A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  Leaning forward to take better advantage of rubbery muscles, Corniglia climbs again until she reaches two small children and the ersatz priest, sitting on a bench shaded by the brothers’ grape arbor. Gravely, Renzo Leoni shifts Isma from one black-gowned knee to the other. “Suora Corniglia! Permit me to introduce Signorina Stefania. Stefania is this many,” he says, holding up four fingers, “and lived in Austria when she was little. Angelo was just telling me about a squadron of British pilots who strafed the school yard on Friday. Blow,” he says, holding a large white handkerchief over the little boy’s nose.

  Face blotched by the purple stigmata of childish rage and anguish, Angelo swallows. “What I meant was, they didn’t really strafe us.”

  “Well, they might have,” Renzo allows, his sincerity less specious. Switching to German, he asks Stefania quiet questions. She starts to cry, and he pulls her close. “Of course, you were scared! Planes are scary!” He winks at Angelo. “Just like Suora Paura! Angelo, Suora Corniglia has a nickname, too! It’s—”

  “— very likely to get Angelo in a lot of trouble if he uses it,” Sister Dimples warns.

  Stefania holds up her doll and whispers. Renzo brings his ear closer to her mouth. Stefania repeats something almost inaudibly. “I am requested to tell Suora that Antoinette is also from Austria.”

  Word by word, with frequent asides to Angelo and the nun, Renzo draws the little girl out. As the conversation progresses, infant allegiance to her mother tongue begins to loosen and it becomes clear that she understands more Italian than she’s been willing to admit. Gradually, Renzo brings the questioning around to the painful topic of parents. All he can get from Stefania is “They went away.”

  Angelo, by contrast, is voluble on the topic, hurt and angry that his parents haven’t visited either. “Angelo,” Renzo reminds him, “I told you— your babbo can’t come yet. He’s locked up, but he’s in a safe place—”

  “Well, you should just go and get him out!”

  Above the starched white collar, Renzo’s eyes rise to meet Suora Corniglia’s. “It’s not that simple, Angelo.”

  Abruptly, Renzo lifts Stefania off his lap, plunks her onto the bench, and limps toward a bicycle leaning against the monastery wall. Between grief and grievance, Angelo stares open-mouthed at his neighbor’s back. Just as stunned, Suora Corniglia’s lips part. You can’t just leave! she thinks, appalled. You can’t just walk away.

  As if in answer, Renzo stops and takes a deep breath, willing the fun back into his face. “But wait! I almost forgot!”

  Drawing something from a rucksack draped over the handlebars, he returns, hands concealed behind his back. “Which?” he asks. Angelo points to his right. Crestfallen, Renzo moans his dismay. “Too bad! I thought you’d like to have this.”

  He reveals a left-handed miracle: an orange. Horror-stricken at having guessed wrong, Angelo’s face falls. Renzo lets him suffer for an instant before tossing it. The fruit, heavy with juice, drops into Angelo’s palm with a thwack, and he tears the peel like a ravening wolf. “Share it with Stefania!” Renzo orders.

  Angelo rips the fruit in half and hands Stefania her portion. With the bliss of a soul ascending directly to heaven, the little boy bites into a segment and staggers with pleasure as the juice slides over his chin. Stefania may never have seen an orange before, but the item is demonstrably edible, and she too stuffs orange segments into her mouth, one after the other.

  “Suora Corniglia,” Renzo says sternly, “you’ve neglected the subject of table manners.”

  Suddenly dizzy, the nun closes her eyes, but summons enough presence of mind to say, “In my defense, there is very little for us to practice on.”

  “Sit,” he says quietly. “Put your head down.” She leans over, and hears his footsteps as he walks to the bicycle and back. “Drink this,” he says, handing her a silver flask. She shakes her head. “Don’t argue,” he says, “unless you fancy me carrying you back to the convent.”

  Hesitantly, she takes a swallow, coughs, eyes tearing, and hands the flask back. He takes a healthy swallow himself and sits next to her. “There is a special place in hell for the man who invented bicycles,” he says, massaging his knees. Tucking the flask away, he rummages in his pack, produces a second orange, and digs his nails into the peel. The world contracts to the size of the fruit in his hand. She stares, motionless, struggling to keep her head clear. “Eat this,” he says. “Now.”

