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THE TAKEOVER OF THE UNITED STATES Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., began a short time after noon on a Tuesday in late August, the hottest recorded day of the debut decade of the new millennium. A large crowd consisting primarily of advance-ticketed visitors to the museum, mostly tour groups of captive black and Latino kids in shorts and tank tops from summer schools, camps, and other assorted enrichment and holding programs, but also conscientious local citizens driven to come out specifically for this event even in the humidity of the capital’s sublimated swampland, was standing in the Hall of Witness at the foot of the grand staircase for a public rally to “express outrage and reject silence” concerning the Tibetan Holocaust. Maurice Messer had pulled every possible string to engineer an appearance at this program by the Dalai Lama himself—“a close personal friend from mine,” he confided. “When I first heard his name I thought he was maybe some kind of camel or something,” he added off the record when it became clear that his holiness would not materialize. Years earlier, Maurice had escorted this simple Buddhist monk, as he called himself—“a public relations genius and fund raiser par excellence,” Maurice had pronounced him—on a VIP tour through the three floors of the museum’s permanent exhibition amid a bracing sauna of media bulbs. Afterward, blinking in unison as they emerged on the Raoul Wallenberg Place side of the building, on the Eisenhower Plaza near the abstract Loss and Regeneration sculpture, the chairman and the spiritual leader—in his “trademark one-sleeved toga number,” as Blanche had put it at breakfast the next morning, gazing down through her half-moon glasses perched on the tip of her nose at the front-page photo above the fold from which her Maurice had been cropped—had issued a joint statement declaring that the Holocaust is redeemed through the lessons it teaches.

This time, though, a functionary from the Tibetan government-in-exile had advised the museum’s external affairs and special events and press and public relations offices that, regrettably, his holiness would be cloistered at a Buddhist retreat on Martha’s Vineyard throughout the summer, at the beachfront estate, as it happened, of the museum’s backup choice as guest of honor for this rally, who would unfortunately obviously also not be available, “that movie actor, what’s-his-name, you know, that alter cocker Buddhist, the one mit the gray hair and the little squinty eyes mit the wrinkles or the crinkles you might call them on a good day who always gets all the young chiclets, God alone knows what they see in him. Tell me something,” Maurice simply could not hold back this outpouring of his frustration and disgust, “is it strictly kosher for an ort’odox Buddhist to be shtupping all the time mit the opposite gender?”

All Maurice got personally for knocking himself out like this for the Tibetans was a memo from the White House assuring him that the president looked forward to supporting his reappointment as museum chairman in the coming year attached to a letter from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China at Kalorama Circle protesting the Tibetan Holocaust program and the slurs it cast on China, upon receipt of which Maurice had his secretary immediately fax to the Oval Office, with a copy to the Chinese embassy, a first draft hastily put together by Monty’s team of an announcement of a Chinese Holocaust program scheduled for the thirteenth of the coming December, the anniversary of the day in 1937 when the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese began, which, as Maurice very well knew, would provoke an outcry from the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue demanding a program for the Japanese Holocaust on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Well, there was no way in hell Maurice was going there, no way he was going to fire up U.S. veterans and patriots by getting his museum mixed up in some atomic bombshell Japan-versus-America moral equivalency controversy like what happened when his friends and neighbors on the Mall, the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, put up its Enola Gay exhibit with a script giving equal time to the Japanese on the bombing of Hiroshima by that U.S. B-29, and the American right wing went ballistic. No, Maurice had his principles, that’s where he drew the line. Hitler’s Axis partner would get a program in his museum only over his own dead body. To hell with the Japanese. Still, what did he get from the Tibetans for knocking himself out like this? Did these little climbing monks have any conception at all of what is required in terms of organizational infrastructure and financial outlays to raise a voice of conscience in this way? The sad truth was that all they got by way of appreciation from the Tibetans was an anorexic Jewish girl with little round glasses from Scarsdale, the casualty of a lifetime of enrichment overscheduling from tap dance to French horn to lacrosse, who, probably in fulfillment of her so-called volunteer community service requirement for high school graduation, to the indiscriminate applause of the audience, had just read a letter in the name of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala acknowledging the lessons to be learned from Jewish survival strategies in the face of persecution and Diaspora, and thanking the Holocaust.

As far as Maurice knew, to his utter disgust, when he had opened the rally in the Hall of Witness with a short but powerful speech welcoming the “Members from Congress and the Diplomatic Corpse, Fellow Partisan Fighters and Survivors, Mine Fellow Americans,” the highest-ranking official present was Abu Shahid, minister of jihad of the extremist Palestinian organization From the River to the Sea (FRS), now tugging his luxuriant black mustache frosted with silver or working his string of carnelian worry beads and perfecting the drape of his red-checked kaffiyeh over his Armani suit jacket as he sat through the ceremony in the place of honor accorded him beside Maurice, on special chairs set up on the landing of the grand staircase that served as the stage. Nor had it escaped Maurice’s notice that all through his speech this oiled Omar Sharif clone had rudely and inconsiderately conferred with an aide whom he had introduced as his chief of staff, a distractingly stunning woman, as it happened, not quite young any longer but still devastatingly gorgeous, dressed in full military fatigues, leather boots, and a bandolier of cartridges like a beauty queen sash crossing her size thirty-six C bust—Maurice had eyeballed her as a professional from his years in the foundation business. In a patronizing British accent, she had informed the security guards as she sailed past the metal detectors into the museum alongside her boss that her outfit was an ethnic diversity guerrilla-theater folk costume, and were they to discriminate against it by barring her entry, they would be doing so at the risk of massive civil-liberties and human-rights violation litigation; in any case, couldn’t they see, the idiots, that she had no weapon, she added, raising her empty hands to highlight the curves of her body and pirouetting, dizzying them all with her otherworldly lusciousness, like a promised reward only in paradise. Persuaded, Maurice nodded permission and waved her in. And this was how they thanked him, with complete lack of attention during his important remarks, leaning over and consulting each other with mouths so intimately close that their breaths mingled in public, talking throughout Maurice’s entire presentation and stopping only when he finished, just the way Monty always did? It was one of Monty’s least attractive habits, by the way, by no means something to emulate, Maurice could certainly do without it, thank you very much, it drove him crazy. Yet also, despite himself, a part of him interpreted this style of regal disdain and contempt as a sign of superiority, perhaps because it so particularly identified Monty, for whom he still maintained such a passion and such regard, leading him to privately parse such behavior as the mark of a chosen and blessed breed who are above listening, who are excused from the common courtesies due to their special election, the higher sphere they inhabited.

It was Monty, in fact, who had written this speech, as he wrote all the others—or, more precisely, the speech was a product of Monty’s shop, from a boilerplate drawn up years ago, probably by Honey, tailored for each specific occasion such as this Tibetan Holocaust program by one of his cute little interns the age of his daughter, Sibyl, since, following his filthy divorce, Monty no longer had Honey to do the ghostwriting for him. Providing speeches was one of Monty’s responsibilities as Maurice’s chief of staff, the job he had been given as a consolation prize after that whole mess, when he had found out through a press release that Bunny Bacon had been named director of the museum. Rattling drunk, he had showed up after midnight, banging on the door of Maurice’s suite at the Four Seasons hotel, threatening to destroy him together with the entire museum and the whole goddamn Holocaust by leaking everything to the media, every sordid scrap, which he not only had filed away in his head but about which he also had in his possession real documentation in black and white and on tape, both video and audio, the least being the data on the unsavory acts they had been required to perform re that geriatric Zelda Knecht, White House liaison to the Jewish community, to get Maurice named chairman.

“Chief of staff?” Monty had wailed when Maurice had made this compensatory offer. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You know what you can do with your fucking chief of staff?” In vain had Maurice struggled to convince him that while he, Monty, had a life and above all the blessing of a family, of children, Bunny was alone, she had nothing—nothing! She needed the job far more than he did to give her something resembling a purpose on this earth. “What for you need this headache?” Maurice had tried to rationalize with him. In the end, though, Monty had been placated with the promise of complete independence as Maurice’s chief of staff, minimal duties along with a bloated staff to carry them out, the unlimited pro bono services of a museum lawyer in his divorce case, and then the deal clincher, a salary in the stratospheric six figures, which Maurice had to squeeze out annually from private donations rather than federal appropriations to avoid a major whopper of a scandal, justifying the expenditure in a top-secret confidential behind-closed-doors executive session of the council’s Politics and Perks Committee with the cry, “I need him, I need him for mine work, the six million need him, Jewish survival needs him!” That was also the cry he would raise each time some constipated federal GS–7 stickler bureaucrat caught Monty falsifying his expense account records, claiming reimbursement, for example, for a four-star business lunch at Galileo’s or Gerard’s Place with a representative of the Anti-Defamation League or the Pentagon or a similar gourmet type, when actually he had dined there for three hours of applied personal orientation with the newest female Holocaust hire not hopelessly hideous under age twenty-five, who then staggered back to the office to buckshot the details to all of her friends and family via e-mail. “I’m telling you, I need him,” Maurice would cry on those occasions of looming exposure as well. “Don’t worry! I’ll take care from him. I’ll take the boy behind the woodshed and give him a few good potches.”

But for all his tragic heroic flaws, this time, too, Monty had created a brilliant product customized for the Tibetan Holocaust program. When Maurice returned to his seat after delivering the speech, Abu Shahid leaned over cordially and the two men shook their equally fastidiously manicured hands as the jihad minister, in a gonadic voice deepened even more by a lifetime of smoking, like the late lamented King Hussein’s of Jordan, muttered, “Excellent, first-rate—truly inspiring!” And it was inspiring, Maurice could not but agree, even if he had to say so himself, even if this cold sensualist had not listened to a single word—about the lessons of the Holocaust, “learning from the past for the sake of the future,” that brilliant motto coined by Monty one ordinary Sunday morning while casually shopping for brunch items at the Georgetown Safeway with Joy something-or-other who covered museums for the Style section of the Washington Post at the time, and he had noticed in the gourmet freezer a package of lox produced by some venerable smoked-fish company with the slogan “Emulating the past to preserve the future,” to which he gave a creative little Holocaust twist, and—voilà! As Maurice now proclaimed to all the assembled concerning the lessons of the Holocaust, “irregardless of what we suffered and lost from this horror of horrors, in the end made it all wort’while.” Those lessons, he elaborated, were many and rich, but the one we must take to heart now, the one that history and memory and conscience demand of us and teach us so compellingly, is that it is ethically and morally unconscionable to remain silent bystanders in the face of the Tibetan genocide. History, memory, conscience, ethical, moral—“peepee words,” was how Norman characterized them to Maurice not long after the poor nebbish had been passed over for the directorship, “pieties and platitudes.” But for Maurice they were juicy words, words that never failed to thrill, they were all-purpose words that formed a great pool into which you could dip, and however many times you dipped, you always came up looking refreshed and good.

