someone considerably taller than the artists responsible for the work itself. At the end of the corridor, there was a cannonball wedged into the wall, the plaster and paint spidering around it.
“That is a cannonball,” Zora said, without feeling.
“Yes,” said Fra Antun. “From a Venetian ship.” And he pointed out in the direction of the sea.
The children were working in a windowless room that looked like an ancient kitchen. There was an enormous, empty black fireplace, and a spinning wheel in a wooden case in the corner, a shelf with turn-of-the-century irons that looked like instruments with which you could club a person to death. Stone bowls were lined up in small piles along a tiered mantelpiece. The single fold of an old fishing net hung above the door; a scruffy-looking blue plush fish was trapped in it. Fra Antun’s kids sat hunched over wooden benches in the middle of the room. There were glasses of pencils and crayons scattered over the tables, and the color rose up in a glaring mess from the pages the kids were writing on, sitting on, sneezing on, folding into paper airplanes or birds. The strange thing about it all was the silence. We stood in the doorway, and we could hear the broad sound of the bell outside in the courtyard, but in the kitchen there was only sniffling and shuffling paper, the occasional rhythm of someone scratching his head. They were white-faced and small, sturdy despite their leanness. They were working with another monk, a man named Fra Parso. He had a beard and a tonsure, and was Italian. He didn’t smile at us.
We had intended to save the candy for after the injections, to win the children’s cooperation and patience, to comfort the criers and coax the breath holders, revive the fainters and bribe the ones who would go limp and eel out of your grip and onto the floor. But the silence in that room, with the little heads bowed over the flush of paper, did something to Zora, and she unstrapped the box from the top of the pile and set it down right there and announced: “We have candy.” And after that, the children were milling around her, still quiet, but milling, looking inside the cooler, walking away with bags of Kiki bonbons, which they probably hadn’t seen since the war, and some had probably never seen at all. Zora sat down on the stairs leading into the room with the tables and held out the candy, and I stood back until an even-eyed little boy with thick brown hair came up and took my hand and led me inside to look at his drawing. He was a little pale, but he looked painstakingly well cared for, and his head, which he put near me when he pointed to his picture, smelled clean. I was not surprised to find that he, too, had drawn Bis; except he had given the dog apple-green udders.
“That’s a nice dog,” I told him. From the corner of my eye, I could see Zora eyeing the leftover candy in the cooler, and then estimating how many kids were walking around with their mouths full or with wrappers in their fists, trying to work out whether she could bring them back for seconds.
“It’s Arlo’s dog,” the little boy said, without looking at me.
“Who’s Arlo?” I said.
The boy shrugged, and then wandered off to look for more candy.
I had been longing for my grandfather all day without letting myself think about it. Sitting in that hot, moist room with the dogs in all shapes and colors spread out in front of me made me remember how, for years during the war, he had collected my old things—dolls, baby clothes, books—to take to the orphanage downtown. He would take the tram there and always walk back, and when he came home I knew not to disturb him. They had lost children themselves, my grandparents: a son and a daughter, both stillborn, within a year of each other. It was another thing they never talked about, a fact I knew somehow without knowing how I’d ever heard about it, something buried so long ago, in such absolute silence, that I could go for years without remembering it. When I did, I was always stunned by the fact that they had survived it, this thing that sat between them, barricaded from everyone else, despite which they had been able to cling together, and raise my mother, and take trips, and laugh, and raise me.
I started setting up, and a little while later, her candy-distributing energy spent, Zora joined me. With the discipline of the morning lesson shattered, the kids hovered in the doorway and watched us set up in an empty room at the end of the hall. Fra Antun and a few other monks carried plastic tables up from the cellar, and we straightened out the table legs and put down cloth, stacked our boxes of injections and sterile blood vials in the corner that didn’t get sun, set the scales, got out towels and tubs and boxes of gel for the lice station, and then Zora had a fight with Fra Parso about the contraceptives we had brought to hand out to the older girls. When it was all finished, we gave the monks the supplies we had brought just in case, the thermometers and hot water bottles, a box of antibiotics and iodine and throat syrup and aspirin. The children were waiting for more candy, and Zora was getting more and more agitated by what she was now seeing as our lack of preparation. There were no papers, she had realized—the monks did not have the children’s medical histories—so we were going to have to make up the records by hand as we went.
The little boy who had drawn the dog with green udders stood, without a word, on the scale and opened his mouth obediently for the tongue depressor, tilted his head for the ear thermometer, drew deep breaths when we asked him to. He did not want to know how a stethoscope worked. Zora, always great with children despite her insistence she would never have any herself, failed to impress him with her analogy of lice as warriors, fortified and equipped for siege, while she rifled through his hair with gloved hands, finding nothing. Ivo watched with mild interest as I sawed off an ampoule tip and filled the syringe, swabbed down his arm with alcohol. When I put the needle in, he watched the thin depression on his skin deepen without flinching, and when I did his other arm he didn’t look at it at all, just sat in the green plastic chair with his hands on his lap and stared at me. We had special-ordered children’s band-aids with pictures of dolphins and a counterfeit Spider-Man in a yellow suit, and when I asked him which one he wanted he shrugged, and I gave him two for each arm, and would have given him more. I had the horrified feeling then that all the kids would be like this, oblivious to pain, unmoved in practice by the things that kids at home reacted against on principle. When the next kid kicked me in the shin, I was relieved.
The wails of children in distress are monstrously contagious: the moment one child strikes up, six more follow it, and the acoustics of the monastery halls amplified this phenomenon so that the whole place was ringing with howls of dread and indignation before we even laid hands on the second child. We had presaged what they were capable of doling out, a life-or-death struggle, an eagerness to bite. The monks, who stood by in terror for the first half hour, eventually came to our aid, pinning down legs and arms, threatening punishment, promising sweets. Beguiled by the prospect of more candy, some of the kids came and went without a fight. But in distributing most of the candy beforehand, we had made a serious tactical mistake: our only leverage in the situation had been that candy, and we watched it disappear, piece by piece, bar by bar, with an upwelling of despair, realizing that any minute now we would be down to just one or two.
At two o’clock, the young woman from the house appeared. I looked up and there she was, hovering in the doorway, and I didn’t know how long she had been standing there. She had covered her shoulders and head with a shawl to come into church, and the little girl was braced against her hip, asleep on her shoulder. When I motioned for her to enter she turned around and went back into the courtyard. By the time I got the next kid squared away and went to follow her, Fra Antun had cut her off at the door. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear what she was saying. They had found the body.
She was holding a yellowed envelope out to Fra Antun, tilting it toward him, and he had his hands up, refusing to touch it. “Afterwards,” he was saying. “Afterwards.” I waited for him to notice me in the doorway, and then I pointed to the child in the young woman’s arms. He smiled and turned the young woman to face me, took her elbow, gestured for her to follow me indoors. But she was shaking her head, backing away from him to leave, and
