A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “You should have been on your way to Mass by then anyway, you lazy thing! I’ve already been to the market, and I got the only decent pears in Sant’Andrea!”

  Renzo rolls his eyes and backs off the balcony in a strategic retreat. Lidia Leoni and Rina Dolcino have been bickering for decades. One thin, the other round— Stick and Ball, the neighborhood children call them. Once the game’s begun, it’s impossible to tell who’s hitting whom.

  Mirella sets her own broom aside, in too good a mood to be drawn into even the most affectionate of arguments. The war is over, she thinks for the fiftieth time this morning. The bombing will end. The king will repeal the race laws, and Angelo can go to school with the other children. Soon it will be Rosh Hashana, and life will start fresh. Everything will be as it was before. Except for Altira…

  Her eyes fill, but she blinks away the tears. Altira is gone, but the new baby will arrive with the new year. It is time, she thinks resolutely, to be happy again. “Have either of you been able to find soap?” she asks the older women. “All this smoke! I’m dying to wash the walls.”

  “She’s getting close,” Rina says shrewdly. “I always washed walls the night before I went into labor.”

  “I have three weeks to go, Signora Dolcino.”

  “Verdi’s had soap two days ago,” Lidia says.

  “They charge too much,” Rina counters. “Try Alesci’s instead.”

  Shops, prices, and the availability of necessities are the topics of the next squabble. It continues long after the rabbi’s wife has gone back inside, until Rina runs out of opinions and gazes at the Soncinis’ doorway. “Oh, Lidia, I hope the new baby is all right! Mirella went through so much with Altira, poor little thing. You know, I thought at the time it was a mistake to keep that child at home—”

  “Don’t be morbid, Rina. Mirella has moved on, and so should you!” Lidia leans over the balcony and lowers her voice. “Do you know that new man down at the archbishop’s office?”

  “Don Osvaldo? Yes, yes. A Triestino. Stuffy, but a good heart.”

  Lidia hesitates. She would trust Rina Dolcino with the lives of her grandchildren, but an unknown priest Renzo barely knows? “I’m coming down,” she tells her neighbor. “Cara mia, we need to talk.”

  MARITIME ALPS

  FRANCE

  Before the war, climbers from Italy and France hiked in these mountains to escape the heat and noise of urban life. After sunset, they’d hear only the hoot of an owl or the leathery hush of bat wings, and the unnerving nighttime silence could keep them awake in their woolen blankets. Claudette Blum, by contrast, has spent a dreamless night in the deep, unmoving sleep of a growing child, exhausted by the day’s exertions, until now.

  Her eyelids flutter and snap open in the predawn darkness. All the small noises are near and comforting— her father’s soft snore, the soldier’s deep-chested breathing— but something woke her up. She rises onto an elbow and listens hard. A moment more, and she slumps with relief, matching sound to sight: the pat-pat-skitter-pat of falling autumn leaves.

  They’re alone in this small high clearing: Claudette, her father, and Santino Cicala. Most of the refugees spent the night at a mountainside collection point for a logging operation. Their soldiers worked in teams to lift whole tree trunks from a giant’s woodpile and heaved the logs onto a huge blaze, sending a column of sparks and smoke toward the stars. Santino shook his head at the fire. “The Luftwaffe will see it.” He insisted the Blums move on in a darkness that seemed only slightly less menacing than the Germans.

  They’d have been warmer by the bonfire, but Claudette is grateful for the soldier’s concern. Her father’s optimism annoys and frightens her, but Santino has relieved her of the need to worry, a responsibility her father has obviously relinquished.

  A blush of light tints the sky beyond the mountain. Too cold and hungry to go back to sleep, Claudette sits up. Every morning for months, she’s awakened to her father’s slack face and its gray stubble. He is of no interest, but the soldier is new to her. Santino’s face is lined around the eyes, but his hair is thick and shoe-polish black, so tightly waved it looks marcelled. She cannot guess his age, but he is… mature, she decides, not old like Papa. Serious, and silent. Not handsome like Brigadiere Giovanetti, but he has a wonderful smile.

