A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russell

  Living proof that God protects drunks and lunatics, Renzo Leoni joins them, groaning like an old man when he kneels. He speaks in a low, quick voice, his appraising eyes on Simon. “The boss is happy you still have the radio,” Otello translates. “He says: you did well. He says: a corporal in the paratroops is worth a colonel in any army!”

  Surprised and gratified, Simon can think of no way to reply, and in any case, Renzo seems to forget him in the next moment. “He will count to three,” Otello says, watching the silent orders the boss is conveying with an Italian’s manual eloquence. “The others will cover us, and you will run with me, over the hill—that way. Run very fast, understand?”

  On “Tre!” they take off amid a thunderstorm of gunfire. Knees pumping, crouched like a crone under the weight of the wireless, Simon expects a bullet in the arse, but minutes (hours, centuries) later, he and Otello clear the crest safely and slide down behind it.

  Maurizio is next, flinging himself and the generator over the hilltop and into the declivity beyond. Three more partisans follow, leaping like Olympic long jumpers. One of them has retrieved the batteries from Tonio’s body. Another grins and offers a bottle of red wine. Simon stares, astounded by the idea of carrying wine into battle, but he takes a slug and passes it on.

  Otello and the others confer quickly. Two partisans nod and leave. Silently, the others wait, watching their Englishman’s chest heave. “Are you better now?” Otello asks solicitously. “Can you walk?”

  Insulted, Simon puts his primitive Italian to use, maligning the mating habits of Otello’s entire family. Laughing, they get on their way, teaching him several additional terms for such behavior as they follow the scouts.

  The gunfire grows fainter as they cross hills, cut through fields, and skirt hedgerows, moving at a steady pace that seems to indicate a long journey ahead of them. The day turns warm. Birds sing. Suddenly, the scouts come running back, calling out in hoarse whispers, motioning: Down! Down! Down!

  Everyone dives for cover, and Otello pulls Simon into the freezing waist-high water of a high-banked stream. A German half-track trundles over the horizon. Shivering, sweating, they wait in absolute silence while the vehicle rumbles past, close enough for them to smell its exhaust.

  When it finally disappears around a hill, they scramble out of the stream. Simon shrugs out of the radio rig, determines that it hasn’t gotten wet, and tries to empty his boots without taking them off. Otello holds a whispered conference with the scouts, who take positions about fifty yards ahead. “We go where the Germans came,” Otello says. “Do you understand? The Germans make a radio signal to headquarters that says, ‘All clear. No partisans here.’ So, no more Germans will come that way.”

  For the balance of the day, they meander through the countryside, their only objective to avoid contact with the enemy. Three times they see German patrols in the distance, and once they duck behind a hedgerow. A platoon of Decima Mas Republicans passes: ex–motor torpedo boatmen from the defunct Italian navy, limping morosely in bad boots.

  By dusk Simon is thoroughly lost, and therefore utterly unprepared when they arrive at the very spot where the ambush began. He stares at Maria’s body, forgotten until this moment. Sitting beside her, the same small girl who warned them this morning, a lifetime ago.

  The child is sent away with a few quick orders. The partisans draw straws. Maurizio loses. While the others draw off to a safe distance, Maurizio checks their comrades’ corpses for booby traps. When nothing blows up, Otello says, “This is safe for us tonight. The Germans think no one will come back.”

  Alerted by the little girl, two short, thick women arrive bearing shovels on their shoulders, baskets of food on their heads. Shaped like potatoes, with faces of genial toughness, they cluck their tongues over the fallen while handing chestnut bread and skins of harsh red wine to the living. Famished, the partisans eat, talking quietly, then take turns digging in rocky mud. The women shake their heads. “Poveretti,” they say. “Poveretti.”

  Simon slumps empty-headed beside Maria’s body, listening to the shovels’ crunch and slop. For the first and only time, he reaches out to touch her face; startled by her cold flesh, he draws back. When the time comes, he helps lay her and the other corpses into their shallow graves. Otello cuts branches from some sort of conifer, placing fragrant sprays of green over the slack and empty faces. Maurizio starts to fill in Maria’s grave but stops when Simon asks him to. Removing the little compass hidden in one of his buttons, Simon shows it to the others. They nod with approval when he closes Maria’s fingers around it.

