The Orchids

IF WE KNEW where things began, we would know where to end them. Now, from my verandah, I can see the jungle in all its misery and splendor. I have, during these long years, learned the many cries of the monkey and can distinguish panic from ecstasy. But it has not always been so.

Langhof, rubbing his gloved hands together as the Camp approached slowly like Birnam Wood, knew nothing of how he had come to this moment in his life. And perhaps such moments are themselves nothing more than those points in our lives that we most deeply misperceive. Surely Langhof, as he watched the Camp loom in the distance, wooden barracks enclosed by rusty stretches of barbed wire, felt nothing of the climactic, but only dread rising in him once again. For he was no more than a ball set rolling on an uneven tabletop, dipping this way and that with the contours of circumstance. In his state of profound consternation, he could find the will to ask only one trifling question.

“Have you a handkerchief, Dr. Ludtz?”

Ludtz, ever accommodating, fumbled through his overcoat pockets. “Yes, here.”

Langhof took the handkerchief and quietly blew his nose into it. Then he lifted his collar against the wind.

Beside him, the oblivious Dr. Ludtz turned to Rausch with a look of dismay. “Are we actually going to be living in the Camp?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rausch said. “You seem surprised by that fact.”

“But aren’t staff quarters usually outside the prison?”

“Prison? This is not a prison. This is a different matter altogether, Doctor. And you will be living inside the Camp.”

The car pulled up to the gate. Two guards stood before it, holding machine guns loosely in their hands.

“Open the gate,” Rausch said.

The guards did as they were commanded. The iron gate opened and Langhof passed through it. As he did so, a light snow began to fall. The snow was wholly without symbolic importance, but not to a romantic; for it is part of the blindness of romance to see life, and finally history, as a series of telling moments properly adorned by the imagery of fall or redemption, and to neglect all that lies in between, all that generates, debases, or inspires.

And so the car passed through the gate, the corporal guiding it carefully. A little farther along, he turned the car to the left toward a group of prisoners huddled in the mud. He honked the horn. “Get out of the way, you shit!” he screamed and glanced back at Rausch for approval.

“Just keep a steady pace,” Rausch said.

The car proceeded through the Camp and finally stopped in front of a freshly painted building.

“These are your quarters,” Rausch said. He stepped out of the car. “Come.”

Langhof and Ludtz got out of the car and followed Rausch up a short flight of stairs that led to the entrance.

“This is where you will be living from now on,” Rausch said. “You will each have your own room.” He opened the door and paused, allowing Langhof and Ludtz to pass in front of him.

“It’s like a barracks,” Ludtz said.

“More or less,” Rausch said. “Are you disappointed, my dear doctor?”

“Oh, no,” Ludtz said quickly. “Not in the least, I assure you. One cannot expect luxurious accommodations in a war zone.”

“Precisely,” Rausch said evenly. He nodded toward the hallway. “Down there.”

Langhof and Ludtz walked down the hall until Rausch stopped them at a particular door. “This is your room, Dr. Ludtz,” he said.

“Excellent,” Ludtz said.

“You haven’t seen it yet,” Rausch said.

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

Rausch swung the door open and Ludtz looked inside. It was a small, tidy room with a single metal-framed bed with a drooping mattress covered with military blankets.

“Very nice,” Ludtz said. “Warm.”

“Your bags will be brought to you shortly,” Rausch said.

Ludtz stepped into the room. “Thank you. Yes, very nice. Very nice, indeed”

Rausch closed the door and turned to Langhof. “Your room is farther down the hall,” he said.

Langhof followed Rausch a few paces, then stopped when Rausch did.

“This is it,” Rausch said. He opened the door onto a room almost identical to that of Dr. Ludtz. “Not exactly the capital, is it?”

“It is satisfactory,” Langhof said. He stepped into the room, looked around, glanced at the window, started to move toward it, then suddenly stopped himself.

“You may look out the window,” Rausch said with a little, mocking laugh.

Langhof spun around. “What is your function here, Rausch?”

“I’m in charge of discipline,” Rausch replied coolly. “You might say I am a student of control.”

“I have no wish to be one of your subjects,” Langhof said sharply.

Rausch smiled. “Subject? What an odd idea.”

Langhof turned away. “Please, leave me alone.”

“Subject?” Rausch said. “What do you think this is, Doctor? Let me assure you that we are very serious here. You cannot begin to know just how serious.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” Langhof said. He was still staring at the bed.

“They’re all true,” Rausch said. He paused a moment, studying Langhof’s figure as it was silhouetted by the window. “You are an interesting man, Doctor. The vermin — I know all I need to know about the vermin. But you — now that’s a different matter.”

Langhof turned toward Rausch. “How so?”

“You must be filled with questions at this moment,” Rausch said. “And yet you stand there and say nothing.”

“All right,” Langhof said, “I’ll ask a question. Those people coming off the train, what becomes of them?”

“They are all killed. Most of them right away. The others die sooner or later.”

Langhof shook his head. “That does not seem possible.”

“The trick, of course, is not to think of them as people,” Rausch said. He smiled. “You must take a lesson from the priests, Doctor. You must learn the value of abstraction.”

“Ridiculous,” Langhof said.

Rausch shrugged. “They really aren’t people, you know. They are simply physical material that history is working on.” He smiled. “Besides, you will have very little to do with that. You are a scientist, after all.”

“This is not science,” Langhof said hotly. “This is politics, nothing but politics.”

“Look out the window, Langhof,” Rausch said lightly. “Surely you cannot call this politics.”

“Then what is it?”

“A great experiment,” Rausch said with a wink. “We are investigating great philosophical questions here.”

“Nonsense.”

“All those little philosophical tidbits we used to debate over our beer in university taverns, they are all part of our situation here. Why, the question of freedom versus determinism alone is undergoing a monumental reexamination.”

“Discuss such things with Ludtz,” Langhof said. “I have no stomach for them.”

“Ludtz is an idiot,” Rausch said. “A fool.”

He paused and then smiled with what seemed to be genuine good nature. “Oh, come now, Langhof. Let’s discuss it a bit, shall we? Tell me, my good doctor, did you freely choose to end up in this little room, or was it preordained from all eternity?”

Langhof stiffened. “Get out.”

“Not a very philosophical attitude, Doctor,” Rausch said.

Langhof shook his head wearily. “Just leave me alone.”

“If you think you are above this, Langhof,” Rausch said sternly, “you are mistaken.” And with that, Rausch turned very quickly, at a military clip, and left the room.

And so Langhof was left alone in his room. He slumped onto the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. At that moment, he saw himself as a figure out of classical drama, the noble spirit fatally and undeservedly ensnared in evil. But he was in fact a figure out of melodrama, mired in self-pity and self-justification, the handmaidens of weakness and crime.

And what was the nature of this illusion that turned Langhof’s tragic mien into a shoddy harlequin?

It was this — if now, amid the swelter of my compound, I can know it rightly: that he, Langhof, had been sinned against, victimized, betrayed, stabbed in the back. He believed that now he saw the outside forces that had brought him to his current condition, and saw them clearly. He saw the monumental ones: war, inflation, politics. He saw the lesser ones: his father’s suicide, Anna’s flight, the velvet-gloved coercion of Dr. Trottman. But in fact, he saw nothing, because he did not see himself. There is no limit to our capacity for self-deceit. And perhaps our greatest craft lies in our manifold rejection of that knowledge which, if we embraced it, would make life almost impossible.

And so Langhof, as he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes, began to believe that he had at last seen all the invisible whips that had driven him to the Camp. And he slept, not knowing he was still a fool, still a shadow, still a riddle wrapped in sable.