October 1955
The Federal Republic of Germany was a hallucination.
Peter Polemos stood on the platform of the Munich Hauptbahnhof, a suitcase made of pressed cardboard in his hand—a gift from the Red Cross, containing a toothbrush, a razor, a bar of soap, and a change of underwear. He wore a grey suit that was two sizes too big, the cuffs swallowing his hands, the collar standing away from his neck like a ruff.
He stood still, an island of silence in a river of motion.
Around him, the world was rushing. Men in fitted coats checked gold wristwatches and snapped briefcases shut. Women in nylon stockings and bright lipstick laughed, their heels clicking a frantic, confident rhythm on the polished tiles. Porters pushed carts piled high with leather luggage, shouting "Achtung!" with a tone that suggested commerce was more urgent than survival.
It was loud. It was bright. It was terrifying.
Peter had left a Germany of rubble, ash, and the smell of unburied dead. He had returned to a Germany of neon signs, glass shopfronts, and the smell of roasting sausage and diesel fumes.
There were no craters. There were no sirens. The swastikas were gone, replaced by advertisements for Persil detergent and Volkswagen cars. The people looked fed. Their cheeks were pink, their eyes clear. They walked with the stride of people who had forgotten what it was like to crawl.
Peter felt a wave of nausea. He felt like a contagion, a bacillus of the past introduced into a sterile laboratory. He was the ghost at the banquet.
He walked toward a kiosk. The glass case was filled with newspapers. Frankfurter Allgemeine. Süddeutsche Zeitung. The headlines spoke of economic growth, of NATO, of a future that seemed to have arrived without waiting for him.
He saw his reflection in the glass.
He stopped.
The man in the glass was a stranger. His face was a map of deep ravines, the skin weathered to the texture of cured tobacco by the Siberian wind. His eyes were sunken, dark pits that held a thousand-yard stare. His hair was a thin, steel-grey thatch.
He looked at the reflection and saw the others standing behind him. He saw Hanke's fever-bright eyes over his shoulder. He saw Muller's soot-stained grin. He saw Klein's charred face.
We don't fit here, Peter, Hanke's voice whispered in his ear. This place is for the living. We are the debris.
"Can I help you?"
The vendor, a plump woman with kind eyes, was looking at him. She saw the suit. She saw the haircut. She knew what he was. Everyone knew what the "late returnees" looked like. They were the inconvenient reminders of a war everyone was trying to wash off their hands.
"The train," Peter rasped. His voice was a rusted hinge. He hadn't spoken much in the last few days. "To Verona. Italy."
"Track 11," she said gently. "It leaves in forty minutes. You have a ticket?"
"Yes." He patted his breast pocket. The ticket was there, bought with the "welcome money" the government had pressed into his hand—a wad of Deutschmarks that felt slippery and unreal, like Monopoly money.
"Buy yourself a pretzel," she said, sliding a warm, salted bread twist across the counter. "On the house. Welcome home."
Peter stared at the pretzel. It was golden brown, speckled with large grains of salt. It smelled of yeast and comfort. It smelled like the Sunday mornings of 1938.
He took it with a trembling hand. "Thank you."
He walked away, but he couldn't eat it. His throat was closed tight. He wrapped the pretzel in a handkerchief and put it in his pocket, next to the letters. It was a habit of the camp: save everything. You never know when the famine comes back.
He found Track 11. The train was there—the Alpen-Express. It was a sleek, silver snake, steam hissing from its undercarriage. The destination board read: MÜNCHEN - INNSBRUCK - BOLZANO - VERONA.
Verona.
The word was an anchor. It was the only thing that kept him from floating away into the madness of this new world.
He boarded the train. He found a compartment that was empty and slid the door shut. He sat by the window, placing his cardboard suitcase on his lap. He didn't trust the luggage rack. In the camps, if you let go of something for a second, it was gone.
The train jerked, a heavy metallic clunk, and began to move.
Munich slid away. The factories, the apartments, the church spires—they receded into the grey drizzle of the Bavarian autumn.
Peter closed his eyes.
The journey south was a descent through the layers of his own memory.
As the train climbed into the Alps, the snow began to appear. At first, it was just a dusting on the pines, then deep drifts that swallowed the fences.
Peter stared at the snow. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Snow means death. Snow means the quota. Snow means the 300 grams.
He gripped the armrests of the seat until his knuckles turned white. He had to remind himself: You are on a train. You are wearing a suit. The door is unlocked.
He touched the packet in his shirt. The rubber-wrapped bundle was warm. It was the only reality.
