City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  You think human thought was a different mode then?

  It was brilliant then as it is now among the cosmologists. It was sophisticated, it was politically astute, it brought order. It deferred terror. Mode? I don’t know. They used what they had. Visions. Hallucinations. Just as science is using what it has. So. There it is. I’ve told you everything. Let’s have another. Miss? Could we have another round?

  Wait a minute, Pem.

  Well, everything you can buy.

  You never knew any of this before?

  I always knew all of it. We all do. Divinity students read Nietzsche for immunization. Fact is, most of us make a decision and stick to it.. . . But if you want to speak of modalities, I’ll tell you what I’ve kept. What I know in my heart and in my brain is the closest I’ll ever get to a revelation of my own. I am still happily, thankfully vulnerable to one aspect of the ancient apprehension. I can recognize a sign when I see one.

  What does that mean?

  Not a stop sign, my secular good buddy.

  Uh-oh. You mean after all you’ve been saying—

  I know it’s hard.

  . . . like it was the Jews for Jesus? Is that what you’re telling me?

  Everett, goddamnit, give me a break.. . . It’s not the Jews for Jesus or any other forlorn fucking thing you can think of! Why did I bring this up! Talking about it is ruinous, it turns it to shit, like everything else.

  Well I can’t [inaudible]. . .

  Listen: It doesn’t matter what maniacs put it there or why they did, don’t you understand that? A sign is a sign. And when you know it’s a sign, that’s enough. That’s how you know it’s a sign. It is not something whose meaning is instantaneous. It doesn’t light up on Broadway. And it’s not something you go looking for, it has to come to you. That’s what signs do, they come to you. There is moment to this thing, where you know something. . . has finally happened. It is a thunderous silent thing. I made a mistake even mentioning it.

  Shall I tell you about our specials?

  Not now, dear, we have some drinking to do.. . . I shouldn’t talk about it and neither should you. Let’s forget the whole thing.. . .

  Come on, Father.

  Listen, I’ll just say this one thing. You place a big brass cross down on a synagogue roof, what could you be doing? Well, you could be doing with one brilliant stroke everything I’ve been translating into language for you.

  —Joel, he was the littlest runner. . . Isaiah, Dov, Micah, who went to work in the city eventually. When a boy grew too tall, you see, and his voice changed and he was clearly then fit for factory labor, another identity would be found for him and off he would go. Daniel, Solomon. . . Maybe in some cases these were their adopted names, as Yehoshua was mine. I don’t know. But all were the hope of the Jewish parents who had left them orphans, this covey of kings and prophets waiting up in the loft for their assignments.

  I will say that there was not a great spirit of camaraderie among us. We had each suffered great losses and were depleted in spirit. Also we were hungry most of the time. As growing boys we did not have enough to eat, and this made us lethargic. When we were not busy we tended to fall asleep. So there was never a problem of noise, none of the normally outlandish behavior of boys. We were quiet and kept our own counsel. And we were each privy to secret things we were taught to keep absolutely silent about, not even confiding in one another about where we went or what we had to do.

  In these circumstances we grew stoic, with an unnatural patience for our age. And so even now, in my adult survival and the blessings I have amassed for myself, meaning your late dear mother and yourself, my great blessings and consolation, and even in the sacred bliss of walking as a free man down an American street, I have my constant companion, the shadow of my unlived past, the other-named boy of my lost history.

  When my father’s vegetable garden was again in flower, long lines of refugees began to appear, shuffling across the bridge with their bags and valises as the Germans strove to replenish the supply of slave labor for their war plants. The newcomers camped in the square while the S.S. examined them and passed them over to council staff to assign them their dwellings. The runners were employed in leading them first to the delousing station. Lice were a constant problem in the ghetto, I’d had them myself. The danger, of course, was that they carried diseases like typhus.

  Every once in a while those who had been rejected for one reason or another would climb onto the bed of an open truck, and when it was full, the truck would be driven back across the bridge. I could not look at those people.

  By the summer the ghetto population had swollen to six or seven thousand. Food rationing became more difficult to manage. Public sanitary measures took on a greater urgency. More people were recruited to work for the council, the German managerial bureaucracy increased. More and more often I had to run like the wind from my observation post in the square to let them know a staff car flying a Nazi pennon from its fender was crossing the bridge. And there were all the new people to be registered, under their own names or some other, and testimonies for Mr. Barbanel secretly to record. Many of these refugees brought news with them of the fate of other communities. Outside the city of Kovno, people had been taken into a field where pits had been dug, and they were herded into these pits and machine-gunned from the embankments, and then others were pushed in on top of them and machine-gunned, and in this way, to the screams of agony, with men and women and children murdered and bleeding and buried alive, ten thousand people perished in less than a day. Several sources attested to this number.