  Perhaps sensing her inspection, the infantryman rouses, yawning noiselessly. Mouthing, “Buon giorno,” and then “Scusi,” he rolls to his feet with easy strength and disappears into the woods.

  Claudette brushes bits of dried leaf from her hair and rubs her arms to generate some heat. For a few minutes, she sits on one heel, but it does no good. She jostles her father’s shoulder. “Papa? Papa!”

  “What? What is it?” he cries.

  “I have to go!”

  He flops back onto the ground, fingers digging into his eye sockets. “Na, zum Donnerwetter! For this, you woke me up?” Groaning, he pulls off the pair of socks he wore to keep his hands warm and rummages through his suitcase. He locates the squares he cut from newspaper in preparation for this trek— only yesterday? Handing one sheet to Claudette, he points to a bush.

  She’s still appalled by the necessity of dropping her pants and squatting, but she’s already learned the first lesson of Alpine hygiene: face uphill. This time, the relief is so exquisite, she forgets to be embarrassed. “That’s really not so bad,” she says, returning to the campsite.

  Santino is already back, and he puts a finger to his lips, glancing at her father. Albert chants Shakharis, bowing and swaying, eyes closed. Claudette puts herself to work, preparing a meager breakfast for the three of them.

  “That’s Jewish praying!” Santino exclaims when the chant is complete. “What are those things— those little boxes?”

  Claudette meets her father’s eyes. This is not a subject she has ever heard discussed. Jews know; goyim never ask.

  Unwrapping the long laces of his tefillin, Albert summons his Italian. “The Torah— la Bibbia vecchio, sì? It tells that we should love God with tutto cuore—” He taps on the left side of his chest.

  “Tutto il cuore,” Santino corrects solemnly, accepting the little cube of cheese Claudette offers.

  “Sì. Love God with all the heart, and tutta l’anima—all our spirit. E tutta la forza—all our strength. The Bible also tells us to bind— legare, sì?—bind these words on our hands and in front of our eyes, so we remember them always.” Albert shrugs. “Who knows what that means? How do you bind words in front of your eyes? So we write the words about tutto cuore, tutta anima, tutta forza, and put them inside the little boxes. Then we tie the boxes to our hands and foreheads when we pray.”

  Chewing, Santino nods repeatedly, mouth turned down in thoughtful consideration. “È bello,” he decides. “That’s a good prayer.”

  “The Torah says we must put those words by the doors of our houses and on our gates,” Albert adds, waving toward the forest. “No more house. No more gate. Tefillin are all I have.”

  “The boxes look like little houses,” Santino points out helpfully. “Is that why they’re shaped that way? What’s wrong?”

  Albert is staring at his left hand. “My wedding ring is missing.”

  Swallowing her second, and last, mouthful of dry bread, Claudette shifts to German, too. “Are you sure you were wearing it?”

  “Of course, I was wearing it— I never take it off!” He combs through low vegetation and dry leaves with his fingers. “Don’t just stand there, Claudette! Help me find it!”

  “C’è male?” Santino asks.

  “Mein Ring,” Albert says, unable to remember the word in Italian. “Mariage,” he says in French, and then “Moglie!”— wife— in Italian. Albert points to the place where years of constriction have compressed the small muscles of his finger, and makes a circling motion. Santino’s face lights up, then darkens with dismay. Dropping onto all fours, he joins the search.

  When a few minutes of scrabbling through the stones and twigs produce nothing but scra
tches and skinned knuckles, Claudette sits back on her haunches. “We’ll never find it,” she declares, clapping dirt from her palms. “We’ll have to leave it behind.” Fingers raking, her father ignores her. “Papa, the Germans could be right behind us.” She means only to be practical and to justify her impatience, but speaking makes the prospect real. “Papa? Please— let’s just go!”

  “Claudette, I don’t expect you to understand, but I do expect you to—”

  A loud, unresonant crack! not one hundred meters away startles him into silence. The three of them freeze. Crouched to run, Claudette looks to Santino, who listens, still as a deer. When they hear someone speaking Polish, Santino picks up a branch and mimes breaking it. Smiling reassurance, he gestures for Claudette to resume the search, but she folds her arms across her chest. “That could have been the Germans, Papa!” she insists in a tense whisper. “It’s just a ring, Papa!” Terrified now, clutching her father’s arm, she tries to pull him to his feet. “Papa, let’s go! This is stupid!”

