The Orchids

by Thomas H. Cook

  I walk off the verandah and into my office. The cut crystal goblet sits on top of the large wicker cabinet against the far wall. The light pouring through the bamboo curtain shatters in the crystal, sending a spray of mottled light across the room. Retrieving it from its place, I turn it in my hand and observe the delicacy of the pattern, the exquisite design. It was once the prized possession of my father, a family heirloom passed down through generations of uninspired petty officials and weary civil servants who sat with their noses buried in provincial paper and their minds in middling bank accounts. Warming their feet at tidy, bourgeois fires, they passed the crystal goblet down as something like a grail for the Langhof family. On holidays or family gatherings they would remove it from its sheltered vault and pass it carefully from hand to hand as if it were the heraldic shield of the Hohenzollern princes. But here in the Republic, the sense of the holy is reserved for certain raw materials that, when sold, support the titanic waste over which it is El Presidente’s function to preside.

  I walk to my desk and place the goblet in a small cotton sack. I raise the marble paperweight in the air and bring it down. There is a small crunch as the glass shatters beneath the blow. I open the mouth of the sack and sprinkle the bits of crystal across the desk. Even in this fallen state, they sparkle with a blue and silver light. I select a few of the pieces and begin to file them down, putting each sculptured gem into a small red velvet pouch. Then I take the pouch and stuff it in my trousers.

  I rise from the desk. Esperanza is staring at me from the verandah.

  “¿Qué pasa?” she asked.

  “Nicht … nada.”

  “Oí romper alguna cosa.”

  “Una copa. No es importante.”

  She watches me suspiciously. “Sí, Don Pedro.”

  I wave her from the door, then move down the stairs toward the greenhouse. Juan is inside, relentlessly fighting the demons that have come to destroy the orchids.

  “¿Juan?”

  He turns toward me.

  I pull the pouch from my trousers and lift it toward him.

  He looks at me strangely.

  I tell him to take the pouch and to bury it under the orchids.

  He stares at me, perplexed. “¿Las orquídeas?”

  “Sí.”

  Reluctantly he takes the pouch.

  I tell him to bury it now. “Ahora, favor.”

  “Sí, Don Pedro,” Juan says. He eyes the pouch, feeling the edges of the chiseled glass beneath his fingers.

  I attempt to soothe his anxiety. “Para la enfermedad de las flores.” For the blight.

  Juan nods silently, somewhat relieved, but not entirely so. “Sí, Don Pedro.”

  “Bien.”

  I walk out of the greenhouse and look toward the distant range of hills to the south. The pale orange cloud of dust billows up from the trees as Don Camillo’s spattered limousine speeds along those ancient trails the Indians once carved. In my mind I can see Don Camillo lounging in the back seat, squeezed in between his sleepless protectors, his mind squirming with visions of copper kingdoms in the provinces to the north.

  BACK IN MY OFFICE, I sweep the shards of glass from my desk into the wastebasket at my feet. I sit down and think of the nature of my imagined confession:

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  How long has it been since your last confession?

  There has never been a last confession.

  What have you to confess, my son?

  I confess that I have made myself a vessel of the will. I confess that I have taken up the metaphor of stars.

  Yes, the metaphor of stars. For if the Leader had depended only upon himself, then his success would have been as limited as his person, and his person was supremely limited. I remember that when I saw him the first time in a small street café, I could not see this stooped, slight form hunched rather piggishly over his stein of lager as emblematic of the future. He had rounded shoulders that drooped pathetically under the weight of his military jacket; slick, black hair that poured across his smooth, undistinguished forehead like spilled ink; strange, Moorish eyes that protruded slightly from their oval sockets; a long broad nose, blunted at the end and set within flat, featureless cheeks that curved downward to form a small, trembling double chin; thin lips that arched neither up nor down but rested upon each other in a straight, severe slit, as if sliced by a straight razor; a close-cropped, squared, Chaplinesque mustache whose oddity seemed to blur the surrounding face.

