Love and the shadow of war by Albert Russo (read aloud .txt) 📕

During our stay at the seaside, Massimo and his sister Liliana paid us a visit; they were my husband’s first cousins. He had the litheness and the nobility of a Gregory Peck, and eyes that pierced through you to the soul, whereas she, a head shorter than him, could have seemed quite pretty if she didn’t frown so much. It was only later that I understood why such a woman, still young, bore the wrinkled mask of a lady in her forties.
Unlike their parents, Massimo and Liliana had miraculously escaped from the concentration camp. Upon their return, they found their home in Pisa, luckily, untouched and unoccupied. Massimo had resumed his medical studies at the city’s reknown university and became a pediatrician with a reputation of efficiency and of great benevolence, whilst Liliana, a degree in hand, taught junior highschool, taking care, at the same time, of the household. She doted on her brother, like a mother hen. There was between them the tacit understanding that they should never speak of the horrors they had suffered during the war, and especially not of the loss of their beloved parents.
What had brought the young people to the Adriatic coast was not to have, like most holidaymakers, a good time at the sea, but to meet with their cousin. Considering Sandro like a family elder, they needed to hear his opinion on a serious and urgent matter which disturbed them profoundly.
At university, Massimo had met a young girl with whom he had fallen passionately in love. She in turn reciprocated with the same intensity, to the point where they reached the conclusion that, once they had both accomplished their studies, they would marry.
They had known each other for three years, but Massimo had always concealed their relationship to his sister, for Eva, that was her name, was Austrian. But once she got back home, with her degree, and to Massimo’s distress, the young woman wrote him a long letter, telling him that she had thought over their situation and that, despite her strong feelings for him, she believed that the inhuman treatment he and his people had been subjected to during the war, would sooner or later resurface and that he would hold her, even if only subconsciously, responsible in part for that collective tragedy, and that therefore, it would be better if he forgot her.
Distraught, Massimo telephoned her several times, and seeing that she wasn’t changing her mind, took the train for Linz, where she lived. But even that visit didn’t deter her. They were both heartbroken and cried in each other’s arms. He rode back to Italy, alone, and wearing sunglasses, even in the shade, to hide the redness of his eyes.
After that sad and bitter experience, the young doctor had a few flings, but didn’t want to hear about getting married, ever again. And he didn’t hear from Eva thereafter.
The years went by, then, one day, by a stroke of fate, the two crossed each other’s path in Florence, where Massimo had to attend a medical congress. Their encounter was electrifying. Eva had just divorced from her Viennese husband, but had conceived no children with him. This time the two lovers swore never to part again, but the young woman requested that he have a bit more patience, just a couple of months, until she could settle her affairs in Austria and rejoin him for good.
Came thus for Massimo the most crucial and difficult moment he had to confront: revealing to his sister his intention to get married. The latter received the news with shock and dismay, rekindling the accursed events of the past, like the explosion of a dormant volcano, and she actually became physically ill. It is thus with such a heavy burden, which they now both had to share, that brother and sister had asked to consult with their cousin.
They spent three days in Riccione, staying in a hotel near the pensione, and because of them, our vacation took another turn. Whether we were at the beach, as early as 9.30 in the morning, eating lunch or dinner, having a drink on the terrace of a café - breakfast was the only time that belonged to us entirely -, or even before retiring in one of our bedrooms, till late in the night, the only subject that would be discussed revolved around Massimo, his Austrian fiancée and the unbearable pain the situation inflicted on Liliana, opening old wounds she had vowed to bury in the marshes of her mind; the wretched girl had become an insomniac and she could hardly keep her eyes open, they hurt so much and got relentlessly moist, she had to wipe them every other minute or so. She also had to hold the armrests with a firm grip, lest she broke into new tears. The muscles of her neck wrought like those frightening creepers of the Cambodian jungle that looked as if they enclosed the remains of human limbs, and her veins stood out so tensely that I was afraid they would spill over and burst at the slightest movement.
So as to avoid the inquisitive looks of strangers, especially since Liliana’s shrill voice inevitably drew stares, the four of us would sidle into Massimo’s room, whilst I’d send the children off to have some fun, for the poor dears were constrained to take part in this family drama whenever we went out with them.
