Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  What he doesn’t know yet, flipping through these pages, is that twelve years from now, as an associate professor, he will take a sabbatical and go in search of the Book, that he will find its last living artist, Franz Batke, who will take him under his wing, impart his lost techniques. He doesn’t yet know that he will return again to Batke just before the old man dies—and learn what he’d rather not know about him. That he will write an academic paper about the Book for an obscure journal of medical illustration, in which he’ll praise Pernkopf’s Anatomy as “the standard by which all other illustrated anatomic works are measured.” It will briefly help his academic career and bring him a measure of fame. But with it comes a backlash. He will lose friends, question himself, and be judged guilty of Pernkopf’s crimes by mere association; he will refuse to talk about the Book, curse the day he first saw it.

  If this is indeed a book with emanations, as he will come to believe, perhaps even his heart attacks can be blamed on it—Pernkopf, in white lab coat, reaching from the grave for one last cadaver.

  The book is blindingly beautiful, an exaltation, a paean, and a eulogy all at once. Page after page, the human body unfolds itself, and with each page the invisible becomes visible, some deeper secret reveals itself. What is it?

  Here is an eardrum, whole, detached from the vestibule-cochlear organ and floating in space. It appears as a strange wafered planet. Here is a seemingly glass liver through which appears a glass stomach and then glass kidneys, all in a glass body, an utterly transparent figure, aglow. Here is a skull wrapped in red arterial yarn, and here a cranium packaged in the bright colors of the holiday season. There are eyes that look out, irises in bottomless depth, a disembodied gaze that is the gaze of poetry itself. There is an unpeeled penis, a pulsating liver the color of a blood orange, a brigade of soulful brains, levitating.

  And then there are the drawings of dead people—cadavers, faces half intact, half dissected, skin drawn back in folds from the thoracic cavity, heads half shelled, showing brain. Consider Erich Lepier’s watercolor of the neck. In nearly black-and-white-photographic detail, the dead man seems to be sleeping; the intact skin of his neck is supple, his lips are parted, his eyes half closed. His head is shaved, and he has a mustache. Even the fine hairs of his nose are visible. Inside him a superficial layer of the neck’s fascia comes in two strange shades of color: a bluish pearlescent and a translucent olive green. The acoustic meatus, pathway to the inner ear, is visible, as is the mastoid process. Every changing texture is felt, every wrinkle recorded. Half of this dead man is in exact decay and half of him seems alive. The painting is its own kind of pornography, half violation and half wonder.

  Or consider Batke’s watercolor of the thoracic cavity after the removal of the heart. It’s like gazing on a psychedelic tree of life: arteries, veins, bronchus, extending like complex branches inside their bizarre terrarium. Batke employs all the colors of the rainbow, these interwoven lines of yellow, blue, orange, purple, but invented and mixed by him, all these appear as new colors. The bronchus, which rises in the background, is striped and Seuss-like in white and umber. Although the painting’s concern is the minute sorting and scoring of these air and blood tunnels, it still captures an undulating energy, fireworks, the finely rendered thrum of the body. The painting nearly takes wing from the page.

  Page by page, Pernkopf’s Anatomy is stunning, bombastic, surreal, the bone-and-muscle evidence, the animal reality of who we are beneath the skin. And yet, as incomprehensible and terrifying as these landscapes can be, as deep as our denial that life is first and finally a biological process, hinging even now on an unknown blood clot orbiting toward the brain, on a weak heart, on the give of a vein wall, the Book brings its own reassurance. Lepier’s detached eyes, like spectacular submersibles, Batke’s precisely wrought otherworldly vaginas, Schrott’s abstract, almost miraculous muscles/​ducts/​lymph nodes, Karl Endtresser’s bizarre spinal configurations—all of these slavishly striving for the thing itself while being regarded, through Pernkopf’s eyes and those of the artists, as beautiful, nearly spiritual objects.

  So what can be said about this Book? That its intentions are good? That it is a masterpiece? That each painting contains its own genius? And what if a number of these paintings have been signed with swastikas, what then? Is it possible that only Nazis and their myriad obsessions with the body could have yielded such a surprising text?

