ON THE SOFA LAY AN amorphous lump to which was appended a great pale ham. Lori slammed the door. A hollow groan issued from the ham, and two apertures appeared in its wan surface. After a time a mouth revealed itself, as if in one of those motion-picture cartoons where inanimate objects come to life through lines from nowhere, with the breezy implication that humanity is some sleight-of-hand. However, the present process was not flippant, but ponderous and awesome.
Lori put down her pail and fired more oil lamps, and in the richer light the great object rose gradually and with tremendous deliberation, like a sinking ship preparing for the final and irrevocable plunge, to an attitude of sitting.
“Herr Reinhart, mein Mann,” Lori waved loosely at the hulk.
“Sehr angenehm.” The voice was full, sonorous, making a grand thing of the words, and the eyes which the light showed to be as large and ripe as purple-black plums honored Reinhart directly and briefly, then shifted within the largesse of lid to Lori, who stood before the table, one hand at the base of a lamp, her left side from flank to hair bright in its refulgence.
“Here is your dinner.”
He ignored her to revolve his head to Reinhart, saying in English without accent: “Ah, this is your corporal!”
As Reinhart closed on the cold sponginess of the extended hand, he felt with surprise that his own was not being shaken in acquaintance but rather used as a purchase whereby this large figure was lifting itself from the couch, and the weight was such as to compel him to throw his rear feet wide, lest he be toppled forward.
“S’il vous plait,” his burden wheezed with difficulty on the way up, and then, all at once, was upright before him, or rather looming over him, for the man was a good seven feet tall and bulky as the great Kodiak bear. Reinhart was cast into the, for him, rare feeling of slightness. The pull left the hand, but it stayed clammily and, oddly, weightless, in his own, until he opened his fingers and gravity, not its parent body, moved it to fall slowly away.
Using that language, Lori’s man noted that he could speak English, and would, as a courtesy. Swaying a bit, he said that it was all but impossible for him to stay erect, but that he insisted on doing so until his guest was seated. Lori having furnished a chair, he sank again to the sofa, and drew the dressing gown that was his lone garment more snugly about him.
Lying still, pale, and full, like a sack of mozzarella, he tasted of the air with porcine nostrils, and began:
“Now we can converse at our ease. My name is Bach, which as you perhaps know, signifies ‘brook’ in German, and, naturally, to every German, and very likely to others as well, simply to utter the name is to conjure up the image of the master of the Thomasschule and the three most eminent of his twenty offspring—for his loins were apparently as prolific as his brain—who were also composers of a high rank, but not quite so well known outside their own land. So far as I know, I am not a descendant of that noble line. And you are called...?”
“Reinhart.”
“The name, of course, means ‘pure of heart,’ Hart being the Low German variant of Herz. But I have a feeling that you, like so many Americans, have no great interest in etymology. Unfortunately, it is one of my many weaknesses. And I do have more than my share.” He indicated his body with a sweep of the hand. “The main among them being a physical impuissance, if you’ll permit the word, in spite of a monstrous size. This misfortune has caused my energy to be diverted directly to my brain, which as a result is extraordinarily active and frequently denies me sleep, occupied as it forever is with a thousand and one theories, ideas, and bits of information which it should like to synthesize. I speak of this brain as if it acts of its own volition, has a life, as it were, of its own. For indeed it seems to have such an independent existence—awe-inspiring, to say the least. I—it is ridiculous, is it not, to speak of an ‘I’ separate from one’s brain? but it really seems that way to me—I conceive of my own identity as relating more closely to the emotions, for I am their creature and toil under the dominion of the harsh ambassadors they send to the external world, the senses.” Here he snorted: “Smell!” Poked a pair of spread fingers into his eyes: “Sight!” Extended a fat, pink tongue, swollen as a bladder: “Taste! And so on. Do I make myself clear?” He stared for a while at Reinhart, as if he had forgotten him, then asked, shyly: “I say, do you smoke?”
Reinhart offered the cigarettes, saying, “Please keep them all. I have many.”
“Oh, kind, kind. I cannot thank you enough.” He seemed about to rise, but decided against it. He dropped a tear. Wiping his nose on his dressing gown of dirty-orange cotton, he reverently chose a cigarette from the pack, called for a light from Lori, and getting it puffed luxuriously, his huge bald skull reflecting light like a mirrored ball upon a lawn.
