A Perfect Madness (4 page)

Julia opened her eyes and looked out
at the passing scenery as the train began slowing down for
Chemnitz, Germany, the first stop since leaving Prague. Nothing was
familiar, nothing to help her capture the same moment fifty-two
years back. There were no green-clad German soldiers crowding the
passenger platforms this time, gawking arrogantly at the packed
railcars of terrified Jewish children, only small groups of
casually dressed people, summer tourists mostly, waiting to move
on. Each station, and the land in between, seemed the same to
Julia. It was as if she had never passed this way
before.

“
This is a terrible
mistake,” she said, glancing at Anna sitting across the compartment
from her.

“
A mistake?”

“
Yes, a damn foolish one,
riding this train trying to live in the past as if it were here in
front of me.”

“
And it’s not?” Anna asked
gently, sensing the disappointment in her mother’s
voice.

“
No, and it never will be.
Your mind may tease you some, letting you feel a distant warmth or
horror for a moment, but never the completeness of the experience
itself.”

“
You must be right,
Mother, because the world’s full of middle-aged people emulating
and dressing and running around like twenty-year-olds and asking
their therapists if that’s alright,” Anna said, laughing, trying to
lighten the moment for Julia, who immediately began laughing with
her.

Happy that the coolness between them
had warmed, Anna began reading the
International Herald
Tribune
again, which she had picked up before leaving the
hotel. Folding over the front page, she stopped suddenly, focusing
her eyes first on a small photograph at the bottom of the page
before reading the few lines next to it.

“
What a strange thing,”
she blurted out. “A grotesque naked body of an old man was found
late last night sprawled across Rabbi Loew’s grave in the Old
Jewish Cemetery. And—”

“
What are you
saying?”

“
The story says the man
lying across Rabbi Loew’s grave was naked and wrinkled with age as
an old rhino, his eyes staring at nothing, much like the piles of
dead waiting for the furnaces at Auschwitz. In one hand was a small
crumpled pink name tag, the kind babies used to wear in a
hospital.”

“
How did he die, does it
say?”

“
No, but the indications
are it was suicide,” Anna said, handing the paper to Julia and
pointing to the picture of the dead man.

“
He looks so much like the
man I talked with briefly on Charles Bridge.”

“
What man? You’re not
making any sense.”

Anna then told Julia about her
encounter with the strange man on the bridge by the Crucifixion and
the insaneness of their dialogue. It was as if their meeting was a
prelude to what was to come later. That is, if he was the same man.
She couldn’t be sure, Anna told Julia, but the lifeless eyes were
the same.

“
That is a good story,
much better than the ones I’ve told you lately. We must talk about
it some more after I have rested,” Julia said, leaning back against
the cushion again and closing her eyes.

It was a good story, but it bothered
Anna that the dead man might very well be the stranger on the
bridge. She really couldn’t tell for sure, but the closer she
looked at his face the more certain she became. The article said
little about him, though, not even how he died or who he was. If he
was the stranger, it would be foolish for her to think their brief
conversation earlier on Charles Bridge was connected in some way to
his death. Yet, if suicide was the cause of the man’s death, her
sharp words criticizing the atonement could have pushed him over
the edge. It doesn’t take much, when someone is looking for an
excuse to die.

Looking at Julia sleeping, Anna
believed one year, maybe two, was all that was left of her mother’s
incredible journey in this world. Maybe it will continue in the
next one, if there is one. It would be a shame to deprive God of
such an experience. Feeling drowsy herself, Anna stretched out on
the long compartment seat. The one story she had expected to hear
from Julia this morning remained untold: last night’s visit with
Abram. Why she had been purposely excluded by Abram still puzzled
her. The deaths of her grandfather and grandmother in the gas
chambers meant nothing to her, other than the sadness Julia might
still feel about their loss, or the way they died. She didn’t know
them, or any of the other six million Jews that were murdered. They
were Jews and she was, too, and that was the closest she would ever
be to them. Julia had told her beautiful stories about her mother
and father, and Anna knew she would have loved them dearly had she
known them. And she would have loved Erich, too—more so, in fact,
if he were her father. When the stories began again on the long
flight home, which they would, she would ask Julia about Abram and
Erich, but mostly about Erich.

***

THREE

Prague, 1938

I
t was during the
second year of his medical studies at the German University in
Prague that Erich fell in love with Julia. Madly in love, is the
better term, with a Czech student in her medical studies also, who
just happened to be a Jew. “Not just a Jew,” he would say to other
German students who questioned him about such a precarious
relationship, but a brilliant, beautiful woman, aspiring to be a
doctor like he was soon to become. Yet, it was the worst of times
for lovers such as they. With the
Anschluss
in Austria now
complete, Hitler was looking eastward to the Sudetenland and Prague
itself. What was happening to the Jews in Germany only compounded
the fears of those living in Czechoslovakia. Still, whether it was
plain foolishness, or plain passion, Erich and Julia seemed to
believe the times didn’t matter. Their love was real, and they
thought themselves different from all that was around them.
However, their world would matter to his father, Erich knew, and
for now, he could say nothing to him of Julia and his love for
her.

Julia had entered his heart and life
one autumn morning coming through the forward door of the large
classroom, quite late to a special lecture on Husserl’s
phenomenology. Hesitating for a second, surveying the crowded
six-tiered rows of students, she spotted the empty seat next to
Erich and immediately moved to it, dropping her books loudly on the
table.

“
Good morning, Erich
Schmidt, I am Julia Kaufmann,” she proclaimed boldly, glancing his
way before turning quickly to face the large blackboard on which
Professor Edelstein was busily scribbling a series of Socratic
questions for the class to consider.

