Time's Arrow (17 page)

Considered as an institutional bridge, Schloss Hartheim was part of my winding down from the experience of the KZ
.
Apart from obvious differences in scale, there were close analogies. You found the same collegial spirit, with its masonic taciturnity and instinctive discretion, the same camaraderie and grit, the same alcohol reliance. I am positioned between the two chief medical officers and the fourteen nurses, seven male, seven female. This is not a convalescent home: no patient ever spends the night. Here

comes the bus with its tinted windows. It surges up into the grounds of the fabled castle, into the cold and weary magic of Schloss Hartheim.

It went like this, the sequence. Step one saw the arrival of a regulation urn of ashes, sent to us direct by the patient's family, who would also notify the Condolence-Letter Department in Berlin, with whom we worked in parallel. These ashes, in their small portions, were accompanied by the death certificates of distinct individuals; but ashes are just ashes, and they all look the same, and they went straight into the pot of the Hartheim incinerator. What was wrong? What was the matter? Were the ovens malfunctioning? Was the Chamber faulty? Because the people we produced just weren't any good anymore. All the wizardry and delirium, all the insomnia and diarrhea of Auschwitz—it was failing. Yes, that's right: the wards, the examination rooms, the silent gardens of Schloss Hartheim were heavy with a sense of failing magic. At first the patients really weren't that bad. Some little defect. Clubfoot. Cleft palate. But later they were absolutely hopeless. I try not to look at them closely, the patients, as I lead them in their paper bibs from the Chamber; I keep visualizing my own viscera, and there is something solid and man-made in there, like a lead pipe, snagged and dragging. Here, the gentle hesitancy of the blind. There, the lopsided, the scalene visage of the deaf. The white-haired lady looks nice but everything is wrong. The mad boy screams as he chases the male nurses down the damp corridors. The mad girl crouching in the corner with her frock up and the unforgivable substance coming from her mouth. There is such a thing, we say here, as life that is unworthy of life, and I don't know about that, but nobody wants them, not even us, and they leave here the same day for some other place, in the coach with the tinted windows.

Herta comes down to visit me as often as she can, which is not very often, because this is wartime, after all. We stay at the Gasthaus Drei Kronen on the Landstrasse near Linz, where I am impotent, and once we had a romantic weekend at the Hotel Gretchen in Vienna, where I was impotent. There is a small officers' annex in the village itself for me to be impotent at, and it is on this hygienic apartment that we increasingly depend. As time goes by, Herta seems more and more put out—by my impotence. She says I've changed but I don't think that's true. I've been impotent for as long as I can remember. She also upbraids me about the work I am engaged in at Schloss Hartheim. There are rumors in the village, there is gossip—latrine talk. She has got it all wrong, but then, too, I pooh-pooh her less grandly than I might. We hold hands across the table in the coffee shop. We part. Later in the dusk I entertain a perplexed perfecto as I walk back up the hill to the castle, to Schloss Hartheim. Above its archways and gables the evening sky is full of our unmentionable mistakes, hydrocephalic clouds and the wrongly curved palate of the west, and the cinders of our fires. I can see a lock of snow-white human hair drifting upward, then joining the more elliptical and elemental rhythm of the middle air. Tonight there'll be a party in the basement at the Schloss to mark the arrival of our five thousandth patient (though I'm sure we've had many, many more than that), with Manfred on accordion: songs, toasts, pink party hats. Christian Wirth, our roving director, will be there: his belly, his colorful language, his exploded drinker's face. Patient Five Thousand will also be present, in paper hat (and paper shirt), suspended in its journey between fire and gas, awaiting its span of deformity, hallucination, and constant itching. ... He walks on, alone, Odilo Unverdorben.

—————

Fully alone.

I who have no name and no body—I have slipped out from under him and am now scattered above like flakes of ash-blonde human hair. No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart—and then he put them back together again. For a while it worked (there was redemption); and while it worked he and I were one, on the banks of the Vistula. He put
us
back together. But of course you shouldn't be doing any of this kind of thing with human beings. . . . The party is over. He lies there in the peeling pyramid of the attic bedroom, on his cot shaped like a gutter. A damp pink pillow is twisted in his fists. I'll always be here. But he's on his own.