Maurice definitely looked good this sizzling noon in the Hall of Witness, even with the cutting-edge air-conditioning system pumping desperately and increasingly futilely against the massed body heat. And the fact was, if Maurice looked good, the museum looked good, the Holocaust looked good, which was the bottom line, after all, the reason he was still going full blast on borrowed time—he was driven, he was obsessed, pushing on day and night, never resting even now, well past his allotted three score and ten, well beyond the paltry number of years doled out to his luckless and, let’s face it, less resourceful companions in the shtetl of his boyhood. Too bad Monty wasn’t here to witness his performance today, Maurice reflected, he would have been very proud of his handiwork, he would have been very gratified indeed, though probably the boy was just doing his job outside in the pendulous humidity; despite his wise-guy image, deep down there was nobody more loyal and dedicated than Monty. Most likely he had gone across the street, to the National Park Service grassy knoll on the other side of Raoul Wallenberg Place where that useless gang of protesters was penned behind barriers, to try to keep them from buttonholing the media and agitating the crowd streaming in, in solidarity with the Tibetans.

Maurice didn’t even have to bother to glance out of the window of the red brick administration building that morning to know who was already yelling out there bright and early with the roosters and the cock-a-doodles—the usual suspects, naturally, that yutz, Herzl Lieb, Leon’s crazy rabble-rousing son, a rabbi no less, recklessly attacking in front of all the goyim this sacred temple of his own people in the Diaspora, a fringe character if ever there was one, along with two of his sidekicks, those alter cockers who might, you never know, finally cholesh from the heat once and for all, it was time already, Maurice’s enemies from the hair wars during the formative years of the museum, those so-called survivors, Lipman Krakowski and Henny Soskis. You could count on these three stooges to show up like clockwork, screaming their heads off and waving their signs and shoving their flyers into the face of every passerby whenever Maurice invited another Arab such as this Shahid fellow to the museum as his personal guest as an element of his Teach a Terrorist program, or whenever he presumed to give the persecution of another people, such as these pathetic Tibetans, equal time as part of his You-Too-Can-Prevent-a-Holocaust initiative. This was a lucky day for Herzl and his cronies, they had scored a double whammy, the Tibetans and the Arabs in a single shot, two birds with one stone, yelling bloody murder for all they were worth like the world was coming to an end. How dare you invite Jew killers and Holocaust deniers into the shrine to Hitler’s victims! How dare you undermine the uniqueness of the Shoah by implied comparisons! We are outraged! We are shocked! Shame, shame!

Maurice was not moved. What did these naive troublemaking nothings know of the kinds of pressures that are exerted on someone in his position, especially the pressure to maintain such a fine balance between the museum’s mission to memorialize the Jewish dead and the priceless federal mandate, with all the advantages it conferred in terms of status, prestige, power, funding, visibility, location, location, location, and on and on, not to mention the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol rotunda itself, with that tasteful display of pomp and pageantry—the presentation of the flags and the colors as the U.S. Army Band (Pershing’s Own) played the processional, and then that singing sergeant first-class in her military suit skimming her shapely figure, who gave every donor and survivor a richly deserved hard-on when she belted out not only the national anthem but especially “Es Brent,” that heartrending lament on the burning shtetls, in the original Yiddish no less. It was phenomenal, unbelievable! Who would ever have thought that the Jewish people would have been kept alive and sustained to reach such a moment? As far as Maurice was concerned, instead of screaming and hollering, we should open our prayer books to page sixteen and bow our heads in gratitude, every male member should stand up as the cantor leads the congregation in a recitation of the blessing of a “Shehechiyanu.” Which other ethnic group in America could claim such an affirmation of its tragedy, in the Capitol rotunda no less? Why the Jews? Why not your so-called Native Americans, or your so-called African-Americans? Because unlike those poor suckers, we weren’t screwed by America—at least not yet. The truth is, the Holocaust Museum on the Mall was a testament to Jewish success and clout in America, a “Jewish power testicle,” as Maurice phrased it in strictest confidence, it made the Nazi hunting office in the Justice Department, which everyone used to think was such a big hoo-hah, look like peanuts in comparison. This was not a talking point to be shared with our enemies, Maurice would have cautioned, but as he expressed it to his Blanche in the privacy of their boudoir, the museum was like a Jewish fist in the world’s eye, like, you should pardon me, a proud circumcised Jewish cock erect in the body politic of the country. Every prince and prime minister and president who came to Washington on a state visit was required to pass through the museum, to light a candle in the Hall of Remembrance, place a wreath at the base of the marble altar containing soil samples and God alone knows what else from the concentration camps, and bow his head solemnly, be cleansed and purified as in a mikvah, a ritual bath, for God’s sake.

So if the price of such unprecedented power was to cloak it in the somewhat debasing but nevertheless unassailable armor of historical Jewish victimization—was that too much to pay? And if once in a while the White House or the State Department or another branch or big shot requests a favor for diplomatic or other high-level purposes touching on international or national affairs, to escort a visiting foreign dictator, let’s say, or a documented mass murderer or a local racist or your constituency’s favorite anti-Semite through the exhibition and give him the VIP treatment—what was the big deal? Didn’t the government have a right to expect some return on its investment? Who is hurt if some fascist gets a peek at the Ringelblum milk can in which the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto were hidden, or a brief tutorial about the scale model of Jews being processed through the gas chambers and crematoria? The payoff in terms of publicity and recognition for the institution, for the Holocaust itself, was incalculable. Furthermore—who could say?—maybe, just maybe, your average war criminal would have a conversion episode on the spot as he was led through one of the tower rooms, for example, and his attention was pedagogically drawn to the display of the shoes of the victims of the Majdanek death camp, or to the prewar photographs of the Jews of the Lithuanian town of Eiszyszki, celebrating birthdays and mugging for the camera like normal human beings who believed they had their lives under control, that everything was all right, almost all thirty-five hundred of them slaughtered in two days by mobile killing squads. Even a despot has a heart and a mother or maybe a dog or at least a goldfish that he loves, even for someone who committed crimes against humanity such wrenching sights can be life-altering, even a universally despised creature is capable of learning the lessons of the Holocaust and becoming a better person if only somebody out there cares enough to provide him with a little personal attention and quality time. Maurice regarded this as one of his sacred missions, his personal Sponsor a Sociopath campaign, and he subscribed to it not because he was afraid he would not be reappointed chairman if he refused a high-level government request, God forbid, and not because he enjoyed rubbing shoulders with big shots, even if they were bloodstained, but rather because he sincerely believed in the possibility for change through education and enlightenment. The honor that would reflect on the museum dead from an atonement moment by an instantly reformed tyrant would be incalculable. Instead of being desecrated, as the protesters mindlessly chanted like a broken record, the six million would be sanctified, they would be blessed, their suffering and torment would acquire purpose, the Holocaust would have meaning.

Education—that’s what it was all about, “to capture the hearts and minds of the people,” as Maurice liked to say. And it was not just a matter of educating those willing pupils who sign up on their own for the grueling three-hour text-intensive narrative tour of the museum, from Nazi Assault to Final Solution to Last Chapter, from harbingers to horror to healing, savoring the well-deserved reward of a cathartic, side-of-the-good cry at the end as they watch the heartwarming survivor testimony films with endless boxes of Kleenex thoughtfully provided by the management, and then proceed to the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance, like a triumphant Star of David, for a moment of reflection, to light a memorial candle, and to hum “God Bless America” as they gaze out the tall, narrow window at that mighty American phallus known as the Washington Monument, their appreciation of the bounty of liberty and democracy newly strengthened and revitalized—which is why, by the way, of all the museums on the Mall, this one was the most American, believe it or not, its funding most justified, Congress should just shut up already and give it the money. No, above all, the museum’s task, in Maurice’s view, was to educate the difficult cases, the students with the bad attitudes, the students who do not work and play well with others, the students who get a zero in conduct, cunning perfumed Arabs like this minister of jihad, Abu Shahid, for example, who out of ignorance or perhaps an understandable interest in advancing their own cause claim that the entire Holocaust is a lie, an exaggerated Jewish yarn, sly propaganda fabricated by malodorous Jews and Zionists to gain the sympathy of world opinion, to blackmail the powerful nations in support of Israel. These were the visitors that Maurice was targeting in his Teach a Terrorist program—specimens labeled by the unimaginative as beyond redemption, for example, Osama, or Saddam, or the late Yasser (“a sweetie pie, a pussycat,” as Blanche pronounced him after shaking his hand as he stepped out of the men’s room during a White House reception), and others like them, and yes, also this lesser-known figure, this Abu Shahid of the FRS, From the River to the Sea, which Maurice very well knew stood for the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—stood for a Palestinian state with borders that would mean the end of an Israel that was the only sure refuge for Jews in the event of another Holocaust.

But Maurice was not afraid. He was never afraid, as he always proclaimed; it would have been the motto on his coat of arms, had he had one. For the sake of peace it was necessary to take risks; peace would be the crowning achievement of his career. Yes, despite the protests and the threats and the abuse, he would invite Osama and Saddam, “mit joy in mine heart,” he would invite them—and Mr. Kim Jong Il, too, send him over, Maurice was not afraid—give them the VIP tour of the museum just as soon as the State Department for whatever reasons begins the inevitable rehabilitation process and lets them into the country, and certainly the repackaged Yasser after he got his makeover job would have been welcome to the museum any time as Maurice’s personal guest, he would have had a standing open invitation. Maurice would have walked Yasser through the railway car on the third floor of the museum, just like the one in which as many as one hundred Jews at a time would be packed like sardines and shipped to the death camps. He would have brought him out face-to-face with the photo mural of the dazed men, women, and children just unloaded from the train, lined up for processing and selection, funneled to be murdered in the gas chambers or to be imprisoned and enslaved—arbitrarily to have their lives protracted temporarily or by a whim to die at once. He would have pointed to these lethal pictures, this undeniable evidence, and in a mighty voice trembling with emotion he would have cried, “This, this is why we need Israel!” Yasser’s eyes would have opened wide with instant understanding and recognition, in a life-altering epiphany. The lessons of the Holocaust would have sunk in at last. In front of all the assembled—diplomats, distinguished guests, and media—he would have wept copiously, declaring that he now believes in the Holocaust, and vowing to change his ways. He and Maurice would have embraced with overwhelming feeling. The photo of the two of them bonding through clasped hands would have been splashed across the front page of every newspaper on the planet. And the Middle East problem would have been solved once and for all.

