She offered us milk. Packaged eggs. There were cigarettes, she admitted, but they used these to trade for produce. There was no telling what the soldiers would bring, and rather than allow this to waste she thought we might make good use of the food. There were perfumes (she smelled so sweet herself), stockings, scarves, clothes, but it did not seem a good idea to offer those, unless they could be traded. But trade here, she seemed to indicate the building, is not safe.
On seeing my sister L— looked quickly at my mother and whispered, I am sure I heard it. ‘You should not keep her here. You understand me? Take her to relatives. She is not safe.’
After this warning my parents did not allow my sister to pass through the courtyard unaccompanied. They attempted to keep her to the apartment, but found this impossible, and needed in any case the money she would bring in. She had to work. They hatched between them another plan, a fatal idea, that they could buy a pass for her so that she could leave the city, work elsewhere, somewhere safer. These passes were almost impossible to acquire and were gained through the permission of an adjutant, one of the military administrative over-class. I accompanied my mother to the offices, and we made our way through the vast lobby of what was once the central office for pensions and war relief, less than insects in the shadows of these lofty windows, which made me certain that this endeavour would not succeed. In front of us, a man who had once been a neighbour, who spoke without bitterness about how he had needed to choose between his daughters, whore one to save the other. He was there, on this occasion, to barter for his wife, and had brought with him what remained of her jewellery: her wedding ring, her engagement ring, a pair of diamond stud earrings, which he feared would not be enough.
The queue ran through the corridors, my mother told me to keep in place, then checked for herself and despaired when she saw that this line of people ran a ring about the entire floor then through the stairwell to rise, and who knows, run another circuit about that floor, maybe others also. The people appeared comatose, and this frightened her; resigned to whatever they might need to surrender, they brought with them small packages, clothes, food, boxes of jewellery, all to ensure that their daughters and wives would escape the city. It was not clear how many days we would have to wait, and if that wait would in the end be successful. Another plan needed to be devised.
This failure sent my mother into a depression. E— could not remain in the building, it was not safe, neither could she leave. To confirm her vulnerability E— had been stopped that morning by the soldier from Kentucky. Clear that his tastes ran to the more delicate, the more defenceless of the girls, he singled out my sister as she brought water through the courtyard. The man watched as she passed, turned his whole body as she moved alongside him and toward the stair. He looked up as she made her way up the stairs, then gave a long and low whistle. The kind of whistle a hunter might give his dog, a signal that there was quarry to be had here. He had found something to hunt.
A short time after this, perhaps one or two days, the Americans performed a search of the entire building. Whether this was for security, as they claimed, a kind of census taking to ensure who and how many people populated these palazzi. They came to the door in their uniforms. Four men. Clipboards and rifles.
‘This is how they find their women,’ my mother fretted. Clearly they wanted more than women. They catalogued the rooms and contents, checked our food resources. It was certainly how they found their goods. And we listened afterward as they broke in to the empty apartments. Once those doors were breached, the contents would be pilfered. During the night we could hear the vacant apartments being looted, the soft bumping of furnishing, the splintering of wood: we dared not see who this was.
This situation sustained itself for a while. Once the apartments were looted it seemed that there could be little else that could be taken. And perhaps this might have been the case, perhaps this might have been the story if the women in the courtyard had not caused another upset.
* * *
(page 43) The young private, the youth from Kentucky, was found stabbed. The wounded man wandered, trance-like, out of the lower rooms, into the courtyard. He walked through the stairwells, vacant, seeming to have some quiet purpose, stepping as a cat through wet grass, lifting up his feet, but not sensate enough to express exactly what it was that he was doing, what it was that he wanted. His hands, slashed, showed defensive wounds, where, perhaps, he had tried to grab the knife. His handprints along the wall, small slides and smudges tracking his progress from floor to floor. We saw the blood, ignored it, then later, more worried about what fresh trouble this would bring, my brother and my father followed the trail up to the top floor.
They found him sweating and panting. In the darkness his tunic appeared black, the blood having seeped through his jacket.
Unwilling to touch him, they raised the alarm. One dead solder would be no end of trouble and they did not want to be involved, but considered quickly — which would be worse? To allow him to die and suffer whatever consequences the Americans would bring down on us, or perhaps, through intervening, be seen as people who had helped, at the same time appear as collaborators to our own.
My father could not make the choice. My brother, independently, sounded the alarm. Went down to the basement and roused the women, got the soldiers away from their women’s arms and beds and brought them up the stairs to their companion, who now lay in a swoon.
They brought him down in a blanket, a makeshift stretcher, and laid him in the courtyard, still alive, but feeble from blood loss. The women came out, one by one, and held back to the courtyard walls, hands to mouths, frightened, recognizing that this would be no good thing. Ten of us could die, twenty, a hundred, and it would mean nothing. But one wounded American signalled a whole world of trouble.
The soldiers themselves appeared stunned. They stripped off the boy’s tunic, demanded water and rags and found him stabbed once in the side, and once in the chest. The boy lay pale, his wounds agape. His chest raising and falling with laboured breaths.
The military police arrived alongside an ambulance, and the boy was dressed and taken away with some hurry, and greater fears that he would die. The courtyard trapped silence, no one dared speak, and it seemed that all, even the men who had spent the night here, were under suspicion.
* * *
(page 45) Let me describe now what was happening inside our apartment. How this event brought down a deeper distress. My mother at the table, too gone to wail, head in hands, believing that this would be the last that we would see of my brother. My father, useless, did not know what to do with himself and hung, waif-like at the door. My sister kept back, and I urged her to pack. We would hide her in one of the other apartments. They would not find her. We would say that she had already gone, that she was working elsewhere, that she was now in a city in the north, and that we had not heard from her. We could say that she had died. We would take her belongings, all evidence of her and deny that she existed, say that their records were incorrect, that there never was a girl here, that we had no sister, there was no daughter. The Americans would be bound to come and question us now. Our involvement would be examined. This attention would need to be managed if we did not want it to cause us trouble. Looking about the room, about the apartment, as bare as it was, it would not take much to convince them that there was no girl.
* * *
We hid her in another apartment, the room a chaos of broken furniture — it was not hard. She dug herself under the broken frame of a bed and slipped from view.
The Americans came in the night. They brought dogs. And now my mother’s grief grew into song. She shrieked as they came into the courtyard as they broke the doors and rounded up the women, hauled them into trucks. I strained to watch but did not see L— but watched as the women were roughly gathered, bound, thrown onto the back of the vehicle like meat. They took them away and left a team of men to clear the room, who threw out the beds, tossed the clothes into the courtyard, and then set fire to it; sparks rose and sucked the air, a column of smoke billowed upward. They threw linens, bedding, mattresses, clothes and shoes onto the fire, not caring that this might spread, that the dry night air would carry sparks into other homes.