A Perfect Madness (14 page)

Puzzled by his father’s unexpected
warmth, Erich forced a nervous smile as he was introduced to
Himmler and two men he didn’t recognize, Karl Brandt and Philipp
Bouhler.

“
Prague?” Brandt
questioned.

“
Yes.”

“
You were there then, when
the Führer arrived?”

“
Yes, I was standing near
the castle’s great doors. The crowd was huge,” Erich said, relaxing
some.

“
Wonderful! Wonderful! You
were a very lucky young man to witness such marvelous history. You
must tell me more someday,” Brandt said, shaking Erich’s hand. “We
will leave now and let you and your father visit.”

Standing silently, Dr. Schmidt waited
a few minutes for the stage to clear before turning to
Erich.

“
My prodigal son has
returned, I see. But tell me why?”

Disarmed by his father’s distancing
again, Erich said nothing.

“
Tell me. Is it money?
Surely, there is a reason to bring you back to Berlin.”

Erich looked at his father closely.
Nothing had changed. He was everything he imagined his father would
be after seven years. A little more stooped in the shoulders,
perhaps. More gray than color in his hair. Clean shaven as always.
But the same tentative eyes, displaying some unknown weakness,
remained. His eyes had always belied a falsity to the power he so
desperately tried to project. It was his brilliance, though,
corrupted with a willingness to push beyond the moral boundaries of
doctoring, that kept him in good stead with the Nazi hierarchy.
Like the great mass of German doctors, he viewed Jewish patients as
a group apart from true Germans and was prepared to treat them as
such. A spoken sympathy for “euthanasia” along with a radical
approach to eugenics had rapidly elevated his standing in the
Health Ministry. In time, he would be called upon by Himmler
himself to assist in
Lebensborn
, the “Spring of Life”
institution for breeding the SS into a biological elite. When it
became known to him that biologically valuable children were being
kidnapped to be placed in the breeding program, he said nothing,
but only intensified his research on the hereditarily
gifted.

“
I really intend to take
the German blood from wherever it is to be found in the world, to
rob it and steal it wherever I can,” Himmler had wildly proclaimed
on one occasion to Dr. Schmidt and others as they lined up, one by
one, to give their souls to him for a cause of science that had no
boundaries.

How much truth to reveal, and how many
lies to tell his father, became the question for Erich. “It’s not
money. I came back because I need your help.”

“
What kind of
help?”

Clearing his throat, Erich tried to
look at his father before answering, but couldn’t, and lowered his
eyes quickly from his iron stare.

“
I want to finish my
medical studies here at Berlin University. That is my
reason.”

Dr. Schmidt looked closely at his son.
He was not the same angry young man who had stormed off so long ago
to take his place among Prague’s intelligentsia. The look of
despair on his face revealed that truth. But there was more he knew
that remained hidden—finishing his studies in Berlin was no
reason.

“
Are you in trouble?” his
father asked in a softer voice.

Relieved by the inviting tone of his
father, but unsure of its sincerity, Erich revealed the troubling
nature of his last few months in Prague. Included in his story was
the disturbing murder of the elderly man and woman. Nothing was
said of his love for Julia and her family.

“
They were Jews?” his
father asked, as if they were supposed to be.

“
Yes, I suppose so. Why
else would they have been attacked?”

“
Being Jews was enough.
But you were not involved?”

“
No, but my sympathies
were well known, and I—”

“
That is the past, over,”
Dr. Schmidt said sharply, interrupting Erich. “You will speak no
more of this matter here or anyplace else in Germany, if I am to
help you.”

“
They were old people,
Father, barely able to walk.”

“
What would you have done,
if you could have helped them?”

“
I don’t know really. I
was terrified.”

“
A Jew is just a Jew. That
is all, nothing more. You must not forget that. You may stay with
me until you find your own quarters.”

With that remark, Dr. Schmidt turned
and walked to his office, leaving Erich to follow him, which he
did, meekly and shamed and more beholden than ever to his
father.

Later that night, waiting for sleep to
come, Erich’s thoughts turned again to Julia. Darkness always
brought her face to him. How difficult it is to keep love silent to
the self, when everything about it is alive and screaming at you.
Why love at all if the world hears nothing of it? Appearing
silently back in the shadows of his mind, Julia’s presence seemed
more distant and puzzling to Erich. Fading in and out like faraway
radio signals, he caught only passing glimpses of her beautiful
existence before there was nothing. Fast asleep, a dream that would
haunt him for months to come made its first appearance in the
theatre of his soul. Standing alone, he was looking down at the
shattered humanity of the old Jewish man and woman lying on the
sidewalk, their faces turned to the pavement, twisted in death.
Rolling the man and woman over, he looked no more than a second
before sitting up in bed choking on his own vomit. The old man and
woman’s faces were gone, their flesh torn away by thousands of
hungry, tiny maggots now eating into their brains. Later in the
morning, when his father questioned the traces of vomit showing on
the bed covers, Erich said nothing of his dream, blaming instead a
sudden nausea from spoiled wienerwurst eaten on the
train.

The same excuse would not carry the
next time, which came three days later from a similar dream. His
father said only, “You must be heavily troubled,” then walked away
not asking why. He had done this all his life, leaving the troubles
of his family to Erich’s mother. It was she who encouraged him to
become an artist, or a great German philosopher, anything other
than following in the giant footsteps of his august father. And
Erich loved her for doing so, and she loved him, he believed.
Still, it was his father’s love he coveted most, for it would have
given him respect.

