by Elly Welt
All evening he was trying to get the floating lab assistant, Tatiana, to notice him, but she found him repulsive and totally ignored him.
The dinners always ended in a party. Some of the people would go home early—the Kreutzers, the Krupinskys, Frau Doktor, Madame Avilov, or so—but many would stay, especially the Russians—the Chief, Ignatov, who would be so drunk by the end of the dinner he couldn’t move, Bolotnikov, the Yugoslav, and always, without his wife, the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco. The Russian girls from the ballet—Die Scala—would come over after their performance, and the party would go on all night. The first six weeks or so, I went home right away; then I began to wait until Sonja Press left. She stayed only an hour or so until it began to get wild. At times she allowed me to walk her to the door of her apartment in the park, but usually the Chief would take her. In that case, I’d head right for the train station—until the time when I, too, stayed all night.
The first time I enjoyed the three hours between work and the staff dinners was at the end of June, two and a half months after I’d come to the Institute, when Sonja Press invited me, Frau Doktor, the Yugoslav, the French Physicist François Daniel, and Tatiana to her apartment for tea and cakes made from the cornmeal. Everyone was friendly, and they all just talked together. As far as I could tell, Sonja had no special boyfriend, and I decided that it was time to tell her how I felt—if only I could get her alone.
The next step was to manipulate her into inviting me, alone, to her apartment, using as a wedge her solicitude toward me when I was assigned to a forty-eight-hour stint in the Radiation Laboratory. “You poor thing,” she would say, “it must be terribly lonely to sit there all those hours.”
Actually, I didn’t mind it at all. Although most of the time I was alone in the control booth, people did stop by to chat—the Chief, Marlene, or so. Professor Kreutzer and Krupinsky would relieve me for an hour or two at regular intervals. Someone had to be there all the time to make sure the equipment didn’t break down and to measure the dose hourly. When one worked with fast neutrons from our homemade accelerator, there were too many variables: high voltage wasn’t constant, ion source wasn’t constant, vacuum wasn’t always the same; therefore, the number of fast neutrons produced had to be measured frequently. With ultraviolet or x-ray the dose, once measured, was fairly constant. One needed to spot-check only now and then.
Mostly I liked monitoring the linear accelerator because it meant that I had an excuse not to go home for two or three days at a time. Nevertheless, I began to act sad about it when Sonja was near, and surely enough, she would press my arm and say, “You have the saddest eyes.” But to get her to actually invite me to her apartment, I was forced to more or less lie.
The first week in July, the day before I was to go into the control booth for forty-eight hours, I ran an appalling, sad routine every time she walked into my lab. And at lunch-time, in the cafeteria, I sat across from her and stared down, despondently, at my cup of tea.
It was almost too easy. God, what an ass I was! I made her beg me to tell her the cause of my great sorrow. “I’ll bet it’s the Radiation Laboratory. You poor dear.”
“No.” I sighed. “It’s not that. It’s nothing. I’ll be all right.”
“Then what is it? Are you ill? Are your parents all right?”
“Oh, it’s nothing like that. You’d laugh if I told you.”
“Josef! You know me better than that.”
“Well . . .” I wanted to appear reluctant to say it, so I had to hesitate. “It does have something to do with the Radiation Lab.”
“I knew it! Why don’t you let me talk to the Chief?”
“No, no.” That was the last thing I wanted. “You don’t understand. I really don’t mind being in there at all—but I’m going in tomorrow night at seven and I have to stay for forty-eight hours.” I took a big breath and did it. “And the day after tomorrow is my birthday.” Actually, my birthday wasn’t until six weeks later, August fifteenth.
“We’ll have a birthday party for you,” she said and clapped her hands.
“No! I don’t want anyone else to know. Please. Just forget it.” I blinked my eyes at her a few times. Girls always commented on my eyes. They were probably my only good feature.
The upshot of it all was that she invited me, alone, to her apartment for dinner on my “birthday.” Krupinsky agreed to relieve me in the Radiation Lab for two hours, starting at seven in the evening.
