The villa has reverted to its earliest form: a medieval city under seige. The world shrinks to what can be touched, seen, heard. Mental horizons contract to those of the most isolated peasant, and with that narrowness comes peasant skepticism toward all plans for the future. Nothing you were, or are, or will be, is in your own hands. Society is held together by the simplest of human ties. A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help.

A war of leaflets begins. Paper flutters from low-flying planes. “Anyone who harbors rebels will be shot. Any house in which rebels have stayed will be blown up after all stores of food are confiscated and the inhabitants shot. The German army will proceed with justice, but with inflexible hardness, unless informed immediately of the rebels’ whereabouts.” Leaflets scattered by the Allies give precisely the opposite instructions. “Italian patriots! Continue your resistance with acts of sabotage against the German army. Cut communications, destroy bridges, roads, and electrical plants. The moment for decisive action is near!” Mirella has children collect the leaflets for toilet paper.

After sunset one evening, three Austrian soldiers knock timidly on the door. They’re very young, deserters from the Wehrmacht, trying to get home. Their prospects are poor, but better than at the front, where some great battle is being fought. Mirella gives them some withered apples, shows them the map, sends them on. In the morning, four mortar rounds fall on the villa’s chapel, empty at the time. Somewhere, gunners adjust their aim and the explosions shift away from the farm. Mirella sends the oldest boys to the edge of the woods to dig long trenches, line them with brush, and cover them with tarps. The women stuff sacks with straw for makeshift mattresses, ready to run with the children to the trenches on a moment’s notice. The immediate menace advances and retreats, but this much is certain: the front is no longer in Africa or Russia or France, not in Messina or Rome or Florence. It is here.

“Che sarà di noi?” everyone asks Mirella. “What will become of us?”

No radio, no post, no newspapers, but rumors in abundance. Two villages west, Fascist troops appeared suddenly, blocked off the main street, and arrested everyone. A partisan band took a town south of here, expecting to link up with the Allied advance; the Germans arrived instead, and wiped the partisans out. London has been completely destroyed by a new German weapon. At Villa Senni, three hundred people hidden in the cellar had to flee through artillery fire into the mountains; a hundred were killed— no, two hundred! Thousands of people are dying of Spanish influenza in Bologna. The Allies have landed in strength at Genoa. A German spy has assassinated Roosevelt. The Americans have pulled out of the war.

Inured to the sound of airplane engines, the children don’t even look up when bombers drop their cargo on Roccabarbena, or when small, swift groups of fighters swoop down, guns flashing, on something doomed two valleys away. A new sort of refugee turns up: fugitives from the Italian Black Brigades, begging for civilian clothes and hoping to join the partisans. “You should be more careful,” one tells Mirella. “For fifty kilometers around, people told us, Go to Villa Malcovato.”

A few days later, an Italian civilian appears and takes Mirella aside to tell her about an English paratrooper who needs food and money. There is something about this man… “No,” Mirella says. “We have nothing to do with foreigners here.”

“Signora,” he says, moving closer, “this Englishman is a Hebrew. He needs your help.”

She covers her momentary hesitation by looking for one of the children. “Rosina!” she shouts. “Stay out of that mud!” She turns back toward the man, making sure he can see how tired she is. “Scusi,” she says, distractedly. “What were you asking?”

“Are there any farms nearby where ebrei can get help?”

“None,” she says heartlessly. “We have our own to care for.”

Then one bright blue morning, the contessa announces it is her saint’s day. “Signora, there’s no Saint Lavinia,” the housegirl Giovanna tells Mirella. The contessa insists there should be a party in her honor. “Completamente pazza,” Giovanna murmurs, but the weather has improved, and the notion of a festa is so bizarre, the idea takes hold. One of the older girls ties braided yarn around the children’s legs and teaches them to run three-legged races. The contessa, wrapped in a fox stole, urges the children to sing Christmas songs, and caps the day by awarding a pearl necklace to the child with the sweetest voice, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen to the winner of a sack race. That night, the old lady favors Mirella with a Mona Lisa smile and says, “I think that did everyone good, don’t you?”

The low booming of artillery grows nearer. Angelo runs up the rutted drive, more excited than afraid. “They’re coming, Mamma! Eight hundred Germans!” An hour later, the rumor begins to change. Eight hundred become three hundred. Fascisti, not Germans. By evening, the three hundred are eighty, marching south toward Sant’Andrea.

At midnight, Giovanna shakes Mirella awake. “Signora, there’s a partisan with a bullet in his shoulder at the door,” she whispers. “What should I do?”

Mirella pulls a cardigan over her nightgown, goes to the kitchen, dresses the wound. “You can sleep in the stable,” she tells the boy, “but you must leave before light.”

All that night, they hear cannon fire and planes. In the morning, the ground is littered with leaflets in four languages, offering safe conduct, medical aid, food, and removal from the combat zone to any German who surrenders.

A heavily armed man appears out of the woods, begging for a meal. Around mouthfuls, he warns of two German spies. “They’re wandering around east of Cuneo. They pretend to be deserters and ask for help. They were handed on from farm to farm, until they uncovered the whole network of contadini helping the Resistance.” The man washes his polenta down with a glass of watered milk, and stands to leave. “Last Monday, Fascist troops surrounded three small villages and the outlying farms and shot everyone the spies pointed out, including four women and an old priest. So be careful of anyone asking for help.”

Mirella watches him tramp away, trying to remember the Austrian boys she gave apples to. How many were there? Two of them, or three? Three, she thinks. They seemed like nice boys, but who knows? Who knows…

A squadron of Allied planes flashes overhead, droning toward Roccabarbena. She watches the tracer bullets from German AA emplacements in the city. Two planes are hit just as the bombs are released. The whole valley seems to explode, just beyond the hills.

At ten the next morning, a German staff car roars up the drive through a steady spring rain. Two officers get out. Without knocking, the commander shoves the front door open and shouts for whoever is in charge. Mirella lifts Rosina to her hip, willing herself to appear innocent and ignorant. Would it be better or worse if her pregnancy were more obvious at five months? Better or worse if her eyes were not sunken in half-moons of purple skin? Better or worse if she looked twenty-eight, not a haggard fifteen years older?

Without such worries, the contessa takes charge, supporting herself on two ebony canes. “How dare you come in here with muddy boots! Who are you?” the old lady demands in imperious German. “What are you doing here?”

“We require billets for a field hospital,” he begins.

“What?” she asks with loud annoyance. “Speak up! I haven’t all day!”

The officer tries again. “We require this property as a hospital—”

“Don’t be absurd. This is a children’s home, you ridiculous man! Kinderheim, do you understand? Children!” The contessa flicks the blue-veined back of her hand at him. “Now go away. And don’t come back!”