The transition was not gradual. It did not come like the slow fade of a cinema reel or the gentle drifting of sleep. It was an abrupt, violent dislocation of the senses. One moment, Peter was encased in the freezing mud of Saxony, and the next, he was drowning in gold.
The smell hit him first. It was not the scent of wet lime and cordite, but the heavy, intoxicating aroma of heated dust, basil, and the sharp, acidic tang of citrus rinds baking in the sun. The air was not a solid block of ice pressing against his lungs; it was fluid, warm, and alive with the buzz of cicadas.
Verona, July 1943.
Peter stood in the Piazza delle Erbe. He was nineteen years old, and his uniform was not a shroud of filth, but a garment of pristine field-grey wool, brushed and pressed until the creases were sharp enough to cut paper. He was not a Sergeant then, not a veteran of the freezing steppes. He was Obergefreiter Polemos, a boy playing soldier in a country that felt less like a conquered territory and more like a stage set for an opera.
The heat was a physical weight, glorious and heavy. It soaked into the ancient stones of the piazza, radiating upward through the soles of his boots. It softened the asphalt of the roads and made the white umbrellas of the market stalls glow with an inner luminescence.
And there was Dolce.
She was standing by the fountain, the Madonna Verona, arguing with a vendor over the price of peaches. She wore a dress of pale yellow cotton that had been washed so many times it was almost white at the seams. It was simple, unadorned, and yet, on her, it looked like the raiment of a queen. Her hair was dark, pulled back from her face with a ribbon, but stray curls escaped to stick to the damp nape of her neck.
Peter watched her from the shade of the arcade. He felt a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with fear. It was a terrifying, exhilarating vulnerability. In the hierarchy of his life, there was the Wehrmacht, there was the Fatherland, and then, towering above them both in sheer, undeniable reality, was this girl who sold fruit and smelled of soap.
She turned, sensing his gaze. Her face was not the blurred, grainy image of the photograph in his pocket. It was vivid, high-definition reality. Her eyes were dark, intelligent, and held a spark of challenge. She didn't look at him with the fear of the occupied; she looked at him with the curiosity of a woman assessing a man.
"German," she called out, her voice cutting through the noise of the market. It was a melody, even when she was mocking him. "Are you going to stand in the shadow all day, or are you going to buy a peach?"
Peter stepped into the light. The sun hit him like a hammer, dazzling him. He fumbled with the coins in his pocket—Italian Lire, stamped with the fasces, feeling light and toy-like in his hand.
"I... I would like one," he stammered in his broken, textbook Italian. " The best one."
Dolce laughed. It was the sound that had haunted his dreams for two years. It was not a polite, stifled giggle. It was a laugh that came from the belly, full and unashamed. She picked up a peach, turning it in her fingers, inspecting it for bruises.
"The best one," she mused, switching to a halting German that mirrored his own struggle. "For the conqueror, only the best."
She tossed it to him. He caught it, the skin of the fruit warm and velvety against his palm. It was soft, ripe to the point of bursting.
"It costs fifty lire," she said, her eyes dancing.
"That is robbery," Peter smiled, feeling the muscles of his face relax, a sensation he had forgotten was possible.
"It is a war tax," she countered. "For the noise of your trucks."
He paid her. He bit into the fruit. The juice ran down his chin, sticky and sweet, tasting of sunlight and sugar. It was the taste of peace.
The memory shifted, fast-forwarding through the montage of that summer.
He remembered walking with her along the banks of the Adige River, the water rushing green and cold from the Alps. He remembered sitting on the stone wall of the Castel San Pietro, watching the sunset bleed purple over the terracotta rooftops. They didn't talk about the war. The war was a rumor, a distant thunder in Africa or Russia. Here, there was only the present tense.
He remembered the touch of her hand. It was rough, calloused from work, but infinitely gentle. When she touched his face, tracing the line of his jaw, he felt as if she were sculpting him, making him real. Before Dolce, he was just a number in a ledger. With her, he was Peter.
"Why do they call you Polemos?" she had asked one evening, lying in the tall grass near the Roman theatre.
"It is Greek," he explained. "My grandfather was Greek. It means 'War'."
She had frowned, tracing the eagle on his tunic button. "It is a heavy name for a baker's son."
"I did not choose it."
"Then change it," she said simply. "Be Peter. Just Peter."
"I cannot just change who I am, Dolce."
"Of course you can," she whispered, leaning closer, her breath warm against his ear. "We are not statues. We are water. We change to fit the vessel."
