Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  “Well now, and you, didn’t you become a man? Didn’t you become at least a corporal?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I didn’t become one at all.”

  “Is that right? So, why did we have two wars then, if you didn’t get at least one decoration? What were the wars for, I’m asking you? You Jews are generally losers and good for nothings! Or isn’t that so?”

  “It is,” I readily agreed.

  He looked at me with contempt, even with slight disgust, because that was me all right—a ragged, dirty semi-human being, probably stinking of corpses and carbolic acid, with a graying reddish beard with dried bits of cabbage stuck to it. And right there at this place, something happened that I least expected: Zukerl opened the side door of his desk and angrily dropped on top of the file folders a loaf of brown rye bread, square like a brick, and on top of it—a decent piece of smoked lard. “Take this and get out of here! And if you ever show up in front of me again, I’ll send you you-know-where!”

  I could roughly guess where, but I didn’t even try to play at heroic pride or incorruptible honesty, and quickly hid the newly acquired treasure under my shredded coat and, as per the order, got lost.

  I’m ashamed to tell you, but I secretly shared my acquisition only with my rabbi—we broke everything into little pieces, hid them in our pockets, on the bunks and anywhere else we could find, and ate them crumb by crumb, with the exception of those portions, shared with the rats, with which the camp was overflowing. Unlike the outside world, where people live in communities but die each for himself, here we were dying communally, but surviving each for himself. It’s shameful to admit it, but this is how it was with us people, as well as the rats.

  I don’t know if you got the clue about the deadly sin we committed by eating lard, forbidden by our faith! That’s how it was, I’m confessing sincerely, and on Judgment Day we may have to answer for placing our pitiful life above the Scriptures. But after all, wasn’t it the same sinful temptation to which Rabbi Ben Zvi submitted, when he looked around and sneaked into the Christan sausage shop, saw the pink and juicy Prague ham, and asked, “How much does this fish filet cost?”

  “This is ham, sir,” said the butcher.

  “I’m not asking you the name of the fish, just how much it is!”

  Sturmführer Zukerl had ordered me not to appear in front of his eyes again, but nevertheless I did, though it was sometime later—when I saw him hanging from the observation tower, while American tanks were smashing the gates with the arched sign “To each his own.” I don’t know if Zukerl had done it himself or if he’d been reached by those seven fearful days of Retribution desired by Rabbi Ben-David. In any case, I remembered the bread and the piece of lard, which had probably helped us survive, and I prayed for his soul.

  EIGHT

  Rabbi Ben-David and I hugged each other and wept for a while—two shadows that had once been men, in hanging rags that had once been clothes, and behind the brick tower one little American soldier was throwing up—back home in Oklahoma he hadn’t seen such heaps of semi-burnt and still smoking human corpses. Probably at the same time somewhere in Treblinka, Auschwitz, or Maidanek, little Soviet soldiers were throwing up, believing along with Maxim Gorki that “human being” has a proud sound.

  American nurses were walking up and down the camp, and nuns from some Samaritan order were carrying the dying on stretchers, here and there arrested SS men were being taken away, movie cameras were buzzing and photo cameras were clicking.

  One American major solemnly ascended his tank to announce something to us, probably important and epic, or so it appeared, but I didn’t hear him—a cold darkness crawled into my brain and I collapsed on the ground. That’s the way it goes. Human perseverance is a great mystery and it’s not hidden in biological laws governing the cell, just the opposite, it completely opposes them and submits to completely different, immaterial, metaphysical qualities of the soul, or, as the rabbi would say, its stubbornness. I have heard about people sick with incurable diseases, for example malaria or fainting, who in the face of formidable physical or emotional strain and despite the extreme exhaustion of their organism, have not even once been visited by the otherwise periodic, clockwork-like symptoms of their disability. But on the first day, when the gates of the camp or the prison remain behind their backs, people have collapsed and everything has started up all over again—as if the disease, mercifully gone on temporary leave, energetically spits on its palms and gets back to work again. Then follows the first seizure in years, or the malaria with the exotic name of “terziana” remembers that it hasn’t tormented you for a long time with its fevers that are so high and so pedantically regular, like the ocean’s high and low tides, that you could fry an egg on your palm. So much then for the stubbornness of the soul. I’ll come back to it later.

