Examination

They claimed, as their racial due, the right to intimidate, and were outraged when that right was not endorsed.

The way of our race, he thought, has been to agree with their position, and to couch all requests as appeals to their supposed merit.

How insulting the phrase “a credit to his race”; and, equally, “their contributions to the country.” What country? And, to turn it on its head, those who would patronize the Jews, what contributions had they made, past the accident of their ignorant birth?

What Indians had they fought? What British? What vaccines invented, songs composed, what, in short, had they done except rest content on some supposed inherited merit? Those savage dogs on a dungheap, he thought.

“But nothing will be defended as vehemently as a lie, and there’s the truth of patriotism.

“‘Contributions,’ indeed, meaning, ‘what have you done for me?’

“A Christian country,” he mused, “built on the lie ‘I am saved.’

“Saved from what? From death, which means what? That they have been rendered immortal? By what? By the incantation of a ritual phrase, ‘I believe …’

“What pagan idolatry,” he thought. “It makes the sin of the Golden Calf charming and mild.

“I am saved …” To be proved when?

And can they really believe that their life on earth is worthless? Do they not mean it, rather, of the lives of others?

“Savage, psychotic swine …,” he thought.

As they prepared for his second examination.

“And what did it mean to her, ‘He is not like other men’? She means, it was some misheard understanding of circumcision. Yet she was unsure what it meant.”

His lawyer should have said “Disrobe,” he thought.

“He should have had me do it in the courtroom, where it could have been shown.

“What did it mean? What can the girl have meant?”

He sat in his cell and looked back on the physical examination.

“Yes, I will. No, I will not. Yes. I will,” he thought. “No. I will not. No. I will not think of it.”

But he could not keep himself from reliving the humiliation, the extremity which was mitigated only by his sense of wonder.

“If only everyone knew,” he thought.