CHAPTER THREE

Sheereen

Here is the recipe for heavy water:

Take 5,700 teacups of ordinary tap water. Put in bowl. Put enough electric current through to electrolyze down to 1 teacup.

“It looks just like regular water,” I said to Krupinsky.

“It isn’t, though.”

I knew that. It was now enriched deuterium oxide. “What would happen if I drank it?”

“You could try a small amount, I suppose, but if you drank a large amount, mostly you’d die.” Krupinsky poured it into a flask, corked it, and put it into a cupboard.

One then had to electrolyze the heavy water again in order to separate the heavy hydrogen from the oxygen, then feed the deuterium gas into a near vacuum in which there is a high-powered electrical field. This will make ions out of the deuterium, and then one feeds the ions into the linear accelerator, D ions, deuterons. I had to learn this and much more before Professor Kreutzer, six weeks later, would take me into that central room which housed the linear accelerator: the Radiation Laboratory.

I have lost track of the chronology of my education at the Institute. They crammed my brain with information: the anatomy of the fruit fly—how to tell the males from the females, the virgins from the egg-layers, one species or subspecies from another. I learned dosimetry, the accurate measuring of doses. I learned to handle radioactive material, to work with high-tension equipment, to make and use Geiger counters, to cook polenta in the kitchen in the little greenhouse off our second-floor wing, and so much more.

My education was broad, deep, concentrated, and thoroughly disorganized. For example, one afternoon the first week, after we were finished with the sorting of the fruit flies, the Chief ran into our lab, pulled a dead frog from his pocket, and placed it on the dissecting table of my microscope. Beside it he placed a scalpel, scissors, and tweezers.

“See what’s inside,” he said. And he began to pace.

I took the scalpel, and very generously I slit the frog open as one does a fish he wishes to fry. All the guts spilled out, and I had an excellent view of the interior. I was pleased. The Chief walked back and forth behind me as I poked about in the frog’s insides.

“Notice,” he said, as he paced. “Notice how carefully he uses the scissors and the knife to open the skin of the frog to expose air sacs. Notice how carefully he dissects several layers of muscle to enable him to identify the nerves and blood vessels, and then notice how he discovers another membrane, the peritoneum, and opens that up.”

Everyone in the laboratory came over to my table to notice: Krupinsky, Marlene, Monika, several scientists from Mantle who were using the counting equipment.

The Chief pulled another frog from his pocket, dropped it onto the table of my microscope, and left. Everyone wandered back to what he was doing before, except Marlene. She stayed and tried to comfort me by patting my arm. I wanted her to go away so I could concentrate on the dissection. But she was still there when Sonja Press returned with a zoology book written in English. Sonja pulled up another chair to my table and leafed through the book, showing me the various pictures and charts.

“You see, Josef? It has much information about frogs and other animals. And the English language should not be at all difficult for someone of your intelligence—it is so similar to German. I could help you, if you wish.”

“Thank you very much. I would appreciate that.” Having studied English in high school, I could read it passably, especially in science where the words were almost the same. Of course, I didn’t tell her.

“Study this tonight, and then tomorrow I can go over any questions you have.”

“That would be quite helpful.”

She smiled at me. “Shall we meet for lunch at noon in the cafeteria?”

Marlene had stood there the whole time, and when Sonja left, she asked me if I would like to go with her to the darkroom to take a photocopy of a page in a book. Actually, what I wanted to do was read as much of the zoology book as I could before I met Sonja the next day so I could amaze her with my brilliance. But I was curious about the darkroom and went along with Marlene, thinking it wouldn’t take long.

It was a large room on the third floor, a photographic studio as well as a darkroom. There were no windows, the door was extra-heavy, and one could pull a thick black drape over it to ensure darkness. Consequently, the room was also soundproof. Marlene locked the door so we would not be disturbed.

I was beginning to get the picture, and I was uncomfortable.

This first visit to the darkroom occurred my second or third day at the Institute, and I was unable at that time to see the irony in my fear of the secondary stage of syphilis while still feeling my own death inevitably imminent. Marlene had suspicious sore pimples on her face; most likely, they were not syphilitic rashes but only adolescent acne. However, one couldn’t be sure.

There were several cameras. Marlene used one mounted on a table that was aimed at a frame. She opened the book, placed it on the frame, adjusted some lighting, put a plate into the camera, and took the picture. She forgot to turn the red light on before switching off the others, and she said, “Oh, excuse me, Josef,” when she gave me a full frontal bump in the dark. I jumped away from her, and all the while she was developing I stood in a far corner, feeling wretched and cowardly.

Aside from my concern with the ‘unclean,’ I thought her most unattractive. Furthermore, I am sensitive to odors and hers was not pleasant to me.

I was in a no-win situation. If to be ‘honorable’ is—as my mother insisted—to avoid sex, and at the same time, to be polite, it was an impossible paradox. I was being incredibly impolite. But all I could think of was the book by Lombroso Mother gave me when I was twelve. It was called Genius and Insanity and described the grotesque syphilitic suffering of the romantic poets and musicians, and of Nietzsche, and of the homosexual officers of the Swedish army. And I was thinking about Fromm’s Akt.

They were the most popular brand of condom and were sold in the men’s rooms in railway stations, in vending machines which had on them cartoons of frowsy, overfed women with low-cut blouses, big breasts, and gumma here and there. The caption read: MEN. PROTECT YOURSELVES WITH FROMM’S AKT—50 PFENNIG.

When I was very young, I had a stupid fantasy. I thought the bad women Mother was always talking about were actually raping young boys, whatever that meant, and that one needed Fromm’s Akt to somehow protect oneself. After I was in high school—when I was nine or so—the other boys set me straight.

It took quite some time to develop the film, and I was annoyed that I couldn’t leave the room without ruining the negative. Krupinsky kept a German-English dictionary in our lab, and I wanted to get at it.

As we were leaving the darkroom, Marlene said to me, “If it is because you think I am a virgin, you are wrong.”

That hadn’t even occurred to me.

Outside the door, the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco was waiting with a blond girl from Chemistry. She waved a book at us to demonstrate that they, too, needed photocopies.

His wife was a brunette from Brain Research.

Those first six weeks at the Institute, I did not even try to sleep much. I wanted to be prepared when Professor Kreutzer tested me on the journals he gave me daily. Most of the articles were on the measuring of radiation—but much to my surprise, he never even asked if I had read them. He just assumed I had. I was not treated like a student or laboratory assistant, but more like a new young scientist. And I wanted to study the assignments in biology and genetics from the Chief. I understood most of what they gave me, concentrating hard until I fell asleep over my books at night and rising early in order to arrive at the Institute in time to work with my microscope for an hour or so before anyone else came in. I hated each evening when I had to leave the Technicolor world of the Institute to descend into the gray and brown of the other Berlin—of my parents’ house or my uncle’s slum.

Uncle Otto and Aunt Greta’s apartment was in a heavily bombed area near Alexanderplatz, across the street from the central vegetable and fruit market where the farmers brought their produce. It was a neighborhood where the poorest people lived, and it was dirty and crime-infested.

When my grandfather Josef Jacoby died, before I was born, Uncle inherited the family’s furniture factory and an entire block of apartment buildings in a good residential section of Berlin. However, in 1938 the Nazis ‘aryanized’ his assets, and now he and Aunt Greta were crowded into two wretched rooms with what remained of the Jacoby family library, silver, and china. They existed on his reduced veteran’s pension and on whatever my father could send each week.

I remember his first apartment. It was large and comfortable. And since he owned the building, he had a room in the basement where, each spring, he made his own wine for Passover. Aunt Greta, for the first seder, roasted a goose, delectable, with crackling crisp skin. And the liver! Roasted goose and pâté de fois gras Strasbourg. Truffles. Mother’s family had moved from Strasbourg to Berlin after the First World War and did not join a synagogue, although Uncle Otto had attended services now and then. Because they did not officially affiliate with the Jewish community, we were not on the lists the Jewish leaders in Berlin so kindly handed over to the Nazis. So it took Adolf Hitler longer to catch up with us. Grandmother and Grandfather Jacoby, “may they rest in peace,” as Aunt Greta always said, both died of natural causes before Adolf Hitler came to power.

After my first day at the Institute, when I delivered that stinking salami on the way home, the shock of the difference in the ambience was so overwhelming that I splurged one mark of the food money on daffodils for my aunt. With the remaining four marks I was able to buy two kilos of old potatoes, one of wrinkled apples, one of sauerkraut, two bananas, one piece of ersatz nut torte, and two newspapers. There was more money from Father in a sealed envelope, but that was to cover their expenses for the week. I was never told the amount. In my own defense, I must say that it was the flowers that most delighted Aunt Greta and that the corn polenta and molasses from the Institute more than made up for them.

Their building was suffocating from the fetid air, an accumulation of putrid cabbage, rancid fat, and years and years of mold from the damp Berlin climate. Holding my breath as much as possible, I climbed the four flights, and before I could even knock, there they were, the door thrown open, two smiling faces. Uncle patted my back and tried to take some of the packages, but I would not let him. He wore a brace from his chin to his tailbone. Extra ribs in his neck caused him severe pain. I took the bundles into the kitchen, lifted the daffodils out of the bag, and presented them, with a little bow, to Aunt. She threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. I had to bend way over—Aunt Greta was so short. She had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.

“We are so happy to see you, Josef,” she said. “We were a little worried. It is so late, but now you are here.”

They had no way of knowing that I no longer attended high school, which was out by one and was only three S-Bahn stations from their shop. The Institute’s workday ended at six and it was an hour’s commute to Alexanderplatz. I did not tell them, that day, of the change, although for their peace of mind I mentioned it several weeks later. But, all along, I spoke very little to anyone about the Institute.

My coming must have been the event of the week. It wasn’t just the food; that was important, of course. But they didn’t have a radio—Jews were not allowed to have radios—and Uncle Otto was always anxious to hear the latest war news. So each week I would bring him two newspapers: the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung—DAZ—and a French daily, Le Matin.

Aunt stayed in the kitchen to put the food away, and Uncle and I settled in the Berliner Zimmer, a living room peculiar to that type of building, with three doors, one to the entry hallway, one to the bedroom, and the other to the kitchen. The bathroom was half a flight down the stairs and shared with the other three apartments on that floor. Uncle sat on a couch that had seen better days and I on a chair by their small dining table, which was placed in front of the only window in the apartment. Since it was dark outside, the blackout curtain was drawn.

