City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  —An odd sighting on the dock, a great blue heron looking out one way, almost back to back with a snowy-white egret peering in the opposite direction. This is why everyone should sometimes leave the city.

  With the same food sources, I wonder that they get along, but there they stand with that mutual disregard. I’m not looking, but I know you’re there. The egret breaks first, the neck outstretched, the yellow bayonet beak extended, a beautiful bird in flight, sleek, like a Pre-Raphaelite seaplane, but with merciless eyes. . . and the heron, looking rumpled with its round black shoulder patch, the feathered body more gray than blue, the long legs, feet, and beak black. It is a less comely bird, a less spiffy bird than the egret, although with its huge wingspan as it takes off low over the water it does achieve an airliner’s stateliness. But there is a degree of sorrow in its gaze, and it is clearly a loner, a bachelor sort of bird who could use some female attention, some sprucing up, like me.

  —Heist

  A phone call from Rabbi Joshua:

  If we’re going to be detectives about this. . . we start with what we know, isn’t that what you did? What I know, what I start with, is that no Jewish person would have stolen your crucifix. It would not occur to him. Even in the depths of some drug-induced confusion.

  I shouldn’t think so, I say, thinking, Why does Joshua feel he has to rule this out?

  The police told you your cross had no value on the street. But if someone wants it, then it has value.

  To an already-in-place, raging anti-Semite, for example.

  Yes, that’s the likelihood. This is a mixed, multicultural neighborhood. There may be people who don’t like a synagogue on their block. I’ve not been made aware of this, but it’s always possible.

  Right.

  But it’s also possible. . . placing that cross on my roof, well, that is something that could have been arranged by an ultra-Orthodox fanatic. That’s possible too.

  Good God!

  I’m not saying this is so. I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities. There are some for whom what Sarah and I are doing, struggling to redesign, revalidate our tradition—well, in their eyes it is tantamount to apostasy.

  I don’t buy it, I said. I mean, I can’t think it’s likely. Why would it be?

  The voice that told me my roof was burning? That was a Jewish thing to say. Of course I don’t know for sure, I may be all wrong. But it’s something to think about. Tell me, Father—

  Tom—

  Tom. You’re a bit older, you’ve seen more, perhaps you’ve given more thought to these things. Wherever you look in the world now, God belongs to the atavists. And they’re so fierce, these people, so sure of themselves, as if all human knowledge since Scripture is not also God’s revelation! I mean, is time a loop? Do you have the same feeling I have—that everything seems to be running backwards? That civilization is in reverse?

  Oh my dear rabbi. Joshua. What can I tell you? If it’s true and God truly does belong to the atavists, then that’s what faith is and what faith does. And we are stranded, you and I.

  -Monday

  The front doors are padlocked. In the rectory kitchen, leaning back on the two hind legs of his chair and reading People magazine, is St. Timothy’s newly hired, classically indolent private security guard.

  I am comforted too by the woman at Ecstatic Reps. She is there, as usual, walking in place, earphones clamped on her head, her large hocks in their black tights shifting up and dropping back down like Sisyphean boulders. As the afternoon darkens she’ll be broken up and splashed in the greens and pale lavenders of the light refractions on the window.

  So everything is as it should be, the world’s in its place. The wall clock ticks. I have nothing to worry about except what I’m going to say to the bishop’s examiners that will determine the course of the rest of my life.

  This is what I will say for starters: “My dear colleagues, what you are here to examine today is not a spiritual crisis. Let’s get that clear. I have not broken down, cracked up, burned out, or caved in. True, my personal life is a shambles, my church is like a war ruin, and since I am not one to seek counsel or join support groups, and God, as usual has ignored my communications (no offense, Lord), I do feel somewhat isolated. I will even admit that for the past few years, no, the past several years, I have not found anything better to do for my chronic despair than walk the streets of Manhattan. Nevertheless the ideas I’m going to present to you have real substance and while you may find some of them alarming I would entreat—would suggest, would recommend, would advise—I would advise you to confront them on their merits and not as evidence of the psychological decline of a mind you once had some respect for—I mean for which you once had some respect.”

  That’s okay so far, isn’t it, Lord? Sort of taking it to them? Maybe a bit touchy. After all what could they have in mind? In order of probability, one, a warning, two, a formal reprimand, three, censure, four, a month or so in therapeutic retreat followed by a brilliantly remote reassignment wherein I’m never to be heard from again, five, forced early retirement with full benefits, six, de-ordination, seven, ex-com. Whatthehell!

  By the way, Lord, what are my “ideas of real substance”? The phrase came trippingly off the tongue. So, a little help here. What with today’s shortened attention span I don’t need ninety-five, I can get by with two or three. The point is whatever I say will alarm them. Nothing shakier in a church than its doctrine. That’s why they guard it with their lives, isn’t it? I mean, just to lay the H word on the table, it, heresy, is a legal concept, that’s all. I mean the shock is supposed to be Yours, but a heretic can be of no more concern to You than someone kicked out of a co-op building for playing the piano after ten. So I pray, Lord, don’t let me come up with something only worth a reprimand. Let me have the good stuff. Speak to me. Send me an E-mail.

