After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Read Free Book Online Page A

another. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore exactly when or where … or at least that’s what I tell myself. If I had to be exact, well, I couldn’t go on.
    This morning all I can think about are the clouds. I am sitting on the terrace in one of the canvas chairs. The bottom is torn, I notice, but don’t get up to change my seat. So many things are getting to be too much trouble. Even brushing my teeth sometimes seems too much. Habits are breaking up. But the clouds are beautiful. Huge snow-white cumuli. One looks like a character in a children’s cartoon with fat puffy arms and bottom. If I had grandchildren, I think I could get pleasure from watching them live, carrying on where I leave off. Now the gulls are circling in front of the clouds, white on white. Off to the left over the Palace of Justice, there is a shape that reminds me of the Jungfrau where we used to go for vacations when I was a boy, and where later, climbing with rope and pitons, I got away from the nastiness after Mussolini signed his pact with the devil. Black and white—the pure sky and the
Fascisti
down below.
    Hannah brings me tea. She has a large green shopping bag with her.
    â€œYou’re going out,” I say accusingly.
    â€œJust to the market. Don’t worry.” She turns my arm so that my watch is visible. “Not more than an hour. Back by noon and then we’ll go out.” She kisses the top of my head, caresses my hair. I have the impulse to tell her that I might not be here, wanting to frighten her, make her attend to me, watch me, cosset me. I can hear the lift going down, creaking like a freight train.
    Late in the war, when I was in the Resistance with my remaining Jewish friends, we were always afraid of not coming back from a mission. I was lucky. Once, I was in the underground with Gabriella after her brother, Primo Levi, had been deported. She was carrying a huge green bag filled with antifascist leaflets. She used to walk all over Rome distributing them. They used her a lot because she didn’t look Jewish. Unexpectedly the
Fascisti
closed the station and started to question people on the platform. One of them wanted to lookat what she had, but she said it was a present for her grandmother, and she was so much a lady, so dignified and proud … miraculously, he moved off. Back then, every moment of being alive was a victory.
    Sounds of music from down on the street. Looking over the terrace wall I see a procession right beneath me with flags, people singing as they move along Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. There is a float with a woman and two lambs. Lambs—it must be the feast day of Sant’Agnese. On her birthday lambs are shorn and their wool made into the
pallia
the pope gives his archbishops. When I was small before my mother’s death, the disaster that ended my childhood, I loved Sant’Agnese, the magnificent baroque church in Piazza Navona. I loved the intricate dance of its curves and the plunging horse plashing in Bernini’s fountain in front.
    My parents only went to church on special occasions like a baptism or a wedding, but at around the age of seven I became captivated by a book of saints’ lives that I found in my father’s library. I seem to remember it had a brief forward by Mussolini. By a strange coincidence, Mussolini had been my father’s patient as an adolescent.
Il Duce
probably gave him the book as a gift. In a way, Mussolini was responsible for my going into film. My father took us to Switzerland after the Allies landed because he didn’t want to be involved in Mussolini’s Nazi Republic, and, to amuse ourselves, my brother and I attended a series of lectures by the great director Vittorio de Sico. That was the unofficial end of our medical studies though we stayed in the program for another two years to please our father.
    How much of my life was dictated by a wish to please him! To make him proud I think I even entertained