Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  Bruno, meanwhile, had dropped into his chair to write the numbers. When he had them all on the pad, he nodded to Professor Kreutzer, who, nevertheless, repeated them quickly: “Eight, six, seven, zero, three, two, one. I need this boy. It would be difficult and time-consuming to replace him. I have already cleared him with the local draft board.”

  I cringed. An out-and-out lie. When they saw the maiden name of my mother, Jacoby, I was automatically exempted from serving in the army.

  Professor Kreutzer continued. “You can be assured your cooperation in this matter will be appreciated, and you may send the approval of his working for me to the Director of Personnel, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research, Hagen.”

  Bruno tried to write all this on the tablet, but Professor Kreutzer interrupted him.

  “There is no need to take more of our valuable time. Heil Hitler.” Up went his arm.

  He kicked my shin. “Heil Hitler,” said I, arm raised.

  “Heil Hitler,” said Bruno, jumping to his feet again and saluting strongly.

  Professor Kreutzer turned. I turned. He walked. I walked.

  It was not necessary to use another capsule of vestigials on the train ride back. We were alone in our compartment. I sat beside Professor Kreutzer, and he explained that since my file would be marked Top Secret, and since few people had top security clearance, it would take months before the Labor Department would act upon it. “Do not believe for a moment,” he said, “that Herr Direktor Bruno’s office will ever give you clearance. All we can hope for is investigation and delay. If the Allies come soon enough, you might be lucky. Meanwhile, I will begin correspondence with the office of Reichsmarshal Goering, who is in charge of the Scientific Research Council of the entire Third Reich.”

  More than a year later, we received a letter of clearance from the Scientific Research Council, but it was too late for many reasons, one of which was that Goering had lost too much power by that time. Three months after our trip to the Labor Office, a letter arrived addressed to me in care of the Wilhelm Foundation, Hagen. It was probably another summons, but Professor Kreutzer told me not to open it. He sent it back marked Wrong Address. Five weeks later, another letter came. This time it was correctly addressed, but it was almost illegible; the type was too light. He took it back personally, saying to the secretary that the print was illegible, he had very weak eyes, and what was the Third Reich coming to that they couldn’t put decent typewriter ribbons on their machines in the Labor Office?

  He calculated that it took at least thirty-seven days for a letter to be received by them and dealt with, so every three or four weeks he would write a letter concerning me to the Office of Labor, saying, for example, “Why has my letter of 15 April not been answered?”—which, he said, would cause my file to be removed from the stack, reviewed, and put again at the bottom of a pile. Of course, it was all marked Top Secret and Decisive to the War Effort and one must imagine a very large red-brick building, filled with many secretaries, with many files stacked on each desk.

  “Someday,” said Professor Kreutzer, “there will be machines which can sort through one hundred million names in a matter of hours. Then there won’t be a chance for you. But now it is all manual. You have no idea how much trouble it is for Hitler to keep track of all the Jews.”

  He did all this without humor, a deadly serious game, hoping to delay the action against me for at least a year, by which time the war should have been over. As it was, he was able to delay for sixteen months, until January of 1945, when General Eisenhower and his colleagues were still hesitating in France, afraid to move on to Germany.

  After I’d been at the Institute a year, Marlene got pregnant and quit. I was relieved when the Dutch Medical Student felt he had to marry her. Monika had to leave our laboratory, too, after the disaster the night I was Air Raid Warden, and there actually was an air raid in Hagen.

  A staff dinner had been called at the last minute to celebrate the Russian victory in the Crimea, in the spring of 1944. But Monika and I had private plans, and I used as an excuse for missing the dinner the fact that I was Air Raid Warden.

  It usually was easy to be Warden because the Allies never bombed our hospital suburb. But that night—either by accident, or maybe because the Royal Air Force had cowards like everything else—one crew dumped its bomb load on the outskirts of Berlin, in a field near the Institute.

