Her glacial eyes had never been so clear, so piercing. I was always hesitant to hug her. Each time, I felt as though she might take a step back. Today, I decided not to even risk it.

When she was a child, her schoolfriends had nicknamed her “the Austrian.” Her family had had a troubled history, and this was the one excuse I had come up with to explain her coldness. During the war, my maternal grandfather, Angelo Antonioli, a peasant farmer in Piedmont, had been conscripted into the Italian Expeditionary Corps, two hundred thirty thousand soldiers who, from the summer of 1941 to the winter of 1943, had been posted to the Eastern Front, from Odessa to the banks of the Don to Stalingrad. Barely half of them made it home. My grandfather Angelo was one of those who didn’t make it back; captured by the Soviets during the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh Offensive, he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp but died on the march to the gulag. This beaming boy from northern Italy had fallen in the icy cold of the Russian steppes, victim of a war that was not his. To add to the family’s woes, during his absence, his wife had gotten pregnant and could scarcely hide the fact that it was the result of adultery. As the product of my grandmother’s forbidden love for an Austrian laborer, my mother was born into scandal. The shame that attended her birth meant that she grew up to be uncommonly determined and dispassionate. I had always had the impression that nothing truly unsettled or upset her, a manner that starkly contrasted with my own sensitivity.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were ill?” I blurted out the question almost without thinking.

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“I just wish I’d known, that’s all.”

She had not always been so distant with me. Thinking back to my childhood, I remembered moments of genuine intimacy and affinity, especially when we talked about novels and plays. This was not my wounded pride rewriting history; I had seen countless pictures of myself as a child with my mother smiling, clearly delighted and proud to call me her son. Later, things went sour, though I never really understood why. These days, she still got along well with my brother and my sister but markedly less so with me. In an unhealthy way, I thought of it as a badge of honor. At least I had something my siblings did not.

“So, you’ve been at the fiftieth anniversary of Saint-Ex? I don’t know why you’d bother…”

“It was good to see old friends.”

“You didn’t have any friends, Thomas. The only friends you had were your books.”

This was true, but hearing it stated so baldly was still upsetting. “Maxime is my friend.”