The Children's Train Read online

  6

  THE TRACKS AT THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI RAILWAY station are full of rubble, and the trains have been damaged by the bombing. A bit like the soldiers I once saw at a parade, who were waving flags, but who were all incomplete: some missing an arm, others a leg, others again an eye. The wrecked train cars looked like war veterans. They are wounded trains, but they are not dead.

  The ones still working, though, are gigantic. You can see the head of the train but not the tail. Maddalena told us that our mammas would be coming to say goodbye when we leave, but I’m pretty sure they won’t recognize us when they see us. Luckily, we still have our numbers pinned onto our coats, otherwise they would mistake us for northern kids and they wouldn’t even be able to bless our journey with a little prayer, like “May the Virgin Mary be with you.”

  Tommasino and all the other boys have had their hair cut, and they are dressed in shorts and thick socks, a woolen undershirt, a shirt, and a coat. They left my hair as it was, because my head had already been shorn to look like a melon. The girls have all had their hair braided and tied up with red and green ribbons, and they are wearing little dresses or skirts, with coats on top, too. Then there are the shoes. Every child has a new pair of shoes. I’ve counted so many star-studded prizes that I’ve won the championship. Only, when it was my turn, Maddalena told me they’d run out of my size. So they gave me a brand-new, shiny pair of brown shoes with laces. But they were one size too small.

  “How do they fit? Are you comfortable?”

  I tried walking in them, taking a few steps back and forth, and they were too tight. But I was so scared they would take them away again that I said, “Fine. Fine. They’re fine,” and so I kept them.

  They lined us up in front of the train and they gave us instructions: don’t dirty anything, don’t shout, don’t open the windows, don’t exchange shoes or pants, don’t untie your braids. Then, since we were hungry again, after the bread rolls, they gave us two slices of cheese. But there was no more chocolate.

  When I saw the train, I boasted a little and said that my father had taken a train when he went to America; if he had waited for me to be born, we could have set off together. Mariuccia said, “You can’t go to America on a train; you need a ship.” I said, “What do you know about America? Your father has never even been there,” and she said, “You moron, everyone knows that America is on the other side of the sea.” Mariuccia is older than me, and she says she went to school for a while before her mother had had the bad idea to die and leave her and her brothers alone with their cobbler father. If Zandragliona were here, I could ask her if America really was on the other side of the sea and whether it’s true you can only get there by ship. But Zandragliona’s not here and neither is Mamma Antonietta. Not that she would know, because knowing things is not her strong point. The person who is here is the blond Communist with the sad face. The one who was arguing with his comrades in the apartment in Via Medina. He helps Maddalena count the kids, and when he’s with her, he doesn’t look so sad after all. Maybe she managed to solve that “problem of the south” for him; the one that was making him so worked up and unhappy.

  From far away, the train is the spitting image of a model train I once saw in a toy-store window on the Corso. As it comes closer, it gets bigger and bigger and then it’s suddenly ginormous. Tommasino hides behind me, he’s so scared. He doesn’t realize how scared I am, too.

  The signorinas check the numbers pinned onto our coats, and read our names from a list. “Amerigo Speranza,” one of the signorinas calls out when it’s my turn. I climb up three iron steps and find myself inside the train. It’s damp and smells soggy, like Pachiochia’s ground-floor apartment. From the outside it looks big, but inside it’s narrow and cramped, with a long line of compartments, one after the other, each one with a door that you open and close with an iron handle. Now that I’m here, it feels like everything has gone so fast that, even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to go back. Mamma must be home now in our tenement apartment, and I feel sad in my stomach. Mariuccia and Tommasino climb up after me. We look at one another, and I can see they’re unsure, too, as if they’re thinking, “What the heck are we doing here?” The signorinas go on calling names, and the train slowly fills up with kids. Some are sitting, others are standing, still others are running from one compartment to another; some are hungry, some are thirsty, and some others are crying. Comrade Maurizio appears, the one who wanted to cut our tongues off but then drew a picture of us, and walks from one compartment to the next saying, “Quiet, quiet now. Sit down, everybody. It’s a long journey.” But we keep misbehaving. He’s not laughing now. I think that he must be fed up, too, and that soon they’re going to take everything away from us. The train, the shoes, the coats. We don’t deserve them, Pachiochia’s right. We don’t deserve anything. I sit on the wooden train bench, rest my face against the stained wall of the compartment, and feel my eyes pricking with tears, because of the soggy smell, the wooden seat, the dirty wall, and because I’m thinking about Mamma.

