City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  I know. I’ll change them. Just now they’re still the best names. On the other hand they used to be the only possible names. So that’s progress.

  And it wasn’t the Times that picked up the story of my stolen crucifix. It was only one of the free papers.

  Well, Father, when you compose something, that’s what you do, you make the composition. Bend time, change things, put things in, leave things out. You’re not sworn to include everything. Or to make something happen the way it did. Facts can be inhibiting. Actuality is beside the point. Irrelevant.

  Irrelevant actuality?

  You do what the clock needs to tick.

  Well there are some things just plain wrong.

  Oh boy. Like what, Pem?

  I’m not telling you what to write, you understand. It’s hands-off. But it wasn’t a sermon at St. Tim’s that got the bishop on my back. And what you have me saying is not really the cause. Really it was a bunch of things.

  You told me a particular sermon—

  Well yes and no—I’ve thought about this—and I think it could have been a guest stint I did over in Newark that he felt was the last straw. But I’m not sure. By the way, it’s different in that diocese, they are broad church over there. Bring in the women, the gays. . . the liberal side of the argument. My side. You don’t want to oversimplify. The Anglicans are all over the lot. There’s actually more leeway for people like me than you give the church credit for.

  What did you say?

  What?

  Your bishop’s last straw.

  Oh—it was simple enough. I merely asked the congregation what they thought the engineered slaughter of the Jews in Europe had done to Christianity. To our story of Christ Jesus. I mean, given the meager response of our guys, is the Holocaust a problem only for Jewish theologians? But beyond that I asked them—it was a big crowd that morning, and they were with me, I could feel it, after the empty pews of St. Tim’s it seemed to me like Radio City—I asked them to imagine. . . what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn’t some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau. So what would that be? I went into some possibilities. A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I said to them I didn’t know what the proper response would be. . . but I was sure I’d recognize it if I saw it.

  That’s what you said?

  For starters.

  I see.

  Yeah. That was the doozy.

  —The simplest digital invasive techniques deliver the husband’s brokerage and bank accounts, insurance policies and medical records, mortgage payments, school and service records, credit ratings, political contributions. All available for study and eventual confiscation. His support services, legal, accounting, investment counseling. Who and where they are. Means of communication with. Handwriting analysis. Voice analysis—an easily rendered Philadelphia twang. Analysis of a typical month’s credit card and phone bills for the secrets in his life, a girlfriend, a dependent mother. Nothing. No undue trade with jewelers, florists; the husband is a squeaky-clean narcissist, the only affair, though all-consuming, is with himself.

  Some ten or fifteen years older than either of them, the husband is something of a corporate wonder, the CEO of a computer manufacturing corporation, who is being courted by a Japanese conglomerate with international holdings in satellite communications, electronics, and the soft drink industry. The lover understands that at this level, effective management does not require any special knowledge of the nature of a business. He instructs his mistress to persuade her husband to accept the challenge—life in another city, regular trips to Japan, new fields to conquer.. . . This is done. Then, while the husband is busy wrapping things up at his old job, taking care to maintain cordial relations, even advising the board on his successor, the essence of corporate life being volatility and no bridge ever being burned, the wife/mistress travels to the Pacific coast in order to familiarize herself with the lay of the land, find a new house in the right neighborhood, and so on.

  The lover flies with her to the new city, chooses the house, the furnishings, everything down to the smallest detail. At this point in her mind she is so in thrall to him that everything they are doing seems entirely natural and normal.

  She has come up with several photographs of the husband, from snapshots to formal corporate portraits. The lover flies to Budapest with the digitized photographs translated into holographic representation for a cooperative surgeon he knows from the old days and, without representing that he is still with the intelligence community, lets the surgeon think he is, so that the code of ultimate discretion will be in force. You are not that far apart, the doctor says, studying the holograph. And it’s true, thinks the lover: After all, her attraction to me had to have been somewhat directed by our being more or less the same lean morph type, both of us having called up in her mind someone she loved as a child. I don’t mean oedipal governance necessarily, all of us look for reprises of the pure attachments installed in us in our unconscious youth. There are transferences even then in those tender ages when model people imprint themselves as lifelong loves so deeply indelibly that you are heliotropic in their presence.

  My nose will be broken and enlarged, the hairline brought down via transplants to a widow’s peak, I will have to keep my hair close cut and grayed at the temples to add ten years or so. The jaw will be widened slightly with implants. I will have to gain about twelve to fifteen pounds, wear a shoe lift.. . .

  But this cannot be a story about details. It cannot depend on a realistic presentation of thoughtfully worked out details to prop up its credibility. All of that can be passed over lightly in montage. The movie should operate in the abstract realm where practical matters give way to uncanny resonances with everyday truth. Because evil as it is most often committed comes of the given life, it takes not only its motivation but its form from the structure of existing circumstances, it is not usually a thing of such high-concept deviance and requiring such extensive planning to perform.

