Part 1 (1/2)

Keeping the feast.

One couple's story of love, food, and healing in Italy.

by Paula b.u.t.turini.

Prologue.

Two ghosts. That was how a friend later described us when we returned to Rome in 1992. John and I had been away five years, and though neither of us knew it at the time, we returned, I think, because Rome seemed the most likely place to recuperate and cast out the demons we had picked up in our absence.

We moved into a small apartment near the Tiber on one of those golden October days so perfect that you could never imagine willingly leaving the city again. Every morning I would walk down our narrow street toward the hubbub of Campo dei Fiori, where the flower sellers, the fruit vendors, the vegetable sellers, the fishmongers, the mushroom lady, the bread shop, the lamb and chicken lady, the pork butcher, the notions man, the meat vans, the olive and herb vendors, the newspaper kiosk, the housewares stand, and the roving garlic salesmen from Bangladesh were always open for business no matter how early I awakened.

Morning after morning for an entire year, I walked to the Campo before most people were up. Noisy, honking, shouting Rome is almost quiet at that hour, and what began as a simple routine soon took on the trappings of ritual. I woke up early, dressed, walked out the door and over to the Campo. I would buy a s.h.i.+ny, plump purple-black eggplant. Or a handful of slender green beans, so fresh and young you could eat them raw. I bought three golden pears, or a heavy bunch of fat, green grapes. I bought a few slices of Milanese salami, a bit of veal. I bought a thin slab of creamy Gorgonzola, to spread on crusty, still-warm bread. I bought milk, yogurt, b.u.t.ter, and eggs, and finally the newspapers. Then I would head home, stopping in the tiny church of Santa Brigida, which lay halfway between the Campo and our apartment. The first few months, I would rest my bundles on the cold marble floor, kneel for a moment at the back of the church under the gaze of a painted Madonna, and try not to cry. Months later, I would still kneel for a moment in the same spot, but when I felt the tears coming, I'd make a fist and pound once or twice on the pew in front of me. It made a fitting, hollow sound in the almost empty church. Then I would collect my bundles and continue my short walk home.

I needed both parts of the ritual, the buying of the food and the stopping in the church. We all must eat, and there is nothing more normal than buying the food that keeps us alive. When I performed the ritual of buying our daily bread, the world seemed more normal. Pounding a pew a few minutes later brought home how far from normal I still felt.

Though the name means ”Field of Flowers,” Campo dei Fiori has not been a meadow since Pope Eugene IV ordered the field scythed and cobblestoned in the 1430s. These days the only flowers are the cut variety on sale at one end of the square and a few pots of scraggly geraniums and shrubs outlining the sidewalk cafes and trattorie and pizza joints that ring the piazza. Since the fifteenth century the Campo has been a horse market, a way station for pilgrims who thronged its Renaissance hostelries, and a place of torture and execution for those branded heretics by the Holy Roman Inquisition. Only since 1869, after the popes' temporal powers had finally been checked, has it been transformed into a public marketplace.

Today money changes hands under a patchwork canvas ceiling of gigantic umbrellas and tarps that protect the produce from Rome's fierce sun. The flower sellers jam their lilies, mums, dahlias, daisies, freesia, eucalyptus, sweet williams, and roses into plastic buckets and vases, enough to form a wall of flowers toward the western end of the square. All the other vendors display their wares w.i.l.l.y-nilly, piled high in bursts of brilliant colors atop weather-beaten wooden carts or sawhorse tables. When business is slow, and often when it's not, the vendors converse in deep-toned shouts with their compet.i.tors or the crowd.

From shortly after dawn till shortly after lunchtime, unruly knots of shoppers (I doubt the Campo has ever seen an orderly line, even for a hanging or a burning at the stake) jostle for position around the stands to choose the makings for their next meal. By one-thirty p.m. business is finished for the day and the vendors begin packing up their stands, tossing their rotten tomatoes, molding lemons, festering zucchini, and wilted greens onto the gray cobblestoned pavement. They leave hills of battered produce and mountains of the wooden crates used to haul their daily stocks from the city's wholesale market.

