Andreja
Andreja, Chapter One
September 8, 1943
Central Trieste
The letter from the mayor came in the regular post, along with my other mail. In the false flowery language of the fascists — our deepest condolences for the loss of your beloved, fallen in Libya for the greater glory of Italy — this letter informed me that my husband of twenty years, Renzo, off fighting the British in this ridiculous war, had been killed. Five months ago.
This wasn't a complete surprise. I hadn't had a letter from Renzo in at least half a year. The fear had been with me already, Trieste increasingly crowded with bereaved mothers, wives, sisters, grandmothers and daughters, all clad in black. I sometimes felt my breath catching, haunted by the image of being trapped in a basement slowly filling with flood waters.
Now, with Renzo gone, our son Miha off fighting in Yugoslavia, likely dead himself, my brother and sister miles away and my parents out of my life for the past decade, I concluded that my usefulness in this world had ended. Without thinking, I opened our equipment cabinet and grabbed my hunting rifle. I popped out the magazine and filled it with six fresh cartridges, then snapped it down through the breech and closed the bolt.
With the sun setting gently, casting a pale orange light across my kitchen, it was as fine a time as any to end things.
Even Italy itself had surrendered, this same day. On my radio, I'd heard an American general named Eisenhower announce, from London, and in a surprisingly calm and steady voice, "The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally…effective this instant."
About that, I was thrilled. Finally!
But the mayor's letter encouraged me to be proud. Proud? Proud, that my Renzo, a man who for twenty years would prefer to sit in this kitchen with a sketch pad and draw me, or Miha, or a bowl of fruit, or a building imagined by that brilliant brain of his, rather than show up for work on time, had died in this stupid war? Proud that he had died under the stupid orders of a stupid egomaniac who dragged us unprepared into a war nobody but the most stupid among us had ever actually wanted?
I plopped myself into a chair, placed the butt of the rifle between my heels and rested my chin on the end of the barrel.
But then what? Miha would get a letter from our lawyer informing him that his father had been killed and his mother had killed herself?
No.
*
Miha. I'd last seen him seven months ago, more than a year into his military service. No more a natural soldier than his father, he had the same look I'd seen in Renzo's features after his first combat experience. They'd both seen men destroyed, been splashed with blood and viscera, barely avoiding death themselves. It was difficult for them to hold their eyes still. They constantly looked around, not the calm searching look of a hunter scanning for game, but the frantic fearful look of men too aware that violent death is near.
Miha had my eyes, and I searched their blue-gray depths in vain for some hint of his childlike curiosity, his goofy sense of humor. One of the things he had loved to do was hide things in plain sight. Even as a teenager, his most frequent trick was to sneak one of his tiny toy soldiers, no bigger than the end of my thumb, onto a window sill, on the trim piece spanning a doorway, in the corner of a mirror, in a flower arrangement, in my coin purse, and just wait for me to find it. He even kept a little journal so he'd remember the date he'd placed it, and he'd roar with laughter when I finally discovered it, sometimes months later! I'd silently prayed that he would survive the war, and somehow forget it all, so that the liveliness could return to his features.
What did Italy's surrender mean for him? Last I'd heard he was somewhere in Yugoslavia, fighting alongside the Germans.
Probably no more than fifty miles away.
I laid my rifle down on the floor, spread out the morning's newspaper to cover the kitchen table and began the meditative ritual of breaking down and cleaning my rifle so I could put it away. I opened the breech, palmed the cartridge as it flew out, popped out the clip, inserted the cartridge, and set that assembly aside.
As I worked, cleaning every part one at a time even if it didn't look like it needed it, the BBC's Radio Londra repeated Eisenhower's announcement. Evidently we would no longer be fighting alongside Germany. I also understood enough about Italian politics to know why no Italian authority was lending his name to this announcement. Mussolini, scapegoated by our ridiculous king, had been arrested several months earlier. His replacement, a so-called hero of World War I, wouldn't say it. The king wouldn't say it.
