by Tova Reich
The fact that this Shahid fellow strode through the railcar that morning as if it were nothing more than some kind of shortcut to get to the other side on the traffic-controlled tour route through the storyline exhibition was inconsequential. He was not a major player in any case, merely a two-bit commander of a small squad of marginal suicide bombers. He was impeccably polite throughout the tour, of course, it was hard to believe he moonlighted as a killer, nodding courteously whenever Maurice or Bunny or Monty or another senior staff member who made up the escorting entourage took a moment to point something out, but he did not seem to be particularly engaged until they came to the narrow passageway where the monitors were located displaying atrocities behind “privacy walls” to shield children from the violent images. Pushing imperiously through a large clump of kids yelling “Ooh, Neat! Cool! Awesome!” as they squeezed up against each other and stretched on their toes over the protective barrier to get a peek, as in an X-rated video booth, of naked Jews being tortured or raped or murdered, he stationed himself in front of one of the monitors and watched for a long time. It was a silent film taken by an Einsatzgruppen Nazi, showing Jews being positioned by mobile killing unit officers for execution at the edge of a ditch—and then a dog would begin to run around frantically. Clearly, the jihad minister had figured out that a shot had been fired, because each time the dog was set off, Abu Shahid gave a start, as if he’d heard a bang. When he had had his fill of watching the dog go berserk and the victims fall over and die, and die yet again, he turned to his hosts with glazed eyes and commented, “Fascinating, yes fascinating!” After that, they had to rush through the rest of the exhibition, because of the scheduled Tibetan Holocaust program at noon, but Maurice nevertheless took a moment, as he did with every visiting dignitary, to stop in front of the resistance segment on the second floor to recount his experiences as a “leader from the partisans who fought against the Nazis in the woods,” stroking the side of his leg as he described his precious tommy gun, which he had kept pressed against his body throughout the war as he slept in the forest at night. “So you were a guerrilla fighter too,” Abu Shahid said, “just like me.” “No, no,” Maurice replied, taken aback for a moment, a rare event for him. “Ah, but you’re just being modest,” the minister of jihad said, displaying his long tobacco-stained teeth in a smile like a camel’s. “Of course you can’t deny you were a guerrilla fighter, just as you can’t deny there was a Holocaust.”
And this playboy was the fellow who was provoking that uproar outside? Please! Save your fire, Maurice the veteran operator would have counseled Herzl and his perspiring senior citizens across the street, save it for the really big fish. What amateurs like Herzl Lieb and his merry pranksters failed to understand, no matter how many times you tried to drill it through their thick skulls, was that this was not a Jewish museum. It was a federal institution—or, at the very least, it was in everyone’s interest to maintain that perception, and especially in the interest of the American Jewish community. Yet even so, if there was one thing that Maurice had learned in his years as chairman—may they go on in good health to one hundred and twenty!—it was that no matter what the damage to the well-being and survival of the institution, there was nothing like a perceived slur or threat to Israel to flush the Jewish hotheads out of their holes—that, and even the implied blasphemy that the Jewish Holocaust was in any way not unique, that it was not the mother of all Holocausts, that some other atrocity or genocide or horror or injustice could in any way be compared to it. The first transgression went under the euphemism of politicization, the second was called universalization. Well, this was a subject that Maurice knew a thing or two about. If you were too precious for politics, you should get the hell out of this town. And if you were a uniquist, a Holocaust purist, too proud and possessive to share the wealth and selectively universalize your Holocaust a little bit when necessary—to stamp an atrocity such as Kosovo, for example, with the moral seal of the Holocaust, or conversely, as in the case of Rwanda, to withhold that seal, depending on what was at stake and the interests involved—then you might as well pack up and close shop for good. Without universalization there would be no lessons, no payoff. There would be no point to the museum. The Holocaust would have been a total waste.
Bunny was definitely a universalist, Maurice reflected, as he observed her now standing behind the opulent wooden lectern emblazoned with the museum seal, reading her remarks for the Tibetan Holocaust program, benumbed with beta-blockers and Valium prescribed by her shrink for stage fright, while he, Maurice, had never in his life experienced even a tremor of fear engendered by public speaking. Indeed, as Bunny took the liberty of commenting affectionately even within his earshot, Maurice had never met a microphone he did not want to make love to. In general terms, this was true, Maurice admitted it proudly. However, he wanted to make it absolutely clear that he did not enjoy public speaking for his own glory or honor, God forbid, but rather one hundred percent for the sake of the six million. In Maurice’s opinion, the obligation of the world to listen to him now, an old survivor with a chopped-liver accent and gefilte-fish grammar, like private family smells not meant to be aired in public—for the world to be condemned to listen to him going on at length even in the rotunda of the United States Capitol itself during the Days of Remembrance ceremony broadcast throughout the entire world on C-Span—was nothing less than just reparations to be exacted from those who had stood by and turned a deaf ear as the Jews of Europe cried out to be heard. You didn’t listen to us then, you rotten no-goodniks, you didn’t pay attention while it was happening—now you will pay attention with interest, you will damned well listen now, now we will grate your ears raw with the Holocaust until you fall to your knees and beg for mercy, we will never shut up. Mostly Bunny let him go on to his heart’s content, she humored him that way, but when it was an occasion that “really really mattered,” such as the annual event in the Capitol, for instance, she would tear through the drafts of his speeches ruthlessly, slashing away promiscuously at Monty’s prose. “Not dignified, not dignified,” she would mutter. “Too Jewish, too Jewish!” There was no denying it, the lady was a card-carrying member of the universalist party.
