After lunch I returned to my room where Stephen Brandywine foundme crunched up trying to concentrate on one of the books on physical anthropology.
I took one look at Steve and realized something had gone wrong.
He asked me to come to his room.
And once there, he opened a panel in his wall and, flashlight in hand, escorted me through the curved passageway that ran along the outside skin of the Quonset building. The passageway was small, angled, and cramped, but it was usable. Eventually, we emerged in a storage room and a door which opened into the kitchen. BJ was guarding the door into the kitchen.
I looked past him to see the man called Stanislaus Petoski – alone in the kitchen – cutting vegetables at almost inhuman speeds.
I had expected that.
He was totally unaware of our existence. He had gone over the edge.
I had expected that as well.
It had only been a matter of time. I knew that posture. And, God help me, I knew what it all meant.
I started forward only to find myself gripped from behind.
“You can't go in there – not yet. Christ, I can't get through to him at all.”
I wrenched free and turned to face him – both of us whispering. “Who the hell do you think you're talking to, Henderson? I told you and told you that this would happen.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Yes, I know you did, Brooklyn. That's why I had Stephen bring you. Can you do anything for that man in there? Do you know what the hell you're getting into, Brooklyn?”
“Yes, I know. Leave it up to me. But I have to handle it alone – entirely alone.” I felt rather than saw BJ stiffen, “Let me tell you something else, Henderson. If you leave that poor man go on as he is, neither of us will be able to do anything. He'll be beyond our help. Who in the hell had the bright idea to make him a vegetable slice?”
“He did. He convinced us that he could do the work.”
“You're all idiots. You're criminally stupid.” I was shaking with anger, but I knew I had to control my own anger if I was going to be able to help the man in the kitchen. I had to force myself into tranquility.
“I'm going back in there, BJ, and I'll handle him. I've grown up handling him. Now get the hell out of my way.”
By an act of sheer will, I began to steady myself.
I stepped back into the kitchen and took a deep breath – then another deep breath. It was, I reminded myself, a thoroughly familiar situation. It was a situation I had known how to handle instinctively that first time when I was five and alone in the house with papa. All of us kids had grown up knowing just what to do. But this man was not my father. I didn't know if I could get through to him.
So, I started talking slowly and quietly – holding a monologue in Yiddish. It didn't matter what I said. At least not in the beginning. I knew it only mattered that I kept talking – that I established a pace, that I slowly, very slowly, reached the mind of the man with the knife who was now slicing at those infernal vegetables so quickly that I couldn't even begin to follow the movement of his hands. He was no longer a man. He was a machine, and the man locked up somewhere inside the machine was balanced precariously on the edge of madness.
I talked and talked and talked. Then, slowly, I moved around to where I could see his eyes. And I kept talking. It felt like I had talked for hours.
I knew it had only been about twenty minutes.
I knew at just what moment he became aware of my existence.
I knew when he began to register the words and later when he began to understand what I was saying.
I just kept talking. I talked about my father and my mother. I talked about my brother in Israel, and how he raised cows on a farm in the Negev. I talked about how his wife was going to have a baby, and if it was a boy they were going to name him Nachum after my grandfather, may his remembrance be for a blessing, who had died in the camps. I talked about my sister, and my one month old niece Bracha Leah whom I had never met. I talked about the future and never about the past. And I talked about the little ordinary things in life – the peaceful things. Gradually, very gradually, the hand holding the knife began to slow – to come to rest.
His eyes were no longer glazed over. He was seeing me. He was seeing the kitchen in the DEW Line, and not some work room in a World War II forced labor camp.
“Thank you, Naomi Solomon.” He said with a gallant middle European gesture compounded equally of thanks and self-mockery. “It seems that I am a failure as Stanislaus Petoski.”
“His name is Mordechai Levi.” BJ pronounced the “Mordechai” long and strung out with the accent on the last syllable and the “ch” sounding for all the world like a straightforward uncomplicated cotton bowl “ck.” Pronounced that way, “Mordechai” was the name of a shopkeeper in a David Crocket rerun.
“Mordechai was born in a small town in Latvia and survived, God knows how, in a camp called Ponary.” BJ explained. “The Nazis gassed his parents, three younger siblings, and just about everyone else in the world he had any claim to call kin. He was just nineteen when the war ended in 1945. I saw the photos – he looked seventy years old and three weeks dead. There was nothing left on him for the worms. Does that answer some of your questions, Brooklyn?”
“It answers a few. Where did he get his scientific training?”
“Most of it from one of his co workers in the camp. The older man was a Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry from Vienna and, while they were both working on the machines, the older man taught Mordechai everything he knew. You understand it was all done verbally. They had no paper. Mordechai still doesn't use paper for his calculations. Everything is in his mind.”
I nodded. “It's a mental trick. One of the games people used to remain sane. In the camps there were any number of tricks to remain sane.”
“In Mordechai Levi's case it was something more than a trick, Brooklyn. Mordechai is, without a doubt, one of the great minds of our time.”
“What does that matter?” I said. “He might have been the absolute greatest mind of all times, but still, if he hadn't had the trick of doing calculations in his head while still working the machines at inhuman speeds, he'd have been gassed like everyone else.”
