by Elly Welt
“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 fo
r 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.”