  I had just connected with Monika in the darkroom when the building began to shake. My first impression was that I was finally getting some coital response from her, but when I realized the tremor was external and more like an earthquake, I collapsed. My God! I had left some pretty important Drosophila cultures on my worktable—special mutations—planning to put them back into the incubator later.

  By the time I ran into the lab, it was too late. The windows had shattered, the flies on my worktable were dead from exposure to the cold, and the Chief was standing there, furious.

  “Here is my Warden,” he said sarcastically, and he and I set off to inspect the entire plant, including the buildings in the park. Luckily, no one was hurt, just some shattered windows here and there, and, of course, those isolated mutations on my worktable.

  Everyone from Genetics had been at the staff dinner but Monika and me. Krupinsky, Frau Krupinsky, and the Dutch Medical Student were sweeping up the debris when the Chief and I returned to the lab. He began to pace furiously.

  “In spite of being young,” he said, “one still has to follow certain conventions, certain rules. A gentleman takes, but does not hang it on the bulletin board that he is having an affair with a certain girl, and that the affair took place during a general staff meeting, and that both were absent from that meeting, and that because of their thoughtless behavior their serious work was not properly carried on. Ignorance is the only excuse for anyone to do anything he shouldn’t,” he shouted. “Laziness or thoughtlessness is no excuse.” He strode from the lab.

  I could have killed myself.

  Monika sat in the corner and cried.

  “Frankly,” said Krupinsky, “I can’t imagine what the women see in him. Look at him. Look at all the signs of somatic degeneration. His chin is too short, his teeth are crowded, he has one nonseparated earlobe, his index finger is too short, and his shoulders—I feel sorry for his tailor, he would have an almost impossible task to hide the concave chest, the wings on his back sticking out, the narrow rib cage. And his ears—look at them: one is much larger than the other.” He was sweeping up glass all the time he talked. “Really, I’m much more attractive than he and nobody ever looks at me.”

  Frau Krupinsky gave me a hug and helped me clean up the mess on my worktable.

  Monika was still in the corner, crying. I could have killed myself.

  Monika was moved to Chemistry and replaced by the floating lab assistant, Tatiana, who, as I’ve said, had a background similar to mine, except that her mother was a Russian Jew and a biologist, whereas mine was a German Jew and a physician. Both our fathers were one hundred percent “German” and both were lawyers. The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco was still madly in love with her, and she still ignored him.

  Our second-floor wing smelled also of the rats. We did not use the rabbits for research, and there is no such thing as fast ruthenium. But on the bone marrow and other organs of the rats we did test the effects of artificial radioactive substances produced by the particles from the linear accelerator.

  PART III

  October 10, 1967,

  Iowa City

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Elizabeth

  Dr Josef Bernhardt handed his resignation in a sealed envelope to Dr Jenkins’s secretary at 9:50 a.m., knowing that it would not be read until after the morning’s surgery. With the vial of succinylcholine and a little bottle of Librium rattling in an otherwise empty briefcase, he walked out the tower entrance of the University Hospital feeling, somehow, lighter, and, squinting against the dazzling sunshine of the brilliant October day, hu
rried across the emerald lawn to Student Health for his ten o’clock appointment with Dr Elizabeth Duncan.

  Although he knew Elizabeth was always late, he arrived at her office exactly on time. “Would you mind,” he asked her nurse, “if I waited in one of the examining rooms?”

  “Not at all, doctor.”

  The nurse led him down the hallway, pushed open a door, and flicked on the fluorescent light: a tiny moss-green room, sink in the corner, small desk and chair, the window completely darkened by olive-green Venetian blinds. The examining table lay beneath the window.

  The nurse glanced circumspectly at his face. “Would you like to lie down, Dr Bernhardt? It might be some time.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Deftly, she pulled white paper sheeting from the roll at the head and covered the table. From the cabinet beneath she took a little pillow and plumped it. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No. And thank you very much.”

