THIRTEEN
It is the wind blowing through the Black Forest pines that sounds like the howling voices of fairy tale monsters and witches and dragons and little children lost. And Erich heard them all again, as he had at ten, hiking with his father through the dark woods. He would stay close to him then, holding his hand until the voices stopped and only the birds could be heard singing to each other. The voices, he knew, were make-believe, but he wasn’t sure. They were there too often not to be. Poets and dreamers lived there, too, sometimes. And when they did, Erich went with them, hiding in secret runaway places that the real world knew nothing of. It was so now, the voices. But they were not the poets and the dreamers, or the fairy tale monsters, he knew. Children’s voices, thousands and thousands, all as one, it seemed, filling the forest with their sounds. Heard loudest among them was the silent voice of the child who could not speak, whose hand he had gently squeezed the day he went to sleep forever.
Erich had come to the forest late the night before, staying at a small inn near the edge of a wide wildflower field where a trail begins, leading into the forest. The woods and the streams nurtured him, and he was never happier than when he wandered aimlessly among them. Before he could leave Leipzig, Dr. Catel had requested that he and Dr. Schneider, the assistant chief of psychiatry, and one other doctor that Erich didn’t know, accompany him to the Knauer child’s room to observe while he killed the infant. Then they were to sign the record as witnesses to what was still essentially a crime. There was nothing unpleasant about the boy’s death. But death is never unpleasant—it’s the dying that’s so hard to watch. When the child stopped breathing, and the vile smell of his loosened bowels covered the air, Erich fled the room. Now alone in the innocence of the ancient forest, he realized it was not the sickening stench of the dead child that had made him run away to hide, it was himself covered with his own shit. Dr. Catel had purposely involved him as a witness in the killing of the child, making him an accessory of record. As it was with the old Jewish man and woman, he had just let matters be, saying nothing, offering no protest against a terrible wrong. That he would be a coward to the end, and die a thousand deaths for being so, was all he was able to feel now.
Before leaving the hospital grounds, Erich had sprawled out on a grassy knoll in back of the hospital watching a small riverboat trying to navigate the rain-swollen Weisse Elster River below. The spring rains had come and everything was green and fresh, and he imagined for a quiet minute sailing on the river straight back to Czechoslovakia where its life began. But Dr. Schneider, who had been looking for him, came and sat down next to him, waiting a few minutes before speaking.
“I don’t blame you for leaving, Erich. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to watch, though in the end it did bring peace to the father.”
“I’m not so sure,” Erich answered, sitting up and turning to Dr. Schneider. “His guilt is much greater than ours; not before God perhaps, but in his mind. Could you kill your own child, as he did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if he were suffering horribly. That would change everything.”
“The suffering, yes, but not the killing. It would still be there, hanging before your eyes every day and night. You and I murdered that baby just as sure as if we pushed the morphine syringe with our own thumbs. We watched and said nothing.”
“I know, and that’s why I’m here. We’re to be transferred to the Görden Institute in Brandenburg to help establish a new psychiatric department for children under a Dr. Heinze. The man has the credentials, I hear.”
Puzzled by the sudden news, Erich struggled to make sense of what he was hearing from Dr. Schneider. The reason for Dr. Catel’s trip to Görden was apparent now.
“Will you go? You have a choice, I think?” Erich said.
“No, not unless ordered to by the Health Ministry. From what is rumored, there will be more children like the Knauer child there, all waiting to be treated in some way, or to be killed.”
“We could both go there and protest, if what you say is true.”
“No, thank you—our deaths would be the next ones. No, I’d rather die defending my country. It would be a hell of lot quicker and certainly more honorable,” Dr. Schneider said with some pride in his voice.
“Perhaps that’s what they want from both of us, to defend the Reich by killing the unfit. It’s perhaps the only way to stay alive until the war is over,” Erich said sarcastically.
Erich studied Dr. Schneider’s face. He had found him to be a man of some charm and character. Like Dr. Brandt, he too came from a distinguished medical family in Alsace, which mattered little to Erich. What did, though, was that he was the only physician to welcome him warmly when he first arrived at Leipzig and show him some respect. The curse of his father’s prestige had silenced the rest. When the proposed killing of the Knauer child first arose, Dr. Schneider’s voice was the loudest heard in protest, though he grew silent when the deed was done. Asked later about this, he had no answer except that he was afraid, like all the rest of the doctors. But when Erich confessed to him his own silence in Prague as the old man and woman were murdered, he seemed surprised by Erich’s guilt, and said only, “But they were Jews. Knauer was a German.”
