Home > The Children's Train(9)

The Children's Train(9)
Author: Viola Ardone

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.”

“What 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.

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