Love and Other Ways of Dying (27 page)

Above, the electric tubes were lit brightly in the night, and from my vantage here in the basement you could see the crowns of people’s heads reflecting off the glass ceiling of the tubes as
they were lifted toward the satellites. If you sat long enough, looking down on the crowns of their heads, you could have imagined yourself an angel. And it occurred to me that if you sat long enough thinking such dangerous thoughts, you might never leave either.

B
ENEATH THIS BLACK ROOF
,
ON A
well-clipped block in a small midwestern town on the Wabash River, a professor opens his eyes in the dark, confused at first by an outline under the sheets, this limp figure beside him in bed. From some primordial haze slowly comes recognition, then language:
bed, sheets, wife
 … 
Andrea.
He kisses her and rises. He is fifty-eight years old, and he wakes every morning at this ungodly hour, in his finely appointed brick house with exploding beds of lilies, phlox, and begonias. After three heart attacks, he goes now to cardiac rehab. Wearing shiny blue Adidas sweats, he drives off in the family’s Nissan. Once at the medical center, he walks briskly on the treadmill, works the cross-trainer machine, and then does some light lifting. It’s a standing joke that if he’s not there at 6:00
A
.
M
. sharp, the staff should just put on ties and go straight to the funeral home. After his workout, as he drives to his house, the town glows in a flood of new light; the river bubbles in its brown banks as the flies rise; the lawns are almost too bright, green with beauty and rancor.

He feels better for this visit, more alive, another day on earth ensured, another chance to breathe in the smell of cut grass before a spasm of summer lightning. He takes Lopressor, Altace, and aspirin to thin his thick blood. Even now fragments accumulate, arteries begin to clog, his cardiac muscle weakens, slows, speeds again to make up time. There is so little time.

He wears his silvered hair neatly parted. A creature of habit, he’s worn the same style of round tortoiseshell-frame glasses for thirty years. He drinks a cup of chai every afternoon of his wellplotted life at a café near his office at Purdue University, where he teaches medical illustration. He is a humble, somewhat conservative man, a Roman Catholic whose joy in the simplest things can be overwhelming, inexplicable. After his third heart attack, when they jammed tubes into him and he was pretty sure it was over, he became insistent. “Just tell me I’m going to mow the lawn again!” he said to his doctor. “Tell me I’m going to mow the lawn!”

These were nearly his last words.

If this man can be oversensitive and a bit obsessive, if he has an exact recall of the big and small injustices that have been done unto him—he keeps old hurtful letters on file—he knows he must unburden himself now, make peace with those in his life: wife, children, friends, colleagues. And with the vanished ghosts that roam the rooms of his memory: mother, father, brother.

And what of Pernkopf? What of Batke?

He can’t fathom where to begin with the Book, now forever out of print, effectively banned. When considering it, he often conjures the language of some illicit affair: rapture, consumption, shame. And if he was betrayed by that lover, does it lessen all those days he spent in love? Ah, the Book, the nearly unbearable perfection of its paintings, and then, weltering behind it, armies clashing across the face of Europe, six million spectral Jews.
Under pressure, history splits in two: the winners and the losers, the righteous and the evil.

It’s not like this man to act impulsively, to yield control, to risk missing cardiac rehab, to wander seven thousand miles from his dear doctor, but he does. He packs a bag with some old journals, drives from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, and gets on a plane. He travels eight hours in coach, through spasms of lightning, wearing his Adidas jumpsuit, hair neatly parted. Fragments accumulate; arteries begin to clog. He drinks some wine; he pores through his journals, these copiously recorded memories of a sabbatical he took twenty-three years ago, when he went on a pilgrimage to find the Book’s greatest artist, when he still worshipped—yes, really, that’s the word—the Book’s achievement. He naps, wakes, reads his decades-old handwriting again. If he were to die on this plane, in a hotel lobby in Vienna, in the echoing halls of the Institute searching for some truth, will he have been cleansed? After all, he didn’t do the killing or throw the bodies from the window. He didn’t spew the hate that incited a hemicycle of fanatics.

No, his sin, if that indeed is what it is, was more quotidian: He found beauty in something dangerous. There are days when he can’t remember how it began, and nights when he can’t sleep, remembering.