At that point, when the Campo looks like a garbage dump, cleanup crews-some plying medieval-looking willow brooms or plastic-fronded imitations, others maneuvering ultramodern street-was.h.i.+ng trucks-vacuum up and hose down the chaos. Walk through the Campo about three p.m. and, except for a lingering smell of seafood on the eastern edge of the square, a visitor would have no idea that this was anything other than a large, lovely Roman piazza, about the size and shape of a football field, with a ceremonial fountain splas.h.i.+ng at one end and a looming, hooded statue standing in its center.

At first glance Rome often seems all turmoil and frenzy. But time reveals a gentle side, too, a city of measured pace and rounded edges, a place not just of sun and heat, but of color and grace, whose comforts can outweigh its chaos. When we returned to Rome, ghostlike, in 1992, we were longing for those comforts, that blend of light, warmth, food, beauty, and friends-the very elixir that had nourished and protected us before our jobs as foreign correspondents called us off to cover the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. We had taken a battering during our five years away. Italy seemed the place to try to get over it.

Both of us had lived essentially fortunate lives before we met in Rome in 1985, when I was thirty-four and John was forty-three. We lived four essentially joyous years afterward, deeply grateful to have found each other. Only then, just after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, were we sucked into what I came to think of as our own private tornado. Though I don't believe the maxim that trouble comes in threes, I suspect that consecutive blows make it harder to rebound, easier to be dragged into a downward spiral. Our troubles began with a police truncheon in Czechoslovakia, two weeks before our wedding, and a bullet in Romania three weeks after. Infection, illness, and a family tragedy followed, and finally-the result of all that had come before-a long, slow slide into textbook depression.

I know that bad luck falls to everyone sooner or later. Ours simply hit especially hard, and lasted unusually long. This book recounts our troubles and how we found our way around them. It describes the simple strength we discovered in the one wild card we possessed: our love for Rome and the rituals we clung to there, all involving nourishment of one sort or another. These rituals of feeding and eating-rooted in our warmest memories from childhood and reinforced by our years in Italy-helped heal and strengthen us, allowed us to regroup. We cling to them still to ensure our future.

Like memory itself, this book wanders back and forth between old recollections and new. Food is the thread that connects them, for food has always been my lens and prism, my eye on the world. I may write about the smell of asparagus, the color of polenta, or the taste of figs still warm from the sun, but all of it is a personal shorthand for weighing hunger and love, health and nourishment, secrets and revelations, illness and survival, comfort and celebration, and perhaps above all, the joy and gift of being alive.

Can you love a city for its pink mornings and golden twilights? For the screech of its seagulls, the flitting of its swifts? Can you love a city because it is a riot of ochres and earth tones, all of them drenched by a fierce, rich light? Can you feel sheltered by the earth-hugging chaos of a city's skyline, exhilarated by its church domes floating like balloons across a deep blue sky? Can you feel nourished for a lifetime because an ancient city has never forgotten that its citizens need honest, fresh, and simple food, not only to survive but to flourish?

I know I loved Rome because of the water that streamed out my kitchen faucet, not only because it was clear and icy even in summer but because it sprang from the same mountain sources tapped by the engineers-or were they magicians?-of ancient Rome. I know I never got over the first joyful shock of seeing live green acanthus growing near the Colosseum, in the shadows of columns that are topped by stone acanthus carved thousands of years ago. I know I felt I belonged the day my butcher, standing behind his pocked marble counter, asked if I was planning a festa festa when I ordered four, not two, scaloppine of pale, pink veal. when I ordered four, not two, scaloppine of pale, pink veal.

