A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  He does as he’s told, then returns to the magazine, looking for more ladies to deface. Belly on the floor, feet waving, he says, “I like it when I stay with you.”

  “Thank you, Angelo. It’s kind of you to say so. I have a grandson your age. He lives in Rome, with his two little sisters. All my grandchildren live far away. Rome, Turin, Florence.” Even before the war made petrol scarce and travel dangerous, Lidia didn’t get to see her grandchildren often enough. Her daughters rarely visit.

  “You’re like my Nonno Casutto,” Angelo decides, drawing an airplane in the sky over Amedeo Nazzari’s fedora. “You let me do stuff other grown-ups won’t. One time,” he says, sitting up, “there was this air raid, and me and Nonno Casutto sneaked up to the roof to see the fires! I like air raids. My sister Altira— she got scared, but I like ’em. ’Cause after, you can find stuff, and look in people’s apartments, and see their wallpaper and toilets and everything.”

  “Very interesting,” she admits.

  “I found an unexploded bomb once. I ran for a carabiniere. He gave me caramelle for telling.”

  “That was very brave and sensible, Angelo.”

  “A kid I know? He said Jews are cowards.”

  “Nazi propaganda,” she snaps. “He’s just parroting what he hears on the radio. In the Great War, the oldest man and the youngest to be decorated were both Jews! Remember Signor Loeb? He was decorated after the Battle of Caporetto! And my son, Renzo, earned the silver medal for valor during the Abyssinian—”

  “Look! What a stupid hat!” Angelo holds the magazine up briefly. “One time, I saw Signor Ravera walking around with a bucket. His apartment building was all wrecked, and he was crying and yelling.” The pencil stills, and Angelo aims a sidelong glance at Lidia. “I looked in the bucket. Signora Ravera’s head was in there.”

  Lidia stares, her hands going motionless.

  Gratified by the reaction, Angelo adds a pointy beard to the lady with the stupid hat. The hat has a little bird on it, so he draws a soldier shooting the bird. “If Mammina and Babbo got killed, I wouldn’t care. I’m not a baby,” he boasts. “I know how to do stuff.”

  Lidia lays her knitting aside, horrified by the bravado, awed by the courage. Violent death, casual horror— just part of childhood now. “You are exceedingly competent for a seven-year-old,” she tells him firmly, “but your parents are going to be fine.” The mantel clock begins to chime. “Santo cielo! Noon already.” Eyes narrowing, she considers Renzo’s bedroom door. “Angelo, I believe it’s time to play something nice and loud on the piano!”

  Lingering in the hallway while his pounding heartbeat slows, Iacopo Soncini listens to the racket inside and smiles in spite of everything. The signora is playing Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat while Angelo bangs on the low keys, more or less in time.

  Removing his hat, Iacopo knocks, and his hand automatically brushes the doorpost where a mezuzah used to hang. It’s gone, the nail holes neatly patched. The doors of all eight tenants are freshly painted; no household’s entry attracts attention. “Routine maintenance,” Rina Dolcino can claim if things go badly. “I had no idea anyone in my building was Jewish. Why would anyone pay attention to things like that?”

  Small feet pound down the hall to gleeful shouts of “Babbo! Babbo! Babbo!” Signora Leoni has barely unlocked the door when Angelo hurtles through it, then stops, mouth open. “Babbo, why are you so dirty?”

  “Rabbino, what happened?” Lidia cries, pulling him inside.

  “A little unpleasantness in the street. I was wondering if I might clean here before I take Angelo home.” He glances meaningfully at his son. “We don’t want to worry your mammina, do we!”

  “Angelo,” Lidia says, equally cool, “show your babbo to the lavatory.”

  Angelo leads him past a crucifix hung prominently in the entry. A framed picture of Piux XII has joined the family photos in the salon; the silver menorah is nowhere to be seen. Renzo hunches over the table, unshaven and comprehensively hung over. Hands around a cup of ersatz coffee, he looks worse off than the credenza’s display of grisly plaster martyrs. Colorful saints merely cast lugubrious eyes toward heaven in attitudes of mild vexation at their torture; Renzo can barely raise an index finger in greeting.