  And what of the dead stacked like cordwood at the Institute, their body parts pulled down by pitchfork? Do the secrets revealed in the Book count less than the secrets kept by it? Does its beauty diminish with these facts or the political beliefs of its general and foot soldiers? In a righteous world, perhaps it should, but does it?

  Shortly after the Anschluss, after thousands of Austrians have been conscripted for the front lines of a war against the world, after more and more Austrians have died of starvation, the euphoria fades, the master race begins to devour itself. And yet Eduard Pernkopf ascends, his name a Hakenkreuz and a haunted house.

  He is first and foremost a scientist, believing, mimicking the racial politics of the Third Reich. Well received by the powers in Berlin, he is first named dean of the medical school, then Rektor Magnificus, or president, of the University of Vienna. Shortly after the Anschluss—March 12, 1938—he issues a letter to all university staff: “To clarify whether you are of Aryan or non-Aryan descent, you are asked to bring your parents’ and grandparents’ birth certificates to the dean’s office.… Married individuals must also bring the documents of their wives.”

  Under his presidency, medical experiments are conducted on the unfit and retarded; children are euthanized. Somewhere in his building is the severed head of the Austrian general, the patriot Wilhelm Zehner, who in the first days of the Anschluss either committed suicide in political protest against the Nazis or was murdered by the Gestapo. Among the more than a thousand guillotined bodies Pernkopf claims for himself from the district court, he searches for the best, the youngest, the finest specimens of muscle and skin. He opens the bodies like walnuts, discards what won’t serve him. Those he decides to keep go to the formaldehyde pools in the Institute’s basement, floating there until needed for use.

  So who is Pernkopf? If he’s taciturn with his painters, it is because he maintains the utmost professionalism. A dreamer, an intellect, a lover of music, he is in the workshop early in the morning and late at night: He is simply an overwhelming presence. The Book becomes both his great unfinished symphony and, slowly, his madness. Whether or not he encourages them, some of his artists now sign their work to show their Nazi allegiance: Lepier follows his name with a swastika, Endtresser fashions the double S of his name as an SS lightning bolt, and Batke seems to do the same with the number 44 when he dates his paintings from 1944.

  But even before the American bombs fall on the Institute—mistaking it for a factory, leveling half the building—even before the lot of these men are left scattered on the wrong side of history, half anesthetized by the past and half consumed by it, there is this one last moment in which they believe they are the righteous ones. These paintings of the human body belong to the highest expression of their Nazi idealism, but they exceed even that classification. If they save human lives—which they do every time a surgeon uses them to heal the body—each one is an act of salvation.

  There was no note, but nonetheless he knows. He knows from a conversation they had the last time his brother, Greg, came from New York City to West Lafayette, when they sat on the front stoop drinking beers. They talked about everything, and Greg mentioned how he believed hedonism was the highest possible expression of self and that to die in an act of euphoria was the only way to really live. In context it was not alarming, nor really surprising. In retrospect it explained everything.

  When he learned of his brother’s suicide, David Williams drove four hours to Muskegon, straight to his parents’ house. His mother was sitting in the living room shaking her head, and his father refused to believe
it was Greg, since there hadn’t been a positive identification. Someone had to go to New York to identify the body. “You work with dead bodies all the time,” his father said, cruelly. “You can do this.”

  The next morning, the elder son flew to LaGuardia, then took a bus and walked to the morgue at Bellevue to see the younger son. The waiting room was crowded with people there to identify family members who had been shot, knifed, beaten, or killed by gang members. A very large black man in a uniform, an officer of some sort, brought him into a room with a curtained window. He asked twice if David Williams was ready, and the second time Williams feebly answered “Yes.”

  When the curtain parted, there was his brother, still tall and angular, lying on a metal dissecting table, in severe rigor mortis, with the back of his head resting on a wooden block, exactly like a cadaver in a gross-anatomy lab. But this was his brother—and there was no longer anything beautiful about him, only a pallid mask where his face had been, a lifeless slab in place of his animated body.

