Caravans (22 page)

As he drove off he assured me, “When I come back to get you, Miller, I’ll answer all your questions about Ellen. That’s a promise.” He headed the jeep back toward the desert he dreaded, and I last saw him speeding eastward, his lone flag whipping in the furnace-like air.

At dusk Dr. Stiglitz and I ate a frugal meal and drank a little of the brackish water. We could exist on it, but the prospect was not attractive. We then went out to watch the blazing sun sink behind the dunes and sat together in the refreshing coolness until the great stars appeared, and the white moon. We were about to retire when Stiglitz whispered, “What’s that?” And we heard a soft sound, as if a human being were creeping upon us.

We remained very silent, and then saw moving into the moonlight a small group of gazelles, more graceful now, perhaps, than they had been in sunlight. They had been feeding somewhere to the north and were returning to the safety of the desert, where none of their predators could surprise them. They formed such a contrast to the ugly death we had witnessed, that both Stiglitz and I watched them for many minutes. Then, with an unexpected clap of his hands, he startled the little
beasts and they leaped and spun in the moonlight; vanishing at last over the dunes.

“Exquisite,” Stiglitz whispered, and for the first time I felt some kind of identification with the German. I still wanted to know why he had made the incredible decision of hauling Pritchard onto the desert, and I was about to question him on this when he said, “It’s after nine. Let’s get ready for bed.” We entered the vast caravanserai and lit our Coleman lamp, studiously avoiding the ghostly pillar at the far end of the fort. But it was there.

I said, “You surprised me at Chahar when you refused to make a medical decision … when the facts were so clear. Once Pritchard carried that leg into the desert … he was doomed. Why didn’t you support me?”

“Was he doomed?” Stiglitz asked cautiously.

“Of course he was. Even I saw that.” Something in the way I spoke shattered the empathy we had felt while watching the gazelles. Perhaps Stiglitz suspected that when I returned to Kabul I would use Pritchard as an excuse for not recommending him to our ambassador.

A darkness came over his face and he asked contemptuously, “So even you could make that diagnosis, eh? Well, let me tell you, my young friend, I couldn’t make it. And I’ve been a doctor damned near as long as you’ve been alive. There are many diagnoses you’re not qualified to make, Herr Miller.”

Without warning he rose and stamped off to the pillar, taking with him our only carving knife, which he scraped vigorously against the plaster, as if driven by some harsh compulsion.

“Nazrullah said it’s a national monument,” I warned from the opposite end of the room.

“It’s a universal monument,” he corrected me, “and I’m going to see what’s inside.” He spoke with determination, then called, “Come here, Miller. It’s a human skull.”

Against my better judgment I walked slowly down the room, lugging the Coleman lamp, which Dr. Stiglitz grabbed from my hand to hold against the pillar. Behind the inch of plaster I could see a rounded bone. “Is that a skull?” I asked.

“Yes. How many bodies would you estimate are in this pillar?” Before I could answer he did a most ghoulish thing. He planted the lantern in the middle of an open space and said, “This will be the central pole.” Then he lay flat on the earth, his toes near the lantern, and commanded me: “Mark where my shoulders come.” When the scratches were in the earth, he shifted his body so that I could mark off a new shoulder, and so on around the imaginary pillar.

“Well,” he concluded with some satisfaction, “that makes thirty bodies jammed into one layer. Now how many layers?” He stepped back to calculate the number of tiers required to reach the roof. “Perhaps forty-five layers.” He paused and a slow look of horror crossed his face. “My God! There’s over thirteen hundred people in that pillar.”

We sat on the floor, surveying the grisly monument, and I was struck by the grip it had on Stiglitz. Finally I asked, “When Pritchard died, did I see you crossing yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You were a Catholic?”

“In Munich, yes.”

“Yet you turned apostate?”

“Of course. Since I’m to live here the rest of my life.”

“Why?” I asked bluntly.

“Surely you’ve been told, Herr Miller,” he said with contempt. “That’s why this pillar fascinates me. Gives me hope.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“It proves what I’ve always suspected. The things we did in Germany … the really dreadful things, are what men have always done.” Before I could express my disgust at excusing the civilized man Adolf Hitler by citing the barbarian Genghis Khan, he added, “In each civilization some men run wild. If we’re lucky, we control them early. If not …” He pointed to the pillar.

