by Elly Welt
“I offer you a bouquet of dead flowers when I tell you that we, Alex and I, feel that the kind of creativity you were capable of in mathematics reaches its peak by the time one is in his mid-twenties. Newton, by the time he was twenty-four, had made the two fundamental discoveries which have transformed mathematical science, that of the differential, which he shared with his teacher, Barrow, and that of expansion into infinite spheres.
“Pascal published his study of mathematics at twenty-one and then went on to other things—philosophy. Einstein published his theory of relativity when he was twenty-five, but he actually thought it through when he was an adolescent.
“Your teacher in high school taught you all he knew by the time you were fourteen and was unable to arrange for you to move on. And when you came here, not one of us was capable of carrying you on in mathematics. Crucial years wasted. I regret this. I regret this waste more than anything else. The flower of western civilization was slowly wilting, but Hitler and his cohorts ground it to dust beneath their boots.” He removed his glasses, put them on the table, rubbed his eyes. “Sit down, sit down, Josef.” He peered at me. He hardly could see without his glasses.
I sat on a chair and looked up at him.
“It might be years yet before you could be with the right people. We tried. I, myself, went to Potsdam to see if we could convince the Americans to let us open a university in the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation buildings in their zone in Berlin. But they were using it as a hotel and playground for their officers. He sighed. They are entitled. Furthermore, the best people are gone.”
He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, cleaned the black-rims, and put them on.
“Alex and I also agree that, aside from mathematics, your creativity lies in practical things. You have a talent for mechanical invention. It is our opinion, and, I might add, our strong wish, that you try to emigrate to the United States as soon as you are able, matriculate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and study nuclear physics.”
I looked away.
“With the breakthrough in atomic energy, I foresee a good future for you. I see that in twenty-five or thirty years, the world will be powered by nuclear energy, which force, at the same time, might be the one thing to keep mankind from war.
“But again, most physicists have done their best work by the time they are thirty or thirty-five. Max Planck published his quantum theory when he was thirty-two. It is imperative that you get to the United States as soon as possible to begin your training.”
He took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “Here are two recommendations: one from me, the other from Alex, We are not unknown in scientific circles. With these you should be able, not only to gain acceptance in Massachusetts, but also to be awarded a full scholarship.”
“Professor Kreutzer, I would like to go with you and the Chief.”
“No. It is all over for us. Our hope is in you.”
I sat there, the envelope in my hand, and wept.
“Josef, you must understand that the Soviets will try to put me to work to build weapons. I have decided that under no circumstances will I cooperate in the creating of atomic bombs. You know what that will mean for me?”
“Yes, but I—”
He interrupted me. “Are you aware that the Soviet government has denounced the Darwinian theory of evolution and has gone back to Lamarck, and that the Mendelian theory of genetics is in disfavor also?”
“No, Herr Professor. I didn’t know that.” That meant, of course, that there wasn’t a chance the Chief could continue his work in genetics, and that he, too, would be in disfavor.
“You are aware that the Avilovs fled Russia when Stalin came to power?”
“Yes, Herr Professor, I knew that.”
“No, Josef. It is all over for us.”
“But Herr Professor, I could be of help to you. Excuse me, but because I am younger, perhaps I could make some things easier for you.”
He turned from me. We sat in silence. I held the envelope in my hand. It was sealed. Finally, I rose from my chair.
“Herr Professor, I . . . I thank you.”
He nodded, his back to me.
I left Physics and walked down the dark hallway. There were two guards at the open door to the Rare Earths Laboratory. I waved to Treponesco. He waved back.
Frau Doktor’s Biology Laboratory was next. Although there were no guards at the door, two Russian soldiers inside her small lab were “packing”; that is, they were tearing her lab apart and throwing everything, indiscriminately, into a large crate: books, papers, test tubes, the two binocular microscopes, and even the incubators with the Drosophila. She, crumpled on a chair in the corner, was in a state of such absolute shock that she was unable to respond to my greeting. Usually immaculate and in control, she was now disheveled, her lab jacket open, her blouse half-buttoned, locks of her abundant dark hair—always pulled back severely into a bun—hanging loose.