That king and his war hero were probably driving away from Rome, having bribed the local Germans and hoping to make it to British lines in the south before daybreak.
I stopped. If the army and our government were indeed collapsing, would anyone get word of his father to Miha? Would they even tell him he should stop fighting alongside the Germans? I couldn't rely on it. And I couldn't sit home and wait.
With nothing keeping me in Trieste, I would set off, tonight, for the front, where I would find my boy and tell him everything. He needed to know.
I finished my rifle and inserted the clip. But instead of putting it back in the closet, I leaned the rifle against the frame of my front door and began packing my rucksack for the journey ahead.
*
To understand what happened over the next few weeks, I need you to understand how my parents had fallen apart years before, how all of us came to be at odds with each other, separated by our sorrows and geography.
My mother was a maddening but brilliant woman, a leader in the development of Slovenian culture and literature, unafraid to face down Mussolini himself when he imposed Fascism and Italianized everything after the first war.
My father, her equal in every way, helped build the intellectual underpinnings of Slovenian awareness, as a writer, teacher and publisher, though the first war hurt him badly.
My parents first drifted apart when he came back from combat, having fought in Russia and Italy as first a conscript machinegunner and then an infantry officer in the Austrian army. He couldn't live in the city, and took to farming, spending almost all his time on our family's farm. He eventually started a produce distribution business to help the poor Slovenian farmers of the Carso take maximum advantage of Trieste's huge market.
When my brother Danilo fell ill at thirteen — rheumatic fever leading to heart failure — I was sixteen and saw an immediate difference in how my parents handled this difficulty. My father asked questions, always questions, trying to find a cure. My mother tried to keep everything the same, refusing to discuss Danilo's illness, and became angry, very angry, especially at my father.
And when the doctors announced there was nothing left to try and insisted that someone must tell Danilo, by then fifteen, that the end was near, only my father could bring himself to do that. Can you imagine, telling your own child that he's about to die? My father was right to do it, I saw the change in Danilo, while at first there were many tears of fear and anguish, at the end he seemed at peace. But my mother became even more furious. She blamed my father for Danilo's death. She banished him from the house, forbade us to see him, and seldom let a day pass without insulting him or maligning him in some way, even in public.
My brother Zago and my sister Cvetka, thirteen and eight at the time, well, we all went along because we saw our mother's suffering and we didn't want to add to it. I convinced myself that my father would be alright without us, and quickly escaped my mother's house by marrying Renzo and having Miha.
I had no idea how much this strife would harm us all.
Over the following two decades, I had stopped thinking about my parents, seldom saw my siblings, even kept memories of Danilo at bay by focusing my energies on my husband and son.
Now Renzo was dead. I had no-one but Miha, and Miha was in danger. I simply had to go find him, find a way to keep him safe, and together make a family that could endure.
*
Considering it was still summer, I opted to travel light: One change of clothes, a wool layer for the cooler nights to come, a raincoat with a hood, gloves. My skinning knife. Three tins of sardines. Matches. A compass and binoculars. A first aid kit. Extra under-garments and socks. A towel and a small bar of soap. Toothbrush and toothpaste. A box of ammunition. Boots.
I didn't think it would take me more than a week or two to find Miha. If he was still alive.
Tonight, a few hours of walking would bring me into the hills above Muggia, where I knew of a rural church that might offer me shelter.
What worried me was being away from our architecture atelier, now being run by Renzo's very efficient business partner, Annamaria. She and Renzo, university classmates, had built the business while I, busy with Miha, cheered them along. After Renzo and Miha were drafted, I visited Annamaria almost daily and helped however I could. But my primary work became teaching the Avanguardisti, teenage Mussolini Fascists-in-training, how to shoot straight. I wasn't in it for the fascism. If these boys were going to wind up in the army, I wanted them to know which end of a rifle was up and how to use it.