  Then I hear Tommasino and Mariuccia shouting: “Amerigo, Amerì! Get over here! Run! Look out there!”

  I get up and race to the window. I push my way past the heads of all the other kids who are all reaching out of the carriage window, straining to touch their mothers’ hands. Tommasino moves over a little so that I can see Mamma Antonietta. She looks smaller, in the middle of all the other mothers. It feels like she’s far away, even though the train hasn’t moved yet. Zandragliona is standing next to her. She’s come to say goodbye to me, even though she had a memorial service for a relative today. Mamma comes right up to the window and puts something in my hand. It’s a small, red, round apple. An annurca apple. I stick it in my pocket to keep it safe. I think it’s so beautiful, I’ll never eat it. It looks to me like a red heart, like the one I once saw when I crept in and hid in the Sansevero Chapel. Zandragliona had told me there were two live skeletons, complete with bones, and veins, and hearts, and everything. So I ventured into the dark chapel. When I lit a candle, I saw two bright white statues that seemed to be walking out of the stone they were carved in. The closer I got with the candle, the more alive they looked. There was also a Jesus Christ made of marble, lying under a sheet that was also made of stone. It looked like he was breathing in his sleep, and as if the sheet covering him were so light that he might wake up at any moment. I started walking between the statues, my heart beating in my head, and that’s when I saw them. The two skeletons were standing there, alive as anything, as if they’d been flesh and bone a minute before. Their heads were shiny, with no hair. They were smiling, with no teeth. Their bones were tied together in a tangle of red and blue veins. In the middle was a red heart, as round and red as an annurca apple. I dropped the candle and found myself in the dark again. I groped around but I couldn’t find the way out, so I started screaming, but nobody came. I somehow managed to get to the door, and, once I was outside, I saw that night had fallen. But the dark was nothing compared to the blackness in the chapel. I still have nightmares about Prince Sangro’s skeletons, every now and again.

  I look at Mamma through the window. She’s wrapped up in her shawl in silence. Silence is her strong point. Then the train suddenly screeches, louder than my teacher with the pointed chin when she found the dead beetle we had hidden in her alphabet book. All the mothers on the platform start waving their arms frantically. It looks like they’re saying goodbye, but they’re not.

  All the kids on the train shrug themselves out of their coats and start pushing them through the open windows into their mothers’ arms. Mariuccia and Tommasino take theirs off, too.

  “For the love of God, what are you doing?” I ask them. “Up in northern Italy you’ll be dying of cold.”

  “We promised,” Tommasino explained. “The kids who get to go on the train have to leave their coats to the brothers and sisters who are left behind, because the winter is cold up in northern Italy, but it’s not warm here, either.”

  “W
hat about us?”

  “The Communists will give us another coat, because they’re rich and they can afford it,” Mariuccia explains, as she throws her coat to her cobbler father, who puts it straight onto one of her motherless brothers.

  I don’t know what to do: I don’t have any siblings. My big brother, Luigi, could have done with it a while back, but he has no use for it now. Then I think that Mamma could always turn it around and make a jacket for herself out of my coat. So I slip it off and throw it to her. I’m keeping the apple, though. Mamma Antonietta catches it in midair and looks at me. It’s almost as if she’s smiling.

