“So much…” The nib of Ritter’s fountain pen scratched against the page. “So much work…” He wrote and drank. Pavli set his own glass back down.
In the world outside, where time moved, the war went on. Here, they caught only little glimpses of it, like lightning flashes in storm clouds mounted up on the horizon. More than once, in the middle of the night, the drone of the bombers coming from the west had broken all sleep. Pavli had risen from his cot in the darkroom and stood at one of the corridor’s barred windows, looking up at the dark shapes spreading their arms against the stars. They passed the hospital by, as though the Angels of Death had noted a mark of blood on the great front door. The bombs had fallen upon the distant city’s outlying districts, and the glow of the fires could be seen, an orange-red shimmering above the forest surrounding the building. In the morning, flakes of ash, a black snow, had drifted onto Pavli’s hands as he’d stood in the hospital’s courtyard. The guards had turned their faces up to the sky, silent as they sniffed the air, nostrils flared for the scent of the war.
The guards were soldiers, and knew. Even here, in this little pocket, that time and the black angels had overlooked. Pavli had come upon the guards in their barracks, huddled near a radio receiver, listening to the forbidden broadcasts of the enemy. They had hardly looked up as Pavli had come into the room and laid another framed photograph upon one of the empty bunks. They ignored him, intent as they were upon the news of the armies that had landed on the shores of Normandy, the Russians who had left the German corpses in the snows around Stalingrad and now marched in the muddy tracks of the tanks heading toward Berlin; a fist of iron squeezing around the Fatherland’s heart, blood leaking between the fingers; the blood of soldiers like them…
“Let us review the state of our knowledge.” Ritter laid his pen down on the journal and sat back in his chair. He drained his glass, leaned forward and refilled it, nodding slowly, deep in thought, as his rubbed his thumb over the glass’s rim. “Those things we have determined to be true… and those which are still a matter of speculation.”
More ritual, more repeated non-time. Pavli wanted to lay his head down on the corner of the desk, let the alcohol combine with his own fatigue to blot out the aches left from the beating he had received in the Lazarene dormitory a week ago. The blows from those who had been his brethren once… it didn’t matter. What was important was to not fall asleep in front of Ritter, to make a show of interest in the doctor’s little lecture, the one he had heard so many times before. The broken tooth in Pavli’s jaw had its uses; he prodded it with his tongue and the resulting stab of pain dispersed most of the fog inside his head.
“The Lazarenes are an ancient breed; that has been established.” Ritter had taken another swallow from his glass, and a flush of blood had risen beneath the greying skin of his face. He looked older now, as though more than two years had settled upon him. “We knew that when we started these most critical investigations.” His gaze looked beyond Pavli, as though he were addressing a lecture hall full of medical students. “Yet at the same time, the general awareness of even their existence is minimal. In this, they show a circumspection, a caution lacking in die Juden.” His voice took on a tone of admiration for his research subjects. “Every effort is made to blend in, to seem no different from the Germans around them. The only distinguishing marks, the ritual tattoos upon the wrists and one side of the ribs, are kept carefully hidden. Undoubtedly, the great majority of Berliners who have come into contact with these people, either socially or on business, were completely unaware that they were talking to members of a distinct genetic and cultural group.”
Pavli nodded, as if he were hearing all this for the first time. Well, of course, he wanted to murmur aloud. With so much murder in their history, the washing of streets with the blood of their ancestors – why wouldn’t the Lazarenes wish to go unnoticed? Do you think we’re such fools? A corner of Pavli’s mouth raised, a smile loosened by the warmth in his gut. The doctor’s proud knowledge – it was all so obvious.
“Thus we see…” Ritter took another drink, his gaze glittering brighter, as though the alcohol had begun to seep from beneath his eyelids. “Thus we see how the Lazarenes disappeared into folklore… into myths and old legends…” He spoke slowly, laying a hand upon the already-written pages of the journal; he might have been piecing together for the first time these words from before. “Stories of pale gypsies who lived forever… who shed their skins like snakes and became young again. Some versions maintain that it was the serpent in the garden of Eden who showed the trick to the first Lazarene, the third son of Adam. Others speak of Satan disguising himself as Christ and teaching an unholy, self-inflicted crucifixion, the stigmata of which the Lazarenes still inscribe into their flesh.”
