Lena came to the kitchen doorway.
“The boys,” Liebermann said, “are…duplicates of Mengele?”
“Exact duplicates, genetically,” Nürnberger said. “Whether or not they’ll grow up to be duplicates in toto is, as I said, another question.”
“Excuse me,” Lena said. “We can eat now.” She smiled apologetically; her plain face became pretty for an instant. “In fact, we have to,” she said, “otherwise things will be ruined. If they aren’t already.”
They got up and went from the small room of scavenged furniture, animal posters, paperback books, into an almost-the-same-size kitchen, with more animal posters, a steel-gated window, and a red-covered table—bread, salad, red wine in mismatched tumblers.
Liebermann, uncomfortable on a small wire-backed chair, looked across the table at Nürnberger buttering bread. “What did you mean,” he asked, “about the boys’ growing up in ‘the right environment’?”
“One as much like Mengele’s as possible,” Nürnberger said, looking at him. He smiled in his brown beard. “Look,” he said, “if I wanted to make another Eduard Nürnberger, it wouldn’t be enough simply to scrape a bit of skin from my toe, pluck a nucleus from a cell, and go through that whole procedure I described—assuming I had the ability and equipment—”
“And the woman,” Klaus said, putting a plate before him.
“Thank you,” Nürnberger said, smiling. “I could get the woman.”
“For that kind of reproduction?”
“Well, assuming. It only means two tiny incisions, one to extract the ovum and one to implant the embryo.” Nürnberger looked at Liebermann. “But that would be only part of the job,” he said. “I would then have to find a suitable home for Baby Eduard. He would require a mother who’s very religious—almost a maniac, in fact—and a father who drinks too much, so that there’s constant fighting between them. And there would also have to be in the house a wonderful uncle, a math teacher, who takes the boy out of there as often as he can: to museums, to the country…These people would have to treat the boy like their own, not like someone conceived in a laboratory, and furthermore, the ‘uncle’ would have to die when the boy was nine and the ‘parents’ would have to separate two years later. The boy would have to spend his adolescence shuttling between the two with his younger sister.”
Klaus was sitting down with a plate at Liebermann’s right. A plate lay before Liebermann—dry-looking meat loaf, carrots steaming a minty smell.
“And even then,” Nürnberger said, “he might turn out very different from this Eduard Nürnberger. His biology teacher might not take a shine to him, as mine did. A girl might let him go to bed with her sooner than one let me. He’d read different books, watch television where I listened to radio, be subject to thousands of chance encounters that might make him more or less aggressive than I am, more or less loving, witty, et cetera, et cetera.”
Lena sat down with a plate at Liebermann’s left, looked across the table at Klaus.
Nürnberger, breaking meat loaf with his fork, said, “Mengele was aware of the chanciness of the whole thing, so he produced and found homes for many boys. He’ll be happy, I suppose, if a few, or even only one, turns out exactly right.”
“Do you see now,” Klaus asked Liebermann, “why the men are being killed?”
Liebermann nodded. “To—I don’t know what word to use—to shape the boys.”
“Exactly,” Nürnberger said. “To shape them, to try to make them psychological Mengeles as well as genetic ones.”
Klaus said, “He lost his father when he was a certain age, so the boys must do the same. Or lose the men they think are their fathers.”
“The event,” Nürnberger said, “surely was of paramount importance in shaping his psyche.”
“It’s like unlocking a safe,” Lena said. “If you can turn the knob to all the right numbers, in the right order, the door opens.”
“Unless,” Klaus said, “the knob was turned to a wrong number in between. These carrots are great.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes,” Nürnberger said. “Everything’s delicious.”
“Mengele has brown eyes.”
Nürnberger looked at Liebermann. “Are you sure?”
Liebermann said, “I’ve held his Argentine identity card in my hand. ‘Eyes, brown.’ And his father was a manufacturer, not a civil servant. Farm machines.”
“He’s related to those Mengeles?” Klaus asked.
Liebermann nodded.
Nürnberger, taking salad onto his plate, said, “No wonder he could afford the equipment. Well, he can’t have been the donor himself, if the eyes don’t match.”
Lena said to Liebermann, “Do you know who’s the head of the Comrades Organization?”
“A colonel named Rudel, Hans Ulrich Rudel.”
“Blue eyes?” Klaus asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to check. And his family background.” Liebermann looked at the fork in his hand, put its tines into a slice of carrot, raised the carrot, put it into his mouth.
“At any rate,” Nürnberger said, “you know now why those men are being killed. What are you planning to do next?”
Liebermann sat silently for a moment. He put his fork down and took the napkin from his lap and put it on the table. “Excuse me,” he said, and got up and went out of the kitchen.
Lena looked after him, looked at his plate, looked at Klaus.
“It’s not that,” he said.
“I hope not,” she said, and pressed the side of her fork into her meat loaf.
Klaus looked beyond her; watched Liebermann go to the bookshelves in the other room.
“Not that this isn’t excellent meat,” Nürnberger said, “but we’ll all be eating much better meat some day, and much cheaper, thanks to mononuclear reproduction. It’ll revolutionize cattle-breeding. And it’ll also preserve our endangered species, like that beautiful leopard there.”
“You’re defending it?” Klaus asked.
“It doesn’t need defending,” Nürnberger said. “It’s a technique, and like any other technique you can mention, it can be put to either good or bad uses.”
“I can think of two good ones,” Klaus said, “and you just mentioned them. Give me a pencil and paper and five minutes and I’ll give you fifty bad ones.”
“Why must you always take the opposite side?” Lena asked. “If the professor had said it’s a terrible thing, you’d be talking now about cattle-breeding.”
“That’s not true at all,” Klaus said.
“It is so. He’ll argue against his own statements.”
Klaus looked beyond Lena; saw Liebermann standing in profile, head bent to an open book, rocking slightly: Jew at prayer. Not a Bible, though; they didn’t have one. Liebermann’s own book? He was standing just about where it was. Checking on the colonel’s eyes? “Klaus?” Lena offered the salad bowl.
He took it.
Lena turned and looked, turned back to the table.
Nürnberger said, “I’m going to have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about this.”
“You must, though,” Klaus said.
“I know, I know, but it won’t be easy. Two of the men in the department have tried it themselves, with rabbit ova.”