The Secret Messenger

1 (#u406ffc2f-20ea-598f-aac9-ef9e87026b4a)

Grief (#u406ffc2f-20ea-598f-aac9-ef9e87026b4a)

London, June 2017

The tears come in a torrent – great fat orbs that well up from inside her, catching momentarily on her eyelids. For a second, she feels as if she is looking through a piece of the thick, warped Murano glass dotted around her mother’s living room, until she blinks and they roll down her dried-out cheeks. Ten days into her grief, Luisa has learned not to fight it, allowing the deluge to cascade in rivers towards her now sodden chin. Jamie has helpfully placed boxes of tissues around her mother’s house; much like city dwellers are supposed to be never more than six feet from some kind of vermin, now she is never without a man-size hankie to hand.

Emotional fallout over, Luisa faces a more frustrating issue. The keyboard of her laptop has fared badly from the human cloudburst, and a glass tipped over in her temporary blindness – several of the keys are swimming in salt tears and tap water. It’s too late to mop up the flood – even a consistent jabbing of various keys tells her the screen is frozen and the machine displaying its dissatisfaction. Electronics and fluids do not mix.

‘Oh Jesus, not now,’ Luisa moans into the air. ‘Not now! Come on, Dais – work, come on girl!’ She jabs at the keyboard again, following it up with a few choice expletives, and more tears – this time of frustration.

It’s the first time she’s been able to face opening Daisy, her beloved laptop, since the day before her mum … died. Luisa wants to say the word ‘died’, needs to keep on saying it, because it’s a fact. Her mum didn’t pass away, because that somehow alludes to a serene exit, floating from one dimension to another without rancour, where there is time to put things to right amid crisp white sheets and soft blankets, to say things you want to say – need to say. Even with her limited experience of death, Luisa knows it was short, blunt and brutal. Her mum died. End of. Two weeks from first diagnosis, one week of that in a drug-induced coma to combat the unbearable pain. And now Luisa is the one enduring the inevitable ache of grief. Throw anger and frustration into the mix and you might touch on the myriad of emotions pitching and rolling around her head, heart and assorted organs, twenty-four/seven.

So, Luisa attempts what she always does when she cannot settle, eat, speak or socialise. She writes. Battle-scarred and sporting dog-eared stickers of love and identity, Daisy has been a reliable friend to Luisa in her need to bleed emotions onto a screen page. Often, it’s nothing more than crazy ramblings, but occasionally there is something of worth amid the jumble of words – a sentence or string of thought she might squirrel away for future use or that might well make it into the book one day. The book she will write when she is free of the inane meanderings she currently commits to the features pages of various magazines about the very latest thing in cosmetics, or whether women really do want to steer their own destiny (of course they do, she thinks as she writes – do I really need to spell it out in no more than a thousand words?). But it’s work. It keeps the wolf from the door while Jamie establishes himself as a jobbing actor. But one day the book will happen.

Daisy is party to this dream, a workmate and a keeper of secrets too, deep down in her hard drive.

‘Christ Daisy, what happened to loyalty, eh?’ Luisa mutters, and then feels immediately disloyal to her hi-tech friend. Half drowned in human tears, she may well have reacted in the same way and refused to go on. Daisy needs TLC and time to dry out on top of the boiler. In the meantime, there are pent-up emotions to spill – and for some inexplicable reason a pen and paper is not up to the job. Luisa feels the need to hit something, to bash and clatter at the keys and watch the words appear on screen as if they have magically appeared from somewhere deep inside her, separate to her conscious thinking. Being a child of the computer age, and with her grief threatening to spew, a pen will simply not allow those words to explode from her with venom or unbounded love, or the anger that she cannot contain.

A thought strikes her: Jamie had been up in her mother’s attic the day before to assess just how much clearing out lay ahead of them. As Luisa was tackling the cancelling of direct debits and council tax, he mentioned seeing a typewriter case tucked in the eaves, one that looked fairly old but ‘in good nick’. Would it be worth anything? Or was it sentimental value, he’d asked. At the time, she dismissed it as non-urgent but now her need is greater.