Rome took me in the first time I saw it, a stifling August night when I was thirty-two. I stumbled into a seat along the cool marble benches that ring the Trevi Fountain, a few steps from my hotel. Two elderly matrons in freshly ironed house-dresses were taking their ease, fanning their bare arms and legs as they sat and chatted in the cool, damp air the fountain produced. Acknowledging my presence with a discreet nod of the head, they soon began peppering me with questions. When had I arrived? Two hours earlier. Allora Allora, what did I think of the Colosseum, the Forum, the Palatine, San Pietro? The larger of the two eyed me incredulously when I said that the Trevi Fountain was the only thing I had seen. They stopped their fanning. They collected themselves, took each other by the arm, and walked me slowly the few blocks to Piazza Navona, describing the city's most elegant parlor with a pride of possession so strong that they themselves might have owned it. They left me there marveling in the pink-gold splendor of the square, whose three splas.h.i.+ng fountains somehow swallow up the din of the city, leaving s.p.a.ce only for its charms.

1.

Hungers.

Some mornings, beginning in March, I wake up hungering for green asparagus. It is a grown-up hunger, for I don't remember asparagus cravings before I was twelve or thirteen, when my father learned to braise them in b.u.t.ter under three or four leaves of dripping wet lettuce. The lettuce, lightly salted, would wilt, then give up a mild, sweet juice in which the asparagus would steam. When they were done and my father lifted the lid, a cloud of vegetable essence would fill the entire kitchen. My mother would sigh in delight at the smell of it, and even my brother, five or six at the time and still finicky in his appet.i.tes, would devour them. On those days, our hunger for asparagus was boundless.

Decades later, sudden unshakable hungers still seize me throughout the year. In winter, it might be a craving for baby artichokes, braised in olive oil and mint, eaten barely warm. In spring I often crave strawberries-the smaller, the better-sliced over a mound of fresh ricotta. In summer I long for figs, or tomatoes, their juices still warm from the sun. In fall, I want and need a fat persimmon, quartered, opened up like a flower, sprinkled with lemon juice and eaten slowly, with ceremony and a spoon.

My maternal grandmother's Neapolitan soul knew and respected these sudden cravings. She called them voglie voglie, an Italian word that can mean anything from wishes, wants, and desires to longings, fancies, or whims. But when Jennie Comparato used the word in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1950s she meant only one thing-those deep, impulsive hungers for some special seasonal feast. The word is properly p.r.o.nounced VOHL-yay VOHL-yay, with the accent on the first syllable. But all of us in the family, none of whom had ever been to Italy, heard it rather differently. ”Wool-EEE” is what we used to say, Americanizing it beyond recognition. We changed the v v to a to a w, w, we changed the sound of the we changed the sound of the o o, we accented the last syllable instead of the first.

” I've got the wool-eee wool-eee for a cream cheese sandwich on date-nut bread,” my mother might sigh on a particularly bleak Sat.u.r.day morning in late January when she was convinced spring would never come again. If her for a cream cheese sandwich on date-nut bread,” my mother might sigh on a particularly bleak Sat.u.r.day morning in late January when she was convinced spring would never come again. If her wool-eee wool-eee was serious, she would slap on lipstick and a hat and order me out of my flannel-lined dungarees and into a hated hand-me-down skirt. She would pop me into the backseat of the Olds and drive us downtown. There, in a wood-paneled bakery and sandwich shop called Harkabus, she would satiate her desire, sighing in quiet joy at her first bite, as if that mixture of brown bread and white cheese could coax the bare magnolia in the front yard into early bloom. I never shared her enthusiasm for that particular sandwich, and she never thought to press it. was serious, she would slap on lipstick and a hat and order me out of my flannel-lined dungarees and into a hated hand-me-down skirt. She would pop me into the backseat of the Olds and drive us downtown. There, in a wood-paneled bakery and sandwich shop called Harkabus, she would satiate her desire, sighing in quiet joy at her first bite, as if that mixture of brown bread and white cheese could coax the bare magnolia in the front yard into early bloom. I never shared her enthusiasm for that particular sandwich, and she never thought to press it. Wool-eees Wool-eees were personal, and though best when shared, could not be coerced. She satisfied her soul her way and I took care of mine, with bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast, the mayonnaise carefully sc.r.a.ped off. were personal, and though best when shared, could not be coerced. She satisfied her soul her way and I took care of mine, with bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast, the mayonnaise carefully sc.r.a.ped off.

