My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  The incident of the attempted Holocaust power grab by the rivals Monty Pincus and Norman Messer was also being communicated by Leyla Salmani, reporting through a miniature microphone attached to her wristwatch into the ear of Pushkin Jones at his command post at ground zero inside the Hall of Witness of the museum. Guarding her position close to the source, Leyla riveted her gaze on the movements of the nun and Hasid wriggling their carriage to the very front of the enemy lines, as she went on providing Jones with a blow-by-blow account of the Monty and Norman show, the squalid temporary marriage of convenience hastily consummated between these two senior museum officials who patently despised each other, conjoined in a befouled bed at this critical juncture to prevent the military types from doing what military types were evolutionarily programmed to do—launching a full-scale air and ground assault on their sacred institution to fumigate it of the invaders. “Perish the thought,” Norman the clown declared. “For shame!” Monty the straight man echoed. “The violation of violence within the holy precincts of the six million violated by violence, gas on the sacred ground of the gassed—a sacrilege, an outrage!” “It would be the Mother of all Holocausts,” Norman eked out laboriously, momentously, “the Holocaust Holocaust. We would have to erect a new museum to commemorate it.”

  That was a truly scary prospect. For the moment, Leyla confirmed to Jones, all parties agreed to put the attack scenario on hold. But overhead helicopters were suspended, on the ground troops in full gear were poised. It was a combustible situation, a tinderbox that required only a spark to ignite and consume everything around it, the living and the dead in one great pyre. Now, Leyla reported, continuing with her complete eyewitness coverage as she observed the nun attempt to pass one of her letters to Norman Messer, the august leaders were battling over procedures for the implementation of Plan B—namely, how to secure the good offices of the universally exalted Holocaust High Priest, the only living personage who might embody the moral authority and cultivated prestige to intervene and negotiate with the renegades and bring them to their senses before it was too late.

  “I know the High Priest personally, the High Priest’s a close personal friend of mine,” Norman blurted out, sounding to his own ears alarmingly like his father. Even so, he could not contain his excitement, sputtering out blooming corsages of saliva to keep from using the common pronoun to designate so hallowed a figure as the High Priest while at the same time swatting away the nun’s proffered letter as he waved his arms wildly in the air. But, Norman added, in the attitude of privileged insider, calming down now as befitted his public role, stretching the pleasure of forcing them to hang on his every word, the High Priest is a very difficult number to book, scheduled years in advance, a rare catch. However, if by some miracle the High Priest’s services as arbitrator and peacemaker and savior can be secured in this emergency, Norman most definitely must be the one to personally escort the High Priest into the combat zone. Naturally, Norman in his position could not be expected to take upon himself the responsibility of soliciting the High Priest due to the impossibility of personally guaranteeing the High Priest’s safety in this perilous situation. Nevertheless, like a brain surgeon making his entrance into the operating theater to perform the delicate life-and-death procedure only after the patient has been fully laid out on the table and the gross incision has already been made, Norman was committed to undertaking the risky and dangerous role of aide-de-camp whatever the consequences to himself personally, yes, provided support staff and other subordinate team members paved the way beforehand as appropriate, handling the preliminaries, working out arrangements.

  “No problem,” Tommy Messiah said, stepping forward as if summoned.

  The deal was swiftly concluded: fifty thousand dollars for the immediate services of the High Priest, plus a limousine to transport him back and forth from his suite in the Washington hotel where he happened by a stroke of good fortune to be ensconced at the moment in a meeting with the first lady in connection with her project on children and dogs, plus a twenty-five-thousand-dollar commission for Tommy Messiah as the fixer, the agent, and go-between—all payments in advance, naturally, no strings attached, irrespective of outcome or success, and, needless to say, in cash.

  “No problem,” Tommy Messiah said again when they raised the predictable obstacles. They could go to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing next door to obtain the bills, it was all part of the same federal outfit anyway, he had no objections whatsoever to government greens, bring them to him hot off the presses, in a white cardboard box tied up with string, fragrant and moist, like freshly baked rolls straight from the oven. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn how they got the bread. But the bottom line was—no payment, no priest. “Bottom line, friends,” Tommy Messiah stressed.

  Norman decorously stepped back as the transaction was carried out, preferring in this instance the discretion of silence to the unforeseeable consequences to himself of exposing this operator for the crook he knew him to be. He consoled himself for his noninterference bystander’s policy with the thought that this would by no means be the first time the museum threw away the taxpayers’ money. And who could say? Maybe the High Priest would be delivered after all. He glanced at Tommy Messiah counting the loot, adeptly flipping through the bound wads of lettuce like a seasoned Gypsy accordionist. The snake had obviously not recognized Norman at all. On the one hand, this invisibility felt safely reassuring. On the other hand, considering the humiliation Norman had endured due to having been ripped off by this charlatan with respect to the phony Holocaust artifacts at Auschwitz, not to mention the major personal trauma of the museum check that this swindler had forced him to sign, such dismissive nonrecognition was profoundly insulting. His father, thank God, the honorable chairman, had managed in the end to justify the check in the ledgers as a contribution to Polish-Jewish dialogue, but for the panic and anxiety that Norman had gone through, the pain and suffering, no recompense was possible.

