Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  So, once the ruse is exposed, even my dirty head has no difficulty in making Avigdor—and my parents and the neighbors—expel Mischa in a fit of fury. And so Mischa is left destitute, and he has to sleep on a park bench.

  My dirty head, however, won’t leave him alone, so I continue to imagine things. With the money Mischa gets from panhandling, he buys a lottery ticket. The number—trust this dirty head of mine to come up with something like this—is, of course, the one tattooed on his arm. And he wins in the lottery! Then he moves to Rio de Janeiro and buys a beautiful condo, and he is happy! Happy. He doesn’t know what my dirty head has in store for him.

  There’s one thing that bothers him though: the number tattooed on his arm. He decides to have it removed. He goes to a famous plastic surgeon (these are refinements devised by my dirty head) and undergoes surgery. But then he goes into shock and dies a slow, agonizing death . . .

  One day Mischa tells my father about the soap bars. He says he saw piles and piles of soap bars in the death camp. Do you know what the soap was made of? he asks. Human fat. Fat taken from Jews.

  At night I dream about him. I’m lying naked in something resembling a bathtub, which is filled with putrid water; Mischa rubs that soap on me; he keeps rubbing it ruthlessly while shouting that he must wash the filth off my tongue and off my head, that he must wash the filth off the world.

  I wake up sobbing. I wake up in the midst of great suffering. And it is this suffering that I, for lack of a better word, call the Holocaust.

  APPENDIX

  The Mythical Jew of Jorge Luis Borges

  Emma Zunz

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Translated from the Spanish by Donald A. Yates

  First published in September 1948 in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur, later part of The Aleph and Other Stories (1942; included in its English translation in Labyrinths, 1962), this story constantly surprises with its secret messages. It is a tale of revenge and theodicy, in which the protagonist challenges the code of ethics by taking the law into her own hands. While the word Jew and its synonyms never appear, the historic and linguistic context leaves no doubt as to the ethnic setting. The selection of the character’s first name, Emma, is not arbitrary: the heroine is passionate and rebellious—like Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary.

  RETURNING HOME FROM the Tarbuch and Loewenthal textile mills on the fourteenth of January 1922, Emma Zunz discovered in the rear of the entrance hall a letter, posted in Brazil, which informed her that her father had died. The stamp and the envelope deceived her at first; then the unfamiliar handwriting made her uneasy. Nine or ten lines tried to fill up the page; Emma read that Mr. Maier had taken by mistake a large dose of Veronal and had died on the third of the month in the hospital of Bagé. A boardinghouse friend of her father had signed the letter, some Fein or Fain from Río Grande, with no way of knowing that he was addressing the deceased’s daughter.

  Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterward she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly. She picked up the piece of paper and went to her room. Furtively, she hid it in a drawer, as if somehow she already knew the ulterior facts. She had already begun to suspect them perhaps; she had already become the person she would be.

  In the growing darkness, Emma wept until the end of that day for the suicide of Manuel Maier, who in the old happy days was Emmanuel Zunz. She remembered summer vacations at a little farm near Gualeguay, she remembered (tried to remember) her mother, she remembered the little house at Lanus that had been auctioned off, she remembered the yellow lozenges of a window, she remembered the warrant for arrest, the ignominy, she remembered the poison-pen letters with the newspaper’s account of “the cashier’s embezzlement,” she remembered (but this she never forgot) that her father, on the last night, had sworn to her that the thief was Loewenthal. Loewenthal, Aaron Loewenthal, formerly the manager of the factory and now one of the owners. Since 1916 Emma had guarded the secret. She had revealed it to no one, not even to her best friend, Elsa Urstein. Perhaps she was shunning profane incredulity; perhaps she believed that the secret was a link between herself and the absent parent. Loewenthal did not know that she knew; Emma Zunz derived from this slight fact a feeling of power.

  She did not sleep that night, and when the first light of dawn defined the rectangle of the window, her plan was already perfected. She tried to make the day, which seemed interminable to her, like any other. At the factory there were rumors of a strike. Emma declared herself, as usual, against all violence. At six o’clock, with work over, she went with Elsa to a women’s club that had a gymnasium and a swimming pool. They signed their names; she had to repeat and spell out her first and her last name; she had to respond to the vulgar jokes that accompanied the medical examination. With Elsa and with the youngest of the Kronfuss girls she discussed what movie they would go to Sunday afternoon. Then they talked about boyfriends, and no one expected Emma to speak. In April she would be nineteen years old, but men inspired in her, still, an almost pathological fear . . . Having returned home, she prepared a tapioca soup and a few vegetables, ate early, went to bed, and forced herself to sleep. In this way, laborious and trivial, Friday the fifteenth, the day before, elapsed.

  Impatience awoke her on Saturday. Impatience it was, not uneasiness, and the special relief of it being that day at last. No longer did she have to plan and imagine; within a few hours the simplicity of the facts would suffice.

