A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “The Catholics who took over Emanuele’s studio— they’re helping.”

  “You’ll need the stamps,” Giacomo reminds her.

  “We’re working on that.”

  The three women bid him good-bye. Lidia exits briskly, but Ferdinando Dolcino’s widow allows her hand to linger in the scribe’s a moment longer than absolutely necessary. She is, Giacomo notices, still quite a striking woman, but before the thought can go further, Suora Marta takes her by the elbow and turns her toward the hallway. Rina flashes a smile over her shoulder. The door clicks shut.

  Giacomo sits on the bed. The mattress is thin, but he can’t fault the nuns’ hospitality. He hasn’t eaten this well since before his wife died.

  Outside, a cloud drifts eastward, and a shaft of sunlight makes the ink bottles sparkle. Crimson, grass green, cobalt blue. Gold and silver. Sepia and coal black. With such colors, Giacomo Tura has spent a lifetime documenting the happy events of the Jewish community: illuminating marriage contracts, birth announcements, creating invitations to b’nai mitzvah and weddings. But he is also a skilled conservator. With bits of paper and parchment collected for decades, he can repair a medieval manuscript’s torn corner, mend a gaping hole in a seventeenth-century ketuba. Once he even restored a family photograph spoiled in a flood.

  Lifting the German document again, the sofer studies the color and density of the paper, the ink, the script. Yes, he thinks, laying it aside. I can reproduce this.

  He washes his hands. Struggles into the midnight blue scribal tunic. Settles a kippah onto his head to remind himself that his work is sacred. “We write the Torah for life, for continuity,” his master told him when Giacomo was an apprentice. “Before beginning our task, we blot out the name of Amalek, the biblical enemy of Israel. Thus, we remember the prophesy: our enemies shall pass, and we live.” Humming absently, Giacomo selects a tiny piece of parchment from among the remnants. Inscribes on it, in the vowelless Hebrew, the consonants of Amalek’s name. Crosses them out with two lines, crushes the parchment in his palm.

  This much is tradition, but he takes up a second snippet of parchment. Smiling grimly at his innovation, Giacomo Tura writes four more letters: HTLR. These he crosses out three times, and then he burns the scrap.

  Late September 1943

  VALDOTTAVO

  NEAR FRAZIONE SANTA CHIARA

  “Papa, we should go back down,” Claudette says at first light.

  She is, her father thinks, almost incapable of silence. Just as she had to crawl and walk and climb when she was little, she has to hear her own voice now, to argue, to test her strength.

  “We won’t be giving ourselves away, Papa. Someone already knows we’re here.”

  Sitting up, Albert digs crust from the corners of his eyes with numb fingers, and rubs his palms together briskly.

  She pulls his topcoat more tightly around his shoulders, defying him to yell at her for being nice. “Look at those rocks.” She points at pebbles he was too worn out to brush aside last night. “How could you sleep on those?”

  “I didn’t,” he grumps.

  “We’re almost out of newspaper,” she warns, and leaves to relieve herself.

  In Sainte-Gisèle, Albert had a library to visit, and other adults for companionship. Here, there’s nothing to read but their diminishing supply of toilet paper, nothing to do but fret and argue. They haven’t seen another soul since Santino Cicala left them in the charcoal maker’s shack a week ago.

  Then, yesterday, two apples materialized. Russet red, mottled with lemony yellow, they’d been placed in the center of a flat rock just outside the hut. Albert insisted that they leave the shack and move farther up the mountain, where they’ve spent a wretched night.

  “You look like one of those scraggly Poles who never shave!” Claudette says when she returns.

  You’re no vision of loveliness yourself, he thinks.

  “Papa, what if it was Santino?” she asks.

  He rolls creakily to his knees, and pulls out the velvet tefillin bag. “What if it was Germans?”

  “Germans wouldn’t leave apples.” She watches him wind the tefillin strap. “Papa, what if the Allies—”

  “Claudette, please! Five minutes of peace!” He tugs the dirty tallis over his eyes, grateful for this small symbolic tent to hide within. Blessed be our desert fathers, he thinks, and loses himself in prayer.

  “I would kill for a newspaper!” Claudette says the moment he’s finished. Oblivious to his mood, she glowers at the town that straddles a river far below, visible through half-bare branches. “I’m not joking. I would actually, truly kill somebody for a newspaper,” she says. “And I’d torture somebody for a radio!”