A cloudy afternoon, Vienna, 1957. A man sits and smokes, a body laid before him. A creature of habit, he wears a white lab coat and a white polyester turtleneck, no matter what the weather. He is small, with a crooked nose and skewed chin that give him the appearance of a beat-up bantamweight. He has a lot of nervous energy, except when he sits like this. When he sits like this, he seems almost dead, a snake in the heat of day. Before him lies a nameless
cadaver that was brought up from the basement of the Institute, from the formaldehyde pools of torsos and limbs, then perfectly prepared like this: an incision, a saw to the breastbone, the rib cage drawn open, the heart removed. He stares at this open body, looks down at the floor, stares some more.

In his right hand, he holds a Habico Kolinsky, one with long sable hairs, his brush of choice. On the rag paper before him, he has sketched some rough lines, has plotted his colors. And now, after this prolonged stillness, he bursts from his chair. He paints across the entire canvas, maniacally, almost chaotically. He lays in washes of color, gradually building the glazes. His hand darts back and forth. He goes at the bronchus and then the thoracic duct. With his tongue, he licks the brush and lifts off pigment to show phantasmic light on this internal landscape. He flicks turquoise here and there to make the fascia appear real. What he does is highly intricate, but at this speed it’s like running on a tightrope. He is in deep space, underwater, gravityless. He works in a fever, shaking and levitating. Weeks pass, and still he stands before this painting, this body.

What is his desire? To be a rich man, to paint what he chooses, to hang in museums, to make love to beautiful women, but he is on the wrong side of history. And yet he isn’t a demagogue or a war criminal. He is merely a trained fine artist who must paint dead bodies for the money—and that’s what he will do, for nearly five decades of his life: brains, veins, viscera, vaginas. Perhaps his sin is quotidian, too: In 1933 he says yes to a job because he’s hungry, and so sells his soul, joining Pernkopf’s army of artists, which soon becomes part of Hitler’s army. Now a silver light pours thickly through the tall glass windows. He lifts pigment, then swabs his brush over the
Aquarellfarben
cake. He expertly paints in the ascending aorta and pulmonary trunk, giving them ocher and purple colors. He creates this astral penumbra
of arteries and air pipes, galaxies within the body. For one moment, he does it so well he vanquishes memory. It has always been just him and the canvas. And as certain as he will be forgotten, with each painting he believes he won’t. He is the righteous one, the butcher’s son made king.

They don’t know how to treat him, this unusual specimen, this volcanic event. He shakes and levitates in his temporary palsy. It is the summer between seventh and eighth grades, 1957. Far away, in another world, an unknown man named Franz Batke paints in Vienna while this unknown boy, David Williams, has some sort of infection. His body has burst out with huge open sores on his face, back, and chest. The shots put him into a high fever that brings on convulsions. He is a supernova; he could be cursed.

Outside, the Michigan sun burns, it rains lugubriously, and then there is bright light on the panes again. The floor shines with menace. There is no explanation for this suffering. No treatment that the doctors can find. Inside him a cell has split in two. He is a boy who, by some internal chemical flood of testosterone and disease, is fast becoming something else, a different animal.

In the fall, he is released from his hospital cell. He lifts weights and runs the sand dunes by the lake to build his body back. He dreams of being the middleweight champion of the world, the kid from Muskegon, Michigan, hitting someone so hard that he separates the guy from his body. If only he could convert his rage to power and skill, it might happen. After school he takes a football and runs through the cornstalks in the backyard, pretending each stalk is a tackler. It is twilight now, and the boy has been running through these cornstalks for hours, for days. His shirt is streaked with blood from where he’s been
stabbed by the stalks, the scabs broken open, releasing pustulants from the body. When he heals, his skin will be runneled and pocked. He will always live a word away from that good-looking upperclassman, the one in the locker room who, before everyone, called him Frankenstein. It will take him decades to understand these scars and what has happened to him. What has happened to him?

