Chapter 10
My dearest A,
I am well. Can it have been four years since we saw one another?
Time here is different as one day bleeds into the next with dreaded sameness.
It seems at once forever and nothing at all.
I ramble. My mind drifts all the time to our beautiful island and its peaceful shores, rowing with you in the grottos for an afternoon and tasting the salt on your skin.
You can’t imagine how much I miss you. All I want is to go back to those simple times.
They say the tide is turning here. We know something about tides, don’t we?
Although some days, I admit, my hope is in tatters, like the flags we fly over the trenches, this letter is proof that I’m still here, still thinking of you.
Morning and evening I run my fingers over your golden stitches, praying to whatever or whoever is still listening that I may make it back to you.
Think of me as you swim in our sea, Allegra.
Think of me as you weave and dye and make lovely things.
There is nothing at all lovely here, so you must do it to carry us both, to remind the world in some small way that something beautiful remains.
Please give my regards to everyone. I treasure each letter you send.
There is no accounting for when posts may reach us.
Unless posts come by goat, it’s not easy for them to arrive.
Speaking of goats, you may think I resemble one when you finally see me: my beard is so grown, and I’m sure one hundred baths in the sea might not erase this smell.
I will kiss you despite this, so brace yourself!
All my heart, Johann
Allegra had a small stack of such letters now.
She kept them tied with a thin bracelet of byssus at the bottom of the oleander box that held her weaving sundries.
She tried decoding: when Johann wrote of goats, she was sure he was referring to mountains or some sort of rough terrain.
From this, she tried to ascertain where he might be and piece together bits of broadcasts that might tell her how bad it was where she imagined him to be.
Did this help her state of mind? She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t stop herself.
Any information, even imagined, was something to cling to.
In most ways, life went on as usual in their little community.
Boats still launched daily; sea silk still grew from the mollusks.
After the terrible incident with Susana, Allegra had learned how to keep her worry shut away in a box when she was in the water.
In fact, the water helped give her a purpose and reminded her who she was, with or without Johann.
But outside the sea, truth be told, her heart grasped constantly for the thing it didn’t have: her own small family.
Unfortunately, the war brought more than foreign soldiers and strange ships to the Sardegnan ports.
In addition to the malaria they had to contend with regularly, a new sickness had taken hold.
It gripped the lungs and swiftly left its victims so weakened that many didn’t recover.
A pall had been cast over their quaint community, and people slowly began staying at home, going out only when necessary to avoid catching this new plague that seemed to hang on like a barnacle.
In the past few months, the sickness had spread more quickly, but the government refused to close ports of entry because supplies and troop shipments were vital to the war.
Allegra walked to the post office daily despite passing more and more homes where she knew families lay ill and suffering.
She was determined to have news from Johann if he’d written, and this was where she’d been headed the day she met her brother and father coming home early from the quay.
“Papà?” she said, surprised at meeting them on the street. “Has something happened?”
Her younger brother, Tonio, walked beside her father, who had an unsteady gait, as if he’d been drinking.
His hacking cough betrayed the real reason they’d anchored early, and Allegra felt ashamed as she stepped back, holding the edge of her apron to her face.
Her father had the sickness, the influenza.
Her post office errand forgotten, Allegra led the way home, running ahead to alert her mother and sister to prepare the back room and boil water for tea and honey.
All through the night, her mother nursed her father, wetting his fevered brow, trying to get him to sit up and drink a thin broth.
It only made him cough harder. Allegra and Lora took care of everything else, brewing tea and airing out the linens.
Nothing seemed to help this flu. The sole doctor from their small community had been called to service months ago, and the midwife offered only herbal remedies that they’d already tried.
In the morning, Allegra found her mother asleep in a chair beside his bed, her head tipped forward on her chest. She could hear her father’s labored wheezing from the doorway.
She’d brought a cool glass of water in hopes of easing his throat and fever.
When she sat on the bed, the springs creaked and her mother jerked awake, but her father remained still, his eyes closed and his breath raspy.
She leaned over and took her father’s hand.
“Mamma,” she said, lifting his hand to show her.
“Blue fingertips,” she whispered. “God spare us.” It was a sign the flu was strangling him. Allegra said nothing. She rose and opened the window, letting the autumn breeze waft across the quilt. She offered the water to her mother instead, her father too weak to sip.
Five days later, he was eating soup and able to take slow steps to the garden door, but now it was Lora and Tonio who lay in bed.
Such was the randomness of the illness. Rumors from the quay were that the sickness had gained a foothold in the military, where men and animals were often packed in together.
Some soldiers said that it was claiming more lives than the artillery.
Allegra had no recent word from Johann, and she imagined him lying outdoors, shivering with fever, fighting for air, as she witnessed her sister and brother doing each day.
On an afternoon when she was forced to go to town for supplies, Allegra walked with her apron held against her face.
The sun on her skin felt intoxicating, and at the same time, a guilty pleasure amid the worry at home.
The byssus season was over, but ordinarily, she would have been swimming each afternoon, soaking in the last warmth of the sea before winter.
She craved the quiet and peace of the waves.
Lora and Tonio weren’t recovering like their father had.
Though they were younger and stronger, they seemed weaker and more exhausted by the hour.
Allegra had been dreading the moment when she’d feel the sudden fever and aches herself, but they hadn’t come.
As she selected salt, oranges, and a shank of lamb from the shop’s limited shelves, snippets of conversation between the old men outside reached her.
“Roma and Venezia are filled with corpses, they say.”
“They’re keeping it quiet in the papers and on the radio. It’s worse than we think.”
“If we get through this winter with half the town, it’ll be a miracle.”
Allegra shook her head. She didn’t want to hear such things.
How much more could they all take? Would it ever end?
She hastily paid for her items and pushed her way out the door, her head down.
She didn’t even offer a greeting to the men outside.
Instead of going straight home, she headed inland, following the road to the rabbi’s home and the church nearby.
They’d been closed for weeks, congregants too nervous to gather in crowds, but each had its own cemetery on land that stretched behind the buildings, and Allegra wanted to see the situation for herself.
As she rounded the bend and the buildings came into view, she stopped in her tracks.
The hillside that stretched for acres in the distance was dotted with mound after mound of freshly filled graves.
Their neighbors and fellow islanders. At some, a person or two stood in mourning, heads bowed, but there had been no service, no gathering.
These had been dug in haste. She turned and walked home, anxious about what she might find there.
In the end, Lora and Tonio joined those in the cemetery.
The vicious thing about this flu was how it reaped the young and strong indiscriminately.
They’d been reduced to a family of four.
On a bright fall morning in October, they, too, stood beside the earthen mounds with bowed heads.
As long as she lived, she would never forget her mother dropping to her knees in the dirt there, wailing like a wounded animal.
That image often resurfaced, unbidden, in her mind, and Allegra’s sorrow reverberated inside her like the aftershock of an earthquake.
All she’d ever known was the boisterous clamor of her sisters and brothers, and the loss of them both at once felt like her heart withered in her chest. Please let Nicholas come home, she prayed.
Let him survive. Though the news spoke of an armistice on the horizon and they’d heard of some units shipping home, the possibility of serious illnesses still remained.
For the sake of her parents and their whole family, she needed him to be safe.