A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  We were afraid. We were all afraid. There wasn’t enough of anything, and if there isn’t enough, you’re afraid someone will take the little you have. They’ll hurt you, steal from you, and laugh at your weakness and stupidity afterward. That’s what everyone believed. We were all locked away in our separate fears, and then… the Führer came out of his prison with a key. He would turn our selfish, despicable fear into a kind of glorious selflessness if we obeyed him, if we dedicated our lives to the Reich. If our blood was pure.

  There’s no point in lying, Father. With Irmgard in my family, it was judge or be judged. If I joined the Party, if I did as I was told, there was no question of sterilization. Exceptions were made. Goebbels has a clubfoot, you know. And my children— they’re such fine boys. Strong and handsome. I miss them so much….

  Schramm’s eyes fill. He tries to get a grip on his emotions, but when he sees the small cross scratched in the mortar between the stones, there’s no holding back the tears. Tears for what he meant to do, tears for what he did. Tears for his broken family, his broken life, his broken nation. Sobbing, he crawls to the little cross, and places his fingers on the symbol of salvation, of love that is more than enough, love that is the antidote to all fear. Remorse claws at his lungs, his guts, his heart.

  Father, I was afraid, and weak. And wrong. And I am so terribly sorry! I’ll do penance, Schramm swears, choking on a laugh when he thinks, Not just rosaries, either, Father! For the rest of whatever life I am granted, I will try to make amends.

  The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child. Misere mei Deus: Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Blot out my iniquities, and cleanse me of my sin. Lord, I am not worthy that You should come unto me, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed—

  Footsteps. Voices. At the other end of the long corridor, the jailer jabbers apologies, explanations, excuses. Another man growls ill-tempered rejoinders. Schramm clambers to his feet, drags a handkerchief from a pocket, wipes his eyes, blows his nose. He feels as though he has drained a swamp of sin, but there is no time for contemplation.

  A tall man with a lantern jaw and a luxuriant mustache flings the half-closed door wide open. Schramm points to Tomitz. “You are responsible for this?”

  The bastard’s head tilts back. Arrogant, unashamed. It would be so easy, Schramm thinks. One in the body, one in the head. Send this hound to hell, and step over his corpse without a backward glance.

  Go, said Jesus to the harlot, and sin no more. There is hope, Suora Marta said, even for a pig like you.

  “Innocente, you are an incompetent swine!” Schramm snaps. “Clean up the mess,” he tells the jailer. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  Blinking in the sunlight, he gets his bearings and looks for the quickest route out of town. He’s hardly walked a block when the quiet is broken by explosions, gunfire, screams. Civilians around him cry out, clutch children, race for cover. Schramm grabs a skinny woman’s arm. “I am a doctor! Tell me: where is the hospital?”

  She points, shouting half-coherent directions, and breaks away.

  Schramm asks twice more before he finds the place. A harried nursing sister in the midst of a crowd sees his uniform and snarls. “No, you don’t! Not here! Not in this hospital!”

  An ambulance team pounds by, carrying a stretcher with a wide-eyed old man who holds a shaking hand over a ragged gash in his forehead. Schramm unbuttons his jacket, tossing it into a corner. “I am a doctor, Suora! I want to help!”

  Maybe it’s because he’s speaking Italian. Maybe there is something in his face that convinces her he is not there to kill. She shows him where to scrub. Their first patient is lifted onto the table. An eight-year-old boy, breathing in short, grunting coughs. “One gunshot,” another nun reports. “Hit from behind in the left shoulder. The exit’s just below the right nipple.”

  Schramm taps the chest with the tips of his fingers. Below the left clavicle, the chest resonates like a drum. Lower down: a dull sound, like tapping a stone. The second sister hands him a scalpel and murmurs to the little boy: this will hurt, he must be brave. Quickly Schramm slices through the resistance of the exquisitely sensitive pleura, ignoring the child’s shriek as he widens the knife track. The wound bubbles. Schramm holds out his hand. A drain appears in it. He pushes seven centimeters into the cavity. Blood gushes through the chest tube into a bowl held by a nun.