  The peasants depart with their baskets and tools. Otello posts a sentry. The others pass wine bags from hand to hand, but no one sings tonight. When the skins are empty, each man makes a pile of pine boughs to lie on, above the freezing mud. A childhood prayer runs through Simon’s mind. Now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die . . .

  Tomorrow, he’ll be escorted to one of the many tall stone watchtowers built into the slant of Piemonte’s hilltops. Seven feet on a side, the upper level ten feet above a cellar downslope, they always afford a panoramic view of Valdottavo.

  Otello and Maurizio will stay with him, to help with the batteries and generator. Over the next few hours, they’ll watch activity in the valley. Identify high, quiet places within a few miles of the hideout. Hike to the best spot for the first transmission. There Simon will open the radio case, fit a stone into a loop at the end of a fifty-foot copper wire, and fling it over a nearby tree branch. He’ll tune to Algiers, and be amazed once again by how easily such a primitive arrangement brings in QSA5 signals.

  With a onetime code pad, index finger tapping thirty errorless words per minute, he’ll deliver the intelligence he’s gathered in the past two weeks. “Partisan strength est 23,000 / disciplined under fire well-led / main German withdrawal hwy estimated 150 lorries destroyed / 200 KW 50 POW / partisan losses light / civilian reprisals heavy.”

  He’ll ask to be released from the mission he and Major Salvi were supposed to have carried out in Milan. He’s already with a group of autonomous partisans who deserve all the help they can get. He’ll request airdrops of plastic explosives, of Stens, Brens, and automatic rifles, of ammo and spare parts for all the weapons. He’ll ask for more signal flares, for salt and cigarettes, for penicillin, sulfa drugs, plasma, sterile bandages, and morphine.

  Then he’ll break to receive, taking down his own orders in Morse, to be decoded when he gets back to the stone tower. He’ll have under an hour from start to finish—the time it would take for two German direction-finding vehicles to get a fix on him.

  Today he learned he can rely on his training, rely on himself to do his duty, and do it well, under fire. In the morning, no doubt, Simon Henley will feel like a blooded veteran, ready for whatever the war can throw at him. But tonight? Lying on a bed of pine boughs near the grave of a young woman he barely knew, he thinks of the short, hard life of Maria Avoni, and he cries. Like a baby.

  VILLA MALCOVATO

  NEAR ROCCABARBENA

  They are the bravest of the brave, these girls. The chances they take, the risks they run. The more Mirella learns of them, the more awe and sadness she feels.

  When the occupation began, the Resistance printed pamphlets for wives and mothers. “Your greatest contribution to the nation is to open your door and let your men go—to fight!” But who risked arrest and rape and death to distribute those pamphlets? Girls. Women.

  Staffette carried letters, documents, intelligence. Then medical supplies, then dynamite, ammunition, and grenades. They knew their fate if caught, so they learned to load and fire pistols for their own protection. Soon they joined brigades and assault groups, and now they fight beside the men. Constantly on the move, traveling on foot in the awful cold, sleeping in cellars, on concrete floors, in barns or open country. Hungry, wet, lice ridden.

  No wonder, then, when a widow of sixteen becomes the mother of an infant boy born many weeks too soon.

  Mirel
la hears a quiet knock at the door, and opens it to Werner Schramm. “The doctor is here,” she tells Claudia.

  Mirella moves to the fireplace, listening to Schramm’s soothing murmur as he examines mother and child. In a voice as small as her baby, Claudia asks, “Will he live?”

  Schramm’s eyes briefly meet Mirella’s. “Your son is very small, very weak,” he tells Claudia gently, “but babies can surprise us.”

  “Why won’t he suckle?”

  “He is tired from being born, signora. He needs rest and warmth. As you do.”

  A few years ago, Werner Schramm would have whisked this doomed infant away. Out of sight, he’d have done nature’s work, granting the child a quick and merciful death. He is a different man now, but it is very difficult to watch the little chest heave spasmodically, working hard for air.

  Across the room Mirella refills a cooling scaldino with hot coals and slides it under the bedding near the girl’s feet, tucking the blankets around her. Together she and Schramm step away from the bedside.

  “You can try feeding him with an eyedropper,” he suggests quietly. “The skin is very fragile. Perhaps some olive oil, to protect it. Keep him warm. That is most important.”

