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Afghanistan was an airport, the road that heads into town, a few mountains sprinkled with snow, and the perimeter of the base. She hardly knew these two guys, and still called them by their last names. It had been a happy, even juvenile Christmas dinner there at the edge of the world, together with her tribe. With her desire to make a difference. She sat thinking about it in Teodora’s little living room; it was the most wonderful Christmas of her life. There’d never be another one like it. Maybe that’s what it means to have your future behind you.
    Teodora sets a steaming soup tureen on the table and the pungent odor of liver, kidneys, and pork fat wafts up from it. But there’s no sign of Traian. “It’s ready!” she shouts. “It’s always the same thing—I have to call him a hundred times, one of these days I’m going to throw that computer out the window!” Manuela catches her father’s meek gaze. His photograph in its silver frame is prominently displayed in the little glass cupboard in the living room. His light eyes, dazzled by the flash in city hall the day of his wedding to Teodora, seem happy. But his hair has already thinned, all that remain are two grayish strands on each side of his head, and he’s grown flabby; he certainly doesn’t look like someone who’s beaten cancer. Looking at his picture now, Manuela realizes he was already seriously ill on his wedding day. Teodora, on the other hand, now seems younger than ever. With her teased hair and shapeless, knee-length blue skirt, she looks like a middle-aged peasant in the photo. But in the years since, she has shed the weight of time. Manuela called her from the base on her thirty-seventh birthday. “Happy birthday, Teodora!” she shouted. “You remembered!” Teodora exclaimed, surprised. Her voice came and went, nibbled by the interference, deformed by the distance. Then the connection went dead.
    Teodora was a nurse at the Passo Oscuro hospital. She had gotten to know Manuela’s father while adjusting his catheter, bringing him his medications, and serving him his lunch on a tray. Manuela had never understood what she saw in that depressed, emaciated man, ugly with unhappiness, bald from chemo, whose only love was the electrical plant and who had lately developed a passion for windsurfing. It never even crossed her mind that her father, ill and anguished by the approach of death, would lose his head for that rough nurse, or that he could so carelessly and so remorselessly destroy his own life and that of his family for a love that was already all but terminal. As soon as he finished his chemo and regained his strength, he stuffed his shirts in a suitcase and moved in with Teodora. Manuela hadn’t seen him leave. When she and Vanessa came home from school, their father was gone. He didn’t even have the courage to tell them, their mother had had to do it. Then Traian was born, and in the end Tiberio had married Teodora in city hall. Neither Manuela nor Vanessa was there.
    Her mother never forgave Teodora. She’s a social climber, she says, ruthless and greedy like everyone else from Eastern Europe who had poured into Ladispoli, in wave after wave, paying exorbitant rents for the second homes that Romans had left empty when they’d started vacationing in Sardinia or Sharm. First the Poles, then the Russians, the Albanians, and, finally, the Ukrainians and Romanians. They’d ruined the housing market. Ruined the atmosphere. Even ruined the families. Cinzia would say that Teodora got herself pregnant with a terminal cancer patient’s child in order to get the dying man’s money. She went around blabbing to everyone that before his second round of chemo Teodora had him freeze his sperm. They tried four times, but his sperm had grown weak, and in the end they had to do IVF. Manuela was sorry her mother told people these sad, private things, even though