Mother Night (12 page)

“‘Scuse me,” he said. He read the names on the mailboxes like a first-grader, putting a finger under each name, studying each name for a long, long time.

“Campbell!” he said at last, with massive satisfaction. “Howard W. Campbell.” He turned to me accusingly. “You know him?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“No,” he said, becoming radiant with malevolence.
“You look just like him.” He took a copy of the
Daily News
from the shopping bag, opened it to an inside page, handed it to Resi. “Now, don’t that look a lot like the gentleman you’re with?” he said to her.

“Let me see,” I said. I took the paper from Resi’s slack fingers, saw the picture of myself and Lieutenant O’Hare, standing before the gallows at Ohrdruf so long ago.

The story underneath the picture said that the government of Israel had located me after a fifteen-year search. That government was now requesting that the United States release me to Israel for trial. What did they want to try me for? Complicity in the murder of six million Jews.

The man hit me right through the newspaper before I could comment.

Down I went, banging my head on an ash can.

The man stood over me. “Before the Jews put you in a cage in a zoo or whatever they’re gonna do to you,” he said, “I’d just like to play a little with you myself.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“Felt that one, did you?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“That one was for Private Irving Buchanon,” he said.

“Is that who you are?” I said.

“Buchanon is dead,” he said. “He was the best
friend I ever had. Five miles in from Omaha Beach, the Germans cut his nuts off and hung him from a telephone pole.”

He kicked me in the ribs, holding Resi off with one hand. “That’s for Ansel Brewer,” he said, “run over by a Tiger tank at Aachen.”

He kicked me again. “That’s for Eddie McCarty, cut in two by a burp gun in the Ardennes,” he said. “Eddie was gonna be a doctor.”

He drew back his big foot to kick me in the head. “And this one—” he said, and that’s the last I heard. The kick was for somebody else who’d been killed in war. It knocked me cold.

Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.

“I’m one guy who hasn’t forgot that war,” he said to me, though I could not hear him. “Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell—but not me.

“I brought you this,” he said, “so you could save everybody a lot of trouble.”

And he left.

Resi put the noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage-man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it—but that is another story.

As for my own story:

I regained consciousness on a ruptured studio
couch in a damp, overheated room that was hung with mildewed Nazi banners. There was a cardboard fireplace, a dime-store’s idea of how to have a merry Christmas. In it were cardboard birch logs, a red electric light and cellophane tongues of eternal fire.

Over this fireplace was a chromo of Adolf Hitler. It was swathed in black silk.

I myself was stripped to my olive-drab underwear, covered with a bedspread of simulated leopard skin. I groaned and sat up, skyrockets going off in my skull. I looked down at the leopard skin and mumbled something.

“What did you say, darling?” said Resi. She was sitting right beside the cot, though I hadn’t seen her until she spoke.

“Don’t tell me—” I said, drawing the leopard skin closer about me, “I’ve joined the Hottentots.”

M
Y RESEARCH ASSISTANTS
here, lively, keen young people, have provided me with a photostat of a story in the New York
Times
, telling of the death of Lazlo Szombathy, the man who killed himself with the rope intended for me.

So I didn’t dream that, either.

Szombathy did the big trick the night after I was beaten up.

He had come to this country after being a Freedom Fighter against the Russians in Hungary, according to the
Times
. He was a fratricide, according to the
Times
, having shot his brother Miklos, Second Minister of Education in Hungary.

Before he gave himself the big sleep, Szombathy wrote a note and pinned it to his trouser leg. There was nothing in the note about his having killed his brother.

His complaint was that he had been a respected
veterinarian in Hungary, but that he was not permitted to practice in America. He had bitter things to say about freedom in America. He thought it was illusory.

In a final fandango of paranoia and masochism, Szombathy closed his note with a hint that he knew how to cure cancer. American doctors laughed at him, he said, whenever he tried to tell them how.

So much for Szombathy.

