Synopsis
Book by Hellenga Robert
Extrait
Chapter 1: The Mountain of Lights
On Friday, August 15, 1980 -- Assumption Day, the middle of the August holidays -- a bomb exploded in the train station in Bologna, Italy, killing eighty-six people, including my sister Cookie, who was sitting in the second-class waiting room, about two meters from where the bomb went off, waiting for a train back to Rome.
The station has been repaired, of course, but part of it -- part of the waiting room -- was left the way it had been after the bombing. You can see the bomb crater, which is about the size of a bowling ball. I didn't see it myself till years later, but I often imagined it. Daddy had a picture, a poster, rolled up in a cardboard mailing tube at the back of his closet. On the wall above the crater a marble stone, a lapide, lists the names and ages of all the people who were killed. Cookie was twenty-two. She was on her way to study international law at the University of Bologna. We thought she was in Rome, staying with friends, but she'd gone up to Bologna for a couple of days to look for a place to live.
I was sixteen years old at the time, and Ludi was twelve.
The bomb went off at 10:25 in the morning. That's 4:25 in the morning in Illinois. We were all asleep.
Before breakfast that morning Ludi and I took our books and walked up to the cemetery to wait for trains, not knowing that Cookie was already dead, or close to it. Pretty soon the Illinois Zephyr came by from Quincy -- it ran an hour later on Saturdays -- and about half an hour after that we saw four freight trains coming together on the two sets of tracks that cross about halfway between our house and New Cameron. The Burlington tracks go over, of course, and the Santa Fe tracks go under, but it was exciting anyway, because for a while it looked as if all the trains were going to collide.
Our house was a quarter of a mile from the crossing, and at night, lying in bed, you could feel the house tremble when a train went by, and when the windows were open you could make out the different sounds of the different cars, boxcars and gondolas and flatbeds; and you could hear the whistles blowing as far away as Cass City, on the Spoon River, where Daddy used to go duck hunting with Peter Abbott from the Biology Department; and you could hear the engines switching in the hump yard in St. Clair, three miles away, and the loudspeakers blurting out instructions to the engineers. Overnight guests sometimes said they couldn't sleep; but the sounds had become such a part of our lives, like the sound of Daddy playing his guitar at night, that we didn't hear them till we went away, and then we couldn't get to sleep.
I don't remember what book I was reading, but Ludi was reading Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales. She couldn't get enough of those folktales, every one of which began with a king and three daughters. The two older daughters were always mean and ugly, but guess what? -- the youngest was always beautiful and smart and wonderful. We read for about an hour and saw a few more trains, and when we went back down Mama and Daddy were up and around, but we still didn't know about Cookie. After supper Daddy was reading The Lord of the Rings out loud to Ludi and me. He used to say that he'd read The Lord of the Rings aloud three times, once for each of his three daughters; but that wasn't quite true, because he didn't finish it the third time, which was for Ludi. We were getting close to the end, though. Frodo and Sam had climbed up Mount Doom, followed by Gollum, and Frodo and Gollum were teetering on the edge of the crater when the phone rang. Ludi had been upset by the death of Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit and Daddy'd promised her that no one really important dies in The Lord of the Rings. But things were not looking good for Frodo, and Ludi was nervous, and when the phone rang she started to cry "You promised."
It was Allison Mirsadiqi an old friend of Daddy's, calling from Rome to tell Daddy about the strage, which is Italian for massacre or slaughter. She was worried because Cookie had called on Friday morning to say she'd found an apartment and would be back that afternoon. Allison had spoken to an official at the city hall in Bologna. Cookie's name hadn't been on the list of dead or injured, but a lot of bodies hadn't been identified, and over two hundred people had been injured. Everything was in chaos.
Daddy was saying uh-huh, uh-huh on the phone in the upstairs hallway and shouting for Mama to get on the phone down in the kitchen, and Ludi was still crying "You promised." I'd heard the story before, of course, and I knew that Frodo wasn't going to fall into Mount Doom, and I kept telling Ludi that everything was going to be all right.
Daddy spent the rest of the evening on the phone, and the next morning, Saturday morning, he and Mama flew to Milan and didn't come back till the beginning of September -- classes had already started at St. Clair College, where my grandmother had gone to school and where Daddy taught Latin and Greek -- because Mama had some kind of breakdown and had to stay in the hospital in Italy.
I couldn't remember a time when the house hadn't been full of students and faculty on Friday nights, reading naughty poems aloud in Latin, or putting on Greek plays, or just singing and making lots of noise to celebrate the end of the week; I couldn't remember a time when Daddy hadn't made pizza on Saturday nights; I couldn't remember a time when Mama and Daddy hadn't made love on Sunday mornings, staying in bed till ten or eleven o'clock; I couldn't remember a time when Daddy hadn't told us a story and played his guitar for us every night, or a time when he hadn't been working on his book on the early Greek philosophers, which he was going to call The Cosmological Fragments.
But when they came back from Italy Mama needed to rest a lot, so we didn't have anyone over. In the evenings she stayed in her study and read her Bible and religious books that Father Davis from Corpus Christi gave her. She tried to get us to read them too: C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Father Ronald Knox. On Sunday mornings we started going to mass at Corpus Christi. Mama sang in the choir and went to see Father Davis two or three times a week, and helped him organize a novena, a series of prayer meetings at our house every Friday night for nine weeks in a row. Ludi and I didn't have to get down on our knees and say our prayers out loud, though Mama said it would make our grandparents happy in heaven, and Cookie too; but we had to come into the living room and let Father Davis put his hands on our heads and bless us; and then we had to pass around the plates of cookies that the women took turns bringing. And Mama ordered a tombstone for Cookie that said La sua voluntade è nostra pace on it -- His will is our peace. Daddy went to mass for a while, and he fixed supper for Father Davis once a week and drove him home if he'd had too much to drink; and he drank coffee with the people from Corpus and St. Pat's who came to the novena. But he wouldn't go along with the inscription for the tombstone. "It's a cliché, Hannah; it's the one line from the Paradiso that everybody knows because it's one of Matthew Arnold's touchstones."
"When something's a cliché there's usually a good reason for it."
Ludi and I, sitting at the top of the back stairway, could hear them in the kitchen, and I can remember how sick I felt, because I'd never heard them quarreling before, not like this.
"What kind of God would will a bomb to go off in a crowded railway station?"
"That's not what it says, Woody. Read the line. Please read it aloud to me."
But Daddy wouldn't read the line aloud, and pretty soon Mama stumbled up the back stairs, walking right past Ludi and me without seeing us.
In January Mama took a job at a Catholic girls' school run by an order of Ursuline nuns, in Oak Park, just outside of Chicago. The Latin teacher had resigned. Mama found a little studio apartment in River Forest -- cheaper than Oak Park -- and took the Illinois Zephyr home on weekends, which worked out OK, but to get back to Chicago she had to take the 8:00 train on Sunday morning, so she had to stop singing in the choir. She made us promise to keep going to mass, but by Thanksgiving the novelty had worn off. Ludi was the first to drop out. She simply refused to go. Then Daddy stopped. He said he liked the idea, but that his body started twitching when he thought about going. So he drove me in to Corpus on Sunday mornings. He'd go to his office at the college to do a little work and then pick me up afterwards. Maybe I lasted a little longer than the others because I'd gone to bed with Aaron Gridley, Cookie's old boyfriend, while Mama and Daddy were in Italy, and I was afraid...I'm not sure what I was afraid of, but when I finally went to confession and told Father Davis that I'd committed the sin of unchastity, he asked me if I was truly sorry, and I said no, not really, and that was that. I don't think he heard me, or else he was thinking of something else. I didn't say my ten Hail Marys; I just walked out of the church and sat on the steps till Daddy drove up in his truck with the dogs in the back and we drove back to the farm. That's what we called home -- "the farm."
It wasn't so simple, though, because I was sorry too. Not sorry that I'd done it, but sorry that I'd done it right after Cookie died, done it while Mama was in a hospital in Italy, thinking she was Mary Magdalene, sorry that Daddy and I couldn't go up to his study and have one of our grown-up talks about it, and about everything else too. But by the time I was ready to talk it was too late. Mama was already gone, and Daddy had already told Mr. Steckley at the Steckley Monument Company that he wouldn't pay for the stone unless they sanded off the inscription, which they did, even though the sanding cost more than the stone itself.
For years I've tried to imagine that time in my parents' lives, that month in Italy. I was hungry for facts, for details. I looked through a guidebook of Bologna that Daddy brought back and got a sense of the city -- a circle, described by the old medieval wall, with spokes radiating out from the center. If I close my eyes I can see my parents in front of the bombed-out station.
