Even if I chose to relate the story of my transformation it would be of no use to her. I was completely ignorant of the particulars. And as for being impervious to external forces, the tedious exercise of her experiments, not to mention the general flatness of her company, was doing much to wear me down.
“I understand will, Maddy,” she said, casting a cold eye on my torso as it quietly knit together. “Do you know how I lost this arm?”
“Probably got it caught in the ravenous teeth of your girdle’s zipper,” I said, sitting up.
“I cut it off myself.” She let that linger as she dropped my blouse to my lap. Then she seated herself on her low examination stool. “I was one of the first white persons ever allowed in Tibet. It’s true. I’d come as a representative of the Schutzstaffel. My specialty was Asian religions. I’d planned on being a professor before the Reich. I was there looking for the Bardo Thodol or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Our Führer has always had a weakness for esoteric texts. I found nothing, of course, except a blizzard. And an avalanche. We were buried under ten thousand kilos of snow for two days. We managed to avoid hypothermia by excavating a small den in the loosely packed debris. I recommended vigorous chest massages, sleeping in pairs. When we finally tunneled out, I realized I was the only Caucasian to survive the ordeal. The rest had perished from exposure or perhaps fear of intimacy. I was there with two tiny Tibetans, a lingual gulf between us, and no food. We walked for miles until our bodies finally gave out. I had little to negotiate with. I did not know the terrain like my indigenous guides. I needed them. Protein, preferably animal protein, has arguably the highest concentration of calories, so the choice was clear. The sacrifice would be mine. They are stronger than they look, those little brown Tibetans. But after fifteen minutes of merely pulverizing my upper arm with some igneous shale, I realized they had made dismal progress in shattering the bone. I completed the job myself, fabricating a kind of remedial serration in the blade of the shale. I was through the bone in no time. When it was off, we split it into three parts: the distal portion of the wrist including the carpals and metacarpals, the median section just above the condyles of the humerus, and the humerus itself with its portion of both bellies of the biceps. We ate it cold, like a particularly resistant steak tartar.”
Her efforts to win my compliance did not end with her horror stories. She also tried more traditional methods. I was given the consort’s room in the castle, a room whose original function had been one of inspiring compliance as well, albeit of a different kind. It was done up like the precious dress the artist’s wife had given me, in pink-and-cream watered silk with the French love of the curved line. It was so adamant in its insistence of luxury, so persistent in its desire to saturate the senses, that it was difficult not to be won over by it. The doctor would come at night, at bedtime, with a silver service set with a pot of hot chocolate and freshly baked cookies. She had decided to take a materialist view. I think she thought if I were reminded of what it was to be a simple child, I would eventually develop a child’s sense of insecurity and low esteem. And that first night it seemed to work. Though I could taste nothing, the textures were soothing, the warmth of the liquid in my mouth not much different from the heat that gathered on my satin sheets where the doctor sat. It was the attention I loved, her cotton candy blitzkrieg. She dropped her officious enamel and came as a kind of child herself, full of a child’s questions.
“What is it like, Maddy, to know you will never age and decay?” (Disappointing.)
“How does it feel to know you will outlast the shape of the shoreline?” (Lonely.)
“Do you feel like a god or a stone?” (Neither, actually. But if I had to choose I guess I feel like a bit of meteorite that orbits regular lives. A concrete housefly?)
“Are you sure you will not tell me the purpose of those three words you screamed in the showers?” (Quite sure.)
I supplied none of these answers, merely thought them. I was not expected to answer. This was a seduction, a test of membrane integrity, a way to see by sly observation just what it would take to break me down. Her attentions had their effect. In the days that followed, she would wake me gently, with the same silver tray as in the evening, and so complete a circle, creating a ritual, an expectation. She would “do her rounds,” which I fooled myself did not amount to shower head dispatches and tortures. If I was not beginning to like her, at least I could tolerate her. I would dress and we would walk the grounds or play croquet in the garden, and when I looked up and saw the frightened faces of the patients looking down on me, I did not imagine their fates but smiled at them and looked away. It was the only way I knew I could continue.
