CHAPTER FOUR

The Smells of Eden

The heart of the Institute was the Radiation Laboratory, with those condensers rising two stories in the center of both the second and third floors of the main building. It smelled of candles from the paraffin used as a radiation shield, of the oil used to lubricate the pumps, and of electricity—ozone from the high-voltage discharges. Because it was dangerous and off-limits to the janitors, it also smelled of burning dust and dusty oil.

On the first floor were the entrance lobby, auditoriums, meeting rooms, parlors, and formal dining room, all smelling of stale tobacco smoke, floor wax, and a pungent cleaning soap. Also on first was the cafeteria, which smelled of the soup of the day: cabbage or carrot or turnip.

The basement, with its storage areas, boilers, generators, and what-have-you, smelled dank and mildewed because it had been converted to double as the air-raid shelter for the Institute and, therefore, had inadequate ventilation.

Each department had its own distinctive smells. Genetics and Evolution smelled of the ether for anesthetizing the flies, of the yeast fed them, of the slightly burned polenta fed the yeast. The Chief miscalculated the quantity of polenta necessary and stored the vast oversupplies of raw cornmeal in one of the large greenhouses in the park.

He also miscalculated the quantity of alcohol necessary to pickle the Luftwaffe’s brains, so our second-floor wing stank from large quantities of ethyl alcohol, which was kept in our labs, rather than up in Brain Research, because it came adulterated with other ingredients to make it taste bad and smell even worse, and the Chemistry Laboratory of the Grand Duke was dedicated to its purification, being set up, as it was, to take advantage of the various boiling points of any substance that might be mixed with alcohol, a continuous operation, running twenty-four hours, yielding approximately forty liters of vodka daily, which were then distributed to every lab at the Institute, including those of the Mantle Corporation and the Luftwaffe. There were three flasks in our laboratory of twenty liters each. Pure. According to reports filed, Herr Professor Doktor Grand Duke Trusov was deep into nuclear research, trying to separate isotopes.

Several months after I came to the Institute, the Grand Duke had a serious problem with his work and called a meeting. There were nine of us in his lab: Monika, Marlene, and two girls from Chemistry sat on high stools; Krupinsky, the Rare Earths Chemist, and I leaned against the middle table on which flasks generally bubbled and tubes usually carried liquid here and there. The Grand Duke, straight, tall, gray hair, white lab coat, addressed the Chief.

“Nikolai Alexandrovich, we are through! It is all over!”

The Chief stopped pacing and nodded for the Grand Duke to continue.

“The bastards have mixed it with petrol ether.”

The Chief looked at me. “Josef, what would be the problem with separating petrol ether from ethyl alcohol?”

“They have the same boiling point,” I said.

Everyone groaned.

“So! How can you separate it?” he asked me.

“You can’t.”

“And how do you know this ‘you can’t’?”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard it. I’ve read it.”

“Think,” he said quietly, and he paced.

I thought, shook my head, shrugged, and grew red, relieved that Sonja Press wasn’t there to witness my stupidity. I’d moved no closer to her, thus far, and still had it in my mind to so impress her with my genius, that she would fall into my arms and so on.

“You think like a chemist, my curly-headed friend. Try thinking like a physicist.”

I thought and became even redder. I just didn’t know anything about it. But then, neither did anybody else, even the Grand Duke, who was a chemist, after all.

He asked the others—Krupinsky, the Rare Earths Chemist. “Think! Think like physicists!”

Krupinsky said, “Look, Chief, if you want to know about endocrines, ask me.”

Still pacing, the Chief said, “Josef! Does ethyl alcohol mix with water?”

“Yes.”

“And petrol ether?”

“Aha!” said the Grand Duke. “It’s insoluble.”

We all applauded. As he strode from the room, the Chief said, “Think like physicists, my friends. Think like physicists.”

The rest of us stayed to watch the Grand Duke’s demonstration. Here is the Recipe for Separating Petrol Ether from Ethyl Alcohol:

Put a known quantity of the adulterated alcohol into a measured amount of water. When the petrol ether floats to the top, suck it off with a tube and burn off the residue. When the smoky yellow flame begins to burn blue, cover the vessel and preserve the rest. Before drinking, add a little more water to make it 100 per cent proof vodka.

The next morning when the Chief came into our lab for his daily inspection, Sonja Press was with him, carrying an armload of journals. She wore a pink sweater. Her dark hair was so long that one lock rested on her breast. The Chief held a glass of tea, which he stirred with a spoon as he paced and talked.

“Josef. One can mix salt with water, and it is a solution—ionization takes place. But although it seems the same, if one were to mix sugar with water, or, say, with this tea here, as I have done, it is not the same. It is not a solution but merely a dispersement of the sugar into the water. So even if I were to put, say, twenty-five teaspoons of sugar into this cup of tea, it would not run over because it is not a solution but merely a dispersement. Correct? Or am I right?” He put the glass of tea on a table.

I more or less worshiped the Chief. Everyone did. He radiated such intelligence, such strength and power, that he would have been terrifying if it were not for a skeptical, twinkling warmth that drew all of us to him like a magnet. I took a deep breath and said to him, “I don’t believe it.”

“What?” he roared, trying to sound like a lion. “Speak up, speak up.”

I looked at Sonja, who smiled at me encouragingly. “I think you are incorrect. Wrong.” I actually smiled at him.

“We shall see,” he shouted and stormed theatrically from the room. He returned, shortly, with a silver bowl filled with real sugar. White granulated sugar was a rare sight, and everyone gathered to look. I took the silver bowl from him and placed it near the cup, which was full almost to the brim. At the third spoonful of sugar, the liquid hesitated at the brim, at the fourth it spilled onto the table, at the tenth spoonful, the tea began to run from the table to the floor.

“Stop!” shrieked Krupinsky, protecting the sugar with his hands.

The Chief said to me, “I am relieved to find you think like a physicist, my curly-headed friend.” He patted my shoulder before wandering off in a corner to chat with Krupinsky. All he ever was looking for was the truth.

Sonja Press said, “Here, Josef, are some articles on the theory of solutions.” She smelled like roses. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble understanding them.”

Sonja was warm and kind as ever, but subtly unapproachable. It was difficult to understand. I had never been particularly unattractive to girls. The others on the floor—Monika, Marlene, and the two lab assistants from Chemistry, for example—made it quite clear that they were available, but when I attempted to move in on Sonja, I would bump my nose on a Plexiglas dome encircling her.

The Fromm’s Akt, along with some lubricant gel, was tucked in the back of my worktable drawer. Krupinsky had brought them as he promised. But they had yet to be used.

Our second-floor wing smelled also of the rabbits. The Luftwaffe used altered rabbits to cut the grass on their landing strips. The Chief filed a report that he needed just such stock—Albino Castrates Oldenburg Five—in order to do studies on artificial radioactive substances. Rabbits are rabbits: the Luftwaffe had an endless supply nibbling airstrips. At ten months and six pounds, they would be shipped to us. Every laboratory in the plant, including those of Mantle and the Luftwaffe, was assigned a certain number and had, in return, to supply well-documented protocols. In our laboratory, according to the files, I was doing research on “The Effects of Fast Ruthenium: A Study of Effects of Certain Radioactive Substances on the Organs of Living Rabbits.” In his office, the Chief had two large stamps—TOP SECRET: ONLY TO BE OPENED BY PERSONS WITH TOP SECURITY CLEARANCE—so few officials actually looked at the reports. The second stamp read: DECISIVE FOR THE WAR EFFORT.

Neurophysiological Research, floors three, four, and five, all smelled of formaldehyde. They didn’t use alcohol at all to preserve those brains. They used formalin! I had asked Krupinsky about them, repeatedly, ever since my first day at the Institute, when I visited Herr Wagenführer in Personnel and saw those jars and jars of human brains lining the corridors of the fifth floor. All I got from Krupinsky was a runaround, and I did not want to bother the Chief or Professor Kreutzer with such questions. Finally, two months after I’d first seen them, I was able to find out whose brains they were.

The opportunity came mid-June, thanks to a surprise inspection. Three or four times a month a government agency, such as the Ministry of Military Scientific Research, would make a tour of the Institute. It seemed that every office and service of the Third Reich ran its own surveillance teams, intelligence gatherers, efficiency experts, and internal security division, each group working independently and against the others, not only keeping everything a secret from the other services but also secret within their own offices. There was no central control. The Chief directed these tours. He could lecture without notes on any subject related to the Institute.

Generally, he was forewarned, either officially, or unofficially through the Security Officer, and preparations could be made. Herr Wagenführer, for example, could warn the “specials.” He would search us out, wherever we were: in the labs, the cafeteria, even the bathroom. “Tomorrow morning, Josef Leopold Bernhardt”—he always addressed me by my complete name, like a surgeon who fears operating on the wrong patient—“at nine thirty a.m., it would be a good idea if you disappeared into the park. Use the Chief’s stairs.” The Chief had a private staircase into the park from his penthouse office. “If you are asked, which I doubt very much, you will say that you are employed by the Mantle Corporation. It will be safe to return by noon. Do you have any questions?”

Until that unexpected inspection, I was always assigned to the park, where, if the weather was halfway decent, I walked about, afraid to run for fear of drawing attention to myself. If I was tired, I stretched out in Mitzka’s secret hiding place, the tunnel through the bushes leading to the apple orchard. It was still there! If it was too cold and wet, I sat in a pew in the Physics Chapel. If I was hungry, I headed straight for the large greenhouse, where they had a kitchen and endless supplies of cornmeal, molasses, and sunflower and pumpkin seeds. It was a lonely time. We, the specials, without being told to, stayed away from each other during these little exiles.

But the day of the surprise inspection was different. Instead of Herr Wagenführer, it was the Security Officer who warned us, and instead of its being well in advance, it was last-minute and hurried.

Up to that moment, the Security Officer had not spoken to me, nor I to him. I’d seen him in passing and in the Radiation Laboratory, but we did not acknowledge one another. I, of course, knew who he was and what he was, and, I rightly assumed, he knew about me.

It was he, then, who showed up in our lab that morning. Krupinsky, Marlene, Monika, and I were absorbed with the routine sorting of the Drosophila. None of us looked up when he entered the lab, and I was startled to find him standing behind me. At times the Security Officer wore a white lab coat—he was a chemist, after all—but this day he was in his black uniform. He was dripping sweat, breathing laboriously, as though he had been running, and there was a yellowish cast to his complexion. He looked even more ill than usual.

