A Perfect Madness (19 page)

“
I don’t blame you for
leaving, Erich. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to watch, though in the
end it did bring peace to the father.”

“
I’m not so sure,” Erich
answered, sitting up and turning to Dr. Schneider. “His guilt is
much greater than ours; not before God perhaps, but in his mind.
Could you kill your own child, as he did?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe if he
were suffering horribly. That would change everything.”

“
The suffering, yes, but
not the killing. It would still be there, hanging before your eyes
every day and night. You and I murdered that baby just as sure as
if we pushed the morphine syringe with our own thumbs. We watched
and said nothing.”

“
I know, and that’s why
I’m here. We’re to be transferred to the Görden Institute in
Brandenburg to help establish a new psychiatric department for
children under a Dr. Heinze. The man has the credentials, I
hear.”

Puzzled by the sudden news, Erich
struggled to make sense of what he was hearing from Dr. Schneider.
The reason for Dr. Catel’s trip to Görden was apparent
now.

“
Will you go? You have a
choice, I think?” Erich said.

“
No, not unless ordered to
by the Health Ministry. From what is rumored, there will be more
children like the Knauer child there, all waiting to be treated in
some way, or to be killed.”

“
We could both go there
and protest, if what you say is true.”

“
No, thank you—our deaths
would be the next ones. No, I’d rather die defending my country. It
would be a hell of lot quicker and certainly more honorable,” Dr.
Schneider said with some pride in his voice.

“
Perhaps that’s what they
want from both of us, to defend the Reich by killing the unfit.
It’s perhaps the only way to stay alive until the war is over,”
Erich said sarcastically.

Erich studied Dr. Schneider’s face. He
had found him to be a man of some charm and character. Like Dr.
Brandt, he too came from a distinguished medical family in Alsace,
which mattered little to Erich. What did, though, was that he was
the only physician to welcome him warmly when he first arrived at
Leipzig and show him some respect. The curse of his father’s
prestige had silenced the rest. When the proposed killing of the
Knauer child first arose, Dr. Schneider’s voice was the loudest
heard in protest, though he grew silent when the deed was done.
Asked later about this, he had no answer except that he was afraid,
like all the rest of the doctors. But when Erich confessed to him
his own silence in Prague as the old man and woman were murdered,
he seemed surprised by Erich’s guilt, and said only, “But they were
Jews. Knauer was a German.”

Stunned by Dr. Schneider’s blunt
response, Erich said nothing further to him and walked away. Later,
driving down to the Black Forest, he realized the absurdity of the
entire conversation with Dr. Schneider, but knew the truth was
there to be seen. Compassion seems to carry its own good reason for
killing one’s own but need not be found for the Jew.

Erich was glad he had not told Dr.
Schneider about Julia and his plan to leave Germany, which he might
have done had the conversation continued further. He had been alone
with his thoughts too long and needed to share his thinking with
someone, as he always had done with Julia. But there were only
empty faces around him, their conscience now tightly harnessed to
the Nazi movement itself. Erich figured some had done so from cold
fear, the greatest of all human motivators. Others were after
money, or the fictitious shades of prestige, like his father. What
would he come to barter for when the time came? he
wondered.

Erich sat down to rest on the forest
floor by a small bed of wild bluebells, doing their own thing,
struggling to survive in the sunless solitude surrounding them.
They had blossomed where their seeds fell by chance, dropped by
distant birds from faraway places, perhaps, or carried there by the
warming winds of spring. It seems none of us end up on the road
from which we started. But the end is there for us, as sure as it
was at the beginning. The world is just a barrel organ, Julia’s
father had said one evening during a long, intense discussion,
which God himself turns. This way, we all dance to the tune that is
on the drum. We may not think it so, but we do. It’s there playing
over and over, the same tune for all of us. For now, he had argued,
we are dancing to the discordant sounds of Hitler’s Third Reich.
The night’s discussion ended then rather sadly, Erich remembered.
But he recalled that Julia had said, “Whether we are to survive is
how we dance, not the tune, and you and I must always dance
together, Erich.” There was small comfort in her words, though. The
child’s death had joined the dance too.

