Love and Other Ways of Dying (28 page)

Meanwhile, the cell has split. The Jewish diaspora of the late nineteenth century—one bringing thousands from southern Poland and western Ukraine to Vienna—has also now projected Jews into the highest reaches of society, causing deep-seated rancor. Anti-Semitism becomes commonplace. Even at the Institute,
competing anatomical schools rise under one roof to segregate the Jews from their Austrian detractors, a student army of National Socialists. Passing in the halls, students come to blows.

For Pernkopf this violence is as it should be. From the moment he enrolls as a student at the University of Vienna, in 1907, at eighteen, he joins a nationalistic German fraternity, which becomes the foundation for his later fervency as a National Socialist, including his belief that Jews have corrupted German culture. Shortly after joining the Nazi Party in 1933—which is against the law in Austria at the time—he joins the
Sturmabteilung
, or Brownshirts, the underground uniformed army of Nazis. And then he waits.

Months, then years, pass. Life worsens. The institute is only a microcosm of Vienna itself, of Austria as a whole, of this entrenched hatred pushing up through the dirt of society. On March 12, 1938, Hitler enters the country uncontested, in an open limousine. He speaks from the balcony of the town hall in Linz to crazed flower-throwing crowds and claims his beloved birthplace, Austria, as his own—a blank-check Nazi annexation known as the Anschluss. In Vienna, where Hitler once made watercolors of Gothic buildings, flags bearing swastikas are unfurled. Some feel a rush of hope; others, like Sigmund Freud, who lives only four blocks from the Institute, pack to leave.

And so, on this morning, Pernkopf readies himself for the most important speech of his life. It is 4
A
.
M
., the time he usually reserves for writing the words that accompany the paintings in his atlas. He scribbles in shorthand, striving to find the right intonations and arpeggios, giving words to some echo he hears in his head. Later his wife will type the loose pages, and then he will stand in the hemicycle at the Institute before a room packed with medical school staff, pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler, in his storm trooper’s uniform, a swastika on his left elbow. He will call
for “racial hygiene” and the “eliminating of the unfit and defective.” He will call for the “discouragement of breeding by individuals who do not belong together properly, whose races clash.” He will call for sterilization and “the control of marriage.” And finally he will praise Hitler for being a man who has found “a new way of looking at the world,” as someone “in whom the legend of history has blossomed.”

The speech becomes an overt declaration of war within the university. Jewish students will soon be thrown from the third floor of the Anatomy Institute to a courtyard below, and 153 Jewish faculty members will be purged—some will eventually be sent to concentration camps; others will flee. In this milieu of bloodlust, the bodies of those tried and guillotined after the Anschluss—more than a thousand in all, mostly political opponents, patriots, Communists, and petty criminals, among them eight Jews—will be stacked like cordwood behind the Institute, to be used as preparations for Pernkopf’s sacred atlas. From the legend of these human limbs, his temple rises.

As a child, the boy obsessively draws. He draws humans and animals. He does crude landscapes in watercolor. When he holds a brush in his hand, when he puts that brush to paper, he becomes invisible. He cannot be seen. He has no history, no scars.

He becomes the first in the Williams family to graduate from high school, then goes to community college. In his freshman biology class, he sketches a frog, the insides of a frog, with amazing accuracy and clarity. When his instructor sees it, she tells him about universities where one can learn to draw the insides of frogs—and other animals, including humans.

David the artist may be an enigma to his factory-working parents, but his younger brother, Greg, is an aberration. While
David is short, stocky, and a loner, Greg is tall, angular, and outgoing. As David has his art and science, Greg toys with the idea of becoming a priest.

If the brothers dwell in alternative realities, they unconsciously remain each other’s lodestars, each other’s partial reason for hope. For they have the same goal: to escape the blue-collar drudgery of gray Muskegon and a house that has slowly gone from Norman Rockwell portrait to Ingmar Bergman film, mother listing into alcoholism and mental illness, father burdened by some deeply hidden guilt from his own unspoken past. Each son is searching for some kind of euphoria to obliterate the pain of growing up in this house. At the age of twenty, David abruptly moves to Hamburg to live with a woman he has met when she was visiting the States and who loves him, his scarred self, something he once thought impossible. Greg finds theater and opera, then men and drugs.

Years pass. Greg moves to Detroit, New York City. David splits with the woman in Hamburg, returns home, is accepted into the University of Cincinnati’s medical-illustration program, meets his wife, a schoolteacher, after being set up in a Muskegon bar. Shortly after they marry, he encounters the Book for the first time.

He remembers the exact particle reality of that moment. At the university, he lives in an almost obsessive world in which people spend a hundred hours drawing a horse hock or the tendons of a human arm, in thrall to brush on paper. One of his professors has purchased
Pernkopf’s Anatomy
, a mythic work Williams has heard defined as pure genius, and he goes to the professor’s office to see it.

The books are enormous, with blank green cloth covers. Inside could be almost anything—Monet’s water lilies, pornography, the detailed mechanics of a car—but when he opens them,
when the bindings crack and the dry-cleaned scent of new pages and ink wafts up to his nostrils, there appear before him hundreds of thick, glossy sheets, these wild colors, these vibrant human bodies!

