A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  Rosina starts toward the garden on little hands and knees. “And no one argues with him?” Mirella asks, retrieving her daughter before she can crawl over the zucchini.

  “Not twice.” Schramm shudders at the memory. “He said to me— it was very late, about three in the morning— he said, ‘Uncooked potatoes will cure beriberi in a week.’ I said beriberi is unknown among those who eat sufficient meat. He was—” Dumbfounded, Schramm thinks, but he doesn’t know the word in Italian, so he mimes Hitler’s astonishment. “I thought, Wunderbar! He is impressed with my knowledge! So I said also that potatoes do contain some thiamine, but that vitamin is unaffected by heat. Ergo: potatoes need not be raw.”

  Brows up, Schramm invites comment. The women shrug: So?

  “He began to scream at me!” Schramm says. “There were ten of us that night. No one could move! I was—” He mimes his shock, eyes bulging with astonishment and fear. “For two hours, three hours, he screamed and screamed about the evil of meat, and the absolute necessity of not cooking the potatoes to cure beriberi! I thought he would have me shot!”

  “It wasn’t the potato. It was the contradiction,” Lidia says. “Men like that want everyone to marvel at their power and superiority, but they’re terrified of competition. When such a man proposes a footrace, he intends to begin by battering his opponent unconscious with a rock.” Lidia sets the bowl of peas aside. “Tell me, Herr Schramm, what did you do to merit an invitation to the Führer’s exalted presence?”

  “I wrote a public health pamphlet on the importance of mother’s nutrition during pregnancy for the fitness of the infant. That was my medical speciality before the war. I made a study of the causes of incorrect infants. He heard of my work.”

  Gripping Mirella’s skirt, pulling herself upright, Rosina thumps her mother’s legs. “Mamma! Up!”

  Mirella ignores her. “What do you mean by incorrect infants, Herr Schramm?”

  “Osteogenesis imperfecta, pes equinus. Meningocele, spina bifida. Pardon— I know these terms only in Latin. Hydrocephaly, microcephaly, anencephaly: heads very large from water on the brain, or very small heads, or without a brain. Also— very small people. Blind, deaf. Such conditions might be an error of heredity, but if good seed falls on poor soil, the results are disappointing. Hitler was interested in this idea.”

  “Tell me, Herr Doktor,” says Lidia. “Is idiocy among the defects caused by poor nutrition?”

  Mirella flinches, but Lidia’s brows are raised in calm curiosity. “Some forms, yes,” Schramm tells them. “Cretinism and goiter are often together. Both result from deficiency of iodine.”

  “P’ego! Up!” Rosina demands.

  Mirella pulls her skirt from Rosina’s fingers. “Wait,” she says, first walking, then running toward the hunchback’s house.

  Bewildered, Rosina watches her go. “P’ego up! P’ego up, Mamma!”

  Schramm asks, “Did I say something wrong?”

  Lidia takes her apronful of pea pods to the compost heap and tosses them on top. She says nothing, waiting for the younger woman to return.

  When Mirella reappears with a photo that trembles slightly in her hand, Schramm needs only a glance. The anatomical atavisms are unmistakable: almond eyes with medial epicanthic folds. Midface insufficiency with pronounced saddling of the nose. Fat pads like an orangutan’s around the face and neck. If he could examine the child, its palms would surely present the diagnostic undivided crease. “A younger sister, perhaps?”

  “My second child.”

  “Ach. Unusual for such a young mother. The condition occurs once in, perhaps, fifteen hundred births among women under thirty.”

  “Is there something I could have done? Something I should have eaten, or not eaten?”

  What can he say? When Langdon Down described the syndrome, the Englishman believed it represented reversion to prehuman stock. Others say such children are evidence of Mongol ancestors, who raped their way across Europe. Modern authorities blame mothers too feeble or exhausted to bear healthy offspring. Wishing to be kind, Schramm says, “The condition is not associated with malnutrition. I know of nothing you could have done to prevent this tragedy. Where is the child?”

  Ignored, Rosina begins to cry in earnest.

  “There was an accident,” Lidia tells Schramm when it’s obvious Mirella can’t. “Altira died when she was three.”