Then came the fracture.
September 8, 1943.
The radio broadcast that shattered the world. General Badoglio announcing the armistice. Italy had surrendered to the Allies. In the blink of an eye, the map changed colors. The "Axis" was broken. The girl in the yellow dress was no longer a citizen of an allied nation; she was, by the strict taxonomy of the High Command, a hostile entity.
The order came at midnight: Disarm the Italian garrisons. Secure the passes. Treat resistance with summary force.
Peter had run to her house. The streets of Verona were chaotic, filled with confused soldiers and shouting civilians. He found her in the doorway of her family's apartment, clutching a shawl around her shoulders.
The look in her eyes had changed. The playfulness was gone, replaced by a deep, confusing sorrow. She looked at his uniform as if seeing it for the first time—not as a costume, but as a casing for a weapon.
"You have to leave," she said, her voice trembling. "My brothers... they are talking about the partisans. About the mountains."
"Come with me," Peter had pleaded, a desperate, impossible request. "We can go north. To Germany."
"To Germany?" She shook her head slowly. "Peter, look at the sky. The world is burning. There is no 'north' anymore. There is only the war."
He reached for her hand, but she pulled back slightly. That flinch—that tiny, involuntary recoil—cut deeper than any shrapnel ever would. It was the moment the uniform won.
"I will write to you," he promised, the words feeling hollow even as he spoke them. "Every day. I will come back. When this is over, I will build you a house with a red roof. I promise."
"Don't promise," she said softy. "Just survive. Don't let the name take you. Don't become the War."
She kissed him then, a desperate, salty kiss that tasted of tears and finality. Then she closed the door. The sound of the latch clicking into place was the loudest sound in the universe.
"Sergeant!"
The word was a slap.
The heat of Verona vanished instantly, sucked away into a vacuum. The smell of peaches was replaced by the stench of unwashed bodies and freezing mud.
Peter gasped, his eyes snapping open. He was back. The grey ruins of St. Matthias loomed over him, jagged teeth against the night sky. The wind was howling through the empty arches, carrying with it the fine, gritty dust that coated everything in Saxony.
It was Corporal Hanke who had spoken. He was crouching in front of Peter, his face a mask of concern illuminated by the dying embers of a cigarette.
"You were talking in your sleep, Peter," Hanke said quietly. "Italian."
Peter rubbed his face with his hands. His skin felt like parchment—dry, cold, and dead. The transition from the memory to the reality was physically painful, a decompression sickness of the soul. He felt a profound, aching hollowness in his chest, as if his heart had been scooped out with a spoon.
"What time is it?" Peter rasped.
"Nearly midnight," Hanke said. "The moon is coming up. The clouds are breaking."
Peter looked up. Through the shattered roof of the nave, he saw it. The moon was a pale, malevolent eye staring down at the slaughterhouse. Its light was cold and silvery, washing the ruins in a ghostly luminescence that drained the world of color.
"The tanks?" Peter asked.
"Idling," Hanke said, gesturing toward the valley. "But the pitch has changed. They are revving. Warming up the fluids. They're coming, Peter."
Peter stood up. His joints screamed in protest. The cold had settled deep into his bones during his reverie. He walked to the breach in the wall and looked out.
Hanke was right. The sound had changed. It was no longer a distant hum; it was a throaty, guttural growl. The T-34s were waking up. He could see the blue exhaust smoke drifting up from the treeline, glowing in the moonlight.
The waiting was the worst part. It was a psychological torture designed to erode the will before the first shell was even fired. It gave a man time to think. Time to regret. Time to measure the span of his life against the vastness of the dark.
And in that silence, the guilt that Peter had carried for two years became unbearable.
It wasn't just that he had left her. Soldiers leave. It was the silence.
He had written, at first. Letters full of forced optimism, describing the weather or the food, carefully omitting the horror. But as the war turned, as the Wehrmacht retreated from the Volga to the Dnieper, and from the Dnieper to the Vistula, the ink had dried up.
He had seen things that defied language. He had seen the frozen corpses of horses used as road markers. He had seen villages erased from the map. He had become a creature of reflex, killing shadows in the snow, sleeping in holes in the ground like an animal.
He had stopped writing because he felt contagious. He believed that if he touched the paper, the rot of the Eastern Front would somehow travel through the post and infect her. He wanted to keep her safe in her sunlit memory. He wanted to be the boy in the clean uniform, not the scarecrow in the mud.