  In fact the movie can be said to begin only with what in the lover’s mind is the culminating scene, a work of performance art, in which an American business success, a man for whom he has no feelings whatsoever let alone dislike, will be dropped precipitously into material and psychic dereliction. He will come to a door he thinks is his own and not be recognized by his wife. She will deny that she knows him. A duplicate of himself will ask the police to take him away and charge him with stalking. Security guards will prevent him from entering his office. Hotels will not accept his credit cards. Old friends will back away from him in fear. Lawyers will not take his calls. His passport will be confiscated as a forgery. Disoriented, and only imperfectly understanding that something has been done to him, he will be left ranting and railing in a mad state of total self-displacement, a deportee from himself.

  Perhaps, thinks the lover, he will go crazy. Perhaps he will attempt to kill me and end up in some hospital for the criminally insane. Another delicious bit of suspense is the measure of my control over her, calculable to the extent to which she can be trusted. If residual feelings of affection in the form of pity or terror will operate in her, perhaps to the point of revealing the truth to him, so that even at risk of criminal indictment to herself, she will bring down the whole beautiful work of art to a crashing conclusion.

  What is most likely, of course—and how can I claim I did not suspect this of myself from the beginning—is that having brought about this crime of usurpation, I will discover that even this cannot stave off my profound, chronic lassitude, which can now be alleviated, if only for a moment, by abandoning the woman who has committed herself so obsessively, adoringly to me, so that all she has left for
the life of her is the shattered husband whom she has betrayed.

  And so we have the secular Enlightenment version of Amphitryon. And all of it from the lovely, self-assured young woman I sat next to at a dinner party. This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. . .

  —Crows on the dock? So they’re here now too. I have never heard of crows coming to saltwater. This is very bad. Look at them, three or four, hopping down from the piling to the dock, pecking away at the crab legs and clamshells left by the gulls. An advance party, a patrol. If they like what they find, the flocks will follow squawking and croaking in the waterside trees, raising hell like a goddamn motorcycle club. Jesus. I’ve got orioles here that flash in the blueberry, finches who like to balance on the tips of water reeds when the wind is up, I’ve got redwinged blackbirds, mockingbirds, cowbirds, cardinals, wrens, flickers, swifts, I’ve got skimmers, sandpipers, and bad-postured night herons like old ladies with hump necks.. . . Crows are smarter and bigger and noisier and they commune. They take over, they will drive out all the others, this is serious, I will have to watch them closely. You must go back to the suburban woods of Westchester, crows. You are inlanders, you flock in the big maples and come down to the street to eat the car-casses of squirrels. You don’t look good against an open sky. Crows on the dock are a mixed metaphor.

  —Let us consider for a moment those remarks of my teacher in the Luitpold Gymnasium: that in order to maintain his self-respect he required my attention, and that Jesus had been crucified by such as I. So there were the two elements now fused—the authoritarian and the militant Christian. And now I ask you to consider the possibility that the pious brainwork of Christian priests and kings that over centuries had demonized and racialized the Jewish people in Europe with the autos-da-fé, pogroms, economic proscriptions, legal encumbrances, deportations, and a culture of socially respectable anti-Semitism. . . had at this moment in my gymnasium classroom attained critical mass. Let us imagine such small quiet resentments imploding in the ears of a thousand, a million children of my generation. And a moment later: the Holocaust. For you see what moves not as fast as light but fast enough, and with an accrued mass of such density as not to be borne, is the accelerating disaster of human history.

  So what, to be logical, must we conclude? We must conclude that given the events in the twentieth century of European civilization, the traditional religious concept of God cannot any longer be seriously maintained. Well then, if I am a serious person, as I believe I am, I must seek God elsewhere than in the religious scriptures. I must try to understand certain irreducible laws of the universe as a transcendent behavior. In these laws, God, the Old One, will be manifest.

  Now oddly enough, though these are cold, eternal, imageless verities, insofar as we are beginning to understand them, these great voiceless, vast habits of universal dimension, we may take comfort in their beauty. We may glory in our consciousness of them, that they are—incomprehensibly—comprehensible!

  For, remember, there could in theory be alternatives to what is. For example, if gravity ceased to be a fundamental mechanism of the universe—let us do a thought experiment—what would result? Our solar system would fly apart, all the waters of the earth would spill out of their ocean basins and pour in crystals through black space as lumps of coal down a chute, the whole system of dark-mattered space and stars, sunlight, organic life, mitosis, one thing leading to another in an unfolding of necessary and sufficient conditions. . . would not be. Well, what would be? Perhaps after several trillions of years something organic would occur out of the vast eternal black shapelessness that did not depend on light or moisture in order to propagate—some formless ephemera nourished on nothing—and life, if it was life, would be defined in a way that cannot now be defined. Surely all of this is less an inducement to consciousness than what we have now, what we see now, what we try to understand now.

  By way of calming our nerves, let us celebrate the constancy of the speed of light, let us praise gravity, that it is in action the curvature of space, and glory that even light is bent by its force, riding the curvatures of space toward celestial objects as a fine, shimmering red-golden net might drape over them. The subjection of light to gravity was proven by my colleague Millikan some years after my theory came to me, when the light passing near the star X shifted by his measurements to the red spectrum, indicating that it had bent. And there, my dear friends, is a sacrament for us, is it not? A first sacrament, the bending of starlight. Yes. The bending of starlight.

