A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  The office door closes, muffling the cannonade of words. Adele lingers in the hallway. Her ears aren’t what they used to be, but the voices quickly rise. “And I told you before,” she hears Lidia’s son shout. “Keep the women out of it!”

  Lips compressed, Adele frowns at his tone, but before she can work up a good bout of indignation, the door opens so suddenly she almost falls into the visitor’s arms.

  “If it isn’t Giulietta’s nurse!” he says caustically. “Go tell Romeo it’s time to say good-bye, signora. His train leaves in half an hour.”

  Renzo Leoni watches, face hard, until the old lady harrumphs and leaves. “That is exactly what I’m talking about,” he says, slamming the door. “You are all amateurs!”

  Leto Girotti neatens his desktop, papers here, pens there. Folds his hands. Looks up. “Amateur,” he says. “From the Latin amator—lover. Thus: one who engages in an enterprise for love, not money. In the case at hand, for love of Italy. For love of liberty. For love of those who flee tyranny, and who resist it.”

  “Explain what love had to do with this.”

  Leoni snaps open a leather document case and drops the March 24 issue of La Stampa on Leto’s desk. The front page is dense with tiny print. Centered at the top in a fine ascetic font is the headline: THIRTY-TWO GERMAN SOLDIERS, VICTIMS OF BOMB ATTACK IN ROME. In smaller letters beneath, it says, “The Reaction: 1 °Communist-Badogliani Shot for Each German Injured.”

  Leto whispers, “Three hundred and twenty…”

  “Three hundred and thirty-five. The Germans evidently miscounted. Civilians, machine-gunned in groups of five. It took hours.”

  Ashen, Leto Girotti pushes away from his desk and stumps to the open window. Out in the garden, Signora Toselli is telling Claudia it’s time for Santino to leave. “The Resistance didn’t kill those poor wretches,” Leto says. “The Nazis did.”

  “A comfort to the corpses, no doubt. My sources say Hitler wants reprisals set at fifty to one from now on. Are you keeping track of the numbers in Valdottavo? The SS is.”

  Claudia looks as slender as a willow wand, Santino as solid as one of his own stone walls. Leto Girotti closes his eyes, but it does no good. He can see in his mind the Calabrian’s muscles burst by bullets, Claudia torn to pieces behind the false shelter of that sturdy body. “The Republic of Salò is a puppet government,” he says without facing Renzo. “If we can’t strike at the Nazis, we’ll cut the strings of their marionettes.”

  Behind him, there is a bark of stunned laughter. “That’s your solution? Civil war? Italians shooting Italians, for the love of Italy! What kind of priest are you?”

  Leto turns. “The kind who’s visited Fascist prisons. The kind who has given the last rites to prisoners with no eyes, no ears, no fingernails! What kind of man are you?”

  “We’ve been over this, and over it! I’m doing what I can!”

  “It’s not enough! Old women are risking their lives to get weapons for the Resistance!” Leto points out the window toward the Cave of San Mauro. “There are boys up there— kids who should be in school. The only veteran among them stutters so badly, a battle would be over before he could get an order out! They are hungry for a leader. Renzo, the Communists have already made contact.”

  “I should think the Red Priest would be delighted.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Leto snaps. “There are sins of omission, my son. If you refuse to oppose those who do harm, you are complicit! You were a military officer, a professional. And I believe you are a patriot. Fewer will die if those boys are well armed and well led.”

  A long minute passes. Leoni stands motionless, his expression somewhere between pity and loathing. “Your day is coming,” he warns softly. “God help you when you learn what I know.” He stares until Leto’s eyes drop, and when he speaks again, his voice is tight. “I can get them weapons— but that’s as far as I’ll go. And I have two conditions. One: the brigade goes to ground until I get back from Sant’Andrea next month. No action at all, understand? If I’m setting something up, I don’t need a crackdown before it happens.”

  “And the second condition?”

  “The women stay out of this.”

  “Not even the love of God can keep the ones we love safe. Nevertheless,” Don Leto agrees, “I will do what I can to keep your mother and the rabbi’s wife out of harm’s way.”

  More tears, more embraces. With nothing else to seal their promises, Santino hands Claudette his carbine. “Keep this for me,” he says. “I can’t carry it in the city.”