As for the room where I awakened after my beating: it was the cellar that had been furnished for the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution by the late August Krapptauer, the cellar of Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Somewhere upstairs a printing press was running, turning out copies of
The White Christian Minuteman
.

From some other chamber in the cellar, partly soundproofed, came the idiotically monotonous banging of target practice.

After my beating, I had been given first aid by young Dr. Abraham Epstein, the doctor in my building who had pronounced Krapptauer dead. From Epstein’s apartment, Resi had called Dr. Jones for help and advice.

“Why Jones?” I said.

“He was the only person in this country I knew I could trust,” said Resi. “He was the only person I knew for sure was on your side.”

“What is life without friends?” I said.

I have no recollection of it, but Resi tells me that I regained consciousness in Epstein’s apartment. Jones picked Resi and me up in his limousine, took me to a hospital, where I was X-rayed. I had three broken ribs taped up. After that I was taken to Jones’ cellar and bedded down.

“Why here?” I said.

“It’s safe,” said Resi.

“From what?” I said.

“The Jews,” she said.

The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, Jones’ chauffeur, now came in with a tray of eggs, toast, and scalding coffee. He set it down on a table for me.

“Headache?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Take a aspirin,” he said.

“Thank you for the advice,” I said.

“Most things in this world don’t work—” he said, “but aspirin do.”

“The—the Republic of Israel really wants me—” I said to Resi in groping disbelief, “to—to try me for—for what the paper said?”

“Dr. Jones says the American Government won’t let you go—” said Resi, “but that the Jews will send men to kidnap you, the way they did Adolf Eichmann.”

“Such a piffling prisoner—” I murmured.

“Ain’t like just having a Jew here and a Jew there after you,” said the Black Fuehrer.

“What?” I said.

“I mean,” he said, “they got a country now. I mean, they got Jewish battleships, they got Jewish airplanes, they got Jewish tanks. They got Jewish everything out after you but a Jewish hydrogen bomb.”

“Who in God’s name is doing that shooting?” I said. “Can’t he stop until my head feels a little better?”

“That’s your friend,” said Resi.

“Dr. Jones?” I said.

“George Kraft,” she said.

“Kraft?” I said. “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s coming with us,” said Resi.

“To where?” I said.

“It’s all been decided,” said Resi. “Everybody agrees, darling—the best thing is for us to get out of the country. Dr. Jones has made arrangements.”

“What sort of arrangements?” I said.

“He has a friend with an airplane. As soon as you’re well enough, darling, we get on the plane, fly to some divine place where you aren’t known—and we’ll start life all over again.”

I
WENT TO SEE
George Kraft, there in Jones’ basement. I found him standing at the head of a long corridor, the far end of which was packed with sandbags. Pinned to the sandbags was a target in the shape of a man.

The target was a caricature of a cigar-smoking Jew. The Jew was standing on broken crosses and little naked women. In one hand the Jew held a bag of money labeled “International Banking.” In the other hand he held a Russian flag. From the pockets of his suit, little fathers, mothers, and children in scale with the naked women under his feet, cried out for mercy.

All these details were not evident from the far end of the shooting gallery, but it wasn’t necessary for me to approach the target in order to know about them.

I had drawn the target in about 1941.

Millions of copies of the target were run off in
Germany. It had so delighted my superiors that I was given a bonus of a ten-pound ham, thirty gallons of gasoline, and a week’s all-expenses-paid vacation for my wife and myself at the
Schreiberhaus
in Riesenge-birge.

I must admit that this target represents an excess of zeal, since I was not working as a graphic artist for the Nazis. I offer it in evidence against myself. I presume my authorship of it is news even to the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals. I submit, however, that I drew the monster in order to establish myself even more solidly as a Nazi. I overdrew it, with an effect that would have been ludicrous anywhere but in Germany or Jones’ basement, and I drew it far more amateurishly than I can really draw.

It succeeded, nonetheless.

I was flabbergasted by its success. The Hitler Youth and S.S. recruits fired at almost nothing else, and I even got a letter of thanks for the targets from Heinrich Himmler.