“You”—he exhaled the word and pointed a finger at me, then at Krupinsky—“must go to Personnel on fifth. At once!”

“Inspection?” asked Krupinsky.

The Security Officer nodded grimly.

I began to clear off my worktable.

“You schmuck!” shouted Krupinsky. “Drop it. Run! Use the central staircase.”

As I sprinted from the room, I heard Krupinsky telling the girls, “Get the Roumanian and Rare Earths to help with these flies.”

I ran. Once on the stairs, I easily overtook some of the other specials scrambling for safety—Bolotnikov, the dumpling who sang off-key and worked with Epilachna chrysomelina, and Ignatov, the Bubonic Plague Man—but they were almost as old as my parents. However, by the time I reached the fifth floor, I was, much to my disgust, quite out of breath and totally terrified. Was this, then, to be it? Wheezing and sweating, my heart pounding, I leaned against the metal shelving lining the corridor, so paralyzed by fear that, at first, I did not notice the brains. I tried to calm down by concentrating on other people in the hallway. The specials were gathering down the corridor near the door of Personnel: Bolotnikov and Ignatov, both of whom had passed by me without a glance, and the pianist Rabin. All three were Russians. And there were three others whom I’d never seen before, two men and a girl. One of the men was thirty or so and wearing a white lab coat; the other was just a boy, maybe a year or three older than I. The girl was about my age and incredibly attractive—not as beautiful as Sheereen, but certainly better-looking than even Sonja Press, who was considered to be the best-looking girl in the Institute. She, the new girl, had long black hair—below her waist—tied back with a green ribbon. The men were all, more or less, huddled about her, getting introduced, no doubt, and trying to figure out if she was a candidate for the darkroom.

At the other end of the corridor, Luftwaffe personnel, wearing either lab coats or uniforms, were wandering about, in and out of what I assumed to be laboratories. Strangely enough, some of the uniformed men seemed . . . sick . . . or not quite right. One of them, a young man, had a noticeable limp, and two were actually shaking—palsied.

Krupinsky was dragging himself up the stairs now, Herr Wagenführer plodding like a solid old workhorse on one side of him, and the Yugoslav Zoologist, who was also a ballet dancer, bouncing on the other. Krupinsky looked ghastly gray. I wondered if it was from the climb or from fear—most likely both. The Yugoslav leaped onto the fifth-floor landing, jumped high into the air, made a scissors of his legs, hit the floor on one foot, and did three pirouettes. He didn’t seem very worried.

Herr Wagenführer nodded to me and said, “This is nothing to worry about,” and, kind man, trudged on down the hall toward Personnel.

“Need an elevator,” said Krupinsky to no one in particular, as he stumbled up the last stair, tap-tapping at his chest with two fingers as though he had heart pain.

“You’re out of shape, old man,” said the Yugoslav, thrusting his arm forward in mock-fencing style, jabbing Krupinsky in the gut.

“Cut it out, you shiny ape,” Krupinsky muttered, then leaned against the shelving next to me.

“What is going to happen?” I asked him.

“How should I know?”

“I’m sure the Chief and Kreutzer have everything under control,” the Yugoslav said to me. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Have you been up here before?”

I nodded. “My first day, Herr . . . Professor.”

“We just call him the Yugoslav,” muttered Krupinsky. “That’s because he’s a Russian.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t know your name.”

“I am Russian,” said the Yugoslav, “and my name is difficult for Germans to say.” He smiled, in an embarrassed way. “Dmitri Varvilovovich Tsechetverikov.”

“I see.” Good Lord!

“Professor Yugoslav will do nicely, Bernhardt,” said Krupinsky.

“Excuse me, but why do they call you the Yugoslav if you are Russian?”

“I was with the ballet in Belgrade before I came here. Other than that, my life was in Russia. I was educated there—in biology.”

“And ballet,” said Krupinsky.

“Krupinsky,” I said, pointing to the two men in Luftwaffe uniform at the far end of the corridor, “is it my imagination, or do they both have palsy?”

Krupinsky shrugged without even looking, but the Yugoslav gave them a glance and said, “It’s not your imagination.”

“How did they even get into the Luftwaffe?”

“They’re always looking, in neurophysiological research, for the focus of where such problems originate in the brain,” he said, nodding toward the two palsied men. “So they bring here men who have developed certain neurological symptoms such as paralysis, tremor, Jacksonian attacks—that’s epileptic seizures triggered by brain damage.”

“You mean they experiment on their own personnel?”

“It’s routine. Don’t be so shocked. In every lab the workers are experimental subjects. That’s normal all over the world. They do electroencephalograms on them—record their brain waves and compare them with those of healthy people. It doesn’t hurt them a bit; in fact, sometimes they can be helped. And they have the satisfaction of being useful. Obviously, they aren’t fit for active service, but here they can serve as clerks.”

“The healthy young ones are in the jars.” Krupinsky, glumly, pointed to the brains. “You’ve been wanting to know about them. Here’s your big chance.” He pushed himself away from the shelves and slouched toward Personnel.

The Yugoslav lifted and bent one of his legs and, in one motion, lowered himself onto the floor, where he sat cross-legged, tailor fashion, beside an opened cardboard carton. He always wore those shiny black dancing pumps. “Sit down, Josef,” he said in a kindly way.

I slid down the metal shelving and sat cross-legged with him, my back to the other specials down the hall.

“Reach in there and pull out a jar.”

“Are you sure it’s O.K.?”

He nodded. “Don’t worry. I work in Neurophysiological Research—only with the primates and other animals down on first and second.”

I lifted the flaps of the unsealed carton. There were three jars inside, the same kind as those containing the brains which were already on the shelves. They were packed in a shredded wood packing material and divided by corrugated cardboard.

I reached in and carefully lifted out one jar. It was about the size of a night pot, just large enough so that a human brain could rest without being crushed or damaged. Where the glass lid fit onto the jar, the glass was ground or matted so the lid would adhere securely. It was sealed with paraffin.

“What does it say?” the Yugoslav asked me.

Cradling the jar in two hands, I read the label, which was white with black stenciling and covered almost one entire side of the jar:

SEVENTH LUFTWAFFE LAZARETTO
STRELITZ
No. G. R. 041222 6700 Lt.
21 04 43
22 04 43
Compound Fracture—Sepsis
Brain Removed Intact
Preservative: Formalin
By Hans Bremer,
Medical Sgt. Major

“What do you think it means?”

“The brain was removed at the Seventh Field Hospital in Strelitz. The patient . . . the person . . . died of blood poisoning from a fracture?”

“Right. Go on.”

“It . . . the brain was put in the jar by Sergeant Major Hans Bremer?”

“Bremer removed the brain and put it in the jar.”

“They use formalin? I thought . . . I understood that they used alcohol.”

“Nonsense. Formaldehyde. One never uses alcohol. They come here already picked in the formaldehyde.”

“But who is it . . . was it?”

“Tells you on the label. Read those first numbers.”

“Number G. R. zero, four, one, two, two, two, six, seven, zero, zero, L. T.—he was a lieutenant?”

“Right.”

“In the Luftwaffe? You mean these were all air force personnel?”

“Right.”

“G. R. is a classification?”

“His initials followed by birth date.”

“Zero four, twelve, twenty-two. December fourth, nineteen twenty-two. He is—he’d be twenty.”

“Gunther Rathke, age twenty.”

“Is that his name?” I looked curiously at the brain I held in my hands.

“No, I made that up. His complete history will be sent here later. Look at those other numbers. He died on April twenty-first, nineteen forty-three, and the autopsy was the next day, on April twenty-second.”

“Was he, most likely, sick in some way? Epilepsy or so?”

“To the contrary, these are the brains of fallen young aviators, the cream, so to speak. Goering’s superior, elite, consummate Aryan youth—second only, of course, to Himmler’s beloved S.S.”

“What will they do with them here?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing! There is no research. This is just a collecting place, dead storage. Sometime in the future, if they get all the papers—medical histories and all—they may try to see if any of the known physical or psychic abnormalities are reflected or can be demonstrated in the brain.”

“Will they be able to tell that from dissecting his brain?” I looked curiously at Gunther Rathke.

“No. Nothing. The brain itself isn’t enough. They would need the spinal cord, too. And even then they’d find out nothing. In any case, the field autopsies are too crude and insufficient, and no biochemical data can be obtained.”

“But that’s crazy!”

“The amount of craziness in scientific research is higher than the Chimborazo—but especially in the Third Reich.” The Yugoslav stood, all in one motion. “Most especially in the Third Reich. They want us down the hall. Put Rathke away and come along.” And before I could ask him more, he was loping down the hall toward Personnel.

I put Gunther Rathke back in his box with the other two Aryan creams of the crop and was about to push myself to my feet, when I saw that Sonja Press was ascending. My God, she was lovely. She started the last flight at quite a clip but slowed considerably as she neared the top. When I was certain she could see me, I leaped to my feet à la Yugoslav and bounced down a few steps to help her.

“Ohhh!” She was breathless. “Ohhhh. I ran all the way from first.” I extended my arm. She took it. “Thank you, Josef. You are such a dear.” And I, more or less, pulled her up the last few steps, where, still, she clung to my arm. “These brains made me sick.” She closed her eyes, and I led her down the corridor toward the others, who watched us moving toward them, realizing, no doubt, that she would have the latest information from the Chief. As we approached them, Ignatov and Rabin burst into rapid Russian. Rabin, all the time he was at the Institute, never learned German.

Sonja soothed them with a few soft Russian words and slipped into the Personnel Office. I followed her and saw that Herr Wagenführer was pulling cards from one file and putting them into others. Krupinsky reached in and grabbed my sleeve. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Reluctantly, I stepped back into the corridor.

“Tatiana,” he said, separating the new girl from the pack of wolves surrounding her, “this is Josef. He’s our math genius. He knows the multiplication table backwards and forwards—even the sevens.”

Good Lord!

“Josef, Tatiana here is our new floating lab assistant.” She was as good-looking up close as she had been from a distance, with strong features: large, dark eyes and a firm chin. “She’s a half-Jew like you,” said that stupid schmuck.

“How do you do,” she said curtly, extending her hand in such a way that I knew that she, too, had attended Dance and Social Behavior Classes. Krupinksy, of course, wouldn’t even know such classes existed.

“Enchanted,” I said in French, just to get back at Krupinsky, and I bowed and kissed her hand. One doesn’t actually touch the lips to the hand, of course.

