A Thread of Grace

“G-G-Gesù! They— they just k-keep c-c-coming!” Pierino wept to a major he’d never seen before. “Wh-why d-don’t w-w-we ret-treat?”

“The Germans—” The winded officer gasped, choking on the stench of cordite and blood and shit. “They said… hold the line… to the last man.”

And where could you pull back to? Leave the trenches, you’d be in open country. In Russia. In winter.

Pierino saw the man who threw the grenade that crippled him. Wiping spattered blood and flesh from his face, he stared witlessly at what was left of his right hand, and looked up to meet the Russian’s eyes for an instant before the grenadier’s own head exploded, poppy red.

Cradling his arm as though it were a baby, Pierino bid good-bye to the battle and four of his fingers, and walked, hunched like a hag, to a field hospital eight kilometers west of the front. There were no narcotics, no anesthetics by that time. Appalled by others’ screams, Pierino kept silent while a hollow-eyed, grim-faced medic snipped away the last shreds of his thumb. “Brace yourself,” the medic warned. Pi

The medic cut Pierino’s shirt off. “You’re lucky these didn’t punch through to the lungs,” he yelled, tweezing grenade fragments out of chest wounds Pierino hadn’t even noticed. “Get some sleep,” the medic said, and went on to someone else.

Pierino eased a dead man’s greatcoat around his own bare shoulders and shuffled to a tent nearby. There he lay among moaning, sobbing men, who filled the air with cries of “Mamma! Acqua! Prego, acqua!” He had hardly closed his eyes when a colonel stuck his head into the hospital tent and shouted, “They’ve broken through! Run, boys! Run!”

Later, Pierino heard the Soviets took one hundred thousand prisoners, many of them wounded. He himself flagged down a truck loaded with salvaged materiél, and begged the driver for a ride. “We’re not supposed to carry infantry,” the Neapolitan corporal told him, darting a look around. “Fuck it. Hop in the back.”

Pierino hid behind ammunition crates and slipped into merciful unconsciousness, oblivious to the jarring, springless ride. Sometime during the retreat, his arm turned septic. He was half dead when the truck driver dropped him off at an Italian military hospital near Warsaw. “I can’t save the arm, but I can save you,” he heard the surgeon say just before the amputation. “You’re going home, son.”

A bargain, Pierino thought as the anesthestic took hold. Half an arm was not too much to pay.

By May of ’43, he was strong enough to travel. The Italian trains were crammed with wounded, each man accompanied by as many orderlies and escorts as possible. Hitler ordered his own shattered regiments to die in Russia, and called his allies cowards. Italy’s generals didn’t care; their pride now lay in saving their nation’s sons and brothers and husbands from pointless slaughter.

This time the troop trains rolled west, with fewer men and fewer legs to stretch while the locomotive took on water and coal. But one thing hadn’t changed: the freight cars packed with Jews. “They’re going to labor camps,” someone in the waiting room said. “That’s what I heard.”

Two SS officers were waiting in the station for a different train. The smaller glanced up from his newspaper. “All’inferno,” he said in clear, supercilious Italian. “They are going to hell.”

Stump throbbing, Pierino muttered, “Wh-wh-what’s that ssssupposed to mmm-mean?”

The German said a word the Italians had never heard before. It sounded like a curse or a cough, like a man clearing his throat.

A Sicilian draftee assigned to Pierino had an accent so thick even other Italians had to listen hard to understand him. Carmello stood and pointed violently first at the Germans in their fine black uniforms and then toward his own eyes. “I saw! I saw in dat city! Dey pulla d’ wife froma d’ husban’! Dey dragga d’ screamin’ chil’ren froma d’ papa’s arms!” His voice cracked, but not from youth. “Dey break uppa da families!”

A hundred stony faces turned toward the Germans, whose hauteur did not alter under scrutiny. “You Italians,” the small one said with soft amusement. “So sentimental! Vermin don’t have families. They merely breed. It’s a public health matter, really.”

He folded his newspaper and stood. His boots were polished to such a reflective shine, it seemed impossible that they were leather. Black glass rather, or obsidian. “I believe I’ll have a bite to eat,” he said. There was no café in that station, but the other German left as well.

“I saw wit’a my own eyes,” the Sicilian whispered again and again. “I saw! I saw—”

“What did you see?” Albert Blum asks.

Pierino whirls, startled by this near, real voice, when he had been listening so intently to the remembered one. He takes a breath before he answers, giving himself time. “Fffreight t-t-t-trains, fffull of eb-brei.”

And hands. So many hands. You have not seen them, signore? Pierino asks in thoughts that are still fluent. A hundred in each boxcar. A thousand on each train. Train after train, headed toward Poland, from the east and from the west. How many? Pierino wonders. How many in eight months?

Albert frowns. “The Germans said they’d be resettled…”

Think, Pierino’s face urges. Are the Germans so charitable, signore? Did they conquer the East so that Juden would have Lebensraum?

“There was a Pole in Sainte-Gisèle,” the older man recalls uncertainly. “Jakub Landau. Ebreo, but—” He waves his hand around his head. “Very blond, like an Aryan. He said… crazy things. He told us, ‘They have factories for killing Jews in Poland.’ He was such a strange man! Maybe they shoot people for some infraction? For working too slowly, perhaps, or damaging a machine.”

Pierino Lovera rubs the stump of his aching arm, and says no more. History will break your heart, he thinks, but I won’t wield the hammer.

LEONI APARTMENT

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“Mamma promised me a brother,” Angelo Soncini grumps. “She always lies.”

Loosening a crinkly length of used wool, Lidia Leoni peers over her glasses at the misbuttoned shirt, short pants, and unmatched socks of a child who’s dressed himself. “Your mother didn’t lie, Angelo. Sometimes ladies are quite sure they’ll have a boy, and then it turns out to be a girl. Until a baby is born, only God knows what it will be. Don’t pick those. You’ll get an infection.”

He turns attention from his scabby knees to the handbag slumping near him on the floor. Soon, the rhythmic tick of knitting needles is joined by the metallic click of the two gold beads that hold Lidia’s purse closed. “My other sister died,” Angelo says conversationally. “I didn’t care. She was a pest.” He glances up. “She was!”

In Lidia’s considerable experience, seven-year-olds are frequently morose and sour little people. The best policy for dealing with them is to wait until they’re eight, when they get silly.

Click, click, click goes the purse clasp. “Maybe Rosina will die, too!” Angelo says, brightening a bit.

“Your new sister arrived a little early, but I’m afraid Rosina is just fine.”

“Accidents happen,” Angelo reminds her darkly. “Mamma told Sara, ‘Don’t use that coal oven till we get it fixed,’ but Sara didn’t believe a stove could kill a person.”

Lidia nods. The boy tells this story nearly every day.

“When me and Mamma got back, Sara was all crumped down, and Altira’s eyes were all white, like this.” He demonstrates gruesomely.

“My daughter Ester was the baby of the family for four years,” Lidia tells him, purling. “When her brother Renzo was born, Ester was very a