  Iacopo bids him a hearty, if ironic, “Buon giorno” and retreats behind the bathroom door, closing it more loudly than strictly necessary. He takes his time, wiping gray dust from his black suit with a dampened cloth, washing his face and hands, borrowing a comb to neaten his hair and beard. There’s nothing to be done about his spectacles, and the eye will blacken, but it could have been worse. When he cannot put the moment off any longer, he switches off the light.

  Angelo leaps up the instant the door reopens. “Babbo, look what I found this morning!” he says, digging something out of his satchel.

  “Later, Angelo. Signora, I’m afraid…” Iacopo holds out a slip of paper. “A stranger gave this to me on the street.”

  Unfolding the small note, Lidia reads aloud. “ ‘Five parcels sent to Switzerland have been confiscated at the border. Do not try to export any more of these goods.’ There’s no signature.” She sniffs in a short breath. “Rachele. Tranquillo,” she says numbly. “Their three youngest. That makes five—”

  “Babbo, look!” Angelo says, holding what looks like a cigar stub.

  “Angelo!” Renzo says sharply. “Sit down and be quiet!” Bloodshot eyes on his mother, Renzo pulls out a chair for her.

  Iacopo settles himself across the table from Lidia. “Signora,” he says calmly, “I’ve already seen the archbishop. His secretary, Don Osvaldo, has made inquiries. The Loebs were turned back by the Swiss because they didn’t have the proper transit visas. They’re in German custody. Archbishop Tirassa himself spoke to the man in charge. The Loebs were not arrested for their race, but because they were attempting to leave Italy illegally. His Excellency has been assured that all law-abiding Jewish citizens of Italy will be treated properly. I think that’s true. I’ve been stopped twice by German soldiers today, and allowed to pass with no trouble.”

  “And the unpleasantness in the street?” Renzo asks.

  “Rabble,” Iacopo says. “A carabiniere chased them off.”

  “Babbo, look—”

  “Angelo,” Lidia says a little raggedly, “the grown-ups are talking! Rabbino, I understand that Tranquillo is in trouble, but surely Rachele and the children—?”

  “Technically they all committed a crime when they tried to cross the border with false documents, Signora. His Excellency will try to get them released.”

  “Iacopo,” Renzo says, “you have to close the synagogue.”

  “During the High Holy Days? Never!”

  “Take a million, maybe two million lire out of the bank,” Renzo continues, voice low and even. “Give all the synagogue employees three months’ salary, and tell everyone to get the hell out of the city!”

  Lidia shakes her head stubbornly. “Evacuation is collaboration!”

  “And I don’t have the authority to close the synagogue,” Iacopo says. “That’s the community president’s decision, and he’s in Florence.”

  “Then hide the synagogue records, at least!” Renzo urges. “Take anything with names and addresses to Osvaldo Tomitz. He’ll bury them in the basilica’s papers. Otherwise, we’ll be no better off than the Jews in Rome—”

  “Wait!” Lidia says sharply. “What’s happened in Rome?”

  “Babbo! Look!” Angelo insists, waving the cigar.

  “A shakedown. Angelo, please!” Renzo pleads. “I got a telephone call through to Ester last night, Mamma. She and the children are fine, but she had to give her wedding ring and Nonna Segre’s necklace to the Nazis.”

  “The Gestapo gave the Roman Jews thirty-six hours to deliver fifty kilos of gold,” Iacopo explains.

  “If they don’t pay up,” Renzo says, “Kappler will deport two hundred people to Germany—”

  “A great many Catholics are coming to our aid, s
ignora! The gold will be delivered on time.”

  “Demonstrating that we can be intimidated and robbed,” Renzo points out. “Let’s not make it easy for them—”

  “Babbo! Look!” Angelo yells. Three adults wheel, ready to shout. Angelo holds out his treasure and finally achieves the silent awe he hoped for. “I found it in the street after last night’s raid,” he says proudly. “The nail polish is still on it!”

  It’s not a cigar stub. It’s a woman’s thumb.

  RABBINICAL RESIDENCE

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  Underslept and overburdened, Iacopo Soncini closes his eyes behind the cracked lens of his glasses. Listening to the silence of his book-crammed study, he thanks God that Rosina’s colicky crying has finally quieted and that Mirella will get a few hours of rest before the baby needs to nurse again.

