A Thread of Grace

“Ei! Pierino!” Attilio Goletta yells from his hayloft when the postman comes into sight. “Did you hear? Ocelli’s truffle dog has learned to sniff out fascisti! You know how you can tell when he finds one?”

Pierino grins up at him, waiting for the punch line.

“He shits!” Attilio laughs hugely and tosses his pitchfork aside. Brown, bald, and barrel-chested, the farmer clumps down the exterior staircase in wooden clogs. “How can you tell if a new bridge is good?” he asks, wiping both hands on his pants and offering his left. “Drive over it with a truckload of Germans. If it falls down, it’s a good bridge!”

A tiny six-year-old runs over from the garden to tug on Pierino’s empty sleeve. “Ei! Pierino!” he pipes. “What’s the difference between a dog and a Nazi?”

Smiling expectantly, Pierino shakes his head: I don’t know.

“The Nazi lifts his arm!”

Pierino smiles, and Attilio roars, but gives the kid a shove toward the garden. “Get those rows ready! I don’t want to see any weeds!”

The ground the Golettas work is so bad they need every child, every daylight hour, six and a half days a week, year in and year out, to feed themselves without going further into debt. Attilio’s oldest boy, Tullio, is with the partisans, which makes everything harder. The Golettas aren’t just supporting themselves and their younger kids, either. There’s Florina’s mother, plus Attilio’s widowed sister and her two daughters, and three ebrei besides.

Pierino holds out an envelope, and Attilio grins. “Holy cards from Don Leto?”

Dollars from Hebrews in America become francs in Switzerland. A priest at the border smuggles them to a bishop in Genoa, who turns them into lire. The milkman brings that money to Don Leto, who distributes it to those who come to Mass. Pierino delivers the rest to isolated families like the Golettas and Canobbios and the Ocelli, who’ve taken in foreign Jews the way his own family has.

With his youngest son out of earshot, Attilio leans toward Pierino and whispers, “You hear about Pinocchio? He goes to Gepetto and says, Every time I make love, my girl complains she gets splinters! Gepetto gives him some sandpaper, ne? Couple of weeks later, he runs into Pinocchio again and says, Ei, Pinocchio, you getting along with the girls now? Pinocchio says, Who needs girls?”

Laughing, Pierino hefts his bag. He knows where Attilio’s getting cash, but God knows where he gets his jokes. “Mmm-marrap-podi’s ssssusp-picious. B-b-battista, too.”

“Marrapodi’s a moron. And my cousin’s a sack of shit, just like his father. Battista’s always saying, ‘I’m a Knight of Labor! I worked for everything I got!’ Merda! Battista bought that farm with money that should have been my father’s, and I hope the bastard gets a cancer. Florina!” Attilio yells, fuming. “The postman’s here!”

Florina hustles out of the house with three loaves of bread and a sweater knit from lumpy yarn. People say she was once the prettiest girl in Valdottavo, but ten pregnancies on, Florina is bowlegged and bent, with more fingers than teeth. She wraps the bread in the sweater and slips the bundle into Pierino’s mailbag. “Bring thith to my thon,” she lisps. “Tell Tullio: I pray for him and the otherth.”

Pierino resumes his climb toward the Cave of San Mauro, but he stops when he sees the red thread tied around a certain branch. Removing it, he veers onto a goat track, climbs alone and unobserved for half an hour. He arrives at the appointed place, lets the mailbag thump to the ground, and sits beside it. Still awkward with his left hand, but getting better, he unbuckles the leather flap and pulls out the chunk of cheese and apple Signora Toselli packed for him this morning.

Across the valley, half-buried in snow, the hamlet of Santa Chiara looks like part of the mountainside, its sloping slate roofs as dull as the sky. He hasn’t been home in nearly a month, but Don Leto’s housekeeper looks after him. The rectory has lots of books, and Don Leto likes to talk about them. “I, too, am the first of my family to be literate,” the priest said. “We who love to study are like pigs with wings, ne?”

Or warriors with one arm, Pierino thought.

He has steeped himself in the classics, reading late into each night, until he dreams of battles fought in stately, sonorous words. Like Scipio Africanus, Pierino has set himself to learn from the enemies of Rome.

He is only twenty-one— his education aborted by war, his arm truncated by war, his tongue tied up like a dog by war. Pierino Lovera’s name will never be in a book, but he understands war, and he knows how to win this one. He’s studied the tactics used against Giulius Caesar by Cassivellaunus; understands the trap laid by the German chieftain Arminius, who destroyed the Legions of Publius Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburger Wald. Supplied from the countryside, aided by relatives and neighbors, highly mobile indigenous irregulars have always been able to tie up conventional troops, disrupting and delaying their movement, confusing and defeating much stronger regular forces. History will show that Adolf Hitler is not Caesar but Pyrrhus, who won battle after battle but lost so much each time that he lost his war in the end.

Now, at last, Pierino has found a man who can make others hear what Pierino can only think. The man who has watched him all this time. “Ready?” Jakub Landau asks, stepping into view.

Pierino hoists his mailbag, and leads the way.

CAVE OF SAN MAURO

Duno Brössler hunches on a lump of rock, a dirty blanket around his shoulders, an oily rag draped over his knees. His fingers are blue and he shivers convulsively, but he’s learned to ignore the cold.

Methodically, he takes a 7.65mm RIAF Beretta ’35 to pieces. Removes the magazine, turns the safety on. Locks the slide, pushes the barrel back, lifts it from the rear. He is not worried about being disarmed on duty. He can field-strip and reassemble the pistol in sixty seconds, and he can do it one-handed. Like Pierino.

Duno takes the afternoon watch, because that’s when Pierino’s likely to arrive. Most of the boys loathe sentry duty. It’s lonely, boring, and cold, but Duno doesn’t mind. Pierino was colder in Russia.

Duno detests the Republic of Salò because Pierino detests it. He despises the repubblicani because Pierino despises them. He loathes the Germans on his own account, and Pierino hates them, too, but that puzzled Duno in the begi

Duno remembers Pierino’s answer as if the maimed man had spoken with the fluency of an orator. “The Russians were defending their homeland,” he said. “We, too, will defend our homes against the Germans, and against the Allies if they try to rule us. We’ll fight the landlords and the repubblicani. We will defeat anyone who comes to take land we’ve watered with our sweat.”

Pierino was patient with Duno’s struggle to learn Italian; Duno appreciated the time Pierino required to finish a sentence. After Don Leto introduced them, it took the whole of their climb up here for Pierino to explain where they were going. The Cave of San Mauro, high in the mountainside, has hidden fugitives for centuries. When Napoleon invaded Italy, the valley’s women were hidden from the French here. In this war, it’s the young men who are at risk during rastellamenti.

Una rastella is a hay rake, Pierino explained. The Germans descend on groups of potential laborers and rake them up for work gangs: “Un r-r-rastellammmmento.” By the time Pierino got the word out, Duno had memorized it.

Apart from Duno himself, the San Mauro Brigade consists of local kids born in the unlucky years of 1924 and 1925. Draftees could either serve in the Republican army under German command or risk being raked up. Many of the eighteen-year-olds who reported for duty have deserted, bringing home their guns, and stories of German insult and abuse.