The fact that this Shahid fellow strode through the railcar that morning as if it were nothing more than some kind of shortcut to get to the other side on the traffic-controlled tour route through the storyline exhibition was inconsequential. He was not a major player in any case, merely a two-bit commander of a small squad of marginal suicide bombers. He was impeccably polite throughout the tour, of course, it was hard to believe he moonlighted as a killer, nodding courteously whenever Maurice or Bunny or Monty or another senior staff member who made up the escorting entourage took a moment to point something out, but he did not seem to be particularly engaged until they came to the narrow passageway where the monitors were located displaying atrocities behind “privacy walls” to shield children from the violent images. Pushing imperiously through a large clump of kids yelling “Ooh, Neat! Cool! Awesome!” as they squeezed up against each other and stretched on their toes over the protective barrier to get a peek, as in an X-rated video booth, of naked Jews being tortured or raped or murdered, he stationed himself in front of one of the monitors and watched for a long time. It was a silent film taken by an Einsatzgruppen Nazi, showing Jews being positioned by mobile killing unit officers for execution at the edge of a ditch—and then a dog would begin to run around frantically. Clearly, the jihad minister had figured out that a shot had been fired, because each time the dog was set off, Abu Shahid gave a start, as if he’d heard a bang. When he had had his fill of watching the dog go berserk and the victims fall over and die, and die yet again, he turned to his hosts with glazed eyes and commented, “Fascinating, yes fascinating!” After that, they had to rush through the rest of the exhibition, because of the scheduled Tibetan Holocaust program at noon, but Maurice nevertheless took a moment, as he did with every visiting dignitary, to stop in front of the resistance segment on the second floor to recount his experiences as a “leader from the partisans who fought against the Nazis in the woods,” stroking the side of his leg as he described his precious tommy gun, which he had kept pressed against his body throughout the war as he slept in the forest at night. “So you were a guerrilla fighter too,” Abu Shahid said, “just like me.” “No, no,” Maurice replied, taken aback for a moment, a rare event for him. “Ah, but you’re just being modest,” the minister of jihad said, displaying his long tobacco-stained teeth in a smile like a camel’s. “Of course you can’t deny you were a guerrilla fighter, just as you can’t deny there was a Holocaust.”

And this playboy was the fellow who was provoking that uproar outside? Please! Save your fire, Maurice the veteran operator would have counseled Herzl and his perspiring senior citizens across the street, save it for the really big fish. What amateurs like Herzl Lieb and his merry pranksters failed to understand, no matter how many times you tried to drill it through their thick skulls, was that this was not a Jewish museum. It was a federal institution—or, at the very least, it was in everyone’s interest to maintain that perception, and especially in the interest of the American Jewish community. Yet even so, if there was one thing that Maurice had learned in his years as chairman—may they go on in good health to one hundred and twenty!—it was that no matter what the damage to the well-being and survival of the institution, there was nothing like a perceived slur or threat to Israel to flush the Jewish hotheads out of their holes—that, and even the implied blasphemy that the Jewish Holocaust was in any way not unique, that it was not the mother of all Holocausts, that some other atrocity or genocide or horror or injustice could in any way be compared to it. The first transgression went under the euphemism of politicization, the second was called universalization. Well, this was a subject that Maurice knew a thing or two about. If you were too precious for politics, you should get the hell out of this town. And if you were a uniquist, a Holocaust purist, too proud and possessive to share the wealth and selectively universalize your Holocaust a little bit when necessary—to stamp an atrocity such as Kosovo, for example, with the moral seal of the Holocaust, or conversely, as in the case of Rwanda, to withhold that seal, depending on what was at stake and the interests involved—then you might as well pack up and close shop for good. Without universalization there would be no lessons, no payoff. There would be no point to the museum. The Holocaust would have been a total waste.

 

Bunny was definitely a universalist, Maurice reflected, as he observed her now standing behind the opulent wooden lectern emblazoned with the museum seal, reading her remarks for the Tibetan Holocaust program, benumbed with beta-blockers and Valium prescribed by her shrink for stage fright, while he, Maurice, had never in his life experienced even a tremor of fear engendered by public speaking. Indeed, as Bunny took the liberty of commenting affectionately even within his earshot, Maurice had never met a microphone he did not want to make love to. In general terms, this was true, Maurice admitted it proudly. However, he wanted to make it absolutely clear that he did not enjoy public speaking for his own glory or honor, God forbid, but rather one hundred percent for the sake of the six million. In Maurice’s opinion, the obligation of the world to listen to him now, an old survivor with a chopped-liver accent and gefilte-fish grammar, like private family smells not meant to be aired in public—for the world to be condemned to listen to him going on at length even in the rotunda of the United States Capitol itself during the Days of Remembrance ceremony broadcast throughout the entire world on C-Span—was nothing less than just reparations to be exacted from those who had stood by and turned a deaf ear as the Jews of Europe cried out to be heard. You didn’t listen to us then, you rotten no-goodniks, you didn’t pay attention while it was happening—now you will pay attention with interest, you will damned well listen now, now we will grate your ears raw with the Holocaust until you fall to your knees and beg for mercy, we will never shut up. Mostly Bunny let him go on to his heart’s content, she humored him that way, but when it was an occasion that “really really mattered,” such as the annual event in the Capitol, for instance, she would tear through the drafts of his speeches ruthlessly, slashing away promiscuously at Monty’s prose. “Not dignified, not dignified,” she would mutter. “Too Jewish, too Jewish!” There was no denying it, the lady was a card-carrying member of the universalist party.

Maurice only half listened now as Bunny pounded away at her usual universalist theme—the “others,” the non-Jews targeted by the Nazis, launching into her well-rubbed laundry list, starting with the “Roma,” pedantically emphasizing Roma as the only acceptable usage, “formerly known as ‘Gypsies,’” she added by way of necessary clarification though she recoiled from uttering that taboo word, then on down to political prisoners, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissenters, homosexuals, the handicapped and disabled—“Useless eaters, as far as the Nazis were concerned, useless eaters all,” she declared. She glanced furtively at Mickey Fisher-roshi in his wheelchair, already planted on the stage like an overgrown potted bush; the Zen monk was the guest speaker they had had to settle for in the end for this Tibetan Holocaust program. Between the two of them, Maurice noted, between those two big-eating fressers, Bunny and the guru, they must have put on the weight of about a medium-sized goat since they had first met at Auschwitz. It had been quite a spectacle, before the program began, to watch four black linebacker security guards, together weighing in at over half a ton, huffing and puffing, polished to mahogany by the sweat that was pouring down their faces, as they carried Fisher in a kind of improvised palanquin up the flight of stairs to the landing that served as the stage, with his chief of staff, Koan Gilguli, shuffling along behind lugging the wheelchair, and bringing up the rear, Leon’s problem daughter in her Buddhist nun’s getup and shaven head and little round glasses, Rama, as she now called herself, along with her twins, Rumi and Rumi, already at least four years old, nobody knew if they were male or female or both, it was rumored that even the mother had requested not to be told.

As for Bunny, it registered on Maurice that she was now even more “broad from the beam” than she had been during her Holocaust deflowering on the Auschwitz junket, which was why, as Blanche explained to him, letting him in on a harmless little feminine subterfuge, she wore those long suit jackets, “to camouflage the chassis,” in food colors like eggplant, raisin, chocolate, or wine, her personal interpretation of the professional woman’s executive uniform. Bunny was dressed in one of those outfits today, in a cholent color, Maurice would have described it, since it reminded him of the heavy meat and bean and potato stew that used to sit simmering on the stove for twenty-four hours that his mother would ladle out for Sabbath lunch. Pinned to her lapel, as always, was that diamond and ruby brooch in the shape of a royal crown, like her badge of office, the daytime version of the tiara she wore in her lank dark hair at black-tie evening functions, to symbolize her ascension to the role of a self-styled latter-day Queen Esther, a Jewess with enough balls to speak up on behalf of her people against the anti-Semites, especially against Holocaust deniers, which Bunny had made her specialty, her pet project, even going so far as to advocate that laws be put on the books making Holocaust denial illegal, thereby, in Monty’s opinion, not only threatening free speech and civil liberties, so critical to Jewish survival in the Diaspora, but also shunting these crackpot and kook deniers from the lunatic fringe to center stage.

“Queen Esther?” Monty had sneered. “More like Cleopatra, Queen of De-Ni’al—minus the sex appeal, of course.” For as Rabbi Monty reminded Maurice with respect to the Esther story, the real queen was also a dish, marinated six months in fragrant oils and six months in spices, the pièce de résistance of the Persian harem. That, however, was the racy part of the story with which Bunny did not identify, the sexist part that she rejected on principle. She explained all this one night to Krystyna by the light of a sandalwood-scented candle on the terrace overlooking the Potomac River of the Watergate apartment that they shared, which her mother had bought for her around the time she ascended to the directorship of the Holocaust, and which she justified on the grounds that, as she put it, “I do genocide all day, at night I deserve to be nice to myself.” With respect to the Esther story, however, as she told Krystyna, it was the speaking-up part that spoke to her. Her inner Queen Esther could not in conscience remain silent, especially on the subject of deniers. It was precisely for a crisis of this sort—the epidemic of historical revisionism, the plague of Holocaust denial—that she had reached the perilous throne. “And if I perish,” she added selflessly, “I perish.” Of course, in the case of Abu Shahid and others like him targeted by Maurice’s Teach a Terrorist program, she told Krystyna, there was a competing human rights imperative that obliged her to hold back and refrain from speaking out against them, because when you considered the persecution and humiliation that the Palestinian people had endured at the hands of the Zionists, the motivation behind their Holocaust denial—to undermine the right of Israel to exist—was not only understandable, it was, in the end, forgivable. And even the Palestinians who conceded that there might have been a Holocaust really really had a point when they insisted that they after all were not the ones who were responsible; they didn’t do it, the Germans did it, for God’s sake—so why should their land be stolen, why should they suffer? Oh, Israel was such a pain in the neck; it really really got in the way of orderly Holocaust programming. And to top it all off, it was such an unsafe place, Bunny wished it would just go away, at the slightest hint of a crisis she automatically banned travel to that live volcano by all staff members. But when it came to the matter of the Palestinians, she insisted, all that was required was a little education. With a little education, the Palestinians would not only learn about the Holocaust and its lessons, but even more important for their cause, they would come to appreciate how they might creatively channel and shape and control the narrative for their own advancement.