  In one motion, Albert Blum straightens and slaps his daughter’s face. “It’s not just… a ring!”

  It is the home he and Paula made during sixteen years of marriage, his children’s baby photos, mementos of his own youth. It is his orderly office, and meticulously cared-for wardrobe, the reputation he built as an accountant, accurate and scrupulously honest. It is everything that was, and is no more. He’s barely slept, freezing and miserable on a rocky mountainside. Every muscle and all his joints ache from yesterday’s awful climb, and God knows he’s as frightened of capture as Claudette. But months ago, he left his wife and two young sons on a train platform, expecting to see them a few days later. Now they have vanished, like everything else, and Albert Blum cannot— will not—accept another loss.

  “It’s not just a ring,” he says again.

  Claudette stands. “Fine,” she says, refusing to cry. “Let the Nazis catch us. Let them send us to a camp! See if I care!”

  Full sunlight bursts over the mountain and finds its way to the ground. Santino lies flat, resting his head on forearms thick with muscle. “There! You see?” she cries, in tones of furious vindication. “Santino thinks the ring is stupid, too!” She wants her father to be humiliated. She wants him to admit he was wrong to care about the ring, wrong to hit her. She wishes the Germans would smash through the trees and arrest them all, this very moment! She’d rather be right than free.

  When the slanting light reveals no telltale glimmer in the leaves, Santino starts to rise, then stops, struck by a thought. Reaching for the socks Albert used as mittens during the night, he shakes one, then the other. A small, bright object falls out. “Ecco, signore! Here it is!”

  Hand trembling, Albert takes the ring from Santino’s cupped palm. The soldier smiles at Claudette, who glares resentfully and stomps away. He shrugs, unconcerned. “I have sisters,” he tells her father. “Girls are like that sometimes.”

  Santino hefts the suitcases and trudges up the trail behind Claudette. Albert wipes damp eyes, blows his nose, makes an awkward fist with his thumb over the ring. “My thanks I place before you, O Lord,” he whispers, and continues his assault on the unseen summit.

  The Alps are not the impregnable fortress walls they seem. Hannibal has passed this way, and Caesar, and Charles VII, and Francis I, and Napoleon. The Romans, the Lombards, the Franks. Russian and Austrian and papal armies have all surged across this mountain range. Ordinary people have fled from one side to the other in times of war, hoping to put high rock and bad weather between themselves and those who’d do them harm.

  They’ve all added to the ancient layered repository of possessions that seemed essential at sea level. Treasured books, silver kiddush cups, and heavy brass candlesticks now come to rest above long-buried cuirasses and pikes. Iron kettles rust atop heavy clay pots. Carved stone deities, who might not be so helpful on the other side of the mountain anyway, overlie flint tools and traces of rush baskets that carried dried fish and red ocher. The trail across these mountains has been in use for seven thousand years.

  Time after time, the path crests a rise only to descend sharply before ribboning over an even steeper slope beyond. Chestnut and beech give way to pine and fir, which themselves become dwarfish and gradually disappear. Above the treeline, ancient ice has carved a bowl of rock between two peaks. Barren of all but lichen, its surface is scoured yearly by stones and ice, rain and wind. Stumbling exacts an increasing toll.

  The back of Claudette’s neck feels charred by the sun. Her muscles are rubbery. Too often, she loses her footing in her father’s slick-bottomed city shoes, coming down hard on hands and knees already bloody. Finally she crumples where she stands, waiting for Santino and her father to arrive at her side before bursting into angry tears. “I can’t go any farther! I never should have worn these stupid shoes! This is all your fault, Papa!”

  “What exactly… is my fault?” her father gasps. “The war, Claudette? The Alps? Am I responsible… for how hard… rocks are?”

  Santino says something. Reluctantly, Claudette looks to her father for an explanation. “Save your tears, miss,” Albert translates. “You may need them later.”

