The Orchids

IN LATE EVENING I can see Dr. Ludtz meticulously removing the lichens from his tomb, his fingers clawing at them like small paring knives. This is his futile thrust toward immortality, a stone table set in the jungle vastness. Despite the irremediable squalor of his life, Dr. Ludtz does not wish to airbrush himself from history, but rather to erect a monument to his being. Having once been, he seeks always to be. It is part of his lunacy and his crime, but the urge is not exclusively his.

Other men choose different methods to immortalize themselves. In the Camp, they carved their names into rotting boards to prove that they were there. They plunged into gullies of poured cement and sank themselves into the machinery of their own destruction. They grasped the sizzling wire or danced insanely by the dead-line while the guards took aim above, cigarettes dangling casually from their lips. And in the capital, far away, the Leader descended into his tomb and ate strawberries and cream while he regaled his dutiful secretaries with tales of early glory. Ginzburg went out whistling and Rausch with a look of rude surprise.

Here in the Republic, El Presidente contemplates his final resting place. He has considered many alternatives, but as he ages the search becomes more desperate. It is said that in the northern provinces entire mountain ranges have been sheared off in preparation for El Presidente’s monument. Some say he will build a great glass tomb beneath the sea so that his soul can watch the sharks and barracuda. Others claim that the desert wastes have already been selected and that a great golden shaft is to be erected there, one so tall that its shadow will pass over the curvature of earth.

To nestle the world within the crook of our arm. That is the age-old and ageless dream in its perversity. And this mania is by no means the special pleasure of underdevelopment. In the great manorial halls of the privileged classes, behind the towering walls of stone and marble there are rooms seldom used but elaborately decorated, with great curtains covering intricacies of inlaid glass, boasting hearths of dark malachite, polished floors of mosaic design, and ponderous carved-mahogany doors whose task it is to enclose this splendor. Within all this, one may divine part of the psychology of pomp. For although the grand, silent, empty rooms entomb something that resists ultimate decortication, there is also something that betrays itself within the context of the splendid. Indeed their very grandeur and stolidity bespeaks the paranoia of the impermanent. They are built to withstand the intrigue of time and the whimsy of taste. By their magnificence they attempt to rise above judgment and dwarf all that might subsequently attempt to mar or defame them. They are the very instrument by which power is made manifest on earth, and those who move easily within them carry some physical notion of the resplendent, the immaculate, and the immortal.

The orphaned sons of petty attorneys, however, must find less lofty devices through which to consecrate themselves. Mine was Anna.

At best our romance was not the stuff from which epics could be made. There was sufficient pubescent melodrama to fashion a lusterless novelette, and if it had flowered into marriage and family, perhaps a neat, bourgeois roman-fleuve. But beyond such mundane possibilities, nothing.

Three years after our encounter across the street from Kreisler’s shop, we made groping, unruly love in her small room, while two Bavarian milkmaid dolls watched us from atop an oak armoire. Their lifeless ceramic eyes remain as much a part of my memory of that scene as the first shock of breasts and thigh. But I also remember that I wanted to pull myself into Anna’s body, wanted to mold a pallet for myself within her. It is one of our illusions to believe that once we have entertained such feelings we never really lose them. But they are, at the most, transitory, and if they are not allied to some form of riches that lies more deeply within us, then they are no more than passing incidents, as vacant and useless as sheafs of paper upon which nothing has been written.

And yet even this, or the prolongation of it, came abruptly to an end.

“I have bad news,” Anna said quietly.

We were sitting in a small park. It was late evening and the park was almost entirely empty.

“Bad news?” I could already feel a lethal fluttering in my stomach. I imagined that she was going to let me go, set me adrift, and then rush off to that handsome lover who was already waiting naked in her bed.

“My father has lost his job,” Anna said.

I felt relieved. “I’m sorry. But he’ll find another one, I’m sure.”

Anna lowered her eyes. “He says there are no jobs to be found here.”

“No jobs?” I laughed. “Of course there are jobs. He just has to look for one, that’s all.”

Anna shook her head. “He says there are no jobs.”

I leaned forward attentively. “What are you telling me, Anna?”

She looked up. “I have to move away, Peter. We have to go to another city where my father can find work.”

For years I had walked about in complete obliviousness to the deepening crisis. Herds of workers marched through the streets, parading their grievances. Speakers harangued the crowded parks with the details of their scheming. The police fired on demonstrators of the right and left. The universities were set aflame with struggle. The government tottered back and forth from year to year, groping toward some ill-defined stability. Prices soared, along with unemployment. Production collapsed. The old symbols lost their power to seduce, and by that means, control. Through all of this I had walked without the slightest care. But now the times had finally touched me, blotted out a brilliant romance, snatched blonde Anna from her knight’s protection.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “What do you mean, move away?”

