All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

nothing left to be burned and she noticed nothing. Concettina told her she had not allowed Anna to go to school because she thought she had a slight cold : and Anna made an effort to sniffle and cough, and anyhow she had no difficulty in this, with all the smoke she had swallowed. Giustino came back from school and Anna ran to tell him about Danilo, but Giustino already knew he had been arrested, because people were by now talking of it in the town : in any case it was never possible to tell Giustino anything new, because he was always informed about everything, nobody knew how.
    They waited for the police. They waited all that day and again the next day, sitting in the sitting-room. Ippolito told Emanuele it would have been better for him to stay in his own house instead of being always with them, for when the police came it was not a very good thing that they should be found together. But Emanuele answered that, in the nervous state he was in, he did not feel like staying in his own house, and he begged Ippolito to let him remain with him : when the police came he could always tell them that he too was desperately in love with Concettina, or even, as far as that went, with Anna, because the police like love stories. Anna stayed at the window watching the snow, it seemed to go on snowing for ever and the street was silent in the snow and empty, and no policeman appeared. In the ante-room lay Danilo’s gloves ; the last time he had been to see them he had left them there. As she passed through the room Anna glanced at them and had a strange feeling, and Danilo seemed very far off, it seemed like a dream that it had once been possible to look at him and touch him. He seemed very far off like the dead, and as with the dead it seemed that never again would it be possible to hear from him about the new things he was seeing and thinking.
    Anna asked whether it would not be a good thing to burn the gloves as well. But Emanuele burst into loud laughter; after all Danilo’s gloves were not marked with his name. Giustino liked these gloves very much ; they were fine gloves made of sham pigskin and he wanted to take them for himself. But Emanuele forbade him to touch them. They must be given back to Danilo’s mother, the bush of hair at the cash-desk. Emanuele went and waited for her one evening outside the cake-shop. He gave her the gloves and also some money to send to Danilo, because in prison one needs money, otherwise they give you nothing but tasteless soup, a little bread and nothing else. Danilo was in the New Prison at Turin, he was well and quite calm. His mother also was quite calm and Emanuele was astonished ; the day they arrested him Mammina would certainly have a fit, with screams reaching to heaven.
    They waited for the police. But no policeman was to be seen and they were somewhat dumbfounded. Emanuele said that obviously the police were letting himself and Ippolito go free in order to spy upon them. They would have to be very careful. They decided that Ippolito should go to Le Visciole for a month and that Emanuele should go and see Amalia, to see whether she had learned to be a nurse and whether she had forgotten Franz.
    5
    Ippolito came back from Le Visciole with the dog. He made a kennel for it in the garden, out of old boxes. He spent a day sawing and nailing the wood, and when the kennel was ready he painted it green. But the dog quite refused to go into it. Perhaps it was the smell of the paint that it did not like. It sniffed round about it for a little and went away. It still ate the armchairs and was always dirty, even though Ippolito gave it a bath every Friday.
    The dog at the house opposite, on the other hand, was no longer there ; they had given it away, because it barked at night and kept Mammina awake. No one now played ping-pong at the house opposite, and the table stood forgotten with the net torn, and the only person to be seen in the garden was the old gentleman in a deck-chair basking in