A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “If it’s no trouble,” Claudia says shyly, “a book, please?”

  “She was a good student,” her father says.

  “She’s read Pierino’s books already,” Bettina says. “Are there books about plants, Padre? Claudia Fiori, we call her. She’s always asking the names of flowers.”

  “A botany text, then! Yes, I can find something like that for you, signorina.” With that Don Leto beckons Claudia to follow him a few steps farther, where they can speak alone. “I have a message for you,” he tells her, eyes bright with fun, as though he were passing notes in school. “From Santino Cicala!”

  “Santino! Is he all right?”

  “He’s safe, and he didn’t forget you, figlia mia. He was looking for you, but got lost. He’s staying on another farm for now. They’re snowed in, but with your father’s permission, I’ll arrange a meeting in the spring.”

  He expects excitement, but the extraordinary green eyes fill. “Signore, I don’t… I can’t remember what he looks like!”

  Just as well, Leto thinks, amused. Rather than tease, he invites her to consider Santa Chiara, a hamlet so poor that a single metal spoon may be the only heirloom passed from mother to daughter. “No one here has a mirror, Claudia. Do you remember what you look like?”

  She stares, and laughs, and wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “No!” she says, astonished. “I don’t!”

  “The soul is more important than the parcel it comes in! Your Santino has una buona anima—a good soul, signorina. Wear his love like a crown.”

  He bids her good day and stumps away, with one last errand to perform. “Pierino!” he calls, entering the barn.

  Tercilla’s son appears, silent as a ghost. Leto sets his backpack down and pulls out an oiled rag wrapped around something heavy. “A gift from the milkman. Unfortunately, it’s air force issue from ’35. I don’t know what ammunition it needs.”

  Pierino takes the Beretta.

  “How many are up there now?” Leto asks.

  “T-t-twenty-one,” Pierino says.

  “What about food?”

  “P-p-people b-bring it. Nnn-not much, b-b-b-buh—”

  “But enough.” Leto puts a hand on the veteran’s shoulder. “Moses was halt of tongue as well, figlio mio. Be proud to share his burden. Does your missing arm ache in all this rain and cold?”

  Pierino shrugs noncommittally.

  “Think of our Lord, who suffered on the cross. He knows your pain, figlio mio. So do I.” Struck by a thought, he says, “Pierino, did you hear? Last week, the Valdottavo postman was caught in a German labor sweep.”

  Pierino nods but frowns: Yes. So?

  “A postman with one arm,” Leto suggests, “would be of no interest to the Germans. A veteran of the war against the Soviets would be above suspicion among the repubblicani. Such a postman could travel anywhere in the valley.”

  Pierino nods again, this time with a grim smile.

  “I’ll speak to the district officials in Roccabarbena. It will be my honor to recommend a hero who sustained grievous injury in the service of our nation!” Leto lifts his chin toward the mountain. “There’s another recruit waiting for you up at Santa Anna’s rock. He’s young, and foolish, but he wants to fight.”

  Pierino grabs a jacket with one sleeve amputated, its extra fabric undoubtedly harvested for other use. When the priest has helped him into it, he asks, “A b-b-blessing, P-padre?” Leto makes the sign of the cross and uses his own left hand to shake Pierino’s.

  “Spring will come, figlio mio!” Leto calls, lolloping away. “We’re both alive, Pierino, and we’ve got three limbs apiece! God is not done with us yet!”

  Cadenza d’Inverno

  Winter 1943–44

  One way and another, on every continent, a war has raged for three thousand years. Mummies, twisted by Pott’s spinal variation, have been found in Egypt’s looted graves. In the Dark Ages, the wolfish lupus gnawed at skin. When neck glands were attacked, the enemy was known as scrofula, or the King’s Evil— defeated, French peasants believed, by the touch of King Clovis, who lived briefly and died without passing his tactics on. White death, the British call it, but unlike its cousin leprosy, tuberculosis is not white. It is the Chartres blue of Robert Koch’s methylene stain, the brilliant red of arterial blood.

