Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  I was not sure all this was happening. I turned away from the commotion and stared for a while at all he bottles of Drosophila on my work table and at the newspaper filled with cornmeal and the flasks of molasses, which I knew I should put away in my rucksack.

  I heard Krupinsky’s voice in my ear. “How are you?”

  “I’m quite drunk.”

  “Careful you don’t knock those flies on the floor.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I heard the Chief’s voice.

  “I gave him vodka.”

  “He’s not used to it. Come along. I want to take you up to Personnel.”

  At first I didn’t realize the Chief was speaking to me, but then he clapped my shoulder. “Come along, Josef.”

  I stood and was dizzy. Bolotnikov still sang to Marlene; she ignored him completely and went about her work. The Yugoslav Zoologist had moved to the corner where the Geiger counters were stored and was talking to the Rare Earths Chemist.

  I was no longer nauseated and my breathing, although slightly musical, was all right. But my gut was distended, and I used all my concentration to keep my flatulence from being too obvious; that is, I tightened my rear sphincter to keep the gas in—which was a loud mistake—then attempted a loosening to let it out in little farts: blip, blip, blip.

  The Chief ignored my problem. “You must come to the fifth floor and speak with the Director of Personnel. Tell him the truth and trust him. In order to protect you, he has to know your background. He’s an Alsatian and hates the Nazis. So far, he has been able to keep them out—that is, all but one, and that one is useful.” And that was the first time I heard him say, “A Gestapo in the house saves one from a Caesarean section.” It was a parody on a famous line from Shiller’s William Tell, “An ax in the house saves one from the carpenter.” Even in my drunken condition, I was able to understand that, somehow, it was the covert duty of the black-coated S.S. officer I had seen limping through the lobby that morning to see that one was not untimely ripped from the Institute.

  I reeled after the Chief, blipping and burping, concentrating now on not sliding down the three flights of stairs we had to ascend to the fifth floor, where, for a moment, I was the warm and glowing center of a magic circle and everything outside it was another world—remote and strange—all the way down the long, dark hallway, lined on both sides with shelves and shelves of jars and jars of human brains. Mother had one pickled brain in her office at home, and, of course, I had studied biology. I knew what they were. The vodka loosened my tongue. “Whosh brainsh are those?” I asked the Chief.

  He stopped abruptly, and I rammed into his back.

  “Excush me.”

  “How much vodka did Krup give you?”

  I held up three fingers.

  “Three vodkas?” He grinned broadly at me.

  “Ounces.” Burp. Blip.

  “These”—he waved his hand at the shelves—“are the brains of young men just like you.” He looked at me intently—ominously—no longer smiling. “They like to get the cream of the crop.”

  My good Lord.

  He raced to the end of the hall and popped into a doorway, leaving me frozen in my tracks in the warm, dark corridor, surrounded by the brains of young men just like myself. I turned my head fearfully to my right and to my left, but my feet would not walk.

  The Chief stuck his head out the door and motioned firmly for me to join him. “Come!” he shouted.

  Reluctantly, I moved toward him. Above the door was a sign: PERSONNEL.

  As I stepped in, the Chief ran out, leaving me alone with the man behind the yellow oak desk. The nameplate read R. Wagenführer. He was, I hoped, the Director of Personnel. I could hear the Chief’s steps echoing away from me.

  “How do you do, Josef Bernhardt. Before I ask you about your background,” said Herr Wagenführer, “you must fill in the forms. Sit down!”

  I melted into the chair and looked at the three sets of forms wavering before me on the desk. He told me exactly what to write, and with most intense concentration, I was able to do so. The questions were mostly the same: NAME. ADDRESS. TELEPHONE NUMBER. For RACE he said to put German and for religion, None. But there was no way, he told me, that I could avoid Mother’s maiden name: Jacoby.

  Then he asked me in great detail about my background. I answered truthfully, he listened intently but wrote nothing down. By the time the questioning was over, I was almost sober and feeling extremely tired.

  “I think that will do,” he said to me.

  I stood.

  “No, wait. I want to give you some information now.”

  I sat down again.

  “You are to be employed as an apprentice laboratory assistant. You will receive a small monthly stipend plus commuting money, or, if you elect not to commute from Gartenfeld, you will be given extra money for room and board away from home. We do have some rooms and apartments here on the grounds, or there are places available in the village of Hagen.

  “What I will tell you now is of utmost importance for your survival, so listen carefully. The name of this place, as you know, is the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research, and it is actually composed of three different and separate units. According to the records I will set up, you are now employed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation, a private foundation especially endowed for scientific research. We have here also at the Institute private research by Mantle, which is a corporation, and also by the Luftwaffe. The brain research is almost all Luftwaffe. I have had you fill out three forms for these three different operations. It may be necessary from time to time—say, when the comptrollers are checking the books, or when there is an inspection of a certain section—to switch your forms from one file to another.

