A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russell

  “What is it?” Albert asks him. “Why do you look at me like that?”

  “He has seen terrible things,” Tercilla tells everyone. “He cries in his sleep.”

  “Shut your face, woman!” Cesare snaps.

  “What?” Albert asks again. “Pierino, what have you seen?”

  The soldier’s eyelids flutter. His mouth works. His throat spasms. The word, when it emerges, is like a sigh. “Hhh-hands” is all he says.

  Day and night, the Italian troop transports chugged eastward, toward the Russian front. Whenever the train stopped for water and coal, Pierino and the other draftees would get out to stretch their legs.

  At nearly every station, on the next track over, there were cattle cars filled with Hebrews. “Voda! Voda!” they’d call. Or “Un peu d’eau!” Or, “Wasser, bitte!”

  “Acqua! They want water!” someone shouted.

  After that, the Italians made sure their canteens were full so they could fill the palms thrust out through gaps in the wooden slats. The Germans’ guard dogs snarled, but you could buy the handlers off or distract them while someone else slipped bread or cigarettes into waiting hands. The ladies asked for combs sometimes, ashamed to be so dirty. Children whimpered. Infants wailed, a high peculiar hopeless sound.

  An officer who spoke French found a Jew who did as well. “They’re taking us to Palestine,” that lady told him. “We’re going to be resettled.”

  Back on the troop train, the officer said, “Somebody’s lying. They can’t be going to Palestine.”

  “Why not, Tenente? Didn’t il Duce send a bunch of Hebrews there back in the thirties?” a sergeant asked. “Those refugees from Austria and Germany, remember, sir?”

  “Sì, certo,” the officer said. Mussolini was crafty. Jewish immigrants would stir up the Arabs—that would make things hot for the Tommies in their protectorate. “But the British haven’t let Jews into Palestine for years.”

  “So where are the trains going?” Pierino asked. No one answered.

  The rails ran out, leaving days and days of marching before they reached the front. The Italian Eighth Army was dug in along a line of low hills about a kilometer from the River Don. They had log-and-earth bunkers for each platoon, with interlocking fields of fire to cover the gaps, but even with reinforcements there weren’t enough men for a line of continuous trenches, and they had no cement for pillboxes or dragon’s-teeth obstacles to stop enemy tanks. Already the Eighth had withstood a Soviet offensive north of Stalingrad, saving the Germans to the south a lot of trouble, but that was stalemate, not victory.

  In 1941, theFührer thought Russia would fall as fast as France, and neither Axis army had winter gear for the first Battle of the Don. With a second winter coming on, the Italian reinforcements expected cold. As the days shortened and the weather worsened, they added to their gray-green uniforms a second woolen shirt, a thick sweater, and finally a greatcoat, but no wool in the world could stand up to Russian cold, and their boots were already falling apart.

  Warm in fur-lined hats and fur-lined parkas, with felted valenki like a second skin over fur-lined boots, the Soviet army waited on the other bank, patient as a glacier. On sentry duty Pierino would smoke, and stamp his freezing feet, and stare across the river. Most of the time, the only sound was the whisper of high, dry grasses, but if the wind was right he might hear a Russian sing, or cough, or sneeze across the Don.

  In November, snowy slush coalesced into a veneer of ice. The Reds fired mortars at the river in the morning to see how fast the holes froze over. Soon Field Marshal Winter would build an ice bridge across the river. And then? There wasn’t a schoolchild in Europe who hadn’t read about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Everyone but Hitler knew what was coming.

  The battle began on Pierino’s watch. There was no bugle call to arms, just the sudden stunning concussion of eight hundred shells exploding simultaneously. In an instant, all along the Italian lines, ripped and broken men screamed and bled, or flew upward in cones of flame and landed in pieces, or vanished into a faint pink mist that settled on the snow.

  The Soviet artillerymen loaded and fired, over and over and over, like clockwork executioners. The bombardment went on so long, Pierino could no longer remember a time before it began, or imagine a time when it would end. The entire 2nd Corps was destroyed before the ground attack began.

