City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  “You know my sickness!” he shouted. “A man who is sick with love for you!”

  He turned to me, not smiling now. “What do you look at?” he said. He was brazen, he stepped behind the counter and peered at the papers there, the notices on the wall, and everything else that was none of his business. I didn’t move. I felt the packet of papers against my skin. I was afraid of him, but also angry and protective of Greta Margolin. I should have gotten out of there, but I hoped that with someone, even a boy, watching him he would feel constrained to leave. A minute later, he whistled a kind of soft nonchalant whistle as he walked by me out the door, tilting my hat over my eyes for good measure.

  In all the stories and films, spies are cunning and subtle and it takes the whole story to flush them out. In the ghetto there was nothing subtle about them. They gave off the smell even if they weren’t German.

  Perhaps that same evening, or maybe the next day, Mr. Barbanel sat me down in private and told me the archival material he had taken such pains to assemble and that Greta Margolin had been hiding for him was no longer safe in the ghetto. “It must be moved,” he said. “From now on things must be done differently. Do you understand how important this is?” I nodded. I knew. And I knew immediately, without asking, why he was confiding in me, for after all, wasn’t I his star runner?

  My drab little mind was brought to life by the excitement, the danger of what I was now to do. It was a feverish feeling, quite unhealthy, it was a drug, an amphetamine, this danger to a boy who knew if he was caught he could be tortured and shot.

  Yet, in fact, as you might suppose, knowing Barbanel, my expeditions were reasonably safe. The bulk of the archive, a footlocker’s worth, had been transported over the bridge and to the city, how or by what subterfuge or bribery, I was not told. It remained for me to smuggle out the current material wrapped in oilcloth and held with precious strips of adhesive tape to my chest and back. I made perhaps seven, perhaps eight trips over that many weeks, from the late summer into the fall. As the weather grew colder I felt safer, because I had not only a shirt to cover my contraband but a sweater and a jacket over that.

  Now, this may bring a smile, but as a boy your father had a thick head of hair. You’ll just have to believe me. They trimmed it closely and, besides that, dyed it to a color not exactly blond but certainly lighter. This was one of the pains they took to make me as inconspicuous or non-Jewish as possible for the city. I was outfitted in clothing my own size and not too small for me, as my own clothes were. Of course I wore no star or garrison cap. And I was given a fairly decent pair of shoes. These shoes I carried tied by their laces hung from my neck as I made my way out of the ghetto through an abandoned viaduct, so antiquated that the Germans did not know about it. The access to this pipe, incidentally, was by means of the cistern inside a stone mill house. I was not entirely comfortable scurrying along in a crouch like one of the rats who lived down there, trying unsuccessfully to hold my breath because of the cold, rotten smell of iron viscera and earth and animal droppings. But it was not that far to go, really. The viaduct ended in a pile of boulders and rubble at the river’s edge maybe a half-mile upstream of the barbed wire fencing around the ghetto. Here the river was quite shallow and filled with rocks, it was at a bend, so that it was possible to cross unseen behind the cover of trees and undergrowth on both banks.

  I’m making it sound more arduous than it was. A simple walk down a lane brought me to a lightly populated residential district on the city’s outskirts. I simply waited at a corner for a streetcar. I was equipped with money, a knapsack of schoolbooks, I knew the Lithuanian language, and I had a false identity card with yet another name. Not once on any of these trips was I ever close to being discovered. I was never the object of more than a glance from a policeman or a German soldier, although women of a motherly age, as I got into the heart of the city, sometimes regarded me with curiosity, or even a look of suspicion. I would smile at them brightly and even tip my cap and wish them good day.

