City of God (31 page)

It is true that trials are held and defendants are found guilty or innocent. And of course there is the swan song of an obituary. On the other hand, there are major obits, King Leopold's, Hitler's or Stalin's or Pol Pot's, for example, that do not provide closure simply because the subjects died before they could be put on trial. Simple death is not retribution in such cases. It is not closure when such men die of natural causes without sentence passed upon them that would enact the sacraments of universal moral law. The fact of their death is incidental when their crimes have not been charged to them in the awesome voice of a God-inspired civilization.

Still, the law could hardly come up with commensurate punishment for such creatures. I myself would send them to the lowest circle of hell and install them at its icy core, where they would be embraced
by the scaly arms of Satan, who, over billions of years, would roar his foul excoriating breath into their faces and vomit his foul waste alive with squirmy larvae and dung beetles over them while, languidly, cell by freezing, exquisitely outraged cell, absorbing them into his hideous being. . .

Ex-
Times
guy decides that the occupational cynicism of reporters has to do exactly with the incompleteness of stories, especially as justice fails again and again to catch up in time to effect just endings.

He decides the desire to end a story is powerful within him. His obscure years of work have conferred a moral endowment. His years as a journalist have instructed him in all the delusions, and rationalizations, including righteousness, for doing evil or for covering it up. He has all along been his paper's curator of the stories that could have been completed but never were. And for what purpose other than the obvious one of this new and thrilling assignment? He will be the closure man.

In a state of solemn joy and fervent resolve, he calls upon his old colleagues, who, unable to detect in his manner anything different from the colorless drab they have always known, grant him the professional courtesy of access to the clips. In less than a day he has chosen the stories he will complete.

The first is the story of the former S.S. sergeant living in Cincinnati.

—When Sarah and Pem arrived in Vilnius, Joshua Gruen was still alive, skull fractured, both arms and several ribs broken. One lung was collapsed, and he'd developed pneumonia. The American chargé d'affaires met them at the airport and rushed them to the hospital. Sarah immediately questioned the adequacy of medical care but had to agree finally that Joshua's condition made it too dangerous to fly him out. He was in a coma. Permission was asked to trepan him to relieve pressure on the brain. Pem sat with Sarah Blumenthal in the corridor outside the operating room. He said she did not cry or speak but simply stared at the floor. They had flown from Kennedy to Frankfurt, waited two hours for the connecting flight, and had come straight
from the Vilnius airport to the hospital. He supposed exhaustion served her as a kind of sedative. He said he closed his eyes and prayed silently for Joshua to pull through but thought that Sarah had probably not prayed.

They were put up that night in the ambassador's residence. The ambassador and his wife couldn't have been kinder. They took care of all the arrangements for shipping the body home. Sarah's grief was such that a doctor was called in to minister to her. She was sedated for twenty-four hours. In that time Pem went to the hotel where Joshua had been staying and packed his few things. He told me the rabbi had been reading Gershom Scholem's
Kabbalah,
Emil Fackenheim's
Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy,
and
Trent's Last Case,
the 1930s English country-house mystery by E. C. Bentley. He said he supposed Joshua had gone back to it as to a classic.

Also in the hotel room was the rabbi's notebook in which he had written a careful account of everyone he had spoken to about the ghetto diary. The church where it had been hidden no longer existed—a modern apartment house stood in its place. There were two or three additional names and addresses—presumably people he had not had the opportunity to contact before he was assaulted on the doorstep of the ancient synagogue which stood boarded up on Vokieciu Street, there being no congregants, only visitors, as to a graveyard.

—Reichsmarschall, I have the honor to report on the status of the work gone forward according to the directive of the Reichsleiter by which the Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question is to establish and maintain a museum for the acquisition, inventory, and ultimate exhibition of items of Judaic historic or anthropologic interest such as libraries, religious artifacts, productions of folk art, and all personal property of intrinsic value.

1. The crating and dispatch via military transport of all such property is simultaneous with the removal of the Jewish source populations from each of the 153 villages, townships, and ghetto districts of the
Protectorate (Directives 1051, 1052). This assures the accurate attribution of inventory according to region and province of each and every item from which exhibition items will be chosen, heretofore a particularly complex undertaking given the increasing volume, on a daily basis, of received materials.

