The Orchids (14 page)

Of all our words, perhaps the most beautiful, and difficult, is
no
.

“Surely you cannot say no” was what Dr. Ludtz said to me that September day in my laboratory at the Institute of Hygiene. He looked oddly handsome in his uniform, its sleek cut concealing the somewhat portly body beneath.

Langhof did not look up from his desk. “Why not?”

“It isn't done.”

“I have no wish to be reassigned, Dr. Ludtz,” Langhof said. “I'm busy here. How do I know what kind of laboratory or staff I can expect somewhere else?”

“Forgive me, Dr. Langhof,” Ludtz said, “but I don't think it's exclusively a matter of what you want. These are orders, don't forget.”

Langhof smiled and looked up at him. “Orders? When the Leader speaks, that is perhaps an order. But when some low-level functionary speaks, that is a request.”

Dr. Ludtz shook his head. “I don't understand you, Doctor. These reassignments are necessary. You should be honored to receive one. It means you have been singled out for some special mission. Besides — and one should not forget this — reassignments always mean promotion.”

“I've had my fill of promotions. All I want is to do my work and be left alone.”

Dr. Ludtz looked mildly offended. “In times like these, more is expected of us than that.”

“Save your speeches for Special Section rallies, Dr. Ludtz. They have no effect on me.”

Dr. Ludtz stood rigidly in place, staring down at Langhof.

“Please, Doctor,” Langhof said, “I'm busy. Don't you have a new shipment of heads to deal with?”

Dr. Ludtz stiffened. “These jokes are beginning to wear thin, Dr. Langhof.”

Langhof stood up. “I have been in the Institute of Hygiene for three years, and I have yet to be given a piece of significant research. Instead, I get this racial mumbo jumbo or some absurd form of skeletal cataloging.”

Dr. Ludtz glanced fearfully over his shoulder. “Please, Dr. Langhof. Watch yourself.”

“Forgive me. It's just that I am less interested in this sort of research. It may be very important. I don't know. But for me, it's the wrong thing.”

“Then all the more reason to take a new assignment, Dr. Langhof. Don't you see that?”

Langhof sighed like a teenager weary of life's complexity. “Perhaps.”

“No matter what the new assignment is, it couldn't be worse than this. At least, not for you. Don't you see my point? It would be a chance to start over in a new location with a new laboratory and staff, everything new.”

And so the ambitious scientist — who at this time knew nothing of tropical heat or the infirmities of burros — slumped over his desk and considered the possibilities. He sat at his desk, sat quietly at his desk, while Ludtz stood over him, waiting for an answer. He could feel the dread coming upon him, like a pool of black, contaminated water sloshing over his ankles. What might it be, this new assignment? He knew — he would never deny that he knew — of certain improprieties in the east. But he did not know their precise nature. And yet there was this undeniable sense of dread, which was itself a kind of knowledge.

“What do you say, Langhof?” Dr. Ludtz asked. “Will you accept this reassignment? Surely you would be happier in another post.”

Langhof thought for a moment and then allowed his desire to overwhelm his suspicion. Could anything be more dreadful, he thought, than this ridiculous Institute, this parody of science?

“Well?” Ludtz asked.

“All right. All right,” Langhof said. And thus, another step, taken anxiously and with some trepidation. Another step on the route that would lead him through the trails of night, the ruins of snow, and then, later, to that place where an old burro rolled in a pool of swirling blood.

A
LL JOURNEYS
are not the same. I watch Alberto and Tomás as they make their way down the trail to the village of El Caliz. Theirs is a journey into the simplest form of manhood. They will find their street of dimly lighted bars and adobe brothels. They will find the small brown girl with full lips reclining upon her chaos of rumpled sheets. They will place a few sticky bills or perhaps a little change on the scarred bureau with its wobbly, cracked mirror. She will smile, nod, then move her finger over the thin black strap of her brassiere. This is what they are looking for, satisfaction. It is not hard to find.

Juan, however, seems in search of rarer game. His journey is toward the devils who gnaw the orchids, nibbling the leaves rapaciously with their little pointed teeth. Because they do not exist, he will find them in every place he looks.

