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tonight’s audience will make requests from the list below, allowing the beautiful singer to concentrate on her performance by sparing her the trouble of putting her own program together.”
    I was driven to the restaurant by a German soldier who talked to me in German and never seemed to notice I didn’t answer. I’d walked into the restaurant the back way, at the kitchen entrance. Talking to the cooks was forbidden.
    The head chef, Mariano Minzoni, was there, along with the four other cooks. Not by choice. They were not getting paid. In two chairs near the main prep table were two Germans. Kitchen guards.
    In the old days, everyone used to call sharp-faced, leathery old Mariano a tyrant, as if the worst thing that could happen to them was abuse from a bullying chef. Even Aldo had been afraid of him.
    He was flanked by soldiers, in his apron, a knife in his hand, getting ready to carve the roast that smelled so good. When he looked at me, his eyes welled up and he grabbed for an onion, leaning in close to it to chop it. He made a point of tipping his head in a particular way, then turning, as if he’d cramped his neck and had to loosen it. He did this several times, until he got it across to me that he wanted me to notice his ears.
    He had stuffed them with cotton. Was he telling me he had a head cold or infection? Did he want me to get the message to Ugo Fantini that he needed a doctor? Everyone knew that Ugo’s house, with his office on the ground floor, was being watched. Fascists followed him on house calls, sometimes in their own cars, sometimes in his. They suspected there was a squad; they figured its leader was Ugo. But if Mariano needed him, he would come.
    I was about to say, with my eyes and a tilt of my head, “You have earaches, Mariano, I understand, I’ll fix it up with Ugo,” when I realized that the others had paused in their labors and were showing off their ears, too: little Rico Pincelli, the pimply apprentice, whose brother was a waiter on the squad, and who had to be watched so he wouldn’t run off and try to join them; shy, blond Fausto Fabbi, the seafood specialist, whose hands were always red, always cold; Romano Buffardi, pasta and vegetables, who was beginning to form a paunch; and sullen Gigi Solferino, the sauces and soup man, who was next in line to be
capo della cucina
if Mariano ever retired, which was highly unlikely. Gigi was older than Mariano by several years, and suffered from a palsy that made his hands shake; he couldn’t be allowed to use a knife.
    All their ears were plugged with cotton, same as their boss’s. The guards had no idea. “Sing as badly tonight as you can, and we won’t know, as we’ve made the effort to restrict ourselves to your best,” they were saying to me. Or simply, “We won’t join the bastards in hearing you.”
    Black shirts at the tables. Leather, regalia, boots. I had not experienced stage fright, because it didn’t count as real singing.
    Waves of applause. Compliments in German, translated by Fascists: I was a songbird, an angel. When the war was over they’d arrange for me to sing in great houses all over the world—in their Paris, their Vienna, their London, their Milan, their everywhere. I had not eaten the food placed in front of me, as hungry as I was.
    The cooks. Stuck in the kitchen like prisoners. I imagined them with me, crowded together, finding fault with the train, the seats, the view, each other. They resented it so much that they weren’t with the squad. I could smell the kitchen, as if it were imbued in their clothes and skin and hair: garlic, onions, roasting meats, tomatoes, and complicated scents of the sea, salty and fishy and marvelous.
Oh you ask me.
I imagined them singing our partisans’ song, with the train wheels beating time.

    Oh you ask me why I closed up my shop,
    Why I brought up my boat to dry land,
    Why I walked away from that