  You were once heard to speak,

  You Yourself are a word, though deemed by some to be unutterable,

  You are said to be the Word, and I don’t doubt

  You are the Last Word.

  You’re the Lord our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, at least that is our story of You.

  So here is your servant the Reverend Dr. Thomas Pemberton, the almost no longer rector of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, addressing You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills.

  Will You show him no mercy, this poor soul tormented in his nostalgia for Your Only Begotten Son? He has failed his training as a detective, having solved nothing.

  May he nevertheless pursue You? God? The Mystery?

  —To assure you further that I am no genius whose ideas are too abstruse for the majority of mankind, let me give you some personal information. You will see how ordinary were my beginnings and how I was swept along like everyone else by the dreadful history of my time. I was without speech for the first three or four years of my life and after that, tongue-tied. Even into my ninth year I spoke slowly, as if dealing with a foreign language, which, as it turned out, I was. What does it matter—all language is a translation from something else and I have lived in that something else for seventy-three years.

  My first memory is of the paving stones of Ulm, the ones I toddled on while I hung and sometimes swung about wildly on the axis of my wrist, in the firm grip of my papa. Each rounded stone I scuffed gave back to me its ineluctable mass. And how was it, I wondered, that the stones fit so nicely, like breadloaves in the baker’s oven? Then I discovered the workmen’s chisel marks which made each stone different though the same as the others. Every stone recorded its own shaping, it had the mark of its history of human work, and all the stones together represented an infinity of decisions under one plan, an intent to make a passable street. As they had—a street that went up the hill and spread suddenly in every direction into the great square of the cathedral, which was also of stone. The whole world was stone. Horse-drawn drays and carriages rolled through my vision with a great t
hunderous clattering that nevertheless did not end in any harm to me, and boots strode past my eyes, and swirls of ladies’ skirts, and the dogged commerce of the whole city happened upon these separately sculpted stones placed one next to another long ago. And in the shadow of the great black stone cathedral, I experienced the child’s revelation that he walks on the thoughts of dead men. And so the paving stones of Ulm, my medieval birthplace, are my first memory—not my mother’s breast, not my bed, not a desperately loved toy, but a street, a way of passage from here to there.

  My father’s little engineering shop was located on the cathedral square. Here, with my uncle Jakob, he manufactured electricity motors. A wonderful whirring sound was to be heard, a soft sound with tone to it, a language of total elision, with inseparable words, the meaning instantaneous and at the same time incomplete.

  The only thing like it came from the culvert that ran behind our house to carry one of the smaller tributaries of the river Blau. My mother was made very nervous by the children who played on the stone escarpment, tossing their twigs and paper boats into the stream and running along then to see the current take them. But I was a stolid, silent child. It was as if I didn’t like to move too rapidly under the weight of my large head, I just stood and listened as the water flowed through its channel, laying its black slick along the stones, hissing and lapping in its passage like the busy burghers of another universe in urgent conversation.

  You may think from these remarks that I attribute too much perception to my infancy. Of course I do, we all do. We go back and forth, revising our minds continuously. The entire problem of mind is of enormous interest, and yet it demands a superhuman courage to dwell on. The mind considering itself—I shudder; it is too vast, a space without dimension, filled with cosmic events that are silent and immaterial. For one’s sanity it is preferable to track God in the external world.

  Ulm was of course destroyed in the Second World War. Well before that war, my father and uncle took their little business to Munich, where they proposed to manufacture dynamos, arc lamps, transformers, and other electrical devices for use by municipalities. And for a while everything went well. We lived in a suburb in a big house behind a wall, where there was a garden with trees. Spring evenings were filled with the perfume of apple blossoms, here where the Nazis would be born. And now I had my little sister Maria with me, two years younger, Maja, my constant companion, whose enormous brown eyes made me laugh and for whom I captured crickets in a jar and made necklaces of dandelions.

  In this house, at my mother’s insistence, I began my violin studies. My mother was a musician, a pianist of resolute seriousness. For her, music was central to the education of a human being. I dutifully applied myself under the tutelage of Herr Schmied, a morose man who wore his thin hair long in homage to Paganini and whose fingers were yellowed with tobacco stain. How many years passed before I understood that notes were intervals, relationships of number, and that sound was a property of these relationships? But finally the system of music made itself clear to me and I trembled for the beauty of it, each piece the proposal of a self-contained and logical construction. I began to study in earnest. I wanted to bring precision to my bowing; I searched for the purest resonance of each note as an intellectual necessity, and the joy of making music, especially together with others, I felt as a form of mental travel within a totally reliable cosmos. Bach, Mozart, Schubert—they will never fail you. When you perform their work properly it will have the character of the inevitable, as in great mathematics, which seems always to be made of pre-existing truths.

