The Orchids

  “No,” Langhof repeated.

  “Come now, my dear doctor,” Rausch said. “The New Order has only a few more minutes to bequeath whatever gifts it can to mankind.”

  Langhof felt the pistol jerk forward instantly. He did not feel the pressure of the trigger as he squeezed it. The bullet struck Rausch in the throat, and he fell backward into the snow. The last gasp of air rushing through the hole in his neck sounded like the gurgling of a child.

  IT IS MORNING NOW. I can smell the food my servants are preparing for El Presidente. Tomorrow the feast will be set on the tables beneath the striped tent, and should El Presidente come in Casamira’s guise he will taste a bit of everything. While the rest of us stand at our seats, he will circle the table, dipping his spoon into every bowl, turning the fruits and vegetables over his tongue, nipping at the spiced meats, sipping a single swallow of each juice and wine. Then, when he is satisfied, he will generously bid all to join him and the feast of his assumption can begin. When the meal is over, El Presidente will have the remaining food thrown to his dogs. They have been trained to fight for it, and for the next few minutes El Presidente will laugh and slap his belly while the dogs tear at each other’s throats.

  In the world that calls itself developed, those born between clean sheets find beauty in portraits of naked women reclining drowsily on great burgundy pillows. They find beauty in misty lakes reflecting pastel skies. They find beauty in stern, immobile faces bordered by neatly trimmed Vandykes. In the deep placidity of the developed world, beauty finds expression in that sense of delicacy and restraint which is meant to pluck the chords of quiet contemplation.

  But here in the Republic, the principles of aesthetics take on a more robust character. Here El Presidente, the arbiter of art, finds beauty in the frenzy of his dogs, finds something uplifting and sublime in the simplicity of their appetites and the purity of their violence.

  On the day I fled the Camp, I did not expect to discover a new aesthetic principle. Under the illusion that by killing him I could kill the things for which he stood, I had shot Rausch in the throat. The guards around the ditch watched me in a state of profound confusion, but they did not move. I thrust the pistol in my coat pocket and quickly walked away. I went back to the Camp, much of which was burning by then, clambered up the stairs of the medical compound, and took the box of diamonds from the shelf in my room. I tucked them under my coat and ran outside. I saw Ludtz whimpering in the muddy snow and pulled him up by the arm and took him with me. I did not know where I intended us to go. We ran on and on, and as the Camp disappeared behind us, as the sound of the guns and the smell of the smoke dissolved with distance, we entered a field of inexpressible beauty. It was as if the Camp had fallen behind the curvature of the earth and we were left alone in the forest. The trees were etched black against the sky, leafless, their raw branches outlined with small, rounded banks of snow. It was a world of simple colors, a bleak, wintry landscape that might have been drawn by some dour Norwegian melancholic. I fell to the ground, dragging Ludtz with me, my boots plowing up two gullies in the snow. I remember that the barrel of my pistol still seemed warm, although it could not have been, and the crunch of the diamonds as they slid to the opposite side of the metal box sounded like a single shake of the maracas. To the moralistic imagination, these two figures, Ludtz and myself, might compose a perfect representation of the devastated soul: Here they sat, Joseph K., bereft even of his castle, and his partner, the absurd Dr. Ludtz, a panting Punch slouching against a tree, the bill of his torn cap dangling ludicrously at his ear. Here, then, the New Order in its ruin.

  And yet, something in that moment was richer than anything I had ever known. During those few moments while we sat in the snow, I came as close as I have ever come to an epiphany. It was, I think now, the extreme silence of the place coming suddenly after such tumult, and its stark, relentless clarity coming after so many years of smoke and ash. For a moment I believed that it was in such a place that solemnity was born. And although this nonsensical and romantic notion could be quickly cast off, something still remained and rose within the midst of it: a reverence for the deeply serious. If there are moments in a life that may alter the categories by which we perceive life itself, then perhaps it is best that they be born out of this reverence; not a sudden revelation, nor a flash of insight, but only the weary working toward a precious value of grave and abiding seriousness, and a respect for the endless labor that is both its origin and its legacy, and that leads finally to the simple conviction that it is a moral responsibility to be wise.

