The Detour (15 page)

Aside from the later smells that the rosemary effortlessly conjures, what I remember most clearly from that morning of our second driving day is a sense of self-recrimination, perhaps for all the wrong reasons (a narrowly defined duty, a refusal to face certain facts), but self-recrimination nonetheless. It was my fault we’d gotten into such a mess. I had lost my focus. I had become sentimental, allowing Enzo to retrieve the ring. I had failed to keep Enzo and Cosimo dedicated to our task. And then, somehow and suddenly, Enzo had left, forcing us to go in search of him—a detour resisted but not denied.

As Cosimo steered the truck around each switchback, white dust rising and spreading behind us and painting each passing olive tree a duller silver, the present moment’s worries insisted upon yoking me to other worries I had hoped to leave behind. I did not want to think about Gerhard. I did not even want to think about Enzo. The quickening of my heartbeat and the sour weight in my stomach reminded me of my intolerance for suspense—a poison that my system was no longer capable of handling.

I hadn’t always been so high-strung, I recall thinking that summer morning, as we rolled along, slower and slower as the road became even rockier and steeper, as the sun beat down on our arms and faces and our eyes burned with the
dust, the heat, and the tense effort of looking for something—someone—I didn’t fully expect to find.

There had been a time, eight or nine years earlier, when to be poised in the starter position, with the full track ahead, was to be ready and eager for an explosion of joy. That anticipatory moment was so exceptional that even after my own serious athletic prospects were irreparably damaged in the summer of 1930, I still wanted to run. I recovered my health. I bided my time over the winter. And that following spring of my seventeenth year, I joined a track team again.

I remember the first race day, when I took a small spade in my hand and started digging the holes in the cinder track—the little starter holes we used, instead of starter blocks. I pushed the toes of my thin-soled running shoes into the holes, got into position, and prepared myself for the starter pistol, which for some reason was slow in coming, as it sometimes was. Then—suddenly—even before the shot came, a plug was pulled. The happiness drained away.

I looked to my left at the boys who were stronger than me, who had spent the winter staying in good shape. I looked to my right at the boys who would beat me. I told myself it didn’t matter, I would run just to run, just to enjoy my own relative speed and returning health—but I had lost something, some kind of mental steadiness. I told myself it was the starting position, that my body had simply changed, that I’d lost a little muscle and gained a little fat. But that wasn’t it at all. It was my mind that had changed. Now, the anticipation was nearly sickening. And when the pistol went up, I reacted jumpily, like
a person afraid of being ambushed—which is indeed how I had felt ever since the previous summer.

Which is all a long and unwieldy way of saying that I did not like surprises anymore.
Ohne Zwischenfall
, without incident—that was the preferred state. I did not like waiting and wondering, the strain of not knowing, most forms of conflict or novelty which are essential aspects of many things—competition, for one. Love, for another. The only kind of passion I had managed to sustain was my passion for art, itself a substitution for other losses. And yet it remained to be seen if that passion would itself be my undoing, and if there would be nothing left to hold onto, if even the most carefully carved marble would prove itself to be inconstant, insignificant, ultimately worthless.

It was a month after I’d quit track altogether, a year after the incident, when I showed up at the library one late afternoon in my seventeenth year. The old man behind the desk was seated with his face just in the shadows. What I could see best were his hands, folded on the desk, underneath the bright glow of his desk lamp. My request was a little odd and I felt out of place, so I concentrated on those hands: soft and powdery white, ribboned with blue veins like tunneling worms.

“Books—about bodies,” I muttered to the librarian. He scooted a little closer so that his face came into the light. He looked up over his glasses, noting my age, my blotched adolescent skin, my clear discomfort at stating my interests clearly.

“What about ‘bodies’?”

I had no idea how to put it into acceptable words. “Variations?”

Here he laughed—only slightly, and with forgiveness, but his mirth was plain. “Between the genders?”

The librarian closed the book he’d been reading and removed his reading glasses. “You don’t mean reproductive systems, do you?”

“No,” I assured him. “Not that.”

He waited.

“Perhaps diseases,” I ventured. “Rare ones. But not the kind you catch.”

He would have waited all day, but I had no more clues to impart, so he loaded my desk with some impressive medical tomes. I’d never encountered such thin onionskin paper or such small, dense type. Much of it in Latin. No photographs and only a few illustrations of concepts too general to be useful: circulatory systems and skeletal charts.

One might find my curiosity strange, now that my father’s erratic actions had solved one problem for me (replacing it with another, that summer of infection, the subsequent year of healing), but yes, I was still curious. Even more so. Though he had attempted to remove the small proof of my difference, leaving me scarred in the process, I was even more driven now to discover how deep and permanently within the human body flaws are marked. I wanted to know what remained after he had removed the surface flaw from my flesh.

I was nearly ready to leave that day, my fingertips dirty from the endless turning of pages, each tired breath moving my ribs, evoking the little twinge from my bandaged side. The
librarian showed up: the soft, white hands again, under the light of my own study carrel. No wonder Gerhard would seem familiar to me when I would meet him some five years later: he had the same soft, white hands.

The librarian saw my finished stack of books. “Did you find your variations?”

“No, sir.”

