Читать книгу The Education of Arnold Hitler - Marc Estrin - Страница 10

And what did his father remember? From this sultry August day, George Hitler drifted back to a cold, wet spring morning in the Po valley, eleven years before. Morale down, way down—not like here. How much more mud, more German bullets and bombs? The war was not going to be settled here in Italy—it was Eisenhower up in Europe that would do it, him and the Russians. Why should anyone take risks now? Just be careful and get through.

In the current clamor, George heard the voices of his army buddies taking it all out on the “Niggers of the 92nd,” the black infantry unit, segregated since the Civil War, sent to hold the Serchio valley at the western end of the line. “Eleanor’s Own Royal Rifles” they were called, supposedly given the newest, best equipment, while the rest of the Fifth Army made do. Every time they were cold or wet, they imagined Eleanor Roosevelt’s special socks on warm black feet—and cussed up a storm. Every time someone was late for roll call or showed any dumbness or superstition or lack of discipline, he was showered with racist epithets. Just like now.

George wondered if the 92nd was so stupid and superstitious after all. Why should they be risking their necks to come back to this kind of stuff? If he was a second-class citizen, he sure wouldn’t fight. The 92nd probably thought they were being led into suicidal situations on purpose. Maybe they were! Hell, he’d have hidden like they did.

Then George remembered April 25th of ’45. The whole night, brilliant moonlight, towns burning up and down the hills, the Germans losing it. Big fight over the 92nd, driving into Ferrara. The company spread out, no Germans in sight, lots of corpses in the streets, Krauts, civilians, maybe partisans. Buildings smoldering. Jump out of the jeep at the Piazza Mercato in front of the cathedral, then down via Mazzini. Out a window—was it from there, or the next building over?—shots, bullets ricocheting off the concrete, hit on the thigh, no wound. He sneaks low, unhooks a grenade, pulls the pin, lobs it hook shot through the window, and makes for the shelter of the lamp post across the street.

KABOOM!

Then, rifles at the ready, he and Charlie Higgins break down a door with a Jewish star into maybe an old synagogue, looks like a storeroom. On the floor near the blown-out window, covered in orange pulp, a young woman is moaning, her blond hair swimming in blood under a dark blue kerchief. He runs over, wipes her face with her apron, inspects the head wound, applies pressure. “Charlie, help me get her out from under this mess.” The GIs take her under each arm and try to drag her out from under a pile of shattered pumpkins. One foot seems stuck, so with a huge pull, they free her—without her lower left leg, which stays there, boot protruding, under the pile of pumpkins. Her left thigh is spattering blood from two large arteries.

“Oh my God!” Charlie cries. George cuts the straps off her apron.

“Give her water, Charlie, and compress the head wound. Keep her head low. I’m gonna tourniquet this.”

He begins to lift her skirt, but she resists like crazy, as if he were going to rape her.

George looked over at his wife holding her cane in one hand and his son in the other.

GRITS GUTS GUNPOWDER GRITS GUTS GUNPOWDER GRITS GUTS GUNPOWDER, the crowd was chanting.

The truth of the matter—he had never told her—was that he had thought . . . of something. Charlie restrained her while he pushed up her coat and dress, tied up her thigh, stopping the blood flow, twisted the tourniquet—not too much—was she comfortable? Her thigh, the thigh of a young woman considered one of the most beautiful in town, her thigh, with no underwear in this clothing-short time. Cool hand on warm flesh, her blond pubic hair. Even in a pool of blood, even with Charlie there, this young, lonely, cold, wet, muddy young George from Texas felt his heart jump to his throat and his penis rise. He had never told her.

And she, Anna Giardini, had never told him that just four days earlier, she had been raped—gang-banged by four German teenagers wanting to get some in before getting the hell out. She looked like a German Mädchen—the blond Mädchen of their pinup dreams—why not? She had put up a fierce struggle.

George sent Charlie to find transport. Anna calmed down, beyond fatigue, partly from trusting this boy so intent on caring for her but mostly from blood loss and its attendant faintness. Before she lost consciousness, she was able to tell him that the Ospidale Sant’Anna was up on the Corso della Giovecca, only three blocks away. That was her name, too—Anna, she said. Too impatient to wait for an ambulance that might never come, George picked up her limp body and carried her through the streets to the crowded emergency room.

After bringing her out of shock with IV fluids, they sent her on to the bigger Nuovo Ospidale on the east side of town, where George was able to visit her during the two days his unit remained in Ferrara before pushing on to the Po and the victorious end of the war.

Out of guilt? out of love?—he wrote her every day from then on, keeping his English simple but somehow trying to pay her back for the great harm he had done. As she struggled with writing back in a foreign tongue, he grew more and more fond of her, fond in the sense of liking this obviously remarkable person, and fond in the sense of becoming just plain nuts about her.

He looked over at his beautiful wife holding her cane in one hand and his son in the other. Though she was five years younger, he sensed she was older, so much older than he, from the age-old culture of her ancient hometown. Had he her education, he would have known these lines of Carducci:

Onde venisti? Quali a noi secoli

si mite e bella ti tramandarano . . .

Whence come you? What centuries

passed you on to us, so mild and lovely?

Their correspondence continued after his return to Texas. He lived his life in order to write her of it. Lunchtimes, he went home from the Feed Mill to check the mailbox, so impatient was he. He who had never written even a postcard in his life learned to write, expressively and well. And as her letters became more fluent and his more rich, the possibility of marriage became obvious. Would this now eighteen-year-old Italian, half-Jewish beauty, flower of the ghetto, this classical violinist with the Botticelli hands, this Old World, half-Sephardic treasure, give up her family in Ferrara for the blandness of Mansfield, Texas, or would George Hitler join her in the ancient land he had helped destroy?

The most difficult letter was the one he thought might end their relationship, the one in which he told her it was he, and he alone, who had crippled her. It took nine days for an answer. The first of those days were filled with letters from Ferrara he thought of as “she doesn’t know yet.” The last of those days were filled with letters he called “from before she knew.” On a Monday noon, a Monday after an excruciating Sunday of empty mailbox, he held what must be the letter in his trembling hand.

Giorgio, my dearest,

Do you think I didn’t know? Do you think you coming just after the blast, your loving concern, the way you wiped pumpkin off my face did not give you away? Do you think your love does not far exceed this accident of war? Do you think a woman needs two legs to love a man?

Have no fear, my beloved. I will write you again tonight when there is more time. But I answer this immediately, for I can imagine how you are fearful of what I will say. So I just say I am loving you.

Your Anna,

who, even though she loves you, will never eat a pumpkin pie on your Thanksgiving

They were married in June of ’48, she nineteen, he twenty-four. Her “assimilated” parents, her Jewish father, Jacobo, an ex-editor for the Corriere ferrarese (writing freelance, under a pseudonym, since the Nuremberg laws of ’35), her mother, Lucetta, a math teacher in the high school, thought it best Anna should see America. She and Giorgio could come back to Ferrara if she were unhappy. Perhaps she could send a little money to help them rebuild. Life would be easier in America.

Anna kept her name, Giardini, as a link to her old life in her old world, one of the first women of her generation to do so. George was concerned it was because she didn’t want his name. After all . . . No, she assured him, she knew who was Hitler and who was only “Hitler.”