  And so it could not have been the Leader. Not for me. By the millions, others trembled at his voice. By the millions, women wept at the sight of him. But not me, not Langhof, the stalwart boy. For me he was never more than a crude parody of what he thought himself to be, a posturing little hysteric who somehow managed to vitalize the inert mind-lessness that surrounded him. Never for a single moment did I think him to be anything but what he was.

  For me, it was the stars.

  The boy stood in the park, watching his blue-eyed inamorata rush from him with something of himself still dangling in her hand. For a moment he felt the wind blow through him, stirring leaves and ashes. Then he began to gather himself together. He was unwilling to go home, unwilling to eat his mother’s charred strudel or smell the raw meat on his recently acquired stepfather’s soiled shirt. So he began to walk, and the village that was his neighborhood began to appear to him as the city it really was — a swell of grime and noise, a raw carcinoma growing beside a slow, pestilential river. As he walked, his eyes widened in a detestation so intense he could feel its naked energy in his blood. He conceived a larval hatred for everything that surrounded him: for gaudy lights blinking in hideous pinks and blues as the crackling traffic prowled the streets like huge, iron insects; for the numberless whores with rings of kohl about their eyes flirting with the French foreigners; for the jazz bands hurling strident tones and the colored singers wailing through cigar smoke in darkened cabarets; for the fat, smiling provincials and legless beggars, and the gay blades sporting wrinkled spats; for spike-heeled shoes and lacquered fingernails; for the redbrick burlesque palaces that squatted along the boulevard; for the men who danced with men, and the laughter in that knotted crowd; for the old women snoring in their windows and the drunken soldiers pissing in the alleyways; for the aroma of champagne mixed with sludge; for all the books that fanned the flames of all about him; and for all the politicians who soar above the fumes.

  It is difficult to imagine a repulsion more pure than that of our hero as he walked the streets alone. It is difficult to imagine how he came to associate all that he saw with filth and grime.

  Ah, so that’s the meaning of our tale: No one can guess what winds may blow within a devastated boy. Our little teenage hero, bereft of his first love, sees the sordidness of life, as all artists must eventually see it, and from that awareness he quite innocently surmises that a great purification must take place; this, in turn, leads him to accept those deranged notions that fluttered about the Leader’s mind. Hence, many years later, the Camp. Ah yes, it’s all quite clear now.

  But it is not.

  For although the realities of man’s befuddled life repelled our hero, the eccentricities of the Leader’s ideology did not attract him. He stood between a broken world and the maniacal schemes that claimed authority and competence to rebuild it. He could not accept the one any more than he could the other. And at that moment — at least figuratively — he looked up, and saw the stars.

  • • •

  “Was that Don Camillo?”

  I look up from my desk. It is Dr. Ludtz who, in his anxiety, failed to knock at my door.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “What did he want?”

  “The usual. He always comes before one of El Presidente’s visits. You know that, Dr. Ludtz. He merely wants to make sure that proper arrangements have been made.”

  The tension in Dr. Ludtz’s face dissolves. “And was he satisfied?”

  “Quite satisfied.”

&nb
sp; “Did you tell him about the red and orange motif?”

  “I’m sorry, no. He inquired about you.”

  “Inquired? What do you mean, inquired?”

  “As to your health.”

  “What about my health?”

  I smile. “Really, Dr. Ludtz, everything is quite at ease. You don’t need to disturb yourself.”

  “All right,” Dr. Ludtz stammers breathlessly. “If you say so.”

  “Everything is quite all right.”

  “Good, good,” Dr. Ludtz says. He does not move. For a moment he seems in a trance.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Ludtz?”

  Dr. Ludtz shakes his head. “No. No, I’m not. I think I have a slight fever. It seems to have come upon me rather suddenly.”

  “Have you checked it?”

  Dr. Ludtz looks slightly embarrassed. “I tried. But — I don’t know how it happened — I broke the thermometer. I dropped it. I’m a little shaky, I suppose.”

  He is sweating more profusely than usual. His shirt looks as if it has been dipped in drool. “Let me check it,” I tell him.

