The Secret Messenger. Mandy Robotham
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At first glance, the report I am to translate looks to be merely an engineering update on precious water supplies in Venice, pumped in from the mainland. But as I consult my German-Italian dictionary for more specific words, I discover it’s also about rerouting food supplies through new shipping lines, although the word ‘supplies’ doesn’t always appear to refer to scarce flour, sugar or wheat. The report’s complexity means I can’t possibly remember it word for word, despite having a talent for ingesting and harbouring facts. Luckily, the Resistance has prepared for this. They know I can’t risk making a carbon copy of my translation, or writing notes in my own hand, so it’s been agreed with my unit that I’ll type up brief notes I can immediately recall in the office. Operating in plain sight is sometimes the best form of camouflage and I’m suddenly grateful that having a desk backing onto a bookcase is useful for not being overlooked. Or else I will scribble any facts the minute I can make excuses for a toilet break. A sympathetic cobbler has already made adjustments to several pairs of shoes, allowing me to hide folded notes in my heels. I’ll return to my desk, with an expression of indifference and a willingness to carry on the Reich’s work. That’s the plan.
‘Fräulein Jilani, have you settled in?’ The voice is raised above the office noise and takes me by surprise, not least because Cristian De Luca’s German is cut-glass perfect. He sees my surprise.
‘Yes, we speak German in the office – the general prefers it,’ he explains. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I say, my eyes glancing back to my keyboard. I need to work quickly to complete both the official and unofficial notes, though not so noisily that I attract attention. Sergio, Captain of the Venetian Resistance Central Brigade and my commander, has stressed that I’m to lie low for several days, or even weeks, not be intent on passing information, but this to me looks too important. I feel sure it could really make a difference. I need to get on and this man is loitering.
Still, Cristian De Luca hovers beside my desk. I look up, inquisitive.
‘Erm, I’m just hoping everything was all right with you and the general?’ he ventures. ‘Nothing too … brusque?’
‘No … no,’ I lie, purposely upbeat. ‘He was … direct, but perfectly charming.’
‘Good, well, don’t hesitate to, you know …’ His last words are lost as the general’s voice comes booming from behind me, prompting one of the secretaries to scurry towards the door, almost turning a heel as she goes.
Cristian De Luca walks towards a desk by the window, annoyingly only two away from my own. He puts on a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and opens up a file to read. Now I think he looks even more like a librarian.
The efforts of the previous night are beginning to take their toll – my eyes are smarting with tiredness as I pull the cover over my machine at the end of the day, while the office begins to empty. One of the office girls asks if I’d like to join them for a drink but I make an excuse that I’m expected at my parents’ for dinner. The thought of a bowl of Mama’s pasta – exquisite even with increasingly scant ingredients – makes my mouth water, but instead I grab a bread roll from a nearby bakery and head briskly in the opposite direction, wrapping my coat around me as I head towards the canal’s edge. Despite my fatigue, it’s time for the third part of my full and sometimes complicated life.
Waiting at the stop for the vaporetto that will transport me across the expanse of water to the island of Giudecca, I stare at the soaring tower of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, perched on the adjacent island’s edge. The Palladian monolith looks particularly magnificent tonight, caught in the occasional beam of boat traffic toing and froing across the lagoon. I’m not particularly religious – not as much as Mama would wish anyway – but the tower’s continued existence through centuries of war and strife warms my heart. That warmth is particularly welcome now since the bitter wind is apt to whip through this wide stretch between Venice proper and what’s considered the less ornate, more industrial Giudecca. But that’s what’s so attractive about it tonight, for me at least. The sometimes choppy waters are a divide which helps more than hinders.
The crossing is unhindered by German patrol boats and takes just ten or so minutes; I’m one of only a dozen or so passengers stepping onto the pontoon at Giudecca. The streets are mostly dark with minimal lighting – a consequence of burned-out bulbs not replaced – but I have a mind map of where I’m going. I think I could find it in my sleep, which is a bonus since my eyes are struggling to stay open after so little rest. But I must. This is business and not pleasure. However tired I am, there is more typing to do, though rather than reports to uphold the Nazi occupation, these are my words. Each time I come to Giudecca, I become a different type of translator, one whose fiercely loyal passion for the Resistance is laid on a page for all of Venice to see. It’s one part of my contribution to the partisan cause, defenders of our city. Popsa always said that one day my love of words would mark me out and, each time I step onto Giudecca, I like to think he’s right.
As I round the corner into the tiny, darkened square, a glow pushes out from the ground-floor windows of the café-bar, blinds only half drawn, while the low hum of conversation from behind a heavy wooden door is the sole noise in the empty plaza.
‘Evening Stella,’ says Matteo, the bar’s owner, as I walk in to a general wave of welcome from the ten or so customers. I’m among friends here.
‘Hello everyone,’ I say as chirpily as I can manage. I walk to the back of the bar and into a tiny room, little more than a cupboard, where I replace my coat with a white waitress’s apron around my waist. Instead of heading back out to the bar, though, I knock three times on a door tucked in one corner of the room and turn the handle.
‘It’s Stella,’ I sing in warning as I descend a short set of wooden stairs, towards the dim light below. Arlo looks up from his desk, squinting at me and then back at the paper he’s working on. Poor Arlo – his eyesight is bad enough as it is, without the strain of the faint light and the tiny print he peers at for hours on end. His thick glasses lie discarded on the table as he pulls the page close to his face – his eyesight is a family trait that saved him from an enforced draft into the Italian army, and more than likely prevents the Resistance from allowing him anywhere near a gun, but he’s the best of typesetters. Twice a week, our little band of aspiring paper-producers meets under a cloak on Giudecca to create and construct the weekly Venezia Liberare newspaper. As its name suggests, it’s about spreading the word of liberty and freedom for all Venetians, reclaiming something of our own. And amid the typeset lines of news and local chatter, there is – we think – a manifesto of hope.
Yet Venezia Liberare does not lie side by side on the newsstands with Il Gazzettino and other mainstream papers, those largely controlled by fascist sympathisers. It’s created, printed and collated in this tiniest of spaces, packed and transported under cover of darkness to all corners of Venice, where shopkeepers loyal to the cause will keep a pile of ‘something special’ under their counters, passing over the goods on the quiet, and, with it, the word that we are all still here. Ready and waiting.
‘Hey, Stella, we’ve got eight pages to fill tonight. I hope you’re raring to go,’ Arlo says enthusiastically. My heart sinks for a second and my fatigue rises like a wave but, as I pull up my chair and lift the lid on my typewriter, there’s a rush of energy within me. Just the sight of this machine has that effect on me. It’s much smaller and neater than my industrialsize typewriter in the Reich office, the one with a high slope of keys and tall roller, the shiny metal of grey and black, emulating the SS livery. The shine that my own machine once sported on its black frame is now dimmed and scratched, and some of the bright white keys are grey and smudged with ink, tattooed with my own fingerprints, but it cheers me like a good friend. For years now, since Popsa brought it home on my eighteenth birthday, this small machine has been my workmate, my comrade even. My voice.
We’ve been through quite a lot. In what now seems like an entirely different life as a journalist, I shunned the heavy, brooding office typewriters in favour of my neater, more portable tool. We went on story assignments together, allowing me to type up my notes quickly, settle my