The guards let go of Pavli. He sprawled on the darkroom floor, unable to stand, his vision a blur of red and the dancing black that threatened to swallow him again. It’s not thunder – he lay still, hoping the guards would forget about him, step over him as if he weren’t even there. The distant booming that came from outside the asylum, the rumbling in the ground that shook the walls – he’d realized what the sounds were. Not thunder, but the roaring of great weapons, the vomiting forth of the shells and bombs that tore open the earth like a giant’s hand. They’re here. Time had started again, had broken into the asylum’s timeless world. That was why the Scharfuhrer and all the others were so agitated. The war itself had arrived on their doorstep.
He could hear glass shattering, could smell the photographic chemicals splashing onto the floor. His eyes could focus enough when he opened them, to see a guard sweeping the butt of his rifle along the shelves that lined the darkroom. The others had flung open the cabinets, gathering up the contents in their arms and dumping them into the basin. The fire sank under each new load, then burst upward again, ashes laced with sparks. Smoke had covered the room’s ceiling, low enough to roll out the open doorway into the corridor.
One guard pulled the cot from the far wall and threw it onto its side; a moment later, he had toppled the stacks of empty crates away from the wall. Pavli saw him begin to turn, then hesitate. He had spotted the loose board covering the hiding place. With a sharp tug, the guard snapped the board loose and flung it behind him; Pavli’s breath stopped as the guard reached inside the hole.
“Look at this.” The guard displayed the only thing he found there. “The photographer’s secret love.” The frayed newspaper clipping, the actress’ image fading from grey to brown, received only a glance from the Scharfuhrer before being snatched away, crumpled into a ball and tossed into the fire. The dry paper flared immediately, tumbling upward as it was consumed.
A blast of heat washed across Pavli; he could see the sudden explosion stagger the guards backwards. The darkroom filled with a churning orange glare. “ Schei?! ” – a guard batted the rush of smoke and flames away from himself. A spark from the basin had landed on the spilled chemicals; the fire raced across the floor and licked up the walls. The fumes ignited in the petrol can that the guards had brought in with them, a jagged edge of metal ripping across one man’s shin, exposing the red bone beneath the knee. He howled in pain and fell, clutching his hands around the wound.
“Get out of here!” The other guards were already fighting their way out to the corridor, coughing and covering their eyes, as the Scharfuhrer slung the injured man’s arm over his shoulders. “Leave everything!” They stumbled in tandem toward the doorway.
Beneath the smoke, Pavli crawled away from the flames. The corridor’s windows had been broken out; the rush of cold air into the asylum filled his lungs.
The guards had forgotten about him; no one saw as he raised himself onto his hands and knees. Yards away, the guards pulled Ritter from his office, wrapping his trench coat around him. The doctor looked confused; he fought weakly against his rescuers, as though he were trying to return to his private sanctuary.
“You don’t understand -” Ritter pushed vainly at their arms. “I can’t leave now – I’m so close -”
They overpowered him. The war’s thunder shook the building, closer this time. Ritter fell to the press of the guards; Pavli saw only the doctor’s hands, raised imploringly above the men’s heads, as they bore him toward the stairs at the end of the corridor.
Pavli looked over his shoulder. The darkroom was engulfed in fire, the flames threading the smoke pouring through the doorway. He got to his feet, the wall hot to his palm as he balanced himself against it.
Other things had been forgotten. He felt his way toward Ritter’s office. He leaned inside, hands out to either side of its doorway. The fire had broken through the wall between the office and the darkroom; papers swirled from Ritter’s desk, charring in midair. Pavli lowered his head and pushed through the smoke.
The electrical generator had failed; he could barely see in the surgery’s dim space, the only light that from the burning office. He stepped forward, hands outstretched.
His fingertips hit something wet and yielding, warm not from the fire, but from the heat still fading from its core. “Matthi…” He whispered the name aloud, though he knew it was not his brother, only the red thing left behind by Ritter’s scalpels.
Blind, he turned and bumped into a wheeled cart, the one he had seen so many times before through the camera viewfinders. He heard liquid slosh inside a shallow basin; it smelled of chemicals as well, but different, the preserving ones that Ritter had used on the valuable part of his subjects. Wetness, warm as blood itself, soaked through Pavli’s shirt and spread across his stomach. He reached forward, the fluid lapping up to his wrists. He felt something soft beneath his fingertips, something that floated and drifted in the basin, like a suit of some delicate fabric that had been discarded in a pool of ocean water.
His hands raised, palms upward. Draped across them was a sleeve of silk, empty now of any other substance. A long incision, the work of Ritter’s scalpel, ran along its length, curving at its narrowest taper, where the hand, a vacant glove, rested its fingers against Pavli’s. The fire’s glow brightened in the surgery’s doorway, and he saw the tattooed wound at the wrist, the stigma black in the partial light.
The last one… his brother. He brought his face down toward the mute object, as though he could lay his cheek against it, to comfort his grief. Still submerged in the basin, Matthi’s face, eyeless, mouth parted, watched him.
Pavli…
Beyond the roaring of the flames, trembling of the earth under the asylum; and closer, past the hissing of the liquid spilled over the heated instruments – he heard his own name spoken.
Go… you cannot stay here. His brother’s face, beneath the preserving fluids, gazed up at the smoke mounting against the ceiling. You must go now…
The surgery fell to silence, the hidden walls drawing away from the dissecting table. Pavli listened but heard no more. His heart slowed from its panic. He felt as if he could close his eyes and his brother would wrap him in embrace, arms things of flesh again, rocking him to sleep in the bed they had shared so long ago.
Go…
He tilted his hands, letting the wet silk slide from them. It drifted in the water ghostlike, the motion of the fluid swelling the hollowed chest, then letting it sink once more. He turned away from the basin.
The smoke in Ritter’s office had become so dense that he could barely feel his way through. Coughing, eyes watering, he found the desk and stooped down. The object he sought was still there, left behind by Ritter. He grasped the handle of the leather bag and stood up with it.
In the surgery, the flames had grown bright enough for him to see by. He set the open bag next to the basin, then reached into the preserving chemicals. The weight of his brother’s skin, as he raised it from the fluid, surprised him. It hung awkwardly from his grasp, the torso with its rib tattoo dangling between his hands. The shoulders, neck and face at one end, and the empty legs, splayed by the incision flaps at the ankles, at the other, draped into the basin. The fluid ran down to Pavli’s elbows as he lifted the skin higher. He didn’t know how much the chemicals had already done to preserve the thin tissue; it had been only a few hours at most, since Ritter had carefully peeled it away from the flesh beneath. The fear of damaging the skin seized Pavli, a vision of it shredding to tatters in his hands, rags that bore no human resemblance.