“Perhaps we have begun from the wrong end of things. Perhaps we are being too technical. You know, when I was your age and interested in the human form, in its most ideal and masterful depictions, I began not with modern science but with the Greeks and Romans …”

He had lost me entirely. But he was speaking from his own memories, with evident pleasure. “And best of all—yes, why didn’t I think of it sooner?—they provide us with something more than text; they provide us with images. After all the reading you’ve done, you might find some pictures to be a tonic. Wait here, young man.”

He returned with yet larger books, opening them to show me illustrations of the great Greek and Roman statues. “There you are. I’ll stop back in half an hour, and then I must collect these and set you on your way.”

He disappeared tactfully back into the shadows, leaving me to puzzle over these naked forms. I’d seen the occasional classical illustration, of course, but I’d never had the privacy to make a thorough, close-up inspection. Rather than glancing quickly—at a small penis centered over a scrotal sack, or at the lines and curves where the secrets of womanhood remained hidden—I could stare now until my eyes had had their fill,
then follow the graceful lines of chest and pelvis, thigh and calf, bicep and forearm, belly and breast.

In these pictures I found no clue to my own strange variation, but I found something else: a fascination that would grow during the many library visits to follow. The classical artists had captured perfection—athletic, aesthetic, even moral perfection—and perhaps if I understood perfection I would understand its opposite. I would know which flaws were only minor details, which were deep and ineradicable. I was completely unfamiliar with genetics at this time—my school was about fifty years behind in its teaching of science—but I am not sure genetics would have provided the answers anyway, not in a form that spoke to my own athletic background, my own respect and regret for the minor aspirations I had set aside. Yes, I recognized that wonderful dark line running along the back of a tensed hamstring. Yes, I recognized the commanding realism of
The Spear-Bearer
by Polyclitus, an ancient Greek statue of a muscular man walking with a spear over his shoulder, one leg just beginning to lift from the ground. Yes, I recognized the calm, focused faces of the athletes—who, much more than gods or unlikely heroes, offered real insight into the human condition.

“You haven’t visited the Glyptothek?” the librarian said to me one day, after my weekly library visits had become routine. “Your parents have never taken you there?”

My
father? “Never.”

“Oh, my boy,” he said, deeply apologetic for having failed to mention that we had our own excellent museum of classical art in Munich. “You must go. You know, of course, where the Königsplatz is?”

Nearby, at 45 Brienner Strasse, the Nazis had already built their party headquarters, the Brown House. In years to come, the party would choose this location for some of their enormous rallies. But once I came to associate the Königsplatz with art, with the Greek and Roman masterpieces and the magnificent Glyptothek itself, nothing would ever convince me that the heart of Munich could be anywhere else. Even if this part of the city became the heart of something else, too. Even if one couldn’t walk thirty meters without being expected to offer a
verdammte
salute.

Meanwhile, Germany was facing the currency crisis, bank failures. Here I was, entranced by old bronze and stone, oblivious and increasingly unemployable. Perhaps if I had attended a more rigorous secondary school, I might have gone on to a university such as the one in Erlangen, where that same year a student committee made a request to the Ministry of Culture for the creation of a chair of race science. Some subjects were deemed worthy of national support, even with a failing economy. But I didn’t dare dream that, in a few more years, art history would be deemed worthy of public support as well. It doesn’t always hurt to have a failed artist as Führer, many art lovers might have reasoned in those early years—before life became more complicated, before reason itself was left behind.

When I graduated from secondary school in 1932, the jobs I managed to find were low-paid and sporadic, though I was happy to get them. On weekends, I worked as a sports
club trainer because nationalistic sports clubs were booming in Munich. Even in my unexceptional condition, and even though I had a reputation for being reserved and for keeping my distance from the boys in general and from the changing room in particular, I could still earn a few marks conducting warm-up exercises and running drills.

During the week, I worked as an assistant to a small-time art dealer and auctioneer named Franz Betelmann. This second job was much more important to me. I kept records for Franz and helped him evaluate and catalog the ancient statues, many of them with a Trojan theme, inspired by German archaeology being conducted then in Asia Minor. They were just copies, of course, and were being sold as such—nothing particularly valuable, only
objets d’art
to grace some city dweller’s chilly entrance hall. But Franz wanted to elevate himself. He wanted to appear better educated than he was (as did I; as would anyone who had attended a
Realschule
instead of a
Gymnasium
) and he was eager to absorb what I had already assimilated.

He expressed no embarrassment that someone my age would be lecturing to him on the significance of the
contrapposto
pose in classical sculpture. He’d smack his leg, delighted, the pince-nez he wore for effect falling from his face: “So there’s a name for that! I always thought those Romans looked tired, leaning on one leg.”

I worked for Betelmann on and off for three years, for diminishing pay, as his own accounts became more irreconcilable. I enjoyed learning and sharing my increasing knowledge of art with my employer, and even with the customers. I sketched on the side, not with any artistic ambition, but
only to develop my own eye and memory and appreciation of famous objects. My father wanted me to work for the German Labor Service—yet another unpaid job, and this one promising only toil, but one he thought might lead to some paid job when the economy improved. I put it off as long as I could, but in the summer of 1935, the six-month labor stints were made compulsory. So at the age of twenty-one, I joined thousands of other secondary school graduates. We were each given a bicycle and a spade, and a brown uniform symbolizing the earthiness of our pursuits, and on the uniform—this struck me as funny, somehow—was a cap patch featuring a spade and a special belt buckle featuring, ah yes, the spade again.