No… it was the true Christ, whispered Pavli to himself. He still believed the little scraps of faith he had gleaned from his brother. A few coins of the inheritance that had been stolen from him. It was He who taught us.
Ritter nodded, as though he had heard a respected colleague’s differing opinion. “The Lazarenes, of course, maintain otherwise. They regard themselves as the only bearers of Christ’s actual gospel. The secret of eternal life. The kingdom of God inside the human breast.” He shrugged, taking his hand from the glass to make a dismissive gesture. “But that is all mysticism. Of no…” He looked momentarily confused, words eluding him. “Of no value. For we are men of science. Nicht wahr?”
Pavli looked up. “If you say so, Herr Doktor.” The man was drunk; he could see it in the sweating face, the tongue that seemed to have swollen up too large for the other’s mouth. That, too, was time repeating itself. “Whatever you say.” He helped himself to more from the bottle on the desk; this was the point at which Ritter no longer noticed things like that.
“A certain body of knowledge has accrued over the years… the Lazaranology, if you will…” The lecture to the imagined audience continued. Though now Ritter’s voice seemed to be moving through the incantations of a religious service. “I am not the first to investigate these matters… though I have the great fortune of being in a time and place where the truth may be at last determined. The Ahnenerbe has given me its blessing, placed these resources at my disposal. Every resource… including the human one…” His face darkened, brooding. “Himmler and the others… all the leaders of the SS… none of them can tell the difference between what I’m doing and their own pet theories. The fat little chicken farmer thinks vegetarianism and mumbling over old runes is as important as this work.” Contempt curdled in Ritter’s voice. “That charlatan Mengele sends them a Jew’s head pickled in a jar, and they’re happy. They add it to their silly museum of such things and think it’s all very scientific.” He snorted in disgust. “No matter. As long as they leave me alone… as long as I have been given what I require…”
Pavli knew what the doctor meant. What a strange world this was – the small one behind the fences topped with barbed wire – where all these people, the people of his blood, could be given to someone like Herr Doktor Ritter. As something merely required, like the crates of film that arrived from the Agfa labs or the Zeiss lenses wrapped in tissue paper, so that Pavli could carry on with the work he did with the cameras.
There had been changes, though. Ritter had asked if he had any experience with cine cameras, the kind with which motion pictures were made, and he had answered yes, a little. The doctor had smiled and told Pavli that he knew he was lying. But that it didn’t matter; Ritter had already arranged for a Wehrmacht technician to come and show Pavli how to work the clever machine. The instruction had taken no more than a week, but that had been enough. Now Herr Doktor Ritter had films of his surgical procedures to study, as well as the shots that Pavli took with the still camera he had used before.
“No matter…” The bottle on the desk was now only a third full. Ritter set his glass back down. “We shall proceed under these circumstances.” His head wobbled a bit as he looked at Pavli for confirmation.
“Yes, Herr Doktor.” A ritual. “As you say…” He longed more than ever to lay his head down, or slip from the chair and curl up on the floor, knees close to his chest, forearms hiding his face from the glare of the electric light over Ritter’s desk; burrowing toward the anesthesia of sleep. Though sometimes it seemed like there was no such thing as sleep here – how could there be, when time itself didn’t really exist? Just a wearying round of bad dreams, visions of the things he had seen through the cameras’ viewfinders, sights that woke him trembling and sweating on the narrow cot.
Ritter placed the tips of his fingers together. “Previous investigators into the Lazarene mysteries have speculated that the essential corpus of the faith predates Christianity…”
He listened and didn’t listen to the doctor’s voice, the familiar words. There was some comfort to be found in seeing that others, the guards, suffered in ways similar to his own. The lack of true sleep, the immersion into non- time. The soldiers listened to their illicit radio, not to Herr Goebbels’ lies, but to the broadcasts of the Americans and the other armies cutting their way across Europe. They listened though they knew that the words were meant to erode their morale, hollow the courage from their chests; they listened because they knew it was the truth from that other world, the world in which time moved and was real. The world that would swallow this one… someday. Matthi had promised him that.