“It has improved my marksmanship a hundred per cent,” he wrote. “What pure Aryan can look at that wonderful target,” he said, “and not shoot to kill?”

Watching Kraft pop away at that target, I understood its popularity for the first time. The amateurishness of it made it look like something drawn on the wall of a public lavatory; it recalled the stink, diseased twilight, humid resonance, and vile privacy of a stall in a
public lavatory—echoed exactly the soul’s condition in a man at war.

I had drawn better than I knew.

Kraft, oblivious to me in my leopard skin, fired again. He was using a Luger as big as a siege howitzer. It was chambered and bored for mere twenty-two’s however, making anti-climactic, peewee
bangs
. Kraft fired again, and a sandbag two feet to the left of the target’s head bled sand.

“Try opening your eyes the next time you fire,” I said.

“Oh—” he said, putting the pistol down, “you’re up and around.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Too bad what happened,” he said.

“I thought so,” I said.

“Maybe it’s for the best, though,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all wind up thanking God it happened.”

“How so?” I said.

“It’s jarred us out of our ruts,” he said.

“That’s for certain,” I said.

“When you get out of this country with your girl, get yourself new surroundings, a new identity—you’ll start writing again,” he said, “and you’ll write ten times better than you ever did before. Think of the maturity you’ll be bringing to your writing!”

“My head aches too much just now—” I said.

“It’ll stop aching soon,” he said. “It isn’t broken
and it’s filled with a heartbreakingly clear understanding of the self and the world.”

“Um,” I said.

“And I’m going to be a better painter for the change, too,” he said. “I’ve never seen the tropics before—that brutal glut of color, that visible, audible heat—”

“What’s this about the tropics?” I said.

“I thought that’s where we’d go,” he said. “That’s where Resi wants to go, too.”

“You’re coming, too?” I said.

“Do you mind?” he said.

“People have certainly been active while I slept,” I said.

“Was that wrong of us?” said Kraft. “Did we plan anything that would be bad for you?”

“George—” I said, “why should you throw in your lot with us? Why should you come down into this cellar with the black beetles, too? You have no enemies. Stay with us, George, and you’ll deserve every enemy I have.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, looked deep into my eyes. “Howard—” he said, “when my wife died, I had no allegiance to anything on earth. I, too, was a meaningless fragment of a nation of two.

“And then I discovered something I had never known before—what a true friend was,” he said. “I throw my lot in with you gladly, friend. Nothing else
interests me. Nothing else attracts me in the least. With your permission, my paints and I would like nothing better than to go with you wherever Fate takes you next.”

“This—this is friendship indeed,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said.

I
SPENT TWO DAYS
in that queer basement—as a meditative invalid.

My clothes had been ruined in the beating I’d taken. So, from the resources of Jones’ household, I was given other clothes. I was given a pair of shiny black trousers by Father Keeley, a silver-colored shirt by Dr. Jones, a shirt that had once been part of the uniform of a defunct American Fascist movement called, straightforwardly enough, “The Silver Shirts.” And the Black Fuehrer gave me a tiny orange sports coat that made me look like an organ-grinder’s monkey.

And Resi Noth and George Kraft kept me company tenderly—not only nursed me, but did my dreaming and planning for me as well. The big dream was to get out of America as soon as possible. Conversations, in which I took very little part, were a sort of roulette played with the names of warm places purported to
be Edens: Acapulco … Minorca … Rhodes … even the Vale of Kashmir, Zanzibar, and the Andaman Islands.

The news from the outside world was not such as to make my remaining in America attractive—or even conceivable. Father Keeley went out and bought newspapers several times a day, and, for supplementary enlightenment, we had the blatting of the radio.

The Republic of Israel stepped up its demands for me, encouraged by rumors that I wasn’t an American citizen, that I was, in fact, a citizen of nowhere. And the Republic’s demands were framed so as to be educational, too—teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.