Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  Of course they were starved to skeletons—saturation bombing by the Allies had destroyed German supply lines. Of course there were mountains of bodies and burning pits—typhus outbreaks were rampant near war’s end and all the doctors needed at the Russian Front.

  But the bulldozers were British. Also on file.

  “The smell of burning rubber has been compared to that of burning flesh,” the defendant said.

  “Gutta-percha,” the Frenchman said.

  “The Red Cross was permitted full access,” the barrister said. “Not a trace of mistreatment reported, let alone genocide. They even forced the Nazis to install new plumbing in the showers. There was an inmate swimming pool, nine thousand parcels a day received by prisoners. There are copious memoranda.”

  The Frenchman said, “We’re not saying this was paradise.”

  “But no worse than American internment camps for the Japanese,” the German said.

  “We were at war with the Japanese,” Fred said.

  The defendant stifled a belch. “In 1936 the Zionist leader Weizman declared war on Germany on behalf of the world’s Jewry.”

  “Actually, that needs looking into,” the Frenchman said.

  “What can you prove?” Fred asked.

  “We don’t have to prove everything,” the barrister said. “But where there’s smoke there’s reasonable doubt.”

  “You don’t have to believe us,” the Frenchman said.

  “Perhaps better you don’t,” the defendant said. “Ideally it’s better you don’t believe a thing.”

  “Then of what use am I?” Fred said.

  Everyone looked at everyone else.

  “There has never been a definitive forensic examination of the camps,” the barrister said, “especially of the facilities in question. Someone familiar with the various modes of execution would be required—particularly gas chambers—and who knew such an expert even existed?”

  Fred wanted another cigarette.

  “You will go as an officer of the court,” she said.

  “Go where?” Fred said, and they looked at him.

  “I have this thing about planes,” he said.

  “You have the fear of flying?” the Frenchman said.

  “I have the fear of crashing,” Fred said.

  “Then I will row you there myself,” the defendant said. “As an officer of the court, you will find what you will find. I will accept it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.”

  “What exactly are you accused of?” Fred asked.

  “I’m in the mail-order business,” the defendant said and emptied his briefcase out on the table. Amid the UFO miscellany were other literature, books, pamphlets: The Hollow Cost: A Myth Exposed…The Shoah Must Go On…

  “Falsifying history,” the barrister said, “spreading false news…among other charges.”

  “I didn’t know you could go to prison for that,” Fred said.

  “Depends who is doing it,” the Frenchman said.

  Fred looked at the pictures again. He looked at pictures, maps, photostats, correspondence, communiques, journals, minutes, marginalia, notes scrawled on napkins. Copious memoranda. All that day and part of the next. She was not happy about being left alone so much but she understood. She shopped a little, watched pay-per-view movies in their room. There was a mini-bar, and they haggled with the front desk over it at checkout. When they got back there was much to do and not much time.

  Passports. Reservations. A marriage certificate.

  White oak, quartersawn. A hundred board feet of it. He made a pot of coffee and cut the legs first. He cut outer wraps so the grain figure would show on all four sides of them, then angled the table saw and bevel-ripped the edges of the wraps and cut angled grooves in them for the leg splines. He cut the splines and the cores and dry-assembled the legs, planing the cores till the wraps were flush and the legs square. Then he took them apart and put them back together with glue and clamps and while the glue set he cut the rails, top and bottom and center. He fit the table saw with a dado blade and cut grooves in the long edges of the rails and made cheek cuts for the tenons, trimmed the tenons and chamfered the edges with a block plane. With an unlit cigarette in his mouth he took up his pencil and marked the center and ends of an arch in the bottom rail of the footboard, then drew the arch with a faring stick and cut it with a handsaw and then sanded the arch and sanded the rails. He sanded and stained as he went along, dark walnut, and the smell of the finishing oil began to smell better than the coffee and he made a fresh pot before he cut the filler slats and before he cut the spindles he made the workpiece for the notches that would hold them.

  Sixteen for a double. Eighteen for a queen. Twenty-three for a king.

