THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS, by George Zebrowski

The beast must die;
and the man as well;

one and the other.

—Brahms, Songs

O Germany—

Hearing the speeches that ring from your house one laughs.

But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

—Bertolt Brecht

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

—Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

1.

I learned the details after the war. Jewish scientists had been gathered in America to create a vengeance weapon against us. It happened very much in the way described in those fantastic American pulp magazines that von Braun was always reading (he kept up his subscription through a neutral country once the war started). A team of physicists got together at a secret desert laboratory and concocted the atomic bomb out of decades-old theories.

I didn’t believe that Berlin, Munich, and Dresden had disappeared completely until I saw the Life magazine photos published after the formal surrender in 1946. By then I had been for some months in the Argentine, living quietly, hoping to finish out my life in solitude.

The Japanese had avoided atomic attack by surrendering shortly after their agents reported the magnitude of the blasts in Europe. I don’t blame myself for being skeptical; who would have believed such a story, especially after our bad experience with the V–2 wonder weapons? Always too expensive and impractical, Speer had complained, who knew something of engineering as well as financial planning.

I watched the Jews build their Israel for twenty years, growing in power and prestige, until it dominated the Middle East. Everybody loved them, but how could it be otherwise? Their first miracle, the Manna Machine, took sand and through certain physico-biological manipulations of basic patterns produced edibles of any kind, as well as any other physical object or resource. Solar power was endless, so the machine ran without stop, giving away as much stomach support as Israel’s neighbors demanded. I read about it in Reader’s Digest.

The world fell into a stupor of peace as the Semites gifted the planet with their easy solutions. But it was all on the surface; these magicians would just as easily have worked for our Fuehrer if he had courted them, if their very existence had not been such a blinding abomination. We were too zealous in our convictions. Since it is in the nature of the lower orders to go where they are welcome, these sorcerers would have built for us the greatest bakeries in Europe, and our armies would have marched to victory on the bread transubstantiated from the raw material of the underfolk.

Now, with their stomachs satisfied and their homeland secure, they began to refine their tastes for revenge. I was captured in 1961, as I was strolling by the seashore, and taken to Jerusalem aboard a luxurious submarine. It seems that their Maimonides Mentality, a sophisticated artificial intelligence that also plans economies, had finally been able to predict where I might be found, on the basis of elaborate probabilities and shabby scraps of gossip. It had taken a picture of my footsteps, as well as my bald head, from a satellite.

A world benefiting so greatly from Israeli science and technology looked the other way when I was kidnapped. Nazis were merely a strange and rare form of humanity collected by their Jewish benefactors, for private reasons.

2.

Ten gallows.

They die by metric count, these scarecrows who wear my face. Each morning I am duplicated ten times and forced to watch the execution.

The faces seem puzzled as they stare at me. Who am I? they wonder, knowing full well who they are. Why am I not with them on the block? Do they all have my memories? Or are they blank die cuts, wearing my wrinkles? They are innocent, even if they remember what is in my brain.

What can I care for my doubles?

I imagine rushing forward to mingle with them, thus denying my captors the satisfaction of seeing the original perish, except as the hidden member of a group. Any one of us will answer to being the original, except that the doppelgängers are innocent!

Why? How can that be?

Because they did not exist when my so-called crimes were committed! Only the pattern of specific memories is guilty. I will not rush among my doubles; I do not wish to die anonymously.

They force me to watch as the bodies are fed into the fusion torch, which consumes utterly, leaving only a gas from which basic elements can be reclaimed. What we could have done with that! The final solution would have been completed by 1941.

3.

The point of killing your racial enemies lies in denying them their future, the embodiment of their children. The stream of history is diverted, given a different character than it might have had; but now cultures live or die where once individuals of unconscious species clashed for glorious possession of plain, sea, forest, or sky.

They are manlier, these scientific Jews; they are not fearful of wielding power. Once they were constrained and cowardly; a good number were homosexual. What did they know of true freedom, they who would not dare do what was in their hearts? A true man listens to the abyss, to the inner song that the Fuehrer knew so well. A few years after the war I read that some of the survivors were developing nostalgia for the war, for the death camps, for slavehood.

4.

This morning, one year after my imprisonment, I dreamed of a pit. A huge, dark beast came into it on all fours. Its skin was sandpapery, gray-black, covered with sores. It stood up on all fours and spoke to the crowd pressing in around the guard rail.

“The world is not mine,” it said as the crowd drew back, horrified by its massive body. “This my father taught me, that the world is not mine.” The voice was soft, cultivated, threatening.