Jennie and the entire Comparato clan-she had seven brothers and sisters, four half brothers and half sisters-took wool-eees wool-eees seriously, never mocking or ignoring these often inexplicable desires. When a seriously, never mocking or ignoring these often inexplicable desires. When a wool-eee wool-eee erupted, they knew the stomach was speaking. And the stomach, in our family, was to be listened to attentively, not just blindly fed. In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain, and according to my mother, clearly more trustworthy and often more intelligent. I was not quite sure what she meant by those words nor by the fierceness of the tone she used when uttering similar p.r.o.nouncements, all of which ended with a look into my eyes and the same tag line: ”That's life-better get used to it.” erupted, they knew the stomach was speaking. And the stomach, in our family, was to be listened to attentively, not just blindly fed. In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain, and according to my mother, clearly more trustworthy and often more intelligent. I was not quite sure what she meant by those words nor by the fierceness of the tone she used when uttering similar p.r.o.nouncements, all of which ended with a look into my eyes and the same tag line: ”That's life-better get used to it.”

I thought at the time, and for many, many years, that she was talking to me when she made those p.r.o.nouncements that sounded so wise and so certain. Later I understood that she was talking mainly to herself. At any rate, by age six or seven, I knew wool-eees wool-eees bespoke nourishment and need, both of body and of soul. I knew they transcended mundane treats. Neither body nor soul could ever pretend to require a Hostess s...o...b..ll, a lemon Popsicle, or an Almond Joy. bespoke nourishment and need, both of body and of soul. I knew they transcended mundane treats. Neither body nor soul could ever pretend to require a Hostess s...o...b..ll, a lemon Popsicle, or an Almond Joy.

When I first moved to Rome, in my early thirties, it was the abundance of Roman voglie voglie that made me feel welcome, almost as if I'd moved home. Romans have that made me feel welcome, almost as if I'd moved home. Romans have voglie voglie for all manner of edible things. They are sometimes tied to the days of the week, like the need for potato gnocchi on Thursdays, or for thick pasta and chickpea soup, with rosemary and dried red pepper, on Fridays. They are sometimes tied to hours of the day, such as a craving for for all manner of edible things. They are sometimes tied to the days of the week, like the need for potato gnocchi on Thursdays, or for thick pasta and chickpea soup, with rosemary and dried red pepper, on Fridays. They are sometimes tied to hours of the day, such as a craving for spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino late at night or for a piece of warm late at night or for a piece of warm pizza bianca pizza bianca on the way home from school. They are often tied to seasons of the year, when the body instinctively knows what it needs to eat, such as a mountain of midwinter spinach, barely warm and drizzled with olive oil and lemon; for ricotta in spring, when the cows and ewes produce their sweetest milk; for deep platters of mussels in white wine and garlic, all you can stand on a broiling summer night; for a brown paper cone of roasted chestnuts in November, just off one of the battered braziers that appear on street corners when cooler weather finally sets in. on the way home from school. They are often tied to seasons of the year, when the body instinctively knows what it needs to eat, such as a mountain of midwinter spinach, barely warm and drizzled with olive oil and lemon; for ricotta in spring, when the cows and ewes produce their sweetest milk; for deep platters of mussels in white wine and garlic, all you can stand on a broiling summer night; for a brown paper cone of roasted chestnuts in November, just off one of the battered braziers that appear on street corners when cooler weather finally sets in.

Each year my own wool-eees wool-eees grow stronger, as if by being satisfied they are heightened instead of diminished. It makes a certain sense, for if we are charmed once, and charmed again by repeating the performance, our memories hold the weight of both. So it is that toward the end of each succeeding winter, I need asparagus even more than I needed it the year before. grow stronger, as if by being satisfied they are heightened instead of diminished. It makes a certain sense, for if we are charmed once, and charmed again by repeating the performance, our memories hold the weight of both. So it is that toward the end of each succeeding winter, I need asparagus even more than I needed it the year before.

