The Metal Heart, стр. 38

After an endless stretch of nightmarish light and dark, my fever fades. I wake with a clear head. Con is gone but Cesare is looking at me from the next bed. I try to speak but only a wheeze emerges.

He smiles. ‘I think you are angel but you sound like my grandfather.’

I laugh, then cough. ‘You are better.’ I feel foolish for saying what is obvious.

His face is serious. ‘You save me.’

My cheeks heat and I want to hide my face.

‘Look at me,’ he whispers.

I turn my face towards his. There is intimacy in this, lying down together, within arms’ reach.

‘I remember . . .’ He touches his lips.

Then Con walks in. She stops in the doorway, staring at us. She looks as though she might be sick.

She doesn’t return my smile. The lamp casts ghastly shadows on her face and, for a moment, she seems menacing, monstrous. Before I can call to her, she turns and stumbles from the room.Cesare

It is heat that brings him back to himself. Heat and cold. The heat from Dorotea’s body near his, as if she is a lamp held up close to his warming skin. As she drips water into his mouth, something inside him thaws. Everywhere that she doesn’t touch is icy, numb, dead.

When he wakes fully, it is as if everything during his fever was a dream – had she really touched her mouth to his? What does this mean? What does he want from her, this foreign woman on this strange island? His mind feels fogged and fuzzy. He drinks and dozes. Gradually, his strength returns.

She recovers from her illness more quickly than he does – the work in the quarry has weakened him. Once she can walk and move around more easily, she sits by his bed and reads the newspaper to him.

He sees her sister too. Costanza – Con. Her name means steadfastness, but also obstinacy. Her face is more serious than Dorotea’s, and she is always watching. If she were a man, Cesare would think that she meant him harm. It is not aggressive, her stare, but it is suspicious. Something about her reminds him of the wary cat in Moena’s church: it used to sit above the pews like a gargoyle, glowering, its tail twitching. Sometimes it pounced – Cesare still has the scars on his wrist.

Now Cesare pretends to doze, while Dorotea flicks through the newspaper, recounting stories about war meetings in London and about the movements of the round-faced British prime minister. Her voice, when she reads, is clear as a struck bell. Her red hair falls over her face. The other men lean in to listen too, the whole infirmary quiet while Dorotea tells them everything that is happening in the war.

Occasionally, her eyes skim over an article, her lips compress, and she turns the page, before beginning to read again. The second time she does this, Cesare sits up.

‘What is this story?’

‘Churchill is meeting –’

‘No. The story on the first page. You are not reading to me, I think.’

She looks down at her feet and gives an almost imperceptible shudder. He waits, suddenly fearing what she will say. Her eyes are bright with unshed tears.

‘Bombs?’ he asks, his voice no more than a whisper. The other men must have heard it too, because a silence falls over the rest of the infirmary. Every man holding his breath.

‘Moena?’ he asks.

‘It . . . it doesn’t say here. It says . . . forgive me. It says, successful attack. And it mentions Milan. Is that near your home? Your . . .’ she swallows ‘… your family?’

He shakes his head and closes his eyes, feeling a rush of relief, and then is sickened by it: if his family is safe, then another man’s loved ones will be dead. There will be at least one prisoner in this camp with family in Milan.

There is muffled sobbing from the corner and he looks over to see the man in the far bed with his sheet pulled over his face, his shoulders shaking.

Cesare’s thoughts are suddenly back in the desert: the bleached sky, the circling vultures, the explosions and fire. The coppery smell of blood that was impossible to forget. And he thinks, too, about the quarry. About the endless sea, the brutal guards and the barrier they are building for the enemy.

Madonna Santa.

He’s sick of all of it. He can’t even begin to listen to Dorotea again, though he can feel her watching him, waiting. But how can he lie in a bed, hearing war tales as though they’re entertainment? How can he listen to this foreign woman talking about a successful attack on his people?

‘I am tired,’ he says, trying not to care when Dorotea’s face falls, when she winces as though he’s snapped at her. Perhaps he has. Perhaps that doesn’t matter when, somewhere, everywhere, people are dying.

He turns his face to the wall, pulling up the covers, over his shoulders, over his head so that he re-breathes his own panicked exhalations in a white tent, which cuts off the rest of the world, which cuts off Dorotea. As he hears her rise and turn to leave, her sister, Con, says to her, ‘I said you should stay away from him, that –’

‘Enough!’ Dorotea’s voice is sharp. He hears the door open. A freezing breeze scours the infirmary, and then there is stillness, apart from the low whispers of the other men, and the quiet weeping from the bed in the corner.

Later, the sound of movement wakes him. He opens his eyes, still facing the wall, but he knows it is her: he knows it from the sound of her breathing, from the smell of woodsmoke that she often carries with her, as if she’s not had long to warm herself properly and has stood, very briefly, too close to the fire.

He can’t bring himself to turn, to look at her. He feels ashamed of the way he’d shunned her, the way he’d blamed