Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  Tatiana was shaking me. “Josef, Josef, wake up. You are having a nightmare.”

  I sat up, confused and frightened. “Where am I?”

  “You are in the Biology Lab. You were having a bad dream. Come, the rabbit is done. We can eat.”

  We ate in silence, and I, instead of trying to sleep again, returned to the Physics Chapel and worked all night. By morning it was finished, and after the sorting of the flies, I took it in to Frau Doktor.

  “The brake is very smooth-acting because of the capacitor, Frau Doktor, so because of the smoothness, the braking action doesn’t start immediately upon activating the foot switch, nor does it close, suddenly, upon disconnecting the battery with the foot switch. You must work with it until you have a sense of the rhythm of the time lag.”

  We loaded the first twelve pairs of larvae onto the disk, and Tatiana and I watched while Frau Doktor lifted the cups and performed the transplants. It was efficient, and she was most pleased.

  “You are talented in many ways.” She touched my hand. “What will you study when this war is over?”

  Tatiana said, “Mathematics!”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “What do you mean? We’ve always said you’d be a mathematician.”

  Frau Doktor said to me, “Are you considering other things?”

  “I haven’t really advanced at all in math for three or four years. It may be too late by the time this is over.”

  Tatiana said, “Don’t be a fool. Newton quit school when he was fourteen and didn’t even go back to begin the study of mathematics until he was your age.”

  “There is no one here who knows more about mathematics than I do, Tanya. There is no one here to teach me. There are no books. It is finished!” I turned to Frau Doktor. “I think it would be better to have two disks so that Tanya could prepare the second group of twelve while you worked on the first.”

  Tatiana was angry. She left the room.

  Frau Doktor embraced me and kissed my cheek. “My dear, if there is anything I can do for you, all you have to do is ask.” She looked something like my mother, but was quite a bit younger, thirty or so.

  I returned to the Physics Chapel to make the second disk. Tatiana came at closing time, bringing me some bread, sausage, and tea.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Where will you sleep tonight?”

  I had a full-blown cold and my chest felt heavy. I was having trouble breathing.

  “You’ve got to sleep somewhere.”

  “There’s always the cement bench in the park.”

  She began to weep.

  “Why do you cry, for Lord’s sake?”

  “You can’t sleep outside in this weather. What would people say? And you already have a cold.”

  “Oh, my good Lord, Tanya, since when do you give a damn what happens to me? I’ll sleep under a table in the lab, or there are cots in the basement.”

  And I was thinking of the problem with the ultraviolet radiation. One exposes the flies to it and tries to measure the effect. These results have to be quantitatively or qualitatively reproducible. For example, take a blue dye. You have to check the sensitivity of the blue dye to light, so you expose a solution of dye to a certain amount of light and then measure the change.

  “It wouldn’t be right for you to sleep in the lab or in the basement.”

  “My good Lord, Tanya, don’t you have anything else on your mind?”

  She left.

  It might turn out to have less blue or green in it, or maybe it becomes dirty-looking. So let us see, if one exposes this blue dye to the equivalent of one month of sunlight and one finds a reduction of blueness of ten percent or nine and three quarters percent or eleven and one tenth percent—finally, adding up to nine and four fifths percent—one can make a statistically valid statement of nine and four fifths percent. If, however, each time it is totally different, then something must be wrong. Too much variation in a controlled experiment means the experiment is not controlled. I was finished with the second disk and walked back to the main building. It was ten at night.

  Tatiana was waiting for me in the Biology Lab. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The water was already boiling on the Bunsen burner. She handed me the hot tea and asked me where I was going to sleep that night.

  “I could always go over to Monika’s.”

  “Monika’s? Did she invite you?”

  “Should she have?”

  “No!”

  “Then why ask such silly questions?”

  “Do you want to go to Monika’s?”

  “Should I want to?”

  She left. I could hear the air-raid sirens in Berlin. I lay down under a table, covered myself with a blanket, and fell, at once, to sleep. The train raced toward the end of a long, dark tunnel and collided with a brick wall. My body was cushioned by the bodies of others—Mitzka Avilov, and Dieter Schmidt—and others whom I knew but could not recognize. The train was cut open with a carpenter’s ax, and I was lifted out and saved. I looked down and saw the others, mashed, broken, and dismembered from the impact of my body, their skulls smashed and their brains spilling out into pools of their own red gore.

  I heard screaming. I sat up. It was I. I had been screaming.

  Krupinsky’s Pharmacology was on my worktable. Was there such a thing as an anesthetic gas that allowed one a dreamless sleep?

  CYCLOPROPANE (CH2)3 A colorless gas with a not unpleasant characteristic odor resembling that of petroleum ether and having a mildly pungent taste. In anesthetic concentrations it is odorless. Induction with cyclopropane requires only two to three minutes. It is pleasant, more rapid than with ether, but less so than with nitrous oxide or ethylene. Unconsciousness occurs in 20 seconds to three minutes. Cyclopropane does not cause dreams, as does, say, nitrous oxide.