  When the shelling stopped, ten Soviet motorized divisions and two tank regiments roared across the frozen river. Outnumbered and outgunned from the start, the Italians fell back, clawed their way eastward, and retook ground only to be strafed from the air and attacked again by the inexhaustible Red infantry. Day after day, night after night, the battle went on and on. And through it all: the deafening howl of Katiuscia rockets, the whining roar of diving planes, the grinding metal shriek of tanks. The mind-murdering noise of battle.

  “G-G-Gesù! They—they just k-keep c-c-coming!” Pierino wept to a major he’d never seen before. “Wh-why d-don’t w-w-we ret-treat?”

  “The Germans—” The winded officer gasped, choking on the stench of cordite and blood and shit. “They said . . . hold the line . . . to the last man.”

  And where could you pull back to? Leave the trenches, you’d be in open country. In Russia. In winter.

  Pierino saw the man who threw the grenade that crippled him. Wiping spattered blood and flesh from his face, he stared witlessly at what was left of his right hand, and looked up to meet the Russian’s eyes for an instant before the grenadier’s own head exploded, poppy red.

  Cradling his arm as though it were a baby, Pierino bid good-bye to the battle and four of his fingers, and walked, hunched like a hag, to a field hospital eight kilometers west of the front. There were no narcotics, no anesthetics by that time. Appalled by others’ screams, Pierino kept silent while a hollow-eyed, grim-faced medic snipped away the last shreds of his thumb. “Brace yourself,” the medic warned. Pinning Pierino’s arm down, the medic scrubbed mud and grit out of his lacerated flesh with a surgeon’s nailbrush. Blinking away tears, Pierino watched the chopped meat at the end of his blunted arm being wrapped with dressings torn from the dead.

  The medic cut Pierino’s shirt off. “You’re lucky these didn’t punch through to the lungs,” he yelled, tweezing grenade fragments out of chest wounds Pierino hadn’t even noticed. “Get some sleep,” the medic said, and went on to someone else.

  Pierino eased a dead man’s greatcoat around his own bare shoulders and shuffled to a tent nearby. There he lay among moaning, sobbing men, who filled the air with cries of “Mamma! Acqua! Prego, acqua!” He had hardly closed his eyes when a colonel stuck his head into the hospital tent and shouted, “They’ve broken through! Run, boys! Run!”

  Later, Pierino heard the Soviets took one hundred thousand prisoners, many of them wounded. He himself flagged down a truck loaded with salvaged materiél, and begged the driver for a ride. “We’re not supposed to carry infantry,” the Neapolitan corporal told him, darting a look around. “Fuck it. Hop in the back.”

  Pierino hid behind ammunition crates and slipped into merciful unconsciousness, oblivious to the jarring, springless ride. Sometime during the retreat, his arm turned septic. He was half dead when the truck driver dropped him off at an Italian military hospital near Warsaw. “I can’t save the arm, but I can save you,” he heard the surgeon say just before the amputation. “You’re going home, son.”

  A bargain, Pierino thought as the anesthestic took hold. Half an arm was not too much to pay.

  By May of ’43, he was strong enough to travel. The Italian trains were crammed with wounded, each man accompanied by as many orderlies and escorts as possible. Hitler ordered his own shattered regiments to die in Russia, and called his allies cowards. Italy’s generals didn’t care; their pride now lay in saving their nation’s sons and brothers and husbands from pointless slaughter.

  This time the troop trains rolled west, with fewer men and fewer legs to stretch while the locomotive took on water and coal. But
one thing hadn’t changed: the freight cars packed with Jews. “They’re going to labor camps,” someone in the waiting room said. “That’s what I heard.”

  Two SS officers were waiting in the station for a different train. The smaller glanced up from his newspaper. “All’inferno,” he said in clear, supercilious Italian. “They are going to hell.”

  Stump throbbing, Pierino muttered, “Wh-wh-what’s that ssssupposed to mmm-mean?”

  The German said a word the Italians had never heard before. It sounded like a curse or a cough, like a man clearing his throat.

  A Sicilian draftee assigned to Pierino had an accent so thick even other Italians had to listen hard to understand him. Carmello stood and pointed violently first at the Germans in their fine black uniforms and then toward his own eyes. “I saw! I saw in dat city! Dey pulla d’ wife froma d’ husban’! Dey dragga d’ screamin’ chil’ren froma d’ papa’s arms!” His voice cracked, but not from youth. “Dey break uppa da families!”