These days I find myself willing local asparagus into the market even before it is ready for harvest. By the time they actually arrive, I can almost taste them. But it is not just the taste I crave. I hunger as much, perhaps even more, for what their seasonal appearance signals: that the dark and cold and death of winter is about to yield to the sun and heat and promise of spring. I hunger then for their springy green color, for the sharp crack they make when I snap off the bottom of a muddy, fibrous, white-tipped stalk. I hunger, too, for the sight of them in an orderly, b.u.t.tered mound, their sweet, blunt tips all pointing in the same direction, lying on a thick white pottery platter and covered with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. I even hunger for the proof I have eaten them, for asparagus is the only vegetable I know that produces a vegetal, acrid smell in pee. I hunger, too, for that cloud of asparagus-lettuce perfume that used to fill our kitchen when I was twelve or thirteen, and the four of us ate them, happily.

In Rome, when I needed and wanted and simply had to have asparagus, I walked to Campo dei Fiori early to choose the pick of the lot. They would be standing upright on Signora Maria's crowded vegetable stall, wrapped in green-and-white paper, as if they were flowers, secured with a thick green rubber band so that only the fat tips showed. Back home, I would snap off the woody bottoms where they themselves knew to break. I would wash off the grit, then wish I didn't have to wait till dinner. Sometimes, if that wish was very strong, I didn't. I boiled a few right then and cooked them gently with a beaten egg to produce a filched asparagus frittata, which tastes better than anything, probably because its main ingredient has been stolen, for hunger's sake.

The first few times each season, I want them whole, with a bit of b.u.t.ter melting over them and lots of freshly grated Parmigiano. If John is traveling, I may balance my plate on my knees while sitting on my favorite stool, and this private kitchen picnic will be as satisfying as any proper meal at a well-set table. If John is in town, we'll sit at table, the platter between us, and stalk by stalk contentedly share my winter-to-spring wool-eee wool-eee. Later in the season, for variety, I may dribble a bit of good green-gold olive oil over them while they are still warm. Just as I am about to eat, I squeeze a wedge of lemon over them, and the lemon oil gets into the skin of my fingers and into the air, and the lemon juice rides in droplets atop the olive oil, and the sweetness of the asparagus mingles with the oil and juice. It is a private, heady potion, my own call to Persephone to summon spring.

When I no longer need to eat them whole, I chop them into bits and pieces to turn them into spring's best risotto, using the asparagus water in which the stalks are first cooked as a mild, sweet broth that both colors and flavors the rice. It is a vegetable tonic, helping the body and mind make that longed-for but always difficult change of seasonal gears from darkness to light. In our house, risotto is always served from a large, deep oval platter, just as it appeared on the mahogany dining table in Jersey City when John was a boy. Risotto served from a bowl or from a flat, round plate doesn't taste right to him. When I appear with a platter of asparagus risotto, the color of the soft green cloud that hovers over a tree just before it bursts into leaf, neither of us is craving just the simple ingredients that went into the pot. For me, every forkful is like each bite my mother took from her cream cheese sandwich: a rea.s.surance that winter will, in fact, finally end. For John, I think, each taste satisfies his longing for all the Tagliabues who ate supper together in the two-family house on Columbia Avenue, for Mother and Daddy; for the older boys, Charles, Robert, and Paul; for Aunt Julia, who never married; for Upstairs Grandma, who used to sing softly and absently for hours as she sat in her kitchen just above theirs.

