A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “Explain? Perhaps.” Lidia unpins a small stylish hat with a short black veil. “Insult?” She shakes her head and sets the hat aside.

  “Signora, he has a criminal record! He’s a Communist and a Jew—”

  “I wasn’t a Communist! I was a defeatist!” Renzo calls from the kitchen. “I said this war would be a disaster, and I was right! We never had the manpower or equipment, and our supply lines were—”

  “You’re on the police rolls! It doesn’t matter why!” Tranquillo’s voice drops. “Signora, yesterday we were Germany’s ally. Today we are an occupied country. The Wehrmacht has declared martial law. The Gestapo will begin by arresting Rabbino Soncini and me. Renzo’s name will be third on the Sant’Andrea list. And don’t think a Silver Medal will save you,” he yells toward the kitchen. “German Jews with Iron Crosses were deported like everyone else!”

  Lidia checks her hair, well cut and iron gray, in a gold-wash mirror hanging above an ebonized walnut credenza, the gleam of its surface obscured by dissident dust. Renzo comes back from the kitchen, rumpled trousers sagging on slim hips. “I gave birth to a perfectly beautiful baby boy,” she says to her reflection, “and look what he’s done to himself. Put a dressing gown on, Renzo! You know how I hate those scars.”

  Renzo slouches off to his bedroom. Lidia settles into a straight-backed chair. Tranquillo tries again. “Signora, please! Italy has been invaded—”

  “Oh, but Italy is always being invaded!” Lidia replies airily. “Lombards, Carthaginians, Vandals.” Propping a pair of reading glasses on a thin-boned nose, she leans over for a sewing basket. “Saracens, Spaniards, Normans. Englishmen. Americans.” She peers down through her lenses while threading a needle. “Renzo,” she calls, “is this the third or fourth time for the Germans?”

  Wrapped in a paisley silk robe, he comes into the salon and flops onto the sofa. “Do Goths and Visigoths count?”

  “I suppose they would. The point is, we’ve seen them all, and we’ve outlasted them all.”

  Tranquillo’s effort to remain calm is visible. “Signora, Rachele’s packing as we speak, and I’m trying to get the Soncinis to leave as well. I have contacts in Switzerland and we can—”

  “Switzerland!” Lidia sniffs.

  “Terrible food,” Renzo agrees. He picks a two-year-old magazine out of a pile on the floor. “Much too tidy.”

  Lidia refuses to take the bait. “Who knows how the Swiss would treat strangers? I’m sure we’re better off among friends.”

  “Are you willing to stake your life on that?” Tranquillo asks. “In Poland and France, gentiles couldn’t line up fast enough to denounce Jewish neighbors! Signora, if you won’t leave with us, at least leave the city! Susanna’s in-laws are Catholic. They have a tenant farm up in Decimo, don’t they? You could—”

  “Live in the mountains like a goat? Don’t be ridiculous.” She stretches a stocking over an ivory darning egg. “I am an old woman and blameless, Tranquillo. I have lived in Sant’Andrea for fifty-one years. My children were born here. My husband and eleven generations of his family are buried here! Four of my daughters lie with them. No one has the right to tell me to leave. Not you, and certainly not the Germans!

  Morning noise drifts in from the street. Most of the bombing has been down near the docks, and this neighborhood hasn’t emptied the way others have. “Signor Leoni! The minyan!” young Angelo hollers, two floors down. “Are you coming?”

  With an exasperated sigh, Tranquillo pulls out his pocketwatch and steps onto a small balcony overlooking the synagogue courtyard. “Signor Leoni is ill, Angelo. I’ll be right down.” Returning to the salon, he draws himself up, his bearing still military beneath the weight of his years. “Signora, I have fought and bled for Italy. I yield to no one in my love for my country. I have been married to your daughter almost thirty years. I am a good husband to her, a good father to your grandchildren. I have provided your family with legal advice for three decades. Have you ever had cause to doubt my judgment?”

  “You’ve always had our interests at heart.”

  “Then believe me when I tell you that every Jew in Italy is in mortal danger, and we have very little time to escape it!”

  “I won’t be driven from my own home!”

  “If you stay here, I won’t be able to protect you or Renzo.”

