A Thread of Grace

A tired young woman wearing a man’s padded jacket is next. “My husband served with Pierino. Tomasso’s still in Russia.” She puts a clean, worn shirt in Albert’s hands and pulls a fussy three-year-old onto her hip.

One by one, representatives of each household come forward with a pair of knitted socks, a skirt for the signorina and a kerchief for her head, neatly mended trousers for her father.

Over and over, Albert Blum murmurs gratitude. “You are too kind,” he says, stu

“We all have boys in the army,” Cesare’s tiny wife explains. “Do unto others, ne? Maybe someone in Russia will be good to my grandson.”

“Grazie. Grazie tante,” Albert says. “May God bring your soldiers safely home to you.”

The oil lamps flicker, and Tercilla yanks a homespun blanket across a sapling mounted above the doorway to block the draft. Sitting at last on muscles thick from climbing, she looks taller somehow, though her feet don’t touch the floor. “Signor Blum,” she prompts, “Don Leto said the ebrei might be from Poland, but you speak such pretty Italian, like a Roman!”

“You are too kind, signora— my accent is terrible! We are Belgian. Before the war, I worked for a metal-ore company based in Antwerp. Every year, I traveled to Genoa and Istanbul and Nice to inspect the books of our partners. I was an accountant—”

“Istanbul!” someone cries.

“An accountant?” someone else asks.

The conversation becomes lively and general with questions about the price of firewood and eggs in France, the habits of Saracens, the likelihood that their landlord il maggiore Malcovato is cheating them on a shared chestnut crop. Albert answers as best he can, his voice flat and unmusical as he concentrates on finding words and remembering grammar. Often, his Italian fails him, and brief good-natured charades ensue, but he warms in the attention and dignity he is accorded, and feels as though he has awakened from a long bad dream. This is what I was like before the war, he realizes. A man of the world. Competent, respected.

Across the room, Tercilla’s eyes meet Albert’s and she lifts her chin toward his daughter. He glances back, and smiles. Huddled together on the fireplace platform, Claudette and the other children look like a litter of sleeping puppies, and the adults’ voices drop.

When the talk turns to rumors of Mussolini’s return, Albert’s knowledge falters. He knows less than the peasants do, but that doesn’t matter. The story of the mountain crossing is better than politics anyway, and his telling of it takes on the epic cadences of the Odyssey.

For all the adventure of the trek from Sainte-Gisèle, what concerns Tercilla and her neighbors most is the awful news that Albert’s wife and sons are missing. There are murmurs of approval when he tells them about the carabiniere’s kindness, but when they hear how Paula and the boys were put on an eastbound train, Pierino stands.

“What is it?” Albert asks him. “Why do you look at me like that?”

“He has seen terrible things,” Tercilla tells everyone. “He cries in his sleep.”

“Shut your face, woman!” Cesare snaps.

“What?” Albert asks again. “Pierino, what have you seen?”

The soldier’s eyelids flutter. His mouth works. His throat spasms. The word, when it emerges, is like a sigh. “Hhh-hands” is all he says.

Day and night, the Italian troop transports chugged eastward, toward the Russian front. Whenever the train stopped for water and coal, Pierino and the other draftees would get out to stretch their legs.

At nearly every station, on the next track over, there were cattle cars filled with Hebrews. “Voda! Voda!” they’d call. Or “Un peu d’eau!” Or, “Wasser, bitte!”

“Acqua! They want water!” someone shouted.

After that, the Italians made sure their canteens were full so they could fill the palms thrust out through gaps in the wooden slats. The Germans’ guard dogs snarled, but you could buy the handlers off or distract them while someone else slipped bread or cigarettes into waiting hands. The ladies asked for combs sometimes, ashamed to be so dirty. Children whimpered. Infants wailed, a high peculiar hopeless sound.

An officer who spoke French found a Jew who did as well. “They’re taking us to Palestine,” that lady told him. “We’re going to be resettled.”

Back on the troop train, the officer said, “Somebody’s lying. They can’t be going to Palestine.”

“Why not, Tenente? Didn’t il Duce send a bunch of Hebrews there back in the thirties?” a sergeant asked. “Those refugees from Austria and Germany, remember, sir?”

“Sì, certo,” the officer said. Mussolini was crafty. Jewish immigrants would stir up the Arabs— that would make things hot for the Tommies in their protectorate. “But the British haven’t let Jews into Palestine for years.”

“So where are the trains going?” Pierino asked. No one answered.

The rails ran out, leaving days and days of marching before they reached the front. The Italian Eighth Army was dug in along a line of low hills about a kilometer from the River Don. They had log-and-earth bunkers for each platoon, with interlocking fields of fire to cover the gaps, but even with reinforcements there weren’t enough men for a line of continuous trenches, and they had no cement for pillboxes or dragon’s-teeth obstacles to stop enemy tanks. Already the Eighth had withstood a Soviet offensive north of Stalingrad, saving the Germans to the south a lot of trouble, but that was stalemate, not victory.

In 1941, the Führer thought Russia would fall as fast as France, and neither Axis army had winter gear for the first Battle of the Don. With a second winter coming on, the Italian reinforcements expected cold. As the days shortened and the weather worsened, they added to their gray-green uniforms a second woolen shirt, a thick sweater, and finally a greatcoat, but no wool in the world could stand up to Russian cold, and their boots were already falling apart.

Warm in fur-lined hats and fur-lined parkas, with felted valenki like a second skin over fur-lined boots, the Soviet army waited on the other bank, patient as a glacier. On sentry duty Pierino would smoke, and stamp his freezing feet, and stare across the river. Most of the time, the only sound was the whisper of high, dry grasses, but if the wind was right he might hear a Russian sing, or cough, or sneeze across the Don.

In November, snowy slush coalesced into a veneer of ice. The Reds fired mortars at the river in the morning to see how fast the holes froze over. Soon Field Marshal Winter would build an ice bridge across the river. And then? There wasn’t a schoolchild in Europe who hadn’t read about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Everyone but Hitler knew what was coming.

The battle began on Pierino’s watch. There was no bugle call to arms, just the sudden stu

The Soviet artillerymen loaded and fired, over and over and over, like clockwork executioners. The bombardment went on so long, Pierino could no longer remember a time before it began, or imagine a time when it would end. The entire 2nd Corps was destroyed before the ground attack began.

When the shelling stopped, ten Soviet motorized divisions and two tank regiments roared across the frozen river. Outnumbered and outgu