I preferred the atmosphere of the atelier — it was an airy, well-lit space near Piazza Cavana, in a former warehouse facing the port — and I made a point to drop by almost every day. I enjoyed the staff: Bright, creative, constantly questioning the way things were, imagining what could be. Surely they would be fine without me.
Here at home, I had a stay-at-home neighbor in the downstairs apartment who would keep an eye on things.
It never occurred to me that I might not come back.
I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote two notes, tearing the pages from one of Renzo's smaller sketch pads. First, to Annamaria, telling her Renzo was dead. I could not bring myself to write the words of sympathy that the moment required. I wrote instead, "I regret that my tone is so cold here, I cannot put words to the rest. I trust you will understand."
Second, to my banker, instructing him to exercise his power of attorney to take care of the house, which wouldn't be difficult, pay my bills, which weren't many, and collect payments from the firm. No details, other than "I'm going to find Miha." Envelopes, stamps, addresses, done.
I worried about my little sister. Cvetka was about to turn thirty. Unmarried, she'd moved thirty miles away to Gorizia where she worked as a librarian at the seminary. She loved old books and was by far the most Catholic among us. I wrote her a quick note and asked her to inform our brother Zago, who worked an Italian army desk job in Milano.
As for my parents? The only thing my mother and I had shared for the past decade was our banker. He would tell her. And my father, I couldn't think about him. But I knew he was well-connected and always well-informed, he'd find out one way or another.
*
By the time I locked the door behind me and dropped my letters in the outbound mail slot, it was dark enough that I felt comfortable keeping my rifle slung over one shoulder. With my rucksack
and a slouchy hat, and wearing hiking gear, I gambled that I would appear to most like a townsman heading out on a hunting expedition.
The trolleys had stopped running for the night, so I walked. In just a few minutes I reached Passeggio Sant'Andrea, a pleasant city park overlooking the new port and the Bay of Muggia. Renzo, Miha and I had visited this park hundreds of times, especially when Miha was little. It was where Renzo and I had watched him learn to walk. Renzo and I would stand facing each other, a few steps apart, and Miha would stagger back and forth, at times worrying, at times giggling, eventually running from his Papa to his Mama and tackling us with joy.
I had to stop. The tears blurred my vision and would slow my way if I couldn't make them stop. A cat yowled somewhere, I heard scurrying sounds along the hedges, and tried to imagine that cat hunting the rats, anything to redirect my wailing mind. I dropped the rucksack to dig out a handkerchief to wipe my face and blow my nose. I bit my hand to give myself some other kind of pain to focus on but it didn't work. I tucked the hanky up my sleeve so I could get at it easily, and continued on.
*
Four hours and ten miles later, I found the door of that church locked. It was a clear warm night, so I set up camp in the cemetery. The sun would be up in a couple of hours, so I settled on the west side of the church. It adorned a hill with spectacular views across the bay that took in the entire city and its surroundings, all the way to Monfalcone. On a clear day you could see the Alps.
I knew I wasn't the only woman to receive a letter from the mayor, but still I felt envious of what might total a million people out there, sleeping peacefully, while I made camp leaning against the back of a cold headstone.
I put on my raincoat anticipating a morning chill. Renzo had brought me here, the October Miha turned six. During a fabulous lunch — truffles on a Croatian version of maltagliati — we heard about this tiny church, and came up in the afternoon. The three of us promptly curled together in tall dry grass to sleep off our meal. Ants woke us up, just in time to catch a sunset setting fire to the first snows gracing the distant Alps.
Resting in that cemetery, with the faintest hints of dawn on the eastern horizon, I couldn't keep Renzo in my thoughts, so I looked up, and counted stars until sleep blocked everything out.
*
I woke to a bright sky and immediately checked my rifle. As a hunter, it should be unremarkable for me to be walking around the countryside with a rifle slung over my shoulder. But soon I would reach the edge of where a reasonable woman would go hunting. I was proposing to enter a war zone. I considered the madness of my undertaking. Perhaps if I changed my appearance, made myself look like a man, I would draw less attention. I promptly took out my knife and cut off most of my hair. I stashed the pile of blonde curls in a thicket near the church, imagining they might insulate a rabbit's winter den or get woven into a bird's nest in the spring.
