A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  Hands in his pockets, hat tipped back, Renzo Leoni strolls away, enjoying a peacefulness he’s never felt before. “Why is it so easy now?” Claudia asked him once, when she returned to the brigade, no longer pregnant. “I can’t seem to be afraid anymore.”

  “You have no one to live for,” he told her. “It’s a kind of freedom.”

  Ambling downhill, he finds a local barber heating water in a German helmet over a small fire, and sinks blissfully into all-but-forgotten sensations. A chair beneath him. A warm towel draped around his face. A close shave, and a decent haircut.

  He tips the barber handsomely. Finds a newsstand and buys all the one-page papers available. Following the scent of finely ground coffee hoarded in anticipation of this day, he locates an outdoor café. Sits at a table in its little island of swept pavement. Lights a cigarette, orders an espresso, lays the papers out, and pieces the story together.

  Sometime last month, von Vietinghoff requested permission for Army Group C to retreat back to Germany. From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler ordered Italy destroyed instead. Despairing of their Führer’s sanity, Wehrmacht and SS generals burned their records, and contacted Church officials. In return for safe conduct back to Germany, their troops would not carry out the scorched-earth command from Berlin; civil authority would be handed over to the Committee for National Liberation. Bishops and archbishops relayed their messages to partisan commanders.

  The CNL happily responded that Eisenhower’s orders were clear: no negotiations with the enemy. The Germans were invited to surrender unconditionally. Von Vietinghoff wavered, then refused. Partisan attacks redoubled. The Reich’s defeated divisions indulged in a final spasm of barbarous attacks on civilians, but by the end of the week, all German armies in Italy surrendered. The ceremony lasted seventeen minutes.

  The local news is startlingly unheroic. The CNL plans to present a united front in negotiations with the Allies for control of the Sant’Andrea city government. Political parties are dividing up spheres of influence: food distribution, telephone and electric utilities, police and fire departments. He recognizes a name or two. Jakub Landau will be the head of a civil engineering group; il polacco will begin sewer repairs immediately.

  Sewers, Renzo thinks with a snort. I’d rather be dead.

  The bells have stopped ringing. A weeping girl, still plump from German food, rushes past. Her head is shaved and doused with red paint. Reprisals have begun. There’s gunfire somewhere near the warehouse district. Pockets of resistance being cleaned up, most likely. Republican soldiers who held out until the end.

  The wrong kind of patriots, he thinks.

  He stubs out the cigarette, drops a pound note on the table. Leaving the papers for the next patron, he walks downhill, toward the center of town. The whole city seems to have had huge holes bashed in it by a colossal hammer. Walls still standing are plastered with grainy news posters: il Duce and his mistress hung upside down from a Milanese lamppost. Scrawled graffiti everywhere. Down with Mussolini! Death to Fascism! There’s no intact glass anywhere; shards glitter under broken masonry and rusted iron. Most of a child lies near a pile of debris.

  San Giobatta’s bell tower has collapsed. The gap allows a view of the docks, where Italians long past delusions of dignity hold out tin pails for food flung into the crowd by British sailors who were shelling them a week ago.

  Crouched on a curb, a tiny barefoot boy holds out muddy cigarette butts salvaged from gutters, begging people to buy them. Like an ancient Roman tossing bread at the circus, Renzo flips the kid a pack of Gold Flakes. Stunned by this unimaginable luck, the child runs away, yelling, “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!”

  A few blocks way, the curving marble staircase of the municipal palace is exposed to smoky daylight. Scorched papers blow through the collapsed facade and flutter down the street. In the piazza itself, bodies hang from a makeshift gallows. The north wall of the palazzo still stands, decorated with dripping starbursts of red, chest-high. The executions are presided over by a sixteen-year-old boy with a Sten. The head of the tribunal is a year or two older. Renzo congratulates himself on his own exquisite timing.

  Then he sees the mountainous corpse. Executed by firing squad, too heavy to risk on a noose.