  If his brother’s death left no mark on the greater world, the rest of those dark days in 1978 are part of David Williams’s personal history: how he fell into the arms of the large black man who carried him from the room; how he refused to sign a piece of paper that said his brother was found with needle marks on his arm; how he went to the YMCA to pick up his brother’s belongings; and how, when he arrived back in Muskegon, his parents were in denial about their son’s sexuality and about his suicide, an act that meant he could not be buried, according to Catholic rite, with the other generations of Williamses at St. Mary’s Cemetery.

  And it’s part of history, too, that his brother, the person whose life most closely tracked his own, ended in the cold, unconsecrated ground of Muskegon, among the graves of factory workers, back in this place they both tried so hard to escape.

  Not long after, on sabbatical, David Williams goes to see Franz Batke. He is nervous; he doesn’t know what to expect. He leaves his family behind in Munich and drives to Innsbruck. He thinks it is no coincidence that shortly after falling in love with his wife, he first saw the Book, and now, shortly after his brother’s death, he arrives in Innsbruck to visit the dying old man who is the last living vestige of the Book itself. But what is it that draws him here? He is looking for answers, yes, or perhaps merely reasons to live. And even if Batke’s paintings hadn’t changed his life—as they have—it is not so strange that a young man suffering loss might seek counsel from an old man who knows a great deal about loss.

  What he finds is that Batke is a hermit living in a cell in self-imposed exile. Batke has come to Innsbruck from Vienna, leaving behind his wife, because Vienna represents the past to him, haunting him even now, defeating him, and after more than fifty years with his wife, he is not sure whether or not he still loves her. And he has come here because he has been offered work by Werner Platzer, the man who after the war and Pernkopf’s death brought the last books of the atlas to fruition. Platzer, who is hard-driving with frantic dashes of intellect and craziness, has promised his friend Batke pay and living quarters in return for paintings to fill a new book on vaginal surgery.

  So Batke lives in two rooms at Innsbruck’s Institute of Anatomy, where Platzer is the new director. The old man never leaves, never goes out to take the air. Students bring him his food and sundries. Usually, he drinks ice water all day while he works. At night he has trouble sleeping, due to a bad cough, ominous and deep, which worries even him. Against his doctor’s orders, he continues to smoke cigarettes. If he is smoking himself to death, the cigarettes may also be what keeps him alive for two more years because they give him something, besides painting, to do.

  At first he is mistrustful of David Williams, thinking the American scholar has been sent to spy by the publisher or by someone else looking to profit from him. But slowly Batke realizes that the professor is here for seemingly no reason other than to watch him paint—and to be taught. It dawns on him that, even if he has been remembered by only this one American, he has still achieved a certain kind of immortality. Though they can barely communicate, they become closer and closer. They don’t discuss politics, only art. And at the end of each day, Williams records another entry in his journal.

  “Herr Batke fixes lunch—scrambled eggs and small pieces of pork and wurst. I continue to work on the vein—he says to paint the middle valve first and then add the dark and light dich-weiβ. He wants me to stop using such small choppy strokes.”

  And “even in German, I understand him: ‘Loosen up. It’s no big deal.’ I feel it finally beginning to happen.… I actually enjoy it physically—the way the paint floats around. I really think this way of painting can suit me. He also demonstrates a vein. He can still do it at 77 years old. He works for two and a half hours on a very small section.”

  Under Batke’s eye, the body becomes beautiful again for David Williams. After the shock of seeing his brother as a cadaver, he perhaps retrieves some small part of Greg with each new painting. And yet, for all of the gemütlichkeit, for all the warmth David Williams feels toward the master, Batke himself seems broken. He has been stranded on the wrong side of history, and now he never leaves his cell.

  Night after night, they sit up talking. Batke shows so many little kindnesses, serves food, cakes, wine. One day when David Williams’s family comes to visit, he has presents for the children, charms the American’s wife.

