City of God (12 page)

I found myself oddly comforted by these remarks. I'd always had doubts myself about the biblical God, as I do to this day, as you well know and, I hope, forgive. Also, the old man's attitude reminded me of my father, who was a Zionist and a man of science, although he observed the Sabbath and the High Holy Days. But in addition there was a kind of hidden compliment in the regard the old man had to have had for me by talking to me as a person who was capable of using his own mind, thinking for himself and taking nothing on faith even though I was just a boy.

Most of the time, though, there was no conversation from Srebnitsky. Hour after hour he sat hunched at his worktable by the window, his beautiful hands playing a kind of nimble deaf-and-dumb speech in my mind. The concentration of his gaze on this small field of cloth, over which his hands spoke, I thought of as his defiance of all the lies of God and his obstinate refusal to succumb to the despair that swept through the ghetto in waves, like the fever.

His sewing machine had been taken from him, the loss of which he cursed every day. Their concession to his trade was to leave him his scissors and needles and boxes of notions and skeins of thread. Also his two human figures on wheeled stands, one male, one female, constructed in wire from the waist up. These tailor's dummies were often the objects of my contemplation. Though they could be seen through, I felt them as real presences in the room. I realized how little it took for something to appear human. Sometimes the dummies would get moved around and I would be startled coming upon them unexpectedly, mistaking them for real people. I fantasized their indifference, that nothing could hurt them. You could hang them, shoot them, you could hammer them into a shapeless clump, pull and twist them into one long strand of wire, and they wouldn't feel it, nor would they care. Being inanimate was an enviable, even transcendent, state in my thinking. Yet at the same time I had no difficulty imagining the dummies talking to each other. I liked to wheel them into a conversational position after the tailor had retired and just before I myself lay down to sleep: Well here it is evening, time to rest, the man would
say to the woman. Yes, she would answer, and tomorrow the sun will surely come and shine its warmth upon us.

—Pem's Remarks to the Bishop's Examiners

The sensation of God in us is a total sensation given to the whole being, revelatory, inspired. That is the usual answer to the questioning intellect, which by itself cannot realize sacred truth. But is the intellect not subsumed? Does the whole being not include the intellect? Why wouldn't the glory of God shine through to the human mind?

I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect. It cannot answer the intellect with a patronizing smile. I look for parity here. I will not claim that your access to the numinous is a delusion if you will not tell me my intellect is irrelevant. . .

The biblical stories, the Gospel stories, were the original understandings, they were science and religion, they were everything, they were all anyone had. But they didn't write themselves. We have to acknowledge the storytellers' work.

If not in all stories, certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending: The story of the Tower of Babel gets you there. The known ending of life is death: The story of Adam and Eve arrives at that ending. Why do we suffer, why must we die? Well, you see, there was this Garden. . .

The ending of the story implies that there might have been a different ending. That's the little ten-cent trick. You allow as how since things worked out this way, they could have worked out another way. You create conflict and suspense where there wasn't any. You've turned the human condition into a sequential narrative of how it came to be.

Well, the way I read it, God dealt from a stacked deck. Adam and Eve never had a chance. The story of the Fall is a parable of the glory and torment of human consciousness. But that's all it is. . .

Migod, there is no one more dangerous than the storyteller. No, I'll amend that, than the storyteller's editor. Augustine, who edits Genesis
2–4 into original sin. What a nifty little act of deconstruction—passing it on to the children, like HIV. As the doctrine of universal damnation, the Fall becomes an instrument of social control. God appoints his agents plenipotentiaries to dispense salvation or withhold it. I don't know about you, dear colleagues, but history has a way of turning a harsh light on my faith. We are bound to a theology hard-pressed to hold the line against incredulous common sense. So for instance newborn babies who die unbaptized as Catholics are condemned to the limboic upper reaches of hell? I mean. . . but in all its denominations, punitive fantasies of original sin have begotten and still beget generations of terrorized children and haunted adults, and give those Calvinist graveyards in New England a particular poignancy as they call to mind the witch burnings, scourgings, and self-denials of the ordinary joy and wonder of life on earth to which the unindoctrinated mind is naturally heir. . .

How, given the mournful history of this nonsense, can we presume to exalt our religious vision over the ordinary pursuits of our rational minds?

The old tailor tended to deal with me as if I were an adult boarder who could take care of himself. Nevertheless, as I grew out of my clothes, he let them out or found me others. When I began limping because my shoes had become too tight, he bartered for a pair of wooden shoes. He cooked our potato soup or cut our bread and pointed to the table and we sat down to eat in silence. All of this I accepted as the best that could be. In truth I was a boarder. The old man and I were not really related, and I never came to feel that this was anything but a temporary arrangement.

