One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank

Author:Michael Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Stella had a significant dream of her own after the Germans had occupied the island and were beginning to send the Italian soldiers and officers to prisoner-of-war camps. Luigi Noferini had returned to Italy for the summer—the summer of 1943. He’d joined up with the partisans and never came back to Rhodes, because it became impossible after that point. He left behind his great friend Gennaro Tescione.

“Gennaro and I spent a lot of time together, we went out, we sang, we confided in each other, we exchanged poems… he was a poem, he wrote poems too, some of them to me. I have a whole notebook of his writing. One day maybe I will show it to you…”

Stella here retreats into one of her silences.

“I’ve told you about him before. But I’ve never told you this.”

Her dream: she had it in December 1943, on the night of the eighth to be precise. Tescione is naked, lying spread out in the piazza that is the center of the Juderia. Just that: an image, a silent image of this naked man she cared for so deeply, Gennaro Tescione.

Stella woke up anxious and, like Renée before her, ran to describe the dream to her mother, who said at once, “Go to the mezuzah and say a prayer, then run to the synagogue and say another prayer… hurry.”

Stella did as she was told, but the prayers didn’t help. The whole day she remained unsettled. Finally she took her bicycle and went to the Albergo delle Rose, where she knew that the officials on the island ate in a certain room at a certain time. Just before she reached the Piazza d’Italia she was intercepted by Tescione’s soldato attendente, who said, “Signorina Stella, I was just coming to look for you. The order came that Tescione has to leave the island and is to be sent to prison in Germany. The Germans told him that he had to present himself and he has gone home to prepare.”

“To prepare?” asked Stella.

“To pack his clothes, his things.”

An hour later, a different friend of Tescione’s, a lieutenant by the name of Nino Garzolini, came to the door to tell her that Tescione was in the hospital. Rather than agreeing to be taken to prison, he had shot himself. Later that night he died.

How was it possible, I ask Stella, that she had seen this, a version of this, in her dream?

“Life was like that in the Juderia. We felt things, rumblings, forecasts. The unseen was more… accessible to us, I suppose, maybe because we were such a close community, or maybe… I don’t know why, really. Such a thing would never happen here. I scarcely know a single person in this building, let alone here in the Village, and I’ve lived in the neighborhood for more than half a century.”

Because it was a suicide they would not allow a funeral to be held in the big church, San Giovanni; instead it was in a smaller church, San Francesco.

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