Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

He had seen combat pictures before, and pictures of rubble and bodies crushed in suffering, but this was something new. Skeletons covered with a thin layer of skin looked out at the camera through a wire fence, their eyes utterly without expression. Some wore the black-and-white stripes of dirty prison camp uniforms. Behind them bodies lay on the ground, one so thin that a thighbone seemed to puncture the skin. In another, bodies were heaped in piles, limbs at unnatural angles, mouths wide open to the air. Connolly looked at them, paralyzed. Children. The men at the fence seemed to hang there, as if they needed to hold the wire to remain upright. In another picture, a vast open pit was filled to overflowing with shaved heads and naked bodies. Everyone was dead, even the ones pretending to be alive at the fence. Their eyes burned straight through the camera. Connolly wondered who had taken the pictures, who had recorded not just lifeless bodies but death itself. Only a mechanical box should see this. He imagined his finger trembling on the shutter, refusing to look. His eyes swam. He darted from picture to picture, trying to make any sense of it, but the world had tilted slightly on its axis, rearranging everything, and it was impossible to understand anything so new. Another picture: a ragged group of Nazi guards, their eyes dead too. A camp entrance. More piles of bodies. People lying in bunks, a bony arm jutting out for help. But all too late. Even those with open eyes were already dead. He could hear, outside, the rasp of the viola tuning and people talking, and he realized that in the bedroom they had almost stopped breathing.

There was a shame in seeing this-the act of witnessing made one a part of it. And there was the shame of failed hopes. The past few weeks had been filled with exultant news from Germany. The Rhine crossed. A city taken. Berlin within reach. Refugees marching to a somber future, richly deserved. Since the offensive of the winter, the war had taken on the pace and excitement of a long sporting match finally about to be won. The world was beginning to make sense again. Now he saw it was too late for that too.

“So many,” Eisler said, a low intoning.

“We knew, but we didn’t know.” They were still oblivious to Connolly, but looking at the photographs had drawn him into their circle. “Friedrich,” Weber said, “they killed everybody.”

Eisler put his hand on Weber’s shoulder, glancing up at Connolly. Connolly took him in for the first time-a tall, scrawny man with the pallor of laboratory duty about his face. His neck stretched unnaturally high, with a prominent, bobbing Adam’s apple and the slight discoloration of a birth defect to the right of his chin. Connolly noticed his long fingers, delicate and tapering, as if they had been formed, or trained, for precision work. His hair was uncombed, landing wherever it fell over his gentle face.

“They’ve won,” Weber said, almost to himself.

“No. What are you saying?”

“They killed everybody. It’s too late, don’t you see? All this work. We’re too late now.” He shrugged in resignation just as his wife came to the door to summon him.

“Liebchen, come start, please. It’s getting late,” she said, barely sticking her head in, unaware that she had trivialized the moment.

Dutifully, Weber got up and shuffled out of the room, leaving Connolly and Eisler in uncomfortable silence. Still holding the magazine, Eisler sat heavily on the bed, cushioned by the heap of coats. Connolly stared down again at the pictures. Personalize the crime, an old journalist’s trick. Focus on one person-that man looking through the fence-to construct the story. But as he stared at the picture, everyone became disembodied. There were no people left, just those rows of blank eyes. Then Eisler let the magazine slide shut and he was staring at the bright color of a Chesterfield ad on the back.

“What did he mean, we’re too late?” Connolly said quietly.

For a moment he thought Eisler hadn’t heard, but when he finally spoke, his soft voice was precise, as if he had been carefully considering his answer. “We came here to defeat the Nazis. Soldiers, you see?” He smiled weakly. “This was our way of fighting. With our slide rules. Our tests.” His voice had only a trace of accent. “We were the little boys wearing glasses, not the big ones with the boots and the armbands. But we had the intelligence. We could fight with this.” He tapped the side of his head. “We would build a bomb to kill all the Nazis. A terrible thing, yes. But with the Nazis, anything was permissible. Even the bomb. They wanted to kill everybody. And now, you see, they have. What are we going to do now?”

“The war isn’t over yet.”

Eisler looked up at him, surprised at the sound of his voice, and Connolly realized he’d been thinking aloud, not talking to him at all.

“It is for them,” Eisler said, rising slowly and handing Connolly the magazine. “It will be over for the rest of us very soon. You think perhaps they have a secret weapon? A new rocket for London? Well, it’s an idea. Convenient, certainly.”

“Convenient?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly with a handkerchief. “If there are Nazis, we don’t have these inconvenient moral questions. But what shall we do with this bomb if there are no Nazis?”

“I don’t know,” Connolly said, at a loss.

“No,” he said, smiling. “None of us do. Sometimes I wonder what we have been thinking. Maybe the Nazis did that to us too. But you must excuse me. You came to hear the music, not to discuss-well, what do we call it?”

Outside, the music had begun, the precise lilting phrase of a Bach partita.

“German music,” Eisler said ironically. “Such beautiful music. You must admit, we are an extraordinary people. Or were.”

Connolly felt again that he was eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Eisler might have been talking to Weber, not a stranger holding a magazine. His shy face seemed to be looking elsewhere, at some invisible sadness.

“Something always survives,” Connolly said, not even sure what he meant.

“Yes, we survive,” Eisler said gently, opening his hand to indicate the house. “Americans now. Oh, I can see you think I’m being sentimental. You’re right, of course. That’s very German too. But our culture is over. Perhaps it had to end this way-killing ourselves. Very German. The end of the world. But now it is really over. There won’t be any more music, you know. It’s finished. Only this bomb is left-our last gift. I wonder what you will do with it. Perhaps you’ll become Germans too. Everybody can become monsters now.”

Connolly felt claustrophobic, as if he had stepped into Eisler’s self-absorption and couldn’t find his way out. Los Alamos had struck him as some overgrown international campus, everybody’s project, but that seemed irrelevant now. To Eisler, the Americans, the Hungarians, the Italians, the whole polyglot community were simply spectators to some violent national drama.

“If someone has to have it, I’m glad it’s us,” he said finally.

The blunt pragmatism of the answer roused Eisler, and his faraway milky eyes gleamed with attention. “Why? Because we’re not monsters? I say we. I’m American now too. But perhaps I don’t trust us quite so much. Once, perhaps. Not now. We have all learned to be monsters in this war. I wonder, are those lessons we forget? I don’t think so.”

“Nobody ever won a war being nice.”

“Fire with fire. Shall I tell you something? I am from Hamburg originally. You read about the firebombing there. The number of houses. The docks. Even the casualties. But what was it like? Most people don’t want to read that. The fire so high that it sucked in all the oxygen. For miles. You can do the calculations with slide rules. So you step out of the house and your lungs collapse. No escape. You jump into a canal and you are boiled alive. They found people trying to cross the street. Their feet were stuck in the melting asphalt, so they just stood there-screaming, I imagine-until they burned to death. Thousands. What difference, the numbers? Everybody.”