The Orchids

“So? What do you mean?”

Ginzburg shrugged. “So, the Camp will fall. What am I to do about it?”

“You must save yourself, Ginzburg. You must do it now. No one can say what might happen to the prisoners who remain here.”

“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.”

IN CASAMIRA’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 fete. 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