But now, standing on the precipice of his own annihilation, he realized the arrogance of that decision. It wasn't protection. It was cowardice. He had left her with a ghost. He had let her wait, checking the post every day, until the hope turned to worry, and the worry to grief, and the grief to a cold, hard acceptance that he had forgotten her.
That was the lie. And he could not die leaving her with that lie.
"Hanke," Peter said, turning back to the corporal. "Do we have a candle? A real one?"
Hanke blinked. "There is a stump of tallow in the sacristy. I was saving it for..."
"Give it to me."
Peter took the small, misshapen lump of wax. He moved to the sheltered alcove behind the main altar, where the wind was less severe. He struck a match, shielding the flame with his body. The wick caught, sputtering, casting a weak, yellow circle of light against the stone.
He sat cross-legged on the flagstones. He reached into his bread bag and pulled out the logistical manifest he had saved earlier.
The paper was coarse, yellowed, and printed with columns for "Boot counts" and "Rations, tinned." It was the bureaucracy of the Third Reich, the paperwork of a machine that had ground millions of lives into dust. Peter turned it over. The blank side was his confessional.
His hands were stiff with cold. The fingers wouldn't bend properly. He breathed on them, a cloud of steam rising in the candlelight, rubbing the circulation back into the knuckles until they stung.
He took the pencil. It felt like a foreign object, a splinter of wood he couldn't quite control.
He looked at the blank page. How do you compress a lifetime of regret into a few lines? How do you apologize for a world that has gone mad?
He closed his eyes for a second, summoning the image of the fountain one last time. He needed that light. He needed to borrow the warmth of 1943 to survive the night of 1945.
He pressed the lead to the paper. The graphite scratched loudly in the silence.
The First Letter: The Silence
My Dearest Dolce,
If you are reading this, the silence is final. But I am writing this because the silence that came before was a lie, and I cannot die leaving you with a lie.
I know you have waited. I know you have checked the post every day until the days turned into months, and the months into this endless, frozen year. I can imagine the anger you felt, and then the worry, and finally the cold acceptance that I had forgotten you. That the German soldier had returned to his cold North and washed the memory of Italy from his skin like so much dust.
Peter paused. His hand was shaking. Not from the cold this time, but from the sheer weight of the truth. He looked at the words. They were jagged, the handwriting of an old man, but they were legible.
I did not forget. I have never forgotten. I stopped writing not because I loved you less, but because I loved you too much to touch you with these hands.
A mortar shell landed somewhere down the slope—a dull whump that shook the flame of the candle. Dust drifted down from the fractured arches, coating Peter's shoulders in a fine, grey powder that looked like ash from a cremation. He waited for the debris to stop falling before he continued, shielding the paper with his body.
They call this the Eastern Front, but that is a mapmaker's term. It is a moral winter. I have seen things here, Dolce, that have scraped the humanity out of us. We are not men anymore; we are mechanisms of survival. We sleep in holes in the ground. We smell of rot. We kill shadows.
I wanted to keep you safe from this. I thought that if I wrote to you, if I sent a letter from this hell to your garden in Verona, the ink itself would carry the infection. I was afraid that if I described the snow here, you would feel the cold. I wanted you to live in the sun, pristine and untouched. My silence was a shield. I realize now it was only a wall.
Forgive me for the cruelty of my protection. I wanted to remain the boy in the clean uniform in your memory, not the ruin I have become.
He stopped. He read the lines again. They felt inadequate, paltry things against the enormity of his failure. But they were true.
He signed it simply: Peter.
He didn't fold it yet. He stared at the name. Peter. Not Polemos. Not Sergeant. Just Peter.
"Sergeant!"
The whisper came from the breach in the western wall. It was Vogel, the machine gunner. His voice was tight, a wire stretched to the breaking point.
"Movement. Sector three. By the cemetery wall."
Peter blew out the candle instantly. The darkness rushed back in, absolute and suffocating. The afterimage of the flame danced in his vision—purple spots floating in the black.
He folded the letter in the dark, his grease-stained thumbs creasing the paper. He shoved it into his tunic, against his skin, beneath the layers of wool. It sat there, a burning coal against his heart.
He crawled on his belly across the flagstones, the cold seeping through his knees, until he reached Vogel's position.
"Show me," Peter whispered.
"Wait for the flare," Vogel hissed.
The engines were louder now. The growl had become a roar. The earth was vibrating against Peter's chest. The memories of Verona were gone, locked away in the paper inside his jacket.
Now, there was only the mud.