by Elly Welt
Bernhardt laughed in class today.
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 sup
ply 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.”