  Duno Brössler is in the kitchen, pacing as nervously as a young father. When Claudette went into labor, Duno sent for Schramm immediately, but the baby was born so soon . . . “Your young friend will live,” Schramm says, “but her son won’t last the night.” Duno sags. “You did well to save one of them,” Schramm tells him. “You should go to medical school when this is over.”

  Duno runs his fingers through lank and dirty hair. “Is she awake? May I go in?”

  “Yes. She will like to see a familiar face, I think. Send Signora Soncini to bed. She needs rest, or she may lose her own pregnancy.”

  Duno steps quietly into the little room, speaks to the rabbi’s wife, who kisses the infant’s forehead on her way out. Duno draws a chair near, sitting close enough to stroke the dying baby’s fine, dark curls. He looks more like an organ-grinder’s monkey than a human child, but Duno says, “He’s beautiful, Claudette.”

  “Thank you,” she says, believing him.

  “Have you chosen a name?”

  “Alberto, for my father. That’s what Santino wanted.”

  “That’s a good name,” Duno says. “Rest now. I’ll stay with you, Claudette.”

  Once they knew that Osvaldo Tomitz was in a Gestapo prison on Via San Marco in Porto Sant’Andrea, the hours of discussion yielded only one good plan. “I’ll say I was sent to check on his condition,” Schramm argued. “My friends, you must allow me to save lives. That is a doctor’s duty, is it not?” Eventually even Renzo was persuaded: Schramm could do by stealth what would otherwise require a full-scale attack on a fortified position in an occupied city.

  He unwraps the bundle of dirty cotton sheets delivered at such cost by la vedova. Shakes the wrinkles from the uniform, holds the jacket to his shoulders with a sense of unreality. Who wore this? Werner Schramm shares a name with that man, and a biography to a point. To wear the uniform now is to put on a mask in a Greek tragedy, but Schramm is ready to assume his role.

  He leaves a note of thanks and farewell for Renzo. Urges Mirella to take care of herself. She cries, and kisses him on both cheeks. A partisan escort waits outside.

  They hike across pastures and through woodlands, snake along bends in the winding river, take cover in a vineyard. A church bell strikes nine. Across the road, at the top of a slight rise, Tullio Goletta waves, taps his ear, and puts his finger to his lips. Wind rattles the branches of nearby trees. Tullio raises one finger, makes a T of his hands. Tedeschi: Germans.

  The noise grows. A camouflaged Wehrmacht command car lumbers into view, slowly dodging craters left by British bombs. Half-amused by how predictable German schedules are, Schramm brushes dirt and leaves from his uniform, squares his shoulders, and walks out onto the road. The lines come back to him. The posturing, the presumption. Herr Doktor Oberstabsarzt Werner Schramm of the Waffen-SS commandeers the car, demands to be driven to Sant’Andrea. He is obeyed by a very young, very inferior officer.

  Schramm blusters and bullies his way through roadblocks and checkpoints, and arrives at his destination in early afternoon, sweating in the early warmth of the coast. Surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags, and giant iron stars, the building’s windows are bricked almost to the top, leaving just a few centimeters open for ventilation.

  Boot heels ringing, Schramm enters, shouts, intimidates. The jailer is a well-fed Italian toady eager to mollify bad-tempered Nazis. Grabbing his keys, he is happy to lead the way down a twisting set of stairs cut into living rock. The air is moist, damp, cooler by the step.

  “A relief from the heat outdoors, ne?” the chatty jailor remarks. “Until your joints start to ache. Of course, these bastards have more than their joints to think about! Down this way, signore. These used to be storerooms, I don’t know what for. Must have been valuable, though. Look at those doors!”

  Wide, heavy planks, reinforced with iron bands. Two long rows on either side of a stone corridor. Behind one door, a man weeps and begs. Someone yells at him, voice harsh, words garbled. A third man cries, “Coraggio, camerati!”

  “Courage, comrades!” the jailer mocks. “That one must be new.” He glances over his shoulder. When the German fails to share his amusement, a scowl automatically replaces the grin. “Shut up in there!” the toady shouts, banging on doors with his truncheon. Halfway down, he sorts through keys, opens the door, steps aside. “In there,” he says unnecessarily.