  I SEE JUAN moving through the rippling heat toward the verandah. From the bottom of the stairs he looks up at me worriedly.

  “El Doctor Ludtz está muy mal,” he says.

  “Sí.”

  “Muy mal, Don Pedro,” Juan adds with gentle insistence.

  I rise from my chair and start down the stairs. Juan offers his hand, and I allow him to ease me down to the ground. In Spanish, I tell him that I will look in on Dr. Ludtz. He nods his appreciation.

  At the cottage, I tap lightly at Ludtz’s door and it opens before me. Dr. Ludtz is lying on his back, breathing in short, painful gasps.

  “How are you, Dr. Ludtz?” I ask.

  He does not respond. His eyes are closed. The sheet draped over him is damp. For a while he kept two canaries in the empty cage that stands near his bed. One morning he awoke to find that both had died. “Look at that,” he said to me worriedly. “Just like that.” He was frightened, even a little mystified that death could come so quickly, and, old man that he was, he saw in every death the shadow of his own.

  I shake his body lightly. “Dr. Ludtz?”

  His eyes dart about under the closed lids, and his lips part slightly, but he says nothing. The lips close.

  “Dr. Ludtz?” I repeat.

  His head shifts. A part of the pillow case clings to the moisture at the back of his neck. There was a time when I believed that he might one day wake up to find his mind tattooed, though not his hand.

  “Do you need anything, Dr. Ludtz?” I ask.

  “Ich kann nicht …” Dr. Ludtz breathes, but the sentence trails off and is covered by a rattling wheeze.

  I pour a glass of water and put it to his lips. They tremble slightly but do not open to receive it. In El Caliz it is the custom to take the dying from their fetid, steamy cottages and lay them out under the Spanish moss, so that when it moves in the breeze, the flies will be driven from the face.

  I pull a chair up to the bedside and sit down. It is, I think, one of our more kindly customs to insist that no one die alone.

  Dr. Ludtz opens his lips, and I put the rim of the glass to them. He flinches away from the glass, as if slapped.

  I lean back in my seat and notice that Juan has taken it upon himself to open the shutters. The light that falls through them is very harsh and bright. I rise and close them once again. In this place, if Dr. Ludtz should suddenly open his eyes and see light, he would think himself in heaven.

  “Ich …” Dr. Ludtz mumbles. “Ich …”

  I lean toward him. “Was, mein Freund?”

  “Ich …”

  “Ich bin hier, mein Freund,” I tell him.

  Dr. Ludtz’s hands close and open, close and open, as if he were reaching for ropes to pull him back to earth.

  “Ich bin hier,” I tell him. “Was kann ich tun?”

  Dr. Ludtz does not respond. His lips close tightly and begin to turn bluish. Blue, as I recall, was his favorite color. He used to say it was the shade that eased his nerves, the shade of peace.

  I turn and see Esperanza standing in the doorway. She says nothing but lifts a severed chicken’s head in my direction, the blood dripping on the floor.

  I wave her away.

  “Para el doctor,” she says.

  “No,” I tell her.

  “Para el doctor,” Esperanza repeats. She does not move from the doorway.

  I rise threateningly. “No!”

  Esperanza
frowns resentfully, steps back slowly, and disappears behind the door. If I were to leave Dr. Ludtz unattended, she would slip back into the cottage once again, open his mouth, and place the chicken’s head in it.

  “Ich bin nicht …” Dr. Ludtz mutters. He does not finish the sentence.

  During our first days at El Caliz, Dr. Ludtz sat sullenly, squatting behind a tree, raking his bald head with trembling fingers. Later he gave his grief expression in an art as unadorned as the tumblings of his brain. On canvas after worthless canvas he drew figures with his brush. Sometimes they stood before hazy swashes of green, which represented trees, sometimes before squares with crude windows, which represented houses or churches or schools. Always three figures with long hair. His wife and two daughters.

  “Ich kann nicht …” Dr. Ludtz whispers.

