Writer, M.D.

by Leah Kaminsky

  More of the Infernal Chorus

  The Nazi Doctors had more prepublication exposure than any of my other books. Largely through the strong interest of Abe Rosenthal, executive editor and dictator-in-chief of The New York Times, two chapters were adapted into full-length Times Magazine articles, one on Mengele and the other on the “euthanasia” program. My friendship with Abe was long-standing and ambivalent: I admired his early critical reporting in the late fifties from Poland and in the sixties from Japan (including sympathetic writings on Hiroshima survivors), where we were able to spend some time together. Unfortunately, he was to turn into a petulant reactionary, partly through backlash to the sixties, and came to alienate almost everyone around him. When he died in 2006 I had not seen him for almost two decades, but I am still grateful for the intensity with which he embraced my work on Nazi doctors and contributed to the launching of my book.

  The Nazi Doctors received an anguished front-page Sunday New York Times review by Bruno Bettelheim, a psychoanalyst who was himself a survivor of Nazi camps but a controversial figure because of attacks on other survivors, including those of death camps, for alleged compromises they had made with Nazi jailers. In a similar vein he questioned my efforts to understand the motivations of Nazi doctors and ended his review with the enigmatic acknowledgment: “For this reason I may not have been able to do full justice to this book.”

  But I have come to realize that such a review, and a number of others as well, were a kind of extension of that “infernal chorus” from which I had to struggle to extricate myself. The moral insanity of the Nazi doctors reverberated in ways that could evoke a reaction that was itself caught up in the madness. My book was an attempt to expose that grotesque chorus, and in writing it I had to suppress my own rage, including sentiments not too different from those of Bettelheim. It would seem that any immersion into the world of Nazi doctors runs the risk of entering into that infernal chorus. Fortunately, the great majority of reviewers stepped back from it sufficiently to open themselves to what I was trying to do. I was especially pleased by the response of Neal Ascherson, the British journalist and historian, in The New York Review of Books because he affirmed what I most wished the book to convey: a way of grasping how Nazi doctors could do what they did, and a new and useful approach to the Nazi movement that was both psychological and historical. I had no idea that the work would have later relevance for American doctors and their collusion in torture during the Iraq War era.

  I began this section by saying there were moments when I could not believe I’d done any such work on Nazi doctors; the same was true about writing a book about them. My own work, I now realize, was a constant struggle to connect with the “separate planet” mentioned by both Nazi doctors and inmates, to make Auschwitz real to others and to myself. While I knew there had to be a cost, I have never been much inclined to examine that cost, partly because of my awareness that whatever the study did to me pales before the suffering of actual victims and survivors. But I think there was also involved a certain research macho pride in viewing myself as one who can deal with such painful matters.

  BJ has always said that the Nazis turned my hair gray—it had been almost black—and if so, there was probably involved an element of survivors’ despair concerning the human potential for such behavior. But the pain is inseparable from a sense that the work is a culmination of my life as a researcher. When the book was completed and published, I found myself saying that I could now better accept dying because something elemental in me had been realized. A friend once asked me whether, knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision to do the study—to which I replied that I would anticipate and share the dread of people close to me but would very likely go ahead with the project.

  fiction

  We Are Nighttime Travelers

  ETHAN CANIN

  Where are we going? Where, I might write, is this path leading us? Francine is asleep and I am standing downstairs in the kitchen with the door closed and the light on and a stack of mostly blank paper on the counter in front of me. My dentures are in a glass by the sink. I can clean them with a tablet that bubbles in the water, and although they were clean already I just cleaned them again because the bubbles are agreeable and I thought their effervescence might excite me to write. But words fail me.

  This is a love story. However, its roots are tangled and involve a good bit of my life, and when I recall my life my mood turns sour and I am reminded that no man makes truly proper use of his time. We are blind and small-minded. We are dumb as snails and as frightened, full of vanity and misinformed about the importance of things. I’m an average man, without great deeds except maybe one, and that has been to love my wife.

  I have been more or less faithful to Francine since I married her. There has been one transgression—leaning up against a closet wall with a red-haired purchasing agent at a sales meeting once in Minneapolis twenty years ago; but she was buying auto upholstery and I was selling it and in the eyes of judgment this may bear a key weight. Since then, though, I have ambled on this narrow path of life bound to a woman. This is a triumph and a regret. In our current state of affairs it is a regret because in life a man is either on the uphill or on the downhill, and if he isn’t procreating he is on the downhill. It is a steep downhill indeed. These days I am tumbling, falling headlong among the scrub oaks and boulders, tearing knees and abrading all bony parts of the body. I have given myself to gravity.

  Francine and I are married now forty-six years, and I would be a bamboozler to say that I have loved her for any more than half of these. Let us say that for the last year I haven’t; let us say this for the last ten, even. Time has made torments of our small differences and tolerance of our passions. This is our state of affairs. Now I stand by myself in our kitchen in the middle of the night; now I lead a secret life. We wake at different hours now, sleep in different corners of the bed. We like different foods and different music, keep our clothing in different drawers, and if it can be said that either of us has aspirations, I believe that they are to a different bliss. Also, she is healthy and I am ill. And as for conversation—our house is silent as the bone yard.

