16. I LOOK DOWN at him curiously.

“What happened to Dr. Jäger?”

The priest, unsurprised, answers in the same flat, dry voice. “He disappeared. He was thought to have gotten across the Bodensee to Switzerland and eventually to Portugal and to Paraguay.”

“What happened to the others you met?”

“Oh, that’s a matter of record. You can look it up.” He recites rapidly, as if he were a clerk reading the record. “Dr. Max de Crinis, the ‘charming Austrian,’ who was responsible for sending retarded children to Goerden, one of the murder institutions, could not get out of the Russian encirclement of Berlin in 1945. He committed suicide with a government-supplied capsule of cyanide. Dr. Villinger, the eugenicist, was indicted in the euthanasia trial in Limburg. After questioning by the prosecution he went to the mountains near Innsbruck before the trial and committed suicide. Dr. Carl Schneider, respected successor to Kraepelin at Heidelberg, worked with the SS commission at Bethel and selected candidates for extermination. When he was put on trial after the war, he committed suicide. Dr. Paul Nitsche, author of the authoritative Handbook of Psychiatry during the Weimar Republic, was tried in Dresden for the murder of mental patients, sentenced to death, and executed in 1947. Dr. Werner Heyde, director of the clinic at Würzburg, where patients had been treated humanely since the sixteenth century, was also put on trial at Limburg for euthanasia. He committed suicide in his cell five days before the trial. He approved carbon monoxide as the drug of choice in euthanasia. At the time he was head of the Reich Society for Mental Illness Institution. Dr. C. G. Jung, co-editor with Dr. M. H. Goering of the Nazi-coordinated Journal for Psychotherapy, after the war became, I understand, a well-known psychiatrist.”

After he finishes, we sit for a while in silence. The moon is overhead. The sea of pines, without shadows, looks calm and silvery as water. There is a sliver of light in the south where the moonlight reflects from Lake Pontchartrain.

“No fires tonight,” says the priest.

“No,” I say absently.

“Would you do me a favor, Tom?”

“Sure.”

“Get me that soup and Jell-O. I’m hungry.”

He spoons up chicken soup from the can and drinks the melted Jell-O from the bowl.

“You seem to feel better, Father.”

“I’m fine.”

“Do you have these episodes often?”

“Mostly in winter. I think it’s an allergy to the dampness.”

“How long have you had them?”

“Since last year when we had all that rain.”

“I see.” I reach for the ring of the trapdoor, hesitate. “There is something I don’t understand.”

“Yes?” He turns up the wick of the kerosene lamp.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to tell me—about your memory of—about Germany.”

“What is there to understand?”

“Are you trying to tell me that the Nazis were not to blame?”

“No. They were to blame. Everything you’ve ever heard about them is true. I saw Dachau.”

“Are you suggesting that it was the psychiatrists who were the villains?”

“No. Only that they taught the Nazis a thing or two.”

“Scientists in general?”

“No.”

“Then is it the Germans? Are you saying that there is a fatal flaw peculiar to the Germans, something demonic?”

“Demonic?” The priest laughs. “I think you’re pulling my leg, Tom.” He looks at me slyly, then narrows his eyes as if he is sizing me up. “Could I ask you a question, Tom?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think we’re different from the Germans?”

“I couldn’t say. I hope so.”

“Do you think present-day Soviet psychiatrists are any different from Dr. Jäger and that crowd?”

“I couldn’t say. But what is the point, Father?”

Again the priest’s eyes seem to glitter. Is it malice or a secret hilarity? “Of my little déjà vu? Just a tale. Perhaps a hallucination, as you suggest. I thought you would be interested from a professional point of view. It was such a vivid experience, my remembering it in every detail, even the florist-shop smell of geraniums—much more vivid than a dream. Some psychological phenomenon, I’m sure.”

I look at him. There is a sly expression in his yes. Is he being ironic? “No doubt.” I rise. “I’m going to pick up Claude. Come in tomorrow for a CORTscan. If you don’t feel well, call me or have Milton call me. I’ll come for you.”

We shake hands. Something occurs to me. “May I ask you a somewhat personal question?” His last question about the Germans irritated me enough that I feel free to ask him.

“Sure.”

“Why did you become a priest?”

“Why did I become a priest.” The priest at first seems surprised. Then he ruminates.

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“That’s all.”

He shrugs, appearing to lose interest. “In the end one must choose—given the chance.”

“Choose what?”

“Life or death. What else?”

What else. I’m thinking of the smell of geraniums and of the temporal lobe where smells are registered and, in some cases of epilepsy or brain tumor, replay, come back with all the haunting force of memory. And play one false too. I don’t recall geraniums having a smell.