Still other journeys require more patience, are full of effort, and have no known termination.

Langhof took his reassignment, and began his journey by train. It moved through a polar whiteness that not even night could dull. Ludtz snoozed beside him as the train rumbled past miles and miles of unblemished snow, and it seemed to Langhof, as he stared sleeplessly out the window, that the ancient symbolists had been right in choosing whiteness as the emblem of absolute purity. He turned from the window from time to time, for purity is terribly monotonous, and glanced at the medical bag resting near his feet. Inside were the tools of his art, themselves made perfect by hundreds of years of inquiry — made perfect, as all things finally are, by doubt tirelessly applied to certainty.

Something moved in him again. Not a mystical intimation, but a feeling of grandeur shared between himself and his science, a feeling of connection between himself and the first stirrings of human thought. He had not felt it in years, this sense of being moored to something truly noble, and it was a great joy to recapture an essence he thought had utterly abandoned him. He remembered how, long ago, he had sat in the park after Anna had left him. He remembered how the stars had seemed to single him out for some special purpose. And although the boy he was at that time could not possibly have articulated the message of the stars, the man now riding through the snow, his medical bag at his feet, could. The message was for him always to seek the mystery behind the stars, to apply his considerable intelligence like a probing needle into the panoply of the physical world. Metaphorically, his task was to snatch the stars and twirl them between his fingers, to place them on a slide and inquire into their density and structure. Now, as the train rumbled toward its eastern destination, Langhof could feel his mission rising in him once again. For him, there would be no more Institute of Hygiene, with its obsequious debasers of the empirical; no more prattling nonsense from the political professors who traded thought for rhetoric; no more cringing subalterns with their conspiratorial whispers. Ludtz had been right, Langhof thought; anything would be better than that.

And so the train moved forward like a black snake over a pool of frozen milk, while Langhof grew more and more relaxed as the distance widened between himself and the hated Institute. He saw the last years as an intolerable waste, as bleached of any importance as the bundles of bones that arrived almost daily at the doors of the Institute. It seemed he had been given a second chance — that the stars, though no doubt disappointed in him thus far, had withheld final judgment and had offered him one last chance to prove himself worthy of them. Here in this new climate, where the snow changed everything, where the winds were fierce and clean, where the voice of the Institute could not be heard, where the idiocies of the capital could not reach him, where spineless superiors could not besmudge the clean lines of inquiry — here, in a land made brilliant by starlight shining over snow, Langhof might find the natural habitat that the excesses of the times had denied him, a place where, at last, his work could make him free.

It was late in the afternoon when the train finally arrived at its destination. Langhof and Ludtz quickly disembarked.

“It was a tiring journey,” Ludtz said.

Langhof did not feel tired. He felt exhilarated. “Not too tiring, Dr. Ludtz,” he said. “Rather a pleasant ride, I think.”

A tall Special Section officer stood a few feet from them. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “but you are Drs. Ludtz and Langhof?”

“Yes, we are,” Langhof said.

The officer stepped forward. “Allow me to present myself,” he said. “My name is Rausch. I have been assigned to direct you to the Camp.”

“Excellent,” Ludtz said.

“I hope you had a pleasant journey,” Rausch said.

Langhof inhaled the cool, crisp air. “Very refreshing to be in the countryside again.”

Rausch looked at him quizzically. “Yes,” he said. “You are Langhof?”

“That's right.”

Rausch held up two folders in his right hand. “Your picture is in your dossier.”

“Thank you for meeting us,” Langhof said.

“The Camp is a few miles from the village,” Rausch said. “I have a car waiting.”

“Excellent,” Ludtz said.

Rausch watched him, unsmiling. “Yes,” he said dully. “Well, we'd better be on our way.”

Rausch escorted them to the car and joined them in the back seat. “To the Camp,” he said to the driver.

The car pulled away from the train station, then made its way out of the village. Drifts of snow were piled high along the shoulders of the road. In the distance, Langhof saw two peasants struggling with a mule. They looked like small ink stains on the landscape.

