A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “We’re not made of sugar— we won’t melt!” her father says with breathless cheer.

  Santino sets the suitcases down and flexes his cramped fingers. Artillery, he thinks. Three minutes’ rest this time.

  Far below, just east of town, Rivka Brössler sits alone, admiring a sunset made glorious by low clouds first gilded, then enameled with Fabergé colors. “The best view in Sainte-Gisèle!” her grandson Duno told her once. “Do you like it, Oma?” Rivka waved her hand, as though flicking at a fly. It was too much trouble to answer.

  Not even the most charitable of her descendants ascribe her present state to age alone. True, she’s retreated from the world more decisively since the Brösslers left Vienna, but even as a young mother, Rivka always seemed distracted. Long ago, her family left the Ukraine for the opportunity and relative safety of Austria; they were better off, but something was always reminding Rivka of home.

  Her youngest son, Herrmann, grew up in Vienna, embarrassed by his mother’s Slavic vowels and awkward syntax. Now, when she speaks at all, it is in Ukrainian, a language Herrmann never learned.

  “She’s gone back to the Ukraine in her mind,” a doctor from Holland told the Brösslers. “Think of it! No one left alive who calls her by her first name. Such loneliness, to be only Mother, or Grandmother, or Frau Brössler, but never Rivka again. You are sad to see her this way, but she’s happy in her memories. Sit with her,” he advised. “Keep her company. Enjoy her contentment.”

  Everyone thinks she’s senile, but Rivka knows she’s not. She’s tired, that’s all. Tired of Herrmann and Frieda quarreling, of the grandchildren making noise. Tired of new places, new languages. People coming and going, with their names and opinions and rules and demands. Life is one damned thing after another, Rivka decided when they left Austria behind. To hell with it.

  Since moving to the Jewish nursing home last spring, Rivka has spent the greater part of every day sitting out on this arcaded wooden balcony waiting for the sunset. Tonight, the air is soft. The scent of roses rises from a nearby garden. Best of all, there’s a big storm coming. Rivka settles down happily, listening to booming thunder. She’s always enjoyed the drama of a nice storm.

  She sneaks a look over her shoulder at the clock. It’s past time, but no one’s come to bully her into bed. Watching the lightning, she feels like a naughty child, thrilled to stay up late, and like a child, she falls asleep although she’d rather not. Memories blur into dreams, and back again. Who was that girl in the dream? Cousin Natasha! Now, what brought her to mind?

  When Rivka wakes again, it’s to the sound of footsteps. She doesn’t see the soldier enter her room, her attention caught instead by the people running in the streets, just beneath her balcony. “Natasha, look!” she says, before she can stop herself. Now I really am senile! she thinks.

  She smiles and shakes her head at her own foolishness, which spoils the soldier’s shot. “Scheisse,” he swears irritably. Averting his face from the fountaining blood, he presses the gun barrel to the old Jew’s skull, and finishes the job.

  9 September 1943

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  “Mamma,” Renzo Leoni calls, wincing at his own voice. “For God’s sake, get the door!”

  He doesn’t expect a reply. She might be at the market, but it’s just as likely that his mother is sitting at the table, content to let him pay the price for last night’s binge.

  “Signor Leoni!” the rabbi’s son yells again. “Are you awake yet? My babbo needs ten men for morning prayers, and I’m only seven, so I can’t, so you have to!”

  “Your babbo can go to hell, and take the minyan with him,” Renzo mutters. He limps as quickly as he can through an apartment crammed with generations of dusty furniture. Piles of knitting and mending slump beside every chair. Books, cinema and fashion magazines, newspapers, and mail obscure every horizontal surface. Before the race laws, peasant girls helped with the endless heavy housework of middle-class families. Now most Jewish housewives struggle to maintain their prewar standards. Not Lidia Leoni. “It’s a political protest,” she says.

  Before Renzo reaches the door, Angelo Soncini has banged on it three more times, kicking it once for good measure. “My mamma says she’ll make you breakfast! Signor Leoni, are you—”

  “Belandi, Angelo! Stop it! You’re killing me!” Renzo unlocks the door.

  Angelo takes a step backward, staring.