I begrudged Massimo and his sister to spell out their problems in front of my daughters and Daviko, exposing them to events which reflected, with such sadness and such crudeness, the darkest side of the human soul, events they could never have imagined, since, growing up in Africa, they were spared the details of the war, even during their history classes. It was one thing to read that millions of people had lost their lives during the two world conflicts, and another to face relatives who had suffered the consequences in the flesh, with all their sordid descriptions. People just didn’t want to hear about them, and even in Europe, the victims of the Holocaust who had escaped death, did all they could to close their book of horrors.
Within the walls of our room, Liliana became hysterical and hurled daggers at her brother, repeating in a long-drawn wail, like that of a wounded animal, so that the echo of her lament reverberated deep into your marrow:
“What he intends to do is nothing less than blasphemous, it is unacceptable! Why did our parents die, and with them millions of our folk? So that this massacre - the largest and most horrific mankind has ever experienced - be so quickly forgotten, erased from memory? Pushed under the carpet, like dust? And on top of it all, the father of that Boche (dirty Fritz) was a nazi officer. He wants to marry a nazi!!!”
“Eva isn’t a Boche, she’s Austrian!” retorted her brother, in a broken voice.
“Oh, a fat lot of a difference it makes!” she snapped, brushing him off with another nerve-wracking tirade no one dared interrupt. “And if that wasn’t enough, she bears the same name as Hitler’s whore; wasn’t the monster born in Austria? Champion of the Aryan race, Ha! The tragic farce! Remember how small he was, and how disgusting he appeared, dressed like a clown, with hair the color of mud? Beautiful, tall and blond! Let me laugh! Even the ugliest among the Jews was better looking than him.”
Then she would turn toward Sandro and reiterate her question: “Would you accept that one of your brothers marry the daughter of a nazi torturer? You see, it is as if they killed my parents a second time, with the difference that the crime this time would be committed by their own son.”
Massimo was perspiring, eyes downcast, shivers running up and down his spine. He let her blather, so tangled up that she was in her frantic verbiage, during five, ten minutes, then, incapable of standing it any longer, he too began to holler:
“Stop it, stop it, will you! Haven’t we both lived through the same hell in Bergen Belsen? I loved our parents as much as you did and the image of their pleading stares will burn my heart until my lasting days, so don’t play the righter of wrongs with me, ok!” He was now out of breath, sweating profusely, and before she could resume her accusations, he stretched out his arm, determined to have the upper hand. Picking up strength, he addressed her this time with a more conciliatory tone:
“Do try to understand, Eva has always loathed the nazi regime, and she doesn’t want anything to do anymore with the people who were involved with it, be they simple acquaintances, former friends of her parents, or even her own family. And ... most important of all, we want to get married, start a family, and live, live normally, like millions of couples. Is there any sin to that?”
“And he has the nerve to speak of sin!” Liliana bellowed, looking at me, the stranger, the Rhodesian Anglican! In her blind fury she forgot where I had come from, and, calling upon me as a witness, she said: “She will bear his children, what will their faith be? Christian, atheistic? They might as well be bastards.”
I didn’t know where to put myself, and poor Sandro felt doubly insulted, wasn’t he taken to task? for he never demanded that I relinquish my faith to become Jewish, and what’s more, he let me educate the girls in a Catholic school. Then too, what could be said of Daviko who was a half-caste?
“That’s not how we intend it to be!” countered Massimo, raising his voice again so that he could be heard by all of us. “Eva wishes to convert to Judaism, she’s the one who proposed it, not I, and she insists upon the fact that our future children should learn both Hebrew and the Torah, even if they go to a lay school. Actually, she is against them frequenting a Christian institution, for she refuses that they be indoctrinated by some zealous priests or by Sisters. I have not suggested any of this to her.”
“So here we go again,” exclaimed Liliana, “reverting back to the abominable Sippenschaft which the Boche have concocted so that they could hunt down the ‘Jewish vermin’! This time though it is the other way round, for even those Jews who had converted to the Christian faith were caught in their grip - like Sister Edith Stein, whom the Church will probably want to sanctify one day -, the nazis traced suspects several generations back to search for a Jewish ancestor. An eighth of the so-called poisoned blood was enough to send you to a concentration camp.”
These conversations were weighing on me to such a point that, in order to avoid them, I pretended I was having a splitting headache.
The day of the cousins’ departure was a huge relief for the whole family, in spite of the fact that Sandro’s long and compassionate interventions had no positive effect on their predicament, and that brother and sister returned to Pisa, both exhausted and still at loggerheads with each other. I