I continued my walk down the hallway. There were two guards at the open door to my lab, and inside at the worktables sat Krupinsky and Kirsti with their suitcases.
“It seems,” said Krupinsky, “I am no longer needed as an interpreter and order clerk at the hospitals, but now I am needed for my great nuclear knowledge. They won’t believe me that I know nothing about it.”
I could think of nothing to say.
“I am not a physicist or a great mathematician like you, Bernhardt, but I was doing some good work in my specialty when they let me. It would be hard for a person like you to understand that all I ever wanted to be was a mere medical doctor.”
“Abe, please.” Kirsti took my hand. “Josef, he doesn’t mean what he says.”
“Do you have any idea what they have had me doing? I am an endocrinologist; I keep telling them that. But all I’ve been is a goddam purchasing agent, ordering rubber gloves and gauze in Russian, German, and English. I wasn’t even allowed near a patient.”
I had no words. I left the lab and walked across the hall to take a last look at the Radiation Laboratory—at the linear accelerator.
NKVD were dismantling our patched, homemade machine, created by Professor Kreutzer from bits and pieces of the junkyard. The Security Officer stood watching, more stooped than ever, ghastly thin, his face gray. There was much swearing in Russian and much ill humor. I watched. When the soldiers tried to disconnect the huge pumps, oil began to pour out all over the floor. The officer screamed, “Sabotage! Sabotage!”
I ran from the cement-block room, slipping and sliding on the flood of oil, back into my lab. Krupinsky sat with his head in his arms at a worktable. I opened the drawer of my table, and, after a quick survey of the three-year accumulation of junk I’d collected, stuffed my mother’s potato peeler, four chocolate bars, and the Fromm’s Akt into my pants pockets, then picked up a wire basket and the map of the park.
“Take my wife.” Krupinsky’s voice was muffled, his face still buried in his arms.
Kirsti said, “No.”
Krupinsky swung around in his chair. “Here, send this telegram as soon as you are able.”
I looked at the words he had scrawled on the paper:
Dear Herr Stalin:
Fuck you. Strong letter to follow.
Abraham Morris Krupinsky, M.D.
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Berlin-Hagen
11 August 1945
I carried the basket and the map of the park into the little greenhouse kitchen off our lab, burned the “telegram” over the gas flame, filled four bottles with water and put them in the carrier; and then I went down the hall to the laboratory of Frau Doktor. She sat as before, only now, with a dazed look on her face, she watched the two Russian soldiers actually removing the panes of glass from her windows.
“Frau Doktor. It is time to collect the Drosophila melanogaster Berlin wilds in the park.”
She looked at me.
“Come!” I said. “It is time to collect.” I took her arms, pulled her to her fee
t, and picked up her handbag, which was on the floor beside her. The soldiers were intent only on their panes.
My hand on her arm, we walked from the lab and down the hall to the bathrooms. “Frau Doktor, go in there and relieve yourself. Take your time. Then comb your hair and arrange your clothes.”
She seemed loath to let go of my arm. Gently, I detached and gave her the handbag. “I will be waiting right here. Now go.”
She obeyed me as one in a dream. As promised, I waited at the door for her, and when she emerged ten minutes later, her hair was combed neatly, her face powdered, and her lab jacket buttoned. She followed submissively, allowing me to take the lead, enough in control to cooperate fully, but trembling and terrified. Somehow her helplessness brought out the strength in me and gave me courage. We walked down the hallway together, I carrying the wire basket and she the map of the park. On the staircase of our right wing, we were stopped by a Russian guard, who jabbed me in the side with his rifle butt.
“What do you do, you Nazi?” he said in German.
