The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  Or: once, before I became a priest, one night I was attending a symphony concert in New Orleans. I was talking to a friend of the family, a splendid old lady from a noble Jewish family and president of the symphony board—New Orleans Jews, God bless them, keep the arts alive. She was telling me about her recent trip to Italy. She’d been to Rome, where she’d seen the pope carried aloft around the square in a throne. She too winked. It was the way she said the word pope that was in itself outlandish. It made him sound like some grand panjandrum borne aloft by a bunch of loony Hottentots. As a matter of fact, she was right. I never did see why they hauled the pope around in that sedia—and I’m glad John XXIII put a stop to it. But it was the way she said the word pope—it made me think he was absurd too.

  But Catholics as part of the Judaic conspiracy? Helmut said it. He took it as a matter of course. I couldn’t make head or tail of it—then. Imagine hearing that from a young SS cadet, with his German eagle and death’s-head on his cap and lightning bolts on his shoulder patch. Of course, in his own mad way he was right, but not quite in the way he meant.

  I am ashamed to say that I did not question him or argue with him, at the time not having much more use for Catholics than he did. I thought of them as a lot of things but never as part of the “Judaic conspiracy.” In defense I can only say that the expression would also have amazed both New Orleans Jews and Holy Name parishioners.

  My father and I went on to Bayreuth. I remember hearing Tristan and Isolde with him. He had graduated from Puccini to Wagner. His eyes were closed during the entire second act. I confess I felt contempt for him and admiration for Helmut.

  Do you know that I don’t think he ever noticed the Nazis or Hitler or the SA or the SS that entire summer—any more than he noticed Huey Long when we got home?

  I decided not to stay in Germany, after all. I came home and went to Tulane, tuition-free because of my father’s academic connection.

  15. DURING THIS STRANGE, rambling account, I noticed with surprise that the old priest’s voice grew stronger. Toward the end he pushed himself up to a sitting position and began gesturing vigorously—for example, holding out both hands, palms up, to show how Helmut had presented him with a bayonet inscribed with Blut und Ehre.

  Now he is struggling to get up.

  “Why don’t you just stay here, Father,” I suggest. “You need a good night’s sleep.”

  “I’m fine! I’m fine!”

  “But you suffered some sort of attack and I’m not sure what—”

  “Oh, I’ve had those before. It’s an allergic reaction.”

  “Allergic reaction? Maybe, but it may be something more serious.” Like temporal-lobe epilepsy. Hence the vivid recall of smell, place, memory of Germany in the 1930s.

  But he insists on getting up, back to his post, as he puts it, as firewatcher. I help him onto the stool, on condition that he come in for a CORTscan and an ECG. He agrees.

  I am anxious to leave. I am worried about Claude Bon.

  “One question, Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Of what? The Nazis?”

  “No. Your colleagues. The Louisiana Weimar psychiatrists,” he says ironically.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind,” he says quietly. “What do you think of my experience in Germany?”

  There is nothing to do but answer truthfully, without saying that I was more interested in his story as a symptom of a possible brain disorder than in the actual events which he related.

  “Well, I see your German experience as a very vivid recollection of a youthful experience, not an uncommon phenomenon actually. It has happened to me.”

  “Is that all you see?”

  “Very well. So you were attracted by Helmut and the esprit of the SS. You were very young. Many people were attracted, even Churchill, as you mentioned. I don’t doubt you. As a matter of fact, I am familiar with some of the German doctors and eugenicists you mentioned. Very interesting, but—”

  I must have shrugged. He shakes his head, makes a face, rounding his eyes in his earlier rueful-risible expression. He is fiddling with the azimuth.

  “Okay,” he says suddenly. “Except for—”

  “Then I’ll be going along.”

  “—one thing. A footnote.”

  I sigh but don’t sit opposite him this time. I snap Lucy’s bag shut.

  FATHER SMITH’S FOOTNOTE

  I’ll make it short and sweet. You should pick up Claude as soon as possible. Believe me.

  I did not stay in Germany. I came back to New Orleans with my father.

  I went to Tulane for four years. I played some football.

  The war came. I took OCS in Jackson, became a ninety-day wonder.

  I ended up as an infantry lieutenant in the Seventh Army, General Patch commanding. Nothing very dashing about us, nothing like Patton’s Third Army. I wasn’t exactly a dashing lieutenant either, though I liked the army well enough. To tell you the truth, I was scared all the time. Scared of what? Of getting killed. To tell the truth, I never got shot at.

  We were in the XV Corps that crossed the Rhine on the Mannheim bridge and took part in the final thrust in April of ’45, down the Danube first, then struck south to Munich, which we captured on the thirtieth of April. Not much resistance. A single SS division tried to block our advance without success, but we lost a few. Our captain—we were in the 3d Division—got himself killed, and I was acting captain for a few weeks, my highest rank in the military.