  Renzo slams the magazine against his thighs. “Who the hell is asking you for protection? Belandi! You, of all—”

  “Renzo!” Lidia warns.

  Tranquillo takes a breath, retrieves his hat, lifts his briefcase. “Rachele and the children and I are leaving tomorrow,” he says tightly. “I won’t be here for Yom Kippur, Renzo, so if I offended you by offering help, or in any other way this year, I beg pardon.” Tipping his hat smartly to Lidia, Tranquillo makes a short bow. “Signora, I will protect your daughter and your grandchildren, as is my duty. Should you reconsider, there will be a place for you with us in Switzerland. Buon giorno!”

  “Three years locked up in Ventotene for him!” Renzo fumes. “And he has the nerve to offer us his protection! That pompous little—”

  “Renzo, caro, I’ve heard it all twice now.” Lidia takes a shirt from the basket and begins strengthening a button that’s come loose. “You have to admit there’s an element of opera buffa to be appreciated.” Apparently dumbfounded, Renzo mutters something. “I heard that,” she says, even though she hasn’t. “Stop pacing and sit down.”

  He stands still, but refuses to sit. “You never told him.”

  “You asked me not to. I keep my word.” She tests the button, clips the thread, tosses the shirt into the ironing basket. “Everything Tranquillo did for those refugees is to your credit.”

  He starts to say something, but goes instead to the upright piano Lidia bought when Rachele was six and seemed musical. His back to his mother, he plays standing up. Lidia recognizes the piece. “Good Morning, Blues.” Count Basie. She tries not to hate this kind of music, primarily because the Nazis do, but for a year after Renzo came home from Abyssinia, he did little more than listen to American jazz. Minor keys, mournful melodies. “I wish you wouldn’t play that,” she says. “It makes you—”

  He bangs the keyboard cover down and disappears into his room.

  “It makes you moody,” she finishes firmly.

  Would things have been different if he’d been born a Catholic? Lidia herself is not so much a Jew as an Italian who celebrates Passover rather than Easter. All her children went to Torah Talmud classes, but they also went to schools taught by nuns. Two of Lidia’s sons-in-law are Catholic, a commonplace in modern Italy, where there hasn’t been a functioning ghetto anywhere in Italy since 1870. That Lidia lives so near a synagogue is happenstance. Rabbino Soncini is less a spiritual guide than a neighbor, a man who married a girl Renzo once fancied.

  Since Mussolini caved in to Hitler’s pressure in ’38, Lidia has been reminded of her Jewishness constantly by restrictions and regulations that circumscribe her daily life. The race laws are an insulting, but temporary, annoyance. She would certainly never convert, and yet… Since he came back from Africa, Renzo’s life has been atonement without hope of absolution.

  She rummages through the mending basket and slips another stocking over the darning egg. “Tranquillo is a good man,” she admits, making her voice carry. “He was a great support to me when your father died, but I have never met anyone so inaccurately named! He believes every story the refugees tell him. I’m sure they’ve suffered, but honestly? I think they exaggerate. Understandable, of course. Makes them feel more worthy of charity. Saves their pride.”

  Suspiciously jaunty, Renzo returns, with a silver cigarette case she’s never seen before. Casually, he snaps it open and offers the contents to her. “A gift from my new German friend. He’s decided to quit smoking. He’s got a terrible cough.”

  Shamefaced, she puts her mending aside and reaches for a cigarette, resting a hand on her son’s wrist as he leans over with a match. She smells liquo
r on his breath, but this is not the time for a lecture on vice. “How long have you known?”

  “That you smoke? Since 1926.”

  Machine-made and elegant, the cigarette is a slim and perfect package of oral gratification, nothing like the harsh Italian tobacco people roll in squares of newspaper these days. “This is wonderful,” she murmurs.

  “American.” Renzo props his hips against the credenza. “The Germans confiscated a smuggler’s boat off the coast of Rome. Remember the mafiosi Mussolini jailed down in Sicily? The Allies thought they were political prisoners and let everybody out. They’re robbing Patton blind and selling the stuff up here. Cigarettes, oranges, blankets, coffee.”

  His voice is light, but Lidia is paying attention. “What else did you find out?”