  She does as she’s told. The juice is acid and sweet. When it hits her stomach, she retches. He hands her a canteen of water from his rucksack. This time, she drinks deep. Then she finishes the orange.

  He makes the children drink as well, and when they’re done, he folds his handkerchief to a fairly clean spot, wetting white linen with the last of the water. Feinting left, he anticipates Angelo’s dodge to the right. Doing the same for Stefania, Renzo says, “Let’s see if the sisters have done a better job with your religious lessons than with your table manners. Angelo, who were the first man and the first woman?”

  Angelo rolls his eyes at how easy this is. “Adamo and Eva!”

  “And when were Adamo and Eva created?” Renzo asks, busily cleaning juice from Stefania’s fingers.

  Angelo cries, “On the sixth day!”

  “Right. And what happened next?” Renzo asks cagily.

  Staggered by this evident contempt for his biblical acumen, Angelo yells, “God rested!” with a great show of exasperation.

  “Wrong!” Renzo yells back triumphantly. Suora Corniglia blinks, and Angelo scowls. “God rested on the seventh day,” Renzo admits, handing Corniglia the damp handkerchief, “but what happened before that?” Silence reigns. “Before the evening of the sixth day,” he informs them patiently, “there was the sixth afternoon! And what happened on the sixth afternoon?”

  Wiping her fingers and refolding his handkerchief neatly, Suora Corniglia bats her eyelashes in a parody of flirtation. “Do tell, Padre! We are breathless with anticipation!”

  “I should think you would be,” he says huffily. “On the sixth afternoon, Adamo and Eva and the animals were all sitting around in Eden enjoying the lovely weather when something strange happened.” He pauses dramatically. “The big round yellow light up in the blue place—”

  “The sun!” Angelo hollers. “In the sky!”

  “Well, you know that, but Adamo and Eva had just been created, remember, and hardly anything had a name, and they didn’t know how anything worked! So when the big yellow thing started slipping down the blue place toward all that green stuff, Adamo wondered, ‘Why is the big yellow thing doing that?’ Eva said, ‘You’re asking me? I just got here myself.’ So Adamo asked the animals, ‘Why isn’t the big round yellow thing sticking up there in the blue place?’ And the animals said, ‘We were hoping you’d tell us!’ ”

  “Except,” Suora Corniglia breaks in, “there was one little mouse who just looked at her feet and said, ‘Isma glai!’ ”

  Stefania giggles, a tiny silvery sound, and lies back against the black worsted cassock, relaxing into the story. “The big round yellow thing disappeared,” Renzo continues, pulling Angelo onto the bench. “Eden got dark and chilly. Adamo and Eva and the animals were all cuddled up to keep warm, just like this. Santo cielo!” he cries wickedly. “No one is cuddling with Suora Corniglia!”

  “Grazie, Padre,” she says smoothly. “I am quite warm enough!”

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because I’d be happy to—” Stefania tugs the crucifix hanging around his neck and whispers something. “You’re right. I’ll finish the story. So there they were, all cuddled up. Adamo said, ‘I wish God had let us keep that big round yellow thing.’ But Eva said, ‘Well, those new little twinkly things are pretty, too.’ ”

  “Stelle,” Stefania whispers.

  “Stars! Exactly! But nobody knew that then. One by one, the animals went to sleep. Adamo whispered, ‘What a lot of trouble for God, making that big yellow thing for such a short time.’ But Eva said, ‘H
e’s the Boss.’ ” Renzo’s tone changes. “What do you think happened next?”

  “The sun came back!” Angelo yells.

  “The sun came up! The animals stretched and started walking around, mooing, and roaring, and so on. Adamo said, ‘Look, Eva! God made another big round yellow thing, but this time He put it over on the other side of the garden!’ ” Renzo lifts Stefania from his knee, his fingertips meeting across her little back. “What do you think, Stefania? Does God make a new sun every morning?”

  She looks at her feet. “I don’t know,” she says. Not, Suora Corniglia notes, “I don’t care.”

  “It just goes around to the other side!” Angelo tells her. “You can’t see it, but it’s still there!”

  “Yes,” Renzo says softly. “The sun is still there, even when you can’t see it. And your parents love you, even when you can’t see them.” Out of the corner of his mouth, he mutters to Suora Corniglia, “Even when you can’t stand them.”

