by Tova Reich
All of these treats they spurned, wailed and would not be comforted. For Maurice Messer in the wheelchair at the Founders’ Wall, praying now with even greater fervor after having absorbed the bitter medicine of the note scribbled on the prescription stationery of his so-called comrade in arms and resistance collaborator, Adolf Schmaltz, the relentless piercing crying of these strange-smelling creatures was simply the limit. How much more could a man take? They’re gonna wake up the dead, all six million of them, he wanted to shriek, including the one and one half million innocent children, I’m gonna strangle those little cockers. But instead, for propriety’s sake, over the personal assault of their screeching, he attempted to put forth the more civilized point of theological etiquette—a little respect please if you don’t mind, there are people here who are trying to pray, this is a house of worship, curb your children, for God’s sakes. Schmaltz’s message had been dropped into Maurice’s lap by the nun and Hasid along with the letter they had sought to deliver to Norman. Maurice had just had a few seconds to absorb this treacherous blow from his good friend Schmaltz, the man of the rear, right where it hurt the most, when the lights went out. Then that intolerable bawling of those alien beings commenced and would not let up. Maurice felt himself at last to be utterly unmanned. They were all against him. What was the use of going on?
Only a few moments before, before the plagues of darkness and the wailing of the firstborns had descended upon him, he had begun to feel again the stirrings of hope, he could not say exactly why, perhaps it was naive foolishness, a natural human instinct toward healing and recovery, his innate survivor’s optimism, but still, whatever the reason, even his appetite had begun to revive in some measure. Of course he would never have considered partaking of anything from the brown paper grocery bags of that deranged trio over there, macro this, organic that, spread out in front of the Remember the Children exhibition on a filthy cloth like a picnic in the underworld by the black river, with Bunny posted as sentinel at the bridge alongside her new pal, Honey Pincus, brandishing her rejuiced DustBuster in readiness for the banquet’s inevitable fallout and debris. To Maurice this offering of seeds and dried fruit droppings looked like what went into a bird at one end and what came out at the other, he definitely did not recommend it to himself for his own health. Still, before the lights went out and the brats began to howl, Maurice could almost summon up in his memory the warm fragrance that would waft out of the tall bags deposited each morning at the entrance to the museum cafeteria, the words “Holocaust Bagels” scrawled in bold letters with black marker. He was already mentally skimming the cafeteria menu, indulging an impossible fantasy of ordering out. He would even have been willing to settle for one of those cat-food tuna sandwiches if that was all that was left, even on one of those air buns sprinkled with little sesame seeds like lice nits, a very insensitive reminder for survivors of the camps.
Maurice did not even like tuna fish, as it happened, he had wanted to ban it from the menu entirely along with the lice-nit buns, that’s how keenly his appetite had been rekindled just a few minutes earlier, but now all thoughts of preferences, all thoughts of physical comfort and nourishment, went out with the lights, drowned out by the nonstop screaming of the Rumis, dashed by Schmaltz’s note curling like a special delivery of poison in Maurice’s lap. The whole Holocaust had gone to hell. This is what Maurice Messer now acknowledged to himself as he watched from his sacred Founders’ Wall the underworld procession descending the grand staircase, bearing flickering memorial candles from the Hall of Remembrance and setting them down in a demonic circle on the floor to illuminate the Hall of Witness, in accordance with instructions from Bunny Bacon and her latest discovery, Honey Pincus, to whom Bunny had promised the directorship of the academic branch of the museum, Monty’s old job, as soon as this nasty crisis could be put behind them and they could get on with their lives. The two women were already planning a special exhibition on the Gynecological and Menstrual Holocaust, which, as Honey correctly pointed out, has already claimed many many more millions and billions of victims, gay and straight, than the conventional bourgeois Holocaust, and is, as a matter of fact, still ongoing. “Don’t worry,” Honey reassured Bunny, “you can handle it. You already know much more about this Holocaust from personal victimization than you ever knew or will know about the other one. It’s going to be an absolutely sensational show—really really transgressive,” Honey added delightedly. It would include, they both agreed, in addition to such testimonies of gynecological atrocities as a video of a doctor with one hand inside a patient and the other holding a cell phone, “Hi, what’s up? It’s me, I’m in the examining room, doing a pelvic,” a large artifact as its centerpiece, a major installation—a menstrual hut, an exact replica of the structure into which, in some African cultures, women were banished during their lunar periods of pollution, so offensive and inimical to spiritual devotions within the house. Museum customers could sit in the menstrual hut just as they are invited to pass through and even linger in the railcar upstairs on the third floor, in order to personally experience the suffering and humiliation from the point of view of the victim. “A room of one’s own,” Honey said.