  His own dogged momentum broken, Albert, too, sinks onto the bald stone. There’s been no water since noon, when the path last snaked past a spring. His toenails feel as though they’re being pried off his feet. His swollen fingers look like bratwurst. The ring finger that shrank in last night’s cold now throbs like a second heart, and the word “gangrene” flickers through his mind. Oh, Paula! he thinks, worn out with being the object of their daughter’s frightened peevishness. I should have taken the boys and left Claudette with you.

  To make peace, he holds out his puffy hand so Claudette can see how awful his finger looks. “You were right,” he offers. “I should have forgotten about the ring.” Her shoulders relax a fraction, and Albert puts an arm around her. “I miss your mother.”

  “I even miss David and Jacques,” she sobs, and laughs at this evidence of extremity. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “They had it easy, sitting with Mama on that train!”

  “After the war, you can brag to them. They’ll be sorry they missed this adventure.”

  They cling to each other until Albert realizes with his body what his mind has resisted for some months now. She’s nearly grown, and he has no idea what she does and doesn’t know. Shuddering at the idea of such a conversation, he watches a little group tramping down a slope, one gully back. The Brösslers, he realizes. Steffi rides on Duno’s shoulders. Liesl has slowed the family down— too big to carry and too small to climb well. Frieda Brössler could speak to Claudette, Albert realizes. I’ll ask her when we get to Italy.

  A few feet away, Santino has hunkered down on the slanting rock face, glad to rest while the Blums pull themselves together. The sky is vast, Madonna blue, and unmarred by clouds. He can see the French countryside clearly. A swarm of Focke-Wulf 190s would have easy work up here, strafing soldiers and refugees with nothing but moss for cover, but there’s been no pursuit. He expects the British or Americans to be waiting on the other side of the mountain, given no more opposition by Italy’s armies. His own self-imposed objective is within reach. The Blums are only hours from safety. I’ll get them settled, Santino thinks comfortably. Then it’ll be south for me. A boat from Genoa or Sant’Andrea. Home.

  He looks up, trying not to grimace. An officer told him that the Pass of Aurelius was popular with serious mountain climbers from Italy and France, before the war. The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.

  “How much farther?” Signor Blum asks.

  Santino makes two mountains of his fingers and gestures a short distance over the space between them. “Not far,” he guesses vaguely, “but a lot of climbing first.”

  And the mountain begrudges every step. By late afternoon, Claudia has slowed to a crawl, and Signor Blum’
s lips are blue. Altitude and sun glare off granite have given Santino a fierce headache made worse by hunger, but he hasn’t complained aloud. The Blums probably think he’s stoic, or naturally quiet. Truth is, Santino’s mother tongue is a Calabrian dialect. He learned basic Italian during his four years of compulsory school. His working vocabulary consists of curses and obscenities, picked up in the army. He does not wish to slip and offend a refined gentleman like Signor Blum with bad language, and yet the moment has arrived: his unhappiness demands expression.

  Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower, whom Santino holds responsible for this disorganized retreat and who is, without doubt, at this very moment engaged in contracting enviable diseases from shameless women who rouge their lips.

  Recognizing the sentiment, if not the words, Signor Blum holds up a bruised and bleeding hand. “Santino, you tried. This’s impossible. Leave the valises.”

  Santino hates to do it, but shrugs philosophically. The only thing worse than dumping the suitcases now, after lugging them so far, is falling off the side of this stinking mountain while trying to carry them over the pass.

  Kneeling awkwardly, Albert Blum opens first one bag, then the other. He removes the Giovanetti passports, a photo of Paula with the children. Both toothbrushes and the can of tooth powder. His razor, the remaining squares of newspaper. His tefillin. All these he wraps in his prayer shawl, making a vagrant’s gunnysack. The small, silver-bound prayer book he hands to Claudette. “Your mother gave me this siddur on our first anniversary. Keep it in your pocket.” He takes out the last of their food— two rolls, a little cheese. Closes the valises, locking them carefully, the better to make them fly. “Prego,” he says to Santino, and gestures down the mountain.