  “Understand, each section is distinct from the others, so there is never an inspection of all at the same time. We might at any given moment—and with no warning—ask you to say you work ‘here’ instead of ‘there,’ if you are asked, which, most likely, you will not be. For example, when the Foundation is being checked, we will switch your file to Mantle or to Luftwaffe. The inspectors, one can hope, will not see it at all. If they do—if, say, the Ministry for the Study of Working Conditions should come across your file—any questions about your background would be out of their jurisdiction. We have been lucky and have known in advance about most inspections. Do you have any questions?” He stood.

  I stood. Yes, I had questions. The brains. I wanted to ask him whose brains were lining the hallway, but I did not. “No, Herr Wagenführer,” I said, “and thank you.”

  We shook hands. “You just do as I say, and we will do our best for you.”

  I was quite sober by now and the brains didn’t bother me quite as much. But, just the same, I ran the long, dark corridor and raced down the stairs to the second floor. In the lab, I found Krupinsky, Marlene, and the other girl—her name was Monika—putting away the equipment and the flies.

  “How’d it go?” Krupinsky asked, scrutinizing me the way Mother did when she thought I had a fever.

  “Fine.”

  “You’re feeling better?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a nice man, that Alsatian.”

  I nodded. “Could I ask you a question?”

  Krupinsky shrugged. “How could I stop you?”

  “Is the neurophysiological research the main work done here?”

  “I’d say so. The brain research by the Luftwaffe takes up the third, fourth, and fifth floors. It’s important.”

  “Then why is it that the Chief is Director of the whole Institute? His speciality is genetics, and he isn’t even German.”

  “It’s complicated.” Krupinsky slouched against my worktable.

  “The Chief is a really famous geneticist—world-famous?”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Well, you know how those Nazis are obsessed with the study of genetics.”

  I nodded.

  “And as for his not being German, he’s from an u
pper-class Russian family that escaped to Germany during the revolution. You know Hitler hates the Communists almost as much as he hates the Jews.”

  “He calls them Jewish Bolshevists.”

  “Right.” Krupinsky was silent for a moment before continuing. “But maybe the center of it all is the linear accelerator he uses for his research. You know about that?”

  “I’ve heard him lecture.”

  “An atom smasher has to be of big interest to the military. So for all those reasons, and also because he is an incredibly capable administrator, he was appointed Director of the entire Institute. Of course, it was before we were actually at war with Russia.” Krupinsky, still leaning tiredly against my worktable, unfolded his tall, thin frame until he stood in his usual round-shouldered stance. “Does that make any sense at all to you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, it doesn’t to me. Any other questions?”

  “Yes. Whose brains are those up on the fifth floor?”

  “Actually,” he said, “they are all over the third, fourth, and fifth floors.”

  “Well, whose are they?”

  He leered menacingly at me. “You’ll find out soon enough. Now why don’t you get to work like the rest of us and help put this stuff away so we can get out of here?”

  I helped Marlene and Monika file away the rest of the flies into the incubators. Then we went into the little kitchen, where the polenta was already warming on the flame. Krupinsky insisted that I down another jolt of vodka before eating a bowl of polenta and molasses.

  I did.

  We didn’t take the bus. A large group of us walked together the three kilometers to the train station in Hagen. I know I had my stinking rucksack with me, and I must have had an armful of journals and books. I don’t remember for sure, for I was extremely tired and not sober. I cannot picture the scene or the weather. There must have been weather. It was April. The apple trees in the orchard beyond the Institute were blossoming in the evening of that first day.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sheereen

  Here is the recipe for heavy water:

  Take 5,700 teacups of ordinary tap water. Put in bowl. Put enough electric current through to electrolyze down to 1 teacup.

  “It looks just like regular water,” I said to Krupinsky.

  “It isn’t, though.”

  I knew that. It was now enriched deuterium oxide. “What would happen if I drank it?”

  “You could try a small amount, I suppose, but if you drank a large amount, mostly you’d die.” Krupinsky poured it into a flask, corked it, and put it into a cupboard.

  One then had to electrolyze the heavy water again in order to separate the heavy hydrogen from the oxygen, then feed the deuterium gas into a near vacuum in which there is a high-powered electrical field. This will make ions out of the deuterium, and then one feeds the ions into the linear accelerator, D ions, deuterons. I had to learn this and much more before Professor Kreutzer, six weeks later, would take me into that central room which housed the linear accelerator: the Radiation Laboratory.

  I have lost track of the chronology of my education at the Institute. They crammed my brain with information: the anatomy of the fruit fly—how to tell the males from the females, the virgins from the egg-layers, one species or subspecies from another. I learned dosimetry, the accurate measuring of doses. I learned to handle radioactive material, to work with high-tension equipment, to make and use Geiger counters, to cook polenta in the kitchen in the little greenhouse off our second-floor wing, and so much more.

  My education was broad, deep, concentrated, and thoroughly disorganized. For example, one afternoon the first week, after we were finished with the sorting of the fruit flies, the Chief ran into our lab, pulled a dead frog from his pocket, and placed it on the dissecting table of my microscope. Beside it he placed a scalpel, scissors, and tweezers.

  “See what’s inside,” he said. And he began to pace.

  I took the scalpel, and very generously I slit the frog open as one does a fish he wishes to fry. All the guts spilled out, and I had an excellent view of the interior. I was pleased. The Chief walked back and forth behind me as I poked about in the frog’s insides.