  She read in La Prensa that the Nordstjärnan, out of Malmö, would sail that evening from Pier 3. She phoned Loewenthal, insinuated that she wanted to confide in him, without the other girls knowing, something pertaining to the strike, and she promised to stop by at his office at nightfall. Her voice trembled; the tremor was suitable to an informer. Nothing else of note happened that morning. Emma worked until twelve o’clock and then settled with Elsa and Perla Kronfuss the details of their Sunday stroll. She lay down after lunch and reviewed, with her eyes closed, the plan she had devised. She thought that the final step would be less horrible than the first and that it would doubtlessly afford her the taste of victory and justice. Suddenly, alarmed, she got up and ran to the dresser drawer. She opened it; beneath the picture of Milton Sills, where she had left it the night before, was Fain’s letter. No one could have seen it; she began to read it and tore it up.

  To relate with some reality the events of that afternoon would be difficult and perhaps unrighteous. One attribute of a hellish experience is unreality, an attribute that seems to allay its terrors and that aggravates them perhaps. How could one make credible an action that was scarcely believed in by the person who executed it, how to recover that brief chaos that today the memory of Emma Zunz repudiates and confuses? Emma lived in Almagro, on Liniers Street: we are certain that in the afternoon she went down to the waterfront. Perhaps on the infamous Paseo de Julio she saw herself multiplied in mirrors, revealed by lights, and denuded by hungry eyes, but it is more reasonable to suppose that at first she wandered, unnoticed, through the indifferent portico . . . She entered two or three bars, noted the routine or technique of the other women. Finally she came across men from the Nordstjärnan. One of them, very young, she feared might inspire some tenderness in her and she chose instead another, perhaps shorter than she and coarse, in order that the purity of the horror might not be mitigated. The man led her to a door, then to a murky entrance hall and afterward to a narrow stairway and then a vestibule (in which there was a window with lozenges identical to those in the house at Lanus) and then to a passageway and then to a door that was closed behind her. The arduous events are outside of time, either because the immediate past is as if disconnected from the future or because the parts that form these events do not seem to be cons
ecutive.

  During that time outside of time, in that perplexing disorder of disconnected and atrocious sensations, did Emma Zunz think once about the dead man who motivated the sacrifice? It is my belief that she did think once, and in that moment she endangered her desperate undertaking. She thought (she was unable not to think) that her father had done to her mother the hideous thing that was being done to her now. She thought of it with weak amazement and took refuge, quickly, in vertigo. The man, a Swede or Finn, did not speak Spanish. He was a tool for Emma, as she was for him, but she served him for pleasure, whereas he served her for justice.

  When she was alone, Emma did not open her eyes immediately. On the little night table was the money that the man had left. Emma sat up and tore it to pieces as before she had torn the letter. Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread; Emma repented the moment after she did it. An act of pride and on that day . . . her fear was lost in the grief of her body, in her disgust. The grief and the nausea were chaining her, but Emma got up slowly and proceeded to dress herself. In the room there were no longer any bright colors; the last light of dusk was weakening. Emma was able to leave without anyone seeing her; at the corner she got on a Lacroze streetcar heading west. She selected, in keeping with her plan, the seat farthest toward the front, so that her face would not be seen. Perhaps it comforted her to verify in the insipid movement along the streets that what had happened had not contaminated things. She rode through the diminishing opaque suburbs, seeing them and forgetting them at the same instant, and got off on one of the side streets of Warnes. Paradoxically, her fatigue was turning out to be a strength, since it obligated her to concentrate on the details of the adventure and concealed from her the background and the objective.

  Aaron Loewenthal was to all persons a serious man, to his intimate friends a miser. He lived above the factory, alone. Situated in the barren outskirts of the town, he feared thieves; in the patio of the factory there was a large dog and in the drawer of his desk, everyone knew, a revolver. He had mourned with gravity, the year before, the unexpected death of his wife—a Gauss who had brought him a fine dowry—but money was his real passion. With intimate embarrassment, he knew himself to be less apt at earning it than at saving it. He was very religious; he believed he had a secret pact with God that exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety. Bald, fat, wearing the band of mourning, with smoked glasses and blond beard, he was standing next to the window awaiting the confidential report of worker Zunz.

  He saw her push the iron gate (which he had left open for her) and cross the gloomy patio. He saw her make a little detour when the chained dog barked. Emma’s lips were moving rapidly, like those of someone praying in a low voice; weary, they were repeating the sentence that Mr. Loewenthal would hear before dying.

  Things did not happen as Emma Zunz had anticipated. Ever since the morning before, she had imagined herself wielding the firm revolver, forcing the wretched creature to confess his wretched guilt and exposing the daring stratagem that would permit the justice of God to triumph over human justice. (Not out of fear but because of being an instrument of justice, she did not want to be punished.) Then, one single shot in the center of his chest would seal Loewenthal’s fate. But things did not happen that way.

