Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Meanwhile, an oral surgeon at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, Howard Israel, has referred to Pernkopf’s Anatomy before every new surgery of his career. When he finds out about its past, he feels deeply betrayed. He researches the Book with another Jewish doctor, William Seidelman, asserting in a medical journal that cadavers from concentration camps may have been used in the making of the atlas. Their evidence: the appearance of roughly shaved heads and circumcised penises. When Williams is asked about this by a reporter from The Jerusalem Report, he disputes the fact, saying that when he asked Batke if death camp cadavers were used in the Book, the old man became enraged and denied it vehemently. Even famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal examined the records, and his conclusions seem to bolster Williams’s side. The two doctors, however, take a dimmer view of Williams as one of the Book’s greatest defenders.

  Williams is not alone in his view of the Book. Following the publication of his paper, the two most prestigious American medical journals review Pernkopf’s Anatomy and declare it in “a class of its own” and “a classic among atlases,” with illustrations that “are truly works of art.” Nonetheless, Williams increasingly feels isolated, doubtful. How could beauty have made him half blind? Is he, as it appears to some, a Nazi apologist? On public radio, he is asked how it feels to be the one benefiting from a Nazi text, and he fumbles for an answer.

  He loses friends; he loses sleep; his heart begins to hurt. He meets several times with the local rabbi, who tells him that his sin may be one of perspective. He must imagine the unimaginable when it comes to the Holocaust, must feel the grief of that woman at Cambridge, assuming she may be like so many who lost mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and spouses, in the ovens and dark chambers of places like Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. How hard could it be to see that for some the Book is not a metaphor for beauty or salvation or transfiguration, that it’s not the highest expression of what saves David Williams from Muskegon, Michigan, or erases his scars, or, in some complicated way, brings Greg back? No, for that woman at Cambridge, the Book is nothing but a dirty crime scene, violated bodies that might include her brethren. The artists are no better than vultures over their carrion. What affliction or hubris has kept that from him?

  Three heart attacks and several angioplasties later, he is a different man, one who still lies awake at night thinking about the Book, but thinking about it from the point of view of that woman who broke down at Cambridge. He doesn’t speak about Pernkopf’s Anatomy for years, though he follows developments from afar. Under pressure, the University of Vienna launches and concludes an investigation into Pernkopf’s Anatomy, claiming in November 1998 that circumstantial evidence suggests Jewish cadavers were probably not used in the making of the atlas. Reviewing the hundreds of pages of findings, Williams is left unconvinced, believes the university administration has obscured the results to protect its reputation.

  From some primordial haze slowly comes recognition. It is the spring of 2002, and in West Lafayette he now prepares to return to Vienna, to Munich. He packs his bags, and when he is briefly overcome with doubt, his wife says, “You are Pernkopf’s Anatomy. A big part of that Book is who you are.” So he travels eight hours in coach, through spasms of lightning. But this time he arrives aggrieved, angry, skeptical, confused, searching for truth—more, perhaps, as a Jew would. He has come to avenge the naïveté of his younger self and to make his final goodbyes to the paintings, for he is sure he will never see them again in this lifetime, nor perhaps ever have the desire.

  In bright sun, beneath a heavy roof, the Institute occupies half a city block along the trolley routes and shops of Ringstrasse. The first time he came to Vienna, the weather was bad—rain, thick clouds rolling over themselves—and somehow the city seemed cold, less receiving, left him empty and alone. This time he feels more resolute. Somewhere, he hopes, in the locked rooms and forgotten closets, among the thousand cadavers used by a new generation of anatomy students, is a clearer answer to the past.

  He meets with professor after professor. He is unfailingly polite, phrases sensitive declarations of fact as questions in his midwestern lilt. A few he meets are defensive; most, quite the opposite. A gentle old man, a former president of the university who knew Pernkopf, serves him tea and cakes. Later, he finds out that the old man was an SS officer. Many records, including those of the identities of a number of cadavers, were destroyed by the American bombs that brought down half the Institute. Others were tampered with by those looking to obscure their crimes. Exactness is elusive. Rather than thinking there’s a cover-up here, David Williams begins to feel pity for these people, relentlessly driven back to an increasingly untraceable past.

