Verona, October 1955
The cobblestones of Via delle Fogge were not merely hard; they were indifferent. They had supported the sandals of Roman legionaries, the velvet slippers of Renaissance princes, and the boots of Austrian occupiers. They did not flinch beneath the knees of Peter Polemos.
He knelt there, a grotesque statue of penitence carved from grey suit wool and Siberian famine. The impact had jarred his spine, but he did not rise. He remained fixed, his forehead resting against the cool, damp stone, his breath rasping in and out of his lungs like wind through dry reeds.
He was conscious of the silence. It was not the silence of the void, nor the silence of the snowy tomb in Bautzen. It was a silence that had a texture—heavy, velvet, and smelling faintly of the geraniums that spilled from the iron balconies above.
"Signore..."
The voice was a ribbon of sound, trembling in the air. It was Dolce.
Peter felt hands on his shoulders. They were not the rough, testing hands of guards or the desperate, clawing hands of dying men. They were small, warm, and terrifyingly gentle. They exerted a pressure that was more invitation than force.
He allowed himself to be lifted. His joints popped, audible gunshots in the quiet alley. He felt lightheaded, his blood rushing from his head to his feet, leaving his vision swimming in a kaleidoscope of gold and black.
They guided him—the old woman in black and the woman in yellow—across the threshold.
The transition was violent. He passed from the public glare of the street into the amniotic gloom of the hallway. The door closed behind him with a heavy, final thunk, shutting out the twentieth century.
The house breathed. It respired with the scent of beeswax, old lemons, and the dust of centuries. The floor was terrazzo, a mosaic of red and white chips polished to a mirrored sheen by generations of slippered feet. Peter looked down and saw his own reflection: a shattered, dark specter floating in the red stone.
"Into the kitchen," the old woman commanded. Her shock had calcified into a matriarchal efficiency. "He cannot stand. Look at him. He is made of straw."
They led him down a corridor lined with daguerreotypes—solemn faces of ancestors emerging from sepia fog—and into a kitchen that seemed to be the heart of the world. A copper hearth dominated one wall. A heavy oak table, scarred by knives and hot pans, stood in the center.
"Sit," Dolce said.
She pulled out a chair. It was rush-seated, humble. Peter lowered himself onto it. He placed his hands on the table. They looked like foreign objects—driftwood cast upon a fine shore.
Dolce stood opposite him. She had placed the packet of letters on the center of the table.
For a long moment, nobody moved. The object lay there between them: the yellowed paper, the frayed edges, the stains of sweat and pitch. It pulsated. It was a reliquary containing the bones of a saint, or perhaps a bomb that had yet to detonate.
Dolce did not touch it yet. She looked at Peter. Her eyes were dark, vast, and searched him with a hunger that stripped him bare. She was looking for Mario. She was scanning Peter's face, searching for a trace of the man she loved—a shared gesture, a familiar turn of phrase, a spark of the soul she remembered.
She found nothing. She found only the Gulag.
"You brought him," she whispered. It was not a question.
"I brought his voice," Peter croaked. His Italian was a rusted mechanism, grinding gears.
The old woman, Signora Rossi, moved to the stove. She was bustling, creating noise to fill the vacuum of grief. She clanged a pot. She struck a match. The blue flame of the gas hissed.
"You are hungry," the mother said. "You look like you have eaten nothing but sorrow for ten years."
"I am fine," Peter lied.
"You are a liar," the mother said, not unkindly. "You will eat."
Dolce reached out. Her hand hovered over the packet. Her fingers, long and unadorned save for a simple silver band, trembled. She touched the oilcloth skin Peter had fashioned from the tire rubber. She touched the string he had knotted in the dark of the barracks.
She began to undo the knot.
Peter wanted to look away. He felt like a voyeur. He was witnessing a woman undressing her dead lover. But he could not turn his head. He was paralyzed by the gravity of the moment.
The knot gave way. The oilcloth fell open.
There they were. The envelopes. Some were blue, some were white, some were torn scraps of logistical manifests. They were a chronology of the apology.
Dolce picked up the top one. The paper was so thin it was translucent. The graphite writing, retraced a hundred times by Peter's hand in the dim light of the camp, shone with a metallic luster.
She brought the paper to her face. She inhaled.
She wasn't smelling the ink. She was smelling the history. She was smelling the smoke of the crypt, the sewage of the drain, the pine of the forest, and the sweat of the man who had carried it.
"Mario," she breathed.
She began to read.
She did not read aloud. She read with her body. Her lips moved slightly, shaping the vowels. Her breath hitched. Her hand flew to her throat, clutching the collar of her yellow dress.
Peter watched the words he had written take root in her.
He had written them in a circular tomb while men burned. He had written: I release you, Dolce. I am not the man who danced with you by the river. That man is gone. I am a memory now, and memories must not hold the living hostage.