Allison Mirsadiqi -- Cookie had been staying with Allison -- has driven up from Rome to meet them. Allison, the first grown-up who ever asked me to call her by her first name, was Daddy's girlfriend when she was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, and later on she married an Iranian businessman she met on a train from Rome to Naples. She went to St. Clair as an undergraduate, and now she's an important trustee of the college.
I located everything on the map, which was sort of a cross between an aerial photo and a perspective drawing, as if you were looking down on the red roofs of the city. I located the Ospedale Maggiore, where Cookie died, and the morgue where they took her body for an autopsy, and the Policlinico Sant'Orsola, where Mama was hospitalized. I studied the map as if it held an explanation, but I never found what I was looking for.
Daddy always said that at the heart of everything -- religions, countries, families -- you'd find not doctrines or philosophical propositions but stories, that stories took you as close as you could get to the heart of things. As far as he was concerned, the greatest storyteller of all was Homer, and he was always threatening to read the Odyssey and the Iliad to us, but as far as we were concerned the greatest storyteller of all was Daddy himself, and we always wanted him to tell us stories, not read them out of a book. It wasn't till I was in high school and began to read grown-up books on my own that I realized what had happened. Daddy hadn't made up his stories at all; he'd stolen them. From Dickens and Jane Austen and from Homer too. And he'd changed them. In Daddy's versions my sisters and I were always in the stories. Three little girls. Sometimes one of us would be the main character, and sometimes we'd just be minor characters going along for the ride: in Polyphemus's cave with Odysseus; swimming down with Beowulf to the bottom of the mere where Grendel's mother lived; going into Humbaba's sacred forest with Gilgamesh and Enkidu; packed off to Salem House with David Copperfield in Mr. Barkis's cart; a few extra sisters in a Jane Austen family; in the belly of the whale with Jonah; hiding in the bushes at the sacrifice of Isaac. But even as minor characters we would usually play a crucial role: one of us would suggest the "nobody" trick to Odysseus, or tell Abraham to look in the bushes for the ram, or warn Elizabeth Bennet about Lady Catherine de Bourgh. When I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time I didn't even recognize the name because I'd always heard Daddy pronounce it so that it rhymed with "crow." But when I read Combray in my French class at St. Clair I recognized Marcel, except that in Proust he was a little boy instead of a little girl, and he didn't have any sisters.
I reminded Daddy of Marcel as we were driving back from Grinnell College on Interstate 80. We'd taken Ludi down -- or sideways if you look at a map -- for her freshman orientation. That was at the end of August 1986, six years after the bombing. Daddy'd wanted to take Ludi and me out to dinner in Grinnell, which is a town of about a thousand people, plus the college, but Ludi just wanted us to go so she could be on her own, so we left early. Daddy said that at the heart of every family there's a story like Marcel's, and I knew that he was thinking about Cookie, and about that month in Bologna. I asked him whatever happened to Marcel, or Marcelle, as she was called in Daddy's version; but he didn't know. He'd tried to read Remembrance of Things Past three or four times, but he never got past Swann's Way.
Daddy was a man who cried easily, even before it became fashionable. "Well," he'd say, when he'd pulled himself together, "Beowulf cried when he said good-bye to Hrothgar, and Achilles cried when Patroclus died, and Sir Launcelot..." He had a whole list. And he could make us cry by singing "Danny Boy" or "Just Before the Battle, Mother" or "The Poor Lonesome Cowboy." When we took Argos, our German shepherd, to the vet to have him put down, I was on the edge of tears, but Daddy was so far over the edge it was embarrassing. He'd just had a hernia operation so Mama had to carry poor old Argos downstairs -- he couldn't even stand up the last day -- and hold him on her lap in the truck. Ludi and I rode in the back. I thought Daddy wasn't going to be able to drive, and in the vet's office I tried to pretend I didn't know him. But I never saw him cry after Cookie's death. I thought about that when we read Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" in my English Lit. class. Professor Arnold said that the last two lines were a blemish on an OK poem, a decline into sentimentality, and when she read them aloud they did sound a little silly. But Daddy said that the little bump in the rhythm at the beginning of the last line knocked out the sentimentality, and that anyone who read the lines aloud paying attention to the rhythm would feel their strength, and when he read it aloud, not really accenting any syllable between "thoughts" and "lie," I could hear what he meant:
To me the meanest flower that blows
Can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
When we got home from Grinnell after taking Ludi to school, I opened the pocket door that separates the living room from the dining room -- Ludi had it closed to keep Laska, our other dog, out of the dining room, where s...
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