by Elly Welt
“I’m supposed to paint lurid pictures for you of the effects of radiation before Kreutzer gets you.”
“Paint away.”
“But first I’d like to say that my wife was right about you.”
I would be a fool to take the bait; I kept my mouth shut.
“Don’t you want to know what she said?”
“Not particularly.”
“She said you probably weren’t as big a schlemiel as you appeared to be.”
“Did she now.”
“No. She said you were a nice person and that you wouldn’t come back here yesterday. So I suppose I should thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“We’d better get on with this radiation business,” he said.
“I have a favor to ask you first.”
“What is it?”
“Can you loan me one mark?”
“Is that all? Sure. I don’t have it with me, but I’ll bring it tomorrow. What do you want it for?”
“It’s none of your business—but for condoms.”
“Where do you get them?”
“Train station. The vending machines.”
“That’s a stupid way to buy them. You only get four for a mark. Let me get you some from the pharmacy. When do you want them?”
“As soon as you can. Tomorrow.”
“Anything else?”
“If you promise not to make fun of me, I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, the girl . . . I think she may not have done it before.”
“So?”
He was going to make it miserable for me. “So, can you give me any advice?”
“Sure!” He laughed demonically. “If you want to deflower a virgin, my advice is to use lots of lubrication.”
I was furious for letting myself in for this. “You know, I took quite a chance coming to your house to detune your stinking radio—”
“Who is it?” he interrupted me.
I hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”
“You like her a lot?”
I nodded.
“I have an idea who it might be. And maybe I could save you some trouble if you’d tell me who it is.”
“I doubt that.”
“Hmm.” He put his hand over his mouth and thought for a while. “Let me think about this. My wife was a virgin when we got married. It wasn’t much fun for her at first. If the woman is tight, it hurts, so I wasn’t kidding when I said to use lots of lubricant. And don’t expect much until the soreness goes away. And she’ll always be worried about getting pregnant.”
“That’s one of the reasons I want the condoms.”
“Use two.”
“Two?”
“If you really want to protect her. Those things can spring a leak. They’re only eighty percent sure anyhow. Trouble is, using one diminishes your pleasure, and two is like making love through a blanket.”
“It’d be worth it to protect her.”
“How noble of you.”
This was very embarrassing for me. I hoped he’d talk about the actual approach of the whole thing.
“Maybe you should try it with a non-virgin first and get some experience, if you know what I mean.”
That man was a master at humiliation. “What makes you think I haven’t?”
“Well, have you?”
Damn him. “No. And I don’t want to.”
“So it’s like that. The love affair of the century. Why don’t you marry her first, if she’s a—” He stopped. “I’m sorry. That was below the belt.”
Under the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, marriages between Jews and ‘Germans’ was forbidden. Besides, I was not yet seventeen. I stood to leave.
“Wait!”
I sat down.
“Look, Josef, don’t worry about it. If she’s really that kind of girl, and she likes you, she won’t be unhappy that you’re inexperienced. Know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“Just be honest and don’t pretend to be anything but what you are. You’ll both learn together.”
“Thank you.” I meant it.
“And remember, it isn’t as much fun at first as you think it should be. That comes later. And if you care for each other, that’s what matters. And just take it slow. I’ll bring those things tomorrow.” He took a pencil and tablet from his pocket, made a note, then he began to try to nauseate me about the effects of radiation. But I’d read it all already.
He ended up by reminding me of the grotesque mutated Drosophila and by showing slides of rats which had been irradiated. “If you’re not careful,” he said, “you will have the same kind of crippled offspring as the flies and the same kind of degenerated bone marrow as the rats.” He then threatened that radiation caused sterility and enforced this with a lecture on how the only important cells, the only thing important to life, are the sperm and the ovum. “Everything else,” he said, “everything which hangs around it is just there to induce the bee to visit the flower.”
“Is the sterility from radiation any different from that caused by surgical sterilization?” I asked him.
“Why do you want to know that?”
“The Chief said that the gardener, Gunther, is the most popular man in the village because of his vasectomy. Maybe a certain kind of impotency could be an asset.”
Krupinsky leaned against the Geiger counters and cupped his chin in his hand. “Hmm. I’ll tell you, Josef, the accidental radiation to sterilize you would be so large that you would die, and it would be impotency because of death.”
But it wasn’t the unseen radiation that frightened me. I felt protected from it by the lead apron, by the extra lead plates guarding the genitals. I was overwhelmed with fear of the high-voltage, high-tension equipment. One could hear it. One could see it.
The door to the Radiation Laboratory was opposite Krupinsky’s lab. Signs were posted:
DANGER OF DEATH: HIGH VOLTAGE
VERY STRONG RADIATION
DO NOT ENTER
NO SMOKING. EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
It was locked and Professor Kreutzer had the key. Before entering, we had gone into the control booth, put on the lead aprons, and then returned to the hall to face the special entrance. The door into the Radiation Laboratory slid open pneumatically. It was of thick lead and paraffin, and when one walked in, he faced a thick wall and another door offset from the first opening. Another pneumatic mechanism slid the second thick door open, and one faced yet another wall. Then a small maze of offset passages led into that huge cement-block room—a cathedral of a room.