“The older man, his teacher, was gassed late in 1943. and for the rest of the war Mordechai sat at the machine – a punch press in his case – and concentrated on staying alive. And that's all he did do – stay alive. Lord knows how. The Russians got him after the war and he managed to impress them just enough to get into the university for a year or two. I don't think the Russians ever realized how valuable he was as a scientist – I don't think he ever let them know. He did just enough to stay in school. On the side, he became something of a poet.”
“And” I added. “By the late forties Stalin was systematically eliminating virtually all Jewish thinkers and poets – those that had survived Hitler.”
“At least you know your history, Brooklyn, and you're not a revisionist.”
“I know too damn much to be a revisionist, BJ. That's why I joined up.”
“Fortunately, Mordechai Levi was a very minor poet, and the Russians were content to incarcerate him in a forced labor camp in Siberia in 1948. That's one thing Mordechai was very good at – surviving in forced labor camps. He was a pro. What an obscene waste of human resources. It's like having Albert Einstein cleaning latrines for Attila the Hun. Mordechai survived that camp for almost two years.”
“How did he get out, BJ? They didn't release him did they? I mean they didn't release anybody until maybe 1954.”
“No, they didn't release him. He escaped.”
“Escaped from Siberia?”
“You wouldn't think it of him, would you, Brooklyn, but that frail wisp of a man is strong. Apparently he'd been sent out on an errand from the camp mines shortly before the shaft collapsed, killing everyone inside. He realized, of course, that he was presumed dead, and he figured that it was going to be his one and only chance to escape. Just then they weren't looking for him – at least not among the living. They were digging out the bodies. He was able to smuggle himself out in the bed of one of the trucks, and afterwards he walked and rode the rails to Mongolia where he crossed over to Japan on a fishing vessel. The border wasn't as tight then as it is today.”
“Did he make himself known to the Americans?”
“Almost immediately. He was pretty well played out, but he had the sense to request political asylum. I don't suppose our knuckleheads in Japan would have listened except that he managed to convince one of them that he was a valuable Soviet scientist with a host of secrets.”
“But, it wasn't true, was it, BJ?”
“No, it wasn't true, but it damn well could have been. In Washington they figured out the con, but by then it was largely academic. They recognized the quality of Mordechai's mind, and they weren't about to let the Russians have him back. They just set him to work, quietly, with a lab of his own.
After that he began to live a curious sort of half-life. I understand some withdrawal from the world is common for World War II survivors. Mordechai certainly withdrew. He married another survivor in 1952 and they had two children. She suicided five years later. Those children have kept him alive – those children and his work. There hasn't been room in his life for anything else. The son has gone into cancer research, and the daughter is getting her Ph.D. at MIT in physics. The daughter gave him his first grandchild a year ago, and I understand the son's wife is expecting early in September. Mordechai Levi lives for those children, and for science. I don't suppose there is anything else that exists for him anymore.”
I doubted that. If that had been true, Mordechai would have found himself a safe nesting place in some university. He wouldn't be slicing carrots at a DEW Line base in the Arctic. “Should I have heard of him? Does he publish?”
“No, he doesn't. Other people publish his work under their names. Only the people who need to know who he is, know who he is.”
Yes, I thought. He was one of Bill Schmidt's frail little men in the back room.
“For the rest, Mordechai is not a man who craves recognition, Brooklyn. He doesn't want to attract attention to himself. He has an absolute horror of people in groups of more than two or three. He is a very private person.”
“So what's he doing at Foxe Five, BJ? Given his history, Mordechai Levi probably also has an absolute horror of uniforms.”
“Brooklyn, he's been involved directly and indirectly in the Defense Department for thirty years.”
“But he wasn't working with soldiers in uniform, was he?”
“No, for the most part he's been our adviser on Soviet activities in his field. He reads their papers and interprets them for us. And, of course, he does his own research independently of the military. But Brooklyn, he has worked with soldiers – he's learned to live with them. And he is probably the only person alive capable of completing this test work. Believe me, if it had been at all possible, I would have packed one of his disciples up here in his stead. Mordechai is a hell of a lot too valuable to risk unnecessarily.”
“Disciples?”
“You know what I mean. The average American university is overrun with disciples. No matter how withdrawn from the world, a man like Mordechai will always attract disciples. But Mordechai doesn't communicate well. He's always been a man who works within the confines of his own mind, and none of the disciples knew enough about what made ARTHUR tick to be of real use up here. Mordechai had to be at Foxe Five to run the tests. There was never an effective choice. But Brooklyn, it was his idea to work in the kitchens.”
I nodded. “Yes, I could see how he would have chosen the kitchens. They have a curious sort of pride – the work camp survivors. Here he is – a scrawny little Jew and he can still physically out work the rest of your crew. He thought he could do the work, but he can't, BJ. I managed to pull him through this time, but he's very near the breaking point.”
“He says the tests will be done within a week.”
“He won't last out the week slicing vegetables. That's what I'm trying to tell you, Henderson. You just can't understand the psychological pressures that are building up in that man. He's doing machine like work in an isolated military camp with uniforms and guns all around him.”
