The act of love did happen—and only once, and only just—immediately before I took up my new post at Schloss Hartheim, near Linz, in the province of Austria. Real last-gasp stuff: it happened in the eye of a storm of tears that the whole house must have heard with horror. I was still crying when I put on my boots and picked up my kit bag; and after a few desperate embraces I burst out into the stars and the snow—the constellations of snow, the blizzard of stars.
With its noble grounds, its archways and courtyards, Schloss Hartheim—an hour from Linz, toward Eferding—looked fair to provide the ideal setting for my full recuperation. This Renaissance castle had until recently served as a children’s home. And when you sat, trembling forgetfully, on one of the benches in the frosted gardens, with the grass like white hair standing on end, you felt you could hear the ghosts of the children’s cries and shouts—for here they must surely have played in their packs. Behind you stood the tall windows, in fives, and the glimpsed interiors always the color of watery gravy. A bucket, a mop; an orderly in his white coat; a patient’s illegible gaze. That smell again. The sweet smell . . . Now I lean forward and pick up a dead bird whose wings sag open like a fan or like the streets of Berlin under their cam nets. Berlin, where Herta waits.
Considered as an institutional bridge, Schloss Hartheim was part of my winding down from the experience of the KZ. Apart from obvious differences in scale, there were close analogies. You found the same collegial spirit, with its masonic taciturnity and instinctive discretion, the same camaraderie and grit, the same alcohol reliance. I am positioned between the two chief medical officers and the fourteen nurses, seven male, seven female. This is not a convalescent home: no patient ever spends the night. Here
comes the bus with its tinted windows. It surges up into the grounds of the fabled castle, into the cold and weary magic of Schloss Hartheim.
It went like this, the sequence. Step one saw the arrival of a regulation urn of ashes, sent to us direct by the patient’s family, who would also notify the Condolence-Letter Department in Berlin, with whom we worked in parallel. These ashes, in their small portions, were accompanied by the death certificates of distinct individuals; but ashes are just ashes, and they all look the same, and they went straight into the pot of the Hartheim incinerator. What was wrong? What was the matter? Were the ovens malfunctioning? Was the Chamber faulty? Because the people we produced just weren’t any good anymore. All the wizardry and delirium, all the insomnia and diarrhea of Auschwitz—it was failing. Yes, that’s right: the wards, the examination rooms, the silent gardens of Schloss Hartheim were heavy with a sense of failing magic. At first the patients really weren’t that bad. Some little defect. Clubfoot. Cleft palate. But later they were absolutely hopeless. I try not to look at them closely, the patients, as I lead them in their paper bibs from the Chamber; I keep visualizing my own viscera, and there is something solid and man-made in there, like a lead pipe, snagged and dragging. Here, the gentle hesitancy of the blind. There, the lopsided, the scalene visage of the deaf. The white-haired lady looks nice but everything is wrong. The mad boy screams as he chases the male nurses down the damp corridors. The mad girl crouching in the corner with her frock up and the unforgivable substance coming from her mouth. There is such a thing, we say here, as life that is unworthy of life, and I don’t know about that, but nobody wants them, not even us, and they leave here the same day for some other place, in the coach with the tinted windows.
Herta comes down to visit me as often as she can, which is not very often, because this is wartime, after all. We stay at the Gasthaus Drei Kronen on the Landstrasse near Linz, where I am impotent, and once we had a romantic weekend at the Hotel Gretchen in Vienna, where I was impotent. There is a small officers’ annex in the village itself for me to be impotent at, and it is on this hygienic apartment that we increasingly depend. As time goes by, Herta seems more and more put out—by my impotence. She says I’ve changed but I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been impotent for as long as I can remember. She also upbraids me about the work I am engaged in at Schloss Hartheim. There are rumors in the village, there is gossip—latrine talk. She has got it all wrong, but then, too, I pooh-pooh her less grandly than I might. We hold hands across the table in the coffee shop. We part. Later in the dusk I entertain a perplexed perfecto as I walk back up the hill to the castle, to Schloss Hartheim. Above its archways and gables the evening sky is full of our unmentionable mistakes, hydrocephalic clouds and the wrongly curved palate of the west, and the cinders of our fires. I can see a lock of snow-white human hair drifting upward, then joining the more elliptical and elemental rhythm of the middle air. Tonight there’ll be a party in the basement at the Schloss to mark the arrival of our five thousandth patient (though I’m sure we’ve had many, many more than that), with Manfred on accordion: songs, toasts, pink party hats. Christian Wirth, our roving director, will be there: his belly, his colorful language, his exploded drinker’s face. Patient Five Thousand will also be present, in paper hat (and paper shirt), suspended in its journey between fire and gas, awaiting its span of deformity, hallucination, and constant itching. … He walks on, alone, Odilo Unverdorben.