Constant shelling accompanied their days. Angelo and Mario made their way among the injured, along with the two volunteer nurses from the area and Jack Prior, the American doctor assigned to the division. They did the best they could with almost nothing—a few bandages, very little morphine, some sulfa pills, and plasma. The aid station in some old Belgian barracks a ways down the road, organized by the 101st Airborne Division, didn’t have it any better. Gangrene was the biggest problem, and Dr. Prior wasn’t a surgeon. The best hope was keeping the wounded alive long enough to evacuate them, which hadn’t happened yet, and wouldn’t happen unless the enemy could be pushed back.
By December 21, the town of Bastogne was completely surrounded by the Germans with the 101st and much of the 20th trapped inside. The soldiers started joking, “They’ve got us surrounded, poor bastards. No matter where we shoot, we’re bound to hit one.” “Poor bastards” became a rallying cry in the days to come.
On December 22, a German commander sent a letter to General McAuliffe threatening annihilation if Bastogne was not surrendered, to which a terse “Nuts!” was the only answer he received. The soldiers were laughing about it, and Angelo puzzled about the response for all of ten minutes, then shook his head and laughed too, supposing it was simply slang he didn’t understand. He’d discovered he liked Americans and was proud to be one, if only by birth.
Reports of a massacre of almost one hundred American soldiers near the village of Malmedy—soldiers who had only a few days before found themselves surrendering to a Panzer Division—probably made it easy to refuse the Germans when they urged surrender. Angelo figured “Nuts” meant “You’re crazy.” That . . . or “Go to hell.” Either worked. With divisions biting at the German flanks and the 101st refusing to surrender, the battle in Bastogne had gone on for almost a week.
Angelo did his best to be another pair of hands and to aid the dying physically and spiritually. He had started to think that he might make a decent doctor if he lived to see the end of the war, if he found Eva, and if they ever made it home. If he couldn’t be a priest, he had to do something.
It was after dark on December 24, a Christmas Eve like no other in his memory, when an old woman came into the field station, asking for help for a village woman who had gone into labor.
Mario was in the middle of stitching a wound and Dr. Prior was stemming a hemorrhage. Mario looked around wildly for someone to assist the adamant woman. She was pulling at his arm, urging him, and chattering about pain and length of contractions and the baby being stuck.
“Angelo!” he called across the space. “There is a woman in labor not far from here. She needs help.”
“Why didn’t they evacuate with the rest of the city?” Angelo finished helping a wounded soldier sip some water and then moved toward Mario and the old woman.
“The mother was afraid of going into labor. Looks like she was right,” Mario answered. The old woman had backed up, away from the blood, and her eyes were weary and desperate.
“I will go with her. You can’t leave,” Angelo agreed, trying not to think about what he might find.
“If she can, have her get on her hands and knees, Angelo. If the baby is face-first but hasn’t entered the birth canal, sometimes this position will help it turn on its own.” The instructions had Angelo drawing up short and reconsidering.
“Mario, I can’t do this,” Angelo said softly. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the first thing about delivering babies, especially if the mother or child is in trouble.”
“I know. But go, see what can be done, and if you can, bring her here. We can better help everyone if they’re all in one place. Take the cart.”
The old woman kissed her rosary beads even as she walked and tugged, reminding Angelo of his nonna back in Florence. He pulled the cart to a house only three buildings from the aid station, and the woman picked her way up the icy steps. He followed her, treading just as carefully as she opened the front door and removed the scarf from her head, calling out to whomever was in the house.
“I’ve brought a priest,” she hollered in French. “He was the only one they could spare.”
She turned to Angelo, who kicked the snow from his mismatched footwear—a consequence of having a prosthetic leg with a permanent black boot—and shut the door behind him.
“She’s been trying to walk, thinking that would help. I don’t know what else to do. She’s so exhausted, and it’s been going on so long.” The old woman looked ashamed, as if she, being a woman, should be of more help.
Slow steps, measured as if there was pain with each footfall, sounded on the landing above them, and Angelo raised his eyes to the top of the stairs. The woman’s hands were pressed to her back, as if holding herself together, and her hair was a dark cloud of curling disarray around her thin shoulders, but Angelo’s eyes went immediately to her stomach, which was enormous and made even bigger by the size of the girl who wielded it. She wore a droopy pink sweater around her shoulders and a loose black frock that had seen too many washings but was obviously chosen to fit over her burgeoning belly. Her feet were slim and bare, despite the cold, and her toenails, miraculously, were as pink as her sweater. Angelo wondered for two seconds how she had accomplished such a feat before his eyes rose to her face, and his world teetered and turned upside down. The woman was staring down at him like he had risen from the dead, a modern-day Lazarus come to visit.
“Eva?” he gasped.
One hand left her back and stretched toward the wall, as if she felt them closing in. She didn’t question his presence but only stared as if she expected him to disappear as soon as she blinked, and her legs buckled dangerously.