  I opened my eyes and looked around, without moving my head, and found myself in some kind of a yellow cloud. Light was beaming literally from everywhere and this light was making everything hurt—my eyeballs, every fiber, every little atom of my body. I tried to lift my arm, in order to block out this yellow luminescence, but it was immobile and heavy as lead.

  Then I saw myself—you won’t believe it, but I swear that’s how it was—from the height of the square brick tower, below which the body of Sturmführer Zukerl had earlier been dangling from a piece of electric cord (but how much earlier—yesterday, last year, last century?) and I also saw myself lying on a folding bed in the huge yellow-orange medical tent with the two red crosses on it. How I could simultaneously be up there at the tower, and see myself from Zukerl’s point of view inside the tent, I don’t know, but that’s how it was—I could see my arm, immobile and heavy, because it was tied with a strap to the folding bed, and drop by drop, through the transparent little tube inside its veins, flowed something glistening and yellowish—maybe from the yellow light, streaming in from everywhere, or maybe this was the color of life, I don’t know.

  Only when things began to take on realistic outlines and I managed to move my head did I come down from the tower and see Rabbi Ben-David, sitting on a folding chair, his eyes fixed on me with a worried look. “How are you?” he asked.

  I moved, very slightly, my cracked lips—a sign that I heard him, that I was there, that I was alive, but even so much as a squeak I couldn’t produce. The rabbi dipped a small handkerchief in the aluminum mug and wet my lips with it, and then my forehead too, burning with fever. I reached out with my free palm and placed it on his knee, clothed in ragged duck trousers. I did it perhaps in search of security and support, and he, my rabbi, stroked my hand. After that I again sank into darkness, bottomless and endless.

  Time again lost its dimensions, I don’t remember how many times I observed myself from the top of the brick tower and then again came down to the tent, to my body. My thoughts, shredded to rags, slid down the surface of my consciousness as if it were a smooth glacier and none of them could catch hold of anything, any kind of small jagged bump, to avoid sinking deeper down, into the darkness. But I still managed to crawl up stubbornly to one single thought, because I needed the answer: Was I alive? And why was I at the same time both up at the tower at Zukerl’s wire, and down in the tent? From my height I was dispassionately observing the doctor, who in his white coat over his military uniform was listening to my heart and lungs, or my rabbi, who was trying to thrust a spoonful of broth through my spasmodically clenched teeth. I was sliding down the glacier, naturally it was cold, my whole body was shivering in spite of the clear sensation that I was sweating profusely.

  One night, during a blinding full moon, I was sitting up at the tower, and right below me Zukerl was swaying in the breeze, whistling some tune from The Merry Widow. On such cloudless nights the Anglo-Americans don’t fly, the moon was up there staring, and I was feeling light and immaterial, calm and good. I didn’t notice when my former sergeant major sat down quietly beside me, loosened the noose
around his neck, patted me on the shoulder in a friendly way, and said:

  “But do you know why I love you? Because you’re a dirty Jewish bastard!”

  I gave out a laugh, happily: “That’s what I am all right!”

  “And now the two of us, are we dead?”

  “Of course,” I answered, still so happily.

  “It’s good to be dead,” dreamily said Zukerl.

  “Very much so, Mister Sergeant Major.”

  “Sturmführer!”

  “I mean to say it’s wonderful to be dead, Mister Sturmführer. You and I saw a lot of death, we were transporting death, burning death with gasoline, and burying it. Now it’s our turn and I think it’s fair.”

  “Naturally,” Zukerl agreed readily. “As they say, ‘To each, his own,’ isn’t that so?”

