A Thread of Grace

Schramm comes to himself, and clears his throat. “When the speech ends,” he says quietly, “it is a climax. For him. For us. A seduction, and a climax.”

For some reason, Mirella will not meet his eyes, but Lidia is judicial. “ ‘The serpent deceived me,’ ” she quotes aridly, “ ‘and I did eat.’ ”

“I met him once,” Schramm says. “I was invited to the Berghof— his villa in the mountains. He is less impressive in private, except for his eyes. They are not beautiful, precisely, but extraordinary. Hypnotic! But he can be so boring! The same stories, over and over. ‘When I was a soldier… When I was in prison…’ He talks and talks. All night, every night, when others want only to sleep. He knows a great deal about medicine and biology, but much of what he said was not correct.”

Or was simply absurd. A Turkish porter can lift a piano by himself. Humanity depends on the whale for nourishment. Fifty thousand Irishmen went to America in 1641. No one in the Middle Ages had high blood pressure. When their blood rose, they’d fight with knives; now, thanks to the modern safety razor, the world’s blood pressure is too high. Anyone who paints a sky green and pastures blue should be sterilized. Roosevelt’s a Jew. Jesus wasn’t. The Czechs are really Mongolians. Look at the way their mustaches droop. Roman legio

Rosina starts toward the garden on little hands and knees. “And no one argues with him?” Mirella asks, retrieving her daughter before she can crawl over the zucchini.

“Not twice.” Schramm shudders at the memory. “He said to me— it was very late, about three in the morning— he said, ‘Uncooked potatoes will cure beriberi in a week.’ I said beriberi is unknown among those who eat sufficient meat. He was—” Dumbfounded, Schramm thinks, but he doesn’t know the word in Italian, so he mimes Hitler’s astonishment. “I thought, Wunderbar! He is impressed with my knowledge! So I said also that potatoes do contain some thiamine, but that vitamin is unaffected by heat. Ergo: potatoes need not be raw.”

Brows up, Schramm invites comment. The women shrug: So?

“He began to scream at me!” Schramm says. “There were ten of us that night. No one could move! I was—” He mimes his shock, eyes bulging with astonishment and fear. “For two hours, three hours, he screamed and screamed about the evil of meat, and the absolute necessity of not cooking the potatoes to cure beriberi! I thought he would have me shot!”

“It wasn’t the potato. It was the contradiction,” Lidia says. “Men like that want everyone to marvel at their power and superiority, but they’re terrified of competition. When such a man proposes a footrace, he intends to begin by battering his opponent unconscious with a rock.” Lidia sets the bowl of peas aside. “Tell me, Herr Schramm, what did you do to merit an invitation to the Führer’s exalted presence?”

“I wrote a public health pamphlet on the importance of mother’s nutrition during pregnancy for the fitness of the infant. That was my medical speciality before the war. I made a study of the causes of incorrect infants. He heard of my work.”

Gripping Mirella’s skirt, pulling herself upright, Rosina thumps her mother’s legs. “Mamma! Up!”

Mirella ignores her. “What do you mean by incorrect infants, Herr Schramm?”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta, pes equinus. Meningocele, spina bifida. Pardon— I know these terms only in Latin. Hydrocephaly, microcephaly, anencephaly: heads very large from water on the brain, or very small heads, or without a brain. Also— very small people. Blind, deaf. Such conditions might be an error of heredity, but if good seed falls on poor soil, the results are disappointing. Hitler was interested in this idea.”

“Tell me, Herr Doktor,” says Lidia. “Is idiocy among the defects caused by poor nutrition?”

Mirella flinches, but Lidia’s brows are raised in calm curiosity. “Some forms, yes,” Schramm tells them. “Cretinism and goiter are often together. Both result from deficiency of iodine.”

“P’ego! Up!” Rosina demands.

Mirella pulls her skirt from Rosina’s fingers. “Wait,” she says, first walking, then ru

Bewildered, Rosina watches her go. “P’ego up! P’ego up, Mamma!”

Schramm asks, “Did I say something wrong?”

Lidia takes her apronful of pea pods to the compost heap and tosses them on top. She says nothing, waiting for the younger woman to return.

When Mirella reappears with a photo that trembles slightly in her hand, Schramm needs only a glance. The anatomical atavisms are unmistakable: almond eyes with medial epicanthic folds. Midface insufficiency with pronounced saddling of the nose. Fat pads like an orangutan’s around the face and neck. If he could examine the child, its palms would surely present the diagnostic undivided crease. “A younger sister, perhaps?”

“My second child.”

“Ach. Unusual for such a young mother. The condition occurs once in, perhaps, fifteen hundred births among women under thirty.”

“Is there something I could have done? Something I should have eaten, or not eaten?”

What can he say? When Langdon Down described the syndrome, the Englishman believed it represented reversion to prehuman stock. Others say such children are evidence of Mongol ancestors, who raped their way across Europe. Modern authorities blame mothers too feeble or exhausted to bear healthy offspring. Wishing to be kind, Schramm says, “The condition is not associated with malnutrition. I know of nothing you could have done to prevent this tragedy. Where is the child?”

Ignored, Rosina begins to cry in earnest.

“There was an accident,” Lidia tells Schramm when it’s obvious Mirella can’t. “Altira died when she was three.”

He draws himself up in the chair, familiar with the sensation of being across the desk from a devastated parent. “Mirella, you must not grieve: I assure you that a mongoloid idiot is better off dead—”

The slap is so sudden, so unexpected, Schramm can only stare.

Mirella snatches back the photograph. She tries and fails to say something. Scooping Rosina up, she stalks away, slamming the hunchback’s door behind her.

Lidia sighs. “Go in there and apologize, Herr Schramm.”

Schramm stands, astonished. “Apologize! For what?”

Lidia leans over to retrieve the wrap that’s fallen from his lap. Shakes its dust out. Folds it loosely in her lap. “You insulted her child.”

“I spoke as a physician, signora! There were many worse things I could have said!” Swept by an ancient anger, he jabs a finger in Mirella’s direction. “Mothers like her— they think only of themselves! They are the ones— they don’t see! They refuse to see!”

“To see what, Herr Schramm?”

The wrecked families. The broken dreams. The teeming institutions, like satanic zoos filled with every sort of biological failure.

Approach the children’s yard: mongoloids and cretins would rush the fence, faces contorted in caricatures of human emotion. Grunting, tongues protruding, their mouths issuing wordless shrieks or meaningless, mindless babble. When they saw you had nothing for them, they’d wander away, sit cross-legged on the ground, clustered together. Drooling, laughing horribly at nothing. Picking up pebbles, eating bits of debris, tugging at the few remaining tufts of grass in the barren courtyard.

There was an entire ward for the hydrocephalics. White plaster walls, white iron cribs, white cotton sheets, and on each white pillow an enormous head. Immense egg-shaped domes tapering to tiny wizened faces co