Puenzo Wakolda

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78094-401-2
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Now a major motion picture The German Doctor is a story of obsession, loyalty and control as one man with dark intentions charms his way into the lives of an innocent, unsuspecting family. Patagonia, 1960. José is on the run. Having fled from him homeland Germany, he has come to South America to continue his work - José is a doctor, who is seeking to manipulate genes to create the 'perfect' human race'. In the small village of Chacharramendi he first meets Lilith, a child he notices from the balcony of his motel and is instantly fascinated yet repulsed by. For Lilith has a growth defect, and the disproportionate size of her features represent all he is trying to exterminate from humankind. Yet, even more fascinating is the fact that her siblings are perfect examples of the Aryan race; tall, strongly built and fair. The anomaly of Lilith's existence fascinates him, and when he discovers Lilith's mother is pregnant, if he is not mistaken with twins, the temptation to involve himself in their lives and even interfere with the pregnancy is too much for him to pass up on. A cold, calculating but eerily charming man, José befriends Lilith and manipulates his way into the family. And so begins a dark relationship between the doctor and little girl, a kind of love that cannot end well. For José is actually Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, infamous for performing human experiments at Auschwitz and sooner or later his past is going to catch up with him.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Puenzo, Lucía

Leseproben

1

That day, a mixture of sodium chloride and magnesium nitrate, injected with infinite patience into each eyeball, would change forever the course of science. The mass sterilisations, the vivisections, the frustrated attempts to change skin and hair colour using subcutaneous injections and even the night on which he thought he had finally succeeded in joining together the veins of two twins to create Siamese twins, only to find them a few hours later gasping like fish out of water – all his failures would be forgotten if he could manage to change the colour of the eyes of this child. He had imagined at least a thousand times holding the only surviving Romanian twin whose left iris had been coloured by the dye (albeit after an overdose had burned his right one), standing on the stage of every medical Racial Hygiene congress in which he had participated during the last decade. The boy’s optical nerves paralysed by an excess of chemicals and his pupils dilated with terror, in the arms of the person who had jabbed him something like a thousand times until he had finally freed him from mediocrity. He had dreamed of him with his head shaved to allow the black fuzz of his origins to be eclipsed by a future Aryan. Although he understood it was only a dream, the images of that first life in which everything was possible were obliterated by the certainty that his victory was only the harbinger of all the transformations that were to come (including moulding genetically the citizens of an entire nation), even if up until then had only been lacerated skin, gangrene and amputations. Their investment of millions of Deutschmarks had not been in vain. All in the name of the purity of blood and genes. That was the real war: purity vs contamination.

He sat down on the bed with the excitement of a child preparing for a day at the amusement park. Only then did the surroundings of his rented room with its sparse decor return him to the shaky present. It was all a mirage. Every day his skin hung looser and his ruined muscle tone was that of an old man. His entire existence had turned grey, days and nights of identical routine repeated ad nauseam, in the secret hope something would happen. Someone was going to inform him they had finally stopped searching for him, or they had arranged the journey across the border to his next stop. He had devoted his life to freeing the world of rats and now, on the run and a coward, banished to the shadows and the fringes of the world, he had turned into a fleeing rat himself.

, he thought.

When he received the warning that they were on his trail, he didn’t doubt it was true for a moment: he froze the samples of bacteriology in terminal specimens he had been working on in recent months, walked out of his laboratory, stopped at the bank to empty his account, and drove until he left the city behind. He was never going to lack money: his bottomless family fortune had been supplemented by the contributions of his mentor, Professor von Verschuer, who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Dahlem and who had always taken it upon himself to obtain the necessary underwriting for his work in exchange for being the first to receive the results of his experiments. Even in Mengele’s exile, von Verschuer was one of the many who continued to contribute anonymously to this well-being, convinced that it was only a matter of time before he could resume his studies. There were many who continued to believe in him, supporting him from a distance, from the shadows, and writing him long letters in which they treated him like a mentor. An illustrious man. Theirs were not excessive words of praise, but the acknowledgement that gave him the strength to go on.

