Nelson than by Streisand. Streisand. She’s got the look. Friend of mine in California is very close to the film industry [cackle], he’s not so happy with the Jews. You know, there is a little Gentile remnant there. Disney used to be their home. But it’s all been taken over. They’ll tell you that any business the Jew is in is filled with kickbacks, payoffs, trading off, networking, but networking fucks you. They got to hire the nitwit brother-in-law. Why? Because the father-in-law has invested in the business, and, Jesus, they shake their head, but of course you can’t fire him. So he just sits at a desk or takes long lunches, you hope. But if he gets actively involved, he fucks up everything. Jews don’t put trust in the bank, they have private trusts. I know from my business experience. Jesus Christ, I dealt with so many Jews in my time. All of them have Jewish attorneys, all of them sharp dealers, all of them this, all of them that, right? My boss knows how to treat ’em, he says this is the price, fuck you. He treats them like shit. [Laughter.] He treats them like shit right away, when they come in. I wondered why he did it. He says, I used to be nice to these fucking people but you can’t be nice to them. He makes them write letters, which they don’t like. They love that fuckin’ telephone. Because if they bid on something, well, I’ll pay three hundred and forty thousand for it, then they come in and say, well, you know I told you three twenty on the phone, they like to fuck over your head, and with their sharp business practices they create enemies. They know they’re disliked. Why? It’s because of what they do! But still you can’t say anything against Ivan Boesky or any of these other people. If you say anything about them you are therefore [whispering] an anti-Semite. No wonder anti-Semitism has gone underground — it has to. Man, how can you not be anti- Semitic? When you see them they’re all on the fucking telephone, manipulating. For better jobs. Or helping their friends. Jesus Christ, they’re born with the PR gene. Born with this aggressive gene. It’s just amazing. Of course, if you fire them — especially if you make a Jew fire a Jew. Jesus Christ, I guess there’s no such thing. Very weird and strange people. See, one of the things about Jews that I really dislike is that they don’t understand the Gentile mind. You can say to the Gentile, “We suffered,” and we agree, the German did push you around. Then you come out with the six million, then you extract money from the Bonn government based on six million, then you talk about this and that, then people start chipping away at that six million. Bring the six million even down to eight hundred thousand, let’s say. They don’t understand the goy mind. Have you ever seen any publicity about a Jew who hasn’t suffered because of his faith? The “survivors.” Everyone survived. There are so many Auschwitz “survivors.” No one, of course, asks the question if maybe you survived by turning in your friend. The “survivors” all wrote books. You ever notice they’re all the same books? Because they’re all copying from another book. They’re all the same because Jewish Control Central said, Here’s the line on Auschwitz, write it! Oh, sly fucking devils. Sly!
When my phone rang at almost eight a.m. I had been asleep in the chair beside it since I’d last checked on Demjanjuk’s son at about five-thirty. I had dreamed that I owed $128 million on my water bill. That was what my mind came up with after all I’d just been through.
On awakening I smelled something enormous putrefying. I smelled must and feces. I smelled the walls of a damp old chimney. I smelled the fermenting smell of sperm. I smelled her asleep in my trousers — she was that heavy, clinging, muttony stench and she was also that pleasingly unpleasing brackishness on the middle fingers of the hand that picked up the receiver of the ringing phone. My unwashed face was rank with her. Dipped in her. In everyone. I smelled of them all. The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.
The phone was ringing in a hotel room where nobody I knew knew that I was.
A man said, “Roth?” Again a man with an accent. “Roth? You there?”
“Who …?”
“The office of Rabbi Meir Kahane.”
“Wants Roth?”
“This Roth? I am the press secretary. Why do you call the rabbi?”
“Pipik!” I cried.
“Hello? This is the Roth, the self-hating Jewish assimilationist?”
“Pipik, where are you?”
“And fuck you too.”
I bathe.
Two words.
I dress in clean clothes.
Five words.
I no longer smell.
Four words.
Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse.
And this, I thought, my mind already, first thing, careening around its densely overstocked little store of concerns, this is how Demjanjuk does it. Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and the friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened. The accusations? Well, they might as well charge him with owing $128 million on the water bill. Even if they had his signature on the water bill, even if they had his photograph on the water bill, how could it possibly be his water bill? How could anyone use that much water? Admittedly he bathed, sprinkled the lawn, wet down the garden, washed the car, there was a washer-dryer, an automatic dishwasher, there was water for cooking, there were houseplants to water, there were floors to wash every week, they were a family of five, and five people use water — but does that add up to $128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do, and in the summertime I drink my fill after going out and weeding the garden. But do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million? Do I strike you as somebody who, twenty-four hours a day, thirty days a month, twelve months a year, year in and year out, is thinking about water and nothing else? Is water running out of my nose and my mouth? Are my clothes sopping wet? Is there a puddle where I walk, is there water under the chair where I sit? Pardon me, but you’ve got the wrong man. Some Jew, if I may say so, stuck six zeros on my bill just because I am Ukrainian and supposed to be stupid. But I am not so stupid that I don’t know my own water bill. My bill is one hundred and twenty-eight dollars — one — two — eight! There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!
* * * As I was leaving the room on my way to get something to eat before racing off to the trial, I suddenly remembered Apter, and the thought of him wondering if I had abandoned him, the thought of his vulnerability, of his lonely, fear-ridden, fragile existence, sent me back into the room to phone him, at least to assure him that he hadn’t been forgotten and that as soon as I possibly could, I would come to see him … but it turned out that I had seen him. It turned out that I’d had lunch with him just the day before: while Aharon and I had been eating together at the Ticho House, Apter and I had been eating together only a few blocks away at a vegetarian restaurant off Ethiopia Street where we’d always gone in the past for our meal together. It turned out that while Smilesburger was presenting me with his staggering contribution, Apter had been telling me again that he was afraid to go to his stall in the Old City for fear that the Arabs there would kill him with their knives. He was afraid now even to leave his room. And even in his bed, he lay awake, watchful all night long, afraid that if he were to so much as blink his eyes, they would steal through his window and devour him. He had cried and begged me to take him back with me to America, he had lost control of himself completely, bawling and shrieking that he was powerless and that only I could save him.
And I had acceded. At lunch with him I had agreed. He was to come to live in my barn in Connecticut. I had told him that I would build a big new room for him in the unused barn, fix up a room with a skylight and a bed and whitewashed walls, where he could live securely and paint his landscapes and never again have to worry about being eaten alive while he slept.