7

She loves me, she loves me not

The world has stopped making sense

again, and Odilo forgets everything

again (which is probably just as

well), and the war is over now (and it

 seems pretty clear to me that we lost

it), and life goes on for a little while.

Odilo is innocent. His dreams are innocent, purged of menace and sickness. Oh, sure, he quivers on slippery poles as tall as the moon is high, and lopes nude down tunnels while alarm clocks sound, etc.—but there are no worrying resonances. And, as against that, his sleep savors many vulgar triumphs with treasure chests and locks of hair and sleeping beauties. And toilet bowls. The tutelary spirit of these dreams is no longer the man in the white coat and the black boots: it is a woman, a woman the size and shape of a galleon's sail, who can forgive him everything. My hunch is that this woman is his mother, and I'm anxious to know when she's going to show up. Odilo is innocent. Odilo is, it turns out, innocent, emotional, popular, and stupid.

Also potent. He has no power whatever, of course, and does his stuff in the Reserve Medical Corps with impeccable ovinity. But he's potent. Ask little Herta, who will defeat-edly attest to it. She can barely walk. National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology. Odilo is a doctor: a biological soldier. So this two-year orgy we're having must form part of his personal campaign. He's on active service; he smells powder; he's going over the top for the baby. Yes, they still want one, even though Eva was such a disappointment. When Odilo has Herta on the bed, splayed and buckled, with her ankles on either side of the headboard, it's as if he's trying to kill something rather than create it. But we all know by now that violence creates, here on earth. Never before have we been so potent, not even in New York when we were combing nurses out of our hair. Herta sometimes looks as though she could do with the odd impotent interlude. But there aren't any. What made the difference, I wonder? After Schloss Hartheim, which seemed to go on forever, the three of us moved out of her parents' house and came down here to Munich and its Alpine air  Away from

Herta's childhood room, away from the angels on the walls that used to watch over her. Here, in our apartment, we have a skeleton watching over us, made of white wood, and anatomical drawings loud with ginger meat.

The German girl is a natural girl. She comes just as she is. With no makeup and hairy legs. This is okay by Odilo. In fact he forbids the use of cosmetics, even soap; and as for her hair and down, her crackling armpits, her upper locks and lower wreath—Herta, I suspect, could be woollier than any yak and still keep Odilo happy. He calls her his
Schimpanse:
his chimpanzee. I have to say that I'm mad about her too. Herta's body gossips with youth. Her ears are like cookies, her teeth are like candy. Her flesh is as taut as the flesh of an olive. At first she wasn't so keen, always complaining of tiredness or soreness or emotional unease; but these days, as Odilo says again and again to all his friends (and the compliment, I think, is pitched decorously high), she bangs like a shithouse door in a gale. Herta is so small that it seems natural to be quite strict with her. She is eighteen. And getting smaller all the time. One mustn't give in to pessimism, and it's pointless to look too far ahead, but in a couple of years she won't even be legal.

It's very sweet. Now that the wedding nears, Odilo is altogether gentler. He has stopped having tantrums. No longer is his chimpanzee required to do the housework naked, and on all fours. Herta responds with gratitude, and with an apparently unbounded tenderness, never seen before. . . . Erotic rapture, it transpires, is in a sense a reptilian condition. The higher mind, the soul, the princes of the faculties—they absent themselves. And so, too, most emphatically, does the reptile brain. Let me think about it. When reptile brains get together, they want to do harm from a position of safety. But when it's just their b dies, they

seem to want to do good, and close up, with maximum risk to the self. I don't know. I'm still there, in their bed, and I like it; but the oozy ecstasy belongs to Odilo, that glistening lizard, and to Herta, that glistening lizardess, in their world of succulent slime, where no words are necessary: you just croak and hum. . . . Their love life is steadily divesting itself of all irregularities. For instance, they used to play a kind of game (about twice a week, or rather more often if Odilo put his foot down), where she must lie still and show no sign of life, throughout. Similarly, he used to take a healthy interest in his wife's bowel movements, as is meet. But that's all behind him now. When she weeps and sulks, he dries her tears with kisses, and not with a punch in the breasts. And nowadays she hardly cries at all: the wedding is only weeks away. Less and less often, though still pretty regularly (say most nights), Odilo quits his pact of reptiles and, with enthusiasm, seeks his herds of friends: their strength in musky numbers, their heat of hide and stall. We shout and we drool, with the distorted faces of babies; individually we have no power or courage, but together we form a glowing mass. Often the night's play begins with us going out and helping Jews. Odilo, Herta, and I are officially on our honeymoon now but in fact we're going nowhere. Except back to Berlin, for the wedding.