She eventually drew the conversation away from my physiology. She asked me about my past and when I told her of my time in Hollywood, she pretended to be impressed. She found a hand-cranked motion picture camera, an old Bell & Howell, and several tins of color film, somewhat novel at that time. She allowed me full access to the grounds for my “gelatins” as she called them.
I couldn’t think of a narrative and was more interested in experimenting with color balance, so I shot a series of unrelated vignettes. The clouds with a polarization filter. The children, mostly twins, at exercise in the main courtyard. The mason who had come to build the large iron-faced oven in the basement. He could clown like Harold Lloyd and even wore the same glasses. (It was this footage, later shown at the trials, which helped achieve the conviction and execution of Dr. Flosse along with several other doctors from Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, and Hadamar.)
I had a darkroom at the top of one of the towers, a cylindrical space like an empty oatmeal container, where I kept my basins of chemicals and drying racks. I’d spend hours in the solid dark, experimenting with developers and bath durations. When I had something interesting, I was allowed to show the other patients my footage. We’d set up benches in front of a hung sheet that covered the elaborate hearth of one of the sitting rooms. We’d dim the lights and wait for the infectious shushing and yelps that accompanied any sudden change in ambience to die down, and then I’d start the show. I used a soundless eight-millimeter projector. I provided the narration with such pronouncements as “Angels in the briars” over an image of several pairs of twins taking the air in the rose garden, regaining their constitutions after the morning’s experiments, or “Wake up, sleepyheads” over panning shots of patients under disturbed dreams, pulling on their restraints.
The joy these images brought to the patients who could recognize themselves was enormous. “That’s me! That’s me!” would crackle like candy cellophane in the flickering dark, and the mantra, once picked up by the bulk of the viewers, would sometimes never diminish. I wondered if there was a cruel aspect to these evenings, if there was a perversity in providing a few hours of normalcy. But I reminded myself that I was a prisoner as well, and what I provided could never be mistaken as hope. I kept them calm and diverted, and I suppose there was some complicity in that. But I never saw it that way. It was merely a way to pass the time before the inevitable. I had, after all, crossed back over the water.
CHAPTER 46
I became aware of him slowly. It began as a faint dawn of panic, the sensation of having forgotten something important and the sinking realization that you are too late. But it soon gained focus, focus in my lower belly and groin. And I could feel a kind of desultory tingle there, a halfhearted assault that teased the edges of desire as it steadily grew in intensity. The first cold fingers of February. Icy tongues of scorched metal. He was approaching rapidly from a great distance. I hung my reel of dripping film in the complete darkness and looked down to my hands. My small child’s bones had begun to throb with a faint greenish glow. They flickered and guttered as the sickly verdant light flowed frigidly up my arms and shoulders, beating the flesh behind the darkness, raising my chilled structure to blinding skeletal relief. I was a beacon. A light to guide his way. Finally. But this light was not content to evanesce. This light had teeth. And abruptly I was shot
through with an icy shock so strong I was thrown from my small stool. I heard his thin, cruel laugh echo in the close room.
“Volker?”
Certain veins are never deaf to the promises of the needle.
His reply was the rasping of the walls as they grated against the floor. I stood as the room began to shrink. And when the confines of the space finally cupped me in its coffin-size palm, when I could struggle no more, the walls began to writhe. At first I thought it was spiders. He was fond of spiders. In the weak light from my anatomy, I thought it was webs downing softly against the hard angles. But it wasn’t. It was hair. Human hair, neglected under the lid. Hanks of seething tendrils spewed from the ceiling, floor, and walls. A dead dowager’s braid. A young suicide’s tresses. Worming blind in the dark. A glut of the keepsake of the dead snaking dryly around my ankles and up my thighs, cresting with the stink of rot and failed lilac over my shoulders and finally down my throat. Tickling, clogging, stifling. And there, finally, the longed-for staleness of him on my tongue, his sweet caustic breath filling my airless lungs. The thunder of his approach filled me with a sickly excitement I could not contain. I leaned against the tight walls and fumbled with the folds of my skirt. My knees opened without complaint. My entire body was slack with desire, with an ever-cold and neglected longing that reflexively shunted fear like a chest unhasped by a single terrible whisper.