  Corniglia smiles. Renzo stands, groaning when he gets up. “I can’t promise to bring your parents to you,” he says, “but I can promise I will try. Before I go… Angelo, take Stefania over to the bicycle and look in the other bag.”

  The children race off. “That was beautiful,” Corniglia says.

  “It’s midrash: a story behind a story in the Torah. My oldest sister told me that one when she left home to get married. She was killed last October, trying to get to Switzerland.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Chocolate!” Angelo shouts, dancing with a candy bar. “Chocolate, Suora!”

  Renzo looks over his shoulder. “Angelo, you little savage! Offer Suora some!”

  “Just share it with Stefania!” she calls.

  “Thank you,” Renzo says quietly, “for taking care of them.”

  They are not my children, she thinks, but they are a son and daughter for my use. Renzo looks at her so searchingly that she turns away, her veil shielding her eyes. “You’re not a bad fellow,” she hears him say, “for a nun.”

  She glances at him. “And you’re not a bad fellow, either. For a fake priest.”

  Once again, a slow grin transforms the mournful Renaissance face. Pleased, but aware that she is skirting sin, Suora Corniglia regains custody of her eyes, and keeps them on the path as she strolls with him toward the bicycle.

  “Angelo,” Renzo asks, “do you have a message for your mammina?”

  Angelo scrunches up his face. Teeth brown with chocolate, he looks at the monastery wall, at the ground, at the arbor. At Stefania. He squints up at his neighbor. “It’s a secret.”

  Renzo leans over. Angelo rises on tiptoe, putting grubby little hands around the man’s ear. “That’s a good message,” Renzo says, when the whispering ends. “I’ll tell her that.”

  Below them, at the school-yard gate, Suora Ursula rings the brass bell. Well trained, the children race down the hill, knowing the day’s outing is over. Suora Corniglia returns to the bench and retrieves Stefania’s doll, forgotten in the excitement. “You, too,” she tells Renzo, coming nearer. “Get going!”

  Not caring if anyone can see them, the black-gowned Jew takes her hand and kisses it, watching her reaction. Challenged, she refuses to pull away and meets his eyes, unflustered. Vanquished, he clutches at his heart and staggers backward, as though struck by an arrow.

  “Pagliaccio! Clown!” she says with affectionate reproof, as though he were one of her eight-year-olds. Hiking up the cassock, he throws a leg over the bicycle seat. While he’s busy fitting a clip around his pants leg, she impulsively removes her rosary. “To complete your disguise,” she says.

  He holds out his hand, and she drops the plain black beads with their simple silver links into his palm. After a long moment, he says, “Take care, Suora Fossette.”

  “I’ll pray for you, Padre Pagliaccio.” She watches him push off, her rosary in his pocket, bicycle tires grating on gravel. “Don’t get arrested!” she calls. He raises a hand without looking back, and disappears over the crest.

  THE HUNCHBACK’S HOUSE

  FRAZIONE DECIMO

  Drying laundry snaps in the breeze. Ravens squabble in the treetops. The garden is green with seedlings. Content in his high-backed chair, Werner Schramm turns his face toward the late-spring sun. The women wear faded cotton frocks, and though he himself is wrapped in woolens to guard against a chill, he feels remarkably well. As long as he doesn’t raise his arms, there’s no chest pain at all.

  He’s begun to take short walks, an ambition little Rosina now shares. Plump hands in her mother’s firm grasp, she lumbers with baby industry between Mirella’s legs. “You shouldn’t make her walk too early,” Schramm advises. “Her legs won’t grow properly.”

  “Nonsense! She loves it!” Mirella bends to kiss her daughter’s silky curls, and returns undaunted to her topic. “Anyway, you don’t have to be Freud to work it out. All those stiff, raised arms. All that talk about how hard he is. He’s covering something up!”

  “You’ll have to excuse Signora Soncini, Herr Schramm.” Lidia pops peas into a bowl and drops the pod into the apron stretched across her lap. “Like everyone who takes Doktor Freud seriously, she seems to have only one thing on her mind. Thank God, her husband will be visiting soon.”

  “Babbo’s coming, cara mia!” Skirt ballooning, Mirella swings Rosina up and around. “He’ll see how you go flying!” she cries, delighted when the beaming baby repeats, “F’ying!”

  Halfway down the mountain, a church bell tolls. Sunday Mass is over, but the parish choir is rehearsing for some saint’s festa. A polyphonic hymn floats up through air so clear and light so true, Schramm dreams again of painting. Lidia’s dark eyes in their spiderweb of parchment-colored skin. The crescent curls of Rosina’s red-gold hair. Mirella’s cheeks, like ripe peaches beneath freckles she earned planting their kitchen garden. Focus on the near, forget about the distant. War becomes a memory, a rumor, a myth…

  “Admit it, Werner,” Mirella says. “Doesn’t the Führer seem sort of— I don’t know… prissy?”

  Werner blinks and straightens. “He isn’t married, but there is a woman. She is never spoken of in public—”

  “So every girl in Germany can dream that the Führer would choose her,” Lidia says cannily. “My grandmother was in love with Bonaparte.” She reaches into the willow basket for more peas. “She saw him once when she was twelve. He was young then, and dashing. He smiled down at her from his white charger, and she very nearly swooned. Later, he gained weight and lost charm, but for several years, she was enthralled, and kept a scrapbook of his battles.”

  Schramm knows these two women better than his own mother or his wife. After months in this isolated house, no topic is off-limits. Female combativeness no longer shocks him, but he still hasn’t decided if it is an Italian trait, or Jewish, or simply Lidia and Mirella. His own wife, Elsa, is a bland, blond memory, but he wonders now if he ever really listened to her.

  Looking up, the baby buzzes her lips like an airplane. “Airp’ane, Mamma!”

  “Say prego!” both women correct reflexively, and when she does, Mirella rewards her with another swoop through the air.

  Rosina is tiny but seems startlingly precocious. She can already tell birds from planes. “My boys didn’t speak so well until they were two,” Schramm says.

  “Girls talk early.” Lidia hands the baby a pea pod to gum, to give Mirella a rest. “Renzo had almost nothing to say until he was almost two and a half. He’s made up for it since.”

  Refusing to be sidetracked, Mirella asks, “Has Hitler’s secret woman had any secret children? Are there any little Überkinder fathered by the Führer?”

  “No,” Schramm admits, “there are no children.”

  “Heavens!” she says archly. “He denies his own superior germ plasm to the nation, when it’s every good Aryan’s duty to breed?”

  “I think what you suggest of him is not quite correct,” Werner says delicately. “But all his energy is—” He m
akes a gesture suggesting a funnel. “He puts everything into his speeches. To hear him is almost— scusi, ladies, but it is almost pornographic. He begins very gently. He takes the crowd into his confidence. He speaks, and you think, He speaks to me alone. The others disappear. I have felt this,” Schramm confesses. “Thirty thousand around me, but I felt alone with him. He is like a strong friend who knows your secret thoughts, who is more experienced, more wise. Everyone moves toward him. Your heart is faster, your eyes see only him. His voice rises. He—”

  He swells, Schramm thinks. He grows tumescent— larger, more powerful— before your eyes. Your heart and soul open to him, like a girl’s legs. He fills you. Nothing in the world exists but this man, his words, his voice, his power to make you believe, to adore him, to let him do as he pleases with you.

  Schramm comes to himself, and clears his throat. “When the speech ends,” he says quietly, “it is a climax. For him. For us. A seduction, and a climax.”

  For some reason, Mirella will not meet his eyes, but Lidia is judicial. “ ‘The serpent deceived me,’ ” she quotes aridly, “ ‘and I did eat.’ ”

  “I met him once,” Schramm says. “I was invited to the Berghof— his villa in the mountains. He is less impressive in private, except for his eyes. They are not beautiful, precisely, but extraordinary. Hypnotic! But he can be so boring! The same stories, over and over. ‘When I was a soldier… When I was in prison…’ He talks and talks. All night, every night, when others want only to sleep. He knows a great deal about medicine and biology, but much of what he said was not correct.”

  Or was simply absurd. A Turkish porter can lift a piano by himself. Humanity depends on the whale for nourishment. Fifty thousand Irishmen went to America in 1641. No one in the Middle Ages had high blood pressure. When their blood rose, they’d fight with knives; now, thanks to the modern safety razor, the world’s blood pressure is too high. Anyone who paints a sky green and pastures blue should be sterilized. Roosevelt’s a Jew. Jesus wasn’t. The Czechs are really Mongolians. Look at the way their mustaches droop. Roman legionnaires were vegetarians and had magnificent teeth.