  I met her once, his wife. She was a large-boned woman with a curiously delicate face. It was clear that Dr. Ludtz thought her immensely beautiful, though she was rather plain except for two lambent blue eyes. We all sat together and drank a few steins of beer in a rathskeller a few blocks from the Institute. It was a trivial conversation, but as Ludtz began to feel the affects of the alcohol, he grew somewhat suggestive in the gestures he made toward her. Soon they rushed off to their apartment, tottering toward the door, comically bumping against the tables of other patrons. It was never Ludtz’s way to court a reluctant lover.

  I lean forward and ask if he would like some water.

  He does not hear me.

  I take a handkerchief from my pocket, dunk it in the water basin on his table, and wipe his forehead. His eyes seem to steady for a moment under the closed lids.

  “Ich kann nicht …” Ludtz begins again. I cannot.

  But what is it that he cannot do? If suddenly he were to open his eyes and say, “Ich kann mich nicht verzeihen,” I cannot forgive myself, it strikes me that I would love him until I died. But this he will not do, because his mind is too woolly to understand its own monstrosity. In this, he is like so many of the others. The Minister of Air sneers from the witness stand, batting away the prosecutor’s insistent questions with a cynical flippancy as damnable as himself. The Commandant of the Camp stands in the shadow of the gallows and declares himself a kindly family man who never personally harmed anyone. And in the bowels of Jerusalem, among the tortured survivors whose specificity engendered all his enterprise, the Obersturmbannführer and former traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company declares himself the product of Kantian philosophy. Dead to thought when they began, they remain dead to thought in their squalid termination.

  “Magda …” Dr. Ludtz moans.

  It is the name of his wife. If still alive, she is by now a jovial suburban grandmother pressing fruitcake into the mouths of her laughing grandchildren.

  “Magda …” Dr. Ludtz repeats. If she is dead and I could raise her from the grave and transform her black, rotting lips into something soft and pink and pliant, I would press them next to his.

  Dr. Ludtz raises one hand slightly, then it drops to his side. I reach over to feel his pulse. There is none.

  I rise, walk to the door, stop, and look back. Even now I want to go to him, shake him back to life, and lead him along the trail of his past, convince him that freedom from moral pain is not the only value.

  But he is gone now, into the oblivion of perfect blue.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Dr. Ludtz’s grave is prepared. Juan and his sons have dug a crude, uneven trench before the monument whose construction was Dr. Ludtz’s tireless task.

  I walk down the stairs to the grave. Father Martínez turns to greet me.

  “So sorry, Don Pedro,” he says. He takes my hand and shakes it limply. “This must be a terrible blow.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Across the grave, Esperanza watches me resentfully, secure in the knowledge that she could have saved him with a chicken’s head. Later in the evening, she will spear a little doll made to resemble me and hope it brings a sharpness to my heart. To her, I am the very soul of mockery, one who would not recognize the holy spirit if it bathed me in celestial light. For years she has scraped the jungle floor, praying for her gods to overwhelm my soul. Now she prays that they might consume me in annihilating flame. Because she is so close to God, she has been able to seize the very beating heart of malice.

  “I trust he did not suffer,” Father Martínez says.

  “No,” I tell him, “he did not.”

  “Is there any special sort of service you would like, Don Pedro?”

  “No. Whatever you think Dr. Ludtz might have wanted.”

  “Very good, then,” Father Martínez says.

  Alberto and Tomás smile at each other, grateful that the service is about to begin. They have to meet their girls in the village later on, and digging a grave has not seemed the appropriate preparation for it. I nod to them and tell them that they need not stay for the funeral. They smile brightly and trot away.

  Father Martínez steps to the graveside. He lifts his palms to the air. “May we pray.”

  Juan and Esperanza bow their heads and listen while Father Martínez commends the soul of Dr. Ludtz to heaven. When he has finished, he turns to me. “Do you have anything to say, Don Pedro?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Surely something,” Father Martínez insists.

  “No. Nothing.”

  Father Martínez turns to Juan and Esperanza. “Would either of you like to say anything?”

