Of course my answer was just another disguise for yes. There were many nights when I had dreamed myself into the wide open spaces of my old life and the people who were now just shadows. Each year he would ask me again and so, four years later, your father borrowed just enough money for the trip from his brother in Verona. You wil recal the time—you stayed with Paoli's family while we took the train al the way from Bolzano. We went clear across two countries and stopped in Vienna, your mother grown old in her headscarf, your father in his threadbare suit. The streets were so clean that they surprised me with the occasional piece of litter, a cigarette butt, a bottle cap. We bought our tickets for Bratislava but stayed one night in what was once a fine hotel on a street near the railway station, Kolschitzkygasse, where the streetlamps seemed to curtsy. There was a mirror on the dressing room table over which I draped the bedcover in order not to look at our reflections. We lay completely stil . Your father had bought me an array of colored beads, which I intertwined around my waist for a belt, it was the closest I wore to the clothes of my old life. I cinched down on the beads and could hear the glass chipping as I tightened. The hotel was two lifetimes old. The dim hum of elevator cables sounded and the front desk bel clanged. There was cornicework high in the corners. Molding a handspan beneath the waterstains. I made pictures from the col ision of stains and created my old self there. I stil was not sure if I could ever make the journey back to the place I had been a child.
Enrico did not say a word when I stepped down off the train the fol owing day and shook my head, saying: Sorry.
He turned his hat inside out and punched a smal dent in it, and I knew ful wel that he was thinking of the money he had borrowed. We walked through the city of Vienna like two old piano notes floating, and later that evening took a bus out to the countryside for an hour or more, to Braunsberg. We walked up the hil overlooking the Danube and in the distance I could see the towers of Bratislava standing gray against the skyline. It looked like a thing made of child's building blocks, my old country. The river curled away from it. The wind blew strong. Enrico squeezed my hand and did not ask me what I was thinking of, but I turned away, I did not know an answer. It seemed to me that our lives, though mostly gone and getting smal er, were stil large with doubt. The distant towers went in and out of cloud shadow. I held Enrico's arm and leaned against his shoulder. He spoke my name and that was al .
I could not go back there, not then, I could not make myself cross that river, it was too difficult for me, and he walked me back down the steep hil with his arm around me, and I thought us both a part of the silence.
The next morning we stood in the train station. I was tempted to make the journey as I watched the letters clacking on the signboards, but instead we took the train in the direction of what I could, I suppose, now cal home. Your father laid his head against my shoulder and slept, he sounded for al the world like an old horse wheezing. Later he found me a berth on the train and put me to sleep and he climbed up beside me. That whole journey back to Italy, I wondered what I had missed, or what, perhaps, it was better to have missed. I feared my old country would be the same, and yet I also feared it would be terribly changed. How can I explain that there are times we hold on, even to the terrors? But if I speak the truth, it would have been the lake that I would have visited, along the road to Presov, the dark groves where we played the harps, and the smal laneway where we danced at Conka's wedding—those days shone in my head like a bright coin.
There are times I stil miss the crowded days and being old does not shelter me from sadness. Once I was guilty of thinking that only good things could happen; then I was guilty of thinking they would never happen again. Now I wait and make no judgment. You ask what it is that I love? I love the recol ection of Paoli each time I hear the shop bel sound. I love the dark coffee brewed up by Paoli's daughter, Renata, who sits at the counter in her dangling earrings and painted fingernails. I love the accordionist, Franz, in the cafe corner shielding his bad teeth with his hand. I love the men who argue about the value of things they don't real y like. The children who stil put playing cards in the spokes of their wheels. The whistle of skis.
The tourists who climb out of their cars and hold a hand to their eyes and then climb back in again, blind. The blue wool mittens of the children. Their laughter as they run down the street. I love that in the orchards the fruit trees grow out of mud. I love the strol through woods in autumn. The deer walking up the narrow switchbacks, the lowering of their heads to drink, the black center of their very eyes. I love the wind when it blows down from the peaks. The young men in open ragged shirts down by the petrol station. The fires that burn in homemade stoves. The brass catches worn on the doorway. The old church where roofbeams lie noiselessly in rubble, and even the new church, though not its mechanical bel . I love the rol top desk where the papers have not changed. I love to recal when you were one year old and you took your first steps and you fel on your bottom and cried, surprised at the hardness of the wood floor. The first stomp of your tomboy foot. The day you came in with the firewood and stood in the doorway, almost tal er than I, and you said that you would be leaving soon, and I asked where and you replied to me: Exactly. I love the dawn of al these questions, they come around again and again and again. I love the winters that have crossed me and even the angry weather that has passed over us al , and our times of silence on those days when Enrico was not home, when I was left to wait for the click of the latch and he came in, shaking snow or rain or pol en off his boots.
It is good, daughter, to be prepared for surprise. This is a place where a slant snowfal can arrive at any time —even in summer I have seen flakes fal , fol owed by gales of light and dark. It is strange to think how far my life has come, having discovered enough beauty that it stil astounds me.
Enrico once told me of a time when he was just a boy, no more than five years old, the sort who was told to wear navy-blue calzoncini and long white kneesocks. He ran around the courtyard of his Verona home, its beautiful garden with large ferns and white brick and fountains and giant pots of towering plants that his mother's gardener tended to. In the far corner of the garden there stood a large brass statue of three chimpanzees: one with its hands over its eyes, one with its hands over its ears, one with its hands over its mouth. Beneath them was a smal wel of a pond where water gurgled in and out. Enrico used to sit there and pass his days.
I sometimes stil see myself as a child and how much I was loved and how much I loved in return and in my childish heart I was sure it would never end, but I did not know what to do with such love and I relinquished it. I put my hand over my mouth, my ears, my eyes, but I have come around again, and I stil cal myself black even though I have rol ed around in flour. I have always been with my people even though they have not been with me.
He never much asked me about my past, your father, so I told him wil ingly, I always thought that he, and you, were the only ones to whom I could trust these words of mine, the dark ink of what they have said.
SINCE BY THE BONES THEY BROKE WE CAN TELL NEW WEATHER: WHAT WE SAW UNDER THE HLINKAS IN THE YEARS ‘42 AND
‘43
