A Thread of Grace

And the nurseries— Christ! The nurseries were filled with the worst that could happen to human zygotes. Babies with gaping holes where their mouths and noses should be. Fragile little skeletons wrapped in a thin layer of blue-white skin the color of watered milk. Spastic, or rigidly immobile. Children so crippled they’d never leave their cribs. So impaired they’d never learn anything. Their only communication was the ceaseless, tearless, wordless moan of those trapped for years in a life of unspeakable, inescapable pain. Free me. Free me. Free me—

“Herr Schramm? Herr Schramm!” Lidia says sharply. “Are you all right?”

“Those children are like a bomb!” he says raggedly. “A bomb that kills the whole family, that breaks everything in a home! All the mother’s time and attention go to the weakest. She deprives her other children of her care. She neglects also her husband. It is natural that he should leave! And for what? A child who will never contribute anything to society!”

When Lidia speaks, her voice is emotionless, factual. “Yes. I knew a mongoloid when I was young. A neighbor’s child. His nose ran constantly. He never used a handkerchief. Disgusting. His tongue was always out. He couldn’t learn to control his bowels.”

“They never do!” Schramm declares. “A proven fact!”

Lidia raises her hands, adjusts a hairpin, tightening the iron-gray chignon. “When Altira was born, everyone told Mirella the condition was hopeless. Some of us also believed—” She hesitates. “I believed the child would reflect badly on the Jewish community. It would give comfort to those who believed us an inferior race.”

Schramm looks away from the level eyes, dry beneath lined and looping eyelids.

“Mirella stood up to us,” Lidia recalls. “You’ve seen how she can be. I told her she was being unreasonable. She said, ‘The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What’s wrong with unreasonable love?’ Sentimental nonsense, I thought, but she kept Altira. Mirella treated that hopeless child like any other beloved baby. The results were…” Lidia pauses to choose her word. “Stu

The wind carries the scent of rock and warming soil. A few meters from where they sit, a hawk rides heat from sunlit crags. Feathers rippling in the wind, the bird lifts one wing and wheels.

“I was surprised by Altira’s sweetness,” Lidia continues, voice light, controlled. “She was often rather boring. All small children are boring, frankly. They love to do the same thing over and over. Altira had a capacity for repetition far beyond the limits of my patience. Even so, there was a light in her eyes.”

The breeze shifts. The hawk rocks slightly, working to maintain his position, yellow eyes sweeping the tangle of spring-green vegetation at the edge of the hunchback’s terraces.

“When I was thirty-four, I had a child— not like Altira, but not … right. When she was born, I swore she’d never be ridiculed as that neighbor boy was. We told everyone the baby died. My husband took her to the Cottolengo Institute near Genoa. She lived there for seven years.” Her chair creaks as she eases sparely fleshed bones on the unforgiving surface. “I never went to see her.”

The hawk stalls for a breathless moment, folds his wings, plummets. In the silence, they hear the brief, small cry of his hapless prey.

“Regret changes nothing.” Lidia waits until Schramm’s eyes meet hers. “Go to Mirella,” she says. “Beg pardon, Herr Doktor.”

Inside, dripping rag in hand, Mirella scrubs furiously at the trompe l’oeil drawings on the wall. When Schramm appears in the doorway, she plunges the rag into the bucket of washwater and wrings it like a chicken’s neck.

“Doctors! Doctors like you— She won’t live, that’s what they told me. But she did. She’ll never talk, but she did, Schramm. Not clearly, I admit that, but lots of three-year-olds are hard to understand! And she understood what we said to her. She was not an idiot!”

A chalk ocean disappears. Rosina sobs. Schramm sinks onto the stone platform near the fireplace.

“They said she’d never walk, but she did. Yes, she was clumsy. So what? Not everyone is a ballerina. She was sick a lot, but everybody gets colds. And yes! I probably did neglect Angelo, but he didn’t need me as much as she did.”

“Mirella, please—”

The washrag, filthy with land and sea, smacks against his shoes. “It’s Signora Soncini to you!”

“Signora, no parent would wish for the kind of children I have— I have seen. If such conditions could be prevented—”

“The race would be improved?” Mirella wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Homer was blind. Beethoven went deaf—”

“Signora, you don’t seriously believe that a mong— that your daughter could have been a composer?”

“We don’t know what she could have been! She died before we found out!”

Frightened by her mother’s anger, Rosina crawls to Schramm. He bends stiffly and takes the baby onto his lap. Mirella snatches Rosina away.

“Doctors,” she says contemptuously, oblivious to the child wailing on her hip. “You look at people for ten minutes, and you think you know everything about them!”

Less, Schramm thinks. Ten seconds, perhaps? Five?

“Airp’ane!” Rosina sobs, pointing.

“She wasn’t a tragedy, Werner! She was a little girl. She was my daughter. And she loved to dance.”

Rosina squirms out of her mother’s heedless embrace. “Airp’ane!” she cries, patting at the door.

The noise outside grows. A shift in tone: acceleration. “Mein Gott,” Schramm whispers.

“You’re not even listening!” Mirella cries, aghast. “You doctors never—”

They have, perhaps, half a minute. He grabs Rosina, thrusts her at Mirella, flings the door open. “Get out!” he shouts. “Get away from the buildings! Run!” he yells to Lidia, pushing Mirella out the door. “Run for the trees!”

The first Stuka shrieks by. Mirella makes for the woods, the baby clutched to her chest. Head between his shoulders, Schramm runs toward Lidia, grips her arm. A second gull-wing shadow sweeps over the ground. They both stumble when the engine backblast hits them.

Mirella crouches, shielding Rosina with her body. Rosina’s terrified screams join the high-pitched wail of the Stukas, and the rattle of their machine guns. The first concussion nearly knocks Lidia off her feet. Schramm staggers but keeps his grip. The second bomb explodes farther up the mountain.

Fifty meters into the forest, they scrabble sideways, skirting the mountain’s incline, scrambling over vines and rocks. Keep track, he tells himself. Center-mount 500s, away. Four SD70 fragmentation bombs on the wing racks. How many left?

Schramm spots an ancient chestnut. Thin mountain soil has eroded away from a snaking tangle of tree roots, creating a little cave. Pointing, he gasps, “In there!” He takes Rosina. The women crawl through an opening like a Gothic arch made of roots as thick as Rosina’s body. One of the planes lets its rack of 70s go. Stones and dirt shower down through treetops. He hands the shrieking baby in to Mirella.

“Get in!” Mirella shouts. Schramm shakes his head. She and Lidia move to the edges of the little space. “Get in!” Mirella yells again. “There’s room!”

A second rack of bombs falls. The detonations merge into a single titanic blast. He squirms under the tree and wedges himself between the women. “Luftwaffe! They want the partisans, not us!” They nod, trembling. He puts his arms around them.

Another pass: explosions are replaced by the rattle of machine guns and answering small-arms fire. Engine noises doppler away. Six, perhaps eight minutes after the raid began, it’s over.

For a time, only the baby’s hiccuping sobs break the forest’s stu

When cramped muscles demand movement, Schramm delivers himself like a breech birth, feet first. Mirella hands Rosina through, crawls out on her own, takes the baby back. “Wasn’t that exciting, Rosina?” she cries, voice high with forced cheer. “Santo cielo! What a racket!”