Wolf finally swallowed. The doctor released him, leaving Wolf gasping for breath.
“Opium poppy,” the doctor explained. He picked up his medical bag and grinned as he headed for the door. “You will have good dreams now.”
*
He was in a vast library, surrounded by overflowing bookshelves that spiraled upwards toward a massive domed ceiling. Sunlight streamed in from an oval oculus in the dome’s center. Wind rushed in and out of the room every few seconds with regularity, its force gently rattling the bookshelves as if the structure itself were alive and breathing.
“Excuse me,” someone said. Wolf looked up. The voice belonged to a raven-haired librarian standing behind a reference desk.
He straightened himself and puffed up his chest a little. He felt naked in the white linens. Where was his uniform?
“I remember you,” she said.
Wolf could not place her. “Where did we meet?”
“Here, silly. You were outside burning books with your friends.”
She was mistaken. Wolf was very young during the time of the book burnings, and his mother would not let him go. He blushed nevertheless. He surveyed the girl’s straight teeth and thin, symmetrical eyebrows that had been plucked into gentle curves over her green eyes. He leaned over the desk so that he did not have to speak so loudly.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for something.”
Gazing into her eyes made him forget why he had come. Girls were not allowed at the academy, and he had never even had a girlfriend.
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for books by Karl Landsteiner,” Wolf said in a quiet voice.
“The scientist?”
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows who Landsteiner is.” The girl walked to a large set of files and opened the drawer marked “K.” Ten seconds later, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. He’s still on the list.”
“List?”
“You know. The forbidden authors list.”
“Are you positive? All the German researchers talk about Landsteiner.”
“They’re probably not supposed to.”
“True. It’s forbidden.”
She shrugged. “One minute an author is on the shelf, and the next minute, they are on the list. A few minutes later, they are in the room.”
“The room?”
“Where books go when their authors are on the list.”
“Then I should be authorized to see the room.”
“You should?”
“Yes. I’m with the Ahnenerbe.”
She looked him up and down. “Then why aren’t you in uniform?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s strange.”
“Listen, you’ve got to help me. I’ve been assigned to research breakthroughs in the blood sciences. It’s classified.”
She smirked, as if amused by his lie. Her hand shook slightly as she grabbed a set of keys on a large brass ring.
Wolf followed her to the spiral staircase, watching the way she walked — painfully careful, highly aware of how every movement of her body might be interpreted.
“And where is your family from?” Wolf said. He had meant to simply make small talk and put her at ease, but he saw by her posture that the question had made her tense.
“Bavaria,” she said. “Our family is one of the oldest and most famous in our village.”
“Unquestionably German, then.”
“Unquestionably.”
They came to a set of double doors. The girl unlocked it and held the door for Wolf. He found himself amidst piles of books, some of them above eye level. “Most of the books on the list were burned,” she assured him. “I was told that the books in this room have been preserved for archival purposes only.”
Wolf looked around in wonder, daunted by the enormity of the mess. “How do you find anything?”
She let out a small laugh and led him to an area where books about science had been stacked into piles that resembled roman columns. She quickly located a book by Karl Landsteiner in the middle of a pile and began rifling through the books on top. Wolf pitched in to help, removing a large portion of the stack in one chunk. When he turned and bent down again, he head-butted her by accident, sending her to the ground with her hands covering her forehead.
“Are you all right?” He removed his cap and got down on one knee.
“I’m okay,” she replied in an unconvincing voice.
Wolf took her by the wrists and pried her hands apart. A small bump was forming just above her right eyebrow.
He bent a little lower. He kissed the bump on her eyebrow. She did not move. She stopped breathing. But when he began to stand, she grabbed his face and pulled his lips to hers. He did not know how or why, but kissing came naturally to him.
And then suddenly he was high in the dome, sitting alone at a table on the observation platform. The girl was gone. The light shining in from the oculus was hotter and more intense now, much like the searchlights in the guard towers at Wewelsburg Castle. The sound of the building’s ventilation was louder too. The wind rushed in, then out, in an endless pattern.
He picked up the book the librarian had found for him and unwrapped the brown covering she had protected it in. The book’s title was written in English: The Specificity of Serological Reactions. Although Wolf’s English was quite advanced, he had no idea what serological or specificity meant.
He flipped through the opening pages until he found the biography:
Karl Landsteiner is a Nobel Laureate and considered one of the world’s foremost pathologists, with specialties in anatomy, histology and immunology. He was born in Vienna in 1868, and graduated from the University of Vienna. He spent the next several years in the world’s finest laboratories in Germany and Switzerland. Between 1901 and 1909, he revolutionized the medical world by developing a classification system for blood into types A, B, AB and O, paving the way for the first reliably successful blood transfusions. His work also led to resolving questions of paternity. When he was 21, he converted from Judaism to Catholicism, later serving at a Catholic war hospital during World War I. In the 1920s, he left Europe to work at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. He cut ties with Europe by becoming an American Citizen in 1929. In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1937, he discovered the Rh factor in blood.
Now Wolf understood Himmler’s repugnance at the mere mention of Landsteiner’s name. The world’s foremost blood researcher had once brought glory to Germany, but now embodied everything Himmler hated: Landsteiner was a Jew, a Catholic and an American all at once. And Wolf admired Landsteiner all the more for it.
Goose pimples rose on the young stormtrooper’s arms as he saw the photograph of Landsteiner in his laboratory. The big, inquisitive, forbidding eyes. The gray mustache, aerodynamic, like the wings of a diving bird.
“Read the first chapter,” a man’s voice said.
Wolf looked around. He saw no one. “Father?” he asked. No one answered.
He turned to the first chapter. The text was not what he expected. It did not appear to be a science book. There were no formulas or diagrams. It was scripture, and yet it was not the scripture that he had been taught as a boy. He began to read.
I. And the LORD said, I am God, and I have made you in my likeness.
II. And the LORD asked all people to apply their hearts to seek and to search out all the wisdom on Earth.
III. For to know wisdom, said the LORD, is to bring truth to light, so that all people might know the essence of God.
IV. And so there were many who sought wisdom, collecting and deciphering all of the languages and solving all of the mathematics in the world, and charting all of the stars in the sky, and dissecting and reassembling every living creature, so that all of the knowledge in Heaven might be distributed on Earth.
V. And it came to pass that there were men who sought to keep knowledge for themselves. Would it not be better, they asked, if we alone had the means to communicate with Heaven? Would our communion with the Holy Spirit not be more pure if it were channeled through but a few learned men?