  The child gasps and coughs in the cold sweat of agony. The basin overflows. An orderly mops it up. The nun connects the drain to a bottle on the floor. Half-filled with water, that will act as a simple one-way valve. With each wailing exhalation, air and blood burble from the submerged end of the tube. The boy’s lung begins to expand. Already the next casualty is being carried in.

  In the hallway, a temporary receiving station is set up to assess serious cases and assign an order of treatment. Occasionally the triage nurse has a case stretchered directly into surgery, hoping immediate intervention might save a life. Hour after hour, Schramm digs out shrapnel, opens abdomens, sews up perforated bowels, removes crushed limbs. Time stops. There is only the flesh beneath his fingers.

  When the last patient has been carried off, Schramm is lightheaded from dehydration. Exhausted, but exhilarated. He pulls off his gory shirt and trudges to a sink to wash away the blood, lifting handful after handful of water to his face, head, shoulders, chest. Drying off, he asks the nurse, “Is there someplace I could stay, Suora?”

  She doesn’t answer. He lowers the towel from his face. The nun is as white as her coif. A Wehrmacht officer stands in the scrub-room doorway, imperious in full if filthy uniform. “There is a German doctor here.” He frowns at Schramm. “You?”

  Startled, Schramm stammers, “Sì— jawohl. Yes, sir. I was cut off from my unit—”

  “You’re needed. We’ve got casualties.”

  There seems to be no choice. Schramm tosses the towel aside and shrugs into his uniform, a soldier again. “Are we going to the front, sir?” he asks as they climb into an open staff car and head north.

  Gray in the face, the other officer looks blank. “Going to the front? Scheisse, man! Where do you think you are? We’re pulling all the field hospitals back. The Allies have broken through.”

  April 1945

  VILLA MALCOVATO

  NEAR ROCCABARBENA

  Werner was the first to come under her protection. Then Simon Henley, nearly frozen. Young Claudia was next, and Mirella hoped the girl would stay, but two days after tiny Alberto was buried, the staffetta left to rejoin her brigade.

  A destitute old woman with five small grandchildren arrived at the villa that afternoon. Mirella took them in. On that signora’s rundown heels: a Moroccan soldier, completely lost. Nobody understood a word he said. Mirella gave him a meal, and after looking at a map, he went off happily to whatever fate awaited him.

  The following week brought a bewildered Sicilian draftee, terrified and begging to stay. The owner of an antiques shop in Genoa, who offered to pay for a meal with a Renaissance figurine carved from ivory. A farmer’s son, desperately ill with pneumonia. A man who’d worked for an English businessman before the war: denounced by one neighbor, warned by another, on the run. Mirella kept the farmer’s son in the villa’s small clinic; the others moved on.

  Lavinia Costa-Valsecchi was next. A ninety-year-old contessa, dotty in furs and diamonds, she was dumped at the villa by her chauffeur, who drove off to join the partisans with her auto and its petrol as his dowry. Then a little girl with an even littler baby boy on her hip knocked at the kitchen door. Their mother was dead. The girl heard that Villa Malcovato still had a milk cow. Could they stay here?

  District by district, the Germans steal anything of value as they pull back. They burn whatever they can’t carry away, shoot anyone who protests and many of those who don’t. Allied air raids are destroying what’s left. The Germans are hated and Allied bombardiers cursed, but true loathing is reserved for the Italian SS volunteers
, and for informants who buy favor with neighbors’ lives.

  Civilians are of no consequence to anyone but themselves, and tell stories of pointless destruction and casual cruelty to anyone who pretends to listen. Kindly, naive people arrested for giving a meal to a stranger. A little boy hit by a staff car, deliberately run over by the tanks that followed. Bombs falling on four children herding some geese in a field. A fifty-year-old man tortured for three days before the fascisti realized their prisoner was Giuseppi Pesce, not the Giovanni Pesce they sought.

  Villa Malcovato’s population doubled, and doubled again, filling the house, the stables, the barn. A dozen peasant families burned out of their homes. Twenty-three children, overflow from Mother of Mercy, itself inundated by orphans. Exhausted evacuees from Genoa, Sant’Andrea, and Savona, many in a sort of walking coma, speechless and trembling.