  The man who calls himself Ugo Messner grips Santino’s small suitcase in one hand and Santino’s large arm in the other. “I’m sorry, Giulietta. Time, tides, and Mussolini’s trains wait for no man, not even your Romeo.”

  Pulled downhill toward the station, Santino looks over his shoulder for a last glimpse of Claudia, and stumbles. “Watch where you’re going, Cicala!” Messner’s German accent has disappeared, a no-nonsense Ligurian one taking its place. “We don’t have much time, so listen carefully. The Germans are worried about an amphibious assault near Genoa. God knows why, considering what a mess the Allies have made of their campaign so far.” Messner waits until they clear a corner and he can speak again without fear of being overheard. “The Wehrmacht is building a seawall with bunkers for heavy machine guns and seventy-five-millimeter cannon, from Savona to Varazze. You’ll be working for a German engineering firm, Lorentz and Company—”

  Santino stops a few steps uphill. “I won’t collaborate!”

  Messner turns. “Don Leto told you about this job, vero? Would he ask you to collaborate?” Messner waits for Santino to consider this. “A man who knows how to make a good wall also knows how to build a bad one, true?”

  Santino squints. “Are they using concrete?”

  “Of course.”

  Santino catches up. “Enough sand in the mix? It’ll crumble by November.”

  “Precisely. Turn here.” The station in sight, Messner speaks quickly. “I’m taking you to meet a man named Fichtner. He thinks I’m a Volksdeutscher—an ethnic German from Bolzano who’s perfectly delighted that the Vaterland has retaken Südtirol. Fichtner’s desperate for skilled workers.” He glances at Santino and adds sourly, “I’ll see if I can get you a better salary. You’ll need the money if you’re going to get married.”

  “You’re not so nasty as you pretend,” Santino tells him. “Don Leto said you were a war hero—”

  “Don Leto is completely full of shit.”

  The locomotive looses a piercing blast. Porters wheel pushcarts stacked with luggage past crates of produce, cages of chickens, sacks of dried corn. Passengers mill nervously, waiting to display their documents to men in long leather coats.

  Messner leans against a low granite wall engraved with the names of men from San Mauro who died in the last war. Rubbing his knee with one hand, he reaches into his suit coat with the other. “Here’s your ticket. That’s the queue for third class. Get off at Sant’Andrea.”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  Messner’s voice drops. “Ugo Messner, I’ll have you know, is a member of the fucking master race. The fucking master race travels first-class!” He stands and assesses the crowd casually. “Sometimes it’s safest to hide in plain sight,” he says even more quietly. “If anything happens to me, get off in Sant’Andrea and go to Fichtner anyway, but in that case, don’t mention my name. Tell him you heard he was looking for masons.”

  Messner starts to leave, but Santino grabs his arm. “Signore, I–I never traveled alone. There was always an officer.”

  The hard eyes soften. “Your papers are authentic. You’re doing nothing wrong. Show the man your ticket. Find a seat. And buon viaggio—enjoy the trip.”

  EN ROUTE TO PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  The train stops repeatedly, taking on passengers until they fill every seat, every corridor, even the linkage platforms between cars. Small children nap on overhead luggage racks, pillowed on bundles. Everyone st
inks: unwashed bodies, unwashed clothing. “Soap is cheap,” Santino’s nonna used to say. “There’s no excuse for dirt.” But nothing’s cheap in wartime.

  There’s a long stop in Roccabarbena. A lot of people get off, but Santino isn’t sure he’s allowed, so he sits by the window watching the people at the station. A young woman gets on just before the train pulls out again, and sits next to him with a quick smile. The train rolls out, crosses an iron trestle, rounds a wide bend that skirts the last of the mountains.

  Abruptly, Piemonte’s high country flattens into a vast plain. Contadini stagger behind oxen. Black ribbons of fertile soil curl away from gleaming plow blades. Santino wishes he’d paid more attention when they’d studied Piemonte’s characteristics in school, but he’d never thought he’d see it himself.

  “Tanta bella! The land is so beautiful!” he remarks to the young woman at his side. “In Calabria, it’s all rocks. What do they grow in those fields?”

