Italy

Nello Ferretti is twelve, and he plays trumpet in the band his father conducts. He has played in that piazza since he was small enough to stand on a box, and he can tell more from the way it sounds than from anything anybody says in it.

Then, on a hot June afternoon, a radio is carried out into a bar doorway, a certain voice tells the town that Italy is at war, and the band plays a march that comes home off the stone hard and bright, with all its corners on.

His brother Sergio goes away, and leaves him an old coin worn nearly smooth. For luck. And in a back room behind the church, a home-made wireless brings in a second voice — speaking perfectly ordinary Italian, from London, and not saying the same thing as the first.