I would become Andrej, Miha's older brother.
"My name is Andrej," I said out loud, using the lower third of my register, "and I'm looking for my brother Miha." I didn't sound convincing. I tried it again. It would take some practice. I am, fortunately, among the tallest of women, but the shoulders, the hips — I hoped my loose clothes would help disguise me.
After a breakfast of sardines — still no sign of life at the church — I set off toward Fiume.
Around midday I spotted a trio of Italian soldiers before they saw me. Taking shelter behind a clump of short junipers, I observed them with my binoculars. I determined that they had no weapons, so I approached, doing my best to walk like a man. Perhaps they could explain what the Italian regiments were doing since yesterday's surrender.
They greeted me with indifference. Instead of asking the many questions I had about why they were out here, just the three of them, without weapons or rucksacks, I asked only if they knew of Miha's unit.
"Three days ago," one of them said, "they were on a hill this side of Fiume. But after yesterday, who knows."
I waited, but they said no more, and appeared anxious to be on their way. I was tempted to ask if their commander had released them, but I bit my tongue — it was just as likely he hadn't, making them deserters. Or that they had simply taken matters into their own hands amidst chaos.
"You must be pleased the war is over," I ventured.
"The war's not finished," one of them said, giving me a sidelong glance I couldn't read. Perhaps they could tell I was a woman, after all? Or just reluctant to reveal their decision-making. "Just the Italian army. I hope we can get home before the Germans nab us."
That surprised me. Yesterday morning, they would have been fighting alongside the Germans. Now they worried about being captured by them? That they might be near? "Where are the Germans?"
"Our commander said they were rolling tanks into every Italian city north of Naples," another said, squinting at me.
"Trieste too?" I asked. I felt the third one looking at me. Maybe he was onto me?
"Almost certainly," he replied. "Fiume also."
"How will you avoid them?" I asked, cocking my shoulder a bit, as I'd seen Renzo do when talking to men.
"We're going to my grandparents' house in Muggia," the third one said, still looking at me suspiciously.
"After a rest and a little home cooking, maybe join the Partisans," the first one said.
I nodded. Unsure whether my masquerade had persuaded, I bid farewell and carried on.
*
That day I walked about twenty miles. I felt tired but good, and the requirements of staying alert and focused on where I was going, and who might appear before me, kept my mind off difficult subjects. The gentle hills of Istria rose and fell, sometimes shading me in forests, sometimes exposing me to the hot sun between two tilled fields. At hilltops I paused and listened carefully for trucks, tanks or aircraft, but heard nothing. Over the course of the day, I spotted maybe two dozen other Italian soldiers, in clusters of two to five men, none of them armed, but kept myself hidden.
Hiding from one of those groups, it occurred to me that I would need to sharpen my hunting skills somehow. Renzo and I hadn't gone on an outing of any kind since he'd been drafted. It had been years! I started by concentrating on looking. As I watched this group of young soldiers through my binoculars, I tried to look at everything about them, from how their hair was cut to the lapels and shoulder tabs of their uniforms, to their belts and what might hang off them, even their footwear. Then I looked again, searching for what I had missed with the first scan. I looked hard at their eyes and facial features, how they held their shoulders, what gestures they used as they spoke.
When I resumed walking after the men passed by me, I thought through my memories of hunts with Renzo: Long waits and longer shots on chamois in the Dolomites. Careful stalking of deer in the forested hills of the Isonzo valley. Following the tracks of wild boar — very smart animals — until the heart-stopping moment when the boar would charge us out of a thicket.
I had loved the feeling of hunting with Renzo: After the first few years, when he taught me, we had become hunting partners, communicating with tiny gestures, pleasantly interdependent, sharing the pleasures of the hunt itself as well as all the blood and gore and hard work when we achieved success.
Late in the day, I stopped in a village to buy food. The owner of the tiny shop studied me with tired eyes but confirmed the news about the Germans taking over. He said Italian troops were fighting Germans in Rome, and he'd seen a steady stream of soldiers heading for Trieste. With his permission I made camp in his apple orchard with a loaf of country bread, a brick of local goat cheese and a bottle of unlabeled red wine. I tried an apple but it wasn't quite ripe yet.
As I curled up in my makeshift bed in the grass, my mind drifted to a fall outing in the Dolomites with Renzo. On a wide, flat ridge on the western fringe of Croda Rossa, above Cortina d'Ampezzo, we made a camp to watch the sunset paint the mountain red, and then waited for the stars to come out. When the morning's chill pressed us close, Renzo maneuvered himself under me to protect me from the cold ground. He was so gallant. After lying on top of him and snoozing, I woke to a feeling of warmth and, well, desire. "Are you alright?" I asked, my lips brushing his. I felt him smile.
"Never better," he whispered.
"Would you like to make love?"
He answered by gently seizing my lower lip with his teeth.
*
Mid-morning the next day, crouching in the cover of rows of tall dry grasses in a field left fallow, I spotted a lone soldier ahead on the road, walking in my direction. Through my binoculars, I noticed he looked older than the boys I'd seen, more like my age, and he had unfaded patches of fabric on his collar that suggested he might have removed an officer's rank insignia. I decided to approach.
I had been working on my male gait, and felt it had improved.
The man greeted me politely, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. We stepped off the road into the shade of a small cluster of cedars where this man, who looked exhausted, his face surprisingly dirty, corroborated what I had heard from the young men and the shopkeeper the day before.
He had no rucksack so I asked if he was hungry.
"Si, grazie," he said. He was thin, almost a full head shorter than me, his hair graying, his face sun-baked and lined. But he had a charm in his eyes, some sense of mischief that the war had not yet snuffed out. He gave me a second once-over and muttered, "Strange place for a woman to be out walking with all her hair chopped off."
"Ma scusami, signore," I said, blushing, "I just offered you food, the least you can do is give me some advice on how to better camouflage myself from the Nazis."
He threw up his hands, grinning. "I don't know if I can help you with that. Perhaps something else would be helpful?" He glanced at the tree beside us, broke off the end of a thin branch and appraised it.
"I can tell by your collar that you're an officer."
He reached up to touch his collar and said, "You are very observant." He then used the broken end of his stick to clean his left index fingernail.
"Why aren't you with your unit?" I asked as he started on his next finger.
His face fell. "Unfortunately, signora, that sort of question is a bit anachronistic."
I laughed. I liked him. I shed my rifle and rucksack, and dug for a can of sardines.
"When your government collapses," he went on, meticulously attending to yet another finger, "and runs away in the night leaving no instructions, well, everybody decides they are on their own. I called my division headquarters, no answer. I called corps headquarters, no answer. I even managed to get a radio call into an office in Rome. Nothing. When I tried to organize my regiment to resist the Germans, my subordinates told me in not so polite terms to, well, you can imagine what they said."
I handed him the can. He tossed the stick and squatted. "And by then," he said, squinting into the distance from which he'd come, "the Germans were upon us, so we ran for our lives."
"Mi dispiace," I said, pulling out the bread. "I'm sorry you've had to go through this. Here, I'll cut you a piece."
We settled down to the ground with grunts and I cut him a slice, then offered him a drink from my canteen. As he drank, I asked, "May I ask you another question?"
He gestured in the affirmative as he chewed on a mouthful of bread and sardine.
"My husband was an artillery officer in Africa. Killed in action."
"Please accept my condolences, signora. What unit?" he asked.
"Centauro division."
