to get there?” Marcella looked more startled still for a long moment and then she nodded, frowning, thoughtful. She looked into his eyes again, with a hopeful gleam in her own.
She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering, and then brought him a pencil and a piece of paper, and waved him to a chair. “You write it down like I tell you.” He was only too happy to obey her orders, and a few minutes later he was out the door with the paper in his hand. He waved to her one last time as he ran toward the little shed where he kept the jeep he used when he didn't have a driver, and she watched him as he drove away, with tears of hope in her old eyes.
The trip from Rome to Umbría was long and arduous, the roads were poor, deeply rutted, and crowded with military vehicles, foot traffic, and carts filled with chickens, or hay, or fruit. It was here that one remembered that there had been a war on not so very long ago. One still saw signs of the damage everywhere, and there were times when B.J. thought that neither he nor the jeep would survive. He had brought with him all of his military papers, and had the jeep collapsed beneath him, he would have commandeered anything he had to, to reach the farm.
As it was, it was after dark when he got there, traveling down the uninhabited, rutted road in the direction that Marcella had described to him, but he began to wonder in a few moments if he had taken the wrong turn. Nothing looked familiar according to the directions, and he stopped the car in the darkness. It didn't help him that there was even no moon by which to travel, and there were dark clouds passing through the sky as he looked up and then at the horizon beyond. But as he did so, he suddenly saw a cluster of buildings in the distance, huddling together as though for warmth, and he realized with a long tired sigh that he had found the farm.
He turned the jeep back until he found a narrow, rutted lane, and followed it through overgrown bushes in the direction of the building he had seen on the horizon, and a few moments later, splashing through deep potholes, he reached what must have once been a large courtyard, or a kind of main square. There was a large house facing him, barns stretching out toward the right, and an orchard both to the left and behind him. Even in the darkness he could see that it was a large place, that it was deserted. The house looked weather-beaten and empty, the doors of the barns had fallen off their hinges, there was grass growing waist high between the cobblestones in the courtyard, and what farm equipment there had once been stood rusting and broken in the orchard, which obviously had not been tended for years. He stood there for a long moment, wondering where to go now. Back to Rome? Into a village? To a nearby farm? But there were none. There was nothing here, and no one, and surely not Serena. Even if she had come here to find refuge, she could not stay here. He stared sadly at the barns in the darkness, and then at the house, but as he did so, he thought he saw something scurry into the darkness of a corner. An animal? A cat? A dream? Or perhaps someone very frightened at his intrusion. Realizing how mad he was to have come on this solitary adventure, he kept his eyes in the direction of what he had seen, and walked slowly backward toward the jeep. When he reached it, he leaned inside, and took out his pistol, he cocked it and then began to walk forward, wielding an unlit flashlight in his other hand. He was almost certain now of where he had seen the movement, and he could see a form huddled in a corner, crouched behind a bush. For an instant he realized how insane it was that he should be pursuing this encounter, that he might perhaps die, for no reason at all, on a deserted farm in the Italian countryside in search of a woman, six months after the end of the war. After all he had survived in the years before that, it seemed ironic that he could die now, he thought