Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  You don’t know the first thing about shadows. That’s okay. I’ll bet you weren’t even born yet when Hitler came to the throne of Hell and made us swallow the splinters of ourselves. Tears and bleeds the insides like so much glass.

  This little goy wriggles around, her fantastic hips in black doing a gravedigger’s bump and grind that she could bury me alive with. Emaciated prisoners in stripes hover nearby, watching her with confusion as if not sure whether she might be Babylon. She doesn’t see them or else she pretends not to. Everyone in the joint pretends not to see them. Even as I pretend.

  She gives me the limpid look. But there are storm troopers in her eyes.

  ««—»»

  I put my heart into my jazz because I have no soul.

  My instrument moans in a spotlight of blue shade, as lovingly played as if it were a putz filled with nihilism jizzum. Adroit toit.

  Milt plays bass. He’s dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt. Appreciated the look on Brando. Bernie on drums sports a black beret, Harlem’s Charles Boyer. Keeps all his money in his goatee, saving up for Palestine.

  Someone just threw up their expresso over one end of the stage. It steams under a purple light. But I don’t gag or turn away. Think I’ve never seen vomit? And this little dancer grins up at me like it’s the naughty high point of a stag film. Go figure.

  The smell reminds me of the cattle cars. The barracks. The special hospital that practiced reversing the healing process. The smell brings back clearly every time out of a thousand that I’ve done that myself. It’s played back on the scale without fanfare but downbeat: waking up in a bed surrounded by puke from bad food or no food, from some variant factor administered in the name of science. For the Fatherland, Daddyo-land.

  Needles. They were pretty common. As the soup they fed us, when they fed us. As common as the cold, the lice. Ordinary, like my cup or my blanket or my beatings. From the time I was thirteen until I was eighteen in 1945, my puberty was perceived, directed, and formed around needles.

  A lot of people were terrified of them. Some are naturally so, but most of them ended up that way whether or not it particularly bothered them at first. I was more logical about it. In the face of inevitability—like rape, another subject on which I was well versed—I rendered it prosaic. Is it any wonder that I cannot shake the habit of the needle a decade later?

  Sometimes I can’t remember anything before the needles came into my life. It’s a blank. It’s a chord without tone.

  It doesn’t have the wizened Mesooshelach and his circle and the silent scarecrows as shadows. It’s a scary zip.

  Picture it in your mind: yeah;, like the movies. Or that newer stuff, television. Can you do that? Better than me, pal. I can’t do that. There’s nothing on the screen. But, anyhow, it’s as if all that went before—the attack on our shop and the murder of my father, the train—were just things I was told had happened to me. Wild, ain’t it?

  Okay, okay, so it isn’t possible. We all have a past and it’s not as if I have amnesia or, God forbid!, brain damage. But what also isn’t possible is to have survived five years of medical experiments when most others died, screaming or blank, but always twisted.

  Altered.

  I did. Listen to my music. Hear that note and that one? One screams. The other is blank.

  ««—»»

  So hear this and be patient even if you can’t dig. Don’t look around you. If you don’t try to see the cadaverous ghosts rattle-boning about the landscape, then you won’t see them. And you won’t hear them. They don’t ever speak except for the old pisher.

  I’ve gotten plenty of flak off this poem already.

  I got them ole concentration camp blues. Oh, yeah.

  Them ole concentration camp blues, nu?

  Oh, Treblinka she left me a long time ago,

  just another victim of a medical experiment

  and pining for the touch of her magic needle.

  Tenderly I finger the numbers on my arm,

  remembering her sensual, swastika charm.

  Suffering for love, suffering for love,

  the caress of her black leather SS glove.

  (I can’t remember before the needles. God help me but I can’t.)

  So?

  Well, I’m working on it.

  The poet is really the spokesman for the fifties. He’s a soothsayer of ides of march cool. A shaman of hip. And all these beatniks are poets to hear them talk. But as attentive and respectful as the crowd is to the poet on showcase, you can tell the change in the club when he goes off and we come on. Themic religion and motif current affairs dissolve, baby, when we turn on the jazz.

  Hey, there’s that chick. Dancing in leotards and a black turtleneck sweater. So with it. She’s Grace Kelly, man. Debbie Reynolds. Natalie Wood jailbait.

  She’s the American movies ideal promising me the myth of orgasmic democracy. Indivisible, with libertines and jazz dust for all. The American G.I.s with pin-up faces and million dollar legs come to liberate me from the camp.

  Free me, baby, I wink at her over my sax. Do some great mouth work on the scales to show how good I am with my lips. Trying to keep it light. Swinging. Humor the white shit in my veins. Keep the poppy on a positive note. Key of G.

  But there’s no freedom in her eyes. Half-closed, they are yet blue. They summon me, order me. Into a white-walled room with gray windows. Pressed outside to the walls, the windows, not speaking, not breathing…shadows dead hungry.

  The crazy scar on my forehead itches. Feels tighter than the skin allows. As I look at her and can’t help but know who it is she reminds me of—or who she is.