  He eases the desk drawer open and chooses a pen with care, selecting one his grandfather gave him on the day Iacopo became bar mitzvah. “These are the Days of Awe,” he writes, wondering if even a minyan will be left for Sabbath services. “When Abraham bound Isaac upon the altar, he was ready to sacrifice his only son at the Holy One’s command. God did not require that awful deed: an angel stayed Abraham’s hand, and told him to substitute a ram for the boy. On Rosh Hashana, when the year begins anew, the children of Abraham and of Isaac are reminded by the call of a ram’s horn that during the following eight days, God considers all His children and decides who will be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.”

  Since Italy’s surrender, Allied air raids have become more frequent. Targets seem more random. Renzo Leoni has offered to take Lidia, Mirella, and the children to the mountains, where they’ll all be safer. Should I have said yes? Iacopo asks himself. Have I waited too long? Dio santo, my son believes that finding a woman’s thumb is interesting— like finding a bird’s feather or a pretty shell on the beach!

  “Wake up from your slumber,” he writes. “Examine your deeds! Maimonides tells us that is what the ram’s horn proclaims. Turn in repentance, remembering your Creator. On Yom Kippur, we’ll rise together to ask forgiveness, so that we might be inscribed in the Book of Life, and together we will be comforted by Jonah’s assurance of the Lord’s compassion for all creatures. And yet, next year at this time, some of us will be gone.”

  You’ve got to close the synagogue…

  Easy enough to ignore the advice of a dislikable drunk, but Osvaldo Tomitz came this evening to give the same advice, and the priest was even more insistent. “What better target than a synagogue full of fasting Jews on Yom Kippur? Just surround the building with troops and scoop the Juden up! Rabbino, the Loebs were not the only ones to be stopped at the Swiss border,” Don Osvaldo told him. “Forty-nine Jews were arrested at that crossing. This afternoon we got word that their bodies were found in Lake Maggiore!”

  “Never has a year passed in which no one died,” Iacopo writes resolutely. “Death waits for all who live— the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the beasts of dry land. We who have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, we alone know that death is coming for us. Adonai, in His compassion and wisdom, has given us the Days of Awe, so that we might turn back toward Him. Some do. Some don’t. Some need not return because they’ve never left. It seems to make no difference. Each year, the Holy One takes life from those whose deaths leave us stunned and bereft. Each year, He leaves among us those whose lives are a curse. Of all His creatures, we alone ask, ‘Why?’ ”

  Why my mother, my son, my cousin, my wife? his congregants will ask themselves. Why these innocents, when Hitler and Himmler, Goebbels and Kappler live on.

  “I have studied Torah for many years,” he writes. “Had I studied alone, I might have come to believe that Torah does not teach us to understand God but simply to belong to Him. Fortunately, we Jews have as our study partners the wise of all ages, sages who lived in the times of the Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hellenists, and the Romans.”

  Iacopo’s gaze drifts along the shelves of his library. Bibles in Hebrew and German, French and Italian. The many-volumed Talmud with its centuries-long conversation among past rabbis. Commentaries by Maimonides and Nachmonides, by Rashi and Rabbi Luzzatto share a plank with Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Plutarch. Flavius Josephus and Nathan ben Yehiel rest cozily between Machiavelli and Tacitus. Schiller and Shakespeare rub shoulders with Solomon Conegliano. Cantarini, Cardoso, Lampronti. Deborah Ascarelli, Sara Coppio Sullam. So many dear friends…

  “The sages offer us a way to understand the terrible times when we are driven into exile, when we are beaten and enslaved, when we are killed with less thought than a shochet gives a chicken. The Holy One has made us His partners, the sages teach. He gives us wheat, we make bread. He gives us grapes, we make wine. He gives us the world. We make of it what we will— all of us together. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty. Bombs do not drop from God’s hand. Triggers are not pulled by God’s finger. Each of us chooses, one by one, and God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or from those who inflict suffering. Our choices are weighed. And, thus, the nations are judged.”

  Carefully, Iacopo removes his cracked spectacles. Elbows on his desk, he presses his fingers into his eyes and weighs his own obligations. He cannot abandon the foreign Jews hiding in Sant’Andrea, but he will risk only his own life, not the lives of his family or his congregants.