Stunned by Dr. Schneider’s blunt response, Erich said nothing further to him and walked away. Later, driving down to the Black Forest, he realized the absurdity of the entire conversation with Dr. Schneider, but knew the truth was there to be seen. Compassion seems to carry its own good reason for killing one’s own but need not be found for the Jew.
Erich was glad he had not told Dr. Schneider about Julia and his plan to leave Germany, which he might have done had the conversation continued further. He had been alone with his thoughts too long and needed to share his thinking with someone, as he always had done with Julia. But there were only empty faces around him, their conscience now tightly harnessed to the Nazi movement itself. Erich figured some had done so from cold fear, the greatest of all human motivators. Others were after money, or the fictitious shades of prestige, like his father. What would he come to barter for when the time came? he wondered.
Erich sat down to rest on the forest floor by a small bed of wild bluebells, doing their own thing, struggling to survive in the sunless solitude surrounding them. They had blossomed where their seeds fell by chance, dropped by distant birds from faraway places, perhaps, or carried there by the warming winds of spring. It seems none of us end up on the road from which we started. But the end is there for us, as sure as it was at the beginning. The world is just a barrel organ, Julia’s father had said one evening during a long, intense discussion, which God himself turns. This way, we all dance to the tune that is on the drum. We may not think it so, but we do. It’s there playing over and over, the same tune for all of us. For now, he had argued, we are dancing to the discordant sounds of Hitler’s Third Reich. The night’s discussion ended then rather sadly, Erich remembered. But he recalled that Julia had said, “Whether we are to survive is how we dance, not the tune, and you and I must always dance together, Erich.” There was small comfort in her words, though. The child’s death had joined the dance too.
Opening the knapsack he always carried in any season, Erich took out a small metal flask half filled with warm dark lager. Julia had given it to him one early fall day driving from Prague to the nearby Biskid mountains, where they had hiked many times together.
“Warm beer and nature’s solitude are a tough combination to beat when totaling up God’s gifts to us,” she had said that day, laughing.
Laughter to Julia, though, was the greatest gift from God, because it quiets our hurts and disappointments, and even death, should it come near. But laughter also can hide us from who we are, Erich believed, allowing us to seem what we’re not. He had observed this phenomenon too many times in his friends and strangers, all trying to be more than they were. And he wondered how different his and Julia’s laughter would sound when they were together again, each having so much to hide from the other. He would not be the
same, nor she. Nor anything else. Nothing ever is after there’s been a lot of killing in the world. Where would their love be in all this mess? The longing he felt for Julia swept over him in great waves of despair. And he cried out to her, as if she would suddenly step forth from behind a tree and come to him through the shadows of the forest, laughing.
Drinking the last of the beer, Erich tucked away his emotions the best he could. The outburst of self-pity felt good, though he detested it in others. Placebo therapy, Julia’s father called it, excuses that never erase the weakness you are hiding. It helps us to survive, to be something when all else fails. And for Erich, the task ahead was to survive with his soul somehow intact.
Used by the Romans two thousand years back, the ancient trail he had chosen to hike on led to Switzerland, but he was ill prepared to flee Germany without first returning to Leipzig. As he started to turn back on the trail leading out of the forest, a loud shrill voice called out, startling him.
“You there, halt!”
Not sure from which direction the voice came, Erich froze when he heard a loud rustling movement through the leaves and underbrush to his right, much like a charging wild boar would make. Two Wehrmacht soldiers, each carrying a light 9-millimeter machine gun, stepped from the woods and cautiously approached him.
“Do not move,” the closest soldier said, pointing his gun at Erich.
“Your knapsack—quick, empty it on the ground,” the other said scruffily.
Erich did so, trying all the while to control the churning fear that was beginning to numb his whole body, making it difficult for him to move. The metal flask fell harmlessly to the ground, along with a half-eaten piece of sauerbraten and hard bread wrapped in butcher’s paper.
“Your pockets, empty them, too.”
Erich pulled his pants pockets inside out, showing nothing but two keys, a handkerchief, and a folding wallet holding his identification papers.
“Stand over there,” the first soldier said, waving the gun at Erich and pointing to his right.
