“I’m in charge of discipline,” Rausch replied coolly. “You might say I am a student of control.”
“I have no wish to be one of your subjects,” Langhof said sharply.
Rausch smiled. “Subject? What an odd idea.”
Langhof turned away. “Please, leave me alone.”
“Subject?” Rausch said. “What do you think this is, Doctor? Let me assure you that we are very serious here. You cannot begin to know just how serious.”
“I’ve heard rumors,” Langhof said. He was still staring at the bed.
“They’re all true,” Rausch said. He paused a moment, studying Langhof’s figure as it was silhouetted by the window. “You are an interesting man, Doctor. The vermin — I know all I need to know about the vermin. But you — now that’s a different matter.”
Langhof turned toward Rausch. “How so?”
“You must be filled with questions at this moment,” Rausch said. “And yet you stand there and say nothing.”
“All right,” Langhof said, “I’ll ask a question. Those people coming off the train, what becomes of them?”
“They are all killed. Most of them right away. The others die sooner or later.”
Langhof shook his head. “That does not seem possible.”
“The trick, of course, is not to think of them as people,” Rausch said. He smiled. “You must take a lesson from the priests, Doctor. You must learn the value of abstraction.”
“Ridiculous,” Langhof said.
Rausch shrugged. “They really aren’t people, you know. They are simply physical material that history is working on.” He smiled. “Besides, you will have very little to do with that. You are a scientist, after all.”
“This is not science,” Langhof said hotly. “This is politics, nothing but politics.”
“Look out the window, Langhof,” Rausch said lightly. “Surely you cannot call this politics.”
“Then what is it?”
“A great experiment,” Rausch said with a wink. “We are investigating great philosophical questions here.”
“Nonsense.”
“All those little philosophical tidbits we used to debate over our beer in university taverns, they are all part of our situation here. Why, the question of freedom versus determinism alone is undergoing a monumental reexamination.”
“Discuss such things with Ludtz,” Langhof said. “I have no stomach for them.”
“Ludtz is an idiot,” Rausch said. “A fool.”
He paused and then smiled with what seemed to be genuine good nature. “Oh, come now, Langhof. Let’s discuss it a bit, shall we? Tell me, my good doctor, did you freely choose to end up in this little room, or was it preordained from all eternity?”
Langhof stiffened. “Get out.”
“Not a very philosophical attitude, Doctor,” Rausch said.
Langhof shook his head wearily. “Just leave me alone.”
“If you think you are above this, Langhof,” Rausch said sternly, “you are mistaken.” And with that, Rausch turned very quickly, at a military clip, and left the room.
And so Langhof was left alone in his room. He slumped onto the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. At that moment, he saw himself as a figure out of classical drama, the noble spirit fatally and undeservedly ensnared in evil. But he was in fact a figure out of melodrama, mired in self-pity and self-justification, the handmaidens of weakness and crime.
And what was the nature of this illusion that turned Langhof’s tragic mien into a shoddy harlequin?
It was this — if now, amid the swelter of my compound, I can know it rightly: that he, Langhof, had been sinned against, victimized, betrayed, stabbed in the back. He believed that now he saw the outside forces that had brought him to his current condition, and saw them clearly. He saw the monumental ones: war, inflation, politics. He saw the lesser ones: his father’s suicide, Anna’s flight, the velvet-gloved coercion of Dr. Trottman. But in fact, he saw nothing, because he did not see himself. There is no limit to our capacity for self-deceit. And perhaps our greatest craft lies in our manifold rejection of that knowledge which, if we embraced it, would make life almost impossible.
And so Langhof, as he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes, began to believe that he had at last seen all the invisible whips that had driven him to the Camp. And he slept, not knowing he was still a fool, still a shadow, still a riddle wrapped in sable.
Part III
I STAND in the hot mist of the nursery and watch the orchids droop. In some, the petals draw slowly in upon the pistil like Caesar’s robed assassins. A soft rot has overtaken the Erwinia, wrinkling the leaves as the internal tissue collapses. The buds of the Phalaenopsis are rotting, brown spots spreading across the knotted petals. Fungi devour the rhizome of the Epidendrum and the Vandas. The nursery has become the slaughterhouse of orchids. Their languishing is critical to Juan, trivial to me. Still, he will not follow my instructions. He has closed the greenhouse, which will suffocate the orchids. He has filled the pots with water, soaking the osmunda fiber, and syringed the buds and leaves, spreading the infection with the flowing water, drowning the orchids in their own disease.
For Juan, I am no longer the protector of the orchids. For him, I am the young Don Pedro in a yellow, wrinkled skin, a strange, white-haired presence who totters about the compound or sits for endless hours in the baking heat of the verandah or strolls into the jungle night, alone.
It does not matter what Juan thinks. Least of all, should I be subject for his thought. For the orchids — and the demon spirits that assail them — are his only concerns. His mind is cast in the mold of a healthy, thriving flower, and his interests do not extend beyond the kissing of its petals. In an otherwise blameless life, this is his awful crime.
I turn, and he is standing in the doorway of the nursery, framed by it like some romantic’s portrait of the noble peasant. He nods. “Don Pedro,” he says humbly.
“Si.”
In Spanish, he asks me if anything is wrong.
“No, Juan.”
He does not move. He is guarding the orchids against my lunacy. He suspects that those devils that plague the orchids somehow reside in me.
I tell him that the orchids do not look well.
He nods sadly, a vassal of the flowers, a last centurion of the princely orchids.
I touch the petals of one of the Lymbidiums and tell him that even in decline, they are beautiful.
“Si, bellisima,” Juan replies. Standing quietly in the doorway, he is the perfect representation of the terrible and inert slumber of the pastoral.
I release the petals. Watching Juan, I know that he will not leave the nursery until I do. I walk past him. “Buenos noches, Juan.”
“Buenos noches, Don Pedro.”
I make my way up toward the house, then pause and glance back at Juan. He is standing where I stood, staring down at the orchids, assuring himself as best he can that I have not brought them harm. Standing amid the flowers in a hazy square of light, Juan looks like some cheap lithograph of Christ in the Garden. It is the same melancholy face and outstretched arms offering perfect solace, the same head bowed slightly toward the penitent and the wounded that I have seen in a thousand store windows. It is in the nature of religion to take everything into itself, draw everything within its circle, especially the wounded heart. And one day, perhaps, there will be a certain Saint Juan, patron saint of orchids, canonized in the year three thousand because of miracles wrought in the
