Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  He and his wife sat in the front row with the man who called himself Hans Raeder, an audience accumulating slowly behind them. Her leg was in a cast. The man who called himself Hans Raeder was less diffident in person than he was on Fred’s answering machine. Paunchy in his late thirties, he wore a beige sort of uniform with the banner in miniature around his arm, a square black smudge under his nose. Though the effect was closer to Oliver Hardy than what might have been intended, he was an affable and considerate host and warmly greeted all arrivals, most of whom he seemed to know, and some of whom brought trays and bowls covered with aluminum foil. He was especially solicitous of Fred’s wife, providing an extra chair as a footrest (it was crucial to keep the leg elevated), and for whom he had his son fetch a can of Diet Coke. His son was a big skinhead who wore a nylon bomber jacket and a t-shirt transformed with safety pins and permanent marker.

  “Name of my band,” he explained, shaking hands though he seemed to regard Fred with some suspicion. White Lightning had loaned their P.A. to the event. He said he’d tried to read the Report but found it too full of scientific mumbo-jumbo.

  “I threw a desk out the window in Chemistry,” he said.

  “No one was hurt,” his father said.

  “Only book I ever read was The Outsiders in Juvie.”

  “Maybe I can clear some things up for you today,” Fred said with doubts of his own.

  “We’ll see,” the kid said, but he didn’t seem to need things cleared up. There was beer on his breath. “I guess I’m more the man-of-action type. How many niggers does it take to turn on a TV?”

  “We just need to focus his ideology a bit,” the man who called himself Hans Raeder said, and turned to the man ringing with keys.

  Fred turned his head every time the back door clanked open, marked the progress of the minute hand above it. When it had crept almost to the top of the hour and the rented seats seemed as full as they were going to get, the man who called himself Hans Raeder suddenly bounded onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, his back to the red and black and its crooked cross. He raised his right arm stiffly, clicked his heels together and shouted two words; somebody shouted them back, and somebody else giggled. The microphone squawked. Preliminary remarks (a less colloquial version of his son’s joke; a reiteration, for the benefit of newcomers, of the Three P’s), and then the Report. He held up a copy and told the audience how many thousands more were thought to be in print—nobody knew for sure—and that it had been translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, perhaps other languages of which he was not aware. He read from the Introduction, written by the English historian who’d testified on behalf of the defendant in Toronto, and this was the first Fred heard that such a preface existed. Even before he called him by name, the man who called himself Hans Raeder referred to Fred as the new Galileo, the new Tyndale—which latter comparison he was eager to explain—and as a would-be martyr whose persecutors, cowering once again behind the last letter of the alphabet, had recently tried to burn alive as they had the heretics of old.

  “Without further introduction,” he said finally, “what they didn’t tell you on 20/20,” and Fred rose and took the stage and shook hands with the man who called him the new Galileo and the new Tyndale. He adjusted the microphone stand and stood alone before the audience clutching his sheaf of conviction, one hand in his pocket, his suit still reeking of smoke as if he’d arrived fresh from the stake.

  He looked at them.

  Wide Slavic faces, first-generation, second. A biker chewing gum. A baby on a lap. More men than women, more scattered than gathered, they looked back: machinist, nurse’s aide, forklift driver, truck driver, cashier, assistant manager, idler. People. Skinheads in the back row, snickering, jostled each other like boys in pews. The man who called himself Hans Raeder stepped back to keep an eye on them, confiscated something in a paper bag. He read your gas meter with his mustache and haircut, and a few of the audience wore homemade uniforms similar to his. Others dressed as though they’d come straight from church, with petitions that could not be answered there. People. Most looked fundamentally decent, honest as you or I, but fed up, unappeased, even afraid, forgotten, and now they all looked at Fred as if to see was it he who had remembered them.

  The Guide to Public Speaking said the maximum audience attention span was thought to be about twenty minutes.

  So he started with himself. Stammered briefly through background and profession, through the shriek of feedback like some hysterical objection. He spoke of his father. His mouth strayed from the mike. Then the call from the Frenchman, the meeting in Toronto, the trip to Poland and the forensic tour of the camps—to the best of his knowledge the only such inspection ever performed. He had not wanted to forget anything, it was all there in his notes, but he couldn’t forget the waning of time and attention, pages were shuffled, and then the trial was gone and only the Report remained, as if it had been the real purpose of his mission all along, which case might have been made, and he read a short excerpt describing the chemical properties of Prussian blue.

  “Ferric-ferrocyanide,” he intoned, and some of the audience nodded reverently as at the disclosures of a new testament, while one of the skinheads made a snoring sound and the man who called himself Hans Raeder gripped the back of his son’s neck.

  Then, life after the Report: the conspiring, discrediting, slander and libel. The undoing and undermining, the loss of livelihood, the blackballing and blacklisting against any possibility of employment. His wife, a Type 2 diabetic forced not only to work a job detrimental to her health, but also made the subject of the vilest threats and harassments imaginable…

  “And now, most recently, an attempt on my life resulting in the loss of the home I was raised in and bodily harm to the person who means more to me than anyone else on earth. And, to add insult to injury, bad faith to good, our insurance company has denied our claim, blaming faulty wiring and unpermitted work.”

