A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  Lidia fastens a clawlike hand on Renzo’s arm. “She doesn’t know you. I’ll go. Keep Mirella away.”

  Mirella hears her name, sees Rosina, rushes toward her. Renzo blocks her path. “No!” she screams, struggling as Renzo lifts her off her feet. “Rosina, no!”

  Lidia moves steadily through the garden. When she is close enough to hear ticking, she glances over her shoulder. Schramm and Renzo have manhandled Mirella behind the hunchback’s house. Bending at the knees amid feathery carrot seedlings, Lidia points toward the sky. “Rosina!” she says. “See the airplane?”

  The baby looks up. Lidia seizes the child under the arms, steps over the bomb, and starts for the stone barn. The ticking pauses. The baby is heavy but Lidia hurries, thin old legs stumping along decisively.

  They’re just inside the door when the blast lifts her off her feet for a weird, short sail through the air. There is no sensation of impact, only the need to keep Rosina in her arms. Her shoulder goes numb when she hits a bale of hay, but she hangs on, curling around the baby while they’re pelted by stones and dirt.

  Straw is still falling when the others reach her. Schramm stoops to feel along Rosina’s limbs. The baby is crying, but there’s no blood, and she’s safe now in her sobbing mother’s arms. Ears ringing, Lidia reads Schramm’s bleached, anxious face, his moving lips: She’s fine. She’s fine! Are you all right? “Yes, I think so,” Lidia says, faintly amazed by the whole experience. She will be badly bruised, no doubt, but she’s too keyed up to feel pain.

  Renzo helps her stand, holds her briefly. Schramm looks more shaken than she feels, and says something. Lidia taps her ears and shakes her head. “I can’t hear you!”

  They make her sit on a hay bale. She paws bits of straw from her hair while Schramm examines her. Renzo spots her spectacles, straightens the frames, and puts them on her face. Still laughing, she catches sight of the view beyond the barn, and her face loses its shape.

  The garden is a crater. The chairs she and Schramm sat in a minute ago: vaporized. The laundry posts have remained upright, the rope bizarrely in place. Renzo’s cassock lies twenty meters away, unscorched, in the weeds. Diapers smolder nearby. Smoking-hot chunks of metal are everywhere: jammed between the stones of the house and barn, embedded in trees, littering the ground. “A miracle!” she says, stupefied. “A miracle.”

  Werner Schramm has witnessed the phenomenon in others many times: the buckling knees, the helpless weeping. Under fire, your training takes over. When the danger’s past, the shaking and crying begin. Renzo stands behind Lidia, his hands on her shoulders, both of them taking in the devastation. Mirella’s forearm makes a seat for Rosina’s bottom. Her other hand cups the back of her baby’s head, fingers lost in red-gold curls. So ordinary. So normal. But they might have died half a minute ago…

  Schramm wipes his eyes, ashamed of going to pieces. “Cataplexy,” Schramm tells the others, tears spilling. “It’s nothing. Reaction. Truly. Just reaction.” But the recoil intensifies as he looks from face to face. Lidia. Renzo. Mirella. Concerned. Understanding. Sympathetic. The faces blur. He knows who they are, but he cannot see them. They become, with terrifying ease: items, categories. Jew, too old to work. Jew, able-bodied. Jew, with child. Left. Right. Left.

  Sinking in a heap on the packed dirt of the barn floor, he gives himself up to the weeping, until he hasn’t strength for more. Finally, exhausted and empty, he pulls himself together and sees two adolescent boys. Out of breath from their long run, they stare at what’s left of Mirella’s garden. Lidia goes to them. A hurried conversation, and she points to Schramm. They come toward him, their anxious faces pinched by shock. They take his arms, lift him to his feet, pull him toward a path that leads to the Cave of San Mauro.

  “You have to come!” they are saying. “We need a doctor!”

  The sun has dropped behind the mountains on the other side of the valley when Renzo emerges from the hut with the household’s sole remaining chair. He settles it onto a patch of level ground, making a courtier’s sweeping gesture, and Lidia accepts the seat. They are alone. Rosina is napping, Mirella beside her. Schramm, depleted by the events of the day, has sent word from the cave that he’ll stay tonight with the San Mauro Brigade, which has sustained its first casualty.

  Renzo shakes a cigarette from a package of Nazionales and offers it to Lidia. “What happened to that silver cigarette case?” she asks.