  “Notice,” he said, as he paced. “Notice how carefully he uses the scissors and the knife to open the skin of the frog to expose air sacs. Notice how carefully he dissects several layers of muscle to enable him to identify the nerves and blood vessels, and then notice how he discovers another membrane, the peritoneum, and opens that up.”

  Everyone in the laboratory came over to my table to notice: Krupinsky, Marlene, Monika, several scientists from Mantle who were using the counting equipment.

  The Chief pulled another frog from his pocket, dropped it onto the table of my microscope, and left. Everyone wandered back to what he was doing before, except Marlene. She stayed and tried to comfort me by patting my arm. I wanted her to go away so I could concentrate on the dissection. But she was still there when Sonja Press returned with a zoology book written in English. Sonja pulled up another chair to my table and leafed through the book, showing me the various pictures and charts.

  “You see, Josef? It has much information about frogs and other animals. And the English language should not be at all difficult for someone of your intelligence—it is so similar to German. I could help you, if you wish.”

  “Thank you very much. I would appreciate that.” Having studied English in high school, I could read it passably, especially in science where the words were almost the same. Of course, I didn’t tell her.

  “Study this tonight, and then tomorrow I can go over any questions you have.”

  “That would be quite helpful.”

  She smiled at me. “Shall we meet for lunch at noon in the cafeteria?”

  Marlene had stood there the whole time, and when Sonja left, she asked me if I would like to go with her to the darkroom to take a photocopy of a page in a book. Actually, what I wanted to do was read as much of the zoology book as I could before I met Sonja the next day so I could amaze her with my brilliance. But I was curious about the darkroom and went along with Marlene, thinking it wouldn’t take long.

  It was a large room on the third floor, a photographic studio as well as a darkroom. There were no windows, the door was extra-heavy, and one could pull a thick black drape over it to ensure darkness. Consequently, the room was also soundproof. Marlene locked the door so we would not be disturbed.

  I was beginning to get the picture, and I was uncomfortable.

  This first visit to the darkroom occurred my second or third day at the Institute, and I was unable at that time to see the irony in my fear of the secondary stage of syphilis while still feeling my own death inevitably imminent. Marlene had suspicious sore pimples on her face; most likely, they were not syphilitic rashes but only adolescent acne. However, one couldn’t be sure.

  There were several cameras. Marlene used one mounted on a table that was aimed at a frame. She opened the book, placed it on the frame, adjusted some lighting, put a plate into the camera, and took the picture. She forgot to turn the red light on before switching off the others, and she said, “Oh, excuse me, Josef,” when she gave me a full frontal bump in the dark. I jumped away from her, and all the while she was developing I stood in a far corner, feeling wretched and cowardly.

  Aside from my concern with the ‘unclean,’ I thought her most unattractive. Furthermore, I am sensitive to odors and hers was not pleasant to me.

  I was in a no-win situation. If to be ‘honorable’ is—as my mother insisted—to avoid sex, and at the same time, to be polite, it was an impossible paradox. I was being incredibly impolite. But all I could think of was the book by Lombroso Mother gave me when I was twelve. It was called Genius and Insanity and described the grotesque syphilitic suffering of the romantic poets and musicians, and of Nietzsche, and of the homosexual officers of the Swedish army. And I was thinking about Fromm’s Akt.

  They were the most popular brand o
f condom and were sold in the men’s rooms in railway stations, in vending machines which had on them cartoons of frowsy, overfed women with low-cut blouses, big breasts, and gumma here and there. The caption read: MEN. PROTECT YOURSELVES WITH FROMM’S AKT—50 PFENNIG.

  When I was very young, I had a stupid fantasy. I thought the bad women Mother was always talking about were actually raping young boys, whatever that meant, and that one needed Fromm’s Akt to somehow protect oneself. After I was in high school—when I was nine or so—the other boys set me straight.

  It took quite some time to develop the film, and I was annoyed that I couldn’t leave the room without ruining the negative. Krupinsky kept a German-English dictionary in our lab, and I wanted to get at it.

  As we were leaving the darkroom, Marlene said to me, “If it is because you think I am a virgin, you are wrong.”

  That hadn’t even occurred to me.

  Outside the door, the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco was waiting with a blond girl from Chemistry. She waved a book at us to demonstrate that they, too, needed photocopies.

  His wife was a brunette from Brain Research.

  Those first six weeks at the Institute, I did not even try to sleep much. I wanted to be prepared when Professor Kreutzer tested me on the journals he gave me daily. Most of the articles were on the measuring of radiation—but much to my surprise, he never even asked if I had read them. He just assumed I had. I was not treated like a student or laboratory assistant, but more like a new young scientist. And I wanted to study the assignments in biology and genetics from the Chief. I understood most of what they gave me, concentrating hard until I fell asleep over my books at night and rising early in order to arrive at the Institute in time to work with my microscope for an hour or so before anyone else came in. I hated each evening when I had to leave the Technicolor world of the Institute to descend into the gray and brown of the other Berlin—of my parents’ house or my uncle’s slum.