From the landing where he was sitting next to Abu Shahid, Maurice had a direct view of the top of Krystyna’s head as she leaned against the railing halfway down the flight of stairs between the improvised stage and the long expanse of the Hall of Witness where the crowd stood listening to Bunny. He could follow the straight part in her flaxen hair like a row in a Polish wheat field, her hairstyle vastly subdued since Bunny had taken her in hand, sponsoring her as a protégée and making her her chief of staff. Everyone and his uncle has a chief of staff these days, Maurice reflected—Bunny, this Abu Shahid guy, and even he himself, the Honorable Maurice Messer, for his sins. Without a chief of staff, you were a nothing. Over Krystyna’s shoulder, Maurice could see, was slung that famous tote bag containing Bunny’s essential supplies, most notoriously the DustBuster—in case, while making her daily directorial inspection rounds through the museum, Bunny noticed a telltale pile of dirt or litter in a corner that required a quick vacuuming job. She was “seriously anal,” as Norman had painstakingly explained to his father, a disgusting modern concept when you visualized it that unfortunately seemed to fit, “an obsessive-compulsive control freak,” Norman said—Dust Bunny, the staff called her, not to her face, of course. Rummaging among the equipment in that tote bag for a stick of gum that she needed to chew full-time now that Bunny had forced her to give up smoking, Krystyna abruptly looked up with concern during what seemed to be far too long a pause in the speech—the gap was not lost on Maurice either—as if Bunny had suddenly grown confused and lost her place just as she was coming to the end of her account of the Nazi euthanasia program and the fate of those “other” victims—the disabled, the paralyzed, the syphilitic, the retarded, the mentally ill, the demented, the senile—eliminated, Bunny intoned in a rhetorical refrain, as “life unworthy of life, useless eaters, useless eaters all.”

These were the very words she had used at dinner the previous evening, Krystyna recalled—useless eaters, life unworthy of life—when she had disclosed that she had authorized the staff at the Parklawn nursing home in which her stepfather, Leon Lieb, was still a silent partner even after the scandals, to stop all feeding of her mother. Setting down her glass of chardonnay, she added pointedly, “It’s not like a Holocaust thing, you know. It’s not like I’m some kind of Nazi and my mom’s a useless eater or life unworthy of life or something like that. I definitely know the lessons of the Holocaust, but this is different, this is a quality-of-life issue—you see what I’m saying? Basically, what it all boils down to is that my mom just needs a bit of help from all of us who care about her in order to give herself permission to move on.” She expected that her mother would expire sometime the next day, she told Krystyna. That was the timetable she had been given by the professionals now that the feeding had been stopped totally. She had been advised by the head nurse that Gloria was phasing in and out of coma. She intended to catch the shuttle to New York right after the Tibetan Holocaust program tomorrow, she said, in order to be at her mother’s side for as long as her schedule permitted. Of course, as Krystyna was aware, she needed to be back at the museum by ten o’clock Wednesday morning for the monthly meeting of the Politics and Perks Committee, so if Gloria took her sweet time and did not pass before say, seven a.m. on Wednesday morning at the very latest, well, Bunny would just have to say her good-byes and leave. In any case, knowing her mom as well as she did, Bunny was certain that Gloria would prefer to be alone for her final moment, her preference would definitely be to have her own space in which to die. Gloria was such a private person, after all, and dying was really really such a private and personal act, like going to the bathroom or looking in a mirror. You didn’t want anyone else watching while you did it. It was something you did when you were alone. Only the condemned died in public.

Yes, it had probably been that summoning up of those Nazi classifications—useless eaters, life unworthy of life—specifically in reference to the demented and the senile, that had shaken Bunny so, Krystyna was convinced, evoking a disturbing image of her mother dying of starvation in the nursing home bed even as she, Bunny, was speaking before this Tibetan Holocaust audience. It was this vision that must have floated before Bunny’s eyes as she spoke those words, causing her to fumble for a moment. But she was back on track again, thank goodness, moving right along toward the finale of her speech, about how we must all learn from the Holocaust the lesson that silence is intolerable, that complacency is not permissible as the Tibetan people face extinction along with their heavenly bird, the black-necked crane. As moral and ethical human beings, we owe it to history, to memory, to conscience, and to the eleven million victims—the six million Jews and the five million others—to raise our voices and cry out against the Tibetan Holocaust and the Holocaust of the Black-Necked Crane.

Krystyna was sincerely relieved that Bunny had recovered her bearings and made it to the end of her remarks. The whole business with her mother had been an awful drain. It had dragged her down, especially after Gloria’s husband Leon had thrown up his hands and declared, “I’m sorry, I can’t deal with another sick wife,” and dumped the whole problem in Bunny’s lap—and he was supposed to be a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, of all things. Though his own daughter Rama, as she now insisted upon being called, who had been reconciled with her father after the Auschwitz camp reunion by Gloria no less, had sought to chasten him with her pronouncement that sick wives were his karma, he had probably been a gynecologist or an abortionist or a female genital mutilator in one of his previous incarnations, he had just better accept his place on the wheel of life, Leon had bailed out, literally moved from the Fifth Avenue duplex back to his old apartment on Riverside Drive in which he had lived with his first wife, Rose, handing the entire mess over to Bunny.

And it was a mess, Krystyna reflected, shaking her head. Gloria’s decline beginning soon after her return from Auschwitz was shocking. It seemed, at first, almost selfishly purposeful and intentional, almost like a case of gross self-indulgence. Bunny had been furious. Until she finally found a doctor who would sign off on a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or, at the very least, dementia, Bunny could not forgive her mother for what she interpreted as cold abandonment and neglect, just like what had happened to poor little Binjamin Wilkormirski in his memoir, which she had no doubt, though she knew very well that some spiteful people now regarded it as a pathological fantasy and a fraud, was truer than true; she and Krystyna still maintained the ritual of reading a passage out loud from its pages each and every night, faithfully, at bedtime. With no consideration whatsoever for Bunny’s needs or feelings, shortly after she came home from Auschwitz, Gloria totally and almost maliciously gave up taking care of herself. She began to eat desperately, as if she had herself been a victim of starvation in the camps and had just been liberated, anything she could lay her hands on she ate, from morning to night, never pausing through all of her waking hours. She was never without food in her mouth, as if there were no tomorrow and yesterday had all been deprivation. Bunny was obliged to dispatch Krystyna to secondhand thrift shops to purchase extra-large T-shirts for Gloria and polyester skirts with elastic waistbands. It was astonishing to witness this once supremely elegant and impeccably groomed woman wearing a purple shirt from a rock concert stamped with the logo of a forgotten band called Brain Dead, strands of gray hair wilting around her bloated face. The only personal item she held on to, struggling ferociously to assert her claim to it even while being bathed by her caretakers or manipulated by licensed health care providers or when the Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist brought over by Marano attempted to apply three fingers to her pulse for diagnostic purposes, to pinpoint exactly where the flow of vital energy from the bodily organs had become unbalanced or been interrupted, was a heavy charm bracelet that Marano had fashioned for her, weighted down with single earrings that had languished forlorn in her drawer when their mates were lost—To transform your losses into healing, Marano said therapeutically; to keep before me at all times a reminder of what I have lost, Gloria thought.

A little more than a year after the Auschwitz trip, following a private meeting with Maurice, the last non-family member she saw not including medical and household personnel, on the day that Bunny was installed as director of the museum in a solemn ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance by the eternal flame atop the altar filled with museum-quality soil collected from the concentration camps, Gloria stopped walking. “I’m not playing anymore,” she said. Then she stopped opening her eyes. “You haven’t shown me anything about the boy,” she said. Finally she stopped talking, except for rare occasions, such as during one of Bunny’s visits, when Gloria suddenly turned to her Filipino caretaker and inquired, “Who is that old lady, Loretta?” She must have opened her eyes for a flash to have a peek at the visitor, and unfortunately they had missed it. She also stopped feeding herself, though her devotion to eating remained as single-minded as ever. “Your mama have very good appetite,” Loretta told Bunny—pints of vanilla ice cream, slabs of chocolate cake, bowls of melon and oranges, potatoes and pickles and pasta, chicken and lamb chops and loaves of crusty bread. Her teeth were phenomenal, a rich woman’s teeth, the best that money could buy in dentistry; she ate voraciously. “All right already,” Gloria would say, “give me another cookie.” Bunny had heard this herself when she visited the Fifth Avenue duplex to observe one of the marathon feeding sessions, Loretta cooing encouragingly, like a mother feeding her baby, opening her own mouth sympathetically as she pushed into Gloria’s perpetually open mouth like a ragged fledgling’s poking upward from the nest spoonful after spoonful, each feeding session lasting a minimum of an hour and a half. But when, after more than three years of faithful service, never missing a day, Loretta informed Bunny that she planned to begin training a substitute to cover for her over a period of a few weeks while she returned to Manila to visit her own mother, who was also ailing, and then traveled on to Puttaparthi in India for a short retreat at the ashram of her guru, Sai Baba—she really really needed a break, she needed to clear her head and refresh her soul—Bunny announced that this would be the perfect time to put Gloria in the nursing facility, it was something she had long intended to do, keeping her at home in this ridiculous patched-together substandard setup was just so unprofessional. “But who will feed your mama?” Loretta had cried. “Nursing home will put feeding tube in her.” “Never, no way,” Bunny said. “Absolutely no feeding tube, it’s against our principles. No drastic measures, Mother would never have wanted that.” “Your mama not need feeding tube anyway,” Loretta said glumly. “She need somebody to feed her.” Then she added in desperation, “Your mama love to eat, but she cannot feed self. If nobody sit and feed your mama how long it takes, I afraid she die.” Bunny closed her eyes to express her thinly concealed impatience with Loretta’s incapacity to get it. The nursing home had professional feeders to deal with clients who for whatever reasons refused to feed themselves, she coldly informed the subordinate. Mother will just have to get used to it.

“I’m not used to it yet,” Gloria had said as Loretta leaned over the railing of her hospital bed on her second day at the nursing home. This, at least, was what Loretta reported in a telephone call to the museum, which Krystyna had been obliged to take in her chief of staff’s office since Bunny refused to talk to her former employee. It was in that phone call, too, at Bunny’s behest, that Krystyna ordered Loretta to cease and desist at once from visiting Gloria; in any event, Director Bacon had given firm instructions to the nursing home administration to eject Loretta should she make any further attempts to invade the premises. And by the way, Director Bacon did not for one minute believe that Gloria ever said anything coherent at all such as that she wasn’t used to it yet; these were just quotes that Loretta invented to convince Director Bacon that Gloria was not a goner, that she still had a claim on life, so that she, Loretta, could keep her job. If Gloria really could speak, why on earth would she talk to a stranger, to an alien from a Third World country, instead of to her own daughter, to a benighted follower of this Baba boy guru, no less, a well-known pedophile and pederast and sexual harasser, as it happened, his name was on a list to be considered for condemnation by the museum’s Conscience Committee, speaking out against abusers and cults was definitely one of the important lessons of the Holocaust. Finally, in her capacity as Director Bacon’s official spokesperson, Krystyna advised Loretta that if Gloria persisted in refusing to make productive and efficient use of her turn with the nursing home’s professional feeder, who of course in all fairness had to divide the meal hour equitably among all the other geriatric clients on the floor who also required her assistance, which was only right and appropriate, she was in danger of losing her eating skills, of forgetting how to chew and swallow and so on, the staff would be afraid to risk the liability of feeding her lest she choke or aspirate or something. The bottom line was, Krystyna told Loretta, if Gloria wanted to survive, she had just better descend from her high horse and get used to it.

That was about two weeks ago when Gloria had been delivered to the nursing home. Krystyna could hardly believe it, it seemed so much longer, she and Bunny had gone through so much. And now Gloria was dying. Just as Bunny had predicted, the professionals had thrown up their hands, they had determined that Gloria was as good as dead, she was just too spoiled and stubborn for her own good, they had drawn up the stop-all-feeding papers for Bunny’s approval and signature. It was a truism that at any given moment on this earth, someone is being born and someone is dying, but it really made a difference, Krystyna reflected resentfully, it was in its way an uncomfortable intrusion and imposition and irritation, to know who it was while it was happening. Especially in the matter of dying, it was unseemly, prurient, disturbing information to have forced upon you, well beyond what you cared to know.

Krystyna’s eyes fell upon the twins, Rumi and Rumi, at the bottom of the staircase. The dying woman had doted upon them for a while after their birth, but had progressively lost interest as she continued deliberately to shut down into nothing more than an eating machine, divesting from the twins just as she had divested from her own daughter. They were striking children, like exotic display pieces, dressed in white embroidered kurtas over their loincloths, in bare feet, with shaved skulls punctuated by their silky ponytails, and dark eyes rimmed in kohl. As Gloria went on relentlessly with her business of dying at the Parklawn nursing home in New York, one of the Rumis at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was being bounced to the chanting of the Monotone Monks, now entertaining the crowd, on the lap of that coddled teenage princess who earlier in the program had read the greeting from the Tibetan government-in-exile. Krystyna had heard that she was related to Rama in some fashion, which explained how one so young and unimpressive had landed such a singular honor—another personalized extracurricular to be added to the résumé on her college application. The other Rumi was perched a step or two higher, dancing with beguiling innocence and abandon to the delight of the audience, as the Buddhist singers with their shaved heads, in their mango-colored robes and yellow rubber flip-flops, sat cross-legged on the makeshift stage and intoned their mantras to the rhythms of their cymbals and bells, their drums and gongs.

The Monotone Monks had been creatively recruited by Monty only the day before to be the entertainment portion of the Tibetan Holocaust program. After their lucky break of a gig at the Tibetan pavilion during the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival on the Mall in the early days of the summer, they had just casually ignored their visas and neglected to use the other half of their plane tickets to return home to their place of exile in a remote village in Bhutan with no electricity or running water or McDonald’s. Monty, walking leisurely back to the museum the day before the Tibetan program at around three-thirty in the afternoon from lunch at Gerard’s Place with the newest intern in the survivors’ affairs department, showing her the sights, had spotted them busking in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, coins and wrinkled bills tossed by passersby piling up in an empty bottle of the moonshine they had learned to appreciate from their Folk Life costars in the Mississippi Delta pavilion. The crowd at the museum was going wild over them. From the honorable chairman, to the minister of jihad, to the lowliest overweight Holocaust voyeur in backward baseball cap with a Coors Beer patch and exposed rear cleavage, this entire collection of mortality in the Hall of Witness that broiling afternoon had lost all awareness of its own transience on earth, united in moist sentiment as the Monks led the singing of the Tibetan national anthem, after which the whole house exploded with cries of “Free Tibet! Free Tibet!”—swaying and clapping, rocking and rolling along with the Monotones until their hearts nearly burst in palpable ecstasy from the swelling of their own goodness and virtue.

It was a rousing warm-up for the featured speaker, and as the Monotone Monks took their triumphant bows with the rhythmic clapping segueing to crashing applause, Rama and Koan Gilguli, waving bouquets of burning incense sticks, pushed Roshi Mickey Fisher forward in his wheelchair, right to the brink of the landing at the top of the flight of stairs, extracting an audible gasp from some of the spectators standing in the front rows of the pit who would have received the full brunt of the impact had he cascaded over. Fisher-roshi good-naturedly jiggled his generous girth in his seat, rocking the wheelchair playfully to demonstrate that it was securely braked. He smiled with mystical wisdom, his grizzled beard splaying across the neckline of his magenta robe lit up with gold threads. It pleased him to alarm his audience in this way. There was an important teaching to be gleaned from it. Life was illusion. Whether we have an awareness of it or not, we are always on the edge. Behind him to his right, on the black granite wall carved with the words of the prophet Isaiah, “You are my witnesses,” the projected image of the bejeweled cover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead was superimposed over the intricate pattern of a mandala fashioned out of ephemeral sand. Fisher-roshi raised both of his heavy arms in an appeal for order. “My holy, holy friends,” he said when they quieted down at last, “let us meditate.”

Most in that crowd simply bowed their heads, deprived as they were of meditation training and skills, assuming for the occasion the familiar moment-of-silence position that is the price of admission to the ball game, but there were a few adepts who instantly folded into authentic lotuses on the spot and smoothly glided into their measured breathing, showing off with the swagger and display of insiders in a house of worship who know the tune and belt out by heart every word of the prayers in a dead language. Fisher-roshi, aided by Rama and Koan Gilguli seated on the floor on either side of his wheelchair, then began the mantra—ohm mani padme hum—until, very soon, as if captured in the expanding web of a trance, the entire audience was chanting along with them—ohm mani padme hum, peace and love, compassion and enlightenment, ohm, ohm, behold, behold, the jewel in the lotus, behold the Jew. Koan Gilguli held up a large prayer wheel, spinning out the mantra printed in Tibetan script on diaphanous paper as the congregation went on chanting, while Rama nestled the glossy-eyed Rumi and Rumi in the cradle of her folded legs, each child nursing at a breast.

“Hey!” the roshi suddenly bellowed, startling them out of their enchantment, setting their hearts pounding in a panic as if they had been hurled from the clutch of a paralyzing dream. “Hey, you dead souls in this mausoleum to memory! Hey, you who were once called Chazkel and Chatsche in Warsaw, Tenzing and Tenzin in Lhasa, Norodom in Cambodia, Kagame in Rwanda, Omar in Bosnia, Vartan in Armenia, listen with full attention, do not be distracted. Your oppressors are defeated—the Germans, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, the Serbs, the Turks—all are maya and illusion. Do not be terrified, do not tremble, do not cling to your suffering as you wander in the spiritual transition, in the narrow bardo of the cycle of samsara. Do not be overcome, do not be embittered, do not fear. Attain liberation. Seek release from your physical body. Seek rebirth.”

The roshi gripped both arms of his wheelchair with his two thick-fingered hands, hoisting himself to his feet with a rushing noise like fluttering seraph wings. At the same time, Koan Gilguli quickly stepped forward to pull the wheelchair back from where his master was rising.

“What is happening to me?” Fisher-roshi cried.

Under the stupefied gaze of the audience he began to move in his place, then to dance rapturously. “I have transcended my body,” he exulted. “I am liberated. I am released. I am transformed. I am reborn. I am dazzled by light—wisdom, perfection, clarity. My holy, holy friends”—and here Fisher-roshi opened his arms in an all-encompassing universal embrace—“praised be the Lord Buddha, hallelujah!”

 

Whether it was from the shock of the roshi’s resurrection or from the ponderous heat, which was becoming more and more liquefied and oppressive, no one could say, but as Mickey Fisher thrust forward a crimson velvet slipper from under his gold-threaded magenta robe to begin his descent of the stairs into the bosom of his flock, like Moses from the Mount, someone in the crowd fainted—the news was broadcast in alarm by the voice of an unidentified woman. At first, the quarantine-like circle that had already formed around the fainter who now lay in a dark heap on the floor—a creature in a torn woolen cloak that enshrouded its entire body and hooded its face, male or female, nobody could make a definitive diagnosis—grew wider rather than contracted. Bystanders leapt even farther back, listening in stunned horror as the cowbell around its neck engraved with the warning “leper”—or was it its former owner’s name, “Pepper”?—tinkled steadily as the body spiraled dreamily downward, as in a slow-motion replay, collapsing finally against the battered baby carriage filled with brown paper grocery bags that it had wheeled into this lessons-of-the-Holocaust program in the Hall of Witness.

Within a moment, however, a young Hasid rushed forward in his shoulder-padded, boxy black suit and wide brimmed black felt Borsalino hat that hid his face except for the tuft of sparse beard pointing like an arrow in the direction of the overcome creature, his long sidelocks and the fringes of his ritual garment flying as he pushed ahead. “Hatzolah, I’m from Hatzolah!” he cried. “Volunteer lifesaver coming through! Move back! Out of my way!” Behind him came a nun with lowered head carrying a half-empty plastic bottle of water, murmuring, “The paralytic, the leprous, I will go and heal them, Jesus said.” From the height of the landing where he sat in his place of honor, Abu Shahid had an excellent view of the action. Flashing a gold ring set with a glittering diamond as he stroked his mustache with his trigger finger, he turned to his host, Maurice Messer, who was fuming at Rama for exposing her “maternity brassiere filling mit out the brassiere,” as he phrased it from his first career in the foundation business, “like this state-of-the-art museum is some kind of bazaar in Calcutta mit overage suckling babies mit flies walking on their eyes,” and at Fisher-roshi for his preposterous grandstanding—“I’m gonna eat that swami-salami faker alive,” he growled into Bunny’s ear. “What does he think this is, some kind of revival preacher show in a fershtunkene circus tent maybe?”

The minister of jihad indicated the Hasid, who was now crouching down, pulling equipment out of his luminous orange bag, and attending to the fallen body on the floor of the Hall of Witness, and confided in a familiar way to Maurice, “That’s my son the doctor.”

“He’s a doctor?” Maurice asked incredulously. Almost nothing could surprise him anymore.

“Ah well, you’ll excuse a poor father’s forgivable embellishments,” Abu Shahid conceded, working his worry beads. “Actually, he’s merely an emergency medical technician. But, alas, he is my son, Shahid, a crazy boy unfortunately. They should call me Abu Majnun, not Abu Shahid! I sent him to the Harvard of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, he was on track to become the world’s greatest jihad martyr for Allah, a hero of Islam. But then the rabbis got hold of him when he was on holiday in Ukraine looking for a preview of paradise—the rabbis of Chabad. He mixed them up with the mullahs of Hamas, my poor Shahid. Chabad, Hamas—what’s the difference? A bunch of beards on the prowl for lost souls, promising deliverance, salvation, the Messiah—the boy was never too discriminating. And this is my reward—a Jewish doctor without even a shingle.”

“I see, I see,” Maurice replied, nodding his head sympathetically. “Well, if that’s your son the doctor, then maybe that holy schwester nun over there talking to herself holding that urine analysis pish bottle is mine daughter the nurse. It looks like a shidduch made in heaven. Maybe we should introduce them.”

That was the last time anyone connected to the museum saw or spoke to Abu Shahid, though his chief of staff, Leyla Salmani, having at some point changed out of her military gear into a civilian public relations suit with an elegant leather briefcase, the rich black tresses of her hair pinned neatly back in a stern chignon that revealed the coiled wire descending from the plug in her ear, took up her post in front of the Fourteenth Street entrance as the official spokesperson for United Holocausts throughout the ensuing takeover of the museum. Afterward it was determined that the minister of jihad had probably vanished during the wild confusion of the opening salvos of the action, when the strobe lights on the ceilings throughout the museum began to flash, the fire alarm started blaring, and the public address system came on with calm authority. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Holocaust simulation role-playing exercise. It is only a test, but all visitors are required by law to just follow orders as if it were the real event. Remain calm and do not panic. Collect all your belongings and valuables, and proceed to the designated Umschlagplatz assembly points for resettlement. Uniformed guards with batons will conduct you down the stairs, which for the purposes of this exercise will serve as virtual cattle cars to be unloaded at the Department of Agriculture as you exit the building on the Fourteenth Street side, or, if you are sent to the right, Raoul Wallenberg Place and the official entrance to the popular Bureau of Engraving and Printing on the Fifteenth Street side. Once again, please remain calm and refrain from talking—and have a nice day.” It had been Monty’s brainstorm to frame the fire-drill announcement in this way, in line with the overall concept of immersing visitors in a virtual Holocaust experience from the perspective of the victims, as reflected also in the raw crematorium-like brick and steel design of the building with such atmospheric details as its narrowing central staircase and its watchtower-like structures on one side, and the ID cards distributed to visitors upon entering the exhibition personally linking them to a random victim in the creepy journey through the haunted house of the Holocaust in the lottery of ultimate extermination or survivorship—all carried out within psychologically tested parameters set by the comfort-level consultant, of course, visitors safely aware throughout that it was all not real, that it was all just for fun, that after undergoing this self-improvement tour, and after inscribing their selected deep thoughts in the comment book at the end, “I enjoyed it very much, thank you for making the Holocaust possible,” they will walk out Homo erectus as they had walked in, resuming once again the hunt for something to eat.

Now as the visitors, prodded and hustled by the guards, streamed down the stairs and out of the vaulting gallery of the Hall of Witness to the two exits on either side of the building, mostly calmly but also on occasion with sporadic flurries of muted cries and mounting panic that were swiftly and decisively brought under control by the uniformed personnel, Bunny turned in a fury to Maurice. “Is this really really for real?” she demanded. “Who authorized this, if I may ask?” Maurice simply flipped out his palms and elevated his shoulders with a look of utter confusion on his face; it was one of the rare occasions in his life when he truly had nothing to say and did not say it anyway. The next moment, though, he and Bunny, along with Krystyna, as well as Fisher-roshi and his complete entourage, including Koan Gilguli, and the twins Rumi and Rumi, one carried by Rama, the other in the arms of her niece, the teenager who had read the message from the Tibetan government-in-exile, were borne down the steps like pieces of a shipwreck along with the massive tide of fleeing visitors and museum personnel. Incense and prayer wheels and copies of speeches and other props for the Tibetan Holocaust program were trampled underfoot. The chairs for honored guests and the costly speaker’s podium that had been placed on the landing were also swept or levitated down the stairs at some point in the midst of the stampede, miraculously injuring no one. As for the now-empty wheelchair, only toward the end, when the building had been almost totally evacuated, a visitor with a handicapped-parking-space gripe, who unfortunately had not had time to absorb the lessons of the Holocaust before the alarm went off, gave it a definitive push. As if in a dream, they all watched from the floor of the Hall of Witness as it went bumping down, steered, it seemed, by some invisible divine hand, until it came to a halt upright and undamaged at the foot of the stairs. Maurice immediately sat down in it. He did this unthinkingly, for in every other known public circumstance without exception he took great pains and pride in separating himself from the signs and symbols of infirmity and old age that afflicted lesser mortals. He was simply not himself at that moment. That moment, it could reliably be said—and, indeed, Maurice did say so himself to his Blanche afterward, when it was all over—was the worst moment he had ever experienced in his entire life, not excluding the actual Holocaust itself, which, however terrible it was, with the humiliation and torture and murder of his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth, not to mention all that he had personally suffered and gone through, at least had a reason. What was that reason? “What kind stupid question is that? To make lessons, of course, to make memorials mit morals,” Maurice stated categorically.

Seated in the wheelchair, Maurice now regarded this beloved estate of his in which he would have vowed that the mortar between every brick was mixed with his own life’s blood, you could probably prove this with a DNA test. He saw that the place was already almost entirely empty. It gave off the hollow ghostly residue and vibrations of a space that was forlorn and solitary after having once been tumultuous with life. It seemed now to have finally truly been turned over to the dead. Looking around, Maurice observed someone he did not immediately recognize taking great pains to adjust a large notice of some sort behind the glass on the Fourteenth Street entrance of the building and locking securely the doors from within; he assumed that another thug was carrying out a similar criminal act on the other side. Apart from himself and Bunny and Krystyna, representing the museum, and apart from Fisher’s Buddhist delegation with the twins Rumi and Rumi, supervised by their cousin, now chasing each other with wild squeals and skidding delightedly on their rumps along these vast, polished, evacuated spaces, the only other people he could see in the shadows of the lofty Hall of Witness were the nun, the Hasid, and the cloaked creature now evidently recovered, the three of them unloading the grocery bags from the baby carriage in front of the entrance to the Remember the Children exhibition. Maurice’s eye turned to the information desk in the center of the atrium. Information, he thought, that’s what I need. With remarkable speed and dexterity, he rolled the wheelchair across the floor to this visitors’ service facility. Though it was now completely abandoned, he was determined nevertheless to exercise his right as a taxpayer to get his money’s worth. “Gottenyu,” Maurice cried, “what’s going on here?”

As if in answer to his question, a deep voice came down from the monumental heights of the Hall of Witness with its great angled skylights letting in the fragmented light of the brooding heavens. “Brothers and sisters, rejoice! The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is liberated. The Holocaust has been returned to the people. All Holocausts are created equal. United Holocausts, the umbrella group for all Holocausts, known and unknown, past, present, and future, has occupied this infrastructure. The occupation will continue until equal representation is given to all Holocausts, public and private, personal and global, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The Jewish Holocaust will be apportioned an equal place among all other Holocausts, no better and no worse, no more and no less in the universe of Holocausts. Stand by for the posting of the details of our nonnegotiable demands on our Web site and in the media. Museum personnel still on the premises are free to leave unharmed. We take no human hostages. We take hostage only the infrastructure and everything it contains, pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor not to leave until the Holocaust is returned to We the People, to all Holocausts united. Remember, when it comes to Holocausts, a laboratory rat is a force-fed chicken is an endangered-species whale is your grandma. Brothers and sisters, take back your Holocaust!”

“I’m out of here,” Krystyna declared, and, dropping the tote bag at Bunny’s feet so that the DustBuster came spilling out, she loped on her high heels across the vacated expanse of the Hall of Witness toward the exit on the Fourteenth Street side, where she was quickly let out by a tall menacing figure in a three-piece suit with the leg of a pantyhose in a mocha latte hue squashing the features of his face beyond recognition.

Bunny turned sharply to Mickey Fisher. “How could you do this to me after I gave you this gig today in the Tibetan Holocaust?” she demanded with barely suppressed hysteria. Then, glaring in a rage at Rama, she hissed, “And I thought we were sisters!”

“You’re free to leave too, you know,” Rama said serenely. “You heard the man.”

“Are you out of your mind? I should leave this place for trash like you to vandalize and muck up like nobody’s business? Never! You’ll have to carry me out in a box first!” Bunny bent down furiously to retrieve her DustBuster. Then, noticing some dirt a short distance away, she could not stop herself. She flicked on the switch and began to vacuum. As she spotted more and more places that required attention, she started to crawl on her hands and knees, vacuuming as she went along. Fisher-roshi, Rama, and Koan Gilguli intuited that it was a tremendous relief to Bunny to be engaged in this useful chore, it was overwhelmingly healing and therapeutic under the circumstances, it helped her enormously in dealing with this extremely stressful situation. They watched with enlightened and tolerant interest as Bunny continued to do her thing, crawling away from them on all fours, behind the staircase in the direction of the Donor’s Lounge, vacuuming all the way. Only when she came suddenly to a stop, depositing herself with a thud directly on the floor with her head sunk in the palms of her two hands and her shoulders heaving, did they judge it to be the correct time to approach.

Bunny lifted her flushed face with her red-framed glasses all askew, resembling a portrait by Picasso. “I need a Valium,” she said.

“We don’t do Valium,” Rama responded. “I can roll you a joint though.”

“Just do me one favor please?” Bunny said. “No marijuana in the museum—out of respect for the dead? It’s the least you could do for me when I’ve really really always been on your side, after all. Who has worked harder for Holocaust equality and diversity than I have?—only I’ve been doing it the whole time by peaceful means, bit by bit, and now you’ve come in like gangbusters and blown it all to hell. Thanks a lot! Why are you doing this to me of all people—especially at a time like this? My mother is dying in your deadbeat dad’s crappy nursing home,” she spat out, glaring at Rama. “I was supposed to catch the shuttle right after today’s program to visit her on her deathbed—and now I can’t go. By tomorrow she’ll be gone. Because of you, I’m never going to see my mommy again. And afterward I won’t even have a chance to do the appropriate grief work. I’m going to have to sign up for a three-week session at bereavement camp when this is all over if I ever want to get closure—and where am I going to find time for that with my schedule? It’s all your fault.” She began to grope desperately around on the floor for her DustBuster, her fingers itching again for the relief of at least one more small dose of vacuuming.

Rama looked down at her unmoved. “The way I see it,” she said, “you have two options. You can split like the man said and catch your old lady before she heads out to the bardo, or you can call off your final-solution orders and hire a private nurse to give her something to eat—you dig what I’m saying? You can afford a private nurse, right? That way, if she’s not too far gone already, since you’re so uptight about doing the right thing when it comes to looking good in this bourgeois town, maybe you’d have a little more lebensraum to get to her in time for the deathbed trip.”

“Starving your own mommy to death?” Koan Gilguli put in, gliding his two forefingers over each other. “Shame, shame, not very nice, especially for the director of the formerly Jewish Holocaust Museum. What about the lessons of the Holocaust? I truly hope and pray that reports of this don’t get out—so unseemly, such a tacky Third Reich thing, life unworthy of life and all that yucky stuff. And scheduling the mercy killing at such an inconvenient time, too, when it’s so hard to slot a deathbed visit into your calendar—who would have ever thought? We heard all about it through the grapevine, by the way, that you’ve given the order to hasten the end so to speak, from Rama-sensei’s sister, Naomi-zenchin’s mom,” and he indicated the teenager now positioning herself for meditation on the floor, not far from the information desk where Maurice remained parked in his wheelchair, absorbed in watching three figures drawing closer, grimacing as they struggled to peel the pantyhose off their heads.