  “Sold it.” He leans over with a match. “I sold Zia Elena’s credenza, too.”

  She dismisses the news with a queenly wave. “All that carving! Made me think of skin diseases.”

  Cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth, he lowers himself to the weedy ground, using his hands to ease his knees as he stretches out. She holds her own breath until he leans back on his elbows and his face relaxes. Smoking in companionable silence, they watch a flock of swallows dive murderously through clouds of insects.

  “I saw Angelo a few days ago,” Renzo says, tapping ash. “He has a little girlfriend. Austrian, probably Jewish. About four. I asked Angelo if he had a message for his mammina. He wants his parents to adopt Stefania. He said he was ‘practicing up on being a big brother.’ ”

  “Eight-year-olds can be rather sweet little people. Does he miss his parents?”

  “Yes, and—” Renzo shakes his head at his own foolishness. “I may have a way to get his father out of jail, if you—”

  “Very.” Lidia sends smoke upward.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Just before Rosina and I took our first flight,” she reminds him drily, “you asked how bored I am. Very,” she repeats. “I am very bored, and I want to go home!” They are both surprised that her voice is shaking. “Well, look around!” she cries, waving at the bomb crater. “How much more dangerous could a city be? I can help you, Renzo. Old women are practically invisible, and that gives us a kind of power.”

  Who else is there? He is a member of no group, working alone, making things up as he goes. He pulls out a flask. “To the death of chivalry!” he says before offering it to his mother.

  She sips delicately, returns the flask. Steadier, she asks, “So what do you have in mind?”

  He watches the sky turn from gold to pink, and waits for the liquor to do its work. When benign indifference has claimed him, Renzo gestures carelessly at the twilight. “What color would you call that? Would you say that’s ultramarine or—”

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

  “Mamma,” he says grandly, “we have two tasks before us, and you may have your choice of them. One of us will go to jail, while the other blows up a building.”

  Lidia Segre Leoni was the first woman in Sant’Andrea to ride a bicycle in public. She started smoking in 1916 and kept it secret for a decade, even from her son. She has faced down German officers and led their soldiers into ambush. She reaches for Renzo’s flask and tips the last of its contents into her own mouth. Eyes watering, she hands it back. “Going to jail, as I recall, is your speciality.”

  5 June 1944

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  10:15 A.M.

  Relaxed, tanned, and looking a good deal the better for his month at some mountain spa, Ugo Messner waves a languid hand toward the Mediterranean a thousand meters below. “Bombing has improved this place!” he decides. “The vista is enlarged. There is a breeze.”

  A rabbit-toothed waiter delivers Artur Huppenkothen’s breakfast: Cognac and coffee. To his sister Erna’s dismay, Artur routinely ignores the heavy meal she prepares each morning and comes instead to the Café Vittorio, where white-coated waiters serve patrons in dove-gray uniforms or smartly cut suits. Artur never used to drink, and he himself blames Messner for encouraging the vice, but Ugo can do no wrong in Erna’s eyes. Her reproaches are for her brother alone.

  “What could be better, Artur?” Messner asks, brushing bread crumbs from his fingers. “French brandy, Ethiopian coffee, Italian sun, and German power!”

  “Wh
at’s left of it,” Artur mutters sourly.

  Messner’s voice drops. “Is it true then? Rome has fallen? Kesselring’s retreating toward Florence?”

  All last month, the war in Europe went quiet. Italy was especially calm, until a witch’s cauldron of nations suddenly attacked the Gustav Line. Americans, British, Canadians. Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans. Bolsheviks from France, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia. Indians, Senegalese, Moroccans— Negroes, given guns by Aryans! Now Rome is lost, and the Führer has allowed a retreat from the USSR as well. Rubbing a hand over his forehead, Artur says, “Greater Germany is shrinking by the hour.”

  “More reason to take advantage of present circumstances,” Messner advises quietly, brandy in hand. He pauses to appreciate a young woman strolling by in a tight tan skirt. Fabric cups her buttocks, and she is wearing high heels. Her flesh rises and rests, rises and rests as she walks. “No place to hide a bomb in that ensemble,” he remarks, “but I imagine sentries enjoy making sure.”

  The slut brushes past a pair of patrolling soldiers. Both heads turn. A brief conversation, and they change direction. She stops when they call, smiling at the taller soldier, casually reaching into her blouse to adjust the strap of her brassiere. A canvas-draped army truck rumbles through the piazza. Artur loses sight of the three just as a bicyclist approaches from the opposite direction, bearing down on the café.

