Ritter turned the lamp so it shone straight upon the jar sitting in the middle of the desk. “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “Look more closely.”
Pavli leaned toward the jar. The thickness of the glass distorted the two objects floating inside. He saw a milky-white sphere streaked with red, then, as it turned, a circle of jewel-like blue. The other drifted toward him, its red tail twisting behind, exactly the same but that it bore a circle of golden-brown, a dot of black at the center…
Then he knew what had happened to the woman’s babies. Or to at least one of them.
“Those fools,” murmured Ritter, as he laid his hand on the side of the jar, contemplating the pair of eyes suspended in preserving fluid. “This is the use they make of my lovely children…”
This is a dream, thought Pavli. I’m still asleep. I didn’t wake up. I never woke up, I just went on sleeping and dreaming, not even in this bed here… I’m not here, I’m in my bed with my brother Matthi sleeping next to me. The eyes – a child’s, smaller in diameter than an adult’s – gazed back at him, as though he were part of the dead child’s dreaming. And I’ll wake up, and I’ll get dressed and walk out onto a little narrow street in Berlin. And that will be real… not like this…
“He had already dissected this one.” Ritter’s voice sounded far away. “The other child had already been given its injection and was dead, but hadn’t had the knife taken to it yet.”
Not a dream. Pavli drew back from the jar, feeling dizzy and nauseous. “Who… who did this…”
Ritter’s expression turned to disgust. “That idiot Mengele. At the camp in Auschwitz -”
Pavli had heard the name before. Not the man’s name, but the word that was the German for the Slovenian village – Oswiecim – from which the false gypsy had returned with all his whispered stories. “It was in Block Ten,” said Pavli. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.” Ritter nodded. “That is where my esteemed colleague Mengele performs what he likes to think of as his experiments. It’s all just butchery. I’m appalled to think that the man actually has a medical degree, that he studied with Mollinson and von Verschuer. When I heard some of his crackpot notions…” Ritter tilted his head back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I knew of the man’s obsessions with twins – he sorts them out himself, as each new trainload is brought in. The little ones call him Onkel, he treats them so well, with bits of candy in his pockets for them. Pets and fusses over them, right up until the moment he takes them into the dissection room…” A shrug. “He fancies himself an expert on the matter of human eye coloration – he has some notion that he can change brown eyes to blue, by injecting coal tar dyes directly into the pupils. Perhaps he thinks he can turn dark-eyed Jews into Aryans that way. That’s the level of his scientific thinking. Of course, he just winds up blinding the poor little bastards with his needle.”
“So he came here.” Pavli had begun to understand. “This Mengele – he came here. Because of us… because of the Lazarenes…”
“I’d warned him off. I told him there would be hell to pay if he tried to snatch any of my heterochromes for his stupid experiments. He wouldn’t be able to resist – his obsessions have reached the point of madness by now. That’s why I gave specific orders to all the guards here. If Mengele turned up with transfer orders for any of my research subjects, nothing was to be done in my absence; it didn’t matter from how high up the orders came, how urgent he made them sound.” Ritter laid his hand on the jar’s curved stopper. “Whatever he used to bribe that fool Jurgen, to let him in here and take away those twins, I hope Jurgen found the price satisfactory.”
The things of which Ritter spoke still sounded dreamlike. It was as if he and his rival dealt in some rare form of livestock, an unusual breed of rabbits to be kept in cages at the back of their laboratories.
“This time, however, that quack Mengele overreached himself.” A thin smile formed on Ritter’s face, his eyes half-lidded, as though contemplating some pleasant memory. “I don’t think he realized how highly my research is regarded by the officers of the Ahnenerbe. The greatest degree of personal support is afforded to me by Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler himself. And why wouldn’t it be so? Mengele amuses himself, down there in that little hellish empire he has created in his Block Ten, with his muddleheaded injections and dissecting sprees; that is all that having power over human lives means to him. While I…” Ritter nodded slowly, savoring his own words. “I will penetrate to the heart of that life. The seal of the scrolls will be broken, and every mystery will be read out to me…”
The doctor’s voice dwindled to silence. In his nervousness, Pavli had drunk most of the fiery alcohol in his glass. Its warmth spread across his chest and through his limbs. The room seemed bigger now, its walls fallen away, leaving him and Ritter in a space bound by the glow of the desk lamp. At the center was the jar with the child’s eyes inside, turning and gazing upon them in wordless judgment.
“Do I frighten you with such wild talk? My apologies.” The alcohol made Ritter clumsy; his hand knocked over his empty glass, and he watched it roll off the desk’s edge and fall to the floor. “You must understand, Iosefni… there is no one else to whom I can speak of these things. Not of how they really are. I’ve managed to convince Himmler of their importance, so we won’t be bothered by that butchering clown in Auschwitz again. But Himmler – he’s a simpleminded mystic, always listening for voices from beyond. He can’t tell the difference between what I’m doing and all his collection of ancient runes and horoscopes; it’s all the same to him. The entire Ahnenerbe is that way; there’s no one who understands. But you, my invaluable photographer…” Ritter leaned forward, head lowered to the level of his shoulders, his face heavy with drink. “ You understand… because you and I are so much alike…”
“What…” Pavli’s tongue thickened in his mouth. “What do you mean?”
“We are both so close… to knowing.” Ritter spread his hands against the desktop, to keep himself from falling forward and knocking over the jar. “I have spent the better part of my life studying the Lazarene Community. Everything that could be learned, from the outside. The history, the legends, the lies. And you, Iosefni… you were born in it. You are of the Lazarene blood. Yet neither one of us knows. The secrets… the truth. Mysteries.”
The other man’s words sobered Pavli. He felt a touch of fear, as though he had been walking in a dark forest and had spotted, far off among the dense, moss-covered shapes, another shape, one that moved and then disappeared. “Perhaps…” Pavli spoke carefully, treading in silence, waiting to see if that distant figure would show itself again. “Perhaps there is nothing to know. Perhaps it’s all just… nothing. Nothing at all.”
“You show a commendable loyalty to your brethren.” A lopsided smile twisted Ritter’s face. “But you can’t fool me. My study of the Lazarenes extends to you as well, Iosefni. I can sense how you feel. How you look at the other ones, the words – or the lack of them – that pass between you and the rest. How it must feel to have been cheated that way… to have had the great pearl of knowing snatched away from you…”
He spotted the figure in the darkness again, closer. “They did that… they did it to protect me.” He stopped himself from saying the words from you.
“Yes… of course they would say that. Your brother would tell you that, wouldn’t he? Even if – let us say – even if they weren’t concerned about you at all. About what happens to you. Perhaps they’re just concerned about their precious secrets. The secrets of their faith. And if they thought that you were weak… that you couldn’t be trusted with those secrets… that you could be made to tell them… to me, let us say…” Ritter raised an eyebrow as his smile widened. “Then that’s different, isn’t it? From what they told you.”
He could almost see its face. “But… that’s not true. It’s not. My brother didn’t lie to me.”