  Renzo turns toward the mirror, smoke curling around his face as he tilts his head from side to side to inspect his temples. “Do you think I’m losing my hair? I don’t mind going gray, but bald—”

  “Renzo, caro,” Lidia says wearily, “don’t be an ass.”

  He gets a heavy crystal ashtray from the kitchen and brings it to the table. “Tranquillo’s right about the occupation. Schramm thinks Hitler will take the armistice as a personal insult, and he’ll make Italy pay.”

  “Then Jews won’t be singled out. We’ll all be in it together.”

  “Mamma, the Germans have something like a hundred thousand troops on the peninsula now. Schramm says Kesselring got his men out of Sicily and onto the mainland last month. No matter what Radio London says, that wasn’t a rout.” He taps off a coil of ash. “The Germans expected Badoglio to switch sides— they’ve put eight more divisions into Italy since July. Hitler pulled troops away from the eastern front— that’s where Schramm served. Hausser’s panzer corps took horrendous casualties at Kursk, but those units are back up to strength now, Mamma, and Schramm says their officers are excellent.”

  They smoke silently for a few moments, Lidia adjusting her opinions, Renzo watching dust dance on a thin shaft of morning light. “I won’t see Schramm again,” he says. “He only knows my first name. Even so…”

  “It was foolhardy, but that kind of information is valuable.” Lidia stubs her cigarette out delicately and sets the rest aside for later. “The resistance will need to know what the situation is.”

  “The resistance!” He snorts. “Eleven boys in Cuneo printing an underground paper? Six Communists in Milan painting ‘Death to Fascism’ on a wall?” He shakes his head. “Mamma, I just spent three years locked up with hundreds of dissidents representing several thousand political parties. I’ve seen more organization in an alleyful of cats.”

  “There were strikes all over the north last spring, Renzo. Huge antiwar demonstrations. I marched in one myself.” He gapes at her. “It was the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done. Twenty-two years of fascism. That squalid little colonial war in Abyssinia— and then an alliance with the Germans, of all people. Five years of being treated like a second-class citizen. My only son in prison! To go out in the sunlight and join with thousands of others and shout, No more!” Her needle stabs at the darning egg, and the edges of a hole draw tight. “We shut the factories down, Renzo. We ran Mussolini out of power.”

  “We’ve got a Bolshevik in the family, all right, but it’s not me.”

  “There weren’t only leftists in those marches, Renzo! There were royalists, Catholic Action people. The Communists will probably run things,” she concedes. “They’re the only ones organized for an effective opposition. But the whole country’s sick to death of fascism, and everyone hates the Germans for dragging us into this war. Everyone hates the Germans, full stop,” she mutters, biting off the thread. “They’ve always been the enemy! And now there’ll be soldiers, and we’ll fight—”

  The ashtray shatters against a wall. Open-mouthed, Lidia stares at the glittering pieces.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He is on his feet, his eyes opaque. Turning his back on her, Renzo crosses to the window. A fragment of breeze finds its way in from the sea. The curtains flutter weakly. His fingers tap the shutter’s framework in time to some inner rhythm. “I tried having enemies once, Mamma. It was a mistake.”

  Abyssinia, she thinks. It always comes back to Abyssinia!

  The bronze bells of San Giobatta ring eight. She withstands the chilly silence as long as she can. “All right,” she says evenly. “We know what we are not going to do. I won’t oblige the Nazis by disappearing. You won’t fight. We are left with Tolstoy’s question: what then shall we do?”

  He speaks without facing her. “Go back to bed?”

  “That’s a plan,” Lidia admits drily, “though not quite as ambitious as I had envisioned.”

  His fingers curl into a fist that he touches to the woodwork, once, twice, gently. He backs away from the window and stumbles over a low table covered with books. “This place is a mess!”

  “Signor Mussolini is welcome to clean it himself.”

  When he returns from his bedroom, the remains of the ashtray have disappeared, and she is back to her mending as though nothing has happened. “That shirt came out well,” she observes. It was his father’s. Renzo lost weight in prison, and she had to cut it down, but the fabric was a pleasure to work with. Checking the collar in the credenza’s mirror, Renzo knots his tie. “You’re rather overdressed for a nap,” she notes.

  He shakes out a linen jacket. “I’m going to apply for a job.”