  He kept pulling it out of himself, kept giving it back to her. To them. He was running out of room at that end of the basement and had to lay the side rails across the washer and dryer because they were over seven feet long.

  The windows grew dark, then light, and he lay down on the old wood-dusted couch and woke up wood-dusted himself under windows that were dark again. He thought he’d heard someone knocking but no one ever came there on weekends; it was either a dream or someone whose dreams he’d torn apart with his saw. He’d told her not to call. A clock ran silently on the wall but he was outside time and the only space of which he was aware was that in which he worked; there was a toilet in the basement so he didn’t have to leave till it was done. He made more coffee and lit another cigarette and cut the tops and subtops and center slats and corbels, and sanded the corbels with a sanding drum fitted to the drill press. He assembled the headboard and the footboard with the glue and clamps, and when the glue had dried he stained the parts he couldn’t stain before, and when the stain dried he topped it with a clear finish, three coats, napping between coats and sanding with 320 grit.

  He worked through the weekend with the phone off the hook and it was getting to be another day again when he took it upstairs one piece at a time. Then the hardware, the angle iron, the mating fasteners and panhead screws. He put it all in the master bedroom, his parents’ room—it hadn’t been used in years. The windows threw slabs of light on the floor, the boards ticked. A bureau, a chiffonier, two night tables, a chair. Now this. He put it together in the empty space in the middle, the light peeling up off the floor, bending and rippling over him. It warmed him as the work did. When he was done he dragged on the box spring and mattress and wanted to lie down on it and sleep, but he had not built it to be alone in. He heard his draftsman walking up the front porch, coming to work.

  Valentine’s Day. Fred wore the suit he wore on the road, his bride the dress she’d worn to someone else’s wedding. Pink double-knit. No best man, no maid of honor. The warden exercised the power vested in him by the state, in his office, his secretary the only witness.

  You sit in seat B and cross yourself. Rolling, rolling like an outsize bus with five hundred riders looking for a lost road. You hope they never find it, watch the demonstration in the aisle. She points out the location of the emergency exits, demonstrates the deployment of the oxygen masks and attaches one to her face (make sure yours is properly fitted before assisting your neighbor, your blue-faced bride, gasping for air like a landed fish), says you can use your seat cushion as a flotation device in the unlikely event of (but landing cannot be the right word). You watch it again in German. Your draftsman sits next to you on the aisle, every man for himself.

  You recall your only other flight, too many years ago, the tiny cabin, the planetary curve of the ground, try to think of it as an initiation, but now it seems like a dry run in which you used up your allotment of luck. If there’s a first time there has to be a last, so you cross yourself discreetly again and look out the window. The flaps open and close, show you the workings of the wing.

  The flight attendants patrol the aisles, checking seatbelts, locking luggage bins. One of them is a man and you think of male nurses and switchboard operators. They are asked to take their seats. He
can’t help you, either.

  The plane slows, turns sharply, a ninety-degree pivot. Stops, but not for long. Everyone is facing the same direction. The rumble of the engines, with you so long it was no longer there, returns with accumulated vengeance and becomes a roar that drives you ahead in sudden emergency, burning distance like a fuse, turning speed into velocity and your body into a problem of physics. It reaches an ultimate level and stays there, everything trembling and rattling, the windows, the seats, the backs of heads in the long tunnel of the fuselage. You would cross yourself again if you were willing to let go of the armrests, so you close your eyes and are heartily sorry for offending and things change right away; the cabin lurches again and your seat tilts back, though you know it is not just your seat. A smoothing of the tremor beneath you, a floating in your stomach and groin and then the whine of hydraulics, the landing gear and the doors that seal them into the great body as though they won’t be needed again. You turn your head to reorient yourself in the dark and when you open your eyes you are looking across your wife’s chest, through the window and along the great wing. The plane banks, your weight shifts to the left and the earth tilts toward you like a table off which all the objects are about to slide: streets, cars, green of yards, blocks of roofs and grids of blocks, lives lived as remote and unknowable as the atoms of matter. A pit that is next to you and below you, and though you don’t suffer from vertigo or any particular fear of heights, you turn your head and look around the cabin for an object on which to fix your eyes and anchor yourself, find it in the flat gaze of some celebrity stranger peering from the seat pocket in front of you. The flaps align.