We spent the hours before midnight discussing this theory, and he marshaled strong support for his idea that what he had seen in Germany was a recurring sickness which might strike any nation at any time. I argued against this theory of inevitability, but he was adamant in extending it.

“To be specific,” he said, “I haven’t been to America but I’ve seen your films and read your books. I’m positive that in your country there would be no difficulty in finding S.S. volunteers for the jobs of collecting Negroes and throwing them into concentration camps.”

“Wait a minute!” I cried, condescendingly.

“Herr Miller!” he replied, pulling my face close to his. “Don’t you know in your heart that you could do to the Negroes what we did to the Jews?”

I said quietly, “Don’t judge us by the fact that we have a few sick people.”

“You have an endless supply,” he assured me. “We turned ours loose on Jews. Some day you’ll turn yours loose on Negroes.”

“But never Buchenwald,” I resisted.

“In the beginning, never,” he agreed. “Your sensibilities would not permit it. Your Bill of Rights … But after two or three years of total propaganda … the president, churches, newspapers, cinema, labor unions … don’t you understand that you would find many Americans eager to shoot down Negroes with machine guns?”

“No,” I announced confidently.

“Herr Miller, you’re an idiot,” he stormed. To my surprise he leaped to his feet and rushed to the pillar, which he banged with his fist. “Do you think that Genghis Khan started with this pillar? No. He marched step by step until this pillar was nothing. I could find in any American city you care to mention men who would be glad—joyous, shall we say —to be led step by step until they were building this pillar with living bodies. Do you think we Germans started out one day by building pillars? No, Herr Miller, no! Do you think I started with this?” He beat the pillar until I expected his knuckles to come away bleeding.

Breathing hard, he came and sat beside me. It was now past midnight and we were both worn by the tragic day on the desert, but the pillar kept us awake, and Stiglitz said softly, “Do you really think, Herr Miller, that the reports the Allied governments have on me started with a pillar like that grisly thing? Oh, no! I was a fine, respectable doctor
in Munich, married to the daughter of an important businessman … a member of the church. My wife and I saw certain promotions available through the Nazi party and we joined. Many prudent men and women did. It was easy at first. The Jews, whom we all despised”—he told me this in a confidential voice, as if I would appreciate why any reasonable man would despise Jews; indeed, as if our hating them together made us brothers— “were merely to be sequestered. That was all, sequestered.

“One day they asked me to check the health of the Jews they rounded up, and I did so, very carefully. Believe me, Herr Miller, if I found a Jew who needed an expensive medicine, I said so, and there are many Jews alive today solely because I prescribed expensive medicine for them.” He nodded in confirmation of his own plea, and I judged that he had often conducted this dialogue with himself. There were Jews living today because of what Dr. Stiglitz had done for them, of that I was sure.

“If I were ever brought to trial,” he assured me with great confidence, “the health records of the City of Munich would show case after case where I saved the lives of Jews. It’s all there … in the reports.”

He looked at me beseechingly, a tired, pudgy man with turbaned head, wrinkled brow and worried eyes. I thought, perhaps, that he was perspiring, but he was sitting with his back to the lantern, and all I could see was shadow. Persuasively, cautiously, his words resumed: “Unexpectedly other problems arose. A Jew was to be certified mentally
deficient so he could be sterilized. The government wanted me to designate a complete stranger as three-quarters Jewish so his property could be confiscated. I’d never seen him before, but he was obviously Jewish … you can always tell a Jew. So step by step my soul was corrupted.”

He was driven by some deep hatred back to the pillar, which he hammered with his open hands. “Miller,” he cried in a hoarse shout, ‘’do you suppose that the man who applied this plaster over living, breathing mouths started with this job? Do you believe that you’re immune?”

“To killing Jews, yes!”

“Ah, but the Negro is your Jew. Are you immune there?”

“Of course!” I shouted in disgust.

“Herr Miller, you’re a liar! You’re a self-deceiving liar!” He beat the pillar again. “This is your pillar, too. This is the pillar of Americans and Englishmen and Germans alike. I couldn’t have built this alone, you know.”

