A Thread of Grace

“It’s spartan, Giacomo,” Lidia Leoni says, “but no one will think to look for you here.”

“The sisters will watch for trouble,” Suora Marta assures him.

“Is there anything else you need, Signor Tura?” Rina Dolcino asks.

The sofer inspects a miniature forest of brushes, quills, and pens rising from glass jars. His gnarled fingers walk in the air above the tools of his trade. Kneaded erasers, cleaning pads, sponges, tapes. Little piles of parchment trimmings that can be turned into glue to restore other documents. Rows of small bottles filled with colored inks. The ladies have smuggled in the entire contents of his studio, including two chunks of Jerusalem limestone that serve as paperweights. He perches on the stool, adjusts the drawing table to a better angle. “I could use more light. My eyes aren’t so good anymore.”

The ladies think. “Mirrors?” Lidia suggests. “To reflect the light from the window.”

“Of course!” says Suora Marta. “We have no mirrors in Immacolata, grazie a Dio, but—”

“I’ll bring one,” Rina Dolcino promises quickly. She’s seen Signor Tura coming and going from the synagogue for years, but they have never spoken, beyond wishing one another ’n giorno. The scribe is a small man, bent from his work, but he has a fine head of white hair and intelligent eyes. The age Rina’s husband would have been, if the sugar disease hadn’t taken him… She blinks and pulls a set of documents from her handbag. “These are the newest, Signor Tura. My brother just got them from the office in Genoa. He’ll stay off the street until you’re done.”

Surprisingly nimble, Giacomo hops off the stool and steps to the window. Holding the identity card to the light, he studies the paper, the printing, the signatures. “I’ll have a set of blanks for the engraver by the end of the week. How will you get photos, Lidia?”

“The Catholics who took over Emanuele’s studio— they’re helping.”

“You’ll need the stamps,” Giacomo reminds her.

“We’re working on that.”

The three women bid him good-bye. Lidia exits briskly, but Ferdinando Dolcino’s widow allows her hand to linger in the scribe’s a moment longer than absolutely necessary. She is, Giacomo notices, still quite a striking woman, but before the thought can go further, Suora Marta takes her by the elbow and turns her toward the hallway. Rina flashes a smile over her shoulder. The door clicks shut.

Giacomo sits on the bed. The mattress is thin, but he can’t fault the nuns’ hospitality. He hasn’t eaten this well since before his wife died.

Outside, a cloud drifts eastward, and a shaft of sunlight makes the ink bottles sparkle. Crimson, grass green, cobalt blue. Gold and silver. Sepia and coal black. With such colors, Giacomo Tura has spent a lifetime documenting the happy events of the Jewish community: illuminating marriage contracts, birth a

Lifting the German document again, the sofer studies the color and density of the paper, the ink, the script. Yes, he thinks, laying it aside. I can reproduce this.

He washes his hands. Struggles into the midnight blue scribal tunic. Settles a kippah onto his head to remind himself that his work is sacred. “We write the Torah for life, for continuity,” his master told him when Giacomo was an apprentice. “Before begi

This much is tradition, but he takes up a second snippet of parchment. Smiling grimly at his i

Late September 1943

VALDOTTAVO

NEAR FRAZIONE SANTA CHIARA

“Papa, we should go back down,” Claudette says at first light.

She is, her father thinks, almost incapable of silence. Just as she had to crawl and walk and climb when she was little, she has to hear her own voice now, to argue, to test her strength.

“We won’t be giving ourselves away, Papa. Someone already knows we’re here.”

Sitting up, Albert digs crust from the corners of his eyes with numb fingers, and rubs his palms together briskly.

She pulls his topcoat more tightly around his shoulders, defying him to yell at her for being nice. “Look at those rocks.” She points at pebbles he was too worn out to brush aside last night. “How could you sleep on those?”

“I didn’t,” he grumps.

“We’re almost out of newspaper,” she warns, and leaves to relieve herself.

In Sainte-Gisèle, Albert had a library to visit, and other adults for companionship. Here, there’s nothing to read but their diminishing supply of toilet paper, nothing to do but fret and argue. They haven’t seen another soul since Santino Cicala left them in the charcoal maker’s shack a week ago.

Then, yesterday, two apples materialized. Russet red, mottled with lemony yellow, they’d been placed in the center of a flat rock just outside the hut. Albert insisted that they leave the shack and move farther up the mountain, where they’ve spent a wretched night.

“You look like one of those scraggly Poles who never shave!” Claudette says when she returns.

You’re no vision of loveliness yourself, he thinks.

“Papa, what if it was Santino?” she asks.

He rolls creakily to his knees, and pulls out the velvet tefillin bag. “What if it was Germans?”

“Germans wouldn’t leave apples.” She watches him wind the tefillin strap. “Papa, what if the Allies—”

“Claudette, please! Five minutes of peace!” He tugs the dirty tallis over his eyes, grateful for this small symbolic tent to hide within. Blessed be our desert fathers, he thinks, and loses himself in prayer.

“I would kill for a newspaper!” Claudette says the moment he’s finished. Oblivious to his mood, she glowers at the town that straddles a river far below, visible through half-bare branches. “I’m not joking. I would actually, truly kill somebody for a newspaper,” she says. “And I’d torture somebody for a radio!”

“Where would you plug it in?”

It’s a good point, but she won’t admit it, any more than he’d admit he’s as starved for news as she is. This is what I’ve been reduced to, he thinks. Childish games with my own daughter.

Her tone changes. “Papa? Do you remember what Mama looks like? Without looking at a picture, I mean.”

“Of course,” he says a bit too quickly.

“I wish I had a photograph of Santino. I think I remember, but he’s sort of mixed up with John Garfield.”

More like Edward G. Robinson, Albert thinks.

“I’m sure Santino left the apples! He’s looking for us, and we’re up here freezing and starving for nothing!”

“Why would he leave us apples without so much as a buon giorno?”

Albert slips the tefillin into their bag and folds the prayer shawl neatly, remembering the day, years ago, when he was shocked by a newspaper account of a woman who killed her four children and then herself. “How could a mother murder her own children?” he asked Paula. “The mystery,” his wife informed him, after a long day with their three, “is how many of us don’t.”

Claudette stomps around, rubbing her arms. “I can see my breath! Papa, you never listen! We can’t stay up here! It’ll be winter soon—”