“Is the weather always this brisk?” Langhof asked, feeling talkative.

Rausch kept his eyes on the road, only occasionally glancing over the driver's shoulder to judge the distance traveled. “It is not the best climate,” he said. “Certainly not as pleasant as you have in the capital.”

“Have you been in the capital recently?” Langhof asked amiably.

“Not for years.” Rausch offered no elaboration.

“The capital is full of activity,” Ludtz said.

Rausch said nothing. He kept his gloved hands clenched in his lap.

The car bumped slightly, and Rausch stared about nervously. “There is always the possibility of ambush,” he said.

“Ambush?” Ludtz said with fear.

“Yes,” Rausch replied. “Only a few days ago a major and two lieutenants were killed outside the village.” He looked at Langhof. “One cannot be too careful. Stay near the Camp. That's the safest place.”

It was at this point that Langhof realized, fully rather than simply intellectually, that he was now in a war zone. The snow suddenly appeared menacing, a place where partisans lurked in wait for men dressed like himself.

“But we are so far from the front,” Ludtz protested.

Rausch did not look at him. “The whole world is at war, Doctor. Everything is a war. It is no longer a matter of fronts.”

Ludtz glanced fearfully at Langhof. “I hadn't counted on this.”

“Don't worry,” Langhof said. “We'll be safe once we're in the Camp.” He turned to Rausch. “How far are we from the front lines, may I ask?”

Rausch seemed to sneer. “What difference does it make?”

“I was only asking.”

“Did you think you could spend the whole war in a nice warm office, Doctor?”

“We volunteered for this position,” Ludtz said quickly.

Rausch stared at Ludtz without pity. “Never lie to me, Doctor,” he said. “You were assigned here.”

“Yes, but —” Ludtz stammered.

“What exactly will our duties be?” Langhof asked.

“To take orders. From your superiors,” Rausch replied. He uttered the word
superiors
as if using such a term was a mere convention of language, a way of referring to people of higher rank but lower esteem.

“But surely you have some definite plans for us,” Langhof said.

“Plans?”

“Assignments. Research.”

“Oh, yes,” Rausch said. “We do.”

Langhof attempted to break through Rausch's reserve. “Look, this is all very new to us — to Ludtz and myself. Perhaps you could give us some advice for getting along well in the Camp.”

Rausch turned to Langhof, his face expressionless. “Always keep your pistol close by. Then, if something tragic happens, you can use it to blow your head off.”

As the car moved forward through the brilliantly white fields, Langhof — despite Rausch's dark eccentricities — felt another surge of anticipation. Beside him, Ludtz sat nervously, clearly alarmed. But Langhof could only remember the aridity of the Institute, and compared to that, anything that gave the slightest sign of intellectual fecundity was cause for jubilation. He could sense again the dispensation of the stars.

Farther on, Rausch ordered the driver to pull the car over beside a large wooden ramp. A train puffed and smoked beside the ramp, and Langhof could hear people shouting inside the cattle cars.

“This is how your patients arrive, Doctors,” Rausch said.

Armed soldiers were scurrying back and forth about the train like ants over a carcass. At the far end of the ramp a band was playing a sprightly melody.

Ludtz, who only now seemed to have noticed that the car had stopped, leaned forward. “What's that?” he asked.

“A piece from
The Magic Flute
, I believe,” Rausch replied.

“No,” Ludtz said. “I mean these people in the train.”

“Prisoners,” Rausch said casually. He took a cigarette from his overcoat pocket and lit it.

Langhof sat rigidly in place, watching.

The soldiers had now assembled themselves in a kind of rough order. Some stood, legs spread apart, on top of the train, their machine guns pointing down toward the locked doors. Others had formed a cordon around the train. Some held their guns rigidly forward, others let the barrels droop slightly toward the ground.

“So many prisoners?” Langhof asked.

“Yes,” Rausch said. “Many prisoners.”

At a signal several soldiers stepped forward and began unlocking the doors of the train. The people seemed to explode onto the ground as if vomited from the cars.