The Road Beyond Ruin Read online

  ALSO BY GEMMA LIVIERO

  Broken Angels

  Pastel Orphans

  Marek

  Lilah

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Gemma Liviero

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904767 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503904768 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503901018 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503901017 (paperback)

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  First edition

  To Oscar & Stella

  CONTENTS

  MAY 1945

  CHAPTER 1 ERICH

  AUGUST 1945

  CHAPTER 2 STEFANO

  CHAPTER 3 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 4 STEFANO

  CHAPTER 5 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 6 STEFANO

  CHAPTER 7 ERICH

  CHAPTER 8 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 9 STEFANO

  CHAPTER 10 ERICH

  CHAPTER 11 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 12 STEFANO

  17 April 1937

  CHAPTER 13 ERICH

  CHAPTER 14 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 15 STEFANO

  22 April 1940

  CHAPTER 16 ERICH

  CHAPTER 17 STEFANO

  23 March 1942

  CHAPTER 18 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 19 ERICH

  CHAPTER 20 STEFANO

  7 August 1942

  CHAPTER 21 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 22 ERICH

  CHAPTER 23 STEFANO

  21 June 1943

  CHAPTER 24 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 25 ERICH

  CHAPTER 26 STEFANO

  10 August 1944

  CHAPTER 27 ERICH

  CHAPTER 28 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 29 STEFANO

  20 March 1945

  CHAPTER 30 ERICH

  CHAPTER 31 ROSALIND

  CHAPTER 32 MONIQUE

  OCTOBER 1945

  CHAPTER 33 MONIQUE

  CHAPTER 34 STEFANO

  CHAPTER 35 GEORG

  CHAPTER 36 MONIQUE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MAY 1945

  CHAPTER 1

  ERICH

  The color of Erich’s hair was scarcely visible amid a field of yellow wildflowers. He lay very still on his stomach, one eye closed, the other trained on the muzzle of his rifle pointed toward the people at the base of the hill. An older man and a female of indeterminable age walked slowly, their pace encumbered by the failing legs of the man, with his uneven gait.

  Erich’s finger pressed lightly against the trigger, testing the weight of its resistance. No one would miss them, he thought before movement off to the side distracted him. He changed his aim to his originally intended target, saw the grasses quiver. When he caught a glimpse of the rabbit’s gray-brown legs disappearing beneath its tenuous cover, he pulled the trigger, and the sound of the small explosion traveled far across the valley. All movement in the grass ahead ceased, and he stood up to mark the spot, shirtless, his narrow torso suntanned, red in places, his browned face burned and peeling. He walked to claim his quarry, enjoying the temporary freedom that had been afforded him.

  The people on the road had quickly disappeared from view. It mattered not to Erich that the sound of gunshots was a recurring nightmare for them. Like so many others, he assumed, the pair traveled the roads to reach a home that was repossessed or no longer standing. He picked up the rabbit by the legs and set off toward his two-story weatherworn house that in recent times had lost its self-respect, with mold under the eaves and shingles missing from its roof. The quaint storybook windows that had once been open to possibilities were kept shut against a hostile present. And the building that had once been beautiful, with its milky walls and chocolate gables, had become little more than a temporary refuge.

  Erich squinted toward the sun and a powdery gust from the east, which carried a familiar yet vastly different smell from that of the acrid fumes and smoke he had grown used to elsewhere. Something was stirring up the dirt in the far paddocks, and the scent triggered memories of his sister, Claudine, running wild, uncaring about punishment and consequence, hands covered with dirt to smear the faces of the younger ones.

  On the far side of the paddocks, he could see a haze of dust and hear the groan of several engines, and a sense of urgency replaced the feeling of freedom.

  He turned and ran through the front door.

  “Mother, trucks! Russian!”

  His mother shoved the plates she was holding down hard so that they rattled together on the table.

  “Get the matches. Hurry!” she said.

  While Erich followed this instruction, she hurried into her bedroom and returned, carrying a wooden box. During Erich’s childhood the box had been untouchable, something that held secrets shared only between parents. As an adult he had learned the value of its contents, and more recently it had become a threat to their survival.

  His mother withdrew from the box letters, photos, and papers and threw them into the fireplace. Erich struck a match and held it to the pile, which quickly caught the flame. It was their names, their past lives they were burning, but Erich, born to survive, felt only a sense of relief watching them shrink and blacken as he fanned them into charcoal ash.

  “They might not stop here,” said Erich.

  At the bottom of the box were several other documents that consisted of both drawings and text. His mother examined them carefully, lovingly almost, as he had seen her do many times before.

  “Keep them with you,” she said to Erich, shoving the papers into his hands. “You must not let people forget your father, forget what he did.”

  Erich looked at the papers, then at his two younger brothers at the dining table, serious faces, their hands in their laps, the middle brother on the threshold of manhood. They were growing used to these moments when they had to wait and hope. The empty chairs at the table said much about their family. The space told of change—how much they had lost.

