The Orchids (26 page)

“Then there are many to save, Langhof,” Ginzburg said.

“Don't be ridiculous. They're doomed.”

“And what about you?”

Langhof shook his head. “I don't care about me.”

Ginzburg smiled. “But you do care about me, is that it?”

“Well, yes. I do.”

“Why is that, Langhof, may I ask?”

Langhof looked at Ginzburg quizzically. “Well, because you are …”

“What?”

“Because you're an intelligent man, Ginzburg. There's no need for you to die.”

“Intelligent?” Ginzburg said, amazed. “Intelligent? You have piped half the scholarship of Europe up those chimneys and you speak to me of intelligence!”

“That cannot be undone, Ginzburg,” Langhof said pleadingly. “But you can save yourself.”

Ginzburg laughed derisively. “Save myself? Really? How, Langhof?”

“Speak to Kessler. He may help you.”

“To do what?”

“To escape, for God's sake. Don't you understand what I'm telling you?”

Ginzburg sat up in his bed. “Forget it, Langhof. There is no way for me to escape.”

“Are you sure Kessler wouldn't help you?”

“Kessler would kill me himself before letting me get out of here alive,” Ginzburg said. “My God, do you think he would let me live, with what I know about him?”

Langhof straightened himself. “Then I will help you,” he said.

“You? You are nothing, Langhof. A petty functionary. You would not be able to save yourself, much less me.”

Langhof sat down on the bunk next to Ginzburg. “Surely there must be something I can do for you,” he said.

Ginzburg looked at Langhof a moment. “Yes, perhaps there is.” He got down from the bunk, lifted a loose plank from the floor, and brought out a small metal box.

“Here, take this,” he said.

Langhof looked at the box. “What is it?”

“Open it.”

Langhof slowly opened the box and saw the diamonds. He looked up, astonished. “My God, where did you get all this?”

“I've been here a long time. You'd be surprised what's passed through my hands.”

“But so much!”

Ginzburg smiled. “I have friends everywhere, Langhof.”

Langhof looked down at the diamonds. “What were you going to do with these?”

Ginzburg smiled. “What do you want, a noble answer? Perhaps I was going to use them to build a great monument for the victims of this place. Does that satisfy you?”

“Why did you keep them, Ginzburg?”

Ginzburg shrugged. “Because they were too valuable to throw away. I used to buy things with them. But this is not a great place to shop, you know. There wasn't much to buy. They just kept accumulating.”

“These could get you out of the Camp,” Langhof said.

Ginzburg shook his head. “No. Nothing could do that now.”

Langhof lifted the box toward Ginzburg. “So keep them, then.”

“No,” Ginzburg said, “that would be ridiculous. The Camp will be overrun soon, as you said. They mean to kill us all, all the people who look like me.”

Langhof continued to press the box toward Ginzburg's hands. “I don't want these. What would I do with them?”

“Whatever you like.”

“No,” Langhof said, “I could never take them.”

“Look, Langhof,” Ginzburg said, “if I had other choices I might keep them. But there's no hope for me. No hope at all. There's no way I can escape. There's no way anyone can escape now. You may not even make it yourself. But you have a better chance than anyone else I know.”

“Do you really think I could take such things and live off them? Please, Ginzburg, I'm not that monstrous.”

“I want you to take them, Langhof,” Ginzburg said, “because I think that as long as you have them you will think about this place. There must always be someone who thinks about this place. Not someone who just remembers, but someone who thinks.” He pushed the box back toward Langhof. “Please take them.”

Langhof stood up and tucked the box under his arm. “Perhaps we will both make it out of here.”

Ginzburg smiled. “If we do, then we'll go out one night, and I'll show you the best burlesque in Paris.”

