The Sleeping Nymph, page 41
She followed the sound of the boy’s crying, Smoky’s warm, soft body pressing against her leg with every step she took, the clicking of her cane following the rhythm of her heart. Having reached the source of the terrified sobbing, she sat down next to him, feeling her way with her hands.
“They told me you’re the one who found the skeleton,” she said while Parisi spoke to the boy’s parents. “That was lucky!”
The boy sniffled.
“Aren’t you scared of skeletons?” he asked her.
“Not really. They’re already dead anyway. And they’re funny.”
“Really?”
He didn’t seem convinced. She could tell from his voice.
“I live with one, you know. He’s called Mr. Skinny.”
She heard him laugh in delight and horror combined.
“Why have you got a skeleton at home?” he asked her.
“Well, actually, it’s only a skull. But he helps me to find others like him.”
She heard the boy gasp in amazement.
“Can he talk?” he asked her.
“Of course he can—in a way. You’ve got to listen very carefully if you want to hear what he’s saying.”
Blanca leaned toward the boy.
“They just want to be found, you know,” she confided. “Sometimes they’ve gotten lost and never found their way home. Sometimes someone’s hurt them and hidden them away so no one will ever find out.”
“Are they sad?”
“Very.”
“So maybe that skeleton hand was just trying to wave at me.”
“I’m sure it was. And it was happy you found it.”
“It scared me, though.”
Blanca felt a warm tear land on her hand with a soft splash.
“That’s normal. I was scared too, at first,” she said reassuringly.
“And then what happened?”
Blanca had never told anyone what had compelled her one day to start “searching”—searching for bodies, that is. But surely if there was someone she could tell, it was this little boy crying beside her.
“Is anyone listening to us?” she asked him.
“No. They’re talking to each other.”
“I’ve been looking for someone I really care about,” she whispered into his ear. “She’s out there somewhere, waiting for me.”
“Do you love her?”
“I always will.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s my mom.”
“I suppose your mommy can’t scare you,” said the boy after a moment’s pause.
His voice was stronger now and almost clear of any traces of fear.
“No, she can’t. And neither can the others—not when they’re all so dried out and crumbly!”
The boy laughed again and Blanca knew then that he wouldn’t ever cry again about what he’d seen in the woods. Now, it was his turn to whisper in her ear.
“Are you sure?” she replied, surprised.
“Yes!”
“Ready?” Parisi asked her warmly, putting his hand on her shoulder.
Now that the air had been cleared of the child’s terror, she was.
“We’ve had the ropes laid out and I’ll always be by your side,” he told her. “But tell me if I get in your way.”
Blanca stood up and felt for Smoky’s leash. His tail kept whipping back and forth against her leg. He was excited; he couldn’t wait for his favorite game to begin.
“I’ve just got one more request,” she murmured, unsure if it was all right for her to make it.
“Whatever you need.”
“I’d like to take the boy with me.”
Blanca’s world wasn’t just the dark, obstacle-ridden bubble everyone imagined it to be. The space around her spoke to her in the language of matter, made of shapes and proportions, density and emptiness, distances and patterns. Its breath, warm or cool, wrote messages on her skin made out of shivers or beads of sweat. Keeping her balance meant engaging in a perpetual dance with sudden inclines and sloping surfaces.
To anyone else, a road was either straight or curved. To her, it was thousands of things besides that: slanted, undulating, coarse if she got too close to the edge of the lane, soft and sticky if the asphalt was fresh or the heat too unforgiving. Her feet could feel the change when she stepped onto a painted zebra crossing, each stripe like the key of a piano playing a tune her mind could hear. It made sense, given black and white were the only colors she could still remember.
Her nose could smell the difference between a downtown alley and a suburban road, and—whenever she happened to walk past a bakery—the difference between a wood oven and an electric one: it was a question of ingredients, of temperatures and materials.
The forest was an infinitely more complex system, alive and pulsating.
“This is where I saw my sister,” Luca was telling her now.
Blanca stretched out her hand and her palm cradled the ticklish softness of leaves.
“I can’t remember which direction I came from,” the boy told her. “I was running.”
Blanca turned her face upward to catch a current of cooler air that seemed to be flowing from the soil up, carrying moisture. She had felt the ground slide almost imperceptibly lower beneath her feet.
“We’re coming up to a hollow, an incline of some sort,” she said.
The map on which Parisi had made various notes on the surrounding terrain crackled in his hands.
“We are,” he confirmed. “It’s about ten steps ahead of us.”
“You said you fell,” Blanca said to Luca. “Maybe that’s where it happened.”
“We’re about halfway to where he disappeared,” Parisi calculated.
Blanca nodded.
“We’re close to the site now,” she said.
She could feel it from the energy emanating from Smoky.
The boy pressed himself closer to her.
“Don’t go there,” he whispered. “It’s dark.”
