So the theory has it that the universe expanded exponentially from a point, a singular space/time point, a moment/thing, some original particulate event or quantum substantive happenstance, to an extent that the word explosion is inadequate, though the theory is known as the Big Bang. What we are supposed to keep in mind, in our mind, is that the universe didn’t burst out into pre-existent available space, it was the space that blew out, taking everything with it in a great expansive flowering, a silent flash into being in a second or two of the entire outrushing universe of gas and matter and darkness-light, a cosmic floop of nothing into the volume and chronology of spacetime. Okay?

And universal history since has seen a kind of evolution of star matter, of elemental dust, nebulae, burning, glowing, pulsing, everything flying away from everything else for the last fifteen or so billion years.

But what does it mean that the original singularity, or the singular originality, which included in its submicroscopic being all space, all time, that was to voluminously suddenly and monumentally erupt into concepts that we can understand, or learn—what does it mean to say that. . . the universe did not blast into being through space but that space, itself a property of the universe, is what blasted out along with everything in it? What does it mean to say that space is what expanded, stretched, flowered? Into what? The universe expanding even now its galaxies of burning suns, dying stars, metallic monuments of stone, clouds of cosmic dust, must be filling. . . something. If it is expanding it has perimeters, at present far beyond any ability of ours to measure. What do things look like just at the instant’s action at the edge of the universe? What is just beyond that rushing, overwhelming parametric edge before it is overwhelmed? What is being overcome, filled, enlivened, lit? Or is there no edge, no border, but an infinite series of universes expanding into one another, all at the same time? So that the expanding expands futilely into itself, an infinitely convoluting dark matter of ghastly insensate endlessness, with no properties, no volume, no transformative elemental energies of light or force or pulsing quanta, all these being inventions of our own consciousness, and our consciousness, lacking volume and physical quality in itself, a project as finally mindless, cold, and inhuman as the universe of our illusion.

I would like to find an astronomer to talk to. I think how people numbed themselves to survive the camps. So do astronomers deaden themselves to the starry universe? I mean, seeing the universe as a job? (Not to exonerate the rest of us, who are given these painful intimations of the universal vastness and then go about our lives as if it is no more than an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.) Does the average astronomer doing his daily work understand that beyond the celestial phenomena given to his study, the calculations of his radiometry, to say nothing of the obligated awe of his professional life, lies a truth so monumentally horrifying—this ultimate context of our striving, this conclusion of our historical intellects so hideous to contemplate—that even one’s turn to God cannot alleviate the misery of such profound, disastrous, hopeless infinitude? That’s my question. In fact if God is involved in this matter, these elemental facts, these apparent concepts, He is so fearsome as to be beyond any human entreaty for our solace, or comfort, or the redemption that would come of our being brought into His secret.

—At dinner last night, code name Moira. After having seen her over the course of a year or two and having spoken to her only briefly, always with the same sign within myself, I have come to recognize some heightened degree of attention, or a momentary tightness in the chest, perhaps, or a kind of, oddly, nonsexual arousal, that usually gives way in a moment to a sense of loss, to a glimpse of my own probably thrown away life, or more likely of the resistant character of life itself in refusing to be realized as it should be. . . I understood as I found myself her dinner partner why, finally, it was worthwhile to endure a social life in this crowd.

She wears no makeup, goes unjeweled, and arrives habitually underdressed in the simplest of outfits for an evening, her hair almost too casually pinned or arranged, as if hastily done up at the last minute for whatever black-tie dinner she has been dragged to by her husband.

Her quiet mien is what I noticed the first time I met her—as if she were thinking of something else, as if she is somewhere else in all our distinguished surroundings. Because she did not demand attention and was apparently without a profession of her own, she could seem entirely ordinary among the knockout women around her. Yet she was always the object of their not quite disguisable admiration.

A slender, long-waisted figure. Fine cheekbones and dark brown eyes. The mouth is generous, the complexion an even ecru paleness that, unblemished by any variation, seems dispensed over her face as if by lighting. This Slavic evenness, particularly at her forehead under the pinned slant of hair, may account at least in part for the reigning calmness I have always felt from her.

She nodded, smiled, with a clear direct look into my eyes, and took her place at the table with that quietness of being, the settledness of her that I find so alluring.

Things went well. Let me entertain you.. . . I spoke my lines trippingly on the tongue. She was responsive, appreciative in her quiet way. On my third glass of Bordeaux, I thought, under cover of the surrounding conversations, I should take my chances. My confession drew from her an appreciative and noncommittal merriment. But then color rose to her cheeks and she stopped laughing and glanced for a moment at her husband, who sat at the next table. She picked up her fork and with lowered eyes attended to her dinner. Characteristically, her blouse had fallen open at the unsecured top button. It was apparent she wore nothing underneath. Yet I found it impossible to imagine her having an affair, and grew gloomy and even a bit ashamed of myself. I wondered bitterly if she elevated the moral nature of every man around her.

But then, when dessert was about to be served, the men were instructed to consult the verso of their name cards and move to a new table. I was seated next to a woman TV journalist who expressed strong political views at dinner though never on the screen, and I was not listening, and feeling sodden and miserable, when I looked back and found. . . Moira. . . staring at me with a solemn intensity that verged on anger.

She will meet me for lunch up near the museum and then we’ll look at the Monets.

—And everything flying away from everything else for fifteen or so billion years, affinities are established, sidereal liaisons, and the stars slowly drift around one another into rotating star groups or galaxies, and in great monumental motions the galaxies even more slowly convene in clusters, which clusters in turn distribute themselves in linear fashion, a great chain or string of superclusters billions of light-years on end. And in all this stately vast rush of cosmosity, a small and obscure accident occurs, a chance array of carbon and nitrogen atoms that fuse into molecular existence as a single cell, a speck of organic corruption, and, sacre bleu, we have the first entity in the universe with a will of its own.

Message from the Father:

—Everett@earthlink.net

Hi, the answers to your questions, in order: the Book of Common Prayer; surplice; clerical collar with red shirt; in direct address, Father, in indirect, the Reverend Soandso (a bishop would be the Right Reverend); my man was Tillich, though some would stick me with Jim Pike. And the stolen cross was brass, eight feet high. You are making me nervous, Everett.

Godbless,
Pem

—Heist

This afternoon in Battery Park. Warm day, people out. Soft autumn breeze like a woman blowing in my ear.

Rock doves everywhere aswoop, the grit of the city in their wings.

Behind me the financial skyline of lower Manhattan sunlit into an island cathedral, a religioplex.

And I come upon this peddler of watches, fellow with dreadlocks, a big smile. Standing tall in his purple chorister’s robe. His sacral presence not diminished by the new white Nikes on his feet.

“Don’t need windin, take em in de showerbat, everyting proof, got diamuns ’n such, right time all de time.”

A boat appears, phantomlike, from the glare of the oil-slicked bay: the Ellis Island ferry. I will always watch boats. She swings around, her three decks jammed to the rails. Sideswipes bulkhead for contemptuous New York landing. Oof. Pilings groan, crack like gunfire.

Man on the promenade thinks it’s him they’re after, breaks into a run.

Tourists down the gangplank thundering. Cameras, camcorders, and stupefied children slung from their shoulders.

Lord, there is something so exhausted about the NY waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.

But I went back to the peddler in the choir robe and said I liked the look. Told him I’d give him a dollar if he’d let me see the label. The smile dissolves. “You crazy, mon?”

Lifts his tray of watches out of reach: “Get away, you got no business wit me.” Looking left and right as he says it.

I was in mufti—jeans, leather jacket over plaid shirt over T-shirt. Absent cruciform ID.

And then later on my walk, at Astor Place, where they put out their goods on the sidewalk: three of the purple choir robes neatly folded and stacked on a plastic shower curtain. I picked one and turned back the neck and there was the label, Churchpew Crafts, and the laundry mark from Mr. Chung.

The peddler, a solemn young mestizo with that bowl of black hair they have, wanted ten dollars each. I thought that was reasonable.

They come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, they find a piece of sidewalk and go to work. The world’s poor lapping our shores, like the rising of the global warmed sea.

I remember how, on the way to Machu Picchu, I stopped in Cuzco and listened to the street bands. I was told when I found my camera missing that I could buy it back the next morning in the market street behind the cathedral. Merciful heavens, I was pissed. But the fences were these shyly smiling women of Cuzco in their woven ponchos of red and ocher. They wore black derbies and carried their babies wrapped to their backs. . . and with Anglos rummaging the stalls as if searching for their lost dead, how, my Lord Jesus, could I not accept the justice of the situation?

As I did at Astor Place in the shadow of the great mansarded brownstone voluminous Cooper Union people’s college with the birds flying up from the square.

A block east, on St. Marks, a thrift shop had the altar candlesticks that were lifted along with the robes. Twenty-five dollars the pair. While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade.

I’m lying, Lord. I just read the damn things when I’m depressed. The paperback detective he speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. And his world is circumscribed and dependable in its punishments, which is more than I can say for Yours.

I know You are on this screen with me. If Thomas Pemberton, B.D., is losing his life, he’s losing it here, to his watchful God. Not just over my shoulder do I presumptively locate You, or in the Anglican starch of my collar, or in the rectory walls, or in the coolness of the chapel stone that frames the door, but in the blinking cursor. . .

—We made our plans standing in front of one of the big blue-green paintings of water lilies. It is a matter of when she can get away. She has two young children. There is a nanny, but everything is so scheduled. We had not touched, and still did not as we came out of the Met and walked down the steps and I hailed a cab for her. Her glance at me as she got in was almost mournful, a moment of declared trust that I felt as a blow to the heart. It was what I wanted and had applied myself to getting, but once given, was instantly transformed into her dependence, as if I had been sworn to someone in a secret marriage whose terms and responsibilities had not been defined. As the cab drove off I wanted to run after it and tell her it was all a mistake, that she had misunderstood me. Later, I could only think how lovely she was, what a powerful recognition there was between us, I couldn’t remember having felt an attraction so strong, so clean, and rather than being on the brink of an affair, I imagined that I might at last find my salvation in an authentic life with this woman. She lives in some genuine state of integrity almost beyond belief, a woman of unstudied grace, with none of the coarse ideologies of the time adhered to her.

—Drifting around town picking locations like the art director of a movie. I place St. Timothy’s in the East Village, off Second Avenue around the corner from the Ukrainian hall and restaurant. There had to have been at least one church’s worth of WASPs down here in the old days. Before Manhattan moved north to the sunnier open spaces above Fourteenth Street. . . St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, typical New York Brownstone Ecclesiastic, little brother of the grander Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue. So to please the good Father I’ve now changed the name and the locale. (There is an actual old ruin of a church on East Sixth, but the wrong color, Catholic gray granite, with a steeple more like a cupola and the stained-glass bull’s-eye all blown out and pigeon shit like streaks of rain on the stone. Three young men on the steps, one in the middle eyeing me as I pass, the other two covering each end of the block.)

Here in the neighborhood of St. Tim’s, lots of people just getting by. On the corner, young T-shirted girl, braless, tight cutoffs, she is running in place with her Walkman. Gray-haired over-the-hill bohemian, a rummy, he affects a ponytail. Squat, short Latina, steatopy-gous. Stooped old man in house slippers, Yankees cap, filthy pants held up by a rope. Young black man crossing against the traffic, glaring, imperious, making his statement.

East Village generally still the six-story height of the nineteenth century. The city is supposed to deconstruct and remake itself every five minutes. Maybe midtown, but except for the Verrazano Bridge, the infrastructure was in place by the late thirties. The last of the major subway lines was built in the twenties. All the bridges, tunnels, and most of the roads and parkways, improved or unimproved, were done by the Second World War. And everywhere you look the nineteenth is still here—the Village, East and West, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the row houses in Harlem, the iron-fronts in Soho. . .

The city grid was laid out in the 1840s, so despite all we still live with the decisions of the dead. We walk the streets where generations have trod have trod have trod.

But, Jesus, you’re out of town a couple of days and it’s hypershock. Fire sirens. Police-car hoots. Ritual pneumatic drilling on the avenues. The runners in their running shorts, the Rollerblades, the messengers. Hissing bus doors. Sidewalk pileups for the stars at their screenings. All the restaurants booked. Babies tumbling out of the maternity wards. Building facades falling into the streets. Bursting water mains. Cop crime. Every day a cop shoots a black kid, choke-holds a perp, a bunch of them bust into the wrong apartment, wreck the place, cuff the women and children. Cover-ups by the Department, mayor making excuses.

New York New York, capital of literature, the arts, social pretension, subway tunnel condos. Napoleonic real estate mongers, grandiose rag merchants. Self-important sportswriters. Statesmen retired in Sutton Place to rewrite their lamentable achievements. . . New York, the capital of people who make immense amounts of money without working. The capital of people who work all their lives and end up broke and gray New York is the capital of boroughs of vast neighborhoods of nameless drab apartment houses where genius is born every day.

It is the capital of all music. It is the capital of exhausted trees.

The migrant wretched of the world, they think if they can just get here, they can get a foothold. Run a newsstand, a bodega, drive a cab, peddle. Janitor, security guard, run numbers, deal, whatever it takes. You want to tell them this is no place for poor people. The racial fault line going through the heartland goes through our heart. We’re color-coded ethnic and social enclavists, multiculturally suspicious, and verbally aggressive, as if the city as an idea is too much to bear even by the people who live in it.

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet. . . and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? There is a specie recognition we will never acknowledge. A primatial over-soul. For all the wariness or indifference with which we negotiate our public spaces, we rely on the masses around us to delineate ourselves. The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.

And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversize, undersize, weird, fat, or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, or green-haired punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry, inconsolable person I see. . . is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this diaspora as I am, and part of our great sputtering experiment in a universalist society proposing a world without nations where anyone can be anything and the ID is planetary.

Not that you shouldn’t watch your pocketbook, lady.

—Uncounted billions of years idle away as this single-cell organism, this speck of corruption, this submicroscopic breach of nonlife, evolves selectively through realms of slime and armor-plated brutishness, past experimental kingdoms of horses two feet tall and lizards that fly, into the triumphant dominions of the furry self-improving bipeds, those of the opposed thumb and forefinger, who will lope out of prehistory to sublime into a teenage nerd at the Bronx High School of Science.

Of the brilliant boys I knew at Science whose minds were made to solve mathematical problems and skip happily among the most abstruse concepts of physics, a large number were jerks. I’ve since run into a few of them in their adulthood and they are still jerks. It is possible that the scientific character of mind is by its nature childish, capable through life of a child’s wonder and excitements, but lacking real discernment, lacking sadness, too easily delighted by its own intellect. There are exceptions, of course, the physicist Steven Weinberg, for example, whom I’ve read and who has the moral gravity you would want from a scientist. But I wonder why, for instance, the cosmologists and astronomers, as a whole, are so given to cute names for their universe. Not only that it began as the Big Bang. In the event it cannot overcome its own gravity, it will fly back into itself, and that will be the Big Crunch. In the event of a lack of density, it will continue to expand, and that will be the Big Chill. The inexplicable dark matter of the universe that must necessarily exist because of the behavior of galactic perimeters is comprised of either the neutrino or of weakly interacting massive particles, known as WIMPs. And the dark-mattered halos around the galaxies are massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs.

Are these clever fellows mocking themselves? Is it a kind of American trade humor they practice out of modesty, as the English practice self-denigration in their small talk? Or is it bravery under fire, that studied carelessness in the trenches while the metaphysical rounds come in?

I think they simply are lacking in holy apprehension. I think the mad illiterate priest of a prehistoric religion tearing the heart out of a living sacrifice and holding it still pulsing in his two bloodied hands. . . might have had more discernment.

—Heist

Tuesday evening

Up to Lenox Hill to see my terminal. Ambulances backing into the emergency bay with their beepings and blinding strobe lights. They used to have QUIET signs around hospitals. Doctors’ cars double-parked, patients strapped on gurneys double-parked on the sidewalk, smart young Upper East Side workforce pouring out of the subway.

