“The rig went on,” Joe said, sitting up.
“What are you going to do?” She seated herself on the edge of the bed, drying her arms and hands with the dish towel.
“I’ll catch him on the return. He won’t say anything to anybody; he knows I’d do the same for him.”
“You’ve done this before?” she asked.
Joe did not answer. You meant to miss it, Juliana said to herself. I can tell; all at once I know.
“Suppose he takes another route back?” she said.
“He always take Fifty. Never Forty. He had an accident on Forty once; some horses got out in the road and he plowed into them. In the Rockies.” Picking up his clothes from the chair he began to dress.
“How old are you, Joe?” she asked as she contemplated his naked body.
“Thirty-four.”
Then, she thought, you must have been in the war. She saw no obvious physical defects; he had, in fact, quite a good, lean body, with long legs. Joe, seeing her scrutiny, scowled and turned away. “Can’t I watch?” she asked, wondering why not. All night with him, and then this modesty. “Are we bugs?” she said. “We can’t stand the sight of each other in the daylight—we have to squeeze into the walls?”
Grunting sourly, he started toward the bathroom in his underpants and socks, rubbing his chin.
This is my home, Juliana thought. I’m letting you stay here, and yet you won’t allow me to look at you. Why do you want to stay, then? She followed after him, into the bathroom; he had begun running hot water in the bowl, to shave.
On his arm, she saw a tattoo, a blue letter C.
“What”s that?” she asked. “Your wife? Connie? Corinne?”
Joe, washing his face, said, “Cairo.”
What an exotic name, she thought with envy. And then she felt herself flush. “I’m really stupid,” she said. An Italian, thirty-four years old, from the Nazi part of the world… he had been in the war, all right. But on the Axis side. And he had fought at Cairo; the tattoo was their bond, the German and Italian veterans of that campaign—the defeat of the British and Australian army under General Gott at the hands of Rommel and his Afrika Korps.
She left the bathroom, returned to the living room and began making the bed; her hands flew.
In a neat stack on the chair lay Joe’s possessions, clothes and small suitcase, personal articles. Among them she noticed a velvet-covered box, a little like a glasses’ case; picking it up, she opened it and peeked inside.
You certainly did fight at Cairo, she thought as she gazed down at the Iron Cross Second Class with the word and the date—June 10, 1945—engraved at its top. They didn’t all get this; only the valiant ones. I wonder what you did… you were only seventeen years old, then.
Joe appeared at the door of the bathroom just as she lifted the medal from its velvet box; she became aware of him and jumped guiltily. But he did not seem angry.
“I was just looking at it,” Juliana said. “I’ve never seen one before. Did Rommel pin it on you himself?”
“General Bayerlain gave them out. Rommel had already been transferred to England, to finish up there.” His voice was calm. But his hand once more had begun the monotonous pawing at his forehead, fingers digging into his scalp in that combing motion which seemed to be a chronic nervous tic.
“Would you tell me about it?” Juliana asked, as he returned to the bathroom and his shaving.
As he shaved and, after that, took a long hot shower, Joe Cinnadella told her a little; nothing like the sort of account she would have liked to hear. His two older brothers had served in the Ethiopian campaign, while he, at thirteen had been in a Fascist youth organization in Milan, his home town. Later, his brothers had joined a crack artillery battery, that of Major Ricardo Pardi, and when World War Two began, Joe had been able to join them. They had fought under Graziani. Their equipment, especially their tanks, had been dreadful. The British had shot them down, even senior officers, like rabbits. Doors of the tanks had to be held shut with sandbags during battle, to keep them from flying open. Major Pardi, however, had reclaimed discarded artillery shells, polished and greased them, and fired them; his battery had halted General Wavell’s great desperate tank advanced in ‘43.