It’s an electric moment, a pinnacle, of which a life may contain not more than a handful. But it is more than just the bright frisson of discovery, the wordless awe before some greater fluency. If this is a book with emanations, with a life of its own, then perhaps what startles him most is the glint of self-recognition that he finds in its pages: While he sees the timeless past in the trenches and deep spaces of the body, he also, oddly—and he can’t yet put words to this—sees his own future.

What he doesn’t know yet, flipping through these pages, is that twelve years from now, as an associate professor, he will take a sabbatical and go in search of the Book, that he will find its last living artist, Franz Batke, who will take him under his wing, impart his lost techniques. He doesn’t yet know that he will return again to Batke just before the old man dies—and learn what he’d rather not know about him. That he will write an academic paper about the Book for an obscure journal of medical illustration, in which he’ll praise
Pernkopf’s Anatomy
as “the standard by which all other illustrated anatomic works are measured.” It will briefly help his academic career and bring him a measure of fame. But with it comes a backlash. He will lose friends, question himself, and be judged guilty of Pernkopf’s crimes by mere association; he will refuse to talk about the Book, curse the day he first saw it.

If this is indeed a book with emanations, as he will come to believe, perhaps even his heart attacks can be blamed on it—Pernkopf, in white lab coat, reaching from the grave for one last cadaver.

The book is blindingly beautiful, an exaltation, a paean, and a eulogy all at once. Page after page, the human body unfolds itself, and with each page the invisible becomes visible, some deeper secret reveals itself. What is it?

Here is an eardrum, whole, detached from the vestibule-cochlear organ and floating in space. It appears as a strange wafered planet. Here is a seemingly glass liver through which appears a glass stomach and then glass kidneys, all in a glass body, an utterly transparent figure, aglow. Here is a skull wrapped in red arterial yarn, and here a cranium packaged in the bright colors of the holiday season. There are eyes that look out, irises in bottomless depth, a disembodied gaze that is the gaze of poetry itself. There is an unpeeled penis, a pulsating liver the color of a blood orange, a brigade of soulful brains, levitating.

And then there are the drawings of dead people—cadavers, faces half intact, half dissected, skin drawn back in folds from the thoracic cavity, heads half shelled, showing brain. Consider Erich Lepier’s watercolor of the neck. In nearly black-and-white-photographic detail, the dead man seems to be sleeping; the intact skin of his neck is supple, his lips are parted, his eyes half closed. His head is shaved, and he has a mustache. Even the fine hairs of his nose are visible. Inside him a superficial layer of the neck’s fascia comes in two strange shades of color: a bluish pearlescent and a translucent olive green. The acoustic meatus, pathway to the inner ear, is visible, as is the mastoid process. Every changing texture is felt, every wrinkle recorded. Half of this dead man is in exact decay and half of him seems alive. The painting is its own kind of pornography, half violation and half wonder.

Or consider Batke’s watercolor of the thoracic cavity after the removal of the heart. It’s like gazing on a psychedelic tree of life: arteries, veins, bronchus, extending like complex branches
inside their bizarre terrarium. Batke employs all the colors of the rainbow, these interwoven lines of yellow, blue, orange, purple, but invented and mixed by him, all these appear as new colors. The bronchus, which rises in the background, is striped and Seuss-like in white and umber. Although the painting’s concern is the minute sorting and scoring of these air and blood tunnels, it still captures an undulating energy, fireworks, the finely rendered thrum of the body. The painting nearly takes wing from the page.

Page by page,
Pernkopf’s Anatomy
is stunning, bombastic, surreal, the bone-and-muscle evidence, the animal reality of who we are beneath the skin. And yet, as incomprehensible and terrifying as these landscapes can be, as deep as our denial that life is first and finally a biological process, hinging even now on an unknown blood clot orbiting toward the brain, on a weak heart, on the give of a vein wall, the Book brings its own reassurance. Lepier’s detached eyes, like spectacular submersibles, Batke’s precisely wrought otherworldly vaginas, Schrott’s abstract, almost miraculous muscles/​ducts/​lymph nodes, Karl Endtresser’s bizarre spinal configurations—all of these slavishly striving for the thing itself while being regarded, through Pernkopf’s eyes and those of the artists, as beautiful, nearly spiritual objects.

So what can be said about this Book? That its intentions are good? That it is a masterpiece? That each painting contains its own genius? And what if a number of these paintings have been signed with swastikas, what then? Is it possible that only Nazis and their myriad obsessions with the body could have yielded such a surprising text?

And what of the dead stacked like cordwood at the Institute, their body parts pulled down by pitchfork? Do the secrets revealed in the Book count less than the secrets kept by it? Does its beauty diminish with these facts or the political beliefs of its general and foot soldiers? In a righteous world, perhaps it should, but does it?

Shortly after the Anschluss, after thousands of Austrians have been conscripted for the front lines of a war against the world, after more and more Austrians have died of starvation, the euphoria fades, the master race begins to devour itself. And yet Eduard Pernkopf ascends, his name a
Hakenkreuz
and a haunted house.

He is first and foremost a scientist, believing, mimicking the racial politics of the Third Reich. Well received by the powers in Berlin, he is first named dean of the medical school, then
Rektor Magnificus
, or president, of the University of Vienna. Shortly after the Anschluss—March 12, 1938—he issues a letter to all university staff: “To clarify whether you are of Aryan or non-Aryan descent, you are asked to bring your parents’ and grandparents’ birth certificates to the dean’s office.… Married individuals must also bring the documents of their wives.”