Lycanthropos (33 page)

"Yes, as
‘
Wise Men,
'
" she finished for him impatiently. "So? Who were they?"

"Well, the Magi were a class of priests in ancient
Persia
. They existed for centuries before Zoroaster, but
eventually became the dominant figures in the rituals of the Zoroastrian religion."

"Dzardrusha," Kaldy muttered pensively in a far away
voice.

Weyrauch turned back to him, startled. "What did you
say?"

"Dzardrusha," he repeated. He frowned and seemed perplexed.

T
he minister felt his customary academic fascination
asserting itself, and he knelt down beside Kaldy and asked,
"Is that Zoroaster, Kaldy? Is Dzardrusha how you say the name Zoroaster in Persian?"

Kaldy shook his head slowly from side to side. "I don't
know, Herr Doctor."

"Then why did you say that word?"

"I don't know, Doctor." He shook his head again, vigorously and with frustration. "You were speaking about Zoroaster and the Magi and the word just bubbled up in my brain." He paused. "Dzardrusha. Dzardrusha." Kaldy sighed. "I don't know what I'm saying."

Weyrauch's brow furrowed in thought, and then his eyes widened. "Wait...wait..." he said excitedly, "perhaps there is a connection…perhaps…"

"Gottfried, will you kindly include me in your
contemplations?" Louisa demanded.

He looked up at her. "Do you know anything about the
Parsi religion?"

"The what?"

"The Parsi religion, the religion of ancient
Iran
, the religion founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster."

She shook her head. "Not a thing."

"Well,"
he said, rising up from his knees, "there was a prophet in ancient
Persia
, some three thousand years ago. No one knows for sure when he lived. Some scholars think it was as recently as twenty-seven hundred years ago or as early as
four thousand years ago. It is certain that he lived after the
Aryan conquest of
Iran
, which was at least four thousand years ago..." He paused. "I use the word ‘Aryan' correctly, by the way, not as the Nazis use it. There really were a people called the Aryans, you know. They conquered
Persia
and
India
at about the same time..."

"Gottfried, get to the point!"

"Yes, yes, the point is that Zoroaster was apparently either a monotheist or at least a dualist. He wandered around ancient
Iran
preaching about one supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, and one primordial force of evil, Angra Mainyu."

"Like God and the Devil?"

"Precisely," Weyrauch said. "Zoroaster
said that the entire universe is nothing more or less than a
stage for the eternal struggle between good and evil, between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, between absolute
righteousness and utter iniquity. And he said that the
struggle goes on constantly
within each human being
!"

Louisa began to discern his drift. "Are you saying that…you think that
Herr Kaldy is...is somehow..."

"A personification, an embodiment, something of that sort? It could be. It could be."

Louisa looked at her husband with astonishment. "Gottfried, are you trying to tell me that Herr Kaldy is
suffering under the curse of a pagan god?! Are you serious?!"

He shook his head, impatient and annoyed, and responded
in a rushed and hurried manner. "There is a school of thought in Progressive Theology which accepts the possibility that the Judeo-Christian tradition of God's
revelation is not the only one, that God did reveal himself
to Zoroaster as Ahura Mazda, and possibly also to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton, as the monotheos Aton."

"Gottfried, please!" she interrupted. "Slow down, and
think, will you? You are a Christian, Gottfried! God is God, and there is no other!"

He paused, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "All right, listen to me carefully."

"I always do." she said sarcastically. "I hang on every word."

"I want to remind you of a few things which you already know, but probably haven't thought about," he went on,
ignoring her remark. "You know what the Babylonian captivity
was, do you not?"

"Of course, I read my Bible." She paused and then added
pointedly, "And I pay attention to it as well." Her husband did not rise to the bait of the implied insult, so she went on, "The Babylonians conquered ancient
Judah
, destroyed the temple in
Jerusalem
, and took the Jews as captives to
Babylon
."

"Correct, and they remained there
until
Babylon
itself was conquered and they were sent back
to
Jerusalem
and ordered to build a new temple to the Lord."
He paused. "Do you remember who sent them back, who released them, who ordered them to build a new temple?"

"Of course I remember," she said, annoyed at his patronizing attitude.
"It
was..." She stopped speaking as she began to understand his point.

"Cyrus the Great," he finished for her, "the King of Persia, a Zoroastrian! Think about the opening words of the book of the prophet Ezra, Louisa. ‘Thus saith Cyrus, the King of Persia: The Lord, the God of Heaven, has given unto me all the kingdoms of the earth,' et cetera, et cetera. Don't you see, Louisa? The Jews and the Persians worshipped the
same God by different names!"

"Gottfried, wait a minute..."

"And when the promise of the Messiah was about to be fulfilled, whom do we find wandering into Judea from out of the east to visit the manger in
Bethlehem
? Zoroastrian
priests! And there's more, Louisa, there's more. The Hebrews
had no concept of the Devil before their contact with the Persians in
Babylon
. The earliest sections of scripture include no explanation of the origin of evil; for example, in the second book of Samuel it says that God caused King
David to conduct a census of
Israel
, and then punished
Israel
because the king had conducted a census. Makes no
sense, does it?"

"No," she agreed, "not if what you're saying is
accurate."