  He can close the synagogue school on his own authority. Suora Marta has offered to enroll Jewish children in a boarding school run by her order in Roccabarbena. The repubblicani have closed the state schools, but Mother of Mercy is also an orphanage, and classes are in session. Inland, away from industrial targets, the children can continue their education in relative safety.

  On Monday, Iacopo will bring Angelo to Suora Marta himself, and urge other parents to follow his example. And then he will ask— no, he will beg Lidia Leoni to take Mirella and the baby to Decimo, where they can hide on a tenant farm owned by her Catholic son-in-law’s parents until the war is over.

  Iacopo is aware of the irony. All these years, he has refused to bless mixed marriages, alarmed that so many of his congregation’s young people were marrying Catholics— the inevitable result of shared lives, shared neighborhoods, shared values. He considered those marriages heartening proof of Italy’s religious tolerance but a threat to Jewish survival. Such unions may be the salvation of the Italkim now.

  Replacing his glasses, he picks up his grandfather’s pen. “The Jews of Italy have always striven to be a source of generosity in the world, for God has often granted us koach latet: the power to give. For centuries, we Italkim have supported the victims of persecution and expulsion. In the days to come, remember this: when we accept the generosity of others, we are the occasion of the Holy One’s blessing on our benefactors for their kindness. May God guide us all,” he concludes, “from war to justice, from justice to mercy, and from mercy to peace.”

  He caps his pen and taps the paper into a neat stack. His muscles are cramped, and his mind seems packed in cotton wool. Even so, before he goes to bed, he reaches for the small Bible he keeps on his desk for easy reference. Holding it in one palm, he opens his hand and lets the book fall open where it pleases. “I cannot go where God is not,” he whispers, and draws a finger down the text, stopping midway down a column in Psalms.

  “I hear the whispering of many, terror on every side,” he reads. “But I trust in you, O Lord.”

  EN ROUTE TO ROCCABARBENA

  VALDOTTAVO, PIEMONTE

  Mussolini’s trains contrive to leave stations on time, only to slow and stop repeatedly. Damaged rails must be repaired. Military transports sidetrack civilian trains. Locomotives break down, or run out of coal.

  “Bring food,” everyone advised. “It
’ll take all night to get there.”

  Third class was crammed with passengers who would doze and cough and curse, but when Suora Marta boarded, a conductor recognized her from a geometry class in 1931. Crooking his finger, he led her and her companions to a safer and more private compartment shared by three well-dressed gentlemen who treated the nuns with courtesy and smiled at the little boy. On Marta’s left, nearest the sliding door, Suora Ilaria drew out her rosary; within minutes, she was snoring peacefully, black beads clutched in fingers clawed by arthritis. Squashed next to the window, the rabbi’s silent son stared at the countryside until he, too, fell asleep.

  Bookended by her companions in the motionless train, Marta shifts carefully, trying to restore feeling to her thick little legs, without notable success. Unable to sleep, she offers up the pincushion sensation and starts another drowsy rosary.

  Outside, welders work: demonic in iron masks, lit blue and brilliant white by acetylene torches. Sparks scatter from a section of twisted rail. At last, and slowly, the train makes its way past the workers, onto a different track. The gentleman sitting opposite lifts his chin toward the window. “That’s why we were delayed, Suora.”

  First she sees only her own unappealing reflection. Her breath catches. A young man’s body hangs from a rope tied to the crossbar of a telegraph pole. A placard slung around his neck reads “Saboteur” in Italian and German.

  “Troublemakers,” the man grumbles as the train’s movement smooths out and gains speed. “They only make it harder for the rest of us.”

  “We must pray for his soul,” Suora Marta counters, pugnaciously pious.

  The man snorts, crossing his arms over his chest. No one in the compartment speaks again.

  They arrive in Roccabarbena just after dawn. The station isn’t large compared to those at Sant’Andrea or Genoa, but this is an important, if small, city. On five tracks flanked by crowds and crates, Roccabarbena gathers in Valdottavo’s olive oil and wine, cornmeal and chestnut flour, pork and fruit, and sends this bounty to the coast in exchange for manufactured goods, dried cod, sardines, and anchovies.