“Ah,” said Uncle, scanning the front page of DAZ and laughing. “I see that the ‘victorious German Army’ is again ‘straightening out the front’ in a ‘victorious retreat.’” The Russians had recovered Stalingrad two and a half months before, in February, and were continuing to drive the Germans out. Even the twisted, insane news articles couldn’t hide the facts. “It shouldn’t be long now before the Russians are in Berlin.”

“I don’t know, Uncle. From what I understand, the German Army is recovering in the spring mud on the Russian Front, and the Allies are having heavy losses to German submarines in the Atlantic.”

“That’s just propaganda. You can’t believe anything they say.”

“No, I think it’s true.”

“How do you know this? Josef, you haven’t been listening to shortwave?” He searched my face. “You mustn’t. Remember what happened to your Uncle Philip.”

Uncle Otto looked so worried that I lied. “No, of course not, Uncle. You are right. If one reads between the lines the news is looking better.”

“Look what our dear nephew has brought us.” Aunt Greta appeared from the kitchen holding up the cone of newspaper with the cornmeal in one hand and the flask of molasses with the other. “We will have quite a feast. You must stay to dinner, Josef. I insist.”

“Thank you very much, Aunt, but I can’t. It’s late and Mother will be worried.” It was absolutely taboo to eat at anyone’s house and take up their rations. Aunt Greta, who had been jolly and plump, was so wasted that her skin hung in folds. She was forty and looked twenty years older.

She went back through the kitchen door and returned with the daffodils in a white vase. “I’ll put these right here.” She placed them on the table with the black drape as background. Then she sat down on the sofa next to my uncle, and they held hands.

“I’d really better go. I have a lot of homework.” That was the truth. I wanted to read the stacks of material given to me by the Chief and Professor Kreutzer.

“Why were you so late?” Uncle asked worriedly.

“I was working on a new science project.” Also the truth, more or less. I pointed to the books and journals that I couldn’t fit into my rucksack. To change the subject, I said, “Aunt, I’ll need that flask back.”

She jumped up and went into the kitchen. I followed her to avoid further interrogation and watched her empty the molasses into a bowl, then boil a little water to swish out the residue—not a drop wasted. I wanted to return the flask to Krupinsky in the morning.

The people in my lab usually drifted in about nine, continuing the discussion they had started over tea in the cafeteria. It was always about the war. Krupinsky saw an early end in every Allied action, and his daily news analysis was hopeful, loud, and couched in a framework of sexual banter: “Hey, Josef, did you know that the condoms they issue the S.S. are perforated? And when the Americans come and get hold of them, what will that do to the Master Race?”

Amid such chatter, the daily sorting of the newly hatched flies began. Since the work was mechanical and needed no thought, the dialogue could continue throughout the morning. But one morning at the end of my first six weeks, Krupinsky was quiet. Unusual. Marlene was telling me, as we sorted the flies, about her problem in hearing BBC the night before. Most people in our wing tried to catch the news each night on England’s German-language broadcast. It was, of course, highly illegal to listen to this and quite dangerous if one was caught.

“Bad reception,” Marlene said.

“Why don’t you try at night the normal medium waves and not rely on the shortwaves?” I said to her.

Krupinsky looked up from his silent sorting as Marlene and I talked, then asked me to join him at the far end of the lab where the Geiger counters were stored. He was most obviously depressed and spoke in a voice so low I hardly could hear him. “I don’t understand how this stuff works.” He waved a limp hand at the Geiger counters and other measuring equipment. “And they expect me to do it.” He was supposed to measure background radiation several times each day. “I’m not a physicist or a mathematician.” He slouched against the shelves. He was tall, six feet or more, and too thin. “I’m a medical doctor specializing in endocrines.”

I could not think of what to say.

“Look, I heard you tell Marlene about the medium waves. You must know something about radios and electricity?”

“Yes, I do.”

He waited. He touched a Geiger counter and asked me, “Would you like to learn about this measuring equipment and take it over?”

“I wouldn’t be afraid of it. I would like to.”

But there was more on his mind. He thrust his hands into his pockets and just stood there in front of those shelves and looked down. “Do you really know a lot about radios? I mean, how to repair them and all?”

“Pretty much.”

He put his face into his hands and rocked his body. “Something horrible has happened with my radio. If I get caught it’s the end of us. My wife,” he moaned.

“What happened?”

“It’s stuck on BBC. Last night—”

“What do you mean ‘stuck’?”

“I mean stuck.”

“You can’t detune?”

“That’s it.”

“Can’t you change the meter bands?”

“Yes, I can do that—I can push the button from shortwave to broadcast to long wave, but all I get on those other bands is static. And when I push back to shortwave, I either get BBC or the jamming.”

“What kind of radio do you have?”

“It’s a Blaupunkt, suitcase model.”

“If you turn the turning knob, does the pointer move?”

“No! That’s it. The knob moves but not the pointer.”

“It doesn’t sound too serious. Most likely the cord from the tuning knob to the tuning condenser is broken, or a pulley has slipped, or a tension spring dislodged.”

“Could you fix it?”

“Most likely.”

“Then you have to come home with me right away!”

We could not leave until we had seen the Chief. He came every morning for half an hour, between eight thirty and eleven, and paced up and down our lab, often not saying a word, or sometimes asking if we’d heard the news; or there might be a few personal comments. We could ask him questions. He visited daily in each laboratory of the Genetics wing. And he knew absolutely what was going on.

While we were waiting for him, we continued sorting—Marlene, Monika, Krupinsky, and I. The new flies emerged from the pupae in the morning and had to be sorted every two hours until about one in the afternoon. They were anesthetized and put into a paper cone, which was then stuck into the polenta pudding in the bottom of a beaker. We separated the males from the females and the non-virgin from the virgin females before they were sexually mature—a matter of hours; a female only two hours old was still a virgin, and one could tell by its lack of pigmentation, by its soft, moist-looking wings. The whole thing just looked plump and still didn’t have the right form.

To propagate the race, one put in three or four males with three or four females; to isolate mutations, one male and one to three females, depending on what one was looking for. The females had to be virgins, so I spent much time looking for virgins, peering at the females, at first at a distance through the microscope, and then, later, when I was more adept, with my naked eye.

In the beginning, the discovery of the variations was exciting, but soon the sorting became so monotonous that I came to prefer being assigned to monitoring the linear accelerator. Sitting in the booth of the Radiation Laboratory—even for as long as forty-eight hours—was a relief. There one could ruminate in peace with only occasional interruptions.

Krupinsky was feeling a bit more cheerful now since I told him I thought I could fix his radio, and he instructed me in a loud voice: “Look out, Josef. As soon as those females mature: wham! That’s it, and you have to look around for another virgin.”

He said “wham!” with such force that he blew away the little flies from the cone he held, and he had to look for more virgins himself. One had to be careful not to expel a strong current of air at them or they were gone. If one were to laugh too hard, for example, the flies would disappear.

Krupinsky delighted in pointing out the sex organ in the male—“Look, it has a built-in French tickler”—and often he asked me to notice the special comb on the legs of the male which allowed it to grip the female tight during coitus. For a boy like me, nurtured in the bosom of Victorian antisexual propaganda, the atmosphere was like that of a stag movie, and Krupinsky sustained the tension with his continual teasing and innuendo.

The Chief came into our lab before ten and sent for Sonja Press and for the Rare Earths Chemist to help complete the sorting so that Krupinsky and I could take off at once to fix Krupinsky’s radio. The Chief said I needn’t bother coming back until the next day, since the distances were so great, and he gave me three biology books to read. Krupinsky and I gathered together some tools and left.

On the way, Krupinsky told me about his situation. He was 100 percent Jewish, married to a Gentile, and had been working as an endocrinologist at the Charité in 1938 when Adolf Hitler banned Jews from the practice of medicine—the same law that affected my mother. The Chief took him in, but the only way they could get by the authorities was to hire him as an apprentice biologist and pay him very little. So he and his wife had an even smaller apartment than my uncle. Everything but the bath, which was shared and down half a flight of stairs, was in one room.

His wife was still in bed when we got there, and when she heard us at the door, she shouted out, “Abe, is that you?” By the time he said yes and unlocked the door, Frau Krupinsky was completely out of the bed, her arms raised in supplication like those pictures of Eve being forced out of Eden, except that Frau Krupinsky didn’t have even a fig leaf. The only thing she wore was a little silver cross on a thin chain at her breasts, which were all that I noticed in my shock—not her face or her genitals but those melon-full breasts hung onto a bony rib cage, not too heavy, but full and ripe and with the rosiest nipples.

“Oh, Abe, I have been so frightened.” She flew naked into Krupinsky’s arms. He walked her backward toward the bed and tried to pull the blanket off to cover her while still protecting her from my view.

I could not take my eyes off his wife. I, sixteen-and-a-half-year-old idiot, just stood there gaping, with a bulge in my pants and one urgent desire: to see them again. Krupinsky finally got the blanket around his wife, but in doing so he uncovered the radio, which was resting on a pillow at the foot of the bed.

“For God’s sake,” he hissed at me. “Shut the damn door.”

I closed the door.

There was some confusion. Frau Krupinsky in a blanket sat on the bed with the radio. Krupinsky, still blocking her from my eyes, tried to calm her down. “You knew I’d come back, Kirsti. I said I would. And Josef here can fix anything.” He turned around and looked me down and up, his eyes stopping an instant at my crotch. “You got an eyeful, didn’t you, Bernhardt?”

It was what one might call an awkward social situation, and it had not been covered by lectures in my Dancing and Social Behavior Class. Fortunately, his wife had more sense than the two of us.

“It’s not the boy’s fault, Abe. Leave him alone. Josef, is it?” she said to me. “Why don’t you turn your back while I put something on?”

Her sweet voice restored some health to the situation. I turned around and diverted my mind by taking the various tools from my rucksack and arranging them neatly on their table, all the while translating the intimate sounds of a woman dressing: stepping into her corset, fastening the hooks, sitting on the groaning bed to pull on her stockings, sliding her slip silkily down her body.

“You can turn around now.” The melody of her speech was not native German, although the accent was correct.

