by Elly Welt
“He says,” Krupinsky translated, “that he is not very drunk.”
“Ask him how much longer it will go on.”
“He doesn’t know,” translated Krupinsky. “Two hours, three.”
Rabin shrugged apologetically and spoke again. This time Tanya translated. “He will play for us,” she said.
“Fine,” said Professor Kreutzer. “I will be in my lab if you need me, and I will meet you, in any case, at seven, in the cafeteria kitchen downstairs.”
The Krupinskys, Tanya, and I followed Rabin down the stairs and into the parlor. Krupinsky and his wife nestled close together on one couch; Rabin settled at the piano, eyes closed, head bent, as though asleep; Tanya and I sat apart on the same couch. She held Mitzka’s balalaika on her knees. Rabin hit the keys and the hair on the back of my neck stood up: an orgy of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky—magnificent, technically perfect, passionate, some pieces over and over without stopping.
Berlin is cold at two o’clock in the morning, even in August. I left the parlor long enough to fetch two woolen blankets from the bomb shelter in the basement. I tucked one around the Krupinskys, huddled lovingly together. Frau Krupinsky kissed my cheek. The other I took to where Tanya sat, tight against the end of the couch. She put Mitzka’s balalaika down beside her, where I had assumed I would sit, took the blanket from me, and covered herself. I could have fetched another for myself, but I did not. And I did not sit again on her couch, but chose, rather, to listen until dawn from a hard chair as far from her as possible.
At seven, Professor Kreutzer joined us in the cafeteria kitchen and, over a hurried cup of tea, gave us instructions: Krupinsky was to check to see how Madame Avilov was doing, then see if Sonja and/or Frau Doktor could be spared to help with the cleanup, which Tanya and I were to begin at once.
The Krupinskys left to cross the park to the Chief’s house. Professor Kreutzer, Tanya, and I walked through the lobby just as Grand Duke Trusov came down the front stairs—a Die Scala dancer on each arm—looking for a cup of tea. He glanced out the windows, dropped his dancers, and came tearing toward us.
“Max!” he shouted. “An inspection team!”
We all ran to the windows. Three black cars—two Mercedes and a Horch—were coming around the circular drive.
Professor Kreutzer snapped orders: “Tatiana, run after Krupinsky and tell him to come back. You, Duke, find Alex—he’s probably asleep in his office—and tell the dancers to vanish.” To me, he said, “Telephone the Security Officer and tell him to hurry over. Quickly.”
I raced up the stairs to the phone in my lab, then decided it would be safer to use the private telephone in the Chief’s penthouse office. Grand Duke Trusov was already there bending over the Chief, who was collapsed on the floor, clad only in a shirt, a Die Scala girl naked in his arms. The Grand Duke couldn’t waken either of them. He was slapping their faces and dousing them with cold water.
“Bernhardt,” he ordered, “run down to my lab and get some vodka. That will wake him up.”
Through the window, I saw the Krupinskys running across the lawn. I telephoned the Security Officer. Krupinsky came dashing up the outside steps to the penthouse and into the office.
“Good Christ, Duke!” he shouted. “What are you trying to do, drown him?” Krupinsky turned to his wife. “Run to the lab and get my stethoscope and sphygmomanometer.” He knelt beside the Chief to take his pulse. “Listen, Duke you go down to Chemistry and get me two ampules of Polybion, one Bexatin Fortissimum, and one Cebion Forte.”
“Vitamins?” shouted the Duke. “Vitamins? Why don’t you give him a shot of Adrenalin?”
“I want to wake him up, not kill him, damn you. His only son got murdered last night, he is dead drunk—what the hell do you think his blood pressure might be?” He turned to me.
“Josef, run along to the lab and get a new sterile syringe, needles, cotton, and alcohol.”
My good Lord, the lab was in chaos: rabbit bones, broken glass, dirty dishes, congealed polenta, apple cores, Bolotnikov asleep under one table, and the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco and a girl under another. Tanya had begun to clear away the mess on the worktables. The morning sorting of Drosophila would have to be done no matter what else was going on.
I hurried back to the penthouse.
