A Thread of Grace

At seventeen, he got a job at the ski lodge and distinguished himself by working harder than any of the aging veterans drifting through the countryside hoping for a handout. Werner washed dishes. Shoveled snow. Cleaned privies. Anything was preferable to his mother’s frantic loneliness. For a year he saved in secret, and when he had enough he left, like his father before him: at dawn, without saying good-bye. “One way, third-class, to Florence,” he told the Freiburg ticketmaster.

Two days later, he stepped down onto a platform at the Stazione Centrale di Firenze: reborn, sui generis, in Florence, Mother of genius, where painting and sculpture and architecture flourished with jungle luxuriance in the warm Italian sun. A friendly carabiniere told him of a pensione whose owner spoke some German. Schramm paid for two nights, and crossed an i

Too excited to rest, he dropped his rucksack on the bed and made a dash for the Uffizi, where art books and holy cards came to life. He gaped at David, stu

That summer, Schramm did chores at the pensione in return for meals and an attic bed. His thoroughness and energy earned the owner’s praise and a few extra lire, which he spent on drawing lessons from an old woman who claimed she was a principessa fallen on hard times. She tutored him in Italian, too, and whenever he could, Schramm practiced conversation with the hotel maid, whose angular face, soft breasts, and complete indifference stoked a sexual heat he was too awkward to reveal.

The days grew shorter. Rooms were closed, one by one. The chambermaid was let go for the off-season. With the kitchen ashes hauled out and the coal fire banked, Schramm was free most afternoons and wandered the city munching roasted chestnuts purchased in paper cones. He hiked the hills of Fiesole and Settignano. The Ponte Vecchio, Boboli Gardens, and Lungarno Corsini became his private domain.

The Florentine winter proved cold and misty. Narrow streets and small piazze turned dark and dirty gray. With the tourists gone, there was no one to look down on. Loneliness set in.

Florence taught Werner Schramm many things, the most significant of which was that he had no real talent. Embarrassed to go home, he waited until his nineteenth birthday to send his mother a postcard, giving his address. The response was a telegram from his aunt’s convent. “Regret to inform you of your mother’s death. Come home. Irmgard needs you.”

His aunt and another nun were waiting for him at the Freiburg station. They boarded the local back to Hinterzarten, where he laid wildflowers on his mother’s grave and learned that shame was worse than grief. That spring, he sold the farm for little more than an apple and an egg, but he cleared his family’s debts. Finally, no excuses left, he went to visit Irmgard.

“The Church will tell you that your mother’s suicide was sin,” Irmgard’s doctor said. “I say the sin is on the heads of those who permit hopeless cripples to drive strong, healthy Germans to despair! It is a perversion of medicine and nature when civilization allows the health of the race to be undermined by these useless wretches.” Silver-haired and kindly, with the high forehead and lucid eyes of a scholar, the physician placed his hand on Schramm’s shoulder, but looked past him toward a better future. “Someday institutions like this will disappear. Money and effort will cease to be lavished on the weakest and the worst. When you return to Freiburg, you must look up Professor Hoche! Ask about the paper he wrote with Karl Binding. It is persuasive, my boy. Persuasive!”

That summer, his aunt arranged for a scholarship, and Werner matriculated at the University of Freiburg. “If you can’t be an artist, you can be art’s apostle,” she said, urging her nephew to study art history. For want of a better idea, he began his courses, working with diligence if not passion. He inquired about a garret on Goethestrasse. The rent was criminally high, but he was still capable of romantic delusions about artistic poverty, and the Jugendstil house was breathtaking: all twining vines and whiplash curves, and slender stained-glass girls with damselfly wings. He did yard work in exchange for Sunday di

At one such di

That year he began to see the future more clearly. Or, rather, he heard the future’s voice every night on the radio. Full of faith, full of emotion. Ringing like a bell, calling the masses to worship. Promising a whole generation— a whole nation! — what it yearned for. A task, a meaning. A greatness that would redeem misery and defeat.

Moved, inspired, Werner Schramm resolved to follow the Führer’s example. He would give up dreams of artistry and serve the German people. With an introduction from Irmgard’s doctor and an energy he hadn’t felt since he first left home, Werner made an appointment with Professor Hoche, who even helped him with the paperwork required to change his field of study from art history to medicine.

“I am so proud of you!” Elsa squealed when Werner told her the news. “Papa will make sure you have the right co

“Professor Hoche thinks I should do research,” Werner said cautiously. He’d never mentioned Irmgard to the Rombachs. “There were so many defectives born after the Diktat of Versailles. People believe such defects result from bad breeding, but if they were a result of starvation after the Great War, good nutrition could prevent them in the future.”

Elsa pouted prettily. “You sound like a scientist already!” Then the idea sank in, and her guiltless, guileless face lit up. “Oh, Lieber, yes! Why, you’d be contributing to the health of the whole nation! Papa could never object to a son-in-law who did that!”

Years have passed, and Werner Schramm is in a garret once again, but artistic dreams play no part in his choice of quarters now. He needs a place to hide, and this attic is the cheapest he could find. “View of the sea,” the advertisement promised, without mentioning, “only if you sit in the musty upholstered chair near the southern window, lean onto your left elbow, and squint.”

From there, he can just barely see an island in Sant’Andrea’s harbor. “What is that big building on the island?” he asked his landlady after his first night under her roof.

“Il lazzaretto di incurabili,” Signora Usodimare said, crossing herself. “A hospital for incurables. Mostly tuberculars, poor things. You shouldn’t smoke so much, signore! It weakens the lungs. You could get consumption, you know.”

“Yes,” he said, making his face bland. “I’m trying to quit.”

To change the subject, he asked her for something to read. Proudly, she offered a history of Sant’Andrea, which he studies daily, a thick dictionary at his side. The lazzaretto, he’s learned, was built to isolate victims of the Levantine plagues that Renaissance merchants imported to Europe, along with spices, silks, and ivory. During a single fifteenth-century epidemic, over 150,000 Sant’Andresi died. In hope of a cure, Ludovico Usodimare sailed off to raid Montpellier, determined to capture the mummified body of Saint Roch— a holy relic, sovereign against plague. Alas, the Venetians arrived first and stole the Frenchman’s corpse before Usodimare could. A practical man, the prince did some pillaging on his way home and acquired, among other things, a golden salver. This plate, he declared, had once carried the severed head of John the Baptist, and he built the Basilica di San Giova