“I understand, I do. But did your parents not wish for you to have an education? I know your schooling was interrupted, but you’re a bright girl. A spot of private tutoring, a year or so of hard work, and I’m sure you’d pass the entrance exams.”

“I don’t know. I’ve my daughter to think of.”

“Only consider it. Your father has many friends who would be glad to help.”

“What are you suggesting, Dr. Koller?” she asked at last.

“That you go to medical school. I’m certain your father, were he still alive, would encourage you to at least try. And you’re more than capable. Our conversations over the past weeks are ample proof of that.”

Dr. Koller’s belief in her was flattering, and terribly encouraging, but his plans would have to wait. All she wanted, now, was to return to Mezzo Ciel. One day, perhaps, she might go back to school. One day.

By the middle of September she and Stella were judged well enough to travel. There had been no objection to their remaining together, though Dr. Koller had fretted that Nina was too young to take over the care of a teenager.

“It’s quite one thing to care for an infant, but you’re not much older than Stella yourself. Perhaps it would be better if we tried to find a place for her through one of the orphanages—”

“No. Never. She is coming with me. She will have a family with us in Mezzo Ciel.”

For their journey home, she and Stella traveled in the unimaginable luxury of a third-class carriage, complete with upholstered seats, windows that opened, a WC at the end of every car, and a tea trolley that passed their compartment once an hour. They had bread and cheese and apples, a gift from one of the nurses, and Dr. Koller had given Nina ten whole American dollars. The steward happily accepted fifty cents in return for eight cups of tea, two each for the days they spent on the train to Munich.

From there she and Stella were put on a bus heading south to the Allied base in Mittenwald, right at the Austrian border, where they and the other passengers, all refugees, were furnished with new identity papers and the nearly unimaginable sum of five hundred lire each. Fearful of being robbed, they retreated to the nearest restroom, opened a seam in the lining of Nina’s new coat—yet another parting gift from the hospital staff—and tucked the money inside.

It took another long day, squashed in the back of an enormous GMC truck, to get to Innsbruck, though the GIs traveling with them were polite and respectful and generous in sharing their sandwiches and chocolate. From there they found a train south to Italy, the Brenner Pass having finally reopened; another day would see them back in Bassano.