The Golden Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

had left the city house behind and moved out here full-time to avoid the hazards of approaching war.

    Now—all tradition and history eclipsed by the reality of war—we were living in five small rooms on an upper floor in the back of our own house. Mother and Papa settled into this new routine with an apathy and resignation that seemed to me to be a disease affecting everyone and everything around me. They nodded politely and greeted the soldiers whenever they encountered them. They kept the radio turned low, and they avoided talking about how the Nazis were running our lives.
    Living upstairs, I could hear from below the clink of silver on our dishes as the soldiers ate their meals, smell the sour odor of cabbage and sausage that Rosa was forced to prepare for them. An acrid cloud of fermented grain hung all through the house, rising from half-drained mugs of beer evaporating on side tables that wecould see through the windows as we passed. With the coming of spring, smoke from their huge cigars curled up from the terrace into my open window while I tried to sleep. Below, the murmur of their voices sounded impatient, cold, and unfeeling. Even my dreams became hemmed in and rigid, outlined in gray shadows through which I would hurry, anxious and lost, and awake most mornings feeling disoriented and lonely.

    I slowed down as I reached the top of the narrow stairs. I knew I was late, but I wasn’t sure what Papa wanted, whether he might be angry about something. “Papa, are you here? Tonino said you wanted to see me.”
    Father appeared in the doorway to the parlor. He was slightly taller than I was. Nearly fifty, he was still youthful, his hair only beginning to turn silver at the temples; he had two long, creased dimples at the sides of his mouth, and just above his upper lip a prominent indentation, as if someone had carefully placed a finger in clay and left an imprint there, permanently molded. His brown eyes, like shots of espresso, were powerful and penetrating, and now he looked down his long, straight nose at me.
    “Where have you been? It’s nearly six o’clock. I thought we were going to hit some balls this afternoon.” He wore white slacks and a sweater vest with blue and gold stripes around the V-neck, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow. It was a casual, elegant statement, as if there were no war, as if nothing had changed. Sometimes it seemed wrong to me that we should claim these moments of class-bound leisure in the midst of such upheaval, but getting Papa to play tennis seemed to restore him to his rightful stature. Living in those few rooms, he seemed stooped, weighed down by anxiety, as if his spirit and life force shrank in proportion to the walls of our confined quarters. He went about the business of overseeing the orchards and vineyards, but his heart was not in it.He showed no interest in progress or hope for the future. Tennis was also one of the ways I could fill Giorgio’s absence and give my father back a measure of the normality he had lost.
    I slipped my hand into the pocket of my skirt, fingering the photograph lightly, guiltily. I had completely forgotten that I had promised to play that morning when I left for the school.
    “Oh, Papa, I’m so sorry!” I could feel my cheeks flush. “I had extra work to do, and I couldn’t get away until now. I’ll just change.”
    Later, after our game, he put his arm around my shoulder. “Your smile does my heart good. Where would I be without you,
piccola
?”

    Once dinner was over, I was finally able to shut the door of my room. At least I still had this small measure of privacy. I reached into the top drawer of my dresser and slipped the photograph out from under a pile of silk camisoles. Seeing it there both thrilled and terrified me. What if Klaus had come back and discovered it missing? But still, here in my hand, in my own room, was this fragile token of his most inner and personal life. Here was Mathilde, the woman he