She wore a blue-patterned housedress that buttoned all the way down the front. And they were completely encaged and undistinguished beneath corset, slip, and dress. But the memory of them is vivid in my mind till this day.

I looked at her face. For those who like strong Nordic features, Frau Krupinsky would seem most attractive.

“Could we move the radio over to the table?” I said. “There’s more light, and I’ve got my tools ready.”

“I’ll bet you have,” muttered Krupinsky, pulling the radio to the edge of the bed.

To get to the tuning linkage, I had to pull the chassis out of the cabinet. Much work. All those knobs had to come off. At first, Krupinsky hung over me, watching, until I said, “You’re making me nervous.” So he went over and sat beside his wife on the bed. He couldn’t keep his hands off and I heard her whisper, “Abe, not now, later.” I could tell by the way she said “later” that she wanted it. Probably as soon as I left. Damn him.

My diagnosis was correct. The cord to the tuning condenser was broken and the radio was permanently tuned to BBC. The linkage in the receiver was, as in most radios, a cord kept under tension by a spring and threaded over a number of little wheels from the axis of the tuning rod to the wheel on the main triple-tuning condenser. The path of the cord was complicated. If one is lucky, he finds the remainder of the broken cord and can use it as a guide by knotting the new cord to the old one and by pulling them both through the proper pathway. And I was lucky. It had broken in the favorite spot of breakage, right where it attaches to the big wheel of the condenser. Of course, one could not buy a new cord.

I stood up and turned around. And there he was, sitting beside her on the bed, an arm around her with the hand clutching the side of her corseted breast, and the other hand God knows where.

“Do you have any multistrand fishing line?”

“Nothing like it.” Krupinsky disengaged and stood up.

“I’ve some string,” said Frau Krupinsky.

“That won’t do at all. Do you think you could buy some or get it from a neighbor?”

“Will that take care of it?” she asked.

“In about three minutes. I know we could get some at the Institute.”

“That would take hours,” said Krupinsky. “Let me see what I can do. I should be able to find some right around here.”

“It has to be multistrand,” I called after him as he ran out the door and left me alone with his wife.

She began to make the bed; I poked about the radio tube. Actually, I had already detuned from BBC but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing. I needed the fishing line so they could continue to use the radio, and could do nothing more until I had it. So I listened to her bustle about the room, straightening, until, finally, I could hear her standing right behind me.

“I’ll make some tea,” she said.

I pretended to be so engrossed that I could not hear.

“Would you like some tea, Josef?” Her voice was pleasant. It had a Scandinavian melody that I could not pinpoint.

I pretended to be startled out of deep concentration. “Oh! No, thank you.” What an ass I was.

“It’s past lunchtime. You must be hungry. I’ll cut a little sausage and bread.”

“No. No. Thank you very much. Not a thing.” I said all this without looking at her. I knew my face was red, and I knew I was acting like a clod—but what does one do in such a situation? Should one say “I’m sorry”? Inadequate.

“I’m sorry you are so embarrassed,” she said. “Please don’t be.”

“It is I who should apologize to you,” I said, still looking down at the radio.

“I’m Finnish, you know, and we don’t make a fuss about our bodies. When I was a child in Finland, we all took sauna together: mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, the children, and friends. Do you understand?”

Finally I looked at her. “Yes. I had a Norwegian friend—his name was Petter—and his family was just like that.”

“That’s right. And the Swedes, too. It’s just a matter of what one becomes accustomed to.”

Could one ever become accustomed to those breasts? The thought started another erection and I turned my back and fiddled with the radio until Krupinsky returned with the fishing line. He had been gone half an hour.

I was able to attach it to the old cord and just pull it over the pathway. “It’s fixed,” I announced. “All I have to do now is put it back in the cabinet.”

They applauded and acted quite grateful, and both insisted that I have a cup of tea with them in celebration. I didn’t want it. I just wanted to get out of there, but it was impossible to refuse.

I put the radio back in the cabinet, and Krupinsky and I took it off the table and put it back on the bed. I said, “You shouldn’t even have the radio in this building. It’s much too dangerous.”

He just shrugged, but Frau Krupinsky looked at me peculiarly and said, “One must draw the line somewhere, Josef. You cannot give in completely to those swine.”

Her reprimand—which I never forgot—disquieted me even more, and although she and I attempted polite conversation over tea, it just wouldn’t go. For one thing, I had the feeling that Krupinsky was teasing me with his wife and trying to shock me. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, even while we were drinking tea. I’d had enough, and I suggested that it was time we both return to the Institute. “It’s one thirty,” I said, “and we could be back there before three.”

“The Chief said we didn’t have to come back this afternoon.”

“The Chief said I didn’t have to come back. He didn’t say anything about you, Krupinsky.”

“Well, I’m not going. We’ll no sooner get there than we’ll have to turn around and come home.”

I knew he wanted to stay and make love to his wife, and I didn’t want him to, little bastard that I was. I began to gather together the tools.

“Leave them! I’ll take them back tomorrow.”

I shrugged.

I could see that Frau Krupinsky was troubled by the dissension. Her face was pale. “Thank you, Josef,” she said, “I don’t know how we can ever thank you.” She extended her hand to me.

I fell back on the formula I’d learned in Social Behavior Class. I bowed slightly, kissed her hand, and said, “It has been my pleasure.” Realizing at once what I’d said, I blushed to the roots and somehow grabbed my rucksack and got out the door.

Krupinsky followed me down the hall. “You’re not really going back, Bernhardt?”

“Oh, yes. I am.”

“If you do, you little pisher, the Chief will know I’m playing hooky.”

“That’s your problem,” I snapped.

“You little schlemiel.”

“You ought to go back.”

“No.” A malicious, lewd grin. “I have better things to do.”

Ordinarily I did not talk enough. When I did, I said too much and made an absolute ass of myself. I raced down the stairs feeling as out of joint as a tin man who clanks and jangles as he moves, and so out of shape, from lack of exercise and inadequate diet, that after two blocks of jogging along, I, who had been a runner, was breathless and had a sharp pain in my side. I slowed to a shuffle, my torso bent, and squeaked and jarred along, my brain in utter confusion. Krupinsky would have her clothes off already, and the idea of him fondling them in his nauseating hands infuriated me more than the image of him actually screwing her to the bed. With her rose-tipped breasts in my fantasy, I could have done it with anyone—even Marlene—if only I had a condom. And the fact that this was so, disgusted me. There was nothing good about me; I was irretrievably rotten.

When I got back to the S-Bahn station, I headed for the vending machines in the men’s room. I had fifty pfennig—half a mark—in my pocket. The machine read; FROMM’S AKT—one mark. They had raised the price. I could have wept from the frustration of my own helplessness, and I was in actual pain from the continual genital tension. Alone in the lavatory, I relieved myself.

When I came out, the train for Hagen was waiting. At two in the afternoon, it was not full, and I was able to sit by a window. We would be underground for twenty minutes in dim light. I rested my head against the cool dark glass, shocked and disgusted by my violent reaction to Frau Krupinsky’s breasts. With all our lack of intimacy, my family was not overly modest about the body, perhaps because Mother was a physician. But it wasn’t the body. It was the sexual body, the fact that they so warmly embraced and that she enjoyed it as much as he. And it brought back the warmth and womanliness and sweetness of Sheereen, and of the way we had been together. I realized with a crunching jolt, as the train started down its dark tunnel, that at thirteen, I had been ten times the man I now was. I had deteriorated in three years into nothing but a masturbating coward.

Sheereen’s father was the Ambassador from Iraq—one fifth or so of the students at the Collège Français de Berlin were children of the diplomatic corps—and at age ten, when she joined my class, she was ten times the woman the German girls would ever be, and so spectacularly beautiful that most everyone was afraid to talk to her. I couldn’t believe she liked me, too. After all, there were eighteen boys in my class and only four girls.

Sheereen was absolutely the only reason I consented to Dancing and Social Behavior Class, an optional course running eight weeks each winter. Ten- and eleven-year-old boys were not supposed to have a high opinion of girls. One had to pretend to hate them, and if one showed any interest whatsoever, he was teased unmercifully by the other boys. Consequently, although I was stirred to the core by Sheereen’s loveliness, I was too much of a conformist to let on. The only acceptable way I could demonstrate my feeling was by tormenting her. So in every class I tried to sit behind her—a boy never sat beside a girl—and pull her hair and poke her with my pencil. She was very understanding and would turn and smile at me every time I did this. One can imagine the effect this had on me. Secretly, I dreamed of holding her romantically in my arms, and, therefore, let Mother talk me into the class—which pleased Mother no end.

Dancing and Social Behavior Class was stupid. Imagine this group of ten- and eleven-year-old boys bowing and saying to some giggly little female, “Would you give me the honor of this dance?” And picture lectures to them on “How to Talk to a Woman in a Social Situation.” The upshot always was that one must give honor to women and never indulge in street language when speaking to them.

I wasn’t much of an authority on street language. When I was six, I talked my mother into letting me out on the street to play with other neighborhood children. When she called me in after an hour, I said to her, “Shut up, you stupid old wreck,” and I was never permitted out on the street again. All my playmates, thereafter, were from approved families.

One would have to dress better than usual on the day of Dancing Class, and instead of my Bavarian leather shorts and favorite blue shirt, which I always wore, Mother forced me into wool Bleyle short pants that itched miserably and a white shirt, tucked in. And she would put clean white silk gloves in my pocket. One had to wear them because one sweats so when he touches a girl. And then I had to stop downtown at a flower stall and buy a small bouquet. One bows to the lady, presents her with the bouquet, and then one tries to dance.

Since I liked Sheereen so much, I dared not ask her. A private girls’ school participated in the class to make the numbers even, and although those girls were cruel and laughed at the boys, the first few weeks I would ask one of them.

One of the problems was that I became quite nauseated from the waltz. It is not at all the way it appears in the movies, the couples gliding in a stately manner around the room. In a real waltz, the dancers move fast and make a turn at each step. It wasn’t as difficult when the dancing masters counted and the pianist played. There were three masters, and they would walk among us shouting, “One-two-three, one-two-three.” But when they put on the Viennese records, one couldn’t hear the “One-two-three,” and I would twirl so fast I almost threw up from dizziness. My white silk gloves would be dirty almost at once from the falls I took trying to execute the turns.