The loft space is like a million others across the globe: a curious odour of old lives dampened and dust that flies up with irritation as you disturb its years of slumber. A single light bulb hangs from the timbers, and Luisa needs to adjust her eyes before objects come into focus. She recognises a few Christmas presents she took pains to choose for her mother – a thermostatic wrap for her aching back and a pair of sheepskin slippers – both of which look to have been barely out of their wrappers before being abandoned to the ‘Not Wanted’ pile. Another reminder of the distance between mother and daughter, now never to be bridged. She pushes the memory away – it’s too deep inside her for now, though it constantly threatens to push through into her grief. It’s therapy for another day. Luisa ferrets around for a few minutes, feeling her frustration rise and wondering if this is the best pastime at this moment, when things still feel so raw. She both relishes and dreads finding a family album where she knows she won’t be able to stop herself from turning the dog-eared pages of so-called happy memories. All three of them on the beach – her, Mum and Dad – fixed Kodachrome smiles all round. In better days.

Mercifully, an object that is not a fat bound book of memories pushes its way out of the gloom. Instead, it’s a grey, moulded case whose shape – square and sloping towards a brown leather handle – means it can only be one thing. It has the look of a life well worn, the scuffs and scratches immediately reminding her of the history Daisy sports on her own casing. There is a distinctive twang as both clasps spring upwards under Luisa’s fingers, and what almost sounds like the escape of a human breath as she lifts the lid. Even under the dim light, she can see it is beautiful – a monochrome mix of black and grey, white keys ringed with a dull metal and glowing bright against the dimness. Luisa puts a tentative finger on one of the keys, pressing it gently, and the mechanism reacts under her touch, sending a thin metal shaft leaping towards the roller. It hasn’t seized up. She notes, too, that there is a ribbon still attached and, even better, a spare, sealed reel tucked alongside the keyboard. The aged cellophane is intact but almost disintegrates under her finger. If fate is on her side, however, the ribbon won’t have dried up.

Luisa fixes the lid back down and pulls the case away from a pile of boxes – it’s surprisingly light for an old machine. As she pulls, the lid on one of the boxes slides off, sending a puff of dust in its wake. She turns to replace it, but her eye catches a single photograph, black and white yet sepia-toned with age. It features a man and a woman – their joyful expressions suggest a couple – standing in St Mark’s Square in Venice, the distinctive grandiose basilica behind them, surrounded by a groundswell of pigeons. She recognises her mother in the features of the woman, but not the man. Luisa searches her memory – did her mother and father even mention going to Venice, perhaps for their honeymoon? It looks that kind of photo – the couple seem happy. It’s not how she remembers her parents, but she thinks even they must have been in love once. And yet the photo looks older than that, from a bygone age.

Luisa is aware of her Italian roots, the spelling of her name being an obvious indication. Both of her mother’s parents were Italian, but they died some years ago; her grandfather when she was just a baby, and grandmother in her early teens. She knows very little about their history – her mother would never talk about it – except that they were both writers. She likes to think she has inherited at least that family trait from them.

She flips over the photograph; scrawled in pencil are the words ‘S and C, San Marco June 1950’. Her mother was Sofia, but she was born in 1953, so maybe it’s her grandmother’s face beaming contentment? S for Stella? Perhaps that’s Luisa’s grandpa standing alongside her – Luisa barely remembers him, only a fleeting image of a kindly face. But his name was Giovanni. So who is C? It’s entirely possible he was a suitor before Grandpa Gio, as she knows they called him. Luisa’s curiosity gives way to a smile, her first in days, and the movement of the muscles feels odd. She thinks they look so stylish, he in his high-waisted suit trousers, and she in a neat Chanel-like suit and elegant court shoes, her hair swept in a chic, black wave.

Luisa bends to replace the photograph in the box, but sees that underneath a decaying layer of tissue paper there is more – photographs and paper scraps, some hand-scribed and others typed in an old font, perhaps on the newly discovered machine? To any other curio browser it would warrant a look at the very least, but to a journalist it spikes the senses. There is something about the smell too – the pungency of old dust – which sticks in Luisa’s nostrils and makes her heart beat faster. It reeks of lives lived and history unmasked.