  “Where would you plug it in?”

  It’s a good point, but she won’t admit it, any more than he’d admit he’s as starved for news as she is. This is what I’ve been reduced to, he thinks. Childish games with my own daughter.

  Her tone changes. “Papa? Do you remember what Mama looks like? Without looking at a picture, I mean.”

  “Of course,” he says a bit too quickly.

  “I wish I had a photograph of Santino. I think I remember, but he’s sort of mixed up with John Garfield.”

  More like Edward G. Robinson, Albert thinks.

  “I’m sure Santino left the apples! He’s looking for us, and we’re up here freezing and starving for nothing!”

  “Why would he leave us apples without so much as a buon giorno?”

  Albert slips the tefillin into their bag and folds the prayer shawl neatly, remembering the day, years ago, when he was shocked by a newspaper account of a woman who killed her four children and then herself. “How could a mother murder her own children?” he asked Paula. “The mystery,” his wife informed him, after a long day with their three, “is how many of us don’t.”

  Claudette stomps around, rubbing her arms. “I can see my breath! Papa, you never listen! We can’t stay up here! It’ll be winter soon—”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Claudette! Will you please shut up!”

  Claudette whirls, ready to shout, “Mama told us never to say ‘shut up’!”

  The words die in her mouth. For an instant she sees a dimly remembered grandfather: Zeide Blum, pallid and pasty under a gray stubble, his lips as blue as his eyes. Something’s wrong, she realizes. Not like before. Something else.

  “This is stupid,” she mutters. “It’s not the Germans.”

  Ignoring her father’s strangled shout, she sets off through beeches that glow like gold, their yellow leaves filtering the autumn sunlight. Dirty hair slapping at her neck, she stumbles and slides through glacial gravel and thin crumbly dirt, suffused with a reckless confidence that does not waver until she nears the shadowy edge of the woods.

  The ground drops away abruptly. She cannot see the shack from here, but while there’s nothing she can interpret as an ambush or trap, caution seems less absurd now that she’s alone.

  She reties her father’s oxfords, crouches slightly, sucks in a nervy breath. Giving herself no more time to think, she explodes from the forest, sprints through the meadow, vaults a fallen tree trunk, dashes through clumps of high, stiff autumn grass. “It’s not the Germans! It’s not the Germans!” she huffs, but she veers and ducks like a cinema cowboy dodging arrows, knees lifting high. Suddenly the shack comes into view. She alters course, sprints straight toward it. Mouth open, lungs bursting, she skids to a pebbly halt.

  The apples are gone.

  She groans, crumpling with disappointment. Hands on her knees, she bends to ease the cramp under her ribs, and sees two pears and a good-sized chunk of pale cheese wrapped in white muslin, on a makeshift plate of leaves. “Santino!” she shouts. “Hello? Anybody?”

  Nothing. Not even birdcalls.

  Working quickly, she gathers a loose bouquet of hardy wildflowers still blooming near the hut and swaps this token of thanks for the fruit and cheese. “Molte grazie!” she says loudly, just in case, and scampers up t
he wooded mountainside, laughing with excitement.

  “Whoever it is, they decided we don’t like apples!” she yells when her father comes into view. “And they know there are two of us,” she says more quietly when she sees his face.

  Hand trembling, he points with a combination of fury and relief. “Don’t you ever do that again!”

  “But Papa, they left us food.”

  “The people in these mountains are illiterate peasants! They’re ignorant, Claudette. Priests have been filling their heads with Christ-killer lies all of their lives!”

  She bites into one of the pears and moans. “Oh, Papa! Oh, this is beautiful! This is the best pear I ever tasted!”

  “They think we poison wells! They think we murder babies and use their blood to make matzoh! They hate us—”

  “Name two.”

  Albert blinks.

  “Whenever we said ‘they,’ Mama told us to name two.” Claudette divides the lump of cheese, handing half to Albert. “Mama said if you can’t name two actual real people, then you’re just being prejudiced. So name two peasants who hate us.” She takes another bite of pear, holding his eyes with her own: ocean green and guileless in a dirt-smeared face. “Mama said.”

