The Economy of Light

by Jack Dann

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  OPENING QUOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JACK DANN

  THE ECONOMY OF LIGHT

  JACK DANN

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Jack Dann

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Lucius Shepard

  OPENING QUOTES

  We wander in darkness now, but one with another we all have the conviction that we are advancing to the light.

  —Albert Schweitzer

  The physiognomy, or vertical structure, of the rain forest, is best understood in terms of the universal quest for light.

  —Alex Shoumatoff

  “Look there! See how the sun’s shafts do not drive through to the left of that one lower down, and how he walks as if he were alive!”

  —Dante’s Purgatorio

  CHAPTER ONE

  LET THERE BE LIGHT

  I stood by the side of the grave, along with the other reporters, photographers, doctors, police officials, and bystanders, and watched three gravediggers working with pick and shovel to exhume Josef Mengele’s remains. We were in the Embu Cemetery, about twenty-five miles outside of São Paulo. The workers, dark cafuzos of black and Indian blood, had been digging for almost an hour. The sweat ran from their arms and faces, and the heat seemed to radiate from them in clouds. I was reminded of cars overheating in the humid mid-afternoon air.

  I had arrived late, having taken the wrong exit on the eight-lane highway that leads out of São Paulo, and I felt nauseated. My stomach ached, a dull pain that had started when I had finally gotten out of my rented Saab. Before I left my hotel in São Paulo to drive here, I had wolfed down a poorly prepared feijoada; the beef and sausages had seemed a bit too sour. I could only hope that it wasn’t too badly tainted. But it was more than the food or the weather. I was uncomfortable here because of the cold-sweat memories of childhood that intruded on this circus-like gathering.

  As I looked down into the grave at the white-shirted cafuzos mugging for the television cameras as they chopped and dug and burrowed about four feet into the damp-smelling earth, I could almost smell the sickeningly sweet stink of Auschwitz; and I remembered being pushed out of the train and separated from my mother and brother by soldiers with snarling, snapping guard dogs. I was screaming for my mother and David, my brother, but they had both been swallowed into the frightened crowd that the soldiers were dividing into two groups. I was too short to see over the milling adults. I tried to move, but screaming people were pushing against me from all directions, as if everyone needed to stay as close together as possible, as if that was the only way to survive.

  I remember looking up toward the sky and seeing a huge red brick chimney that narrowed toward the top. Thick black smoke billowed out of it, and flames rose between its lightning rods, as if conjured up from sorcerer’s wands. Although I didn’t recognize the smell that permeated the air, it was burning flesh and hair. I put my hands over my mouth and pinched my nose to block out the smells of death and fear and looked down intently at the dry, parched ground, which was like the surface of the moon. I repeated the Shema Yisroel, over and over and over. I thought that if I could narrow my focus of attention and pray with my entire being, I might be able to make the terrible noise and smell of that place disappear.... I might be able to make the camp disappear.

  I was only ten years old, but I had been in a slaughterhouse before. I knew what this place was.

  And that’s when I saw Mengele.

  I saw his boots first. They were black and polished, although covered with dust. He held my chin and raised my face upward, and he looked as large as the chimney I had seen an instant ago. He was handsome in his well-tailored SS uniform; he had an angular face, shaved clean. I noticed that there was a gap between his front teeth and he had a mole on his left cheek. He wore white gloves and, unlike everyone else, he didn’t seem to be sweating. His breath smelled of cigarettes as he said, “Zwillinge, Zwillinge?” Was I a twin? he had asked, but I was so frightened that I could only look at him and blink. I seemed to see with a sort of tunnel vision. I noticed that there was a dull spot and a long scratch on the polished cane he held in his left hand.

  “Yes,” someone else said, “he’s a twin. His mother and brother are in the other line.”

  That had saved my life. They took my brother and me to a hospital for experimentation and gassed my mother. May she rest in peace.

  Then there was a shout, for the gravediggers had located the coffin, and I was jolted back to the present. I found myself whispering the Shema, as if from old habit, although I am not a religious Jew. The cafuzos dug the dirt away from the plain pine coffin, but couldn’t get the top open. The police chief of São Paulo, a heavy-set man with a greased mustache, ordered them to break it open. I’d had a nodding acquaintance with this man when I worked for Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He had built up his political base of fear and power through the Brazilian intelligence bureau and was responsible for capturing Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant of the Sobibor camp who had gassed two hundred and fifty thousand people with carbon monoxide fumes from a captured Russian tank.

  One of the gravediggers smashed through the lid with his pick, and they pried it off. Inside the coffin I could see rotting shreds of clothes and a skeleton with its arms placed at its sides instead of over the chest, which was the customary manner of Brazilian burial. But The SS always buried their dead with arms at the sides, as if one should spend eternity at attention.