  One professor leads him through the Institute on a tour: They stand on the spot where guillotined bodies once were piled in ten-foot-high drifts and taken down by pitchfork for Eduard Pernkopf’s use. They stand in the hemicycle, where Pernkopf headily praised Hitler and called on his colleagues to lead a new age of medical experimentation, a period that would come to include the sterilization of the mentally disabled and the euthanasia of nearly eight hundred “defective” children. They go to the basement, a dark, dank, spooky place, to look upon the formaldehyde pools that once held Pernkopf’s cadavers. An attendant opens the lid on one of the pools, activates a hydraulic lift, and suddenly several bodies, bloated and pale, each one donated for use in the school today, appear from the depths on metal trays.

  Somehow, on his last visit he had failed to mark all these spots, or perhaps unconsciously didn’t entirely want to or feel he needed to. Now he does, shaking his head, grimacing.

  Finally, he dines with a young historian, Daniela Angetter, the woman charged with investigating much of the University of Vienna’s Nazi legacy. Her world is one of chilling medical experiments and severed heads, and she wears her work with a gaunt hauntedness and weary eyes. Allergic to protein and lactose, she eats potato chips at dinner while her husband, a plumber, eats blood sausage. “This has been horrible for me, to see dead bodies,” she says. “I’m a historian, and to think that people were executed because they were starving and stole a pig and ate it. Would I have been strong enough to stand up? If you didn’t conform to the Party, you were executed. I’ve stayed awake many nights thinking about these things.”

  Sitting there, moved by this young woman, believing her, David Williams comes to realize this: All these people are run down by ghosts, too. He is not alone in his confusion. After illustrious postwar careers, former SS officers serve afternoon tea; a new generation born thirty years after the war pores over the past, making amends for its grandparents. Even now, on a sunny spring day in 2002, on the eve of the anniversary marking fifty-seven years since the fall of Nazi Germany, students carry urns bearing the last discovered remains of victims at the university during Pernkopf’s reign; the government calls for calm in the streets of Austria’s capital, deploying fifteen hundred police officers to ensure that neo-Nazi demonstrators don’t rampage in the Heldenplatz, the square where Hitler addressed hundreds of thousands of euphoric Austrians in 1938.

  Here is an entire country living the events of the war over and over and over again. Later, in Munich, Williams spends an afternoon with his friend Michael Urban, the erudite sixty-three-year-old grandson of Eduard Urban, the man who first struck a deal in 1933 with Pernkopf to publish his atlas. Having inherited his grandfather’s company, Urban sold it to a company that decided to cease publication of the Book. He believes it to be a troubled masterpiece, one that should continue in print with a foreword detailing the most harrowing events of its creation. Now, while the German quietly listens, the American attempts to put into words something that has troubled him, continues to trouble him on this trip: He wonders whether, by being friends with Franz Batke, by seeing the magnificence in Pernkopf’s Anatomy, he is doomed. And yet he feels that to reject both fully is a sin of its own, a betrayal.

  “David, there’s nothing wrong with you,” says Urba
n. “We are moving on two planes: the principal, everyday plane and then one made up of these overwhelming feelings and emotions. When we try to talk about this, we move into a wordless dimension.” Here he pauses, runs a tapered finger over his furrowed brow, smiles weakly. “My father was at one of these mass rallies, the Goebbels speech at the Sports Palace in 1943, and he said his arm was up in a Nazi salute before he knew what he was doing. It was hysteria. It’s inconceivable what people did to one another during the war. But you must remember: People endure.”

  The next day, he goes to see the original paintings. He is wary, excited, and nervous. Urban has arranged for the paintings to be delivered to the downtown offices of the publishing house. And he has also arranged for Werner Platzer, the man who finished the atlas after Pernkopf’s death, to come to Munich to lead Williams through nineteen oversized black binders stuffed with eight hundred original pieces of art.