About the third week, when I thought I understood the step, I took off like the athlete I was, perhaps confusing the waltz with a track-and-field event. I got up some pretty good speed and then, somehow, lost control. I tripped on a foot—not my own—and my partner went flying backward and slammed against a wall. I spun, fell over, and, as luck would have it, landed right on the foot of Sheereen. She was gracious. She smiled and said it could happen to anyone and that I was not at all clumsy, just strong.

My partner had the wind knocked out of her and was crying. She refused to dance with me anymore, so it was all rearranged by the head dancing master when Sheereen told him she wouldn’t mind.

It was accepted that she was my partner after that, and by the time I was removed from the rowing team a year or so later, we had become quite close. Of course, I was never permitted to be alone with her. She was always accompanied either by her older brother, Ahmed, who was several years ahead of us in school, or by her English governess. Miss Vinny—even her last night in Berlin, three years after we met, on her thirteenth birthday. By that time, we were deeply bound to one another.

I was thirteen and one half when her father’s chauffeur delivered to my house an invitation, engraved in gold, to Sheereen’s thirteenth birthday party. I should have been suspicious when both Sheereen and her brother missed school for the two days preceding her birthday. When I telephoned the embassy, Miss Vinny said they were slightly ill but would be all right by the evening of the party.

The invitation indicated dancing and a midnight supper, so I wore a suit with long pants and Mother put the white silk gloves in my pocket. She actually wanted to accompany me on the train to midtown and help me choose a very special bouquet, but I insisted that I was capable of doing this myself. She even wanted to choose the birthday present, but I had bought it weeks before at the village bookstore where my father had given me a charge account. It was a slim, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

So much of our relationship had to do with books. I helped Sheereen with math and science, and she helped me with poetry, especially with the Arabic poets, whose images and metaphors were so different, and with the British Romantics and Shakespeare. Iraq had been a British Protectorate, and Sheereen and her family were fluent in English. She loved Shakespeare, especially Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, which, she told me, were all about time and love.

Mother, of course, disapproved of my choice of gifts for ten different reasons. If she had seen the inscription I wrote after showing her the book, she would have denounced me to Father and both would have forbidden me from going to the party. Sheereen and I, all along, kept the depth of our feelings from our parents. Had they known, they would have used all their power to keep us apart.

And we didn’t actually declare our feelings to each other, except for one little exchange: one day when we were studying together in the school library, I looked up and found Sheereen staring at me. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Looking at your eyes. You have very nice eyes.”

“No, it is you who have the very nice eyes.”

“No, you. I am lucky to have a boyfriend with such beautiful eyes.”

“No, I am the lucky one.”

We condensed this conversation into a little formula which we repeated every time we were together: “I am the lucky one,” one of us would say. “No, I’m the lucky one,” the other would answer.

This was the closest we came to words of love until her thirteenth birthday, when I inscribed the book of sonnets. For Reenie, from her Seff, with all love for all time, and she gave me the poem she had written herself.

The Iraqi Embassy was within walking distance of our high school in midtown Berlin, in a garden district of winding streets and huge villas where many of the embassies were located. It was decorated in white and pastels and had a very beautiful garden. I was surprised to find that there were many people there, mostly adults in evening clothes and officers in dress uniforms, and that I was the only boy from our class.

It was all quite different this year. For her eleventh and twelfth birthday parties, there had been only schoolmates, and her parents had provided entertainment for us by grown-ups who did things—a puppet show, clowns, or so—and there had been trays of brightly colored ices and cakes and a sweet red punch. But this year, as I searched through the house and garden for Sheereen, I saw that there were sweet tables with heavy pastries drenched in honey and almonds, servants circulating with trays of champagne, and in the air the delicious aroma of roasting lamb and spices, which would be served later, at a midnight supper. An orchestra was playing in the ballroom, although no one was yet dancing. There was a table piled high with beautifully wrapped gifts. I kept mine in my inner pocket, planning to give it to her privately. I carried a small bouquet of violets.

She was nowhere in sight. I joined others at the foot of the broad staircase to wait for her entrance.

I describe other women as good-looking or attractive, as pretty or as nearly beautiful, to make it clear that Sheereen was truly extraordinary. Even when she came down that staircase, stricken and ill, on the arm of her brother, she was so breathtaking that there was an audible gasp from those watching her descend. She, too, had been permitted to dress as an adult that night and had chosen a long gown of the palest blue silk, so pale that the lights from the chandeliers made it seem iridescent. And there was a net of gauzy stuff of the same blue all around her bare shoulders. The second I saw her leaning so feebly on Ahmed’s arm, I knew.

At the foot of the stairs, other guests crowded around, wishing her happy birthday. I could hear her sweet voice answering, “Thank you, thank you,” but I could see she was looking anxiously about for me.

I had moved to a corner, away from the stairs. When she saw me, she left her brother’s arm and quickened her pace, stopping short, not touching me.

“You are leaving,” I said, very softly.

“Tomorrow. I begged Father to take you with us.” She began in a trembling, soft voice, but it began to rise in pitch and volume. “He said no, and I said I wouldn’t go.”

Ahmed was there beside us, and her governess, who looked tense and drawn. “Sheereen,” Miss Vinny pleaded, “you promised me you would behave.”

“I don’t care,” she sobbed. “I won’t go.”

Those near us could hear every word she said. Her brother’s eyes filled with tears; I was able, by some miracle, to hold mine back. From across the room, her father glared fiercely in our direction, and I knew that if her public hysteria continued for a moment longer, he would not hesitate to send her to her room and we would not have even this last evening together.

If she had been strong, I would have crumbled. But she was not. The news she had received two days before that they were leaving had devastated her. Strange as it may seem, her terrible suffering brought out the manliness in me, and that night—her last in Berlin—I was a rock for her, and for a time after, I was more of a man than I had ever been, until six months after her departure, when my father knocked my manhood from under me by laying the responsibility for the life—or should I say the death?—of my mother on my young shoulders, when all the time it was his failure in not taking her away and the failure of his entire generation for allowing Adolf Hitler to rise to power. It was then—without the love and support of Sheereen—that I crumbled.

Her father moved towards us.

Both her hands were touching my arm.

“Reenie,” I said. “You must begin the dancing with your father, or he will send you away from me right now. I will be waiting.” I folded the violet bouquet into her left hand.

Her father was there, furious, apoplectic.

“Good evening, Herr Ambassador.” I bowed as I had been taught in Social Behavior Class.

He stopped short, hesitated, then turned angrily toward her.

“Oh, Father,” she said in a shaky, small voice, “don’t you think it is time we began the dancing?” She extended her right hand most properly, the left holding the violets crossed beneath her breast. I remember that she wore long gloves of pale blue silk, without fingers, that her nails were polished in the softest pink, and that the violets were achingly right.

Her father had used Sheereen’s thirteenth birthday as a pretext for a political farewell party for himself, and had he not been surrounded by Nazi brass and diplomats from other embassies, I think he would have yanked her arm out of its socket, thrown her into her room, and locked the door. It was another time in my life when the black-coated S.S. officers were useful: Gestapo in the house can save one from a Caesarean section. But form is everything for the people of my parent’s generation, and for an ambassador protocol is all. He bowed to his beautiful daughter, clicked his heels, took the little hand hanging so delicately in the balance, touched it with his lips, and said loudly, in French, “It would be my greatest pleasure, my dear.” Then he whispered gruffly, in German, so I would be sure to understand. “I like to think we Arabs, unlike our cousins”—and he threw me an ugly glance—“are in control of our emotions.”

She smiled at him tremulously through her tears and had the presence of mind not to turn her head even slightly to look at me.

Everyone, of course, was relieved. Nazis and other bureaucrats detest scenes. A little procession followed them into the ballroom. One could hear the orchestra begin a Viennese waltz. I was still in the corner with Ahmed and Miss Vinny, who began to prattle. “She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten for two days. I’m half out of my mind. Talk to her, Ahmed. Tell her she must obey her father. He is very angry.” The poor woman was so distraught.

Ahmed, who was a stout fellow, said to no one in particular. “If she’d eat something, it would go better for her. See if you can get her to eat.”

I moved away and Ahmed followed me. We could hear Miss Vinny saying to some of the guests, “Yes, it is so sad. Of course, she hates to leave her little school friends,” and “We have been very happy here in Berlin,” and so on.

Ahmed said, “Let’s go into the garden. I’ve got some good Turkish cigarettes.” We were not friends. He was three years older, which is quite a difference at that age, and he never approved of my relationship with his sister, of whom he was very fond.

We passed through the ballroom. Her father, no doubt, had been to dancing class as a boy, for he was making his way quite passably around the ballroom, overweight, puffy as he was. Sheereen, whom he held at the greatest distance, was a slender blue reed.

We wandered about the garden, smoking, while Ahmed talked. “She threatened to kill herself every other minute—wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink and read Romeo and Juliet about seventeen times. Miss Vinny finally talked Mother into convincing Father to let her spend most of this evening with you. You even get to sit with her at dinner. What a mess. Oh, damn, damn. All I ever wanted was to be able to go to Cambridge when I finish high school. And now it’s out of the question.”

“Why should it be? Iraq was a British Protectorate. You could still go there, couldn’t you?”

“My dear old chap,” he began. We spoke French to each other most of the time, but he said “old chap” in English quite often when he was feeling British. “My dear old chap, you are most naive. Of course, Iraq was British—but the old guard like my father hate the British, and, as a matter of fact, if you had any sense at all, you’d realize from all those uniforms here tonight that my father is pro-Axis.”

“You mean your father is pro-Nazi? How can he be after living here and seeing what goes on?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” he said angrily.

“What do you mean? My father a Nazi? How could he be?”

“That’s not what I mean. Your mother is a Jew, isn’t she?”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t get up in arms, old chap; we Muslims, through the ages, have not been racial bigots.”

“Oh, no? Then what did your father mean when he made that remark about his ‘cousins’?”

“Don’t pay any attention to that. He has good reason to be furious with you. What I meant was, your father sees what is going on here. Why the devil hasn’t he taken you and your mother away? Don’t you see? It isn’t the separation from you that is driving my sister crazy. You know Sheereen, she’s as solid as they come. But she knows that if you stay here, sooner or later . . . they will get you. She’s been hysterical because she wants my father to save you. It’s not a matter of money, is it? I mean, with your father?”