Everything ran smoothly all night and all day, and by the time he was supposed to come, I’d had plenty of time to think about Sonja Press and how I would say it and do it. But Krupinsky didn’t get there at seven. The British bombed early that night, and he was held up for two hours by the air raid. I was so upset that I blew up at him, even though it wasn’t his fault. He gave me one of his expressionless looks and said, “You have three hours, you schmuck. I’ll stay until midnight.”
Sonja had said I could come any time after six and before nine—and here it was several minutes after nine. Fortunately, I had showered and shaved when Professor Kreutzer relieved me in late afternoon, so all I had to do was pick up two Fromm’s Akt and the lubricant gel from my worktable drawer and run across the park to her building and up the stairs.
She seemed a little anxious. “I was so worried you wouldn’t make it.”
“Krupinsky was delayed by the British. Am I too late?”
“Well, no. We do have a little time.” Then she smiled, gave me a hug, and said, “Happy seventeenth birthday. Here, I have a little vodka ready.”
She handed me a glass of it, and I had to stand there while she toasted me with “Many, many happy returns of the day.” Then she began to weep, probably over the contradiction of many happy returns for a cross-breed half-Jew in the Third Reich.
I was extremely ill at ease, and I already knew it wasn’t going to work. When things start off so wrong—the lies and Krupinsky being late—the best thing is to drop it. But I was trained by my father, a Prussian, that once a job is started, it must be completed—right or wrong. “In the army,” he said to me over and over, “if one buttons a tunic beginning with the wrong hole and discovers it halfway up, he must finish it wrong and then unbutton all the buttons and start all over again.”
I stood there, rigid as a Prussian soldier, feeling totally alienated from the scene. Words wouldn’t come naturally. I had to think of what to say.
Sonja gave me another hug and said, “You poor dear, sitting up all night and all day in that control booth.”
I put an appropriate expression on my face and sighed. “It’s not too bad. I really don’t mind it.” Ah, I let a little honesty creep in.
“Here! Lie down on the couch and rest.”
I sank onto the couch, half reclining, a position uncomfortable for me, and she actually bent down and untied my shoes. “Take these off and stretch out a minute while I get some food on the table.” I hated to take off my shoes; my socks were threadbare, darn on darn. But she left me no choice.
Stocking-footed, I stretched out and she covered me with her shawl. She puttered about the hot plate and the table for ten minutes or so, then sat beside me on the couch and took my hand.
“Would you like some more vodka?”
“No, thank you.”
“How is the irradiation going?”
“Fine, thank you. Sonja? May I tell you something?”
“Dinner is ready.” She dropped my hand and tried to rise from the couch. But I held her arm.
“Dinner is ready.” She tried, again, to rise, but still I held her arm. Gently, she pushed my hand away.
“Sonja, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you.”
“Josef, dear, I think it would be best if we have our dinner now.”
“Please, you must let me speak.” I knew she didn’t want to hear, but I had to finish buttoning up the tunic, wrong hole and all.
She did not try to get up.
“From the very first moment I s
et eyes on you that very first day, I . . . I have felt . . .” God! Her face was so anxious and pained. “I have felt the greatest affection for you.”
She leaned over, kissed my cheek, and took my hand. “You have no idea how greatly I esteem your affection for me and how I will always cherish your friendship.” This conversation was right out of a nineteenth-century novel. “And now, dinner is ready.”
“You don’t understand . . .” I began. But someone was at the door. I heard a key turning in the lock.
Sonja jumped to her feet and I to mine. The shawl fell to the floor.
It was the Chief. He opened her door with a key. He frowned and said to Sonja, “What’s he doing here at this hour?”
“It’s his birthday today. I invited him for dinner.”
He looked at me. “Happy birthday. Aren’t you supposed to be over in the Radiation Laboratory?”
I did not run. I bowed slightly. “Good evening, sir.” I bowed more deeply to Sonja and kissed her hand—“I thank you for a most pleasant evening”—and I walked slowly toward the door.
“Your shoes,” she said.