He would never recall how he traversed the stairs, or even if he did. He must have flown, because he found himself standing before her, the stairs at his back, Eva slumped against the wall, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Eva.” He said her name again, and then she was falling into his arms. For several breaths they stood with their arms locked around each other, and then Angelo was pulling away just enough to look at her again and make sure she was real. Her hands framed his face as her incredulous eyes traced his features. She kept saying his name, the word Angelo opening her lips and melding them more completely against his when he kissed her, first on the mouth and then everywhere else—cheeks, chin, nose, forehead—before seeking her lips once more.
“Eva!” A startled cry rose from the bottom of the stairs, making them pull apart briefly. The poor woman was clearly beside herself as she watched a stranger—a priest!—kissing her pregnant charge.
“This is my Angelo, Bettina,” Eva cried, laughing and weeping simultaneously, as she continued to touch his face in disbelief. “This is my Angelo.”
“Angelo? Le père du bébé?” Bettina gasped, and she immediately crossed herself again, his cleric’s collar obviously confusing her. Eva must not have shared everything. Then the woman’s shocked words penetrated Angelo’s euphoric disbelief.
“The child’s father?” he repeated, suddenly remembering why he’d been summoned in the first place. His hands fell to Eva’s swollen abdomen, and his eyes followed. Then he was looking at her again, at her beautiful, weary face and her tear-filled eyes.
“Yes. The child’s father,” she whispered, her eyes never leaving his, and her breath caught and her hands clutched, and she was in his arms again as he held her through the pain of a labor he was wholly unprepared for.
“The contractions are deep and strong,” she panted. “I’ve been in labor since yesterday, and I don’t think it’s progressing like it should.”
“You need to get on your hands and knees,” he urged, walking back into the room she’d obviously vacated. A fire was roaring in the grate, and water and towels and a bed made up with clean sheets were at the ready. Clearly, Bettina had done all she knew to do. Angelo walked Eva to the bed and helped her ease into a crawling position on her hands and knees. Her arms and legs wobbled in fatigue. She seemed extremely weak, an
d he could see why Bettina had gone for help.
“I have to go get Mario. This may work, but you’re going to need a doctor,” he said urgently.
“Mario?” Her voice rose in amazement. “Mario is here too? How can this be? Where did you come from, Angelo? I thought you were dead. They told me you were dead.” The shock weakened her further, and her arms wobbled wildly.
“Shh. We have time for that. We have so much to talk about, but you need a doctor.”
“Don’t leave,” Eva entreated, her eyes pleading even as she attempted to reach out a hand and swayed dangerously. “Please, Angelo. Please stay with me.”
He felt it too, the foreboding sense that if they parted now, the fissure that had opened up and allowed them to step through time and distance and find one another, would close forever. He hesitated, knowing he needed Mario but unwilling to let Eva out of his sight.
“J’y retournerais,” Bettina volunteered from the doorway. The poor woman had just climbed to the top of the stairs. “I will go again.”
“Madame!” Angelo called after her. “Tell Dr. Sonnino I’ve found Eva. He will come.”
But Mario didn’t come. Bettina never returned either. Instead, the Luftwaffe parted the clearing December skies with screaming fire, and all at once the night was as bright as noon in July from the magnesium flares. Seconds later, a hellish shrieking pierced the air, and Angelo draped himself over Eva as the first bombs found their targets and the earth shook with their impact. The apartment trembled, but it hadn’t been hit. Angelo braced as the screaming, whirring, shrieking began again, signaling another bomb was hurtling toward them.
“I love you, Angelo,” Eva said in his ear, and he could only return the words, sheltering her the best he could as the world exploded around them. And still the building stood. Then the strafing began, a German bomber dropping low to pepper the area with machine-gun fire. The sound of shattering glass and strafing was punctuated by the screams and shouts of the survivors outside, and Eva and Angelo waited breathlessly, delivered from one trauma by the arrival of another.
“Angelo,” Eva panted. “It’s coming. The pain is different. There’s pressure now. The baby is coming.” He had braced Eva for as long as she could maintain the position on her hands and knees, and then eased her down to her side, letting her rest between rounds before agony twisted her up again.
She smiled as if he’d performed a miracle, and he closed his eyes in grateful relief before he helped her to sit, pulling her legs back into her chest. He didn’t know how he knew what to do, but somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he remembered a woman assisting his mother as she labored to bring his little sister into the world. His mother had won the battle but had lost her life. That would not happen now. He wouldn’t let it.
“Bettina?” Eva panted, interrupting his terrified train of thought. Her eyes were wide and worried. “Mario?” The fact that neither had returned was an alarming indication that the bombing had wreaked death and destruction in the streets, but Angelo had one goal, and he would worry about Mario when Eva was no longer in danger.
“I don’t know, Eva. But I’m here. Everything will be okay,” he soothed. The fear inside his belly was so great it had congealed into a massive rock, but he would be calm. He had found her, and she was having his child. He would be calm.
Eva smiled, just the smallest wisp of a smile, and she nodded, believing in him like she always had. Then her eyes filled with tears as the pain built again, making her chin sink to her chest and her back bow in protest.
“Tell me . . . ,” she panted. “Tell me how you found me.”
“I heard you were sent to Bergen-Belsen. After the Americans liberated Rome and then Paris, I went to France and began following the army up through the country, trying to find a way to get into Germany and up to you. I have been so frustrated. There were days I almost set out on my own, but Camillo always held me back.”