Maurice only half listened now as Bunny pounded away at her usual universalist theme—the “others,” the non-Jews targeted by the Nazis, launching into her well-rubbed laundry list, starting with the “Roma,” pedantically emphasizing Roma as the only acceptable usage, “formerly known as ‘Gypsies,’” she added by way of necessary clarification though she recoiled from uttering that taboo word, then on down to political prisoners, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissenters, homosexuals, the handicapped and disabled—“Useless eaters, as far as the Nazis were concerned, useless eaters all,” she declared. She glanced furtively at Mickey Fisher-roshi in his wheelchair, already planted on the stage like an overgrown potted bush; the Zen monk was the guest speaker they had had to settle for in the end for this Tibetan Holocaust program. Between the two of them, Maurice noted, between those two big-eating fressers, Bunny and the guru, they must have put on the weight of about a medium-sized goat since they had first met at Auschwitz. It had been quite a spectacle, before the program began, to watch four black linebacker security guards, together weighing in at over half a ton, huffing and puffing, polished to mahogany by the sweat that was pouring down their faces, as they carried Fisher in a kind of improvised palanquin up the flight of stairs to the landing that served as the stage, with his chief of staff, Koan Gilguli, shuffling along behind lugging the wheelchair, and bringing up the rear, Leon’s problem daughter in her Buddhist nun’s getup and shaven head and little round glasses, Rama, as she now called herself, along with her twins, Rumi and Rumi, already at least four years old, nobody knew if they were male or female or both, it was rumored that even the mother had requested not to be told.
As for Bunny, it registered on Maurice that she was now even more “broad from the beam” than she had been during
her Holocaust deflowering on the Auschwitz junket, which was why, as Blanche explained to him, letting him in on a harmless little feminine subterfuge, she wore those long suit jackets, “to camouflage the chassis,” in food colors like eggplant, raisin, chocolate, or wine, her personal interpretation of the professional woman’s executive uniform. Bunny was dressed in one of those outfits today, in a cholent color, Maurice would have described it, since it reminded him of the heavy meat and bean and potato stew that used to sit simmering on the stove for twenty-four hours that his mother would ladle out for Sabbath lunch. Pinned to her lapel, as always, was that diamond and ruby brooch in the shape of a royal crown, like her badge of office, the daytime version of the tiara she wore in her lank dark hair at black-tie evening functions, to symbolize her ascension to the role of a self-styled latter-day Queen Esther, a Jewess with enough balls to speak up on behalf of her people against the anti-Semites, especially against Holocaust deniers, which Bunny had made her specialty, her pet project, even going so far as to advocate that laws be put on the books making Holocaust denial illegal, thereby, in Monty’s opinion, not only threatening free speech and civil liberties, so critical to Jewish survival in the Diaspora, but also shunting these crackpot and kook deniers from the lunatic fringe to center stage.
“Queen Esther?” Monty had sneered. “More like Cleopatra, Queen of De-Ni’al—minus the sex appeal, of course.” For as Rabbi Monty reminded Maurice with respect to the Esther story, the real queen was also a dish, marinated six months in fragrant oils and six months in spices, the pièce de résistance of the Persian harem. That, however, was the racy part of the story with which Bunny did not identify, the sexist part that she rejected on principle. She explained all this one night to Krystyna by the light of a sandalwood-scented candle on the terrace overlooking the Potomac River of the Watergate apartment that they shared, which her mother had bought for her around the time she ascended to the directorship of the Holocaust, and which she justified on the grounds that, as she put it, “I do genocide all day, at night I deserve to be nice to myself.” With respect to the Esther story, however, as she told Krystyna, it was the speaking-up part that spoke to her. Her inner Queen Esther could not in conscience remain silent, especially on the subject of deniers. It was precisely for a crisis of this sort—the epidemic of historical revisionism, the plague of Holocaust denial—that she had reached the perilous throne. “And if I perish,” she added selflessly, “I perish.” Of course, in the case of Abu Shahid and others like him targeted by Maurice’s Teach a Terrorist program, she told Krystyna, there was a competing human rights imperative that obliged her to hold back and refrain from speaking out against them, because when you considered the persecution and humiliation that the Palestinian people had endured at the hands of the Zionists, the motivation behind their Holocaust denial—to undermine the right of Israel to exist—was not only understandable, it was, in the end, forgivable. And even the Palestinians who conceded that there might have been a Holocaust really really had a point when they insisted that they after all were not the ones who were responsible; they didn’t do it, the Germans did it, for God’s sake—so why should their land be stolen, why should they suffer? Oh, Israel was such a pain in the neck; it really really got in the way of orderly Holocaust programming. And to top it all off, it was such an unsafe place, Bunny wished it would just go away, at the slightest hint of a crisis she automatically banned travel to that live volcano by all staff members. But when it came to the matter of the Palestinians, she insisted, all that was required was a little education. With a little education, the Palestinians would not only learn about the Holocaust and its lessons, but even more important for their cause, they would come to appreciate how they might creatively channel and shape and control the narrative for their own advancement.