  The field of battle is commonly the human lung, but any organ can be affected. The enemy infiltrates, takes up a defensible position, waits for weakness. Once inside the body, the bacillus is indestructible, its waxy carapace resisting the assaults of drugs and prayer. Attack and retreat, parry and riposte. Stalemate alternates with all-out offensives. Not Blitzkrieg then, but a war of attrition, often dismissed in the beginning as civil unrest. A persistent cough? Coal dust in the air, or asthma, or a smoker’s just deserts. Weight loss, a general decline in health? Too much work, a poor diet. Gathering exhaustion and irritability: unrefreshing sleep, an overburdened mind. Chills and night fever— influenza, perhaps, or lingering grippe.

  Nineteenth-century poets, capable of romanticizing anything, adopted as fashionable the high-necked collars originally worn to hide lesions caused by strumous glands. They made consumption a sign of genius, sensitivity, refinement. No popular novel was complete without a pale young person, delicate and languid, prone to fainting fits. Prima donnas expired beautifully in operas; slum dwellers and industrial workers coughed up their cheesy bleeding lungs without benefit of orchestral accompaniment.

  Schiller, Keats, Shelley all lost their private battles. Chopin, Thoreau, Balzac, Paganini were among the famous casualties. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Anton Chekhov— physician, dramatist— died of it as well. He once coughed blood for three days and three nights, but decided the hemorrhage was “a burst artery in the throat.”

  How could a doctor have missed the diagnosis? Werner Schramm once wondered, but he understands it now. He has seen starving men chew shoes and eat rats raw when the reward for survival was just another day of ceaseless labor and pitiless beatings. He himself fights for breath after agonizing breath, hating each moment of pain but desperate for the next. The soul craves hope, as the body hungers for food.

  In November, he left Sant’Andrea in a coffin, dead drunk but not quite dead, packed with a decaying pigeon whose nauseating odor discouraged inspection of the coffin’s contents. “Taking him home… the family plot,” he heard Renzo say when the truck’s movement stopped. Troops at checkpoints saw a young mother who wept while an old one sat dry-eyed next to the box. Soldiers manufactured details on their own. A bereaved widow, a fatherless baby. A mother who never liked the dead son-in-law. “Sì, certo, signori. Your papers are in order. Move on.”

  Schramm remembers little else from the jolting ride, beyond one short conversation, overheard. “Renzo,” the old woman said testily, “I will never understand why I let you talk me into this.” “Mamma,” her son replied, “I’m paying a debt to a surgeon who was killed in Abyssinia. He can’t collect.”

  “And this surgeon can?” the younger woman asked. Renzo must have nodded.

  All winter, that nameless surgeon’s beneficiary lies bundled against the cold beneath layers of wool and fur, marking time by the light on a mountain visible through a hayloft’s unglazed windows. On windless days, Schramm gazes at the peak— thoughtless, motionless, waiting for the next storm. Sometimes the snow is so fine and weightless it fills the air like fog or smoke. Twice blizzards have struck like hurricanes, lightning exploding within clouds so heavy with snow they seemed to press the air from his rattling chest.

  Sweating through fever dreams, he awakens now and then to frost on his dampened blankets, and to the old woman’s hard, thin face. The young mother is like the distant moon, filling his sky briefly, at long intervals. But he knows she is near, in the small house connected to this barn by a second-story passage. Schramm hears her baby cry sometimes and listens, weeping stupidly, to the lullabies its mother sings.

  You’ll spoil
that child, he thinks. And then he sleeps again.

  Northwestern Italy

  1944

  Anno Fascista XXIII

  March 1944

  FRAZIONE DECIMO

  VALDOTTAVO

  “Where is the other lady?” Schramm asks when the young woman appears two days in a row.

  She sets a basin filled with warm water onto the floor, pushes the hayloft shutters fully open, stands outlined by the sunshine. For the first time since they arrived here, the breeze carries no knife. “Signora Savoca took advantage of the weather. She’s down in San Mauro for a few days.”

  “The signora is your mother?”

  “Stefano’s. The man who brought you here?” she prompts. “Stefano Savoca?”

  “He said his name was Renzo.”

