Medicus Castrare
by
Mykola Dementiuk
chapter 22 of Vienna Dolorosa
Kurt was certain he had an erection. A morning erection; he could feel the stiff penis standing up from his groin, lifting the thin sheet about him, and wondered why morning erections were always so much harder and stiffer than any he could arouse during the day.
He opened his eyes and looked across the ceiling to a small window high up on the wall. The sun shone through the window, and though its bright light fell directly on his eyes and face, Kurt did not squint or turn away and stared into the sunlight as if basking on a park bench or in a country meadow.
He certain his penis twitched again, but it wasn't morning, more like early afternoon. What time was it anyway? Noon? Three in the afternoon?
He looked away from the window and scanned his eyes across the room. He no longer seemed to be in the basement cell, but on a long table in what appeared to be a makeshift laboratory room; obviously the daisy-patterned curtains open at the window were not part of the laboratory-decorating scheme, but maybe the crucifix on the wall was.
His penis twitched.
Kurt looked at his groin and grimaced. The sheet lay flat across his belly and dipped into the open space between his parted legs. There was no erection; there was no penis. Like people who lose an arm or leg, and years later still reach to scratch an itch on the missing limb, so, too, Kurt felt his missing penis rise up to erection again and ache to be touched; would he, too, years later, try to clasp and jerk at a memory?
He shut his eyes and shook his head from side to side. This should not have happened; not the way it did. He should not have been summarily punished; not without any legal proceedings or judicial order, and certainly not by the police themselves, no matter what Paragraph 175 of the German anti-homosexual laws stated about the punishment for homosexuals. A trial should have held where he could defend himself, protest against the barbarism, the inhumanity, and at least then, if castration had been so ordered, it could have been performed by a trained medical doctor and not by some frightened medical student.
***
Unfortunately for Kurt, the student, showing off the skills and training of the venerable Viennese medical schools, performed too ably. He had injected Kurt with enough anesthesia to ease him into an immobile physical coma, while keeping him conscious and aware of the operation he was undergoing. The student performed expertly, making his painless and almost bloodless incisions beneath the scrotum, removing the testicular sacs, gliding them delicately into a small metal bowl.
But when he tried to stitch up the wound and the police realized what he was doing, the suture was snatched from his hand and he was ordered to continue the surgery, which he protested was not necessary now that the vital sexual sacs had been removed. To his credit as a future healer, he found the personal courage of his medical ethics to stand up to the police and explain that castration did not mean the entire elimination of sexual organs, the penis and scrotum, but rather, the simple removal of the two testicles from the scrotum.
The police weren't having any medical school scheisse crap and ordered the student to get on with it and do what was proscribed by law or face the consequences of being a homo-sympathizer, for which the punishment was most likely the same, and which they certain was codified somewhere in the German law books due to arrive any day now.
"That's what controls the sex drive," the student naively argued, holding out the metal tray and indicating the little gleaming ballocks. "He won't even get an erection now."
The tray flew out of his hands. Someone hit his head; he fell and heard the clang of metal strike the floor beside him, glimpsing a blood-veined gray ball shimmer in the tray.
He felt his trouser belt flapping open. "I'll do it!" he screamed, thrashing at the hands at his waist. "Let me go! I'll do it!"
A policeman laughed and knelt on his chest. "I'll do it! I'll do it!" he mimicked, snipping a pair of forceps before the student's face. He grabbed the front of student's shirt and hoisted him to his feet. "You do it!" he glared, thrusting the forceps into the student's groin. "Or I will!" Snip! Snip!
The student whimpered but quickly readjusted his belt, glancing at the floor for a torn-off trouser button, and spotted the mucous puddle of Kurt's testicles. One of the balls had been stepped on in the scuffle and lay smudged in a jellied pool, as the other ball, oval and gleaming, clung to its useless partner by a wrinkled whitish cord. The student gagged.
"Do it!" ordered the policeman, shoving the student toward Kurt.
The student took the forceps from the policeman and set them down on an instrument tray next to Kurt's shoulders. "A scalpel is needed," he said coldly, holding up a thin long blade for the policeman's inspection.
"Get on with it," snapped the policeman.
The student looked into Kurt's open eyes. He knew the anesthesia was making his patient see everything in a slow dream-like uncomprehension, bewildered images seeming unconnected to other images, pointless, meaningless, as if one step behind the reality of the nightmare.
The student bent over and examined Kurt's scrotum. A small puddle of blood had gelled under the open emptied sac. The student picked up a small towel and pushed it between Kurt's thighs.
"I'm getting quiet fed with this," the policeman glared at the student.
The student glared back at him. "The law says castration," he said firmly, picking up a sheet of cotton gauze and pressing it to the bleeding scrotum. "Not execution."
He turned his back on the policeman and looked at Karl. "I'm sorry," he said quietly to Kurt's open eyes, holding Kurt's hand and pulling it gently to the penis. The student circled his own hand atop Kurt's limp fingers and gently wrapped them around his flaccid cock. For a moment Kurt, staring at the student, held his penis, then the student let go and Kurt's hand dropped back to the side of the table.
The student bent over Kurt's groin and lifted the tip of the penis with his thumb and forefinger, tugging at the flabby loose skin around the base of the cock. He deftly touched the sharp scalpel to the stretched separating skin and circled the blade twice, cutting into and pulling up the stretched separating skin. He wiped the bloody edge of the blade on the gauze of Kurt's scrotum, then ran the blade around once more on the skin and freed the penile-sheath from the groin, sliding the soft skin up the cock and pulling it inside out. He made a final incision at the tip of the cock to free the foreskin and held it out of the policeman.