  He draws himself up in the chair, familiar with the sensation of being across the desk from a devastated parent. “Mirella, you must not grieve: I assure you that a mongoloid idiot is better off dead—”

  The slap is so sudden, so unexpected, Schramm can only stare.

  Mirella snatches back the photograph. She tries and fails to say something. Scooping Rosina up, she stalks away, slamming the hunchback’s door behind her.

  Lidia sighs. “Go in there and apologize, Herr Schramm.”

  Schramm stands, astonished. “Apologize! For what?”

  Lidia leans over to retrieve the wrap that’s fallen from his lap. Shakes its dust out. Folds it loosely in her lap. “You insulted her child.”

  “I spoke as a physician, signora! There were many worse things I could have said!” Swept by an ancient anger, he jabs a finger in Mirella’s direction. “Mothers like her— they think only of themselves! They are the ones— they don’t see! They refuse to see!”

  “To see what, Herr Schramm?”

  The wrecked families. The broken dreams. The teeming institutions, like satanic zoos filled with every sort of biological failure.

  Approach the children’s yard: mongoloids and cretins would rush the fence, faces contorted in caricatures of human emotion. Grunting, tongues protruding, their mouths issuing wordless shrieks or meaningless, mindless babble. When they saw you had nothing for them, they’d wander away, sit cross-legged on the ground, clustered together. Drooling, laughing horribly at nothing. Picking up pebbles, eating bits of debris, tugging at the few remaining tufts of grass in the barren courtyard.

  There was an entire ward for the hydrocephalics. White plaster walls, white iron cribs, white cotton sheets, and on each white pillow an enormous head. Immense egg-shaped domes tapering to tiny wizened faces connected by birdlike necks to emaciated bodies. His sister Irmgard’s withered little hand would reach through the guardrail to touch his fingers. “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” she’d whisper, her voice like a breeze passing through dead leaves. “We go for a walk when it’s sunny.” A walk? Schramm wanted to cry. Hospital attendants pushing high-wheeled baby carriages like peddlers’ carts, laden with grotesque vegetables.

  And the nurseries— Christ! The nurseries were filled with the worst that could happen to human zygotes. Babies with gaping holes where their mouths and noses should be. Fragile little skeletons wrapped in a thin layer of blue-white skin the color of watered milk. Spastic, or rigidly immobile. Children so crippled they’d never leave their cribs. So impaired they’d never learn anything. Their only communication was the ceaseless, tearless, wordless moan of those trapped for years in a life of unspeakable, inescapable pain. Free me. Free me. Free me—

  “Herr Schramm? Herr Schramm!” Lidia says sharply. “Are you all right?”

  “Those children are like a bomb!” he says raggedly. “A bomb that kills the whole family, that breaks everything in a home! All the mother’s time and attention go to the weakest. She deprives her other children of her care. She neglects also her husband. It is natural that he should leave! And for what? A child who will never contribute anything to society!”

  When Lidia speaks, her voice is emotionless, factual. “Yes. I knew a mongoloid when I was young. A neighbor’s child. His nose ran constantly. He never used a handkerchief. Disgusting. His tongue was always out. He couldn’t learn to control his bowels.”

  “They never do!” Schramm declares. “A proven fact!”

  Lidia raises her hands, adjusts a hairpin, tightening the iron-gray chignon. “When Altira was born, everyone told Mirella the condition was hopeless. Some
of us also believed—” She hesitates. “I believed the child would reflect badly on the Jewish community. It would give comfort to those who believed us an inferior race.”

  Schramm looks away from the level eyes, dry beneath lined and looping eyelids.

  “Mirella stood up to us,” Lidia recalls. “You’ve seen how she can be. I told her she was being unreasonable. She said, ‘The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What’s wrong with unreasonable love?’ Sentimental nonsense, I thought, but she kept Altira. Mirella treated that hopeless child like any other beloved baby. The results were…” Lidia pauses to choose her word. “Stunning.”

  The wind carries the scent of rock and warming soil. A few meters from where they sit, a hawk rides heat from sunlit crags. Feathers rippling in the wind, the bird lifts one wing and wheels.