I
N
C
ASAMIRA
'
S
Official History
it is written that El Presidente did not need sleep, and that, in fact, during the three years it took him to assume the Presidency, he did not sleep at all. Through countless nocturnal hours, his rodent eyes peered into the darkness. He perched in trees and learned the secrets of the owl. He slithered on the river bank and learned the cunning of the crocodile. He watched the moon move through its phases of its orbit and saw the seedling straighten in the sun. During these deep, mahogany hours, El Presidente learned silence the way a stone learns silence, by being singularly itself, by taking absolutely nothing in. And so he was there — as he always will be — to greet the morning with his smile.

Now safe within the securities of office, El Presidente reclines upon his bed, wallowing in the fat of the mythology he has created for himself. Waking, he is served apricots and wine; and after that, a fresh young human delicacy procured for him while he slept. At noon he rises from sheets made wet by his spent strength and strolls down the marble corridors to his office. There, ravenous again, he devours fish and fowl, picking his teeth with a Spanish slaver's whittled rod. Then he sleeps again, slumped in his great velvet chair, his heavy breath whistling through the medals on his chest. As the afternoon languishes, he rises once again, departs for the state dining room, and there, bellowing commands, instructs his servants on the evening fête. At sunset he dines with his ministers of state. They sit chatting at the great table, their laughter counterpointed by the tinkling of the chandeliers, a tinkling that, in this windless clime, requires the use of special fans implanted in theceiling. During this final orgy of consumption, El Presidente rouses from the bowels of himself something that might be called a personality. His cheeks grow rosy and his eyes fill with tears as he regales his audience with sad tales of orphans abandoned at the palace door.

Such is the El Presidente of Casamira's song.

But what of Casamira? He, the conscience of the Republic, stands on the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, his hands clenched around the wrought-iron rail as around a chicken's throat, and lifts an exiled poet's wail into the smutty air. The darling of the pleasure set, he lives now in a world of black ties and cummerbunds, sips champagne in paneled lecture halls, and, with trembling voice, entrances the chic, adoring crowd with tales of fallen hope.

Of all things easy to become, it is easiest to become ridiculous; and when you have grown so old you cannot see your face behind your face or feel the texture of a feather; when you have grown so old that your voice seems to speak behind your back; when you have grown so old that none remember you in youth, even then you will be a fool. You may languish in a room lined with books and listen with gravity and calm to a cello's idle lamentation; you may sit surrounded by a circle of worshipful disciples; you may puff on a scholar's pipe, your white hair gleaming in the firelight — and you will still be a fool rolling in illusion as was Langhof with his tin box.

Langhof took the box and left Ginzburg's room. He walked down the hallway to his own room and sat down on his bunk. For a time he thought about hiding the diamonds under the floor as Ginzburg had, then about simply keeping them under his pillow. Then a much better solution found its way into Langhof's mind. He would not attempt to hide the diamonds at all. He would simply lay the box on the shelf next to his bunk and leave it there. Sooner or later the diamonds would be discovered, and he would be shot as a thief. That would be a martyrdom he could accept. And so Langhof, in his romanticism, thought that the greatest martyrs are those who refuse to give their names at the moment of their immolation. Thus, the blaze consumes them entirely. Anonymously burning, they fuse absolutely with their cause, so that they become not this or that martyred person, but martyrdom incarnate. By being shot as a petty, vulgar thief, Langhof sensed that he could utterly fuse with the nameless and unheralded fate of all those whose ashes had drifted over the Camp.

It takes a most extraordinary egotist to perform so extreme an act of self-effacement, but Langhof, in his illusion, saw only the grandeur of his act, not its trifling and insipid vulgarity. He believed that he had grasped at last that will to act selflessly, which we associate with courage and with failure.

But Langhof was denied his auto-da-fé. The box rested on the shelf quite undisturbed, while the muffled sound of distant enemy guns grew steadily closer. Once Ginzburg passed the open door of Langhof's room and glimpsed the box. He stopped and looked at Langhof with an expression that our hero took at the time to be one of great admiration, but that I know now was one of the deepest disappointment. For Ginzburg, in his sorrow and weariness, was like the worthy, dutiful monk who despises all illuminism.