  I’ll tell you by contrast the kinds of things I learned in school. I had a teacher in the Luitpold Gymnasium. When he came into the room we stood, and when he held the velvet lapels of his gown and nodded his head, we sat. This was quite normal. But I’d always thought discipline was their means of imposing intellectual rigor and maintaining alertness for the reception of ideas. And that is why in this ridiculous school we did not walk but marched, and stood and sat in unison and chanted our Latin declensions as if they were tribal oaths. It was altogether insulting, in my opinion, perhaps even deadly. After a term or two these boys lost all sparks of mind, curiosity was bludgeoned out of them, their personalities were sealed, and in recess I would sit with my back to the building and watch them running about or wrestling or kicking the football, but, whatever the game, trying undeniably to kill each other. In their recklessness, with their uniform jackets laid aside in neat piles so as not to suffer damage, was the rage of their smoldering beings dispersed helplessly among their comrades. So I saw this and kept myself apart, doing my work, which was undemanding enough, and not testing the ambiguities of possible friendship with any of them, for it was all ruination, in my view, and all from this clearly flawed Germanic principle of education through tyranny. I sat in the classroom and my mind wandered. I had been given a book by my mother’s brother Casar on the subject of Euclidean geometry. I had read it as people read novels. To me it was an exciting, newsworthy book. And now on this one morning I was smiling to myself remembering the marvelous theorem of Pythagoras and the teacher was all at once standing in front of me and he slapped his map pointer across my desk to regain my attention. When the class was over, as I was on my way out with the others, he called me to the front of the room. He looked down at me from his lectern. He had a round red shiny face, this teacher, that reminded me of a caramel apple. One could bite into a face like this and expect to crack through the hard glaze to the pulp. You are a bad influence in my class, Albert, he said. I am going to have you transferred. I didn’t understand. I asked what I had done wrong. You sit back there smiling and dreaming away, he said. If I don’t have the attention of each and every student, how can I maintain my self-respect? With that remark I learned in a flash the secret of all despotism.

  This same teacher, or perhaps it was another, it could as easily have been any of them, but no matter: He one day in class held up a rusty nail between his thumb and forefinger. A spike like this was driven through Christ’s hands and feet, he said, looking directly at me.

  I will say here of poor Jesus, that Jew, and the system in his name, what a monstrous trick history has played on him.

  —Walt Whitman assures us of the transcendence of the bustle and din of New York, the sublimity, the exuberant arrogance, of the living moment. But do pictures lie? Those old silver gelatin prints. . . The drays and carriages, streetcars, els, and sailing vessels at their docks. . . A busy city, great construction pits framed out in wood, streets laid out with string. Men on their knees setting paving stones, great dimly lit lofts of women at sewing machines, men in derbies and shirtsleeves posing in the doorways of their dry-goods stores, endless ranks of clerks at their high desks, women in long skirts and shirtwaists instructing classrooms of children, couples greeting couples on Fifth Avenue, muffled-up ice skaters on the lake in Central Park. . . This is our constructed city, without question the geography of our souls, but these people are not us, they inhabit our city as if they belonged here, the presumption of their right to it is in every gesture, every glance, but they are not us, they’re strangers inhabiting our city, though vaguely familiar, like the strangers in our dreams.

  I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of word is infrastructure? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.

  Christ, how wrong to point out the Brooklyn Bridge or Soho or the row houses of Harlem as examples of our continuity. Something dire has happened. As if these photographs are not silent instances of the past but admonitory, like ghosts, to be of then and of now simultaneously, so as to prophesy hauntingly our forfeiture of their world, given such time only for our illusions to flourish before we’re chastened into our own places in the photographs, to
stand with them, these strangers of our dreams, but less distinctly, with faces and figures difficult to make out, if not altogether invisible.

  —So I hear from Tom Pemberton and we meet for a drink at Knickerbocker’s, Ninth and University Place.

  He doesn’t wear the collar these days, he’s not defrocked but more or less permanently unassigned. Works at a cancer hospice on Roosevelt Island. He’s grown heavier, the big face is more lined than I remember, but still open, candid, floridly handsome, the light, wide-set eyes moving restlessly over the room as if looking for someone to gladden his heart.

  You write well enough, he says, but no writer can reproduce the actual texture of living life.

  Not even Joyce?

  I should look at him again. But now that I see the dissimilarity from the inside, so to speak, I think I’ll be wary of literature from here on.

  Good move.

  You’re offended. But I’m telling you you’re exemplary. It’s a compliment. After all, I might have chalked you off as just a lousy writer. It’s unsettling reading about me from inside my mind. Another shock to another faith.

  Well, maybe I should drop the whole thing.

  You don’t need my approval, for God’s sake. I agreed to this—that’s it, there are no strings. I wouldn’t even ask you to keep that mention of my girls out of it. They’re older now, of course. Apartments of their own.

  Consider it done.

  Trish is remarried.. . . Why didn’t you say who her father is?

  That’s to come.

  I still hear from him. The usual smirk from on high, though I have to say he enjoyed having a peacenik priest in the family.

  Good for the image.

  I suppose. But now, listen, you’re using the real names. You told me—