Herr Wagenführer, carrying a long drawer of file cards, joined us at that moment, and I abruptly stepped away from Tatiana to be near Sonja. No doubt, I got off on the wrong foot with her—Tatiana—from the very beginning. Obviously, she was accustomed to having men fall all over her, so she could reject them. In any case, at that moment I was obsessed with Sonja Press.

Herr Wagenführer cleared his throat and began to speak, pausing every sentence or two so Sonja could translate into Russian for Rabin, Bolotnikov, and Ignatov. “As you must have gathered by now, we are in the process of being inspected without having received prior notice. The agency is the Ministry for the Coordination of Total War Effort, and it is interested, it turns out, only in the genetic aspects of the research done here and how that relates to the war effort. We foresee no problems for any of you. It is just a matter of keeping you out of the way for four hours, until two o’clock this afternoon, when you may feel free to return to your own work. These inspectors do not have security clearance to come up on the Luftwaffe or Mantle floors.” He pointed to the file drawer under his arm. “Your cards are removed from these files I carry down to them.”

“Herr Wagenführer,” said Sonja, “at noon they will be having lunch in the dining room, and at one the Chief would like Rabin to give a concert for them in the parlor.”

“Yes, all right, but I would prefer that certain others stay away from the first and second floors until all the inspectors have left the premises. Now, Fräulein Press, please inform Professor Boris Ivanovich Ignatov that he may continue with his normal activities in the park, and if he is asked, which I doubt, he may say that he is in the Department of Genetics and Evolution. Inform Stanislas Rabin that he may return to his piano and prepare a concert: no Chopin, no Russians, only German composers.”

He waited until she translated, then said, “Please ask them if they have any questions.”

“They want to know if they may leave now?”

Herr Wagenführer nodded, and Ignatov and Rabin, looking relieved, walked together toward the stairs.

“Now, Professor Igor Vasilovich Bolotnikov and Professor François Marie Daniel”—Herr Wagenführer nodded to the new man, obviously French; I found out later that he was a physicist who worked with photons—“you two will go to a Mantle laboratory on fourth. Fräulein Press will show you the way. If you are asked, which I doubt, you will say you are employed by the Mantle Corporation. Once you are in the laboratory, someone will show you what your duties will be for the day. Please stay there until the inspectors have left the premises. Do you have any questions?”

They shook their heads.

“You may go now.”

As Bolotnikov and François Daniel started down the hallway with Sonja, she threw me a little wave. Then that damned Frenchman, whom some might consider quite good-looking, offered her his arm, and she took it!

That left the new girl, the new boy, Krupinsky, the Yugoslav, and me. Herr Wagenführer continued his instructions. “Tatiana Rachel Backhaus and Eric van Leyden, I am sorry, but you two are so new I have not had time to make any files, so you must remain hidden in the darkroom on third until two o’clock, when the inspectors will have left the premises.”

“Lucky dog,” said Krupinsky, snickering. “Better send a chaperone with the lady.”

“I can take care of myself,” Tatiana Backhaus said firmly, tossing her chin in the air. And one had the feeling that she could.

“Where is this darkroom?” asked van Leyden, who, it turns out, was a medical student from Holland.

“I will show you as soon as I have assigned these others,” said Herr Wagenführer. “Now, Josef Leopold Bernhardt, Dr Abraham Morris Krupinsky”—he paused and took a deep breath—“and Professor Dmitri Varvilovovich Tsechetverikov will remain here on fifth in Brain Research. If you are asked, which I doubt, you will say you are in the Luftwaffe’s Department of Neurophysiological Research. Could you perhaps”—he looked at the Yugoslav—“run encephalographs on each other?”

“Yes, of course,” said the Yugoslav.

“Do you have any questions?”

We did not.

The Dutch Medical Student offered Tatiana Backhaus his arm, but she refused it. They went down the stairs with Herr Wagenführer; the Yugoslav, Krupinsky, and I walked into the Electroencephalograph Laboratory on fifth.

The EEG machine was housed in a Faraday cage, a copper-mesh cage that was supposed to eliminate all external electromagnetic fields, but didn’t. “Not a hundred percent,” said Krupinsky.

“Not even fifty percent,” said the Yugoslav. “It’s super-sensitive to any kind of noise or vibration, so stand still while I try to adjust it.”

The machine was white and quite large, the size of a kitchen table. The top had a paper drive mechanism, with paper about half a meter wide on a roll. There was a tray on each side, and the paper stretched across the machine. For recording, there were ten pens on arms, and for every pen there were three or four buttons to adjust, including one for the amount of ink flowing through. And each pen had to be calibrated so that it showed a deflection of one cm per 100 microvolts. In other words, for every pen, there was a complete push-pull amplifier—highly sensitive—with its own battery supply.

Another adjustment was that the deflection for positive or negative was the same. So the amplifier had to be balanced. Then there was an adjustment for the rejection of fifty-cycle hum. And the whole affair was run on batteries—six-volt wet cells for the heaters of the tubes, then dry batteries for the other required voltages. The Yugoslav had to check all this, including the batteries, before he could even begin to run a test.

After half an hour, he said, “I’ve only worked with this thing twice before, and both times the pens got to swinging and covered the paper and me with ink. O.K., Josef, sit yourself in that chair over there and Krup will hook you up.”

They had a wire-mesh helmet, which Krupinsky fixed to my head with elastic adhesive. There were little wires with tiny cups which he filled with electrode jelly and then bent back so the cups would touch my scalp—twenty or so of them. It was slow work and difficult because I had so much hair.

“Won’t work,” said Krupinsky at one point. “We’ll have to shave his head.”

“Go to hell,” I muttered.

When all the wires were attached, they had me stretch out on my back on a leather bench in the center of the room. It was hard and uncomfortable. Instead of a pillow, there was a neck support, the kind they use for the guillotine, except that I was face up, my helmeted head hanging over the support.

The wires were formed into cables, which, in turn, were plugged into the electroencephalograph. Then Krupinsky attached a large metal plate to one leg. I knew it wasn’t going to work.

Krupinsky stood beside me. “Ready,” he said.

The Yugoslav, at the controls, said, “O.K., Josef. Relax.”

“Ha!” I said.

“Hush,” shushed Krupinsky.

I could hear the machine whir to a start as the paper was set in motion.

“O.K., now, Josef,” said the Yugoslav quietly, “open your eyes . . . Now close your eyes and relax . . . Now do what you usually do and think of nothing . . . Damn . . . damn. There’s nothing but a fifty-cycle hum in the pens. Christ! The goddamn ink.” I could hear him shutting off the switches, and the machine hummed to a stop.

Krupinsky was over beside the machine now, and I heard him say, “There also seems to be an EKG superimposed.”

“We’ll have to do the whole thing over,” said the Yugoslav.

“Can you let me out of this thing?” I hollered from my guillotine.

They both ignored me and continued their idiotic conversation.

“Let me out of here.”

Nothing.

“Have you tried adjusting the in-phase rejection circuit?” I called over to them.

That they heard. They walked over to me, and when I looked at the Yugoslav, I burst out laughing. His face and the front of his white lab coat were covered with black ink. Krupinsky took a good look at him and started to laugh, then the Yugoslav started to laugh, and we all laughed and laughed and laughed until we were in tears. Here I was, my cross-breed brain wired to a stupid machine, and Gunther Rathke’s pure-bred Aryan brain in the hall, and those Nazis touring the fruit flies on second, trying to figure out how those happy little winemakers could help Adolf Hitler win the war. I think the absurdity of it all hit us, for, obviously, the Yugoslav must have had some Jewish blood in him, too, or he wouldn’t have been hidden in the Luftwaffe’s Brain Research Department.

Krupinsky finally unhooked me from the machine and removed the helmet. “We’ll have to do the whole thing over again,” he said.

“What was that you said about in-phase rejection?” the Yugoslav asked me.

“I was thinking about it,” I said. “As some of the interfering currents are arriving with the same phase at the electrodes, I would imagine that by balancing a circuit in the amplifier one could almost eliminate this particular type of disturbing signal. In other words, it would serve mainly to eliminate a fifty-cycle hum and the EKG.”

The Yugoslav said, “How do you know so much about electroencephalographs?”

“I don’t. But I do know about amplifiers.”

The Yugoslav looked dubiously at Krupinsky, who said, “I hate to admit it, but the little pisher knows what he’s talking about when it comes to machines. People, on the other hand, he doesn’t know from borscht.”

They let me at the machine, and I was able to balance the circuit in the amplifier by putting a dummy electrode into the circuit with a switch. I explained it to them. “This mimics the condition of putting real electrodes on the skull, one of the main characteristics of which is that there is a certain resistance between those two points. The higher the resistance, the more apt you are to pick up interfering signals. What you try to do is adjust these two potentiometers to eliminate all the interfering signals picked up.”

“What makes the ink spray?” asked Krupinsky.

“I imagine that when all that interference comes in, the pens get to swinging wildly, and the developed centrifugal force sprays the ink.” I pointed to the machine. “Look at those pens. They swung so much they got interlocked. They look like crossed fingers.”

And I looked at each pen, too, not only to balance the amplification but also to check the ink flow. Just as I had thought, the ink was clotted in two of them and running too fast in two others.

When I thought it was all ready, I sat again on the chair and Krupinsky reapplied all the cups with fresh electrode jelly. Then I lay down on the couch. Krupinsky, as before, stood beside me. I could hear the machine rolling.

“Blink your eyes,” said the Yugoslav. “Don’t move . . . Imagine Marlene and Monika, or how about the new girl, what’s her name? Tatiana? Yes, Tatiana with the long black hair and almond-shaped eyes . . . Now, don’t move. Krupinsky will tickle you but do not move.”

Krupinsky tickled my gut and under my arm, but I did not move.

Then the two of them held a conversation which was supposed to make me angry. “He’s from superior stock, you know,” said Krupinsky. “He’s one of those high-toned Sephardic German Jews who won’t have anything to do with us low-class Ashkenazis.” And so on.

In two or three minutes, which seemed much longer to me, they were through. Krupinsky carefully removed the mesh helmet. Then I walked over to the machine and tried to get them to explain what the encephalogram said about my brain waves.

“It’s disgusting,” said Krupinsky. “If you think at all, you have nothing on your brain but evil thoughts.”

“Come on,” I pleaded with the Yugoslav. “What does it say?”

He looked long and carefully at the inky lines scribbled across the paper. “It demonstrates,” he said thoughtfully, “that even birds have larger brains than you.”

Then the Yugoslav sat in the chair while Krupinsky fitted him with the helmet and I readjusted the machine, which Krupinsky wanted to operate. I fixed it so as soon as he turned it on, he would get sprayed with black ink. Unfortunately, I stood too close; he grabbed me and I got some in the face, too.

