A Thread of Grace

Landau points at Valdottavo blanketed by a brown haze. “Comrades! The fascisti have burned our houses, our villages. They have killed my family, your family! Will these men live?”

From three hundred throats, a single word.

Nine men are beaten to their knees, shoved facedown into the damp stone cobbles of the castle’s courtyard.

Blood spatters, fountains, pools. A slaughterhouse stink joins the cordite. The shooting goes on and on, until the guns are emptied, the rage is sated, the silence broken only by crow calls and wind.

“That was wrong,” Renzo says raggedly. “What was done here was wrong.”

“Yes,” Landau agrees. “It was a waste of bullets. Next time, we use rope.” Focusing for the first time on the green-eyed girl, Landau frowns. “Who are you?”

“You know her,” Duno Brössler reminds him. “She was in Sainte-Gisèle. She’s—”

“Capable of speaking for herself,” Landau says. He comes closer and asks again, “Who are you?”

She meets his eyes, then looks past him to the others. “I am the widow of Santino Cicala, and I have come to join you.”

Hours later, one man sits alone on a crude wooden bench, his back against a stone wall, an empty bottle in his hand, talking to the blood, diluted now by steady rain.

“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks.

“Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”

November 1944

VILLA MALCOVATO

NEAR ROCCABARBENA

Paradise, Mirella thought when she first saw this place. A large farm, fifteen kilometers from the nearest train station, five from the nearest village. The main house on a hillside, with a wide prospect of the broad valley, a small wooded mountain beyond. Patches of sloping cultivated land: wheat, corn, alfalfa, olives, vines.

“In the summer, it’s dry as dust,” Suora Corniglia warned her, “and hot! You can barely breathe! The riverbed becomes a desert— nothing but stones, with a little muddy trickle down the middle. But when it rains, the whole countryside comes to life. Everything has color again. That’s when the work is hardest, but it’s so beautiful…” The nun came to herself and cleared her throat. “There is a small school for the farm children. Your husband will replace a teacher who… is needed elsewhere. You’ll run the kitchen and the ambulatorio—a sort of clinic for the peasants. And everyone helps with harvests. You can trust the padrone without reservation. His name is Massimo Malcovato.”

This personage arrived at the convent in a huge car. Painted in the Vatican’s yellow and white, it was driven by a liveried chauffeur who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Don Osvaldo Tomitz. The children were thrilled by the grandeur of riding in an automobile, but their parents were more dazzled by the ease with which the vehicle sailed through roadblocks and checkpoints. Osvaldo slowed and stopped just long enough for Malcovato to declare, “Ich bin ein Diplomat des Vatikans!” Carabinieri asked no further questions. Even Germans waved the car on.

Wounded three times in the Great War, Malcovato retired a major, and he is still il maggiore to everyone he deals with. Wearing five Silver and three Bronze Medals for valor, he became an important food distributor under Mussolini, and to this day, he strides through Fascist Italy, greeted with respect everywhere he goes. “Officially,” he rumbled, “I am disabled by my war wounds. This status entitles me to first-class train compartments, and an attendant to accompany me whenever I must travel.”

“Il maggiore has businesses in Milan, Turin, Genoa, and Sant’Andrea, all with large Jewish communities,” Osvaldo said, throwing a grin over his shoulder at Iacopo. “And he has almost unlimited access to ration cards.”

“To be turned into cash,” Iacopo surmised, “for payoffs and bribes.”

“Gifts,” il maggiore corrected serenely. “Expressions of gratitude— as is my desire to help you, Rabbino. During the Battle of Caporetto, a soldier named Tranquillo Loeb carried me half a kilometer to a field hospital. Perhaps you knew him. He became a lawyer, and I followed his career— to its end. Shameful. Shameful! I never had any affection for the Germans, but how a civilized nation could permit such things is beyond me. I’ve done what I could since Loeb was killed. My daughter made me aware of your personal difficulties.”

“Your daughter?” Mirella asked.

“Suora Corniglia is il maggiore’s youngest,” Osvaldo said. “Renzo met her at San Giobatta. He kept in touch.”

“It was Leoni who suggested that Don Osvaldo become my attendant.”

“The fascisti were getting suspicious about the ‘doctor’ visiting so many houses in Sant’Andrea. So I’ve become a chauffeur. We’ve rebuilt the distribution network.”

“The arrangement has been quite satisfactory. Ah— we are nearly at the end of our journey. I have a house in Milan,” il maggiore told them, “but this is home. Don Osvaldo and I generally visit once a month for a few days of rest. Occasionally we may bring additional guests, but I’m sure Signora Soncini will be able to accommodate them at the table.”

Villa Malcovato proved to be a self-contained kingdom straddling the border between the mountains and the plains of Piemonte. Some six hundred contadini on fifty-seven tenant farms are scattered across seven thousand hectares, all administered from the villa fattoria, with its threshing floor, an ox-powered mill, a granary, oil presses, a dairy, carpentry and ironwork shops, a laundry and stables, poultry coops, pigpens, barns. Operating on the mezzadria system, the estate produces wine, oil, flour, pasta, bread, cheeses, meat and eggs, fruits, vegetables, and beans.

The villa itself is unpretentious: a square sixteenth-century stone and redbrick house, its loggia overlooking a garden of cypresses and ilex. “Rosina, see how pretty?” Mirella said. “Angelo, look! There are dogs!”

“Kitties, too?” Stefania asked softly.

“Every barn has kitties!” Mirella assured her. They had to take Stefania, of course. Angelo would not be parted from her, and it felt right to add a daughter that age to the family.

When the car pulled up to the back door, the older children raced off to see the animals. Iacopo went with il maggiore and Don Osvaldo to meet the factor and begin learning the farm’s operations. Left behind, with Rosina squirming in her arms, Mirella nearly swooned when she saw the enclosed privy. And the kitchen! Limestone floors, a marble sink under a window fitted with glass, not just oiled lambskin. An indoor pump for water. Glasses, plates, tin-lined copper pans. Beautifully crafted storage baskets hanging from the rafters. A long wooden table for her family, plentiful food to place before them! Paradise, she thought again, with a Shehecheyanu of thanksgiving.

Three months of relentless labor have sweated the romance out of country life. Since her first rapturous day in the kitchen, Mirella and two housegirls have rolled out highways of pasta, scrubbed mountain ranges of potatoes and carrots, ground swamps of basil, garlic, and oil for pesto. Dio santo, the bread alone is a full-time job! Thirty loaves a week to fill those pretty baskets— bread made by hand from standing grain to flour to kneaded loaves. Fifteen kilos of dough at a time, baked in a wood-burning oven fueled by cuttings from grape vines and fruit trees.

Rosina alone is exempt from work. Like all the estate’s children, Angelo and Stefania pick tomatoes, shell beans, and glean a second harvest from the wheat fields after the men have gone through with mechanical threshers. Ta