Free The Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman Page A

three hours by train. But since her parents’ death, Orsina had difficulty returning to a place with so many memories. But the city still pulled her, especially during moments when she felt lost.
    She had buried both her parents during the flu epidemic of 1918, just two years after she had married Pietro, and when she was five months pregnant. She had returned to her native city only to bury them, her heart heavy that she was forbidden to care for them while they were still alive because of the risk to her and the baby.
    Pietro had traveled with her for the funeral, although he wished she had adhered to the Italian tradition of pregnant women being forbidden to attend funerals. But since her brother had died in infancy, Orsina was an only child and felt the full weight of her responsibilities.
    The stench was horrific. Every day, boats traveled from the hospital to the cemetery to deliver the dead.
    The island of San Michele, the city’s ancient burial ground, was directly across from the hospital. Orsina had received letters from her father before he fell ill, detailing how the gondoliers had wrapped their faces with muslin as they were forced to ferry the dead.
    The sensation of feeling like she was floating, which she felt most of her life there, had completely vanished. Now when they arrived at her childhood city, it felt like they were all suffocating. Orsina felt like she was sinking, being pushed into a cloud of blackness.
    “We shouldn’t have come,” Pietro whispered to Orsina on the boat. He pulled a shawl over his wife’s shoulders and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her closer as if to shield her from the invisible, infectious disease.
    “How can a daughter not bury her own parents?” she protested. Pietro shook his head. He could feel his wife trembling. Her body was rail thin except for the soft swelling of her stomach. On top of the morning sickness, the stress of being unable to see her parents, to care for them as they were dying, had taken its toll.
    “I won’t abandon them to be buried by strangers in some mass grave.”
    He had weakly tried to put his foot down and forbid her from coming. But the sight of her crying and pleading with him had made it impossible for him to insist. Still, he knew that the frail and the weak were even more susceptible to infection.
    “We must leave the same day as the funeral” was his only demand. “I don’t care if we have to take a night train home, I will not have you sleeping there.”
    She nodded, her throat too tight from choking back the tears to talk.
    That afternoon, they stood by the graves. The rest of the cemetery was filled with families all silently connected in a weary haze of funeral rites.
    The priest in his dark robe raised the crucifix over both graves and recited the Prayer for the Dead. Two boys hovered to the side with oversized shovels in their hands, like staffs that seemed incongruous to their childish frames.
    Orsina nearly fainted as the first shovel of earth fell upon her parents’ black coffins.
    On the way home, she did not stop crying.
    They returned to Verona exhausted and Orsina took immediately to her bed.
    For three days she slept, only waking occasionally to drink water and eat a few bits of boiled rice.
    Then the fever began.
    “It will be a miracle if she survives.” The doctor stood outside their bedroom, looking grave.
    Pietro, already pale and exhausted with worry, became chalk white. “She will make it. The baby, too.”
    “The baby?” The doctor shook his head. “Just try and care for your wife. Wash your hands. Keep your face covered. Get her to drink as much as you can.” He snapped his leather bag shut. “The rest is in God’s hands.”
    For days Orsina was on fire, her black hair wet with perspiration.
    Pietro lifted his wife’s head every two hours, imploring her to take even a few sips of water. Twice a day he took a moistened sugar cube and placed it between her lips.
    He had never been one to seek