“One hundred sixty over one hundred and ten,” said Krupinsky. “Lift the girl off and help me turn him over.”
The Chief muttered and shook his head at the needles but did not wake up.
“I want to get his head down. Don’t want his aspirating vomitus.”
We wrapped the Chief in a blanket, dragged and carried him through the outer office, and laid him on his stomach down the stairs. Grand Duke Trusov and I, at the top of the stairwell, held his feet, and Krupinsky sat by his head, talking quietly.
“Hi, Chief. Time to get up. Good morning. The sky is blue, and we have visitors.”
The leonine head shook away the sound.
“Good morning, Chief. Another day, another dollar, your pulse is steadier, time to get up.”
Eyes opened. Blink.
“Good morning, Chief. How’s the head?”
Blink. “Krupinsky, is it true that I am hanging down the staircase?”
“True.”
“I cannot understand what this fuss is all about. I was extremely tired and was only resting.” He tried to jump to his feet, but, of course, it was impossible. Head down again, eyes closed. “Tell them to let go of my feet.”
“Just a minute, Chief. We have a logistics problem. Listen, Duke, you and Josef swing his legs around, and for Christ’s sake, both of you move in the same direction—I’ve got his shoulders: Christ, Chief, you are heavy—and let’s get him all on one stair.”
The Chief sat up. “Take this damn blood pressure cuff off me,” he growled. “Why didn’t you let me sleep?”
“Chief, there’s an inspection team downstairs,” said Krupinsky.
“What is it they want?”
“I don’t know,” said the Grand Duke. “Max is with them.”
“All right.” The Chief jumped to his feet, wrapping the blanket around himself. “Josef, be a good boy and brew me a pitcher of tea. Strong. And bring it to me in my shower. And Krup, will you stop fiddling with that damned stethoscope. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
The dancer was still asleep on the floor of the Chief’s office. Krupinsky took her blood pressure, and then he and the Duke wrapped her up in a blanket and carried her to the darkroom on the third floor, leaving Frau Krupinsky to watch her.
The Chief drank the first four cups of tea under water. When Professor Kreutzer stepped into the bathroom, the Chief emerged from the shower holding the fifth cup. He beckoned to me to hand him the huge bath towel hanging on a hook, and gave me, in exchange, the cup and saucer. “What is it they want, Max?” He began to dry himself.
“It is, again, the Ministry for the Coordination of Total War Effort—eleven ‘inspectors.’ They want, and I quote them, ‘to see the linear accelerator and know its place in the atomic potential of the Third Reich.’”
“Are they scientists?”
“Only one. He’s not a physicist, but a biologist, and not quite as stupid as the rest. The others are the average Party officials—grocers and schoolteachers. I told them, of course, that the work here is Top Secret and that they must undergo strict security clearance—which would take some time, several hours or so. Latte is interviewing each one separately, then checking their clearance. He will let six or seven through, but for sure not the scientist.”
“Our Gestapo in the House is not too useful, is he?” The Chief enveloped himself in the great white towel.
“He’s as surprised as we.”
“This inspection has nothing to do with what happened last night?” the Chief asked quietly.
“No. I am almost certain it is coincidental, although both are reactions to the twentieth of July and to the liberation of France. It will get worse.”
The Chie
f nodded, grimly. “I see. What time is it?”
“Eight fifteen. The security check will keep them busy for at least another hour.”
“How much time do we need to get the Biology Lab cleaned up, the flies sorted, and a demonstration made ready in the Radiation Lab?”
“As much time as you can give me.”
“Then I will lecture to them in a meeting room on the first floor for three hours.” His hair still dripping wet and plastered onto his forehead, the huge white towel wrapped about him like a toga, the Chief raised his right arm and began an oration in his penthouse shower room. “I will begin with Empedocles and Democritus, from the Greek atomos, ‘indivisible,’ hence, ‘that which cannot be split,’ and on through Dalton and Thomson and to our good friend, Niels Bohr, with his simplistic image of a miniature solar system, with its planetary electrons in circular orbit about the nucleus, but one must not mention Einstein to the officials from the Ministry for the Coordination of Total War Effort of the Third Reich. No! But I will say that now, with all we know since Democritus, we are unable to measure to conjecture, for it is wave yet particle, empty yet full, forward yet backward. It trembles, sputters, radiates, expands, collapses, splits, absorbs, discharges, and reappears. And though we cannot define it, we can release, in theory, its power. And then I will give them an equation, a formula for population casualties—I’ll need a blackboard for that—and I’ll tell them about fallout, retombées radioactives, radio actionye ossadkye. Then I’ll show slides, myself.” He looked at me.