  The signorinas start shouting from the compartments on both sides. I stay at the window to see what is going on. The stationmaster walks up and down the platform not knowing what to do: whether to stop the train to get the coats back, or order us all off as a punishment for double-crossing them . . . Comrade Maurizio leaps off the train in a hurry to talk to the stationmaster. The stationmaster says they’ll hitch a radiator car to our train to make it warmer.

  So, with the signorinas scolding us, the mothers stampeding to get away with our coats tucked under their arms, and the children on the train laughing, the stationmaster waves his flag and the train lurches forward. It starts slowly, slowly, and then gains a little speed. Mamma Antonietta is in a corner of the station that is getting farther and farther away. She’s holding my coat to her breast. As if she were holding me tight during the air raids.

  7

  “NOW THAT THEY’VE TAKEN OUR COATS, HOW are they going to recognize us?” Mariuccia asks, worried sick.

  “Well, by our faces, right?” Tommasino answers.

  “Okay, but how will the Communists know who I am and who you are? We all look the same to them, like black American soldiers do to us. We’re all kids who are dying of hunger. There’s no difference between us. How are they going to give us back the right mamma at the end?”

  “I think they did it on purpose,” a kid with yellow hair and a gap three teeth wide in his mouth says. “They must have told our mothers to take our coats, so that when we get to Russia, they can’t find us.”

  “And we’ll die of cold,” another kid next to him adds.

  Mariuccia looks at me, her eyes welling, to see whether this is true.

  “Did you know that in Russia they eat babies for breakfast?” the boy with gaps in his mouth says to Mariuccia, who is as white as a sheet.

  “Well, they’ll be sending you back, then, since you’re all skin and bones . . .” I say. “And anyway, who told you we were going to Russia? I heard we were going up to northern Italy.”

  Mariuccia looks a little calmer but the boy with the straw-colored hair goes on.

  “They only say northern Italy to convince our mothers. But the truth is they’re taking us to Russia and they’ll put us in houses made of ice, with ice beds, ice tables, and ice sofas . . .”

  Mariuccia starts crying silently. Tommasino holds her hand tight while her tears fall onto her new dress.

  “Sure. We’ll have a nice granita then. What flavor do you like your water ice, Mariù? Lemon or coffee?”

  Comrade Maurizio comes into our compartment with a tall, thin man wearing glasses. The kids start teasing him: four-eyes, goggles, blinkers, you name it.

  “Be quiet, the lot of you!” Comrade Maurizio shouts. “You may not know it, but if you’re on this train it’s all thanks to this person here.”

  “Who is this person, then?” the short dark boy asks.

  “My name is Gaetano Macchiaroli,” the man in the glasses says, in good Italian, not dialect. “My main job is making books.”

  We are so quiet that anyone would think our tongues had actually been cut out.

  “I organized this nice trip for you, together with other comrades.”

  “Why? What do you get out of it? You’re not our father or our mother,” the short, dark-faced boy challenges. He’s the only one that isn’t scared.

  “When necessary, we are all fathers and mothers of those in need. That’s why we’re taking you to stay with people who will take care of you and treat you as if you were their children, for your own good.”

  “So, are they going to shave our hair off, so we look like melons?” I ask, almost in a whisper.

  The man in glasses doesn’t hear me. He waves his hands in the air as if he’s saying goodbye.

  “Have a great trip, kids! Be good and have fun!”

  When the tall, thin man leaves the compartment, nobody dares breathe.

  Comrade Maurizio sits down right next to us and opens his ledger.

  “Since you all decided to give your mothers your coats with your names and numbers written on them”—and he looks each and every one of us straight in the eye—“now we have to identify you again from scratch. In this ledger there are all the lists of all the children, car by car.” He says he wants to know our first name, last name, mother’s name, and father’s name. We answer one by one, and he pins a card with our name on the sleeve. When he comes to the blond boy with no teeth, Maurizio has to ask him his name two or three times, but he never opens his mouth. He pretends to be deaf and dumb. Maurizio tries calling him different names to see if he will react. Pasquale, Giuseppe, Antonio. Nothing. Maurizio gets fed up and goes to the next compartment.