  A hundred stony faces turned toward the Germans, whose hauteur did not alter under scrutiny. “You Italians,” the small one said with soft amusement. “So sentimental! Vermin don’t have families. They merely breed. It’s a public health matter, really.”

  He folded his newspaper and stood. His boots were polished to such a reflective shine, it seemed impossible that they were leather. Black glass rather, or obsidian. “I believe I’ll have a bite to eat,” he said. There was no café in that station, but the other German left as well.

  “I saw wit’a my own eyes,” the Sicilian whispered again and again. “I saw! I saw—”

  “What did you see?” Albert Blum asks.

  Pierino whirls, startled by this near, real voice, when he had been listening so intently to the remembered one. He takes a breath before he answers, giving himself time. “Fffreight t-t-t-trains, fffull of eb-brei.”

  And hands. So many hands. You have not seen them, signore? Pierino asks in thoughts that are still fluent. A hundred in each boxcar. A thousand on each train. Train after train, headed toward Poland, from the east and from the west. How many? Pierino wonders. How many in eight months?

  Albert frowns. “The Germans said they’d be resettled . . .”

  Think, Pierino’s face urges. Are the Germans so charitable, signore? Did they conquer the East so that Juden would have Lebensraum?

  “There was a Pole in Sainte-Gisèle,” the older man recalls uncertainly. “Jakub Landau. Ebreo, but—” He waves his hand around his head. “Very blond, like an Aryan. He said . . . crazy things. He told us, ‘They have factories for killing Jews in Poland.’ He was such a strange man! Maybe they shoot people for some infraction? For working too slowly, perhaps, or damaging a machine.”

  Pierino Lovera rubs the stump of his aching arm, and says no more. History will break your heart, he thinks, but I won’t wield the hammer.

  LEONI APARTMENT

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  “Mamma promised me a brother,” Angelo Soncini grumps. “She always lies.”

  Loosening a crinkly length of used wool, Lidia Leoni peers over her glasses at the misbuttoned shirt, short pants, and unmatched socks of a child who’s dressed himself. “Your mother didn’t lie, Angelo. Sometimes ladies are quite sure they’ll have a boy, and then it turns out to be a girl. Until a baby is born, only God knows what it will be. Don’t pick those. You’ll get an infection.”

  He turns attention from his scabby knees to the handbag slumping near him on the floor. Soon, the rhythmic tick of knitting needles is joined by the metallic click of the two gold beads that hold Lidia’s purse closed. “My other sister died,” Angelo says conversationally. “I didn’t care. She was a pest.” He glances up. “She was!”

  In Lidia’s considerable experience, seven-year-olds are frequently morose and sour little people. The best policy for dealing with them is to wait until they’re eight, when they get silly.

  Click, click, click goes the purse clasp. “Maybe Rosina will die, too!” Angelo says, brightening a bit.

  “Your new sister arrived a little early, but I’m afraid Rosina is just fine.”

  “Accidents happen,” Angelo reminds her darkly. “Mamma told Sara, ‘Don’t use that coal oven till we get it fixed,’ but Sara didn’t believe a stove could kill a person.”

  Lidia nods. The boy tells this story nearly every day.

  “When me and Mamma got back, Sara was all crumped down, and Altira’s eyes were all white, like this.” He demonstrates gruesomely.

  “My daughter Ester was the baby of the family for four years,” Lidia tells him, purling. “When her brother Renzo was born, Ester was very annoyed. She didn’t hate Renzo. She hated not being so special as before.”

  The child watches her hands, momentarily fascinated by the way old moth-eaten sweaters can become a new blanket. “Can I look in your purse? Please?”

  She nods. Angelo begins to dig. “I know a lot of dead people,” he brags. “Both my nonne are dead.”

  “How sad! My grandmothers are dead, too,” Lidia confides, turning the needles.

  “And one of my nonni is dead, plus Altira.” He holds out an ancient candy he’s found at the bottom of her purse. “May I have this? Please?” Lidia nods. “Catholic funerals are better than sitting shiva,” Angelo decides, unwrapping cellophane so old it disintegrates in his fingers. “You go, and it’s over. Shiva lasts forever! After Altira died, there was a scary man. He kept looking in the windows.”

  Lidia has never been sure whether the scary man was real or just a bad dream.