Lights coming on in the apartment buildings. If only I were elevating to a smart one-bedroom. . . a lithe young woman home from her interesting job awaiting my ring. . . uncorking the wine, humming, wearing no underwear.

In the fluorescent lobby, a stoic crowd primed for visiting hours with bags and bundles and infants squirming in laps. And that profession of the plague of our time, the security guard, in various indolent versions.

My terminal’s room door slapped with a RESTRICTED AREA warning. I push in, all smiles.

You got medicine, Father? You gonna make me well? Then get the fuck outta here. The fuck out, I don’t need your bullshit.

Enormous eyes all that’s left of him. An arm bone aims the remote like a gun, and there in the hanging set the smiling girl spins the big wheel.

My healing pastoral visit concluded, I pass down the hall, where several neatly dressed black people wait outside a private room. They hold gifts in their arms. I smell nonhospital things. . . a whiff of fruit pie still hot from the oven, soups, a simmering roast. I stand on tiptoe. Who is that? Through the flowers, like a Gauguin, a handsome light-complected black woman sitting up in bed. Her bearing regal, her head turbaned. I don’t hear the words, but her melodious, deep voice of prayer knows whereof it speaks. The men with their hats in their hands and their heads bowed. The women with white kerchiefs. On the way out I inquire of the floor nurse. SRO twice a day, she says. We get all of Zion up here. The only good thing, since Sister checked in I don’t have to shop for supper. Yesterday I brought home some baked pork chops. You wouldn’t believe how good they were.

—Another one having trouble with my bullshit is the widow Samantha. In her new duplex that looks across the river to the Pepsi-Cola sign, she’s been reading Pagels on early Christianity.

It was all politics, wasn’t it? she asks me.

Yes, I sez to her.

And so whoever won, that’s why we have what we have now?

Well, with a nod at the Reformation, I suppose so, yes.

She lies back down. So it’s all made up, it’s an invention.

Yes, I sez, taking her in my arms. And you know for the longest time it actually worked.

Used to try to make her laugh at the dances at Brearley. Couldn’t then, can’t now. A gifted melancholic, Sammy. The dead husband an add-on.

But almost alone of the old crowd she didn’t think I was throwing my life away.

Wavy thick brown hair parted in the middle. Glimmering dark eyes set a bit too wide. Figure not current, lacking tone, glory to God in the Highest.

From the corner of the full-lipped mouth her tongue emerges and licks away a teardrop.

And then, Jesus, the surprising condolence of her wet salted kiss.

-for the sermon

Open with that scene in the hospital, those good and righteous folk praying at the bedside of their minister. The humility of those people, their faith glowing like light around them, put me in such longing. . . to share their trustfulness.

But then I asked myself: Must faith be blind? Why must it come of people’s need to believe?

We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity or any other claim of God’s authority for that matter. Look around. God’s authority reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly submission.

So where is the truth to be found? Ecumenism is politically correct, but what is the case? If faith is valid in all its forms, are we merely making an aesthetic choice when we choose Jesus? And if you say, No, of course not, then we must ask, Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to salvation. . . and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know—of course we think we know. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a story? Can we, each of us examining our faith—I mean its pure center, not its consolations, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments—can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? To presume to contain God in this Christian story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive. . . in our story of Him? Of Her? OF WHOM? What in the name of Christ do we think we are talking about!

—Wednesday lunch

Well, Father, I hear you delivered yourself of another doozy.

How do you get your information, Charley? My little deacon, maybe, or my kapellmeister?

Be serious.

No, really, unless you’ve got St. Timothy bugged. Because, God knows, there’s nobody but us chickens. Give me an uptown parish, why don’t you, where the subway doesn’t shake the rafters. Give me one of God’s midtown showplaces of the pious rich and famous and I’ll show you what doozy means.

Now listen, Pem, he says. This is unseemly. You are doing and saying things that are. . . worrying.

He frowns at his grilled fish as if wondering what it’s doing there. His well-chosen Pinot Grigio shamelessly neglected as he sips ice water.

Tell me what I should be talking about, Charley, if not the test to our faith. My five parishioners are serious people, they can take it.

Lays the knife and fork down, composes his thoughts: You’ve always been your own man, Pem, and in the past I’ve had a sneaking admiration for the freedom you’ve found within church discipline. We all have. And in a sense you’ve paid for it, we both know that. In terms of talent and brains, the way you burned up Yale, you probably should have been my bishop. But in another sense it is harder to do what I do, be the authority that your kind is always testing.

My kind?

Please think about this. A tone has crept up, a pride of intellect, something is not right.

His blue eyes look disarmingly into my own. Boyish shock of hair, now gray, falling over the forehead. Then his famous smile flashes over his face and instantly fades, having been the grimace of distraction of an administrative mind.

What I know of such things, Pem, I know well. Self-destruction is not one act, or even one kind of act. It may start small and appear insignificant, but as it gathers momentum it is the whole man coming apart in every direction, all three hundred and sixty degrees.

Amen to that, Charley. You don’t suppose there’s time for a double espresso?

Oh, and his other line: We’re absolutely at a loss to know what is going on inside you, Father. But I’m pretty sure you are not availing yourself of the strength to hand.

That may well be, Bishop, I should have said. But at least I don’t do séances.

—This afternoon, two soft taps on the door. At the beginning it was awkward, looking at my books, the prints on the walls, my digs. She drank only water from the tap. In thrall to her quietness, I had not much to say. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. All was silence. Finally I went in. She was in bed with the covers up to her chin. She was skittish, balky, turned her head away from my kiss. She had to be dragged into it. She had to be held down to do what she had come to do.

Afterward it was as if I lay in the blue-green warmth of Monet’s pond, feeling the wet lilies clinging to my skin.

—Heist

Friday

All right, that wise old dog Tillich, Paulus Tillichus—how did he construe the sermon? Picked a text and worried the hell out of it. Sniffed the words, pawed them: What, when you get right down to it, is a demon? You say you want to be saved? What does that mean? When you pray for eternal life, what do you think you’re asking for? Paulus, God’s philologist, that Merriam-Webster of the DDs, that German. . . shepherd. The suspense he held us in—bringing us to the edge of secularism, arms waving. Of course he saved us every time, pulled us back from the abyss and we were okay after all, we were back with Jesus. Until the next sermon, the next lesson. Because if God is to live, the words of our faith must live. The words must be reborn.

Oh did we flock to him. Enrollments soared.

But that was then and this is now.

We’re back in Christendom, Paulus. People are born again, not words. You can see it on television.

Saturday morning

Following his intuition, Divinity Detective wandered over to the restaurant-supply district on the Bowery, below Houston, where the trade is brisk in used steam tables, walk-in freezers, grills, sinks, pots, woks, and bins of cutlery. Back behind the Taipei Trading Company, too recently acquired to have a sales tag, was the antique gas-operated fridge with the mark of my shoe sole still on the door where I kicked it when it wouldn’t stay closed. And in one of the bins of the used dish department, the tea things from our pantry, white with a green trim, gift of the dear departed ladies’ auxiliary.

Practically named my own price, Lord. With free delivery. A steal.

evening

I walk over to Tompkins Square, find my dealer friend on his bench.

This has got to stop, I say to him.

My, you riled up.

Wouldn’t you be?

Not like the Pops I know.

I thought we had an understanding. I thought there was mutual respect.

They is. Have a seat.

Sparrows working the benches in the dusk.

Told you wastin your time, but I ast aroun like I said I would. No one here hittin on Tim’s.

Not from here?

Thasit.

How can you be sure?

This regulated territory.

Regulated! That’s funny.

Now who’s not showin respeck. This my parish we talkin bout. Church of the Sweet Vision. They lean on me, see what I’m sayin? I am known for compassion. No one lies to me. You dealin with foreigners or some such, thas my word to you.

Ah hell. I suppose you’re right.

No problem. Unsnaps attaché case: Here, my very own personal blend. No charge. Relax yoursel.

Thanks.

Toke of my affection.

Monday night

I waited in the balcony. If something stirred, I’d just press the button and my 6-volt Bearscare Superbeam would hit the altar at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second—same cruising speed as the finger of God.

The amber crime-prevention streetlights on the block making a perfect indoor crime-site of my church. Intimations of a kind of tarnished air substance in the vaulted spaces. The stained-glass figures yellowed into lurid obsolescence. For how many years has this church been home to me? But all I had to do was sit up in the back for a few hours to understand the truth of its stolid indifference. How an oak pew creaks. How a passing police siren in its two Doppler pitches is like a crisis being filed away in the stone walls.

And then, Lord, I confess, I dozed. Father Brown would never have done that. But there was this crash, as if someone had dropped a whole load of dishes. The pantry again—I had figured them for the altar. I raced my bulk down the stairs, my Superbeam held aloft like a club. I think I was shouting. As in “Cry God for Tommy, England, and St. Tim!” How long had I been asleep? I stood in the doorway, found the light switch, and when you do that, for an instant the only working sense is the sense of smell: hashish in that empty pantry. Male body odor. But also the pungent sanguinary scent of female pheromone. And something else, something else. Like lipstick, or lollipop.

The dish cabinets—some of the panes shattered, broken cups and saucers on the floor, a cup still rocking.

The alley door was open. My sense of a bulk of something moving out there. A deep metallic bong sounds up through my heels. Someone curses. It’s me, fumbling with the damn searchlight. I swing the beam out and see a shadow rising with distinction, something with right angles in the vanished instant of the turned corner.

I ran back into the church and let my little light shine. Behind the altar, where the big brass cross should have been, was a shadow of Your crucifix, Lord, in the unfaded paint of my predecessor’s poor taste.

What the real detective said: Take my word for it, Padre. I been in this precinct ten years. They’ll hit a synagogue for the whatchamacallit, the Torah. Because it’s handwritten? Not a mass-produced item? It’ll bring, a minimum, five K. Whereas the book value for your cross has got to be zilch. Nada. No disrespect, we’re related, I’m Catholic, go to mass, but on the street there is no way it is anything but scrap metal. Jesus! whata buncha sickos.

Tuesday

Mistake talking to the Times. Such a sympathetic young man. I didn’t understand anything till they took the cross, I told him. I thought they were just crackheads looking for a few dollars. Maybe they didn’t understand it themselves. Am I angry? No. I’m used to being robbed. When the diocese took away my food-for-the-homeless program and merged it with one across town, I lost most of my parish. That was a big-time heist. So now these people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But now I’m beginning to see it differently. That whoever stole the cross had to do it. And wouldn’t that be blessed? Christ going where He is needed?

Wednesday

Phone ringing off the hook. One coldly furious bishop. But also pledges of support, checks rolling in. Including some of the old crowd, pals now of my dear wife, who had thought my diction quaint, like hearing Mozart on period instruments. Tommy will now play us a few pieties on his viola da gamba. I count nine hundred and change here. Have I stumbled on a new scam? I tell you, Lord, these people just don’t get it. What am I supposed to do, put up a barbed wire fence? Wrap up my church like the Reichstag?

The TV news people swarming all over. Banging on my door. Mayday Mayday! I will raise the sash behind this desk, drop nimbly to the rubbled lot, pass under the window of Ecstatic Reps where the lady with the big hocks is doing the treadmill, and I’m gone. Thanks heaps, Metro section.

—This just in. . . the elusive invisible heretofore only deduced neutrino has a detectable mass. How is this verified? There’s this cult of neutrino physicists, and all over the world they’re building great huge tanks to hold heavy water deep inside mountains, under the Aegean Sea, on the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia, in tunnels under the Alps, below the Antarctic ice cap. . . so they can watch the flying neutrinos that can slip so easily, effortlessly through the diameter of the earth, like bats at night flooping behind your ear and lifting your strands of hair with their wing wind—and detect with powerful light sensors the minuscule voltage emitted by the neutrinos plunging through the dark giant tanks of pure heavy water.. . . Some say Enrico Fermi figured out the neutrino had to exist. He may have given it its name, but unknown to all but me, the neutrino was discovered at the Bronx High School of Science, in the study hall one afternoon in 1948, when this fat jerk of a kid, Seligman, borrowed my algebra homework to copy and in return privileged me with the information that he’d proven the existence of a subatomic particle that had no physical properties whatsoever. So excited that he sprayed me with his words, very unpleasant. On the other hand we both got grades of 100 for our homework.

Well if the neutrino is, after all, something with mass and it is monumentally present throughout the universe, why. . . shouldn’t that define dark matter? And doesn’t it suggest that space is not empty, not merely the capacity of distance between objects, but itself a qualified substance. . . and so far beyond our sensing abilities, like dog whistles, like ghosts, that for all our science nerdwork, we are just beginning to understand we are only at the beginning? I mean, if the universe has such mass, will it inevitably cease to inflate? There’ll be this moment of peace, a universe at neap tide, everything still, and then, with a little groan and creak, it will quietly shift into its shrink mode, slowly and then more quickly sucking itself back in the direction of itself again. And then what? Never mind the Big Crunch. What will it have left behind, vacated? Nothing? How can there be nothing! That was what Leibniz wanted to know: How, he said, can there be nothing? And what if neutrinos in their uncountable multitudinous dark-matteredness gravitationally directing the universe. . . are the souls of the dead? Has that ever been considered by the hotshots of the Bronx High School of Science?

Jesus, I think I am going crazy.

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

ME AND MY SHADOW

Me and My shadow,

Strolling down the avenue.

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

And when it’s twelve o’clock

We climb the stair
We never knock

For nobody’s there

Just me and my shadow

All alone and feeling blue.

The song speaks of oneself shadowed by loneliness

The singer of the song may be a shadow of himself

He could be singing, “Me and the me that’s a shadow of me,

We are here in this nameless avenue

We don’t see anyone else in view,

Must be they’re under the apple tree

Left the whole damn city to my shadow and me.”

He is saying the Fall of Man is misery:

“I hear no footsteps but my own

And the avenue goes straight on down between the tall buildings

For miles and miles, and the lights turn green

And the lights turn red,

As if it mattered, as if there were metered taxis and trucks and cars and buses

Bumper to bumper, hellish ruckuses

Of horns blowing, cops blowing their whistles

A river of people, eddying souls

The avenue flowing as far as you can see with millions of folks none of them me.

But that’s not what I see. I’m all alone

I’m casting my shadow on a sunny pavement

Scuttling along in the street of my enslavement chained to my shadow, bone by bone.”

And then the singer hears the clock strike twelve— is it noon or the midnight hour?

Is it the end of time, the end of the time of His patience?

The singer’s way to heaven is an open door in space.

He thinks, If there’s no heaven beyond this door—

If there is nothing more for this poor mortal, why have I been brought here,

What is this life for?

(tentative applause)

But think for a moment what a shadow portends

The sun is in its heaven, that’s what that means,

This may not be the world that’s on your string

But this is God’s world, there is goodness there is sin

We have to learn the difference again and again

Your shadow is the Good Lord’s light not passing through you,

You are dense, you’re opaque

that ought to tell you something, for God’s sake!

At twelve o’clock when my time comes to an end?

I know that I will climb the stairway to heaven!

I will hear them say, Don’t bother knocking the gate is open!

I will feel His warm celestial light shine down upon me

And when I turn around my shadow will be gone!

Sent back down to bring another soul along!

O happy day, when the bell begins to toll for all the world’s poor souls—

I can tell you they won’t be feeling blue

When they find out it’s His glory they’ve been strolling to!

(enthusiastic applause)

The singer is saying, “Of all the troubles I’ve seen

The last and worst is the trouble of never again having someone to tell my troubles to.”

In fact he’s saying, “I’d be trouble-free

If I had someone to listen other than me.”

This is a mourning song of love lost

Remembering a time of past happiness

When he was one half of a fine-looking high-stepping couple enjoying a walk on the day of rest

Where now he has only his own pale shadow for company.