  Platzer operates three cups of coffee ahead of the world. He doesn’t eat; he doesn’t pee. He just sits with the paintings, providing long discourses on each. And Williams sits with him, a student again, savoring every moment, but this time questioning, too. He asks Platzer why he thinks the Book is out of print, and Platzer shakes his head, incensed. “It’s too good,” he says. “The Book is too good.” When Williams points to a painting that many feel is that of a Jewish cadaver with a shaved head, Platzer explodes. “What does a Jew look like?” he says. “Tell me. It is absurd. I wish you Americans ate what we ate then: nothing. Three days a week, I might not eat. I looked like this man here. Absolute nonsense.”

  Williams sits before him, unblinking, and presses his concerns. He believes the swastikas and SS symbols have been removed from some of the originals, as they were removed from subsequent printings of the Book, so a laborious hour is spent trying to locate the paintings in question. In the end, he discovers the symbols have been erased, and he seems troubled, angry.

  And yet, when he comes upon a Batke painting of the inner ear, he holds it up and stares for a long time. “It’s just so alive,” he says softly, passing a hand lightly over it. When he sees another, of the chest, he says, “I’d give anything to have that hanging on my wall.” The two men look at the Lepiers and Dietzes, Endtressers and Schrotts. They marvel at the near psychedelic colors and intricate brushwork. With each painting—with each proliferation of arteries, with each gravityless organ—the body becomes that exalted place again.

  The viewing takes seven hours, and in the end he feels it all over and over: joy, curiosity, shame, awe. In person, in full color, the paintings still mesmerize. They still emanate.

  But this time in their presence, he is not exactly euphoric. If he feels a deep sense of fulfillment in seeing these paintings one last time, he also feels a strange sadness. When it is over, when the sun dips below a building and a streetlight blinks on in the window, he is almost trembling. He pulls out a handkerchief, removes his glasses, and wipes his face. His hair is slightly disheveled. He exhales, looks once at the oversized binders against the wall, presses his lips tightly together, and then turns his back and leaves the room.

  The old man sits and smokes, a bottle of beer set before him. He has a crooked nose and a skewed chin. Night pours through the windows of his cell. Sitting across from him is the American, fellow exile and good friend now, who has remembered him, who has made a pilgrimage to record a way of painting that will be forever lost with his death. It is 1980, and they have spent months together, eating, drinking, laughing. There is so little time. Though they don’t speak fluently to each other, they have formed a bond through painting. And now they are drunk, and their conversation veers from art to the war.

  The old man suddenly rises and disappears for a moment, then returns with a small cardboard box that makes a jingling sound. It is dust covered and full of medals, including an Iron Cross he won for valor on the Russian front, where he was shot in the groin. He passes the medal to the American, who feels its weight in his hand, turns it in the light, admires it. The old man, who trusts the young man now, who is being a little vain and showy, sad and funny, mentions that he is still proud to have worn his Brownshirt uniform. He says the Americans blew it, joining the war on the wrong side, and accuses the Jews of forcing the Americans to enter the war against the Germans rather than with them. He chides his guest for this. He describes his imprisonment and his days being de-Nazified. And David Williams, the American professor, listens, nods, and later writes in his journal, “The evening seems like a dream to me … perhaps it’s the beer. This man who I have admired for so long—I should say his work—there is no doubt in my mind that as a painter he is a genius!!—this man reveals himself as a common Nazi, a Jew hater, a Brown Shirt.… Is it possible that all makers of great works of art are ultimately exposed as thus?”

  And ever after, he will wonder: Who is this old man, this last living vestige of the Book? And what secret has he found after his life as a vulture at the side of carrion? It appears there is no secret. The Nazis have lost, and he is dying on the wrong side of history. The mouth is made for food, the penis for the vagina, the heart made to beat. Until it simply ceases. Death is no salvation. The only thing left is to paint.

  On the wall above David Williams’s desk at home today in Indiana hangs a painting by Franz Batke, near an old portrait of Eduard Pernkopf. Sometimes, at the end of the day, after mowing the lawn, he spends a minute gazing at them. But if asked why the pictures are there, David Williams shakes his head; he can’t say why. But he doesn’t take them down.