“You little schlemiel. You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Tell me about my brain waves, Krupinsky.”

“They are completely normal—for a schlemiel, that is.”

“How do you tell?”

“We try to analyze these wiggles by shape, amplitude, and number. I’ve got a book in the lab.”

“You mean you actually count the number of wiggles?”

“That’s right.”

I thought that sounded pretty clumsy. I readjusted the amplifiers, and we graphed the brain waves of the Yugoslav; we readjusted the amplifiers again and graphed Krupinsky.

By the time we were through, it was almost two, and we knew we could return to the second floor. But it was so pleasant, we stayed in the EEG Lab and talked for a while.

“I hate using this machine,” the Yugoslav told us. “It’s so primitive. Down in my lab, we use light rays on photosensitive paper. It’s probably much more accurate due to lack of inertia. Those pens are heavy.”

I said, “Instead of counting a bunch of wiggles on paper, why don’t you just feed the electrical signals into counters, like the ones we have in our lab?”

“You see how lucky you are he doesn’t work for you?” Krupinsky said to the Yugoslav.

“That’s a great idea,” said the Yugoslav. “Could you set that up in my lab?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“We can go down now,” said Krupinsky. “Maybe Josef can stop by and see your operation.”

“Not looking like that, he can’t.” The Yugoslav pointed at me, and we started to laugh all over again. All three of us were spattered with black ink, and our hair, heavy with electrode jelly, was greasy and standing on end.

We walked down the hallway, past the jars and jars and shelves and shelves of the brains of fallen young aviators, then, three abreast, down the three flights, and as one mind went first into the kitchen off the small greenhouse in our second-floor wing to have some polenta smothered in molasses and plenty of vodka.

After showering and shampooing to get rid of the ink and the electrode jelly, the Yugoslav and I went over to his department, which was in the left wing of the first and second floors, and he showed me the animals in which he had implanted electrodes, surgically, right into the brain.

The left wings of the first and second floors had their own special smells, filled as they were with a collection of dogs, cats, and rabbits with hereditary defects mimicking some of those in man, such as harelips, shortened limbs, and club feet. They were difficult to get because the breeders destroyed the malformed, wishing to conceal the presence of deformity in their highly prized lines. Goebbels, of course, had a club foot.

There were cages and cages of primates, dogs, and cats, most with electrodes planted in their brains for recording and for stimulation. When they were not strapped down for electroencephalographs or similar tests, the male monkeys masturbated. They had nothing else to do, each kept separate, and most having had delicate brain surgery. These masturbating monkeys so fascinated the soldiers of the Red Army when they “liberated” us some two years later that they carried them off to Russia, along with the Yugoslav, as a gift to their Great Leader Josef Stalin.

After the delicate brain surgery, these animals were unstable physically and required a lot of care. But it was almost impossible to find women workers who were willing to stay on. After two or three days they would quit, complaining of the smell, or of the female monkeys who bit and scratched, but never mentioning the real reason. This particular personnel problem came up for discussion over and over during the bi-weekly staff dinners of the Department of Genetics and Evolution.

The bi-weekly staff dinners of the Department of Genetics and Evolution were private, absolutely top secret, and kept from the Luftwaffe and from all but a few of the Mantle personnel. They began three hours after official closing time, at nine. To avoid drawing attention to these secret meetings, nothing was used from the cafeteria or dining room downstairs. Dishes and utensils were brought from the Chief’s house, and all preparation was done in the Genetics wing: we men would slaughter the rabbits—pick them up by the ears and hit them with a lead pipe, bleed and skin them—but mostly the girl lab assistants would cook them in the autoclaves and also cook the polenta in the kitchen of the small greenhouse attached to our wing. Tables would be arranged in a large rectangle in one of the labs in our second-floor wing.

Between twenty and twenty-five people came: the Chief, Professor Kreutzer, and the Grand Duke always sat at the head of the table, with Madame Avilov and Frau Kreutzer, who was very good-looking and much younger than her husband. I don’t think the Grand Duke had a wife. Near them sat some of the specials like Ignatov, the Bubonic Plague Man, who would eat and drink himself into a stupor and never say a word, and Stanislas Rabin, the pianist.

Some of the specials would not sit by the Chief, but way at the other end near the girl lab assistants: for instance, the Russian dumpling, Bolotnikov, and the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco.

Or there might be, at the head of the table, visiting scientists: atomic physicists from the other Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes; or the physicist who was supposed to be reassembling the Humpty-Dumpty cyclotron the Nazis had been tricked into moving from Paris to Alsace-Lorraine—of course, it couldn’t be put together again; or the one in charge of the working cyclotron belonging to the post office; or notables like Pascual Jordan. When these visitors came, the dinners were even more private, with no lab assistants invited. Because I was treated like an inexperienced young scientist rather than a laboratory assistant, I was always expected to attend. I didn’t mind, because Sonja Press was always there, too.

Sitting at the middle of the long table would be the kind woman biologist Frau Doktor, Krupinsky and his wife, the Yugoslav, and the Rare Earths Chemist, who at his own discretion would bring some of the part-time Mantle Corporation people who used his lab. The Chief mistakenly trusted him. And there was that Frenchman, François Daniel, who worked with light perception, trying to measure the minimal amount of light which will evoke a response—a photon. His laboratory was over in Physics.

Some wives would come now and then, but never the wife of the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco. This Treponesco had been sent by the Roumanian government to learn genetics, but all he was interested in were the girls. He could have sat in the middle, if he’d wanted, but he preferred to sit at the end where the young girls were, and after Tatiana came he always maneuvered to sit next to her.

The rest of us—Monika, Marlene, other laboratory assistants, the Dutch Medical Student, and Sonja Press—sat at the foot of the table. And Mitzka Avilov, when he came, would not sit with his parents at the head of the table, but below the salt with us. He was as cavalier as ever, easily maintaining the adoration of all with tales of his daring exploits in the underground. He and his confederates were stealing food and blankets from German troop trains and cleverly distributing them to Russian prisoners of war. From these Russian prisoners he received word of the atrocities—the mass murders, gas chambers, cyanide, the ovens—and Mitzka, in turn, passed this information on to us, not at the staff dinners, because even there certain subjects were not openly discussed, but in private conversation with one or, at most, two others. Krupinsky dubbed him the “Russian Robin Hood,” and the new floating lab assistant, Tatiana, called him “William Tell.” She would always sit beside him, and after dinner, when Mitzka amused us with his balalaika, she sang, making the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco quite jealous. When Mitzka wasn’t there, Tatiana would let the Frenchman, François Daniel, sit beside her.

The Security Officer was not invited, but would be given a tray with baked rabbit, polenta, and vodka, which he would take to his small house in the corner of the park and share with his wife and children.

There was no formal beginning to those dinners. One came in, sat down, and began to eat. There was always the rabbit, polenta, and vodka for the men and a vodka punch for the women. Sometimes there would be vegetables from the garden or greenhouses in the park and sometimes there were apples. When the apples were ripe in the orchard adjacent to the park, the Chief would say to me, “How well apples would taste with the baked rabbit tonight,” and I would crawl through Mitzka’s secret hole in the fence. At first, the farmer had two large dogs guarding them, so I would make only one trip. But later, I suppose he could no longer feed them, and I could make as many trips as were needed.

The discussions could begin any time, and the Chief made no opening statement unless he felt the need to impose some discipline. Then, before sitting, he would pace back and forth and talk. “Can you imagine that I just came from a laboratory in which someone had taken a liter or so of alcohol and replaced it with water?”

Everyone looked surprisingly guilty when the Chief began his tirades.

“Can you imagine that someone would think me stupid enough not to know the difference? I don’t care a bit if you steal as much alcohol as you like, but to contaminate the remainder is what should not be done. Ignorance,” he would shout, “is the only excuse for anyone to do anything he shouldn’t. Thoughtlessness or laziness is no excuse.”

“Sit down, Nikolai Alexandrovich,” said Madam Avilov. “You’ll ruin everyone’s dinner.”

He stopped pacing, picked up a glass, raised it high. “In spite of, nevertheless, why don’t we have a drink?”

And we all did.

The drinking was very important, and the Chief pushed the vodka all through the dinner. It was necessary, for so deeply was it engrained in our German souls to revere authority, especially in a place like the Institute, where the difference in status between individuals was so vast, where there were so many titles and so much formality, that a younger person or a less titled person never dared contradict or interrupt, even to ask a question. As I had learned from ministers at my high school, it was more than just engrained in our souls. In Germany, the teachings of Paul in Romans 13 had actually replaced the heart, and all reverence was given to the governing authorities, no matter how evil they were, not because they were ministers of God but because they were ministers of fear. To overcome this, the Chief had to get everyone pretty well drunk, insisting that we eat vast quantities as we drank, the scientific hypothesis being that alcohol was harmless and that liver damage was caused by malnutrition and avitaminosis. Besides, we were hungry.

And although the pecking order in seating remained, he broke down the reticence, the fear of speaking, and there was much conversation and shouting up and down the tables.

“Did anyone hear Voice of America this evening?”

“Ha!” yelled Krupinsky. “If I’m going to risk my life to listen to the radio, I’m not going to turn on Voice of America to hear about Farmer Jones who milks his cows all day and tired but strong works all night in a bomber factory, or listen to Thomas Mann rattling on about what Germans in Germany should do, when he’s safe in America. No, sir, Chief, if I’m going to risk my life to listen, I’ll tune in to BBC and hear some news.”

“He’s right,” said the Rare Earths Chemist. “BBC. But listen, Krup, I don’t know why you’re so against Mann. He’d be dead by now if he hadn’t left.”

“All right, all right, but he should shut up, pray hard, and stop giving advice.”

Then there would be a middle-table argument about Thomas Mann, and a head-table fight, in Russian, over a ballet performance, or about how to cure tobacco, or how to keep the female flies from ovulating and the males from ejaculating under ether, or whether or not the lab windows should be closed so that the Berlin wilds in the park would not be contaminated by the controlled stock, or how to cover with “amplifier noise” an article on Einstein’s relativity so it would pass the censors and still make sense, all this with everyone eating incredibly much and drinking and the Chief listening to everything with half an ear until something caught his interest.

“If it isn’t a secret,” he said to a middle group talking about forced labor, “let’s talk about it together.”

The Yugoslav said, “It’s no secret. We can’t keep any assistants in the primate wings because of the masturbating monkeys. We were wondering about forced labor. After all, we’d treat them well. They’d actually be better off here.”