  “Inform your esteemed babbo,” Renzo tells the boy in a low and careful voice, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, but this is absolutely the last time. Tell your beautiful mammina,” he adds with conviction, “that if I come within one hundred meters of food during the next three hours, we’ll all regret it.” Angelo looks blank. “No breakfast, thank you,” Renzo explains. “I’m not feeling entirely well.”

  Angelo looks a bit stunned, but he nods gravely and takes off for home. Appalled by the amount of noise a small boy can generate during the simple act of descending a carpetless staircase, Renzo closes the door as quietly as he can and shuffles to the nearest chair.

  Pretty girls and handsome women gaze at him in the dim, divided light of the shuttered salon. His mother’s apartment is his father’s Uffizi, its walls a gallery of family portraits, mute testimony to her late husband’s professional talent. Beautifully lit, cunningly composed, the largest photo was taken thirty years ago. Round-faced and chubby, the long-awaited son grins toothlessly on his triumphant mother’s lap. Around these two, the stair-step Leoni sisters are arrayed, elegant as Romanovs in white organdy, their hand-me-downs kept quietly stylish by their mother’s own clever fingers. Rachele, then eighteen and already engaged to Tranquillo Loeb, a successful attorney ten years her senior. At two-year intervals: Bianca, Elena, Debora, and Susanna, each slender and striking, with their mother’s aristocratic bearing and Torinese fairness. Then a sad gap: two miscarriages, both girls, and another daughter who died shortly after birth, followed by sturdy little Ester, four in the photo, a proprietary hand resting on her mother’s arm. And then? When hope had faded, a son and heir for the proud photographer: Renzo, himself. The little prince.

  “Renzo flew before he could walk.” That’s the family legend, and it’s very nearly true. With six sisters to carry him like a doll, his feet rarely touched the ground before he was three, and his earliest memory is of sailing through the air.

  It must have been spring, and close to sunset. A small boy awakens from an afternoon nap at his grandparents’ home. Downstairs: the high-pitched chatter and squeal of girls, their mother’s imperious orders mercifully muffled. Their father, silent, yearns for the peace of his darkroom, no doubt. The boy squirms onto a rush-bottomed chair in front of an open window. He is alone, and enchanted by a thousand swifts that soar and wheel just out of reach. Dark wings flash against a lavender sky. The birds plunge, disappearing. Sweep upward in tight formation. The rushes prickle his bare feet, so the boy levers himself onto the broad stuccoed windowsill. Squirming forward, he dangles breathlessly, head in the air, rump in the bedroom. The swifts dive again, and in a moment of toddler ecstasy, the boy hurls himself after them, arms wide as wings.

  “His maiden flight,” Emanuele Leoni called it with perverse paternal pride, telling the story to anyone who’d listen and admire the plaster casts on his son’s little wrists.

  His sisters watched young Renzo more carefully after that. Escaping their vigilance became part of the game. He did so with a fluid combination of bald-faced lies and physical daring, acquainted at an early age with Sant’Andrea’s crowded rooftops and sheer cliffsides. If a few weeks passed without his appearance in the emergency room of the local hospital, the white-clad nursing nuns telephoned to make sure Renzo hadn’t been killed. “You should enroll him in flying lessons,” one advised when Renzo turned fourteen. “Perhaps he’d learn to control his landings.”

  In the spring of 1927, over his wife’s objections, Emanuele Leoni’s son became the youngest member of the Sant’Andrea Aviation Club. And whil
e there was no photograph to record Renzo’s initial crash landing, other moments in his son’s career as a pilot were immortalized.

  “Look at this!” Emanuele would order clients who came to the studio to document an engagement, a wedding, a bar mitzvah. “That’s Renzo— he was over the harbor in an old Savoia 17 when the engine shaft broke. See this? That’s Italo Balbo himself, visiting my boy in the Benghazi Hospital. Renzo was flying a Macchi 52R with a thousand-horsepower Fiat AS1 engine. He set a new speed record just before one of the wings ripped off. Here he is getting his commission in the Royal Italian Air Force. Renzo joined up the day after we declared war on Abyssinia. That snapshot’s him in a field hospital in ’36. Led a squadron back in a sandstorm. His own engine failed just before he landed, but Renzo didn’t lose a single man. See this? The Medaglia d’Argento. My boy’s a hero!”