  Whenever Mr. Barbanel received reports, he either wrote down verbatim what he was told or asked the person reporting to write a statement. He kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation, the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details—every imaginable item went into this history of his. I often saw him writing. He used whatever paper he had on hand—unused student exercise books, for example. Even now I can close my eyes and see Barbanel’s handwriting, a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day, each moment, of our lives as captives, that supple, deft determination to put it all down, record it indelibly, as something of immense human importance. As it was. As it always will be. Of course his doing this was illegal. The Germans were quite aware of their culpability and forbade unauthorized writings or photographs. They had confiscated all cameras. But as the chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold this within his formal duties.

  Gradually, over time, sitting on the bench in his office while he interviewed a new arrival or seeing him stuff a week’s past orders from the German command into his briefcase, I understood what he was doing and asked him one day if he was by profession a historian. Barbanel looked surprised for a moment and then smiled and shook his head. “You are one smart kid, Yehoshua,” he said. “Yes, I’m a historian, by necessity. But you wouldn’t tell anyone, would you.” This was a statement, not a question. I swore I wouldn’t and we shook hands on it.

  Barbanel had been a dealer in lumber before the war. I suppose it was because he was a younger man that he generally took bolder positions than Dr. Koenig in council discussions. It was good morale for us boys that he poked fun at the enemy, made fun of their ways, as if it were not their power over us but their stupidity that characterized them. In the presence of the Germans he was not deferential but matter-of-fact. He made no effort to hide his contempt for them, yet for some reason they tolerated this.

  Now that I knew about Barbanel’s archive, I was brought further into his confidence. Every week or so he put in my hands a packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “For Miss Margolin, and watch your step.” I would
slip the packet under my shirt and run with it to this nurse in the hospital, Greta Margolin, who was his friend and, as I realized only when I was older, his lover.

  Miss Margolin was every bit as brave as he. Not only because she kept the diary for him, but because she was involved in the very dangerous business of smuggling women who were pregnant out of the ghetto, and in at least one case of a woman who had somehow escaped attention, delivering the baby and taking them both out, how and where, I didn’t know. She was a real nurse, the only real nurse there. I suppose she was in her thirties. Of course I was in love with her. I looked forward to these runs though they were probably the most dangerous thing I did. This Greta, it was not so much her beauty, though she was quite good-looking, with prominent cheekbones, a good well-defined jaw, and straight straw-colored hair, which she tied behind her. . . but the way she smiled and her eyes lit up when she saw me. She had a lovely healing smile, it broke out, that smile, spontaneously and with such affection in it, as if in that moment no troubles could interfere with what was between us as dear human beings, the inviolable state of human love that was the true natural thing. “Yehoshua, my boyfriend, where have you been all this time?”

  Mr. Barbanel, I could admire and trust and even revere, though without knowing it, but there was about him always a sense of urgency, the need to get things done or undone. With Greta Margolin, in her always sparkling clean white nurse’s frock, I found a dignified bearing, a composure, that I remember now and that my boy’s heart translated as her physical attraction. In my eyes she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I watched her hands as she received the manuscript package from me, sometimes they touched mine. I would be flustered and, without ceremony, run off and hear her soft laugh behind me.

  She stored Barbanel’s manuscript somewhere, I didn’t know where, but I understood her nurse’s position was a factor in keeping it safe until she could smuggle it out of the ghetto, across the bridge, to a hiding place in the city or perhaps in the countryside.

  Barbanel’s diary, by the time I was aware of it, must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. And since neither he nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, to this day those papers are hidden there in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition.

  I myself am not a writer and so I cannot convey to you the presence of this couple, their living presence, the immediacy of the breathing being of them, their greatness of life. My worshipful memory of them disguises the truth, that they were ordinary folks who in normal times would have lived out quite modest lives. They were resplendently nothing special, Josef Barbanel and Greta Margolin, no more than my own mother and father, no more than any of us.

  I think now that though Dr. Koenig knew and approved of Barbanel’s secret archive, he did not know, or pretended not to know, about Barbanel’s shortwave radio, which was kept inside a wall in our attic dormitory over the council offices. Two or three nights a week, Barbanel would climb the ladder to our quarters and we would assist him as he pried open the wall board to expose the radio and plug it in to a socket affixed to our one light fixture. We had several training practices in closing the radio down quickly. And one boy always kept watch at the window and another stationed himself beside the door to listen for any sounds below.

  There were immeasurable gains to our morale in having that secret radio, which I think Barbanel understood. He sat cross-legged on the floor, with his earphones on, and listened with his eyes closed to the late-night British news broadcast. We studied his face intently, trying to learn from his expression if the news was good or bad, watching him nod or shake his head or lift his fist in silence, sitting through fifteen minutes of this, totally rapt, fearless and, above all, connected in spirit to the rest of the world.