  ««—»»

  I write poetry, too, you know. Published a bit here and there in obscure Greenwich papers. Haven’t we all. I’m an American citizen. Got papers, a driver’s license, a loyalty oath. I drive a Ford. The camp is behind me. The interlocked puzzle of corpses, lime pits, experiments.

  Tears.

  Her.

  But I’ve written poetry. For her. About her.

  Nancy Nazi Nurse, do you remember me?

  And the thousands of other lovers you hung from your tree?

  And the ovens you tended personally?

  Do you still dream of keeping those home fires burning?

  The mixture of Zyklon B and ashes churning?

  I got them ole concentration blues. Oh, yeah.

  Them ole concentration camp blues.

  And do you know what Milt said?

  “Are you crazy or just of diminished mental capacity?”

  I didn’t take it too personally. I know how Milt is.

  “Meshuggener!” he screeched. A very passionate man, isn’t he? “You can’t get up on stage and sing that stuff. What is that shit? Are you nuts?”

  Could be, I tell him.

  “Well, it’s sick. We’d never work again if you did that up there. Man, God forgive you. You’re missing something major.”

  Bernie just looks flat black like the unlit stage. Under his beret, behind black glasses. He says nothing because he’s been there and he knows. We were all there. In different camps, but terror is really only one place.

  I’ve never even seen old Bernie without those shades of his. I don’t even know what color his eyes are. Can you dig that? Have known him since we met in the displaced persons camp after liberation. He even sleeps with them on. Showers. Probably wears them so that nobody can see the memories in his eyes. The haunt. This preserves his dignity.

  Milt’s the nervous sort. He denies it all as if to utter historical atrocity is to invoke its possibility again. He thinks that the clean sheets of America will give birth to a new life. A sweet babe of brotherhood circumsised of nightmares.

  Me, I do junk. Squint at shadows and circles. Shoot up a little forgiveness and make do.

  ««—»»

  This German nurse was our Lilith. A vampire of young men coming to us from the wasteland of Facism. Luring us by force to the sterile nest where her kisses were chemicals and
her claws were the needles she fed us with. And the best of us—young, barely men—she stroked and squeezed and wrenched until she broke.

  Traveling on a train to meet my Treblinka.

  She’s dressed to kill in a barbed wire G-string,

  enough to send them to the showers singing:

  Baby, loving you is a gas, loving you is a gas rumba.

  Oh, break for the drum solo, Bernstein.

  “No!” Milt screams at me, really shaken up. “It’s the worst thing since lime Jell-O!”

  He’s afraid I’ll do something stupid. Like, do this number on stage tonight. A death wish that would be for all who need their paychecks.

  I get his point. I don’t know why I see things as I do. Take horror and extermination and then render them to libidinous components. As if I have merely attended an all-night torso binge at a friend’s fashionable pad.

  I take this hand, the one I use to cup the curve of my sax like a lover’s breast. Right, that one. I try to grasp a concept with it. Heinous, of dead cousins and grandmothers. I can’t even though I was there to witness their ashes and smell their smoke.

  I even see the starved revenants everywhere. But it doesn’t mean anything. Why are they there? Well, is there a reason they shouldn’t be? Isn’t this normal? Was there ever a time I didn’t see them?

  (Times of blank. Times of nothing.)

  My compassion is gone, along with a lot of other things I think I needed. I feel only needles. I envy Milt’s passion although I think one day it might give him a stroke.

  Was it something this Lilith—this snake woman—did to me that burned away that part of my brain? Leaving a bare spot where my empathy for my race should be? I remember nothing before the needles. And nothing since but the memories of needles.

  The scar on my forehead hurts.

  The stage is round. The damned spotlights are round. Thin spirits drag past, hardly able to lift their heads to look at me with their blank eye sockets. No, there is something in those holes. What is it? Cremation smoke.

  The little beatnik dances the tuna-hootchie-koozie. She’s wearing one of those pointy bras that look so lethal…impaling as needles in place of nipples. She slips me a note when the band takes a break. She wants me to meet her in the alley after the show.

  Right, baby. My fan club. You can use those on me if I can use my blue sax on you.

  ««—»»

  Shadows. Circles. Circle of chalk and the skinny old man hunched inside it, whispering in my ear.

  “And you had a father and this was how he died. He owned a liquor shop, and the brown shirts came in and smashed it all. Mint sharp as glass. And they put you on the train with all the others and didn’t let you out again for days until the arrival at the camp. You were cold and hungry and lying in your own shit. You must remember this. These will be your memories. Our memories are what make us human.”

  The others in the barracks were standing around us tightly. Somebody kept a watch for the guards and chewed his nails as he did this. The drops of his blood fell into the dust when he began to bite his fingers and couldn’t stop, because it was meat after all and it had been a long time since he’d eaten.

  No one was speaking. Only the old man with a prescription of things I was to recall and a litany of cabalistic names that sparked along the various points of the circle in beginnings and ends.