The pumps were gigantic, the condensers so tall they rose up two stories high. Thick electrical cables hung from the ceiling by strings. Pipes and tubes and wires everywhere. So loud! I wanted to put my hands over my ears. And there were sparks and crackles, hisses and lightning. I was terrified. And in the center was the linear accelerator, all sectioned and patched from bits and pieces of the junkyard, running diagonally twenty-eight feet or so, smaller in diameter than an oil drum—I could almost have put my arms around it.
Immediately upon entering, Professor Kreutzer went around the room with a pole, at the end of which was a chain of copper attached to a piece of pipe—another product of the scrapyard—which he used as a mobile lightning arrester by touching different points where there might be high tension. It made a terrific bang as it discharged, say, the condensers. Very methodically, each time he entered, Professor Kreutzer went around with that thing.
That’s the way he did everything, as though he had a lightning arrester in his hand. He minimized risk to the best of his ability and went on from there. For instance, when we were in the control booth putting on the lead aprons, he took off his jacket and vest, and I noticed that he wore both a belt and suspenders.
He said I must use the lightning arrester each time I entered to make sure that all the electricity was discharged safely to the ground. And he showed me how to paste
the little capsules of Drosophila onto the target with the dosimetry capsule, explaining that we were looking for a translocation induced by fast neutrons. The fast neutrons came from the lithium on the target of the linear accelerator. Every hour I must measure the amount of radiation, I must watch the pumps and valves and meters, I must listen for the crackling boom which signaled a breakdown of the high-voltage system, and I must listen for the hsssss which signaled a leak in the accelerator itself—which meant I must stretch a baton eight feet to the machine and seal the leak with chewing gum. And I must beware, for if it were all to stop suddenly, there would be a terrible explosion. I must immediately, if there was a failure, switch to another source of power. If the pumps had to be stopped, he must be called, for one did it by closing them down in a certain way in a certain sequence. Alone, just avoiding the mixing in the pumps of oil and mercury took expert knowledge.
In between the hourly measuring of radiation, I could sit quietly in the insulated control booth, always chewing gum, and watch through the windows of lead glass, through the aquarium of glass and water, and listen for the hsssss and boom through the intercom. And I could watch the meters and valves. If anything were to happen that I could not handle, I was to push the red emergency button, and he would come. Professor Kreutzer left me alone in the safe, warm control booth.
I had drunk too much tea. What Krupinsky once said to me was true. It was a scientific fact, he told me, that people of our background and class had a high incidence of haemorrhoids and distended bladder because they were trained from infancy to be overly fastidious about using any bathroom but their own. They developed tremendous capacity and control, and, after all, I had left home before five in the morning. It was now after two in the afternoon, and I had drunk ersatz coffee at home, tea with Sonja Press and the Avilovs and again with Krupinsky. In order to leave the control booth, I would have to push the red emergency button and summon Professor Kreutzer. I was loath to do so, probably because my mother had conditioned me to believe that calls of nature are less than civilized and that it is almost impolite to relieve oneself.
I was quite surprised when I discovered that other people of the same class and of even higher class had no such inhibitions. For instance, I went to the engagement party of the sister of my school friend, Petter. His sister was the first girl I ever loved—before Sheereen. Of course, she was totally out of reach, being so much older and all. The point is, I was in a similar dilemma at her engagement party.
Petter was my best friend at school, and when we were ten years old, he asked me if I thought his sister was attractive. I said, “Neither, nor,” meaning that she was just a girl. He was surprised I was not interested in girls, and he told me that he couldn’t wait until he was old enough to do it with a girl. Petter was absolutely astonished that it wasn’t my major goal in life. He said his sister was doing it, and his whole life was aimed at the time when he could.
It gave me something to think about, and next time I went to his house to play, I looked at his sister and began to follow her about. She seemed to enjoy talking with me and was very pleasant. When she became engaged to some wretched undersecretary at the embassy, she allowed Petter to invite me to the engagement party.
Their father was the Ambassador from Norway, and they lived in a mansion on a lake in midtown Berlin, rather than at the embassy. The engagement party was a huge event for me. They were so totally democratic. Everybody was on a first-name basis. The Ambassador and his wife were always just like any other ordinary parents—unlike the parents of Sheereen and Ahmed, who rarely dealt directly with their own children.
The party started in the afternoon and went on all day with champagne, punch for the children, and canapés, and then in the evening there was a huge meal with more champagne and punch. My bladder became overfull—and here we were, a tremendous number of people sitting at a great long table. I knew one is not supposed to get up from a table, but I thought I was going to have an accident. So I whispered to my friend.
He laughed loudly and shouted something in Norwegian. Everyone began to laugh. Someone yelled, in French, “Let’s all go have a pee.” So we, all the men, walked down to the lake and did it in unison. It was wonderful.
