Mary Russel - A Thread of Grace

In the spring of 1927, over his wife’s objections, Emanuele Leoni’s son became the youngest member of the Sant’Andrea Aviation Club. And while there was no photograph to record Renzo’s initial crash landing, other moments in his son’s career as a pilot were immortalized.

“Look at this!” Emanuele would order clients who came to the studio to document an engagement, a wedding, a bar mitzvah. “That’s Renzo— he was over the harbor in an old Savoia 17 when the engine shaft broke. See this? That’s Italo Balbo himself, visiting my boy in the Benghazi Hospital. Renzo was flying a Macchi 52R with a thousand-horsepower Fiat AS1 engine. He set a new speed record just before one of the wings ripped off. Here he is getting his commission in the Royal Italian Air Force. Renzo joined up the day after we declared war on Abyssinia. That snapshot’s him in a field hospital in ’36. Led a squadron back in a sandstorm. His own engine failed just before he landed, but Renzo didn’t lose a single man. See this? The Medaglia d’Argento. My boy’s a hero!”

In thirteen years as a pilot, Renzo Leoni crawled out of five bloody wrecks. Blinded by fog, deafened by thunder, he’s flown over the Mediterranean and the Alps. He’s been lost and low on fuel above the Libyan desert and trackless Ethiopian wastes, and shot at by Abyssinian anti-aircraft guns. But it was Emanuele Leoni who was buried with that Silver Medal; Renzo took it off the day it was awarded, and never spoke of it again.

The familiar sensation rises in his throat. Renzo pushes himself upright and vectors through the maze of tables and chairs and chests, trying not to add bruises to his shins. Centuries of settling have rendered the marble floor uneven, but the uncompromisingly modern bathroom is only ten years old. And surprisingly clean, given his mother’s attitude toward housekeeping.

Unwilling to increase the glare off the white ceramic tiles and nickel-plated fixtures, Renzo kneels before the toilet without turning on the light. He brings up bad brandy and outraged stomach acid in two efficient gouts. It takes considerably longer to make his crash-battered knees and ankles straighten, but he gets to his feet and hauls down on the chain, relieved that the plumbing still works after the last English air raid. Mouth sour, he unbuttons his rumpled shirt and pulls off the cotton singlet beneath it. With stately deliberation, he gives the cold-water tap a quarter turn. Splashes his face and chest. Brushes his teeth, and spits. Only then does he confront the man in the mirror.

The asymmetries of his chest are familiar: hard knobs of badly healed ribs on the right, a ragged scar on the left where his collarbone punched through the skin. Dark and anarchic, his hair is a chaos of short brown curls above a broken nose that gives a hawkish look to the lined and haggard face. Two years in Abyssinia, three in Ventotene Prison. A total of twenty-nine months in a variety of hospitals… Closer to forty than thirty, his face says, lying.

It’s just the hangover, he lies in return, stropping a straight razor.

Friends on leave have carried home lurid tales of drunken parties hosted by German officers. Hitler may be an abstemious health-food fanatic, but schnapps and beer fuel his military, and Renzo can now confirm the stories of prodigious Teutonic boozing. When he got Schramm back to the Bellavista, the German had sobered up enough to drink some more and insisted that Renzo join him. Curious about Schramm, and thirsty himself, Renzo was easy to persuade. They found a tavern near the hotel and sat at a corner table: a comity of two, ignoring the armistice celebration around them.

Night came. The bar emptied. Schramm talked on, and on. He spoke of the eastern front, and the Red Army. He spoke of the Allies, and the Japanese. He speculated about the effect of Italy’s surrender on the course of the war. Then, when the yawning waiter deposited yet another bottle on the table, Schramm spoke, at last, of Germany. “Four long years, we fought the whole world to a standstill. Then we wake up one morning in 1918, and the war is lost!” Schramm shook his head in dazed amazement. “One day the empire’s there, and the next— pfft! Gone. And who presumes to take the kaiser’s place? Friedrich Ebert. A harness maker whose magnificent ambition was to make Germany a nation of bureaucrats! Governments rising and falling like drunks in a gutter. Influenza. That filthy, humiliating treaty! Demonstrations, strikes, riots. Christ! The inflation—!”

“The Jew bankers getting fat while real Germans starved,” Renzo supplied, mashing a cigarette into an ashtray. “That was shit, you know. The kaiser financed the war by printing money. Inflation wrecked the banks, not Jews.”

Schramm never paused. “Everything we had— gone, overnight. Six million men unemployed, and if you had a job, you were paid in worthless heaps of Weimar paper. Then the stock market crashed, and the whole world went to hell!”

“And of course, it was the Jew speculators who did it.”

“Yes, but why?” Schramm asked, surprising Renzo for the first time. “The Jews lost everything, too! The Depression dragged everybody down!”

“Why indeed?” Renzo asked cannily. “This is the subtlety, Schramm. This is the key! For Jews to cause a catastrophe that ruined them along with everyone else makes… no… sense. So it must be a conspiracy, right? A diabolical Jew conspiracy! I’ve had three years to think about this, my friend.” He poured them both another drink. “Life was shit. Hitler had the most appealing solution. Just get rid of the Jews.”

“Put a stop to all that useless parliamentary crap,” Schramm said, remembering. “March together as comrades! Rebuild the German nation—”

“And reclaim your place in the sun!” Renzo declared, chin jutting, mouth turned down, nodding vigorously at his own rhetoric: Mussolini with dark and coiling hair.

“Aha!” Schramm cried, a spongy cough merging with the exhalation. “You Italians did the same thing. Americans, Russians, the Japanese. We all wanted to march behind men who knew what to do! Your family, your teachers, your friends. Newspapers, the radio! All saying the same things—”

“Democracy is degenerate! Greatness lies in struggle! Virtue lies in blood!” Renzo recited grandly. “Say yes to the leader, and you can wear this handsome uniform. Say yes, and you’re a patriot!”

“You’re part of something big, and new, and powerful! You’re better than you were alone.”

Renzo offered Schramm one of his own cigarettes. “Say no, and you’re a coward and a traitor. Say no, and you’re in jail.”

“Say no, and you’re dead.” Schramm lit up, coughed himself blue, and shoved his empty cigarette case across the table. “Keep it! This’s my last one, I swear! You should quit, too. Tobacco will give you cancer. We proved it years ago.”

Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”

Staring at the hollow-cheeked image in the mirror, Renzo lathers his face. Feel nothing. Believe nothing. Do nothing, he thinks. Lots of practice at that—

The banging on the door begins again. The razor blade knicks his chin. Muttering curses, he hurries down the hall, barefoot and bare-chested, wiping shaving soap and blood from his face. The instant he unlocks the door, it flies open, revealing a short, stout man nearing sixty, who points at him furiously.

“ Pazzo! Madman! You are going to get yourself killed, and you’ll drag the whole family down with you!”

“ Buon giorno to you, too, Tranquillo,” Renzo replies as genially as he can. “Always a pleasure to see my darling sister’s husb—”