funnels of the Camp, he turned to me and said in a voice of almost wistful repudiation, “One cannot imagine waltzing after this.”
He is outside now. I can see him through the window, his body neatly dissected by the blades of a large green fern. He is calling Alberto and Tomas, Juan’s teenage sons. For a moment they do not see him, caught up as they often are in a kind of manic play, an endless, banal chase from which no clear victor ever emerges.
He has caught their attention, and I see him motioning toward the small boat that bobs lightly on the river, a length of braided rope holding it to the bank. He is right. The river is very calm, a perfect day for rowing. And I can see him years before, sailing in a sleek white skiff, a blue European river rolling beneath him and crashing up against the sides of the boat, covering his face with spray.
Alberto and Tomas secure the boat. They smile at each other mockingly as they watch Dr. Ludtz lumber toward the boat and then heave himself awkwardly into it, causing it to groan and sway. To them this Teutonic Falstaff is no more than a mound of blubber who by some incomprehensible twist of circumstance employs and therefore commands them. Their bodies are tawny and sleek; his, ruddy and gelatinous. They are the trim young bulls; he, the imprisoned Minotaur. They cavort mindlessly in the humid forest, far beyond history’s mortmain; he is history’s dilapidated product.
With Dr. Ludtz securely seated, Alberto and Tomas leap agilely into the boat and take up positions fore and aft. Then they paddle slowly from the bank, the boat sliding across the surface of the river as effortlessly as a knife through air. Dr. Ludtz grabs each side of the boat and steadies himself. He does not trust the depths. Though the river is for rowing, it also has the terrible ability to swallow him up entirely. For him, the crocodiles that drift indifferently beneath the boat are wily demons from the underworld. His is the anxiety of the paranoid who has come to fear even his paranoia.
As the boat moves toward the center of the river, a large red bloom drifts slowly toward it. Dr. Ludtz watches as it nears him. When finally it has come close enough, he leans forward to scoop it up but, as he does so, jostles the boat. He quickly renews his grip. Holding to the edge of the boat, he watches the bloom float past him, his face slightly drawn and disappointed, a famished Tantalus from whose grasp all good things recede.
THE YEARS immediately following my father’s suicide were difficult but not altogether unpleasant. Scrupulous in all matters, he left my mother and me quite enough to get by without undue hardship. But he also left us with a stigma, one my mother was hardly aware of, but which I used to the utmost. The child of a suicide has about him something of the radiance of celebrity. His peers presume that such a person is in touch with occult circumstances, that he has seen behind the locked door and gained some dreadful knowledge that has so far been denied them. It is a dreary notoriety, not unalloyed to pity, but for such a one as I, it was not an altogether unfavorable condition. As I felt no real love for my father, or even very much respect, his loss was no great matter. I tried to grieve, but the cold solitude of his life, his inability to touch without awkwardness, to speak without formality, so distanced him from me that his absence seemed little different from his presence. As a consequence, I was granted the special privileges of my condition without having to experience the pain. Indeed, the only real sorrow I felt at my father’s death was my mother’s survival, and that from now on I would be under her authority exclusively.
As the months passed, my mother grew increasingly worthless and embarrassing in my eyes. I continued to attend school and gained some small acclaim in swimming and academics. I met Anna. These were happy circumstances, so I cannot really excuse my life by an unhappy childhood, as so many others habitually do. For whatever discomfort attended my coming of age, it was discomfort only, not torture. What discomfort there was originated almost entirely with my mother. She was much as my father understood her — altogether beyond reflection on matters that did not immediately attend to the domestic. Ignorant of literature or art, heedless of the political turmoil that increasingly swept around us, beyond concern for any of the issues that enlivened public debate, utterly at home within the confines of her own grotesque physicality, and smelling always of raw fish, my mother came to epitomize everything I wanted to escape.
To the people of the village she was simply the unfortunate Frau Langhof, whose crazy husband had taken a pistol to himself. But to me she was a large, dull mop of a woman, unkempt and frowsy, her oily, matted hair forever licking at her eyes. Perhaps it could be said that it was her slovenliness that inspired my later commitment to the study of hygiene. And yet if it were that easy to explain ourselves, we would know a good deal more of what we are.
I do know this: that beside my mother, Anna, my fourteen-year-old infatuation, appeared as a creature out of myth, the very image of perfect maidenhood with her pale blue eyes and elaborately braided hair. She radiated health and vigor, while my mother lumbered forth in a cloud of putrescence. Anna was lithe and agile, a body glinting in the sun as it sliced through the waters of the public pool. My mother was squat and unwholesome, with small milky eyes that stared mindlessly over my proudly squared shoulders.
“What are you reading there, my dear Peter?”
I was sitting in the half-light of the dining room when she came in. I shut the book immediately. “Nothing, Mother.”
“In a dull light, it hurts the eyes.”
I looked up at her. A thin line of milk glistened over her upper lip. “What do you want?” I asked.
“That you should go to the butcher. For veal.”
I could see her gnawing the raw meat like a scavenger. “I’ll go tomorrow,” I said.
“It’s for tonight. For dinner. I want you to go now.”
She handed me a piece of folded paper. “And give this note to Kreisler in the butcher shop. Here’s some money, too.”
I stood up. “All right then,” I said, taking the note and wrapping the crumpled bills around it. She stared at the book suspiciously. “Not good to read without light, Peter.”
I snatched the book from the table and deposited it on the umbrella stand as I left. From behind the closed door I could hear her calling for me to hurry and get back, not to linger on the corner.
I rushed down the stairs as if her breath were chasing me from the house, filling it with contamination. Some of the village services had fallen off and I could see bits of paper lying in the gutter. In the Camp there was no such litter problem. Any scraps of paper were quickly snatched up by the prisoners and dropped into their watery gray soup to give it bulk.
The butcher, Kreisler, was a large, big-boned man, vain of his huge black handlebar mustache, which curled upward on either side of his mouth. He looked at me from behind the counter. “So, Peter, what for you?”
“Veal,” I said, and handed him the note and the money.
He quickly read the note, and I could see a little smile playing on his lips. When he had finished, he placed the note in his apron pouch and retrieved two choice cutlets. He held them up for me to see. “How about these two?”
“Fine.”
He wrapped the veal quickly and handed it to me with the change. “Tell me, Peter,” he said, “how is your mother?”
“Fine,” I said indifferently.
Kreisler gave me a penetrating stare. “Is she seeing anyone?”
I could not believe his words. “Seeing anyone?”
“Is she going out, I mean. That sort of thing. With a man, my boy. Surely you’re old enough to understand.”
I could not imagine such a thing. “She certainly is not,” I said.
Kreisler scratched his face, then rolled one point of his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s been a long time since your father’s death,” he said. “It’s not good for a strong woman to live alone.”
So that was it. Kreisler had his eye on my mother. I could imagine them rolling like two pink pigs in the grimy disarray of my mother’s bed. And what was that note? Suddenly it took on a hideous aspect. Had I been reduced to the role of go-between for these two creatures? “My mother does not intend to remarry,” I announced.
Kreisler grinned. “Who said anything about marriage, Peter?” There was nothing but insult in his eyes.
“Well, then, she does not intend to see anyone,” I said haughtily.
Kreisler winked as if he knew better. “Is that so?”