  Other gases are not so pleasant:

  HYDROCYANIC ACID (HCN) A colorless, volatile, extremely toxic, flammable, aqueous solution of hydrogen cyanide, used in the manufacture of dyes, fumigants, and plastics. Also called “Prussic Acid” and “Hydrogen Cyanide.” Hydrocyanic acid is one of the most rapidly acting poisons. The symptoms appear within a few seconds after the ingestion of compounds or the breathing of vapors containing the ion, and consist of giddiness, apnea, headache, palpitations, cyanosis, and unconsciousness. Asphyxial convulsions may precede death. As long as the heart continues to beat there is a chance of saving the patient since effective antidotes are available. Diagnosis can be made by the characteristic odor on the breath of the poisoned individual (oil of bitter almonds).

  A punishing, suffocating death.

  By morning my chest was congested, my eyes and nose running.

  Krupinsky said, “If you want to commit suicide, let me give you a gun.”

  I coughed. He looked at my leg, listened to my chest.

  “Your leg is coming along. And you don’t have pneumonia yet, but you will. There’s a lot of music in your chest. I suggest you go to bed for a few days.”

  “No.” Coughing and sneezing, I limped—my leg more sore than ever—into the lab of Frau Doktor with the second disk.

  “My dear boy,” she said, “you should be in bed.” She put her hand on my forehead. “I have a couch in the living room of my apartment. Why don’t you take the bus over there and lie down?” She had an apartment in Hagen. “Here.” She began to dig through her purse. “I’ll give you the key.”

  Tatiana sat at her side of the microscope, pale, lips tight.

  “No, thank you. I’m all right, Frau Doktor. Just a little cold.” And I limped, coughing, from her lab.

  Tatiana came running after me. “I have just one small room,” she said, “with a bed, a table, and two chairs. Where would you sleep?”

  “There’s always the cement bench in the park.” I coughed, sneezed, blew my nose. “Or Frau Doktor’s.”

  At that moment the Chief and Krupinsky came talking down the hall.
r />   “Do you think it is a good idea for you to contaminate all the personnel with your disease?” said the Chief.

  “Go home and go to bed,” said Krupinsky. “And take your vitamins.”

  “You must promise to sleep with your clothes on,” Tatiana said quietly. She had a strong face but pretty, a pointed chin, large dark eyes set wide apart, but most beautiful was the thick dark hair that fell below her waist, tied always with that green ribbon. I would like to see it free, cascading, like the hair of Sheereen.

  She took a key from the pocket of her white lab coat. “Here. I will come at noon to give you lunch. You are not to move from that bed until you are well.”

  I took her key and limped off to the lab to pick up my suitcase, the charts on ultraviolet radiation, and those on the search for an alternate anesthetic which would keep the females from ovulation when gassed and the males from losing their sperm. I took, also, several of Krupinsky’s medical texts, including the Pharmacology. I found only two references even slightly related in the Pharmacology text. The first was in relation to gas: Occasionally priapism may develop under cyclopropane anesthetic. And the other was in relation to ethyl alcohol:

  Much of little worth has been written on the subject of the relation of alcohol to sexual activity. It is a popular notion that alcohol is an aphrodisiac. Shakespeare however, realized that inebriation interferes with coitus. In Macbeth,for example, the following conversation occurs (Act 2, Scene 2, translated by Tieck and Schlegel): MACDUFF: What three things especially does drink provoke?

  PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.

  The experiments on the effects of alcohol on the sexual reflexes of normal dogs support the observations of Shakespeare: in neurotic dogs, alcohol has some therapeutic value.

  The dream returned every time I fell asleep. I began to drink myself senseless each night before we got into bed, I, in the patched remnants of my pajamas, Tatiana fully clothed, her long dark hair brushed and plaited into one braid and tied with a string. Nothing I could say or do would induce her to let it lie free.

  My cold abated after one week, although the bronchitis never really left me, and I developed a wound infection in my leg. It was localized; I didn’t die of blood poisoning like Gunther Rathke, the fallen aviator whose brain lay in a jar on the fifth floor. In spite of the stitching, one part opened, providing drainage. I carry the scar to this day.

  I stayed at Tatiana’s a nightmarish three months—until early January, when my summons came. After three weeks of my heavy drinking, during which I completely ignored her, she, misunderstanding my motives for drinking, gave in. The French do understand women.

  “I see no reason to torture you any further, since of necessity you must stay with me at night. But you must promise to marry me when the war is over.”

  I had not so much as jumped on a black spot since I had been sleeping beside her.

  “You must promise,” she repeated.

  I promised to marry her!

  I used two Fromm’s Akt to protect her and lots of lubricating gel to make it easier, but she was tense and tight—rigid—and nothing could induce her to relax. I was not permitted to touch her breast or to kiss her, but was allowed, only, to lift my leg to a tree once each night to relieve myself. She would not untie the ribbon on the thick braid, plaited behind the ear and falling, like the string of the bow or the band on the balalaika, across her breast to her waist. She lay still, unmoving, silent. Impotencia Josefus, the inability to satisfy a woman. When I tried to talk to Tatiana about it, she said, “I will not allow myself to enjoy it until we are married.”

