Chapter 19 #2
His eyes raked over her face, the dirty smudges that surely streaked her cheeks, the shape of her chin and nose that betrayed her ancestry.
Zaneta tried not to wince as her neck twisted.
She met his gaze and slowed her breathing.
She would not be afraid of this deserter, not when her family faced worse.
A collective of voices vibrated inside her with a rising chorus: the song of the sea, reaching from the past to lend its strength to her.
Something in him seemed to shift, and he jerked his hand away as if he’d received a jolt.
He shook his head at her, and she imagined he almost laughed.
She was a pawn, nothing more, useful for now, but once her usefulness was done?
They walked silently back to the well room, but his actions had quickened something in Zaneta, a renewed resolve to see the end of this war, to swim in her sea and embrace her family again.
The helplessness and despair she’d felt for so many months in hiding had shifted.
A palpable rage had been slowly climbing its way from the depths of her, a rage built from pointless loss, deprivation, and destruction.
What could this one soldier do to her that hadn’t already been done?
As she felt the rising of this new emotion, Zaneta somehow knew it was preparing her for something, a resolve to act, to save herself and thereby preserve her family and its legacy.
As she picked her way through the scrubby plain, she let her thoughts drift.
She imagined the day—she’d been no more than six or seven—she’d swum to the cove with her sisters and her mother.
Dark clouds had drifted overhead after they’d arrived, and her mother had hurried them along, not wanting to be caught out in lightning.
At first, Zaneta dove and surfaced with the others, but when the first fat raindrops plinked divots into the water’s surface, she’d let herself sink to the sandy bottom, where she could observe the rainstorm from below.
Schools of silver-scaled fish swirled as usual—water was nothing unusual to them; it came from above, below, and everywhere.
But for Zaneta, the sound changed from simple current and waves to a kind of static hiss like trying to find a station on an old radio.
The zigzag pattern of sunlight across the rocks disappeared as the water darkened, and from where she sat, the upside-down surface of the sea looked like hammered pewter, gray and pockmarked where the raindrops left their imprints.
The soldier couldn’t follow her there, when she sank or drifted in the sea in her mind.
There, the water enfolded Zaneta like a blanket, her memory of her life before safe in its embrace.
It became a useful exercise, especially when the soldier toyed with her, demanding favors besides food or weavings.
She couldn’t run, so she floated in her imaginary sea.
Zaneta spent more and more time letting her mind wander to the waves, recalling the path to the cove, the cry of the gulls, and the darting schools of fish that moved as one.
She reminded herself that the knowledge she held, the skill her hands knew, was as secret to this man as her father’s box filled with their family treasures wedged in the cave wall.
Holding that knowledge close gave Zaneta some small comfort.
One afternoon, two months since the incident in the almond trees, as he watched her weave, stretched lazily against a wall, Zaneta noticed idly that since he’d been able to go out in the day, to linger at the shore and lift his face to the sky, his pale face had become bronzed.
She looked forward to his trips to the port for obvious reasons but also because, maybe perversely, she knew that when he returned, he would bring with him the salt smell of the sea, tiny shells and sand still plugging the treads of his boots.
“I’m thinking of a story from when I was a child,” he told her. “Watching you weave on that little loom reminded me. In German we call it Rumpelstilzchen—do you know it?”
“Tremotino,” said Zaneta. “I think it’s the same. In Italian, it means ‘little earthquake.’”
He shrugged. “No matter. There’s a girl spinning straw into gold for the king, right? It’s a strange tale. Rumpelstilzchen was a goblin, I think, some wretched creature.” He laughed. “You’d probably say that’s my role in the story. He gets rich in the end from all the gold, if I remember.”
Zaneta didn’t respond. The last time the soldier returned from the port, he’d been in a state, pacing and muttering.
The island’s port was emptying of soldiers, he said, and she detected traces of worry in his face.
Slivers and hints of information were all she could pry from him, and even that was grudgingly given.