"Jesus Christ!" someone said, and gagged.
The student casually tossed the at the testicular puddle on the floor and leaned back over Kurt. He examined the raw penile muscle; it was small and shriveled and looked as much an object of sex and pleasure as did an aborted fetus resemble the end result of that sexual pleasure. The student sighed.
"I don't know much about this," he said quietly to himself, squinting and studying the penis. "I'm afraid I might damage the urinary tract."
He looked at Kurt; the man's eyes were open but his face had sagged into a drugged comatose indifference. He gazed back at the student as though uncomprehending and unconcerned over the entire situation; still, the student noticed a lone tear easing out of a corner of the man's eye and flow to his brown stubbled sideburn.
The student looked away, wiped the scalpel, and dipped it in a small jar of alcohol. Once more he lifted the raw penis, certain the drugged torso winced from his searing touch, then cleared his throat. Just as he had done with the covering sheath, he made a few rapid arcing incisions at the base of the groin, moving the blade underneath the cock, then quickly slicing over the top.
The blade cut easily, and the bleeding was intense, but the student wondered at his own expertise and indifference to what he was doing. They had never practiced castration, or mutilation, on the cadavers in school (the subject never came up), yet it was quite simple. Anyone with more than scant anatomical knowledge could discern the proper and improper way of going about it without inflicting too much damage.
Sure, it wasn't as though a brain tumor or cancer cyst was being sought out for removal, but then again, maybe it was. The man was a human being, but what he did with others was disgusting, and anyway, the law was the law. If the police were empowered to enforce the law, it was the student's duty as a medical practitioner to ensure that medical treatment to injured lawbreakers was dispensed as humanely as possible.
That's why he had chosen to intern in the clinic at the prison house and police station, caring for the prisoners who were constantly fighting and beating on each other and for the criminals brought in with various stabbing and gunshot wounds. This was the first time he had been called upon to create a wound rather than mend one.
But the man was a homosexual, caught on his knees with another man's penis in his mouth, in a public lavatory. If it hadn't been for his Party uniform, he probably would have suffered the same fate as his lover and been tossed out of a third-story window. The uniform saved him, but whether it would do him any good afterwards or not was in question. It was up to the student to keep him alive at least till then.
The student cut, and wondered if perhaps, now that Austria was reuniting with the Fatherland, castration might not become a part of the medical curriculum. It might even lead to a whole new specialization. Medicus Castrare. Doctor of Castration. He might even be called upon to give the first courses. And to write the first textbook.
The penis came off.
For a moment the student stared at the stared at the severed penis in his fingers as though surprised and unable to recognize what he was holding. Then he shuddered, gagged, and doubled over, dry-heaving and dropping the bloody cock back into Kurt's lap, where the damp warm clump struck Kurt's thigh and slipped down between his legs.
The policeman grabbed the student, spun him around and slapped his face. Kurt tried to move his thighs and shake the unbearable clump away. The policeman snatched it up and grabbed the student's throat, squeezing until the student's mouth opened and he gasped for air. The policeman forced the small red clump into the gagging student's mouth.
Kurt also gagged, and wretched, and saw the knobby bulb of th student's Adam's apple suddenly jut out over the policeman's fingers and just as suddenly ease down again as he swallowed.
The policeman let go of the student and stared in disbelief into his open mouth. Kurt passed out.
***
When Kurt came to, he was alone, and the window seemed to be growing dark, or so he thought. Once more he glanced at his flattened groin, and he was certain of it: he had an erection. Just as on mornings he was greeted by his stiff cock boring into a bed sheet, a blanket, a pillow end, so too he was certain his penis was once more hardening and rising up between his legs.
He squinted down at his torso. He was still clad in his Nazi Brownshirt, but his leather chest-belt was missing, the front and sleeve buttons torn off, the breast pocket gouged and ripped. Except for a white sheet covering his groin, his legs and feet were bare.
Kurt again felt the involuntary jerk of his stiff penis, and he pushed down the sheet to look. The blood-dried gauze taped under his belly button had come free in the moist tangle of pubic hairs and curled over itself, reveling the unevenly cut and blood-gelled curve of his rounded crotch.
He touched his stomach and edged his fingers down his groin, wincing at the soft clumps of gelled blood and stiff-pointed suture ends. Someone had sewn him up; the student? Unlikely, after what the policeman did. Kurt groaned and shook his head; they had probably brought in another student to finish the job.
He moved his fingers lower and felt a few more sutures poking between the moist hairs and scabs. He reached the top of the now useless fleshy flab of his scrotum and realized he had unknowingly inched his fingers over the spot where his penis should have been.
He screamed out. Though he had witnessed his own castration and mutilation, the anesthesia had somehow held him back from fully comprehending the reality of what was being done to him. Only now did the awareness of the barbaric loss breach into his consciousness and bestir him to anger and rage.
He screamed out again, gripping his empty scrotum, squeezing and pulling it in his fist. The sutures instantly opened, and blood splashed over his fingers and thighs.
He screamed, let go of the scrotum and slammed his fist down on the curved sutured groin. He struck once more, flinging his arm over his face and eyes, sobbing and shaking his head from side to side.
In the doorway, a disheveled uniformed soldier stood placidly watching and stroking his own limp soft cock.
*
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