  In thirteen years as a pilot, Renzo Leoni crawled out of five bloody wrecks. Blinded by fog, deafened by thunder, he’s flown over the Mediterranean and the Alps. He’s been lost and low on fuel above the Libyan desert and trackless Ethiopian wastes, and shot at by Abyssinian anti-aircraft guns. But it was Emanuele Leoni who was buried with that Silver Medal; Renzo took it off the day it was awarded, and never spoke of it again.

  The familiar sensation rises in his throat. Renzo pushes himself upright and vectors through the maze of tables and chairs and chests, trying not to add bruises to his shins. Centuries of settling have rendered the marble floor uneven, but the uncompromisingly modern bathroom is only ten years old. And surprisingly clean, given his mother’s attitude toward housekeeping.

  Unwilling to increase the glare off the white ceramic tiles and nickel-plated fixtures, Renzo kneels before the toilet without turning on the light. He brings up bad brandy and outraged stomach acid in two efficient gouts. It takes considerably longer to make his crash-battered knees and ankles straighten, but he gets to his feet and hauls down on the chain, relieved that the plumbing still works after the last English air raid. Mouth sour, he unbuttons his rumpled shirt and pulls off the cotton singlet beneath it. With stately deliberation, he gives the cold-water tap a quarter turn. Splashes his face and chest. Brushes his teeth, and spits. Only then does he confront the man in the mirror.

  The asymmetries of his chest are familiar: hard knobs of badly healed ribs on the right, a ragged scar on the left where his collarbone punched through the skin. Dark and anarchic, his hair is a chaos of short brown curls above a broken nose that gives a hawkish look to the lined and haggard face. Two years in Abyssinia, three in Ventotene Prison. A total of twenty-nine months in a variety of hospitals… Closer to forty than thirty, his face says, lying.

  It’s just the hangover, he lies in return, stropping a straight razor.

  Friends on leave have carried home lurid tales of drunken parties hosted by German officers. Hitler may be an abstemious health-food fanatic, but schnapps and beer fuel his military, and Renzo can now confirm the stories of prodigious Teutonic boozing. When he got Schramm back to the Bellavista, the German had sobered up enough to drink some more and insisted that Renzo join him. Curious about Schramm, and thirsty himself, Renzo was easy to persuade. They found a tavern near the hotel and sat at a corner table: a comity of two, ignoring the armistice celebration around them.

  Night came. The bar emptied. Schramm talked on, and on. He spoke of the eastern front, and the Red Army. He spoke of the Allies, and the Japanese. He speculated about the effect of Italy’s surrender on the course of the war. Then, when the yawning waiter deposited yet another bottle on the table, Schramm spoke, at last, of Germany. “Four long years, we fought the whole world to a standstill. Then we wake up one morning in 1918, and the war is lost!” Schramm shook his head in dazed amazement. “One day the empire’s there, and the next— pfft! Gone. And who presumes to take the kaiser’s place? Friedrich Ebert. A harness maker whose magnificent ambition was to make Germany a nation of bureaucrats! Governments rising and falling like drunks in a gutter. Influenza. That filthy, humiliating treaty! Demonstrations, strikes, riots. Christ! The inflation—!”

  “The Jew bankers getting fat while real Germans starved,” Renzo supplied, mashing a cigarette into an ashtray. “That was shit, you know. The kaiser financed the war by printing money. Inflation wrecked the banks, not Jews.”

  Schramm never paused. “Everything we had— gone, overnight. Six million men unemployed, and if you had a job, you were paid in worthless heaps of Weimar paper. Then the stock market crashed, and the whole world went to hell!”

  “And of course, it was the Jew speculators who did it.”

  “Yes, but why?” Schramm asked, surprising Renzo for the first time. “The Jews lost everything, too! The Depression dragged everybody down!”

  “Why indeed?” Renzo asked cannily. “This is the subtlety, Schramm. This is the key! For Jews to cause a catastrophe that ruined them along with everyone else makes… no… sense. So it must be a conspiracy, right? A diabolical Jew conspiracy! I’ve had three years to think about this, my friend.” He poured them both another drink. “Life was shit. Hitler had the most appealing solution. Just get rid of the Jews.”