  “You’re quite welcome.” The nurse left, closing the door but leaving the light on.

  Josef leaned the brown leather briefcase against the wall, removed his dark gray suit jacket, hung it on a hook, kicked off his black oxfords, and lay down. He felt somewhat better: his head still ached, he was nauseated, each respiration was a rasping wheeze—but he could breathe. And still he felt on the verge of tears.

  To wrench his mind away from his physical symptoms, Josef willed his thoughts to the beauty of the day: the vivid colors, yellow and red against the blue sky and the green grass . . . alas . . . the geese rising from their noon apple-dreams.

  The poem again, the little elegy. He scanned his memory for the words, feeling pressed and then panicked by his inability to remember something he had known so well. Josef sat up, inhaled deeply, pushed the breath out by tightening and releasing his diaphragm—three times—and lay down again. As with a name on the tip of the tongue, it is often best to trick it into floating to the surface. He closed his eyes and permitted his mind to free-associate: green grass . . . alas . . . white geese . . . snow goose who cried in goose alas against the green grass.

  Still it did not ring a bell.

  He tried again: green grass . . . goose . . . alas . . . beauty . . . brown study . . . body . . . little bodies . . . His body was cushioned by the bodies of others whom he could not identify. He smashed them to bits. The trolley or the train—he couldn’t remember—yes, he remembered. It was a train and it was cut open with a carpenter’s ax and he was lifted out. Saved. But the unremembered others were mashed and broken, crushed and dismembered from the impact of his body—not beheaded—but their skulls smashed and their brains spilling out into pools of their own gore. Little Hans Levy and his grandmother, the button lady, were taken in July 1942, but the others, so many others, were not taken until nearly the end of the war, after the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and the liberation of Paris in August 1945. The Americans just stopped. Stopped! They could easily have marched through Germany, almost without resistance, and saved so many! But Eisenhower seemed more interested in humoring his prima donnas—Montgomery et al.—and in refereeing the little war between the Allies than in concluding the big one. His delay provoked unimaginable despair. Unimaginable! The Russians. Josef, lying on his back on the examining table, breathed deep, rasping breaths.

  And yet, during a war there is hope. One can hope, always, that the war will be over and that life will be better. It is only after one is “liberated” that he realizes there is no hope at all and no reason at all. That is when the true emptiness begins.

  His meditation was interrupted by Elizabeth Duncan, who, at half past ten, burst into the examining room clutching a large handbag and a grocery sack reeking so of garlic pastrami that Josef’s nausea momentarily escalated into another dimension. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the table.

  “My life is running three weeks late,” she said breathlessly. “Don’t get up.” But Josef was already on his feet. Elizabeth dropped her purse and brown paper bag onto the table, and, as he helped her with her coat, began her inevitable apology. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ve a really sick one over at Mercy. Diabetes complicated by LSD.” She shook her head. “And it’s such an incredibly beautiful day that I stopped at the deli on the way back and picked up some sandwiches for us. I thought we might find a minute or two to wander down to the river and have a picnic. It’s so beautiful out,” she repeated, “so warm that I didn’t even need my coat. Oh, no!” Elizabeth pointed to the grocery bag. “What on earth was I thinking? I bought pastrami on rye and potato chips. And with your blood pressure!”

  “It’s quite all right. I’m not the least hungry.”

  “Salt,” she murmured.

  They stood awkwardly, Elizabeth leaning against the examining table scrutinizing Josef dangling in the center of the little room. Although she denied it vehemently, Elizabeth was a striking woman. He had thought so since the day he met her when he was only nine and she, seventeen, had come with her father to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. His Uncle Philip, who had just completed his residency in pediatrics that spring, was taken with her, too, and Josef would stand at the high window of his third-floor bedroom and observe the two of them as they walked together about the garden. She was to have stayed in Germany for several years, to study nursing, but the political climate was such that her father, wisely, took her home with him—back to Iowa. Who in his right mind would elect to leave his child in Germany during those dreadful years? During the visit to Germany, Josef’s mother had convinced her to become a physician—not just a nurse.