"Ah yes, a very distinguished unit," he said, before taking another bite. I waited while he chewed and swallowed. "I have a cousin who was in that unit, taken prisoner, one of the few survivors. Got a letter from him just two weeks ago." He took a sip of water. "Told me that Erwin Rommel, the top German in Africa, ordered his officers to strip the Italian units of all their vehicles and leave them in the desert. Can you imagine? Our so-called allies!" He shook his head, then gestured toward Fiume with his chin. "You going there?"
"I am," I said. "My boy is over there."
He winced. "When my cousin's unit ran out of water, they surrendered to an American patrol. He said they were very polite. One of them even spoke a little Italian. Saved his life." He looked at me. "May I ask you a question?"
It was my turn to nod with a mouthful.
"Do you know how to use that rifle?"
I took a swig of wine and handed him the bottle. "I'm a hunter. Deer, wild boar, chamois in the Dolomites. And for the past two years I've been teaching riflery to the Avanguardisti."
He pointed at my rifle with the bottle. "I see you removed the folding bayonet."
"My husband and I didn't think it would be especially useful in hunting, and it cuts the weight down."
"It's a good weapon," he said, and handed me the sardine can, indicating I should finish it off. "Well suited for a woman."
I raised an eyebrow at him. "It's a far more practical design than the original infantry Carcano, and it's not just for women."
He laughed, raising his dirty hands in surrender. "You win, signora, I meant no insult." He smiled. "Now, I've been thinking about your attempts at camouflage." He studied me. "You could use more dirt, or ash, to darken your hair, skin and fingernails. Add lines to your forehead, and perhaps mimic the shadow of a beard on your cheeks and neck."
"Grazie," I said. "I will work on that. Did I walk like a man? That's what I was working on yesterday."
"Si, si, perfecto!"
*
As the officer and I went our separate ways, I struggled to keep myself focused on the tasks at hand. My mind kept wanting to wander out into the Libyan desert, flashes of Renzo dying of thirst, in battle, being hit by enemy fire. The mayor's letter had said his body couldn't be recovered. Had they blown him to bits? Did a piece of shrapnel cut off a leg, or his arm, one of his wonderful arms? Did he die instantly, or did he suffer?
During grape harvest at my mother's farm years ago, a hurried affair during a heat wave, Renzo and I, along with my mother, her staff of two and a couple of friends, started cutting the thick dark clusters of purple Teran grapes at first light. The day grew oppressively hot, and my dictatorial mother pressed us, urging us to work as quickly as possible to prevent sun damage to the grapes. We didn't stop to eat or drink. Working next to Renzo, I sensed him slowing down. Then he simply let his arms drop, the clippers falling from his hand.
"I'm dizzy," he said, wobbly on his feet. "I feel like I want to throw up, but nothing comes."
"Water!" I yelled. "I need water now!" I threw down my own clippers and pulled Renzo to the end of the row of vines where there was a bit of shade.
Matej, my mother's lead farm hand, appeared with a jug. No stranger to this sort of crisis, Matej quickly splashed Renzo's face and then held the jug to his lips. Renzo drank deeply as I held him, then I unbuttoned his shirt to cool him further. Matej took a long drink himself, then left the jug with us to get back to work.
Renzo slumped, his head settling into my lap as he stretched out in the shaded grass under the vines. He looked up at me from below my breasts. "Ciao," he said weakly, then gave me a sly smile. "I swear to holy Jesus and God on high that I will never touch a glass of wine ever again."
*
In the distance I could see the steep and rocky hills that lay between Istria and Fiume. Better cover, perhaps, but I had to be careful that I wouldn't stumble into view of any Germans.
At the bottom of a small depression between two gentle ridges, I came across a freshly tilled field of nearly black soil. I grabbed a fistful and rubbed it all over my head, my face, my neck, the backs of my hands. My fingernails looked horrible. I dirtied my clothes as well. Without a mirror, I couldn't make lines, but hoped this would be an improvement.
Even though it seemed like I was alone on this back road in the Istrian countryside, there was danger and I simply could not allow myself to break down or even daydream.