  Several men climbed down into the grave. One of them, the São Paulo assistant coroner, a man of about sixty with short-cropped white hair, lifted up the skull and held it high for the reporters, who were feverishly snapping pictures. He turned around slowly, holding it in his outstretched hand, and when he held it toward me, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me, and the pain in my stomach became excruciating. The eye sockets and nose cavity seemed dark as tar, even in the blazing sunlight. Everything seemed to waver around me as I looked into that vertiginous darkness, and I saw the barracks when I’d lived in Camp B2f in Auschwitz. They called it the Zoo, and we called Mengele ‘Uncle Pepi.’ He would bring us chocolate and clothes one day and experiment on us the next. As I looked into those eye sockets, I remembered the experiments on my brother and myself—the transfusions of blood, mine to his, and vice versa; the injections every day that made us sick and feverish; and the electrical experiments, which put David into a coma. He had taken David away to the laboratory where he injected chloroform into his heart to kill him. I was to be next...for comparison. But the allies disrupted his plans by liberating us.

  I could feel myself falling backward, as if the darkness was time itself and Mengele was still God, taking and giving life. His breath was the crematorium, his touch was the needle and the knife, and his voice was the last lullaby we heard. He used to sing while he worked on us. He loved Verdi and Strauss, the sonovabitch.

  He had taken my family.

  And I cursed him every moment for choosing my brother first.

  * * * *

  When I regained consciousness, I found an old acquaintance, Filip Hausner, bending over me. We had worked together years ago in Paraguay and had almost caught Mengele in 1962 right here in São Paulo, but Ben-Gurion had been pressured to call off
the operation because of a religious kidnapping that had threatened Israel with a civil war. Hausner and I were called back to Israel. Filip was in his sixties, a camp internee who had left Poland to settle in Israel. He made an unlikely ghoul, for he had been a rabbi, and a brilliant one, from what I had heard. But hatred had changed the course of his life, too. He was bald and jowly, his face spotted with age marks. His eyes were clear and blue, and he still had no need for glasses.

  I tried to get up. My back was against a gravestone; the smell of the well-tended grass seemed to revive me.

  “Just relax, you still look pale,” Filip said. “You created quite a noise there, trying to grandstand the coroner.” He smiled. “What happened to you?”

  “Something I ate, I think. The heat. Old age.”

  “I’ve got ten years on you.” He turned to look back at the grave site. The party was over; most everyone had left. “They took the bones to a laboratory,” Filip said. “It looks like this is it.”

  “You think that was really Mengele?” I asked.

  “It depends on what the forensic doctors have to say, but for my part, I think it’s him. Once the Germans got hold of Mengele’s letters, it was all over. Did you see the couple standing beside the police chief? Wolf and Liselotte Bossert. They took care of Mengele; he was at their beach house when he died. The police found his letters and personal objects at their home in the city, along with a book he’d written.”

  I knew most of this. “The Germans really gave you a screwing, didn’t they?”

  “Both us and the Americans; this was supposed to be a joint venture. But the Germans conveniently forgot to notify any of us. They just dispatched some of their LKA people down here and flushed it all out. We heard about it when you did, probably; after it was leaked, so the Germans would get the right publicity. But what can you expect from Germans?” Although he was joking, there was a harshness in his voice. He meant it. “Are you feeling better now?”

  I stood up, testing. “I feel fine,” I said, although my stomach still hurt. We walked back to the exhumed grave. They had taken everything, every bit of wood from the casket. The gravediggers were standing about, as if admiring the hole they had dug, and then, reluctantly, they began to shovel back the dirt.

  “I understand you’re living in America,” Filip said.

  I nodded.

  “And teaching at university. Why did you leave Israel?”

  “I guess I became tired of it all,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wanted to leave the war behind, I wanted to forget.”

  “But you’re here.”

  I sighed and looked out over the cemetery at the hundreds of odd angled and weathered headstones, which were like concrete sentences punctuated with the marble and stone crypts and mausoleums of the wealthy. The grass was cut so short it might be used as turf for a golf course, and the sun bleached the gravestones white as bones in a desert. But Mengele’s bones...they were brown, as brown as the water of the Amazon, as brown as the cafuzos who had dug them up. Mengele wouldn’t like that, for surely his bones should be Aryan white. Or so it would seem.

  “You said that Mengele had written a book. Have you seen it?” I asked.

  “No,” Filip said. “But I understand it was an autobiography. He called it Fiat Lux...Let There Be Light.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  WILD FIRE

  The pain in my stomach was not from bad food, but from bowel cancer. I checked myself into a hospital in São Paulo, where they gave me a private room overlooking a low, flat roof that seemed to exist solely to provide a surface for the television antennae that grew out of the tar like steel plants. In the distance were gray buildings, brick chimneys, and the miasma of pollution that seemed to soften everything in this city...a city I had always hated. I had a small ranch near the gigantic King Ranch, which is in Amazon country just outside of Belém, and I wanted nothing more than to return there and let Onca, a heavy Indian woman of Yąnomamö extraction whom I had hired to take care of the place, look after me. But afraid as I was—and I was terrified—I couldn’t bring myself to return to the States. It was as if I’d never had a life there, as if only the ranch felt like home; and I wanted to forget the university and my whole life in upstate New York. The ranch was the only place I’d ever felt completely comfortable, perhaps because it was so isolated, for even now, forty years later, I associated the steel and concrete of civilization with the camps. I could live and work and teach in cities, but the little boy that still lived inside me could only sleep in the red-tiled stucco house outside of Belém.