  It was a nice, quiet night, but I had to excuse myself to Zukerl and go down to my body, because they were sticking in my behind some of those nasty and painful needles, after which a wave of heat ran through my spine all the way to my brain, and made me wake up and vomit some bitter green stuff.

  I opened my eyes and whispered “water.” This apparently was the end of both my painful crawling along the slippery ice, and my sweet nights on top of the tower in the company of the swaying Zukerl. I looked around surprised and saw above me the blurry face of Rabbi Ben-David.

  “Am I alive?” I asked with difficulty.

  “Probably,” said the rabbi, “because the dead don’t ask stupid questions.”

  “But I was dead,” I said.

  “Almost. But not completely.”

  “I think completely. Because my soul had left my body and was observing everything from above, from the top of the tower, with the hanged Zukerl.”

  The rabbi laughed quietly, “And what did your souls see from the top of the tower?”

  “Everything. And me, and you, and the doctors. And that angel all in white, with a white halo, and a cross on the breast, who came to take me.”

  “Ai-ai, Itzik, you’re dreaming Christian dreams!”

  “It wasn’t a dream,” I insisted.

  The rabbi tried to remember something, then asked, “And wasn’t the face of this angel completely black?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t see it.”

  “Because the angels from the cotton fields of Mississippi have black faces. And yours is even called Nurse Angela, a sergeant from the medical unit.”

  “Nurse Angela…. If that’s so, why have I been then simultaneously here and on top of the tower?”

  “This was a dream of your soul, Itzik. Just a dream for courage. Because every mortal is in his own way vain and wants to leave something of himself behind that is eternal and unchanging—if not a pyramid, at least an immortal soul. But even the pyramids get robbed a long time before the end of eternity. After death there’s nothing left, I’m sorry to say. It’s the same with humans and with worms; both of them submit to the same conditions of life—Ecclesiastes said it. Now sleep, my boy, and stop dreaming of hanged Zukerl.”

  Much later, during one of my next lucid periods, when I felt considerably better, I asked Ben-David, “When are we going back to Kolodetz?”

  The rabbi was silent for awhile, apparently hesitating, then he finally said, “Itzik, you should be admitted to a hospital. Nurse Angela will take care of it. And to Kolodetz—I’ll go alone, for now.”

  “Are you abandoning me?”

  “We’re all bound together in a chain, the dead and the living, the innocent and the guilty, and none of the links can leave the chain. I love you, Itzik, but I have to go—I have seven times seven accounts to settle and seven times seven thousands of dead to rebury. And to learn all the truths, and utter all the curses, and say all the prayers. Otherwise what’s the meaning of all the trials we’ve endured? Stay here, I’ll let you know when and whether to come back!”

  “But I have to find Sarah and the children!”

  “I’ll tell you when to come back,” the rabbi stubbornly repeated, “and whether to come back. Because the fruit of futile hopes is bitterer than even the saddest truth.”

  I stretched my powerless arm, took the rabbi’s hand, and squeezed it while one single, lonely, hot tear ran down my cheek.

  And so, my dear brother and patient reader, some took off to the east, with the military forces, to home and hearth, all in ashes; others took off for the west, to new shores. Who was wrong and who was right? I don’t know. Right and pure remained only the dead, may God give them shelter in His boundless kingdom.

  THE FIFTH BOOK OF ISAAC

  “Shnat Shmita.” Once More, from the Beginning. About the Black Sun and the White Nights.

  ONE

  Have you ever seen an idiot who carefully builds a house, paints it, plants three pine trees under the window, puts up a curtain with little blue flowers over the window and a pot of geraniums on the ledge, and, after he marvels at his creation, starts systematically tearing it down, stone by stone, until not even one is left standing? Then this fellow, the idiot, declares the day the house has been finally demolished a big family holiday and shoots fireworks in the sky, while his neighbors for a long time to come will be taking out pieces of brick from their soup and spitting plaster. Something similar was done by those friends who provided construction materials to Hitler and all of his Mein Kampf, and gave him money for a curtain with little blue flowers and even the pot of geraniums. They were numerous, these benefactors, acting sometimes discreetly, sometimes more obviously, but each one nurtured his own tender thoughts and his own tender hopes. Then all of them got together as a group and got angry at him because too often he refused to obey, and then all together they demolished the little house at the cost of fifty million dead.