  “Really?” she remarks, brows lifted. It’s illegal for Catholics to employ Jews, and for Jews to own businesses, but getting around the race laws is a popular Italian sport. “What sort of job?”

  He jerks his shirt cuffs down to provide a centimeter of reveal. “I met a man in prison whose cousin is a member of the Dairy Association. They need drivers. If you can keep a truck with a gasogene rig running, the foreman won’t ask questions.”

  “Get him to pay you in cheese. I can trade it on the black market.” She peers over her spectacles. “You do realize that milkmen are expected to be out of bed before noon?”

  He turns from the mirror and smiles at her brightly. “Mamma, you and I have two additional tasks before us this morning, and you may have your choice: clean this apartment, or seduce a priest.”

  Serenely, she surveys the domestic chaos around her. “How old is the priest?”

  Downstairs, the rabbi’s wife props her aching back against the open door and bids each member of the minyan a good day as he leaves. “Buon giorno,” the first seven say, adding, “B’sha’ah tova! May the child be born at a lucky hour!”

  Bald and bent, the eighth to leave is Giacomo Tura, but he takes his time about it. With hands twisted by a lifetime of gripping pens and brushes, the widowed scribe waves arthritic fingers over Mirella Soncini’s swollen belly. His rheumy eyes rise slowly, lingering on her breasts before arriving at her wry and smiling face. “Mirella! Chè faccia bella!” he sings in a raspy tenor. “If you weren’t a married woman, O Dio! I’d make you mine!”

  Mirella waves off his randy gallantry. In her own clear eyes, the war and her third pregnancy have rendered her shopworn and middle-aged at twenty-six, but she knows what others still see when they look at her: an early Renaissance life model, Botticelli blond, demeanor demure, but with a direct and level gaze.

  Reaching into the entryway, she grabs a broom and sweeps the night’s grime from the low stone steps. “’N giorno, Signor Loeb,” she says, when the minyan’s ninth finally appears. “Is your brother-in-law all right? Angelo said he was ill.”

  Tranquillo Loeb pushes both hands at the air, miming rejection of Renzo Leoni and all his affairs, and stalks away from the synagogue talking to himself. Mirella decides to go to the source. “Renzo!” she calls loudly. A moment later, he steps onto the Leonis’ small balcony. He’s dressed, but… “Your hair seems to have exploded,” she informs him helpfully. “You look like an alarmed cartoon character.”

  “And you look like a brood mare,” h
e replies. “When you pass small children, it must seem like an eclipse of the sun.”

  “Diogenes, put down your lantern!” she cries. “I have found an honest man!”

  “How are you feeling?” he asks more seriously.

  “Huge.” She widens her stance and presses her hands against her lower back. “But everything’s going well, grazie a Dio! Except—” Casting her eyes toward her own door, and then ever so slightly upward, she mouths, “The noise…” Every morning, a minyan packs her dining room, waiting for Iacopo to make the tenth. The congregation’s secretary and treasurer arrive next. They’ve had desks in the Soncinis’ salon since the synagogue’s business offices were converted to a school in 1938. They’re followed by refugees queuing for relief money. “Angelo said you had morning sickness!” she tells Renzo.

  “An acute but temporary condizion,” he tells her with a German doctor’s accent. “Die Prognose ist gut.”

  He’s handsome, in a rather world-weary way, but it’s increasingly difficult to tell world-weary from hungover. “I still have a headache powder saved up,” she offers.

  “What he needs is a smack in the head!” Catarina Dolcino mutters, emerging from the apartment lobby. For fifty years, Rina’s been the neighborhood portiere; old age and widowhood have merely increased the amount of attention she can devote to stern surveillance. Left fist on a pillowy hip, right wielding a broom like a bishop’s crozier, she scowls upward. “You’re a disgrace, Renzo Leoni! Everyone in this building heard you come in!”

  “Santo cielo!” Renzo’s mother cries, coming to stand at his side. “Who is that dreary old woman shouting like a fishwife in the street?”

  “And who raised such a boy?” A gold crucifix dangles between ample breasts swaying under a cotton housedress as Rina sweeps the sidewalk. “Some other old woman, whose son is a public nuisance! Five in the morning, he came in! He woke the whole neighborhood up!”