The brainstorm of co-opting the lights of the memorial candles came from Jake Koan Gilguli, who was sitting on the red granite floor of the Hall of Remembrance at the foot of the altar with the tongue of the eternal flame lapping above him, plunging into a past-life therapy session with Rama-sensei, when the power was cut off and darkness fell. Nodding beneficently and smiling with heartening serenity and acceptance, Rama was seeking to help Koan Gilguli delve even further back, to access an incarnation prior to Yankel Galitzianer of Przemysl, Poland, murdered in Crematorium III at Birkenau. An awesomely learned and revered rabbi in Israel had declared that the six million who were exterminated in the Holocaust were actually resurrected sinners, atoning for their evil deeds in a previous life. That explained everything. No longer could the question of why with respect to the Holocaust ever again be asked. Koan Gilguli therefore set himself the task of discovering this gilgul, this former incarnation of himself who had sinned so grievously as to merit in the next life the fate of Yankel Galitzianer in the gas chamber. As he sat on the floor of the Hall of Remembrance opposite Rama-sensei, the two of them intimately passing from mouth to mouth something green she had rolled and sealed with her spittle and ignited with the flame of a memorial candle in its jar doubling now as an ashtray, he permitted his eyes to stream idly, as if for inspiration, over the names affixed in a burnished metal dirgelike procession upon the hexagonal walls—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ponary, Jasenovac, Transnistria, Ninth Fort, Babi Yar, and so on through the familiar stations of torture and murder slipping from the sharp edge of memory into mindless refrain and litany, doggerel and kitsch. Then, in a flash, just a moment before the lights were extinguished and the children began to wail, the phrase “Death Marches” snagged his vision, like the mystical odd bead on a frayed old string. It was then that Koan Gilguli recovered it all: the death march on the night of August 1915; the Knights of Mary Phagan just a few months before their transformation into the new knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Jew Leo Frank, abducted from a cell in the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville, hanged from a tree limb in Frey’s Grove.
“Jim Gilchrist, member of the lynch mob—that’s who I was,” Koan Gilguli announced to Rama-sensei. “Reborn for my sins as Yankel Galitzianer to feel Frank’s pain.”
Rama nodded sagely, displaying her small milky teeth in a beatific smile. Then, like a goddess rising from the bestowal of blessed knowledge, she rose to attend to the crying of her children. The flames of the rows of memorial candles set out on the ledge along the wall of the Hall of Remembrance cast their reflections in the pools of her steel-rimmed glasses.
Koan Gilguli carried two of these burning candles, one in each hand, to light the path for his master, Roshi Mickey Fisher, as he made his way toward Maurice Messer at the Founders’
Wall. He’s coming to take back the wheelchair, Maurice fathomed. His old brain was still ticking, thank God, he had instantly figured it all out. No way I’m gonna let him have it, the lousy putz, he resolved, and shimmying backward on his rump, Maurice wedged himself more securely into the seat, staking his claim, his feet dangling childlike in space above the footrests. Just let him try to kick me out, I’ll scream bloody murder, even louder than those rotten kids I’ll scream. The roshi, though a minimum thirty years younger, Maurice was pleased to note, was puffing like an obsolete boiler beside him, a fat zhlub with gefilte pipes. Koan Gilguli was holding aloft the memorial lights to illuminate the wall, for his master’s edification. Without even condescending to glance at the faker, Maurice demanded that he do something about those kids. “Can’t you make them shut up? You’re the poppa—right? You get the credit—correct me if I’m wrong. So nu—maybe it’s time already for a little discipline from the daddy department, you know what I mean? I’m going crazy here. What you think this is? A rumpus room? This is a holy place, for God’s sakes!”