“No matter how well we treated them,” the Chief said, “we would be in trouble. Later we would be investigated, and the authorities—the Americans or the Russians—they would say, ‘How come you had here fifty forced labor?’”

“But couldn’t the laborers explain how well off they were?”

The Chief shook his head. “The workers will be the first people to be repatriated and gone. If they are gone they cannot defend us. No, my friends, if you are caught with the thieves you are also hanged with the thieves.” He turned to Professor Kreutzer. “Correct? Or am I right?”

Professor Kreutzer nodded agreement, pushed back his chair, stood, and began to change his glasses. He rarely spoke at the dinners, but when he did, everyone stopped eating and listened. He changed from the gold-rims to the rimless.

“I would like to take this opportunity to implore you to lower your consumption of water and fuel for the next month. Stay within the prescribed consumption. Do not draw attention to what we do here by forcing us out of budget. Also, we need more projects in order to keep supplies coming. If you have an idea, let me know.” He sat down.

All resumed eating.

Krupinsky said to the middle and lower groups, “I would like to suggest a new project for the Chemistry Lab.”

“What’s that?” said the French Physicist François Daniel.

“Beer. They should try making beer. The stuff you buy nowadays is so bad that when I sent a sample in for analysis, the report came back, ‘Your horse has diabetes.’”

We all laughed, and François Daniel said, “That’s because it’s made out of whey. Can’t get the right ingredients, Krupinsky; there’s a war on.”

“I wasn’t sure the French had noticed,” said Krupinsky. “Say, Chief,” he hollered. “We’ve got quite a project going in our lab. Josef here has rigged up a cigarette holder on his microscope so he can smoke and sort flies at the same time. We’ve got so many orders coming in for them, he hardly has time to do anything else.”

That wasn’t at all true. I had made a few for the microscopes in our lab. But everyone was laughing and looking at me. I could have killed Krupinsky.

Sonja pressed my arm and said, “Don’t pay any attention to him. He loves to tease.”

The Chief said, “I hear you’ve been working on other things aside from those very important cigarette holders. Eh, Josef?”

I nodded. It came quite easily for me to make little mechanical changes here and there.

“We’d all like to hear about it.”

This was the moment I had looked forward to: implementing my plan to so impress Sonja with my genius that she would fall into my arms. But I was terrified of speaking publicly, and especially before this group of distinguished scientists. My major problem was that I liked to think before I spoke, so there was always a hesitation, a delay, which caused my listeners to demonstrate impatience, compounding my anxiety and making me stammer.

They were looking at me—all of them. I thought for a moment, organizing my ideas into sentences, took a deep breath, and began. “The flies were drowning,” I whispered.

“Louder!” said Professor Kreutzer. “We can’t hear you.”

“The flies were drowning in their—”

“Speak up!” roared the Chief.

I stood up.

“Sit down!” shouted Krupinsky. “This is an informal meeting.”

I sat down. Paralyzed.

The Chief raised his glass. All did and drank. I, too. They were all staring at me.

I said, “The flies when they breathe produce water vapor, and when they were put in the small airtight chambers in order to be irradiated with ultraviolet rays, they would become waterlogged by their own vapor they produced by breathing. And they would die.” I held my breath.

Professor Kreutzer helped me. “The reason he secured them in airtight chambers was that they would crawl all over the target area so the radiation hit randomly. Ultraviolet radiation is too easily absorbed by other parts of the anatomy, and we want the gonads to get a full dose.”

The Chief raised his glass and said, “To the gonads.”

We all drank.

I said, “So we had to figure out how to hold them in such a way that only the abdomen got the radiation, and, at the same time, to keep them from drowning in their own vapor.”

The Chief raised his glass. We all drank.

“So I looked at my wristwatch and got the idea to lay them on their backs in a Plexiglas capsule that has a round face like my watch and put cellophane on top, and I fastened the cellophane to the Plexiglas with the screws from my wristwatch.” I showed them my bare wrist, where the watch had been. “Of course, I anesthetized them before putting them into the capsule. Just lightly squished them down so they wouldn’t wiggle around. And then I had to figure out how to get air into the capsule.”

The Chief raised his glass. We all drank, and, of course, the others continued to eat as I talked. But they listened.

“So I got a small motor and made it turn a screw that pushed a syringe in and out. And just that small amount of air was sufficient to keep the flies dry.”

There were murmurs of approval around the room. The Chief beamed at me and Sonja pressed my arm again. I must admit, I felt rather pleasant. Actually, I was quite drunk.

The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco said, “That’s all well and good, young man, but with all that air pushing in and out, the ether wears off and you wake up the flies. How do you intend to take them out of the capsule when they are flying all around?”

“I thought of that,” I said. “I put an ether mixture into the syringe and the flies would go to sleep again.”

“It’s too bad,” said Treponesco, “that they don’t offer a Nobel prize for kindergartners.”

All evening he was trying to get the floating lab assistant, Tatiana, to notice him, but she found him repulsive and totally ignored him.

The dinners always ended in a party. Some of the people would go home early—the Kreutzers, the Krupinskys, Frau Doktor, Madame Avilov, or so—but many would stay, especially the Russians—the Chief, Ignatov, who would be so drunk by the end of the dinner he couldn’t move, Bolotnikov, the Yugoslav, and always, without his wife, the Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco. The Russian girls from the ballet—Die Scala—would come over after their performance, and the party would go on all night. The first six weeks or so, I went home right away; then I began to wait until Sonja Press left. She stayed only an hour or so until it began to get wild. At times she allowed me to walk her to the door of her apartment in the park, but usually the Chief would take her. In that case, I’d head right for the train station—until the time when I, too, stayed all night.

The first time I enjoyed the three hours between work and the staff dinners was at the end of June, two and a half months after I’d come to the Institute, when Sonja Press invited me, Frau Doktor, the Yugoslav, the French Physicist François Daniel, and Tatiana to her apartment for tea and cakes made from the cornmeal. Everyone was friendly, and they all just talked together. As far as I could tell, Sonja had no special boyfriend, and I decided that it was time to tell her how I felt—if only I could get her alone.

The next step was to manipulate her into inviting me, alone, to her apartment, using as a wedge her solicitude toward me when I was assigned to a forty-eight-hour stint in the Radiation Laboratory. “You poor thing,” she would say, “it must be terribly lonely to sit there all those hours.”

Actually, I didn’t mind it at all. Although most of the time I was alone in the control booth, people did stop by to chat—the Chief, Marlene, or so. Professor Kreutzer and Krupinsky would relieve me for an hour or two at regular intervals. Someone had to be there all the time to make sure the equipment didn’t break down and to measure the dose hourly. When one worked with fast neutrons from our homemade accelerator, there were too many variables: high voltage wasn’t constant, ion source wasn’t constant, vacuum wasn’t always the same; therefore, the number of fast neutrons produced had to be measured frequently. With ultraviolet or x-ray the dose, once measured, was fairly constant. One needed to spot-check only now and then.

Mostly I liked monitoring the linear accelerator because it meant that I had an excuse not to go home for two or three days at a time. Nevertheless, I began to act sad about it when Sonja was near, and surely enough, she would press my arm and say, “You have the saddest eyes.” But to get her to actually invite me to her apartment, I was forced to more or less lie.

The first week in July, the day before I was to go into the control booth for forty-eight hours, I ran an appalling, sad routine every time she walked into my lab. And at lunch-time, in the cafeteria, I sat across from her and stared down, despondently, at my cup of tea.

It was almost too easy. God, what an ass I was! I made her beg me to tell her the cause of my great sorrow. “I’ll bet it’s the Radiation Laboratory. You poor dear.”

“No.” I sighed. “It’s not that. It’s nothing. I’ll be all right.”

“Then what is it? Are you ill? Are your parents all right?”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that. You’d laugh if I told you.”

“Josef! You know me better than that.”

“Well . . .” I wanted to appear reluctant to say it, so I had to hesitate. “It does have something to do with the Radiation Lab.”

“I knew it! Why don’t you let me talk to the Chief?”

“No, no.” That was the last thing I wanted. “You don’t understand. I really don’t mind being in there at all—but I’m going in tomorrow night at seven and I have to stay for forty-eight hours.” I took a big breath and did it. “And the day after tomorrow is my birthday.” Actually, my birthday wasn’t until six weeks later, August fifteenth.

“We’ll have a birthday party for you,” she said and clapped her hands.

“No! I don’t want anyone else to know. Please. Just forget it.” I blinked my eyes at her a few times. Girls always commented on my eyes. They were probably my only good feature.

The upshot of it all was that she invited me, alone, to her apartment for dinner on my “birthday.” Krupinsky agreed to relieve me in the Radiation Lab for two hours, starting at seven in the evening.

Everything ran smoothly all night and all day, and by the time he was supposed to come, I’d had plenty of time to think about Sonja Press and how I would say it and do it. But Krupinsky didn’t get there at seven. The British bombed early that night, and he was held up for two hours by the air raid. I was so upset that I blew up at him, even though it wasn’t his fault. He gave me one of his expressionless looks and said, “You have three hours, you schmuck. I’ll stay until midnight.”

Sonja had said I could come any time after six and before nine—and here it was several minutes after nine. Fortunately, I had showered and shaved when Professor Kreutzer relieved me in late afternoon, so all I had to do was pick up two Fromm’s Akt and the lubricant gel from my worktable drawer and run across the park to her building and up the stairs.

She seemed a little anxious. “I was so worried you wouldn’t make it.”

“Krupinsky was delayed by the British. Am I too late?”

“Well, no. We do have a little time.” Then she smiled, gave me a hug, and said, “Happy seventeenth birthday. Here, I have a little vodka ready.”

She handed me a glass of it, and I had to stand there while she toasted me with “Many, many happy returns of the day.” Then she began to weep, probably over the contradiction of many happy returns for a cross-breed half-Jew in the Third Reich.

I was extremely ill at ease, and I already knew it wasn’t going to work. When things start off so wrong—the lies and Krupinsky being late—the best thing is to drop it. But I was trained by my father, a Prussian, that once a job is started, it must be completed—right or wrong. “In the army,” he said to me over and over, “if one buttons a tunic beginning with the wrong hole and discovers it halfway up, he must finish it wrong and then unbutton all the buttons and start all over again.”

I stood there, rigid as a Prussian soldier, feeling totally alienated from the scene. Words wouldn’t come naturally. I had to think of what to say.

Sonja gave me another hug and said, “You poor dear, sitting up all night and all day in that control booth.”