Erich stood still trembling, unable to move. He was to die right here and no one would ever know.
“What are you waiting for?” the other soldier screamed, shoving Erich hard, causing him to stumble and fall against a small tree stump by the edge of the trail.
Then the soldier picked up Erich’s wallet from the ground where it had fallen and glanced hurriedly through his identification papers.
“You are from Leipzig?”
“Yes, the hospital. I am a doctor there,” Erich said in a whispery voice, literally having to force the words from his mouth.
“A doctor? Leipzig is miles away. Why are you here?”
“To rest, I suppose. The work has been heavy lately,” Erich responded, becoming more frightened with each question.
“Where were you headed?” the second soldier asked, moving closer to Erich to compare his face with the ID photograph.
“Nowhere in particular. Just hiking. I came here when I was young with my father and walked this particular trail.”
“It is being used now by many deserters to try and escape to Switzerland. Two were killed here yesterday,” the second soldier said, returning Erich’s wallet and papers to him.
“It’s strange that you are not in the army,” the first soldier said, still wary of Erich.
“To you, perhaps, but not to the Health Ministry. Someone must stay behind to heal the wounds of our soldiers when they return from battle,” Erich slowly responded, regaining some composure.
Both soldiers seemed pleased with his answer, and one gathered the backpack and the contents from the ground and handed them to him.
“You may go, but do not use this trail again. You are lucky we didn’t shoot you,” he said.
“Thank you,” Erich said weakly, before starting back to the trailhead where his car was parked. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back at the two soldiers, who were still watching him, and waved to them, then quickly increased his pace, adding distance.
Darkness would cover his way soon. He couldn’t hear the waterfalls near Triberg yet, and knew many miles remained before he would be safely out of the forest. No forest is safe from one’s imagination at night. What is real before you is not what you see. And the voices of the night that speak to you are different from those of the day. Sometimes they don’t belong to this world. But to Erich, darkness had always been a glorious time for the mind to try to picture the infinite. His love for psychiatry began with the nights. One could be quite insane, he believed, and yet find sanity at night because there were no truths in the dark. Fears of the day are hidden then, in the shadows of the night, just as one’s sins are secreted away in the murky gray recesses of the mind. He had never been afraid of the dark. Long before his days in college, when night came, he would wander the streets and tree-lined parks of Dresden guessing what the shadows of distant objects might be. He became odd then to his father, and a worry to his mother, mostly because his father swore by the inviolability of science as a believer would the Holy Bible, not the hodgepodge of Freudian and Jungian psychology. If a woman was crazy, her genes were, too. It was that simple to him. No such woman should be allowed to pass on such crazy genes to the next generation. For him eugenics had become the new covenant for mankind’s salvation, as the New Testament was to the early Christians.
But the silent, twisted face of fear stayed close to Erich this night, seemingly darting back and forth in front of him from the surrounding blackness of the forest as he slowly made his way along the trail. Then it stopped for a moment and began walking along beside him, looking very much human, saying nothing but smiling all the while at his troubled and trembling soul. Later it would talk with him, not aloud, but deep down within him where no one else could hear. It was that real. And it frightened Erich. Later he would come to believe that something else has to exist alongside the reality in his life. It gives one’s life more thickness to imagine a clandestine side to things one knows are real. So the terrible fear he felt of dying had become just that, a being he could not see but knew was there where the real and the imaginary world could no longer be separated.
The encounter with the military patrol had left Erich shaken and more confused than ever as to what the future now held for him. He knew no one close in Leipzig to talk to who might feel as he did about the murdered child. Dr. Schneider, who had initially shared his concerns about euthanasia, was silent now as to what he might do should such a case arise again. Where anyone stood on the question of loyalty to Hitler’s Third Reich was a question he couldn’t ask, nor would anyone answer had he done so. This was so because Hitler himself had penned the authorization to kill the Knauer infant on his personal stationary from the Chancellery, quickly dispatching Karl Brandt to deliver the message and see that it was done. To everyone involved, the letter became a strange god-like tablet that sanctified the killing.