I returned, picked up my shoes, bowed again, and walked slowly from the apartment, slowly down the flight of stairs. Then I ran, in my stocking feet, through the park to the main building and up the stairs to the Radiation Lab.
Krupinsky said, “Back so soon? It’s not even ten, Why didn’t you get some sleep? Why are you carrying your shoes? What did you do, get caught in somebody’s bed?”
“Why don’t you shut up and shove it up your ass, you shiny ape.”
“Good idea!” He picked up his jacket and left.
A male Drosophila would jump on anything, even a black spot on a piece of paper. In the lab, I had made black spots on paper, watched them pounce and stagger off in confusion, return and pounce again. But I had made my sexual frustration unilateral: Sonja Press. Not like him, who had a wife, too, and who, everybody knew, fornicated with all the ballet dancers who came to the parties after our staff dinners. It had been two months since Marlene had invited me to the darkroom.
I sat all that night, checking hourly the amount of radiation given to the one hundred flies in the three gelatin capsules pasted to the target. At six in the morning, Professor Kreutzer relieved me for two hours, and I passed out on a table in our lab until eight, when I returned to the control booth. At eight thirty the Rare Earths Chemist came in with a solution he wanted irradiated. Good Lord, why him? Always him? Such a nice man. But in the first place, he forgot to use the lightning arrester, in the second place he was about to put his hand into the target area in order to paste on the small capsule of solution he wanted irradiated. I had to pull switches, causing crashing noises and many sparks. He’d been so nice to me from the beginning, directing me to the Chief’s penthouse that first day, and after that always ready to explain about the Rare Earths elements, which are not really so rare, and showing me the tremendous collection of alkaloids stored in his lab, and explaining how he was always trying to isolate the transuranium which they knew was there from the measuring equipment, but which, of course, they had never seen. In the third place, his solution might give off secondary radiation. If this happened I could throw away my one hundred flies because I couldn’t be sure if the effect I got was from primary or secondary radiation.
Professor Kreutzer had put me in charge of the linear accelerator, but without any authority. So I couldn’t tell the scientists not to put their solutions on the target, or not to go into the Radiation Lab unprotected, or not to stick their hands in front of the target. I could just make the machine seem to break down.
I looked at the Rare Earths Chemist through the glass and water. And he, kind man, looked at me, waved, smiled, pointed to the machine. I said over the intercom that I was sorry things seemed to have broken down, but if he would come back at four or five in the afternoon, it should be fixed. He picked up his solution and left.
By the time the Chief stopped in to see how things were, I had rationalized my way into a fit of moral indignation over his sexual behavior. It was the only way I could handle my humiliation. He acted as though nothing had happened and began talking about statistical validity. He was forever talking about how to confirm the validity of statistical phenomena. “One must have a very large number, a very large number, and even then, Josef, one must be careful with statistics, for they are like a lady’s brief bathing suit. What they reveal is interesting, but what they hide is essential. Correct? Or am I right?”
One began to notice that he repeated the same trite phrases over and over: Correct? Or am I right? And one knew also that what one does not say also hides the most essential. I was coldly polite but said little.
Krupinsky came in after lunch to relieve me. “How’re you doing, Josef?” His tone was so kind that I became wary.
“How should I be doing?” I rose from the chair. He closed the door and blocked my exit.
“It was Sonja, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged.
“I should have told you, I suppose. But you’re such a damned know-it-all.”
“Told me what? That the Chief’s a moral pygmy?”
Krupinsky grabbed my shirtfront and pulled me toward him. “You goddam schmuck.” He released me with a push; he actually had tears in his eyes. “You are so brilliant,” he said, “and probably the most stupid individual I’ve ever met.”
“It’s time to measure the dose.”
“A minute more won’t matter. Don’t you understand, you schlemiel, that the Chief is carrying you on his back—and me—and all of us, including those Luftwaffe people in Brain Research and at Mantle? Anything he has to do to keep his sanity is O.K.”
“But he has a wife!” I blurted out.
“When the hell are you going to grow up? It doesn’t make any difference.”