Opposite him, the compartment door slid open.
A young couple entered. They were laughing. The man wore a tweed jacket and glasses; the woman wore a red scarf and held a basket of apples.
They stopped when they saw him. The laughter died instantly.
They looked at his face. They looked at the suit. They smelled the faint, indelible odor of the camp that no amount of soap could wash away—the smell of sour cabbage and old fear.
"Is this seat taken?" the man asked, his voice stiff.
"No," Peter said.
They sat down, but they sat close to each other, as far away from him as possible. The woman opened a book. The man stared out the window. The silence in the compartment was thick and suffocating.
They were afraid of him. Not because he was dangerous, but because he was a mirror. When they looked at him, they saw the war they had lost. They saw the guilt they had buried under the asphalt of the Autobahn.
Peter turned back to the window. He didn't blame them. He was a monster from the deep, dredged up by a political treaty.
The train crossed the border at Kufstein. Then Innsbruck. Then the Brenner Pass.
The engine strained as it climbed the spine of Europe. The mountains here were jagged, violent teeth biting into the sky. It was the barrier between the North and the South, between the grey and the gold.
And then, they began to descend.
The change was subtle at first. The light shifted. The harsh, flat grey of the German sky began to soften into a bruised purple, and then, as they rolled down into the South Tyrol, into a warm, hazy blue.
The architecture changed. The steep, slate roofs of the north gave way to terracotta tiles. The dark pines were replaced by cypress trees, standing like tall, thin sentinels. Vineyards appeared, clinging to the terraced hillsides—rows of gnarled vines that looked like handwriting on the earth.
Italy.
Peter felt a physical loosening in his chest. The iron band that had constricted his breathing for ten years eased a fraction.
This was the land of the letters. This was the place where the sun was not an enemy.
The train stopped at Bolzano. The young couple got off, casting one last, nervous glance at the scarecrow in the corner.
Peter was alone again.
He took out the packet. He peeled back the rubber. He held the yellow envelope.
He looked at the name. Dolce.
He tried to conjure her face. It was difficult. The face he remembered was a photograph in a soldier's wallet—static, frozen in 1943. He wondered what she looked like now. She would be older. Maybe she was fat. Maybe she was thin. Maybe she was married to a grocer and had five children.
Maybe she was dead.
The thought struck him like a physical blow. Dead.
He hadn't considered it. In his mind, Dolce was a fixed point. She was the destination. She had to be there, because if she wasn't, then the journey had no end. If she wasn't there, then Hanke and Muller and Klein and Schultz were just dead men in a ditch, and their sacrifice was a joke.
"She is alive," Peter whispered to the empty compartment. "She has to be."
Verona
The train pulled into Verona Porta Nuova station in the late afternoon.
The doors opened, and the heat hit him. It wasn't the searing heat of summer, but the gentle, retained warmth of an Italian October. It smelled of diesel, yes, but also of coffee, dust, and something sweet—perhaps roasting chestnuts.
Peter stepped onto the platform.
The noise was different here. In Munich, the noise was industrial, efficient. Here, it was operatic. People shouted to each other across the tracks. Porters argued with conductors, waving their hands. A group of nuns moved through the crowd like a flock of penguins, chattering incessantly.
It was chaos. It was life.
Peter walked through the station, clutching his cardboard suitcase. He felt dizzy. The colors were too bright. The advertisements were in a language he only half-remembered—the language of occupation, the language of command, but also the language of love letters he had never written himself.
He exited the station and stood on the wide steps.
Verona lay before him.
It was a city of gold and ochre. The buildings glowed in the afternoon light. The ancient walls, the Roman arena in the distance, the wide boulevards lined with trees—it was breathtakingly beautiful.
And he was terrified.
He had no map. He had only an address memorized ten years ago.
Via delle Fogge, Number 14.
He walked to a taxi stand. The driver, a man with a cap pulled low over his eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lip, looked at him skeptically.
"Where to, Tedesco?" the driver asked. He recognized the suit too.
Peter handed him a slip of paper where he had written the address. He didn't trust his voice.
The driver looked at the paper. He looked at Peter. His expression softened slightly.
"Via delle Fogge," the driver said. "Old town. Near the Piazza dei Signori. Hop in."
Peter sat in the back of the Fiat. The leather seat was cracked and warm.
The car wove through the traffic—Vespas buzzing like angry wasps, trucks, bicycles. They passed the Arena, its massive stone arches standing timeless against the modern traffic. They crossed the Adige River, the water green and swift below the bridge.