Years later, after crossing an ocean in search of something he can’t put a name to, he finds himself in a room with the old man, who smokes so many cigarettes it seems he is on fire. They talk about the thing they both love most: art. Sitting in that studio in Innsbruck, David Williams, the would-be middleweight champion of the world from Muskegon, Michigan, who speaks in faltering German, feels immediately at home with this Austrian, Franz Batke, who speaks no English and who, unbeknownst to him, is a former Nazi. How has this happened? Because they speak only of art. Williams will write in his journal, “I am truly beginning to see this man as a genius.” After all, among the scarred carapaces of lost civilizations, among the ugly ruins and tormented dreams of history’s fanatics, some beauty must rise, mustn’t it?

Mustn’t it?

The cell has split in two. There is no diagnosis, no explanation. Clouds cover the city, hyena-shaped, turning on themselves. The tanks are rolling, and the people come out of their houses, clutching bouquets to pledge allegiance to their invaders, without fully understanding. They throw flowers and sing. They are thin already, engraved by rib cages and dark rings beneath their eyes. It is not easy to understand. Their euphoria is blinding.

On this morning, Eduard Pernkopf rises at 4
A
.
M
. He is a short, portly man with gray-blue eyes, dour and phlegmatic,
though not entirely humorless. He wears round glasses and diligently reads his well-thumbed Schopenhauer. He has a scar on his left cheek from a duel he once fought. It is hard to imagine this particular fellow in a duel. And it is equally hard to imagine what moves inside him—ambition, zealotry, some canted idealism? Or is it just sickness? He has thyroid problems and crippling headaches. A blood clot is moving slowly toward his brain. When his first wife dies of tuberculosis at twenty-seven, he pens a symphony dedicated to her titled
The Pleasure and Pain of Man.
He marries her sister. He smokes exactly fifteen cigarettes a day. He comes to care about only two things: the Book and the Party.

The Book begins as a lab manual while Pernkopf is teaching at the Anatomy Institute in Vienna. He needs a dissection guide to help students better identify the organs and vessels of the body, but he finds other anatomy texts outdated or unsatisfactory, and he is a perfectionist. He soon has what seems like an impractical dream: to map the entire human body. And this dream is what leads to his life’s work: an epic eponymous four-volume, seven-book anatomical atlas, an unrelenting performance spanning thirty years of eighteen-hour workdays. Here our mortality is delivered in Technicolor, in eight hundred paintings that illuminate the gooey, viscous innards of our own machine, organized by regions: the Chest and Pectoral Limb; the Abdomen, Pelvis and Pelvic Limb; the Neck; and the Topographical and Stratigraphical Anatomy of the Head.

The group he recruits to paint comprises fine artists, some of whom have trained for years and are known as
akademische Maler.
At this time—the early 1930s—there is no work in Vienna. People scrounge for crumbs. Beggars line the streets. On Fridays shopkeepers leave small plates of pennies out for the poor. A rich person is someone who owns a bicycle, and the artists take their jobs willingly, thankfully. Perhaps in another place
and time, they’d be famous for their watercolors of Viennese parks or Austrian landscapes. But here they draw the cold interiors of the human body.

Pernkopf oversees these men and women: four, seven, nine, then eleven artists in all. Perhaps he is dimly aware that this moment may never repeat itself. Never again will social conditions warrant that so many talented fine artists gather together to detail the body, and never again will the art of medical illustration veer so close to that of fine art itself. The book will coincide with the discovery and refinement of four-color separation: All anatomical works before it will seem to be from Kansas, while
Pernkopf’s Anatomy
will seem to hail from Oz.

For his part, Pernkopf directs the dissections and preparations of the cadavers for painting. These preparations can be exacting, hour upon hour spent pinning back skin on a forearm, scraping fascia from a bone, sawing skulls open to reveal a fine minutiae of arteries, the skein of veins beneath the dura. But he learns quickly: The better the preparation—the more fresh and vivid the viscera—the better the painting.

He is driven by ideas of accuracy and clarity. He stresses again and again: The paintings must look like living tissue, even
more
alive than living tissue, if such a thing is possible. He strikes a deal with a publisher named Urban & Schwarzenberg, which after seeing the early work is convinced that Pernkopf’s book may one day be mentioned in the same breath as da Vinci’s sketches of the body, Vesalius’s
Fabrica
, or Sobotta’s
Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen.