The Children's Train Read online

  At one point, I hear a voice I know well. Striding in front of the group of ladies marching in a procession is Pachiochia. She’s swinging her arms and barking out commands with all the breath in her body. There’s a picture of King Umberto I pinned to her breast. The first time I had seen the photo I had said: “Who’s this handsome man with the mustache? Your fiancé?” Pachiochia had started kicking me, because I’d offended her dearly departed husband-to-be who’d died in the First World War and whom she’d never betrayed, even in her thoughts, God bless us! Then she’d crossed herself three times, the third time kissing the tips of her fingers and lobbing the kiss up to the sky. Pachiochia had said the handsome man with the mustache was our last king, Umberto, who was finished before he even started, because those people had gotten it into their heads to make our country a republic and cheated with the ballot sheets, so they would win. Pachiochia had said that she was a mon-ar-chist, and that the Communists had turned the world upside down and now nothing made any sense at all. Crooks and thugs, the whole lot of them. In fact, she’d said, my father was probably a red Commie crook and a thug himself, and that’s why he’d had to get away. America, ha-ha! I thought she could be right, because I have red hair and Mamma’s hair is black . . . so the carrot must be from my father. Since then, I don’t get upset when people call me “evil hair,” as they often do.

  Pachiochia, with the portrait on her breast, leads the procession of ladies, who have no kids with them. These women start giving a piece of their mind to the mothers in the crowd with their kids.

  “Don’t sell your children,” they shout. “They’ve turned your heads with their talk, but the truth is they’ll be taking your children to Siberia to put them to work, if they don’t die of cold first.”

  The little ones don’t want to leave, and the older ones dig their heels in and say they want to leave. It’s like St. Gennaro’s feast day, but without the miracles. The more Pachiochia beats her breast, the more she pummels the mustached king who is pinned there. If Zandragliona were here, she would say something back, but she hasn’t arrived yet. Pachiochia goes on. “Don’t let your children leave! They won’t allow them back. Hold your children close, like when we were under the bombs, and you were all they needed to protect them. With Providence on your side.”

  I remember the wailing of the sirens and everyone screaming. When the bombs came, Mamma would pick me up and run to the shelter with me in her arms. Once we were inside, she would hold me tight all the time. I was happy during the air raids.

  The procession of ladies with no children plows past the crowd of mothers and us kids, who have somehow finally managed to get in line, and everything turns into a mess again. A few more signorinas rush out the front door of the long, long building to try to make peace.

  “Don’t leave,” they tell the mothers. “Don’t deprive your children of this chance. Think of the winter that’s coming. Think of the cold, the trachoma infections, your damp houses . . .”

  In the meantime, the signorinas go up to every kid and hand out a little package wrapped in silver foil.

  “We’re mothers, too,” they go on. “Your children will be warm over the winter; they’ll have food and they’ll be taken care of. There are families in Bologna, Modena, and Rimini waiting to welcome them into their families. They’ll come back prettier, healthier, chubbier. They’ll have food on their plates every day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  Then a signorina comes and gives me a package wrapped in silver foil, too. I tear the wrapper off, and there’s a dark brown bar inside.

  “Eat it, my sweet boy. It’s chocolate!” she says.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about it,” I say, trying to look indifferent.

  “Donna Antonietta, are you selling your son, too?” Pachiochia calls out at that very moment, her hand resting on the photo of the mustached king, pounded so much that it is crumpled and almost unrecognizable. “I didn’t think you would stoop so low! You are not that needy. Is it because they took Capa ’e Fierro away? If you had asked me, I would have offered you a nice cup of coffee.”

  Mamma Antonietta gives me an ugly look, convinced I was the coffee spy, but I go on munching my chocolate bar and pretend to keep my eyes closed.

  “Donna Pachiochia, I’ve never asked anything of anyone, and if I ever have, I’ve always paid everything back. When I can’t pay someone back, I don’t ask. My husband had to go away to seek his fortune, and when he comes back . . . You know my story. I don’t need to explain anything to you.”

  “What fortune, Donna Antoniè? Who are you kidding? There’s no longer any dig-ni-ty!”

  When Pachiochia says the word dignity, I really do close my eyes, so I don’t have to see the flecks of spit flying through the gaps in her brown gums. But I open them again when I realize Mamma Antonietta isn’t answering, which is never a good sign. Not saying anything when she’s being taunted is not like her. So I take the last piece of chocolate out of the foil, crush the silver paper into a little ball, and put it in my pocket so I can use it as a cannonball for a tin soldier I found the day before yesterday on the Corso. In the end, I’m the one that speaks up for Mamma.

  “Donna Pachiò, I have a father some place or other. What about you, though? Do you have a child?”

  Pachiochia places her hand on her breast and strokes the poor crumpled mustached king.

  “You don’t, right? Is a portrait of King Umberto all you have left?”

  Pachiochia’s brown gums quiver with anger.

  “What a pity! If you had a child, I’d give him this last piece of chocolate. See this?”

  And I toss the whole thing in my mouth.

  5

  “LADIES, LADIES! LISTEN UP! I’M MADDALENA Criscuolo from Santa Lucia. I fought in the four-day uprising here.”

  The mothers go quiet. Maddalena stands on a vegetable cart and speaks through a metal funnel that makes her voice louder.

  “When we had to drive out the Germans, we women did our part. Mothers, daughters, wives, young and old: we went down into the streets and we fought with our men. You were there, and so was I. This is another battle, but the enemy is more dangerous: hunger and poverty. If you fight now, your children will be the ones to gain something!”

  Every mamma looks down at her children.

  “They’ll come back fatter and more beautiful, and you will be able to rest after the endless toil that life has been for you until today. When you embrace your children again, you, too, will be fatter and more beautiful. I’ll bring them back myself; I swear on my honor this is as true as the fact that my name is Maddalena Criscuolo.”

  Everyone was quiet, even the kids.

  Maddalena climbs down from the vegetable cart and starts walking through the crowd of mothers, with kids hanging on to their skirts, and she starts singing through the metal funnel. She has a nice voice, like the ones I hear when I go and sit outside the Conservatory, waiting for Carolina to come out with her violin.

  “Sebben che siamo donne, paura non abbiamo . . .” she starts. It’s a song about a union, where women aren’t scared because they are together and they love their children and they want something called socialism: “Per amor dei nostri figli, socialismo noi vogliamo.”

  The other signorinas follow Maddalena’s lead. The mothers stand there in silence, but then a few of them take courage and start singing, too. Then they all join in. That is when Pachiochia and the ladies in her procession start singing the royal anthem: “Viva il Re!” Long live the King. The happy trumpets blast. “Viva il Re! Viva il Re!” But there are not very many of them, and in any case, they sing out of tune, and so our mammas’ voices drown them out as they sing louder and louder and in the end, you can only hear their voices, their kids singing along too. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Mamma Antonietta sing. Pachiochia clamps her mouth shut, hiding her gums. Then she turns around, positions herself at the head of the procession, and leads her ladies away. As she passes right next to me, I hear her say, “Hunger is
stronger than fear . . .” but then the crowd closes around her, and I can’t hear the rest.

  Maddalena speaks through the metal funnel again and tells us we should say goodbye to our mammas and go into the long, long building because they need to wash us and give us a checkup from a doctor. She promises that the kids who behave will get more chocolate. I hold Mamma’s hand tightly, and when I look at her, I see that her eyes are a strange color, like the uniforms of the German soldiers when they came to raid our neighborhood for food. So I open up my arms like I once saw an orchestra conductor doing, when I snuck into the theater with Carolina during a rehearsal for a concert, and I hug Mamma with all my strength. My face is flattened against her belly, and I feel as though my eyes are turning the same color as the German soldiers’ uniforms when Pachiochia and Zandragliona made them eat pigeon poop. Mamma Antonietta is surprised, because hugs are not our strong point. But then I feel her hands in my hair moving slowly back and forth. Her hands are soft, like soapstone underwater. It doesn’t last long.

  One of the signorinas comes up to me and asks my name.

  “Amerigo Speranza, like Mamma Antonietta,” I answer.

  She sticks a card on my shirt with a pin. There’s my name, last name, and a number on it. She gives another card just like mine to Mamma, who tucks it into her bra, where she keeps all the important stuff: a little money, a holy card of St. Anthony—the enemy of the devil—a hankie embroidered by her mamma, Filomena—bless her soul—and now this card with my number on it. That way, when I’m gone, she can keep everything close to her heart.

  When all the kids and mothers have been given their numbers, Maddalena picks up the metal funnel again and starts talking, her head turning one way then the other so that everyone can hear.

  “Ladies, ladies! Don’t go away yet. Wait a moment. Stand in a line everyone, each mother with her children in front of her, so we can take a photograph.”

  The mothers are so stunned by this idea that they all start milling around again, breaking up the line that took God Almighty himself to form. One of them straightens her hair, another pinches her cheeks to make them rosy, yet another bites her lips to make them look like she’s got lipstick on: she’s seen it in the portraits of the ladies in the photographer’s window on the Corso. Mamma Antonietta licks her hand and wets my hair, which is growing fast after my melon crew cut, to make a parting. Maddalena walks through the crowd and divides the mothers and children into groups. She’s holding a big piece of card with writing on it.

  “What does it say, Amerì?” my mother asks. I look at the letters. I can read some of them, but not all of them. I get muddled up when I try and put them together. I like numbers better.

  “What did I send you to school for? To warm up the chair?”

  Luckily, Maddalena picks up the funnel and reads it out to all of us. It says that we’re the children of the south whom northern Italians are waiting to host, and that this is called solidarity. I wanted to ask her what solidarity meant, but a big boy in a jacket and slightly worn-out gray pants tells us to get ready for the photograph. When everyone is in position, Mamma Antonietta puts a hand on my shoulder. I turn around to look at her. It almost looks as though she’s smiling, but at the last minute, she changes her mind and pulls her same old face.

  Finally, we get to go inside the long, long building. We all look smaller without our mammas next to us, even the boys who were acting tough while we were waiting outside. The signorinas put us into rows of three and leave us in the dark corridor.

  I GO AND STAND RIGHT NEXT TO TOMMASINO, whose legs are shaking worse than the drenched hamsters when they were turning back into sewer rats. I wanted to give him some courage. The third kid in our row is a thin little girl with short hair called Mariuccia. She’s the cobbler’s little girl, the one who resoles shoes up on Pizzofalcone. I recognize her, because Mamma Antonietta had once taken me to her father to ask whether he could teach me the trade, since I was so obsessed with shoes. The shoe mender had looked at me, then at my mother, and finally he had pointed behind the counter: there were four kids of different ages with shoes, nails, and glue in their hands. They were the four kids his wife, bless her soul, had had the courage to burden him with before disappearing to the other world. Mariuccia was the only girl, and one day, when she was a little older, she would keep house and look after her brothers. Anyway, at that time, the father was keeping all four kids in the shop as apprentice shoe-menders, so his answer to Mamma had been no.

  Zandragliona had told me that when Maddalena and the others went and talked to him about the trains, the cobbler decided to send Mariuccia, since the others were boys and could be useful in the shop. Mariuccia was a girl, but she didn’t even know how to heat up leftover macaroni, so she wasn’t good for anything. When we were told to get into a line, Mariuccia’s face was white and her eyes wild. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to! They’ll cut off my hands and put me in the oven!”

  There were other kids who were so desperate to leave, they were calling out: “I have an eye infection,” “I have trachoma,” as if they had hit the jackpot rather than caught a disease. And then all the others started acting important and yelling, “We have trachoma, we have trachoma,” because they thought that they would only let you get on the train if you had trachoma.

  Me, Mariuccia, and Tommasino sit next to one another. Every now and again, Mariuccia sniffs the air. But she can’t smell any burning or cooked flesh and she can’t see any smoke. So, for now, they’re not putting us in a gas oven. All we see are signorinas running up and down and stopping in front of a tall young man holding a big ledger, where every now and again he jots something down with a pencil. They call him Comrade Maurizio. He walks up and down, too. He listens to everyone and has an answer to every question. When he comes up to us, he stops and looks at us.

  “And you? What are your names?”

  We’re too embarrassed to answer.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you. Don’t you have any tongues?” he asks, laughing. “Did they cut them off or something?”

  “Well, not yet,” Tommasino says, scared to death.

  “Why? Are they going to cut them off?” Mariuccia asks. “So, Pachiochia was right after all.”

  Comrade Maurizio laughs again. Then he gives us each a pat on the head.

  “Come on, show me. Stick them out!”

  We all three look at one another and then stick our tongues out.

  “If it were up to me, I’d cut the tips off because they’re a bit too long for my taste . . .”

  Mariuccia pulls her tongue back in and crosses her hands in an X over her mouth.

  “. . . but the regulations don’t allow it . . .”

  Comrade Maurizio flicks through the pages of the ledger he’s holding.

  “. . . you see, it’s written here. Can you read? No? What a pity. If you could, I would show you. It says here in the regulations of the Committee for Children’s Salvation, Article 103: It is forbidden to cut children’s tongues off . . .” and off he goes, laughing again.

  Then he turns the book around and shows us a blank page.

  “Comrade Maurizio likes joking!” Tommasino says, some color coming back to his cheeks.

  “Bravo! That’s exactly right!” Comrade Maurizio says. “And there’s something else I like doing too. Sit still for five minutes.”

  He starts drawing with his pencil on the blank page he showed us. He looks at us and then draws, stops, looks at us again, and draws a little more. He looks at the page, looks back at us, and then rips the page out of the ledger. Our faces are on the sheet of paper. Spitting images. He gives the sheet to Tommasino, who puts it in his pocket.

  From the end of the corridor, two signorinas in white coats and white gloves tell us to take our clothes and shoes off. Tommasino, Mariuccia, and I look at one another and start crying. Tommasino because he’s scared they’ll take away his old shoes full of holes, Mariuccia because she’s embarrassed to strip naked in front of everyone, a
nd me because my underpants are patched up and my socks are dirty. So I go up to one of the signorinas in a white coat and gloves and I tell her I can’t take my clothes off, because I’m cold, and my two friends follow my example.

  Luckily, Maddalena comes along.

  “Let’s play a new game, okay?” she says. “A game you’ve never played before!”

  Tommasino stops blubbering and stares at her.

  “But if we’re going to play this game, you need to take your clothes off. Then we’ll give you some new clothes that are nice and warm.”

  “Shoes, too?” I chip in.

  “New shoes for everyone!” she says, tucking her hair behind her ears.

  The three of us strip off, and Maddalena takes us into another room with some pipes that spray water from the ceiling. It’s kind of like rain, but it’s hot.

  I stand under the pipe and feel the first drops falling. I keep my eyes tightly shut as I’m scared of drowning, but then Maddalena comes up to me with a sponge and soap and covers me with sweet-smelling bubbles. She washes my hair, my arms, my legs, my feet. The soapy aroma reminds me of Carolina, who smelled of violets when we hid in the theater listening to music, and I get a tickly feeling in my belly. When I open my eyes, I see Tommasino next to me splashing, and Mariuccia stamping her feet in a gray puddle.

  Maddalena lathers and rinses the other two and then she wraps us all in rough white sheets. After our shower, she takes us into another room where all the kids who have already been washed are sitting on wooden benches, every one of them wrapped in a rough white sheet. Then a Communist signorina does the rounds with a basket full of bread rolls on her arm, and hands us one roll each. She tells us the bread is from the doctor who is going to be giving us a checkup; the one in the room next door. I’ve never seen a doctor before, and I don’t want to start now. In the meantime, though, I eat my bread with my eyes shut, breathing in the strong smell of soap.