I, too, have train-station nightmares, train-station nightmares, nightmares, frightening dreams, repeats Haya, while she digs around in the red basket, then finds a little photograph that, back in 1944, slid in — she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know how, how did it slide in? — among the pictures that S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz gave her. Here it is, she says.
7
On 31 October, 1944, at about 6 p.m., Ada’s sister, Haya’s aunt, Letizia Puhaz, shouts: Fanny, run and fetch Teresa from Via Caporetto! At 8.17 p.m. Teresa Cavalieri, a midwife from Via Caporetto 51, delivers Haya Tedeschi’s baby. Antonio “Toni” Tedeschi comes into the world.
Kurt Franz sees his son twice. In late December, leaning over the counter at La Gioia, Kurt Franz twiddles a lock of Haya’s light-brown hair between his index finger and his ring finger, leans in to her face and whispers: My little Jewess, we can’t go on like this. Oh, yes, I know, Tedeschi ist ein jüdischer Name. Besides, my fiancée is waiting for me at home. Heinrich Himmler, Minister of the S.S. Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt has finally granted me permission to wed. I am leaving for Düsseldorf at Christmastime, and when I come back, I will not be in touch. Please do not ask for me.
This is when Haya seeks out Don Baubela. Antonio Toni is baptized as every good Catholic should be, in the presence of Letizia and Laura Puhaz and Teresa the midwife, he is entered into the church books with his father’s name, yes, Kurt Franz, and is given the mother’s surname, Tedeschi. All of this should remain a secret, Haya says to Don Baubela. The times are risky, she says. Don Carlo Baubela probably says not a word, because that is the way of priests. Don Baubela dies in 1946, having lived to more than eighty. Gorizia believes that Antonio’s father has died in combat, but in whose army? On whose side? This doesn’t interest many. The times are murky.
Gorizia is a small town. Nevertheless.
On Friday, 13 April, 1945, Haya takes Antonio Toni, as usual, to the Duchessa Anna d’Aosta Asilo Nido in Via Veneto, in other words to a nursery where he is cared for by Iolanda Visintin, a friend of her mother Ada’s from elementary school days. At the front door the postman says, You have a letter. Your parents are sending you money from Milan. Sign here. When Haya turns around, Toni’s pram is empty. There is no-one walking along Via Veneto. Not a single passer-by. The morning is brisk, sunny, and the air is clear after several days of driving rain; the trees are shyly blooming in white and pink. The postman and Haya stare, appalled, at how this magic trick has happened. And so it is that, five months after his birth, Antonio Toni Tedeschi disappears, suddenly and quietly, as if he had never lived.
Oh yes, Haya searches for Antonio high and low, high and low. Gorizia is on its feet. The police investigate, dispatches fly, phones jangle, tears well, chaos reigns in her mind. The nights do not pass. The days do not pass. Time grows like yeast, time swells, then one day it overflows, pours out of Haya’s breast, clambers up on to a merry-go-round and off it flies. Nothing could be done.
History decides to hide, to go underground for a spell. I need a break, says History, turns its back on the here and now, sweeps up all its rattles, leaving a huge mess behind, a hill of rubbish, vomit everywhere, and with a satanic cackle, witch-like, it soars heavenward. On Saturday, 28 April the partisans kill Mussolini and Clara Petacci at Mezzegra and on Sunday they hang them head down on a gas pump at an Esso petrol station at Piazzale Loreto in Milan, somehow gauging this at precisely the same moment that Hitler swears his fidelity to Eva Braun “until death do us part”. On Monday, 30 April, 1945, Adolf and Eva kill themselves; Dachau is liberated by the Americans; and on Tuesday, 1 May the Yugoslav 4th Army and the Slovenian 9th Corps march into Trieste. Who has the time to look for one stolen child?