I sat down again on the swivel chair in front of the control panel. “But he’s so old.”
“Did Sonja tell you about the Chief?”
“He walked in on us. He has his own key.”
Krupinsky turned away from me, perhaps to hide a smile. I swiveled around and looked through the aquarium of glass and water into the Radiation Laboratory and saw the wavering image of the linear accelerator. “I’ll measure the dose before I go to lunch,” I said.
“Thanks. I can stay one hour.”
After the measuring, I went into my lab. The girls were through with the daily sorting and were putting the flasks of flies into the incubators. I took Marlene aside and asked her if she would like to go with me to the darkroom.
She took a step backward, looked up at me, and nodded. A serious face. The eruptions on her skin were, most likely, not syphilis at all.
“I don’t have much time,” I said.
“It doesn’t take much time.”
So we went up to the darkroom.
It takes the flies a long time. Many minutes. The male jumps on the back of the female and holds her with all six legs. There is no struggle. Sometimes they fly around joined, but usually they just crawl or hop. But slowly—they take their time.
Marlene turned on the red light, bolted the door, and pulled the soundproof curtain. I tried to embrace and kiss her.
“Don’t kiss me.” She pushed me away.
There was a stack of folded blankets in the corner. She began to spread one. I helped, being careful to smooth out the corners neatly. She put a folded blanket down for a pillow, stepped out of her underdrawers, lay down, and raised her skirt above her waist. I looked.
“Don’t look at me.”
I closed my eyes.
“Just unbutton your pants.”
It was not embarrassing to me—slightly awkward, but mainly matter-of-fact. “Do you have a safety?”
“Two.” I pulled the Fromm’s Akt from my pocket.
“One will do.”
I pictured the full, rose-tipped breasts of Frau Krupinsky with the small silver cross in the cleavage. Then I dropped to my knees.
Mother’s medical books listed only two kinds of sexual impotency for the male: impotentia generandi, the inability to procreate, sterility; and impotentia coeundi, the inability to perform coition. To this I added a third, impotentia Josefus, the inability to satisfy a woman. She just lay there stiff and quiet while I did it to her.
I was able to heat up and eat three bowls of polenta with molasses in the greenhouse kitchen and return to the control booth within the hour, by two p.m.
At four thirty, Professor Kreutzer walked into the Radiation Laboratory with his lightning arrester and the Gestapo in the House. It was time for the Security Officer’s daily x-ray therapy. When I had asked Krupinsky about him, I was told that the Security Officer—who was a high-ranking officer in the S.S., an Obersturmbannführer—had a doctorate in chemistry, and that is why Himmler himself assigned him to keep watch over the various scientific activities at the Institute. And Krupinsky gave me a book to read about his particular disease, Principles of Internal Medicine, page 1317:
Hodgkin’s disease is characterized by painless, progressive enlargement of the lymphoid tissue. The proliferating cells tend to encroach upon, obscure, and finally replace the architecture of the lymph node. No age is immune, and males are more frequently affected than females. The cause of these disorders is unknown.
The nodes are discrete and movable at first; only later do they become matted together and fixed. At first they are painless and the overlying skin is normal; however, when they have developed rapidly or when the nerves are infiltrated, they may be painful. The effect of irradiation may be dramatic, large masses melting away in the course of a week.
If correct diagnosis is not made early, dissemination of the disease occurs.
Correct diagnosis had not been made early in his case, and it had spread. He’d already had surgery on his underarm and groin, which accounted for his peculiar walk: a limp, a shuffle, his arms held gingerly away from his body.
He took off his black trousers and lay down on the table. Groin. Does such a disease make one impotent in any way? He had three small children. Professor Kreutzer came into the control booth and switched the power from the linear accelerator to the deep x-ray machine. The Kreutzers had no children, nor did the Krupinskys or Treponescos, only the Avilovs. They had the one, Mitzka. My parents had one, me. Uncle Otto and Aunt Greta had no children, and my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Philip, was not married when he was picked up and “relocated to the East.”