He saw her eyes widen as she read those lines. She let out a soft, broken sound—a whimper that was half-pain, half-gratitude.
She was receiving the absolution he had fabricated. She was being set free by a ghost.
But the ghost was sitting across from her.
The tragedy of it clawed at Peter's throat. I am wooing her, he realized with a sick, vertiginous drop in his stomach. I am making her fall in love with a soul that is mine, but she thinks it is his.
He had poured his own longing, his own regret, his own capacity for love into Mario's name. Mario had been a soldier—brash, perhaps, or simple. Peter didn't know. But the Mario in the letters? The Mario in the letters was a poet. The Mario in the letters was a man who understood the geometry of loss.
Peter had created a better man than Mario ever was, and now, he had to watch Dolce mourn that fiction.
"He wrote this?" she asked, looking up. Her eyes were swimming in tears, magnifying the iris to black pools. "At the end?"
Peter nodded. The lie came easier now. It was no longer a lie; it was a mercy. "In the crypt. Before the fire."
"He thought of me?"
"He thought only of you. The other men... they prayed to God. Mario prayed to you."
It was a beautiful blasphemy.
The old woman placed a bowl in front of Peter. It was soup—Minestrone. Thick, dark red, crowded with beans and vegetables. A piece of crusty bread lay beside it.
The smell hit Peter like a physical blow. Oregano. Basil. Tomatoes. The richness of it made his salivary glands ache with a sudden, sharp pain.
"Eat," the mother commanded.
Peter picked up the spoon. His hand shook so violently the spoon rattled against the ceramic. He lowered his face to the bowl. He took a mouthful.
The taste was overwhelming. It was too much life in one spoon. It tasted of sun and earth and care. He swallowed, and the warmth spread through his chest, fighting the cold that had lived there since 1945.
He ate. He ate with a terrifying focus, wiping the bowl clean with the bread, ignoring the tears that leaked from his eyes and fell into the soup.
Dolce continued to read. She moved through the letters, through the years. She read the letters he had written in the sewer (in his mind), the letters he had composed while chopping wood in Siberia.
Wait.
Peter froze.
The packet contained all the letters.
Including the ones he had written in his head during the captivity and then transcribed when he found scraps of paper in the camp.
Those letters.
The letters from 1947. From 1950. From 1953.
They were dated.
Dolce stopped. She held up a scrap of brown wrapping paper—cement bag paper. It was dated June, 1948.
"Mario died in 1945," she said. Her voice was flat. The air in the kitchen vanished.
Peter stopped chewing. The bread turned to ash in his mouth.
He had forgotten. In his madness, in his desperate need to keep the conversation alive, to keep the connection to Verona unbroken, he had dated the later thoughts. He had chronicled his own survival and attributed it to the dead man.
Dolce looked at the date. Then she looked at the handwriting. It was the same. The pencil pressure was the same. The soul was the same.
She looked at Peter.
The realization dawned on her face not as a shock, but as a slow, creeping sunrise of comprehension.
She looked at the man in the suit. She looked at his hands—hands that were stained with the same graphite that was on the paper. She looked at his eyes—eyes that held the same melancholy depth as the words she had just read.
"1948," she whispered. "He was dead."
"Yes," Peter said. He put the spoon down. The sound was a gavel falling.
"Who wrote this?"
Peter looked at the table. He could lie. He could say Mario had written them in advance, predicting the years. But that was madness. He could say he had hallucinated the dates.
Or he could tell the truth.
"I did," Peter said.
The silence that followed was absolute. The mother stopped scrubbing the pot. The gas flame seemed to hold its breath.
Dolce stared at him. She did not look angry. She looked bewildered, as if the earth had shifted beneath her feet.
"You?"
"I was the Sergeant," Peter said. His voice was steady now, resigned to the execution. "Mario died in the first hour. He died quickly. He didn't have time to write. He didn't have time to speak."
"So you..."
"I wrote them," Peter said. "At first, in the crypt, because the men needed it. They needed to believe there was a future. I read them aloud to keep them from going mad. I invented a life for Mario so my men could die with hope."
He looked up at her.
"And then... I kept writing. In the drain. In the river. In the camp. I wrote them because... because if I stopped writing to you, I would cease to exist. You were the only thing that was real. You were the anchor."
He reached across the table and touched the paper.
"I am sorry, Signora. I stole your husband's name to save my own life. It was a theft. I am a thief."
He pushed his chair back. The scraping sound was harsh.
"I will go," Peter said. "I have delivered the body. The words are false. Burn them."
He stood up. He felt the old vertigo, the pull of the road, the call of the void. He had failed. He had delivered a forgery.
"Sit down," Dolce said.
Her voice was not a request. It was steel.
Peter paused.
"I said sit down."
He sat.
Dolce picked up the letter from 1948. She read it aloud.