“Poppa.” I moaned in dusky expectation. Even with my unaided ambition slumbering six feet inside me, the need of him still rankled, a ghostly itch from some ancient amputation. But nothing fluttered my deserted flesh. I could sense him, could smell his vicious spice in the air, but he refused to surge.
“Maddy,” I heard him whisper harshly, free from the intimate tissues of my skull. “What are you doing, my girl?” I sat up. He was congealed there, his outline solid as a reflection in a dark and undisturbed pond. “Not like this, child. Never like this.”
“What do you mean?” I said as a slight shame shivered through my nerves.
“Look at you, sprawled there, spread like a common whore. After all these years, this is how you’ve soured?”
“Soured? Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that what you’ve made me only fit for?”
“Pull up those knickers,” he hissed.
“But I don’t understand.” I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. What weakness of mine was required to signal his supremacy? The ceaseless mechanical horrors of my last few years had taught me the only benefit of my condition: the dead have no fear.
“You’ve grown old, Maddy,” he said with a touch of sadness, retreating. “My little girl is gone.”
“But I am so much more now.” How many nights had I tossed in my consort’s bed while the woman raged inside this useless girl?
“Alas,” he whispered, “without fear the rose has no sweetness.”
I righted my clothes roughly as I stood, feeling sickened by the extreme of my so often deferred passion. Humiliated by a reflex I could never have engendered without addiction. I crossed to my worktable and dunked a fresh reel in its bath, looking at him. He was his same impeccable self, his lips still full and sensual, the tines of his mustache still crisp as a vivisectionist’s hook. Fury seized me and I threw the shallow tub to the wall with a metallic crash.
“Why have you come, Volker?” I shouted. Dry sobs bent my back. I turned from him shuddering in the smallness of the wide room.
“Why have I come?” he said soothingly. “Isn’t it obvious? To continue our work.”
“Our work? I haven’t needed you for my work in years!”
“Is that what this is?” he asked, his fingers fondling the stuttering images of twins still dripping with developer. “These home movies of the damned? I was so hoping I might find you a success.”
“I was a success!” I screamed, trying hard to believe it.
“Never,” he whispered with a grin. “You were a lapdog to your Hollywood pimps and now you are more so to these goose-stepping comedians. I taught you nothing. You contented yourself with scraps. Like a mongrel so beaten by its master any slight recognition seemed a feast. You whispered your passion. Never shouted it,” he spat. “You insinuated your vision. Never owned it. Oh, you need me, girl,” he said as his dark eyes flashed. “You need me badly. You can choke down the lie of your accomplishments all you like. But that is a biscuit of cold shit I’ll never swallow.” He had been many things to me. A cruel puppet master, an intractable advocate, a tyrannical drug that shored up my ever-crumbling confidence as it drained my capacity to dread. But never this. Never a disapproving father. I didn’t know what I feared most. “There is still work to do,” he continued, his voice broadening theatrically. “Still nightmares left to be hollowed. Magnificent terrors still to be harnessed. But not if you don’t have the heart to claim them.” His eyes were wide. But not with terror. Something much worse sat in his pupils, an angry child fingering a ridiculous rubber knife.
“What would you have me do?” I laughed, picking up my upset tub and footage. “Horror grew up, Poppa. Just like your little girl. It put on uniforms and spit-shined its boots. These people have washed horror in soap and starch and made it stand in line.”
“Then smash their lines. Poison their soap and starch.”
“My God,” I said with a faint curl of disgust. “Look at you. You still believe the boogeyman is waiting under the bed. What half-shadowed thing could we throw up on a screen that could compete with this? Even if I wanted to, how could I? Look around you. The conviction of these walls is quite adamant, I assure you.”