  Illuminated by the borrowed light of the hallway, the room is narrow. Like a tomb. Like a sepulcher. The walls are tiled with porcelain-faced bricks, as a bathroom’s might be, but there are no facilities beyond a galvanized bucket in one corner.

  Curled on the bare basalt floor, the man inside does not rouse. Eyes swollen shut, lashes buried in purpled pulpy flesh. Broken teeth visible through torn lips. Both shoulders dislocated; vast bruises speak of ripped blood vessels. The abdomen, too—hideously bruised. Testicles blackened. Blood in a drying pool of voided urine: ruptured kidneys, a torn bladder.

  A thousand years of artwork have prepared Schramm for this body. Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. The damned of Bosch’s hell. The crucifix in every church. Look without flinching at atrocity, they instruct the faithful. Imagine what the saints endured, and envy them. Behold what the Savior suffered for your sake. But not everyone learns the intended lessons; some dream of hammering the nails.

  Blinking, gagging, Schramm takes a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it over his nose; not even the greatest artwork can convey the smell of ammonia and shit. “This is Tomitz? You are certain?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! Absolutely!”

  Voice low and controlled, Schramm asks, “Who is responsible for his condition?”

  The jailer shrugs. “PierCarlo Innocente, I suppose. The Gestapo made the arrest, but Innocente specializes in priests. He says priests and Communists are the hardest to break. They believe in a better world to come. This one didn’t look like much when they brought him in, but he still hasn’t talked—”

  “Christ! Look at his mouth! If he wanted to talk, how the hell would we make out what he’s saying? Get Innocente, now!”

  “I—I don’t know where— He’s off today.”

  “Find him, or I’ll hold you responsible.”

  The jailer hesitates. “I should lock up.”

  Schramm points to what’s left of Osvaldo Tomitz. “Do you suppose that is going to escape?”

  The jailer hurries off. Just as quickly, Schramm kneels at the priest’s side, bending to bring his lips close to the torn ear. “Father,” he says, “I’ve come to help.”

  Spongy eyelids flutter. Bleeding fingers twitch. One must be ordained to give extreme unction or to hear confession, but one of the partisan priests has provided Schramm with what he needs, and given him instructions. He opens a medical bag and withdraws a small, round
case that looks like a gold pocket watch.

  “Receive my confession, Lord,” he whispers for Tomitz. “Savior of the world, O good Jesus, who gave Yourself to death on the cross to save sinners, look upon me, most wretched of all sinners. Give me the light to know my sins, true sorrow for them, and a firm purpose of never committing them again.”

  He’s probably getting the prayers wrong, but he doubts that God will mind. “Pray with me, Father,” he urges. “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishment, but most of all—”

  The priest’s split and crusted lips begin to move, and together they finish the Act of Contrition. Opening the gold case, Schramm brings the consecrated Host close enough to touch the swollen lips. Throat clogged, he whispers, “Corpus Christi.” The priest’s tongue reaches forward to bring the dry and nearly weightless wafer within his battered mouth.

  The ritual is complete, but not the task. “Osvaldo Tomitz,” Schramm asks, “do you believe in Jesus Christ, who died so that others might live?”

  Tomitz nods once, twice. Slowly: again, again, again.

  “This day, you shall be with Him in heaven. Father, pray for me!”

  Exchanging the gold case for a syringe, Schramm finds the intercostal space, depresses the plunger. A moment later, the suffering ends. A thousand Jews, the people who harbor them, and God knows how many Resistance cells are safe.

  Schramm should leave now. Just walk home, to his sons and to his wife. War changes men, but it changes women, too. He’s spent the better part of two years in the company of Italian women running households in the midst of war. If, by the grace of God, he lives long enough to reach home, and if Elsa is alive when he gets there, Werner Schramm is determined to make a better job of it than his own parents did after the Great War.

  But somehow, he cannot bring himself to move. Slumped against the wall, next to the body of the soul he has just released, Schramm thinks, You understand now, don’t you? You are with God now, Father, but after what you went through, surely you no longer believe it’s a sin to prevent suffering. We were right in the beginning, but—the borders kept moving. Perversion, vagrancy, gambling, theft became diseases. Dissidents, Communists, Gypsies were carriers of disease. To be a Jew was to be disease itself. At the trains, I tried to choose the best, the strongest, the most likely to survive awhile. It was like a juried art show—inferior work was rejected. Yes, I know. Judge not, but . . .