The Orchids

FROM MY VERANDAH, at night, I can see only what is purposefully illuminated: Dr. Ludtz’s cottage, the nursery, and to the left, a few lights still burning in the village of El Caliz. El Presidente can see much more from the balcony of his palace. He can see the gardens and the reflecting pools, the cobblestone walks bordered on either side with potted palms, the marble steps that lead to the great mahogany doors of the palace itself. And beyond the pale orange stucco walls of the palace he can see the wide boulevard of administration buildings, their façades made brilliant by klieg lights buried in their lawns: the Department of Justice, with its Doric columns rising toward lofty entablatures; the Museum of the Republic, with its tiled roof and high gables, a Tudor contrivance set in the tropics; the Ministry of Finance, with its Egyptian design, ornate as the Temple of Horus, a huge façade of vast, teeming multicolored murals where scenes slide invisibly into other scenes, colors into other colors, a pulsing, indecipherable panorama perfectly representative of the intricate circularities of money, the veiled, impenetrable calligraphy of man’s worldly goods. And then, should El Presidente’s eyes move upward, he will see the lights of the capital city: first the tall, airless structures of the professional classes; then the shaded streets of the middle classes; and finally, sweeping out in all directions, the great teeming slums of splintered wood and rusting tin, the moiling, wasted afterbirth of underdevelopment.

When the Athenian painter Parrhasius wished to do a work of art based on the suffering of Prometheus, he first had an old man brought to him and tortured in his presence so that he could observe the changing face of agony. El Presidente, in the egocentrism of his art, has created the Republic. But it was the Camp that brought to greatest fruition this process by which man is made idea. In the locked gas chambers adjoining the crematoria, human flesh piled itself into a pyramid of Darwinian simplicity: babies and small children on the bottom; next, the old and sick; next, the small of frame, mostly women; then men of medium build; and piled on top of them, their fingers clawing at the ceiling, the strongest representatives of physique. Here the real became surreal, and all merged into a landscape whose perfect epigram was Hier ist kein Warum — “Here there is no why.”

Langhof, our hero, saw all of this and continued to eat and sleep and evacuate his bowels. In a single month he saw more horror than El Presidente could create in a thousand years with his limited technology: women hung by the heels and slit open like pigs, their intestines dangling in their faces; old men fried on electric wire, blue smoke rising from their ears; the cheeks of young girls eaten through with noma; piles of rotting bodies that made a catacomb for rats. Subtlety would veil the horror; rhetoric would turn it into style. And yet, Langhof did see these things, and at the point where one can no longer look, it is there one must look on. Langhof looked, and did not stop looking. Why?

Perhaps here in the Republic it is possible to know. I can sit in perfect silence through the night and think only of this question. Here there is no distraction from the process of examination. But beyond the railing upon which I lean, my eyes moving up and down the river, there are a billion alternatives to thought, a million modes of hallucination, each no more than a small particle of that hot mist that rose above the primordial pit. But here on the verandah there are no plaster statues of dead saints, no sweaty tools of bowed labor, no applications for advancement, no familial distress. Free of all these encumbrances to thought, it is perhaps possible for me to use fully the powers that I possess. And so I have come to think that what remained in our hero — weak, pathetic, destitute, and yet abiding still — was a sense of inquiry. Ridiculous as it may seem, even through the long period of his somnambulance Langhof had never failed to observe the Camp through the gentle curve of a question mark. That much of science was still left to him, and the brief exchange with Ginzburg had served to rouse it further. Ginzburg’s absurdity, his surrealism, touched a dormant chamber in Langhof’s mind. And so, like a fairy child following a trail of bread crumbs through the forest, he pursued the dancing comic who had disappeared behind the door of the medical compound.

Langhof walked down the hall. He could hear someone whistling softly in the distance and toward the rear of the compound he found Ginzburg lying on a bunk, his hands behind his head, the door of his room swung wide open.

“Don’t you think you should close the door?” Langhof asked.

Ginzburg turned over on his side and propped his head up in one hand. “Why?”

“For privacy,” Langhof said.

Ginzburg stared evenly at Langhof. “What are you doing here, may I ask?”

The question sounded like an accusation. To counter it, Langhof asserted his authority. “These quarters. Very nice. May I ask how you rate them?”

Ginzburg smiled. “Easy. I’m Kessler’s boy. His court jester. His fool.” His eyes seemed to grow cold. “And his whore.”

“Really? And what were you doing outside just now?”

“Burying something,” Ginzburg said airily.

“What?” Langhof demanded.

“Drugs, mostly. Morphine. Aspirin. A little food, too.”

Langhof stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “You could be shot for that.”

“Not as long as Kessler has anything to do with it,” Ginzburg said confidently.