  Already puffs of vapor that you recognize as shreds of clouds are bursting against the windows—you swear you can hear them. The cabin still angled back, still climbing, but a soft bell rings and symbols light up on the bulkhead: you can smoke but you can’t leave your seat. Fair enough. The pilot’s voice welcomes you to the abyss with a German accent, nasal through the cabin speakers but confident, authoritative, full of altitude, knots, ceilings and weather. You find the language of aeronautics reassuring and feel no immediate need to imagine a destination. Now the pilot is speaking German and sounds older, grave, and you wonder if he flew in the war, Messerschmidt or Stuka, and you wonder about his allotment of luck, or justice, do some quick arithmetic and realize it is not likely, but you don’t know if you’d rather it were.

  They were to meet their translator in Frankfurt.

  Less than two hours into the flight the captain announced they were over the ocean. Finally they’d leveled off—for a while there seemed no limit to how small things could get. Fred leaned over his bride’s lap, looked out the window and studied the wing. It was very long and bent and flexed in the wind as if to beat, birdlike. The sun they fled flattened itself upon it, molten orange, and below, the clouds in streams and rafts. Below again, six or seven miles, the other abyss, more black now than blue, smooth, metallic, reflecting nothing. There were no islands. Looking down for one, Fred found instead recollection of an incident he had seen in headlines, though he couldn’t remember exactly when: a defective cargo door opening on a flight over the Pacific. Explosive decompression, five rows of seats ripped out of the business section and into the void along with nine of their occupants, still strapped in, embarking on the journey for which there is only one class of passenger.

  Everyone else had gone on to Honolulu. He stopped looking.

  His wife’s hand was on top of his. The light on the wing had dimmed, no longer a glow but a ghost of pink, lessening as you looked, and Fred realized that at six hundred miles an hour heading due east they were traveling through time as well, into the night of the future.

  “I thought they’d never,” the bride said; the attendants were trundling carts up and down the aisles, stopping at each row to speak with the captain’s accent. What would you like? Was wilst Sie haben? Fred chose a meal that looked like an abstraction of food: a rectangle of chicken breast with dark squares of pumpernickel and cubes of butter. Salad and coffee. When he was done he reclined his seat and smoked, terror deferred, watching the cabin steadily darken around the tiny overhead lights. The muted roar, the sustaining hum and hiss. His briefcase of bones in the bin overhead. The distant chiming of a piano. A stewardess spiraled up the coil of steps at the head of the cabin, into the piano. A man and a woman and a young girl sat in front of him, ostensibly a family. The parents spoke infrequently and mainly to each other, in whispers. The girl would sometimes turn around in her seat, sit on her knees with her arms on top of the backrest, and study the aft cabin. The fourth time or so she did this she looked directly at Fred and said, “Are you a chain-smoker?”

  “He sure is,” Fred’s wife said.

  “That’s why I’m sitting here,” Fred said. “This is the chain-smoking section.”

  “It sure is,” Fred’s wife said.

  “I hope it isn’t bothering you,” Fred said.

  The girl shrugged. “I like the smell.” She glanced at her parents, then whispered, “Can I have one?”

  Fred didn’t say anything.

  “I have some gum, cutie,” Fred’s wife said. “Would you like some gum? Where are you going?”

  “I was just kidding,” the girl said, somewhat annoyed. “We’re seeing my grandmother in Dresden. She smokes too. She’s a communist.”

  “I’m sure she’s a very nice person,” Fred said.

  “She’s dying,” the girl said.

  “We’re so sorry,” Fred’s wife said, and sounded like she’d been grieving for days. She was like that, you just had to push the button.

  The draftsman sat drinking dark beer.

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” the girl said. “She’s just old. What are you going to do in Germany?”

  “Just stopping over,” Fred said, and for a moment was saying so to the girl who’d lived two doors down. He’d found no one else to haunt him.

  The girl looked at Fred’s wife. “Are you his mother?”

  The bride was silent. The draftsman set down his beer.