“Now where were we? Oh yes, I believe some biography may be in order. Perhaps you would like to hear of my term of years in the Orient, where I served as cultural attaché in the Embassy in Tokyo. A strange people, the Japanese, rather stolid, in spite of their reputation for wit. Their art is curiously constipated. Nevertheless, it has a kind of mordant humor all its own, in its juxtaposition of human limitation and the infinity of nature. But perhaps I’m doing them an injustice. They have, like all peoples, much to recommend them. Good clear skins, for example; one never finds them shriveling up in later years, and scrupulously clean. Absolutely no odor! This may owe to their arriving at puberty earlier than we. Our Western pubescence, which, although we think it consonant with some divine ordinance, is the slave of social, rather than natural, imperatives, has certain unpleasant concomitants: the foul stink of perspiration, for example. Children, you will note, never stink, even in the heat of strenuous play. The Japanese, arriving at adulthood still in the vigor of extreme youth, consume the life-stuff in toto, while in us a certain excess accrues which maturates. Your excellent English verb, by the way, expresses beautifully both aspects of this process: the fructification and the rot. Orientals maintain that white men smell like corpses.”
The slight movement of Bach’s trunk, as he pitched the cigarette butt to the cracked concrete floor, where Lori stamped it dead, communicated a tremor to his lower extremities; the robe slipped away, exposing a view of verdigrised leg braces, complex in rods, wires, and articulations.
“The Japanese have an unusual poetry, which resists qualitative judgment. So long as a haiku is written in accordance with the traditional seventeen-syllable form, it is the peer of every other constructed in the past, or to be constructed in the future. If it violates the form, it is not a haiku. A Westerner at his first exposure is nearly driven mad by the question as to whether this is the beginning or the end of art, not to mention morality and history. Of course, this question is of no concern to the Japanese: it simply is, without qualification. They are wise and courageous enough to accept the given. Westerners can approach this knowledge only by burlesque, as when the Englishman says the great thing about the Order of the Garter is that no damned merit’s involved.”
Bach repeated the phrase, fondling it word by word, with the lust of a gourmand measuring off the links of a sausage, and developing an amusement which terminated in a high-pressure giggle, half-audible; the remainder being in the upper, silent-dog-whistle ranges, where it worked a secret violance on Reinhart’s nerves, so that forboding ballooned the membranes of his heart as might a seizure of gas.
Bach gasped and grunted a tongue which Reinhart took for Japanese. “Let me translate:
The snow crowns pale Fuji
Here below, it is spring.
That is of my own authorship, but it will do.”
He spoke Orientally again, in an altered voice.
“Chinese. Their verse is considerably different, but I am too exhausted to explore the subtleties of the difference at this time.”
Despite his growing nausea, Reinhart asked for a translation. He was determined not to permit this strange man to elude fact, believing that the secret of power lay in its mystery.
“Oh, yes, that is Meng Hsien-Wong.
Like a shimmer of bird calls
The petals of the pear-flower drift
Through the late clear air;
Already since the morning rain
The blossoms have grown older.
So does the pear-branch, snow-perfumed,
Hold a bright mirror up to man.
“You can see right off that this is not so pure as the haiku, being corrupted with morality. You perceived the moral, of course?”
Reinhart did not attend to this bit of malice. He had, at the mention of the “pear-flower,” discovered a primary cause of his illness: the room stank of rotten fruit.
“The latter was a tributary verse to an incomparable thirteenth-century painting by Chien Hsuan which I once owned but was confiscated, supposedly for some use in the advancement of the war, but how such an item could be used for such a purpose, I have no idea.”
“No, Bach,” said Lori, still standing by the table. “You sold it, don’t you remember?”
He narrowed his eyes at Reinhart, and his massive face became mean, piggish, as he spoke to Lori in German: “Manners, manners! We here speak the language of our guest.”
“But I have no English, as you know.”
Reinhart, working at a piece of gum, felt slightly relieved. He explained that he knew German and suggested that it be spoken for Lori’s benefit.
“To be sure,” said Bach, “I am at your command. Yet, I am about to tell you something in confidence. However, I wonder if I dare? She understood enough of my comments on the painting to correct me.”
“You probably have told the story before,” observed Reinhart, in a schoolmasterish voice.
“Of course! That’s exactly it.” He peered sagely at Reinhart. “You look like quite a decent fellow. Tell me, how many Germans have you shot?”
Reinhart enjoyed a brief daydream of cutting down rank upon rank of blond men with a Thompson submachine gun. But he lacked in nerve to carry it off. He sheepishly admitted:
“I’ve never fired a gun since I put on the uniform. I’m a medic, a sort of half a soldier. Geneva Convention...”
Bach made the best of it. “An appropriate office for an American, really; an exemplary role.” With a beatific smile, “A marvelous people: one-hundred thirty millions of decent chaps spread out across that strange Siberia. I have been there, of course, so I will not amuse you by asking if you know my friend Smith in New York.”
“My home is in Ohio,” said Reinhart, dolefully.