  “I was surprised by Altira’s sweetness,” Lidia continues, voice light, controlled. “She was often rather boring. All small children are boring, frankly. They love to do the same thing over and over. Altira had a capacity for repetition far beyond the limits of my patience. Even so, there was a light in her eyes.”

  The breeze shifts. The hawk rocks slightly, working to maintain his position, yellow eyes sweeping the tangle of spring-green vegetation at the edge of the hunchback’s terraces.

  “When I was thirty-four, I had a child— not like Altira, but not … right. When she was born, I swore she’d never be ridiculed as that neighbor boy was. We told everyone the baby died. My husband took her to the Cottolengo Institute near Genoa. She lived there for seven years.” Her chair creaks as she eases sparely fleshed bones on the unforgiving surface. “I never went to see her.”

  The hawk stalls for a breathless moment, folds his wings, plummets. In the silence, they hear the brief, small cry of his hapless prey.

  “Regret changes nothing.” Lidia waits until Schramm’s eyes meet hers. “Go to Mirella,” she says. “Beg pardon, Herr Doktor.”

  Inside, dripping rag in hand, Mirella scrubs furiously at the trompe l’oeil drawings on the wall. When Schramm appears in the doorway, she plunges the rag into the bucket of washwater and wrings it like a chicken’s neck.

  “Doctors! Doctors like you— She won’t live, that’s what they told me. But she did. She’ll never talk, but she did, Schramm. Not clearly, I admit that, but lots of three-year-olds are hard to understand! And she understood what we said to her. She was not an idiot!”

  A chalk ocean disappears. Rosina sobs. Schramm sinks onto the stone platform near the fireplace.

  “They said she’d never walk, but she did. Yes, she was clumsy. So what? Not everyone is a ballerina. She was sick a lot, but everybody gets colds. And yes! I probably did neglect Angelo, but he didn’t need me as much as she did.”

  “Mirella, please—”

  The washrag, filthy with land and sea, smacks against his shoes. “It’s Signora Soncini to you!”

  “Signora, no parent would wish for the kind of children I have— I have seen. If such conditions could be prevented—”

  “The race would be improved?” Mirella wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Homer was blind. Beethoven went deaf—”

  “Signora, you don’t seriously believe that a mong— that your daughter could have been a composer?”

  “We don’t know what she could have been! She died before we found out!”

  Frightened by her mother’s anger, Rosina crawls to Schramm. He bends stiffly and takes the baby onto his lap. Mirella snatches Rosina away.

  “Doctors,” she says contemptuously, oblivious to the child wailing on her hip. “You look at people for ten minutes, and you think you know everything about them!”

  Less, Schramm thinks. Ten seconds, perhaps? Five?

  “Airp’ane!” Rosina sobs, pointing.

  “She wasn’t a tragedy, Werner! She was a little girl. She was my daughter. And she loved to dance.”

  Rosina squirms out of her mother’s heedless embrace. “Airp’ane!” she cries, patting at the door.

  The noise outside grows. A shift in tone: acceleration. “Mein Gott,” Schramm whispers.

  “You’re not even listening!” Mirella cries, aghast. “You doctors never—”

  They have, perhaps, half a minute. He grabs Rosina, thrusts her at Mirella, flings the door open. “Get out!” he shouts. “Get away from the buildings! Run!” he yells to Lidia, pushing Mirella out the door. “Run for the trees!”

  The first Stuka shrieks by. Mirella makes for the woods, the baby clutched to her chest. Head between his shoulders, Schramm runs toward Lidia, grips her arm. A second gull-wing shadow sweeps over the ground. They both stumble when the engine backblast hits them.

  Mirella crouches, shielding Rosina with her body. Rosina’s terrified screams join the high-pitched wail of the Stukas, and the rattle of their machine guns. The first concussion nearly knocks Lidia off her feet. Schramm staggers but keeps his grip. The second bomb explodes farther up the mountain.

  Fifty meters into the forest, they scrabble sideways, skirting the mountain’s incline, scrambling over vines and rocks. Keep track, he tells himself. Center-mount 500s, away. Four SD70 fragmentation bombs on the wing racks. How many left?