  Dr. Ludtz steps over to me. I take a thermometer from the black bag that sits beside my desk. “Here, put it in your mouth.”

  He takes the thermometer and places it under his tongue. In the Camp, I once saw him holding the brain of a three-year-old boy in his hands, lifting it toward the light. On the table, the boy’s eyes had plopped into the hollow of his skull like egg yolks.

  I take the thermometer from Dr. Ludtz’s mouth and look at it. “You have a slight fever, Doctor.”

  “Do I?” Dr. Ludtz says worriedly. “I thought so.”

  “Very slight, that’s all.”

  “But why? What do you suppose it is?”

  “Perhaps a virus,” I say casually. “I wouldn’t be overly concerned.”

  Dr. Ludtz glances apprehensively at his prickly monument. The grasses are gnawing at its base.

  “Really, Doctor,” I tell him, “there is no cause to be alarmed. You know how these things come and go.” I smile. “Perhaps it’s the season. Even the orchids are unwell.”

  Dr. Ludtz turns to me. “The orchids?”

  “A blight has afflicted them.”

  “Frankly, it’s not the orchids that concern me, Doctor,” Dr. Ludtz says. He is slightly irritated. “Men are not flowers, you know.”

  “True.”

  Dr. Ludtz wipes his brow anxiously. “I wouldn’t want to be ill during El Presidente’s visit. He might take it as a slight. You know how he is about things like that. He might become rather offended.”

  “If you are ill, I will explain it to him.”

  Dr. Ludtz laughs. “He is not a man for explanations, Doctor. He could easily get the wrong idea. He could take it as … I don’t know … as an insult, a personal insult.”

  “And do what?”

  Dr. Ludtz looks at me knowingly. “You know what. I don’t have to tell you.”

  “He will not send you home, Dr. Ludtz.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he wants the diamonds.”

  “But it’s you who have the diamonds, not me.”

  “I would not give him any if he did any harm to you.”

  Dr. Ludtz gazes at me beatifically. “Would you do that for me? Would you really?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  Dr. Ludtz grabs my hand and squeezes it gratefully. “Much thanks, Dr. Langhof. I can’t tell you what that means to me.”

  I ease my hand from his grasp. “Go to bed, Dr. Ludtz. Take care of yourself. What would I do in this place without you?”

  Dr. Ludtz stares at me, transfixed. “Dr. Langhof, I had no idea that … that …” He is practically in tears.

  “Go now. Get some sleep.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dr. Ludtz says. He starts to move toward the door.

  “I will be up to check on you this evening,” I tell him.

  “Oh, that would be fine, Dr. Langhof. Thank you so very much.”

  I watch as Dr. Ludtz walks away. He moves heavily, something infinitely curious washed up out of time like a bone from the sludge-pit, strange in shape and texture, belonging to no known creature, a small particle of mystery floating in a galaxy of crime.

  FEAR IS a great constrictor. In his terror of the fever and what it might portend, Dr. Ludtz mires his mind in the rudiments of the physical. It is in the nature of illness to reduce the parameters of one’s world to a tight little knot of injury. Nothing contracts the self into a small, aching center of restricted consciousness more than a sudden assault upon the integrity of health. The I that is not in pain, the I that is not afraid may follow the ballerina in her flight, may feel the swell of symphonies, may soar along the glimmering rim of verse. But once under assault, once in the grip of terror, the I draws in upon itself in a horrible deflation of sense and understanding. I know this to be true because I am a doctor, and my becoming one had to do with stars.