  “You look terrible,” Elizabeth said, finally. “Seff, I know you’re not going to listen to me, but please, you should go to someone a little more removed, more objective—and more qualified.”

  He shook his head.

  “Bob Ericksen. He’s a top-flight internist. Honestly, the only ills I get to work with around here are V.D.s, O.D.s, and final exams.” She searched for cigarettes in her bag, offered Josef one. He refused but took the matches from her hand, lit her cigarette, and stepped back again to the center of the room. “I’ve got to cut down on these,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Ah, doctors. We know too much. Do you want me to examine you?”

  He nodded.

  “I suppose we should get some tests to eliminate the nasties: pheochromocytoma, kidney problems. Do you want to arrange it, or should I?”

  “Don’t you bother.”

  “EKG, too, and a chest x-ray. Your breathing. I can hear it from here. It sounds as though you’ve got quite a bit of music in your chest.”

  “An entire orchestra.”

  “Here,” she said, moving her handbag, grocery sack, and coat from the table and laying them on the little desk. “Take off your shirt and sit up here and tell me your symptoms.”

  While Josef divested himself of white shirt and tie, Elizabeth picked up the telephone, dialed one number, said, “Hold my calls,” and hung up.

  Josef, perched on the edge of the examining table, began his recitation: “Recurring headache, getting more severe. Blurring of vision. Tingling in fingers and lips. Runs of extrasystoles. Short spells of disorientation and panic.”

  “Panic?”

  “Panic. Nycturia.”

  “Heart,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Respiratory distress with and without congestion. Sudden onset of an irresistible tiredness without being able to fall asleep.”

  “How do you sleep generally?”

  “Poorly. I wake up exhausted.”

  “How’s your stamina?”

  “I need more and more will to maintain it.”

  “Any disturbance in walking, in equilibrium?”

  “Dizzy spells after physical exertion.”

  “What kind of physical exertion?”

  “Running. Heavy lifting . . .”

  “How is your sex life?”

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Hmpff. Take off your shoes and pants and lie
back.”

  Elizabeth washed her hands and began a thorough, old-fashioned physical examination, saving further questions until it was over.

  “You know what I’ve found,” she said when she was through. “The blood pressure is right up there—hundred eighty over hundred and ten. You have frequent extrasystoles, pulmonary congestion, bronchospasms. I want to put you in the hospital this afternoon, call Bob Ericksen, and do a complete workup.”

  “No.” Josef reached for his clothes and dressed while she talked to him.

  Elizabeth lit another cigarette, sat behind the little desk in the only chair in the room. “How long have these acute symptoms been with you, my friend?”

  “Since Kristallnacht.”

  “Crystal Night? You were just a child. What—nineteen thirty-seven, thirty-eight?”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven. Crystal Night in Montréal this spring, when the national soul of Canada erupted over the decision of a referee in a hockey game.”

  “Oh, yes. It made the news here. That was awful.”

  “I was on call. The injured were brought to the hospital. One had hopes that such behavior was indigenous to the Germans, that the Americans and the Canadians would not indulge in senseless, sadistic—”

  “That’s not fair!” Elizabeth cut him short. “You know there have always been mobs, even in America. Read Huckleberry Finn.”

  “That’s just the point, Eliza. It hit me that the Nazis are not unique. Don’t you see?”

  “Josef, I just can’t let this pass. Crystal Night in Germany in—when was it?”

  “November ninth, nineteen thirty-eight.”

  “That was different. It was planned by the government, by Hitler and his cohorts. It didn’t just happen.”

  “Ah, yes. You are right. They organized, as they used to call it, ‘a spontaneous demonstration of the German people.’”

  “Wasn’t it in reaction to something? The assassination of some official?”