And it’s not as if this isn’t some festive scene everything in color, alive and humming with other fine-looking high-stepping couples on their Sabbath walk under the flags in the warmth of the morning sun

So that it might be an Easter parade of the city’s population—

Not at all. The rest of this city is turned out in its best

Whereas for him, singing a dirge of his soul’s lost romance

Alone, independent, he’s atonal, he is dissonance.

And when he reaches the destination of all shadowed beings,

the most silent and mysterious of buildings,

Before he can knock the door swings open

And he steps into the darkness of the shadow cast by God.

And the singer has to acknowledge as he steps through the door,

“In His shadow I am nothing, don’t even have my shadow anymore.”

(a few hands clapping)

Shadow me,
shadow you,
what’s a shadow
gonna do. . .

Up at dawn,
hides at noon,
evening comes
does the moon

Go to ground,
make no sound,
mourners done,
shadow’s gone.

—What if there’s no heaven, just a door?

—I don’t even have my shadow anymore. . .

—We don’t know the glory we are strolling toward. . .

—Gone, shadow’s gone.

Me and My shadow,

Strolling down the avenue.

Me and my shadow

Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

( wild acclaim)

—That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated. . . is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.

Einstein was one physicist who lived quite easily with the concept of a Creator. He had a habit of calling God the Old One. That was his name for God, the Old One. He was not a stylish writer, Albert, but he chose words for their precision. One way or another God is very old. . . because archaeologists in the fifties discovered a sacred ossuary cave of the Neanderthals on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Pomptine Fields in western Italy. They found the skull of a male buried within a circle of stones. The cranium had been severed from the jaw and brow and used for a drinking bowl. That’s how old God is. So Einstein is right about that. And One. . . because God is by definition not only unduplicable and all-encompassing but also without gender. So the phrase is really very exact: the Old One. Not much in the way of a revelation, of course. Albert thought of his work in physics as tracking God, as if God lived in gravity, or shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, or could be seen now and then indolently moving along at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. . . not exactly the concerned God people pray to or petition, but, hell, it’s a start, it’s something, if not everything we have if we want to be true to ourselves.

—Heist

Wednesday

Trish giving a dinner when I got here. The caterer’s man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond of time, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She’s doing the veal paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual fund manager. Odds on the Frenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish’s glance over the rim of the wine glass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the amused blue eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I’d slunk home. But isn’t it terrible that after it’s over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do you have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven’t even gotten around to Your small-time perversities. I mean, when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence? And it’s the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn’t Trish.

But the dining room was the least of it. It’s a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.

We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.

In the E-mail:

“dear father if u want to no where yor cross go to 2531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an cuts the chickns troats.”

“Dear Reverend, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York. . .”

“Dear Father, I am one of a group of your neighbors in nearby New Jersey who have taken a Sacred Oath to defend this Republic and the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ from alien heathen interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thing these people understand, The Gun that is our porrogative to hold as free white Americans. . .”

—This afternoon as we lay side by side on our backs Moira told me about herself: She grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania. She went to Penn State for two years before dropping out and leaving for New York. She thought a job in publishing would be nice but in the meantime was working as a temp in a corporate headquarters when her future husband, the CEO, happened to notice her. I knew the rest of the story: He had her assigned to his own secretarial staff, took her out a few times, proposed, and set about terminating his twenty-year marriage. You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement. In another era, spats and top hats, he might have gone to the theater and picked out a girl in the chorus line. We are not so flamboyant now, we have culture, real art hangs on the office walls, we sprinkle our dinner parties with novelists, filmmakers. We know who Wittgenstein was.

For her part, Moira severed the little connection she had with her family by not inviting them to her wedding.

And that is the genealogy of her serene certitude, and her charming air of being unimpressed to be among them, that the men and women of our set, myself included, found so intriguing.

I feel deceived not by her but by appearances: how real they can be in my America. I feel no animus for her husband, I hardly know him. He’s a powerful figure in business often quoted in newspaper articles about the economy. She said he is a child who needs her unceasing admiration and praise. He worries constantly about his position in the business world, she has to listen to his anguished reports of matters she does not really understand and suffer his wild private swings from vanity and pride to whining self-doubt. He is afflicted with nameless fears, he has night sweats, and often expresses his dread that everything he’s made for himself, everything he owns, will one day be taken away from him. Including me, she said by way of conclusion.

She turned on her side. She was smiling. Including me, she said again, whispering and then putting her tongue in my ear.

—When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you recite the words you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will form in your mind. That is an indication of an unusual self-referential power—the physical equivalent would be limb regeneration, or cloning the being from one cell. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains, to be called up in whole or in part, or to come to the mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of our times past. We use standards in the privacy of our minds as signifiers of our actions and relationships. They can be a cheap means of therapeutic self-discovery. If, for example, you are deeply in love and thinking about her and looking forward to seeing her, pay attention to the tune you’re humming. Is it “Just One of Those Things”? You will soon end the affair.

—Heist

Yesterday, Monday,

voice mail from a Rabbi Joshua Gruen of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism on West Ninety-eighth Street: It is in your interest that we meet as soon as possible. Clearly not one of the kooks. When I call back he is cordial but will answer no questions over the phone. So okay, this is what detectives do, Lord, they investigate. Sounded a serious young man, one religioso to another, mufti or collar? I go for the collar.

The synagogue a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive, a steep flight of granite steps to the door. I deduce Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. Confirmed when I am admitted. Joshua (my new friend) a trim five-nine in sweatshirt, jeans, running shoes. Gives me a firm handshake. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-four, good chin, well-curved forehead. No yarmulke atop his wavy black hair.

A converted parlor cum living room with an Ark at one end, a platform table to read the Torah on, shelves with prayer books, and a few rows of bridge chairs, and that’s it, that’s the synagogue.

Second floor, introduces me to his wife, who puts her caller on hold, stands up from her desk to shake hands, she too a rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, in blouse and slacks, pretty smile, high cheekbones, no cosmetics, needs none, light hair short au courant cut, granny glasses, Lord my heart. She is one of the assistant rabbis at Temple Emanuel. What if Trish wore the collar, celebrated the Eucharist with me? Okay laugh, but it’s not funny when I think about it, not funny at all.

Third floor, I meet the children, boys two and four, in their native habitat of primary-color wall boxes filled with stuffed animals. They cling to the flanks of their dark Guatemalan nanny, who is also introduced like a member of the family. . .

On the back wall of the third-floor landing is an iron ladder. Joshua Green ascends, opens a trapdoor, climbs out. A moment later his head appears against the blue sky. He beckons me upward, poor winded Pem so stress-tested and entranced. . . so determined to make it look effortless, I could think of nothing else.

I stood finally on the flat roof, the old apartment houses of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive looming at either end of this block of chimneyed brownstone roofs, and tried to catch my breath while smiling at the same time. The autumn sun behind the apartment houses, the late afternoon river breeze on my face. I was feeling the exhilaration and slight vertigo of roof-standing. . . and did not begin to think, until snapped to attention by the rabbi’s puzzled, frankly inquiring gaze that asked why did I think he’d brought me there, why he’d brought me there. His hands in his pockets, he pointed with his chin to the Ninety-eighth Street frontage, where, lying flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, lay tarnished and shining in the autumn sun.

I suppose I’d known I’d found it from the moment I heard the rabbi’s voice. I bent down for a closer look. The old nicks and dents. Some new ones too. It was not all of a piece, which I hadn’t known: The arms were bolted to the upright in a kind of mortise-and-tenon idea. I lifted it at the foot. It was not that heavy, but clearly too much cross to bear on the stations of the IRT.

How did Rabbi Joshua Gruen know it was there?

An anonymous phone call. A man’s voice. Hello, Rabbi? Your roof is burning.

The roof was burning?

If the children had been in the house I would have gotten them out and called the Fire Department. As it was, I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and up I came. Not the smartest thing. Of course, the roof was not burning. But modest as it is, this is a synagogue. A place for prayer and study. And as you see a Jewish family occupies the upper floors. So was he wrong, the caller?

He bites his lip, dark brown eyes averted from the cross. It is an execrable symbol to him. Burning its brand on his synagogue. Burning down, floor through floor, like the template of a Christian church. I want to tell him I’m on the Committee for Ecumenical Theology of the Trans-Religious Fellowship. A member of the National Council of Christians and Jews.

This is deplorable. I am really sorry about this.

It’s hardly your fault.

I know, I say. But this city is getting weirder by the minute.

The rabbis offered me a cup of coffee. We sat in the kitchen. I felt quite close to them, both our houses of worship desecrated, the entire Judeo-Christian heritage trashed.

This gang’s been preying on me for months. And for what they’ve gotten for their effort, I mean, one hit on a dry cleaner would have done as much. Listen, Rabbi—

—Joshua.

Joshua. Do you read detective stories?

He cleared his throat, blushed. Only all the time, Sarah Blumenthal said, smiling at him.

Well, let’s put our minds together. We’ve got two mysteries going here.

Why two?

This gang. I can’t believe their intent was, ultimately, to commit an anti-Semitic act. They have no intent. They’re not of this world. And all the way from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side? No, that’s asking too much of them.

So this is someone else?

It must be. Somebody took the cross off their hands—if they didn’t happen to find it in a dumpster. And then this second one or more persons had the intent. But how did they get it onto the roof? And nobody saw them, nobody heard them?

Angelina, whom I think you met with the children: She heard noises from the roof one morning. We were already gone. That was the day I went to see my father, Sarah said, looking to Joshua for confirmation. But the noise didn’t last long and Angelina thought no more of it, that it was a repairman of some sort. We assume they came up through one of the houses on the block. The roofs abut.

Did you go down the block? Did you ring bells?

Joshua shook his head.

What about the cops?

They exchanged glances. Please, said Joshua. The congregation is new, not much more than a study group, just a beginning. A green shoot. The last thing we need is that kind of publicity. Besides, he says, that’s what they want, whoever did this.

We don’t accept the ID of victim, said Sarah Blumenthal, looking me in the eye.

And now I tell you, Lord, as I sit here back in my own study, in this bare ruined choir, I am exceptionally sorry for myself this evening, lacking as I do a companion like Sarah Blumenthal. This is not lust, and you know I would admit it if it were. No, but I think how quickly I took to her, how comfortable I was made, how naturally welcomed I was made to feel under these difficult circumstances. There is a freshness and honesty about these people, both of them I mean, they were so present in the moment, so self-possessed, a wonderful young couple with a quietly dedicated life, what a powerful family stronghold they make, and, oh Lord, he is one lucky rabbi, Joshua Gruen, to have that beautiful devout by his side.

It was Sarah, apparently, who made the connection. He was sitting there trying to figure out how to handle it and she had come in from a conference somewhere and when he told her what was on the roof she wondered if that was the missing crucifix she had read about in the newspaper.

I hadn’t read the piece and I was skeptical.

You thought it was just too strange, a news story landing in your lap, Sarah said.

That’s true. News is what happens somewhere else. And to realize that you know more than the reporter knew? But we found the article.

He won’t let me throw out anything, Sarah says.

Fortunately in this case, says the husband to the wife.

It’s like living in the Library of Congress.

So thanks to Sarah, we now have the rightful owner.

She glances at me, colors a bit. Removes her glasses, the scholar, and pinches the bridge of her nose. I see her eyes in the instant before the specs go back on. Nearsighted, like a little girl I loved in grade school.

I am extremely grateful, I say to my new friends. This is, in addition to everything else, a mitzvah you’ve performed. Can I use your phone? I’m going to get a van up here. We can take it apart, wrap it up, and carry it right out the front door and no one will be the wiser.

I’m prepared to share the cost.

Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I don’t need to tell you but my life has been hell lately. This is good coffee, but you don’t happen to have something to drink, do you?

Sarah going to a wall cabinet. Will scotch do?

Joshua, sighing, leans back in his chair. I could use something myself.

The situation now: my cross dismantled and stacked like building materials behind the altar. It won’t be put back together and hung in time for Sunday worship. That’s fine, I can make a sermon out of that. The shadow is there, the shadow of the cross on the apse. We will offer our prayers to God in the name of His indelible Son, Jesus Christ. Not bad, Pem, you can still pull these things out of a hat when you want to.

I’d been just about convinced it really was a new sect of some kind. I thought, Well, I’ll keep a vigil from across the street, watch them take St. Tim’s apart brick by brick. Maybe help them. They’ll reassemble it as a folk church somewhere. An expression of their simple faith. Maybe I’ll drop in, listen to the sermon now and then. Learn something. . .

Then my other idea, admittedly paranoid: It would end up an installation in Soho. Let me wait a few months, a year, and I’d look in a gallery window and see it there, duly embellished, a statement. People standing there drinking white wine. So that was the secular version. I thought I had all bases covered. I am shaken. What am I to make of this strange night culture of stealth sickos. . . these mindless thieves of the valueless who go giggling through the streets, carrying what? whatever it is! through the watery precincts of urban nihilism. . . their wit their glimmering recognition of something that once had a significance they laughingly cannot remember. Jesus, there’s not even sacrilege there. A dog stealing a bone knows more what he’s up to.

—Moira turning into a story, a woman crossing class lines. He’s a bit of a snob, isn’t he? Not sure I like him if he can spend his afternoons at the Met. He was shocked when she stuck her tongue in his ear. Not only the vulgarity of it, but as the act of a different person from the one he’d imagined her to be.

Only way to go with this is to rev up their moral natures, put motors in them, but then all you have is a movie.

Movie: Guy begins an affair with this really elegant trophy wife of a business leader—they are all three in the loosely bordered swirl of NY society comprised of publishing, the arts, advertising, journalism, Wall Street.

After some encouragement she turns out to be an ardent lover without guilt or self-recrimination. He can’t devise anything she is unwilling to try. He is creative. She honors his every perversion and does not sulk and cannot be driven to anger.

Largely from conditions he has laid down she trains herself to ask for nothing more of the relationship than he will give. He assumes uncontested control—when they will meet, how they will conduct themselves, what endeavors he will think up for her in her torrid state of self-abasement. She is content to meet him, indulge them both, and go to her home until the next time.

But the total surrender of her will, and consequent stability of the affair, begins to bore him. He extends his control over her life with her husband: when she should withhold sex, when she should not withhold it, what clothes she must wear, what perfume, the dinners she is to order from their cook, the restaurants she is to insist upon, the destinations of their trips, even to the sheets he sleeps upon, the soap in the soap dish. It revives him to be exercising, through her, remote control of the private circumstances of her husband’s life.

I see now that he is a real shithead. Why should I have anything to do with him? Once, by means of his direction, the husband finds himself with his wife in Maui—and while he, the husband, suns himself on a private beach, the lover is in his suite peeling off the wife’s swimsuit, pinching up the sand grains he finds in the groinal cleft of her thigh and presenting them with a dot of his finger to the tenderest part of her person. He leaves her short of breath, she is addicted to the danger he’s become to her, the threat to her well-being, her self-respect, her life.

Someone as bad as this guy has to be a star. I mean, if he were a fat bald slob who sucked air through his teeth, the audience would be repelled, aroused to indignation. Want their money back. So he is lean, fit, he takes very good care of himself in that way of someone profoundly faithless. He runs, works out almost religiously, for the self-maintenance that is his due. Drinks sparingly, does nothing to excess except plot. Makes no effort to ingratiate himself with others, does not indulge in the small talk designed to demonstrate one’s unthreatening nature. He never raises his voice. When he is funny he is contemptuous, when he is angry he is quietly menacing. His selfishness is so smoothly distributed over every aspect of his life that it is not visible to others except as a patina of snobbery, a degree of arrogance that, in a better light, would be a visible ruthlessness. This is what attracts women. This is what attracted her.

I realize now his casual upper-class grace of knowing the compensations in wine, horses, sailing, and so forth derives from his former profession, that of a CIA covert-action planner with a background in foreign postings. How could it be otherwise? He evinces the condescension of one who has been on the inside of the geopolitical adventures of the cold war toward ordinary people, who get their news from the newspaper.

He is as middle-class as she is, born in upstate New York, perhaps, though it is wrong to place him precisely in that his whole life has been a training away from the specific identity attaching to a region or a family. More precisely, his nihilist moral endowment, or perhaps only the necessity of bringing the movie in under two hours, has erased any secondary compensation of character that is conferred by a religious or ethnic qualification.

By now he has wired his mistress so that he can hear the husband’s private conversations with her, learn the weaknesses, the inflections of voice that betray fear or guilt, lust or love. The husband has a softness about the underchin, a mama thing in his most private moments, a desire for his wife’s praise and admiration. Living with him she has felt imprisoned. The drama of his business life is like a bludgeon. She understands that his prideful attention to her in public is a kind of self-congratulation, in the same way that he will not go anywhere or accept any invitation that does not by its auspices bring honor or status to himself.

Why she has responded to the dark-hearted lover is not clearly thought out by her but is in fact what she responded to when her executive husband courted her, with the sense in both instances of rising on a tide that would lift her with immense power beyond any possibilities of freedom she could have realized for herself. But she has become as indentured to her lover and to his ways as she had been to her husband according to his, and freedom for her is realized as subjection, as an idea attainable only in its wreckage.

And so we have in these three roles three lives more or less unattached to reality, and vivified by that fact. The lover, for his part, envisions a grand finale to his enterprise that is so dangerous, so extreme, that he decides his life, heretofore adrift in boredom and alienation and the absence of serious conviction, may now be redemptively recon-ceived as an art form.

—This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. I can assure you that it is barely furnished. In fact, in a matter of speaking, my work has been to empty my laboratory of the furniture there, the beakers, measuring scales, cabinets, old books. While I have succeeded to some extent, there are still some things here that I can’t seem to part with: the idea that the universe is designed, that there are a few simple rules, or laws, physical laws, from which all the manifold processes of life and nonlife can be derived. So you see I am hardly the undermining subversive revolutionary the Nazis of Hitler made me out to be.

Of course, the universe we have all known and seen since our childhoods is only apparently explained by the great, esteemed Sir Isaac Newton. That universe, with all the stars in the heavens and the planets turning in their orbits and night following day, and actions having reactions and objects in their gravity falling—all of it seems quite sound except to a mind like mine, nor is it the only one. Because my revered Sir Isaac’s mechanical model of the universe makes one or two assumptions that cannot be proven. The idea of absolute motion and absolute rest, for example, the idea that something can move in an absolute sense without reference to anything else. This is clearly impossible, a concept that cannot be proven empirically, by reference to experience. The ship that moves on the sea does so with reference to the land. Or if you prefer with reference to another ship, moving at a greater speed or a slower speed. Or by reference to a dirigible overhead. Or to a whale beneath the sea. Or to the currents of the sea itself. Always to something. And this is true of a planet as well. There is nothing in the universe that can be proven to move absolutely without reference to something else in the universe, or for that matter without reference to the universe in its entirety.

Now, that is a very simple insistence upon which all my further thought is based. That absolute motion and absolute rest are false concepts that cannot be demonstrated. But you see the implications are enormous of this picky stubborn insistence of mine that we deal with these things only insofar as they can be proven. I’ll show you, it’s very simple. We will do a little thought experiment. . .

If I am in a rocket ship flying through space at millions of miles an hour. . . and you catch up to me in your rocket ship and decelerate your engines so that we are flying at the same speed side by side. . . and a person asleep in each of our rocket ships wakes up and looks from his window into the other’s window. . . without seeing the meteorites and bits of star material whizzing or drifting by. . . but seeing only into each other’s cabin. . . they will not be able to say if the rocket ships are moving uniformly together or not moving at all. Because in either case the experience is the same.

You see how simple that is? I am really a simple man and I begin with the questions that a child would ask. For example, I was not much more than a child when I wondered what would happen if I traveled at the speed of light. Nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. You know what that means? That means there are no instantaneous processes in our universe, because nothing can occur faster than light can move and light takes time to get from one place to another. That means for example that a person cannot be in two places at the same time. Also for example that there cannot be the ghosts which are cherished by so many people, because ghosts no more than anyone else can appear and disappear as if having taken no time to travel from one place to another. So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away. And there would be nothing I could see in the mirror I was holding up to my face. Yet that does not seem right. It doesn’t feel that this would be the case, does it? It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.

So from this simple thought experiment I deduced the following: No object, neither mirror nor person, even a thinner person than myself, one who did not indulge in the Sacher torte or tea with raspberry jam or a scone with butter, no, not even the thinnest person alive can move through the universe with the speed of light. Because we are always visible to ourselves in our mirrors and to each other, we must move more slowly than that, though light itself is moving from the surface of our dear faces and from our mirrors at the same constant ultimate speed. We ourselves are slower than that. Even in our fastest rocket ships. Do you know what would happen if we moved toward or closer to the speed of light, going faster and faster, from zero miles an hour to one hundred and eighty-three million miles a second? Do you know what would happen to us? My goodness, we would get so leaden, heavier and heavier the faster we went, until our immense weight or density would be so great that the space around us would curve toward us and we would suck space into such density around us that. . . as fast as we might go, the less we would have the chance of attaining the speed of light. . . because the faster we moved, the more mass we would have and the more mass, the greater the resistance to our progress. . . until the celestial heaven around us would curl and bend and warp itself and us out of all recognition.

And from these few simple thoughts, perhaps simpleminded thoughts, I have discovered laws, physical laws, that alarm people to such a degree that they have decided the man in the street cannot be made to realize what I’m talking about, the revolution I have supposedly made. That I am some sort of genius to respect or even venerate while you scratch your head and say, God bless him. Look how funny, his hair is sticking up in every direction, perhaps from his having tried to fly into his mirror at the speed of light. Look at his sweatshirt, his unpressed trousers, not that this is practical for work but that forgetting to wear a coat and tie, he must be a genius. The chalk with which he writes his secret formulas on the blackboard, the chalk breaks in his hand! All this is the way the press and the radio people have relieved you of thinking about what I have to say. It is an insult not only to me but to you, because of course the human mind can always find out the truth, because however hidden it may be, eventually it will emerge. And nothing I have discovered is revolutionary, because I am seeing only what has always been as it is now and as far as I can tell always will be. It is only that our perception has become more. . . perceptive.

So: after all, we may with assurance say only the following about the Old One’s universe: that nothing is constant other than the speed of light.

Of space all we may say with assurance is that it is something you measure with a ruler.

And of time all we may say is that it is something you measure with a clock.

But for the theological visions and screams and terrors this produces in our brains, I beg you do not hold me responsible.

—There are no science songs to speak of. No song tells you the force of gravity is a product of the masses of two objects divided by the ratio of the distance between them. Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe the laws by which the universe operates and suggest in equations that a balance is possible even when things are in apparent imbalance. So do songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do this to me, why did you break my heart. . . the inhering formula is that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry of pain. Feelings transmute as quickly and perversely as subatomic events, and when there is critical mass a song erupts, but the overall amount of pure energy is constant. And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.

—An odd sighting on the dock, a great blue heron looking out one way, almost back to back with a snowy-white egret peering in the opposite direction. This is why everyone should sometimes leave the city.

With the same food sources, I wonder that they get along, but there they stand with that mutual disregard. I’m not looking, but I know you’re there. The egret breaks first, the neck outstretched, the yellow bayonet beak extended, a beautiful bird in flight, sleek, like a Pre-Raphaelite seaplane, but with merciless eyes. . . and the heron, looking rumpled with its round black shoulder patch, the feathered body more gray than blue, the long legs, feet, and beak black. It is a less comely bird, a less spiffy bird than the egret, although with its huge wingspan as it takes off low over the water it does achieve an airliner’s stateliness. But there is a degree of sorrow in its gaze, and it is clearly a loner, a bachelor sort of bird who could use some female attention, some sprucing up, like me.

—Heist

A phone call from Rabbi Joshua:

If we’re going to be detectives about this. . . we start with what we know, isn’t that what you did? What I know, what I start with, is that no Jewish person would have stolen your crucifix. It would not occur to him. Even in the depths of some drug-induced confusion.

I shouldn’t think so, I say, thinking, Why does Joshua feel he has to rule this out?

The police told you your cross had no value on the street. But if someone wants it, then it has value.

To an already-in-place, raging anti-Semite, for example.

Yes, that’s the likelihood. This is a mixed, multicultural neighborhood. There may be people who don’t like a synagogue on their block. I’ve not been made aware of this, but it’s always possible.

Right.

But it’s also possible. . . placing that cross on my roof, well, that is something that could have been arranged by an ultra-Orthodox fanatic. That’s possible too.

Good God!

I’m not saying this is so. I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities. There are some for whom what Sarah and I are doing, struggling to redesign, revalidate our tradition—well, in their eyes it is tantamount to apostasy.

I don’t buy it, I said. I mean, I can’t think it’s likely. Why would it be?

The voice that told me my roof was burning? That was a Jewish thing to say. Of course I don’t know for sure, I may be all wrong. But it’s something to think about. Tell me, Father—

Tom—

Tom. You’re a bit older, you’ve seen more, perhaps you’ve given more thought to these things. Wherever you look in the world now, God belongs to the atavists. And they’re so fierce, these people, so sure of themselves, as if all human knowledge since Scripture is not also God’s revelation! I mean, is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backwards? That civilization is in reverse?

Oh my dear rabbi. Joshua. What can I tell you? If it’s true and God truly does belong to the atavists, then that’s what faith is and what faith does. And we are stranded, you and I.

-Monday

The front doors are padlocked. In the rectory kitchen, leaning back on the two hind legs of his chair and reading People magazine, is St. Timothy’s newly hired, classically indolent private security guard.

I am comforted too by the woman at Ecstatic Reps. She is there, as usual, walking in place, earphones clamped on her head, her large hocks in their black tights shifting up and dropping back down like Sisyphean boulders. As the afternoon darkens she’ll be broken up and splashed in the greens and pale lavenders of the light refractions on the window.

So everything is as it should be, the world’s in its place. The wall clock ticks. I have nothing to worry about except what I’m going to say to the bishop’s examiners that will determine the course of the rest of my life.

This is what I will say for starters: “My dear colleagues, what you are here to examine today is not a spiritual crisis. Let’s get that clear. I have not broken down, cracked up, burned out, or caved in. True, my personal life is a shambles, my church is like a war ruin, and since I am not one to seek counsel or join support groups, and God, as usual has ignored my communications (no offense, Lord), I do feel somewhat isolated. I will even admit that for the past few years, no, the past several years, I have not found anything better to do for my chronic despair than walk the streets of Manhattan. Nevertheless the ideas I’m going to present to you have real substance and while you may find some of them alarming I would entreat—would suggest, would recommend, would advise—I would advise you to confront them on their merits and not as evidence of the psychological decline of a mind you once had some respect for—I mean for which you once had some respect.”

That’s okay so far, isn’t it, Lord? Sort of taking it to them? Maybe a bit touchy. After all what could they have in mind? In order of probability, one, a warning, two, a formal reprimand, three, censure, four, a month or so in therapeutic retreat followed by a brilliantly remote reassignment wherein I’m never to be heard from again, five, forced early retirement with full benefits, six, de-ordination, seven, ex-com. Whatthehell!

By the way, Lord, what are my “ideas of real substance”? The phrase came trippingly off the tongue. So, a little help here. What with today’s shortened attention span I don’t need ninety-five, I can get by with two or three. The point is whatever I say will alarm them. Nothing shakier in a church than its doctrine. That’s why they guard it with their lives, isn’t it? I mean, just to lay the H word on the table, it, heresy, is a legal concept, that’s all. I mean the shock is supposed to be Yours, but a heretic can be of no more concern to You than someone kicked out of a co-op building for playing the piano after ten. So I pray, Lord, don’t let me come up with something only worth a reprimand. Let me have the good stuff. Speak to me. Send me an E-mail.

You were once heard to speak,

You Yourself are a word, though deemed by some to be unutterable,

You are said to be the Word, and I don’t doubt

You are the Last Word.

You’re the Lord our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, at least that is our story of You.

So here is your servant the Reverend Dr. Thomas Pemberton, the almost no longer rector of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, addressing You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills.

Will You show him no mercy, this poor soul tormented in his nostalgia for Your Only Begotten Son? He has failed his training as a detective, having solved nothing.

May he nevertheless pursue You? God? The Mystery?

—To assure you further that I am no genius whose ideas are too abstruse for the majority of mankind, let me give you some personal information. You will see how ordinary were my beginnings and how I was swept along like everyone else by the dreadful history of my time. I was without speech for the first three or four years of my life and after that, tongue-tied. Even into my ninth year I spoke slowly, as if dealing with a foreign language, which, as it turned out, I was. What does it matter—all language is a translation from something else and I have lived in that something else for seventy-three years.

My first memory is of the paving stones of Ulm, the ones I toddled on while I hung and sometimes swung about wildly on the axis of my wrist, in the firm grip of my papa. Each rounded stone I scuffed gave back to me its ineluctable mass. And how was it, I wondered, that the stones fit so nicely, like breadloaves in the baker’s oven? Then I discovered the workmen’s chisel marks which made each stone different though the same as the others. Every stone recorded its own shaping, it had the mark of its history of human work, and all the stones together represented an infinity of decisions under one plan, an intent to make a passable street. As they had—a street that went up the hill and spread suddenly in every direction into the great square of the cathedral, which was also of stone. The whole world was stone. Horse-drawn drays and carriages rolled through my vision with a great thunderous clattering that nevertheless did not end in any harm to me, and boots strode past my eyes, and swirls of ladies’ skirts, and the dogged commerce of the whole city happened upon these separately sculpted stones placed one next to another long ago. And in the shadow of the great black stone cathedral, I experienced the child’s revelation that he walks on the thoughts of dead men. And so the paving stones of Ulm, my medieval birthplace, are my first memory—not my mother’s breast, not my bed, not a desperately loved toy, but a street, a way of passage from here to there.

My father’s little engineering shop was located on the cathedral square. Here, with my uncle Jakob, he manufactured electricity motors. A wonderful whirring sound was to be heard, a soft sound with tone to it, a language of total elision, with inseparable words, the meaning instantaneous and at the same time incomplete.

The only thing like it came from the culvert that ran behind our house to carry one of the smaller tributaries of the river Blau. My mother was made very nervous by the children who played on the stone escarpment, tossing their twigs and paper boats into the stream and running along then to see the current take them. But I was a stolid, silent child. It was as if I didn’t like to move too rapidly under the weight of my large head, I just stood and listened as the water flowed through its channel, laying its black slick along the stones, hissing and lapping in its passage like the busy burghers of another universe in urgent conversation.

You may think from these remarks that I attribute too much perception to my infancy. Of course I do, we all do. We go back and forth, revising our minds continuously. The entire problem of mind is of enormous interest, and yet it demands a superhuman courage to dwell on. The mind considering itself—I shudder; it is too vast, a space without dimension, filled with cosmic events that are silent and immaterial. For one’s sanity it is preferable to track God in the external world.

Ulm was of course destroyed in the Second World War. Well before that war, my father and uncle took their little business to Munich, where they proposed to manufacture dynamos, arc lamps, transformers, and other electrical devices for use by municipalities. And for a while everything went well. We lived in a suburb in a big house behind a wall, where there was a garden with trees. Spring evenings were filled with the perfume of apple blossoms, here where the Nazis would be born. And now I had my little sister Maria with me, two years younger, Maja, my constant companion, whose enormous brown eyes made me laugh and for whom I captured crickets in a jar and made necklaces of dandelions.

In this house, at my mother’s insistence, I began my violin studies. My mother was a musician, a pianist of resolute seriousness. For her, music was central to the education of a human being. I dutifully applied myself under the tutelage of Herr Schmied, a morose man who wore his thin hair long in homage to Paganini and whose fingers were yellowed with tobacco stain. How many years passed before I understood that notes were intervals, relationships of number, and that sound was a property of these relationships? But finally the system of music made itself clear to me and I trembled for the beauty of it, each piece the proposal of a self-contained and logical construction. I began to study in earnest. I wanted to bring precision to my bowing; I searched for the purest resonance of each note as an intellectual necessity, and the joy of making music, especially together with others, I felt as a form of mental travel within a totally reliable cosmos. Bach, Mozart, Schubert—they will never fail you. When you perform their work properly it will have the character of the inevitable, as in great mathematics, which seems always to be made of pre-existing truths.

I’ll tell you by contrast the kinds of things I learned in school. I had a teacher in the Luitpold Gymnasium. When he came into the room we stood, and when he held the velvet lapels of his gown and nodded his head, we sat. This was quite normal. But I’d always thought discipline was their means of imposing intellectual rigor and maintaining alertness for the reception of ideas. And that is why in this ridiculous school we did not walk but marched, and stood and sat in unison and chanted our Latin declensions as if they were tribal oaths. It was altogether insulting, in my opinion, perhaps even deadly. After a term or two these boys lost all sparks of mind, curiosity was bludgeoned out of them, their personalities were sealed, and in recess I would sit with my back to the building and watch them running about or wrestling or kicking the football, but, whatever the game, trying undeniably to kill each other. In their recklessness, with their uniform jackets laid aside in neat piles so as not to suffer damage, was the rage of their smoldering beings dispersed helplessly among their comrades. So I saw this and kept myself apart, doing my work, which was undemanding enough, and not testing the ambiguities of possible friendship with any of them, for it was all ruination, in my view, and all from this clearly flawed Germanic principle of education through tyranny. I sat in the classroom and my mind wandered. I had been given a book by my mother’s brother Casar on the subject of Euclidean geometry. I had read it as people read novels. To me it was an exciting, newsworthy book. And now on this one morning I was smiling to myself remembering the marvelous theorem of Pythagoras and the teacher was all at once standing in front of me and he slapped his map pointer across my desk to regain my attention. When the class was over, as I was on my way out with the others, he called me to the front of the room. He looked down at me from his lectern. He had a round red shiny face, this teacher, that reminded me of a caramel apple. One could bite into a face like this and expect to crack through the hard glaze to the pulp. You are a bad influence in my class, Albert, he said. I am going to have you transferred. I didn’t understand. I asked what I had done wrong. You sit back there smiling and dreaming away, he said. If I don’t have the attention of each and every student, how can I maintain my self-respect? With that remark I learned in a flash the secret of all despotism.

This same teacher, or perhaps it was another, it could as easily have been any of them, but no matter: He one day in class held up a rusty nail between his thumb and forefinger. A spike like this was driven through Christ’s hands and feet, he said, looking directly at me.

I will say here of poor Jesus, that Jew, and the system in his name, what a monstrous trick history has played on him.

—Walt Whitman assures us of the transcendence of the bustle and din of New York, the sublimity, the exuberant arrogance, of the living moment. But do pictures lie? Those old silver gelatin prints. . . The drays and carriages, streetcars, els, and sailing vessels at their docks. . . A busy city, great construction pits framed out in wood, streets laid out with string. Men on their knees setting paving stones, great dimly lit lofts of women at sewing machines, men in derbies and shirtsleeves posing in the doorways of their dry-goods stores, endless ranks of clerks at their high desks, women in long skirts and shirtwaists instructing classrooms of children, couples greeting couples on Fifth Avenue, muffled-up ice skaters on the lake in Central Park. . . This is our constructed city, without question the geography of our souls, but these people are not us, they inhabit our city as if they belonged here, the presumption of their right to it is in every gesture, every glance, but they are not us, they’re strangers inhabiting our city, though vaguely familiar, like the strangers in our dreams.

I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of word is infrastructure? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.

Christ, how wrong to point out the Brooklyn Bridge or Soho or the row houses of Harlem as examples of our continuity. Something dire has happened. As if these photographs are not silent instances of the past but admonitory, like ghosts, to be of then and of now simultaneously, so as to prophesy hauntingly our forfeiture of their world, given such time only for our illusions to flourish before we’re chastened into our own places in the photographs, to stand with them, these strangers of our dreams, but less distinctly, with faces and figures difficult to make out, if not altogether invisible.

—So I hear from Tom Pemberton and we meet for a drink at Knickerbocker’s, Ninth and University Place.

He doesn’t wear the collar these days, he’s not defrocked but more or less permanently unassigned. Works at a cancer hospice on Roosevelt Island. He’s grown heavier, the big face is more lined than I remember, but still open, candid, floridly handsome, the light, wide-set eyes moving restlessly over the room as if looking for someone to gladden his heart.

You write well enough, he says, but no writer can reproduce the actual texture of living life.

Not even Joyce?

I should look at him again. But now that I see the dissimilarity from the inside, so to speak, I think I’ll be wary of literature from here on.

Good move.

You’re offended. But I’m telling you you’re exemplary. It’s a compliment. After all, I might have chalked you off as just a lousy writer. It’s unsettling reading about me from inside my mind. Another shock to another faith.

Well, maybe I should drop the whole thing.

You don’t need my approval, for God’s sake. I agreed to this—that’s it, there are no strings. I wouldn’t even ask you to keep that mention of my girls out of it. They’re older now, of course. Apartments of their own.

Consider it done.

Trish is remarried.. . . Why didn’t you say who her father is?

That’s to come.

I still hear from him. The usual smirk from on high, though I have to say he enjoyed having a peacenik priest in the family.

Good for the image.

I suppose. But now, listen, you’re using the real names. You told me—

I know. I’ll change them. Just now they’re still the best names. On the other hand they used to be the only possible names. So that’s progress.

And it wasn’t the Times that picked up the story of my stolen crucifix. It was only one of the free papers.

Well, Father, when you compose something, that’s what you do, you make the composition. Bend time, change things, put things in, leave things out. You’re not sworn to include everything. Or to make something happen the way it did. Facts can be inhibiting. Actuality is beside the point. Irrelevant.

Irrelevant actuality?

You do what the clock needs to tick.

Well there are some things just plain wrong.

Oh boy. Like what, Pem?

I’m not telling you what to write, you understand. It’s hands-off. But it wasn’t a sermon at St. Tim’s that got the bishop on my back. And what you have me saying is not really the cause. Really it was a bunch of things.

You told me a particular sermon—

Well yes and no—I’ve thought about this—and I think it could have been a guest stint I did over in Newark that he felt was the last straw. But I’m not sure. By the way, it’s different in that diocese, they are broad church over there. Bring in the women, the gays. . . the liberal side of the argument. My side. You don’t want to oversimplify. The Anglicans are all over the lot. There’s actually more leeway for people like me than you give the church credit for.

What did you say?

What?

Your bishop’s last straw.

Oh—it was simple enough. I merely asked the congregation what they thought the engineered slaughter of the Jews in Europe had done to Christianity. To our story of Christ Jesus. I mean, given the meager response of our guys, is the Holocaust a problem only for Jewish theologians? But beyond that I asked them—it was a big crowd that morning, and they were with me, I could feel it, after the empty pews of St. Tim’s it seemed to me like Radio City—I asked them to imagine. . . what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn’t some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau. So what would that be? I went into some possibilities. A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I said to them I didn’t know what the proper response would be. . . but I was sure I’d recognize it if I saw it.

That’s what you said?

For starters.

I see.

Yeah. That was the doozy.

—The simplest digital invasive techniques deliver the husband’s brokerage and bank accounts, insurance policies and medical records, mortgage payments, school and service records, credit ratings, political contributions. All available for study and eventual confiscation. His support services, legal, accounting, investment counseling. Who and where they are. Means of communication with. Handwriting analysis. Voice analysis—an easily rendered Philadelphia twang. Analysis of a typical month’s credit card and phone bills for the secrets in his life, a girlfriend, a dependent mother. Nothing. No undue trade with jewelers, florists; the husband is a squeaky-clean narcissist, the only affair, though all-consuming, is with himself.

Some ten or fifteen years older than either of them, the husband is something of a corporate wonder, the CEO of a computer manufacturing corporation, who is being courted by a Japanese conglomerate with international holdings in satellite communications, electronics, and the soft drink industry. The lover understands that at this level, effective management does not require any special knowledge of the nature of a business. He instructs his mistress to persuade her husband to accept the challenge—life in another city, regular trips to Japan, new fields to conquer.. . . This is done. Then, while the husband is busy wrapping things up at his old job, taking care to maintain cordial relations, even advising the board on his successor, the essence of corporate life being volatility and no bridge ever being burned, the wife/mistress travels to the Pacific coast in order to familiarize herself with the lay of the land, find a new house in the right neighborhood, and so on.

The lover flies with her to the new city, chooses the house, the furnishings, everything down to the smallest detail. At this point in her mind she is so in thrall to him that everything they are doing seems entirely natural and normal.

She has come up with several photographs of the husband, from snapshots to formal corporate portraits. The lover flies to Budapest with the digitized photographs translated into holographic representation for a cooperative surgeon he knows from the old days and, without representing that he is still with the intelligence community, lets the surgeon think he is, so that the code of ultimate discretion will be in force. You are not that far apart, the doctor says, studying the holograph. And it’s true, thinks the lover: After all, her attraction to me had to have been somewhat directed by our being more or less the same lean morph type, both of us having called up in her mind someone she loved as a child. I don’t mean oedipal governance necessarily, all of us look for reprises of the pure attachments installed in us in our unconscious youth. There are transferences even then in those tender ages when model people imprint themselves as lifelong loves so deeply indelibly that you are heliotropic in their presence.

My nose will be broken and enlarged, the hairline brought down via transplants to a widow’s peak, I will have to keep my hair close cut and grayed at the temples to add ten years or so. The jaw will be widened slightly with implants. I will have to gain about twelve to fifteen pounds, wear a shoe lift.. . .

But this cannot be a story about details. It cannot depend on a realistic presentation of thoughtfully worked out details to prop up its credibility. All of that can be passed over lightly in montage. The movie should operate in the abstract realm where practical matters give way to uncanny resonances with everyday truth. Because evil as it is most often committed comes of the given life, it takes not only its motivation but its form from the structure of existing circumstances, it is not usually a thing of such high-concept deviance and requiring such extensive planning to perform.

In fact the movie can be said to begin only with what in the lover’s mind is the culminating scene, a work of performance art, in which an American business success, a man for whom he has no feelings whatsoever let alone dislike, will be dropped precipitously into material and psychic dereliction. He will come to a door he thinks is his own and not be recognized by his wife. She will deny that she knows him. A duplicate of himself will ask the police to take him away and charge him with stalking. Security guards will prevent him from entering his office. Hotels will not accept his credit cards. Old friends will back away from him in fear. Lawyers will not take his calls. His passport will be confiscated as a forgery. Disoriented, and only imperfectly understanding that something has been done to him, he will be left ranting and railing in a mad state of total self-displacement, a deportee from himself.

Perhaps, thinks the lover, he will go crazy. Perhaps he will attempt to kill me and end up in some hospital for the criminally insane. Another delicious bit of suspense is the measure of my control over her, calculable to the extent to which she can be trusted. If residual feelings of affection in the form of pity or terror will operate in her, perhaps to the point of revealing the truth to him, so that even at risk of criminal indictment to herself, she will bring down the whole beautiful work of art to a crashing conclusion.

What is most likely, of course—and how can I claim I did not suspect this of myself from the beginning—is that having brought about this crime of usurpation, I will discover that even this cannot stave off my profound, chronic lassitude, which can now be alleviated, if only for a moment, by abandoning the woman who has committed herself so obsessively, adoringly to me, so that all she has left for the life of her is the shattered husband whom she has betrayed.

And so we have the secular Enlightenment version of Amphitryon. And all of it from the lovely, self-assured young woman I sat next to at a dinner party. This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. . .

—Crows on the dock? So they’re here now too. I have never heard of crows coming to saltwater. This is very bad. Look at them, three or four, hopping down from the piling to the dock, pecking away at the crab legs and clamshells left by the gulls. An advance party, a patrol. If they like what they find, the flocks will follow squawking and croaking in the waterside trees, raising hell like a goddamn motorcycle club. Jesus. I’ve got orioles here that flash in the blueberry, finches who like to balance on the tips of water reeds when the wind is up, I’ve got redwinged blackbirds, mockingbirds, cowbirds, cardinals, wrens, flickers, swifts, I’ve got skimmers, sandpipers, and bad-postured night herons like old ladies with hump necks.. . . Crows are smarter and bigger and noisier and they commune. They take over, they will drive out all the others, this is serious, I will have to watch them closely. You must go back to the suburban woods of Westchester, crows. You are inlanders, you flock in the big maples and come down to the street to eat the car-casses of squirrels. You don’t look good against an open sky. Crows on the dock are a mixed metaphor.

—Let us consider for a moment those remarks of my teacher in the Luitpold Gymnasium: that in order to maintain his self-respect he required my attention, and that Jesus had been crucified by such as I. So there were the two elements now fused—the authoritarian and the militant Christian. And now I ask you to consider the possibility that the pious brainwork of Christian priests and kings that over centuries had demonized and racialized the Jewish people in Europe with the autos-da-fé, pogroms, economic proscriptions, legal encumbrances, deportations, and a culture of socially respectable anti-Semitism. . . had at this moment in my gymnasium classroom attained critical mass. Let us imagine such small quiet resentments imploding in the ears of a thousand, a million children of my generation. And a moment later: the Holocaust. For you see what moves not as fast as light but fast enough, and with an accrued mass of such density as not to be borne, is the accelerating disaster of human history.

So what, to be logical, must we conclude? We must conclude that given the events in the twentieth century of European civilization, the traditional religious concept of God cannot any longer be seriously maintained. Well then, if I am a serious person, as I believe I am, I must seek God elsewhere than in the religious scriptures. I must try to understand certain irreducible laws of the universe as a transcendent behavior. In these laws, God, the Old One, will be manifest.

Now oddly enough, though these are cold, eternal, imageless verities, insofar as we are beginning to understand them, these great voiceless, vast habits of universal dimension, we may take comfort in their beauty. We may glory in our consciousness of them, that they are—incomprehensibly—comprehensible!

For, remember, there could in theory be alternatives to what is. For example, if gravity ceased to be a fundamental mechanism of the universe—let us do a thought experiment—what would result? Our solar system would fly apart, all the waters of the earth would spill out of their ocean basins and pour in crystals through black space as lumps of coal down a chute, the whole system of dark-mattered space and stars, sunlight, organic life, mitosis, one thing leading to another in an unfolding of necessary and sufficient conditions. . . would not be. Well, what would be? Perhaps after several trillions of years something organic would occur out of the vast eternal black shapelessness that did not depend on light or moisture in order to propagate—some formless ephemera nourished on nothing—and life, if it was life, would be defined in a way that cannot now be defined. Surely all of this is less an inducement to consciousness than what we have now, what we see now, what we try to understand now.

By way of calming our nerves, let us celebrate the constancy of the speed of light, let us praise gravity, that it is in action the curvature of space, and glory that even light is bent by its force, riding the curvatures of space toward celestial objects as a fine, shimmering red-golden net might drape over them. The subjection of light to gravity was proven by my colleague Millikan some years after my theory came to me, when the light passing near the star X shifted by his measurements to the red spectrum, indicating that it had bent. And there, my dear friends, is a sacrament for us, is it not? A first sacrament, the bending of starlight. Yes. The bending of starlight.

—Sarah Blumenthal’s Conversation with Her Father

I was a runner. My job was to carry the news or the instructions from the council to the families in their houses. Or messages from one council member to another. Or to stand watch by the square, at the entrance to the bridge, to let them know if the open car was coming with the half-track filled with soldiers just behind it, which meant the next bad thing was about to occur. I would run like the wind through the back alleys and side streets to give warning. So I had responsibilities beyond my age. There were seven of us, seven boys, who were runners. We wore special caps, like police caps, with a military brim. And the stars sewn on our jackets, of course, so it was all very perverted, my military sense of myself. I felt privileged that the star was not like all the other stars but some indication of rank, and the military-style hat, and knowing what was going on almost before anyone else—all that made me feel special. Mr. Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader, Dr. Koenig—he said I was his best runner. For the most important matters he chose me. So there it was, I had a star on my tunic and a garrison cap, and I was the star runner, that’s the way I thought of myself.

I ask you to remember. I was only ten years old. At the same time of living in this illusion, and of sometimes even secretly admiring the uniforms of our enemies, I knew full well what was happening. How could I not?

The overall duty of the council was to provide on a daily basis worker brigades for the military factories in the city. If this was not done, if the Germans thought we were not productive enough, that would be the end of us. While the men and the younger women were conscripted for labor, most women and the less able men were assigned to maintain the ghetto, to keep it functioning, the bakery, the hospital, the laundry, and so on. So women as well had to be fit. Any woman found to be pregnant was taken away and murdered. Or if the child was born, both mother and child were murdered. So pregnant mothers as well as old people, homeless children, and the physically incapacitated were kept illegally in houses all through the ghetto. When we knew a search was coming, each runner had a number of houses to cover. I would dash to my allotted houses and knock on the door a special way. This was the signal that people had to hide. It was all done quietly, efficiently, no screaming or shouting. Then, my route covered, either I would have time to get back to the safety of the council offices or I would hide myself somewhere, usually on the roof of some empty house, huddling against the chimney. These were the moments of the purest terror, when the illegals would be dispersed into all manner of hiding places, cupboards, empty potato bins, root cellars, attic closets, wells, underground crypts. And I would listen as inevitably some of these hiding places would be discovered. From different quarters I would hear the running feet of a squad of soldiers, or guttural shouts, then the screams of someone, or sometimes a pistol shot. The Germans brought Jewish ghetto policemen with them on these searches and tortured them on the spot to find out what they knew. People were found and dragged away, you could hear awful sounds from the different streets. Wherever I was, however safe myself, I would feel such rage—to the point where I would verge on a suicidal impulse to rush out and attack the soldiers, leap on their backs, claw at them, pound them. I felt this desire in my jawbone, my teeth.

When I was assigned to the square where the guards on post stopped and examined the work details crossing the bridge, my mission was to give the council warning of anything unusual. The guards were oafs, stupid men for the most part, they were the dregs of the German military, some clearly of middle age. In my runner’s garrison cap I was virtually invisible to them. I could keep crisscrossing the square endlessly, even occasionally hunkering behind some pile of rubble in order to observe the goings-on. If for instance one of the workers was caught in the evening trying to smuggle in a loaf of bread or a few cigarettes, there would be a terrible row and the council would have to intervene in a hurry to try to negotiate the least possible punishment. Sometimes the soldiers would accost a woman worker and try to detain her in their guardhouse on some pretext or other, and that would have to be dealt with. In the middle of the day, when less went on, I stayed mostly in the side streets, though never out of sight or hearing of the square. I was a responsible child, but when things were too quiet and I could not resist the impulse I’d slip into one of the empty houses and climb out on the roof and maintain my watch there. Most of the ghetto houses were no more than cabins, but some were two stories, some were made of stone, there were barns with haylofts, stables, shops with flat roofs, a commercial building or two. The danger of watching from a roof, huddled in the crevice made by the chimney and warmed by the sun, was that I could find myself falling asleep and one of the open cars could come across the bridge and pass under me without my being aware. Usually, I was too hungry to fall asleep, though I did daydream. I could see the entire span of the bridge and the frontage streets of the city across the river that I had once called home. The veins of the city spread into the uplands and I could see the blocks of apartment houses and office buildings and, depending on where I was, I might even see the military factories against the hills where on windless days smoke from the tall stacks poured directly upward into the sky.

If I turned my head to the east, I could see where the terrain roughened into foothills and then mountains with canyons, all of it thickly forested with pine and birch trees. This terrain was magical to me because it was where the Jewish partisans were based who had guns and attacked Germans in military forays. I believed, quite unreasonably, that my parents were with the partisans, were themselves fighting heroes of the Jewish resistance. I believed this at the same time that I believed they were dead. I believed both simultaneously. I will explain this to you, because it also will show you how I became a runner in the first place.

Before the German invasion, before the eviction of the Jews, my father, your grandfather, had been an agrarian economist at the university. That meant matters of crops, farm production, and so on. That is why he was a secret consultant of the council. They had to figure out the distribution of foodstuffs allotted by the Germans. Of course there was never enough. It was my father who staked in two empty lots the plan for a community vegetable garden that the council brought to the Germans for their approval.

My mother had been a doctoral candidate in English language and literature at the same university. When we moved to the ghetto all of that was over. In the beginning my father went off every dawn with the labor details across the bridge to work on the assembly line in the airplane factory, and my mother was designated to teach in the ghetto school. But nothing stayed the same, restrictions followed one another, and more and more of the normal things of life were taken away. So one day the Germans shut down our schools, and after that my mother was assigned like my father to the labor brigades in the city.

I was warned to stay out of sight. I spent most of my time in our house. My mother had saved several books from confiscation and brought them home to me. The books were kept behind a loose wall board in my room. It was an attic room with a small window I could see from only if I got down on my knees. I studied those books avidly, French and English readers, math workbooks, and histories of European civilization. I relished books from the higher grades and liked to master them. My mama made up assignments from these books and even tests for me to take. I loved tests. I loved her voice as she read my work and graded it and I loved it when we bent over my workbook together in the evening after she made our supper.

Of course I had one or two friends. Joseph Liebner, who had been a year ahead of me in school and whose father was a baker in the ghetto bakery, and a boy named Nicoli, who shared with me his German-language cowboy novels, and the blond girl Sarah Levin, whose pretty mother, Miriam, taught music and who had told my mother that Sarah had an eye for me, a bit of news that I heard with feigned indifference. In fact every week on Tuesday I went down two blocks to Mrs. Levin’s for my fiddle lesson. The fiddle was kept in her house, though it was mine. Naturally I could never practice. My lesson was also my practice for the lesson. It took place while the men in the carpentry shop next door were still working, so that the sound of the fiddle could not be heard over the noise. At such times Sarah Levin sat in the room, a thin child with pale hair and large eyes that watched me, which I told myself I hated, though of course it made me play smartly.

Still, most of the time I was alone. I waited for my parents, praying to God they would return from their day’s labor in the city. As they’d come in the door, bringing the cold air with them, perhaps with a bit of smuggled food bartered from the Lithuanians, I would thank God for His beneficence.

It was in this period of my life I learned from observation of my mother and father what adult love was. That this could be maintained—a presumption of a father’s male powers, a mother’s beauty, her waiting upon him, her reception of him in their bed—when they lived stripped of their lives, enslaved, everything taken from them, I did not understand as something remarkable until years afterward. Now I only accumulated the evidence. The strong attraction between them had nothing to do with me. My mother could not stop looking at her husband. When he was in the room with us she was transfixed. I watched her bosom as she breathed. I noted the thickness of the curve of his forearm under the rolled shirtsleeve. I watched him stand out at the open door and look down the street each way before he permitted them to leave the house. When they readied themselves for work at dawn, he helped my mother with her coat and then she turned and raised the collar of his jacket. Upon each, front and back, was sewn the star of yellow cloth.

One night I was awakened by what I thought was the wind whistling through the cracks in the attic boards. But it wasn’t the wind, it was screaming. Not from nearby, not from my house—I heard my parents in the room below, the urgent tones of their voices when they thought I couldn’t hear them. I knelt at my window: The sky was alight. My street was quiet, the houses dark, but the sky beyond seemed to be flying upward. I saw the color of flame reflected on my nightshirt and called to my parents. Fire, fire! In moments my mother was with me, leading me back to bed. Shh, she said, it’s all right, we are not on fire, you are safe, go back to sleep. I wrapped myself in the safety of my covers, I folded the pillow over my ears and hummed to myself so as not to hear those screams. It was a terrible sound, though distant, of many screaming voices. I watched the firelight fade on the inside of my eyelids. I fell asleep imagining the screams turning back into the wind, as if drawn up by God, rising to heaven.

In the morning the word came that the Germans had burned down the hospital. When I say the hospital, you must not imagine the sort of modern high-rise facility we have here. It was a cluster of houses that had been refashioned by opening walls and tying the buildings together with lumber so as to provide three wards of bunk beds, one for men, one for women, one for children, as well as some examining rooms, a small ill-equipped operating room, and a dispensary. The Germans surrounded the hospital, boarded up the doors and windows and, with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children, set the place on fire. These are numbers indelible in my mind. Sixty-five. Twenty-three. Some of the patients had been ill with typhus and they feared the contagion, the decimation of the labor supply. So this was their solution, to burn everyone alive, including the staff. All the next day smoke rose over the town. The sky was overcast, the weather unnaturally warm. The smoke lingered like fog. My eyes smarted, I coughed to expel the smoke. I imagined I’d inhaled the smoke of the dead, and perhaps I had. At dawn, everyone had to go off to work as usual. In the evening, after the workers returned, though it was illegal to gather in numbers, several men slipped into the rabbi’s house next door to say Kaddish for the murdered souls.

This was not the first of the so-called actions by the Germans. There were and would be others, sudden, unannounced sweeps of the houses, when they trucked people to the old fort on the river west of the city to be murdered. They had these bouts of efficiency. But with this particular horror, my father resigned from his role with the council. He had found his complicity in a life of helpless subjugation no longer endurable. There was a secret meeting of the council the next night after the fire, and when he came back, I was upstairs supposedly asleep but as awake and alert as I could be. A silence while my mother put the bread and soup before him. He pushed the dish away.

“Tomorrow is the monthly meeting with the Germans,” he told her. “The council will make a formal protest. It would apply moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror.” His voice was uncharacteristically leaden, toneless.

“What would you have it do?” my mother asked. She spoke softly. I could hardly hear her.

“Above and beyond the fact of our systematic slavery, they like to surprise us,” my father said. His voice grew louder, angrier. “They like to amuse themselves. Schmitz, that jackal who runs things”—this was the chief S.S. officer—“how can the council bear to look at him, speak with him, as if he is human? This ritual pretense of a common humanity to which we have to subscribe if we hope to outlast them! As if we are the caretakers of madmen who must never be told they are mad. Schmitz and the others will be laughing to themselves while affecting civilized conversation. They will say it is wartime and things that are regrettable are nonetheless unavoidable. They will go on to discuss the flour and potato allocations as the next order of business.”

“Ari, shah,” my mother said. “You’ll wake him.”

“I can no longer endure this!”

That cry of despair I will never forget, not only for the clenching of my boy’s heart that my father was, truly and in fact, without the resources to protect us, but for the piercing illumination it brought to me of my physical self as game for a predator. He went on about this effect of our history: that we had lived among them, the Christians, for generation upon generation, only to see ourselves bent and twisted to the shape of their hatred. We had been turned into Jews so that they could be Christians.

Now exactly what happened after this I cannot tell you. It was perhaps two or three months after the fire, emotions had become numb. The shock had worn off in the routine of work, secret meetings, secret prayers on the part of the religious. The return once more to the hope of outlasting them, to hanging on until liberation came. There had been rumors of the defeat of the Nazi armies in Africa. It was in this period that my parents failed to return home from their labor. To this day I don’t know the circumstances. One morning at dawn, as usual, he helped her with her coat, she turned up his collar against the cold, they both kissed their son. They gave me the usual instructions for the day. And they opened the door into the dark morning and closed the door behind them and I never saw them again.

I do know that around this time a notice was posted in the ghetto—the Germans were calling for a hundred intelligentsia for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives. Mama and Papa discussed this. She was against volunteering, arguing that the Germans could not be trusted. Papa’s view was that it was a reasonable risk to take and that he should sign on. He believed if he had such a job he would see people he knew and could make contact with the Resistance. My mother said she wanted us to survive. My father said while any decision they made could be the last, of one thing he was certain, and that was how it would end for everyone who remained in the ghetto.

Well of course my mother was right, it was another of the Germans’ murderous deceptions: The intelligentsia who had given their credentials for archival work were trucked out of the city to the old fort by the river and shot to death. But if my father was among them, what about my mother, who would not have volunteered? Or had she after all? But that would have been too reckless, both of them taking a chance with their lives and leaving a small boy behind. Perhaps if he had volunteered, she had been implicated in some way and taken off too before she could flee. Perhaps they had been murdered for other reasons having nothing to do with this question. I didn’t know.

But there was another possibility—that they were still alive, that they had managed to escape and join the partisans. It was Rabbi Grynspan from next door who told me this on the very evening my parents didn’t return. “Come quickly, you must not stay here,” he said. “You are technically an orphan, though of course your parents are alive in the forest and will come back for you, may the Lord, Blessed be He, show them the way.”

“They went with the Resistance?”

“Yes.” This after a moment’s hesitation.

“Well why couldn’t they take me with them?”

“They thought you would be safer here. Quickly, no more talk. Unattended children the Nazis do not tolerate. You will be provided, never mind books, take your sweater, these shirts, wrap these things in your coat and come with me.”

Thereafter, I lived knowing Mama and Papa were dead but at the same time waiting for them to come rescue me. I knew they were dead because they wouldn’t have thought I’d be safer alone in the ghetto than with them. But I thought they were alive, because the rabbi had confirmed what my father had said, that he wanted to make contact with the Resistance. I lived in this irresolute state of mind for a considerable time, knowing in my heart they were dead, but always looking up from what I was doing to see if they had come for me. It was a long time before I stopped thinking of them altogether.

—If Albert is right, there is consolation to be derived from the planets. For example, that they’re all spheroid, that none of them are shaped like dice or the cardboards laundered shirts come folded on. And thinking about their formation—how, from amorphous furious swirls of cosmic dust and gas, everything spins out and cools and organizes itself into a gravitationally operating solar system.. . . And that this has apparently happened elsewhere, that there are billions of galaxies with stars beyond number, so that even if a fraction of stars have orbiting planets with moons in orbit around them. . . a few planets, at least, may have the water necessary for the intelligent life that could be suffering the same metaphysical crisis that deranges us. So we have that to feel good about.

—Sarah Blumenthal’s Conversation with Her Father

The rabbi took me to the council offices. Several children were there. Some were crying. I sat among them on the floor and leaned back against the wall and watched and listened. The council staff were begging everyone to be quiet. One man at a desk was typing. He had a typewriter because it was the council. I liked the clear, precise clack of the typewriter keys. I fell asleep for a while. When I awoke the other children were gone, the room was quiet, and a woman was kneeling before me. “You have a new name now,” she said, smiling. “A nice name, too. Yehoshua. Go ahead, say it.”

“Yehoshua.”

“That’s right. Yehoshua Mendelssohn. That is you from now on. It is the name you must answer to, and this is your registration that says you are now him that you will carry always in your pocket, all right? In case anyone asks? You live in Demokratu Street. I will take you there. It is pretty, it looks onto the vegetable garden.”

The woman took my bundle and held my hand as if I were a baby and walked with me through the ghetto. Her palm was damp with fear, but she would not let go. She stopped in front of the door of a small house. “You have a grandfather,” she told me, and then she knocked at the door.

The so-called grandfather was a tailor named Srebnitsky, a thin illtempered man, somewhat stooped, with gray hair curling from under his cap and with narrow shoulders over which a shirt and vest hung loosely. A musty smell came from him which I thought of as grandfather smell. He had pale blue eyes that glimmered with water. But the most powerful impression he made on me was that he was a stranger.