Living undercover, I could no longer see my friends from before or have my music lesson with Mrs. Levin or see that little Sarah, who was so crazy about me. From time to time the woman from the council who had given me my new name came to visit, to look around, to see that everything was all right. She would bring Srebnitsky a few cigarettes, or schnapps in a small jar. He accepted these things as his due. She would have for Yehoshua Mendelssohn a pocket comb or a
pencil and notebook. But the best thing she ever brought, my most valued treasure, was an American funny paper, a sheet of color comics from an American newspaper used as inner wrapping in a package that had miraculously found its way to the ghetto. I smoothed out the wrinkled page and read it over and over, trying to work out the English words above the heads of the characters. One story was about a medieval knight in armor riding through the countryside on a white horse. Another showed a police detective in a yellow coat running along the top of a railroad car with a gun in his hand. It did not bother me that I could not take each story further than the six or eight panels in the paper, it was enough for me to know of these heroes and imagine for myself the kinds of adventures they had. Different periods of history were suggested, people were born into different times, each of which brought its own dangers. This was more or less the same thought delivered by a rabbi in a secret gathering of children for Chanukah. “The Holy One, blessed be His name, gave us the Torah, gave us compassion, humility, and the strength to stand up to all who would deny us our faith. And we are tested even as the Maccabees were tested, who recaptured the Temple from the wicked ones and lit the lamp that had just the oil for one day's burning but which, thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He, lasted for eight days. And we will break out of our chains and defeat the oppressors as the Maccabees did.”

Each morning when I arose, I looked out across the street at the vegetable garden that my father had laid out for the community. Even in the cold, harsh weather, with the ground bare but for the dried-up stalks of plant stubble, I could see the furrows that outlined different sections and imagine his thoughts as he worked out what should be planted and where. In the afternoons I liked to walk there when it was dark enough. Nobody bothered me. Those soldiers posted to guard duty tended to be less vigilant, more concerned with keeping warm than guarding anything. But then the snows came like a burial shroud laid over the field. All the configurations of the ground were gone, there was just this mound of glaring cold whiteness. It was blinding, it wouldn't let me look, and for the first time since I had lost my parents I cried. There had come to me from that whiteness a terrible realization that my memory of them had begun to fade. . . their physical appearances, their voices.

Eventually, try as I might, all I could recover of them were flashes of their moral natures in the habits of my own thinking.

I came back one day from my wandering and found Srebnitsky at work cutting patterns from a thick bolt of luxurious material of a rich charcoal color and remarkable pliancy. Where had it come from? I would have asked had there not been in the tailor's attitude of concentration a demand for silence. His lips were moving as if he were talking to himself. He seemed angry. Yet he went about his work quickly and with precision. I sat to the side and watched his hands. Eventually they lifted the sections of cloth they had cut and tacked and slipped them over the wire male, who in that instant became an S.S. officer in the process of realization.

He stepped back to regard his work. “You see how famous your grandfather has become. News of his art has reached His Eminence S.S. Major Schmitz. Is it wrong of me to accept this honor?” he said, pointing at the dummy.

“You had to,” I said with a youth's directness.

“Yes. I suppose so. I tell myself also that it is a hopeful sign, the first stirrings in their evolution that one of these thugs can actually be party to an ordinary business deal.”

Here he uncovered a sewing machine with a treadle. “So I have it back now. So? Do I hear you saying something?” I shook my head, but he went on with his argument with himself as if I were disputing him. “If not for his skills, Srebnitsky would not be here. Just remember that. These hands you're always looking at with admiration—for I know that about you, although you are too high-and-mighty to become a tailor yourself—it's these old hands of his that have kept him alive. And if you don't think that's worth a damn, they've kept you alive too, Yehoshua Mendelssohn! Yehoshua Mendelssohn,” he said again, muttering, as he turned to his work.

For of course, as I realized at this moment, just as he was a stranger to me, I was not his grandson. You understood that, didn't you, that I had been given the name of the tailor's dead grandson? He never told me what had happened, it was at the council later that I learned. Before there was a ghetto, when the war came to our city, the Russians pulled back to the east. Our Lithuanian neighbors took the opportunity to have themselves a little pogrom. Srebnitsky lived with his daughter and son-in-law and grandson Yehoshua in an apartment on
Vytauto Street. While he was at work in his shop in another part of town, a mob broke down the door of the apartment and rushed his family out into the street and clubbed them to death. All around, others were doing the same, killing Jewish people and looting their houses of furniture, rugs, dishes, radios, everything. Srebnitsky ran home and found the bodies of his daughter and her husband and son on the sidewalk. When the Germans occupied the city, they restored order by evicting all Jews and resettling them in the ramshackle slum on the other side of the river that became our ghetto. This was done not for our protection, of course, but to save us for forced labor in the war factories. I remembered that time myself, hiding in our own apartment, on a high floor, luckily, with the bureau lodged against the front door. And I remembered our own trek, with my parents pushing a cart of belongings and pieces of furniture we had been allowed to take with us across the bridge. Srebnitsky, bereft of all his living relations, had made the trip alone.