“Holy, holy, holy,” Fisher-roshi chanted along in tune with the wailing of the children, impervious to Maurice’s gross self-display. “The crying of babies—holy music, celestial music. We have fallen into the place where everything is music, the Persian poet sang. If it fades, we fade. Apocalypso—the latest musical sensation! Attend closely to the teaching in the crying of the children, I say to you. Planes crashing into buildings, towers crumbling to the ground, men leaping headfirst from the clouds—this is not a silent movie. It is screaming and yelling, howling and sobbing, crying, crying, crying, all the way down. Did you imagine it was silent in the gas chambers? Consider this screaming as you gaze at your halls and walls and contemplate the imminent destruction of all the creations of your pride. The crying of the babes, the bleating of the lambs, holy, holy, holy, Adonai Tzevaoth, all the earth is filled with His glory. It is the music of enlightenment, the music of the divine—purer than Bach, sweeter even than Coltrane.” His eyes squeezed shut, as if in a trance, the roshi was swaying and dancing, boogying to the rhythm of the children’s shrill lamentations rocking the stone and steel of this mausoleum in which they had buried the Holocaust.
Maurice was in hell, and the howling of the children was a wind bladder, a rattling tumor he was condemned to drag through eternity. His eardrums were stretched to the bursting point; they were ringing, vibrating, frizzing like seltzer; the only comfort in all this for him was that now he would have a license to tune in and tune out selectively in accordance with what he chose to hear, yet Fisher’s voice cut through the din with his blasphemy. “So this is your Death Wall, like they have in all the synagogues—you know, the yahrzeit wall, with the memorial tablets for dead members, bigger tablets for bigger members?”
“You some kind of apikores or something?” Maurice cried. “What you talking, you fershtunkene heretic? This is mine holy donors’ wall, for your information. Mine donors are alive and well, thank you very much—and still donating. Till one hundred and twenty—years, I’m talking, not millions. What kind of grubber you think I am?”
“Ah,” the roshi intoned, starting in again with his unbearable chanting, “I see only death on this wall. The physical bodies behind these names may believe they’re alive, they may flatter themselves that they’re buying and selling, getting and spending, strutting and preening, fucking and farting, moving and shaking, attending functions, posing for pictures, but it is all maya and illusion. Out of one stinking hole they have been excreted, and into another stinking hole crawling with maggots and worms they’re fated to be shoved. They can be likened to broken pottery, to withered grass, a passing shadow, a blowing wind, a fleeting dream, they’re nothing but scattering dust, though they believe they’re alive. Let them like the ancient monks dig up the cadavers of young women at night to watch them decay. Then they will grasp the true meaning of their desires and appetites. On this earth they are as transient and impermanent and forgotten as the suffering and torment of the millions of souls you’ve exploited in the erection of this vainglorious self-aggrandizing monument. On this wall they are already counted among the dead. What I see here on this wall are only the names of the dead.”
The roshi took a memorial candle from Koan Gilguli’s hand to hold up against the wall as if to scrutinize it more closely. “This spot here—where it says ‘Reserved’? You see it? It’s Jiriki’s spot—yes? It belongs to Jiriki, to the holy holy soul you call Gloria who at this very moment is struggling to cross over to the bardo. But she clings to this life, her mind is agitated, she cannot achieve tranquillity even as I, her transition coach, urge her with all my power to step out boldly. Nevertheless, she holds on desperately despite the inconvenience and annoyance and burden to family and friends. She does not let go though they have denied her all nourishment to body and spirit. She declines the release from worldly illusions and passions due to some unfinished business here on this earth—some unfinished business touching on this wall.”