“Quite so. Very near Chicago. You see, I do know. I once, with a friend, took a motor trip from that city to Michigan. We passed a number of persons who hailed us with leafy stalks, and felt like Christ entering Jerusalem through the palm branches. However, when we were eventually brought to halt by an exceptionally violent signal, we were asked to purchase celery. But excuse me for a moment, won’t you?”
He called Lori, and with the same kind of help Reinhart had rendered earlier, performed the impressive ritual of rising. By a tottering, brink-of-disaster, Humpty-Dumpty locomotion he arrived at the door, where he leaned briefly against the jamb, while that frail member moaned at the weight, and then went out. The door stood open. His voice boomed in the hall in a complaint about the lack of light, and another door could be heard to open, but not afterwards to close. The rich rush of his water was audible.
Lori sat on the edge of the couch, extending both hands in supplication. “I fear he’s been drinking. It’s horribly embarrassing, you must forgive me.”
Reinhart was also embarrassed—for his own membership in the sex that made noise at the toilet. To cover up, he said, “It’s true, then, that he knows Chinese, and so on.”
“Yes,” said Lori, smiling wearily. “For some years he was assistant curator of Oriental art at the museum. I am sorry we have no paintings or china left for him to show you. He can be very illuminating. But most of our own collection had to be sold and what few things remained went to the incendiary bombs.”
“You sold them to pay for his medical treatment?”
“Oh no—it is another long story.”
“You have so many.”
“Yes, life is merely several long stories laid end to end.” She reached across and patted his knee maternally. “They must not trouble you.”
Although they should have, at that moment they did not. His distress owed rather to the dreadful odor, which was on the point of laying him low. Life takes precedence over courtesy.
Lori shook her head at his apologetic question. “That is one of Bach’s conceits. He read in Eckermann that Schiller was stimulated by the aroma of rotting apples.” She opened a drawer in the table. “Voila!” Exposing, sure enough, three blackened, scabrous fruits.
Bach was missing for a long time after he could no longer be heard. When he reappeared he stated that, having taken the air, he was much refreshed, which claim was supported by his looking a shade stronger on his pins, though still not by any means competent.
Reinhart was not sure as to what proportion of Bach’s weakness could be attributed to gigantism and what to drink. Indeed, the drunkenness referred to by Lori had taken Reinhart by surprise, for Bach, given his odd body, had not spoken in a way that would have seemed, to Reinhart, out of consonance with it had Bach been sober.
At any rate, Bach swayed in, regained the sofa, where now with his new-found strength he sat rather than reclined, and confessed to copious draughts of potato schnapps; had, in truth, drained the bottle, otherwise he would have offered some to his guest. A pity, grievously hard to get; for the past few years in Germany, there were few potatoes to eat, let alone drink. He gauged the present state of his inebriation to be at the half-saturation point, but rapidly clearing.
“If you stay with me throughout the period of sobering, you will no doubt see the engine run diminuendo and eventually cough dead, so I had better make the most of what articulate time’s left.
“Now I am not unconscious of my failure to ask you of yourself, but your status is not in question. I have reason to believe that the American Intelligence, when it finds time, will be unusually interested in mine. You see in me one whose only engagement for the future is with Judgment Day, for, frankly, I was a National Socialist.”
Reinhart straightened in his chair, crossed his legs the other way, tugged at the margin of his jacket, and checked his buttons. How seldom we meet the real thing!
“It would be silly for me to do anything else, my record being readily available. For I was no more tepid in my political convictions than in anything else. In short, if I was a Nazi, I was an absolute one. My only wish is to tell my story without rancor, without extenuation, and submit myself to your mercy. Will you, as a matter of simple humanity, grant me this favor? Hier stehe ich—”
“Only you are reclining, Bach,” interrupted Lori, with a foolish giggle which made Bach frown and even Reinhart to turn his head in impatience. She had brought up another chair when dispossessed of the sofa, and slumped there like a discarded rag doll.
“Please, please,” Bach replied in German, “none of your Quatsch. This is a sober affair.”
“How can I hide it?” asked Bach. “What is done is done. Nazism might be defined as an extreme attempt to alter the relations of Jews and gentiles, in the latter’s favor. All the other involvements start from this, and this is one of those sublime simplicities that achieve the miracle of fecundity in reduction, like the Cartesian cogito. It requires the utmost in intellectual courage to accept the proposition that all human beings are either Jews or non-Jews; with anything less, the whole thing collapses into absurdity.
