Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  He wears his silvered hair neatly parted. A creature of habit, he’s worn the same style of round tortoiseshell-frame glasses for thirty years. He drinks a cup of chai every afternoon of his wellplotted life at a café near his office at Purdue University, where he teaches medical illustration. He is a humble, somewhat conservative man, a Roman Catholic whose joy in the simplest things can be overwhelming, inexplicable. After his third heart attack, when they jammed tubes into him and he was pretty sure it was over, he became insistent. “Just tell me I’m going to mow the lawn again!” he said to his doctor. “Tell me I’m going to mow the lawn!”

  These were nearly his last words.

  If this man can be oversensitive and a bit obsessive, if he has an exact recall of the big and small injustices that have been done unto him—he keeps old hurtful letters on file—he knows he must unburden himself now, make peace with those in his life: wife, children, friends, colleagues. And with the vanished ghosts that roam the rooms of his memory: mother, father, brother.

  And what of Pernkopf? What of Batke?

  He can’t fathom where to begin with the Book, now forever out of print, effectively banned. When considering it, he often conjures the language of some illicit affair: rapture, consumption, shame. And if he was betrayed by that lover, does it lessen all those days he spent in love? Ah, the Book, the nearly unbearable perfection of its paintings, and then, weltering behind it, armies clashing across the face of Europe, six million spectral Jews. Under pressure, history splits in two: the winners and the losers, the righteous and the evil.

  It’s not like this man to act impulsively, to yield control, to risk missing cardiac rehab, to wander seven thousand miles from his dear doctor, but he does. He packs a bag with some old journals, drives from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, and gets on a plane. He travels eight hours in coach, through spasms of lightning, wearing his Adidas jumpsuit, hair neatly parted. Fragments accumulate; arteries begin to clog. He drinks some wine; he pores through his journals, these copiously recorded memories of a sabbatical he took twenty-three years ago, when he went on a pilgrimage to find the Book’s greatest artist, when he still worshipped—yes, really, that’s the word—the Book’s achievement. He naps, wakes, reads his decades-old handwriting again. If he were to die on this plane, in a hotel lobby in Vienna, in the echoing halls of the Institute searching for some truth, will he have been cleansed? After all, he didn’t do the killing or throw the bodies from the window. He didn’t spew the hate that incited a hemicycle of fanatics.

  No, his sin, if that indeed is what it is, was more quotidian: He found beauty in something dangerous. There are days when he can’t remember how it began, and nights when he can’t sleep, remembering.

  A cloudy afternoon, Vienna, 1957. A man sits and smokes, a body laid before him. A creature of habit, he wears a white lab coat and a white polyester turtleneck, no matter what the weather. He is small, with a crooked nose and skewed chin that give him the appearance of a beat-up bantamweight. He has a lot of nervous energy, except when he sits like this. When he sits like this, he seems almost dead, a snake in the heat of day. Before him lies a nameless cadaver that was brought up from the basement of the Institute, from the formaldehyde pools of torsos and limbs, then perfectly prepared like this: an incision, a saw to the breastbone, the rib cage drawn open, the heart removed. He stares at this open body, looks down at the floor, stares some more.

  In his right hand, he holds a Habico Kolinsky, one with long sable hairs, his brush of choice. On the rag paper before him, he has sketched some rough lines, has plotted his colors. And now, after this prolonged stillness, he bursts from his chair. He paints across the entire canvas, maniacally, almost chaotically. He lays in washes of color, gradually building the glazes. His hand darts back and forth. He goes at the bronchus and then the thoracic duct. With his tongue, he licks the brush and lifts off pigment to show phantasmic light on this internal landscape. He flicks turquoise here and there to make the fascia appear real. What he does is highly intricate, but at this speed it’s like running on a tightrope. He is in deep space, underwater, gravityless. He works in a fever, shaking and levitating. Weeks pass, and still he stands before this painting, this body.

