Tuscan Rose (43 page)

‘The Germans are bluffing,’ Gina assured her. ‘They can’t afford to alienate the Italian people otherwise everyone will turn against them.’

Rosa had heard shots ringing out across the city the previous night. She thought of the stories she had heard from the Allied
prisoners who had fought in France. The first people the Germans usually shot in reprisal for resistance activity were those already captive in prison. There were only a few days left until Antonio was released from Le Murate. Rosa was sure she would not be able to breathe properly until he was free.

Besides reinstating fascist rule, the Germans brought their Nazi racial laws into practice. After Italy’s milder racial laws had been introduced, records were kept of Jews living in Florence including those citizens of Jewish parentage. Because of Nonno’s conversion, Rosa wasn’t sure if Antonio was included in those records or not. But she didn’t want to take any chances. The Italian soldiers returning from the east spread horror stories of mass killings of Jews.

‘As you know we have a crypt under the convent,’ Madre Maddalena told Rosa when she made her weekly visit. ‘We have been approached by Rabbi Cassuto and have agreed to take several Jewish women and children and hide them there. When your husband is released from prison you can bring him as well.’

Rosa had never visited the crypt. She remembered as a curious child opening the door in the chapel that led to it and creeping down the cool and dark stairway. But she had been caught by Suor Dorotea who had scolded her so harshly that she had never ventured there again.

‘Thank you,’ said Rosa. She was grateful to Madre Maddalena because helping Jews put the convent in danger. Hiding Antonio amongst the dead was not the homecoming Rosa had imagined for him, but there was nothing else to be done.

Later that afternoon, two German officers arrived at the prisoner-of-war hospital. Rosa was changing the sheets on the New Zealander’s bed while Fiamma was working in the laundry and Gina was taking temperatures and checking dressings. Rosa almost flipped the New Zealander off the bed when she saw the two Germans looking at her. One was in his late twenties, the other slightly older. They both had the same flawless skin and greyblue eyes. If not for the age difference, they could have been twins.

‘Who is in charge of this hospital?’ the first officer asked in Italian.

‘I am,’ said Gina, coming forward.

The officer frowned. ‘Where is the doctor? Where are the guards?’

‘They left a few days ago to join the militia,’ said Gina.

She glanced at Rosa, who thought it was an excellent lie. She just hoped that the officers wouldn’t check up on it.

‘So who is guarding these men?’ the officer asked.

He had a self-important air about him, but he spoke politely. Was his courtesy sincere or was it to trick them into revealing something? The second officer said nothing but looked around the room. Rosa wondered if it was because he couldn’t speak Italian or because he was searching for something his fellow officer might miss.

‘There is no need to guard these men,’ Gina replied.

The officers glanced at the New Zealander’s stumps and understanding dawned in their eyes. They exchanged a look and it seemed as if they were on the verge of leaving when the second officer pointed out the empty beds.

‘And the others? They have fled? You helped them escape?’ he asked Gina in English. Gina didn’t understand him. He turned to Rosa.

‘They were taken to the prisoner-of-war camp at Laterina once they were well,’ Rosa said in Italian. She could have answered the question in English or German, but then Gina would not have understood and the soldiers might have cross-examined them.

The two officers stared at Rosa. She did her best not to flinch.

‘Good!’ said the first officer after a pause. ‘That is all for now then.’ The men left.

‘This place is surprising well kept,’ Rosa heard the second officer say to the first as they headed for the stairwell. ‘Compared to the other shitholes for hospitals we’ve seen.’

Rosa had been struck by the Germans’ proud posture and their assuredness. They gave the impression that Germany was sure to win
the war. It occurred to her that Hitler had produced exactly the kind of soldiers he needed for European domination. The other thing she had noticed was the quality of the officers’ uniforms and boots. Rosa thought of the men in the forest, including Lieutenant Barrett whose uniform was frayed after so many battles. Where could the partisans get weapons and equipment to match those of the Germans? She admired the courage of the men who had taken to the hills, but winter was coming and she feared that they were doomed.

The patients wanted to know what the Germans had said. Rosa explained it to them.

‘That was quick thinking about the camp at Laterina,’ said one of the Canadians, giving Rosa a nod of admiration. ‘You would make a good spy—or a partisan.’