I put an appropriate expression on my face and sighed. “It’s not too bad. I really don’t mind it.” Ah, I let a little honesty creep in.

“Here! Lie down on the couch and rest.”

I sank onto the couch, half reclining, a position uncomfortable for me, and she actually bent down and untied my shoes. “Take these off and stretch out a minute while I get some food on the table.” I hated to take off my shoes; my socks were threadbare, darn on darn. But she left me no choice.

Stocking-footed, I stretched out and she covered me with her shawl. She puttered about the hot plate and the table for ten minutes or so, then sat beside me on the couch and took my hand.

“Would you like some more vodka?”

“No, thank you.”

“How is the irradiation going?”

“Fine, thank you. Sonja? May I tell you something?”

“Dinner is ready.” She dropped my hand and tried to rise from the couch. But I held her arm.

“Dinner is ready.” She tried, again, to rise, but still I held her arm. Gently, she pushed my hand away.

“Sonja, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you.”

“Josef, dear, I think it would be best if we have our dinner now.”

“Please, you must let me speak.” I knew she didn’t want to hear, but I had to finish buttoning up the tunic, wrong hole and all.

She did not try to get up.

“From the very first moment I set eyes on you that very first day, I . . . I have felt . . .” God! Her face was so anxious and pained. “I have felt the greatest affection for you.”

She leaned over, kissed my cheek, and took my hand. “You have no idea how greatly I esteem your affection for me and how I will always cherish your friendship.” This conversation was right out of a nineteenth-century novel. “And now, dinner is ready.”

“You don’t understand . . .” I began. But someone was at the door. I heard a key turning in the lock.

Sonja jumped to her feet and I to mine. The shawl fell to the floor.

It was the Chief. He opened her door with a key. He frowned and said to Sonja, “What’s he doing here at this hour?”

“It’s his birthday today. I invited him for dinner.”

He looked at me. “Happy birthday. Aren’t you supposed to be over in the Radiation Laboratory?”

I did not run. I bowed slightly. “Good evening, sir.” I bowed more deeply to Sonja and kissed her hand—“I thank you for a most pleasant evening”—and I walked slowly toward the door.

“Your shoes,” she said.

I returned, picked up my shoes, bowed again, and walked slowly from the apartment, slowly down the flight of stairs. Then I ran, in my stocking feet, through the park to the main building and up the stairs to the Radiation Lab.

Krupinsky said, “Back so soon? It’s not even ten, Why didn’t you get some sleep? Why are you carrying your shoes? What did you do, get caught in somebody’s bed?”

“Why don’t you shut up and shove it up your ass, you shiny ape.”

“Good idea!” He picked up his jacket and left.

A male Drosophila would jump on anything, even a black spot on a piece of paper. In the lab, I had made black spots on paper, watched them pounce and stagger off in confusion, return and pounce again. But I had made my sexual frustration unilateral: Sonja Press. Not like him, who had a wife, too, and who, everybody knew, fornicated with all the ballet dancers who came to the parties after our staff dinners. It had been two months since Marlene had invited me to the darkroom.

I sat all that night, checking hourly the amount of radiation given to the one hundred flies in the three gelatin capsules pasted to the target. At six in the morning, Professor Kreutzer relieved me for two hours, and I passed out on a table in our lab until eight, when I returned to the control booth. At eight thirty the Rare Earths Chemist came in with a solution he wanted irradiated. Good Lord, why him? Always him? Such a nice man. But in the first place, he forgot to use the lightning arrester, in the second place he was about to put his hand into the target area in order to paste on the small capsule of solution he wanted irradiated. I had to pull switches, causing crashing noises and many sparks. He’d been so nice to me from the beginning, directing me to the Chief’s penthouse that first day, and after that always ready to explain about the Rare Earths elements, which are not really so rare, and showing me the tremendous collection of alkaloids stored in his lab, and explaining how he was always trying to isolate the transuranium which they knew was there from the measuring equipment, but which, of course, they had never seen. In the third place, his solution might give off secondary radiation. If this happened I could throw away my one hundred flies because I couldn’t be sure if the effect I got was from primary or secondary radiation.

Professor Kreutzer had put me in charge of the linear accelerator, but without any authority. So I couldn’t tell the scientists not to put their solutions on the target, or not to go into the Radiation Lab unprotected, or not to stick their hands in front of the target. I could just make the machine seem to break down.

I looked at the Rare Earths Chemist through the glass and water. And he, kind man, looked at me, waved, smiled, pointed to the machine. I said over the intercom that I was sorry things seemed to have broken down, but if he would come back at four or five in the afternoon, it should be fixed. He picked up his solution and left.

By the time the Chief stopped in to see how things were, I had rationalized my way into a fit of moral indignation over his sexual behavior. It was the only way I could handle my humiliation. He acted as though nothing had happened and began talking about statistical validity. He was forever talking about how to confirm the validity of statistical phenomena. “One must have a very large number, a very large number, and even then, Josef, one must be careful with statistics, for they are like a lady’s brief bathing suit. What they reveal is interesting, but what they hide is essential. Correct? Or am I right?”

One began to notice that he repeated the same trite phrases over and over: Correct? Or am I right? And one knew also that what one does not say also hides the most essential. I was coldly polite but said little.

Krupinsky came in after lunch to relieve me. “How’re you doing, Josef?” His tone was so kind that I became wary.

“How should I be doing?” I rose from the chair. He closed the door and blocked my exit.

“It was Sonja, wasn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“I should have told you, I suppose. But you’re such a damned know-it-all.”

“Told me what? That the Chief’s a moral pygmy?”

Krupinsky grabbed my shirtfront and pulled me toward him. “You goddam schmuck.” He released me with a push; he actually had tears in his eyes. “You are so brilliant,” he said, “and probably the most stupid individual I’ve ever met.”

“It’s time to measure the dose.”

“A minute more won’t matter. Don’t you understand, you schlemiel, that the Chief is carrying you on his back—and me—and all of us, including those Luftwaffe people in Brain Research and at Mantle? Anything he has to do to keep his sanity is O.K.”

“But he has a wife!” I blurted out.

“When the hell are you going to grow up? It doesn’t make any difference.”

I sat down again on the swivel chair in front of the control panel. “But he’s so old.”

“Did Sonja tell you about the Chief?”

“He walked in on us. He has his own key.”

Krupinsky turned away from me, perhaps to hide a smile. I swiveled around and looked through the aquarium of glass and water into the Radiation Laboratory and saw the wavering image of the linear accelerator. “I’ll measure the dose before I go to lunch,” I said.

“Thanks. I can stay one hour.”

After the measuring, I went into my lab. The girls were through with the daily sorting and were putting the flasks of flies into the incubators. I took Marlene aside and asked her if she would like to go with me to the darkroom.

She took a step backward, looked up at me, and nodded. A serious face. The eruptions on her skin were, most likely, not syphilis at all.

“I don’t have much time,” I said.

“It doesn’t take much time.”

So we went up to the darkroom.

It takes the flies a long time. Many minutes. The male jumps on the back of the female and holds her with all six legs. There is no struggle. Sometimes they fly around joined, but usually they just crawl or hop. But slowly—they take their time.

Marlene turned on the red light, bolted the door, and pulled the soundproof curtain. I tried to embrace and kiss her.

“Don’t kiss me.” She pushed me away.

There was a stack of folded blankets in the corner. She began to spread one. I helped, being careful to smooth out the corners neatly. She put a folded blanket down for a pillow, stepped out of her underdrawers, lay down, and raised her skirt above her waist. I looked.

“Don’t look at me.”

I closed my eyes.

“Just unbutton your pants.”

It was not embarrassing to me—slightly awkward, but mainly matter-of-fact. “Do you have a safety?”

“Two.” I pulled the Fromm’s Akt from my pocket.

“One will do.”

I pictured the full, rose-tipped breasts of Frau Krupinsky with the small silver cross in the cleavage. Then I dropped to my knees.

Mother’s medical books listed only two kinds of sexual impotency for the male: impotentia generandi, the inability to procreate, sterility; and impotentia coeundi, the inability to perform coition. To this I added a third, impotentia Josefus, the inability to satisfy a woman. She just lay there stiff and quiet while I did it to her.

I was able to heat up and eat three bowls of polenta with molasses in the greenhouse kitchen and return to the control booth within the hour, by two p.m.

At four thirty, Professor Kreutzer walked into the Radiation Laboratory with his lightning arrester and the Gestapo in the House. It was time for the Security Officer’s daily x-ray therapy. When I had asked Krupinsky about him, I was told that the Security Officer—who was a high-ranking officer in the S.S., an Obersturmbannführer—had a doctorate in chemistry, and that is why Himmler himself assigned him to keep watch over the various scientific activities at the Institute. And Krupinsky gave me a book to read about his particular disease, Principles of Internal Medicine, page 1317:

Hodgkin’s disease is characterized by painless, progressive enlargement of the lymphoid tissue. The proliferating cells tend to encroach upon, obscure, and finally replace the architecture of the lymph node. No age is immune, and males are more frequently affected than females. The cause of these disorders is unknown.

The nodes are discrete and movable at first; only later do they become matted together and fixed. At first they are painless and the overlying skin is normal; however, when they have developed rapidly or when the nerves are infiltrated, they may be painful. The effect of irradiation may be dramatic, large masses melting away in the course of a week.

If correct diagnosis is not made early, dissemination of the disease occurs.

Correct diagnosis had not been made early in his case, and it had spread. He’d already had surgery on his underarm and groin, which accounted for his peculiar walk: a limp, a shuffle, his arms held gingerly away from his body.

He took off his black trousers and lay down on the table. Groin. Does such a disease make one impotent in any way? He had three small children. Professor Kreutzer came into the control booth and switched the power from the linear accelerator to the deep x-ray machine. The Kreutzers had no children, nor did the Krupinskys or Treponescos, only the Avilovs. They had the one, Mitzka. My parents had one, me. Uncle Otto and Aunt Greta had no children, and my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Philip, was not married when he was picked up and “relocated to the East.”

The flies had been irradiated forty-six and one-half hours. Enough. When Professor Kreutzer and the Security Officer were gone, I took my three capsules from the target area and stopped by Rare Earths to tell the Chemist that the Radiation Laboratory would be O.K. now, and then I went into my lab to etherize the flies and put each male in a flask with three virgins. You could figure that as soon as the virgins matured, after two hours or so, and there were male flies in the vicinity, the virgins had to be considered fertilized.