  What is his desire? To be a rich man, to paint what he chooses, to hang in museums, to make love to beautiful women, but he is on the wrong side of history. And yet he isn’t a demagogue or a war criminal. He is merely a trained fine artist who must paint dead bodies for the money—and that’s what he will do, for nearly five decades of his life: brains, veins, viscera, vaginas. Perhaps his sin is quotidian, too: In 1933 he says yes to a job because he’s hungry, and so sells his soul, joining Pernkopf’s army of artists, which soon becomes part of Hitler’s army. Now a silver light pours thickly through the tall glass windows. He lifts pigment, then swabs his brush over the Aquarellfarben cake. He expertly paints in the ascending aorta and pulmonary trunk, giving them ocher and purple colors. He creates this astral penumbra of arteries and air pipes, galaxies within the body. For one moment, he does it so well he vanquishes memory. It has always been just him and the canvas. And as certain as he will be forgotten, with each painting he believes he won’t. He is the righteous one, the butcher’s son made king.

  They don’t know how to treat him, this unusual specimen, this volcanic event. He shakes and levitates in his temporary palsy. It is the summer between seventh and eighth grades, 1957. Far away, in another world, an unknown man named Franz Batke paints in Vienna while this unknown boy, David Williams, has some sort of infection. His body has burst out with huge open sores on his face, back, and chest. The shots put him into a high fever that brings on convulsions. He is a supernova; he could be cursed.

  Outside, the Michigan sun burns, it rains lugubriously, and then there is bright light on the panes again. The floor shines with menace. There is no explanation for this suffering. No treatment that the doctors can find. Inside him a cell has split in two. He is a boy who, by some internal chemical flood of testosterone and disease, is fast becoming something else, a different animal.

  In the fall, he is released from his hospital cell. He lifts weights and runs the sand dunes by the lake to build his body back. He dreams of being the middleweight champion of the world, the kid from Muskegon, Michigan, hitting someone so hard that he separates the guy from his body. If only he could convert his rage to power and skill, it might happen. After school he takes a football and runs through the cornstalks in the backyard, pretending each stalk is a tackler. It is twilight now, and the boy has been running through these cornstalks for hours, for days. His shirt is streaked with blood from where he’s been stabbed by the stalks, the scabs broken open, releasing pustulants from the body. When he heals, his skin will be runneled and pocked. He will always live a word away from that good-looking upperclassman, the one in the locker room who, before everyone, called him Frankenstein. It will take him decades to understand these scars and what has happened to him. What has happened to him?

  Years later, after crossing an ocean in search of something he can’t put a name to, he finds himself in a room with the old man, who smokes so many cigarettes it seems he is on fire. They talk about the thing they both love most: art. Sitting in that studio in Innsbruck, David Williams, the would-be middleweight champion of the world from Muskegon, Michigan, who speaks in faltering German, feels immediately at home with this Austrian, Franz Batke, who speaks no English and who, unbeknownst to him, is a former Nazi. How has this happened? Because they speak only of art. Williams will write in his journal, “I am truly beginning to see this man as a genius.” After all, among the scarred carapaces of lost civilizations, among the ugly ruins and tormented dreams of history’s fanatics, some beauty must rise, mustn’t it?

  Mustn’t it?

  The cell has split in two. There is no diagnosis, no explanation. Clouds cover the city, hyena-shaped, turning on themselves. The tanks are rolling, and the people come out of their houses, clutching bouquets to pledge allegiance to t
heir invaders, without fully understanding. They throw flowers and sing. They are thin already, engraved by rib cages and dark rings beneath their eyes. It is not easy to understand. Their euphoria is blinding.

  On this morning, Eduard Pernkopf rises at 4 A.M. He is a short, portly man with gray-blue eyes, dour and phlegmatic, though not entirely humorless. He wears round glasses and diligently reads his well-thumbed Schopenhauer. He has a scar on his left cheek from a duel he once fought. It is hard to imagine this particular fellow in a duel. And it is equally hard to imagine what moves inside him—ambition, zealotry, some canted idealism? Or is it just sickness? He has thyroid problems and crippling headaches. A blood clot is moving slowly toward his brain. When his first wife dies of tuberculosis at twenty-seven, he pens a symphony dedicated to her titled The Pleasure and Pain of Man. He marries her sister. He smokes exactly fifteen cigarettes a day. He comes to care about only two things: the Book and the Party.