  Juan shakes his head. He stands at the corner of the grave, his hat crumpled in his hands. From time to time during the prayer he glanced toward the nursery, suspecting that it was Ludtz’s malady that continues to devastate the orchids.

  Father Martínez looks imploringly at Esperanza. “And you, my child?”

  Esperanza frowns, glances furtively at me, then tosses a piece of frayed rope and a clove of garlic into the grave.

  “What was that?” Father Martínez demands irritably.

  Esperanza stares at him contemptuously, but says nothing.

  “This man was a Christian,” Father Martínez says hotly. “This is a Christian ceremony!”

  Esperanza’s face hardens, and I can see that something in her frightens Father Martínez.

  “Please, now,” Father Martínez says, “we must be respectful. Isn’t that right, Don Pedro?”

  “The funeral is over,” I tell him. “Let Dr. Ludtz be buried.”

  Dr. Ludtz’s body rests on a stretcher. It is wrapped in a blue blanket. I bend down and take hold of Ludtz’s feet. Juan steps over quickly and takes his head.

  “Is there no coffin, Don Pedro?” Father Martínez asks.

  “No. We had no time to make one.”

  “But can’t we wait for one to be built?” Father Martínez asks. “Surely it would be more proper.”

  I lift the legs up. “Dr. Ludtz never permitted himself to be disturbed by anything,” I tell Father Martínez. “He will not be disturbed by this.”

  Father Martínez looks rebuked. “As you wish, Don Pedro,” he says softly.

  Together, Juan and I hoist Dr. Ludtz’s body into the shallow grave. As it falls, it sounds like a pillow dropping from a bed.

  “Do you wish a song, Don Pedro?” Father Martínez asks after a moment.

  I look at him. “A song, Father?”

  “A hymn? A song of repose?”

  “Dr. Ludtz had no ear for music, Father,” I tell him. I turn toward Juan and tell him that he may go. He replaces his hat on his head and moves down toward the nursery. Esperanza follows him a little way, then turns off on a trail that leads downriver.

  I take the small shovel that leans against the monument.

  “I suppose you are full of memories, Don Pedro,” Father Martínez says. “May I share them?”

  “Ludtz used to wear a red scarf in the Camp,” I tell him flatly. “That always seemed curious to me.”

  The mention of the Camp seems to stir Father Martínez. “The Camp, yes. Would you like
to talk about it?”

  I thrust the shovel into the mound of earth beside the grave. “No.”

  “But surely, Don Pedro …”

  “That will be all, Father Martínez,” I say. “Thank you very much for your help.”

  “Yes, of course,” Father Martínez says sadly. “And Don Pedro, I trust that if you ever need my …”

  “Services. Yes, Father. I will not hesitate to call upon you.”

  “Thank you, Don Pedro.”

  “Adiós, Father.”

  Father Martínez nods gently and begins his journey down the hill to the village of El Caliz. I watch him as he goes, a short square of shifting black against the jungle’s verdancy.

  I turn back to the grave and pat the earth gently with the shovel, so that the animals will be less inclined to disturb it. Then I step away. This is where he wished to be buried, near his squat memorial. The catastrophic I, when dead, turns necrophiliac and seeks to clothe its transient, dusty self in the permanence of monumental stone.

  I place the shovel on the ground beside the grave and walk down toward the river, slapping the red, chalky clay from my hands. Perhaps, when I die, they will throw me into its depths, so that I might bring brief excitement to the piranha.

  THE FEAST is prepared for El Presidente. The tables are set with the riches of the Republic, with its natural plenitude and its inexhaustible labor. The flies are kept away by servants fanning the tables with peacock feathers, so that when El Presidente arrives, he will find nothing diminished from this creation.

  After a little time, I hear the sound of the helicopter as it moves over the far ridge. It is silver in the sun, and from it El Presidente watches the earth below as if he created it. When it lands, a few meters from my compound, the dust rises like a golden cloud.

  I walk out and stand near the twirling blades. My white suit billows behind me like Ludtz’s crimson scarf. When the blades cease their noisy rotation, two guards leap from the body of the helicopter and come to attention. Then they turn toward the door and extend their hands to El Presidente.