Opening the knapsack he always carried
in any season, Erich took out a small metal flask half filled with
warm dark lager. Julia had given it to him one early fall day
driving from Prague to the nearby Biskid mountains, where they had
hiked many times together.

“
Warm beer and nature’s
solitude are a tough combination to beat when totaling up God’s
gifts to us,” she had said that day, laughing.

Laughter to Julia, though, was the
greatest gift from God, because it quiets our hurts and
disappointments, and even death, should it come near. But laughter
also can hide us from who we are, Erich believed, allowing us to
seem what we’re not. He had observed this phenomenon too many times
in his friends and strangers, all trying to be more than they were.
And he wondered how different his and Julia’s laughter would sound
when they were together again, each having so much to hide from the
other. He would not be the same, nor she. Nor anything else.
Nothing ever is after there’s been a lot of killing in the world.
Where would their love be in all this mess? The longing he felt for
Julia swept over him in great waves of despair. And he cried out to
her, as if she would suddenly step forth from behind a tree and
come to him through the shadows of the forest, laughing.

Drinking the last of the beer, Erich
tucked away his emotions the best he could. The outburst of
self-pity felt good, though he detested it in others. Placebo
therapy, Julia’s father called it, excuses that never erase the
weakness you are hiding. It helps us to survive, to be something
when all else fails. And for Erich, the task ahead was to survive
with his soul somehow intact.

Used by the Romans two thousand years
back, the ancient trail he had chosen to hike on led to
Switzerland, but he was ill prepared to flee Germany without first
returning to Leipzig. As he started to turn back on the trail
leading out of the forest, a loud shrill voice called out,
startling him.

“
You there,
halt!”

Not sure from which direction the
voice came, Erich froze when he heard a loud rustling movement
through the leaves and underbrush to his right, much like a
charging wild boar would make. Two Wehrmacht soldiers, each
carrying a light 9-millimeter machine gun, stepped from the woods
and cautiously approached him.

“
Do not move,” the closest
soldier said, pointing his gun at Erich.

“
Your knapsack—quick,
empty it on the ground,” the other said scruffily.

Erich did so, trying all the while to
control the churning fear that was beginning to numb his whole
body, making it difficult for him to move. The metal flask fell
harmlessly to the ground, along with a half-eaten piece of
sauerbraten and hard bread wrapped in butcher’s paper.

“
Your pockets, empty them,
too.”

Erich pulled his pants pockets inside
out, showing nothing but two keys, a handkerchief, and a folding
wallet holding his identification papers.

“
Stand over there,” the
first soldier said, waving the gun at Erich and pointing to his
right.

Erich stood still trembling, unable to
move. He was to die right here and no one would ever
know.

“
What are you waiting
for?” the other soldier screamed, shoving Erich hard, causing him
to stumble and fall against a small tree stump by the edge of the
trail.

Then the soldier picked up Erich’s
wallet from the ground where it had fallen and glanced hurriedly
through his identification papers.

“
You are from
Leipzig?”

“
Yes, the hospital. I am a
doctor there,” Erich said in a whispery voice, literally having to
force the words from his mouth.

“
A doctor? Leipzig is
miles away. Why are you here?”

“
To rest, I suppose. The
work has been heavy lately,” Erich responded, becoming more
frightened with each question.

“
Where were you headed?”
the second soldier asked, moving closer to Erich to compare his
face with the ID photograph.

“
Nowhere in particular.
Just hiking. I came here when I was young with my father and walked
this particular trail.”

“
It is being used now by
many deserters to try and escape to Switzerland. Two were killed
here yesterday,” the second soldier said, returning Erich’s wallet
and papers to him.

“
It’s strange that you are
not in the army,” the first soldier said, still wary of
Erich.

“
To you, perhaps, but not
to the Health Ministry. Someone must stay behind to heal the wounds
of our soldiers when they return from battle,” Erich slowly
responded, regaining some composure.

Both soldiers seemed pleased with his
answer, and one gathered the backpack and the contents from the
ground and handed them to him.

