“Dear Randolph,” he wrote.
It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is interesting and that Priscilla is well.
Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you. I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not think myself Robert Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note; I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.
I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women. Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city, country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one inquires solicitously how I’m getting along In The Aftermath….
Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings. Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I’ve accepted it and hardly think of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It’s great fun, most fun I’ve had in the war….
But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again. He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room. He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of something. But he didn’t. He thought he might try and get some sleep. Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.
The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring now and again — the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a network of subtle blue veins. He’d pulled the blanket around him like a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a scale for the larger numbers of extinction.
Why couldn’t the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor? Or why couldn’t they have arrived just a day earlier, before the warehouses had been looted? No — again, this Repp had been lucky. He’d left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained memories of Eisner the tailor.
“Remember: the records,” Leets had said.
But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to do, no time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the heart. That was old Eisner’s uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel preferred, not this—
Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.
Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter, smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not guarded, and had not been looted.
He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness shapes appeared. Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.
“No. This guy is different. I don’t know why, but he is. He’s a curious combination of valor and evil. He’s very brave. He’s enormously brave. He’s much braver than I am. But he’s—” He paused, groping.
She would not help him.
“I can’t figure out how they turned out such men,” Leets said. “You see, we always expect them to be cowards. Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us? What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?”
“You melodramatize. I’ve seen their work. They were grim, seedy little killers, that’s all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens.”
“I asked Tony about all this. He’s a very brilliant man, you realize. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t get too philosophical, chum. We’re merely here to kill the swine.’ But that’s not enough, don’t you see?”
“You’re obsessed with this guy, that’s all I see. And he’s nothing, he’s no concept, no symbol. He’s just a pig with a gun. It’s the gun that makes him special.”
Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long storage.
He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor out of his sleep. Now where
As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as an article of faith one kept one’s hopes limited to the next day, not the next year. Yet in his sudden new leisure, Shmuel began to think of a new way of life. Certainly he wouldn’t stay in Europe. The Christians had tried to kill him; there was nothing for Jews in Europe now. You’d never know who’d been a Nazi; they’d all say it had been others, but each time you heard a German voice or saw a certain hard set of the eyes or a train of boxcars or even a cloud of smoke, the sensation would be discomfort. The Zionists were always talking about Palestine. He’d never listened. Enough to concentrate on without dreams of a desert somewhere, Arabs, fig trees, whatever. It seemed absurd. But now — well, it was there, or America.
The old man stirred.
“You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?”
“Not so bad,” said Eisner. “It’s been worse.” Then he saw Shmuel. “A uniform? And whose is that?”
“Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in the East. Called Auschwitz.”
“A terrible place, so I’ve heard. Still, it’s a surprise.”
“It’s true.”
“I thought you were with the Gentiles.”
“With, yes.
“All Gentiles frighten me.”
“That’s why I’m here alone.”
“Still after the records? I should remember records, all I’ve been through. Listen, I’ll tell you, I know nothing of records. The civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German.”
“Kohl?” said Shmuel, writing it.
“Ferdinand Kohl. I’ll spell it if you like. It makes no difference though. He’s dead. Not a bad man, but that’s how it goes. The inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But there’s too many other sorrows in here”—heart—“to make room for him.”
“Mine’s crowded as well,” Shmuel said.
“But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest. Very fancy. We made them in the thousands.”
“When?”
“Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic. Then a real true coat.”
“A special demand? For a group. Say, a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five. Do you remember?”
