Limbo by Melania G. Mazzucco Read Free Book Online

co-op fields and smash them on the highway, hurling them from the overpass. Then they’d flee on their bikes, disappearing into the spiderweb of dirt roads that used to cover the countryside. She wasn’t the only girl in the gang, but she wasn’t one of the ones who just followed the boys. She didn’t take orders from anybody. She’d talk back to her mother, or ignore her, as if her mother’s very existence constituted some kind of punishment. She dreamed of being free, strong, independent: adolescence was a prison.
    *   *   *
    Manuela battles Traian in Sniper, Battlefield, Medal of Honor. She beats him every time. He takes it badly, but refuses to give up. Every time GAME OVER blinks on the screen he requests a rematch, loses again, insists, then flies into a rage. She is unmoved. The only thing she can teach him is to learn how to lose. Only at the end—when, exhausted and incredulous, he asks for a truce—does she explain that there was a soldier at the base who did nothing during downtime but play video games. He had beaten all his comrades, and so finally he challenged his platoon leader. She couldn’t let herself be defeated by one of her men, could she? So she learned to play. And she beat him. Traian says she can wish him a merry Christmas, even see him while they talk, because he still has Skype even if he doesn’t use it anymore.
    For the months his sister was in Afghanistan, their Skype calls were the highlights of his days. But when Manuela was in Italy, he didn’t hear from her much. She came home on leave only twice a year. Sometimes she’d spend an afternoon with him. Just her, because Vanessa always had something else to do—or at least that’s what Manuela would say. As if he cared. He didn’t give a damn about Vanessa. Nor she about him, for that matter. Manuela would have him climb on the back of her motorcycle, a crazy Honda Fireblade she’d bought on installment as soon as she got her first paycheck, and they’d go for a ride. Manuela had taken on the role of teacher or mentor or something. Maybe she learned it in the army. Whatever, she took care of him. Manuela had been the one to take him to the Roman Ship Museum in Fiumicino, and to Rome, to see Trajan’s Forum. She showed him the hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-high marble column whose spiral friezes recount Trajan’s exploits, and explained that the ashes of the emperor who bore his name (or rather the other way around) were once kept there, in a golden urn. One Sunday last year, in Rome, they ran into a soldier from her company. He wasn’t in uniform, but he saluted her anyway. It made an impression on Traian that this burly, iron-pumping guy was afraid of his sister, a twig he could have snapped with one hand.
    But once she left for Bala Bayak, he heard from her more often. To him she seemed like the protagonist in one of his shoot-’em-ups—a tough marine under evil Afghan fire. He always had trouble getting through to her, but when he finally did, he never knew what to say, because he was afraid that talking about stupid things like school, grades, exams, and homework would bore someone who’s in a place where airplanes sow missiles, enemies sow explosive traps, and people are ripped to shreds every day. But Manuela was interested in those stupid things, or pretended to be, and he was happy she found the time to talk with him. He didn’t know that time was the only thing she had plenty of. Traian would brag about his military sister. At school he’d show his classmates and teachers photos of her on his cell. Manuela manning the gun on a Lince, Manuela in uniform surrounded by dozens of ragged children in front of a ruin riddled with bullet holes, Manuela, helmet on, gun raised. And since she’d been blown up, and was all over the news, his classmates had stopped calling him “Romanian.”
    â€œThanks,” Manuela says,