  “One time, a lot of Blackshirts came, and they were yelling, and Nonno Casutto shot at them!”

  “Yes, I remember,” Lidia says aridly. A stray bullet lodged in her kitchen ceiling that evening.

  “The police came. Nonno Casutto didn’t care. He wouldn’t go to services either. Mamma was always yelling at him.”

  “Angelo, I live right across the street, and I’ve never once heard your mother raise her voice in anger.” In complete and utter exasperation, perhaps . . .

  “She yells soft! May I draw with this?” he asks, squirming around to show her the fountain pen from her purse. “Please?”

  Lidia finds him a pencil instead, and chooses a copy of Cinema from a pile of magazines. “I suspect there are ladies in this who would look very nice with beards.”

  “Do you have any little boys like me?” he asks, turning pages.

  Lidia had forgotten how much children talk. “My little boy is all grown up. You know Signor Leoni—he’s my son, Renzo.”

  Angelo thinks this information over; at seven, the notion that grown men were once boys is still hearsay. “I know a kid who says Signor Leoni is a galeotto,” he says slyly. “What does that mean?”

  “It means jailbird, Angelo, and something else very vulgar. Don’t use that word in my home.”

  “Now you’re yelling at me.” Lower lip protruding, he looks for an old woman in the magazine and scribbles furiously through the face of a character actress in her forties. Lidia is flattered. “Everybody’s always yelling at me,” he mutters. “Angelo, be quiet!” he whines in what he believes to be his mother’s voice. “Angelo, you’ll wake Rosina up! Angelo, play outside!” This reminds him of his earlier grievance. “Mamma does too lie! She said the war was over, but they bombed us last night again.”

  “Being wrong is not the same as lying. The war we fought against the Allies is over, but now the Germans are using our factories to make things for their army, so the English are still bombing—”

  He’s stopped listening. World politics are difficult enough for adults these days. She reaches down to lift his chin. “Angelo, listen carefully. If we can save a life by lying—our own or someone else’s—it is our duty to lie. That’s why I’m pretending to be Catholic.”

  “Babbo says that’s wrong. Babbo says if he carries the Torah to God’s people, he’s safe. ’Cause God protects him. ’Cause he’s doing a mitzvah.”

  “Your father is a
very brave man.” Foolhardy, but brave. “Just remember: you don’t have to tell Germans the truth. If a German asks where a road goes, tell him you don’t know, even if you do. Or tell him it goes to Milan, even if it really goes to Genoa. If he asks, ‘Do Jews live here?’ You must say, ‘They all left!’ Or you could say, ‘We kicked them all out!’ Germans will like that. Those lies can save lives, Angelo—”

  “Do you know any other dead people?”

  This is what’s so tiring about children. Endless changes in direction, the constant need to adjust. “Ye-es,” she says slowly, summoning patience like a moderately obedient dog. “I know a lot of dead people.” She goes back to her knitting. “I had an uncle who died before I was born.”

  “Then you didn’t know him!”

  “Don’t be pedantic. My uncle fought with the House of Savoia against the ninth Pius. The popes owned the whole middle of Italy back then, and Pius the Ninth was a terrible man. My uncle was killed in battle, but he was so brave, the king gave my grandmother a medal.”

  “The king? Himself?”

  “Vittorio Emanuele the Second! The very king who unified Italy and made us equal citizens, because Jews fought so well.” Lidia decides not to confuse the child with her current opinion of the monarchy.

  “Who else do you know that’s dead?” Angelo asks eagerly. “’Specially soldiers! I’m going to be a soldier, and I’m going to drop bombs and shoot bad people.”

  After six daughters, Lidia was always shocked when Renzo came home bloody and grinning; she is retroactively comforted that even a rabbi’s son starts out as barbaric as her own once was. “Two of my nephews died in the last war, fighting the Austrians. So did my daughter Susanna’s first love. Davide was a nice boy, but he was killed before they married. It was very sad. And then there was a terrible sickness called influenza—”

  Footsteps in the hallway slow. An envelope slides under the door. Angelo runs over to get it. “Is it a secret message?”

  “Just some papers.” Lidia flips through the documents. “Very serviceable,” she remarks, and goes to the kitchen to sign several of them. “Put these in my purse, please, Angelo.”