  She calls herself Marisa. Lovely, even if it’s not her real name. He knows almost nothing about her except that she is gentle, and he is half in love. A weakened man. A pretty nurse who is not contemptuous of that weakness. The situation is banal, and she counters it by making herself sisterly: casual and matter-of-fact in caring for him. Staying windward, she pulls his blankets off and airs them over a laundry line strung between the house and barn. Returning to his bedside, she makes a move for the sheet. Well enough to be startled, he snatches it back.

  Dipping a rag into the water, she wrings it out. “Herr Schramm, you are in Italy,” she reminds him, washing his face, neck, chest. “No country on earth is more densely populated by male nudes. Nuns in Florence know more about reproductive anatomy than whores in Marseilles!”

  He stares.

  “Sometimes I forget you’re German. That was a joke,” she says, resoaping the rag. “Should I have applied for a permit before I told it?” He smiles, and she hands the washcloth to him. “You’re well enough to do the parts that make nuns blush.” She leaves the hayloft with his chamber pot. “How old is your baby?” he asks when she returns.

  “Rosina?” Marisa pauses to count. “Six months! Imagine that!” She busies herself, using a clean handkerchief over her hands to collect the dirty ones she’ll boil. “No blood for three weeks!” she notes. “Signora Savoca is right. You’re going to live.”

  “Life is full of missed opportunities.” It’s her turn to stare. “A joke,” he says.

  “Next time, get a permit!” Marisa stoops to give the washrag one last swish, twists it nearly dry. “I’ll bring soup later,” she says, flinging washwater out the window. The clothesline pulley squeaks as she reels the line in.

  “I should begin to walk a little. Tomorrow perhaps.”

  She pauses, a blanket over her arm. “Why not today?”

  That afternoon, she brings him a paisley robe that must have been Renzo’s and helps him to the edge of the bed. Spent, he sits, rests, then manages a few steps on shaking legs. After his soup he tries again, and with Marisa’s encouragement, he crosses the hayloft to a chair and back before they hear the baby’s waking wail.

  “Mamma’s coming, cara mia!” Marisa calls. “If the weather holds,” she tells Schramm, “I’ll open up the house tomorrow. You can come down for a visit.”

  The clouds pile up overnight, but the temperature stays warm enough for rain, and a change of scenery is a powerful incentive. With frequent stops, Marisa guides him across the sloping covered passage that connects the barn to the house, through an open door, and across a swept plank floor. Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet until she settles him at a table. Propped on his elbows, he wills his heart to slow, concentrating on each breath until he can spare the energy to look around.

  “Terra nova!” she says. “Do you feel like Columbus?”

  A pedal-powered sewing machine sits on a sturdy worktable under the window, where the pale winter light is best. An oil lamp hangs from a metal chain in the center of the ceiling. Suspended from a tripod in the open hearth: an iron pot. The fire’s been built up, to counteract a chilly breeze through the open door. A cupboard holds a jug of olive oil, a bottle of wine, and three slumping burlap sacks— cornmeal, dried chickpeas, and chestnut flour. Rafters, posts, door, and windowframes— all retain the shape and color of the branch or trunk from which they were hewn. The house is simple, but beautiful in its way. Long ago, someone plastered its thick stone walls, and these have been adorned with trompe l’oeil windows that reveal summer landscapes or the sea—

  “Mirella,” his hostess says firmly.

  “Scusi?”

  “My real name is Mirella. The other lady is Lidia.”

  “Grazie,” he says, touched by her trust. He lifts a hand toward the walls. “Are you the artist?”

  “More artisan than artist. My father was a stuccatore—a specialist in fresco restoration. He started me on forced perspective when I was very young. My son’s age, now that I think of it. Angelo’s almost eight.”

  “I have a boy that age! And another, of six years. They are Klaus and Erwin. Where is your son?”

  “In a boarding school. He was safer there, away from the bombing. My husband couldn’t leave his work. He’s still in Sant’Andrea.”

  “And this is Rosina,” Schramm says. Her cradle is on the floor, near the fire and as far from the sick man as it can be in this tiny house. Arms flailing, legs pumping at a restraining blanket, she is practicing B’s: “Bub, bub bub.”