I pointed to the wire basket. “We pick up bottles of fruit flies from the trees and bushes in the park.” I nodded toward the map in Frau Doktor’s hand.
She opened it and showed the guard. “There, there, there, there.” She pointed.
He shoved me again with his rifle butt. “Do it!” And he followed us down the stairs to the main entrance in the lobby and pushed me out the double doors with his rifle and a boot on my ass.
Under the scrutiny of the guard, who watched us from the entrance, we consulted the map and picked up two bottles which were on bushes near the front door, then began working our way into the park, picking bottles off trees and bushes, until, toward the back of the park, we came near the willows guarding Mitzka’s tunnel to the apple orchard.
We stayed in that area until there was absolutely no one in sight. Frau Doktor first, then I, slipped behind the trees and into the shrubbery, crawling on our hands and knees partway through the hole to the little area Mitzka and I had cleared, where we used to lie, side by side, our bodies touching, plotting the destruction of Adolf Hitler and his Thousand Year Reich. There was very little room, and Frau Doktor and I had to sit very close, touching. As soon as she felt we were out of immediate danger, her entire body began to shake and she was racked with sobs. I put my finger to my lips, cautioning silence, and took her in my arms, letting her bury her face in my chest, my lab coat and shirt becoming soaked from her tears. I had a genuine affection for this woman who had been so kind to me from the very beginning. We were quite good friends, despite the difference in our ages.
Even this far back in the park, we could hear the racket those Russians were making with their “packing,” and we knew, without saying it, that we could not make any noise whatsoever. All the while, I felt certain that they would not find us. Mitzka had chosen well, and as far as I could tell, these units had no dogs with them. Tracking dogs would be the only way they could find us; that is, by smell. Furthermore, we would not be missed. I wasn’t considered important enough, and Frau Doktor’s research had nothing to do with neutrons.
After an hour, I suggested we stretch out and try to get some rest. It was unusual weather for Berlin, sunny and warm. I cleared away twigs and stones, then lay on my back, making it possible for her to rest partly on my body, with her head on my shoulder. I admire her for not pretending to be compromised, as Tatiana would have done. It was an obligatory intimacy. There simply was no room. We rested and slept quietly, with careful changes in position, until when darkness came she was calm, all was quiet, and we felt safe enough to converse in whispers.
“What will happen to them?” she asked, a rhetorical question requiring no answer. “I am so angry with myself,” she continued. “I am so greedy. I should have left at once as Max suggested.”
“You had a good reason. Your work. Years and years of work—gone.”
“What does it matter now?”
“It will matter. You know that.”
A tremulous sigh and she began again to weep—quietly.
“I have some chocolate bars and a little water, and I’ll crawl through the fence and get us some apples.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Oh, yes. I’ll be right back.”
I retrieved a lab coat full of apples, and we sat unavoidably close, our bodies, of necessity, in sustained contact. As we munched on chocolate bars and sucked the sour apples, we discussed our escape, deciding it would be safer to wait until morning. To be found wandering at night was far more dangerous than walking, openly, in the fields in daylight. And our discussion inevitably led to our plans—when and if we made the escape. She would make her way to friends in Great Britain. I had no idea where I would go the next day.
I pulled the sealed envelope Professor Kreutzer had given me from my pocket and put it in her hand.
“What is this?”
“Letters of recommendation from the Chief and Professor Kreutzer to M.I.T. They want me to go to the United States and study nuclear physics.”
“Do it. With their recommendations you will be accepted. You will have to begin at once to get a visa. Your father will be able to help you.”
“I do not want to go to my father’s house!”
“Where else could you go?”
“I don’t know. Things happened so fast today, I haven’t had time to think where I’ll go or what I’ll do. What would you say if I told you I’ve been considering medicine?”
So close, her body resting against mine, her mouth so near my ear, I could feel her negative reaction. “My dear,” she said, “with your aptitudes, your intelligence, that would be a tragic mistake which you would regret forever. Do as the Chief and Max advised. Use all your power to get to America. Max is always right.”