  Make sure your gestures are large enough for everyone to see, and Fred threw up his arms, suddenly inspired.

  “I was going to say,” he said, “that the rest is history. But on reflection, looking out upon your assembled faces here today, I would rather say,” he said, “that the rest is the future.”

  One of the skinheads belched.

  At first they kept to their seats. Though the applause was as generous as this congregation was capable of, it wasn’t until the man who called himself Hans Raeder, banging his hands together like slabs of raw meat, whistling with his tongue against his teeth, stood and encouraged them with upward sweeping motions that others followed suit. Emboldened, and though he hadn’t intended to, Fred waited till they were sitting again and then asked if anyone had any questions. The customary silence out of which a hand then rose, and a man in a windbreaker affiliating him with the pipefitters’ union asked Fred if he’d received any royalties from the myriad printings of the Report, and Fred replied that he hadn’t, nor was he in it for the money to begin with, eliciting another round of applause, another interval, and, though this wasn’t a group that readily yielded appetite to attention and most of them had yet to eat lunch, another raised hand (Was it true he’d practiced engineering without a license?), another (How many Jews does it take to light a cigar?), another, and then a woman with a voice full of country warmth asked Fred if he had any children, and if so were they being bused, and Fred said he hadn’t, but while he didn’t consider himself political, he did believe that people should be allowed to educate their families as they saw fit, regardless of race, creed, and other considerations drowned out in another burst of acclaim, almost another standing ovation.

  About twenty minutes later, after the man with the keys had whispered in his ear, the man who called himself Hans Raeder leapt onto the stage, clapping just a bit more rapidly than before. He took the microphone from its stand and put his arm around Fred’s shoulder. He praised Fred’s speech, praised his courage and conviction and the selfsame qualities in Fred
’s wife, who self-consciously lowered her Diet Coke, her leg up as though she were watching videos in her kitchen. The man who called himself Hans Raeder then with great reluctance said he’d have to cut the Q&A short—they’d rented the hall for four hours—but he encouraged the attendees to stick around; a modest buffet was being provided, potluck, with beverages, and there was going to be a raffle in which first prize was a Naugahyde recliner. There were also copies of the Report for sale, the proceeds of which would go to the guest of honor and his wife against the financial hardships imposed on them by (did he have to say it?), and Fred was so taken with the reception he’d thus far received it didn’t occur to him to ask if this was in addition to the speaker’s fee he’d already been promised.

  “But before that,” the man who called himself Hans Raeder said, “before that I’d like to ask each and every one of you here, except for Fred’s lovely beloved here, who can’t for obvious reasons, but everyone else here today I’d like to invite you to join us in a little march around the block here now, to show our support for Fred and each other, our Pride in Preserving the Purity of our heritage, our unity in our common brother-and sisterhood. We don’t need a permit if we keep it on the sidewalk, people. We’ve made a few signs, feel free to grab one, and remember, this is a peaceful demonstration—we are a peaceful people,” he said, unless, and someone muttered something about marching on an empty stomach, and one of the unruly contingent from the back tapped their putative leader’s gut and said, “Don’t look so empty to me,” at which the man who called himself Hans Raeder simply said, “So let’s keep it single-file and leave room for pedestrians,” and then turned to look at Fred.

  The man who called himself Hans Raeder looked at Fred then like a suitor on the verge of proposal: “And I would like to ask our guest of honor here to join me at the head of the line as honorary parade marshal. We would be privileged to have you if you would accept this invitation,” he said, “but of course you’re under no obligation.”

  The chair had been donated. There was macaroni and beef.

  A rough line assembled itself off to the side, near the fire exit. Fred behind the man who called himself Hans Raeder, still holding his speech instead of a sign. His wife stayed exactly where she was and was in no want for company; the majority of those in attendance chose not to participate though all had limbs intact. Someone pushed the panic bar. The day so brilliant with promise it hurt to look at. The leader raised his right arm in salute, left hand on his belt, and commenced singing a German children’s song in a rich and gifted baritone. A boy goes out into the wide world alone, comes back to his family a man. Fred had heard it before. Behind him a guy in a denim vest wore a Wehrmacht infantry helmet and held a flag and tried to sing along, though he didn’t seem to know the words. They set off in a ragged file through the fire doors, not to escape a blaze but to enter one, a retinue of roughly a dozen apostles, youth bringing up the rear with a melody of its own.

  Everything has to start somewhere, but after that you could pick and choose—there was plenty to choose from on the answering machine. It was a question of growth, a question of only so much to go around. No more rallies then, no more paper plates, beans and franks; let the basements and backyards become hotel convention rooms and auditoria, his appearances lectures and conferences. They wanted him to tell his truth in the suburbs too, not to mention Columbus, not to mention Chicago. He was invited to appear on panels, he was invited to Birmingham and Houston. There was talk of New York. He was still preaching to the choir, but the choir evolved with the changes in venue, became educated, professional, politically sophisticated, though sometimes still the red-and-black flashed like a flesh wound (a blond-haired girl with a beret, her khaki breast jutting like artillery), still sometimes the tattoos, suspenders and Doc Martens, but now strictly for purposes of security.