  He was wrapping a piece of a torn blanket around my head because there was a fresh set of cuts there. He kept saying to remember most of all the nurse who had been taking their sons and doing things that made them rot from the inside out.

  He said, “She had you a long time, remember that. We need you to save us. The guards are coming to take you to her. She will use a needle and that will be your signal.”

  He touched my wounded forehead, muttering emeth, emeth.

  There was a commotion outside.

  “Is it the guards?” the old man asked.

  No one answered. They heard gunfire and hugged their frail bodies in terror. But it was only the Americans liberating the camp. I never saw the nurse again.

  Had I ever seen her? Was she the one who injured my head and that was why it bled, why I couldn’t recall so the old man had needed to tell me?

  I heard she was hanged for war crimes.

  Milt and I are friends but he doesn’t understand me. It’s okay. His nightmares have left him broken.

  Bernie is cool. Those dark glasses are right since he probably sees the world that way. His nightmares have left him silent.

  My nightmares haven’t left. That’s my problem.

  Beat it out half-time, quick-lime, blues-rhyme.

  That death song, daddy-o, is the dark of night jazz.

  So don’t razz me ‘bout my memories, Milton.

  The rhythm of six million lingers

  in Miss Nancy Nazi’s fingers.

  Plucking on those crazy bass strings

  until even my worst shadow sings.

  ««—»»

  I go to meet my little beatnik, thinking about that pointy bra and imagining her breasts freed from it. Liberated. My turn to be the hero.

  Get your autograph book ready, baby.

  In the alley past the stage door I can hear some guy in a parked car, pounding on a set of bongos. Pretty soon he’ll be ready for an audition. I can’t help but snap my fingers.

  She’s there, waiting, gorgeous. She rolls up one sleeve of her chic, black sweater. She ties a rubber hose tight around one pockmarked arm.

  “Want some sugar, jazzman?” she coos. And hootchie-kooze.

  The needle gleams like tears on a dagger. Several clicks, syncopated. The metric accent slips by fractions in my head. There’s a definite beat to the signal. I see over her shoulder that Bernie has come out into the alley.

  “Well, honey? Care to take the horse for a ride?” she asks.

  My forehead burns and seeps blood. In the back room of my head I see a face in the mirror. The scar almost looks like a word. Emeth. Truth. Everything we believe about ourselves comes true in the abyss.

  Bernie slides down those shades of his. His eye sockets aren’t really empty. They’re full of crematorium smoke.

  My hands have become steel. Squeezing until she bursts. Her one scream is a blank. It doesn’t matter that she is not the nurse. None of them were the nurse.

  I am the clay man. I am the golem.

  I am the ineffable name of God.

  How about that, Bernie? The world is as black as you see it. Who would have thought it?

  As all men are made of clay, am I even more of dust.

  | — | — |

  FOUR ELEMENTS AND AN EMPHATIC MOON

  I did not steal her face. I borrowed it to smile up at the moon with. And to see it with eyes that could freely shed tears the revenants cannot drink.

  Just a woman, gazing up at that nightly cratered visage—silver or golden, depending upon atmospheric conditions. Trying to create a simple magic it would take a lunar goddess to understand. (I was aware that many cultures viewed the moon as a masculine deity. But not I. No, never.)

  Just a woman gazing up… A woman within a woman, an invocational grin, using that other pair of lips which felt so familiar to me.

  We’d been lovers. I didn’t remember when, although I was reasonably confident that it hadn’t been within this lifetime. Not that I would necessarily have recalled a thing like that. I’d suffered lapses; this was documented by the doctors during the one time—back in college—when I was committed for a while. But each of us has floated through other incarnations, and it might just as easily have been one of these in which Atroce and I celebrated our romance.

  It was sufficient that I recognized her, that night, through a window as I was strolling down the street she lived on. First she was only a silhouette imprinted on curtains. A cat howled from somewhere in a tangle of honeysuckle vines. She parted the drapes and looked out. I knew her at once, feeling that spectral Deja vu that travelers through the centuries have.
How I got into her house doesn’t matter. I don’t remember anyway.

  There were little things in her rooms which made me certain that she was the one. A crucifix upon the wall with a tiny body frozen in arm-flung agony over its crossroads. Rose candles here and there. A mirror round as a wheel. Her white gown. A movie playing on the television in which someone could be heard screaming. And, of course, the auburn of her hair and the halo of heat around it.

  I waited until she came down the hall and passed where I was concealed. Then I stepped out and struck her from behind. I caught her in my arms before her body could hit the floor. My blade wasn’t brought out until I was certain she was unconscious.

  Why terrify her? If the separations of time could be cruel, I would be more merciful. Besides, she probably didn’t know who she was, much less being likely to recognize me. Most such memories are wiped after death and during the transition.

  I used my knife. The flesh of the head was not so difficult to peel. Especially when what you wanted didn’t require going all the way to the bone. Done deftly and with practice, one barely knicked the underlying muscles.