Schultze, one of their teachers, a world-famous expert on racial-biological measurements and measurement techniques, a very proper older gentleman with fuzzy silver-gray hair and cheeks made rosy by burst capillaries, had also come back to the school. A not easily approachable but very musical man, he mainly hummed and whistled to himself. Every month he spent a week, sometimes two, in his separate little room in the attic loft, full of instruments and implements that could be seen nowhere else.
He ordered boys by name up to his office and he himself came downstairs only at mealtimes.
Sometimes his word would tip the final judgment about a boy, but nobody, absolutely nobody, talked about this, not with the other boys and not with any outsider.
They had to go up to him at impossible times.
That is what the instructions were: they had to go to him whenever he called and no matter what activity they were engaged in at the time. There was nothing in the attic but two offices, convalescence rooms, storage rooms, and spaces for various discarded objects, kept in meticulous order behind locked doors and accessible only to the housekeeper.
And to the unusual silence, which surprised everyone and immediately held them captive.
Up here, one could hear, at most, voices or echoes of shouts from the other side of the brook, from the great meadow, or from the sports fields, squeezed in between high retaining walls and glistening with snail trails. Or Schultze’s singing behind closed doors; he often talked to himself in recitative, as if he were performing in an unknown large-cast opera.
The boys would listen to the creaks of the floor or crossbeams while waiting in front of Schultze’s office.
During the examination, Schultze kept his eye on the limb he’d chosen and his ice-cold instruments; nothing else interested him. Occasionally he’d jot something down but hardly ever said anything, preferring to point, indicating that a boy should turn this way or stand over there. Never looked anyone straight in the eye, probably wasn’t curious about the boys. The instruments clinked and clanged. If he especially liked something or was dissatisfied with a result, he would click his tongue.
Let us now look at this marvelous distance, O Tibiale, wherefore hast thou receded so from Stylion.
These were not Greek gods but measuring points on the human body.
Or he would sing something like, O Symphyse, tremble not while from on high Omphalion keeps an eye on thee. These musical mutterings meant that the knee joint on a standing person with arms at his side was farther than usual from the wrist joint, or that the skin over the pubic bone should not tremble nervously, since he was doing nothing to it except, with his instrument designed for this sort of measurement, marking its distance from the navel. Not everyone feared him. The instruments were always cold, so even the bravest boys dreaded that first touch. In ordinary Latin dictionaries, the boys did not find the names Schultze used. They also worried that Schultze might touch their naked limbs and other exposed parts. Two life-size drawings of the human skeleton hung on the wall, with the measuring points of the body marked with numbers. One drawing, of the body in profile, had twenty-seven points; the other, a frontal view, showed twenty-eight points, all according to Braus. This mysterious name was written above both drawings in beautiful Gothic letters, but Braus could not be found in any of the encyclopedias.
Schultze looked at the boys’ eyes while he took out the large leather case in which he kept instruments for assessing eye color. But the leather case so alarmed most of them — the imminent danger making their eyes ache in their sockets — that they quickly closed their eyes or buried their faces in their hands.
In four black-velvet-lined cannonlike cases, glass eyes looked up at the ceiling. They were arranged in five rows, eight to a row, in trays that one could lift out of the cabinet. This meant that there were 160 differently colored and differently patterned glass eyeballs; under each eyeball, on a tiny copper plate sunk into the black velvet, the eye color’s number and letter designation was indicated. Schultze unpacked all this, bringing out all the velvet-framed cases and laying them side by side, the better to see his entire holding. At the bottom of the cabinet, on the last removable tray, there lay on the velvet bed a frightening instrument made of silver and resembling candy tongs, and a strong-smelling, hair-thin sandalwood fan.
Schultze made his first determination with the help of the fan. Individual segments of the fan could be cleverly separated from the others and, along with small enamel panels that showed hand-painted images of the many different eyes, be held up to a living eye in order to identify its color correctly. Although he worked with a steady hand, in his professional excitement Schultze sometimes touched a real eyeball with these small panels lifted to the boys’ temples.
Which of course was enough to make the boys wince.
But Schultze would go on singing, don’t be so sensitive, you little fool.
After this crude definition, he would reach for his ominous silver tongs, with which he could not only lift a valuable glass eyeball adroitly from its velvet bed but hold it with total confidence right next to a real eye. Throughout this activity, he shone strong lights into the boys’ eyes from the front and sides. And he preceded everything by dripping something into their eyes to keep them from blinking. If they resisted or blinked involuntarily, Schultze sang out that intrigue and scheming would not destroy the divine design, the gods cannot be tripped up, and the boys would get more drops in their eyes.
For hours after the examination, the boys would wander about with numb eyelids and enlarged pupils or just sit motionless on a bench, heads buried in their hands.
The light hurt.
Or Schultze would sing, hark, hark, I need but a single secundum, lend me thy patience, Prince, I am on the trail.
For the capital offense, the villain will pay forthwith.
Sometimes the boys would keep rubbing their eyes to gain time.
Don’t pick at it, don’t rub it, unless you want me to take it out with my tongs, my boy. What the devil, so it’s tearing, sang Schultze, and then they had to open their eyes obediently to receive the initial drop or the stabilizing drop or the drop against tearing.
It was very quiet on this floor for another reason: right underneath, on the third floor, were the dormitories, two large and three smaller sleeping halls that during the day were off limits to everyone. All their windows had to be kept open regardless of the season. Even in the vaporous winter cold the halls were barely heated but, because of the high humidity, sometimes in the summer months they tried to moderate the temperature in the rather musty dormitories.
On the second floor were classrooms and the so-called great hall with its two enormous stone fireplaces, thick chimneys, and a chandelier made of painted wood. One could still see, on the gilded rims of the small colorful plates at the base of the electric candles, remnants of guttering wax candles of former days. This large space with its coffered ceiling, painted with great artistry, had once been called the knights’ hall because of two full sets of knight’s armor standing at either side of the entrance. Everything here seemed to have been left where the Thum zu Wolkensteins, who had used them for centuries, abandoned them in somewhat poetic disarray, at which point the baroness turned over the building and the part of the estate that went with it for the protracted use of the institute.