"It is accurate, believe me. Second Samuel, chapter twenty-four, a very early, possibly contemporary account of
the event. But," he said dramatically, "when the same events
are recounted in First Chronicles, chapter twenty-one, written
after
the Babylonian captivity, the census is not God's idea, it is
Satan's
idea. Don't you see? The Persians
believed in the Devil, they called him Angra
Mainyu, and the Jews incorporated that bit of divine revelation into their own, because the revelation came from the same source!"

Weyrauch was startled to hear Janos Kaldy laughing
softly. "This is really quite amusing, Herr Doctor, quite
amusing indeed."

The minister did not know quite how to respond to
Kaldy's laughter. "Kaldy, don't you understand? We may have uncovered something which relates to your origins!"

"Permit me to remind you of what you are trying to say," Kaldy said, his laughter subsiding. "You are saying that for
some reason, God turned me into a werewolf."

Weyrauch did not reply immediately. He remembered
Schlacht's sarcastic blasphemy of a short time before, and was uncomfortable with the realization that he had in all
seriousness suggested essentially the same thing. "Well, I
don't mean that..."

"If it's true, of course, it has another amusing aspect," Kaldy went on. "If I am indeed an ancient Persian, it means
that I am the purest Aryan in all
Europe
!" He laughed again.
"It is fortunate that Festhaller is no longer with us. He would have to classify me all over again!"

"I'm
sorry, Herr Kaldy," Louisa said, "but I don't find
this at all funny. The very idea that someone would blame
this horrible thing on the Lord...!"

"Louisa,
I'm
not saying that, necessarily..." Weyrauch
began.

"Allow me to put both your minds at
rest,"
Kaldy said. "From what our hypnosis sessions have reminded me about my own past, I am at least fifteen hundred years old. I have spoken Latin without being Roman, German without being German, French without being French. I have spoken Turkish and Romansch and the language of the Gypsies, without belonging to any of those nations. The fact that I came up
with a sentence in ancient Persian means absolutely nothing.
For all we know, I once spoke Chinese and Eskimo."

"Of course, Gottfried," Louisa added, relieved and pleased by Kaldy's observations. "You are allowing your learning to interfere with your common sense. You know as well as I do that there is nothing in Christianity or Judaism to allow for the ridiculous, blasphemous idea you were beginning to suggest." She paused. "And I'll wager that there's nothing in Islam or Zoroaster's religion or in any
other legitimate faith either."

Weyrauch nodded slowly as he thought about Kaldy's explanation and Louisa's remarks. "Yes, yes, you're right. I suppose I was just, well, carried away by the intellectual symmetry of the whole thing."

"Intellectual symmetry," Louisa muttered with exasperation. "May the good Lord protect us from our own
intellectuals. It's just as Dietrich always says about Hegel
and Marx and Nietzsche. Our German thinkers can build complex, magnificent thought systems on the basis of ideas that a ten-year-old child could demolish."

The mention of Bonhöffer irritated Weyrauch, and he said, "And that reminds me, Louisa. Helmuth made it very
clear to me that we had better uncover some believable facts
about Kaldy's origins, or when your precious Dietrich is finally shipped off to a concentration camp, you and I will
be there to greet him."

She emitted a curt, scornful laugh.
"I'm
not afraid of
Helmuth."

"Then you are an idiot," he replied seriously. "He isn't
your little cousin in
Lederhosen
anymore, Louisa. He is a
mass murderer."

"Eyewitness testimony from a willing collaborator," she snapped. "An unimpeachable source!"

"Damnation, Louisa, we are in danger!" he shouted.

"Donna," Blasko asked softly in the liquid tongue of the
Alps
, "can you take a moment to tell me what you are all
saying?"

"What was that?" Weyrauch asked. "What did he say?"

"He wants to know what we are arguing about," she replied testily. "And inasmuch as I prefer speaking with him to speaking with you, I shall inform him."

"You do that," Weyrauch muttered and then turned to
Kaldy. "Lie out flat. We must try to go back farther in your
memory..." He paused. "If indeed you are not just playing
with us..."

Kaldy smiled condescendingly as he moved onto his back. "You will pardon me. Herr Doctor, if I say that you are not worth the effort which would be involved in such a deception. I cooperate so that my friend Blasko may escape torture and death, at least temporarily, and because of the remote possibility that you may learn something which will
enable me to
die."

 

As Weyrauch absorbed yet another insult from yet another
source, Colonel Helmuth Schlacht drummed his fingers impatiently upon the surface of a lab table as Petra Loewenstein watched the second hand of the wall clock make yet another slow, regular circuit. "Has it been long enough?" he asked.

"Another minute, Herr Colonel," she replied, keeping her
eyes on the clock. "Just to be certain that his system has
assimilated the enzyme."

Neither Schlacht nor
Petra
nor Corporal Vogel nor the two guards paid any attention to Walter Heine, one time assistant bank president, university graduate, loving father, devoted husband, dutiful son,
Auschwitz
inmate number 456098, Jew. Heine was bound hand and foot, tied to the back of the stiff wooden chair, doubled over in excruciating pain, trembling, sweating, weeping. The solution had been injected directly into the vein in his arm five minutes before, and though he screamed in agony, he had
not died.

"Time enough,"
Petra
muttered and then picked up a
scalpel and approached the shuddering figure. "Sit
up,"
she
ordered coldly. When he did not respond, she pushed his head
back and repeated. "I said, sit up!" Heine struggled to move
his shoulders up to align themselves with his head, and the exertion of his muscles caused a spasm of pain to shoot through his body. He screamed again, but the scream was
ignored just as if it had been the squeak of a white mouse.