“Yes, exactly, you smile. So should have I genuinely, not too many years ago, and so do I now, with the hypocrisy of courtesy, and also with real sympathy, for I can deny myself no indulgence in my present state. But I did not begin life as an anti-Semite. There were no Jews in my birthplace, a small village in Bavaria, and it was not until I entered the Gymnasium at ten years old that I ever saw a Jew, and not until I entered the university that I ever, to my knowledge, heard Jews remarked on in a special way. In short, for many years I thought of Jews as simply Germans of a religious persuasion different from my own. Such hostile attitudes towards the Israelites as I came across from time to time, I believed to be the by-products of doctrinal differences of the sort that obtain between Catholics and Protestants—of which I was thoroughly aware, as a Protestant Bavarian.
“I continued in my naïve tolerance throughout the university years. A force to support it was my personal status as an aesthete. I avoided the drinking and the fraternal societies and the other nonsense, and consequently did not escape being marked as an odd one. Finding myself in the same category as the Jews, I went so far as to make some friends among their ranks. They were, naturally, excellent scholars, and their scholarship was conditioned with the sort of finesse that is so sadly lacking among the Germans. In my reaction against Spiessbürgertum, I shortly became infatuated with the Jews, and with their culture. And surely no culture is more attractive to the young man than the Jewish, just as there is no more repugnant than the German. Besides, Orientalism was my pursuit, and the Jew was the earliest flowering of the East. I gradually became aware of the indictment brought against my pets by the Germans, in all of its ramifications, but I still was not be moved. Indeed, I became more pro-Jewish than before. And I did this in an unusual mode. I accepted the accusations as truth, taking issue only with the interpretation. That is to say if the charge was that Jews owed allegiance only to their international Jewish state, I agreed and approved. For, thought I, what else could they do, when throughout history they have been rejected from the Christian society they sought innocently and sincerely to join? In the Twenties, as you may know, the Germans were in narrow straits, while the Jews allegedly flourished. Now it took some nerve to hold, as I did, that it was natural and just that they should tighten the screws against the gentile, for would not the latter have done so had the situation been reversed? I could never see anything peculiarly evil in the Jew’s economic behavior. Should the executioner be blamed for the practice of hanging?
“As for the arguments on racial grounds, they were sheer foolishness, only to be believed in by the kind of people who take up vegetarianism, Rosicrucianism, and other crackbrained schemes to evade paying the piper. I paid little attention to them, and I think this was also true of most convinced anti-Semites, whatever certain loudmouths said. This phase of Nazism was sheer spectacle; this was the Nazis’ analogy to Christianity’s graven images, saints’ relics, etc., and a central vulgarity on which Protestants and Catholics could agree. Never since Luther, whose nationalistic fury vis-à-vis Rome withered his sense of psychology, had the national appetite for histrionics been so appeased.
“Well, then, in the light of all this, why did I eventually reverse myself and become ineluctably anti-Semitic, even to the extent of joining the National Socialist party, which I had from the first abominated as an unholy alliance of gangsters and buffoons? I became an anti-Semite, not for the usual reason—because of the anti-Semites—but because of the Jews, and I joined the united front against the Jews because there was nowhere else to go.
“When I emerged from the university into the great world, moved to Berlin and entered its intellectual life—which in that time was almost uniformly Jewish—I did not change my stand. I still baited the anti-Semites, and, as one will when in the grip of a self-righteous obsession, in the absence of suitable adversaries engaged in dialogues with myself, acting first as advocatus diaboli in the presentation of the strongest possible case against the Jew, then demolishing it with my better arguments. I would probably never have had cause to change had I kept company only with gentiles, and certainly never, had my associates been anti-Semites. But I found myself in ever-closer relationships with Jews, whom I attracted as my philo-Judaic position became known, and whom I of course sought out. And thus the foundation came to be built, stone by stone, for the mansion of knowledge. For I found that no matter how well disposed a gentile is towards a Jew it can never be sufficient, for the Jew will not stop short of the total debasement of his friends. The Jew does not want, and does not ask for simple understanding. He craves only total victory, and rewards anything less with corrosive hatred.
“I was not permitted by the Jews to deplore the persecutions they had suffered at Christian hands. In their arrogance they asserted that this very act of deploring was a form of anti-Semitism because it credited their enemies with efficacy, and no matter how superficially well-intentioned the gentile who entertained such sentiments, he could not avoid unconscious Schadenfreude, no more than can the athlete who sympathizes with the cripple.
