A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “Your father is a sensible man, Liebes. Come in. We’ll see what we can find.”

  Head high, Claudette flounces through the door, shooting a look of triumph at Duno, who is forced by hard-taught courtesy to stand aside and let her pass, but she stops dead when she catches sight of his father’s face. “Liesl, we cannot carry a birdcage over the mountains,” Herr Brössler shouts. “No more than we can take your grandmother on such a climb!”

  Duno picks up a china-faced doll and hands it to little Steffi. “We have to leave Tzipi behind,” he says, kneeling in front of her. “There’s plenty of food for canaries here. He’ll be very happy. Oma will be all right, too,” Duno says, eyes on his father. “The doctors and nurses are staying.”

  “Thank you, Duno,” Frieda Brössler says quietly. “Stop arguing, girls. Bring only what you can carry with one hand!” She holds a pair of Duno’s trousers. “Take the woolen ones, Claudette. It will be chilly at high altitude.”

  Albert Blum pushes tall shutters aside and leans from the window. In the street below, people are hurrying east on foot, but he himself closes his mind to fear and haste. Taking a seat at the little wooden desk, he smooths a single sheet of carefully hoarded stationery. Iron habit demands that his pencil stub be perfectly sharpened. He brushes wood shavings into the wastebasket, wipes the blade of his penknife with a handkerchief, replaces both in his pocket. When he begins at last to write, each letter is precise and regular.

  “My beloved Paula, my brave David and darling Jacques,” he begins. “Claudette and I are leaving Sainte-Gisèle. I cannot know if this or any of my letters will reach you. I’ve spent days at bus stops and markets, asking everyone for word of you. I’ve contacted the Red Cross and the Jewish Council in every town, but nobody’s taken notice of a woman traveling with two small boys. In July, I enlisted the aid of a compassionate and resourceful carabiniere,” Albert writes, silently blessing Umberto Giovanetti. “He found your names on the manifest of an eastbound train last September, but could learn nothing of your present whereabouts. The Italians have done little to ingratiate themselves with the Vichy government, but this policy makes it difficult to obtain information from French authorities.”

  Claudette bursts in, trousers slung over one arm, pale but calm. “I’ll change,” she says. “Give me five minutes.”

  “Claudette is nearly grown,” her father writes, and turns the paper over. “She’s like a dolphin, Paula. The woman she will be surfaces now and then, before submerging again into childhood’s sea. We are moving on to Italy, where the war is over. Our carabiniere told us of DELASEM, an Italian Jewish organization that operates with government approval. They will find us a place to live, and I’ll register again with the Red Cross. There’s no more time, my dear ones. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord shine His countenance upon you. May the Lord give us all peace, and bring us together again! Your devoted husband and loving father, Albert.”

  He folds the letter, seals it into an envelope, addresses it simply Paula Bomberghen Blum. Shrugging into a baggy suit coat, he turns toward his daughter. His jaw drops. “What on earth have you done to your hair?”

  She lifts her chin, but tears brim. “My bangs were too long. I cut them.” Shamefaced, she picks up her bag. “They didn’t come out the way I wanted.”

  He shakes his head and drapes a topcoat over one arm. “Never mind. Hair grows.”

  She holds the door open while he takes a final look around the room. They join others in the hallway and descend the stairs in a murmuring flow, but when they reach the hotel lobby, Albert steps aside. Claudette looks back at him uncertainly. “A moment,” he says. “Wait at the corner, please.”

  When she’s left the hotel, Albert approaches the front desk, where a bored clerk pares his nails. “My wife may come here, looking for us, monsieur,” Albert says. “Would you be so very kind as to keep this letter for her?”

  The clerk takes the envelope without so much as a word.

  “Merci beaucoup, monsieur,” Albert says with a small bow. “Please give the owner our thanks for his hospitality all these months—”

  “Hospitality!” A sour-faced maid lumbers past, a bundle of linens heaped in her arms. “Who’s going to pay the bill, that’s what I want to know!”

  The clerk is not heartless. He waits until the fidgety little Belgian is gone before ripping the letter into tiny pieces. The Germans will be here soon, he thinks. No sense taking a chance for a dirty Jew.

  “Pace yourselves,” Umberto Giovanetti advises, waving civilians past carabinieri headquarters toward a bridge over the Vesubie. “Long, easy steps.”

  A reminder, nothing more: they are practiced at this, the Jews of Sainte-Gisèle. For most, this is the second or third or fourth time they’ve fled the Wehrmacht or Gestapo or local police, moving from Austria or Czechoslovakia or Poland to Belgium or Holland or France. Many carry children. Most carry suitcases. Some have fashioned knapsacks from blankets and string. Leaderless, they will attempt to climb the Alps in street clothes, wearing whatever shoes are still intact after years on the run, one step ahead of the Nazis, but not alone this time. Among the bobbing homburgs and swaying kerchiefs are hundreds of gray-green field caps; the Italian Fourth is at their side. The armistice was supposed to be kept secret until Italy’s armies could withdraw in good order. Instead, the Germans learned of their ally’s surrender the same way Italy’s armed forces did: on Radio London, when that idiot Eisenhower told the whole world three days early. Now it’s every man for himself.

  Behind Giovanetti, a squad of carabinieri dig in near the stone bridge that spans the river east of town. “Brigadiere!” one of his men says, nodding toward the crowd. “Your little admirer!”

  Claudette Blum waves as she and her father work through the throng. Umberto blinks, taken aback. Mortified by his reaction, the girl’s fingers fly to her forehead. “A new hairstyle!” Umberto exclaims heartily, trying to recover. “How very becoming, Mademoiselle Blum!”

  She turns away, blushing, only to confront Duno Brössler’s mocking leer. “Mmmmmmberto,” he moans, eyes closed in dreamy devotion. Claudette snarls and Duno laughs, crossing the bridge and striding down the road after his family.

  Umberto Giovanetti masks amusement with official courtesy. “Here are your passports, Monsieur Blum. You’ll need photos, but they’re complete, apart from your signatures.”

  “Passports?” Albert asks worriedly. “Not visas?”

  “Naturally, a passport!” Umberto says, brows high. “Any good Fascist can see that you are a member of the Italian Aryan race.” He glances toward Claudette. She is preoccupied by a fervent desire to perish from embarrassment, but he drops his voice anyway. “I regret to inform you, monsieur, that your many-times-great-grandmother cuckolded her unknowing husband. You are clearly the descendant of her Italian lover, and therefore eligible for citizenship!” Albert Blum laughs incredulously. Umberto remains straight-faced. “The Romans conquered a great deal of territory, monsieur. As my father used to say, everyone in Europe is a little bit Italian.”

  “Brigadiere, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “It was nothing. A telephone call to a cousin. And La Guardia di Finanza— the border police? They’re unlikely to check passports under present circumstances. I only wish I had been able—”

  “You did all you could, Brigadiere,” Albert assures him, “but if you should hear of Paula—”

  “Papa! How will Mama find us?” Claudette asks with sudden anxiety. “She won’t know where we’ve gone!”

  The carabiniere holds up his hand. “That problem can be addressed when there’s a mountain range between you and the Wehrmacht, mademoiselle!”

  Umberto Giovanetti has known this little family only a short while, but their fate has become important to him. Small and neat in his late forties, Signor Blum wears a fraying double-breasted suit with a once-fashionable tie and a dented homburg. His worn-out city shoes are buffed to a forlorn gloss. Add an umbrell
a, and he’d be dressed for a tram ride to an office in Antwerp, but the Hebrew does not look well. His daughter is young, and annoying, and she falls in love with someone new every second day. Even so, Umberto is tempted to tell this gangly girl to take care of her father.

  “Permesso?” he asks instead. Clicking his heels, he lifts the girl’s hand, brings it toward his lips. “Mademoiselle, it has been a great pleasure to know you.”

  “But… aren’t you leaving, too?”

  Umberto glances at his compatriots busily wiring the bridge for demolition: a rear guard of volunteers who will do what they can to slow the Wehrmacht down. He meets Albert Blum’s eyes for a moment before smiling warmly at Claudette. “This is a charming town,” he says lightly. “No doubt, some of us will remain here.”

  The road is level. The breeze is pleasant. The sun is shining. The fretfulness of children and anxiety of parents yield to the novelty of a warm day in the countryside, but soon their pace slackens. Pregnant women and new mothers carrying infants perch on suitcases or lean against trees, resting in the shade. Old people and children quickly feel the strain. Alert to opportunity, French peasants have set up makeshift tables on the roadside, selling pickled eggs, rolls, tomatoes, wine, and water to the passing Jews.

  “Papa! You aren’t going to pay that for an apple!” Claudette cries. “That’s profiteering!” she tells a sharp-eyed woman surrounded by cowed and ragged children. “You’re a profiteer!”

  “War is hard on everyone,” Albert remarks as much to his daughter as to the peasant.

  The woman pockets their coins with chilly self-possession. “Good riddance,” she mutters at their backs, and Claudette whirls to stick out her tongue.

  “Claudette! You’ve made an enemy,” Albert tells her as they walk on. “That woman will always remember that a Jew was rude to her.”

  “And I’ll always remember that a Frenchwoman was mean to us!”

  “As long as you don’t forget how kind a French doctor was to your mother.”

  Paula’s family is Sephardic-Fleming, wealthy and secure. Claudette inherited confidence from them, as well as height, but Albert himself is the child and grandchild of immigrants who moved from Poland to Germany to Belgium in three generations. His careful clothes, his correctness of manner are protective coloring. He has tailored his soul just as carefully, trying not to give offense. Pride, his grandfather told him, is a Jew’s most dangerous luxury. “Your mother and I spent our honeymoon in Italy,” Albert says, to change the subject. “Beautiful country. Such warmhearted people! Talk to an innkeeper for five minutes, and you’re part of his family.”

  “What’s my name in Italian, Papa?”

  “Claudia,” he tells her. “Italian is close to French, but easier to learn. Italians talk with their hands, their faces— they make it easy for strangers to understand.”

  “You should teach me Italian while we walk.” She shifts her suitcase from one side to the other. “This’ll be my fourth language! German, French, Hebrew, and now Italian!”

  How long has the road been her classroom? It seems a lifetime since she practiced penmanship at the kitchen table, while Czechoslovakia and Poland and Finland fell. “Will the Germans come here?” Claudette asked her mother when Holland was attacked.

  “Belgium’s borders are very strong,” Paula said, “and King Leopold has a pact with the French. Finish your homework.”

  A few days later the bombing began. The Blums packed. “Mama said they wouldn’t come here!” Claudette complained while Albert roped suitcases to the roof of their little Citroën. “Why do the Germans keep winning?”

  “We expected trenches.” He yanked the knots tighter, while David wept and Jacques clambered into the backseat to claim a spot by the window. “Since 1919, we trained for trenches! This time the Germans came in tanks.”

  Driving along the coast, Albert made Claudette memorize multiplication tables. She squabbled with her younger brothers most of the time, but had reached six fives when the family reached Coxyde. Everyone spilled from the cramped car. Paula and the children pulled off stockings and shoes and splashed into the waves. Albert negotiated an off-season rate for a month’s stay in a cottage they’d rented in happier times. War was almost unimaginable in the cheerful resort town, with its fresh paint and bright flowers and sea breeze.

  Belgium’s defenses held for eighteen days. The Wehrmacht crossed the Meuse, and when they reached the Moselle River, the Blums packed again. “Five sixes are thirty, six sixes are thirty-six, seven sixes are forty-two,” Claudette chanted while the Citroën crawled through a stream of refugees headed for Paris. Albert pulled off the main highway onto a country road, only to be trapped at dusk in an immense traffic jam surrounding Dunkirk. They slept in the open that night, and woke to the roar of army vehicles pushing civilian automobiles into weedy ditches, clearing the way for the British retreat, and snapping the Citroën’s rear axle in the process.

  The Blums trudged south on foot, joining thousands of Parisians now fleeing Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. “Six sevens are forty-two, seven sevens are forty-nine. Seven eights…” For the life of her, Claudette could not remember seven eights. “Fifty-six!” Albert would shout, lugging suitcases, with Jacques stumbling along beside him. Carrying David in her arms, Paula was already limping, but somehow she found the patience to say, “The numbers go in order, Claudette: five, six, seven, eight. You see the pattern? Fifty-six is seven eights.”