‘Please don’t even joke about it,’ Rosa told him.

A few days later, Rosa, Gina and Fiamma were surprised to find that Red Cross parcels had arrived for the Allied soldiers at the hospital. They distributed the tins of food and packets of tea to the patients.

‘It’s like Christmas,’ said Rosa, opening a tin of fruit for the New Zealander and handing him a spoon.

‘You have some first,’ he told her. ‘I know that you have been giving your rations to me.’

Rosa squeezed his arm. Although his name was Alan, she always thought of him as ‘the New Zealander’. She had trouble understanding him sometimes but she was as fond of him as an older sister would be of a younger brother.

There were no personal letters in the packages. Those had been removed. Although Mussolini had been rescued he was only the figurehead for the puppet government. It was the Germans who ran Italy now. All correspondence was banned. Rosa would not hear from her children now. She would rather have done without food than letters.

Rosa didn’t sleep that night. She could hear bombing in the distance and gunfire. She had never been fond of fireworks
displays, and this noise was far worse. The sound rang in her ears. With each explosion or crack of gunfire, she thought of the people who were being maimed and killed.

She visited the crypt with Madre Maddalena the next morning and was glad to find it wasn’t as macabre as she had feared. The tombs were sealed and the area was covered in mosaic tiles. The nuns had set up camp beds behind vaults and secreted blankets and supplies in spaces in the walls. It was cold, however, and Rosa knew it would be an icebox in the winter. Afterwards, she rushed to the hospital to help with lunch and change bedding. She was due to pick up Antonio in the late afternoon. The inspector guard at Le Murate had told her that he would not be released unless she was present. ‘You must take him within twenty-four hours to register for anything the Repubblica Sociale Italiana requires him to do.’ Rosa was surprised that the new administration did not force prisoners to do that on release themselves, but was glad for it. She had no intention of taking Antonio anywhere except straight to the convent.

Rosa was putting the sheets in the laundry bag when a commotion broke out on the street in front of the hospital. She and Gina rushed to the window. They saw people with their hands on their heads being loaded at gunpoint by German soldiers onto a lorry. The prisoners looked like ordinary housewives and shopkeepers.

‘It’s a round-up!’ said Fiamma, rushing in from the stairwell. She dropped the potatoes she had gone out to buy on a table. ‘Some partisans attacked a convoy and now the Germans say they are going to hang thirty people in the Piazza della Signoria.’

One of the British soldiers moaned. Gina left the window to attend to him. Rosa saw a child, a girl of no more than ten or eleven, being pushed up onto the truck. She covered her mouth in horror.

‘You’d better get away from the window,’ Fiamma told her.

She was moving to lock the door to the stairwell when there was a rumble of footsteps. German soldiers stormed into the ward. They were nothing like the calm, methodical German officers who
had come the week before. They were wild-eyed and their belts were laden with pistols and grenades. Rosa saw the SS symbols on their lapels.

Their officer shouted something in German that Rosa didn’t understand. The nurses froze to the spot. He grabbed Fiamma and punched her in the face. She went sprawling onto the floor. For a terrifying moment Rosa thought the soldiers intended to rape her.

‘Let her go,’ shouted Gina. ‘We are nurses.’

‘You will come with us now,’ the officer told Gina in Italian.

Rosa struggled to breathe. Had the Germans come to round them up too? The situation was so surreal that she didn’t even feel fear for herself. She was more concerned about the patients. Who would take care of them if she, Gina and Fiamma weren’t there? They’d be left to starve or die of infection.

‘We can’t leave these men,’ she told the officer in German. ‘We are the only staff at this hospital.’

The officer flashed his eyes at Rosa. She saw the killer instinct in them. It was like staring into the soul of a beast. Then, to her surprise, he grinned.

‘You speak German? I am impressed,’ he said, stepping towards her.

Rosa flinched from the smell of wine on his breath but was even more unnerved by his sudden change of mood. She didn’t like the way he was smiling.

‘Such dedicated nurses,’ the officer said, looking around the room. ‘Albeit for the enemy.’