“My father? What do you mean?”
“Camillo went to Austria and never came home. I knew I would never see you again if I wasn’t prudent. Every time I wanted to rush in, it was like he stood at my shoulder, directing my paths.”
“He was with me too. If it hadn’t been for him, I would be in Bergen-Belsen now. I dreamed about him, and he told me you were with me. Inside me. I didn’t understand what that meant until I found out I was pregnant.”
“How did you end up here? In Belgium?” he asked, trying to distract her from the building agony. He sat at her back, letting her lean into his chest, turning her face into his neck as she tried to escape the waves of pressure.
“I jumped.” She groaned out the words, tucking her face into him as she began to shake. “I jumped, and then I walked.” She stopped talking then, speech too great a task, and he could only marvel at her words.
She jumped. And then she walked.
Her contractions seemed to grow until there was no relief, no brief moments to regroup and quietly rest, and Eva began bearing down helplessly, her body demanding that she push. It was an onslaught, a blitz, and one hour grew into another and then another as the world beyond the shattered windows continued to burn, and the woman he loved begged for deliverance. Angelo moved her bed beside the fire and nailed blankets over the windows to keep out the worst of the cold and to block the light in case the German bombers returned, but conditions were far from favorable. Bettina had brought in plenty of boiled water, and Angelo kept the area as clean as he could and Eva as comfortable as he was able, when finally, as midnight neared, she reached the end.
A surge of blood-tinged water soaked the sheet beneath her as she groaned in agonized protest. She bore down, pushing and crying with an endurance born of love and little else. Angelo, on his knees before her, begged the Madonna for intercession, and a little baby boy, conceived in love and tribulation, came into the world on Christmas Day. The baby’s cry broke the sacred stillness of the moment, his little arms and legs kicking in outrage as his father greeted him for the first time.
“It’s a boy, Eva. It’s a little boy,” Angelo cried, overcome. In a bombed-out village, in a foreign land, a tiny leaf had appeared on a new branch, a new sun dawning on a day when so many sons had slipped away. Shaking and afraid of his own emotion, Angelo carefully laid the baby across Eva’s sweat-stained chest and cut the cord that connected mother and child. Eva’s smile was weak, but her breathing was deep and her face serene. She covered her son with a clean towel and searched his tiny face with glorious eyes.
“He is here, my little Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco.”
Her baby stopped crying almost immediately and stared up into his mother’s face with curious wonder, making Eva laugh even as her tears continued to fall, unabated. And then she started to sing, more a whisper than a song, and Angelo bent his head near hers to listen to the carol she’d sung exactly a year earlier in the cab of a delivery truck, wedged between Angelo and Monsignor O’Flaherty.
“Oh, my divine baby
I see you trembling here,
Oh, blessed God
Ah, how much it costs you,
Your loving me.
Ah, how much it costs you,
Your loving me.
Dear chosen one, little infant
This dire poverty makes me love you more
Since love made you poor now.
Since love made you poor now.”
Angelo kissed the tears from Eva’s face and tasted them on her lips. Love had not made them poor. Love had made them wealthy. In that moment, they were royalty, a king of fortune and a queen of destiny, embracing a tiny prince of peace. Angelo still had no idea where Eva had been, how she had ended up in a town called Bastogne in the middle of a firefight, but he’d found her.
He’d found her.
And there was no man on earth or angel in heaven who could convince him that miracles did not exist. For once, God had not been quiet.
CHAPTER 26
BASTOGNE
In the early hours of morning, Ange
lo and Eva heard the door downstairs being forcibly opened and feet clattered into the house, accompanied by shouting. Angelo, who had been dozing in a chair near Eva’s bedside, was up and out of his chair instantly and hurrying to the door. He flung it open and moved out onto the landing.
“Mario!” he called, the relief heavy in his voice. “Up here. We’re up here!”
Eva pulled her baby deeper into the blankets Angelo had laid over them, listening as boots pounded up the stairs, and Angelo laughed in sheer gratitude.
The men began talking at once, clapping each other on the back and reassuring each other they were both okay. Then Mario Sonnino was standing in the door, his face black with filth, his uniform splattered in blood and looking like it had survived a direct hit from an enemy bomb.
“Bettina—the woman who told me where to find you? She’s safe. We couldn’t get to you because there was debris as high as my head piled in front of the door. The building next to you took a direct hit, right through the roof. We had to wait for a bit. All hell was breaking loose outside, and none of us could stand out in the opening, clearing rubble,” he explained. He shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, and he rubbed at his eyes wearily. He looked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
“Hello, Mario,” Eva said softly, and smiled at his awestruck face. He walked slowly to her bedside and knelt beside her with humble deference. Angelo followed him, his eyes on Eva, his mouth trembling with emotion.
“Meet Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco,” she murmured, revealing her son’s sleeping face. “Born on Christmas Day.”
Mario just stared, dumbstruck. “How?” he finally uttered, his voice cracking on the word.
“When two people love each other very much,” she said teasingly, “sometimes they have children.”