The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Spring by Megan Weiler

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content warning for war and violence

I: Summer 1996
12

(excerpt)

“We slept on the floor,” Silvana says, “crammed side by side, thirty to a room, with at most a blanket underneath for cushioning. We were on the second floor of a house; the ground floor was occupied by German soldiers. One night a bomb fell into the room next to the one where we were sleeping. Everything was filled with smoke. We couldn’t very well go down and join the Germans, so we climbed out the windows and slept in the chicken coop. We were away from home for forty-five days.

“And then there were the partisans and the Republicans, fighting each other. But they were both bad. I remember one day, my mother had just put bread in the oven, over at Casabassa where we were living, when two partisans came by with two Republicans whom they’d captured down by the Villa. They were bringing them up to the woods to shoot them. When they smelled the bread, they wanted some. They said they’d wait until it was done. So you see, the partisans were bad too, demanding food from us. If the Republicans had caught us giving it to them, they would have shot us all.

“Later, there were three of them coming back down from the woods. One of the Republicans switched sides and became a partisan.”

We are all silent for a moment.

“One time,” Costanzo says then, “my friends and I found a German who’d had the whole bottom of his face blown off.”

Silvana: “Did he die?”

“Porca miseria, yes he died! We covered him with a blanket.”

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