All the patients were awake now, looking nervously at the soldiers. Rosa felt sorry for them. None of them spoke German. They didn’t know what was going on. She understood something of the powerlessness the men had felt after their amputations and debilitating illnesses. They had once been the strongest and bravest of their fighting forces; now they were helpless, with only three women to protect them.

The German officer cocked his head. ‘I am impressed by your having learnt the fatherland’s language and
very
impressed by
your concern for these men,’ he told Rosa. ‘I want to do something for you.’

Rosa swallowed. The sense of menace that emanated from the officer turned her blood to ice. He was like a circling shark. She tried to see the source of him but all that came back to her was darkness.

The officer turned to his soldiers. ‘I think we should relieve this good nurse of her worries,’ he said.

Rosa saw him reach for his pistol and cried out. The soldiers opened fire on the patients, shooting them in their beds. The officer fired at the New Zealander, hitting him in the chest. Gina tried to shield the British soldier she was standing next to and both were shot in the face. Gina’s lifeless body slipped to the floor. Fiamma’s screams dissolved into sobs when the gunfire ceased. Within seconds the ward that the nurses had taken pride in keeping orderly was blood-spattered and bullet-ridden; the patients they had strived to keep alive were all dead. Rosa collapsed to her knees. The floor was covered in blood. She nearly fainted but was lifted roughly by one of the soldiers.

‘Get your nurses’ kits!’ the officer shouted at Rosa and Fiamma. ‘Put everything into them that you’ve been wasting on these soldiers.’

Rosa’s hands trembled as she emptied the contents of the supply cabinet into the bags Fiamma held open for her. Fiamma looked haggard, as if she had aged ten years in ten minutes. Rosa saw that Fiamma’s uniform was wet and then realised that her own stockings were damp too. They had urinated on themselves from the fright, but Rosa was too terrified to care about the humiliation. She dropped a vial of morphine. Luckily Fiamma caught it before it hit the ground, otherwise Rosa was sure the soldier who was guarding them would have shot her. Morphine was almost impossible to obtain. Gina had bought some vials on the black market and they were as precious as gold. Rosa stuffed everything they had collected into the bags, disgusted to think it was all going to be used by the enemy.

She heard the soldiers dragging the bodies of Gina and the patients down the stairs. Shooting defenceless prisoners of war and a nurse was a crime the officer might have problems justifying to his superiors.

When the soldier guarding them saw that Rosa and Fiamma had taken everything from the cabinet, he ordered them down the stairs. Rosa nearly slipped on one of the pools of blood on the floor. There was no sign of the lorry outside. Instead the women were pushed into an open-topped Mercedes. One of the soldiers jumped into the front seat next to the driver while the officer climbed in the back with Rosa and Fiamma, aiming his gun at them.

They were driven back towards the centre of Florence then in the direction of the Cimitero degli Inglesi. People on the streets stared in horror at the two captive nurses but quickly looked away. Rosa was convinced that she and Fiamma were going to be raped or shot—perhaps both. The onlookers probably assumed that too. The car turned onto the road to Fiesole. Rosa recognised the villa with the pietra serena columns that she had seen the day Giuseppe had driven her from the convent to her position in the Scarfiotti household. The windows were boarded up now and the magnolia and olive trees were dead. Fiamma reached for Rosa’s hand and squeezed her fingers. Fiamma’s touch, despite the horrific circumstances, comforted her. Rosa had always been closer to Gina, finding Fiamma’s pessimism too intense at times. Now she experienced a profound love for Fiamma; a spiritual connection as they were both being driven to their deaths.

Rosa caught glimpses of Florence as the car sped uphill and raced around the hairpin bends. She would never see her city again. She wondered what would happen to Antonio now and prayed for his safety. Her mind drifted to her children. She had been upset to have missed their spurts of development. Now, she realised, she was going to miss every milestone in their lives. She would not be there. Lorenzo and Giorgio were young, they might forget her and think of Renata as their mother. It would be better
that way, Rosa thought. She would rather be forgotten than be a source of pain to her sons. Then Sibilla’s beautiful face loomed before her. Sibilla would not forget her mother. They had been through too much together. Rosa closed her eyes and hoped that her children would sense her love for them. She would have given anything for one more cherished moment in their presence.