“You're exaggerating Brooklyn. Mordechai, whatever his war experiences, has never cracked up before. And he's had the opportunity. He's been under constant pressure. He hasn't been hibernating all these years in some co ed college in Vermont. For Christ sake, Naomi, he's been working with the Defense Department.”
“Yes, but that was in the abstract. He was fighting them. He knew how bad they were. He probably never really understood that our guys wore uniforms and carried guns too. Sure he knows the difference – at least he did in the beginning. But every time he starts slicing away at those damned vegetables he's transported back to another time and another place. And let’s face it, BJ, Foxe Five looks like a World War II military camp. In fact, Foxe Five is a World War Two military camp.”
BJ had stood and was pacing the room. “Correction, Brooklyn, there's no barbed wire, and damned few guns at Foxe Five.”
“So, what if most of the barbed wire and the guns are in Mordechai's mind? What difference does that make? It doesn't make them less real. BJ, his body can slice vegetables – his mind can't. Mordechai is walking on a tightrope. One wrong step and he'll fall into madness.”
“All human beings walk a tightrope, Naomi. It's what distinguishes us from the apes.”
“That's true. But there is a difference in degree. Surely you'll grant me that much. I understand Mordechai because I was raised with his obsessions – his fears. My fears are less obvious because my abyss is less profound. I am one generation removed from the camps. But you and your guys in Langley can't be expected to understand Mordechai Levi at all.”
“Why the hell not? Is there some monopoly on understanding? Do you have to have a name like Solomon or Greenberg and be raised in Brooklyn to understand Mordechai Levi?”
I thought about that for a long moment. “Yes, BJ, I think you do,” I said quietly. “I don't think that people whose parents belong to the Daughters of the American Revolution can know what Mordechai's kind of fear is.”
“Not the Daughters of the American Revolution. My mother is a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.”
I tried for a smile. “It goes without saying that they can't understand.”
BJ didn't think I was funny.
“OK, BJ, so I'm a bigot. You think I have this unreasoned prejudice against anyone with blue eyes. Perhaps I did but you've gone a long way toward reeducating me – you and Phyll. I had never even met anyone like either of you before. But that has nothing to do with Mordechai Levi, does it? He doesn't come from a world of plantations and mint juleps. He comes from a world where people had to worry about their day to day physical survival.”
“Christ Almighty, do you realize who the hell you're talking to, Brooklyn? I worry about my physical survival every minute of every day. I'm an agent for the CIA. People try to kill me regularly. It's part of my job description.”
“They don't try to kill everyone, you know.”
“They sure as hell try to kill most of the people I associate with.”
“Well, that explains one thing.”
“What?”
“It explains why the romance of the century has gone underground. Why you are no longer meeting me in public.”
“I would have never met you in public, if you hadn't done that damn fool thing and come to the DEW Line. You're a congenital idiot.”
There was a knock at the door and, like magic, the romance of the century was on again. I was in BJ's arms, his body was ram rod tense, but the lazy drawl was firmly in place, “Yeah, who is it?”
“Stanislaus Petoski.”
I felt BJ relax, hug me to him for a moment, and then lean over to open the door.
Mordechai came into the room. He seemed to have recovered from his ordeal or, at least, he had recovered something of a sense of humor. “Am I disturbing something?”
BJ grinned, “Only the romance of the century. Have you been formally introduced to Brooklyn? Naomi Solomon this is Mordechai Levi. Mordechai Levi – Naomi Solomon. Shake hands, you'll be working together.”
Mordechai smiled and took my hand. “Naomi will make a welcome change from you and Steven. She is much prettier.”
“Smarter too.” BJ said. “This is one brainy broad. Too brainy for her own good. She's suggested you retire from the assignment, Mordechai.”
Mordechai shrugged the suggestion aside. “Naomi has not seen me at my best – at my most competent. But I cannot leave until the work on ARTHUR is completed. That would be unconscionable.”
“Is ARTHUR that important?” I asked.
He looked at me closely – weighing and evaluating what he knew of Naomi Solomon. “Yes, ARTHUR is that important. But, God willing, the work will be completed in a matter of days. One cannot rush these things.”
“Then at least take a sick leave and retire from your work in the kitchen. Say you've got the flu. Surely you can do that.” I said.
BJ reached back into his pocket for a cigarette. “Yes, we can arrange that. I've even got a pill or two that will counterfeit the symptoms. We'll have one of the nurses in to treat you. We've established the cover, and we can let you have a week off with no significant loss of credibility.”
“What of the kitchen work?” Mordechai asked.
“I'll get them to volunteer a few of the soldier boys for the week. The DEW Line has the mechanisms in place for dealing with illness.”
Mordechai thought this through for a few minutes. “Very well. I'll retire from active service as a kitchen assistant. If Naomi had not been there this afternoon, you might have had a truly mad scientist on your hands. Again, I thank you,” And he held out his hand to me – a curious blend of Yankee forthrightness and European courtliness.
It was BJ who lightened the atmosphere. “Sure thing, Brooklyn. I thank you too – for the nation, so to speak.”