“I’m going to see the fire, Mom!” he screamed at the door, not waiting for a reply.
A cover of black and gray smoke lay over the sun. As he ran along the beach the fumes attacked his throat. By the time he was parallel with the fringe of the amusement area, he was certain that the fire was on the Midway. From a spectator’s point of view, this was unfortunate since the Midway was set back from the beach. But a fire of this intensity would jump all over the place.
Harry stopped parallel to the Midway. Behind the boardwalk row of concessions, smoke so dense it seemed solid rose like a reverse tornado. Explosions were followed by flames leaping, stretching, as if to burn the sky. The Cyclone, suddenly an intricate design of kindling wood, was as yet untouched, but in danger. The onshore wind intensified, blowing most of the smoke off the beach toward Luna Park, whose spires disappeared.
In the distance he saw a familiar stiff-legged gait. As Soldier drew closer, Harry made out splinters of wood ridged with dried blood imbedded in his forehead.
“Father, father!” Soldier shouted.
Harry smiled.
“Yes, father,” he said.
“Tried to tell him! Tried to tell him!” Soldier was screaming. Spittle flew onto Harry’s face.
Harry put his hand on Soldier’s shoulder. The splinters explained his words. His agitation had even eliminated his prefatory damn.
“You must have had a nightmare, Soldier.”
A look of utter helplessness, like Charlie Chaplin done in by an assembly line, clouded Soldier’s eyes. He fell at Harry’s feet, pounding his head on the hard sand, driving in the splinters deeper and surrounding them with seashell fragments and sand.
The flames were gigantic. Harry wished his father were here. But he had declined before, saying that to enjoy witnessing human catastrophe was unwholesome, and he hoped that Harry would grow out of it. Then, as usual, he had thrown in a quote, not from Freud but from another Vienna wise man. It had stuck in Harry’s mind: Man could only have fire when he could control his urge to urinate on it. Harry did feel like pissing again. But he could hold it. Chalk one up for Vienna.
“Fire, fire, this ain’t no fire.”
Schnozz was coming toward him shouting and waving derisively at the Midway.
“Dreamland, that was a fire. Dreamland, something great was lost. What’s this? A few shacks, skee ball, darts, hit the milk bottles. Baby games. You know, Harry, I told you.”
Schnozz wore one black and one gray sneaker.
“Did I ever tell you about the Somalis I brought over to Dreamland?”
Harry showed no interest, but once Schnozz was wound up there was no stopping him.
“Let’s see. Yes. I came upon them in a tiny village in British East Africa. I was trapping animals for the sideshow. Fact is I was checking out some native tales about a two-headed lion. Said it had two fully developed heads growing like a Y out of its neck. Wouldn’t have believed them—didn’t really anyhow—except they said it had two different-colored manes, one red, one yellow. That got to me. Didn’t think natives could think like carny folk.
“Anyway, we come on these thatched huts and there are these Negroes, who are black and blue. But I mean as blue as the sky over Tahiti. I look more closely and I see the blue is kind of something attached to their bodies, like growing maybe an extra skin. They speak a little English and are nice and friendly, so I ask them how come they’re blue? They laugh and let me feel their bodies. The blue parts are ridges brought about by rubbing blue clay in wounds to kill the pain. All the time all I can see is a sign saying: ‘Wild, Blue Men of Africa.’
“I made them a proposition. I bring them over to Coney and put them in a sideshow. About a hundred agreed to come. But they had conditions you wouldn’t believe. Get this: no breaking up of families. If Mama and Papa come, so do the kiddies and their schoolteachers. Hell, I didn’t care if they transported their whole village, huts and all. All I could see was Blue Men, a hundred Blue Men.
“They was as great a hit as I knew they would be. And they got bluer and bluer because I hit on the idea of paying each one by the number of ridges they could raise.
“Now comes the best part. All the time they’re saving their money, and it was a considerable sum. One day they come up to me, thank me for helping them out and tell me they’re going home. I offer them more money, but they say they got enough. Couldn’t do anything to stop them. Later I heard they all bought plantations. Became rich, some even millionaires. All because they knew how to turn blue.”
