The Economy of Light. Jack Dann
party was over; most everyone had left. “They took the bones to a laboratory,” Filip said. “It looks like this is it.”
“You think that was really Mengele?” I asked.
“It depends on what the forensic doctors have to say, but for my part, I think it’s him. Once the Germans got hold of Mengele’s letters, it was all over. Did you see the couple standing beside the police chief? Wolf and Liselotte Bossert. They took care of Mengele; he was at their beach house when he died. The police found his letters and personal objects at their home in the city, along with a book he’d written.”
I knew most of this. “The Germans really gave you a screwing, didn’t they?”
“Both us and the Americans; this was supposed to be a joint venture. But the Germans conveniently forgot to notify any of us. They just dispatched some of their LKA people down here and flushed it all out. We heard about it when you did, probably; after it was leaked, so the Germans would get the right publicity. But what can you expect from Germans?” Although he was joking, there was a harshness in his voice. He meant it. “Are you feeling better now?”
I stood up, testing. “I feel fine,” I said, although my stomach still hurt. We walked back to the exhumed grave. They had taken everything, every bit of wood from the casket. The gravediggers were standing about, as if admiring the hole they had dug, and then, reluctantly, they began to shovel back the dirt.
“I understand you’re living in America,” Filip said.
I nodded.
“And teaching at university. Why did you leave Israel?”
“I guess I became tired of it all,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted to leave the war behind, I wanted to forget.”
“But you’re here.”
I sighed and looked out over the cemetery at the hundreds of odd angled and weathered headstones, which were like concrete sentences punctuated with the marble and stone crypts and mausoleums of the wealthy. The grass was cut so short it might be used as turf for a golf course, and the sun bleached the gravestones white as bones in a desert. But Mengele’s bones...they were brown, as brown as the water of the Amazon, as brown as the cafuzos who had dug them up. Mengele wouldn’t like that, for surely his bones should be Aryan white. Or so it would seem.
“You said that Mengele had written a book. Have you seen it?” I asked.
“No,” Filip said. “But I understand it was an autobiography. He called it Fiat Lux...Let There Be Light.”
CHAPTER TWO
WILD FIRE
The pain in my stomach was not from bad food, but from bowel cancer. I checked myself into a hospital in São Paulo, where they gave me a private room overlooking a low, flat roof that seemed to exist solely to provide a surface for the television antennae that grew out of the tar like steel plants. In the distance were gray buildings, brick chimneys, and the miasma of pollution that seemed to soften everything in this city...a city I had always hated. I had a small ranch near the gigantic King Ranch, which is in Amazon country just outside of Belém, and I wanted nothing more than to return there and let Onca, a heavy Indian woman of Yąnomamö extraction whom I had hired to take care of the place, look after me. But afraid as I was—and I was terrified—I couldn’t bring myself to return to the States. It was as if I’d never had a life there, as if only the ranch felt like home; and I wanted to forget the university and my whole life in upstate New York. The ranch was the only place I’d ever felt completely comfortable, perhaps because it was so isolated, for even now, forty years later, I associated the steel and concrete of civilization with the camps. I could live and work and teach in cities, but the little boy that still lived inside me could only sleep in the red-tiled stucco house outside of Belém.
I endured the batteries of tests, the stool samples and barium enemas, the GI series and colonoscopies. As if to further complicate matters, I developed an ugly blister on my right cheek, just below where my glasses touch. Then another appeared on my mouth and scalp, and on my chest. The lesions wept a clear liquid; the one in my mouth left a constant bitter taste. My doctor, a no-nonsense woman who wore her long, beautiful black hair in a bun, explained that I had also developed a form of pemphigus, called wild fire, which was found only in certain areas of Brazil. Pemphigus was also a disease that middle-aged Jews were susceptible to. It was a virulent condition, and the usual cure was corticosteroids and antibiotic therapy. But the corticosteroids might increase the growth of the spreading cancer. She would try 75 mg of a drug called Methotrexate.
Still, the wild fire was minor in comparison with the cancer. If I would take chemotherapy and radiation treatments for the cancer, she could give me six months to a year longer to live.
But I would probably need a bowel operation.
And I would have to wear a colostomy bag around on my stomach.
No, I thought. I wasn’t going to live in hospital to gain a few months of pain. I wasn’t going to die to the smell of antisepsis and live in the white rooms near the laboratories. Laboratories.... I could see Mengele’s laboratory in my mind as if I had just left it.
Even as the doctor talked to me, I distanced myself from her and her words. I was numb, in shock, I supposed, and it was like being inside a cool, wet cloud high above the ground. I knew that I would be making a long fall any second now, yet it was as if fear and death and all the other emotions had become mere intellectual states. I considered my own death as if it was someone else’s. Perhaps because I couldn’t bring myself to believe any of it.
I suddenly began to tremble.
I stared out the window at the wild sculpture of rooftop antennae below and could think only of Mengele—Uncle Pepi, who had said that my twin brother and I wouldn’t be in hospital for long. I grimaced, for the sonovabitch had been telling the truth. He had intended on killing both of us. But I had had one up on him. He hadn’t gotten me. He had tried, but he had failed. Or had he...?
Irrational as it was, I found myself blaming Mengele for the cancer and the lesions. I couldn’t help but feel that they were a parting gift from him. As I had looked into the hollows of his skull—I, who was alive and he, who was dead—he had somehow magically transformed my lunch of tainted food into cancer; and like Job’s wife, who had taken that one last look back at Sodom, the place of her youth, I had looked into the dark shadows that had once been Mengele’s blue eyes, and he opened up my skin and made it bubble, as if his death’s-head’s stare was invisible fire scorching my flesh.
I knew then that I was going home...to Belém, back to the ranch. I would die properly. In my own home.
And I would still have one up on Mengele.
* * * *
My fazenda was small, barely four hundred hectares, while the other neighboring ranches were paced out at several hundreds of thousands of hectares. My manager Genaro, who had been a macheteiro, a drifter, drove me home from Belém in my ‘pickoppy’. He was in his sixties, of white and Indian extraction. I knew very little about him, except that he was born near Manaus on the Rio Negro; he was quiet and looked sullen, perhaps because his lower jaw jutted out, but his pale blue eyes revealed an intelligence that seemed to be belied by his habit of reclining wherever and whenever possible. He was tall, thin and wiry, extremely well-muscled for a man his age. He had high cheekbones and black hair greased back away from his high forehead. His left cheek was distended from a roll of tobacco; his front teeth were missing. Yet for all that he was a formidable-looking man. He reminded me of a condor, or some other great, ungainly bird.
We drove down the Belém-Brasilia highway, which was like driving through hell, for much of the land to either side was on fire, and in some places the flames reached toward the cracked red ground along the highway. The sky was dark with smoke. The acrid smell was overwhelming, and the heat came in waves that seemed to suck away every bit of moisture. What wasn’t burning was as scorched and dry as a desert; the burned stumps of trees reached out like props in a Grade