  With Osvaldo Tomitz dead, there was no one left to testify on Serafino Brizzolari’s behalf. Despairing, Renzo tries to remember when he heard the shots. Was I drinking coffee? Belandi. If I’d skipped that goddamned haircut…

  The rest of his plan is flawless— aided, even, by this final failure. The piazza is filled with people eager to finger others, and now simply asking about Brizzolari is enough to arouse hostility. “That’s Ugo Messner!” cries the rabbity little waiter who served cappuccino to Nazis for eighteen months. “I heard him say, ‘My faith in the Führer and the Vaterland is unshaken! I am a good Nazi,’ he said, ‘and I hate the partisans!’ ”

  Not precisely true, but hardly worth arguing about. And in any case, the owner of a Fascist bar hurries to corroborate the waiter’s accusations. Yes, that’s Ugo Messner. He was very friendly with Erna Huppenkothen! Her brother ran the Gestapo!

  That should have been sufficient for conviction, but in Sant’Andrea there is, amusingly, a lawyer for the accused. The avvocato has two minutes to plead for each client’s life, and does so with Ciceronian eloquence, despite the fact that acquittal is unlikely when there’s already a rope around the defendant’s neck. “I myself suffered under the fascisti,” he reminds the mob, “but I still believe in the integrity of the law. If you won’t give me time to call witnesses on his behalf, at least allow this man to speak in his own defense!”

  The adolescent magistrate calls for silence. “Ugo Messner, have you anything to say?”

  The crowd quiets, and the temptation of one last performance is too much. “ ‘I am the one who has no tale to tell,’ ” Renzo declaims grandly. “ ‘I made myself a gibbet of my own lintel—’ ”

  He stops, mid-verso, amid catcalls and curses. Two nuns skirt the edge of the crowd with a line of orphans trailing them: skinny little goslings behind dark blue geese. Suora Marta hurries the children along, intent on getting them past the makeshift gallows as quickly as possible. Her wimple shields her eyes, and for a moment he believes himself safe, but— “No! Wait!” she cries when she sees him. “You mustn’t— He’s not a collaborator!”

  Leaving the children, she pushes through the crowd, jerked backward when a man snares her arm. His face is yellow and green with fading bruises. “Look!” he snarls, pointing at jagged teeth with nailless hands. “Look at what they did to me!”

  “Not him! That’s Renzo Leoni!” She wrenches her arm loose, shouts to the others. “Find the rabbi! Or ask the archbishop!”

  “Go back to your convent!” the nailless man yells.

  “This man is not a criminal! He was using the Germans—”

  The rush-bottomed chair beneath Renzo’s feet wobbles. Its legs, or perhaps the cobbles they stand on, are uneven. Below him, arguments and accusations fade away. In his mind, it’s nearly sunset, and his eyes rise to a lavender sky where a thousand swifts soar and wheel. Their dark wings flash as they disappear, plunging, and reappear, sweeping upward in tight formation. He waits until the swifts dive and, in a moment of remembered ecstasy, hurls himself after them, and dangles breathlessly.

  It’s like flying, except you never come down.

  Autumn 1947

  MOTHER OF MERCY ORPHANAGE

  ROCCABARBENA

  Tongue in the corner of her mouth, a little girl glowers in mighty concentration. Determined to master this skill, she sighs heavily and stops to rub at a mistake. The paper crinkles. She looks up, close to tears.

  “Va bene, Filomena,” Suora Corniglia says. “You’ve practiced enough for today. Go out and play.”

  Filomena adds her worksheet to the wrinkled and deformed stack on Suora’s desk. Nearly every piece in the pile is crumpled or creased or blotted. The children do their best, but the paper undermines them. Parades of
nicely ovalled O’s and properly angled P’s stumble over bits of wood embedded in cheap grayish pulp. The older children have fountain pens, and any hesitation in the flow of writing results in a little pool of ink soaking into the paper. The younger ones use pencils, but their worksheets are holed by erasures. “Gently,” she reminds them over and over. “Don’t rub so hard!” But there is something about eight-year-olds and mistakes. Errors must be obliterated. The paper suffers.