To my embarrassment his voice began to choke, as if he were going to burst into tears of confession. Then, thank heavens, he gained control of himself and rejoined me on the floor. It was now about two in the morning and in the flickering light of our Coleman lamp I could see his drawn face, weary yet driven to further revelation, and in some strange way he looked as he had that night in the square at Kandahar when he was condemning the dancers. I could hear his voice speaking the words but this time applying them somehow to his own history:
They’re cruel little sodomites. When they come to town they create a great evil.
What
ugly passage in his own life among the Nazis did that repeated phrase illuminate?

Toward four he got to the heart of his chronicle: “Finally, when we were winning the war on all fronts—it was 1941—they came to me and said, We’re looking for a director of research. Military problems of the gravest significance. Involved is the final destruction of England.’ What could I say? I was flattered.

“They gave me a fine laboratory in Munich. I could live at home.” He seemed to savor, here in the Afghan desert, those bright visions of a happy German home life in Munich. “I could live at home,” he explained persuasively, as if eager to convince me. “I had to take the job, you can see that. At first it was routine experiments on colds … very sensible, very productive. I believe they’re selling in America now a cold remedy that came from my researches. I convinced myself that I was helping win the war.

“I enjoyed other successes and then one day in 1943 they asked me to explore a purely theoretical question: How much cold can a human being tolerate? Now that’s a nice question. A very important one, militarily speaking.” He paused a long time to stare at the pillar, then laughed in a high-pitched giggle. “Without my knowing it, we were about to conduct pragmatic experiments on the same subject … at Stalingrad.” He laughed openly. Undoubtedly he had used the joke before.

“A fascinating medical question, Herr Miller,” he said reflectively. “How much cold can a human being tolerate? Yesterday, for example. You were very hot … thought you couldn’t take any more.
But Nazrullah said, ‘You can discipline yourself,’ and the thermometer rose fourteen degrees and you did discipline yourself. How much heat could you have stood? That’s a nice question. How much cold … I remember the exact phrasing because I wrote it down the day they posed it. You see, Herr Miller, I have a love for keeping records. Yesterday I could sympathize with John Pritchard when he said, ‘I must have the records.’ Because it is only from careful records that science can …” His voice broke and he dropped his head in his hands. His turban fell off and I could see the gray hairs on his stubbly head; I could see his shoulders moving up and down, silently. Finally he put his hand on my knee and said, “The English captured my records. I was meticulous. I was meticulous.”

For some minutes we said nothing, then he rose, overcome by a terrible emotion which I did not try to specify, and walked about the pillar several times, his mouth moving as if he were making a speech. The flickering light—the Coleman lamp gives a very white light and throws facial shadows in deep relief—made him look old. Suddenly he leaned against the pillar and issued a flood of words: “In the cage there was this Jew. About fifty years old, a fine human being. His name … you can check this in the records … was Sem Levin. I had tried all sorts of experiments and had proved what required to be proved, but I had not applied my findings to an average, healthy man like the older soldiers in our army. So I chose Sem Levin. I chose him right from a nondescript group in the cage. I told my aide, ‘That’s the man! Now we’ll see what’s what.’”

He hesitated. He could look from the pillar to where I sat and he must have seen the horror and revulsion rising in my face, but he could not silence himself. “Each morning we put Sem Levin completely naked into a room whose temperature could be exactly controlled. We dropped it lower and lower. After eight hours’ exposure we discharged him and he returned to the cage filled with nondescript Jews. At first he merely dressed and talked with them. Later, when he joined them blue with cold, two fat middle-aged Jewish women began caring for him. They took his frozen body and held it between them, as if he were a baby. Everyone in the cage who had clothes to spare piled them over the three Jews, the two fat women and shivering Sem Levin.

“I grew to hate this tough little Jew, because each time he entered that room he announced quietly, ‘I am still alive.’ And when he said this, the Jews cheered, no matter what we had done to them that day. ‘I am still alive.’ Now it became with them a matter of honor to keep him alive. They saved food for him. Massaged him. Stole medicine for him. And from their resolve he too became determined not to die.