She stroked his cheek and loosened his grip on her waist.
“I live in the dark,” she replied.
“What are you doing? Stop,” said Parisi, holding her back. “I’ll go first.”
“We need to let Smoky get on with it.”
“I am going first.”
Parisi summoned two colleagues and told them to look after the boy.
“You wait for us right here,” he told him, his sternness leavened with a smile.
Blanca was struggling to hold Smoky back. She could feel him quivering with excitement and restlessness. The wolf still nestled inside him seemed suddenly desperate to leap out, awakened by a powerful spell.
The sound of Parisi’s footsteps grew farther away. Blanca could hear him climbing down into the hollow.
The wind picked up again and brought with it a new smell. Smoky growled and barked, then growled again. Blanca took a deep breath. The smell reminded her of something familiar.
Metal. Rust. A forest.
Smoky’s howls confirmed that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
Metal. Rust. A forest.
About a year ago, they had been contacted by the family of a man who’d been missing for months, lost in the mountains. His family were desperate and hoped at least to be able to give him a proper burial.
Blanca had agreed to help. She’d found the man’s body, or what remained of it, still caught in the trap he’d been setting up. A poacher.
Metal. Rust. Death.
“Stop!” she yelled to Parisi,
But then she put her foot in the wrong place and up became down, then up again, as she tumbled to the ground in a cloud of dirt, twigs and rocks.
She came to a stop at the bottom of the slope, buried in a pile of earth, Smoky barking in anguish.
Parisi was by her side immediately, brushing the rocks off her legs.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
His voice was no longer brusque, nor reassuring, nor friendly. It was terrified.
“Traps,” was all she managed to say, still disoriented.
“There aren’t any traps,” he said.
But when he flung one of the rocks away, the forest suddenly echoed with the sound of a metal trap snapping shut.
“Fuck!”
“A poacher,” said Blanca, feeling her legs. She wasn’t in pain, but her whole body was shaking. “He must have laid more.”
She got back to her feet and felt Parisi’s hand clasping her elbow.
“I’m sure you’re right, but it wasn’t a poacher. Whoever it was, they didn’t want us going any farther. We must be close.”
Smoky emitted a howl that made a shiver run through Blanca’s spine.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she said by way of apology.
He’d never behaved this way before, not when they were practicing, and not during any of their past searches, either. He kept pushing his nose into her hand, lifting it up again and again.
“I know what it is,” said Parisi. “Don’t move. There’s a skull staring up at me from between your feet.”
99
Outside Krisnja’s house, there was no evidence of any kind of trouble. It was a calm evening and the crickets were chirping already. The car Marini had arrived in was parked reassuringly on the side of the road.
But all of the shutters were closed, suffusing the building with an aura of darkness and a sense of deafening loneliness. Like some remote outpost, the house was closed off to the world.
Was this the beginning of a siege? Or was it the deathly quiet that followed one? All of a sudden, Teresa was afraid.
She’d told the officers to park their cars farther away and they had all approached the house on foot. Now, they stood observing it from across the road.
You have to go inside. That’s the only way you’ll know what awaits you across the threshold.
But she stayed where she was and tried Marini’s phone again. After a brief silence, she heard it ring—not just out of her mobile, but also in the space that separated her from the building.
Marini was in there and he couldn’t answer his phone.
“The district attorney and Gardini are on their way,” de Carli informed her.
This was of little comfort to Teresa. There wasn’t anything they could do that she couldn’t do herself.
Except, perhaps, make the right decisions.
“I’m going in,” she said, the words tumbling out of her of their own volition.
“They told us to wait, Superintendent.”
They told us to wait, Teresa thought tetchily. Impossible.
They heard the sound of an engine rumbling and turned around. It was an environmental protection agency jeep, from which Parisi soon emerged, helping Blanca down with him.
“We found Ewa’s remains,” they said almost in unison.
Teresa hadn’t expected such swift results.
“Are you sure it’s her?”
“There were signs of knee replacement surgery in the left leg,” Parisi replied. “And we found something else, too.”
He handed her a silver necklace, covered in dirt and with some of the links in its chain bent out of shape. The pendant was rather unusual, to say the least: it was a bullet shell, roughly two inches long. The steel casing still bore traces of its original green coloring. The base was flat and inscribed with the unique code that signaled its origins. At the bottom of the circle, the letter B, pointing to the firearms factory in Bologna, followed by two digits denoting the year of production: 1942.
“A 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano,” said Parisi.
It was standard-issue ammunition for the Italian army during both world wars and all the way through to the sixties, but to Teresa, right now, it was much more than that: it was a clue, an insight into the mind of the person who had held on to it until death and beyond.
“It was still around Ewa’s neck,” said Blanca, voicing Teresa’s thoughts.
