The Orchids

TOWARD EVENING it is my custom to take a short stroll beside the river. Walking along it, I can imagine the life that teems above and below it. In the depths the crocodiles wave their heavy tails, propelling themselves forward, their slit eyes searching through the murky waters for some morsel to devour. Above the green waters, enormous jungle spiders weave their webs between the sagging branches and sit upon their spindly legs to await the first incautious butterfly.

Here in the Republic it is easy to be seduced by death. But in the final weeks of the Camp, death took on an unnatural aspect, an anthropomorphic quality that allowed it to be imagined as a living thing that had grown weary of itself. Gout-ridden now, bloated and surfeited, it seemed to sink down into the mud and slime, and Langhof, our hero, lying on his bunk waiting for the Camp to fall, believed that perhaps he had found that limit for which earlier he had so desperately searched. It seemed to him that perhaps this limit resided in the simple, irreducible exhaustion that finally overwhelms all the works of man, no matter how exalted or debased. He walked out of the compound and stood staring at the smokeless chimney of the crematorium. It seemed to partake both of something new, in its moronic vanity, and of something very old, in its inevitable defeat. Standing facing the chimneys, enjoying his revery, his boots ankle deep in mud, he heard the crunch of footsteps from behind. He turned. It was Rausch.

“Gloating, are you, Langhof?” Rausch asked.

Langhof did not answer. He returned his eyes to the chimney, which stood towering silently above him.

Rausch stepped up beside him, fixing his eyes on the crematorium, his vision clinging to it, almost sucking at it, like sea leeches on a shark’s belly. “Do you feel safe now?” he asked.

“From what?” Langhof asked quietly.

Rausch did not answer. He turned toward Langhof. “All the work is not finished,” he said. “You should be aware ofthat.”

“It’s quite finished, Rausch,” Langhof replied. “And you should be aware of that.”

“The final orders for the Camp have not arrived as yet,” Rausch said, “but it doesn’t matter what they are.”

Langhof turned toward Rausch and smiled rebukingly. “Really? I’m surprised at you. Do you mean to say that you are no longer obeying orders?”

“Yes,” Rausch said.

“That does surprise me,” Langhof said tauntingly.

Rausch gripped the handle of his pistol. “Much of what I am would surprise you,” he said.

Langhof turned away and began to walk back toward the medical compound.

“How is it with you and that Ginzburg character,” Rausch called loudly after him.

Langhof whirled around. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve become quite close, you two,” Rausch said with a menacing smile. “Are you bedfellows also, Doctor?”

“Why would that possibly concern you?” Langhof asked with a sneer. “I should think that you would have more important questions on your mind, given the faltering state of the New Order.”

Rausch’s face seemed to soften. “We could have been friends, you and I.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Langhof said. “Not in the slightest.” He stepped toward Rausch. “I despise you.”

Rausch’s body seemed to tighten. “All this time, and you still believe that you are above this. Let me tell you something, Langhof, you have wallowed in this place, and becoming chums with some rotten little vermin jokester won’t change that.”

“I don’t expect it to.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

Rausch chuckled coldly. “You are the real slime, Langhof,” he said. “Shall I tell you why?”

Langhof started to walk away, but Rausch grasped his arm. “Listen to me,” Rausch said hotly. “You are the real slime because you have crawled through this pit for three years and never once followed a courageous impulse!” He released Langhof’s arm and stepped back slightly. “A man either does what his thought commands, or he does not. That makes all the difference.”

Langhof nodded toward the crematorium. “And you have obeyed your thoughts, am I right, Rausch?”

“Yes,” Rausch said firmly. “And I will continue to do so until the end.”

Langhof could feel the heat of his rage enveloping him. “Do you know what Ginzburg is, Rausch?” he asked. “He is a reason to live. And you, my pathetic countryman, are a reason to die.”

Rausch stared at Langhof rigidly. “At this point in my life, do you really believe I can be wounded by an insult?”

Langhof shook his head despairingly. “I don’t care, Rausch,” he said. “That’s what you’ve never understood. I don’t care about you or your cause or anything connected with you. You are nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. You should be a circus performer, playing your sophomoric philosophical games.” He smiled bitterly. “You are a clown of the New Order.”

“And I will act my part, Langhof,” Rausch said coldly, “to the very end.”

Langhof grinned mockingly into Rausch’s face. “You bore me, Rausch,” he said. Then he turned on his heels and walked away. He could feel the mud sucking at the bottoms of his boots as if tiny hands were pulling him into its depths. He stopped and turned back, but Rausch was no longer facing him. Instead he had turned toward the crematorium. It seemed to Langhof that the proud rigidity of Rausch’s body had given way to a kind of slumped and drooping stature, the head nodding slightly forward with the torpor of a wilting rose.

Now, beside the river, it is easy to remember the superiority Langhof felt as he marched back to his room in the medical compound. In the terrible vividness of my memory, I can see our hero’s schoolboy pride at having finally bested an ancient adversary. In the puerility of Langhof’s superiority, in the consuming lunacy of his vaunted self-esteem, the catastrophic I took yet another bow. Obliviously, Langhof strutted down the hall to his room, spread himself out on his bunk, and allowed himself to feel a kind of victory over Rausch. In his vanity he saw himself as an actual participant in the collapse of the Camp and as one of the authors of Rausch’s imagined desolation. If it were that easy to play the hero’s part, then we would all be saddled on the wind.