Though they had been in the class
together for one week, Erich had paid little attention to Julia
until this morning, as he watched her move rapidly with an unusual
grace to the vacant seat beside him. A grace on grace, he would
later call it. She was short and petite, with long, flowing raven
hair and deep-set eyes full of laughter, the kind you like seeing
life through, and skin so femininely delicate one would shy to
touch for fear of harming it. She was beautiful, was all Erich
could think, just beautiful. What would eventually capture Erich’s
heart, though, was that which few could see until they knew her: an
irrepressible liberation and beauty of the soul that could exist in
the worst of times.

For the next several sessions, Erich
sat behind Julia, or in front of her, but always near her. Before
class and after, furtive glances would be exchanged between
them—sometimes a nod, but nothing more, as if saying the game would
go no further. Finally, perhaps emboldened by the intense morning
discussion on the ancient Greek virtue of courage, Erich walked
straight to Julia at the end of class, and in the firmest voice he
could muster announced his interest in her.

“
I am going to the Old
Town Café for morning coffee and would like very much for you to
join me.”

Julia waited several seconds before
responding to the invitation she had secretly hoped would soon come
from him.

“
Are you sure that is what
you want?”

“
Certainly. Why do you
ask?”

“
I am Jewish and you are,
well, German. The days are becoming extraordinarily difficult for
the Jews there.”

“
I know, but this is
Prague, not Germany.”

“
Prague may not be
different either. Hate has its own legs, and has a way of moving
on. There is much angry propaganda here now against the Jews—the
Nazis are good at that.”

“
Things will settle down,
I’m sure. Anyway, we’re just two small people in all that is
happening. So, will you have coffee with me?”

“
Yes, but first I must
talk with my father; he will want to meet you. Then perhaps
tomorrow we can share a table together,” Julia said, smiling as she
turned from Erich and walked away.

Meeting Julia’s father and asking his
permission to take her to a café for coffee seemed so formal and
wasn’t what Erich had expected from her. His whole life had been
formal, regimented by a father that followed only one path in life:
tradition. As a father, he was undemonstrative and could neither
share his feelings with his family nor deal with the feelings they
had for him. He had never uttered the words “I love you” to Erich,
or to anyone else in the family, and Erich often wondered how he
and his mother ever got to the marrying stage. Any sex between them
had to be an expected formality of marriage, nothing more. From the
day he first could remember being in time, every waking moment
seemed regimented. It was only in the dark shadows of the night
that his imagination became free to think of things that might be.
And as he neared manhood, it seemed to Erich, in looking back on
his life, that all of his childhood had been collapsed into a
single afternoon. And even then he pretended love was always there,
or something like it, until the day it came to him with Julia.
Nothing he had experienced growing up in his family had prepared
him for the emotions he felt the moment Julia first touched his
hand, nor the warmth afterwards. From then on, he believed that
love could grow many different blossoms because the seed was the
same in everyone, planted in us at birth by God. Dried up long ago
by the arid formalities of his own father and mother, he had simply
failed to nourish it, and it had died. He liked to believe it was
still there in his father, too, perhaps, thirsting for the
wellspring of human touch.

Yet doctoring came easy to Erich,
though not by choice. It was a necessity for his salvation if he
wanted to remain a Schmidt, because it was a tradition. Both his
father and grandfather had studied with the great bacteriologist
Koch at his institute in Berlin, eagerly embracing the new science
and the miraculous revolution it was bringing to medicine. Though
doctoring was in Erich’s blood, his mind fancied other intellectual
disciplines much more than medicine, especially the fields of
philosophy and theology. In 1926 this fancy was confirmed. At age
seventeen, he reluctantly accompanied his father to attend a
conference being held at the renowned eugenics research institution
in Cold Springs Harbor, New York. There the exciting new world of
eugenics swirled around Erich and his father like the newness of
early spring winds, though he quickly developed a distaste for its
radical preaching. Led by an American doctor, Charles Davenport,
and the renowned German physician-geneticist, Fritz Lenz, social
Darwinism moved to center stage carried on the arms of a science
already showing the first signs of a madness that was yet to come,
one that would hark back to the ancient Greeks when wholeness was
the norm, and anything less was unworthy of life. If all that we
have built as an advanced civilization is to be preserved,
cleansing the gene pools by sterilizing the unfit must become the
scientific standard, Davenport and Lenz and many of the other
leading scientists attending the conference loudly
proclaimed.

With Erich fidgeting by his side, Dr.
Schmidt listened in awe to the major scientific papers underscoring
the sweeping eugenics passion in the United States for sterilizing
criminals and mental patients and prohibiting marriage between
people of different races. Some went even further in their rush to
embrace the glorious movement, like Foster Kennedy, whose
pronouncements quickly caught the ears of Dr. Lenz and his fellow
Germans, especially when he openly suggested the whispered word,
“euthanasia.”

“
Why not, with Christian
compassion, euthanize the mentally disturbed, the physically unfit
who threaten mankind’s very existence,” he would say and
write.

“
Compassionate
euthanasia,” the coined phrase being tossed about so casually by
many at the conference, troubled Erich greatly. He had been
thinking about existence lately and the miracle of life, and it
seemed to him to be the most remarkable thing that one could ever
imagine, coming into this world as we do, as nothing more than a
piece of protein. Everything we have been and everything we will
become is tied up in that small world, a microscopic glob of
molecules that somehow stays connected to our ancient history. So
each day, until his father admonished him for doing so, he would
ask the same question to those who would listen: “How could we even
begin to think of ending another person’s existence when that was
all he would ever have?”