This hut is more than a chapel. This hut is life.
‘Listen!’ Cesare says. ‘Shut your eyes and listen.’
The men look at him doubtfully. Gino raises an eyebrow, and Cesare shoots him a pleading glance. They all close their eyes. Even Stuart, the guard, stands with his arms folded and his eyes shut.
The wind gusts over the sea into the chapel. And as it escapes through the rust-crazed cracks in the roof, it whistles. A high note, at first, when a sudden fierce blast billows in, followed by a lower note as the wind drops, then a higher note again, higher still, and dropping lower once more. Softly, Cesare hums the five notes.
‘Listen,’ he whispers in Italian. ‘It sounds like the Ave Maria.’
The men look sceptical. Gino opens his mouth to object, but before he can, Cesare hums the five notes again. They rise through the echoing space, resonating off the metal walls. Unmistakably, the start of the Ave Maria.
One by one, the men’s faces break into smiles and, when the wind gusts through the chapel again, the men all hum the five notes, then continue to hum the rest of the song.
Ave Maria, Gratia plena . . . Ave Dominus–…
Even Stuart hums along – somehow this foreigner, this Orcadian, knows the tune, the Catholic prayer that feels like the sound of home to the Italian men.
Cesare’s eyes fill with tears as the men’s voices unite in the prayer, the plea. The sound rises, swirls, swells to fill the space. And in this rusted old hut, this piece of discarded war junk, there is sudden beauty. The men’s faces fill with wonder and hope as they sing. They must picture, as Cesare does, the vast, beautiful churches of home. The gleaming altar. The arching ceilings, covered with beautiful frescos.
In Cesare’s church in Moena, there is a painting of the Madonna and Child above the altar. Maria’s face is so peaceful, her eyes so full of warmth and hope, like the face on the prayer card he carries in his pocket.
He will paint the same picture above an altar here, he decides, only Maria’s face will look like Dorotea’s. He imagines her peaceful smile, as the men sing. He remembers her hand in his as they walked through the mist. Her cold fingers, which had slowly warmed in his. He hasn’t seen her since. Perhaps he’d frightened her away, somehow. Their joined hands had felt . . . like peace. It is the same feeling he has now, surrounded by song, full of music, which is swelling out of the chapel and must be echoing through the air, over these islands.
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
After the final notes have faded, they walk out into the cold, clear sunlight, blinking. Cesare feels cleansed somehow, as if the few moments in the church have drained some of the anger that has been storing over the past months. The other men’s faces are livelier too and they talk to each other – and to Stuart, in English, discussing how beautiful the church will look, how it will remind them of home.
Stuart holds up his clipboard. ‘What will you need?’
The men begin to list the bags of cement and sand, the quantities of metal and wood.
‘And paint,’ Cesare says. ‘I need paint.’
Stuart writes it down and scans the list. ‘Major Bates has said you can have spare cement from the barriers and any other scraps you can find on the ships in the bay.’ He gestures out towards Scapa Flow and the sunken vessels from the last war.
‘But,’ Stuart frowns, ‘paint may be difficult to find.’
Cesare tries not to let his disappointment show, as the glowing church in his mind fades and is replaced by a drab, gloomy building, where everything is the same colour as the barriers.
He forces a smile. ‘It is good,’ he says. ‘We start with cement. No painting yet.’
The next evening the men sit planning in the rusted hut, which will become the chapel. They have been allowed to light a fire just inside the doorway, and although sometimes the wind blows choking clouds of smoke into the structure, no one minds. They are here together, away from the itchy anxiety of the cramped sleeping huts, where fear always lurks: fear of the guards; fear of these strangers, from all over Italy, who must suddenly become something akin to family; fear of the weather; fear of the next morning and the shrill, insistent whistle that will drag you outside to face other, more brutal fears.
Among them is a slightly older man, grey-haired and a little stooped, who had come to Cesare’s hut yesterday and introduced himself as a priest.
‘Father Ossani,’ he’d said. ‘You are building a chapel, they say.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Cesare had replied.
‘Well,’ Father Ossani said, ‘I would like to lead this church, if you do not already have a priest. And I’d like to help now too.’
‘With the building?’ Cesare looked doubtfully at the small man, his skinny arms and bowed posture – they couldn’t have him working in the quarry, surely.
‘Not the building,’ Father Ossani said, ‘but if you need supplies I can apply pressure to the major. No one likes an angry priest.’ And then he’d winked.
Cesare gave a delighted laugh and assured Father Ossani that he would prove very useful.
Now the priest is here, sitting among the other men in the shell of the echoing building. At first, the men were shy with