  “Mostly corn, but—” The train slows, and she sighs with exasperation. “This trip used to take four hours! We’ll be lucky to do it in twenty…”

  She’s friendly, and her skirt is so short it rides up above her knees. She’s wearing short socks, too; the skin of her legs is bare. They chat awhile, and Santino tries to make up his mind about her. At home he’d be certain she was a prostitute, but the north is different, and he decides to give this young woman the benefit of the doubt.

  Moving toward an arc of mountains, the train picks up speed, then slows to a crawl, then stops inside a tunnel. The girl waves a hand at the dense darkness around them. “What’s worse? Getting bombed outside or buried alive in here?”

  “Arches are very strong,” he says. “The tunnel won’t collapse, and the bombs can’t reach us in here. So tunnels are safer. Stuffy, but safer.”

  She rears back, to get a better look at him in the gloom. “It was a rhetorical question, but I like your answer.”

  Prostitutes wouldn’t know a word like that “torical” one. “Are you a student?” he asks.

  “I was, until they closed the universities.”

  “La mia fidanzata?” He stops to savor the moment: he’s never called Claudia his fiancée before. “She was a good student. Reads any book she can get. Me, I only had the mandatory. Soon as I finished my four years, I was glad to get outside and do something useful.”

  “Then your children will be smart like their mamma and practical like you, ne? A good combination.”

  The train quivers and begins to roll. Santino closes his eyes. Smart, and practical, he thinks. And maybe good-looking, like their mamma.

  Content to let the prophecy linger in his mind, he dozes off, head against the glass. When he awakens, it’s night. The train is stopped, but this time out in the middle of nowhere. He stretches as compactly as he can and rubs at crusty eyelids. Several seats away, a badly dressed boy of about twelve clutches a knapsack, his frightened eyes on the girl at Santino’s side.

  The young woman taps her fingers on the armrest, and grips it when two German soldiers board. “Madonna,” she says quietly. No one else speaks.

  Beams of light sweep through the car from the soldiers’ flashlight. “Dokumente!” one of them shouts. Many of the passengers moan and reach for their papers, but the girl next to Santino hardly breathes as the Germans work their way down the aisle. Suddenly, she stands and addresses the other passengers. “Dio santo! Why don’t we just paint a target on the roof?”

  Startled, the soldiers pause in their task.

  “Can’t you people hurry?” she demands, motioning with her hand like a wheel turning faster and faster.

  “Yes!” someone else yells. “We’re sitting ducks for Allied bombers!”

  In the next instant, half the passengers crowd into the aisle, thrusting papers at the Germans, complaining loudly about the delay. The soldiers shout back, and bash somebody with a club. A woman screams. Men shout. Santino untwists in his seat in time to see the pale boy drop from view. Moments later, there’s a tap on Santino’s boot. He crosses his legs, and does not look down when the fugitive wriggles past him on the floor, moving toward the section of the car the soldiers have already checked.

  Eventually the Germans leave. The passengers settle down. The train pulls forward again. “Brava!” Santino whispers when the young woman sits beside him. “Who is that boy?”

  “I have no idea.” She takes a shuddery breath to settle her nerves. “Since last September, half of Italy is hiding the other half. If someone looks scared, you do what you can.”

  It’s past dawn when the train slows yet again. Outside, forests, hills, villages, and fields have been replaced by bombed factories and wrecked apartment buildings, some still smoldering.

  The young woman slides forward on her seat. “This is my stop,” she says, yanking her skirt down. “Sant’Andrea is next.” Santino helps her pick up her bundles. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” she warns. She meets his eyes, and adds, “Neither should I.”

  PENSIONE USODIMARE

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  “She was probably a staffetta,” Messner says quietly when Santino tells him what happened. “A messenger for the Resistance. Turn here. That’s the house. Naturally, I stay elsewhere. Members of the master race do not share accommodations with treacherous Italian scum,” he whispers as they enter the lobby. “Ah! Signora Usodimare, I have another boarder for you.”

  Suspicious, the old woman looks Santino up and down. “Sicilian?”

  Santino hands her his papers. “Calabrian, Signora.”

  “No better!” she snaps.

  “He’s a nice boy,” Messner assures her, “with a job, and a housing voucher from Fichtner at Lorentz.”