The third night of dreams left Erich
exhausted and beginning to question his sanity. His presence in the
scenes played out before his sleeping eyes was becoming too real
for his fragile mind. This time, though, the old man and woman were
gone, their bodies replaced by much younger ones. Erich knew the
faces before turning their heads to look at them. No hungry maggots
this time, no rotting flesh, only Julia and Hiram, unmolested and
staring at the stars as if they could see them. There was no
vomiting by him, only a soft sobbing that comes when something
precious is lost.

In time, Erich came to believe that
the troubling nightmares were a clear omen of the Jews’ fate should
war come to Europe. None would escape it, not even his Julia and
her family. The death of the old man and woman was simply God’s way
of telling you the truth.

As the weeks passed, Erich realized
that his sudden arrival at the medical school had immediately
altered the favored status of senior students among the professors.
His father’s immense prestige placed him above all the rest and he
knew it, and he hated that it did so because of what was expected
of him during the clinical rounding with patients. Stressed from
the horrific series of nightmares, he would often find a small
measure of rest by drifting into sleep during the morning reports.
As a result, he knew very little about the patients’ histories and
what to expect when questioned by the instructing physician. Each
time, when called upon to discuss the prognosis and treatment plan
for a particular patient, he would struggle unmercifully, to the
delight of the other students gathered about, none of whom cared
for him. But it mattered little to Erich how anyone felt about him.
After the tragic episode in Prague with the old man and woman, he
had come to the conclusion that no one possessed a soul anymore,
not even his father; and without a soul to question you, everything
that is done and felt becomes a deception so cunningly hidden that
the truth can only be recognized with great difficulty. It is then
that one begins to dress in the many different clothes of
pretending. None of this would change, not even when the welcoming
news came later in the day that the dreaded medical thesis would no
longer be required. The Health Ministry had drastically reduced the
medical studies in order to provide more doctors for the state.
Incompetence was of little consequence to the Ministry—all would be
conscripted and ground into the war machine being assembled by the
Reich.

At the close of an unusually long day,
Erich was summoned to his father’s office, which had not happened
since his arrival. To be called to a professor’s office was of no
small concern to any student, but to Erich it was doubly worrisome
when the professor was your father. Dr. Schmidt was sitting behind
his desk when he arrived. Sitting next to him, busily leafing
through what appeared to be a stack of official papers, was a man
Erich had not yet met.

“
Erich, my son, come in,
come in,” Dr. Schmidt said with a blustering, authoritarian voice,
a false tone that Erich despised, a tone his father had reverted to
many times in front of him when impressions were to be made. So
Erich knew the importance of the stranger in the room. “Erich, this
is Herr Professor Werner Catel, head of Leipzig Clinic. You have
heard of his important work with children, I’m sure.”

Erich knew nothing of the man, nor his
work, but nodded, acting as if he did to please his
father.

“
A new young Dr. Schmidt,
perhaps to replace the old one,” Dr. Catel said laughing, turning
to Erich’s father, who laughed with him, though quite displeased by
Dr. Catel’s clumsy attempt to be funny.

“
No, not yet, I’m afraid,
but another semester should do it,” Erich said.

“
A mere formality, my boy,
that can easily be taken care of, should you come with me to
Leipzig. You will do well there.”

Stunned by what he was hearing, yet
unsure of what it meant, Erich turned to his father for an
explanation.

“
You must listen to what
Dr. Catel has to say,” was all he had to offer him.

“
I am to be a
psychiatrist, not a baby doctor, Dr. Catel. Why would you want
me?”

“
I could tell you because
you are Dr. Schmidt’s son, and that would be enough. But that is
not an answer that will likely satisfy you. Rather, let me just say
you should know that a child’s mind is not always free from
sickness,” Dr. Catel answered, beginning to show a mild displeasure
with Erich’s reluctance to simply accept without questioning the
opportunity being offered to him.

“
But my training is with
adults,” Erich insisted.

“
Good, children become
adults.”

Not used to being isolated from such a
conversation, Erich’s father stepped forward to the side of Dr.
Catel as an obvious gesture of support for him. “Erich, your class
will go straight into the military the very moment they graduate.
They have no choice, nor do you, unless the Health Ministry
approves a special assignment, as it has now for you,” he said
sternly.

It was his father’s words that Erich
listened to now, not Dr. Catel’s. Only his father could keep him
out of the military, a place where there would be little chance of
finding a way to follow Julia to England. Should he try and be
caught, he would be shot and his father disgraced. The one possible
door he might find open could be in an unguarded hospital such as
that at Leipzig. So Erich listened intently to every word Dr. Catel
uttered about the new pediatrics project at Leipzig and asked only
questions that pleased his father. Strangely, but not to his
liking, he found himself professing considerable interest in the
idea that he would be an important part of a clinic that was
expected by the Health Ministry to become exceptional in its degree
of specialization. There all the children would receive the
blessings of medical science. None would go untreated, which
pleased him greatly.

Later, dining with his father at the
faculty club, Erich felt a closeness to his father that had been
years in the making. Their talk was of home and family and Dresden,
nothing about the war, which both knew was just over the horizon.
Before parting for the evening, Dr. Schmidt looked wistfully at his
only son for a second.

“
These are extraordinary
times, Erich, and to survive we must be extraordinary, too,” he
said, expressing unusual concern in his voice.

When his words were finished, in the
rarest of moments, he reached across the table and touched Erich’s
arm. It was the best he could do, but it was enough for Erich. Then
he got up and walked away, leaving Erich standing alone in the
silence of the night, still wrapped in the warmth of his father’s
touch and words, all of which was new to him.