All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

scorched-looking hair, with curls that were rough and dead and of a yellow colour that was almost green. He could never stroke hair like that. Her face was pretty but very much the worse for wear, her complexion already faded, her skin rough and dead. Giustino, however, had liked Marisa, he said Emanuele understood nothing at all about girls, goodness knows what scarecrow of a wife he would marry, some snobbish old bird planted on him by his mother. They were coming back from the wedding party at Danilo’s, Concettina had been asked too but she had not come. Danilo’s mother had started talking to Emanuele in a corner, she was asking whether it was possible to get Marisa taken on at the soap factory too, she was asking whether it had been sensible for them to get married, with Danilo who hadn’t yet got his accountant’s diploma, and the girl wasn’t up to much anyhow, at twenty her complexion was already so much the worse for wear. Emanuele complained that now he would have to quarrel and intrigue all over again, to get Marisa taken on at the factory. However it was not necessary, for Marisa at once found work at the foundry. She got up early in the morning and before going to work she cleaned Danilo’s shoes and brushed his suit, and she brushed his bowler hat long and carefully, and it became more and more stiff and lustrous. And then she cleaned the room and Danilo’s room was now no longer recognizable, with the floor polished and the curtains ironed, and a little set of bottles and glasses on the chest-of-drawers. But Danilo’s mother, when she saw Emanuele coming out of the factory, complained always about the girl, who perhaps was not actually bad but who never seemed content with anything, she went back and washed the salad again after they had washed it ever so many times, and she sniffed the butter and the meat, she sniffed everything. And she was sure that Danilo had not married for love but as a matter of reason, and things which are done as a matter of reason never turn out well.
    Danilo resumed his habit of coming to see Ippolito all the time, and Signora Maria had to resign herself to seeing him arrive at the end of dinner, even though it dismayed her each time to reflect that he had been in prison and that he had married a working girl, one who worked all day long at the foundry in a black apron. Danilo always came alone, because his wife was tired in the evenings and went to bed immediately after supper. Signora Maria ran away as soon as she saw him coming, but Concettina did not run away, in fact she would start making jokes with Emanuele and uttering shrill shrieks of laughter, but as soon as she stopped laughing her face would suddenly become all wrinkled and tired. She would disappear and reappear immediately with her hat on and pulling on her gloves, and would open the window and talk to someone waiting underneath, then she would run downstairs and her shrill shrieks of laughter would still be heard, and the sound of a car driving away. She had unearthed her old fiancés, and had resumed her visits to the library and had taken up with Racine again, and the young man with the car waited for her at the door of the library, smoking one cigarette after another.
    Emanuele related the news he had heard on the radio, but there was never much news. The Germans and the others were carrying on the cold war, on the Maginot Line and on the Siegfried Line, no one was winning or losing, just a few shots in the air from time to time. Emanuele said they had now invented the cold war to make him die of boredom, no one would ever win or lose, the cold war would go on for ever. But Ippolito only asked himself what was happening in Poland, what it could be like there in the winter with the houses fallen down and with the Germans, with the Germans taking people away to die in the concentration camps, and he said his will to live left him at the thought of those camps, where the Germans put