2. Appended is a manifest of collections by category. Numbers of items of each are not supplied, being provisional:

Torah (Pentateuch) parchment scrolls handwritten, Torah scroll mantles silk, Torah scroll mantles velvet, Torah scroll vestments hammered and engraved silver, Torah scroll crowns engraved chased silver with semiprecious stones, Torah scroll valances silk, Torah scroll valances silk velvet, Torah text pointers silver, Torah text pointers wood, Torah text pointers silver or wood in the shape of small hands with index finger extended, Torah finials engraved silver, Torah finials gilt leaf, Torah binders silk, Torah binders linen, Torah curtains silk, Torah curtains silk velvet, Torah curtains velvet, prayer shawls silk, prayer shawls linen, prayer shawls silk gold embroidered, prayer shawls silk silver embroidered, prayer books daily, prayer books holiday, books midrash (theology), candelabra silver, candelabra brass, mezuzot (door amulets) carved wood, mezuzot leather, Chanukah (holiday) lamps silver, Chanukah lamps pewter, Chanukah lamps brass, dreidlach (children's spinning tops) wood, dreidlach cast lead, keys synagogue, “eternal” lights pewter, “eternal” lights brass, readers' desks oak, readers' desks pine, lecterns oak, lecterns pine, combs burial society, pitchers burial society, shroud cloths burial society, uniforms burial society, banners trade guild, flags trade guild, synagogue ark lions rampant carved wood, synagogue ark lions rampant carved wood painted, alms boxes wood, alms boxes copper, alms boxes silver plated, skullcaps velvet, skullcaps silk, wedding rings gold, engagement rings silver and diamond, ceremonial wedding dishes silver, ceremonial tankards silver, salvers silver, place settings china, place settings silver, serving bowls, cups, saucers crockery, cooking pots iron, cooking pots enameled, kettles iron, skillets iron, cutlery steel, tools carpentry, implements farm, portraits men oil on canvas, portraits women oil on canvas, portraits children oil on canvas, country scenes oil on canvas, country scenes watercolor on paper, hand-colored photographs bride and groom, hand-colored photographs children, hand-colored
photographs family groups, cameras, typewriters, book sets uniform binding, books individual, books reference, books art, sheet music bound, sheet music unbound, music instruments stringed, music instruments woodwind, music instruments brass, music instruments percussion, surgical instruments steel, surgical instruments chrome steel, bedsteads wood, bedsteads brass, mattresses horsehair, quilts, duvets, pillows down, pillows cotton, washbasins ceramic, washbasins pewter, evening clothes men, evening clothes women, top hats men, coats men, coats women, suits men, dresses women, wallets leather, purses leather, purses beaded, school uniforms boys, school uniforms girls, combs, cosmetics, hairpins, barrettes, notions, pipes, cigarette cases, cigar cutters, shoes men, shoes women, shoes children, binoculars, opera glasses, eyeglasses, watches wrist, watches pocket, hearing trumpets, inkstands, pens nibbed, pens fountain, stationery plain, stationery embossed, umbrellas, walking sticks wood, walking sticks wood and silver, chessmen ivory, chessmen wood, pull-toys children, dolls children, board games children, wagons children, snow sleds children, paint sets children, composition books children, pencil boxes with pencils children.

—I will say, posthumously, that Europe is the world's sore affliction, that you in America who have taken the best that Europe has to offer while hoping to avoid the worst are, in your indigenously American phrase, “whistling Dixie.” All your God-drenched thinking replicates the religious structures built out of the hallucinatory life of the ancient Near East by European clericists, all your social frictions are the inheritance of colonialist slave-making economies of European businessmen, all your metaphysical conundrums were concocted for you by European intellectuals, and you have now come across the ocean into two world wars conceived by European politicians and so have installed in your republic just the militarist mind-state that has kept our cities burning since the days of Hadrian.

Why do I tell you this? My own genius as a twentieth-century philosopher of language, insofar as it has been recognized by those in your country who are capable of understanding me, could be said, like
Ludwig van Beethoven's, to be redemptive. Europeans or not, a few of us have done some good. I have tried to save language and thought from the aphasic minds of our philosophers. I have for example distinguished
things,
which inertly exist or just lie there, from
facts,
which are the propositions of things in relationship, in much the same spirit that Flaubert (who, though a Frenchman, is worthy of our respect) discovered how things were brought to life in his fiction by having them interact with other things. A wheel is a thing, not a fact, and a paving stone is a thing, not a fact, but if the wheel rolls over the paving stone, they both come to life as a fact. Even if it is a fact solely in his own mind.
Sun
is just a noun and
window
is just a noun, but if the sun shines through the window, together they are jolted into propositional life.

So to distinguish things from facts. . . may not seem like much at first glance. However, by similar techniques of analysis, I've reclaimed language for what it can reasonably do, and thereby defined everything beyond its limits as responsive only to our dumb awe. What this means is that I have liberated your thought from the heavy chains of European culture. The nonsensical idealism of Kant, Hegel? Done,
kaput
! The metaphysical gibberish of everyone from Plotinus to Descartes? Swept away as so much clutter in the house. My achievement in the interest of the given nature of the world is equivalent to Einstein's. We are both revolutionaries, he in having overthrown the false cosmology of Newton, I in having upended Plato and all his descendants.