But she gathered that by July 1943, the Allies had taken the neighbor island of Sicily.
The soldier spat in the dust every time he mentioned the treachery of Italy and its so-called partnership with Germany.
He told her Prime Minister Mussolini had been arrested, and Germany now fought against its former ally, which, it turned out, hadn’t been truly all-in from the start.
The soldier tortured her with the news he’d gathered.
Despite the weak stomach of some Italians and the pathetic pockets of resistance groups that persisted in working against it, Italy’s Jews, especially in the north, continued to be deported.
He thought surely Italy would be rid of all of them soon.
The Germans were gathering quite a population of Italian POWs as they retreated back north.
He dangled that before her, amused by the anguish in her response.
Zaneta thought she’d cracked a tooth, biting back her emotions and the words she wanted to hurl at him when he happily delivered news he expected would hurt her.
Round and round her thoughts tumbled. Did the emptying port mean the war’s end?
Could she return to her home in a month?
A week? Would that mean the return of those who’d been taken away?
All of that would have been enough to deal with, but Zaneta reasoned that her island of Sardegna floated far south of Germany, and now that the port was empty of his comrades, the soldier was alone, and he needed a way home.
He couldn’t hide his accent. He’d told her the officers so keen on relieving him of his byssus wares had gone.
Every day, Zaneta would catch him counting the lire he’d collected, assuring himself he had enough for transportation off the island.
He could hire a boat, he said, but the tricky part would be finding false papers.
Why he told her all this, she didn’t know.
It was true, the soldier was the imp in the Rumpelstilzchen story, gaining riches from her weaving of the golden thread, making bargains, and pretending to help her out of being a prisoner.
She remembered the story well. She had a mind for oral history and, like all water women, was a keeper of stories.
In the story, the girl discovered the imp’s weakness—his name—and was able to slip out of the impossible bargains she’d struck.
She knew he was a deserter. That small bit of damning information alone would certainly be enough for him to get rid of her.
He still had his gun. It would be easy enough.
The soldier’s growing desperation made him more dangerous. Zaneta was under no illusions about what awaited her once he no longer had use for her—her fate now lay in her own hands.
Seek and you shall find. Sant’Antioco had provided.
From Zaneta’s first taste of early almonds back in the spring—auspicious, considering the timing—a seed had germinated.
She recalled the bright-yellow blossoms of honeysuckle azaleas she’d seen near the almond trees and the dead one, its trunk shriveled and hollow.
“I noticed something by the almond trees,” Zaneta said. “Tonight, if we bring that empty jar from the pickles you found, I may have something to fill it.”
“A surprise? Have you been keeping a secret, Fr?ulein?” he asked.
In the moonlight, it was hard to find the tree she remembered, but finally Zaneta found it and picked her way through the low underbrush until she was close enough to give it a sharp shake. Sure enough, a low hum rose and fell inside.
“It’s a bee tree,” she told him. “There’ll be honey inside.”
“No joke?” He held his light aloft and, striking a match, lit the stout bundle of sticks and dead leaves she’d given him to carry.
“Problem is, it’s dark, so they’ll all be inside instead of out foraging. If you wave that around the entrance, it’ll help.”
The soldier took a step back. “You’re going to stick your hand in there? Ha! Be my guest, but I’ll just stand over here.” He handed her the smoking bundle and retreated.
Zaneta set her mouth in a line. Was she really surprised at his cowardice?
For the first time in a long time, she sang, slowly at first, the familiar mix of Nuragic, Hebrew, and Italian, and then, as her courage rose, a little louder to soothe the bees.
She thrust the end of the smoldering bundle into the opening in the tree trunk and held it there a few seconds.
The buzz increased inside, but only a few bees flew out to investigate.
The rest, she knew, were head-deep in open honeycomb, the smoke signaling them to eat their fill and be ready to flee.
“Have the jar ready,” she called back to the soldier.