  Last week we did talk. “Frank,” she said one evening at the table, “there is something I must tell you.”

  The New York game was on the radio, snow was falling outside, and the pot of tea she had brewed was steaming on the table between us. Her medicine and my medicine were in little paper cups at our places.

  “Frank,” she said, jiggling her cup, “what I must tell you is that someone was around the house last night.”

  I tilted my pills onto my hand. “Around the house?”

  “Someone was at the window.”

  On my palm the pills were white, blue, beige, pink: Lasix, Diabinese, Slow-K, Lopressor. “What do you mean?”

  She rolled her pills onto the tablecloth and fidgeted with them, made them into a line, then into a circle, then into a line again. I don’t know her medicine so well. She’s healthy, except for little things. “I mean,” she said, “there was someone in the yard last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Frank, will you really, please?”

  “I’m asking you how you know.”

  “I heard him,” she said. She looked down. “I was sitting in the front room and I heard him outside the window.”

  “You heard him?”

  “Yes.”

  “The front window?”

  She got up and went to the sink. This is a trick of hers. At a distance I can’t see her face.

  “The front window is ten feet off the ground,” I said.

  “What I know is that there was a man out there last night, right outside the glass.” She walked out of the kitchen.

  “Let’s check,” I called after her. I walked into the living room, and when I got there she was looking out the window.

  “What is it?”

  She was peering out at an angle. All I could see was snow, blue-white.
<
br />   “Footprints.”

  I built the house we live in with my two hands. That was forty-nine years ago, when, in my foolishness and crude want of learning, everything I didn’t know seemed like a promise. I learned to build a house and then I built one. There are copper fixtures on the pipes, sanded edges on the struts and queen posts. Now, a half-century later, the floors are flat as a billiard table but the man who laid them needs two hands to pick up a woodscrew. This is the diabetes. My feet are gone also. I look down at them and see two black shapes when I walk, things I can’t feel. Black clubs. No connection with the ground. If I didn’t look, I could go to sleep with my shoes on.

  Life takes its toll, and soon the body gives up completely. But it gives up the parts first. This sugar in the blood: God says to me: “Frank Manlius—codger, man of prevarication and half-truth—I shall take your life from you, as from all men. But first—” But first! Clouds in the eyeball, a heart that makes noise, feet cold as uncooked roast. And Francine, beauty that she was—now I see not much more than the dark line of her brow and the intersections of her body; mouth and nose, neck and shoulders. Her smells have changed over the years so that I don’t know what’s her own anymore and what’s powder.

  We have two children, but they’re gone now too, with children of their own. We have a house, some furniture, small savings to speak of. How Francine spends her day I don’t know. This is the sad truth, my confession. I am gone past nightfall. She wakes early with me and is awake when I return, but beyond this I know almost nothing of her life.

  I spend my days at the aquarium. I’ve told Francine something else, of course, that I’m part of a volunteer service of retired men, that we spend our days setting young businesses afoot: “Immigrants,” I told her early on, “newcomers to the land.” I said it was difficult work. In the evenings I could invent stories, but I don’t, and Francine doesn’t ask.

  I am home by nine or ten. Ticket stubs from the aquarium fill my coat pocket. Most of the day I watch the big sea animals—porpoises, sharks, a manatee—turn their saltwater loops. I come late morning and move a chair up close. They are wanting to eat then. Their bodies skim the cool glass, full of strange magnifications. I think, if it is possible, that they are beginning to know me: this man—hunched at the shoulder, cataractic of eye, breathing through water himself—this man who sits and watches. I do not pity them. At lunchtime I buy coffee and sit in one of the hotel lobbies or in the cafeteria next door, and I read poems. Browning, Whitman, Eliot. This is my secret. It is night when I return home. Francine is at the table, four feet across from my seat, the width of two drop-leaves. Our medicine is in cups. There have been three presidents since I held her in my arms.

  The cafeteria moves the men along, old or young, who come to get away from the cold. A half-hour for a cup, they let me sit. Then the manager is at my table. He is nothing but polite. I buy a pastry then, something small. He knows me—I have seen him nearly every day for months now—and by his slight limp I know he is a man of mercy. But business is business.

  “What are you reading?” he asks me as he wipes the table with a wet cloth. He touches the saltshaker, nudges the napkins in their holder. I know what this means.

  “I’ll take a cranberry roll,” I say. He flicks the cloth and turns back to the counter.

  This is what:

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

  And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

  Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

  Through the magnifier glass the words come forward, huge, two by two. With spectacles, two by two. With spectacles everything is twice enlarged. Still, though, I am slow to read it. In a half-hour I am finished, could not read more, even if I bought another roll. The boy at the register greets me, smiles when I reach him. “What are you reading today?” he asks, counting out the change.

