Sally Brady's Italian Adventure: a Novel by Christina Lynch

Author:Christina Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Prague

1942

Alessandro

It looked like the snow was falling only in the broad cones under the streetlamps, not in the darkness beyond, but of course it was piling up on everything—the parked cars, the tanks, the concrete barricades, and Alessandro’s own head. He was standing in Wenceslas Square, holding a gun, making sure no one expressed any political opinions. At his back was the massive equestrian statue of the saint, the patron of Bohemia. He knew this square, or rather this very long rectangle, had been the traditional site of political gatherings and protests for centuries. The Germans knew that if there was any place in Prague the Czechs would choose to protest the Nazi knee on their necks, again, this was it.

Trains were leaving Prague every day, taking the city’s Jews to a fortress called Terezin.

He had to get out of this war.

A Panzer rumbled past in the nightly show of force. It blared the German national anthem from speakers on the front. Six German soldiers sat on top, pointing their guns at anyone left on the street. They passed a bottle around, then one of them threw it through a shop window with a loud smash. Alessandro remembered something a professor had said about how as societies collapse, they spend more and more on war, police, and prisons. That professor had then disappeared. Alessandro had sat in the lecture hall that first semester, a skinny kid with wild hair, envisioning a future for himself as a professor or an artist, or a writer like his father. He would travel the world and live at Belsederino. Raise a family there. He was pretty sure he had imagined actual butterflies. That it would be an existence of peace and love was a given. By the end of that year, that imagined halcyon future was obliterated. Less than four years later, he was the police, and the war, and the prison. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a butterfly.

Bundled figures hurried along the sidewalks. It was nearly eight, when curfew began. The snow had quieted the city.

Because the suicide bomber got through the checkpoint, the Germans came and took Carlo away. The Italians assumed they shot him. No one talked about it. Alessandro felt a poisonous mix of fear and guilt. He didn’t eat. He didn’t speak to anyone. He did his guard duty, he marched from the embassy or his assigned checkpoint to the barracks in the pensione and back. He didn’t even read, he just lay in his narrow bed staring at the ceiling. And then, on the second night, just before eleven, a trumpet suddenly blared through the hotel. He jumped out of bed and mustered in the hallway for one of the periodic inspections they were subject to. As his commanding officer stormed through the rooms, overturning furniture and berating the men, Alessandro recognized what the trumpeter was playing. It was The Radetzky March. He knew the piece well. Strauss composed it to celebrate the squelching of northern Italy’s attempt to remove itself from Austrian dominion in the 1800s.

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