The crowd gasped and whispered, and moved closer to observe the tragic, apelike face.

“They captured it at the headwaters of the Amazon,” someone said. “It’s descended from giant tree otters.”

I didn’t want to look into the beast’s eyes. The lights in the arena flickered. It grew dark.

“You see,” the same voice said, “it’s not really intelligent. A very kind, sensitive man taught it that speech, but it’s nothing but a kind of mimicry…”

I watched the beast out of the corner of my eye. The creature was watching me; it knew I was there.

I woke up and yearned to see the sun; there was no time in my cell.

5.

Today, one of my brothers visited me.

“How goes it?” the image asked.

“And you?”

He shrugged. “I have your thoughts and memories, innocently. They explained, as if confessing their crime. I feel that what we did, what you and I remember doing, is a bad dream from which I have wakened.”

“Have they told you that you will die?” I asked, staring into my own eyes.

He smiled. “I’m a sample. I’ll work for them. They want me to labor on a farm, even though they no longer till the soil. I’ll make public speeches of repentance. You and I know exactly what they wish to hear. They will not kill me.”

“Traitor,” I whispered.

“To what? Do you want me to die with the puppets that torment you? They’ll only get another to walk in your shadow.”

“But you are me!”

He nodded and touched my hand. “I would have been if they had not explained. The facts of my origin have absolved me. Don’t you see? I’ve been forgiven.”

“But they might be lying! You didn’t think of that, did you? I might be you and you me!”

“But I’m not,” he said serenely. “My brother, imagine if you were given the chance to undo what you have done, or to learn that you did not do it. Imagine that you are merely a copy of the flesh and memory of one who did, but that your flesh was born only a few days ago. Imagine.”

He was glad not to be me, and I knew how he felt, how I would have felt to have been him.

“You are only a bit of me that has stepped aside, not escaped.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” he replied. “Our pattern is guilty, in so far as it contains certain beliefs, but only the pattern at a specific moment in time is physically guilty. It doesn’t matter that I would have acted as you did. I am implicated, certainly, through no choice of my own, but not physically guilty. Get it through your head, I wasn’t there.”

He got up and gazed at me as if I were a child who would never learn.

6.

The Fuehrer spoke to me that night. Adolf, his voice said, you never understood the deepest reasons for killing the Jew, only that they were to be hated and butchered. You could not imagine in your ordinary soul, as I knew, the inner need to return Germany to another age.

I woke up and realized that my tormentors had poisoned my memory of the Fuehrer; his echo was beginning to reproach me.

But I know now that they cannot punish me; their rope is too feeble a thing, their puppet show no match for my camps and ovens and endless trainloads of flesh.

I have won. And even if they should hang me, it will not be enough. The cowards! They do not even put hoods over my faces to hide the truth!

7.

They are not going to tell anyone what they are doing with me. I am the subject of an experiment in physico-biological duplication. Their psychologists claim that it will reveal to them hitherto unplumbed depths of human nature; the facts of historical guilt, the honesty of vengeance, the essential weakness and banality of evil, will stand naked before their gaze.

I have begun to wonder if I am the original Eichmann at all. They won’t answer that question. In their secret hearts they hope that I will prize the possibility that has been created for me, of a self swept clean, made innocent. There will always be an Eichmann for them to study, long after I am gone; they can’t bring themselves to kill me completely. They need a sample of my evil.

8.

They came today to explain.

“To kill you once,” the gray-haired spokesman said, “would have been a blot on memory. All agree concerning the inadequacy of such a punishment.”

“How many of me have you killed?” I asked.

“Ten per hour, these years…it will be six million one day.”

I spat on the floor in front of him. “It’s no punishment for me, you fools!”

“We’re trying,” he said.

“No one can punish me!” I shouted in triumph.

“Or forgive you,” he said softly, “no matter what contortions we impose upon the living fact.”

“You’re no better than me.”

“There was little heroism in the camps, Mr. Eichmann, only a confrontation with a human nature that we had thought tamed within ourselves. You have only yourself to blame.”

“Your vengeance will be my victory.”

“Perhaps. I have already admitted the inadequacy. You are being punished because it will happen nowhere else. All punishment is futile, I suppose. That is why those of us who have no faith in it as a deterrent or corrective have readopted an eye for an eye.” He sighed deeply. “It is the best we can do, anyone can do. Six million German flesh for six million Jewish. German flesh created by our conscience, from our soil and the sunlight of God, Mr. Eichmann.”

I stared at him and answered, “Innocence in your eyes is not the prize you think. I repudiate nothing.”

He shrugged. “I understand. It is the only way you can still dirty us. That is why in your case justice must be very personal. I will kill you myself, Mr. Eichmann, next Monday.”

9.

“Another set of ravings?” the gray-haired man asked.

“Yes,” the young doctor replied.

“Do they differ?”

“Not much. The language changes, but it’s the same.”

“File them in sequence.”

“How long can we go on?” the doctor asked.

“Indefinitely, even if it’s useless. Our sample may still not be large enough to reveal the angelic core of the human being. We must give him enough chances. I still can’t quite accept that the raging beast is more…than a vestige in each of us.”

“We should kill the original and be done with it,” the doctor said.

The gray-haired man sighed and shook his head. “His guilt would flee from the world and we would forget. We must relieve it with punishment, but we can never let it die.”

“But the doubles—”

“They’re innocent, of course, in a technical sense, but they carry the guilty pattern just the same. His guilt cannot be duplicated, but it is passed on. The new generations of Germans are not guilty, but they inherit past crimes socially, like it or not. He says it himself—the pattern is guilty.”

“But we, the children of victims, have now created our own, permanent victim,” the doctor insisted.

“He lives in all humanity,” the gray-haired man said. “Our punishment, at worst, merely matches his crime.”

“We are always better than the worst,” the doctor whispered. “What would they think, those who died in the Holocaust?”

The old man looked at his hands, as if he had just discovered them. “It’s been said that in the Holocaust reality for the first time exceeded the imagination. And for a time afterward imagination retreated and hid, to ready something that would give it back its own.”

“Nuclear war?”

“Our fear restrains us, Doctor, but I suppose reality will always have the last word—unless we learn to make angels of ourselves.”

“Shall we stop then?”

“No—that would waste all that has gone before. He will live and he will die. Maybe we’ll learn something yet.”

“But how can you even hope?”

“If even one variation repents, I’ll destroy the original and close down the project.”

10.

My neck holds a sympathetic crick this week. Muscle tension from watching my flesh and blood dying day by day. In the evenings they show me a museum of details from individual lives—photos, letters, drawings, bits of clothing. They push these sentiment-laden moments into my brain. They want me to feel, psychosomatically, that my body, my life, is joined to others; that one’s brother or sister or neighbor is morally identical to one’s self through these petty details.

But I can only record that my tormentors have failed. I have overcome the uncertainty of whether I am a copy or not—by finding the small tattoo with which they have marked me…on my elbow. The horror of being innocent even as I embrace my guilt has left me.

It follows, therefore, that I am myself, and they are using duplicates to make further copies while holding me separate. My alternates are only animated garbage, mere echoes. For what can they be punished? How can they be me, if they are innocent?

I cannot be copied.

AUTHOR NOTES TO “THE EICHMANN VARIATIONS”

This was a disturbing story to write. I had read Ira Levin’s disquieting novel, The Boys from Brazil, and had seen the motion picture, in which the argument is movingly made that Adolph Hitler’s clones would all be innocent. Cloning and exact copying remain misunderstood concepts today. Levin’s clones were new people, growing up in new circumstances, while my Eichmann copies were in fact additional examples of the same man. I believe this path faces the issues more bravely, since the Eichmann copies in my story were exact, including all memory and the sense of self. They don’t know they are copies. Yet they are innocent, from an objective view, even if they feel and know otherwise. I was trying to hang on to the view that Eichmann’s pattern of personality is not innocent, and that even supposing a copy were to learn its true identity it might yet make compact with the past and share the guilt by accepting the crimes “remembered.”

Such subtleties belong to the dialogue about future possibilities, as refracted through our human character, that writers of SF carry on with the present.

The story troubled me to write, and I even considered putting it away. But Michael Bishop, who published it in his anthology Light Years and Dark, wrote: “To find such a subject (the Holocaust) handled with fresh and dynamic insight in an SF story of some 3000 words would seem at first as unlikely as discovering intelligent life at a Ku Klux Klan rally, but ‘The Eichmann Variations’ is that story. It examines the questions of guilt, vengeance, and atonement without surrendering to either sensationalism or maudlin hand-wringing.” And Bruce McAllister further confirmed this view by writing that “it’s your best…intellectually/spiritually so sophisticated that it should embarrass us all, showing what significance and craft are possible in SF and at the same time how little we settle for at awards time. Pivoting on historical horror metamorphosed and given new life as alternate history, is what gives it the incredible impact it has. The craft alone is worth a Nebula.”

The story was rejected, with great praise, by every magazine in the field, but it was a Nebula Award finalist in 1984, and made the Locus Recommended Reading List of the year’s best stories.