  “You must miss your family, Herr Schramm.”

  “Yes. As you do, no doubt.”

  They glance at each other, and Mirella clears her throat. An unspoken agreement is reached: they will not speak of absent family. The emotions are too raw, tears too close.

  “Trompe l’oeil is very common in Liguria,” Schramm observes.

  “Painters are cheaper than masons and sculptors.”

  “It’s also cheaper to employ relatives than strangers, I think.”

  She smiles. “My father had me bagging pigments when I was four! I loved the blues: lapis lazuli, cobalt, ultramarine. All I have here are pastels, but the colors please Rosina.”

  “Signora Savoca has not returned?”

  “No, and I expected her back by now.”

  “She hates me, I think.”

  “Bub, bub, bub. Bub!” the baby shouts, thrilled by her own volume.

  “Signora Savoca lost children to influenza in 1918.” Mirella picks Rosina up and bubs back at her for a time. “She thinks Bayer aspirin was poisoned. Her theory is that Germans were exacting revenge for their defeat in the Great War.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  She smiles at the baby. “Two of her older girls took the aspirin. They died. The youngest children didn’t. They lived.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Probably.” Mirella plants noisy kisses on chubby cheeks, her eyes on Schramm. “Distressing to be hated because of lies, isn’t it.”

  He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Especially when there are so many legitimate reasons to be hated.”

  “You people do keep starting wars,” she says tartly. “Every family in Italy has lost men because of Germany, and this occupation isn’t helping your reputation.”

  “I imagine it would make a nice change if we tried tourism.”

  She laughs, genuinely amused. “The Allies aren’t especially popular here either. They leveled Monte Cassino a few weeks ago.”

  “For God’s sake, why?” Sitting on a hill between Naples and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery was the jewel of medieval Italy.

  “The Americans said the Wehrmacht was calling in artillery strikes from the abbey. The Germans deny it. Either way, it’s gone.” She jounces Rosina on her knee. “The Allies are still south of Rome. On the other hand,” she reports cheerfully, “the Russians have pushed your panzers all the way back to Poland! And there’ve been huge bombing raids on Berlin and Cologne— Dio mio, I’m so sorry! Do you have family there?”

  “They are in Freiburg.”

  “Then they’re all right,” she says, awkwardly.

  “Probably.” Schramm
turns his attention to a hand-carved crutch hanging from a hook by the front door.

  “The last tenant was a hunchback,” Mirella tells him. “Tuberculosis of the spine, I think you’d call it. People around here are still frightened of the house. It’s been empty for years.”

  “I am probably not contagious anymore, but are you not concerned?”

  “My uncle died of tuberculosis when I was fifteen. He lived with us when I was a child.” She sets the baby back into the cradle. Astonished, Rosina produces a scowl of imperial displeasure, large brown eyes following her mother’s move toward the iron pot hanging in the open hearth. “X-rays show spots on my lungs, but they’re encapsulated.” Mirella tucks her apron between her legs, to keep the fabric away from the fire, and ladles thin soup into a thick pottery bowl. “Renzo explained about keeping the windows open and so on. And Rosina is upwind.” She brings the bowl and a wooden spoon to him. “The soup’s very bland, I’m afraid. Salt is like gold these days. Your Italian is quite good. Did you study Latin?”

  “Yes, in school.”

  “And your accent is Florentine.”

  “I spent a year in Florence when I was young. Words come back to me. I worked hard last fall to remember the grammar.” She steps to the window. Light from the setting sun makes a nimbus of her hair. “It must be close to the equinox,” he remarks, waiting for the broth to cool.

  “Yes— it’s March already! Friday, the seventeenth, I think. Easy to lose track up here.”

  An experimental howl issues from the cradle. Mirella takes an oil lamp from the top of the cupboard and puts it next to the one already on the table. She doesn’t light either, though it’s getting dark. Rosina begins to wail. Mirella stoops to lift her.

  “Don’t pick her up!” Schramm says sharply.

  “Why on earth not? She’s probably hungry.”

  “She should wait. It’s good for her.”

  “I can’t imagine how. She’s not a prioress fasting her way into heaven.”