  So this was Yehoshua X, Secret Agent Mystery Boy, in action. My trips were designed to put me in the heart of the city in the late afternoon, when the streets were active. But a crushing revelation awaited me each time I arrived. True, it was a wartime occupied city, with troop carriers rushing through the streets, and Nazi flags flying from the city hall, and not exactly a profusion of goods and foodstuffs in the stores and shops, and not exactly a well-fed or happy populace to be seen going about their business. . . nevertheless, to see the urban expanse around me, to be assailed by the sights and sounds of the city I had been born in and had gone to school in, the streets of stone apartment houses with courtyards, electric power lines, street railways, overhead signs that suggested the vast extent of city environs, to be recalled to the assumption of a normal historically grounded modern civilization, as wretched and anti-Semitic as it had been. . . and to compare this inevitably to the pathetic impoverished little slave camp in which we lived, with our rural hovels, penned like animals, and isolated, displaced, and habituated to the terror of not knowing each day if we were to be allowed to live to the next. . . it was unfortunate for anyone, let alone a child, to have this acute instruction driven home. I mean, if I had not been assigned to make these trips with Barbanel’s documents, I would not have so keenly felt the terrible loss that had been incurred, nor understood with a voluminous awareness the catastrophe that had happened and was still happening. . .

  My destination was a small Catholic church in a working-class neighborhood not far from the railroad station, a stone church, with a small graveyard in the front. Unfortunately I cannot remember its name. It probably wasn’t that big, nothing as grand as the cathedral in the central square, but it seemed formidable enough to me, and I have to say, the moment I entered through the oaken doors was always the uneasiest moment of my journey. It was dark in there, with banks of flickering candles, those votive candles that reminded me of the yahrzeit or memory candles that, when we had them, we lit in the ghetto for our dead. I couldn’t understand why there were gates, like prison bars, to separate the altar from the people praying in the pews, sometimes a German soldier or two, but more usually women, elderly women with babushkas over their heads. The women and the candles seemed very Jewish to me, although this could only be a puzzling thought, what with the large, painted, and very realistic plaster Christ hanging on his crucifix in the apse behind the altar with blood dripping from his forehead and hands and feet.

  The procedure in which I had been trained required me to kneel and cross myself and then repair to one of the confessionals off to the side, on an aisle. Here I would wait for a few minutes until, having seen that the coast was clear, a priest, Father Petrauskas was his name, opened the door and led me to his rectory.

  He was a kind man, the father, he would nod and smile in genuine friendship when he greeted me. Some of his teeth were missing. His head was shaven, and his face was so wrinkled with grooves, folds, and crosshatches that it seemed made of parchment. His eyes were slitted in his cheeks. His black suit was tight on him and very shiny. After I had removed my shirt, he would unwind the adhesive tape, always taking care where it had to be peeled from my skin, and accept the packets of material, and when I was again buttoned up, he would give me something to eat, a piece of bread with jam, or some soup, and sit across the table from me and watch me eat. I do not mean to libel the Catholic Church, but it has occurred to me from time to time over the years that this father may have been a Jewish convert to Catholicism. I don’t know why I have that feeling, I have no evidence this was the case. Somehow he was known to Barbanel as a trusted friend and had taken this risk for what, given the exigencies of the times, might have seemed an almost abstract cause, the cause of the historical record, the helpless cause of no redress but memory.

  I would leave, usually as darkness was setting in, and retrace the route and take the streetcar back to the edges of town, getting off one stop before or after my corner, where I drifted down the lane to the rive
r crossing. Here I would once more remove my Lithuanian boy’s shoes and crawl back through the viaduct into the ghetto. I would arrive exhilarated and go looking for Mr. Barbanel to report my success, and then I would change into my clothes like an actor after his performance and set my runner’s cap firmly on my head.

  —You can go up to look at birds in the short summer of the Canadian Arctic, flying from Yellowknife low in a DC-3 over the startled herds of caribou to Bathurst. There you camp on top of the impregnable tundra and go out in outboard motors with the Inuit, the people who live up there. In the summer, the lower Arctic is a sea, and they take you out in their open boats to an island where they know one eagle lives, or a clutch of phalaropes, or a white gyrfalcon raising a nest of chicks. The numbers are small in the Arctic, whatever is alive is noticed. The genuine face of pleasure of our guide at the tiller pointing up as a yellow-billed loon beat past I thought of as a collegial satisfaction. Some of these little islands you stop at seem to be made of eggshells and feathers and guano. There is another kingdom of life that has nothing to do with us. The Inuit who’ve not gone to the cities, those who stay behind living the old way—modified, of course, they use snowmobiles for their wolf hunting in winter—the Inuit hunt and fish, and navigate these waters by taking their position from a distant mountain, which appears as a face looking at the sky. The face is Indian, the top of the mountain is the nose, and these Inuit are therefore known as the People of the Nose.