In answer he simply smiled. “Do you remember the time you fell?” he said, beginning his soft retreat, the almost imperceptible blurring of his clean and vivid dimensions. “You fell so far and hard a choice sprang up. Do you remember? And what did you do? Did you retreat? Fail? Pretend you were less than what the desire in your soul knew you to be? Do you really think the walls of this place are any more covetous than oblivion?” I felt the quickening of some tiny rebirth, the haunting at the corners of my eyes where tears might go. “All you need to do is what you did then. Will it, my girl,” he said, his image growing fainter. “All you have to do is want it.”
And I stepped toward him as a frightened child might approach her father, and he paused. And then he grinned, his eyes flashing a terrible solid black, his teeth bared clean by a menacing peel of his lips, and rushed into me, screaming, tearing, lacerating the very core of me.
And was gone.
I kept making my little presentations, although the audience changed each week. Every night I pondered of escape. I got used to the screams in the early mornings, the stink of burning bodies at night. I know now we were in dress rehearsals for the Holocaust, that every major player made his grim debut in castles like ours all over Germany. I watched as the first drafts on the etiquette of extermination were written. Each night before “bed,” Dr. Flosse would alert me to refinements in the system. She had discovered that “selecting” family members, that is separating them before the gassings, actually achieved results in the long run. Without a familiar face to embolden them, she found they were less likely to resist her, especially when they were told they would meet with their loved ones shortly. The confusion and vulnerability of the initial separation engendered the beginnings of a calm compliance that only the element of hope could complete. She considered the “specter of hope” so necessary in the “fluid processing” of certain victims that she made a special note to her bosses in Berlin “that under no circumstances should children ever be separated from their toys. They are comforting symbols that can bear no fruit of rebellion and so should be indulged.” She even thanked me for an insight I had helped her discover. Before my arrival with Mutter she had been flirting with the idea of “processing upon arrival.” She was curious to see if subjects with no previous experience with the facilities, i.e., those who had not taken actual showers on the premises, would resist processing. That was why Mutter had been mixed so so
on with others who had established a familiar routine. And thanks to Mutter’s example, with my help, she could safely report that subjects would process just as compliantly with merely a bar of soap and a useless towel. I, however, was the exception and could not be considered relevant to statistical evidence. But her words stirred nothing in me, no pity, no outrage. I simply eyed the walls of my prison, wishing, like the living wish, that something might come and release me.
CHAPTER 47
One day word came that the doctor’s efforts would be rewarded with a visit from Reichsführer Himmler himself. The castle was in a dither, as if the newly engaged were entertaining their soon-to-be in-laws for the first time. A menu was planned, silver polished, the main dining room cleared of its vivisection tables. French food was considered publicly decadent but privately desired and I remember slabs of foie gras and brioche toast, duck simmering in champagne and oranges and a huge Alsatian tart in a replica of our castle. Several of the more cognitive patients were given reprieves and fitted with white serving jackets and told from what side to place a dish and from what side to pull it. One, a microcephalic named Gertzi, who also loved to watch me thread the projector, was given white gloves and the job of sommelier. He practiced for an entire week, filling a wine bottle with dyed water and emptying it out into a line of stemware until he could achieve a perfect pour without leaving a single drop on the linen.
A day before the visit, we were informed Himmler had a cold and would not be attending but would send his attaché in his stead. How could one be disappointed that history’s most notorious war criminal, the meticulous architect of all their untimely deaths, was unable to make it to supper? But we were. The patients actually cried when they heard the news. They pulled their hair. They mewed like kittens. I had to find Gertzi’s cork from his practice bottle and sneak it into the kitchen to scorch it. I used the blackened end to draw a quick mustache and I hunkered and swiveled and pratfalled until their smiles returned. I was reprimanded by the lead cook for making sport of the führer. How could I tell her I was doing my best Chaplin?
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 26