Harry saw them: old, blue men, moving gently on rocking chairs, enjoying a late-evening pipe on the terrace of magnificent mansions.
“Schnozz,” Harry said pointing to Soldier, “he’s having a fit. Keep an eye on him. I want to get a little closer to see what’s burning.”
“Ah, Harry that ain’t no fire.”
“I know, Schnozz, but I just want to see.”
“OK Harry, I’ll watch him.”
Harry moved to the soft sand. The flames were menacing the Cyclone, thrusting and retreating like a dueling swordsman. Soon it would go up. The most spectacular show he had ever seen.
He turned to check on Soldier. He still beat his head into the sand. Schnozz knelt beside him, saying:
“Fire, fire, this ain’t no fire.”
Harry turned back to the hissing orange curtain. A limerick Fred Krause’s older brother had recited captured his mind, insisting on sound. He repeated it aloud, raising the volume, until he was shouting:
There was a young man of St. James
Who played the most horrible games;
He lit up the front
Of his grandmother’s cunt
And laughed as she pissed through the flames!
APRIL 1945
“NU, WONDERFUL AMERICAN BOY, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO NO LONGER BE a boy but a man?” Infantry platoon sergeant Harry Catzker smiled as he recalled Aba’s words, spoken in the cherry tree on Harry’s thirteenth birthday.
Tomorrow, he would lead the platoon into Buchenwald, the first concentration camp in the path of Allied forces. He had convinced himself that Aba would be in that camp. After all, he never had been reported dead. Fate had chosen that they be reunited in this place they had shared on the symbolic day of Harry’s manhood, when Aba had offered a parable on German insanity:
“Centuries ago, Goethe and his friend Eckermann would lean against an oak tree in a forest four miles above Weimar, gaze down on the soft, green fields below and discuss life and literature. When that forest was cleared to construct Buchenwald, the tree, now the famous Goethe oak, was spared. A protective fence enclosed it.”
Upon entering Weimar on April tenth, Harry had asked for directions to the oak, only to be told that it had been destroyed by an Allied bombing raid.
The platoon, assigned to root out diehard German resistance between Weimar and Buchenwald, rose early on April eleventh. Harry’s men appreciated his knack for killing the enemy while minimizing risk. However, some were uneasy with his quick trigger finger which blasted Germans obviously on the verge of surrender or perhaps even a split second after their hands were raised. Captured prisoners never were allowed to unclasp their hands from behind their necks or sit or smoke. Conversation with them was forbidden.
The camp’s tall iron gate loomed. Harry made out the legend stretched across its top: Jedem das Seine. His Yiddish translated it: To each his own. A good omen. Aba and he surely would be reunited. To each his own.
Before Harry passed through the gate, a stink clogged his nostrils, overflowed to his tongue and palate and nauseated him. When he came upon the decomposing, naked corpses piled like cordwood and the milling crowds of pus-soaked, fleshless human beings who barely filled the rags hanging from their bodies, he vomited.
Retching, he bolted for relief to a courtyard and almost knocked down an inmate, who recoiled, then stood rooted. Harry escaped the horror he beheld by creating a fiction: here was the elemental man—eyes, ears, nose, limbs—God�
��s first stab at it before surrounding the essential parts with softening esthetic.
He could be Aba, Harry thought; individual identification is impossible, “Aba?” he whispered.
The man’s eyes expressed bewilderment.
Aba, Harry realized, was the Hebrew word for father.
“I can speak Yiddish,” Harry said. “Ich ken redden Eidish.”
The man’s eyes widened. “Are there many Jews like you?” he asked.
“Yes, many.”
The man smiled, yet tears filled his eyes.
“I thought there were only Jews like me left.”
He shuffled forward. He buried his forehead in Harry’s shoulder. Harry felt no weight, as if a light breeze had brushed him. Harry delicately encircled the man’s waist. They rocked, sobbing.
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