“This is an excellent example of the Jew’s ability to pursue his end by contradictory means. Sometimes he will object to the very designation of ‘the Jews,’ maintaining that no such racial, cultural, religious, ethnic, or whatnot entity exists, that it is the sheerest invention, the most fantastic lie. If you point out that if this were so, anti-Semitism would also be nonexistent, he will say, ‘Exactly, that supports my claim that the whole affair is simply the eternal struggle between the mob and the elite, with no relation to Jewishness.’ At other times, and under other guises, he will present the argument that only the Jews exist, and no other people, because of all the peoples of the earth, only the Jews have been able to preserve their identity in every milieu. He can disclaim Jewish influence on any culture, or assert that the Jew is the Ernährer of our heritage, and cite Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Yes, he will cite Jesus with the composure which is his forte! The modern world is, for him, a theater in which the Jews are anonymous members of the cast—unless the situation requires the reverse strategy, in which case he produces a list of leading performers beside whom the gentiles are relegated to the beer-hall stage: Marx, Freud, Einstein.
“He can assume any position at will, for he believes in none. And he hates the sympathizer because sympathy implies melioration, and melioration is change. The Jew’s real aim is to bring Time to a stop. Like all Asiatics, he has a horror of motion, process, becoming—whatever name you like—for us Occidentals, the superior Deity. When is replaces to be, he will have won. Humanitarianism, liberalism, evolution, tolerance, understanding, these he rightly sees as temporal devices to frustrate him, whereas he delights in the antagonism of fanatics. The anti-Semite is his darling, just as the atheist is the theist’s sweetheart, the murderer the victim’s beloved. The Jew would be a god. How near to success is he then when called a devil! And how he writhes in hatred when a slobbering, mealy-mouthed humanitarian addresses him as Man!
“Totalitarianism provides his most congenial society, with its stupid calls and alarms, its aping of the Jew’s own tricks, such as the obliteration of time and the fierce attack on moderates, and—its persecution of the Jew! When he becomes an obsession, he is on the threshold of victory.”
Bach retracted his big head into layers of neck-flesh, recovered, then began again, right forefinger extended:
“I do not mean to claim that I quickly saw the light. Young and innocent as I was, I determined after each rejection to redouble my efforts at understanding, feeling still that it was our responsibility that this strange people faced the world in a crabbed, distorted way. How very close was I to the truth! A human being if thrown into water at birth can swim. A few years of growth and this talent is gone, to be regained only by artifice. Yet, this is as it should be. Artifice is what makes us human. It is morally necessary to withhold this function from a child until he has lived long enough to learn the properties of water and the human body, and to experience a sense of achievement in placing them in a new relationship. So with me. By the heart, I had arrived at the proper relationship with the Jews, the masterly one, but I was condemned to tread the earth for some years in ignorance before returning to it by ratiocination.
“But, to proceed. I told myself again that the Jews had no reason to think kindly on their oppressors, and that it was only natural they would out of pride decline any aid that tended to imply a lack of self-competency on their part. I summoned up my resources of love, decency, intelligence. They might deny me, but I would not deny them. I suddenly took on, through the force of my commitment, the identity of a Jew; and the soma reflected the psyche: the cartilaginous tissue of my nose thinned, my eyebrows thickened, and my shoulders developed a nervous twinge.
“At first, my gentile friends derived much fun from this state of affairs, and would jokingly call upon me for the Jewish point of view on every question (this “Jewish opinion” is a favorite delusion of gentiles, and one which while ostensibly deploring, Jews enjoy enormously). But it did not take long for them to discover that what was an idle jest to them, was deadly serious to me. As my philo-Semitism became firmer and firmer, I felt a wall rising between us. The last brick fell into place when a story began to go around that I was really half-Jewish, and had thrown my lot with the alien part of my heritage. This fiction, I realized, was only their defense against accepting the terrible fact that I had, in free will, abdicated from the gentile’s estate.
“But, of course, neither was I received as a fellow by the Israelites. Here there existed no solid wall—this people could not have survived all those agonizing centuries by material means. (The Jew, by the way, has always deluded his enemies into thinking he is materialistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth, which you can appreciate when you observe that he has flourished in the West under capitalism, a philosophy which above all others is abstract and visionary, and based on the intangibles of faith and spirit. He is, however, naturally opposed to the recent developments of capitalism. If it becomes humane, that is to say, evolves into true socialism—which is absolute materialism—we have a chance of conquering him. Vain thought!)
“So I was with and around the Jews without being of them. Oh, they don’t hold secret meetings, like the mythical Elders of Zion (that wonderful legend, which is far too gross to be of Jewish origin—you know they, themselves, ‘plant’ most of the anti-Semitic fairy tales—is an example of the gratuitous aid they are often rendered by moronic gentiles), they have no arcane signs or handgrips, no insigne. How they communicate their identity to each other is so mysterious that it exceeds mystery, as does the manner in which a single spermatozoon out of ten thousand penetrates the egg. The important thing is that it happens. And, if we cannot grasp it, no Jew can fail to. Which is why no Jew can truly forsake his people, and why the Jews display that odd combination of mockery and pity towards those of their fellows who vainly toy with religious ‘conversions’ and facial surgery.
