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"Oh, my God! How horrible!" Esther's stomach did a slow lurch. She wished she hadn't eaten. "What can you do? Is there a cure?"
"I can do nothing. No one can do anything." Dr. Dambach's voice was hard and flat. "There is no cure. All children who have Tay-Sachs disease will die, usually before they turn five. I intend to recommend to the Kleins that they take the baby to a Reichs Mercy Center, to spare it this inevitable suffering. Then I intend to go out and get drunk."
He couldn't bring himself to come right out and talk about killing a baby, though that was what he meant. The Germans who'd slaughtered Jews hadn't talked straight out about what they were doing, either, though people weren't so shy about it any more. Here, Esther had more sympathy. "How awful for you," she said. "And how much worse for the Kleins! What causes this horrible disease? Could they have done anything to keep the baby from getting it?"
Dr. Dambach shook his head. "No. Nothing. It's genetic. If both parents carry the recessive, and if the two recessives come together…" He spread his hands. Even that gesture didn't remind him of the cheese pie he was holding. Intent on his own thoughts, he went on, "We don't see the disease very often these days. I have never seen it before, thank heaven, and I hope I never see it again. The books say it used to be fairly common among the Jews, though, before we cleaned them out… Are you all right,Frau Stutzman?"
"Yes, I think so. This is all just so-so dreadful." Esther made herself nod. Dambach nodded back, accepting what she'd said. He couldn't know why her heart had skipped a beat. A good thing, too. He couldn't come out and talk about killing a baby, but he took the extermination of the Jews for granted. Why not? He hadn't even been born when it happened.
"Dreadful,ja. A very unfortunate coincidence. Even among the Jews it was not common, you understand, but it was up to a hundred timesmore common among them than it is among Aryans." Dambach thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "Did you happen to see on the news a few days ago the story about the Jews found in that village in backwoods Serbia?"
How to answer? Esther saw only one way: casually. "I sure did. Who would have imagined such a thing, in this day and age?" What she wanted to do was get up and run from the doctor's office. That that would be the worst thing she could possibly do didn't matter. Reason held her in her chair, held a polite smile on her face. Behind the facade, instinct screamed.
Still thoughtful, Dr. Dambach went on, "Tay-Sachs disease is so rare among Aryans, it almost makes one wonder…"
Ice lived in Esther. "Don't be silly, Doctor," she said, keeping up the casual front. "None ofthem left any more, not in a civilized country." Pretending she wasn't a Jew was second nature to her; she'd done it almost automatically ever since she learned what she was. But mocking, scorning her true heritage wasn't so easy. She didn't have to do that very often, simply because Jews were so nearly extinct.
"I suppose you're right," the pediatrician said, and relief flowered like springtime in her. But then he added, "Still…"
The door to the waiting room opened. In came Irma Ritter, who would work in the afternoon. She was even rounder than Dr. Dambach. Pointing to the slice of cheese pie in his hand, she asked, "Any more of that left?"
He looked down in surprise. "I don't know," he said, sounding foolish. "Let me go look." While he did, Esther made her escape-and that was exactly what it felt like.
Alicia Gimpel and her sisters were playing an elaborate game with dolls. Part of it came from an adventure film they'd seen a few weeks before, but that was only the springboard; more came straight from their imaginations. "Here." Roxane picked up one of the few male dolls they had. "He can be the nasty Jew who's trying to cheat the dragons out of their cave."
"No!" Alicia exclaimed before remembering she wasn't supposed to say anything like that no matter what.
"Why not?" Roxane clouded up. "You never like any of my ideas. It's not fair."
"I think Alicia's right this time," Francesca said. "He's not ugly enough to be a Jew."
That wasn't why Alicia had said no, of course. She seized on it gratefully all the same. "Yes, that is what I meant," she said. She still didn't like lying to her sisters, but she didn't see what she could do about it, either. She couldn't tell the truth. She could see that.They'll find out soon enough, she thought from the height of her own ten years.
Roxane examined the doll, who was indeed plastic perfection. "Well, we canpretend he's ugly," she declared, and made him advance on the cardboard box doing duty for a cave. In a high, squeaky, u
Francesca reached into the box and pulled out a stuffed dragon. "You nasty old Jew, you're trying to fool us. You'd better get out of here or I'll burn your ears off."
Roxane made the doll retreat. "I'll figure out another way to get your gold, then-you see if I don't."
"Oh, no, you won't," Francesca retorted. "I'm an Aryan dragon, and I'm too tough for you."
Alicia got to her feet. "I don't think I want to play any more."
"Why not?" Roxane said. "Things are just getting good." She looked down at the doll. "Aren't they?" It responded-she made it respond-with a thoroughly evil chuckle and a, "That's right," in the high, squeaky voice she'd used before.
"She's a wet blanket, that's why," Francesca said. "She's been a wet blanket for weeks now, and I'm tired of it."
"Wet blanket! Wet blanket!" Roxane sang, now in her own voice, now in the one she'd invented for the Jew doll.
"I am not!" Alicia said angrily. "This is a stupid game, that's all."
Roxane got angry, too. "You're just saying it's stupid because I'm doing something I thought up all by myself." She wheeled out the heavy artillery: "I'm going to tell. Mommy says you can't do things like that."
And Francesca was also angry, in a quieter way. "How can you say it's a stupid game when you thought up half of it?"
"Because-" But Alicia couldn't say what she couldn't say. Knowing what she knew and not being able to talk about it threatened to choke her. "Because it is, that's all."
"I'm going to tell," Roxane said again."Mommy!"
"You and your big mouth," Alicia said, whereupon her little sister opened it as wide as she could and stuck out her tongue. Alicia was tempted to grab that tongue and give it a good yank, but it was too slimy for her to do it.
"What's going on?" came from the ground floor. Ominous footsteps on the stairs followed, each one louder than the one before. Their mother appeared at the doorway to Francesca and Roxane's room. "Can't the three of you play together nicely?"
"I didn't want to play any more, that's all," Alicia said.
"That's not all. You didn't like my ideas, that's what it is," Roxane said, and proceeded to explain in great detail what her ideas were.
Understanding kindled in their mother's eyes. She started to say something, then closed her mouth again. Awe trickled through Alicia.She can't tell, either, she thought.She's a grownup, and shecan't tell. That spoke more clearly than anything else of how important the secret was. It was important enough to constrain a grownup, and grownups by the very nature of things were beyond constraint.
Their mother tried again. This time, she succeeded. "Play the game, Alicia," she said gently. "Go ahead and play the game. It's all right. That's what we have to do."
"See?" Triumph filled Roxane. "Mommy told you to."
And so she had. But she'd told Alicia something else, too, something that had gone by Roxane and Francesca.That's what we have to do. People who weren't Jews were going to say things about them. They were going to mock them. They couldn't help it. They believed all the things they'd learned in school. (Alicia still half believed them herself, which sometimes left her half-sick with confusion.) If you couldn't get used to that, if you couldn't pretend it wasn't anything, you'd give yourself away.