  “Put a stop to all that useless parliamentary crap,” Schramm said, remembering. “March together as comrades! Rebuild the German nation—”

  “And reclaim your place in the sun!” Renzo declared, chin jutting, mouth turned down, nodding vigorously at his own rhetoric: Mussolini with dark and coiling hair.

  “Aha!” Schramm cried, a spongy cough merging with the exhalation. “You Italians did the same thing. Americans, Russians, the Japanese. We all wanted to march behind men who knew what to do! Your family, your teachers, your friends. Newspapers, the radio! All saying the same things—”

  “Democracy is degenerate! Greatness lies in struggle! Virtue lies in blood!” Renzo recited grandly. “Say yes to the leader, and you can wear this handsome uniform. Say yes, and you’re a patriot!”

  “You’re part of something big, and new, and powerful! You’re better than you were alone.”

  Renzo offered Schramm one of his own cigarettes. “Say no, and you’re a coward and a traitor. Say no, and you’re in jail.”

  “Say no, and you’re dead.” Schramm lit up, coughed himself blue, and shoved his empty cigarette case across the table. “Keep it! This’s my last one, I swear! You should quit, too. Tobacco will give you cancer. We proved it years ago.”

  Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”

  Staring at the hollow-cheeked image in the mirror, Renzo lathers his face. Feel nothing. Believe nothing. Do nothing, he thinks. Lots of practice at that—

  The banging on the door begins again. The razor blade knicks his chin. Muttering curses, he hurries down the hall, barefoot and bare-chested, wiping shaving soap and blood from his face. The instant he unlocks the door, it flies open, revealing a short, stout man nearing sixty, who points at him furiously.

  “Pazzo! Madman! You are going to get yourself killed, and you’ll drag the whole family down with you!”

  “Buon giorno to you, too, Tranquillo,” Renzo replies as genially as he can. “Always a pleasure to see my darling sister’s husb—”

  “Shut that door! What time did you get home last night? Your mother was frantic—”

  “Tranquillo, my mother has never been frantic in her life.”

  “We thought you’d been arrested—”

  “For what? Taking a tourist back to his hotel?” Renzo slouches toward the dining room and lowers himself gingerly into a chair.

  “Then I find out you’re not just drinking yourself senseless again, you’re doing it with an SS officer! You were supposed to be helping your own people! Instead you go off with some Nazi and—”

  “Schramm’s not a Nazi, Tranquillo. He’s a combat surgeon.”

  �
�You don’t think he can be both?” Tranquillo pushes the shutters open, grimly pleased when Renzo swears at the light and twists away. “Let me tell you something. German doctors invented the race policy that put you in prison.”

  “Tranquillo! Please! Come back and lecture me this afternoon,” Renzo suggests, elbows on the table, aching head in his hands.

  Tranquillo sits across from him, round arms crossed above a round belly. “Renzo, we have two, perhaps three weeks before the Gestapo starts rounding up Jews—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, what kind of Jew am I? If my mother didn’t live across the street from a synagogue—”

  “Renzo, what exactly do you think the word judenfrei means? The Nazis don’t consult a rabbinical jury to decide if you’re pious enough to arrest! In the next twenty-four hours, our existence will become a criminal offense. Renzo, the Gestapo aren’t like the Blackshirts! The Nazis won’t just force a liter of castor oil down your throat and humiliate the shit out of you, you idiot! They’ll—”

  “Tranquillo!” Slender and severe at seventy, Lidia Leoni has shut the door to her apartment as quietly as she stepped through it. “War,” she declares, “is no excuse for vulgarity.”

  Startled by her resonant contralto, Tranquillo leaps to his feet, murmuring courtesies. He reaches for his mother-in-law’s parcels, but she offers them to Renzo instead, presenting a lightly powdered cheek for a ceremonial kiss. “Take the groceries into the kitchen and put them away for me, will you, please? I couldn’t find much— there are roadblocks outside the city.” Eyes on Tranquillo, Lidia waits until Renzo has left the room. “You come into my home,” she asks softly, “and call my son names?”

  Tranquillo Loeb is a decorated hero of the Battle of Caporetto, a respected attorney from whom Catholic clients seek advice, in defiance of the race laws. His modest stature rarely concerns him, but even now, her height reduced by age, Lidia is taller than her son-in-law, and he takes two steps back to compensate. “I apologize, signora, but someone has to explain to him—”