its age – and it felt good: the rhythmic tackety-tack of the mechanism winding up speed as her fingers became accustomed to the keyboard. It produced a rambling array of thoughts, now stuck in a notebook entitled ‘Head space’. She’s certain the machine is the origin of some of the typed pages – the dropped letter e bears that out – but the mystery is that some look like fact and others a kind of story, with a fictional, descriptive air. What are they doing amid the pictures of suave Italians with guns and camouflaged faces?
The office wall is now papered with a mosaic of scraps and photographs, topped off with coloured Post-it notes in Luisa’s scribble, as she tries to understand the timeline and characters in this war tableau. As she reads and deciphers over her Italian dictionary, she is becoming convinced that her grandmother was more than simply a bystander to war; that she had some part to play in its direction and the eventual liberation of her city. But what part? The mystery gnaws at her, night after night as Jamie snores lightly beside her. Who was her grandmother? Certainly, someone with more to her past than Luisa could have ever imagined. And why didn’t her own mother ever talk about this potentially colourful life? With her storyteller’s head, it’s not that much of a stretch for Luisa to imagine her grandmother as some sort of underground spy; she’s sure that if it were her own mother, she would have wanted to shout it from the rooftops, been prodigiously proud.
She scrolls back in her memory of her grandmother; Luisa’s own mother always seemed short with her, impatient, as if there was a long-standing feud between them. Something in her past had seemed to colour her mother’s personality, making her bitter and bad-tempered towards almost everyone. Certainly, Luisa’s father had retreated inside himself before his death. Yet no one ever spoke of it.
This new search, however, is a welcome distraction to those memories of home life as often cold and humourless. Luisa has researched enough articles about the grief process to know that it is undoubtedly helping with her own; to imagine something of her family within the paper bundles means she feels closer to her long-dead grandmother, whereas she struggled to find a connection with her own mother in life. Luisa has always known that her grandma Stella was a writer of novels – three or four family dramas written under the name Stella Hawthorn, but long since out of print. Just one had been on her mother’s bookshelves, and Luisa had read it with pride in her early teens. It was good, a definite page-turner, filled with sumptuous