Reserved? What was this bubba-baba yammering? What a low-class, tacky idea—reserving space like in some kind of bargain-basement blowout sale! Show me, go on, show me the word Reserved, you miserable fraud, Maurice wanted to yell. Nowhere on this wall could Reserved be found. Who would know this better than Maurice? He could recite by heart every word, every name on the wall, Honorables all the way down, from the Honorable Bugsy Ackerman to the Honorable Dutch Zwillman, a ladder of H’s reaching up to the heavens, stacked like a poem, Maurice was the troubadour of this epic hymn. Yet Fisher had seen the word Reserved, as in a vision, and Maurice was so shaken by this madman’s insight that he lurched halfway out of his seat in the wheelchair, sending the two sheets of paper in his lap swirling to the floor, and over the mounting earsplitting ululations of the Rumis, like a harbinger of chaos, it flashed through his mind for a split second that maybe he ought to fall upon his knees at the feet of the roshi and cry, Master, forgive me, you have looked into my soul and exposed my sin, but though the buck stops here, it wasn’t I who took advantage of a helpless old woman. Her daughter, my director, made me do it. The inscription the old lady wanted was so inappropriate and undignified—My son Michael, my son, my son Michael, if only I had died instead of you, Michael, my son, my son—sons coming out of your ears, a person can get a headache from all those sons, a Jewish mother tearjerker dripping with schmaltz straight from the Second Avenue Yiddish theater, we could never put something so melodramatic, so unprofessional, up on my wall in our world-class state-of-the-art federal Holocaust headquarters, though the old lady paid for it in advance and in full, it’s true, I admit it, and even got a receipt to prove it, but we figured with her mind gone to Poughkeepsie she’d never know the difference, she’d never find out.
Fortunately, though, instead of surrendering to this mad temptation to purge himself through such a radical and demeaning and ultimately self-destructive act of contrition, Maurice came to his senses, thank God, reclaiming his stately position in the wheelchair. And despite the shock to his system from Fisher’s revelation that he had endured, he even mustered up enough presence of mind to casually lean over as he regally resettled himself in order to retrieve Schmaltz’s prescription from the floor. He crumpled it soundlessly in his fist and shredded it with his pearlized manicured fingernails. He moistened it discreetly in his mouth and dispatched it with a shot of saliva down his gullet through all the tubes and coils of his system straight to the sphincter at the lower depths, the good doctor’s department as it happened, returned to sender in new and improved form.
Fisher-roshi turned his backside disrespectfully to Maurice’s wall, pressed his palms prayerfully together in front of his heart, and dipped his head in a gentle bow. “Namaste, Jiriki,” he pronounced softly, yet like a shark fin slicing through the unceasing roiling waves of the children’s screams, his words headed straight for Maurice. “You may rest in peace now, Jiriki. If this little specialty-shop museum survives the coming doomsday, old ma
n Messer will put up your son’s plaque on his precious wall exactly as you ordered it. Trust me. As for what Schmaltz is prepared to do to preserve his son—Messer has just eaten the evidence. If he’s truly that hungry, we can probably spare a few of the copies of Schmaltz’s letter that we xeroxed on the equipment upstairs in the learning center of this user-friendly Holocaust.”
Then the roshi lifted his head and raised his voice, not only projecting it over the continuing wailing of the two Rumis but launching it like a missile targeted for the warehouse in which Gloria lay in desolation moaning mama, mama on her mean bed three hundred miles away. “Listen, oh Jiriki,” Fisher-roshi shouted. “The time has come for you to detach yourself from all this noise and set out on your journey to the noble silence within. Liberate yourself now from the impermanence of all things, my holy holy Jiriki. Break your attachment to all worldly passions and illusions. Cross over to the silence of luminous oneness. Fly out to the grace of this silence. Transcend the cycle of life and death and achieve enlightenment. Loosen your grip from the metal bars of your bed. Ease your body out of the iron cage of your personality. Float out on your good energy to the place where you are no longer old or young, no longer woman or man, no longer desired or cast off, no longer Gloria or Jiriki—to where you simply and purely are.” The roshi held the memorial light against his grizzled beard, casting the nether part of his face in diabolical shadow. “I’m blowing out the flame now, my holy holy Jiriki,” he whispered, tears darkening his beard. “I honor the place where our spirits are one. Namaste, seeker. It’s okay to stop fighting.”