“Hide this boy,” he said, “and the others. Tell our Alsatian friend to switch the records of all our specials and keep them out of here.
“I will show them slides of radiation burns, of destroyed bone marrow, of grotesque mutations in rats. I will talk for exactly three hours. And then, Max, you can put on a show in the Radiation Laboratory, after which we will serve them dinner in the dining room downstairs and answer any questions they might have.”
“I’ll need the boy,” said Professor Kreutzer.
“No. Let him hide upstairs with Krup. We have lost enough boys.”
“I need him in the Radiation Laboratory. He will be all right.”
I was to remove the shielding from the ultraviolet lamp, a mercury-vapor arc enclosed in quartz, so that it would fill the room and do two things: make the air smell of ozone and make certain things glow—teeth, buttons, fingernails, and the collection of minerals I took from the Rare Earths Laboratory. The Rare Earths Chemist was not there, so I had to take them myself.
When I was finished with that, Professor Kreutzer and I rigged up an old spark rectifier which had a point as an anode and a flat plate as a cathode, and when it reached approximately 250,000 volts, a spark jumped almost twenty inches every ten or fifteen seconds. And then we reconnected an old x-ray tube whose anti-cathode was radiation-cooled, so after a while it emitted very bright lights.
After that, we tidied up the Radiation Laboratory: picked up the tools, oil rags, glass tubing, and all the other junk lying around on the floor.
Finally, we tested our equipment and had a dress rehearsal of our light show, beginning with Professor Kreutzer and his terrifying lightning arrester. Even without our theatrical tricks, the Radiation Laboratory was a frightening place, with its high-tension, high-voltage equipment. It is ironic, though, that the greatest danger—the radiation—is not picked up at all by the senses.
These preparations and the rehearsal took until noon—well over three hours—and when Professor Kreutzer had no more use for me, I went into my lab. They seemed to have everything under control. Sonja, the Krupinskys, and the Yugoslav were carrying the last of the dishes, all washed and dried, down the hall to Physics, where, most likely, they wouldn’t be noticed among the junk. Tanya and Frau Doktor were sorting the flies.
I walked over to them and said, “Good afternoon.”
Tanya ignored my salutation.
Frau Doktor turned to me. “Good afternoon, Josef. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you, Frau Doktor.”
“He was a close friend of yours, wasn’t he?”
“We were schoolmates since I was nine—and friends since I was twelve.”
“He is . . . was your age then?”
“Older. Mitzka was almost twenty.”
Tanya twisted in her chair and looked up at me. “And you are eighteen!” she said unpleasantly.
“He was a brave young man,” said Frau Doktor. “A great loss.”
“He was a hero!” snapped Tanya, accenting the he.
“And I am a coward!” I answered, accenting the I.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.
“Oh? What did you mean?”
“Please,” said Frau Doktor. “This is no time for dissension.”
Tanya jumped to her feet and walked quickly to the far corner of the lab. I followed.
She had deep shadows under her eyes, making them look bigger, and her thick long hair was working loose from the green ribbon that always held it back. I wanted to put my arm about her to comfort her.
“Do you really want to know what I’ve been thinking?” she said.
I nodded.
“May I be frank?”
“By all means.”
“I think that you waste your time and talent.”
“What has that to do with my cowardice?”
“Nothing. I don’t know why I said that. And Mitzka . . . he was brave, but also very foolish.” She began to cry. She was so very tired. “His activities with the underground are one thing, but coming back here—to show off—was another. It was dangerous for him and put all of us in jeopardy—his own father and mother! He put my life in danger. My life! He was a fool!” Tanya sobbed.
