“It’s none of my business, but it’s better to go with girls of your own kind.”
Did he have something against Rumanians? Nicola wasn’t concerned about that, that’s not what he was talking about. Caia was Rumanian, did he know that? No, he didn’t know where Rumania was. He remained silent for a while, his hands falling idle, which made me think I was bothering him. I was about to apologize when he said with effort, “The girl is not one of those people you’re talking about.”
What the devil could he know about it? Two conflicting emotions made the blood rush to my face: anger and shame. Finally I was able to talk about her, and I was hearing offensive suspicions from someone who had seen her only one morning and had not addressed a word to her. I was about to stand up when Nicola said gruffly, lowering his voice, “The girl is Jewish,” stressing the dj sound. I looked at him, narrowing my eyes. A chasm opened between us, a collision, a slap, a betrayal. Why? How did he know? But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. An anchor had plunged into my throat.
“The name is Jewish. In Sarajevo there were lots of Jewish women whose names were Sara and Caia. Not Caia, the way we say it, with a k sound, but with a heavy h, like when you clear your throat, Chaie. The little girls were called Chaiele, Sorele. There were lots of them, and then they were taken away. First they were locked up, then they were put on trains, not in coaches, but in freight cars. By the time we arrived, all the men were gone. People said they had all been killed by the Germans. The only ones remaining were women, children, and a few old people.”
His hands had remained still, his head bowed over them. Then, before returning to his work, he added in closing, “Gualgiò, che brutta carogna è ’a guerra,” Oh kid, what a dirty rotten thing war is.
And what kind of a war was it? A war against women, babies? What kind was your war?
“What do you want to know? When you came along it was all over, no Germans, no Jews, all you saw were Americans, smuggling, black market, a whole business of dollars. I could talk till tomorrow, tell you what the war I saw was like, you’d still know nothing. You have to know with your own eyes, with fear, an empty stomach, not with ears and books. We were twenty years old, they pressed us like olives, and like olives we didn’t make a sound. There were Jewish women, they asked us to save their children, they handed them over to us, to us, Italian soldiers who were the enemy, and we could do nothing.” Nicola choked up on his last words and couldn’t go on.
Nothing. Only you, Nicola, managed to say this word, digging it out of helplessness and fear. Nothing. There are nothings that you can never get rid of. Each time I hear someone say “nothing,” it rings false; they don’t know how to say it. They don’t know what nothing is. You know, Nicola, and those women who handed their children over to enemy strangers, they knew. I couldn’t reply. I was a kid who didn’t even understand sunlight. Caia was a Jew. I was mortified not to have thought of it myself, with all my pretensions at discovering a secret from those crumbs she had confided in me. How was I different from the other city boys vacationing on the island? They were hospitable by nature, by indolent custom, not out of any genuine wish to meet people or get to know them. Caia was just a funny name for us. The accident of fate that sent a fisherman from the south to make war in Yugoslavia provided the most basic fact. She came from a people who had been eliminated house by house, her parents killed. Her life had depended on being saved, unlike ours, exposed at worst to the ills of the south. Perhaps she was one of the children placed in the arms of a stranger who carried her to safety.
I asked Nicola to repeat her name to me, as he remembered it, and its diminutive: Chaie, Chaiele, Chaie, Chaiele: a thick h never heard before, followed by the vowels of a little shout. I was learning her secret by pronouncing her name. I was afraid someone might already know about it, but Nicola had told no one, not even Uncle. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about it at all, and rightly so because he had let this slip, but only because I had asked him to talk to me about the war. He regretted having told me and asked me not to repeat it to anyone. It wasn’t right to put your nose in other people’s business. I promised willingly, relieved. I said I had understood nothing, that I could not have figured it out by myself. In his rapid dialect Nicola said: “I don’t even understand the sea. Don’t know why a boat floats, why wind and storms make waves on the sea and dust on land. I live by the sea because I was born to it, but I don’t understand a thing about it. What is it after all? It’s just sea, water and salt, but it’s deep, very deep.”
And then he left me troubled by the thought that perhaps the girl didn’t know anything about her own background. In that case, her secret was mine alone. I couldn’t even share it with her.
I got up from the sand of the fishermen’s beach reeling, drunk, consumed with shame. Without Nicola, master even of that, I would never have known anything about the most sought-after truth. Caia’s secret was handed to me as a gift, in view of the fact that I would never have acquired it all by myself. I wandered off to the Aragonese castle on the bridge of the isthmus that connected it to the land. I climbed down among the rocks in search of a blank space for my eyes, stopping at a point that opened out to the horizon and nothing else, just water. Dusk was falling. Exhausted by my emotional upheaval, I fell asleep. It was night when I woke up, my head was cold, the sky packed with stars. My steps were wooden at first, then looser, and then I broke into a run which set me racing through deserted streets, accompanied from time to time by hunting dogs left loose on the island. Aimless happiness, warm stones under my soles, soft breezes in my ears, my throat parched, I broke into the house like a thief. Daniele was asleep in my room whistling through his nose, my guitar lying on his sandals. I picked it up and hung it on its nail. Its sounding box pinged a delicate A on contact, and in my head the name Chaie, Chaiele kept coming back, telling me why I felt happy. I murmured the name until sleep overtook me.
In the morning I was faced with my mother’s reproaches and Daniele’s questions. I had fallen asleep on the beach, having gone to watch them fish with lanterns, and had no awareness of sleeping on the warm sand. That half lie came out with cheeky veracity. I never told lies. Daniele said that’s what he had thought, and had proposed going to look for me precisely on the beach. It would not happen again, I promised. In our family, oaths were not permitted. It was enough to say with conviction, I promise.
Chaie, Chaiele became music in my ears. I repeated it in the morning, barely awake, I put my thoughts to rest with it at bedtime. Lovers pray with only one word, a name. I didn’t write it, I didn’t pronounce it out loud; I couldn’t jeopardize the secret by leaving traces behind.
One evening I was with Daniele’s crowd on a terrace very close to the sea; they were having a party. A boy kept putting on records with a fast beat, dances with a lot of jumping and turning, and Caia bounced back and forth amid arms and shirts, or so I saw her from my observation spot. Needing a rest, she came and sat down next to me, a friendly gesture. I had no idea that she had seen me. She wiped away a film of perspiration with the back of her hand and as a joke spread it on my face. I smiled over the borrowed sweat and didn’t wipe it off. The music started up again. She declined to go back, putting off till later the boys who called out to her. Daniele was standing off in a corner with a girl. Caia turned her back to the party and faced the sea so that we sat side by side but in opposite directions.