“
You may go, but do not
use this trail again. You are lucky we didn’t shoot you,” he
said.

“
Thank you,” Erich said
weakly, before starting back to the trailhead where his car was
parked. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back at the two
soldiers, who were still watching him, and waved to them, then
quickly increased his pace, adding distance.

Darkness would cover his way soon. He
couldn’t hear the waterfalls near Triberg yet, and knew many miles
remained before he would be safely out of the forest. No forest is
safe from one’s imagination at night. What is real before you is
not what you see. And the voices of the night that speak to you are
different from those of the day. Sometimes they don’t belong to
this world. But to Erich, darkness had always been a glorious time
for the mind to try to picture the infinite. His love for
psychiatry began with the nights. One could be quite insane, he
believed, and yet find sanity at night because there were no truths
in the dark. Fears of the day are hidden then, in the shadows of
the night, just as one’s sins are secreted away in the murky gray
recesses of the mind. He had never been afraid of the dark. Long
before his days in college, when night came, he would wander the
streets and tree-lined parks of Dresden guessing what the shadows
of distant objects might be. He became odd then to his father, and
a worry to his mother, mostly because his father swore by the
inviolability of science as a believer would the Holy Bible, not
the hodgepodge of Freudian and Jungian psychology. If a woman was
crazy, her genes were, too. It was that simple to him. No such
woman should be allowed to pass on such crazy genes to the next
generation. For him eugenics had become the new covenant for
mankind’s salvation, as the New Testament was to the early
Christians.

But the silent, twisted face of fear
stayed close to Erich this night, seemingly darting back and forth
in front of him from the surrounding blackness of the forest as he
slowly made his way along the trail. Then it stopped for a moment
and began walking along beside him, looking very much human, saying
nothing but smiling all the while at his troubled and trembling
soul. Later it would talk with him, not aloud, but deep down within
him where no one else could hear. It was that real. And it
frightened Erich. Later he would come to believe that something
else has to exist alongside the reality in his life. It gives one’s
life more thickness to imagine a clandestine side to things one
knows are real. So the terrible fear he felt of dying had become
just that, a being he could not see but knew was there where the
real and the imaginary world could no longer be
separated.

The encounter with the military patrol
had left Erich shaken and more confused than ever as to what the
future now held for him. He knew no one close in Leipzig to talk to
who might feel as he did about the murdered child. Dr. Schneider,
who had initially shared his concerns about euthanasia, was silent
now as to what he might do should such a case arise again. Where
anyone stood on the question of loyalty to Hitler’s Third Reich was
a question he couldn’t ask, nor would anyone answer had he done so.
This was so because Hitler himself had penned the authorization to
kill the Knauer infant on his personal stationary from the
Chancellery, quickly dispatching Karl Brandt to deliver the message
and see that it was done. To everyone involved, the letter became a
strange god-like tablet that sanctified the killing.

Erich’s years away from Dresden had
dismissed old ties and weakened others, changing serious thoughts
once shared with friends to idle chatter. Perhaps that is what
happens in time to old and distant friendships, as matters of one’s
soul become less important to them. This is particularly true for
those we love, where just existing is their only passion. His
mother was of this kind. A beautiful Nordic woman from Hamburg, she
had never moved far beyond the shadow of his father. Poorly read,
she rarely spoke, and when she did it seemed of nothing. Respect
though, came to her easily through marriage to his father, whose
academic credentials, even then, were towering. But respect also
came to her through her own father’s death, dying as he did in the
terrible battles along the Argonne forest during the Great War.
With most of his company lying dead in the water-filled trenches
around him, manning a machine gun he single-handedly stopped
advancing French units until the few left of his company could
escape. Then, in a matter of minutes, he was blown to pieces by two
well-placed mortar shots and a hero’s tale began. Months later she
stood, holding her mother’s hand as Field Marshal Hindenburg
presented the Iron Cross to her, recounting her father’s great
heroic deeds. Others received the coveted Iron Cross that day, too,
including a small man standing next to her with a silly-looking
mustache that made her laugh, Corporal Adolf Hitler.