Roads that choose us: A dedication story to Vincenzo Irolli's painting "Girl with a Doll"

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We are starting an experimental series of essays based on paintings by famous artists. All stories are fictional, but this does not mean that they could not have actually happened. “The Roads That Choose Us” is a dedication to the painting “Girl with a Doll” by the Italian genre painter Vincenzo Irolli.

The rays of the merciless midday sun were entangled in the dense foliage of the olive tree and hardly penetrated the shady garden, where a pleasant coolness reigned. Five-year-old Bianca was sitting on a knitted blanket spread on the grass, humming something quietly to a doll wrapped in a blanket and watching her father repair a sagging door.

Soon, life will rapidly rush forward, gaining speed, and this June day will remain in Bianca's memory as an island of peace and serenity.

A few days later, Mussolini will declare war on France and Great Britain, and then Italian newspapers will report on the total mobilization and steel determination of the Duce to start a crusade against Bolshevism.

Vincenzo woke up from a painful shock and felt the cool touch of someone's fingers. A thin, frightened girl in a white kerchief was carefully bandaging the wound on his shoulder.

He tried to smile. This emaciated, bald, shaved youth in a torn shirt with the number 116 on his back was hardly Vincenzo, if not for a smile. She remained the same: with dimples in her cheeks and small sunbeams in the inky depths of her eyes.

Nastya was dismissed from the camp after the head of the report received the officer on duty: “On November 10, 1944, nurse Anastasia Sotnikova sat on the bed of prisoner of war Vincenzo Cavalli all night. This is not the first time this has been reported,”he said.

Like most prisoners of war, Vincenzo did not survive the winter in the camp - he died of exhaustion.

In July, Nastya gave birth to a black-eyed girl - Lisa, and a year later she married a doctor from the hospital, where she got a job. Soon she and her husband and daughter moved to Minsk - away from gossip and sidelong glances. Nastya never dared to tell Lisa that her father had a family in Italy and fought on the side of the Nazis.

Lisa grew up and became more and more like Bianca - a photograph of Vincenzo's daughter was in a bundle with his personal belongings, which after his death was given to Nastya by one of the camp employees. Nastya kept the photo in a box with documents.

The restless dreamer Kostya has always been out of this world. Languages were easy for him and having decently mastered English, he began to take French and Italian lessons on Skype. A year ago, after graduating from university as an external student, to the horror of his mother, who had worked all her life in a district clinic near her home, he easily found a remote job as a programmer in an American company and went to travel the world, living and working either in Thailand or in Provence. Lisa joked that her grandson had a crazy little traveler in her head who kept whispering: “Come on, go ahead. Something we sat in one place. Look, a discount on tickets to Prague. What are you worth? Packing a suitcase."

Sometimes, so that we do not gape past the cherished door, the angels have to work hard.

Kostin, the guardian angel, rubbed his hands contentedly. To send his ward to the right address, he had to cancel Kostya's pre-booked flights to Lisbon and Budapest, arrange a sale of air tickets to Palermo, and then buy up seats in all the hotels so that the young man finally figured out to book a room in the only available bed & breakfast Casa Bianca in Messina. But in the end everything turned out the way it should have been.

Kostya got behind the wheel of a small yellow Opel rented at Palermo airport and went to the boarding house. Beaches, fishing boats, domes of churches and colorful houses of coastal towns flashed outside the window.

Three hours later Kostya was already standing at the patterned wrought-iron gate. Behind a brick fence in the bright green foam of the garden, like an ocean liner, towered an old house of white limestone. Kostya pushed the gate with strange impatience.

In a wicker chair in the shade of a spreading olive tree, which seemed to hold the sky on its branches, sat an elderly woman in a long silk dress, like two drops of water similar to Kostya's grandmother Lisa.

- Bianca, - the hostess introduced herself, giving Kostya a quick smile like a sunny bunny. She had an unusually pleasant deep velvet voice. Affectionate wrinkles scattered from the radiant grape-black eyes.

An antique mirror in a heavy wood frame hung in the hallway. The glass around the edges darkened and became covered with a thin cobweb of cracks. Entering the house, Kostya hesitated, catching his own reflection: it seemed to him that the young man behind the glass was smiling and trying to tell him something important.

At eighty, Bianca easily managed all the household chores and was happy to cook breakfast for the guests. Early in the morning, she went to a small bakery on the next street, and, inhaling the aroma of fresh pastries familiar from childhood, chose the most ruddy mafald and friselle. At home, all she had to do was sprinkle slices of warm bread with olive oil and garnish them with slices of tomatoes and basil leaves.

Wandering through the echoing rooms of the old Sicilian house, remembering the laughter and tears of each of his many owners, Kostya, for the first time in many years, felt that he did not want to go anywhere at all and that he was surprisingly comfortable next to this seemingly alien elderly woman.

Bianca admired her guest. There was something imperceptibly familiar in this Russian: in his facial expressions, in the dexterity with which he knew how to fix any broken thing. And smile. These laughs are in the black bottomless wells of the eyes.

One morning Kostya decided to take a walk and volunteered to go for bread. The owner of the bakery, a gray-haired, tanned man, deftly folded the friselle into a paper bag.

- Young man, stay with us a little longer. Bianca is very attached to you. She buried her husband last year, but she has no children.

After breakfast, Bianca brought an album in shabby leather cover and began to show Kostya family photos: her late husband, parents who once lived in this house, their childhood photos. Kostin's gaze lingered on the big-eyed girl with a doll. The same photograph was kept in Minsk by his grandmother.