  No, we didn’t see Tübingen, but we liberated Eglfing-Haar, the famous hospital outside Munich. No, we didn’t liberate Dachau, but I saw it later. There was no opposition at Eglfing-Haar, nobody in fact but the nurses and patients. Most of the doctors were gone. I asked about Dr. Jäger. The nurses knew him but said he had been “transferred” a few days before. But one nurse showed me where he worked. It was the Kinderhaw, the children’s division, a rather cheerful place which had a hundred and fifty beds for child psychiatric cases. There were only twenty children there, most in bad shape, though nothing like what I saw at Dachau. I asked the nurse what had happened to the others. She didn’t say anything, but she took me to a small room off the main ward. She said it was a “special department.” It was a very pleasant sunny room with a large window, but completely bare except for a small white-tiled table only long enough to accommodate a child. What was notable about the room was a large geranium plant in a pot on the windowsill to catch the sunlight. It was a beautiful plant, luxuriant, full of bloom, obviously very carefully tended. The nurse said it was watered every day.

  She was very very nervous, obviously anxious to tell me something, but either she was afraid to or didn’t know how.

  I asked her what the room was used for. She said that five or six times a month a doctor and a nurse would take a child into the room. After a while the doctor and nurse would come out alone. The “special department” room had an outside door.

  It took me a little while to understand what she was saying. Then, as if I had understood all along, I asked her casually what they used. She said many drugs, Luminal, morphine, scopolamine, Zyklon B through a face mask. It was then a new gas manufactured by I. G. Farben which upon exposure to air turned to cyanide.

  I asked her if she had ever gone in the room with the children.

  “Oh no,” she said. She would only see the doctor and nurse go in with the children and come out alone. She did not seem horrified, but only anxious that I get it straight. I couldn’t be sure she was telling the truth, but she probably was, because she didn’t have to tell me about the “special department.”

  “Was Dr. Jäger one of the doctors who went in the room?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was usually Dr. Jäger.”

  That’s all, Tom. End of footnote. As a matter of psychological interest, I still don’t know whether the smell I remember—part of the hallucination or whatever—is the smell of the gerani
um or a trace of the Zyklon B. I should add that there seemed nothing particularly horrifying about her showing me the “special department”—that is, she was not horrified nor was I, at the time. It was a matter of some interest. Soldiers are interested, not horrified. Only later was I horrified. We’ve got it wrong about horror. It doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.

  But I’ve kept you long enough. Thank you for coming. I’m all right.

  16. I LOOK DOWN at him curiously.

  “What happened to Dr. Jäger?”

  The priest, unsurprised, answers in the same flat, dry voice. “He disappeared. He was thought to have gotten across the Bodensee to Switzerland and eventually to Portugal and to Paraguay.”

  “What happened to the others you met?”

  “Oh, that’s a matter of record. You can look it up.” He recites rapidly, as if he were a clerk reading the record. “Dr. Max de Crinis, the ‘charming Austrian,’ who was responsible for sending retarded children to Goerden, one of the murder institutions, could not get out of the Russian encirclement of Berlin in 1945. He committed suicide with a government-supplied capsule of cyanide. Dr. Villinger, the eugenicist, was indicted in the euthanasia trial in Limburg. After questioning by the prosecution he went to the mountains near Innsbruck before the trial and committed suicide. Dr. Carl Schneider, respected successor to Kraepelin at Heidelberg, worked with the SS commission at Bethel and selected candidates for extermination. When he was put on trial after the war, he committed suicide. Dr. Paul Nitsche, author of the authoritative Handbook of Psychiatry during the Weimar Republic, was tried in Dresden for the murder of mental patients, sentenced to death, and executed in 1947. Dr. Werner Heyde, director of the clinic at Würzburg, where patients had been treated humanely since the sixteenth century, was also put on trial at Limburg for euthanasia. He committed suicide in his cell five days before the trial. He approved carbon monoxide as the drug of choice in euthanasia. At the time he was head of the Reich Society for Mental Illness Institution. Dr. C. G. Jung, co-editor with Dr. M. H. Goering of the Nazi-coordinated Journal for Psychotherapy, after the war became, I understand, a well-known psychiatrist.”

  After he finishes, we sit for a while in silence. The moon is overhead. The sea of pines, without shadows, looks calm and silvery as water. There is a sliver of light in the south where the moonlight reflects from Lake Pontchartrain.

  “No fires tonight,” says the priest.

  “No,” I say absently.

  “Would you do me a favor, Tom?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get me that soup and Jell-O. I’m hungry.”

  He spoons up chicken soup from the can and drinks the melted Jell-O from the bowl.

  “You seem to feel better, Father.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you have these episodes often?”

  “Mostly in winter. I think it’s an allergy to the dampness.”

  “How long have you had them?”

  “Since last year when we had all that rain.”

  “I see.” I reach for the ring of the trapdoor, hesitate. “There is something I don’t understand.”

  “Yes?” He turns up the wick of the kerosene lamp.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to tell me—about your memory of—about Germany.”

  “What is there to understand?”

  “Are you trying to tell me that the Nazis were not to blame?”

  “No. They were to blame. Everything you’ve ever heard about them is true. I saw Dachau.”

  “Are you suggesting that it was the psychiatrists who were the villains?”

  “No. Only that they taught the Nazis a thing or two.”

  “Scientists in general?”