  So how does one quantify the joy he feels when Batke speaks to him as a friend and mentor—as a father, really—when Batke tells him that he, David Williams, might be the only artist with the ability to paint like the old man himself, someone to carry on the mythic tradition handed down by Pernkopf? Or how does one share what it meant that last day in Innsbruck, to see Batke come downstairs and step outside for the first time in years, to stand in a downpour of sunlight, just to say goodbye?

  Isn’t there something to be said for these moments? Aren’t they a part of this man and this Book’s history, too?

  The tanks are rolling, and the people come out of their houses, clutching bouquets to pledge allegiance to their liberators. They throw flowers and sing. After landing at Omaha Beach, the Allied army sweeps across France, liberating Paris, and breaches the Siegfried line near Aachen. Hitler flees to his underground bunker and commits suicide with his mistress, Eva Braun. The Third Reich implodes.

  When American troops arrive in Vienna, they arrest Eduard Pernkopf and Franz Batke. Both are removed to prison camps, where they are placed in what is called a de-Nazification program, one in which prisoners are subjected to hard labor and a history lesson in the truth: movies showing the reality of the concentration camps, among other horrors of the war. Pernkopf, who is fifty-seven now, who has lived with visions of grandeur, is lost and broken. Still, he has visitors sneak in his work, at which he continues to toil during his three-year stay.

  Meanwhile, at the university, the members of the old regime have been imprisoned or removed, and the school issues a letter to those still-living former Jewish faculty members now scattered about the world, inviting them back. Of hundreds, only one returns, a man named Hans Hoff, whose wartime travels have taken him from New York City to Baghdad. Well regarded before the Anschluss, he is put in charge of the Neurological Institute. When released from prison, Pernkopf is barred from teaching at his own beloved Anatomy Institute but somehow finagles two light-filled rooms under Hoff’s roof to finish his Book. The atlas is all he has left—and all that keeps him alive.

  In these tattered postwar times, with jobs scarce again, he is able to regather his former artists and then add two more. He works his eighteen-hour days, remaining wholly unsympathetic to those who can’t keep up. Among his painters, disillusionment and internecine squabbles are now endemic. Batke and Lepier represent opposite extremes, the improvisational versus the mathematical, and both work to fill the Book with their own work in order to bring more glory to it.

  In 1952, Pernkopf publishes Der Hals (The Neck), but time is short. A blood clot
in his brain causes a stroke, and he dies on April 17, 1955, before the completion of his last two books. Werner Platzer, who is regarded by many as Pernkopf’s scientific son, finishes those.

  Despite Pernkopf’s long fall from grace, his burial turns out the entire faculty. He is celebrated by fellow professors as a perfectionist, a stirring teacher, and the impresario of what many increasingly regard as the world’s greatest anatomy book. Some of those present are former Nazis and some are not, but all who have lived through the war now seem to bear their own burdens, secrets, and sins, and clearly they regard Pernkopf as one of their own. So they commend him to heaven.

  The Jew, Hans Hoff, is there, too, in a black suit. But what passes through his mind, what he says to himself as Pernkopf is lowered into the grave, is lost now in the ash of all unspoken things. Perhaps to stand there in the first place, on Viennese soil again, he has already begun the difficulty of forgiving, or forgetting. Perhaps he marks the moment indelibly, unapologetically. Creator, destroyer—let him lie beneath the burnt grass and dying blossoms of his own history now.

  One day, during the height of the debate over Pernkopf’s Anatomy, a close acquaintance, a kind Jewish woman, approaches David Williams and says sharply, “Why would you want to be remembered for your association with this book, of all books?” He has no answer. Another time, in England, while giving a lecture at Cambridge on the atlas, he is confused when a Jewish woman breaks down in tears and is helped from the room, pained by how this man, this American, has found beauty in the ugliest of books. What sickness moves inside of him?

  And there’s more. He receives a letter from a distinguished academic, challenging his paper for its whitewash of history. “Have you not been struck by the fact, Mr. Williams, when visiting cemeteries in small Austrian towns, how many innocent young men lost their lives on the eastern or western front, but these originators of the Nazi mentality survived?” he writes. “As convenient as it seems to be, one cannot separate a man’s professional work from his spiritual being.”