That necklace was an amulet, a totem Ewa had kept forever close to her heart. Teresa thought of the rifle in Francesco’s hands spitting that shell out after it fired the shot that hit the German soldier and she saw Ewa retrieve it, hold on to it like a relic, because after all, that bullet had changed her life: it had introduced her to the Virgen Nigra. Teresa finally understood what it was about Andrian’s painting of the two children that had always subconsciously disturbed her. It was the expression on the little girl’s face: not one of fear, as she had previously thought, but of excitement. Of evil. The mean, spiteful look of a young witch who had already understood what she needed to do in order to preserve her faith.
Teresa knew now what the sign drawn next to Ewa’s symbol on her arm meant. A cross inside a circle: the ballistic symbol used by NATO to denote ammunition used by its member countries. It was absent from the shell she now held in her hands because there had been no NATO yet at the time that bullet was fired, but Teresa had used it anyway to send herself a very clear message: in practice, it had been Ewa who had fired the shot that day, not Francesco. It was the only explanation for what Teresa had drawn on her skin. Ewa knew that the rifle was loaded—and she didn’t tell her brother.
Cam—tormented, perhaps, by the same remorse that had devoured Francesco—had told his grandson, Alessandro, about it.
And finally, Teresa remembered what Alessandro had told her.
On that day seventy years ago, Ewa had tasted the feeling of omnipotence that comes with taking a human life. It was the same taste she had savored the night on which Aniza had disappeared.
100
April 20, 1945
The violin had stopped playing, but the oppressive aura with which it had shrouded the forest still lingered in the silence.
Aniza hadn’t expected that face to emerge from among the trees. She looked around, concerned that Alessio might also appear and that their secret would be revealed, but there was no trace of him yet. So she smiled and held out her hand.
“Why are you here?” she asked in the language of her ancestors.
The embrace was so strong that it took her breath away. So strong that it hurt.
There was something strange about the way Ewa had flung herself into Aniza’s arms. Almost as if she’d wanted to knock her over. Some instinct in Aniza warned her that something was wrong, she pushed Ewa away.
“You shouldn’t come to the forest at night,” she told her.
“Neither should you!” the girl replied, her manner unabashedly cocksure.
When she saw the surprise in Aniza’s face, she burst out laughing.
“Why did you come here?” Aniza asked her.
Ewa spun on her heels, holding her skirt in the air.
“I’m here to meet someone. Just like you,” she replied.
Aniza grabbed her arm to stop her from spinning.
“What did you say? Who are you meeting so late at night?”
The sound of the violin crept over the forest once more, but closer this time. Aniza understood and felt her blood run cold. She gripped Ewa harder.
“You’re mad!” she hissed, but the girl pulled away and scratched at her face.
“I know you’ve been secretly meeting up with the partisan!” she jeered. “I’m going to tell Grandpa!”
“Hush!”
Aniza tried to pacify her, but Ewa wriggled away, laughing. She hid behind a tree trunk, running her dirty fingernails over the sharp edge of a broken branch.
Aniza approached her, holding out a hand, which Ewa took. The girl began to dance; her aunt mirrored her steps.
“I know you want to be friends with him, Ewa, but that young man has only brought misfortune to this valley,” she explained gently. “Because of him, Francesco will be damned for all eternity for causing the death of an innocent boy. I’ve heard the two of you talking, I know how guilty he feels. He’ll never forgive himself for firing that shot. I know your secret.”
Ewa stopped moving. She was still smiling, but there was a coldness in her eyes now.
Aniza finally understood.
“It was you,” she whispered in horror. “Tell me it wasn’t your fault!”
The girl pushed her, hard, and Aniza fell backwards.
It didn’t even hurt. It was just that she couldn’t get back up. It was as if something had sliced through the invisible threads that governed her gestures. So she remained slumped against the trunk of the tree, the tip of the broken branch sticking out of her chest.
She looked up, her lips moving soundlessly.
Had she been able to speak, she would have said that their dance earlier had been one of death, designed to make her fall exactly in that spot.
Then there was cold, and silence, and the shiver in her soul as it prepared to make its journey into the unknown.
Aniza felt a tear sliding down her cheek.
She saw Alessio. She didn’t hear his scream.
She saw the boy with the violin appear behind him and little Emmanuel emerge from the forest.
She saw Ewa’s smile.
But by then, Aniza was nearly gone.
101
“Stay here,” Teresa ordered, ignoring their protests.
Parisi and de Carli tried to hold her back, but they were so in awe of her that inevitably their attempts were half-hearted. Only Blanca dared to stand in her way, with Smoky echoing his human’s agitation by bouncing up and down around her legs.
Teresa held the girl’s face in her hands.
“I’ll be back soon,” she promised.
“That’s not true, you can’t know that!”
She rested her forehead against Blanca’s.
“I need to get him back,” she said.
“But can’t you smell that?” Blanca sobbed. “Can’t you smell it?”
None of them had noticed anything. They had to go all the way up to the door before they caught the scent.
