Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Water,” I said.

  “And what tells you about this water?”

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

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

  I looked around. “Willow trees.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, Herr Professor.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Come here, come closer, Gunther.”

  The man edged forward, smiling sweetly.

  “Come, come,” said the Chief.

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

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

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

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

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

  I wondered if Sonja Press was a lonely woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Not true. I blushed crimson and could not answer.

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

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

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

  I stood, too, and the Chief stopped pacing.

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

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

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

  Krupinsky complained that I was two hours late.

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