  The Book begins as a lab manual while Pernkopf is teaching at the Anatomy Institute in Vienna. He needs a dissection guide to help students better identify the organs and vessels of the body, but he finds other anatomy texts outdated or unsatisfactory, and he is a perfectionist. He soon has what seems like an impractical dream: to map the entire human body. And this dream is what leads to his life’s work: an epic eponymous four-volume, seven-book anatomical atlas, an unrelenting performance spanning thirty years of eighteen-hour workdays. Here our mortality is delivered in Technicolor, in eight hundred paintings that illuminate the gooey, viscous innards of our own machine, organized by regions: the Chest and Pectoral Limb; the Abdomen, Pelvis and Pelvic Limb; the Neck; and the Topographical and Stratigraphical Anatomy of the Head.

  The group he recruits to paint comprises fine artists, some of whom have trained for years and are known as akademische Maler. At this time—the early 1930s—there is no work in Vienna. People scrounge for crumbs. Beggars line the streets. On Fridays shopkeepers leave small plates of pennies out for the poor. A rich person is someone who owns a bicycle, and the artists take their jobs willingly, thankfully. Perhaps in another place and time, they’d be famous for their watercolors of Viennese parks or Austrian landscapes. But here they draw the cold interiors of the human body.

  Pernkopf oversees these men and women: four, seven, nine, then eleven artists in all. Perhaps he is dimly aware that this moment may never repeat itself. Never again will social conditions warrant that so many talented fine artists gather together to detail the body, and never again will the art of medical illustration veer so close to that of fine art itself. The book will coincide with the discovery and refinement of four-color separation: All anatomical works before it will seem to be from Kansas, while Pernkopf’s Anatomy will seem to hail from Oz.

  For his part, Pernkopf directs the dissections and preparations of the cadavers for painting. These preparations can be exacting, hour upon hour spent pinning back skin on a forearm, scraping fascia from a bone, sawing skulls open to reveal a fine minutiae of arteries, the skein of veins beneath the dura. But he learns quickly: The better the preparation—the more fresh and vivid the viscera—the better the painting.

  He is driven by ideas of accuracy and clarity. He stresses again and again: The paintings must look like living tissue, even more alive than living tissue, if such a thing is possible. He strikes a deal with a publisher named Urban & Schwarzenberg, which after seeing the early work is convinced that Pernkopf’s book may one day be mentioned in the same breath as da Vinci’s sketches of the body, Vesalius’s Fabrica, or Sobotta’s Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen.

  Meanwhile, the cell has split. The Jewish diaspora of the late nineteenth century—one bringing thousands from southern Poland and western Ukraine to Vienna—has also now projected Jews into the highest reaches of society, causing deep-seated rancor. Anti-Semitism becomes commonplace. Even at the Institute, competing anatomical schools rise under one roof to segregate the Jews from their Austrian detractors, a student army of National Socialists. Passing in the halls, students come to blows.

  For Pernkopf this violence is as it should be. From the moment he enrolls as a student at the University of Vienna, in 1907, at eighteen, he joins a nationalistic German fraternity, which becomes the foundation for his later fervency as a National Socialist, including his belief that Jews have corrupted German culture. Shortly after joining the Nazi Party in 1933—which is against the law in Austria at the time—he joins the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, the underground uniformed army of Nazis. And then he waits.

  Months, then years, pass. Life worsens. The institute is only a microcosm of Vienna itself, of Austria as a whole, of this entrenched hatred pushing up through the dirt of society. On March 12, 1938, Hitler enters the country uncontested, in an open limousine. He speaks from the balcony of the town hall in Linz to crazed flower-throwing crowds and claims his beloved birthplace, Austria, as his own—a blank-check Nazi annexation known as the Anschluss. In Vienna, where Hitler once made watercolors of Gothic buildings, flags bearing swastikas are unfurled. Some feel a rush of hope; others, like Sigmund Freud, who lives only four blocks from the Institute, pack to leave.