“These things you bury — what are they for?”

“For some of the prisoners, of course,” Ginzburg said casually.

“You risk your life for them?”

Ginzburg laughed. “My life? No. Kessler will protect me; I told you that.” He paused, watching Langhof’s face. “Oh, I get it now. You want me to be doing this at the risk of my life. You want me to be a brave man risking my life for my fellow suffering creatures. Such a possibility would give you … I don’t know … hope?”

“I’m asking, that’s all,” Langhof said.

Ginzburg tilted his head playfully. “Well, if you’re looking for some surviving heroism in me, then go look somewhere else. You’ve been here a long time, Langhof. You’ve seen some courage. You know that there are people in the Camp — and people outside it — who really do risk their lives for others.”

“Of course,” Langhof said.

“Then why would one more make any difference?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you’re the only one I could talk to.”

“Well, you lost out again, Doctor, because I’m no hero. Kessler looks out for me. He’s in love with me.”

“You must be joking.”

“I’m a handsome boy,” Ginzburg said lightly. “And personable. I have an excellent sense of humor.”

“Enough of this,” Langhof said irritably.

“A hero,” Ginzburg said mockingly. “How ridiculous. A hero to talk to. Nonsense.” He smiled. “No. I know what you want. All those people out there doing their heroic deeds, they don’t interest you. That’s it, isn’t it? They don’t interest you because their heroism is so natural, so thoughtless. No, what you’re looking for is the intelligent hero, the one who knows all the consequences but wills himself to heroic acts.”

“What difference would that make?” Langhof asked.

“All the difference in the world, to you,” Ginzburg said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ginzburg sat up in his bunk. “Don’t I? You just can’t imagine yourself in the situation you’ve been in for years, can you? You’re still wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“You’re still wondering how you got here.”

“I know how I got here,” Langhof said. “It was an accident, a stupid fluke.”

Ginzburg shook his head. “There may be petty accidents in this world, Langhof, but there are no great ones. Think. If you got here by accident, then so did everybody else. That would mean the Camp itself is just an accident. Let me tell you something, Langhof, that thought, that possibility is the only thing on earth more horrible than the Camp itself.”

“I was reassigned,” Langhof said. “I was a scientist pursuing my research in the capital.”

“And that’s the end of it?”

“How did you get here, then?” Langhof asked.

“Don’t be stupid, Doctor,” Ginzburg said. “The way I got here and the way you did have nothing whatsoever in common.”

“Of course,” Langhof said. “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“And you’re not stupid, right, Langhof?”

“I like to think that I am not.”

Ginzburg chuckled. “You are carved out of clouds,” he said contemptuously.

“Please,” Langhof said, almost pleadingly. “I’m trying to … trying to …”

“What?”

“Talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“Talk. Talk. There’s going to be a lot of talk about this place in the future.”

“Yes,” Langhof said, “I imagine there will be.”

“What are you going to say, Langhof?”

“Me? I have nothing to say.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“I don’t know,” Langhof said softly. “Maybe that it was just so very evil here.”

Ginzburg laughed. “Evil? Dear God, how ridiculous. Evil, my ass.” He smiled and stroked his backside. “Or should I say, Kessler’s ass. It belongs to him. Sweet little commodity, don’t you think?”

Langhof turned away, stepped toward the door, then turned back toward Ginzburg.

“What? You’re not leaving?” Ginzburg asked.

“Not yet.”

“Why not, my good doctor?”

“I don’t know,” Langhof said.

“You want to learn something from all this, don’t you?” Ginzburg said softly.

Langhof nodded. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Do you really think there’s anything to be learned?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, something that makes sense?”

Langhof shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Ginzburg smiled. “Do you expect to survive?”

“I don’t know that either,” Langhof said. “Do you?”

“I doubt it.”

“But won’t Kessler protect you?”

“When all this crumbles, Kessler will be the one who needs protection,” Ginzburg said. He smiled. “Sometimes I have this dream of being on the stand in some courtroom after the war. I imagine that I am a witness for Kessler, that I’ve been brought to say something in his defense.” He chuckled. “I’ve already thought of what I’m going to say. I’m going to stand in the witness box and say just one line: Kessler was a gentle lover.”

“Seriously,” Langhof said, “that business about the eastern front — what I told you in the yard — it’s true.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what will be done if the front gets much closer,” Langhof said.

Ginzburg smiled. “Time will tell,” he said.

“I’d better go now,” Langhof said.

“All right.”

“We’ll talk again.”

“Up to you.”

Langhof stepped toward the door. “Good luck, Ginzburg,” he said.

Ginzburg smiled and flipped the collar of his striped suit. “I’d like it better in peppermint,” he said.