His house consisted of two rooms, a front and a back, and a small alcove that served for a kitchen. I was to sleep on a daybed in the front room, where the tailor maintained his business.

“So, I have a grandson,” he said, not smiling. “Thus God in His wisdom provides. May I hope He will give me a daughter and son-in-law as well? And why not a wife as long as He’s at it?” He spoke not to me but seemingly to the work in his hands, or perhaps to the hands themselves, which were long, smooth, and nimble and therefore fascinating, because they seemed so much younger than the rest of him. The needle flew through the cloth, in and out, and perfectly straight lines of stitches grew with amazing speed.

As the weeks passed I took on the duty of sweeping the floor of the bits of thread and shreds of rags that accumulated there. But nothing could be thrown out, everything went back in the rag bin. The garments brought to the tailor were threadbare coats, dresses, trousers that he would mend or tear down and reconstruct, somehow, with his bits of thread and rags from his rag bin, so that they could be worn again, at least for a little while. There was no money exchanged with the customers, there was scrip. More often there was barter. The Germans couldn’t police that very well. A carpenter whose jacket he mended fixed a shutter so that it would close properly. A woman whose coat he lined left some soup.

The only book in the house was a Bible, so I took to reading it closely. I found some of it puzzling. Assuming the old man was pious, I began to ask questions of him. Gleams of triumph came to Srebnitsky’s watery eyes. With relish he pointed out the contradictions and absurdities of the biblical text. “Look closely at what you’re reading,” he said. “The dates tell you. When this happened, when that happened. Samuel could not have written Samuel any more than Moses could have written Moses. How could they themselves know when they had died? Stories, nonsense, all of it. Pious fraud. And in the beginning? In the beginning—what? Who is talking, who is being addressed? Who was there? Where is the voucher? The people who made up these stories knew even less than we do. You want God? Don’t look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That’s the kind of God you’re dealing with.”

I found myself oddly comforted by these remarks. I’d always had doubts myself about the biblical God, as I do to this day, as you well know and, I hope, forgive. Also, the old man’s attitude reminded me of my father, who was a Zionist and a man of science, although he observed the Sabbath and the High Holy Days. But in addition there was a kind of hidden compliment in the regard the old man had to have had for me by talking to me as a person who was capable of using his own mind, thinking for himself and taking nothing on faith even though I was just a boy.

Most of the time, though, there was no conversation from Srebnitsky. Hour after hour he sat hunched at his worktable by the window, his beautiful hands playing a kind of nimble deaf-and-dumb speech in my mind. The concentration of his gaze on this small field of cloth, over which his hands spoke, I thought of as his defiance of all the lies of God and his obstinate refusal to succumb to the despair that swept through the ghetto in waves, like the fever.

His sewing machine had been taken from him, the loss of which he cursed every day. Their concession to his trade was to leave him his scissors and needles and boxes of notions and skeins of thread. Also his two human figures on wheeled stands, one male, one female, constructed in wire from the waist up. These tailor’s dummies were often the objects of my contemplation. Though they could be seen through, I felt them as real presences in the room. I realized how little it took for something to appear human. Sometimes the dummies would get moved around and I would be startled coming upon them unexpectedly, mistaking them for real people. I fantasized their indifference, that nothing could hurt them. You could hang them, shoot them, you could hammer them into a shapeless clump, pull and twist them into one long strand of wire, and they wouldn’t feel it, nor would they care. Being inanimate was an enviable, even transcendent, state in my thinking. Yet at the same time I had no difficulty imagining the dummies talking to each other. I liked to wheel them into a conversational position after the tailor had retired and just before I myself lay down to sleep: Well here it is evening, time to rest, the man would say to the woman. Yes, she would answer, and tomorrow the sun will surely come and shine its warmth upon us.

—Pem’s Remarks to the Bishop’s Examiners

The sensation of God in us is a total sensation given to the whole being, revelatory, inspired. That is the usual answer to the questioning intellect, which by itself cannot realize sacred truth. But is the intellect not subsumed? Does the whole being not include the intellect? Why wouldn’t the glory of God shine through to the human mind?

I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect. It cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile. I look for parity here. I will not claim that your access to the numinous is a delusion if you will not tell me my intellect is irrelevant. . .

The biblical stories, the Gospel stories, were the original understandings, they were science and religion, they were everything, they were all anyone had. But they didn’t write themselves. We have to acknowledge the storytellers’ work.

If not in all stories, certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending: The story of the Tower of Babel gets you there. The known ending of life is death: The story of Adam and Eve arrives at that ending. Why do we suffer, why must we die? Well, you see, there was this Garden. . .

The ending of the story implies that there might have been a different ending. That’s the little ten-cent trick. You allow as how since things worked out this way, they could have worked out another way. You create conflict and suspense where there wasn’t any. You’ve turned the human condition into a sequential narrative of how it came to be.

Well, the way I read it, God dealt from a stacked deck. Adam and Eve never had a chance. The story of the Fall is a parable of the glory and torment of human consciousness. But that’s all it is. . .

Migod, there is no one more dangerous than the storyteller. No, I’ll amend that, than the storyteller’s editor. Augustine, who edits Genesis 2–4 into original sin. What a nifty little act of deconstruction—passing it on to the children, like HIV. As the doctrine of universal damnation, the Fall becomes an instrument of social control. God appoints his agents plenipotentiaries to dispense salvation or withhold it. I don’t know about you, dear colleagues, but history has a way of turning a harsh light on my faith. We are bound to a theology hard-pressed to hold the line against incredulous common sense. So for instance newborn babies who die unbaptized as Catholics are condemned to the limboic upper reaches of hell? I mean. . . but in all its denominations, punitive fantasies of original sin have begotten and still beget generations of terrorized children and haunted adults, and give those Calvinist graveyards in New England a particular poignancy as they call to mind the witch burnings, scourgings, and self-denials of the ordinary joy and wonder of life on earth to which the unindoctrinated mind is naturally heir. . .

How, given the mournful history of this nonsense, can we presume to exalt our religious vision over the ordinary pursuits of our rational minds?

The old tailor tended to deal with me as if I were an adult boarder who could take care of himself. Nevertheless, as I grew out of my clothes, he let them out or found me others. When I began limping because my shoes had become too tight, he bartered for a pair of wooden shoes. He cooked our potato soup or cut our bread and pointed to the table and we sat down to eat in silence. All of this I accepted as the best that could be. In truth I was a boarder. The old man and I were not really related, and I never came to feel that this was anything but a temporary arrangement.

Living undercover, I could no longer see my friends from before or have my music lesson with Mrs. Levin or see that little Sarah, who was so crazy about me. From time to time the woman from the council who had given me my new name came to visit, to look around, to see that everything was all right. She would bring Srebnitsky a few cigarettes, or schnapps in a small jar. He accepted these things as his due. She would have for Yehoshua Mendelssohn a pocket comb or a pencil and notebook. But the best thing she ever brought, my most valued treasure, was an American funny paper, a sheet of color comics from an American newspaper used as inner wrapping in a package that had miraculously found its way to the ghetto. I smoothed out the wrinkled page and read it over and over, trying to work out the English words above the heads of the characters. One story was about a medieval knight in armor riding through the countryside on a white horse. Another showed a police detective in a yellow coat running along the top of a railroad car with a gun in his hand. It did not bother me that I could not take each story further than the six or eight panels in the paper, it was enough for me to know of these heroes and imagine for myself the kinds of adventures they had. Different periods of history were suggested, people were born into different times, each of which brought its own dangers. This was more or less the same thought delivered by a rabbi in a secret gathering of children for Chanukah. “The Holy One, blessed be His name, gave us the Torah, gave us compassion, humility, and the strength to stand up to all who would deny us our faith. And we are tested even as the Maccabees were tested, who recaptured the Temple from the wicked ones and lit the lamp that had just the oil for one day’s burning but which, thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He, lasted for eight days. And we will break out of our chains and defeat the oppressors as the Maccabees did.”

Each morning when I arose, I looked out across the street at the vegetable garden that my father had laid out for the community. Even in the cold, harsh weather, with the ground bare but for the dried-up stalks of plant stubble, I could see the furrows that outlined different sections and imagine his thoughts as he worked out what should be planted and where. In the afternoons I liked to walk there when it was dark enough. Nobody bothered me. Those soldiers posted to guard duty tended to be less vigilant, more concerned with keeping warm than guarding anything. But then the snows came like a burial shroud laid over the field. All the configurations of the ground were gone, there was just this mound of glaring cold whiteness. It was blinding, it wouldn’t let me look, and for the first time since I had lost my parents I cried. There had come to me from that whiteness a terrible realization that my memory of them had begun to fade. . . their physical appearances, their voices.

Eventually, try as I might, all I could recover of them were flashes of their moral natures in the habits of my own thinking.

I came back one day from my wandering and found Srebnitsky at work cutting patterns from a thick bolt of luxurious material of a rich charcoal color and remarkable pliancy. Where had it come from? I would have asked had there not been in the tailor’s attitude of concentration a demand for silence. His lips were moving as if he were talking to himself. He seemed angry. Yet he went about his work quickly and with precision. I sat to the side and watched his hands. Eventually they lifted the sections of cloth they had cut and tacked and slipped them over the wire male, who in that instant became an S.S. officer in the process of realization.

He stepped back to regard his work. “You see how famous your grandfather has become. News of his art has reached His Eminence S.S. Major Schmitz. Is it wrong of me to accept this honor?” he said, pointing at the dummy.

“You had to,” I said with a youth’s directness.

“Yes. I suppose so. I tell myself also that it is a hopeful sign, the first stirrings in their evolution that one of these thugs can actually be party to an ordinary business deal.”

Here he uncovered a sewing machine with a treadle. “So I have it back now. So? Do I hear you saying something?” I shook my head, but he went on with his argument with himself as if I were disputing him. “If not for his skills, Srebnitsky would not be here. Just remember that. These hands you’re always looking at with admiration—for I know that about you, although you are too high-and-mighty to become a tailor yourself—it’s these old hands of his that have kept him alive. And if you don’t think that’s worth a damn, they’ve kept you alive too, Yehoshua Mendelssohn! Yehoshua Mendelssohn,” he said again, muttering, as he turned to his work.

For of course, as I realized at this moment, just as he was a stranger to me, I was not his grandson. You understood that, didn’t you, that I had been given the name of the tailor’s dead grandson? He never told me what had happened, it was at the council later that I learned. Before there was a ghetto, when the war came to our city, the Russians pulled back to the east. Our Lithuanian neighbors took the opportunity to have themselves a little pogrom. Srebnitsky lived with his daughter and son-in-law and grandson Yehoshua in an apartment on Vytauto Street. While he was at work in his shop in another part of town, a mob broke down the door of the apartment and rushed his family out into the street and clubbed them to death. All around, others were doing the same, killing Jewish people and looting their houses of furniture, rugs, dishes, radios, everything. Srebnitsky ran home and found the bodies of his daughter and her husband and son on the sidewalk. When the Germans occupied the city, they restored order by evicting all Jews and resettling them in the ramshackle slum on the other side of the river that became our ghetto. This was done not for our protection, of course, but to save us for forced labor in the war factories. I remembered that time myself, hiding in our own apartment, on a high floor, luckily, with the bureau lodged against the front door. And I remembered our own trek, with my parents pushing a cart of belongings and pieces of furniture we had been allowed to take with us across the bridge. Srebnitsky, bereft of all his living relations, had made the trip alone.

Of course the tailor’s experience was not exceptional in any way, but years later, when I considered the act that brought about his death, I concluded that while anyone could be driven to the point of forswearing life, in cases like Srebnitsky’s it was not the simple desire to die, it was the desire for self-transcendence which once realized brings one to the end of life. That is something different, not the same thing at all. And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

—Pem’s Remarks to the Bishop’s Examiners

Burkert, perhaps our pre-eminent scholar of ancient religions—do you know his work? He investigates the origins of the sacred, itself a heretical pursuit. He gives us the picture of the lizard who leaves his tail in the mouth of the predator. The fox who chews off his foot to escape the trap. You ask what that has to do with God. In that programmed biological response is the idea of the sacrifice. You give up a part to save the whole. Ancient myths abound in which human beings flee monsters and escape only by sacrificing pieces of themselves to divert or slow down the pursuit. Orestes gives up a finger, and so does Odysseus. Finger sacrifice was very big in ancient Greece. But for the most part, over time the sacrifices have been ritualized, symbolized. You no longer mutilate yourself, you leave a ring on the altar in lieu of your finger. You slaughter a lamb. You leave a scapegoat in the desert. But when the fate of a community is involved, one man is chosen to jump into the abyss so that it will not swallow the community. One virgin is given to the bottomless lake. One person on the sled is thrown to the pursuing wolves. Jonah is thrown into the sea to save the ship and its crew. And just as the herd grazes in safety for a time after the lions cut one of them out and devour him, so does humanity feel safer from the nameless formless terrors if one of their number is sacrificed, if for the sake of all one must pay as the part for the whole, as the fox’s foot is left in the trap.

Think about it. We are talking the intellectual’s talk. We are finding the possible biological origin of the sacred, of what is most holy to us, our grand figuration of the incarnate God who dies over and over, from one Sunday to the next, so that the rest of us may find salvation.

Is all of this irrelevant?. . .

Pagels, working from the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, finds that the early Christians were profoundly divided between those who proposed a church according to apostolic succession based on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection and those who rejected resurrection except as a spiritual metaphor for gnosis emotionally, mystically achieved, as knowledge beyond ordinary knowledge, a perception beneath or above the everyday truth.. . . So there was a power struggle. Gnostic and synoptic contested with competing gospels. The gnostics, who said no church was needed, no priest, no episcopate, were routed, inevitably, having no organization, given their views. While the institutionalist Christians were understandably concerned that their persecuted sect needed a network to survive, with rules of order and common strategies for survival, the concept of martyrdom, for example, being created to make something positive from their terrible persecution, it is also true that the struggle for Jesus was a struggle for power, that the idea of an actual resurrection, which the institutionalists put forth and the gnostics ridiculed, provided authority for church office, and that the struggle to define Jesus and canonize his words, or interpretations of his words by others, was pure politics, as passionate or worshipful as it may have been, and that with the desire to perpetuate the authority of Jesus continuing in the Reformation and the creation of Protestant sects, in which a kind of residual gnosis was being proposed in protest against the sacramental accumulations of a churchly bureaucracy, what is now Christianity, with all the resonance that it has as a belief and a rich and complex culture, is a political creation with a political history. It was a politically triumphant Jesus created from the conflicts of early Christianity, and it has been a political Jesus ever since, from the time of the emperor Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century through the long history of European Christianity, as we consider the history of the Catholic Church, its Crusades, its Inquisition, its contests and/or alliances with kings and emperors, and with the rise of the Reformation, the history of Christianity’s active participation, in all its forms, in the wars among states and the rule of populations. It is the story of power. . .

I’m sorry. You have questions for me and here I’ve been running on about these elemental things you well know. But I’m beginning to feel their weight. The higher criticism has gone on now for a hundred and fifty years. We must look again at what is staring us in the face. Our difference is in how we value these. . . distractions of the intellect. You regard them as irrelevant. I wish you saw them as a challenge. Our tradition has great latitude. What unifies us is the sacraments, but there is division among us when it comes to doctrinal issues and I think we must acknowledge that. All these miracles we affirm are a burden to me. Yet I think of myself as a good Christian. This is a profession of faith. I hope you will not use it to expunge from the ranks someone of my generation who you feel has brought the 1960s along with him. Thank you.

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

STAR DUST

Sometimes I wonder why

I spend the lonely night

dreaming of a song?

The melody haunts my reverie,

And I am once again with you

When our love was new,

and each kiss an inspiration,

But that was long ago: now my consolation

is in the stardust of a song.

Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright,

you are in my arms

The nightingale tells his fairy tale

of paradise, where roses grew.

Tho’ I dream in vain

In my heart it will remain:

My stardust melody,

The memory of love’s refrain.

The singer asks why he is wasting his nights longing for his lost love

Whom he dreams of as a song. Of course he knows why—

He is obsessed, he can’t help himself he is in a mawkish self-pitying frame of mind.

She must have shone for him like a star if the song he hears is no more than its dust.

How peculiar to invoke in the name of lost love the cinderous products of a nuclear conflagration.

This is his problem, his metaphorical desperation.

One wonders at his sentimentality

—to have even pretended he was in paradise, the Garden of Eden

where everything lasted forever and the roses never stopped blooming

and his sweetheart sang duets in the evening

with a perching bird cherished by Chinese royalty—

As if no ancestor of his ever ate the fruit from the famous tree,

As if love were eternal, life death-free.

( weak applause)

If what you’re singing to yourself is not a song

but the dream of what a song should be,

Of course it’s all wrong,

The song breaks down as dreams do

And everything you thought you knew is gone

Each note a lamentation.

That’s the real problem of the heart:

The mind’s in disarray

and night and day can’t be told apart.

As if God in consternation has set the world back to its start.

And where the lover stands in all of this as dream, as song, it surely is no Garden.

There is lightning, there is rain,

celestial fires, worlds in collision

And the song of love’s recision

is the music of the spheres.

(indifferent applause)

What’s worst of all is when he’s alone in the night but she’s there, she hasn’t gone.

He recalls the time they were one

Which is the only paradise we can presume to try for

Though of short duration

lasting not as long as a rose in bloom.

So now they’re not in the Garden anymore

Like he was the only boy in the world and she was the only girl

but sitting in opposite chairs in the living room

And maybe he’s reading the paper or pretending to

and she has a book or a Bible

and between them they have nothing to say to each other

Except to try to coordinate their doctors’ appointments.

If he took her in his arms now

She would flinch and pull away

Totally flustered by this bizarre behavior

And perhaps in his reverie he gazes out the window

And sees some lovely slender young girls passing by

and thinks in the words of the poet,

“Once I knew one lovelier than any of you.”

Which is not much consolation.

No more than the sight

of the stars of night

which shine big and brightly enough

but are dying embers

in the ashes of his lethargy.

(very scattered applause)

We sing the blues, Make up words
To imitate
The singing birds

In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd
She’s not in his arms,
They’re looking for God

A nightful of stars,
Is turned to dust
And here I am,
In Paradise lost.

—The singer dreams up a song

—each note a lamentation

—as we sit in our living room chairs

—here in Paradise lost.

Sometimes I wonder why

I spend the lonely night

dreaming of a song?

The melody haunts my reverie,

And I am once again with you

When our love was new,

and each kiss an inspiration. . .

( grateful applause)

—One morning in the winter, just minutes after Srebnitsky had sewn the military insignia on the shoulders and the piping on the lapels, a car pulled up by the front door and the S.S. officer who’d commissioned the work arrived. It was S.S. Major Schmitz, the commandant and executive of all terror. I ran into the back room and slipped out the door. This enterprise of the tailor’s had bothered me from the beginning, because it violated the rule to remain anonymous as possible, to do nothing to stand out. If his skill with the needle had made him useful and kept him, and me, alive, it also raised the possibility of death. The logic of our wretched circumstances ensured that there was no simple proposition that did not contain its opposite.

I positioned myself by the vegetable garden fence some distance down the block. It was a cold, cloudy morning. In the drabness of winter and amid the shabby dwellings of this street, with wisps of smoke coming from the chimneys, the commandant’s staff car stood out, the awesome luxury of another world. It was a black Mercedes sedan with a squarish cab and a long, low-slung engine hood with a chrome radiator grille for a prow. It had huge silver headlights. It shone brilliantly, apparently untouched by slush and snow and soot. The driver occupied himself by going around with a rag and rubbing away the most recent affronts. I knew from the way he glanced at me that I could come as close as I wished, so that I, a Jew boy, could see what German civilization was capable of, the glory of this machine, and the casual magnificence of its driver. He wore the enlisted man’s S.S. uniform with a holstered pistol.

Of course what drew me to the car was not its luster but the heat rising from the engine. So I was to have an unobstructed view of what happened. When Major Schmitz came out he was wearing his new custom-made uniform, including a rakishly blocked garrison cap. He was a portly man with wide hips. Behind him was Srebnitsky, carrying the old uniform over his arm. The driver sprang forward to take this. He opened the rear door for his commandant and then the front door and was occupied in the next moments settling the uniform carefully over the front seat. Schmitz stood posing in his smart uniform and black boots with his hands on his hips and a contemptuous smile on his face. “But you won’t pay?” Srebnitsky asked in a coy voice. The officer laughed. “Not one pfennig for Srebnitsky’s beautiful work, even the sleeves lined, and all of it done in double stitching?” And he began to laugh as well. “Not even a cigarette for the old tailor who has worked so hard, the artist who has made this garment for the beautiful major of the Third Reich?” They were both laughing heartily at this joke, a Jew expecting to be paid. Srebnitsky suddenly frowned, his shoulders rounded as he peered closely at something on the new uniform. In his hand were his scissors. “Forgive me, Your Excellency, a bit of thread, one moment.” And putting his hand to the chest of the commandant, who looked skyward to endure this final snip of perfection, he yanked at the lapel and slashed the scissors-point downward across the front, a gesture so sudden that from one moment to the next a big flap of the ruined tunic hung down to the officer’s knee. “Sew it yourself then, thief!” the tailor shrieked. “Thief, that’s what you are, that’s all you are. All of you, thieves, thieves of our work, thieves of our lives!”

The major stood dumbfounded, I think he had even cried out in fear. But his driver leapt upon the old man and clubbed him to the ground with the butt of his pistol. Then he began kicking him. “You dare to attack a German officer?” he shouted. “You dare to lift your hand!” He then aimed his pistol at the stricken tailor and would have shot him then and there had the major not commanded him to stop. Holding his ripped tunic against his chest, Schmitz was like a woman covering her breasts. He looked around to see who had witnessed his humiliation, and thank God he did not see my face, for I had turned my back and was disappearing into the alley between two houses. From this vantage point in the shadows moments later, I saw the car flash by in the street. I listened to the fading sound of the motor and then I ran back to Srebnitsky, who lay in the snow where he had fallen. His head was bleeding, he was coughing and poking at his throat and trying to speak. I knelt down beside him. He began to shake his head and made an attempt to smile, and then he was coughing and cackling and coughing some more, and his eyes for a moment rolled up in his head. Then suddenly I was pulled to my feet by one of the neighbors. “Don’t you know any better? He’s finished, your old man. Move, run, get out of here!” And then he himself ran back to his house and slammed the door.

What he meant, that neighbor, was that when a head of family committed a crime or was otherwise designated for execution, it was the Germans’ policy to kill his dependents as well. That is why when my parents had not come home I was quickly taken to the council office and given another name. It was to the council I ran now, by myself this time.

My arrival immediately stilled everyone in that busy place, the pale terrified face of a child a warning signal they knew all too well. What I had to say put them on the alert. Several boys were summoned and dispatched to spread the word among the houses and shops for people not known to the Germans to go into hiding. I sat there dumbly while these boys, whose ranks I was to join, ran off in all directions. In a matter of minutes, everyone in the ghetto knew what the tailor had done. After a while the news came back that he had been apprehended and taken to the Gestapo headquarters. The question now was how the Germans would adjudicate his crime. People began to gather in the street in front of the council office. Rumors were rife—the price for Srebnitsky’s act would be thirty, fifty, a hundred Jewish dead. Several times Mr. Barbanel, the chief of staff, had to go outside and tell the crowd to disperse and go about their business.

In clear distinction to the public, who were becoming increasingly agitated, the council staff remained calm. The calmest of everyone, perhaps the source of the calm, was the council president, Dr. Sigmund Koenig, a handsome man in his sixties, a man of great dignity, a good six feet tall. Eventually he went outside and his mere appearance stilled the small crowd that was gathered. He told them he was awaiting a call from the ghetto commandant as to exactly what was to be done but that he doubted there was any immediate danger of a major action. He spoke almost in a whisper. Standing behind him in the doorway, I could barely hear what he said. He wore no coat or hat. The cold did not seem to bother him. He was neatly dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a clean shirt and tie. I would come to understand this was his only suit. It was threadbare, I had a tailor’s eye for such things now, and it hung in a way that suggested his own physical wear and tear. His shirt collar was loose around his neck. His black shoes were also well worn, and I’d noticed the right eyepiece of his spectacles was cracked, so that his eye itself seemed fractured. Nevertheless, everything about him was meticulous. He was clean-shaven and he had this fine silver hair that was combed back in a long wave that caught my attention as something poetic, the pennant of some medieval knight flowing above him as he cantered into battle. He walked back to his inner office and took no notice of me. I wouldn’t have expected otherwise from a man of his eminence.

It was sometime in the afternoon that a German soldier on a motorcycle arrived with a written order that the council immediately provide carpenters to construct a gallows in the town square leading to the bridge. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Koenig was able to reach the commandant by phone. He was told all Jews were to be in the square at dawn to witness the hanging of the tailor Srebnitsky. To everyone but me, it seemed, that was a great relief. Now that my pretend grandfather was finished, the council staff considered calmly what to do with me. From a search through the records they determined that no family was then available with a dead child whose identity I could assume.

Mr. Barbanel, the second in charge, a man I would come to revere, walked over to where I sat on a bench and squatted in front of me. He must have been about thirty-five or so, which made him by far the youngest member of the council. He was a thickset man with a good honest face, a thatch of black hair, and dark eyes under thick black eyebrows and a wide mouth and a Slavic ski nose that looked as if it had been punched into shape. He could joke, Barbanel. He could talk to a child.

“So Yehoshua X, man of mystery, secret agent, are you ready for your next assignment?” He had in his hands a garrison cap of just the kind I had seen on the other boys. And with no further ceremony, he plopped the cap on my head and I was thereby placed under the wing of the council itself as a designated runner, known to all as Yehoshua, though with no last name, neither Mendelssohn nor my own family name, and with no identity card for my protection, but instead the runner’s garrison cap with a yellow band that matched the yellow star on my jacket.

I suppose it was to keep me from brooding that I was quickly put on official runner business accompanying Micah, an older, gangly boy, on his rounds that evening as he informed his “customers,” as he called them, that they must be at the square at dawn. After a while Micah encouraged me to deliver the message. I managed all right. The old man would be hanged and now I was going around telling everyone to be there to watch him hang. I felt weird, as dizzy as if I had been turned around in circles. I was no longer the tailor’s pretend grandson but a pretend someone else—a nameless public charge? a council runner? I didn’t know—but in any case a boy who knew how to hide when a person was in trouble, and who knew how to tell everyone to come see the trouble the person was in.

I spent my first night upstairs in the runners’ dormitory above the council offices in the grip of a cold dread. How sickening to see an old man knocked down and then kicked. And then he had lain in the snow with his eyes rolled up in his head. It was at that moment I should have helped him instead of running away. I could have stayed with him for a little while anyway, even if only to get him back to his house.

In the night, in the darkness, is when you see the truth. I didn’t exonerate myself because I was a child.

Now another thing is that I had never before this been close to the actual management of the ghetto, though I had of course heard my father speak critically of the council. And so as I lay awake through the dreadful night, I thought of what I had seen in the office and I had mixed feelings about it. I had been treated kindly enough, that wasn’t what disturbed me. It was that everyone was so calm, it was uniform, the calmness of being on the inside, of seeing the whole picture. And it was undoubtedly necessary if they were to function. But in a sense, to my young eyes their calmness, the effect of it on me, was to propose that what was happening was routine, as if this terrible power of the Germans over us were normal.

This Dr. Koenig, so burdened with his responsibilities—it may have seemed to me that he functioned at the level of the Germans and was their equal. Given his unassailable dignity, the Germans may have had the same impression, and perhaps to deny to themselves that this was so, they had given him, as I was to learn, the derisive title “chief Jew,” a ridicule which let him know where he stood. Of course he was no fool, the situation did not have to be described to him. He understood everything. Nor did he deny to himself or the other members of the council what they might have been tempted to think—that their roles were not morally ambivalent. For every extra ration they argued for, or relaxation of rule, they paid with a concession. It was a brutal calculus of bodies and work and food and fuel and health and sickness. I do not mean here to question his honor, his fortitude, his nobility, Dr. Koenig. He had been pressed into leadership by virtue of the high regard in which he was held by the community. He comported himself with courage under the most dangerous circumstances, which I came to understand in some detail later. But at this time he did nothing about the tailor who was at the center of the crisis. Not that he could have changed anything, of course. But in my ten-year-old heart, wretched with its own guilt, it seemed to me that he and everyone else was quite ready to accommodate the disaster that had overtaken Mr. Srebnitsky and let it run its course. I have thought about all of this a great deal. This calmness that so puzzled me as a child was first of all the characteristic of doctors, who are familiars of death and are composed in its presence. Sigmund Koenig was, after all, a physician. But beyond that it comes of a capacity to respond with pragmatic realism to experiences that are surreal, a capacity given to adults, though not usually to children. And this is where the ambiguity occurs.

Of course all of these niceties of thought were later to vanish as I myself was connected to the administration as a runner, and absorbed myself in the drama of my duties.

At dawn the Germans lit the square with their guardhouse floodlights and the headlights of their trucks. Enough of the citizenry were gathered, perhaps a thousand, perhaps fifteen hundred, to fill the square and satisfy the authorities. There was absolute silence but for the idling engines of the trucks. Prominently in attendance were Schmitz and his staff, officials of the Lithuanian police, the mayor of the city, assorted soldiers, and so on. Mr. Barbanel had suggested that it might be better for me to stay back in the dormitory until the whole thing was over, but I chose not to. In fact I worked my way through the crowd until I was off to the side quite near the scaffold.

When they brought out the tailor, he was draped over the shoulders of two Jewish ghetto policemen and already half dead. His feet were dragging. He could not walk, it looked to me as if his legs had been broken. They lifted him up the steps to the platform and held him propped under the arms while another policeman tied his hands behind him and slipped the noose over his head. His hands, those slender deft instruments I had admired, were mangled protuberances covered with dried blood. At the last moment before they kicked away the stand under his feet, Mr. Srebnitsky seemed to come out of his agonized stupor. He lifted his head and, of this I am sure, saw the scene before him clearly and, appreciating its magnitude, read his glory into it. You ask how I could know this: I had seen, we all had, the charred remains of the hospital victims, we knew the designated anonymity of the corpses machine-gunned en masse at the fort. I think now a mad triumphant light flashed from the tailor’s eyes before the stand was kicked from under him and his frail body swung from the neck. There was no movement from him, no struggle, the life was gone from him almost instantly. The officials from the city got into their cars and drove off, the soldiers dispersed, the work details gathered in their ranks and passed through the gate and began their trek across the bridge. An S.S. man hung a crudely lettered sign around the corpse’s neck: This Jew dared to raise his hand against a German officer.

The light began to appear at last in the sky. I lingered in the square. I had wanted Mr. Srebnitsky to see me, to see that I hadn’t forgotten him. I sat down for a while with my back against the platform.

He’d had it in his power with his scissors to stab the commandant. For a moment I thought he’d done just that, so great was his rage. I have since concluded that he must have understood the disaster that would befall the ghetto were he to kill the man. So you see, what he accomplished was specifically self-sacrificial, a modulated act of defiance as deft and precise as his tailoring.

But after all these years, what lingers in my mind of this cantankerous old man, this iconoclast, this embittered soul, is that he let out my clothes as I outgrew them and saw to it that I got a new pair of shoes when the old ones no longer fit.