  And so, on this morning, Pernkopf readies himself for the most important speech of his life. It is 4 A.M., the time he usually reserves for writing the words that accompany the paintings in his atlas. He scribbles in shorthand, striving to find the right intonations and arpeggios, giving words to some echo he hears in his head. Later his wife will type the loose pages, and then he will stand in the hemicycle at the Institute before a room packed with medical school staff, pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler, in his storm trooper’s uniform, a swastika on his left elbow. He will call for “racial hygiene” and the “eliminating of the unfit and defective.” He will call for the “discouragement of breeding by individuals who do not belong together properly, whose races clash.” He will call for sterilization and “the control of marriage.” And finally he will praise Hitler for being a man who has found “a new way of looking at the world,” as someone “in whom the legend of history has blossomed.”

  The speech becomes an overt declaration of war within the university. Jewish students will soon be thrown from the third floor of the Anatomy Institute to a courtyard below, and 153 Jewish faculty members will be purged—some will eventually be sent to concentration camps; others will flee. In this milieu of bloodlust, the bodies of those tried and guillotined after the Anschluss—more than a thousand in all, mostly political opponents, patriots, Communists, and petty criminals, among them eight Jews—will be stacked like cordwood behind the Institute, to be used as preparations for Pernkopf’s sacred atlas. From the legend of these human limbs, his temple rises.

  As a child, the boy obsessively draws. He draws humans and animals. He does crude landscapes in watercolor. When he holds a brush in his hand, when he puts that brush to paper, he becomes invisible. He cannot be seen. He has no history, no scars.

  He becomes the first in the Williams family to graduate from high school, then goes to community college. In his freshman biology class, he sketches a frog, the insides of a frog, with amazing accuracy and clarity. When his instructor sees it, she tells him about universities where one can learn to draw the insides of frogs—and other animals, including humans.

  David the artist may be an enigma to his factory-working parents, but his younger brother, Greg, is an aberration. While David is short, stocky, and a loner, Greg is tall, angular, and outgoing. As David has his art and science, Greg toys with the idea of becoming a priest.

  If the brothers dwell in alternative realities, they unconsciously remain each other’s lodestars, each other’s partial reason for hope. For they have the same goal: to escape the blue-collar drudgery of gray Muskegon and a house that has slowly gone from Norman Rockwell portrait to Ingmar Bergman film, mother listing into alcoholism and mental illness, father burdened by some deeply hidden guilt from his own unspoken past. Each son is searching for some kind of euphoria to obliterate the pain o
f growing up in this house. At the age of twenty, David abruptly moves to Hamburg to live with a woman he has met when she was visiting the States and who loves him, his scarred self, something he once thought impossible. Greg finds theater and opera, then men and drugs.

  Years pass. Greg moves to Detroit, New York City. David splits with the woman in Hamburg, returns home, is accepted into the University of Cincinnati’s medical-illustration program, meets his wife, a schoolteacher, after being set up in a Muskegon bar. Shortly after they marry, he encounters the Book for the first time.

  He remembers the exact particle reality of that moment. At the university, he lives in an almost obsessive world in which people spend a hundred hours drawing a horse hock or the tendons of a human arm, in thrall to brush on paper. One of his professors has purchased Pernkopf’s Anatomy, a mythic work Williams has heard defined as pure genius, and he goes to the professor’s office to see it.

  The books are enormous, with blank green cloth covers. Inside could be almost anything—Monet’s water lilies, pornography, the detailed mechanics of a car—but when he opens them, when the bindings crack and the dry-cleaned scent of new pages and ink wafts up to his nostrils, there appear before him hundreds of thick, glossy sheets, these wild colors, these vibrant human bodies!

  It’s an electric moment, a pinnacle, of which a life may contain not more than a handful. But it is more than just the bright frisson of discovery, the wordless awe before some greater fluency. If this is a book with emanations, with a life of its own, then perhaps what startles him most is the glint of self-recognition that he finds in its pages: While he sees the timeless past in the trenches and deep spaces of the body, he also, oddly—and he can’t yet put words to this—sees his own future.