“I have no choice.”

“You can’t move away.”

“It’s not me,” Anna said. “It’s my father. We have to move.”

“No you don’t,” I said desperately. “Let him go. You can stay here. We can get married.”

“We can’t get married,” Anna said softly. She touched my face. “It’s no use.”

She took my hand and we began to stroll across the park. A great stone statue of Frederick the Great loomed ahead of us. He seemed to watch us mournfully.

“We have to do something, Anna,” I said.

“There’s nothing we can do. We can’t get married. You don’t have a job any more than my father does.”

“Jobs!” I said angrily. “We can’t let something like that stop us.”

“We have no choice, Peter,” Anna said evenly.

I could see her evaporating before me, history erasing her from my life. There were no jobs in the village. That was the dictate of history, and because of it, this little love affair must end. For history was the truly great fire, adolescent romance merely cinerary.

“We cannot let this happen, Anna,” I said.

“But it has, Peter.”

I despised her resignation. “No,” I said loudly, “I won’t allow it.”

Anna looked at me. Her eyes were glistening. “I don’t want to go on with this. I can’t.”

And then she rushed away, with something of me still dangling in her hand, a little thread made out of my desire, unraveling me as she moved away. I watched her as she darted across the park, running like some teenage heroine of nineteenth century fiction, her hair swaying left and right as if pushed gently by invisible hands. I stood still and she grew smaller in the distance, like a wisp of paper falling from great height toward — who knows — oblivion.

I have no idea what became of Anna. I have no idea where she is, or if she is alive, or, if alive, how mutated by events. I take a piece of stationery from my desk, and then take up my pen.

Dear Anna . .

The page stares back blankly, my letter stopped in its course. I do not know what to say to Anna. And even if by some miraculous circumstance she were to receive my letter, who would it be who received it? Not the Anna moaning softly under the featureless gaze of the milkmaid dolls. Of that I may be sure. But if not that, then what? Could she have taken the road I took? Could there be pictures of her in some hideous archive, perhaps a grainy photograph in black and white of a woman standing black-booted before a wintry background laced by electric wire, a woman staring haughtily into the camera’s lens, posturing with her feet spread wide apart, slapping a leather truncheon at her thigh, guarding the vermin as they pass with enforced, truckling grace toward the fire.

I return to my letter:

Dear Anna:

I have come to love all things that move with stamina through pain.

I fold the letter carefully, then burn it in the ashtray beside my rack of pipes. Watching the smoke, I recall that moment once again when Anna and I faced each other in the park. Here in the Republic one can grow to hate such banal reminiscences. The aggrieved adolescent stands blank-faced in the park, watching his love abandon him, and feels the first touch of history, a mere chill around his shoulders, and then, that moment past, moves on to greater endeavors involving smoke and poison gas.

Greater things, indeed, for one and all. And yet the little prince, rubbing his eyes under the sculptured gaze of Frederick the Great, can feel nothing of his own loss, nothing but sudden drift, dull and anchorless, as if the world’s firm substance had suddenly exploded, scattering fragments of earth and bone throughout the universe, as if the seas were made of star-crossed lovers’ tears, as if the rising chorus of Fidelio were meant to orchestrate the strife of teenage infatuation. For the true romantic, there is no history or literature or art that does not pertain to him.

I gaze into the enclosing darkness. In the Republic, night is a signal for assault. The owls wait on their secret perches for the dark curtain to fall across the jungle floor, their eyes searching the blackness for the small rodents that must go forth, risking everything for food. Silently, they squeeze the branches with their talons and dream of small hearts beating within their grasp. In the blue, lunar glare of the searchlights Dr. Ludtz has installed about the compound, I see Juan puttering about the greenhouse, muttering prayers against the blight. He believes that darkness is the devil’s work, that it shields that unknowable miasma which will drift in to corrupt the orchids. To the left, the lights in Dr. Ludtz’s cottage are burning brightly through the barred and shuttered windows. Inside he reads Rilke and glances up periodically at the pistol that rests upon his nightstand next to his crucifix.

I turn and walk into my office. Sitting behind my desk, I pour a small amount of absinthe into my glass. Outside, I can hear the night creatures fill the air with calls of mating or distress. Beyond the rim of light that circles the grounds like a thin white wall, the world descends to elemental needs. Out there, small creatures scurry across the leaves, fleeing the swoop of gigantic birds; the great snakes coil around mounds of eggs orphaned by the owls; the beetles inch their way into the viscera of the dead or tumble over lumps of larger creatures’ waste. Here, doom is no more than prologue to further violation. Each night the libretto is the same, and things go forth and are cut down, and all things wait to be relieved.