  Satisfied that all was in order with the payment, Tommy Messiah detached the donkey’s nearly empty feedbag, deftly stuffed the bills inside, then strung it at the creature’s other end positioned just so, under its tail, inspiring by these manipulations a fresh deposit of steaming cover-up for the cash. The task completed, Tommy Messiah stepped up to Norman and handed him a card. “This is where the H.P. is headquartered,” he said. “He’ll be expecting you. Don’t forget the limo. He won’t leave home without it.” He leaned over intimately so that Norman could distinctly smell essence of ass, and whispered into his ear. “Last time we did business you paid me to get you into the fucking convent, you paskundyak. You didn’t pay me to see your daughter. That would have been a much more expensive proposition.”

  Norman started visibly, as if accosted on the road by a man or an angel holding aloft a flaming drawn sword that could pierce his heart. Reminding himself, however, that divine messengers do not after all appear in this day and age, he rushed off toward the fulfillment of his earthly mission, shouting in parting orders to museum underlings concerning the requisitioning of the limousine, “Lincoln Continental, uniformed chauffeur, latest model, fully loaded, make sure it’s red, I happen to know that the High Priest prefers red,” and concerning the nun who was attempting yet again to hand him her letter, “Jesus Christ! Put her in touch with interfaith or external affairs, for God’s sake. Why am I expected to micromanage everything? We need to delegate, guys! We’re losing our Holocaust. It’s slipping away right in front of our eyes. This is a life and death situation.”

  “Our best and brightest,” Monty Pincus whispered much too close to Leyla Salmani, his eyes pointedly following Norman’s exit. She took a step backward, to obtain a better view of the receding black figures of the Hasid and nun with their freak offspring swelling over the rim of the perambulator as they departed the camp of the power elite. “I know who you are, Leyla Salmani,” the chief of staff was miming through the din of her own inner buzz, insinuating himself again into the space she had just vaca
ted. “You’re just another idealistic chick who wants to change the world—classic type who uses tits and ass to get through the door, and once inside, expects to be respected for her mind. Entre nous, babe, you and your cronies inside the museum don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. No offense, sweetheart, but you’re all just a bunch of stupid pissers and pikers. You’re headed straight down the yellow brick road toward one colossal goat fuck.”

  The sensible thing to do, Leyla recognized, would be to get away from this creep, block him from using her physical existence to turn himself on through his own verbiage. But again her energy had forsaken her. What had Tommy Messiah sold her? Sugar pills, placebos. Discreetly she placed two more on her tongue and swallowed them down in a single gulp, attending inwardly for a burst of optimism, a faint pop of rapture. Everything seemed pointless, without meaning. In any case, beyond her internal borders it appeared as if all activity had ceased in the sphere of the eminent persons closest to the museum, an extended intermission was apparently unde way as they awaited the redemptive arrival of the High Priest. Utterly bereft of spirit, failing disgracefully in her mission, as she very well knew, she nevertheless could not bring herself to perform. Her gaze followed the carriage of the nun and Hasid in its funereal march toward the survivors’ camp. The heat was boiling down and thickening, the sky beginning to darken. To move forward in this air was impossible, like wading through a gray aspic in which all animation was suspended. Passively she remained in place without will, submitting to the verbal violation perpetrated by this secretion of male protoplasm closing in upon her, made even more repulsive because he believed himself to be charming, droning through her thoughts with his insider’s expertise about how deluded she and her comrades were, destined for failure, for ridicule and oblivion. What had they expected to accomplish anyway with their anachronistic sixties-tactics victims’-power takeover of the museum premises? The whole joint from kitsch to cattle-car clone would have been handed over to genocides-dot-com soon enough anyway without a struggle, and in the not too distant future. If only they’d had the patience to wait another few years at most, this precious little Jewish Holocaust boutique museum would have been forced to diversify to general human rights products to have any chance at all of surviving even marginally. Because the Holocaust is finished, passé; it’s no longer relevant. The perspective has shifted. But in its heyday, in the days when it still mattered, it’s important to note for whatever it’s worth, no one could have matched the Jewish Holocaust with its mass industrial gassings—come on, who could top that? But the fact of the matter is, finally, at long last, even the Jewish Holocaust with its gas chambers and ovens, its mobile killing squads and extermination camps and all of its endlessly fascinating fetishist exotica, is being removed from the active file for interment in the vaults of history alongside all the other forgotten centuries-old slaughters and atrocities and sufferings. Holocaust chic is out, baby—yours, mine, ours. The age of memorialization is over. The past is a story with an ending—simple, orderly, false. The future is what it’s all about now—unknown, uncertain, unsafe, like sex and death, the raw wild forces ramming out of the sky, gashing the buildings, incinerating the earth, the dark savage forces out of control.

