“So what is on your mind during the experiments?” Ginzburg asked.
“I told you. Nothing.”
“Amazing,” Ginzburg said. He stood up and walked to the window. “When all of this is over, the air will be filled with explanations. Every sort of mind will wallow in this pit. Then they will proceed to vaporize it. They will turn it into mist. I’ve read enough to know what they will do. They will wrap it in the rhetoric of evil. Or they’ll explain it through some crude formula of economic determinism. They’ll bury it under ridiculous notions of Man’s Inhumanity To Man. Ridiculous.” He turned toward Langhof. “But where does it all come from, Langhof? Where does the responsibility begin?”
“If I had not taken this reassignment …” Langhof began.
“What reassignment?”
“To the Camp.”
Ginzburg turned back toward the window. “Do you think that’s where it began for you, by taking a reassignment?”
“I don’t know,” Langhof said. “But if I had not taken it, then I would not be here now.”
“Your being here or not being here is the least of our misfortunes, Langhof,” Ginzburg said.
“I didn’t mean to suggest —”
Ginzburg drew a Star of David in the mist on the window. “My father was a rabbi,” he said. “He was a very studious man, scholarly. I spent my youth going through his library. He was very proud of me for a while.” He turned to Langhof and smiled. “Then things changed. You see, Langhof, it was not my father’s intent for a nightclub comic to spring from his loins.”
“No, I don’t imagine it was,” Langhof said quietly.
Ginzburg watched the mist reclaim the window. “One day a few boys came into the synagogue. They hauled my father out of his study and made him take the Talmud from the cabinet. They spread it out and told him to spit on it. He did. They told him to keep spitting. He did that too. He spat until his mouth was dry. He told them he couldn’t spit anymore, that he had no more saliva. They laughed and said they had plenty of saliva and told him to open his mouth. Then they spat into his mouth so that he could keep spitting on the Talmud.”
“You saw this?” Langhof asked.
“No,” Ginzburg said, “he had kicked me out of the house by then. But even if I had been there, what could I have done?” He nodded toward the window. “This place is a circle, Langhof, and it revolves around one point. Survival.” He shrugged. “That much will be understood later, that people will do anything to survive. But so what? I sold my ass to Kessler. You conduct absurd medical experiments. We both do it to survive. So what?”
“We have no choice,” Langhof said.
“Quite right,” Ginzburg said. “Once we’re here, we have no choice. But responsibility must begin somewhere, Langhof. It must all begin somewhere.”
“But how can we see it?” Langhof asked.
Ginzburg said nothing.
Langhof reached into his pocket and withdrew a small, black notebook. “It’s all in here,” he said.
Ginzburg glanced at the notebook. “What?”
“Everything,” Langhof said. “Everything that’s happened here for the last three years. I have it all down in the greatest detail.”
Ginzburg’s eyes drifted from the notebook to Langhof’s eyes. “That’s your ticket out, then,” he said softly.
Langhof stared at Ginzburg, puzzled. “Out of what?”
“Out of responsibility.”
Langhof held the book toward Ginzburg. “Read it. You’ll see what I’ve been trying to do.”
“We don’t need compilers, Langhof,” Ginzburg said. He rubbed his eyes with his fists and suddenly seemed very weary. He slumped down upon the bunk. “If you have nothing more, Doctor,” he said, “I’d like to sleep for a while.”
Langhof continued to hold the book toward Ginzburg. “Please, read it.”
Ginzburg shook his head. “No.”
“But why not?” Langhof asked.
“Let’s just say that my eyes are tired.”
Langhof pressed the book into Ginzburg’s hands. “Please,” he said quietly. Then he stood up and left the room.
Langhof did not see Ginzburg again for two days, and when he did something odd happened. Langhof was in the dissecting room with Ludtz and Kessler. He was standing over one of the metal tables, the body of a young woman spread out in front of him. His coat was red with blood, and little slivers of the woman’s spleen dangled from the tip of his scalpel. Suddenly Ginzburg entered the room, carrying a box of supplies. As he walked toward Kessler, he glanced at Langhof, and at that moment Langhof’s hand began to tremble. He was mortified, utterly mortified, not because of the absurdity of what he was doing, but because someone he thought as intelligent as himself had observed him doing it.
THE BOW of the canoe gently skirts the bank, bumping it slightly, and I take the rope and tie it to the tree beside the water. Across the river I can see the first hint of dawn, a soft, bluish light that fades into blackness above the mountain ridges. Far to the south, El Presidente squirms beneath his silken sheets, his mind tumbling through kingdoms of moist thighs. And only a few meters distant, Dr. Ludtz wheezes into the white light of his room, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips muttering softly in the forbidden tongue.
The clay gives slightly under my feet as I make my way up the embankment from the water’s edge. All day the river seeps indifferently into the surrounding earth, licking at it, eating it away. A thousand years from now, the hill upon which my compound rests will be nothing more than a million pebbles whirling in the waves where the river meets the sea.
At the stairs to my verandah, I pause and draw in a long, slow breath. Someday I will climb them for a final time. I will look out from the heights, my hands squeezing the railing, and watch the thunderclouds tumble over the ridges or the flamingoes glide over the green, reedy plain. And I will say, “Enough,” and close my eyes.
During all his years in the Camp, Langhof thought that he would find that point where men would say, “Enough.” He saw them inject blue dye into the irises of children’s eyes, and he thought: This is the limit. Beyond this, they will not go. Then he saw them time castrations with a stopwatch, madly ripping at the testicles with scalpels and surgical scissors, and he thought: This is the limit. They will not do more than this. Then he saw them tie the ankles of pregnant women together and watch them go into the agony of labor, writhing on the floor until they died. And so he came to know that there was no limit and that that was why Ginzburg did not willingly take his little book of recorded horrors. The little comedian knew that everything he had recorded there was little more than introduction to man’s possibilities.
And yet Langhof continued to believe that something had to be said about the Camp and that perhaps the accumulation of detail was the best way of saying it. In his little black book there would be no editorialization. The prose would be simple and direct, an empiricist’s worksheet. In his foolishness he hoped that Ginzburg would be able to understand what he was attempting to do, and he was insanely curious as to how the little comedian had received his work. Consequently, when he was instructed to go to the railway station to pick up a package of incoming medical supplies, he chose Ginzburg to go along. The gates of the Camp opened for them and they passed through, riding together in a battered jeep.
Ginzburg twisted himself around and looked back at the closing gate, then straightened himself in the seat. “How did you manage to arrange this?” he asked.
Langhof watched the road, the fingers of his hands drumming lightly on the steering wheel. “I told Kessler I might need some help in case we ran into partisans on the road.”
Ginzburg smiled. “I have acted my part brilliantly,” he said. “Kessler thinks that if we ran into partisans I would fight for you.”
“Yes,” Langhof said. He took his cap from his head and placed it on the seat between them. “That book I gave you,” he asked nervously, “did you read it?”
“Yes,” Ginzburg replied. He kept his eyes on the road.