  Mirella shares her bedroom now with four other mothers, thirteen children among them, and shares the bed itself with Angelo, Stefania, and Rosina. Before falling into stuporous sleep, she takes brief comfort in the way they snuggle around her, warm and sweet-faced, smelling of compost. Each morning she awakens to find another little group of famished people waiting for her attention in the courtyard.

  With two hundred or more to feed and shelter, she tells the factor and his men to dig up the last stocks of cheese and flour, oil and salt, buried for safekeeping last fall. She puts older girls in charge of younger children, or sends them to help in the garden. The boys work in the barns or care for livestock hidden in secret clearings. The women cook, spin wool, knit baby jerseys. They make diapers from old sheets, sew children’s clothes from scraps of worn-out fabric, cobble shoes from wooden soles and strips of carpet.

  The villa has reverted to its earliest form: a medieval city under seige. The world shrinks to what can be touched, seen, heard. Mental horizons contract to those of the most isolated peasant, and with that narrowness comes peasant skepticism toward all plans for the future. Nothing you were, or are, or will be, is in your own hands. Society is held together by the simplest of human ties. A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help.

  A war of leaflets begins. Paper flutters from low-flying planes. “Anyone who harbors rebels will be shot. Any house in which rebels have stayed will be blown up after all stores of food are confiscated and the inhabitants shot. The German army will proceed with justice, but with inflexible hardness, unless informed immediately of the rebels’ whereabouts.” Leaflets scattered by the Allies give precisely the opposite instructions. “Italian patriots! Continue your resistance with acts of sabotage against the German army. Cut communications, destroy bridges, roads, and electrical plants. The moment for decisive action is near!” Mirella has children collect the leaflets for toilet paper.

  After sunset one evening, three Austrian soldiers knock timidly on the door. They’re very young, deserters from the Wehrmacht, trying to get home. Their prospects are poor, but better than at the front, where some great battle is being fought. Mirella gives them some withered apples, shows them the map, sends them on. In the morning, four mortar rounds fall on the villa’s chapel, empty at the time. Somewhere, gunners adjust their aim and the explosions shift away from the farm. Mirella sends the oldest boys to the edge of the woods to dig long trenches, line them with brush, and cover them with tarps. The women stuff sacks with straw for makeshift mattresses, ready to run with the children to the trenches on a moment’s notice. The immediate menace advances and retreats, but this much is certain: the front is no longer in Africa or Russia or France, not in Messina or Rome or Florence. It is here.

  “Che sarà di noi?” everyone asks Mirella. “What will become of us?”

  No radio, no post, no newspapers, but rumors in abundance. Two villages west, Fascist troops appeared suddenly, blocked off the main street, and arrested everyone. A partisan band took a town south of here, expecting to link up with the Allied advance; the Germans arrived instead, and wiped the partisans out. London has been completely destroyed by a new German weapon. At Villa Senni, three hundred people hidden in the cellar had to flee through artillery fire into the mountains; a hundred were killed— no, two hundred! Thousands of people are dying of Spanish influenza in Bologna. The Allies have landed in strength at Genoa. A German spy has assassinated Roosevelt. The Americans have pulled out of the war.

  Inured to the sound of airplane engines, the children don’t even look up when bombers drop their cargo on Roccabarbena, or when small, swift groups of fighters swoop down, guns flashing, on something doomed two valleys away. A new sort of refugee turns up: fugitives from the Italian Black Brigades, begging for civilian clothes and hoping to join the partisans. “You should be more careful,” one tells Mirella. “For fifty kilometers around, people told us, Go to Villa Malcovato.”

  A few days later, an Italian civilian appears and takes Mirella aside to tell her about an English paratrooper who needs food and money. There is something about this man… “No,” Mirella says. “We have nothing to do with foreigners here.”

  “Signora,” he says, moving closer, “this Englishman is a Hebrew. He needs your help.”

  She covers her momentary hesitation by looking for one of the children. “Rosina!” she shouts. “Stay out of that mud!” She turns back toward the man, making sure he can see how tired she is. “Scusi,” she says, distractedly. “What were you asking?”