He bought supplies at a petrol station and a map of Argentina before calling his wife. He didn’t tell her where he was headed. He told her he would be gone for a time and asked her to stay for a few weeks with a couple of friends, hanging up before she could protest. He drove for ten hours before stopping at a roadside motel on the outskirts of Chacharramendi. In reality the town didn’t really have a downtown or outskirts, since it ended in the same block where it began. He stayed in the room until it grew dark. Although his Spanish was fluent, he took out his dictionary and the notebook in which he wrote out his daily correspondence class. Like all survivors, he knew he had to erase some tracks as soon as possible. His mind was more a soldier’s than a scientist’s, and his first training had been the moulding that comes from the blows of military discipline received in the ranks. He never let a day go by without doing his written and oral exercises.

‘I’m a pharmacist,’ he repeated three times, making an effort to improve his pronunciation. ‘My favourite activity is lis… tening to opera with my son.’

He lied, used to protecting himself even when he was alone. He couldn’t even remember his first-born’s features. In the only photograph he’d kept, his son was babbling his first words, mindless to the butchery to which his father had dedicated his existence.

A little girl’s cry startled him as he was about to answer the next question out loud. He pulled a yellowing curtain aside and saw a group of little girls playing in the car park. Two of them were turning a skipping rope in circles, faster and faster, while singing as fast as they could something that sounded like a mantra, given the hypnotic devotion with which they repeated a monotonous verse. They were dark-skinned, children of a mixed race, except for one… She would have made a perfect specimen (blonde, fair-skinned, with clear eyes) if it hadn’t been for her height. Visibly small for her age, although with arms and legs normal enough, the child who jumped faster and faster before his eyes could be an example that defined one of his favourite fields of study: dwarfism, taken to be the exemplary category of the abnormal. She had managed to absorb some Aryan genes, but not enough to lose her animal features. These were the lab rats that most fascinated him: perfect except for one intolerable defect.

When her challenger gave up, she cried out for more. To his surprise, her voice did not match her deformity. It was an octave lower than what he would have expected. She didn’t seem afraid of the rope hitting her on her head or heels.

She didn’t seem afraid of anything.

That evening he saw her sitting on the pavement with three of the dark-skinned girls, playing jacks. She was the one to toss in the air the tiny sacks of rice grains, trapping them with the same hand that held one more jack. He was whistling Tosca’s final aria, , when he stopped to observe her. Her motor skills and her reflexes were excellent, above average. Each one of her movements was an apex of vitality. It was obvious. The dark-skinned girls were locals and the blonde wasn’t from around there, a circus professional who had them captivated by some unknown game.

‘Time for dinner, Lilith!’

‘I’m not hungry!’

‘I didn’t ask you if you were hungry! I told you to come and have your dinner!’

The boy who was shouting was standing in the doorway of the motel, an adolescent about sixteen years old, as blonde and fit as she was and delightfully arrogant. There was no doubting they were brother and sister, although the measurements of the small South American Adonis were perfect. He would have given anything at that moment to know their parents and grandparents so he could delve into the family tree to understand at what fork in the road the one guilty of degrading the race was to be found.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’

He turned and saw the motel owner watching him as he smoked a cigar on the veranda. Except for the blonde children, the rest of the town seemed to move in slow motion, rendered lethargic by the flatness of the desert. That afternoon he’d counted on the fingers of one hand the inhabitants who had dragged their chairs out to the pavement to drink a couple of before the darkness forced them to take refuge in their caves.

‘There’s an inn nearby if you’d like something to eat.’

‘Where?’

‘Two blocks straight ahead… You can’t miss it.’

‘Is it likely to be open?’

‘It always is.’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the little girl was walking toward the boy, swaying her hips as she tossed in the air one of the little sacks of rice and caught it with her hand. She moved with the grace of a ballerina, unaware of her limitations. There was something enchanting about her boldness. An imperfect body had never seemed so irresistible to him. She walked past less than three feet from him without stopping. But when she was close to him, she suddenly turned her head, looked him in the eye and stuck out her tongue.

, he thought.

It was the most disproportionate thing about her. She had the lips of someone twice her size, buck teeth, everything moist and warm. It was the first time in years that something so far removed from asceticism had excited him. The flight of one of the jacks bisected their line of sight, separating them. He was about to walk on when a new question made him stop.

‘Will you be leaving tomorrow?’

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the two fair-skinned bodies that had already turned the corner at the end of a poorly lit block, like grotesque mirrors of the possible results of the same womb.

‘Wait another day. Mark my words, the rains are coming.’

‘Rain,...