  After his dismal march through the workings of the city, the boy found himself in the park once again. Though weary, he still resisted the idea of going home. He sat down on a bench, stretched his legs before him, and looked up at the sky. And there they were, the stars. Above all else, they seemed to him immensely clean. In his tortured brain he tried to think of something in his earthbound existence that might bear some relationship to this shining cleanliness, this perfect radiance. Nothing appeared. He waited. The stars were silent overhead, as, of course, he fully expected them to be. And so, in the end, he left the park with no grand vision. But that does not mean that he left it with nothing at all. For somewhere during those moments as he sat mournfully watching the sky, the process began that ultimately fused two ideas in his mind: one concerning the workings of the physical universe and the other concerning the workings of man. The thought was simple enough: that man only approached the beauty and clarity of the physical order when he himself studied that order; that is, in the practice of scientific investigation. Later he would find the nature of man’s disorder in the metaphor of disease, and that would lead him to what he fully expected to be his life’s work: hygienic research. His dream was to discover the secret formula of health, to comprehend the very roots of malady, to touch the darkest pits of sickness, and then to cauterize them until they blazed visible before him.

  • • •

  “And so you want to be a doctor, Herr Langhof?” Dr. Trottman asked.

  Langhof sat in the book-lined office of the powerful and decisive Dr. Trottman, his hands turning waxy in his lap. “Yes, Dr. Trottman,” he said.

  “You don’t need to be nervous, Herr Langhof,” Dr. Trottman said softly. “This little interview is not an inquisition.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Dr. Trottman stared at the curriculum vitae of our hero as if it were a mysterious specimen from the tropics. “Quite an impressive record.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You must have applied yourself with great vigor to achieve such distinction in the gymnasium.”

  “I am a dedicated student,” Langhof said, hoping he did not sound haughty or self-serving.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Dr. Trottman said. He looked up from his desk, his small eyes twinkling energetically through the lenses of his glasses. “Tell me, then — why this determination to be a doctor?”

  “I have been pursuing this goal for quite some time.”

  “That’s obvious. But why?”

  “I am … simply … it is simply my greatest interest.”

  Dr. Trottman squinted. “And what area of medicine interests you most, Herr Langhof?”

  “Hygiene, sir.”

  Dr. Trottman looked surprised. “Hygiene? May I ask why?”

  Langhof cleared his throat. “Well, as you know, Dr. Trottman, the history of medicine suggests that more improvement has been brought about by hygienic changes than through all the artifice of medical science.”

  “Artifice?”

  “I meant no di
srespect in using that word, I assure you, Doctor.”

  “Then am I to infer from your remarks, Herr Langhof, that you are more interested in pursuing medical research than in private practice?”

  “I would like a private practice as well, of course, Dr. Trottman. But, yes, research is very important to me.”

  Dr. Trottman studied the young man carefully. “What is your … background, Herr Langhof?”

  “Background?”

  “Background,” Dr. Trottman repeated without elaboration.

  “Well, my father was a lawyer. My mother was … well … my mother did nothing.”

  “No doctors or scientists in your family history, then?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dr. Trottman.”

  “How about government service?”

  “Nothing above the rank of civil servant,” Langhof said. He had never so pointedly felt the poverty of his history.

  Dr. Trottman nodded and glanced again at the papers on his desk. “You have no acquaintance with a large university, I take it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Dr. Trottman continued to peruse the papers on his desk.

  “If I may say so, Dr. Trottman,” Langhof said, “it is precisely such an acquaintanceship that I am seeking here.”

  Dr. Trottman looked up and smiled. “Very good, then, Herr Langhof. I shall recommend you for admission. Your record demonstrates great ability. I trust you will never allow yourself to be swayed from your purposes.”

  And so the stiff little knight who had stared at the stars in the lonely park had found that particular star to which he wished to attach himself. Science, the study of which was allied in his mind to a vision of perfection — a sense that once all things had been made clear, they would also be made clean.

  After years have passed, after the stench that rose above the Camp has been blown into the stratosphere, after the trees rooted in the corpses have come to full flower, after a thousand rains have washed the caked ash from the grasses, there will come singers to tell us what it was. They will say that only those who yearn for the extravagantly good can commit the extravagantly evil. With such illogic, romance shall build its symphony again, shading the lines between act and intent, hovering over the stacked corpses that weighed the lorries down, presiding over the paradise of hell with angel’s wings, sifting it through the prism of their verse, sniffing in the noxious breezes that befouled the Camp some hint of misdirected good, for poetry is not a scalpel, but a veil.