  “Are there any farms nearby where ebrei can get help?”

  “None,” she says heartlessly. “We have our own to care for.”

  Then one bright blue morning, the contessa announces it is her saint’s day. “Signora, there’s no Saint Lavinia,” the housegirl Giovanna tells Mirella. The contessa insists there should be a party in her honor. “Completamente pazza,” Giovanna murmurs, but the weather has improved, and the notion of a festa is so bizarre, the idea takes hold. One of the older girls ties braided yarn around the children’s legs and teaches them to run three-legged races. The contessa, wrapped in a fox stole, urges the children to sing Christmas songs, and caps the day by awarding a pearl necklace to the child with the sweetest voice, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen to the winner of a sack race. That night, the old lady favors Mirella with a Mona Lisa smile and says, “I think that did everyone good, don’t you?”

  The low booming of artillery grows nearer. Angelo runs up the rutted drive, more excited than afraid. “They’re coming, Mamma! Eight hundred Germans!” An hour later, the rumor begins to change. Eight hundred become three hundred. Fascisti, not Germans. By evening, the three hundred are eighty, marching south toward Sant’Andrea.

  At midnight, Giovanna shakes Mirella awake. “Signora, there’s a partisan with a bullet in his shoulder at the door,” she whispers. “What should I do?”

  Mirella pulls a cardigan over her nightgown, goes to the kitchen, dresses the wound. “You can sleep in the stable,” she tells the boy, “but you must leave before light.”

  All that night, they hear cannon fire and planes. In the morning, the ground is littered with leaflets in four languages, offering safe conduct, medical aid, food, and removal from the combat zone to any German who surrenders.

  A heavily armed man appears out of the woods, begging for a meal. Around mouthfuls, he warns of two German spies. “They’re wandering around east of Cuneo. They pretend to be deserters and ask for help. They were handed on from farm to farm, until they uncovered the whole network of contadini helping the Resistance.” The man washes his polenta down with a glass of watered milk, and stands to leave. “Last Monday, Fascist troops surrounded three small villages and the outlying farms and shot everyone the spies pointed out, including four women and an old priest. So be careful of anyone asking for help.”

  Mirella watches him tramp away, trying to remember the Austrian boys she gave apples to. How many were there? Two of them, or three? Three, she thinks. They seemed like nice boys, but who knows? Who knows…

  A squadron of Allied planes flashes overhead, droning toward
Roccabarbena. She watches the tracer bullets from German AA emplacements in the city. Two planes are hit just as the bombs are released. The whole valley seems to explode, just beyond the hills.

  At ten the next morning, a German staff car roars up the drive through a steady spring rain. Two officers get out. Without knocking, the commander shoves the front door open and shouts for whoever is in charge. Mirella lifts Rosina to her hip, willing herself to appear innocent and ignorant. Would it be better or worse if her pregnancy were more obvious at five months? Better or worse if her eyes were not sunken in half-moons of purple skin? Better or worse if she looked twenty-eight, not a haggard fifteen years older?

  Without such worries, the contessa takes charge, supporting herself on two ebony canes. “How dare you come in here with muddy boots! Who are you?” the old lady demands in imperious German. “What are you doing here?”

  “We require billets for a field hospital,” he begins.

  “What?” she asks with loud annoyance. “Speak up! I haven’t all day!”

  The officer tries again. “We require this property as a hospital—”

  “Don’t be absurd. This is a children’s home, you ridiculous man! Kinderheim, do you understand? Children!” The contessa flicks the blue-veined back of her hand at him. “Now go away. And don’t come back!”

  The officer mutters something that Mirella takes to be “Loony old bat.” She follows him anxiously from room to room as he inspects the property. “Kinderheim,” she says, taking a cue from the contessa. “This is a children’s home! Do you understand?”

  He leaves the house and confers with the other officer, who has evidently inspected the outbuildings. The children have been herded outside into the downpour. Many are crying. Angelo has Stefania by the hand; he glares at the Germans, who don’t notice, thank God.