Bunny stood up, suddenly feeling herself to be at an extreme disadvantage on the floor, looked down upon and reduced like a child by these emboldened inquisitors. “Excuse me,” she said, “but just who do you think you are? What happens between my mom and me is none of your business—is that clear? I, and I alone, am privy to her living will, and I alone have the legal authority to make decisions in her best interest. Furthermore, for your information, there is no reason in hell why I should feel obliged to justify myself to a gang of terrorists and pot-heads who don’t understand the first thing about it.” Her voice was rising shrilly. “Now if you don’t mind, I need a time out, I need some space to make a call.” She extracted her cell phone from the pocket of her extra-long suit jacket and pressed the top number on her speed-dialing list, instantly reaching her psychiatrist’s answering machine. Even after all her years in therapy with him, going on half a century, he still had never disclosed to her his August number at his vacation house, paid for in large measure, she had no doubt, by the steady flow of her hefty checks, somewhere on Cape Cod or in the Hamptons, she thought, even that detail he had not revealed to her, it had become a bitter theme in their sessions when other topics ran dry.

“Ah, that beautiful soul, the holy holy Jiriki, is poised at the threshold of the fourth bardo, the bardo of the moment of death,” Fisher-roshi now somberly intoned. “How I wish I could be at her side at this moment to guide her toward the liberation of the after-death plane. But I must remain here to claim this memorial in the name of the oneness of all Holocausts, in the name of all the dead of all Holocausts who call out to me now to guide them to rebirth in this holy holy place.” Closing his eyes and raising his arms, he cried out in a voice pitched to pierce the high brick and masonry walls of the Hall of Witness and travel hundreds of miles to penetrate the ears of the hollow-cheeked and dry-lipped Gloria as she lay curled up on her side, clutching a pillow to her breast in a strange institutional bed. “Oh noble one, you who were called Gloria-Jiriki in this life, what is known as death has now come upon you. You are departing from this world. Do not cling to this life out of weakness or fondness or fear. You have no power to remain. Open yourself to the shock of the transition and seek your liberation.”

 

Maurice shook his head as this madness engulfed him. What had he done to deserve it? He had heard that Gloria was dying. He had even heard the rumor that Bunny had helped her along with a grateful daughterly kick out the door. She was going to become a very wealthy lady, this money Bunny. If he ever managed to get out of this present mess, he should not forget to consult with the council lawyer about the public perception and the appearance of impropriety, never mind the ethics, of accepting mega-donations from the in-house sitting director. He could count on his lawyer to deliver the desired opinion, his lawyer was his own personal lapdog, maybe he wasn’t so bright upstairs as lawyers go, but he was his slave, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to hold on to his place of honor at the head of the table at the twice-yearly festive meetings of the full board. Bunny would be forced to resign in order to really really contribute, Maurice fantasized. That would be a blessing from heaven, he would seize the opportunity when this mess was over as he had snatched opportunity from other dark moments in his life, beginning with the Holocaust. Oh, where was Monty now when Maurice truly needed him? Monty would have had the brains and guts to stand beside him in this perilous hour, with the survival of the museum and the entire Holocaust and the memory of the six million at the very top of the severely endangered species list. They would have been an unbeatable team, he and Monty, the two of them together would have instantly vaporized the three goons now stationed in front of him, two of whom, to his dismay but not to his shock, he of course recognized instantly—Jews, what then? Why was it the case that Jews are always the ones who are so liberally ready to sacrifice everything that they’ve struggled so hard to earn, including this powerful monument to their unrivaled, spectacular pain and suffering, for the sake of some soft, deluded, utopian ideal? The third terrorist in front of him, the black guy in the three-piece suit wired for radio communication, the one who looked like the affirmative-action ringleader, standing a head taller between the other two like the African in the Olympics who always wins the gold medal—well, Maurice reflected, that one also looked familiar, Maurice definitely knew him from somewhere too. What, Maurice repeated to himself, oh what had he ever done to deserve this? Bunny, his sole ally on the ground in this crisis, had already fallen to pieces beyond repair, hanging on to her vacuum cleaner like it was a ventilator, life support. She could now be seen shambling around in circles pressing her cell phone to her ear with her right hand, plugging a finger of her left hand into her other ear, engaging in a therapy session with her shrink’s answering machine, speed-dialing over and over again whenever the machine timed out. This was Maurice’s reward for his selflessness in accepting Gloria’s lousy ten million for the sake of the museum. Had he been thinking about his own interests and preferences, of course Monty would be his director today, never mind the potentially explosive scandals such as the refugee calamity due to reckless reporting, or the cans of Zyklon B in the garage, or the police rap for wife and prostitute beating—he and Monty together would have found creative ways to spin all of that, and, for that matter, anything else that might have come popping up out of the sewers. Had Maurice been thinking of himself instead of the museum, he would have turned down Gloria’s money no matter how much she offered, even if she had written out a check on the spot for one hundred million dollars—and Monty would be standing at his side at this very moment, Maurice would not have been so desperately alone.

He looked at the two Jews in front of him. He could hardly believe it—Honey Pincus, Monty’s ex—and after all he had done for her, arranging for a private din Torah grievance hearing in his own suite at the Four Seasons hotel after she was released from the hospital due to injuries from so-called spouse abuse, a hearing over which he had presided himself as the impartial arbitrator in order to avoid, for the sake of the children, a public airing of all that domestic schmutz. He could still picture her bruised face and both of her swollen eyes and her arm in a sling as she had sat in a wheelchair then, just as he was sitting now. “Honey,” Maurice now said with unconcealed disappointment, “is this the thank-you what I get?” She turned toward her black boss as if requesting permission to speak. Divorce seemed to suit her, Maurice could not but notice. She looked fit, trim, dressed in black jeans and a sleeveless black shirt, her gray hair barbered in a crew cut, small silver hoops studding the lobes of her ears—no discernible scars, so far as Maurice could tell, from her suicide exhibitionism with the gas a couple of years ago. “I’m not your Honey,” was all she said finally.

“Not mine Honey?” Maurice responded. “And maybe also your partner in crime over there”—and he pointed to the other Jew, the one with the flamboyant feather pluming from his hippie headband—“is not mine Schmaltz, Eliot Schmaltz, the son from mine dear friend and fellow partisan fighter, the distinguished proctologist and medical mogul, Dr. Adolf Schmaltz, M.D.?”

“I’m not Eliot Schmaltz,” the answer came, in this case without a prior request for permission from the leader.

“Not Eliot Schmaltz? So what kind of Schmaltz are you?”

The feathered friend regarded Maurice with a mixture of pity and contempt. “In the tradition of my people, the Hopi peaceful nation,” he explained with a sigh, “I take the name of the greatest natural wonder wherever I happen to find myself. Thus, while I am in Washington, D.C., as a warrior for United Holocausts, I answer only to the name Foggy Bottom.”

“And your big chief kick-in-the-pants over there,” Maurice inquired, “the one, you should excuse me, mit his flyer open—does he also have a special Washington title, may I ask?”

The leader answered for himself. “Wherever I go, I am known as Pushkin Jones,” he said. “We’ve had the pleasure at Auschwitz.” And he cordially extended the hand he had just used to zip up. Of course, Maurice refused to take it. Maurice did not shake hands with terrorists.

Unfazed, Pushkin Jones exposed his glistening teeth in a grin. “Brother Maurice,” he declared, “we of the United Holocausts rainbow coalition of all Holocausts, personal and global, have come here today to offer ourselves as your allies in your noble battle, and, I might add, the noble battle of your esteemed director, Sister Bunny”—he indicated the place where Bunny was still wrapped up in her therapy session, with the phone now clamped between shoulder and jaw in order to free both hands to search in a panic through her tote bag for the DustBuster’s portable recharger—“against the travesty and disgrace of Holocaust denial. I am referring now to the denial of all Holocausts other than the Jewish Holocaust. We shall combat this kind of Holocaust denial unto death. I am speaking of the denial of the African-American Holocaust, for example, which I have the distinct honor and privilege of representing today, claiming our forty-acres-and-a-mule just reparations for the depredations of slavery. I am speaking, to cite yet other examples, of the denial of the Holocausts of my two chiefs of staff—Sister Honey’s Women’s Holocaust reflecting the confluence of fascism and misogyny, both dead-ending in violence, and the Native American Holocaust of Brother Foggy Bottom here, and, by extension, the Holocausts of all aboriginal and indigenous peoples everywhere brutally uprooted by conquerors and colonialists and imperialists from their native soils since time immemorial, with special recognition due the Palestinian Holocaust, a direct side effect of the monopoly by the marketers of memory of your Jewish Holocaust.”

Oho, Maurice was thinking, two chiefs of staff—this must be a very important guy, and obviously with an intelligence quotient, you had to hand it to him, he talked very good, Maurice acknowledged to himself, a very cool rapper, a very sophisticated cucumber but a genuine anti-Semite through and through, the real McGoy. Maurice would need to conserve every neuron for this crisis, he would have to gather every remaining ounce of his strength to survive this one. This was a command performance, and he was the resistance star.

“This of course does not mean we exclude other Holocausts,” Jones elaborated. “The Children’s Holocaust, the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust, the Christian Holocaust, the Muslim Holocaust, the Tibetan Holocaust, and so on and so forth, all are gathered up equally under our great Holocaust tent.” His eyes swept across the Hall of Witness, from the weird threesome with the baby carriage in front of the Save the Children exhibition to Fisher’s Buddhists, now seated on the floor by the staircase engaged in joint meditation practice. This was when it dawned on Maurice for the first time, with a kind of staggering internal jolt, that they had been in cahoots all along, they were all in this together. “Nor should we neglect to make mention of the other Holocausts not in our line of vision at the moment who have rallied to our support both inside and outside of this building,” Jones added. “The Holocausts, past, present, and future, of nations too numerous to list, from Cambodia to Chechnya, from Russia to Rwanda, from Kosovo to Kurdistan, from Armenia to East Timor, plus Ecological and Environmental Holocausts, the impending Nuclear Holocaust, the Herbal Holocaust targeting marijuana and other fruits and vegetables, the Endangered Species Holocausts of plants and animals from bluegrass to baby seals, from bladderpods to lesser long-nosed bats, plus the personal and private Holocausts of our brothers and sisters everywhere on this earth, from Brother Kwame in the Oppenheimer diamond mines of South Africa to Sister Katya in the brothels of Tel Aviv, from Brother Unborn Fetus tossed in a Dumpster in Los Angeles County to Sister Granny set adrift on an iceberg to starve to death in the Eskimo sea, and on and on in an ancient and endless cycle of sorrow and woe. We are all survivors—cancer survivors, AIDS survivors, sexual abuse survivors, alcoholism survivors, mental illness survivors, circumcision survivors, menstruation survivors, propaganda survivors, et cetera et cetera. Move over, Brother Maurice, the neighborhood is changing, you are not alone, and you are not unique. No longer can you sit there on the ground like a tribe of Jeremiahs girded in sackcloth, covered in ashes, crying out in lamentation, Behold and see, if there be any pain like unto my pain! Your monopoly has been busted, Brother Maurice, your Holy-cause is history. We reject the hierarchy and caste system of Holocausts. All Holocausts are equal in the eye of God. No one Holocaust is superior to another, no one Holocaust is deserving of special treatment or recognition. All Holocausts are unique.”

Maurice’s brain had grown numb. He had tuned out before the full litany of Holocausts and the rhetoric had been exhausted, at the point at which Jones had implied that other terrorists, not visible at the moment to the naked eye, were present in the museum, not only outside the building but also, most ominously, within it. They could be anywhere, Maurice reflected with a shudder, on any of the three floors of the permanent exhibition, lurking in the Gypsy wagon or in the Auschwitz barrack or in the Danish rescue boat, they could be hiding in one of the theaters on the concourse level or in the archives on the top floor. They had scoped out the territory thoroughly, they slinked around like phantoms, as slick and ungraspable as the jellied calf-bone ptscha that his mother used to boil, as cold and heartless as ice, they knew the location of every urinal and piece of art and did not discriminate between them, they set off the fire alarm flawlessly, flushing and voiding the entire building of everyone but themselves within five minutes flat. Maurice was now fully alert to how formidable his enemies were. Sitting in that wheelchair facing Jones and his henchmen, who were lined up like a firing squad in front of him, he prayed in his heart that his dogged will to survive and to prevail, which had carried him through so brilliantly over the years, would not desert him now.

“Brother Pusher,” Maurice began, attempting to inject a diplomatic polish into his voice, “I hear you, I feel your pain, I know where you’re coming from, believe me. I myself started a very successful business from mine own, Holocaust Connections, Inc., mit a similar idea—sharing the moral capital from the Holocaust. But between you and me, you’re barking up the wrong fire hydrant this time. The Jewish Holocaust is bigger from both of us. It’s the super Holocaust, the state-sponsored systematic extermination from the Jewish people for the ‘crime’ of existing by the most advanced and civilized nation on earth—that’s the scientific definition. There was nothing like it before or after and there never will be. Nothing can compete. You should quit while you’re still ahead, you got a lost cause. Believe me, I understand how you feel. Everybody likes to think their Holocaust is the best, everybody likes to think their Holocaust is unique, but face it, the Jewish Holocaust is the most unique. So let me give you a little piece of advice from an old man who has seen a thing or two in his time, okay? Give up this crazy, childish narishkeit what you’re doing, and come express yourself constructively by joining me in mine business. I’ll make you a senior vice president mit complete control from the African-American Holocaust portfolio. What do you say, Pushka? Is it a deal?”

“That’s a very fine offer, Brother Messer, I’m truly honored, but I’m afraid it’s an offer I shall have to refuse. I have a dream, Brother. My dream is that all Holocausts are one and united from sea to shining sea in brotherhood and sisterhood, from the red hills of Georgia to the desert states of Mongolia, and I can never give up my dream. But you can rest assured that we at United Holocausts shall always be mindful of our debt to the pioneering work of the Jewish people in the creative and conceptual uses of victimhood and survivorship and Holocausts, a stellar achievement, truly—memorials and museums across the globe as a reward for your persecution, reparations and restitution, and finally, the greatest prize of all, a country of your own. You are the model that all of our equally special and equally unique and equally equal Holocausts aspire to and strive to emulate. And we shall overcome, Brother, trust me. Today we begin with the museum. Tomorrow we redraw the map of the world. Our eye is on the prize.”

The man was deranged, a megalomaniac, Maurice now realized. How much longer was he obliged to go on eating this dreck? There would be no payoff, Maurice recognized, from continuing to swallow this crap, twisting himself into contortions to avoid giving offense. This was where he drew the line. The time had come to quit making nice. “Listen to me, Pushy,” Maurice said. “I have just one word for you. That word is never! We will never give in to your terrorist demands. When it comes to genocides, we are the genocide mit the capital G, and you are nothing but a lightweight genocide, a Holocaust pisher, Pushy. And you will never get away mit this. This is the major leagues you’re playing in now, mine friend. You are now dealing mit the greatest Shoah on earth mixed up mit the greatest power on earth, the government from the United States of America and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before you can say the name from your greatest hero in the area in which your people happen to excel, the department from at’letics—I’m talking Jackie Robinson here—the marines will come marching into this occupied territory and carry you out mit your whole gang of hooligans in body bags. Trust me! They will be showing up any minute—and boy are you going to be sorry!”

But even as he pronounced these brave words with such ardor and conviction, Maurice seemed to shrivel in his wheelchair in front of the eyes of Pushkin Jones and his two enforcers, Honey Pincus and Eliot Foggy Bottom Schmaltz, as the realization overwhelmed him that it had been a long while now since the masses had poured out of the museum in a panic. It had been a lifetime, or so it seemed, since these outlaws had seized control and unleashed their terror, and yet no one had come to his aid and to the aid of the six million. In spite of the terrible lessons of the Holocaust, Maurice had heard no voice of conscience being raised, no one had spoken out, no one had lifted a finger to save him.

“Yo, Sister Honey,” Pushkin Jones now barked, barely glancing at Monty’s liberated ex as he addressed her, “get the old man a drink of water. You know where our fountains are.”

Yes, Maurice thought in despair, they knew where their fountains were, they knew where everything was, the air, the fire, the water, the source of all life. Jones directed his gaze back to the chairman slumping in his wheelchair. “You are wondering whence cometh your help, eh Brother Messer? Well, as soon as your director, Sister Bunny, gets off the horn with her mental health provider, if there’s any jazz left in it, perhaps you may borrow it to communicate with your spokespersons on the outside, your son Brother Norman and your chief of staff Brother Monty. I’ll tell you something, Brother Messer. There’s not very much that your two guys can see eye to eye on. According to the briefings I’m receiving”—and here he tapped the radio plug in his ear—“the two brothers are squabbling with each other like Jeroboam and Rehoboam over the kingship, now that you have been incapacitated and are out of the picture. But there is one thing, Brother Messer, that the two of them have very wisely and prudently agreed upon—namely, that it would be most unseemly, it would look very bad indeed, if your federal storm troopers come breaking into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of all places, this noble monument to your six million or however many Jews slaughtered by the Hitlerites, and turn this place into another Waco Holocaust. Because, Brother Messer, you should know that if every single one of our demands is not met, all of our people inside this museum, not excepting the children”—he pointed by way of illustration to Rumi and Rumi, now entwined in sleep with their thumbs in each other’s mouth as once they might have slept in the womb they had shared—“literally, every child and woman and man of us, every last sister and brother, is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Trust me.”

Incapacitated? Out of the picture? Was that how they were spinning him right out of the playing field? Maurice shook his head. Well, we shall just see about that. Clearly, they had forgotten whom they were dealing with—the Honorable Maurice Messer, Maurice the Knife. He could scarcely believe it—such betrayal, such ingratitude. His own son Norman and his cherished protégé Monty already battling each other over the succession—and the body not yet cold. Maybe, Maurice speculated, maybe someone had caught a glimpse of the body in the wheelchair. Good, he decided, he would remain in the wheelchair, let them think he was weak, “incapacitated, out of the picture,” in the words of this psychopath and suicide artist Jones—an invalid, invalidated. Then, at the right moment, he would stun them by rising up like a mythical superhero from the comic books that his Norman used to keep in a wet pile next to the toilet bowl, and pow!—he would destroy them all. Swelling with indignation, Maurice flung out his hand and slapped away the plastic cup being held out to him by that sick-in-the-head Honey, sending it flying across the Hall of Witness, the water splashing into the face of this former punching bag of that traitor Monty. “Never!” Maurice cried. “I will never give in to your demands! I will never negotiate mit terrorists! I will never sell out the six million! You will have to carry me out feet first, mit mine nose pointing straight up to God Almighty in His heavens above!”

With one decisive motion, Maurice swiveled his wheelchair and rolled off in the direction of his favorite spot in the museum—the alcove containing his beloved Founders’ Wall. He wanted in this his hour of need to commune with the spirits of his major donors. Bringing his wheelchair to a stop in this sacred space, Maurice felt immediately restored, renewed. This wall was his supreme creation. It was the monument to his greatest achievements, inscribed like a Rosetta stone with the chronicle of his triumphs, which only he could truly decipher. For a long time he gazed at the names on the wall, the roster of his precious donors of one million dollars or more, and was suffused with emotion as he recalled the details of each and every individual deal—how to reach this one on his private island he had retched nonstop over the side of a boat in the Bermuda Triangle, how at the second meeting in the San Francisco penthouse to extract the gift of a lifetime in the estate planning of that one, the prospect had appeared wearing a surgical mask because, as his feygele assistant nonchalantly explained, Maurice had a habit of standing too close and spitting too wildly from excitement in the climactic moments of a fund-raising pitch, and so on and so forth down the roll of his princely benefactors. Those happy days were gone, alas, they had been his finest hour, he was like a retired general returning to the shrine to his historic victories.

With quivering reverence, Maurice stretched out his hand to stroke the familiar names carved into the stone. He felt himself to be in a sanctuary, a holy place, like the Western Wall of the ancient Temple Mount. It occurred to him that maybe he should compose a little note, a kvittel, to God—“Master of the Universe,” he would write, “Save Your Holocaust!”—but there was no place on the wall to put it, no stones and no crannies as there were in Jerusalem in which to insert it, no way to dispatch his petition express to the celestial spheres. He considered affixing it with a drop of his own earwax or mucus or other bodily fluid, but he knew that it would inevitably slip down; Bunny would spot it on the floor instantly, as she had spotted his gold-embossed chairman’s card on the floor, which he had presented to Jones in good faith, in an opening attempt to deal with this gangster as if he were a civilized human being—like a bird of prey Bunny would swoop now as she had swooped then, and suck it up with her DustBuster. Instead, he drew up his wheelchair, butting it against the wall and cramming himself as close as was humanly possible. He took out the yarmulke that his Blanche now presciently stowed in the pocket of each pair of trousers for ready availability in the religious situations that a man in his position regularly encountered, and placed it upon his head. Elevating his upper body within the confinement of the chair, he leaned his head forward and pressed his brow to the cool stone by the letter S, imprinting like a quality meat stamp upon his own flesh the name of his brave partisan comrade, the Honorable Dr. Adolf Schmaltz, M.D., the hospital tycoon and unfortunate father to the terrorist Foggy Bottom Schmaltz. He closed his eyes. And trembling with passion and need at the wall in the presence of the names, Maurice Messer prayed.