The whole box is heavy and awkward to manoeuvre down the attic stairs and into the living room. In the daylight however, she sees the real treasure come to light. Under a layer of loose type and several browned, brittle newspapers bearing the name Venezia Liberare, Luisa can sense it: a mystery. It’s in the fine sandy texture under her fingers as she gingerly lifts the paper cache – men and women grinning in fuzzy tones of black and white, some she notes casually using rifles as props, or proudly holding them across their chests, women included. Momentarily, she is shocked; in a distant memory, her grandma never appeared as anything other than that – a sweet old lady who dished out cuddles and chocolates, grinning mischievously when she was inevitably rebuked by Luisa’s mother for spoiling her with sweets. Sometimes, Luisa remembers her slipping little wrapped bars when no one was looking, whispering ‘Shh, it’s just our secret’, and she felt like they were part of a little gang.

The typewriter is momentarily forgotten as Luisa picks up each piece, peering at its faded detail, squinting to fill in the gaps of pencil scratchings lost to the years. It hits her squarely then – how many people’s histories are contained in this cardboard box with its sunken edges and corners gnawed at by the resident mice? What might she discover in its depths amid the deceased spiders and smell of mould? What will she learn about her family? She wonders, too, if there is an element of fate in her discovery, if today of all days she was meant to find it – to piece it all together in some order, and in turn glue her recently shattered self back together. For the first time in weeks, she feels not defeated or leaden with grief, but lifted a little. Excited.

2 (#u406ffc2f-20ea-598f-aac9-ef9e87026b4a)

The Lion’s Den (#u406ffc2f-20ea-598f-aac9-ef9e87026b4a)

Venice, early December 1943

I think of that pre-war exchange with Popsa often; the word ‘havoc’ resonates a lot these days, more so after last night’s atrocities in the Jewish ghetto: hundreds rounded up like cattle by Nazi troops and their fascist handmaidens, men and women pulled out of their homes – stoical in the face of their screaming, tear-stained children abandoned behind them – and herded into boats destined first for the prison of Santa Maria Maggiore. To be separated from their families was bad enough, but all of Venice knew their eventual destination, and they did too – east into Germany, to Auschwitz. To an almost certain death.

I rub the obvious lines around my eyes, hoping to smear away any smut from the fires that continue to smoulder in the ghetto. Having spent the early hours running from house to house across Venice, breathlessly passing messages and false identification papers to those in need of them, the smell of cordite and desperation is still there in my nostrils. If there was any chance to save even a few families from the cull, we – the Resistance – had to try; huddling women and children in the smallest of hiding places, in cupboards and attics. I saw mothers trying desperately to keep their babies quiet, hands cupped over little mouths, the fear of just one cry or murmur etched on their faces. Our partisan leaders were taken by surprise by the Nazis’ sudden strike on the Jewish enclave; as I weaved breathlessly through the warren of alleyways and tiny passages, avoiding the Nazi scrum, staying out of sight of any patrol and their inevitable questions as to why I was out during curfew and where exactly I was going, it felt like we were fighting a losing battle. We worked all night but, in the clear light of day, it’s evident we only succeeded in damage limitation.

My whole body feels limp and defeated, though I’ve had the luxury at least of returning briefly to my own apartment for an hour’s sleep, a change of clothes and a smear with a wet flannel. Those Jews taken simply for their birthright, born into a religion despised by the Nazis, are now on a cold, inhospitable floor with little respite to look forward to. I am a lucky woman.

‘Another espresso?’ Paolo pulls away my empty cup from the counter and pushes a second, full cup in its place, without waiting for an answer. He only has to look at my face, hastily touched with some of the precious make-up I’ve been rationing and a smear of red lipstick. The coffee is welcome, though it isn’t, of course, the sharp but silken blend of pre-war days. Paolo and his father, owners of the café in the square below my apartment since time began, are masters at making the fake coffee – ersatzkaffee – seem Italian at least; the hiss of the gleaming machine, the way Paolo pours it lovingly into the tiny cup with a true flourish. If nothing else, it helps wake me up.

‘Good luck, Stella,’ Paolo chimes as I swallow down the coffee and wave goodbye. His parting wink tells me he knows exactly where I’m going.