Monika was there waiting to help me. She and Marlene must have talked, for when the hundred flasks were all back in the incubators, she took my hand and led me to the darkroom. Both of them—first Marlene and then Monika—lay so silent and unmoving that I felt that although one had the ability to perform coition, one could still feel inadequate.

We were looking for the effects of radiation on unripe sperm, so those first three virgins had to be discarded into the mass grave, and the second three, and the third three. Each male went through nine or so females before he was put with those whose offspring we could check.

Our second-floor wing smelled also of the rich compost we mixed with the soil to grow the feed for the rabbits, rats, and ladybugs and to grow the tobacco. Some of it was grown in the small greenhouse on the second floor, and the remainder in one of the large greenhouses in the park.

Our wing smelled of the tobacco we grew and aged, and of the particular sauce each scientist developed to cure his own tobacco: it was air dried, hung leaf by leaf on fishing line, and then soaked in all kinds of exotic solutions including the Chief’s recipe of prune juice and extract of dried figs. There was endless discussion on how long to soak, how long to dry, what sauce to use. Then it was cut, then smoked. The report filed showed extensive research on a tobacco virus called “Tabac Mosaic Virus.”

And it smelled of the smoke. Everyone smoked. It was an absolute miracle there was no explosion with the building so full of alcohol and ether vapors.

I smoked a lot after coming to the Institute, and I was puffing away on a cigarette while sorting flies one day early in August when Sonja Press came to get me. She was as warm and friendly as ever. “Your mother is here,” she said, touching my arm. She always smelled like roses.

I unscrewed the cigarette holder from my microscope and put it in a drawer.

“She’s upstairs in the Chief’s office.”

There was always the problem when I stayed overnight at the Institute that my parents would not know if I was all right, and I would not know if they were. Telephone calls to check on family after air raids were against the law. So we developed a system: I would ring the house, and if everything was fine, they would pick up the phone after the fifth ring and then hang up again. It wasn’t too satisfactory because often the phones were out of order, and I would end up riding through the night from Hagen, on the northeastern border of Berlin, to our southwestern suburb, Gartenfeld, only to find the house intact, my parents all right. Sometimes I would stay a few hours to help put out fires at neighboring homes and turn right around, stumble through the dark to the S-Bahn stations, and ride for two hours back to Hagen. The night before, the phones had been out of order, and I was unable to go home to check on my parents because I had to be Air Raid Warden at the Institute. We took turns being Warden.

Mother sat beside the Chief in his private office. So near to his bulk, his bursting virility, there seemed little life left in her. Mother, a small woman and plain, wore a black wool suit. I bowed and took the frail hand she extended.

“Herr Professor informs me that your work is promising, Josef. I hope, also, you are being a good and honorable young man.”

The Chief said, “I understand, Frau Doktor, he is quite good.” He smiled at me.

I could not yet smile at him.

Still her hand held mine. Unusual. “Has something happened, Mutti? Uncle Otto? Aunt Greta?”

She pulled her hand away. “No. We are all fine—your father, too.” A reprimand. “It concerns you.” She withdrew a letter from her black purse and gave it to me. One could see from the envelope that it was from the Office of Labor.

I did not want to be taken from the Institute.

She sat erect in her chair. The Chief jumped to his feet and began to pace.

I opened the letter and read it silently. “They want me to report to the Labor Office, Section IV-B-4, within seven days, in order to be incorporated into the work force.”

I did not want to be taken before my time. From 1941 on, when they were bringing in forced laborers from the conquered countries, there were rumors that the Jews were not being put into labor camps or resettlement camps but were actually being murdered. The first time I was aware that extermination was going on was in 1939. We were called into an assembly at school to hear a recent alumnus talk. He had been a soccer champion and student president of the whole school, and, of course, we all looked up to him as some sort of god. Several months earlier, he had enlisted in the Waffen S.S. and was just now returning from combat on the Polish Front. He had been asked to give a pep talk to the students so that they would go willingly into the S.S. and into the army. But instead, he stood before us and said that he could not live with what he had seen and with what he had done. He told us that in Poland they had rounded up Jews into groups and had driven their tanks and trucks into them, smashing them to death. Of course, the school officials were furious about what he was saying, and, finally, they stopped him. Later that day, he committed suicide by throwing himself off the school roof. We were called, again, into assembly and told that he had killed himself because everything he had said had been lies, and he was ashamed of the lies.

And Mitzka, every time he came to a staff dinner, corroborated all the horrible rumors about the death camps. We knew cyanide was being used—a horrible, suffocating death.

Mother said to the Chief, “Is it because he will be seventeen next week?”

The Chief stopped pacing and looked at me. “Happy birthday,” he said. He took the letter from me and studied it, then said to Mother, “If you’ll please excuse us, Frau Doktor, we will be back shortly. Come along, Josef.”

On the way out he asked Sonja to bring my mother tea with real sugar and to have two rabbits slaughtered and packed in a basket with cornmeal and vodka for her. We ran down the steps from his penthouse and up the central stairs to Herr Wagenführer in Personnel on fifth.

“Is it that he will be seventeen soon?” the Chief asked.

Herr Wagenführer shook his head. “No. Look at this number up in the corner: fifty thousand. They have printed only fifty thousand of these form letters, so most probably it is an action against a certain group.” He handed back the letter. “I’m sorry, Josef, there is nothing I can do for you, but sometimes Professor Kreutzer has ideas on these matters.”

In the Physics Laboratory on second, Professor Kreutzer changed his glasses only once, and quickly, before reading the letter. Afterward, he changed slowly back to the original pair, cleaning, slowly, the gold-rims, taking off the rimless, donning again the gold, putting the rimless away in a pocket, looking at me over the gold-rims and then through the glass before he spoke. “It’s some special action, in your case probably an action against mixed-bloods. If you will notice this number printed on the form, there are only fifty thousand issued, which is not many considering that they have gleaned the mailing list from files of some hundred million people or more.”

“What can be done?” the Chief asked him

“Delay.”

The Chief nodded and said, “Frau Doktor Bernhardt is in my office.”

“Alex,” said Professor Kreutzer, “Find out from our Gestapo in the House about this operation IV-B-4. I think it is not Labor Office at all but something else.”

The Chief left to find the Security Officer. Professor Kreutzer packed a few things into a briefcase—some papers and journals—checked to be sure his spectacles were all in place, and he and I walked down the hall and up the staircase to the Chief’s office. He bowed to my mother and said, “I am optimistic we can delay any action against your son until, we hope, there will be no further need to delay.”

The Chief came, followed by Sonja Press, who carried the basket of rabbits and all for my mother. I could see the Gestapo in the House, in his black uniform, waiting in the outer office.

“No!” said Professor Kreutzer. “It would be too dangerous for Frau Doktor to carry such a basket of food on the train. We’ll send it over later.”

The Chief pounded his palm with his fist. “Of course, how thoughtless of me.”

My mother was unable to speak. Sonja Press took her hand and held it. I, across the room from her, could not move. The Chief and Professor Kreutzer stepped to the outer office to confer with the Security Officer, returning in very few minutes.

“Frau Doktor,” said the Chief, “although it comes through the Labor Office, this action is secretly under the auspices of a special department of the S.S. An appointment has been made, and Professor Kreutzer and Josef will have to pay a little call there today.”

Mother stood and looked at me. I wanted to cross the room and embrace her, but I did not.

“He will be back today,” said the Chief gently.

“Good-bye, Mutti,” I said from my distance.

Professor Kreutzer and I walked the three kilometers to the train station without talking. Once on the train, he motioned for me to sit opposite him in the empty compartment; then he extracted two scientific journals from his briefcase and handed one to me. At the second stop, a family crowded into the small compartment with us. The father, an army sergeant, sat next to Professor Kreutzer. The mother, next to me, began to unpack sausage and bread from a basket. The four children, noisily munching, moved constantly—back and forth, forth and back.

The sergeant tapped Professor Kreutzer’s arm and offered him some food.

“Look,” he said, “real butter. I have just come on leave from Denmark, and we have real butter and good sausage.”

Professor Kreutzer looked at the sergeant over the black-rims. “Denmark, eh? So you eat good food from Denmark?”

“Superior. I am in a hurry to return there.”

Professor Kreutzer nodded and said, “Thank you very much, sergeant, but I have already eaten.”

I was too worried and preoccupied to read, but Professor Kreutzer returned to his journal and was so engrossed he seemed not to notice the continuing commotion, even when the train lurched and the children fell against him with their buttered bread and sausage.

But what? I looked again at him. A spastic movement, subtle. He rubbed his back against the bench; his left shoulder twitched. Discreetly he scratched his head, his chest, his underarm; there seemed a slight convulsion of his trunk.

The mother began to look at him, too, and, I think at the same moment, she and I saw the little fleas hopping about the lap of Professor Kreutzer—hop, hop—onto the leg of her husband. At her exclamation, the sergeant, too, noticed. He jumped to his feet, brushing his chest, his legs.

“What kind of pigs are these people?” he shouted.

And he moved across and sat beside his wife, who was packing the sausage and bread back into the basket. All four children crowded near the parents on my bench, which was intended for four people. They muttered and complained. “Pigs. Fleas.”

Professor Kreutzer, solitary, scratched his chest and said, “Eh? What? Fleas, madame? There are no fleas in Germany.”

At the next stop the family fled from the train. I began to itch. Professor Kreutzer motioned for me to sit beside him. I hesitated, but I did it.

“Your reluctance to sit here appalls me,” he said.

I shrugged.

He opened his hand. A gelatin capsule, the kind we used for irradiating flies. “Open it.”

Of course. Drosophila melanogaster vestigial. A mutation. Withered wings. They were unable to fly but perfectly capable of hopping about like fleas and of breeding with each other to make more such useful creatures. Thereafter, I bred my own private stock and always carried a capsule of them with me on the S-Bahn.

The Central Labor Office was midtown in a massive red-brick structure built at the turn of the century without regard for taste. The windows, all boarded and bricked because of the bombing, compounded its ugliness. Professor Kreutzer unhesitatingly bypassed the main entrance and walked briskly in a side door marked D, I following him. To the man behind the information counter, he said, “I have an appointment with Herr Direktor Bruno.” The man waved us on. Up three flights of stairs and to the right we came to a door marked 1127, Labor Department Section IV-B-4. He knocked.

“Enter,” sang a woman’s voice.

The anteroom was plainly furnished. A good-looking woman sat behind the reception desk. There were three doors leading, I assumed, to other offices.

“I have an appointment with Herr Direktor Bruno. I am Professor Kreutzer.”