  Albert sighs. “All right,” he says, capitulating to hunger, and to a heart-deep weariness, and to the ethical precepts of a wife whose face is more difficult to conjure as each day passes. “All right, but just this once.”

  There are pears again the second day, and more of the glorious creamy cheese; tomatoes and crumbly yellow bread the following morning; a jar of milk and a pile of wild mushrooms next. Claudette pays for each small meal with a fistful of wildflowers, and on the fifth day, there is more than food.

  “Papa, look what they left last night,” she calls, lugging a thick woolen cape of military green up the mountainside. “Pity it rained last night, but it didn’t get too wet.” Without waiting for a response, she flaps the blanketlike cloak and snugs it around her father with a practical dispatch that has begun to feel natural. “I saw footprints in the mud this morning,” she reports, using the handle of her toothbrush to spread the soft cheese over the cornbread’s rough surface. “It’s a child, I think, bringing us things.”

  Their anonymous benefactor has been miraculously faithful, and Claudette has found windfall apples and even raspberries to supplement their diet. They have water from a little creek, but there’s never enough food. They’ve both had awful diarrhea. Her father is thinner and more silent with each passing night. Sunken into craters of bruised-looking skin, his eyes flick toward her, then away. He’s still wearing his tie, the knot drawn close to keep a little of the chill out.

  Claudette tucks blue-nailed fingers into her armpits in a useless effort to warm her hands. “Papa, look at me!” she pleads softly. “Papa, are you sick again?”

  “I–I saw Germans in that town down there,” he whispers through cracked lips, stiff with cold. “Soldiers, taking people away. The war’s not over… I— we won’t survive the winter up here. I don’t know what to do.”

  She is, for once, speechless. He raises the army cape with a trembling arm so she can snuggle in beside him. For a long time they stare in silence at the river: a man of forty-nine, a girl not quite fifteen, weighing bad choices.

  “We have to trust someone,” Claudette says quietly. “Whoever’s bringing the food— even if he’s only a child, he wants to help us. Let’s go down, Papa. Not all the way to the town. Just to the shack.”

  “All right,” he says finally. “All right. If you think so.”

  They gather their few belongings, and Claudette leads the way along the path she’s worn through vegetation crisp with frost. Often, as they descend on numbed and clumsy feet, Albert puts out a hand to steady himself on his daughter’s shoulder.

  After days in the open, the ramshackle hut seems palatial— warm and windless and dry. Carefully Claudette lays a fire with plenty of tinder to catch the flame of their last match. “The war can’t last forever,” Albert whispers as she pulls the cloak around him. He is asleep before she can reply, his chest rising and falling in great heaves, laboring for breath even at rest.

  All her short and willful life, Claudette Blum has tried to make her father listen to her, and now he has. Whatever happens next, she thinks, it’s on my head. She swallows hard and settles down to wait. Save your tears, she tells herself. You may need them later.

  NEAR FRAZIONE GORE

  Herrmann Brössler is on his knees, pointing through the hayloft window. “Duno, use your eyes!” he shouts. “Look at the woodpiles! Stacked to the roof on three sides. Why is that house attached to this barn by a second-story passageway? Because the farmer has to get to his animals, even when the snow is chest-deep! The winters here are terrible!”

  “The partisans can survive in the mountains,” Duno shouts back. “And I’m going to join them!”

  “You’re still frightened of bees! You’re going to be a soldier now?”

  Hugging herself with thin arms, Frieda Brössler takes no part in the argument. She does not notice the mule that snorts and shifts uneasily in the stall below. She does not listen to her husband or her son. The voice she hears is her mother-in-law’s. “De optimists, dey died in a vork camp…”

  When Rivka was widowed a second time, Frieda and Herrmann were pleased and proud to make a home for her. The Brösslers were respected members of the community. Herrmann gave liberally to civic charities and raised funds for the restoration of a lovely old theater in the center of Vienna. Duno and Liesl went to a wonderful school, and Steffi would, too, when she was old enough. Their large, airy apartment was filled with sunlight, art, books. Frieda held lovely receptions for Europe’s finest musicians and most famous singers. Important Christians attended her parties. And yet, whenever things went especially well for Herrmann— when he had just booked a popular opera company or presented an exceptionally good Liedersänger in a concert the critics loved, Rivka’s stories would begin again.

