The Flood

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The boy was four, a pretty child, slim, dark-haired with bright and thoughtful eyes. On this cold, wet day he stood by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo, the city side, not far from home, staring at the stone angels and the vast brown shape across the river. They said it was once the tomb of an emperor, one of the greatest Rome had ever known. But he was a child, so it reminded him of nothing more than the little drum he had in their cramped one-room apartment in the ghetto, the only toy he owned.

Down the Lungotevere soldiers marched in dark uniforms, rifles to their shoulders, gleaming bayonets pointing at a sky so flat and lacking in colour he might have drawn it with a soft pencil and a sheet of paper. He wondered if these serious, frightening men thought their blades could pierce the clouds themselves, slashing their leaden bellies, bringing the heavens down to earth.

His father said the soldiers could do anything they wanted now. The boy didn’t understand what that meant. But in the morning warplanes had flown over the city, their low and threatening engines bellowing like the voice of a great mechanical storm. From the windows of the great palace in the Piazza Venezia the man they called ‘Il Duce’ had spoken to a vast, adoring crowd.

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