“The great reversal (from philo- to anti-Semitism) came, as those things do, all at once. I was in the habit at that time of spending the evenings with my Jews in a cellar-cafe where over a single glass of beer or cheap wine we would exhaust hours talking art, literature, philosophy, and those other diversions of the young, including politics, of which ours was, in that day—1927—communism. All in what I cherished, despite numerous disillusionments, as the intimate atmosphere of brotherhood. One evening a newcomer appeared at our table, a fierce, hideous, wooly-headed young Israelite, looking like the pictures one sees of Trotsky as a youth. He was discoursing passionately on some topic, political I should imagine, but as I took a seat, he terminated abruptly. ‘It’s all right,’ one of the others told him, ‘Bach is all right.’ He nodded amiably at me, and rather transparently began to comment on inconsequential matters. Later, when I had left the table briefly to speak with a friend across the room, I saw on returning that he and Schwartz, whom I regarded as my closest comrade, had their heads together, snickering. The object of their amusement was obvious. Now, lest you think me hypersensitive, I must explain to you that the Jew’s humor is concerned solely with satire; he does not laugh at things, but always at people. That is to say, he finds funny not what occurs by chance, such as a stout man’s tumble on the ice, but what has taken place by human will, and the involvements therefrom, such as, say, a gentile posing as a Jew. This temper stems first from the Jews themselves having suffered too much from chance to find comedy in the fortuitous, and, second, from their great reverence for the given, the inanimate, the timeless. One might almost say the Jew would see the ice mocked by the stout man’s hindquarters.
“I felt a rush of loathing at that moment, as one about to vomit feels the bile-bitter fluid rise in his throat, and not at the Jews, but at myself. For a moment I had seen in those mirrors of degradation that dreadful, abominable specter that no one can face with composure: my naked self. But I choked it down and took my seat, for the deepest self-knowledge bears with it the deepest cowardice. The impulse to action was to come almost an hour later. The conversation had continued in the same silly direction the newcomer had indicated: tastes in wine, the beasts at the Zoo, a job a friend had lately got on one of the Ullstein papers—B.Z. am Mittag, I believe—and so on. Finally, the group began, only half-seriously, to plan an outing in the next week. Half-seriously, I say, because we were all unemployed, and could not have raised the money for the elaborate refreshments listed as the minimum fare. ‘Where shall we go?’ cried Schwartz. Someone named a favorite section of the Grunewald. The eternal dupe, I had been swept up again into the warmth of the fraternity, and was adding my bit. I noted with good humor that we should avoid the spot named, because on a recent Sunday stroll I had marked that it was uncomfortably crowded.
“ ‘Yes,’ said the young Trotsky, ‘too many Jews.’ I think now that he was merely passing a harmless, if masochistic jest, as Jews often do, but, then, it struck the spot that had been worked raw by the earlier incident. I broke down and wept. God, there is nothing more terrible than a young man’s sorrow! But not even that will move a Jew! I sprang to my feet. ‘Yes,’ I sobbed, ‘just as here,’ and fled from the café. From that moment on, the battle was joined.
“I had been a fool, but my greater folly was yet to come. I fell prey to the subtlest device of this devil, and joined the ranks of his greatest ally, the National Socialist Party.
“To war on decency, love, truth, freedom, is to permit the Jew to mask himself with the Good, and thus to embrace him. Through our aid, the Jew was able to achieve what in all the anguished millenia before he was not. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice! We weeded out his weaklings, while increasing his moral capital with every one we destroyed. We hardened him with our tortures. We tempered him, refined him in our fires, we polished him down to the indestructible core. Today you can see the results of our craftsmanship: he is pure hard diamond, and his radiant leer sparkles in triumph over his fallen forge-slave.”
In conclusion Bach reached over and dropped his hand on Reinhart’s knee with a startling weight. Startling because when he had held it earlier in greeting, it was light, and since it was clammy as well, reminiscent of a damp sponge. Now it hit with a plop like a waterlogged sponge, and, sure enough, when Reinhart looked down he saw a faint wet stain melting the crease from his trouser-knee. This oddity was as full of liquid, it occurred to Reinhart, who remembered both the tears of gratitude at the cigarettes and the weeping in the story, as a cheese is full of “whey” in all the best fairy tales. As the first occasion on which he had come across anyone whose hands genuinely dripped with perspiration, it was worthy of cataloguing. Then too, in this damp cellar nothing dried. His own sweat, while not as plentiful as Bach’s, sheathed him like a trout’s mucous envelope. A strip of stagnant water lined the base of the wall; the concrete blocks above had sieved out a patina of mineral salts.