Peter watched the city roll by. He looked for scars. He saw a few—a building here and there that was still a shell, a patch of new brick on an old wall—but mostly, Verona had healed. The ivy had grown over the wounds.
"Here for tourism?" the driver asked, looking in the rearview mirror.
"No," Peter said.
"Business?"
"Delivery."
The driver nodded and didn't ask again. He sensed the weight in the passenger seat.
The car turned into a maze of narrow, cobblestone streets. The buildings here were tall and old, their plaster peeling to reveal ancient brick. Balconies overflowed with geraniums. Laundry hung on lines stretched across the alleyways, flapping like colorful flags of surrender.
The car stopped.
"Via delle Fogge," the driver said. He pointed to a narrow lane that was too small for the car. "Number 14 is down there. On the left."
Peter fumbled with the money. He handed the driver a mix of Deutschmarks and Lira he had exchanged at the border.
"Keep the change," Peter said.
" Grazie," the driver said. "Good luck, Tedesco."
Peter got out. He stood on the cobblestones.
He waited for the taxi to leave. He needed to be alone.
When the sound of the engine faded, silence returned to the alley. It was a domestic silence. The sound of plates clinking. A radio playing an aria. A woman scolding a child.
Peter began to walk.
His heart was beating so hard he thought it would crack his ribs. This was the hardest march of the war. Harder than the retreat. Harder than the snow.
Number 10... a bakery. The smell of yeast.
Number 12... a tailor shop. A mannequin in the window wearing a blue dress.
Number 14.
It was a tall, narrow building painted a faded yellow—the color of sunflowers. The shutters were green, peeling in the sun. There was a heavy wooden door with a brass knocker shaped like a lion's head.
Peter stood in front of the door.
He looked at the brass plate next to the bell.
Rossi.
The name from the letter. Dolce Rossi.
She was here. Or her family was here.
Peter put his suitcase down on the cobblestones. His hands were shaking uncontrollably. He wiped his palms on his trousers.
He reached into his pocket and took out the packet.
He looked at it one last time. The rubber skin he had made in the Gulag. The string.
He slowly peeled it away. He let the rubber fall to the ground.
He held the letters. They were warm. They were alive. They had traveled three thousand kilometers. They had survived fire, ice, water, and time.
He took a breath.
For Hanke. For Muller. For Klein. For Schultz.
He raised his hand to the lion's head knocker.
The metal was cool against his fingers.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The sound echoed in the narrow street.
Peter waited.
He heard footsteps inside. Slow, shuffling steps.
The latch clicked.
The heavy door creaked open.
A darkness inside. The smell of floor wax and old lavender.
A figure stood in the doorway.
It was an old woman. She wore black. Her hair was white, pulled back in a severe bun. Her face was a map of wrinkles, etched by grief and time. She leaned on a cane.
She looked at Peter. She looked at the grey suit. She looked at the gaunt, scarred face.
Her eyes were dark, sharp, intelligent.
"Signora?" Peter asked. His voice failed him. He tried again. "Signora Rossi?"
The woman stared at him. Her gaze dropped to his hands. To the yellow, tattered envelopes he was clutching.
Her eyes widened. Her hand flew to her mouth, covering a gasp. The cane clattered to the floor.
"Mario?" she whispered. The name hung in the air, a ghost summoned from the grave.
"No," Peter said softly. "I am not Mario."
He held out the letters.
"But I have brought him home."
The woman stared at the letters. She didn't move to take them. She was trembling, her body shaking as if struck by an invisible wind.
Behind her, footsteps on the stairs. Faster, lighter steps.
"Mama? Who is it?"
A younger woman appeared in the hallway behind the old lady. She was perhaps thirty-five. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and she wore a yellow dress.
She stepped into the light. She looked at Peter. She looked at the letters.
She stopped.
She didn't speak. She didn't ask who he was.
She knew.
She looked at the handwriting on the envelope in Peter's hand. She recognized the loop of the 'D'. She recognized the slant of the ink.
She made a sound—a low, animal keen of pain and relief that shattered the quiet of the afternoon.
"Dolce," Peter whispered.
She stepped past her mother. She walked out onto the cobblestones. She stood inches from Peter. She smelled of peaches and soap.
She reached out with both hands.
Peter placed the letters in her palms.
The weight left him.
The anchor was cut.
The courier was empty.
Peter Polemos fell to his knees on the stones of Verona, and for the first time in twelve years, he closed his eyes and didn't see the snow.