“You know better than that. You’ve been to my house.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’ve wondered. Sometimes I think it’s because my father’s law degree won’t do him any good in another country.”

“But your mother—she’s a doctor, isn’t she? That’d be good anywhere. She could go to America.”

I shrugged. “Her younger brother was a doctor—Uncle Philip—and he got a visa to the United States. Some people in the State of Iowa helped him get a job on a medical faculty there.”

“He’ll help you. If you make it to Switzerland, he could help you from Iowa.”

“They caught him the day he was supposed to leave.”

“Bloody rotten,” he said in English. “But look, old chap, we’re going to Switzerland in the morning—Mother, Sheereen—and I’m escorting them. Father will come later. Yes, if you could make it to Switzerland, I could help you there, and then those people from Iowa could help you, couldn’t they?”

“My father won’t even discuss it with me, much less give me the money. I’ve tried. And you know that you have to have money in Switzerland or they ship you right back!”

“Maybe my father—”

“Look, Ahmed, thank you. But I won’t leave my mother behind. And she won’t leave my father. And then there’s her other brother here, too.”

He threw his cigarette on the grass and ground it out, and we both took another. “Our parents are all fools. All I want is to go to Cambridge. Ah, listen, old chap, my father told Sheereen that if your own father didn’t care enough to save your hide, why should he? And he’s right, you know. Come on. I’m starving. Let’s go in the kitchen and get some lamb and rice.”

It was an hour and a half, ten or so, before Sheereen was released from her social obligations. Ahmed brought her into the garden—still, she held the violets—and disappeared into the kitchen again, returning with two servants and plates of lamb and rice and a bottle of champagne for the three of us.

It was chilly outside this April evening, and I was so happy to put my wool suit jacket about Sheereen and allow myself to suffer the cold on her behalf.

We fed her—Ahmed and I—choice bits, with small sips of champagne in between, until some color returned to her face and she seemed a trifle stronger.

“Would you like to dance?” I asked her. “I promise not to throw you against the wall.”

And we all three began to laugh. The tale of my waltzing accident had made the rounds at school, so Ahmed knew of it, too. It had happened so long ago, when we had been children.

But then she began to cry. “I think I could not bear to dance with you in front of all those people.”

Ahmed looked despairingly at me. “We still have the bloody dinner to get through. And if she makes another scene. Father will kill us and fire Miss Vinny.”

“All right. How should we do it? Sheereen,” I said in a fake, deep voice, “you may not cry until after dinner. It is a command.”

She laughed and cried, and the three of us marched up and down the garden paths. Sheereen decided that after the dinner she would defy her father and sit in the garden with me until dawn, when her train left for Switzerland.

“If he refuses,” she said, “I will kill myself.” And after that resolve, she was calmer. It was a matter of being in control of one’s own life. It is so important.

We continued to walk about until fifteen minutes or so before the midnight supper, when Ahmed and I urged her to go upstairs and refresh herself. It was then that I gave her the little book of sonnets, wrapped with ribbon.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The sonnets.”

“I knew it! Oh, Seff, I have spent the past two days trying to write a poem for you. But it is not at all good. I couldn’t get it right.”

“Please bring it to me. Please, Reenie.”

“If you promise not to read it until I’m gone.” She began to sob.

“I promise.”

She turned and ran off. Ahmed and I, following at a distance, could see that she bolted up the stairs like a small child, two at a time.

After the dinner, which was the lamb and rice we had been eating all evening, her father clapped his hands and demanded attention. He wished his daughter a very happy birthday, thanked everyone for being so kind to him and his family in this foreign land, and then he announced that they would all be leaving. There were, of course, sounds of protestation and regret around the tables, but everyone knew by now because of Sheereen’s scene early in the evening.

All but a few of her father’s closest friends began to leave at two in the morning, and I slipped into the garden with Ahmed. Sheereen, after a battle with Miss Vinny, changed into ski pants and two sweaters and brought me a warm coat of Ahmed’s, which she insisted I wear. It was chilly and damp outside—typical Berlin weather—and we sat together on a stone bench in the garden. She nestled in my arms—the tired violets crushed between us—crying quietly, drifting in and out of sleep. Ahmed walked nervously about for a time and finally stretched out on another bench and fell asleep.

It was unreal. So close to her. I could not imagine the separation. I held her in my arms for three hours, now and then interrupted by the adults. But we did not let them win this last, small battle. Miss Vinny came out and demanded that Sheereen retire to her room. “This is highly improper,” she said, taking in the three of us: Ahmed wrapped in a greatcoat on his bench, and Sheereen and I, cuddled together on ours, a white mist exhaled with each of our breaths. “You will catch your death,” said poor Miss Vinny.

Sheereen spoke calmly. “If you force me to my room, I will quite happily kill myself, and I mean this.”

Miss Vinny stormed off, uttering threats, returned shortly, and halfheartedly ordered her to obey, but, finally, she gave in. “Ahmed, you stay with your sister. If your father finds out, I’m finished.” As she walked away, we could hear her muttering, “What is the world coming to? Everything is falling apart.”

My mother telephoned. She had arranged a ride home for me, but I had refused it. I said to her, “It is not over yet. Please do not call again.” And I told the servant who answered the phone not to disturb me. So I don’t know if she called back or not. I knew that, in any case, I would have hell to pay when I did go home—which was not until the next afternoon, after school was over.

At five, wordless and without demonstration, Sheereen left me to prepare for her journey. I took off on foot for the railroad station from which she would leave, the Anhalter Bahnhof—a fifteen-minute walk from the Iraqi Embassy—where I waited on the platform. Her train was to leave at six thirty.

She arrived just in time, surrounded by servants, minor embassy officials, and family, and looked wildly about. When she saw me, she broke away and ran into my arms.

“I am the lucky one,” she sobbed.

“No, I’m the lucky one,” I said, and she was dragged weeping and falling out of my arms and into the train, and I did not ever see her again, ever.

I stayed until the train pulled out at exactly six thirty. It was too late to go home and too early to go to school, so I took the S-Bahn that circled the perimeter of Berlin and rode around for over an hour reading the poem which she must have composed in Arabic and then, painstakingly, translated into German, a difficult language for her.

For Seff from His Reenie

Tonight from the sky of your eyes,

Stars fall on my poetry,

Making lights on this virgin paper.

This is the beginning of love,

And the end of the way is foggy.

Through the windows of your eyes

I run into deserts

Sink in the heart of waves,

Lie in the field of wild tulips,

For this is the beginning of love

In the spiritless black of this cruel world.

The chandelier of my memories of your eyes

Will light the dark temple of my mind,

For this is only the beginning,

And I cannot think of ends.

Our love, itself, is the light and is eternal.

I closed my eyes against the light. The train had emerged from the tunnel and was above ground.

“Is something wrong, son?”

I was startled and realized that tears were streaming down my face and that, perhaps, I had even sobbed aloud. An older woman sat opposite me.

“My father,” I said, wondering, as I said it, why I had, for Papa was well.

“In the war?”

I nodded. “Wounded at the Russian Front. He was sent home, and last night . . .”

“He died? Poor dear. These are terrible times.”

“Air raid,” I mumbled.

“And your mother?”

“She’s fine, thank God.”

“Thank God.” The woman crossed herself, a dangerous thing to do in public.

She looked as well-to-do as one could in these times, and I wondered if I could possibly ask her to loan me a mark. I had been giving my stipend from the Institute to Mother, keeping only what I needed for commuting. My parents, supposedly, were well-to-do, but Mother no longer was permitted to practice medicine; Father’s law practice had fallen off, and, my mother told me, the family money was ‘safe’ in Swiss banks. If I asked her for the ‘extra’ mark, she would want to know what I needed it for, and I preferred not to lie to her. In the future, I would hold out a bit more from my stipend, but, somehow, I would have to get my hands on one mark, fast, to buy the Fromm’s Akt. Not for Marlene—I was not interested in her—but for Sonja Press, who I was naive enough to think was a virgin, and ignorant enough to assume might have carnal interest in me.

“You must be strong and be a comfort to your mother now,” the woman said, and then, probably embarrassed by her kindness to a stranger, she turned her head abruptly and stared at the window.

We were pulling into Ostkreuz, the east station that connected to the trains that made the great circle above ground around the perimeter of Berlin. The morning Sheereen left—after her train to Switzerland pulled out at six thirty—I rode the Berlin Circle until it was time to go to school, reading and rereading the poem she had written for me, and that night I stormed into Father’s study and demanded that he take Mother and me away to Switzerland.

“You can afford it,” I shouted. “You are rich!”

He, sitting in his tapestry chair reading legal papers, did not even look up when he answered. “You are too young to understand, and, furthermore, I owe you no explanation.” He went right on reading.

“Of course,” I said through clenched teeth in my most contemptuous manner, “I knew you would say that. But if those swine murder my mother, you will be to blame.” It was the first time I had spoken to him in this way, and it was the only time in my life that he abused me physically.

He jumped from his chair, throwing his papers to the floor, slammed me back against the wall, and slapped my face. I, at thirteen and a half, was wiry and strong, but I did not raise my hand to him. Instead, I retired, without a word, to my room, and the next day began the activities with Mitzka which Father stopped six months later, after I was informed on twice in the same week—once by the Bavarian Baron next door and once by my mother.

Baron von Chiemsee informed Father that he had seen Mitzka and me rip out wires from under the hood of the Horch a Nazi official had parked down the street and throw them down the storm sewer. That same week, Mother informed my father that she caught me smuggling his Parabellum—the huge sidearm he wore as an officer during the First World War—out of the house in my rucksack.

What they didn’t know was that for six months, beginning the day after Sheereen left, I joined Mitzka Avilov, at least twice a week, in riding the Berlin Circle in order to drop food to the forced laborers and prisoners of war who worked the track. Mitzka had an unending supply of cornmeal, which he wrapped in old newspapers, and, occasionally, he had a flask of molasses or vodka. In late summer, when the trees were full, we would crawl through his secret hole in the fence and collect the apples to add to our food drop.

It was doubly dangerous, for neither of us had money for the fare and we were sneaking on and off the trains. If I had been caught, it would have been as deadly for Mother as for myself. That is why I allowed Father to shock my spirit into hiding.

