Diagnosis
T
he military doctor takes Sergeant Major von Rumpel’s temperature. Inflates the blood pressure
cuff. Examines his throat with a penlight. This very morning von Rumpel
inspected a fifteenth-
century davenport and supervised its installment onto a railcar meant for Marshal Göring’s hunting
lodge. The private who brought it to him described plundering the villa they took it from; he called
it “shopping.”
The davenport makes von Rumpel think of an eighteenth-century Dutch tobacco box made out of
brass and copper and encrusted with tiny diamonds that he examined earlier this week, and the
tobacco box sends his thoughts, as inexorably as gravity, back to the Sea of Flames. In his weaker
moments, he imagines walking in some future hour between arcades of pillars in the great
Führermuseum at Linz, his heels
clacking smartly on the marble, twilight cascading through high
windows. He sees a thousand crystalline display cases, so clear they seem to float above the floor;
inside them wait the world’s mineral treasures, harvested from every hole on the globe: dioptase
and topaz and amethyst and California rubellite.
What was the phrase?
Like stars flung off the brows of archangels.
And in the very center of the gallery, a spotlight falls through the ceiling onto a pedestal; there,
inside a glass cube, glows a small blue stone . . .
The doctor asks von Rumpel to lower his trousers. Though the business of war has not let up for
even a day, von Rumpel has been happy for months. His responsibilities are doubling; there are
not, it turns out, a lot of Aryan diamond experts in the Reich. Just three weeks ago, outside a tiny
sun-streaked
station west of Bratislava, he examined an envelope full of perfectly clear, well-
faceted stones; behind him rumbled a truck full of paintings wrapped in paper and packed in straw.
The guards whispered that a Rembrandt was in there, and pieces of a famous altarpiece from
Cracow. All being sent to a salt mine somewhere deep beneath the Austrian village of Altaussee,
where a mile-long tunnel drops into a glittering arcade filled with shelving three stories high, upon
which the high command is stacking Europe’s finest art. They will assemble everything under one
unassailable roof, a temple to the human endeavor. Visitors will marvel at it for a thousand years.
The doctor probes his groin. “No pain?”
“None.”
“Nor here?”
“None.”
It would have been too much to hope for names from the lapidary in Paris. Dupont, after all,
would not have known who had been given the replicas of the diamond; he had no insight into the
last-second safeguards of the museum. But Dupont was of service nonetheless; von Rumpel needed
a number, and he got it.
Three.
The doctor says, “You may dress,” and washes his hands at a sink.
In the two months leading up to the invasion of France, Dupont fashioned three replicas for the
museum. Did he use the real diamond to make them? He used a casting.
He never saw the real
diamond. Von Rumpel believed him.
Three replicas. Plus the real stone. Somewhere on this planet among its sextillion grains of
sand.
Weakest (#3)
T
he scales of cruelty tip. Maybe Bastian exacts some final vendetta; maybe Frederick goes looking
for his only way out. All Werner knows for certain is that one April morning he wakes to find three
inches of slush on the ground and Frederick not in his bunk.
He does not show at breakfast or poetics or morning field exercises. Each story Werner hears
contains its
own flaws and contradictions, as though the truth is a machine whose gears are not
meshing. First he hears that a group of boys took Frederick out and set up torches in the snow and
told him to shoot the torches with his rifle—to prove he had adequate eyesight. Then Werner hears
that they brought him charts for eye exams, and when he could not read them,
they force-fed the
charts to him.
But what does the truth matter in this place? Werner imagines twenty boys closing over
Frederick’s body like rats; he sees the fat, gleaming face of the commandant, throat spilling out of
his collar, reclined like a king on some high-backed oak throne, while blood slowly fills the floor,
rises past his ankles, past his knees . . .
Werner skips lunch and walks in a daze to the school’s infirmary. He’s risking detention or
worse; it’s a sunny, bright noon, but his heart is being crushed slowly in a vise, and everything is
slow and hypnotic, and he watches his arm work as it pulls open the door as if he’s peering
through several feet of blue water.
A single bed with blood in it. Blood on the pillow and on the sheets and even on the enameled
metal of the bed frame. Pink rags in a basin. Half-unrolled bandage on the floor. The nurse bustles
over and grimaces at Werner. Outside of the kitchens, she is the only woman at the school.
“Why so much blood?” he asks.
She sets four fingers across her lips. Debating perhaps whether to tell him or pretend she does
not know. Accusation or resignation or complicity.
“Where is he?”
“Leipzig. For surgery.” She touches a round white button on her uniform with what might be an
inconveniently trembling finger. Otherwise her manner is entirely stern.
“What happened?”
“Shouldn’t you be at noontime meal?”
Each
time he blinks, he sees the men of his childhood, laid-off miners drifting through back
alleys, men with hooks for fingers and vacuums for eyes; he sees Bastian standing over a smoking
river, snow falling all around him.
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