Winter 1943-44 Summary

Cadenza d'Inverno

In Werner Schramm's brilliant mind, war is compared to misdiagnosed tuberculosis, with infiltrates in its battlefield resulting in attack and retreat, attrition, weakness and eventually death. He remembers how the artists of the world romanticized illness and fainting with high colors and drama, and thinks of the talented men and women who succumbed to tuberculosis. He now understands why people cling to one small thread of life for as long as they can.

Werner Schramm traveled from Sant'Andrea through German checkpoints, drunk in a coffin with a stinking dead pigeon, surrounded by two women feigning grief, one of them being Lidia Leoni. Renzo has arranged Schramm's escape as a symbolic repayment to someone Renzo may have killed in Absynnia. Desperately ill, Schramm now lies in a hayloft, recuperating with the help of an older woman and a young mother...