When we returned to Rome after our years away, we arrived with another sort of craving, a hunger for normalcy, a wool-eee wool-eee for some sort of old-fas.h.i.+oned cure. The treatment we sought, unconsciously at first, centered on food. Not fancy food or chichi restaurants, not the latest food fads or expensive ingredients. Just the magic of honest food-fresh and wholesome-simply prepared and eaten together three times a day, from ingredients that Italians have largely been eating for millennia. Italy still celebrates one of the most primordial rituals of the human community, the daily sharing of food and fellows.h.i.+p around a family table. What better place to take ourselves to heal? for some sort of old-fas.h.i.+oned cure. The treatment we sought, unconsciously at first, centered on food. Not fancy food or chichi restaurants, not the latest food fads or expensive ingredients. Just the magic of honest food-fresh and wholesome-simply prepared and eaten together three times a day, from ingredients that Italians have largely been eating for millennia. Italy still celebrates one of the most primordial rituals of the human community, the daily sharing of food and fellows.h.i.+p around a family table. What better place to take ourselves to heal?

Even before the troubles began raining down, we had begun to paint Italy as a haven, a refuge, the place to recover from too much work. John was the Warsaw bureau chief for The New York Times The New York Times, I was the Eastern European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune. Each summer, nearly played out, we would collect John's children, Peter and Anna, from Germany and return to the same magical house on the steep, scrub-covered hills in Trevignano Romano, a quiet village that overlooks Lake Bracciano, an hour's drive north of Rome.

We used to arrive, pale and wan, craving the sun, the heat, the food, the wine, the daily Monopoly games, the hours of reading, the afternoon swims, the naps on the beach, the nightly stroll on the lakeside promenade with ice cream dripping off our cones. We craved the trumpet vines that surrounded our bedroom windows and the cosseting of our older friends, Ann and Joseph, who had built two simple houses on the land, to use as a weekend retreat from the daily chaos of life in Rome. After three blissful weeks in Trevignano, we would leave tanned and rested, nearly restored. The best years, we arrived at the height of fig season, when a neighbor would leave enormous wicker baskets of green-gold figs on our back steps. Anna, seven or eight then, and I would stand around the basket and devour them, three and four at a go-our luggage, even the lake, forgotten. Nothing seemed to banish our hungers more than those meltingly soft figs oozing the thick, honeyed juice of an Italian summer.

After the troubles started, then multiplied and multiplied again, we stubbornly tried to keep to our ritual summer cure. We flew to Rome, met the children, and drove back up to the lake. There were no fat figs on the steps that summer, though. The neighbor who had always welcomed us with the fruits of her tree had died suddenly, shortly before we arrived.

Even if I try to list the troubles simply, objectively, without elaboration, without a frame, I still sound to myself like one of those thin, nervous women-their lips working, their eyes not meeting the camera-who used to appear on Queen for a Day Queen for a Day and tell their tales of woe. The woman with the most pitiful story and the most copious tears won the crown and the fur-trimmed robes. She won the long-stemmed roses, and maybe a refrigerator or some big cash prize. Under the crown and the robe, the winners would sob and laugh, cry and dissolve before the whirring camera. I watched that show with horror as a child, seeing grown-up terrors of loss and suffering paraded across the little octagonal screen of our first television set. It was a peculiar show for its time, oddly un-American, designed to reward trouble, to let a loser win. But I kept my horror of it well hidden, knowing the show would be forbidden if I let on how terrified it left me. I hated to watch it but hated to miss it, afraid this key to the grown-up world of troubles and fears might get away from me. If I watched, took in, and learned its secrets, maybe I could be ready for the adult terrors that obviously were waiting to be grown into, just like the bulky winter coat bought cheap at the end of the season for the following year's wear. and tell their tales of woe. The woman with the most pitiful story and the most copious tears won the crown and the fur-trimmed robes. She won the long-stemmed roses, and maybe a refrigerator or some big cash prize. Under the crown and the robe, the winners would sob and laugh, cry and dissolve before the whirring camera. I watched that show with horror as a child, seeing grown-up terrors of loss and suffering paraded across the little octagonal screen of our first television set. It was a peculiar show for its time, oddly un-American, designed to reward trouble, to let a loser win. But I kept my horror of it well hidden, knowing the show would be forbidden if I let on how terrified it left me. I hated to watch it but hated to miss it, afraid this key to the grown-up world of troubles and fears might get away from me. If I watched, took in, and learned its secrets, maybe I could be ready for the adult terrors that obviously were waiting to be grown into, just like the bulky winter coat bought cheap at the end of the season for the following year's wear.