  When one knows the answer to a riddle, it all seems so simple that one wonders why it was such a revelation: when the flies are mature, they become fully pigmented in the abdomen; therefore, the ultraviolet was not penetrating to their gonads or was penetrating in random amounts. We were careful, thereafter, to use flies only so many hours old. Young enough not to be fully colored but old enough to be sexually mature.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Berlin

  I did not want to be taken from the Institute.

  “You must leave,” Professor Kreutzer said. “Come to see me after you’ve talked.” And he left me standing with my father in the Chief’s office.

  How old Father looked—but then to me my parents always were old—and his face was distorted, the right eyelid sagging, and the left side of his mouth. How perfectly dressed: his wardrobe of shoes, alone, would have lasted another ten years, and his spats, various lengths in gray, black, and white. Did he suffer not being able to wear the uniform of a German officer? He’d been ambitious as a young man, but marrying my mother, of course, ruined everything.

  “Professor Kreutzer advises that you should report to I. G. Farben as ordered and you will be all right.”

  I was smiling. My teeth felt like fangs, my lips curled back. “Little chance of that, is there! Why didn’t you take us away? It wasn’t a matter of money!”

  “Your mother and I discussed it many times, and we talked it over with friends who were in situations similar to ours. We all agreed.” He lowered his eyes. “It did not work in her case, but nevertheless I will explain to you our thinking.” He took a deep, shaking breath, then looked again at me. “We felt that the two of you were not in such immediate danger as fully Jewish families. This was reflected in the semi-official designation as ‘privileged’ and also in the Nuremberg Laws, in which mixed marriages and the offspring from such marriages were set apart. Within mixed marriages, there are also two categories: one where the father is Aryan, the other where the father is a Jew. The families with Jewish fathers were treated much more severely by the law. Your mother and I felt that you both were in a relatively safe and protected category.

  “For reasons as much out of our control as the Nazis themselves, the measures by other countries to control emigration from Germany were so strict and limiting that the few visas which were available, we felt, should go to the most endangered part of the German population. The immigration quotas were insufficient and filled up much too fast, and, for the unprivileged, totally inflexible.

  “Those are the reasons why we did not apply for immigration visas for the two of you.”

  It was the longest speech he had ever made to me.

  “I see,” I said. “Then it was for the sake of others that you did not save my mother or me.”

  “Others without privilege.”

  “I see. How noble of you. You are as great as Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice Isaac for the glory of God, or as William Tell, who used his son’s head from which to shoot an apple. I have not gone through a red light and neither had my mother.” I shouted and waved my summons. “Will this, too, be abortive?” And I ran from the room. On the stairs from the penthouse to the second floor, I had to slow down—vertigo—and I was having difficulty breathing. My lungs were never the same after that terrible cold. I walked slowly to Professor Kreutzer’s lab in Physics.

  He sat on a stool at a worktable, fitting together two pieces of junk, the same posture as the first time I had seen him. I thought he didn’t see me until he said, without looking up, “You will be all right.” Then he turned to me, changed his glasses, routinely, looked at me through the lenses of the second pair. “We fight them like the devil, but we are not suicidal. If you stay here any longer, they will come after you. I have made some telephone calls and advise that you go to I. G. Farben as ordered rather than trying to hide. You are all right. You will be all right. Keep your eyes open. Do not talk to any of the other workers. You will find that at this particular factory they are, for the most part, free workers, refugees from the Baltic states. They out-nazi the German Nazis. Therefore, I repeat: Do not talk. Listen. Do not join any groups. Be alone. You’ve got more brains than all the rest of them put together. As for surviving the war, unless a brick falls on your head, you have a much bet
ter chance than the men your age who are in the army. They will die, or be maimed, or be prisoners for years. Furthermore, you have nothing to fear from what comes after. In that sense you are privileged.”

  He stood and shook my hand—for the first time—at the moment of my abandonment.

  “It is a matter of months. Come back here when it is all over.”

  I returned to my lab and found the Chief talking to Krupinsky. When I began to pack away my microscope, the Chief stopped me. “Leave it!” he shouted. “You will be back.” And he embraced me, crushed me in his arms against his massive chest. A bear. Then he walked quickly from the lab.

  Krupinsky said, “Chief says there’s a good chance you’ll be O.K. They need workers. Your girlfriend was here. She said to tell you to hurry back to her room.”

  “She knows?”

  “I told her. She thinks you should run off and hide, both of you. She has a point, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “What did Max tell you?”

  “He said I would be all right at Farben.” I shrugged. “He made some telephone calls.”

  “He probably has friends over there.”

  I nodded. “He said I’d be all right—if I kept my mouth shut.”

  “That ends your chances right there.” Krupinsky put his arms around me and gave me a hug. “Put your money on Max,” he said, and he turned away, blew his nose, and wiped his eyes.

  Tatiana was in the room packing our things.

  “Why are you packing?”

  “We will run away and hide together.”

  “Oh, my good Lord, Tanya. Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not after you.”

  “You will walk into their hands? Are you as big a fool as your mother and your uncle?”