  Claudette was working on nines when the blisters on her mother’s feet began to burst and bleed. Albert left Paula with the children in a little wooded valley at the edge of a good-sized village and found a doctor, who bandaged Paula’s feet and forbade her to walk another step. Using his influence with the railroad stationmaster, the doctor secured tickets for her and the boys on the next train south. The third-class carriage was horribly crowded, but at least Paula could ride, the two little ones on her lap. The family was to reunite in Nice.

  France capitulated. Paula and the boys never arrived. Britain fought on alone. Claudette learned long division in a series of rented rooms, but geography became her passion as they moved east to smaller towns and cheaper quarters. When Japan joined the Italo-German Axis, when Yugoslavia and Greece and Russia and Bulgaria were invaded, when bombs rained on Britain and the Afrika Korps took Tripoli, she followed every move in an old atlas Albert had bought in a secondhand shop. Ringed by Italian garrisons, the Mediterranean Sea was a Roman lake for the second time in history. By the time Albert found their room in Sainte-Gisèle, the Third Reich occupied most of Europe, its armies were within sight of the Caucasus oil fields, and Rommel’s tank corps threatened the Suez Canal. From there, Hitler could disrupt British supply lines and open a sea link to Japan.

  Albert was cheered by the Soviet Union’s resistance, guiltily elated when Pearl Harbor was attacked— at last, America would join the war! But that was when Claudette despaired. The Axis was invincible; the Americans and Russians could not be beaten. “If no one can lose, no one can win, and the war will never, ever end!” she sobbed. “Why won’t everyone just stop fighting? Papa, when can we go home?”

  Albert Blum had no answer for her then. And now? Another year, gone. His wife and sons, still missing. And Claudette is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand.

  The sun is halfway to the horizon when the first Jews reach the trailhead. Many are accompanied by soldiers who’ve traded army backpacks for Jewish toddlers. Santino Cicala has tried to do the same, but the first little girl he picked up wailed with fright. Santino set her down, accepting the mother’s apology with a shrug and a grimace. A second attempt went just as badly. At nineteen, Santino Cicala is built like a dung cart— broad and low to the ground, and ugly enough to scare children.

  Leaning his carbine against a rock, he lies back on fragrant crushed weeds and waits for someone older to help. Birdsong. Rustling leaves. Take away the Wehrmacht, he thinks, and a nap would be irresistible… A girl’s voice rouses him. “Duno thinks he�
��s so smart!” he hears without understanding her. “Just because he learned a few words from the carabinieri! I already know more than he does.”

  A gentleman with her says something in French, and the girl replies in Italian, “Sono, sei, è, siamo, siete, sono. Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque. Piacere, signore! Mi chiamo Claudia Blum. Pleased to meet you, sir, I am Claudia Blum. Io sono di Belgium.”

  “Belgio,” Santino corrects, on his feet and brushing bits of dry grass from his uniform. “Tu sei di Belgio—”

  Startled, she stops and stares at him. Green eyes, he thinks, thunderstruck. She is tall, with hair like copper wire. He looks down, away, anywhere but at her. “Piacere, signorina. Cicala, Santino,” he says, introducing himself. She manages to smile politely. Hoping to draw attention from his face, Santino points to his boot. “Italia?” he prompts. She nods dumbly. “Io sono di Calabria,” he says, pointing to the sole just west of the heel.

  Her face lights up. “That’s where you’re from? Siete di Calabria?”

  “Sì! Molto bene!” Slinging his carbine over a thick shoulder, Santino takes the girl’s bag in one square hand and turns his attention to the gentleman. “Signor Blum?” The old man nods. Santino gestures for his valise. “Prego, signore. My pleasure!”

  The gentleman hesitates, but the girl encourages him to hand over the suitcase, burbling, “Molte grazie! Tante grazie! Beaucoup di grazie, Signor Cicala. Was that your name? Am I saying it right? We are so tired! You can’t imagine! How do you say ‘tired,’ Papa?”

  “Siamo stanchi.” Albert hands over his bag. A gap-toothed smile transforms the homely soldier into a gigantic six-year-old. Charmed, Albert touches his chest. “Blum, Alberto,” he says. “La mia figlia: my daughter, Claudia. Mille grazie, Santino.”

  With nothing to carry, the Blums can manage the pace the soldier sets: climb half an hour, rest five minutes, then climb again. The sun has nearly disappeared when they hear a low rumbling in the distance. “Just what we need!” Claudette says sourly. “A thunderstorm!”