My conversation with him, after the denunciations, was in his study, as always, and ended in a brief exchange of non sequiturs:

“You must obey the law and avoid drawing attention to yourself. Remember what happened to your Uncle Philip!”

“Send us to Switzerland!”

“You are forbidden to see Mitzka Avilov outside of school!” And then, his final thrust: “If you continue as you are, it is you who will be the destruction of your mother.”

Our nasty little game, each holding the other responsible for her life. If she were to die, whose fault would it be?

I knew that giving in to him would not save Mother in the long run, but at fourteen I was not yet ready to assume responsibility for her death. So, despising my decision, I obeyed Father. I read once in Mother’s medical books that a leper’s aesthetic sense revolts and he begins to loathe himself.

I detrained at Gesundbrunnen. I would not return to the Institute that afternoon. Krupinsky was a shiny ape, but he was not unkind, and I would not get him into trouble. But my God, I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to ride the Berlin Circle and study the biology books the Chief had given me. The fifty pfennigs should cover the fare, and I would go home at the regular time.

I thought it augured well for me, the next morning at seven, when I found Sonja Press waiting for me in the Biology Laboratory. It was an augur, all right, but I misread the signs.

The Chief was there, too. The two of them were drinking tea and had a cup of the smoky stuff ready for me. They had somewhere an unending supply of pressed tea tablets, the size of a thumbnail, which one dropped into boiling water. It must have been some kind of a milled tea. The tablets did not dissolve completely, but there was only a little residue left in the bottom of the cup. Everyone at the Institute drank it all day and all night.

The Chief told me that later that day I would become occupied with Professor Kreutzer and the business of irradiating fruit flies and determining the physical aspects of the effects of ionizing radiation. All my education, but that of the darkroom, led to that central machine in the Radiation Laboratory—the linear accelerator.

“But first,” he said, “I want to take you for a walk around the park to look at this and at that, and I wish, myself, to show you how one entices the wild ones into the small bottles which Sonja here will show you how to prepare.”

It was a little graduation exercise at the end of my first six weeks.

While he paced and drank another cup of tea, Sonja and I prepared the enticing little fly traps. Twenty small bottles in a wire basket were sitting on my table; the polenta solution already was cooking in the laboratory kitchen. The two of them must have been there quite early. I carried the hot pudding into the lab, and at Sonja’s direction, using a rubber tube with clamp, I transferred from the container so much of the boiling polenta into the bottom of each bottle, maybe an inch or so. We had to wait until it cooled before Sonja put in a drop or two of a yeast solution with an eyedropper. So I drank another cup of tea.

The yeast ate the polenta, and the fruit flies ate the yeast. They were wild about it, Sonja told me, and to ensure them against drowning from their own gluttony, she stuck a tight roll of thick paper, bent in a V, into each bottle. It would absorb the excess liquid and give the little fellows a place to sit after they’d eaten and laid their eggs. We stoppered the bottles with cotton, attached wires to each rim, and placed them in the carrying basket.

I carried the basket, the Chief a map of the park. He showed me that each bottle was dated, numbered, and marked on the map. We placed several immediately outside the main entrance to catch the fruit flies that escaped from the Institute—a problem often discussed at staff dinners. These fugitives limited population genetic research of Drosophila in the park—except, of course, for the question of how mutations spread in a given area.

“These escapees”—the Chief waved his arm at the fruit flies swarming about the double doors—“are from controlled stock, and we want as few of them as possible to breed with the wild flies. The wild ones in the park—the Drosophila melanogaster Berlin wild—are mixed-breeds, and, therefore, most vital and stable. Those purely bred in the Institute are, for various reasons, not fit for a free life, but will survive only under laboratory conditions.”

We placed the other bottles throughout the park—on trees and hedges, on the compost heap, and in the garden. And, of course, each placement was carefully noted on the map. It took no time at all to attract the Berlin wilds. One hung a bottle, removed the stopper, and within twenty seconds the little creatures would be inside, eating and laying their eggs, resting on the absorbent paper.

“It’s fast and easy,” said the Chief, “except when the apples are ripe in the orchard next door. Then these happy little fellows disdain our cooked pudding, my curly-headed Josef, and fly through the hedges and over the fence to the sweet rotting apples, where they deposit the minute particles of yeast they always carry with them on their bodies and on their tiny legs, and they contaminate the ripe fruit, starting the process of fermentation which is such a delight to mankind.

“Happy little winemakers,” he said, “the first winemakers. I wish I could fly over the fence to collect those apples when they’re ripe in late summer.”

I could do it. Not over the fence, but through it. I was sure that Mitzka’s secret opening behind a group of willow trees was still there—the cut fence was so well hidden in the shrubbery. But I did not mention it at the time, because I was foolish enough to assume that the Chief did not know about it.

As we walked about, placing the baited bottles, he pointed out areas of special interest: the large greenhouses, the special garden, the many winding and curving drives lined with lindens, beeches, oaks, and cedars, the cultivated earth where flowers were blooming, the stone benches. And the chapel.

“Don’t you think it strange, Josef, that a scientific institution should have a chapel?”

“Yes, Herr Professor.” I always thought it strange that the Institute should have a chapel and a greenhouse and all those winding drives.

The Chief opened the door to the chapel, a gray sandstone structure of neoclassic design, with a dome. There were no pews inside and no altar, either. A mechanic was working at a lathe. It was a machine shop now, obviously belonging to the Physics Department, for it looked like a junk shop. But there is no doubt that the building was intended to be a little church.

In design it matched the house of the Director, which, even as a child, when I played with Mitzka, I thought strange. Both buildings were of gray sandstone, with the false pillars which carry no weight. The house was large, with many little parlors on the first floor, and a small laboratory for the Chief in the basement.

I had not realized, until the Chief told me that day, why the house was so designed: the parlors were mourning rooms, the lab in the basement, a morgue. And the chapel was for services, the greenhouse for maintaining flowers during the winter and for beginning new plant life. The winding drives were convenient to the gravesides. The Institute was a graveyard.

“That is, it was to have been a graveyard,” the Chief told me. “The city architects chose this location for a municipal cemetery because the land was cheap and because it was close to the hospitals and medical doctors who would provide the clientele. But I can’t believe the contractors were not aware of the insurmountable problem. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“Water,” I said.

“And what tells you about this water?”

“Mitzka and I tried to dig a cave and hit water at only three feet.”

“Ah, I see you have practical knowledge of this. But tell me, Josef, what signs are here that would tell you about the water even before you begin to dig?”

I looked around. “Willow trees.”

“Willow trees always mean water. And there are many willows. But what did they care, these contractors and architects? They made their fortune. They built the funeral parlor on a hill and attached rooms for the cemetery director and his family, and they built the chapel and put in the drives and the trees and the flowers.

“When the day came for the first burial, the poor grave digger must have dug down one foot, two feet, two and one half feet, when water began to ooze into the grave. And at three feet, it gushed forth. He must have hurried to another plot and begun again—one foot, two, two and one half. Again the water. He tried again and again before admitting defeat. Tell me, Josef, who would want their loved ones floating through eternity? And aside from the aesthetic problems, if the permanent guests were floating in the local water supply, it would not be healthy for the living.

“So this place was built for the dead, and only when it became a conspicuous failure, a financial burden to maintain, did they donate it to the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation and erect the Institute building and a few other houses and apartments for personnel who cared to live on the premises.”

I was laughing. “Is it really true that they actually dug the first grave?”

“True, my curly-headed friend? If I were to tell you the real truth, I would have to lie. But look. Now the grass is clipped and the flowers tended by the gardener you see in that bed of spring flowers. It gives him work. And you and I, my son, we hang the bottles on the trees and catch the happy little winemakers, who tell us many things. And that man in the grass”—the Chief pointed—“is a scientist. He collects another kind of specimen. Like you, he is one of the special cases in our little graveyard. He is not a Jew, but a Russian prisoner of war.”

The gardener and the scientist were both on their knees, and from a distance, except for their clothing, they looked like twins: two squat, bespectacled men. The Chief and I watched them. The gardener wore work clothes and was digging with a hand tool in the moist earth. The scientist, in a dark suit with vest, crawled over the grass, his face almost to the ground. The sun caught the golden watch chain hanging in an arc from his middle.

The Chief explained to me that both men were victims. “The gardener, Gunther, is feeble-minded, an idiot; the Nazis, because of it, gave him a vasectomy. As a consequence, he has become the most popular man in the village. He has a happy disposition, is very kind and generous, and the women love him very much. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Herr Professor.”

“The scientist, Professor Ignatov, is a genius in his field. He is the expert of the world on bubonic plague. His small plane was shot down by the Germans when he was following the migration of a group of gregarious rodents, some kind of ground squirrel, which are known carriers of the plague. They thought he was a spy, put him in prison, and almost shot him. Luckily, someone recognized him. When I hear through the grapevine of such people, I reward a few subaltern officers and so on, and make out a requisition form. The Institute has top-priority rating, and all I had to do was convince certain authorities that we must have this particular scientist to do a study on ‘Population Analysis of Forestal Rodents in the Park.’”

Ignatov was standing now and moving toward us, clutching something in his extended fist, shouting to the Chief in Russian. He opened his huge paw and pounded his palm with the index finger of the other hand.

The Chief answered him in German. “Yes, yes, Boris Ivanovich, an excellent find, excellent. One is aware that there are many Mus musculus, but we’ve had no evidence of the Mus sylvaticus. An excellent find.”

He had the tiny skull of a long-tailed field mouse in his hand.

“Herr Professor Ignatov, I would like you to meet our young colleague, who, this very day, will begin research on chromosome mutations in Drosophila.”

I think that Ignatov had not even noticed me until the Chief made the introduction. Then he walked up very close to me, too close. His teeth were bad, his breath foul, and he began to shout in German and spit at me. A human textbook with a thick Russian accent.

“Salivary glands,” he screamed, spitting in my face, “sal-i-vary glands . . .” and he jabbed me in the chest with his forefinger. “Chromosomes at meiosis in Drosophila are too small to work with, but in the salivary glands of their lar-vae”—jab, jab, into my chest—“are giant chromosomes with distinct longitudinal differentiation. In fact”—jab, jab—“they may be up to two hundred . . . two hun-dred”—jab, jab, jab—“times the size of corresponding chromosomes at meiosis or in the nuclei of ordinary somatic cells.”