Bach’s rhetoric had made poor Reinhart’s head reel, from amusement through indignation to logical vertigo. He repeated the process, this time at greater cost, that he had undergone in Philosophy 100, where the splendid promise of the fall catalogue—“The major traditions of European thought”—was blighted by the inevitable petty-Machiavelli of a lecturer with his cul-de-sacs: “Epimenides, a Cretan, said all Cretans are liars. Was he telling the truth?” And even if he understood, he was lost, and guilty, guilty.
At last, in desperation, he said: “Just let me get hold of this. You want to kill the Jews with kindness?”
Bach made his giggle, and the hairs rose on Reinhart’s neck.
“Leave it to the American to put things without equivocation!”
Reinhart took his advantage to steer into the congenial area of behaviorism. “But all this is in terms of feelings and ideas. What exactly did you do, as a Nazi?”
Bach withdrew the sponge to his own knee, his eyes bagging in disappointment.
“I should have thought the intellectual history to be the more valuable. Well, then, if you insist, I can produce a few crumbs of physical activity. Humiliating, but perhaps useful as an index to the nightmare from which it took me so long to awaken.
“I joined the Party in November, 1938. I shan’t dwell on the scruples the conquering of which took me an entire decade from the aforementioned events. I placed the button under my lapel a few days before the celebrated Kristallnacht when, in retaliation for the murder by the Polish Jew Grynszpan of an attaché at the German Embassy in Paris, the Nazis instituted an action against Jews and Jewish property throughout the Reich. It may sound queer to you that I participated in some of the raids in Berlin. Yes, I the aesthete! My request for a role was most suspiciously received, the storm troops being constituted of the most ungodly scum you can imagine, whose motivation was not a holy passion against Jews but a simple nihilistic lust for destruction. However, a fanatical eye is an effective persuader. I managed to win a position on one of the flying squads that swooped on the Jewish shops in the Kurfürstendamm. You cannot understand, nor can I describe the exultation with which I plied my axe, even astonishing the thugs whom I accompanied, so that by the end of the night there was a tacit agreement among these canaille that I was their leader.
“In a china shop, where we had done a job worthy of your proverbial wild bull and were ready to depart, one of my companions came upon a hidden safe, buried in the rear wall. We had to send out for explosives to open it, it being impervious to the pick, and I was all for abandoning the project for better work elsewhere. But the cupidity of these swine was aroused; they were convinced the Jew had cached his treasure there. The door was eventually burst, revealing an empty chamber save for a single object, a small vase, which on examination I determined to be a piece of thirty-pfennig trash from Woolworth’s.
“Now why the Jew would have placed such a thing in his vault I could not at first explain, and, indeed, was about to pitch it aside, when the thought struck me that the scoundrel had got intelligence of the raid, and, lacking anything better, had employed this means of retaliation, with a sense that Nazis of the common stripe would be certain to think it valuable and demonstrate their idiocy by confiscating it unbroken. A very deep joke, typically Jewish. But I knew, with the penultimate hatred which is, as I now know, stupidity, but which then seemed wisdom, that at last I had in my hands an instrument to enable me to top the Jew at his own game. I led my men in another diligent round of razing. When we had done, the showcases were flinders, the walls demolished to the lath, the woodwork a pile of faggots for the stove, the wiring ripped out—in short, a reduction that could have qualified us journeymen house-wreckers. A tiny table was spared, and placed in the center of the room. On it, I centered the vase, filled to the rim with my ordure.”
For all the foliage, thought Reinhart, he is a clown at the core. “That was sort of childish, wasn’t it?”
Bach could not be conned. “No, with gratitude, if you mean ‘and therefore not responsible.’ ” And, not seeing Reinhart’s grin grow dim, he struggled to his feet without assistance; swaying over him, face contorted, arms rising and falling like a crazy windmill, he screamed in the voice of his giggle, piercing, forceful, but not loud: “Oh no, no. Can’t you understand? In Auschwitz we of the SS could kill two thousand head in half an hour, but it was burning the bodies that took time.”
He produced a cavernous belch that shook him to the fundament, and toppled backwards, ever so slowly, onto the couch, which recoiled to the floor and recovered. Massively he slept.
Lori, too, slept in the chair, but the absence of sound as Reinhart rose and prepared to creep away, awakened her.
“No, are you leaving?”
Reinhart pointed to the sofa.
“He is spent, poor man!”
At the purity of her look, Reinhart seized her bony shoulders and shook them violently as he might have washed his overcoat with air. When he had exhausted the brutality of his violated virtue and summarized Bach’s dissertation, she tossed back her head and laughed extravagantly.