  In an instant, Artur is on his feet, his pistol at arm’s length.

  The bicyclist brakes frantically, going down in a tangle of limbs and spokes. “Don’t shoot!” he begs, both hands in the air. “Per favore! Bitte! Please, don’t shoot!”

  The child’s eyes are huge with terror. He is nine, perhaps. Or ten.

  From a distance, Artur hears Messner say, “Relax! It’s just a boy!” Artur fires anyway, to kill his own emotions. The gunshot makes everyone jump, but the bullet goes wide and the weeping boy runs away, abandoning his bicycle in the street.

  “That’ll teach the little bastard to look suspicious!” Gently, Messner extracts the gun from Artur’s fingers, placing it next to a china plate flecked with the shards of a crusty roll. “Lugers— the latest thing in wartime flatware!” he announces, smiling amiably at the military men around them.

  One by one, the patrons of the café return their attention to their own tables. Messner catches the eye of the rabbity white-faced waiter, points to his empty Cognac glass, raises two fingers. “Too much espresso, Artur!” he chides. “It can make a man jittery.”

  “So can living in a city filled with assassins! I could clear this region of Reds in a week if von Thadden would get out of my way. He’s stalled for half a year, when anybody could see they’ve been operating out of the north end of Valdottavo. I arranged for a Luftwaffe raid myself when he wouldn’t take action. He went whining to Kesselring.” Artur lifts his upper lip in distaste. “No clear lines of responsibility! No coordination,” he says, mimicking von Thadden’s cultured tones. “Now everyone reports to Kesselring. Gestapo, army intelligence, Waffen-SS, the security police, Kripo. We’re the generalfeldmarschall’s Anti-Partisan Warfare Staff, and precisely nothing gets done!”

  “Surely a handful of partisans can’t make enough mischief to be a military threat!”

  “They’re better armed every day. Every gun they carry is taken from the hand of a dead German soldier.”

  “My dear Artur, the weapons are stolen. Italians are thieves, not warriors! They sing Puccini and eat pasta. They make love, Artur. They don’t fight.”

  “They disrupt supply lines and communications. They’re holding down troops that could have been on the Gustav Line.” When the waiter sets their brandies on the table, Artur downs his own in a single gulp. “They’ve attacked German and Italian military headquarters,” he whispers, “and blown up Gestapo offices.”

  “They’re a rabble,” Messner insists. “Incompetents. Degenerates! The explosions must have been Allied bombs on a time delay—”

  “Quiet!” Artur orders sharply. His eyes are unfocused, but it’s not the liquor. “Quiet!” he shouts.

  Waiters freeze, trays tucked under their arms, coffee cups poised. Patrons scowl, but they follow the Gestapo chief’s eyes upward.

  They hear what sounds at first like a column of trucks, but there is no grinding shift of gears. Just a low, steady groan, high and far away. Wehrmacht officers and SS men come slowly to their feet, linen serviettes falling unnoticed from their laps to the cobblestone pavement. Waiters stare, amazed, as the cloudless Ligurian sky begins to fill with tiny silver sparks, winking like stars in blue daylight. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred: squadron after squadron of American aircraft. Two hundred, three hundred. Bicyclists slow, put down their feet, gaze upward. Five hundred. Six! Heavy bombers, fighter escorts. Pedestrians stagger slightly and lean against stone walls, heads thrown back, mouths gaping. “Madonna,” a waiter says, voice loud in the dense silence that envelops the piazza. Seven hundred! Eight hundred, nine hundred… All on their way to Germany.

  “I make it just under a thousand planes— for a single raid,” Messner breathes, awestruck. “More than the entire Italian air force had at the beginning of the war. God help whoever’s under that…”

  Around the corner, just out of sight, an Italian baritone begins an ironic rendition of “Deutschland über Alles.” There is an angry Teutonic shout, a defiant retort in Italian. A gunshot. A high-pitched scream, cut short by a second bullet. A Sturmbannführer nearby raps his knuckles on a café tabletop by way of applause. “Well done!” he growls as a new-made widow’s wailing joins the drone of Allied engines. “That ought to shut those opera singers up.”

  Always the first to recover from such shocks, Messner snaps his fingers at the rabbity waiter, who still hasn’t moved a muscle. “You there! A round of brandy for everyone!”

  Cognacs are quickly distributed. Messner stands, glass raised. “Our faith in the Führer remains unchanged!” he declares with stout volksdeutscher sincerity. Officers and officials greet the toast with a murmured, “Sieg heil.” Glasses are drained.

  Loyalty demonstrated, Messner moves his chair to sit at Artur’s side. “Have you come to a decision regarding the arrangement I spoke of last month?” he asks quietly. “The corduroy is first-rate, Artur. Fine wale, with a hand like velvet. Bolts of it locked in a warehouse. Getting that Jew fabric to Germany would be a service to the Vaterland, Artur. Another winter is coming.”

  Messner’s voice is low and smooth in Artur’s ear. “Think of Erna!” he urges. “She never complains when others prosper, but I know she loves beautiful things. She is a good woman— I’d ask for her hand, but she deserves better! Where’s the harm?” Messner presses softly. “Corduroy to keep German children snug this winter. A postwar nest egg for Erna, and for the man who might have been my brother-in-law, were I more worthy.”

  Artur watches the planes disappearing into the distance. Why are the pilots willing to bomb fellow Aryans? he wonders, at a loss. They should be standing with us against Bolshevism! Stalin and his Jews’ll turn on them— wait and see. They’ll regret what they’ve done to us when Ivan kicks in their doors!

  “The war will end eventually, Artur. You must think of your future, and Erna’s.”

  Beneath the shimmering white tablecloth, Messner’s thigh is warm. The touch is casual, probably inadvertent. Artur shivers slightly. “Trucks are hard to come by,” he says, his lips hardly moving. “The best I can do is a ’38 Opel Blitz.”

  With the barest motion of his hand, Messner taps Huppenkothen’s glass with his own. “Fifty-fifty?”

  Artur’s glance flicks toward the other patrons. “Sixty-forty.” He presses a heavy linen serviette against skin misted with sweat, then stands. “Drop by my home at noon. Erna will have an envelope for you.”

  SANT’ANDREA MUNICIPAL JAIL

  11:45 A.M.

  When Jakub Landau stopped at a routine roadblock on the way into Sant’Andrea, he still had an out-of-date work permit identifying him a
s Hans Obermüller. He’d nearly bluffed his way into the city when the Republican soldiers discovered anti-fascist pamphlets sewn into the lining of his jacket, and turned him over to the carabinieri. Tomorrow il polacco will be shot.

  Iacopo Soncini is the only one who knows that the condemned man is a Jew. Landau himself considers the fact of no interest. “I am a Communist,” he replied when the imprisoned rabbi identified himself as a clergyman. “Religion is a drug.” Drawn by Landau’s eerie equanimity, Iacopo asked the source of his calm. “The individual does not matter,” he was told.

  In the shadow of death, Landau has talked— to pass the time and, perhaps, to be remembered. His mother was German, his father a Pole working in Germany when they met. “When Mama died, Papa took me and my brother back to Kossow, but we spent our summers in Offenbach, visiting my mother’s parents.” Landau served two years in the Polish army and obtained an engineering degree from Warsaw Polytechnic, but his childhood German did not fade. Like his father before him, he found work in Berlin.

  The Depression hit; foreigners were the first to lose their jobs. Landau went home, married a Warsaw girl, had a daughter. “Her birthday was the first of September,” Landau told Iacopo. “She turned three the day Germany invaded in ’39. The news spoiled her party.” Guests huddled around Landau’s shortwave as Radio Berlin announced that the Wehrmacht had crossed the border “in retaliation for an attack on Germany by Poland.” They laughed— actually laughed— at the absurdity!

  Absurdity or not, Polish corpses soon rotted on the streets, and hospitals overflowed with wounded. Air attacks went on around the clock, and when the Wehrmacht was close enough to shell the city, the Soviet army invaded along Poland’s eastern border. Occupation was certain; by whom was unclear. Bodies bloated in the late-summer heat, and exploded hideously. There was no food, no electricity, no water, no sewer service. The bombardment ended, and the tanks rolled in.

  “The Nazis made a big show of handing out bread. There were journalists, cameras,” Landau recalled. “I heard one reporter say that the German people were compelled to feed the hungry population of Poland due to the criminal neglect of the Polish government!” The cameras didn’t show that the bread was a centimeter deep in mold. Nor did the reporters mention that the food depots near synagogues were called rat traps. “Poles were given moldy bread, but Jews were given beatings.”