  “Actually, we’re on our honeymoon,” Fred said. “We’re going to Poland.”

  The girl looked at them dubiously.

  “Official business, too,” Fred said. “Sort of a professional visit, you could say.”

  The girl looked thoughtful. “Like a mission?”

  “You could say that,” Fred said. “We really can’t talk much about it, though.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  Fred’s wife perked up, a different button. Fred said he wasn’t a spy.

  “You don’t look like one,” the girl said and Fred’s wife laughed outright. The draftsman moved in his seat, sitting on the aisle for his bladder.

  “Well, I guess I’d make a pretty good one then,” Fred said.

  “You look like Mr. Clarke,” the girl said. “He teaches Special Ed.”

  “Well that sounds important,” Fred’s wife said.

  “The retarded,” the draftsman said.

  “I’m sure he’s very nice,” Fred’s wife defaulted.

  “He yells a lot,” the girl said. “He got in trouble but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  Parental whispering turned her head to the seats next to her. A brief, quiet exchange. Then she turned back to Fred and his wife, smiled apologetically and waved and sat back down facing front.

  “Excuse me,” Fred said as if she were still there, and got up for the first time and stepped into the aisle. He’d been drinking coffee nonstop since the cabin service had started.

  The adventure of the lavatory, a narrow booth of polished metal and plastic wood. The fixtures made him think of prison hardware. The dry metal hole, one hand on the bulkhead, unpracticed aim. A burst of blue liquid. When he came out they were just starting the movies. Fred’s wife bought a pair of headphones and said, “Turn out the light.”

  The first one was a romantic comedy. Cher’s mouth moving in German. Fred’s wife didn’t like subtit
les but she’d seen it before and knew just when to cry. Then she fell asleep. An extraterrestrial hunter lands on Earth in search of human prey. This time the subtitles were in German and she still wore the headphones, but the carnage required no translation and Fred watched in silence and smoked. His hand was empty. The credits rolled. Only a few lights remained in the cabin. Blankets and pillows had been distributed, the draftsman had drunk himself to sleep. The bride snored softly. Fred leaned over and looked out the window.

  The moon was full and somehow they were flying above it. The cloudscape over which it shone endless and unbroken, corrugations of silver and gray and ice-blue light. It looked as solid as the moon; everything was made of everything else, and along the horizon, just beyond the lunar corona, there were stars. Fred looked for his familiars: Acrux, Aldebaran, Alpha Centauri, but he could find nothing he’d been taught, as if they’d wandered into a region of sky so remote the constellations were as yet unmapped.

  A red signal flashing at the end of the wing.

  Was wollen sie?

  Fred had not missed Mass in his adult life. He and his bride rose early and had coffee and tea and chocolate biscuits in the hotel café. They were staying near the old city, surrounded by cathedrals and crypts, museums, palaces, Gothic arches and stained glass. The water in the hotel was tepid and there was hardly any toilet paper; they were glad they’d heeded the German’s advice and brought their own. This was a land of shortages.

  After breakfast they put on their scarves and coats and hats and gloves and walked along the garden that circled Old Town, half-covered in snow. They were dressed in cheap off-brands that seemed to come out of the factory secondhand, and few people took them for foreigners till they spoke. Fred wore a tie. They cut through what looked like a campus, passed a statue of Copernicus with thick curly hair and an astrolabe. Fred explained who Copernicus was. His wife said he looked like a rock star, or a fag. Then they reached the medieval market square in the middle of Old Town. Ten acres of brick and ice, the bitter wind that scoured it clear of vendors and stray dogs now hurrying worshippers toward morning service at the basilica. Horses pulling a small bus clopped by, pigeons sat in stiff official ranks atop walls and power lines. They passed the town hall tower and the statue of a great poet, but Fred didn’t know who the poet was. Behind him a long building with twenty arched entrances taking up almost one side of the square. Merchants had come there to sell and trade and spend nights six hundred years past, and you could still buy things—jewelry, embroidery, costume dolls and lace. Some of the shops took hard currency, dollars or Deutschemarks, while others stood empty with their proprietors standing out front, arms folded, merchants of want.