  Spent a half a day waiting below the gyrfalcon’s nest and finally saw her, the mother, pounding over the valley with a shockingly large prey in her talons, a gopher, which was deposited with a great hovering whir of wings in the nest she had built on a rock ledge. The sky was an icy blue. She was a broad-chested bird, not as tall as an eagle. The fledglings screeching, my companions clicking their cameras, and I adrenalized with joy to see this beautiful predatory creature that Yeats had seen and that made me wonder what other way to live than boating through the Arctic seas to look at birds.

  —As the earth spins on its axis, its planetary sloppage of water rises in tidal swells continuously around its periphery, bulging like the cornea of a farsighted eye. At the same time, the earth’s rotation sends the sea waters spinning in opposite directions, westward in the Northern Hemisphere, eastward in the Southern, so that if water could plait, the earth would twist into a long blue-green braid. If for some reason the planetary rotation decreased sufficiently, the waters of the earth would fly off and crystallize into an ice blue ring that would eventually attenuate and head into space, an enormous comet with all its plankton, crabs, fish, bivalves, whales, siphonophores, and shipwrecks flash-frozen for eternity. The planet’s remaining core of rock and mineral and molten magma would glow for a moment like an ember, or like the section of a radiant creature’s toothy jawbone, before it crashed into the moon, creating a big burning smoking mass of disintegrated ores that would be neatly sucked up into the sun like krill into the mouth of a gulper eel. So be thankful to God that this system of cosmic checks and balances, as eccentric as it is, seems to be working. And just as there are the Alps and the Himalayas and the Andes and the Rockies, so there are undersea mountain ranges even more vast. And just as we have our sunlit river-running canyons, so does the sea bottom have its deep trenches. And as we have our flatlands and deserts, so does the seabed stretch for endless miles of abyssal plain. And just as we have our mountain goats standing transfixedly faced into the wind on the unequal crags of our highest mountains, so does the lightless, airless ocean bottom, with its tons of pressure per square inch, have its living tube worms and anglerfish, sea spiders, whipnoses, and sea lilies undulating slimed in the soundless blackness, their mouths agape and tentacles upheld to catch the flocculent dead matter drifting like snow from the blue and green ocean above. Nameless creatures composed of tendrils with suckers on the end, stems with mouths, or jet-propelled worms with toxic stingers and ink-ejection mechanisms, receive as God’s bounty a perpetual fall of death that keeps them alive as they squirt and wriggle about their business. This is all part of the Universal Plan. We are instructed that life does not require air or light or warmth. We are instructed that whatever condition God provides, some sort of creature will invent itself to live in it. There is no fixed morphology for living things. No necessary condition for life. Thousands of unknown plant and animal beings are living in the deepest canyons of the black, cold water and they have their own movies. Their biomass is far in excess of our own sunlit and air-breathing plant and animal life. At the very bottom of the sea are smoking vents of hydrogen sulfide gases in which bacteria are pleased to flourish. And feeding upon these are warty bivalves and viscous, gummy jellies and spiny eels with the amazing ability to fluoresce when they are attacked or need to illuminate their prey. God has a reason for all this. There is one fish, the hatchet, which skulks about in the deep darkness with protuberant eyes on the top of its horned head and the ability to electrically light its anus to blind predators sneaking up behind it. The electric anus, however, is not an innate feature. It comes from a colony of luminescent bacteria that house themselves symbiotically in the fish’s asshole. And there is a Purpose in this as well which we haven’t yet ascertained. But if you believe God’s divine judgment and you countenance reincarnation, then it may be reasonably assumed that a certain bacterium living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchetfish at the bottom of the ocean is the recycled and fully sentient soul of Adolf Hitler glimmering miserably through the cloacal muck in which he is periodically bathed and nourished.

