The men file in silently, all jokes forgotten as they watch the yellow light licking the clean white walls. The altar itself is still grey, the cement still wet, but the scalloped edges are delicate, curving like the inside of a seashell; it rests upon two fluted cement columns, just as Cesare had imagined. He glances across at Alberto and Aureliano: their faces are flushed, their eyes shining.
Back home in Italy, churches may be collapsing, the land may be burning, but here, in this desolate corner of the earth, they have made something sacred.
Father Ossani stands. As one, the men kneel.
The cement floor is hard and cold under Cesare’s knees. He doesn’t care – he barely feels the pain. Candlelight falls on the men’s faces; they raise their eyes, basking in the glow of it.
Father Ossani begins to recite the praise to God that marks the opening of Mass, the familiar litany a balm of dew in the desert. Cesare puts his head back and recites the words he has known since childhood, the words that acknowledge Christ’s conquest of death, and speak of Cesare’s own hope of eternal life.
Behind Father Ossani’s bowed head, the pencil sketch of Dorotea seems to shift in the flickering candlelight. And, in this moment of exultation, Cesare cannot stop himself feeling despair.
He walks forward with the other men and kneels again to accept the bread and wine that Father Ossani has brought to the chapel – a scrap of bread each and a dribble of watered-down wine.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Corporis et Sanguinus Domini.
Body and Blood of Christ.
It is somehow warming, this old bread and weak wine. Somehow filling and strengthening. When Cesare glances at Gino, there are tears on his face. His own cheeks are wet. Father Ossani’s voice quakes; his hands quiver as he makes the sign of the cross over Cesare’s face.
Body and Blood of Christ.
After Father Ossani has touched his fingers to Cesare’s forehead and blessed him, Cesare remains kneeling. He hears the other men rise, one by one, hears them leave the chapel, hears their voices fading as they walk down the dark hill towards the camp and the mess hut, where their dinner will be waiting.
He can’t make himself move. This moment feels like a miracle. How have they built a house of God on this island? How have they begun to craft something so exquisite, when the world is raging and folding in on itself?
To Cesare, it seems that if one miracle can happen, then another must be possible. He bows his head and thinks of Dorotea. He doesn’t know what he wants, but finds himself repeating her name again and again – at first in his mind, and then aloud, in a whisper, like a prayer, his whole body full of a longing that feels like worship, a longing that feels almost idolatrous.
He presses his hands to his face and tries to steady his breathing.
A scraping noise from the doorway, like a boot shifting. His breath stops in his throat and he sits up.
‘Gino?’ he says.
The sound of an intake of breath, and then of footsteps retreating down the path. Cesare stands, runs, his own footsteps echoing around the empty chapel.
‘Fermare! Stop!’ he calls, as he reaches the door. But no one is there. Just the black, blank mouth of the gathering night and, in the distance at the bottom of the hill, the glimmering lights of the camp. He feels as though the surrounding hills are a dark sea, and the chapel is the only thing keeping him afloat.
‘Dove sei?’ he whispers. ‘Where are you?’
The night replies with silence. He must have imagined the footsteps. Maybe it was some creature, a wild animal.
But as he turns to go back into the chapel, where he will blow out the candles, something on the ground catches his eye.
He crouches down. Three small jars, each filled with something.
He picks them up – they are warm as freshly laid eggs. On the altar, he opens them and, in the flickering candlelight, he sees three paints. A dark yellow, a bright red and a vibrant blue.
His instinct is to kneel, again, to thank God for this marvel. But he remembers the scrape of boots, the indrawn breath, the light footsteps running away.
Dorotea.
And as he holds the jars of paint against his lips, he turns around in the chapel, imagining the walls glowing with bright colours, imagining the creatures, brimming with life. And the central picture, above the altar, will be the face of the Madonna, surrounded by angels, her defiant gaze focused on the miraculous Child in her arms.
The night is cold, but Cesare doesn’t feel it as he begins to paint, starting with the blue cloth that surrounds the cherubs.
If one miracle can happen, then why shouldn’t everything be miraculous?
He knows, from the lectures of the artist in Moena who helped him decorate the church, that blue was once the rarest colour. Il blu oltremare was made by grinding precious lapis lazuli into a powder. It was so expensive that Michelangelo abandoned his painting The Entombment because he couldn’t afford the blue paint.
And yet here, incredibly, in this chilly northern wilderness, Cesare holds a tiny pot of blue.
If one miracle can happen . . .
He brushes it onto the plasterboard gently, delicately. The whole wall lights.
He is trembling. He must find a way to talk to her. He must find a way to thank her. He must find her.Orcadians
16 April is St Magnus’s Day. Nearly everyone in Kirkwall flocks to St Magnus’s Cathedral to remember the murdered saint. The red sandstone building has rarely been so full, even before the war and certainly not in recent years. Outside a light mizzle dampens the air, and as the minister recites the Lord’s Prayer, steam rises from the wet clothes of the congregation and ghosts upwards, towards the rose window.
‘We remember our fallen sons,’ the