  “We had nice house, nice furn’ture. Just like you and my Herrmann,” she’d say, her voice tired and thready. “My fader, he alla time helped oders. Good man! Everybody like my fader! But when I got t’ree year old, dey come und took everyt’ing. Even fork! Even spoon! Dey put us ina keller. My mudder, my fader, my bruders. Dey put us ina keller, and set fire! Set fire, with us ina keller. Gott safe us wit’ a rainstorm, ’n we got out, but dey want us to burn.”

  “We have no Cossacks in Austria, Mama Brössler—”

  “Den dey come again anodder time, but we got not’in’ for steal. Not even fork! Not even spoon! So dey kill my oncle. Jus’ spite. Spite absolutely! ’Cause we got not’in for steal.”

  “It’s not like that here,” Frieda would soothe.

  “Den dey come again. By dat time, my fader, my bruders, my first husban’, dey got nice li’l business, moving furn’ture. Wit’ horse, wit’ cart. Nice li’l business. Dey come again. Take everyt’ing. My mudder had li’l box of jewel’ry. Li’l box,” Rivka would say, palms a few centimeters apart. “Dey take dat. Take furn’ture— we sleepin’ on da floor. Take horse, take cart! How we ’sposed to live?”

  “That was the Communists, Mama Brössler. The Communists will never take power in Austria.”

  “Dey’ll come again,” Rivka would say. “A Jew got somet’ing, goyim gonna take it. Dey don’t care ’bout dat Jesus. Dey just t’ieves and murderers.”

  “Mama Brössler, Vienna isn’t like the Ukraine—”

  “You an optimist,” Rivka would tell her sadly, “jus’ like my husban’. We start over. We be all right. But dey arrest him. For not’in! For not’in, absolutely! Dey take my husban’ ’n my bruders to Siberia. De optimists— dey all died in a vork camp.”

  Herrmann’s voice cuts through Frieda’s memories. “Duno, if we don’t turn ourselves in before the deadline, we’re Vogelfrei—birds free for the shooting! Anybody can denounce us for a reward. We have no papers. We don’t speak Italian.”

&nbs
p; “I do!”

  “Buon giorno? Arrivederci? How far is that going to—”

  “I know a lot of Italian. I learned from the carabinieri, and from the farmer. Papa, we don’t have to give up. We can go back to the mountains.”

  “I don’t wanna go up the mountain again,” Steffi wails.

  “Mutti, make them stop!” Liesl pleads.

  The Brösslers have been fortunate. The Calabrian soldier found them a farmer who was willing to give them food and shelter. The mule and two cows warm the barn at night. Not even the girls complain about the smell anymore. A week, maybe two, and the Germans would leave the valley, that’s what everyone expected.

  This afternoon, the farmer brought them a newspaper from Borgo San Mauro. Maps and numbers and arrows told the story: the Allies were bottled up at Salerno, far to the south. In the center of the front page was an article headlined UN PROCLAMA DEL COMANDO GERMANICO. Duno made a great show of reading it, probably guessing at most of the words. The same phrase appeared after a variety of offenses: sará fucilato secondo la legge marziale.

  Then the farmer showed Herrmann a flyer printed in German and in Italian. “By 1800 hours, 28th September 1943, all Jews present in the district of Valdottavo must report to the German SS commanders at reception areas in Roccabarbena or in Borgo San Mauro. Those surrendering in accordance with this order will be resettled in the East, where work for adults and schools for children will be provided. After this deadline, Jews who fail to report will be shot on sight, as will be anyone upon whose premises they are found.”

  The farmer murmured something soothing as he laid a callused hand on Steffi’s fine fair hair, looking across the valley, talking at length about Attilio. “He’s talking about the Huns,” Duno said confidently. “Attilio means Atilla.”

  When Herrmann looked up from the notice, the farmer sighed, “Mondo cane, ne?” Kneeling, he scratched the boot of Italy into the dirt with a stick. In the northwestern corner of the map, he drew a triangle pointing south. “Valdottavo,” he said, looking toward the valley. A twisting line down the center of the triangle was declared Fiume San Leandro: Valdottavo’s main river. A dot poked into the broad end of the triangle was Borgo San Mauro, the railhead town they could see. A bigger dot at the narrow end: the city of Roccabarbena.