  Erich watched his mother’s familiar stoic and unchangeable expression. He had absorbed much of her strength. She had given so much of it to all of them over the years. Though the resilience had remained unshakable, her body was not coping with their change in fortune. She had lost weight. The flesh around her jawline had melted away, her chin becoming more prominent, and a purple tinge to her hands stubbornly remained after a long winter without coal.

  “Is the war over, Mutti?” asked the middle brother.

  His mother held his gaze, but there were no secret messages, no more plans. Nothing to suggest they could do anything more. Those times had gone. Then her eyes drifted toward the window to the trucks now coming up the hill, along the dirt track that led to their door.

  “No,” said his mother.

  AUGUST 1945

  CHAPTER 2

  STEFANO

  Berlin is underwhelming. The city described by Germans as the most progressive in the world, occupied by intelligentsia, superior order, and robust architecture, is little more than a puzzle now, what remains of it, slowly being pieced together. Buildings, unusable, with their insides garishly hollowed, mock the crush
ed regime. Windows, from where Germans stretched their arms to salute their führer, to clap the soldiers in the street, are now empty, elitist dreams.

  There is an absence of men of working age here, men who were killed or imprisoned, along with many too young to wear a uniform and too old to shoulder such loads. The Third Reich no longer had age restrictions in the final days.

  Beige women, in belted dresses and headscarves, walk in groups along the pavement of streets cleared of debris, clutching handbags as if they have somewhere important to be. They appear to acknowledge Stefano as he passes, but they don’t consider him for any length of time. It isn’t from fear or guilt that most avert their eyes; Berliners no longer care about the people who walk their streets. They have thrown away caution and replaced it with apathy. Without the Nazi symbols of false superiority, there is nothing to measure themselves against. Among the debris and the shards of a broken city, they, too, are free.

  Stefano was stopped earlier by British soldiers to show the mark on his arm. It is as good as an identity card. In fact, it is better; the mark means that one is no longer answerable. He is left alone, unquestioned. The Russian soldiers ignore him. The British soldiers nod formally. The Americans stare longer, curious. Stefano is thin, worn, gaunt, haggard, all the words that his mother would have used to describe his condition. She would be horrified by the state of him, but he has seen others in worse condition. He is a survivor—one of the lucky ones who ordinarily wouldn’t consider themselves lucky.

  Tall, muscled, he was once a swimmer, a student of languages. Stefano’s family had used words like “tender” and “loving” to describe him after he left them the first time. Then more words the second, then no words on the last trip, because, by then, as war raged with a new sense of recklessness, thoughts of inevitability had replaced any promises of return. He is twenty-three, but his experiences make him twice as old.

  He passes another group of women, the Trümmerfrau, the rubble women. The Allies have assigned them the task of cleaning up the city. They collect the fallen bricks and place them in a barrow that is already overflowing. An elderly man wheels it away, disappearing down a street between the ruins. The women wipe their foreheads and rub their weary backs before bending down to retrieve more bricks to place in another empty barrow that has just arrived, wheeled unsteadily by a small boy.

  Two children scoot past Stefano from the opposite direction. They converse between themselves and accelerate when one points to something ahead, toward a pile of scrap, another playground. Two small girls carrying sacks walk confidently across hills of broken things, every so often bending to examine something shiny, something of value to them that they place in their sacks. One stops to push some hair from her face with her grimy hand. She catches sight of Stefano, smiles, and waves. This simple gesture confuses him at first, as he is unaccustomed to children who are readily accepting of change, who rise quickly above setback. By the time he raises his hand in response, her attention has been diverted, one tiny arm reaching deeply into the rubble for something she has spied.

  One woman shakily wheels a pram filled with bricks before it finally tilts and falls on its side. Stefano wants to walk past, to leave it, but it isn’t in his nature. Even now. He stops to help, and she matches his pace, brick for brick, returning them to the pram. When he is nearly done, the woman stops to rest, to view the man who is helping her.

  “Danke!” she says, and then she looks down at his left hand to the bandage that has come unwound. There is no trace of repulsion at what she sees underneath.

  “Do you want me to fix the bandage for you?” she asks, her eyes darting several times between his face and his hand, and then to the numbers on his arm.

  He shakes his head.

  “Ein Konzentrationslager?” she queries.

  “Yes.”

  “I had a son your age,” she says. “It would be good to have him here now.” She returns to her work, uncaring whether Stefano responds, whether he might be curious about her son’s fate. Such questions are pointless now, and he leaves before he feels compelled to do anything else for these people.

  He wears the new shirt and trousers the Allied administration gave him, and shoes that fit well. Over his shoulder Stefano carries a satchel that contains a tin of meat and beans, several military chocolate bars, a flask of water, a spare shirt, an extra pair of socks, a torch, some money, a map, and a watch that belonged to a dead German. But most importantly he has a document that says he is free.

  On the south side of the city, a truck is waiting where he was told it would be. He is relieved that he can see the end of the city’s destruction and open landscape ahead, but beyond that is an interminable postwar chaos.