  The radio was a battered German-made table model, a Grundig, with rounded edges and a cloth register over the speaker and a dial that raised or lowered a bar up and down an illuminated scale of shortwave frequencies. I felt I could see into the glowing radio as into the cosmos. I was moved to have philosophical thoughts. Why was the scale of numbers on the Nazi radio recognizable to me, a Jewish boy? Because numbers were immutable. Their order was fixed, universally true. Even Nazis had to comply with them. Well, if numbers were the same for everyone everywhere in the universe, didn’t that mean they had to have been installed in our brains by God? And if so, why—except to teach everyone the nature of truth. It was true, for example, that two plus two of anything was four. No matter what you applied them to, numbers, being fixed and eternally what they were and nothing else, epitomized truth.

  I wouldn’t have wanted to mention my idea to my father or the tailor Srebnitsky. But in the darkness of our loft, I would stare into this illuminated cosmos of radio frequencies and nurture the idea that numbers were the imperishably true handiwork of God. (Not that the Nazis would ever know.) And that He had given us the power to perceive His imperishably true handiwork for a reason. The reason was so that we would be able to perceive the Messiah when he came, whose identity would be as self-evident as two and two equals four, and whose coming would bring the universally recognized, imperishable, and beneficent truth of God to everyone and everything in the world for all time to come. Such were a child’s thoughts in the darkness of the illuminated frequencies of the Grundig radio.

  —I mean, Sarah functions, she is raising their children, running that household. She resigned from Emanuel and works now only for what’s left of their little congregation. But she’s in a state deeper than mourning. I’ll tell you something—could we have another round here, please!—I’ll tell you something, this woman. . . Not that she is angelically inhumanly perfect. . . but there is such a gravity of soul there, such immense inherent, I don’t know, decorum. This isn’t ordinary piety I’m talking about, and certainly not sanctity, a word I hate, it’s more as if she is naturally endowed with a modest urban grace—as if she’s a New Yorker living here but also. . . in Tillich’s country of ultimate concern. Am I being totally incoherent?

  No, I think I understand.

  You were right that I’m attracted to her. You got that right. I don’t remember saying so in so many words. Christ, I’m in love with her, I want to be with her. I would convert, if that’s what it took. But I make no move. I have the feeling this would trivialize me in her eyes, that, in a way she would immediately forgive, I would reveal a lack of understanding of her serious, smiling, irrevocable. . . widowhood.

  And believe it or not I, too, mourn him. To deal with courage with the incredible assault on God, by modernity, by the century, and by the religious themselves. The quest for a believable God, Christ how I understand that. A thin, wiry little guy, Joshua, there was not an ounce of fat on him, a runner’s build, he was really intelligent, but so genuinely modest, he had a characteristic frown—I don’t know, of self-judgment?—he was a serious, gentle soul, neat, meticulous in his thinking, with a very natural serious precision of mind, and this is what she loved, what she found in him as the mate for her and a father for her children. I mean, I was transfixed by both of them. Isn’t that rare? Where do you see that nowadays, people of Godliness whom you want to be anywhere near?

  —By this time, a group of houses at the south end of the ghetto had been converted to a new small hospital of thirty or forty bunk beds, the same Germans who had burned the old hospital having decided that those with infectious diseases must after all continue to be isolated, identified, and then dealt with in a more precise and perhaps less wasteful way. Of course Dr. Koenig was resolved never again to hospitalize a patient with typhus or any other infectious disease. At great risk to himself, he treated that patient at home and wrote a false diagnosis on his chart. I have told you of his bravery, and this was one aspect of it. But that was not all. With the complicity of the one other Jewish doctor and Miss Margolin, Koenig would occasionally admit someone for a hospital stay who was not ill but
in some way at risk of discovery and execution. Then there was the matter of illegal midwifing. For all these reasons, the hospital was an extremely vulnerable area and its security was constantly monitored by the council.

  So now one morning I arrived at the little hospital with a packet of Mr. Barbanel’s writings inside my shirt, and Miss Margolin was in the admitting office with a man who seemed to be annoying her. She glanced at me over his shoulder and shook her head with the slightest motion so that I knew this was not the time to conduct our business. I stood against the wall, near the door.

  “You are not sick,” she was saying to the man. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

  “How can you be so sure?” He turned around and looked at me with a big smile on his face but with eyes that sized me up, from my runner’s cap to my toes. “How can nurse know I am not sick without she examines me?”

  He was an ugly, horse-faced man, his teeth broken and discolored. He spoke this odd, not quite right Yiddish. He wore farm clothes and heavy boots caked in mud. A cap on his head which he did not remove though he was indoors in the presence of a woman.

  “You must examine me if I say I am sick,” he said to Miss Margolin.

  “Your head is what needs to be examined,” Miss Margolin said. “Go back to work, and if you come here again like this, I will report you.”

  She opened the door behind her, and glancing coldly at him, she withdrew. The door closed and I heard the bolt slide into place.