  Schramm spots an ancient chestnut. Thin mountain soil has eroded away from a snaking tangle of tree roots, creating a little cave. Pointing, he gasps, “In there!” He takes Rosina. The women crawl through an opening like a Gothic arch made of roots as thick as Rosina’s body. One of the planes lets its rack of 70s go. Stones and dirt shower down through treetops. He hands the shrieking baby in to Mirella.

  “Get in!” Mirella shouts. Schramm shakes his head. She and Lidia move to the edges of the little space. “Get in!” Mirella yells again. “There’s room!”

  A second rack of bombs falls. The detonations merge into a single titanic blast. He squirms under the tree and wedges himself between the women. “Luftwaffe! They want the partisans, not us!” They nod, trembling. He puts his arms around them.

  Another pass: explosions are replaced by the rattle of machine guns and answering small-arms fire. Engine noises doppler away. Six, perhaps eight minutes after the raid began, it’s over.

  For a time, only the baby’s hiccuping sobs break the forest’s stunned silence. The adults stare straight ahead, gathering their wits.

  When cramped muscles demand movement, Schramm delivers himself like a breech birth, feet first. Mirella hands Rosina through, crawls out on her own, takes the baby back. “Wasn’t that exciting, Rosina?” she cries, voice high with forced cheer. “Santo cielo! What a racket!”

  Lidia accepts Schramm’s help, and doesn’t release his hand as they pick their way back through the forest. “They know about San Mauro,” she whispers.

  “It was a message,” Schramm says. “We know where you are.”

  Mirella, a few steps ahead, holds Rosina close. “Yes, cara mia, those were bad airplanes, but they’re all gone!” she soothes. “You’re such a brave girl! Everything is fine now.”

  The hunchback’s house is still standing, and the ramshackle barn no worse. Schramm collapses onto his chair. Lidia sits next to him, equally drained. They watch, slack-jawed, as Mirella swoops the baby through the air.

  “What noisy airplanes!” Mirella cries. “Wasn’t that fun?” she asks a doubtful Rosina, whirling until the baby’s short, sharp terror begins to yield to her mother’s insistent merriment and her own sunny nature.

  “Extraordinary,” Schramm says, shaking his head when Rosina repeats her mother’s “Flying!” with increasing conviction.

  Lidia extracts a handkerchief from her apron pocket, presses it against a flushed and dirty face. Eyes sidelong, she considers the winded German beside her while dabbing at the trickle of sweat slipping down her crepey throat.

  Schramm looks down the gravel path that leads toward San Mauro. “Someone’s coming,” he says.

  “It’s Don Leto!” Mirella shouts joyously, swinging Rosina around and around. “That means Babbino’s in San Mauro, ca
ra mia! We’re going to see your babbo again, and your big brother!”

  A black-clad figure is hobbling hurriedly up the gravel path, and there’s something familiar about the man, but— “That’s not Don Leto,” Schramm says. “The limp is wrong.”

  Lidia shades her eyes with both hands. “Old as I am,” she notes drily, “there are occasions when I am forcibly reminded that I have not yet seen everything. That’s my son. In a cassock.”

  Renzo waves to them briefly before Mirella reaches him. Hands on her shoulders, he speaks quietly and at some length. Mirella puts the baby down, and sits heavily on a tree stump. Rosina babbles. Mirella sketches a smile, her face crumpling as Rosina crawls off to play.

  “Her husband,” Schramm supposes.

  “Poveretta,” Lidia whispers.

  Leaving Mirella, Renzo approaches, limping heavily. “Schramm! You’re looking less cadaverous! And Mamma.” He kisses the thin-skinned downy cheek Lidia offers. “Pale, but otherwise undamaged?”

  She reaches out to grip his hand. The long, uneven breath he exhales is the only sign of the dread that drove him to sprint the last half kilometer up this mountain. “Iacopo?” she asks.

  “Arrested. Just bad luck: he was raked up with forty other hostages.” Still trying to get his breath back, Renzo unbuttons the cassock and tosses the sweaty woolen garment over the laundry line. “Mamma, exactly how bored are you—?”

  “Don’t move,” she says.

  Schramm and Renzo follow her stare. Half-buried in the soft soil of the garden, the bomb’s stablizing propeller rotates slowly in the breeze. Straddling it, arms wide, Rosina makes buzzing noises with her lips. “Airp’ane!” she announces happily.