  At least we have paper, she tells herself. Things are getting better…

  Rising from her desk, she cleans the board— an eraser in each hand, arms wheeling. Stepping to the nearest open window, she claps the felt blocks at arm’s length, closing her eyes and turning her head from the chalk dust. She sneezes anyway. The breeze shifts, clearing the air and carrying the shouts of workmen repairing the roof of the railroad station.

  The classroom windows don’t frighten her anymore. In the dormitories, orphans don’t wet their beds or wake up screaming quite so often. They are better fed, growing again. No one can love them as their dead or missing parents would have, but they know that the sisters care for them.

  Autumn light makes the varnished chestnut bookcases beneath the windows glow. From the time she was small, she has always loved the beginning of a new school year. Everything seems possible—

  A knock at the door makes her jump. The portress pokes her head into the room. “Sorry to startle you, Suora. There’s someone to see you.”

  “Grazie, Suora, I know this gentleman. Rabbino, how wonderful to see you again.”

  Left alone, the two of them struggle with emotions they are desperately tired of feeling. Widowed, childless, the rabbi is changed: bone and muscle, shadows and lines. They both know he did everything possible to save Suora Corniglia’s father, but il maggiore was so closely identified with Mussolini… Anyone who’d had anything to do with the Germans or the Republic of Salò was likely to get strung up. Even that poor one-armed postman was hanged. He couldn’t stutter fast enough to convince anyone he’d been a partisan all along.

  “Prego,” she begins, “have a seat, Rabbino—”

  The only adult-sized chair in the room is her own. They laugh, and Iacopo leans against a desktop near the window, but not for long. Filling the silence, he moves from place to place in the classroom, chatting a little too brightly about elections and political scandals, the reparations Italy must pay, the fate of territories taken by France and Yugoslavia. Rome has lost Abyssinia and Eritrea as well, but that may be a blessing. All over the world, the old powers struggle to regain control of rebellious colonies and protectorates. Nearly six years of war. Forty million dead, one way or another. Enough killing, one would have thought, to sicken everyone of the sport, but new conflicts have broken out in Palestine and India, in China and Indonesia, in Nicaragua and French Indochina.

  For her part, Corniglia speaks of the school and the children. Aid money from America. The new priest assigned to Don Leto’s old parish in San Mauro. Villa Malcovato.

  Somehow, in the chaos after the war, the villa still passed legally to il maggiore’s only surviving child. Suora Corniglia arranged for the land to be broken into individual farms, and much to the bishop’s dismay, gave title to the contadini who’d worked the land before the war. “Has his excellency forgiven you yet?” the rabbi asks, smiling when her dimples appear.

  “He’ll get over it,” she says, unperturbed. “Do you remember the German doctor who joined the partisans? There was a letter from him, sent to Villa Malcovato, asking about your family. I wrote back to tell him what happened.”

  Another silence. The rabbi stands. His hat brim moves through his fingers, around and around. “I’ve completed my work here,” he says finally. For two years, he has collected names, updated lists, sorting the missing from those gone forever. “We’ve established that nearly all the Italian deportees were sent to a camp in Poland called Auschwitz. A few have turned up, but we have just under six thousand confirmed dead.”

  She’s seen photos in the newspapers. People say the newsreels are too terrible to bear. The rabbi steps to the windows, his back to her.

  “There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’ After the Yom Kippur roundup in ’43, people all over Italy helped us. Almost fifty thousand Jews were hidden. Italians, foreigners. And so many of them survived the occupation. I keep asking myself, Why was it so different here? Why did Italians help when so many others turned away?” He shrugs and turns. “I’ve decided to immigrate to Palestine, Suora. To a kibbutz on the coast, near Tel Aviv.”

  From one war to another, she thinks. “You will be a great loss to us, Rabbino.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so, but I feel—” He looks away. “I feel that life here has been amputated.” He faces her a moment later, and smiles briefly. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you. And to say good-bye. And to return this. Renzo Leoni had it in his pocket when he— The mortician was an old friend of his. This was wrapped in a piece of paper with your name on it. Well, actually, it said Sister Dimples. The undertaker had no idea, but he kept it, and last week it occurred to him to ask me about it.”