  Trying to look harmless, Santino waits politely while Messner takes the lady aside for a murmured conversation. Something Messner says makes Signora Usodimare laugh girlishly as she trades a key for a pack of cigarettes.

  Messner jerks his head, and Santino follows him down a hall that changes elevations three times for no apparent reason, and then up three flights of stairs. At the end of a corridor Messner unlocks a tiny room, taller than it is wide and stiflingly hot. He pushes the window shutters open to let in some air and sends his hat twirling onto a peg by the door. “Give me ten minutes. I need to thaw out,” he says, sitting in the room’s only chair and massaging his knees after the climb. “Belandi, how I hate the mountains!”

  Santino sits on the edge of the bed. “You were going to tell me about staffette.”

  Messner pulls a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his suit coat and offers it. “You don’t smoke?” he asks when Santino refuses. “Good! Filthy habit.” Messner shakes the flame from a match and coughs on the first puff. “Staffette… Where to begin?” he asks. Rhetorically. “Apart from ordinary gangsters, there are about a hundred bands of anti-Fascist partisans in northwestern Italy. Gruppi di Azione Patriottica in the cities, Squadri di Azione Patriottica in the countryside. Liberals, Christian Democrats, Socialists, Communists. Garibaldi Brigades, Catholic Action Brigades. Bread and Justice Brigades. Liberty and Justice Brigades. Most of them couldn’t organize a bun fight in a bakery.” Messner shifts in the chair and gazes absently out the window. “They all use girls like the one you met on the train as messengers because women travel more freely.”

  Thinking of Claudia, Santino says, “Dangerous.”

  “You have no idea. When staffete are caught…” Messner lifts his chin, sending a plume of smoke upward. “The Great War killed courage with machine guns, Cicala. This one’s murdering chivalry.”

  Santino joins Messner at the window. The boardinghouse sits on high ground, and Sant’Andrea is laid out like a map. At least a third of the buildings are damaged, the streets holed with craters bridged by planks for foot traffic, or boarded over with salvaged doors. Piles of rubble block the ground-floor windows of the buildings still standing. Broken glass glitters in the sunlight. A barber cuts hair in the midst of the wreckage. A skinn
y housewife has strung a clothesline between two chimneys; clothes flutter above what was her kitchen floor a few days ago. Smoke and dust drift in the soft spring air. The white shirts will be dingy before they are dry.

  “Are you from Sant’Andrea?” Santino asks.

  “Ugo Messner is from Bolzano.”

  “Even for a stranger, it’s a pity to see it like this,” Santino says, playing along.

  “The city was never picturesque,” Messner admits quietly. “It’s been an industrial port for five hundred years. Tanneries and weaving in the beginning. Shipbuilding before the forests ran out. Chemicals, iron, steel mills later on— Porca miseria! Look at that!”

  “What was it?”

  “The Ospedale Incurabili.”

  The smoking ruins of the hospital are nearly lost in the haze over the Mediterranean. “Maybe the pilots thought it was a factory.”

  Silent, Messner takes a drag, filling his lungs with as much smoke as they can hold before flicking the butt out the window. Taking his hat off the peg, he stands still, as though weighing some decision. “There’s a company of bersaglieri guarding the construction site for the seawall,” he says. “The bersaglieri are—”

  “Repubblicani.” Santino nods knowingly. “Old fascisti, with a new name. And corrupt, like mafiosi.”

  “Is that what Don Leto says?” Messner asks, his voice light with sudden anger. “Allow me to explain something about city life, my son. We’ve got two armies confiscating trainloads of food from us. Civilian rations are down to one hundred grams of bread a day, two hundred grams of cheese a month! People are starving, and unlike the Red Priest, bersaglieri have families to feed. I know one of them is selling supplies from the seawall project. Cigarettes, food, medicines. And he’s got access to explosives, small arms, and ammunition. So he may be corrupt, but Don Leto’s friends can use what I can buy from him. Do I make myself clear?”

  Santino’s eyes remain level.

  “You don’t have to approach the man, Cicala. Just find out who he is.”

  The wind shifts south, bringing with it the musical tinkling of bricks being tossed into piles.