  “I came, I saw, I chiseled,” he said.

  And they paid. Honoraria for his appearances, compensation for lodging and other travel expenses. The Institute told him to keep his receipts—not that he wouldn’t have done it for free; after all, they listened, money was a technicality. Standing before and above, but not of, the upturned, nodding, sometimes smiling assembly, he saw himself being heard and understood, his thoughts becoming words becoming light shining on smooth blank faces, and those faces ripening in that light. He got better at it. Loosened up, forgot about his hands, improvised. It was okay to repeat yourself as long as you made it different each time: the boiling point of hydrocyanic acid, life as the son of a prison guard, the sabotage of his vocation by Zionist conspirators… “and the rest, as they don’t say, is the future.” He would look up and see meaning being made; there were no strangers out there, only friends he had yet to find. He cracked dubious jokes and they burst like a studio audience on cue, as if his jokes didn’t have to be funny—they were funny before he told them, his listeners laughing before he arrived, just as they were already nodding and understanding. He didn’t have to understand them back, and who is to say this isn’t love?

  “At this point I’ll have to supervise my own execution just to turn a profit,” he said, and that bland upturning erupted. He was no longer funny by accident.

  He’d come to enjoy the routine as well, the motions. Long drives accompanied by talk radio, empty stretches of interstate green, the federal highways (a farmer fetching his mail at roadside, you could see his face and wave). Then the outskirts, the approach, the exits to other exits; Holiday Inn, Motel Eight, T.G.I. Friday’s. The proximity of airports, planes roaring within arm’s reach overhead (they seemed a good omen as long as you weren’t on them). Parking lots, luggage, the bright dusted lobbies and clerks in company colors, the waiting, germ-free stillness of rooms upon entering and finding the switch, the formal stiffness of the sheets, the squareness and smoothness, four different kinds of towels. Even the oily soap that never quite comes off, as if you can never be too clean.

  “I’m suing the Anti-Defamation League for defamation of character,” he said. He appeared on an AM radio show like those he heard on the road, the kind devoted to government conspiracy, alien abduction, the moon-landing hoax, JFK in a wheelchair on a Greek island.

  Someone said he should think about a manager, an agent, but he was a regular guy. Fred. He knew what he knew.

  “If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it,” Fred said, “…well they make paper from trees, don’t they?”

  Sometimes they took him out to dinner afterwards. Afterwards there was mingling, handshaking, congratulations, introductions. Nursing a drink and smoking in a smoky drink-filled room. They gave him their cards. There was photographing and videotaping, sitting at a table signing copies of the Report, copied at Kinko’s and staple-bound, foreworded by the British historian who’d testified in Toronto. In Houston he signed a copy for the blond-haired girl with the armband. He also signed her copy of Mein Kampf and a picture of her holding an assault rifle. She seemed confused that Fred was right: “I thought we wanted them dead.” She leaned over behind him, her chest prodding his shoulder. He did not have to understand her, either.

  “‘To Ingrid,’” she instructed.

  “Are you still in school?” Fred asked. She said she was taking inhalation therapy at community college. The woman behind her worked as a paralegal. She had two copies of the Report and her hair was cut short, with a wash of gray like a kind of grace. She asked Fred what he was doing after the signing—did he know Houston? She offered to show him around. A little shyly, it seemed. A slight stutter.

  “I’m having dinner with my wife,” Fred said.

  “Bring her along,” she said. A half smile, what might have been. “I’ll show you both the Space Center.”

  His wife was back at the room with her leg, drawing blood from her thumb. She was sometimes uncomfortable at these functions.

  She left him her card but he had no use for it. It was taken off his hands by the British historian who’d prefaced the Report, who was con
sidered in some circles to be not an historian at all. He’d written books saying the Final Solution was someone else’s idea, that while a visionary leader tried to expand his country’s sphere of influence, subordinates did what they thought he wanted; that Churchill was a racist, alcoholic, warmongering, whoremongering coward; he’d written about Rommel, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, debunked the diary of Anne Frank, moralized on the fire-bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, described the Hungarian uprising of ’56 as an anti-Jewish rebellion. He’d edited the memoirs of Eichmann, refuted the authenticity of Hitler’s purported diary (till official opinion swung the other way whereupon he reversed his position on the Today Show). He had been barred from entering Germany, Austria, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, and Fred shook hands with all of it.

  “Fuck’s sake New Zealand,” the British historian said. “I didn’t even know I wanted to go there.” He raised a glass. “Here’s hoping Mexico doesn’t make the list—now that’s where the party is.” His face, often seen through the lens of a tumbler, was handsome in a lined, world-weary way, and Fred’s wife would have loved his accent.

  The Report was a turning point of his life, he told Fred.

  “It’s all about the brick,” Fred said. “I have no politics.”

  “Thank God,” the British historian said. “Ever been to the U.K.?”