  Was he really daring to say these things to her, taking these liberties, speaking to her in this way? She was tuning in and out as if in a trance, catching the bullets, extracting the gist. Lighten up, Leyla baby—was that what he was saying?—the world is coming to an end, you might as well let yourself go. Her gaze listlessly kept track of the nun and Hasid wheeling their carriage into the camp of the well-fed survivors toward Foggy Bottom’s father the ass man, while, repellently intimate, like a fleshy-tailed demon inside her brain, his words were lashing. Too bad you guys don’t have Jewish heads, he was saying, or something like that—could it have been, too bad you don’t have Jewish deads? Instead of wasting your time on the museum, required reading today but an abandoned tome tomorrow, you should have gone for the gold, cashed in your pain for lucre. Jesus Christ, a little creativity’s in order here, a little imagination, please! Your Palestinian Holocaust, for instance, your pathetic little naqba—rather than crying piteously to the whole world to pay deference to your catastrophe, you should have demanded that they just pay. You should have shaken down the Germans for reparations, the Swiss for the heirless dormant accounts, the Austrians for unclaimed looted art, the Italians for insurance policies collecting dust, and the Jews for a cut and a percentage of their entire take. The Jewish Holocaust is your Holocaust too. Hitler screwed the Jews, and in return they and everyone else screwed you. Because of Hitler you were exiled from your gardens trellised with bougainvillea in Jerusalem, from your Ottoman terraces overlooking the sea in Jaffa, from your arbors of purple grapes on the Carmel. They owe you, baby. Where are your brains? You’re such a dumb bitch.

  She did not resist but absorbed it all, partially closing her eyes and letting him take his pleasure orally even as she could hear the rain pounding down in heavy sheets beyond the canopied entry area where she was standing, and the door slamming as the limousine roared to a halt on the sidewalk as near to the overhead projection of the building as possible, and Norman Messer panting, doubled over and creaking as he unrolled a red carpet under the fine leather shoes of the High Priest the entire distance until his hindquarters smacked against the locked door of the museum. Only when she heard the shriek of the chicken holocaust lady, “The Jews are killing my pullets!” did Leyla Salmani commit to the immense exertion of fully opening her eyes again.

  Chickens were being hurled out of the dark sky, fluttering grotesquely, letting out bloodcurdling squawks, scattering their droppings and feathers, striking the pavement with the bluntness of doom. Holding an umbrella with one hand over Monty Pincus’s head and waving a cigarette with her other hand, Krystyna Jesudowicz opened her mouth wide to receive the last of the ice cream he was stuffing inside in order to avoid mixing milk with meat as he bent down to pick up one of the bird carcasses. He examined the tag attached to a string around its pitiful twist-off neck and read aloud: “This is your replacement. This is your substitute and exchange. This is your penance. This rooster takes on your sins and goes to its death for you. And you? Where do you think you’re going?”

  Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus lifted up his eyes unto the heavens. “Somebody up there is shlugging kaporos for us,” he interpreted for his congregation. “It’s the atonement ritual. Yom Kippur is coming. Look up in the sky. It’s an end-of-days prophet calling on us to repent.”

  Up in the sky a small airplane was accelerating brazenly, whirling ecstatically in circles with a tail of helicopters in grinding pursuit. On the ground, now that all the customers had fled, Tommy Messiah was leading his donkey and cart away. Leyla caught his eye for confirmation. Tommy Messiah nodded his head. Yes, it was what she had thought. Shimshon, of course, the penitent, the zealot, the avenger, the harbinger—who else could it be? The original kamikaze, crashing them with him into the abyss—Shimshon. He was the pilot. Tommy Messiah nodded again. And Eldad and Medad, the minor prophets, casting down the birds.

  PART FOUR

  The Third Generation

  WHEN THE POWER WAS CUT inside the museum, and darkness and heat engulfed them, and they were besieged by the pounding rain, Rumi and Rumi threw back their heads to open the black holes of their throats and howl at the injustice of the universe. They howled without respite, and nothing would quiet them—not their mother’s attempts to nurse them while crooning their favorite personalized lullaby, “Oh Rumi Concentration Oh Rumi Contemplation Oh Rama Meditation,” to the tune of Bessie Smith’s “Oh Daddy Blues,” not the wild ride in the baby carriage pushed by their cousin Naomi-zenchin in dizzying rings around the granite floor of the deserted Hall of Witness, especially not the carob lollipops on recycled paper sticks from the grocery-bag supplies held out by the nightmare cloaked figure whimpering in solidarity, bell trembling in empathy, who had ceded to the twins its nest in the black bugg
y, not even the offer from Foggy Bottom Schmaltz to tell them once again the story of the imminent return of the comet Hale-Bopp crashing to earth and the end of days in accordance with the lore of the Hopi peaceful little people, topped by the ultimate temptation—permission to touch, albeit very carefully touch, the live grenades strapped to his body, with which he intended to blow himself and all of them up if their demands were not met.