  I endured the batteries of tests, the stool samples and barium enemas, the GI series and colonoscopies. As if to further complicate matters, I developed an ugly blister on my right cheek, just below where my glasses touch. Then another appeared on my mouth and scalp, and on my chest. The lesions wept a clear liquid; the one in my mouth left a constant bitter taste. My doctor, a no-nonsense woman who wore her long, beautiful black hair in a bun, explained that I had also developed a form of pemphigus, called wild fire, which was found only in certain areas of Brazil. Pemphigus was also a disease that middle-aged Jews were susceptible to. It was a virulent condition, and the usual cure was corticosteroids and antibiotic therapy. But the corticosteroids might increase the growth of the spreading cancer. She would try 75 mg of a drug called Methotrexate.

  Still, the wild fire was minor in comparison with the cancer. If I would take chemotherapy and radiation treatments for the cancer, she could give me six months to a year longer to live.

  But I would probably need a bowel operation.

  And I would have to wear a colostomy bag around on my stomach.

  No, I thought. I wasn’t going to live in hospital to gain a few months of pain. I wasn’t going to die to the smell of antisepsis and live in the white rooms near the laboratories. Laboratories.... I could see Mengele’s laboratory in my mind as if I had just left it.

  Even as the doctor talked to me, I distanced myself from her and her words. I was numb, in shock, I supposed, and it was like being inside a cool, wet cloud high above the ground. I knew that I would be making a long fall any second now, yet it was as if fear and death and all the other emotions had become mere intellectual states. I considered my own death as if it was someone else’s. Perhaps because I couldn’t bring myself to believe any of it.

  I suddenly began to tremble.

  I stared out the window at the wild sculpture of rooftop antennae below and could think only of Mengele—Uncle Pepi, who had said that my twin brother and I wouldn’t be in hospital for long. I grimaced, for the sonovabitch had been telling the truth. He had intended on killing both of us. But I had had one up on him. He hadn’t gotten me. He had tried, but he had failed. Or had he...?

  Irrational as it was, I found myself blaming Mengele for the cancer and the lesions. I couldn’t help but feel that they were a parting gift from him. As I had looked into the hollows of his skull—I, who was alive and he, who was dead—he had somehow magically transformed my lunch of tainted food into cancer; and like Job’s wife, who had taken that one last look back at Sodom, the place of her youth, I had looked into the dark shadows that had once been Mengele’s blue eyes, and he opened up my skin and made it bubble, as if his death’s-head’s stare was invisible fire scorching my flesh.

  I knew then that I was going home...to Belém, back to the ranch. I would die properly. In my own home.

  And I would still have one up on Mengele.

  * * * *

  My fazenda was small, barely four hundred hectares, while the other neighboring ranches were paced out at several hundreds of thousands of hectares. My manager Genaro, who had been a macheteiro, a drifter, drove me home from Belém in my ‘pickoppy’. He was in his sixties, of white and Indian extraction. I knew very little about him, except that he was born near Manaus on the Rio Negro; he was quiet and looked sullen, perhaps because his lower jaw jutted out, but his pale blue eyes revealed an intelligen
ce that seemed to be belied by his habit of reclining wherever and whenever possible. He was tall, thin and wiry, extremely well-muscled for a man his age. He had high cheekbones and black hair greased back away from his high forehead. His left cheek was distended from a roll of tobacco; his front teeth were missing. Yet for all that he was a formidable-looking man. He reminded me of a condor, or some other great, ungainly bird.

  We drove down the Belém-Brasilia highway, which was like driving through hell, for much of the land to either side was on fire, and in some places the flames reached toward the cracked red ground along the highway. The sky was dark with smoke. The acrid smell was overwhelming, and the heat came in waves that seemed to suck away every bit of moisture. What wasn’t burning was as scorched and dry as a desert; the burned stumps of trees reached out like props in a Grade B horror movie. All the jungle hereabouts would soon be converted into grassland, which the soil could support for five years at best. Most jungle soil is less than three inches deep. Burn down the trees and the microorganisms that feed minerals back into the soil die. Then the rain erodes the soil. The soil becomes sand. And what’s left is red hardpan: laterite. Then more jungle has to be burned to produce more farm and pasture land.

  But the worst of the conflagration was over; the land had been burning for some time. I had seen firestorms in this part of the country where clouds would form over the trees and rain would fall in sheets. Lightning would snake into the trees and as one looked into the isolate darkness, it seemed as if the last days promised in the bible had finally come. I felt a pang of guilt, for my little ranch had also been burned out of the jungle, but I had used the land wisely, had not extended myself, and was determined not to cut into any more of the jungle. The jungle was like a womb for me. I could afford to sell the cattle and just live on the fazenda.