He stepped back. His large, square head drooped to one side as though he were in a trance. It would have been impolite for me to wipe his spit off my face while he stood there. I swallowed my spit, fighting nausea.

His heavy head snapped upright and he came toward me again, index finger extended. “A further advantage of the salivary gland chromosomes for cytological study is that they appear constantly to be in a pro-phase-like state”—jab, jab, jab, jab—“always they are in a condition appropriate for effective staining and detailed observation.”

He stepped back. His head drooped. The Chief thanked him. Ignatov nodded and turned away, his right fist clutching the tiny skull. The Chief handed me a clean handkerchief. As I wiped my face, he said, “Ignatov is typical of a certain type of Soviet scientist whose entire life is his work. Extremely industrious. But only his work.”

Ignatov would come to our staff dinners and parties, get drunk, and go to sleep. One never heard him speak of anything but his research, and that always in a semi-hysteria. He was humorless, illiterate in anything but science. He talked only with the Chief and Professor Kreutzer. In good weather, one could see him at almost any hour of the day, wearing a suit with vest, on his hands and knees in the park, looking for a cranium, or a tooth, or a toenail of a rodent.

The gardener had come closer, too. He and the scientist were not as much alike in appearance as they seemed to be at a greater distance. If Ignatov was a construct of thick, square blocks, the gardener was a series of balloons. His face had the round look of the simple-minded. He came up to within ten feet of us and extended his pudgy hand, which grasped three perfect red tulips.

“Come here, come closer, Gunther.”

The man edged forward, smiling sweetly.

“Come, come,” said the Chief.

He came to within three feet of us but would move no closer.

“Gunther, this is Josef. Josef, Gunther grows many beautiful flowers for us.”

Gunther extended his hand with the tulips. “For Madame.”

The Chief stepped forward and took them and bent in a brief bow. “Thank you, Gunther. She will be most pleased.” Then he bowed again, and we continued our walk.

The bottles had been placed and it wasn’t quite eight thirty. He suggested we had time to walk to his house at the back of the park and present the flowers to Madame Avilov. On the way, he talked more about the gardener. “He is a very happy man because the young men are all gone from home and the women left behind are lonely. He is very kind to them. It is not a bad thing to be kind to lonely women, Josef. It is almost a duty.”

I wondered if Sonja Press was a lonely woman.

Madame Avilov met us in the hallway. She was tall and angular, taller than her husband, and her hair was blond turning gray. Her eyes were the same violet-blue as Mitzka’s, but with no light. Today, they looked almost mauve, matching the dress she wore. Mitzka, who looked like his mother, had the vitality of his father. She had none. I knew how to act with her; she was formal, correct, and I had been trained to bow, hand the bouquet, and say the polite words.

“Madame”—I spoke to her in French—“these are from Gunther, the gardener.”

“Ah, yes, dear Gunther. It has been a lovely spring, has it not? We will have some tea.” She gave the tulips, with brief instructions in Russian, to the servant girl, and we moved into a small sitting room that was all blue and mauve silk and gray walls.

“And how are your mother and father during these difficult times?”

“Fine, thank you. As well as can be expected.”

“And your mother, does she find her medical practice keeps her busy?”

“Not too busy, madame.” Every house had its own brand of unreality, but Madam Avilov seemed to be completely out of touch.

“I admire a woman who can keep a home and have a career.”

The serving girl appeared with a tray. The tulips were in a silver vase, the tea in a silver pot with an ivory handle, and there were three glasses in silver holders. There was a sugar bowl. One rarely saw sugar in those days. Madame poured the tea. In the sugar bowl were brown pellets of rock candy. I looked at them for a moment before I took one and dropped it into my glass. I saw no spoons with which to stir, so I began to rotate the glass to dissolve the sugar. I peered at it; the sugar was still there in a brown lump. The Chief threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“One can see you are not a Russian, my curly-headed Josef. Look.”

He put a pellet into his mouth and showed me that he clapped it with his tongue against the alveolar ridge, inside and above the top front teeth. And then he took a sip of the tea. Madame did not join in the tea-sipping lesson. She sat quiet, still. The Chief worked with me until I could sip the hot liquid, make it flow over the sugar I held in my mouth, taking with it enough sweetness to be satisfying. When in a few moments I’d mastered the technique, he said to his wife, “See, I told you; he is an excellent student.”

“Yes, of course. Mitzka has told me many times that Josef is the brightest in the class.”

Polite words without meaning. I could answer her. “Oh, no, madame, all of us knew that Mitzka could surpass any one of us at anything, if he wished to.”

“If he wished to.” The Chief was on his feet and pacing, his happy mood gone. “Obviously, he doesn’t wish to.”

Madame addressed me. “Nikolai Alexandrovich tells me that they expect great things from you. Great things.”

Not true. I blushed crimson and could not answer.

The Chief was not to be restrained. “Have you heard from the boy this morning?” he asked his wife.

She answered him in Russian. I understood very little from that conversation, only the word “balalaika” and the name “Dieter Schmidt.” I knew that Mitzka had a red balalaika, which he played marvelously well. He even had tried to teach me to play, but it was not for my fingers. And I knew that Mitzka left school several months before to join the Russian underground. Dieter Schmidt was my former classmate, “Commie,” who disappeared from school after the Romans 13 episode two years before. I had not seen him or heard of him again until that moment.

Madame switched back to French and, still addressing her husband, said, “Mitzka said he would come soon to a staff dinner.” She turned to me. “He so enjoys the baked rubbit.” She stood.

I stood, too, and the Chief stopped pacing.

“Please do come again, soon.” She extended her hand. “It is so refreshing to have young people in the house.”

I had to take the extended hand and kiss it. “Thank you, madame, I will, and thank you for the tea.^”

The Chief bowed. I picked up the empty wire basket and he the map of the park.

Krupinsky complained that I was two hours late.

“Only an hour and a half. It’s just nine thirty, and anyway I was with the Chief.”

“I’m supposed to paint lurid pictures for you of the effects of radiation before Kreutzer gets you.”

“Paint away.”

“But first I’d like to say that my wife was right about you.”

I would be a fool to take the bait; I kept my mouth shut.

“Don’t you want to know what she said?”

“Not particularly.”

“She said you probably weren’t as big a schlemiel as you appeared to be.”

“Did she now.”

“No. She said you were a nice person and that you wouldn’t come back here yesterday. So I suppose I should thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“We’d better get on with this radiation business,” he said.

“I have a favor to ask you first.”

“What is it?”

“Can you loan me one mark?”

“Is that all? Sure. I don’t have it with me, but I’ll bring it tomorrow. What do you want it for?”

“It’s none of your business—but for condoms.”

“Where do you get them?”

“Train station. The vending machines.”

“That’s a stupid way to buy them. You only get four for a mark. Let me get you some from the pharmacy. When do you want them?”

“As soon as you can. Tomorrow.”

“Anything else?”

“If you promise not to make fun of me, I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, the girl . . . I think she may not have done it before.”

“So?”

He was going to make it miserable for me. “So, can you give me any advice?”

“Sure!” He laughed demonically. “If you want to deflower a virgin, my advice is to use lots of lubrication.”

I was furious for letting myself in for this. “You know, I took quite a chance coming to your house to detune your stinking radio—”

“Who is it?” he interrupted me.

I hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”

“You like her a lot?”

I nodded.

“I have an idea who it might be. And maybe I could save you some trouble if you’d tell me who it is.”

“I doubt that.”

“Hmm.” He put his hand over his mouth and thought for a while. “Let me think about this. My wife was a virgin when we got married. It wasn’t much fun for her at first. If the woman is tight, it hurts, so I wasn’t kidding when I said to use lots of lubricant. And don’t expect much until the soreness goes away. And she’ll always be worried about getting pregnant.”

“That’s one of the reasons I want the condoms.”

“Use two.”

“Two?”

“If you really want to protect her. Those things can spring a leak. They’re only eighty percent sure anyhow. Trouble is, using one diminishes your pleasure, and two is like making love through a blanket.”

“It’d be worth it to protect her.”

“How noble of you.”

This was very embarrassing for me. I hoped he’d talk about the actual approach of the whole thing.

“Maybe you should try it with a non-virgin first and get some experience, if you know what I mean.”

That man was a master at humiliation. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

“Well, have you?”

Damn him. “No. And I don’t want to.”

“So it’s like that. The love affair of the century. Why don’t you marry her first, if she’s a—” He stopped. “I’m sorry. That was below the belt.”

Under the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, marriages between Jews and ‘Germans’ was forbidden. Besides, I was not yet seventeen. I stood to leave.

“Wait!”

I sat down.

“Look, Josef, don’t worry about it. If she’s really that kind of girl, and she likes you, she won’t be unhappy that you’re inexperienced. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Just be honest and don’t pretend to be anything but what you are. You’ll both learn together.”

“Thank you.” I meant it.

“And remember, it isn’t as much fun at first as you think it should be. That comes later. And if you care for each other, that’s what matters. And just take it slow. I’ll bring those things tomorrow.” He took a pencil and tablet from his pocket, made a note, then he began to try to nauseate me about the effects of radiation. But I’d read it all already.

He ended up by reminding me of the grotesque mutated Drosophila and by showing slides of rats which had been irradiated. “If you’re not careful,” he said, “you will have the same kind of crippled offspring as the flies and the same kind of degenerated bone marrow as the rats.” He then threatened that radiation caused sterility and enforced this with a lecture on how the only important cells, the only thing important to life, are the sperm and the ovum. “Everything else,” he said, “everything which hangs around it is just there to induce the bee to visit the flower.”

“Is the sterility from radiation any different from that caused by surgical sterilization?” I asked him.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“The Chief said that the gardener, Gunther, is the most popular man in the village because of his vasectomy. Maybe a certain kind of impotency could be an asset.”

Krupinsky leaned against the Geiger counters and cupped his chin in his hand. “Hmm. I’ll tell you, Josef, the accidental radiation to sterilize you would be so large that you would die, and it would be impotency because of death.”

But it wasn’t the unseen radiation that frightened me. I felt protected from it by the lead apron, by the extra lead plates guarding the genitals. I was overwhelmed with fear of the high-voltage, high-tension equipment. One could hear it. One could see it.