“If he is always right, why did he let himself be caught by the Russians? Why didn’t they leave when there was still a chance?”
“I think perhaps he has had enough. He is tired. Both of them—Alex, too. But you are young, you have a life before you. Don’t waste it.”
“My mother wants—wanted—me to be a physician. I was thinking about anesthesiology.”
“Anesthesia! That isn’t even a specialty in Germany.”
“Krupinsky said that it is in England and Canada. I could go to Canada or to the United States.”
“And Tanya?”
“I promised to marry her.”
“Are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Josef, listen to me. I care for you too much not to say this to you. at least once. Medicine is not for you. Tanya is not for you.”
I was silent.
“I know. She worked with me, in my lab, for six months—from the time George Treponesco had to move into Rare Earths until she left. We spent ten hours a day together for six months, and never once did she share anything with me.”
“What should she have shared?”
“Oh, how can I say this. There are some people who are unable to make a bridge to another person. No, let me try it this way. Friends share personal thoughts. Tell things about themselves, trusting.” She was silent, for a moment, thoughtful. “All the while she worked with me, Tanya was polite and correct, but this politeness and correctness was never broken by one instant of sharing, of warmth. I think that Tanya may be incapable of intimacy. Intimacy and sex are not the same thing. Surely,” she said, “you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.”
“Ah, well. Enough! You do not need all this motherly advice. You will work it out for yourself, when the time comes. Tell me, Josef, how do you happen to know about this hiding place?”
I thought for a moment before answering. Frau Doktor sat quietly, comfortably molded into my body.
“I know about this place because I was dropped from my high school rowing team when I was twelve years old.”
“You must admit, that is a curious answer.”
“Yes. But it’s tr
ue. Because I was dropped for no good reason for the rowing team, Mitzka befriended me. That was quite wonderful for me. Mitzka Avilov was the school god.”
“I see. It was his secret place, and he showed it to you to cheer you up.”
“Yes, more or less. My school activities were curtailed then—it was 1939—and I began to divert myself by building a secret cave in my own back yard, which gave Mitzka the idea to make this one.”
“Tell me about your secret cave.”
There flashed into my mind the image of my father’s feet—his shoes and gray spats—at the edge of the hole Petter and I dug in my back yard. I pushed it away and changed the subject. “Excuse me, Frau Doktor, I think it would be safe for you to crawl through the fence into the orchard to relieve yourself. There are bushes on the other side, too. And then, perhaps, we should settle for the night.”
She agreed, and I held the cut wires of the fence as best I could. She was only slightly scratched crawling through. When she returned, I made my trip; then we settled for the rest of the night. It was cool now, and I had her nestle spoon-fashion into my arms, covering her with both our lab jackets, holding her very tight, my arm under her breast. I could feel her heart beating rapidly, and she could not help but feel my erection pushing against her.
She reached around and held it in her hand. The only problem was her corset, an armed guard around her vital parts. She detached the garters from her hose and we tried bending it upward, but the metal stays stabbed her so, she gasped in pain. “I’ll have to take it off,” she whispered. But there was so little room, she couldn’t maneuver in our little space, and finally, I had to crawl halfway through the hole in the fence to give her room to stretch flat and wiggle out of that thing.
“I have a condom,” I said.
“No,” she whispered. “I want to feel you.”
I was so ready, I shot off like a gun—would ejaculatio praecox be impotencia coeundi or merely impotencia Josefus, the inability to satisfy a real woman?
“Never mind,” she said. “It just means that you find me desirable. Stay where you are.”
I did, and she kissed me, warmly, and moved in such a way that within five or so minutes everything was all right—more than all right. Her response was so deeply passionate that I actually had to put my hand on her mouth to keep her from crying out. And she moved in waves and convulsions. I mean she actually enjoyed it, tremendously.