Free Warburg in Rome by James Carroll Page A

which the nighttime coals smoldered. Boys in twos and threes threw their fingers in games of morra. Boys at play in every circumstance!
    How the throng of young ones had come to congregate here was a mystery to Marguerite, but the rest of their stories she knew well—the flight of families from battle-ravaged towns to the south and bombed cities to the north, captured fathers, kidnapped mothers, the hidden children left behind in barns and cones of hay, from which finally they joined the snaking lines of desperate Italians on the march toward Rome. In wartime, children are invisible except to one another, and here their companionship had become a condition of survival. The gardens were a kind of no man’s land into which, until yesterday, adults were all but forbidden admission. Adults were dangerous.
    Thoughts of Sisak came unbidden to Marguerite, the trucks roaring around their oval circuit, the dog, the devil priest cupping the heads of toddlers, selecting them. But she had tried to dispel the thoughts with her Memorare —a prayer no longer, but an incantation: O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions . . .
    Now that the open-air kitchen had been established in the corner of the gardens nearest the former palace—stock pots sterilizing water for reconstituting the evaporated milk, onto which lumps of bread were being set afloat for ladling into tin cups—Marguerite was permitting herself actually to look at these little ones. Near the serving tables, a crush of youngsters pushed forward, but elsewhere the children seemed indifferent to the food. Awake and aware of the day, they had assembled themselves with apparent purposefulness, but their herding was unthinking. They seemed blind to Marguerite, for whom they made room like sheep dumbly ovaling a shepherdess. Her own senses were far more concentrated than usual, but were tethered, in truth, to the herd at Sisak.
    Quirinal, she told herself, you are in Quirinal. When she came upon a girl who had curled her willowy body into a fist, beneath the canopy of a prostrate shrub, Marguerite stooped. The stench of urine rose from the child’s filthy frock, which unaccountably made Marguerite think she knew her. The girl’s hands were at her mouth, where she furiously gnawed at her fingernails. Marguerite gently took the girl’s fingers, thinking as she did of her own father, how it always reassured her to have him reach for her hand.
    If Marguerite’s father came to mind now, wasn’t it because he was the one to whom she longed to tell the final story of Carlo, as if then she herself would understand?
    Should she have known that such male fierceness, enough to draw her at last, could have been fueled only by the demonic? In Croatia, she thought she’d come to share equally in Carlo’s hatred for Ante Pavelic, the Fascist warlord. Wasn’t she like Carlo in despising the Ustashe crimes, centered on Jasenovac? If only half of what was said about the place was true, yes, it paired Pavelic with Hitler. To say nothing of Sisak. Nothing of the Franciscan.
    But now Marguerite understood that what she had felt, even that deadly morning after seeing the children in the gas trucks, was cool compared to the furnace that burned in her red-bearded pirate. Having attached herself to his guerrilla band in the rough borderlands between Yugoslavia and Italy, she saw now that she had been merely a child at play, not knowing it was play for her alone. Until Trieste.
    The brigade numbered fifty men. In its boldest strike yet, they had slyly come down out of the hills in pairs or threesomes. A third of them set up ambushes on the roads leading into the seaport city, while the rest lost themselves in its plazas and courtyards, like stevedores or sailors on leave. Carlo had left Marguerite behind in Vranjak, to stay with the other women.
    As was typical, he had said nothing of the unit’s project, but a terrible premonition after he’d gone convinced her that disaster