  He steps up to the window of the truck, shows his paper, then climbs into the back. Inside, several faces look at him vacantly, a sign they are used to changes, to strangers. There are mostly children—washed faces, borrowed clothes—and mothers. Polish refugees, he thinks, from the look of them, the fairness of them, and from the fact they have no homes here. He does not converse with them during the trip, and partway into the journey as the sun begins its descent, the vehicle stops and the driver taps the side of the vehicle to signal for Stefano to climb out.

  “Do svidaniya!” calls the soldier.

  “Do svidaniya,” he replies.

  He watches the truck veer west at the intersection and head toward a displacement camp; then he turns southeast in the direction of Dresden and, beyond that, to a Mediterranean winter above the cliffs of Amalfi.

  1932

  Stefano woke to the sound of boat motors and the slapping of waves against the rocks below. Summer brought many fishing and tourist vessels to his Mediterranean doorstep. The house was not yet hot, the sun not yet high, but the water was already reflecting its silvery surface onto their white sandstone walls and through the windows into their living room.

  Agatha, who had been on his bed when he fell asleep, was missing. Stefano stretched out his arms across his bed, eyes not staying open willingly, and he felt blindly at the end of his bed. With hair tousled and his eyes still puffed with sleep, he pulled on trousers that would soon be too small for him and his fast-growing body. As he had done every morning, he rubbed his finger across the top of his lip. Already he felt some soft hair growing and prayed daily that he would soon have a handsome mustache like his father.

  His sisters were quiet from their bedroom. The younger, Nina, would not rise for at least another hour. His older sister, Teresa, would be up soon to order everyone around. It would do him well to be out of her way when she first rose. She was always looking for reasons to be angry.

  The crunching and scraping sounds of sand and gravel led him down the steps from their terraced balcony to a garden below. Beyond the garden was a cliff face with more steps down to the sea.

  His father was mixing cement, and beside him was a pile of white bricks; also beside him on the grass, Agatha watched. Nicolo had commenced constructing a small square structure. Agatha wagged her tail, happy to see that Stefano had joined them. She was a small black-and-white dog that Stefano had found as a puppy. After two years with the family, she was still mischievous.

  “What are you doing, Papa?”

  “I’m building a little house for Agatha.”

  Stefano studied the bricks and the careful way his father was spacing them apart before the kindness of this action suddenly struck him. That his father would do this for his dog was another reason to love his papa.

  Though, in Stefano’s heart, he knew that Agatha was just as much his papa’s dog as she was his.

  “What will it look like?”

  “About this high,” said his father, his hand stretched flat and placed level against his hip. “Though at the back there will be a long, narrow window so Agatha can look through and see the sea to make sure there are no marauders heading our way. And she can bark and warn us.”

  Stefano looked out to sea, then back to his father, whose mouth had stretc
hed into a grin. His wide smile, so genuine, with his mustache reshaped into a long, thin line, had always been infectious, and Stefano couldn’t help but smile, too.

  “There are no marauders, Papa,” said Stefano, and his father stroked his head roughly with affection. Stefano liked his father’s playfulness, but he liked even more that Agatha was about to have her own house also. “But why can’t she sleep with me on my bed?”

  “Because she pees on the floor, because you sleep so heavily you don’t hear her whining to get out. Besides, she loves to contemplate the Mediterranean. She loves to see the colorful tourists on their large yachts.”

  His father was right. Agatha loved her perch at the balustrade to watch people and the water below and afar. It was the perfect vantage for her watchtower.

  Stefano gave Agatha a hug and rubbed his cheek against her fur. She rewarded him by licking his arm.

  “Can I help you, Papa?” asked Stefano.

  “Of course.”

  They worked all morning. Stefano helped his father mix the cement, then passed the bricks to his father to position. Sometimes they would swap roles, but Nicolo would straighten Stefano’s row of bricks without him seeing.

  By the time they finished, it was just after lunchtime, and they dived into the sea to cool down—Agatha, too.

  When they came back up the rocky climb, and the many stairs up to the ground floor of their house, his mother greeted them with chilled lemon water, and the three of them sat on the terrace to watch the boats. These were the moments that would stay with Stefano through life, the rafts he would hold on to when he was sinking.

  The following year his father fell from the roof of a laboring job and died on the way to the hospital. Agatha barked for weeks from the terrace and for several days did not use her little brick house at all. And the anchor that had been his father was hauled up and buried with him.

  Present-day 1945

  Stefano is startled awake by the sound of voices close by—a group of people walking, wheeling carts, and carrying children on their backs. It is instinct to stay motionless at every sound, to assess, and then to react. His body has been trained for different sounds and smells. He has seen many travelers heading home since the end of the war, carrying clothing under their arms, some with items tied to their backs with rope. They have emerged from the remnants of Europe, across many foreign lands, but their resentment and their hunger bind them. He does not choose to travel with anyone. He does not wish to reflect upon the war or hear their stories. He has too many of his own.