“Bach in the SS! Pardon my rudeness. Perhaps one must be German to see the joke. The SS had most severe physical requirements.”
“Why would he tell such a story?” asked Reinhart, aloud but to himself, as the chair again received his mass. “If he concocts this out of the thin air the man is surely mad.”
“No, he is not insane. The minds of the insane run in straight lines, not always Euclidean, but always straight. The job there is to find the geometrical system by which to measure them. Here, if you insist, we have something eccentric, twisted but normal. In fact,” she added, “normal is twisted.”
“But why evil?” he wailed. “When people lie they make themselves better, not worse.”
“No, you foolish boy!” She thrust her face up at him. “No, they first make themselves something, whether good or bad, but something. A man cannot live without a function. Can you understand that, you American?”
He had never in all his life heard the national adjective pronounced with contempt. Amerikaner: he loathed it for a moment himself, but there was yet one more hateful.
“You German!” he ranted. “Can you understand this: I am ashamed to be of German descent! It makes me sick to my stomach. I might lie to make myself worse, as you say, but not to claim I hurt defenseless people. You once asked about my relatives—I hope they were killed in the bombing! And if they weren’t, they are dead anyway in their souls. Do you know what you did when you murdered the Jews? You committed suicide, all of you!” Of course, no sooner was it out than he realized he echoed Bach to the letter, and was ashamed.
“Don’t talk of things you cannot understand.” She turned her back.
He reclaimed from the table the pack of cigarettes he had given Bach and made for the door. Lori pursued him. In the dank passageway, in the pale light that reached there from the lamps within, they grappled, she shrilling: “I must make you understand about Bach. It is simply an overactive anterior pituitary. Not only does this outlaw of a gland produce great size, but it also eliminates the sexual urge!”
“I don’t care, I don’t care.” Saying which again and again, he nevertheless permitted her to pull him back inside. He knew now of his own impotence: his great moral address had been delivered, every word, in English.
Lori drew him to the chair and notwithstanding their differences in size, literally knocked him into it, all that was necessary being one good push in the midsection.
“Now,” she cried, standing militantly before him. “It was you who insisted on coming here. You forced me to bring you against my will. Therefore you will stay until I finish. Bach has done as much for me as one human being can do for another. He has saved my life, my very life!, every single day for three years.”
“You were anti-Nazi?” asked Reinhart in rapturous awe, but she paid him no mind.
“And it involved more than simply not turning me in to the Gestapo—you perhaps think in your naïve way that that much could be expected of a husband; you have not lived in Germany—and more than concealing me, too, although that at the daily risk of his own life.”
Beneath the vast, important feelings Reinhart had a little tickle of pride, no less important, at her ceasing to speak so as to favor his imperfect knowledge of the tongue. She spoke swiftly and with the full resources of idiom and construction, and he did not miss a word.
“The long story of his art collection is pitifully short. He sold it, piece by piece, to pay for day by day of my life.”
“The Gestapo then could be bribed.” The idea made that dread agency less terrible.
“The money went elsewhere. Who got it does not matter.”
“Excuse me, I am so stupid, foolish as you say—if you don’t wish to answer you don’t have to. Why, when he has this to tell, does Bach pretend to be the reverse?”
“Because the meaningful things are never said. Because he is infected with the Berliner’s disease, irony and gallows-humor. Because—” She moved intensely near, and he was afraid she might call him American again, with all that scorn. “No, I shall not lie to you. ... Because the time when he could do something for me has now passed.”
He found that, idiotically, he had replaced the wretched cigarettes on the table.
“I came here tonight to take pity on you,” he said. “I have to ask it instead for myself. Believe me, it is not easy to be a fool. You have to work hard at it.” He went again to the door, this time unaccompanied, from which distance he looked long at her minor, crumpled figure, and said: “You are a Jew.”
Bach groaned lightly in his sleep while Lori with careful hands arranged a quilt on his recumbent hulk. Then, extinguishing all the lamps but the one on the central table, she came once more to Reinhart.
“That saves me, nicht wahr? That one-half Jewishness, that mongrel portion which so short a time ago condemned me, is now my salvation. And enlightened people no longer believe in miracles! Yet within oneself, one is always just a person. Even Hitler. Do you know, his favorite meal was corn-on-the-cob and jelly omelet. Think of that: there were moments when his sole concern was to retain a bit of slippery jam on a fork.”
He opened the door and stared forlornly into the gloomy passage.
“Shall I light you out?”
“No thanks. I’ll try to manage that much on my own. May I come again?”
Briefly she was against him, her small head in the hollow of his rib cage.
“You are a fool, a good fool, a kind fool.”
She gave his hand the short, one-shot European shake and said no more as he began the tortuous ascent to the mid-world.