  THE AMERICAN HERO (IN FOUR ACTS)

  WHEN YOU FIRST CAME INTO THE country, it was on a Buffalo, a huge, silver-winged transport flashing through the clouds at three hundred knots. This was your commute, the way some people ride the train to work. You stood up in the cockpit, in baggy pants and a T-shirt, watching the earth glide beneath your feet. A flat, spectral wasteland, cyclones of red dust writhing up in some slow-motion manifestation of—what? the devil? Whatever it was down there, it was the opposite of Richmond, Virginia. It was the opposite of home sweet home. Your hands were shaking, just a little, but still—shaking.

  Somewhere at twenty-nine thousand feet, near the fourth cataract of the Nile, near the spot where it was prophesied by a great chief that a wondrous bird would one day bring food to the starving Dinka, they asked you your name. South African pilots—big, burly yahoos with seven tons of maize in the cargo hold, Coca-Colas pressed between their knees, and a couple of porn mags thrown around the cockpit, but good guys—asked you your name. So lost in your head, you couldn’t speak. Move lips, make sound: Ja-son. Yeah, Jason. Jason Mat-us. American. They smiled at that. Like: This fish is gonna get eaten alive.

  Then the earth got bigger. Green spots became tamarind trees; brown dots became tukels, thatched huts scattered in groups of three and four—some of them burned out, some bombed, some lopsided and listing. Purple forms blurred through the bush.

  Now the Buffalo hit the ground, bouncing down a potholed dirt track. You went back into the long, dark cave of the cargo hold, moving on automatic, and suddenly the hatch was thrown open. What hit you was roaring and mean, beams of bright light and a 120-degree blowtorch of heat that incinerated your breath just as it was leaving your lungs, so it seemed to come out of you like fire. What hit you was the smell of Africa, the dust and sweat and burned urine and sun-scorched blades of elephant grass.

  Everyone took a step back when you jumped down, as if you were an alien, dust rising when your booted feet hit the earth near their naked ones, your body inadvertently hunched in ready position as if you were back at school on the wrestling mat. And then there was that weird microsecond when your eyes rose up, your head craned skyward. To these men who just kept growing! You looked up at them, these men. And they looked down at you. And you looked up at them. And they at you again.

  Until a hand came through the air. Big peace, a voice said in another tongue. Big peace, said Jason Matus without hesitation, putting a hand back through
the air. And the hands met there—one the blackest of black, one the whitest of pale white. Like shaking hands with midnight; like shaking hands with goat’s milk. And the man held on to you, Jason Matus, and led you away from the plane, into his world now, and the crowd parted, these amazing faces, hollowed with high cheekbones, super-white eyeballs and teeth, foreheads scarred with tribal markings, bodies clean of hair. You didn’t even notice their ribs at first, the ballooned bellies and the bloated hands. At first, you didn’t notice what the Dinka simply call the Hunger, though that’s what you had come for. Just saw their faces, made sure you met their smiles and gazes. And then all those hands reaching for you. Men in sky-blue djellaba gowns fluttering from their stick-thin bodies like loose sails. Mali madit. Big peace, my brother.

  Suddenly everything you once knew—well, it didn’t matter here in southern Sudan. You were walking into one of the all-time great fucked-up situations on this earth. Famine. Drought. Genocide. For most of the last fifty years, a civil war had been raging between the Muslim government in Khartoum and its militias and then the Christian tribes and Ph.D. rebel leaders of the south, all chasing one another around with AK-47s, trying to blow one another’s heads off. And millions of innocents running, too, fleeing from rape and slave raids and murder, escaping with nothing but their own skin and bones, set loose across the whole wide expanse of barren flatland like crippled giraffes. Hundreds of thousands dying from the Hunger.

  The victims—but they were smiling when you jumped out of that Buffalo. Each hand you touched—it was as if you were being pulled from a fast current of water. So who was strong and who was weak here? Who needed help, anyway? You were young, though not altogether innocent. Tough, but one hour in this sun and you were lobster red. You’d backpacked for nearly three years. Out there in the world—eating at roadside stands in India and bazaars in Morocco, surfing in Sri Lanka, drinking the bad water, going native, wearing sarongs and hippie beads and dreadlocks. Yes, it was a phase, but wonderful how no one cared who your daddy was or where you’d gone to school. No, you started with only two things out there. Name and nationality. Jason Matus, American.