Petter was always so free. Our class took swimming at the pool of the City Police. Before we were allowed into the swimming pool, we had to strip totally and soap ourselves totally, and then the bathing master, a policeman, came with a fire hose of ice-cold water and rinsed us off.
We were always together, Petter and I, and one day, while we were soaping ourselves, he pointed to me and yelled, “Oh, I am circumcised, too.” And he grabbed my penis.
The policeman came with the fire hose. “Hey, you.” And an ice-cold stream of water hit us. But nothing more.
I could understand why they left Berlin the day after Germany annexed Norway, and why, that same spring of 1940, the children of the ambassadors from Holland and Belgium were gone from our school. But I could not understand why, at almost the same time, Sheereen’s family left, too. After all, Iraq was friendly with Adolf Hitler.
All my friends were outsiders—like myself—and when they went away, I was alone. By the time I was forced to leave the school, there were only six left in the class out of the original twenty-two.
Professor Kreutzer opened the door to the control booth and asked me if I would like to take a break and have a cup of tea while he was treating the Security Officer with x-ray. The Security Officer was, of course, the Gestapo in the House, and by that time I understood that his clandestine protection of the staff of the Institute was in exchange for these daily treatments of his disease.
I left for five minutes and returned quite relieved. The Security Officer had taken off his black shirt and was lying on the table with the x-ray tube aimed at his shoulder. It had to be some type of cancer. I must ask Krupinsky.
When the treatment was done, Professor Kreutzer signaled for me to switch the power from the x-ray tube back to the linear accelerator. They both left, and I settled into my chair, looking at the valves and meters before me and through the window into the deserted Radiation Laboratory. The control booth was supposed to have been shielded from the radiation by the paraffin blocks, the concrete and lead, and by the window, two sheets of lead glass separated by water. Years later, I realized that the shielding was totally inadequate, and that one was not protected. But at that time, I looked through the glass and water at the wavering image of the linear accelerator and felt more secure than I had since that moment, in 1933, when I was seven years old and I came home from the stationery store in Gartenfeld with book covers and a notebook for the new school year. All my grade school friends had bought them, too. They were covered with swastikas.
I was just beginning third grade and was quite proud that Mother allowed me to walk the three blocks to and from school alone and even to shop for school supplies myself. When I was in first and second grade, she had insisted on accompanying me, which I had found most embarrassing.
School was out by noon; by the time I finished shopping, it was half past, and I was ravenously hungry. I bounded into the house, peeked into the waiting room, one of the parlors on the first floor—only two patients left—then raced into the kitchen, slammed my book covers and notebook onto the table, and, without even sitting, began to gobble down the Teewurst sandwiches and hot chocolate the maid had prepared for me, all the while straining my ears, listening for Mother to come down the stairs from her second-floor office to get her next patient.
When I heard her footsteps on the stairs, I jammed the rest of my second sandwich into my mouth, ran into the hallway and into the arms of my smiling mother. She gave me a big hug. “How’s my dear Butzelman?” That was her special name for me. Butzelman was a character in my favorite children’s song; he was a funny, bright fellow who danced about the house. “How was your first day?”
“Neither, nor,” I said.
She laughed. “One of your friends is in the waiting room. Come s
ay good day to Herr Stenzel.”
Herr Stenzel was captain of the police precinct in the village. He and his wife and children had been Mother’s patients for as long as I could remember.
“Good day, Herr Stenzel,” I said, shaking his hand and bowing.
“Good day, Josef. Did you go to school today?”
I nodded.
“And you are in second grade now?” he said, his eyes twinkling.
“No!” I said vehemently. “I am now in third grade, and I have my own allowance.”
“How can you be so old as to be in third grade with such a young and beautiful mother?”
I looked up at Mother. She—and Father, too—had always seemed quite old to me.
Mother laughed again. “Did you buy your book covers, Josef?”
“Yes, Mutti. And a new notebook, too. Would you like to see them?” I dashed into the kitchen, returned with my purchases, and held them out for Mother to see.
All color left her face, and she exchanged an adult look with Herr Stenzel. I had done something terribly wrong.
“Excuse us, Herr Stenzel,” she said. Putting an arm about me, she propelled me gently into the kitchen, where she took my book covers and notebook away from me.
It was then Mother first told me that she was a Jew, I a mixed-blood, and that I was different from the other children.
After the engagement party of Petter’s sister, I was driven home by other guests who lived in our suburb. I was so sleepy from the wine that in the car they wrapped me in a blanket, and I awakened the next morning in my own bed, beside me the bag full of cheeses and other delicacies Petter’s mother had insisted I take.
When we played at his house, Petter and I were forever in the kitchen making sandwiches from all the marvelous food. I would go for the cheese and Teewurst, and he would stack a pile of caviar on a piece of toast.
Petter always got me in trouble in Latin class. He sat in front of me and had the fantastic ability to move both ears back and forth in rhythm to the singsong of the Latin grammar. And always, when he did this, I laughed out loud. Then the teacher stopped the lesson, reprimanded me, and wrote in the Daily Diary of the class: