City of God (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

—Sarah Blumenthal's Conversation with Her Father

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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