The door to the Radiation Laboratory was opposite Krupinsky’s lab. Signs were posted:

DANGER OF DEATH: HIGH VOLTAGE
VERY STRONG RADIATION
DO NOT ENTER
NO SMOKING. EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS

It was locked and Professor Kreutzer had the key. Before entering, we had gone into the control booth, put on the lead aprons, and then returned to the hall to face the special entrance. The door into the Radiation Laboratory slid open pneumatically. It was of thick lead and paraffin, and when one walked in, he faced a thick wall and another door offset from the first opening. Another pneumatic mechanism slid the second thick door open, and one faced yet another wall. Then a small maze of offset passages led into that huge cement-block room—a cathedral of a room.

The pumps were gigantic, the condensers so tall they rose up two stories high. Thick electrical cables hung from the ceiling by strings. Pipes and tubes and wires everywhere. So loud! I wanted to put my hands over my ears. And there were sparks and crackles, hisses and lightning. I was terrified. And in the center was the linear accelerator, all sectioned and patched from bits and pieces of the junkyard, running diagonally twenty-eight feet or so, smaller in diameter than an oil drum—I could almost have put my arms around it.

Immediately upon entering, Professor Kreutzer went around the room with a pole, at the end of which was a chain of copper attached to a piece of pipe—another product of the scrapyard—which he used as a mobile lightning arrester by touching different points where there might be high tension. It made a terrific bang as it discharged, say, the condensers. Very methodically, each time he entered, Professor Kreutzer went around with that thing.

That’s the way he did everything, as though he had a lightning arrester in his hand. He minimized risk to the best of his ability and went on from there. For instance, when we were in the control booth putting on the lead aprons, he took off his jacket and vest, and I noticed that he wore both a belt and suspenders.

He said I must use the lightning arrester each time I entered to make sure that all the electricity was discharged safely to the ground. And he showed me how to paste the little capsules of Drosophila onto the target with the dosimetry capsule, explaining that we were looking for a translocation induced by fast neutrons. The fast neutrons came from the lithium on the target of the linear accelerator. Every hour I must measure the amount of radiation, I must watch the pumps and valves and meters, I must listen for the crackling boom which signaled a breakdown of the high-voltage system, and I must listen for the hsssss which signaled a leak in the accelerator itself—which meant I must stretch a baton eight feet to the machine and seal the leak with chewing gum. And I must beware, for if it were all to stop suddenly, there would be a terrible explosion. I must immediately, if there was a failure, switch to another source of power. If the pumps had to be stopped, he must be called, for one did it by closing them down in a certain way in a certain sequence. Alone, just avoiding the mixing in the pumps of oil and mercury took expert knowledge.

In between the hourly measuring of radiation, I could sit quietly in the insulated control booth, always chewing gum, and watch through the windows of lead glass, through the aquarium of glass and water, and listen for the hsssss and boom through the intercom. And I could watch the meters and valves. If anything were to happen that I could not handle, I was to push the red emergency button, and he would come. Professor Kreutzer left me alone in the safe, warm control booth.

I had drunk too much tea. What Krupinsky once said to me was true. It was a scientific fact, he told me, that people of our background and class had a high incidence of haemorrhoids and distended bladder because they were trained from infancy to be overly fastidious about using any bathroom but their own. They developed tremendous capacity and control, and, after all, I had left home before five in the morning. It was now after two in the afternoon, and I had drunk ersatz coffee at home, tea with Sonja Press and the Avilovs and again with Krupinsky. In order to leave the control booth, I would have to push the red emergency button and summon Professor Kreutzer. I was loath to do so, probably because my mother had conditioned me to believe that calls of nature are less than civilized and that it is almost impolite to relieve oneself.

I was quite surprised when I discovered that other people of the same class and of even higher class had no such inhibitions. For instance, I went to the engagement party of the sister of my school friend, Petter. His sister was the first girl I ever loved—before Sheereen. Of course, she was totally out of reach, being so much older and all. The point is, I was in a similar dilemma at her engagement party.

Petter was my best friend at school, and when we were ten years old, he asked me if I thought his sister was attractive. I said, “Neither, nor,” meaning that she was just a girl. He was surprised I was not interested in girls, and he told me that he couldn’t wait until he was old enough to do it with a girl. Petter was absolutely astonished that it wasn’t my major goal in life. He said his sister was doing it, and his whole life was aimed at the time when he could.

It gave me something to think about, and next time I went to his house to play, I looked at his sister and began to follow her about. She seemed to enjoy talking with me and was very pleasant. When she became engaged to some wretched undersecretary at the embassy, she allowed Petter to invite me to the engagement party.

Their father was the Ambassador from Norway, and they lived in a mansion on a lake in midtown Berlin, rather than at the embassy. The engagement party was a huge event for me. They were so totally democratic. Everybody was on a first-name basis. The Ambassador and his wife were always just like any other ordinary parents—unlike the parents of Sheereen and Ahmed, who rarely dealt directly with their own children.

The party started in the afternoon and went on all day with champagne, punch for the children, and canapés, and then in the evening there was a huge meal with more champagne and punch. My bladder became overfull—and here we were, a tremendous number of people sitting at a great long table. I knew one is not supposed to get up from a table, but I thought I was going to have an accident. So I whispered to my friend.

He laughed loudly and shouted something in Norwegian. Everyone began to laugh. Someone yelled, in French, “Let’s all go have a pee.” So we, all the men, walked down to the lake and did it in unison. It was wonderful.

Petter was always so free. Our class took swimming at the pool of the City Police. Before we were allowed into the swimming pool, we had to strip totally and soap ourselves totally, and then the bathing master, a policeman, came with a fire hose of ice-cold water and rinsed us off.

We were always together, Petter and I, and one day, while we were soaping ourselves, he pointed to me and yelled, “Oh, I am circumcised, too.” And he grabbed my penis.

The policeman came with the fire hose. “Hey, you.” And an ice-cold stream of water hit us. But nothing more.

I could understand why they left Berlin the day after Germany annexed Norway, and why, that same spring of 1940, the children of the ambassadors from Holland and Belgium were gone from our school. But I could not understand why, at almost the same time, Sheereen’s family left, too. After all, Iraq was friendly with Adolf Hitler.

All my friends were outsiders—like myself—and when they went away, I was alone. By the time I was forced to leave the school, there were only six left in the class out of the original twenty-two.

Professor Kreutzer opened the door to the control booth and asked me if I would like to take a break and have a cup of tea while he was treating the Security Officer with x-ray. The Security Officer was, of course, the Gestapo in the House, and by that time I understood that his clandestine protection of the staff of the Institute was in exchange for these daily treatments of his disease.

I left for five minutes and returned quite relieved. The Security Officer had taken off his black shirt and was lying on the table with the x-ray tube aimed at his shoulder. It had to be some type of cancer. I must ask Krupinsky.

When the treatment was done, Professor Kreutzer signaled for me to switch the power from the x-ray tube back to the linear accelerator. They both left, and I settled into my chair, looking at the valves and meters before me and through the window into the deserted Radiation Laboratory. The control booth was supposed to have been shielded from the radiation by the paraffin blocks, the concrete and lead, and by the window, two sheets of lead glass separated by water. Years later, I realized that the shielding was totally inadequate, and that one was not protected. But at that time, I looked through the glass and water at the wavering image of the linear accelerator and felt more secure than I had since that moment, in 1933, when I was seven years old and I came home from the stationery store in Gartenfeld with book covers and a notebook for the new school year. All my grade school friends had bought them, too. They were covered with swastikas.

I was just beginning third grade and was quite proud that Mother allowed me to walk the three blocks to and from school alone and even to shop for school supplies myself. When I was in first and second grade, she had insisted on accompanying me, which I had found most embarrassing.

School was out by noon; by the time I finished shopping, it was half past, and I was ravenously hungry. I bounded into the house, peeked into the waiting room, one of the parlors on the first floor—only two patients left—then raced into the kitchen, slammed my book covers and notebook onto the table, and, without even sitting, began to gobble down the Teewurst sandwiches and hot chocolate the maid had prepared for me, all the while straining my ears, listening for Mother to come down the stairs from her second-floor office to get her next patient.

When I heard her footsteps on the stairs, I jammed the rest of my second sandwich into my mouth, ran into the hallway and into the arms of my smiling mother. She gave me a big hug. “How’s my dear Butzelman?” That was her special name for me. Butzelman was a character in my favorite children’s song; he was a funny, bright fellow who danced about the house. “How was your first day?”

“Neither, nor,” I said.

She laughed. “One of your friends is in the waiting room. Come say good day to Herr Stenzel.”

Herr Stenzel was captain of the police precinct in the village. He and his wife and children had been Mother’s patients for as long as I could remember.

“Good day, Herr Stenzel,” I said, shaking his hand and bowing.

“Good day, Josef. Did you go to school today?”

I nodded.

“And you are in second grade now?” he said, his eyes twinkling.

“No!” I said vehemently. “I am now in third grade, and I have my own allowance.”

“How can you be so old as to be in third grade with such a young and beautiful mother?”

I looked up at Mother. She—and Father, too—had always seemed quite old to me.

Mother laughed again. “Did you buy your book covers, Josef?”

“Yes, Mutti. And a new notebook, too. Would you like to see them?” I dashed into the kitchen, returned with my purchases, and held them out for Mother to see.

All color left her face, and she exchanged an adult look with Herr Stenzel. I had done something terribly wrong.

“Excuse us, Herr Stenzel,” she said. Putting an arm about me, she propelled me gently into the kitchen, where she took my book covers and notebook away from me.

It was then Mother first told me that she was a Jew, I a mixed-blood, and that I was different from the other children.

After the engagement party of Petter’s sister, I was driven home by other guests who lived in our suburb. I was so sleepy from the wine that in the car they wrapped me in a blanket, and I awakened the next morning in my own bed, beside me the bag full of cheeses and other delicacies Petter’s mother had insisted I take.

When we played at his house, Petter and I were forever in the kitchen making sandwiches from all the marvelous food. I would go for the cheese and Teewurst, and he would stack a pile of caviar on a piece of toast.

Petter always got me in trouble in Latin class. He sat in front of me and had the fantastic ability to move both ears back and forth in rhythm to the singsong of the Latin grammar. And always, when he did this, I laughed out loud. Then the teacher stopped the lesson, reprimanded me, and wrote in the Daily Diary of the class:

Bernhardt laughed in class today.