Chapter 15
Johann still sailed his weathered, blue fishing vessel offshore to throw his nets, but now he was wary of being accosted, some new official demanding he produce papers or a new license or other such nonsense that somehow only applied to certain pescatori.
He labored alone and anchored in the lonelier coves with fewer chances of running into other boats.
Lev and Avi, helped by Signora Franca’s relatives in Genoa, had obtained papers that changed their names, erasing the Jewish Renda surname from their records.
Worse, they had left for the mainland, hoping to make it to France, where they might join a resistance group to help relocate Jewish refugees, despite their mother’s protest. Instead, they’d been caught in a roundup and conscripted as Italian soldiers.
Italy needed every able-bodied male to do his part.
Now they were sheep in wolves’ clothing, their falsified papers the only reason they’d been assigned to a military unit instead of shipped off to one of the horrible neighborhoods or ghettos rumors were flying about.
The vise had tightened. Even with the mail and communication spottier and less reliable than usual, it began to be common knowledge that Germany was running not-so-secret work camps in Poland and elsewhere.
A Jewish settlement camp had even been established near Salerno, a day’s journey by ferry across the Tyrrhenian Sea from Sardegna, clarifying Italy’s intentions toward its own Jewish citizens, had there been any remaining doubt.
When Papà stayed out late fishing, Mamma sent Zaneta into town to check for letters.
Papà, having served in the first war and being too old now to serve, would likely not be conscripted.
They still needed to eat, and although fewer people agreed to buy from him, her father continued to work to feed them.
He’d already had to drop prices far below market value, but they could still purchase sugar and coffee if they were frugal enough.
Zaneta could tell her mother was desperate for news from the boys, though she tried not to betray her worry.
The family knew the brothers had become separated, Lev in Africa and Avi in the mess that was Greece, but they hadn’t had a letter in weeks, and the bakery radio never broadcast anything encouraging.
Her parents often spoke of the first war, when her father had soldiered for years and the flu had taken almost as many as the fighting.
She knew her mother kept remembrances of her family in a byssus pouch that never left her apron pocket.
The thought of any of her family being hurt or worse made her stomach twist.
Zaneta kept her head down when she walked alongside the port.
You never knew what sort of people docked there anymore.
Boats she’d never seen before anchored off the shore, and unfamiliar accents pricked her ears in the shops.
The once friendly and busy village had sunk into a fog of suspicion.
What did Signor Natale at the post office mean when he asked after the family?
Did he really care, or was it something else?
She hated the thin layer of fear that seemed to coat every interaction like a slimy film.
Her parents whispered late at night, when they thought Zaneta and her sisters slept.
She knew they were keeping tabs as best they could on what was happening with the war and how long they might have to make contingency plans, weighing their shrinking options of staying or trying to send Zaneta and her sisters abroad.
At daybreak, they still trekked to the rocky shore to greet the sun and offer their song to the sea.
The Pinna nobilis thrived still, ignorant of the ships full of men that sank in a blaze of twisted metal and flesh off the coast, plumes of black smoke mixing with the clouds in the impossibly blue Mediterranean sky.
Zaneta harvested byssus alongside her mother and older sisters, diving with her short scalpel in hand to cut precise strands from the mollusk shells.
There, beneath the water, where the only sound was the sea rushing in her ears, she could almost forget the world above that seemed bent on destruction.
The grasses still danced with the waves, and schools of colorful fish still darted about, their silvery scales flashing with mirrored sunlight as, cued by some invisible signal, they switched direction all at once.
Green turtles swept their fins forward and back among the grass as they swiveled their heads, searching for the choicest bites.
She wished she could remain there among the ocean’s creatures, breathing water instead of air, letting the tides carry her where they wished, away from war and worry—away.
All that long summer, Zaneta’s mother picked up the pace of her lessons.
As much as she wanted to hasten the time to when she could take the water oath, the added urgency made Zaneta’s shoulders and head ache.
It seemed they were racing toward something inevitable and catastrophic, and her mother’s response was to stuff them with all the knowledge and secrets of the byssus she could before the time came when their lessons would end.
Zaneta stumbled through the difficult process of making beautiful carmine dye with prickly pear beetles.
Her mother scolded her for being distracted while they gathered the insects, so small they looked like seeds or grit.
She squeezed too hard and crushed so many by accident, her fingers wore a bright-crimson stain.
Making the cochineal required drying thousands of insects and combining them with alum to help the color adhere to cloth.
After many clumsy attempts before her mother was satisfied, Zaneta learned how to mix and apply the cochineal dye and moved on to producing vermilion and madder.
Vermilion was her favorite because it was once almost as precious as the byssus itself, used with gold leaf for medieval manuscript capitals.
She’d read of such illuminated books before, imagining their pages and thinking, I could do that.
Someday I’ll make those colors and weave them into something beautiful, gilded with byssus.
Madder was easier, made from drying and crushing the unassuming root of a small yellowish flower, long ago used in paints in the lost city of Pompeii.
More than once, she’d noticed Luccio sailing near their cove after his workday on the big boat had finished.
He owned a green dinghy with cheerful yellow sails that he used to travel to and from the docks.
He lived farther up the coast, and Zaneta imagined their cove must take him a bit out of his way, but perhaps he enjoyed relaxing on the water once the fishing was finished.
He always raised a hand to them as he passed, shouting, “Buongiorno, Rendas!” or “Ciao, Rendas!” Once, Zaneta had been out swimming when he’d happened by, and he’d idled in circles while she treaded water.
He’d offered to take her aboard and ferry her back to the shore, but she’d waved him off, needing to complete the laps Mamma required for their swimming skills.
Late fall arrived, and still nothing from her brothers.
They were fishermen, not soldiers, after all, and Zaneta imagined the worst. The night they’d left, the family had shared a simple meal and held hands to pray.
Then the boys and their father had slipped into the family boat at sunset and sailed for Genoa with their prow lights doused.
For two days, she and her mother and sisters had held their breath, waiting for Johann’s return.
When he’d finally come through the door in the middle of the night on the second day, his eyes were rimmed red, and his shoulders sagged.
She’d never been so relieved to see anyone in her life.
Zaneta tried to shake the memory from her head, tried to unsee her parents clenched to one another, rocking and weeping at letting their sons go.
In the interest of not drawing attention to themselves, the family had stopped meeting with the other water women, stopped gathering in their makeshift synagogue.
Zaneta felt their lives shrinking as they tried to blend into the scenery.
They were like the wily octopus she’d witnessed on a dive one morning.
She’d come upon a shelf of rock when a movement caught the corner of her eye.
Zaneta had paused to scan the rock and had seen a stone crab acting strangely, darting and retreating.
When she’d moved closer, the camouflaged octopus had appeared from nowhere, crab in one of its tentacles, and she’d drawn back, startled.
A master of disguise, the creature had all but become part of the rock, completely invisible.
Unlike the octopus, Zaneta knew people weren’t fooled by her family’s withdrawal from the community.
She knew they must stand out like the black jackdaws against a cerulean sky.
Mamma spoke about going up to the plains where the wild horses grazed, maybe disappearing for real for a time, so that loose-lipped people in the village might forget about the women who wove golden thread and knew Hebrew.
She went so far as to pack a bag, filling it with enough to last awhile.
As part of their apprenticeship, they were all able to withstand hunger and thirst, hunt for themselves, and find provisions from the land, but her mother left the bag by the back door, eyeing it like a talisman every so often, as if merely having it on hand might fend off the need to use it.