  —Moviemaking everywhere in New York and now they’re here filming a scene on my block. Had to happen. A hum of self-importance fills the air. Police stanchions holding off traffic. Cables, scaffolds, camera lifts, reflector screens. Stars hiding in their trailers. Crowds waiting upon the ponderous filmic decision to verify my street.

  Now I remember. Coming back from my morning run, I ran into two men taking serious pictures of the block. This was months ago. I thought they were Europeans. Europeans love the narrow thoroughfares of Soho. The nineteenth-century paving stones. Tight passage for the horse troops.

  One man shot, the other loaded the cameras and carried the bags. I felt proprietary. Would they photograph the ancient garage from which no car escapes? Would they catch my Chinese streetwalker? Would they love the two exhausted trees? Would they sense the urban grit in the souls of all of us who live here, even on the clearest spring morning with the spray rising in rainbows from the Department of Sanitation water trucks?

  It was just past dawn, and the low angle of sunlight brought out the solid geometric volume of the industrial iron-fronts, their recessed doorways and deep-silled windows.

  In the late afternoon the photographers were back. The look of the street is different then. Sunlight attaches to the particulate matter churned up by the day’s traffic, so that it seems adrift, a floating fall of luminous dust coming down the narrow corridor of the opposed buildings, sifting through the bars of the fire escapes, opaquing the big loft windows, shining off the Belgian block pavement, and seeming to drain away with evening into the blackness of the ancient garage and the culverts at the corners.

  So that’s what they were. Film patrol. And now look, an army on bivouac. Caterer’s van. Generators. Portosans. Everything needed by troops on the move. Self-sufficient in a country they don’t live in but only occupy from time to time.

  All at once the street is bright and clean. I realize it is washed in light. Ordinary-looking people are going about their business. A cab pulls up, a man jumps out and grabs the shoulder of a woman who is walking past a building entrance and turns her around to face him. It is a seriously aggressive gesture, though quite tame by film standards. They talk, and from four stories up, I see the resistance of the woman accosted, it is in her posture. All of this is the action, but then they walk away, casually, in different directions, as if nothing of what they’ve said has mattered, and I realize the scene ended before I knew it and now the li
ghts go out, and the cab backs up the way it came.

  Now men with walkie-talkies are all over the place. A team of workers is placing litter in the street. For miles around, the city not being filmed is oblivious of its unimportance.

  Silence again, the lights come back on. A cab screeches to a stop, the door flies open, a man jumps out and grabs a woman by the shoulder.

  Movies are using up the cities, the countrysides, the seas, and the mountains. Someday every inch of the world will be on film. The planet will have flattened into an enormous reel. The night sky will screen us. The film stock will play out and drift and undulate, twist and spiral Möbiusly through the galactic universe. Life will not be simultaneous, it will be sequential, one story after another, story after story, as if all the DNA of every living thing were extended, on one strand, one byte at a time, to infinity.

  —movie version: guy gets back from his morning run, sees a film company setting up on his street. The scene they are doing, a woman coming out of his building, a cab pulling up, a man leaping out and confronting her, grabbing her by the shoulder, she pulling back, her defiance, his rage. . . looks very familiar to him, like a scene from his own life.

  All morning the scene is shot and reshot. He watches from his window. It becomes clear to him that the scene being filmed is. . . accurate. There’s no other way to put it. He had done that, found his wife leaving just as he got home. The actor playing him is taller, with a thicker head of hair, but generally of the same build and long, slung-jawed face. The actress is a dead ringer—blond, lovely, slender, supple-hipped.

  He can’t imagine what is going on, who is making the movie, what script they may be working from. Had she written it? But how? She lived out to the edges of her life, filled it all with her restless animal integrity. And with such fine contempt for reasonable self-interest. When had she written about him, about their connection, their failed connection? Why would she have bothered?