“I didn’t know you felt that way about him. I thought—”
“You thought I was in love with him. Well, you don’t know the first thing about me, Josef Bernhardt. Everybody loved Mitzka. He was dazzling. But there is a difference between loving someone and being ‘in love’ with someone.” Tears were streaming down her face. “And besides, I don’t think he was capable of loving anybody—but himself.”
Ah, so she knew he didn’t love her. I put my hand on her arm to comfort her, but she jerked violently away from me.
“And you,” she sobbed. “Josef, I don’t think of you as a coward.”
“And how else can you think of me, hiding here under the umbrella of his father, while Mitzka loses his life to help others?”
“How do I think of you?” she said in a quiet, quavering voice. “I think of you as brilliant. I have been told that you have a genius for mathematics—that you could be a great mathematician. But you are already eighteen years old and would have to begin to work for it now.” She took a deep, shaking breath. “But instead, what do you do? You waste your time. You go to the darkroom with every girl at the Institute.”
So that was it. “Every girl?”
Her tears had stopped. “You know what I mean.”
What could I say? “Every girl” was a gross exaggeration. As a matter of fact, since Marlene got pregnant, Monika was almost the only one who actually had sex with me in the darkroom. The others whom I had been seeing regularly—two girls from Chemistry—had an apartment in the village of Hagen and insisted I come there. It was awkward: I had to climb up the drainpipe in the dark, after their landlady was asleep, and sneak out again before she woke up. I would have preferred the darkroom, but every girl had her own form of discretion.
“If you wonder why I have not been sitting by you at the staff dinners, it is because I can’t stand men who cannot control their animal appetites.”
“Yes?” I said sarcastically. “And yet you sit by that Roumanian, Treponesco?”
“I don’t care about him!” It was a wail.
There was a commotion at the door to the lab. Professor Kreutzer had just come in with Herr Wagenführer, who was clapping his hands to gain everyone’s attention: “Attention, everyone. The followi
ng people will report to the Luftwaffe, Squadron Clerk, Sixth Floor, for work assignments for the remainder of the day: Professor François Marie Daniel, Tatiana Rachel Backhaus, Eric van Leyden, Professor Igor Vasilovich Bolotnikov”—he paused and took a deep breath—“and Professor Dmitri Varvilovovich Tsechetverikov. At this time, I cannot tell you how long before you can go back to your regular work. You will be informed. Hurry, there is no time for questions. Josef Leopold Bernhardt?” He looked about for me.
“Here!”
“You will be employed by the Mantle Corporation today and are assigned to Professor Kreutzer here. Make haste, all of you. There is no time.” He clapped his hands again.
“What about my wife?” shouted Krupinsky, as the specials hurried from the room. “She’s here, too.”
“Darkroom,” said Herr Wagenführer, as he hurried from the lab.
The Chief, finished with his three-hour lecture, escorted the inspectors to the hallway outside the Radiation Laboratory, where Professor Kreutzer dressed them elaborately: extra lead plates over their genitals; lead aprons around their shoulders like a cape, covering their entire bodies; safety glasses. In through the pneumatic doors they walked, smelling the ozone, seeing the purple phosphorescent glow, and Professor Kreutzer with the lightning arrester making sparks, crackles, bangs, hisses, and lightning, and the sparks flying, the bright lights emitting from the x-ray tube, and the corona glowing about the high-voltage condensers, cold colors of the spectrum—blue, white, violet. And I, hidden in the dark control booth, pulled the levers. Through the thick windows of glass and water, I could see the purple phosphorescent glow of the teeth of the inspectors from the Ministry for the Coordination of Total War Effort.
Fingernails and buttons glowing, and teeth in the grimaced faces, the seven inspectors who passed our Gestapo’s strict security check huddled, terrified, in a corner of the Radiation Laboratory, as far from the linear accelerator as they could get. The biologist was not among them. Did they think we had enough energy to make a bomb, when in reality all we could do with the little atom smasher Professor Kreutzer made, himself, out of bits and scraps, was irradiate a few flies—if they were left long enough on the target?