From the landing where he was sitting next to Abu Shahid, Maurice had a direct view of the top of Krystyna’s head as she leaned against the railing halfway down the flight of stairs between the improvised stage and the long expanse of the Hall of Witness where the crowd stood listening to Bunny. He could follow the straight part in her flaxen hair like a row in a Polish wheat field, her hairstyle vastly subdued since Bunny had taken her in hand, sponsoring her as a protégée and making her her chief of staff. Everyone and his uncle has a chief of staff these days, Maurice reflected—Bunny, this Abu Shahid guy, and even he himself, the Honorable Maurice Messer, for his sins. Without a chief of staff, you were a nothing. Over Krystyna’s shoulder, Maurice could see, was slung that famous tote bag containing Bunny’s essential supplies, most notoriously the DustBuster—in case, while making her daily directorial inspection rounds through the museum, Bunny noticed a telltale pile of dirt or litter in a corner that required a quick vacuuming job. She was “seriously anal,” as Norman had painstakingly explained to his father, a disgusting modern concept when you visualized it that unfortunately seemed to fit, “an obsessive-compulsive control freak,” Norman said—Dust Bunny, the staff called her, not to her face, of course. Rummaging among the equipment in that tote bag for a stick of gum that she needed to chew full-time now that Bunny had forced her to give up smoking, Krystyna abruptly looked up with concern during what seemed to be far too long a pause in the speech—the gap was not lost on Maurice either—as if Bunny had suddenly grown confused and lost her place just as she was coming to the end of her account of the Nazi euthanasia program and the fate of those “other” victims—the disabled, the paralyzed, the syphilitic, the retarded, the mentally ill, the demented, the senile—eliminated, Bunny intoned in a rhetorical refrain, as “life unworthy of life, useless eaters, useless eaters all.”
These were the very words she had used at dinner the previous evening, Krystyna recalled—useless eaters, life unworthy of life—when she had disclosed that she had authorized the staff at the Parklawn nursing home in which her stepfather, Leon Lieb, was still a silent partner even after the scandals, to stop all feeding of her mother. Setting down her glass of chardonnay, she added pointedly, “It’s not like a Holocaust thing, you know. It’s not like I’m some kind of Nazi and my mom’s a useless eater or life unworthy of life or something like that. I definitely know the lessons of the Holocaust, but this is different, this is a quality-of-life issue—you see what I’m saying? Basically, what it all boils down to is that my mom just needs a bit of help from all of us who care about her in order to give herself permission to move on.” She expected that her mother would expire sometime the next day, she told Krystyna. That was the timetable she had been given by the professionals now that the feeding had been stopped totally. She had been advised by the head nurse that Gloria was phasing in and out of coma. She intended to catch the shuttle to New York right after the Tibetan Holocaust program tomorrow, she said, in order to be at her mother’s side for as long as her schedule permitted. Of course, as Krystyna was aware, she needed to be back at the museum by ten o’clock Wednesday morning for the monthly meeting of the Politics and Perks Committee, so if Gloria took her sweet time and did not pass before say, seven a.m. on Wednesday morning at the very latest, well, Bunny would just have to say her good-byes and leave. In any case, knowing her mom as well as she did, Bunny was certain that Gloria would prefer to be alone for her final moment, her preference would definitely be to have her own space in which to die. Gloria was such a private person, after all, and dying was really really such a private and personal act, like going to the bathroom or looking in a mirror. You didn’t want anyone else watching while you did it. It was something you did when you were alone. Only the condemned died in public.
Yes, it had probably been that summoning up of those Nazi classifications—useless eaters, life unworthy of life—specifically in reference to the demented and the senile, that had shaken Bunny so, Krystyna was convinced, evoking a disturbing image of her mother dying of starvation in the nursing home bed even as she, Bunny, was speaking before this Tibetan Holocaust audience. It was this vision that must have floated before Bunny’s eyes as she sp
oke those words, causing her to fumble for a moment. But she was back on track again, thank goodness, moving right along toward the finale of her speech, about how we must all learn from the Holocaust the lesson that silence is intolerable, that complacency is not permissible as the Tibetan people face extinction along with their heavenly bird, the black-necked crane. As moral and ethical human beings, we owe it to history, to memory, to conscience, and to the eleven million victims—the six million Jews and the five million others—to raise our voices and cry out against the Tibetan Holocaust and the Holocaust of the Black-Necked Crane.