The troubles that, in fact, were waiting started in Prague on November 17, 1989, the first night of what later came to be called the Velvet Revolution against the country's Communist leaders. Czechoslovak ant.i.terrorist police waded into a peaceful crowd of student demonstrators and beat everyone in reach. I was there to report on it and they beat me unconscious in the street, then dragged me off with a colleague who had tried to intervene, hauling us into a building entryway, where they could continue to beat us, with impunity and without witnesses.

Five weeks later it was John's turn. Two nights before Christmas, a sniper hiding in the darkness of a city street in Timioara, Romania, fired at the two-door Peugeot in which John was riding, shattering the car windows, tearing through doors, dashboard, seats, trunk, engine, and roof. The car was demolished, but neither the Frenchman at the wheel nor the two other Americans in the backseat were hit. John was struck by only one bullet, which he remembers ”scurrying like a mouse” across his entire middle before he pa.s.sed out.

I know that a riot stick connecting with a human target makes a sharp thwack thwacking sound when it hits a skull, and a slightly m.u.f.fled, duller thwock thwock when it hits flesh. I know that hundreds of s.h.i.+ny white plastic riot sticks catch and reflect streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn't there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I'd like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all? when it hits flesh. I know that hundreds of s.h.i.+ny white plastic riot sticks catch and reflect streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn't there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I'd like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all?

I needed fifteen simple st.i.tches to close the two long gashes in my head and a couple of weeks for my hugely swollen face to look again like mine. Had my beating been the sum of it, I probably would have nursed a longtime fear of uniformed men wielding riot sticks, but would have few other lingering concerns. But a bullet that pierces a car door, a parka, a sports coat, a sweater, a s.h.i.+rt, trousers, and underwear-a bullet that splits a belt in two, then chews its way across a body I knew and loved-causes an entirely different level of injury. The body is only the first victim; the soul, the psyche, the spirit are each ripped apart as well. People who had learned this lesson in their own particular ways-a wise hospital orderly in Munich, friends who had lost a child, an acquaintance who had once been knifed in the chest-tried to warn us early on that our lives would never be quite the same. They tried to let us know that any biography-changing trauma such as a car wreck or a heart attack was likely to split a life in two, into the time before and the time after.

But we weren't ready to take in their wisdom. It was only over the years that we began to understand that the troubles that befall us alter, permanently, not only our view of the world but our position in it. We still had so very much to learn. Who would have thought that patience could be a vice? And anger a virtue? Who would have thought that there are times when it is not only natural to feel angry and impatient but of enormous importance to demand that a sick person show signs of getting better? Who would have thought that the most fundamental of human rituals-buying, preparing, eating, and sharing our daily bread-would have become our tether to normal life as we struggled to make the crossing from our old life before to our new life after?

The Romanian surgeon who first saved John's life said the bullet slammed into his right side, shattering his pelvis and sending shards of bone deep into the surrounding muscles. The German surgeons who saved his life later said the bullet then tumbled and danced its way across the rest of him, skimming close enough under his spine to shatter the tip of one vertebra and slightly fracture two more. Ultimately, though, it skimmed under his spinal column and chewed across the rest of him, exiting his left side just above what was left of his belt. Doctors-first in Timioara, and later in Munich-had to cut open John's back to expose and clean the tunnel the bullet had made. They had to clean out the bits of bone, metal, paint, dirt, grease, and shredded cloth that the bullet carried with it. They had to kill the inevitable infection that followed, and weeks later, when there was enough new flesh to st.i.tch, they had to sew up the long, deep trench-about as wide and deep as my forearm-that they and the bullet had made.