  “Why are you playing deaf and dumb?” Tommasino asks him. “You were driving the poor guy crazy.”

  The blond boy gives us a nasty smile.

  “You’d have to be dumb to tell them your name,” he says, making a rude gesture.

  “How will they identify you, then?” Mariuccia asks. “Aren’t you scared they won’t give you back to your mother?”

  “My mother?” the blond boy says. “She’s the one who told me that anyone working in contraband should never, ever tell anyone their name, or where they live, or who their family are. Even in an air raid. Especially to the police!”

  The blond boy makes a face as if to say he’s better than us and know things we don’t. We’re all quiet. Him, too. I’m pretty sure he’s getting scared that, after acting so smart, they won’t know who to give him back to.

  After a while, another signorina I haven’t seen before comes in. She sits down with the lists in her hands and starts again. When it’s my turn, she asks me my name.

  “Amerigo Speranza,” I say.

  “Age?”

  “Seven.”

  “Father and mother?”

  “Antonietta Speranza.”

  “And what’s your father’s name? What does he do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, flushed with embarrassment.

  “You don’t know what job your father does?” she asks.

  “I don’t know if I have a father or if I don’t. Some say I do; others say I don’t. Mamma Antonietta says he left. Pachiochia says he ran away . . .”

  “Shall we write ‘missing,’ then?”

  “Can we leave it blank so that when he comes back, we can fill it in?” I ask.

  The signorina looks at me, lifts her pen, and moves on to the line below.

  “Next!” she says.

  8

  THE JOURNEY IS LONG. ALL THE SHOUTING, wailing, and laughing when we pulled out of the station has gone. All you can hear is the rolling of the train, hammering the same rhythm all the way. Then there’s the stink of warmed-up damp. I sit and stare out the window, like all the others. I think about the spot in Mamma’s bed where I sleep, with Capa ’e Fierro’s stashes of coffee hidden under it. I think about the streets where I roam all day, rain or shine, looking for rags. I think about Pachiochia, who must by this time be in bed in her tenement apartment with the picture of the mustached king on her bedside table. I think about Zandragliona, and I can almost smell her onion frittata. I think about the alleyways where I live, which are narrower and shorter than this train. I think about my father, who has gone to America, and my big brother, Luigi, who has gone to the other world with his bronchial asthma and left me to leave on the train all on my
own.

  While I’m thinking, I nod off every now and again. My head lolls, my eyes close, and my thoughts get all mixed up. Nearly everyone is asleep around me. I look out the window a little longer. I see the moon running over the fields, as if it were playing tag with the train. I pull my legs up onto the bench and put my arms around them. Hot, sticky tears are rolling down my cheeks and running into my mouth. They are salty and they ruin the memory of the flavor of chocolate. Tommasino is fast asleep in front of me. He of all people, who is scared of his own shadow during the day! And look at me. I used to be brave enough to go down into the sewers and catch rats, and now all I want is for the train to stop, and for everyone to come and get me and take me back. All I want is to hear Mamma’s voice saying, “Amerì, come along now. It’s time to go home!”

  Just as I am about to doze off, there is a screech that makes my skin crawl, like nails scratching the bottom of a saucepan. The train comes to an abrupt halt, and we are all thrown off our seats, one on top of the other. I find myself facedown on the floor. Mariuccia, who was fast asleep, starts crying, scared that she had torn her new dress. The lights go out and we are plunged into the dark.

  “Who gave this guy his license?” the blond boy calls out from somewhere in the compartment.

  “Maybe we’re there,” Tommasino says.

  “No,” said another boy, who had gotten on the train with us and told the signorinas his name was Mimmo. “Mamma told me that we have to wait the whole night, and then we arrive tomorrow evening.”

  “I bet they throw us all out of the train and leave us in the dark,” says someone, maybe the blond boy, but maybe another boy, making the most of the dark when we can’t see anyone’s face, to frighten us to death.