  “No.”

  “Then is it the Germans? Are you saying that there is a fatal flaw peculiar to the Germans, something demonic?”

  “Demonic?” The priest laughs. “I think you’re pulling my leg, Tom.” He looks at me slyly, then narrows his eyes as if he is sizing me up. “Could I ask you a question, Tom?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think we’re different from the Germans?”

  “I couldn’t say. I hope so.”

  “Do you think present-day Soviet psychiatrists are any different from Dr. Jäger and that crowd?”

  “I couldn’t say. But what is the point, Father?”

  Again the priest’s eyes seem to glitter. Is it malice or a secret hilarity? “Of my little déjà vu? Just a tale. Perhaps a hallucination, as you suggest. I thought you would be interested from a professional point of view. It was such a vivid experience, my remembering it in every detail, even the florist-shop smell of geraniums—much more vivid than a dream. Some psychological phenomenon, I’m sure.”

  I look at him. There is a sly expression in his yes. Is he being ironic? “No doubt.” I rise. “I’m going to pick up Claude. Come in tomorrow for a CORTscan. If you don’t feel well, call me or have Milton call me. I’ll come for you.”

  We shake hands. Something occurs to me. “May I ask you a somewhat personal question?” His last question about the Germans irritated me enough that I feel free to ask him.

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you become a priest?”

  “Why did I become a priest.” The priest at first seems surprised. Then he ruminates.

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “What else what?”

  “That’s all.”

  He shrugs, appearing to lose interest. “In the end one must choose—given the chance.”

  “Choose what?”

  “Life or death. What else?”

  What else. I’m thinking of the smell of geraniums and of the temporal lobe where smells are registered and, in some cases of epilepsy or brain tumor, replay, come back with all the haunting force of memory. And play one false too. I don’t recall geraniums having a smell.

  17. THE IRON GATE at Belle Ame is closed. I get out to open it, hoping it is not locked. It unlocks and opens even as I reach for it. In the same instant headlights come on beyond the gate not ten feet away. They are double lights, on high beam but close enough and low enough not to blind me.

  It is the Ranger four-door parked, waiting.

  “Okay, Doctor. You can hold it right there. That’s fine.”

  It’s the driver, the one dressed in the business suit. The other man is getting out of the Ranger. He is wearing a business jacket over the bib overalls.

  “Please park your car over there, Doctor,” says number one, opening the gate and pointing past the Ranger. He’s Boston or Rhode Island, the park is almost pâk, the car almost but not quite câ. Not as broad as Boston. Probably Providence. Otherwise he’s Midwest Purvis, old-style FBI, hair: crewcut; suit: Michigan State collegiate.

  Why?”

  “We have a federal warrant, Doctor.”

  “For what? What’s the charge?”

  “We don’t need a charge.” He reaches for something under his jacket, behind him—cuffs?—but flips open a little pocket book, showing a badge. “ATFA, Doctor. Please park your car there.”

  “Take it easy, Mel,” says number two. “The doctor’s not going anywhere, are you, Doc?” He’s upcountry Louisiana, strong-bellied, heavy-faced, not ill-natured, but sure, sheriff-sure. He could have been one of Huey Long’s bodyguards. He’s wearing a suit jacket over his overalls. Why bib overalls? Because he’s too fat for jeans? “Doc, we got orders to hold you for parole violation. I’ll park your car for you.” He says päk, cä. They are not unfriendly.

  “Where’re we going?”

  “Angola, right up the road.”

  “That’s a state facility.”

  “We have very good liaison with state and county officers, Doctor,” says Providence Purvis, picking up some Louisiana good manners. “I’m sure we can clear it up in no time. Don’t worry. You’re not going to the prison farm. We have a holding facility there, quite a decent place actually—for political detainees
and suchlike.”

  “He’s talking about parish, Doc,” says Louisiana Fats, pronouncing it pa-ish. “I’m out of the sheriff’s office in East Feliciana, on loan to the ATFA. It’s the feds have the holding facility.”

  “Let’s go, Dr. More,” says Purvis.

  “I want to pick up a patient here, one of the boys. It’s an urgent medical matter.”

  “No way,” says Purvis, turning Yankee again. “Move it.”

  18. THE FEDERAL HOLDING FACILITY is under the levee, outside the main gate, and not really part of the Angola Prison Farm. It is a nondescript, two-story frame building which in fact I remember. It used to be a residence for junior correction officers. It looks like a crewboat washed up from the Mississippi, which flows just beyond the levee and all but encircles Angola like a turbulent moat.

  It is not yet midnight. But the place is brightly lit by a bank of stadium lights. There are two tiers of rooms and a boatlike rail running around both decks. A couple of men, not dressed like prisoners, are lounging at the upper rail like sailors marooned in a bad port.

  It turns out I know the jailer. He’s a Jenkins, Elmo Jenkins, one of several hundred Jenkinses from upper St. Tammany Parish, sitting behind not even a desk but a folding metal picnic table in a passageway amidships which looks like the rec room of an oil rig with its old non-stereo TV, plastic couches, a card table, and a stack of old Playboys.