  This was something like Mendel, who was traveling in a third-class wagon from Berdichev to Odessa. In the compartment, in front of the eyes of his curious fellow passengers, he took down a basket from the overhead luggage rack, laid a plate and a napkin on his knees, and got to work most assiduously. He cut some boiled chicken, cracked and then with his pocket knife sliced into little pieces a hardboiled egg, two boiled potatoes and a red beet, found some onion in the basket, mustard, salt and everything else. Then he mixed everything well, poured some rapeseed oil on it from the small flat bottle that had once contained cough syrup, added a little sprig of parsley for decoration and marveled at his creation, while his fellow passengers were salivating. After that Mendel pulled down the window and threw everything out, wiped the plate and put it back in the basket, and put the basket itself back up again where it belonged. Then he yawned and looked out at the telegraph wires.

  One of the flabbergasted passengers finally summoned up the courage and asked him, “Excuse me, but what is it you just made?”

  “Jewish chicken salad.”

  “And why’d you throw it out the window?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing in the world I hate more than Jewish chicken salad!”

  As far as that business of Mendel’s is concerned, as well as those investors who demolished the little house and celebrated this fact with fireworks, now they pretend to be absentminded and forget whose genius idea it was to provide some kind of necessary support and stimulus for that former painter of baroque facades and, to top it off, give him a parsley sprig for decoration. And on his part the possessed maniac came to believe that he could give the finger to all of humankind, including the ones who planted the three pine trees for him. In fact this was precisely the fatal mistake of the aforementioned painter, and it determined the denouement of the fairy tale, about which everyone now swears that there’s nothing in the world they hate more than the salad they mixed together themselves.

  And in order to continue in the same spirit, I now offer you a joyful little problem to solve in the lazy Sunday idyll before lunchtime: for all of this construction, including the equipment for hu
nting and other types of weapons, about 270 billion dollars, they say, was spent. Deducting from this money the expenses for my delousing, about which I was given a timely warning from Commandant Brückner, known as the Radish, a sum of money remains, about which the problem arises: Where did it all end up? It could hardly have been deducted from the savings of that fat drug addict and lover of stolen works of art, who ended up on the gallows, and even less so from the dowry of that limping apostle of culture, with the looks of a professional gambler, who escaped justice, because, having been in that line of work, he anticipated the executioner, or from the speculations of Bormann, Eichmann, & Co. in unique artifacts of human skin. So where did it come from, then?

  When you add up the many times greater size of the resources, in excess of a thousand billion, spent for the demolition of this same small house and multiply this sum by the cubic meters of bloodshed and suffering endured, the problem then includes the question: Who carries the main responsibility—the master or the slave? The initiator or the person who carries it out? The person who gives the order or the finger that pulled the trigger?

  To this question for the time being only Abramovitch’s answer has been received: “Oy-oy, don’t ask!”

  I don’t want to bore you with puzzles of a higher degree of difficulty: the whereabouts, for example, of those seventeen tons of gold, collected in Auschwitz alone from wedding rings, dental crowns, and the like, including a small pair of earrings in the shape of a four-leaf clover that brings good luck, given to Lizochka Weissberg as a gift on her third birthday. I would ask where they are, as a mere particle of the infinitely greater quantity of things of similar gold origin, but in light of the sensitive peristalsis of certain bankers from neighboring and respected neutral countries, who would take this as a hint that might disturb their good manners and hearty appetites as they sit gathered around the table joyously savoring pheasant in truffle sauce, I withdraw the question. And besides, to tell you honestly, I don’t expect an answer either, and on the other hand I’m in a hurry for the morning checkup in the American army field hospital, temporarily situated in the surviving wing of the bombed-out old-age home “St. Peter” in Salzburg.