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You
are betraying me,
but wasn’t he protecting her?
On the second morning, there are raciological exams. They require little of Werner except to
raise his arms or keep from blinking while an inspector shines a penlight into the tunnels of his
pupils. He sweats and shifts. His heart pounds unreasonably. An onion-breathed technician in a lab
coat measures the distance between Werner’s temples, the circumference of his head, and the
thickness and shape of his lips. Calipers are used to evaluate his feet, the length of his fingers, and
the distance between his eyes and his navel. They measure his penis. The angle of his nose is
quantified with a wooden protractor.
A second technician gauges Werner’s eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so
shades of blue are displayed. Werner’s color is
himmelblau,
sky blue. To assess his hair color, the
man snips a lock of hair from Werner’s head and compares it to thirty or so other locks clipped to
a board, arrayed darkest to lightest.
“
Schnee,
” the man mutters, and makes a notation. Snow. Werner’s hair is lighter than the lightest
color on the board.
They test his vision, draw his blood, take his fingerprints. By noon he wonders if there is
anything left for them to measure.
Verbal exams come next. How many Nationalpolitische Erzie-hungsanstalten are there? Twenty.
Who are our greatest Olympians? He does not know. What is the birthday of the führer? April 20.
Who is our greatest writer, what is the Treaty of Versailles, which is the nation’s fastest airplane?
Day three involves more running, more climbing, more jumping. Everything is timed. The
technicians, school representatives, and examiners—each wearing uniforms in subtly different
shades—scribble on pads of graph paper with a very narrow gauge, and sheet after sheet of this
paper gets closed into leather binders with a gold lightning bolt stamped on the front.
The recruits speculate in eager whispers.
“I hear the schools have sailboats, falconries, rifle ranges.”
“I hear they will take only seven from each age group.”
“I hear it’s only four.”
They speak of the schools with yearning and bravado; they want desperately to be selected.
Werner tells himself:
So do I. So do I
.
And yet at other times, despite his ambitions, he is visited by instants of vertigo; he sees Jutta
holding the smashed pieces of their radio and feels uncertainty steal into his gut.
The recruits scale walls; they run wind sprint after wind sprint. On the fifth day, three quit. On
the sixth, four more give up. Each hour the dance hall seems to grow progressively warmer, so by
the eighth day, the air, walls, and floor are saturated with the hot, teeming odor of boys. For their
final test, each of the fourteen-year-olds is forced to climb a ladder haphazardly nailed to a wall.
Once at the top, twenty-five feet above the floor, their heads in the rafters, they are supposed to
step onto a tiny platform, close their eyes, and leap off, to be caught in a flag held by a dozen of the
other recruits.
First to go is a stout farm kid from Herne. He scales the ladder quickly enough, but as soon as
he’s on the platform high above everyone else, his face goes white. His knees wobble dangerously.
Someone mutters, “Pussy.”
The boy beside Werner whispers, “Afraid of heights.”
An examiner watches dispassionately. The boy on the platform peeks over the edge as if into a
swirling abyss and shuts his eyes. He sways back and forth. Interminable seconds pass. The
examiner peers at his stopwatch. Werner clutches the hem of the flag.
Soon most everyone in the dance hall has stopped to watch, even recruits in other age groups.
The boy sways twice more, until it’s clear he’s about to faint. Even then no one moves to help him.
When he goes over, he goes sideways. The recruits on the ground manage to swing the flag
around in time, but his weight tears the edges out of their hands, and he hits the floor arms first
with a sound like a bundle of kindling breaking over a knee.
The boy sits up. Both of his forearms are bent at nauseating angles. He blinks at them curiously
for a moment, as if scanning his memory for a clue that might explain how he got there.
Then he starts to scream. Werner looks away. Four boys are ordered to carry the injured one out.
One by one, the remaining fourteen-year-olds climb the ladder and tremble and leap. One sobs
the whole way. Another sprains an ankle when he hits. The next waits at least two full minutes
before jumping. The fifteenth boy looks out across the dance hall as if staring into a bleak, cold
sea, then climbs back down.
Werner watches from his place on the flag. When his turn comes, he tells himself, he must not
waver. On the undersides of his eyelids he sees the interlaced ironwork of Zollverein, the fire-
breathing mills, men teeming out of elevator shafts like ants, the mouth of Pit Nine, where his father
was lost. Jutta in the parlor window, sealed behind the rain, watching him follow the corporal to
Herr Siedler’s house. The taste of whipped cream and powdered sugar and the smooth calves of
Herr Siedler’s wife.
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