Ruth was so depressed by the news, she spent the first few days in bed, reading newspaper after newspaper, calling for endless cups of tea, and when she finally rose, she said enough was enough, it was time to book passage home while they still could. Iris said she wasn’t going home until the government ordered her to, but Ruth had bought her a ticket anyway, second class, for the SS Antigone leaving Civitavecchia on the twelfth of June. The tickets sat in the desk drawer. Iris refused to open it.

To make matters worse, she’d hardly seen Sasha at all. He worked all day at the embassy, sometimes sleeping there overnight, and Iris missed him the way you would miss breakfast, lunch, and dinner if they were all taken away from you at once, as if she’d stuffed herself at a banquet and been told the next day she couldn’t eat again, ever. In the beginning, he wrote her a couple of tender notes, but since then he hadn’t sent her so much as a postcard, let alone telephoned her.

To be fair, she did warn him that Ruth’s work had dried up and he shouldn’t try to telephone, because Ruth rarely left the apartment except to buy food and newspapers. Iris had never held a job, anyway, which she now regretted because she hated all this spare time, and all the war talk had turned Ruth into a bundle of nerves, snapping at whatever Iris said or didn’t say. The tension grew worse by the day. Iris felt this inarticulate scream in the air between them. To escape, she’d taken to wandering around Rome with her sketchbook, filling page after page with shadowed, moody drawings of policemen and beggars and soldiers, or else the ruins of civilizations past, the Colosseum or the Forum. She would sit on some ancient stone and contemplate arches and columns that once teemed with civic life, and the idea calmed her. What did Gertrude say to Hamlet?—Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die, passing through nature into eternity. Why rail against the tragedy of the human condition? Wars came and went, they destroyed and then created anew. What difference did her small, inconsequential life make among all these dozens of generations, all of them living and loving and fighting and grieving?