My
position on the Jews has always been without ambiguity. I like them. I am, I would say, one of nature's philo-Semites. It's their eyes I particularly admire. That glossy, heated look. An exoticism that points toward the transcendent—who knows? Anyway, why talk about their
qualities?
I am childless; but the Jews are my children and I love them as a parent should, which is to say that I don't love them for their qualities (remarkable as these seem to me to be, naturally), and only wish them to exist, and to flourish, and to have their right to life and love.

I remember names and faces, names I heard called at dawn gatherings in town squares, or by empty fuel pits and antitank ditches, or under the light of policemen's bonfires, or in waiting zones, in train stations, in green fields at night. And names I saw on printed lists, quotas, manifests. Lonka and Mania, and Zonka and Netka, Liebish, Feigele, Aizik, Yaacov, Motl, and Matla, and Zipora, and Margalit. Back from Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz, from Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Theresienstadt, from Buchenwald and Belsen and Majdanek, from Belzec, from Chelmno, from Treblinka, from Sobibor.

The sick smile that Odilo sported throughout his wedding day seems, in retrospect, all too appropriate. I kept seeing this leer of his, the leer of a wary yokel, reflected in the numerous little mirrors set around Herta's marriage crown (traditional: to ward off evil spirits, and so on). Yes, his smile was a good commentary on the occasion; ditto the painfully explosive backslaps delivered by his many new men friends. How else should a person look, while, in the course of a single ceremony, he kisses everything goodbye—just blows it all away in a prodigal storm of confetti and rice? She gave me the wreath of myrtle, the saffron and cinnamon, the bread, the butter, and the rest of it. And I gave her all my power. We switched our rings from the fourth finger of the left hand to the fourth finger of the right. They said it was an auspicious marriage moon: it was rising. But I could see that the moon above my head was really on the wane. Hence the  unbearable  blows  to  back  and  shoulder.   Hence  the coprophagic smile. Hence Herta's triumphal laughter.

She delightedly moves back into her parents' house, and lies there, among golden-winged angels. And Odilo? Where are
our
parents, for Christ's sake? Suddenly I'm in a five-floor boardinghouse, turbid with cabbage and gym shoes,

sharing an attic with Rolf and Reinhard and Rüdiger and Rudolph, and living a nightmare, an
Alpdruck,
of towel fights and textbooks and jokes about courtship and corpses. That's right: I'm at med school. In the New Germany too, and feeling rather jumpy and furtive along with everybody else. Even the streets are like a dorm these days, with much peer-group pressure and unpredictably intense scrutiny, adolescent, unpleasant, sexual but sexually obscure or half-formed, and made up of ridiculous postures no one is allowed to laugh at. Laugh at these ridiculous postures, and everybody will want to kill you. How fortunate that I am unkillable. Unkillable, but not immortal. What happened to our manhood?

It could be worse, because we still see Herta every day, at the school: she's a tight-skirted secretary in Superintendence. I often get ten minutes with her in a corridor, and sit quite near her table in the cafeteria, and there's a stairwell where we go and kiss—where we breathe into one another. Apart from that it's park benches and dark archways. Mickey Mouse sniggers and Greta Garbo averts her pained gaze from our mortified writhings on the shallow fur of cinema seats. We cling close in the safety of crowds under streetlights and torchlights. During certain ten-minute intervals in her parents' front room, while they set out the filthy plates for dinner, I have achieved much . . . Also on our spring and summer picnics. Among the delphinium, the snapdragon, the hollyhock, and the sweet pea, on a blanket, by a basket, she will grant me a nostalgic caress—always followed, on Odilo's part, by hours of sniveling entreaty. Where once we ruled, now we serve. His most prosperous theme is that the frustration is damaging his health. Another thing that usually works is the naming of flowers, in English. The woods embolden her. The German girl is a natural gir . Odilo is