  The books themselves are small and fit in the inside pockets of my coat. I put one in front of each breast, then walk back to see the fish some more. These are the fish I know: the gafftopsail pompano, sixgill shark, the starry flounder with its upturned eyes, queerly migrated. He rests half-submerged in sand. His scales are platey and flat-hued. Of everything upward he is wary, of the silvery seabass and the bluefin tuna that pass above him in the region of the light and open water. For a life he lies on the bottom of the tank. I look at him. His eyes are dull. They are ugly and an aberration. Above us the bony fishes wheel at the tank’s corners. “Platichthys stellatus,” I say to him. The caudal fin stirs. Sand moves and resettles, and I see the black and yellow stripes. “Flatfish,” I whisper, “we are, you and I, observers of this life.”

  “A man on our lawn,” I say a few nights later in bed.

  “Not just that.”

  I breathe in, breathe out, look up at the ceiling.

  “What else?”

  “When you were out last night he came back.”

  “He came back?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Looked in at me.”

  Later, in the early night, when the lights of cars are still passing and the walked dogs still jingle their collar chains out front, I get up quickly from bed and step into the hall. I move fast because this is still possible in short bursts and with concentration. The bed sinks once, then rises. I am on the landing and then downstairs without Francine waking. I stay close to the staircase joists.

  In the kitchen I take out my almost-blank sheets and set them on the counter. I write standing up because I want to take more than an animal’s pose. For me this is futile, but I stand anyway. The page will be blank when I finish. This I know. The dreams I compose are the dreams of others, remembered bits of verse. Songs of greater men than I. In months I have written few more than a hundred words. The pages are stacked, sheets of different sizes.

  If I could

  one says,

  It has never seemed

  says another. I stand and shift them in and out. They are mostly blank, sheets from months of nights. But this doesn’t bother me. What I have is patience.

  Francine knows nothing of the poetry. She’s a simple girl, toast and butter. I myself am hardly the man for it: forty years selling (anything—steel piping, heater elements, dried bananas). Didn’t read a book except one on sales. Think victory, the book said. Think sale. It’s a young man’s bag of apples, though; young men in pants that nip at the waist. Ten years ago I left the Buick in the company lot and walked home, dye in my hair, cotton rectangles in the shoulders of my coat. Francine was in the house that afternoon also, the way she is now. When I retired we bought a camper and went on a trip. A traveling salesman retires, so he goes on a trip. Forty miles out of town the folly appeared to me, big as a balloon. To Francine, too. “Frank,” she said in the middle of a bend, a prophet turning to me, the camper pushing sixty and rocking in the wind, trucks to our left and right, big as trains—“Frank,” she said, “these roads must be familiar to you.”

  So we sold the camper at a loss and a man who’d spent forty years at highway speed looked around for something to do before he died. The first poem I read was in a book on a table in a waiting room. My eyeglasses made half-sense of things.

  THESE

  are the desolate, dark weeks.

  I read,

  when nature in its barrenness

  equals the stupidity of man.

  Gloom, I thought, and nothing more, but when I reread the words, and suddenly there I was, hunched and wheezing, bald as a trout, and tears were in my eye. I don’t know where they came from.

  * * *

  In the morning an officer visits. He has muscles, mustache, skin red from the cold. He leans against the door frame.

  “Can you describe him?” he says.

  “It’s always dark,” says Francine.

  “Anything about him?”

  “I’m an old woman. I can see that he wears glasses.”

  “What kind of glasses?” />
  “Black.”

  “Dark glasses?”

  “Black glasses.”

  “At a particular time?”

  “Always when Frank is away.”

  “Your husband has never been here when he’s come?”

  “Never.”

  “I see.” He looks at me. This look can mean several things, perhaps that he thinks Francine is imagining. “But never at a particular time?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” he says. Outside on the porch his partner is stamping his feet. “Well,” he says again. “We’ll have a look.” He turns, replaces his cap, heads out to the snowy steps. The door closes. I hear him say something outside.

  “Last night—,” Francine says. She speaks in the dark. “Last night I heard him on the side of the house.”

  We are in bed. Outside, on the sill, snow has been building since morning.

  “You heard the wind.”

  “Frank.” She sits up, switches on the lamp, tilts her head toward the window. Through a ceiling and two walls I can hear the ticking of our kitchen clock.

  “I heard him climbing,” she says. She has wrapped her arms about her own waist. “He was on the house. I heard him. He went up the drainpipe.” She shivers as she says this. “There was no wind. He went up the drainpipe and then I heard him on the porch roof.”

  “Houses make noise.”

  “I heard him. There’s gravel there.”

  I imagine the sounds, amplified by hollow walls, rubber heels on timber. I don’t say anything. There is an arm’s length between us, cold sheet, a space uncrossed since I can remember.

  “I have made the mistake in my life of not being interested in enough people,” she says then. “If I’d been interested in more people, I wouldn’t be alone now.”