  She holds out her hand. The rabbi drops a rosary into her palm. Plain black beads with simple silver links. Father Clown, she thinks. Father Clown…

  “Thank you, Rabbino,” she says when she can speak. “I will pray for him.”

  Coda

  NORTH TORONTO, CANADA

  2007

  This is what they remember about their mother: she never cried.

  Each of her children tells of some crisis that failed resoundingly to elicit maternal compassion. The cancer. The divorce. The miscarriage. In their mother’s mind, nothing that happened in Canada could ever justify lament. “Safe your tears,” she always said. “You may need dem later.”

  A hospice rabbi learns a lot about the families he serves. In the long hours old bodies require to die, gray-haired children take turns sitting at their parent’s bedside. Some are genuinely devoted, distressed at the pending loss but determined to make those final hours comfortable and serene. Others go through the motions, hoping to mitigate their own postmortem guilt. Some are frustrated, almost angry at the dying parent, desperate to know what forces deformed their childhood. This is their last chance to understand, and it is slipping away.

  Claudia Kaplan’s three children returned from Vancouver, from Montreal, from Windsor, to sit at their stricken mother’s bedside. Her face is like marble against the pillowcase. She will never speak again; cerebral hemorrhage, suffered alone, went untreated too long to remedy. Her silence feels familiar to her children. All three have gravitated toward careers that probe secrets or plumb silences. The eldest is a prosecutor, the middle child a psychologist, the youngest an interpreter for the deaf.

  Their mother had many fine qualities, they were quick to tell the rabbi. Despite an endless series of part-time menial jobs, she attended every school event and checked every bit of her children’s homework. She studied English from their basal readers, and helped them with arithmetic and geography. “I didn’ get no school past fourteen,” she’d say. “I gotta learn what you learn.”

  Comically— even stereotypically— tightfisted at home, she was generous to a fault with strangers. She’d squeeze a few dollars from her own meager earnings and those of the gentle tailor she married in a DP camp. She sent contributions to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society every year. “And that woman could not pass a panhandler without giving him some change,” her son told the rabbi. “I’d say, ‘Ma, he’s just going to buy booze.’ ”

  “ ‘If you can help, you gotta help,’ ” his sisters chorused. They’d heard it a million times.

  Their mother was always busy— sewing, cooking, gardening, canning. She knew the Latin binomials for every plant, but never bothered with their common English names. Given how bad her English was, her children were repeatedly surprised by how many lan
guages she knew. Occasionally, there’d be a long-distance phone call, and she would speak at length and mysteriously. “Was that Arabic?” David asked once.

  “Turkish,” she told him.

  “When the hell did you learn Turkish?”

  “After d’ war,” she said. “An’ don’ talk ugly— I don’ like dat hell stuff.”

  “That was her modus operandi,” David said. “Get too close, she’d change the subject.”

  Every Passover, they returned to North Toronto— the prosecutor, the psychologist, the interpreter for the deaf. Their mother provided a vast amount of food, but she seemed alone, no matter how many people were in the room. Maybe she was quiet because she couldn’t get a word in edgewise, with her kids debating and arguing and making wisecracks. Asked about her life, she’d only shrug. “Nossing e’citing, sank Got! I had enough ’citement in d’war.”

  “C’mon, Ma, tell us about the war!” David would urge.

  She wouldn’t be drawn. The prosecutor could ask leading questions or say something provocative to get a rise out of her. The psychologist and interpreter watched her face and hands for clues. She knew they hoped to trick her into revealing something. She had a way of laughing questions off— a short chuckle that did not convey amusement.

  History was their father’s domain, and Claudia disapproved of his obsession with the war. “Abe, you gonna get bad dreams,” she’d predict, and she was always right.

  “What was your father like?” the rabbi asked Jacqui.

  “He was never really there,” she said. “A lot of camp survivors were like that. You had to learn not to be noticed.”

  “Was your mother in a camp as well?”

  “She was hidden in northern Italy during the war. Her mother and two brothers were deported from France in 1942— we’re pretty sure they died in Auschwitz, but we never found out for certain. Mom’s father died of some kind of disease. Typhoid, I think. Something like that. That’s all she ever told us.”