“One moment please, Herr Professor.” She picked up her telephone and pushed a button. “Professor Kreutzer is here . . . Yes, Herr Direktor.” She hung up the receiver and said to us, “Won’t you have a seat, please? It will be a few minutes.”

We sat on the wooden chairs. I was anxious but not afraid. If there were to be a free election for the position of God and the two candidates were the Chief and Professor Kreutzer, I would vote for Professor Kreutzer. Both were brilliant, brave, and competent, and the Chief was also warmly human and overwhelmingly charismatic. Professor Kreutzer, by comparison, was cold and impersonal. But he was infallible—and I would, ten times over, rather be ruled by a well-directed infallibility than by a well-directed charisma.

After twenty minutes or so, the receptionist’s phone rang. “Yes, please? . . . Immediately, Herr Direktor.” She looked toward us. “Please, you may go in now. The middle door. You needn’t knock.”

Behind the middle door was a short passage leading to another door, which was upholstered against sound. Professor Kreutzer opened the second door and walked in, I behind him.

The office was elegant, with oriental rugs and heavy wine draperies. There were four framed pictures on the walls: Adolf Hitler; Himmler, who was Interior Minister as well as Leader of the S.S.; and Ley, Minister of Labor. The fourth was a family group with an officer in the black uniform of the S.S., surrounded by his overfed wife and chubby children.

Bruno, in well-tailored civilian dress, sat behind an ornately carved desk and did not look up as we entered. He pretended to be engrossed in the papers before him.

Professor Kreutzer, of course, was not one to be ignored.

“Heil Hitler and greetings, Sturmbannführer Bruno.” It was barked in staccato and followed by a click of the heels and a Nazi salute.

Sturmbannführer Bruno’s head jerked up. Astonished, he was momentarily impotent and could not get his hand up in a proper salute. “Heil Hitler,” he muttered. “How did you get my name?”

Translated, that meant how did Professor Kreutzer find out he was an officer of the S.S. and that IV-B-4 was not Labor Department at all but a clandestine operation of Herr Himmler’s. To this day, I am not sure why they bothered with such charades, and why they didn’t openly concede that this department was S.S. and that IV-B-4 was a code for Jew in the Labor Force.

Professor Kreutzer answered his question. “Did you not receive a special citation in the Schwarze Korps?”

“Yes, I did. But that was some time ago.” A half smile.

“I do not forget these things,” said Professor Kreutzer and handed him my summons. The man was off-balance and would not be allowed to regain his equilibrium.

Bruno glanced at the summons, and Professor Kreutzer began his spectacle-changing routine. He removed a glass case from one pocket and searched for the cleaning cloth in another, then removed the black-rims from the case and held them to the light from the window and began to clean them in a superior way, attacking a recalcitrant spot in the upper right lens. At this point, Bruno looked up at him. Professor Kreutzer removed the gold-rims, put them in the case and into his pocket, and donned the black-rims, then stared over them at the seated official, looking cold and controlled. He looked very important, not at all kind, very superior—and all reverence is due superiority, so deeply is it engrained in our German souls.

Bruno rubbed the side of his face with his open palm, then stood, “What can I do for you?”

But Professor Kreutzer did not answer him and began to change to the rimless, all in all the most elaborate and perfectly timed exchange I had yet seen. Bruno just stood there, gaping at the stunning performance.

I stood behind Professor Kreutzer. I was as tall as he, but I weighed one hundred and twelve pounds and had absolutely no presence.

“As you well know, Sturmbannführer Bruno, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research in Hagen is involved in work of high priority and of utmost importance for the war effort of the Third Reich.”

Bruno nodded. “Yes, I am aware of this, Herr Professor.”

“Yes. Are you aware that I am the Chief Atomic Physicist, and that this boy has been trained to perform certain tasks? He has been trained by me to perform them well.”

Bruno looked at me.

“Even so, he does not understand what it is that he does, and what the work is all about. He is a machine. I am not free to go into the details of what this work involves, and I ask that this matter be handled with top security—TOP SECURITY! If you wish, you may check into the research projects for the Luftwaffe. The numbers for this project are eight . . . six . . . seven . . . zero . . . three . . . two . . . one.” Professor Kreutzer paused after each number to give Bruno time.

Bruno, meanwhile, had dropped into his chair to write the numbers. When he had them all on the pad, he nodded to Professor Kreutzer, who, nevertheless, repeated them quickly: “Eight, six, seven, zero, three, two, one. I need this boy. It would be difficult and time-consuming to replace him. I have already cleared him with the local draft board.”

I cringed. An out-and-out lie. When they saw the maiden name of my mother, Jacoby, I was automatically exempted from serving in the army.

Professor Kreutzer continued. “You can be assured your cooperation in this matter will be appreciated, and you may send the approval of his working for me to the Director of Personnel, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research, Hagen.”

Bruno tried to write all this on the tablet, but Professor Kreutzer interrupted him.

“There is no need to take more of our valuable time. Heil Hitler.” Up went his arm.

He kicked my shin. “Heil Hitler,” said I, arm raised.

“Heil Hitler,” said Bruno, jumping to his feet again and saluting strongly.

Professor Kreutzer turned. I turned. He walked. I walked.

It was not necessary to use another capsule of vestigials on the train ride back. We were alone in our compartment. I sat beside Professor Kreutzer, and he explained that since my file would be marked Top Secret, and since few people had top security clearance, it would take months before the Labor Department would act upon it. “Do not believe for a moment,” he said, “that Herr Direktor Bruno’s office will ever give you clearance. All we can hope for is investigation and delay. If the Allies come soon enough, you might be lucky. Meanwhile, I will begin correspondence with the office of Reichsmarshal Goering, who is in charge of the Scientific Research Council of the entire Third Reich.”

More than a year later, we received a letter of clearance from the Scientific Research Council, but it was too late for many reasons, one of which was that Goering had lost too much power by that time. Three months after our trip to the Labor Office, a letter arrived addressed to me in care of the Wilhelm Foundation, Hagen. It was probably another summons, but Professor Kreutzer told me not to open it. He sent it back marked Wrong Address. Five weeks later, another letter came. This time it was correctly addressed, but it was almost illegible; the type was too light. He took it back personally, saying to the secretary that the print was illegible, he had very weak eyes, and what was the Third Reich coming to that they couldn’t put decent typewriter ribbons on their machines in the Labor Office?

He calculated that it took at least thirty-seven days for a letter to be received by them and dealt with, so every three or four weeks he would write a letter concerning me to the Office of Labor, saying, for example, “Why has my letter of 15 April not been answered?”—which, he said, would cause my file to be removed from the stack, reviewed, and put again at the bottom of a pile. Of course, it was all marked Top Secret and Decisive to the War Effort and one must imagine a very large red-brick building, filled with many secretaries, with many files stacked on each desk.

“Someday,” said Professor Kreutzer, “there will be machines which can sort through one hundred million names in a matter of hours. Then there won’t be a chance for you. But now it is all manual. You have no idea how much trouble it is for Hitler to keep track of all the Jews.”

He did all this without humor, a deadly serious game, hoping to delay the action against me for at least a year, by which time the war should have been over. As it was, he was able to delay for sixteen months, until January of 1945, when General Eisenhower and his colleagues were still hesitating in France, afraid to move on to Germany.

After I’d been at the Institute a year, Marlene got pregnant and quit. I was relieved when the Dutch Medical Student felt he had to marry her. Monika had to leave our laboratory, too, after the disaster the night I was Air Raid Warden, and there actually was an air raid in Hagen.

A staff dinner had been called at the last minute to celebrate the Russian victory in the Crimea, in the spring of 1944. But Monika and I had private plans, and I used as an excuse for missing the dinner the fact that I was Air Raid Warden.

It usually was easy to be Warden because the Allies never bombed our hospital suburb. But that night—either by accident, or maybe because the Royal Air Force had cowards like everything else—one crew dumped its bomb load on the outskirts of Berlin, in a field near the Institute.

I had just connected with Monika in the darkroom when the building began to shake. My first impression was that I was finally getting some coital response from her, but when I realized the tremor was external and more like an earthquake, I collapsed. My God! I had left some pretty important Drosophila cultures on my worktable—special mutations—planning to put them back into the incubator later.

By the time I ran into the lab, it was too late. The windows had shattered, the flies on my worktable were dead from exposure to the cold, and the Chief was standing there, furious.

“Here is my Warden,” he said sarcastically, and he and I set off to inspect the entire plant, including the buildings in the park. Luckily, no one was hurt, just some shattered windows here and there, and, of course, those isolated mutations on my worktable.

Everyone from Genetics had been at the staff dinner but Monika and me. Krupinsky, Frau Krupinsky, and the Dutch Medical Student were sweeping up the debris when the Chief and I returned to the lab. He began to pace furiously.

“In spite of being young,” he said, “one still has to follow certain conventions, certain rules. A gentleman takes, but does not hang it on the bulletin board that he is having an affair with a certain girl, and that the affair took place during a general staff meeting, and that both were absent from that meeting, and that because of their thoughtless behavior their serious work was not properly carried on. Ignorance is the only excuse for anyone to do anything he shouldn’t,” he shouted. “Laziness or thoughtlessness is no excuse.” He strode from the lab.

I could have killed myself.

Monika sat in the corner and cried.

“Frankly,” said Krupinsky, “I can’t imagine what the women see in him. Look at him. Look at all the signs of somatic degeneration. His chin is too short, his teeth are crowded, he has one nonseparated earlobe, his index finger is too short, and his shoulders—I feel sorry for his tailor, he would have an almost impossible task to hide the concave chest, the wings on his back sticking out, the narrow rib cage. And his ears—look at them: one is much larger than the other.” He was sweeping up glass all the time he talked. “Really, I’m much more attractive than he and nobody ever looks at me.”

Frau Krupinsky gave me a hug and helped me clean up the mess on my worktable.

Monika was still in the corner, crying. I could have killed myself.

Monika was moved to Chemistry and replaced by the floating lab assistant, Tatiana, who, as I’ve said, had a background similar to mine, except that her mother was a Russian Jew and a biologist, whereas mine was a German Jew and a physician. Both our fathers were one hundred percent “German” and both were lawyers. The Roumanian Biologist George Treponesco was still madly in love with her, and she still ignored him.

Our second-floor wing smelled also of the rats. We did not use the rabbits for research, and there is no such thing as fast ruthenium. But on the bone marrow and other organs of the rats we did test the effects of artificial radioactive substances produced by the particles from the linear accelerator.