I walk the twenty minutes from streets around the Fondamenta Nuove to the Nazi headquarters on the grand central piazza of San Marco, trying to nurture a spring in my step the closer I get to the Platzkommandantur. The bright winter sun rising over the Arsenale helps lift my mood, lending a distinct pinky hue through the smaller canals, from one bridge crossing to another, the milky jade of the water lapping at the red and orange brickwork. Usually, this is the best time of the day for me, when Venice is waking up, stout old women in black optimistically on their way to buy whatever they can in the relatively sparse markets. Today, though, the morning buzz feels dampened as news of the ghetto’s cull winds its way through the city. Soon, each and every café and bar will have talk and opinion, someone will know of another who has been taken – be it relative or colleague. In a city like Venice, the people connect and weave like the canals that are its vital arteries.

There are few troops – either Nazi or fascist – around at this time of the morning, but we Venetians have been schooled into believing that eyes are everywhere. Despite my true feelings, those of a proud anti-fascist, like my beloved grandfather, I have to look eager as I’m about to enter the enemy’s nerve centre – and not as a prisoner or suspect, but an enthusiastic new member of staff. Automatically, I adjust my mask and take on the look of a grateful collaborator, a Venetian glad to have the protection of our better, bigger German cousins. We Italians have learned to play the part of the poor relation very well. We’ve had years of practice.

We know what people in the outside world say – that Venetians have had a ‘soft’ war, protected as a kind of oasis because of our city’s beauty and grandeur, its precious art, targeted by the Allied bombers as a place to avoid rather than effect ruin. To some extent it’s true: the classical music still plays in Piazza San Marco, although these days it’s more likely to be the Hermann Goering Regimental Band with its stylistic pomp, replacing any true elegance. The annual celebration of art at the Biennale continues, attracting the rich and beautiful, as well as the Nazi propaganda king in Joseph Goebbels. But tell that to the mothers whose teenage boys were swiftly marched away to Lord knows where as slave labour for the Nazi machine, like a warped playing out of the Pied Piper fable. That early September day only a few months ago is still fresh with me, when the coloured leaflets fluttered from the sky, informing us that the Nazis were coming to conquer our city. To most Venetians – after years of fascist dictatorship under Mussolini – it was simply another coup, another plague. It was followed only days later by the resounding stomp of jackboots on our ancient flagstones, and the Nazis quickly made themselves very comfortable in our requisitioned palaces on the Grand Canal, easing themselves into the bars and outdoor eating places like it was some sort of vacation.

Venice appears on the surface to be compliant, relenting. But I know different. For all its outward splendour, Venice hides itself well; in deep, dark alleyways, behind the painted green shutters, I know for certain there are hives of activity, thousands working to skew the intricate planning of our unwelcome squatters and claim back our city. For now, we do it quietly. But we aim to be ready.

It was a heart-stopping moment when I received a message to attend the offices of the German High Command, on one end of the Piazza San Marco. Since the full occupation in September, when the city swarmed with the grey-green troops of the Wehrmacht and the ashen colours of the SS, it’s a place I’ve taken pains to sidestep, going out of my way to avoid walking across the piazza in full view of the young German sentries, bored and eyeing up pretty young Venetian women. On being summoned, I imagined my membership of the anti-fascist Action Party had been discovered or revealed, but, if it had, there would have been no request to attend – more likely a sudden raid by Italian fascist Blackshirts, and a stay in their none too salubrious headquarters at Ca’ Littoria, becoming painfully familiar with their torture methods. We have learned quickly that the Germans are not here to get their hands dirty if at all possible. Only to oversee the annihilation of freedom.

I have been careful in recent years to publicly align myself with no one in particular, keeping a low profile as a typist in the Venetian works department, the government division responsible for making our fairy-tale city function day to day, even through war. I’d been ‘recommended’ for the job by Sergio Lombardi, a seemingly fine upstanding citizen who, in his other life, is Captain Lombardi, the commander of Venice’s Resistance brigade. The information I gleaned while in the works department proved useful to the partisan groups fighting the Nazis and fascists across the entire Veneto region, though I never imagined it saved lives. When I doubted it, when I itched to do something more useful – more visible – Sergio took pains to reassure me that the detailed knowledge of the city’s workings was vital in helping their troops move undiscovered in and out of Venice. The comprehensive plans I had access to were perfect tools for ghosting Allied soldiers away to safety now the Nazi occupation of Northern Italy made it impossible to move freely.

