expanding their vacation as much as avoiding the traffic. The news, both radio and television, was filled with injunctions about safe driving and spoke of the twelve million cars – or fourteen, or fifteen – that were projected to be on the roads that weekend. One of the news reporters said that, if placed bumper to bumper, these cars would stretch in an unbroken line from Reggio Calabria to the Gotthard Pass. Brunetti, having no idea of the average length of an automobile, didn’t even bother to check the numbers. Though he had a licence, he was in truth a non-driver and was almost entirely without interest of any sort in automobiles. They were big or small, red or white or some other colour, and far too many young people died in them every year. He had decided to travel by train: even to discuss renting a car was to run the risk of one of Chiara’s ecological denunciations. They would go to Malles, where a car would meet their train and take them to his cousin’s house; there was a bus that went up and down to Glorenza twice a day.
Preparing for their holiday, each of the family had begun to pack. Paola created a pile of books on the top of their dresser, whose composition changed each day in conformity with the books she thought she would select for the class in the British Novel she was to teach during the coming term. Brunetti studied the titles every night and thus became party to the ongoing struggle: Vanity Fair lost place to Great Expectations, a substitution Brunetti attributed to weight; The Secret Agent lasted three days but was replaced by Heart of Darkness, though the weight differential seemed minimal to Brunetti; a day later, Barchester Towers took over from Middlemarch, suggesting that the weight rule was back in force. Pride and Prejudice appeared the first evening and stayed the course.
Three nights before their expected departure, curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, ‘Why is it that all the fat books have disappeared, and A Suitable Boy, which is the fattest, remains?’
‘Oh, I’m not going to teach that,’ Paola said, as if surprised by his question. ‘I’ve wanted to reread it for years. It’s my reward book.’
‘What are you being rewarded for?’ Brunetti asked.
‘You can ask that of a person who teaches at Cà Foscari? In the Department of English Literature?’ she asked, using the voice she reserved for Expressions of Public Outrage.
Then, in a more moderate tone, she said, ‘I’ve looked at the books you’re taking.’
Brunetti had hoped she would, thinking the sobriety of his choices would set a salutary example against the vain frivolity of some of hers.
‘Do I detect an unwonted modernity in your choices?’ she asked.
‘I’ve decided to read some modern history,’ he asserted proudly.
‘But why Russian?’ she asked, pointing to a book entitled A People’s Tragedy.
‘It interests me, the Revolution,’ he said.
‘What interests me is the way so many of us bought it all,’ she said in a voice that had suddenly grown harsh.
‘We in the West, you mean?’
‘We. In the West. Our generation. The workers’ paradise. Brothers under Socialism. Whatever nonsense we wanted to spout to show our parents that we didn’t like their choices in life.’ She covered her face with her hands, and Brunetti detected nothing false in the gesture. ‘To think I voted Communist. Of my own free will, I voted for them.’
The only consolation Brunetti could think of to offer her was to say, ‘History swept them away.’
‘But not soon enough,’ she said savagely. ‘You know me well enough to know I’m not much for shame or guilt, but I will forever feel guilty that I voted for those people, that I refused to listen to common sense or believe what I didn’t want to believe.’
‘They never had any real power here,’ Brunetti said. ‘You know that.’
‘I’m not talking about them, Guido; I’m talking about me. That I could have been so stupid and have been so stupid for so long.’ She picked up his book and flipped through it, stopped to look at some of the photos, then closed it and set it down. ‘My father always hated them. But I wouldn’t listen to him. What could he know?’
‘You think we’ll have to put up with the same thing?’ he asked to change the subject. ‘From our kids?’
She opened a drawer and pulled out a sweater, the very sight of which caused Brunetti to break out