  In Aaron Loewenthal’s presence, more than the urgency of avenging her father, Emma felt the need of inflicting punishment for the outrage she had suffered. She was unable not to kill him after that thorough dishonor. Nor did she have time for theatrics. Seated, timid, she made excuses to Loewenthal, she invoked (as a privilege of the informer) the obligation of loyalty, uttered a few names, inferred others, and broke off as if fear had conquered her. She managed to have Loewenthal leave to get a glass of water for her. When the former, unconvinced by such a fuss but indulgent, returned from the dining room, Emma had already taken the heavy revolver out of the drawer. She squeezed the trigger twice. The large body collapsed, as if the reports and the smoke had shattered it, the glass of water smashed, the face looked at her with amazement and anger, the mouth of the face swore at her in Spanish and Yiddish. The evil words did not slacken; Emma had to fire again. In the patio the chained dog broke out barking, and a gush of rude blood flowed from the obscene lips and soiled the beard and the clothing. Emma began the accusation she had prepared (“I have avenged my father and they will not be able to punish me . . .”), but she did not finish it, because Mr. Loewenthal had already died. She never knew if he managed to understand.

  The straining barks reminded her that she could not yet rest. She disarranged the divan, unbuttoned the dead man’s jacket, took off the bespattered glasses, and left them on the filing cabinet. Then she picked up the telephone and repeated what she would repeat so many times again, with these and with other words: Something incredible has happened . . . Mr. Loewenthal had me come over on the pretext of the strike . . . He abused me. I killed him . . .

  Actually, the story was incredible, but it impressed everyone because substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz’s tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names.

  Death and the Compass

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Translated from the Spanish by Donald A. Yates

  Included in Ficciones (1944) and translated into English in Labyrinths (1962), this masterful detective story, constructed with esoteric symbols, is an homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The unnamed metropolis in which it is set could be Amsterdam, where an important group of converso families, including that of Baruch Spinoza, lived in the seventeenth century. And indeed, the unraveling of the mysterious death of three Jews in three different cardinal points of the city is based on the idea that geometry is a tool for achieving knowledge of God, a theory proposed in Ethics.

  For Mandie Molina Vedia

  OF THE MANY problems that exercised the reckless Discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events that culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. It is true that Erik Lönnrot failed to prevent the last murder, but that he foresaw it is indisputable. Neither did he guess the identity of Yarmolinsky’s luckless assassin, but he did succeed in divining the secret morphology behind the fiendish series as well as the participation of Red Scharlach, whose other nickname is Scharlach the Dandy. That criminal (as countless others) had sworn on his honor to kill Lönnrot, but the latter could never be intimidated. Lönnrot believed himself a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him, and even a little of the gambler.

  The first murder occurred in the Hôtel du Nord—that tall prism that dominates the estuary, whose waters are the color of the desert. To that tower (which quite glaringly unites the hateful whiteness of a hospital, the numbered divisibility of a jail, and the general appearance of a bordello) there came on the third day of December the delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic Congress, Dr. Marcel Yarmolinsky, a gray-bearded man with gray eyes. We shall never know whether the Hôtel du Nord pleased him; he accepted it with the ancient resignation that had allowed him to endure three years of war in the Carpathians and three thousand years of oppression and pogroms. He was given a room on Floor R, across from the suite that was occupied—not without splendor—by the Tetrarch of Galilee. Yarmolinsky supped, postponed until the following day an inspection of the unknown city, arranged in a placard his many books and few personal possessions, and before midnight extinguished his light. (Thus declared the tetrarch’s chauffeur, who slept in the adjoining room.) On the fourth, at 11:03 a.m., the editor of the Yidische Zaitung put in a call to him; Dr. Yarmolinsky did not answer. He was found in his room, his face already a little dark, nearly nude beneath a large, anachronistic cape. He was lying not far from the door that opened on the hall; a deep knife wound had split his breast. A few hours later, i
n the same room, amid journalists, photographers, and policemen, Inspector Treviranus and Lönnrot were calmly discussing the problem.

  “No need to look for a three-legged cat here,” Treviranus was saying as he brandished an imperious cigar. “We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the finest sapphires in the world. Someone, intending to steal them, must have broken in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the robber had to kill him. How does it sound to you?”

  “Possible, but not interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You’ll reply that reality hasn’t the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis that you propose, chance intervenes copiously. Here we have a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.”

  Treviranus replied ill-humoredly: “I’m not interested in rabbinical explanations. I am interested in capturing the man who stabbed this unknown person.”

  “Not so unknown,” corrected Lönnrot. “Here are his complete works.” He indicated in the wall cupboard a row of tall books: a Vindication of the Kabbalah; An Examination of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the Sepher Yezirah; a Biography of the Baal Shem; a History of the Hasidic Sect; a monograph (in German) on the Tetragrammaton; another on the divine nomenclature of the Pentateuch. The inspector regarded them with dread, almost with repulsion. Then he began to laugh.

  “I’m a poor Christian,” he said. “Carry off those musty volumes if you want; I don’t have any time to waste on Jewish superstitions.”