And now, thanks to maintaining that low profile, I am here, about to enter the lion’s den; my transfer to Nazi High Command – the Reich headquarters – has been requested because of my fluent German, although the move couldn’t be more timely or fortuitous. Or intimidating.

Beyond the grand exterior near the Correr Museum in San Marco, I present my pass from the works department and a young German soldier runs down a list for my name. He seems pleased to find it.

‘Up the stairs, first door on your right,’ he says in faltering Italian.

‘Thank you, I’ll find it,’ I say in German and he smiles his embarrassment. Poor boy, he’s no more than a child, perhaps the same age as my brother, Vito. Too young for this, both of them.

The office at the top of the sweeping marble stairway is behind a large, ornately carved door. It’s filled with desks in a strict formation, the opulent walls of the vast room deadened by the austere dark wooden furniture and the Nazi icons dotted around. A fierce clattering of typewriters hits me like a wave and I’m briefly startled. I must have shown it because a man approaches – I can tell from his face and his civilian clothes that he’s Italian, and I’m surprised again, though pleased too. Even now, a stark Nazi uniform makes me pull in a short breath and I feel a guilt rising in me, although I’ve become adept at hiding it.

‘Morning, can I help you?’ the man, in his well-cut grey suit, says in Italian. He’s not Venetian; his accent says he’s from the south. Tall and with a short, dark beard – in his early thirties I guess – he looks immediately out of place amid the military surroundings, reminding me of an academic or librarian. His whole demeanour is Italian; it’s only the tiny metal pin on his jacket lapel – the jawless death’s head insignia – that tells me he is a fascist too. A paid-up member of Mussolini’s gang. In any other scenario, I might have thought him attractive, but here, he is marred by his allegiance.

‘I’ve been sent here by the works department – as a typist and translator,’ I venture, holding out my references. ‘Am I in the right office?’

He scans the papers, holding them closer to his face, and I notice his large brown eyes scanning the script.

‘Welcome Signorina Jilani,’ he says. ‘Yes, you’ve found the right place. I’ll show you to your desk.’

He turns and leads me towards the back of the room, passing a vacant desk with a silent typewriter upon it. Backing onto a wall entirely shelved with books and files, he gestures to an empty desk with a large machine to the side.

‘There, that’s for you,’ he says.

‘Oh, I thought I would be over there with the other typists,’ I say, casting a backwards glance. The desire to blend in is well grounded in me.

‘Well, as you’ll be translating for General Breugal, I thought it would be better if you were nearer his office’ – he nods his head slightly towards a closed door, even larger and more ornately carved than the last – ‘since he has a tendency to be a little brief when it comes to instructions. I can’t see him striding across the office ten times a day – he would get a bit annoyed about that. It will hopefully spare you some of his …’ he falters over the next word carefully … ‘irritation.’

He smiles as he says it, an embarrassed offering, perhaps because he’s betrayed a little of his opinion of the general, in painting him as some blustering despot. Except the general’s reputation is anything but – a despot, yes, but his cruelty is already well known within the Resistance.

‘Well, thank you for that in advance,’ I say. I’m genuinely grateful, since the last thing I want to do is attract any unwanted attention. I’m here to type, to translate and to absorb what will help the partisan Resistance wage war with effective sabotage against our German trespassers. But I’m also here to be utterly compliant, in office hours at least.

‘Marta will show you the bathroom and the canteen, and I will arrange a meeting with General Breugal when he arrives shortly.’

I nod, and he turns to go. ‘Oh, and by the way, my name is Cristian – Cristian De Luca – under-secretary to the general, admin mostly. Civilian.’ He adds the last part most definitely, as if he doesn’t want me to guess he’s a card-carrying fascist. As if by not wearing a black shirt and donning a dark ski cap, he’s not part of the bully brigade. But I know plenty of innocents who have been condemned by a typewriter, by being on a list. I have to remind myself that what I’m doing is not collaborating – my Resistance commander assures me the information I can absorb will save many more lives than I could ever condemn.