"My Dearest Dolce, the snow here is a white ocean. I dream of the fountain in the piazza. I dream of the heat of the stone. I hold onto the thought of you like a man falling from a cliff holds a root. You are not a memory anymore; you are the blood in my veins. If I live, it is only to bring this love to your door."
She lowered the paper.
"Did you feel this?" she asked. "When you wrote it?"
"Yes," Peter whispered.
"Did you suffer for these words?"
"I paid for the pencil with my bread. I paid for the paper with my sleep."
"Then they are not false," she said.
She stood up. She walked around the table. She came to stand beside him. She smelled of the peaches he had written about, though it was October and there were no peaches. She smelled of the life he had dreamed of for a decade.
"Mario is dead," she said softly. "He has been dead for twelve years. I have mourned him. I have worn black. I have visited an empty grave."
She placed her hand on Peter's shoulder. The heat of her palm burned through the cheap wool of his suit.
"But these letters..." She tapped the pile with her other hand. "These letters kept me alive too. I felt them coming. I didn't know how, or who, but I felt a love coming toward me from the East. It pulled me through the hunger. It pulled me through the loneliness."
She leaned down. Her face was close to his. He could see the fine lines around her eyes, the grey strands in her dark hair. She was real. She was not a photograph.
"You say you stole his name," she whispered. "But perhaps you just carried his burden. Perhaps you loved me for him, because he couldn't."
She took his hand—the rough, scarred, calloused hand of the logger—and placed it on the letters.
"The words are yours, Peter," she said. She used his name. It sounded exotic and strange on her tongue. "The love is yours."
Peter looked at her. He saw the impossible forgiveness in her eyes. He saw the bridge being built between the living and the dead.
"I am a ruin," he said. "I am empty."
"No," she said. "You are full. You are full of twelve years of words."
The Aftermath
The night deepened. The mother retired, leaving them alone in the kitchen with a bottle of dark, heavy Valpolicella.
They did not speak much. There was no need for the frantic chatter of new lovers. They were not new lovers. They were old souls who had been intimate for a decade without ever meeting.
Peter told her about the others. He told her about Hanke's singing. He told her about Muller's grenade. He told her about Schultz and the motorcycle. He built a monument to them in the air of the kitchen, sculpting their faces with his descriptions.
"They brought you here," Dolce said, pouring more wine. "They passed you along like a baton."
"Yes," Peter said. "I am the sum of their deaths."
"And now?" she asked.
"Now I am here."
"And tomorrow?"
Peter looked at the window. He could see the reflection of the room in the dark glass. He saw the table, the wine, the woman.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I didn't plan for tomorrow. My map ended at your door."
Dolce reached out and took the letters. She gathered them into a stack. She walked to the hearth, where the embers of the cooking fire still glowed red.
"What are you doing?" Peter stood up, alarmed.
"Completing the delivery," she said.
She tossed the packet onto the embers.
"No!" Peter lunged forward, but he stopped.
The paper curled. The yellow edges turned black. The oilcloth flared with a hiss. The words—the beautiful, agonizing words he had bled for—caught fire. The graphite shivered and vanished in the heat.
"Why?" Peter gasped. "I paid everything for those."
"You delivered them," Dolce said, watching the flames. "The message is received. But we cannot live with ghosts, Peter. If we keep these letters, we are married to the past. We are married to a dead man and a prisoner."
She watched the fire consume the last of the paper. The 1948 letter turned to grey ash and crumbled.
She turned to face him. The firelight danced in her eyes, turning them amber.
"The letters are gone," she said. "Now there is only the man."
She walked toward him. She stopped a foot away.
"You have no words left," she said. "You gave them all to the fire. So you must find new ones."
Peter looked at her. He felt a terrifying lightness. The weight was truly gone. The physical evidence of his journey was ash in the grate. There was no proof he had ever been a hero, or a coward, or a poet.
There was just Peter.
He looked at his hands. They were empty.
He looked at Dolce.
"I am Peter," he said. It was a clumsy start. A child's first sentence.
"Hello, Peter," she said.
She stepped into the space between them. She wrapped her arms around his waist. She pressed her head against his chest, listening to the heart that had beaten for her in the silence of the snow.
Peter hesitated. His arms felt heavy, unsure of the mechanics of holding something that wasn't a weapon or a tool.
Slowly, awkwardly, he raised his arms. He encircled her. He felt the warmth of her spine. He breathed in the scent of her hair.
Outside, the bells of the Campanile began to ring. It was midnight. The day was over. The war, finally, was over.
Peter Polemos closed his eyes. He did not see the sunflowers. He did not see the snow. He saw only the darkness behind his eyelids, a warm, rich velvet darkness that was not an end, but a beginning.
He held her tight, anchoring himself to the earth, and for the first time, he did not apologize.
The End
The Writer's Note: There is a groundbreaking TWIST. Hope you like it. CHEERS!!!