And so the last days came. Thousands of prisoners had already been driven westward, but thousands still remained, starving in the darkness of the barracks. They ate wood shavings and licked bits of frozen paint from the sides of the buildings. There were no work details, and even the fires of the crematoria had been extinguished. It was as if the machinery of the New Order had simply ground to a halt, the gears finally mired in crushed bone.

During this period, Langhof waited to be shot for theft or, if that did not happen, captured and later shot by enemy troops. He reveled in either fate, and even began to take a little pride in his own indifference toward himself, his heedlessness for his own life. In his own mind, he saw himself quietly waiting for death, and it semed to him an almost beatific state.

Then, on the last day of the Camp's existence, with the enemy troops only a few kilometers away, everything changed. The torpor that had seemed to occupy the Camp suddenly dissolved and became a welter of noise and frenzy. The Camp personnel who remained began burning their files in a panic of concealment, as if the Camp could be wiped away by destroying the papers that described it. The bombardment began, and the guards started tumbling into the truck that would take them to the west. Some of the stronger prisoners roused themselves, rioting in the yards and ripping at the doors of the empty supply houses.

Through all of this chaos, Langhof moved with saintly detachment. He believed that he was about to die, and this thought filled him with unutterable serenity. While the Camp personnel frantically burned the evidence of their crime and the prisoners scratched at the barracks walls or wallowed in their own filth. Langhof floated about as if transported on a cushion of air. And he might have floated there until a bullet brought him down, had not Rausch grabbed his arm.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rausch demanded.

“Nothing,” Langhof said. “What should I be doing?”

Rausch stared at Langhof angrily. “You are going to stick with this to the last,” he said, “just as I am.” He pulled Langhof forward. “Come on.”

Langhof followed the jerk of Rausch's arm. “It's no use putting me on a truck for the west,” he said. “We're all going to die anyway, just as we deserve.”

“Truck? You're not going on any truck, Langhof. I have other plans for you.”

“It's hopeless, Rausch.”

Rausch tugged at Langhof's arm and led him around one of the barracks to where a group of prisoners stood, surrounded by a few guards.

“All right, march!” Rausch shouted at the prisoners. “Quick time!”

The prisoners began to move between the barracks. Langhof followed behind them, walking beside Rausch.

“Let's go!” Rausch shouted to the prisoners. “Quick! Quick!”

The prisoners continued to move, their feet sloshing through the snow and mud. The barracks disappeared behind them as they passed the crematoria.

“Go! Go!” Rausch commanded. He lifted his pistol into the air and fired. “Get going! Move! Quick!”

As they continued to run, leaving the crematoria behind them, some of the prisoners lost their footing and tumbled into the snow. Rausch ignored them and pressed the remaining prisoners forward with screams and gunshots.

Langhof continued to follow along, feeling rather smug about what he took to be Rausch's desperation.

The prisoners ran past the final buildings of the Camp, through a tangled opening of snipped wire, and out of the Camp entirely.

Rausch pulled fiercely at Langhof's sleeve. “I said double time,” he shouted.

They trudged up a slight incline, moved through a small stand of trees, and then to the edge of a gulley.

“Halt” Rausch shouted.

Langhof stopped beside him and looked down into the ditch. Twenty or thirty prisoners were standing below him, idly watching the guards.

“Get into the ditch,” Rausch commanded the prisoners. “Get in there with the others. Quick!”

Haltingly, the prisoners followed Rausch's orders, sliding down into the ditch. Some did not get up when they reached the bottom. Others got quickly to their feet.

Rausch glanced at the guards who stood on the other side of the ditch. “That's all for now,” he said.

The guards straightened themselves and waited.

Langhof felt something harden in his stomach. His eyes moved through the group of prisoners, scanning their faces. He saw Ginzburg squatting to the left, a trickle of blood flowing from his nose. Instantly he stepped back from the bank, so that Ginzburg would not see him.

“What's the matter, my dear doctor?” Rausch said fiercely.

“What are you going to do?”

Rausch smiled. “What do you think?”

“No,” Langhof said. “You can't do this.”

“I have to,” Rausch said. “It's too late to do anything else.”