Erich’s years away from Dresden had dismissed old ties and weakened others, changing serious thoughts once shared with friends to idle chatter. Perhaps that is what happens in time to old and distant friendships, as matters of one’s soul become less important to them. This is particularly true for those we love, where just existing is their only passion. His mother was of this kind. A beautiful Nordic woman from Hamburg, she had never moved far beyond the shadow of his father. Poorly read, she rarely spoke, and when she did it seemed of nothing. Respect though, came to her easily through marriage to his father, whose academic credentials, even then, were towering. But respect also came to her through her own father’s death, dying as he did in the terrible battles along the Argonne forest during the Great War. With most of his company lying dead in the water-filled trenches around him, manning a machine gun he single-handedly stopped advancing French units until the few left of his company could escape. Then, in a matter of minutes, he was blown to pieces by two well-placed mortar shots and a hero’s tale began. Months later she stood, holding her mother’s hand as Field Marshal Hindenburg presen
ted the Iron Cross to her, recounting her father’s great heroic deeds. Others received the coveted Iron Cross that day, too, including a small man standing next to her with a silly-looking mustache that made her laugh, Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Erich saw the night lights of Triberg as he crossed over a slight rise leading down to the small town. History carpeted his mind as he paused for a second to look at the distant lights dancing and flickering through the forest like a thousand small candles. Cuckoo clock merchants of old, carrying their priceless wares, must have crossed this same rise in the trail centuries before, marveling with disbelief, as he was now, at the same sights. But such moments are really for poets. We see them for what they are for only a passing second in time, and then let them go their way. A poet’s eyes see them for an eternity because he sees them from his soul.
Erich took one last look at the lights before him and then started down the trail, which widened considerably as he drew close to the outer limits of the village where his car was parked. A parting gift from his father, he initially shied away from using the small Audi roadster when he first arrived at Leipzig. Resentment among the staff over his favored position with Dr. Catel was more than enough without flaunting such a luxury in wartime in front of their eyes. But having such reliable transportation available continued to anchor the illusion harbored by him that somehow it was his only means of escaping Germany.
He would go first to Dresden to visit his mother for a day, then return to Leipzig before undertaking the questionable move to Görden. It would be after midnight when he arrived to awaken her with a scare.
As simple as his mother was, she was clean from all that was going on around her, Erich believed. She had not been dirtied by the outcry against the Jews and everybody else in the world. Though she had often worried that silence about a wrong was greater than the act itself, she believed God would understand and forgive her. To her, no sin of man was beyond forgiveness so long as you believed in being saved, which she did every day of her life. For Erich, though, it was she to whom he would go for forgiveness, not God. He had done this all his life, as he would now. She would listen and never judge, and when she spoke, it was always, “I understand.” The feeling of forgiveness, of being clean, could not be greater if it had come from God.
Erich talked for hours into the night with his mother. Emptying the trash from his soul took that long. He talked of Julia and the deep love that owned his heart, and of exchanging their sacred vows witnessed only by Rabbi Loew, though he lay buried in the ground next to them with his golem. All was said with a tenderness his mother had never seen in him. Then he spoke of the old Jewish man and woman and the murdered baby and his desire to flee Germany. All the while he talked, his mother listened and said nothing, studying his face from time to time, as if trying to find the innocence her son once carried. At the end, Erich spoke of his father, which she knew he would. He always talked of his father last, and then with great reservation, as if he were standing in the room hovering over them. There was no warmth in Erich’s words, only timid inquiries about the man he loved but couldn’t reach. The world is so different when we open the door to it, his mother thought, looking at him. It is those we lived with and loved and should know that elude us in the end.
Leaving, Erich embraced his mother, clinging to her as he had as a child, not wanting to let go. Finally he said, “I will be moving to Görden next week, a new assignment, a new psychiatric treatment program for children.”
“I know, your father has told me of it and your position there. He believes you will rise high in the eyes of the Reich Committee there.”
Before continuing, his mother brushed a heavy strand of Erich’s long blond hair away from his face and placed his hands in hers.
“My sweet Erich, you have been running away so long. Maybe when the war is over you can become the painter of great pictures you dreamed of doing. But now you must find your duty, whatever it’s to be.”
“My duty?” Erich thought it odd she would use such a word.
“Yes, whatever you find it to be. Otherwise, you’ll keep bouncing around like a puppet dangling aimlessly on a string. Life imposes strange duties on all of us, but those in war are even stranger.”
Erich left then, still puzzled by his mother’s odd soliloquy. He had never heard such serious words from her before, nor to such length. Perhaps she was only repeating his father’s admonitions from a time they talked about him. Even though it was doubtful, it pleased him to think that his father had done so.
***