  —Sarah Blumenthal’s Conversation with Her Father

  I was a runner. My job was to carry the news or the instructions from the council to the families in their houses. Or messages from one council member to another. Or to stand watch by the square, at the entrance to the bridge, to let them know if the open car was coming with the half-track filled with soldiers just behind it, which meant the next bad thing was about to occur. I would run like the wind through the back alleys and side streets to give warning. So I had responsibilities beyond my age. There were seven of us, seven boys, who were runners. We wore special caps, like police caps, with a military brim. And the stars sewn on our jackets, of course, so it was all very perverted, my military sense of myself. I felt privileged that the star was not like all the other stars but some indication of rank, and the military-style hat, and knowing what was going on almost before anyone else—all that made me feel special. Mr. Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader, Dr. Koenig—he said I was his best runner. For the most important matters he chose me. So there it was, I had a star on my tunic and a garrison cap, and I was the star runner, that’s the way I thought of myself.

  I ask you to remember. I was only ten years old. At the same time of living in this illusion, and of sometimes even secretly admiring the uniforms of our enemies, I knew full well what was happening. How could I not?

  The overall duty of the council was to provide on a daily basis worker brigades for the military factories in the city. If this was not done, if the Germans thought we were not productive enough, that would be the end of us. While the men and the younger women were conscripted for labor, most women and the less able men were assigned to maintain the ghetto, to keep it functioning, the bakery, the hospital, the laundry, and so on. So women as well had to be fit. Any woman found to be pregnant was taken away and murdered. Or if the child was born, both mother and child were murdered. So pregnant mothers as well as old people, homeless children, and the physically incapacitated were kept illegally in houses all through the ghetto. When we knew a search was coming, each runner had a number of houses to cover. I would dash to my allotted houses and knock on the door a special way. This was the signal that people had to hide. It was all done quietly, efficiently, no screaming or shouting. Then, my route covered, either I would have time to get back to the safety of the council offices or I would hide myself somewhere, usually on the roof of some empty house, huddling against the chimney. These were the moments of the purest terror, when the illegals would be dispersed into all manner of hiding places, cupboards, empty potato bins, root cellars, attic closets, wells, underground crypts. And I would listen as inevitably some of these hiding places would be discovered. From different quarters I would hear the running feet of a squad of soldiers, or guttural shouts, then the screams of someone, or sometimes a pistol shot. The Germans brought Jewish ghetto policemen with them on these searches and tortured them on the spot to find out what they knew. People were found and dragged away, you could hear awful sounds from the different streets. Wherever I was, however safe myself, I would feel such rage—to the point where I would verge on a suicidal impulse to rush out and attack the soldiers, leap on their backs, claw at them, pound them. I felt this desire in my jawbone, my teeth.

  When I was assigned to the square where the guards on post stopped and examined the work details crossing the bridge, my mission was to give the council warning of anything unusual. The guards were oafs, stupid men for the most part, they were the dregs of the G
erman military, some clearly of middle age. In my runner’s garrison cap I was virtually invisible to them. I could keep crisscrossing the square endlessly, even occasionally hunkering behind some pile of rubble in order to observe the goings-on. If for instance one of the workers was caught in the evening trying to smuggle in a loaf of bread or a few cigarettes, there would be a terrible row and the council would have to intervene in a hurry to try to negotiate the least possible punishment. Sometimes the soldiers would accost a woman worker and try to detain her in their guardhouse on some pretext or other, and that would have to be dealt with. In the middle of the day, when less went on, I stayed mostly in the side streets, though never out of sight or hearing of the square. I was a responsible child, but when things were too quiet and I could not resist the impulse I’d slip into one of the empty houses and climb out on the roof and maintain my watch there. Most of the ghetto houses were no more than cabins, but some were two stories, some were made of stone, there were barns with haylofts, stables, shops with flat roofs, a commercial building or two. The danger of watching from a roof, huddled in the crevice made by the chimney and warmed by the sun, was that I could find myself falling asleep and one of the open cars could come across the bridge and pass under me without my being aware. Usually, I was too hungry to fall asleep, though I did daydream. I could see the entire span of the bridge and the frontage streets of the city across the river that I had once called home. The veins of the city spread into the uplands and I could see the blocks of apartment houses and office buildings and, depending on where I was, I might even see the military factories against the hills where on windless days smoke from the tall stacks poured directly upward into the sky.

  If I turned my head to the east, I could see where the terrain roughened into foothills and then mountains with canyons, all of it thickly forested with pine and birch trees. This terrain was magical to me because it was where the Jewish partisans were based who had guns and attacked Germans in military forays. I believed, quite unreasonably, that my parents were with the partisans, were themselves fighting heroes of the Jewish resistance. I believed this at the same time that I believed they were dead. I believed both simultaneously. I will explain this to you, because it also will show you how I became a runner in the first place.