courtroom with his Orthodox coconspirators, poised to undertake the folly of kidnapping Demjanjuk’s son. If Pipik returns to steal these … well, that’s Supposnik’s hard luck, not mine!
Nonetheless I turned back to the desk from which I’d turned away and asked the clerk to hand me the package that I had only just deposited with him. While he watched with a barely discernible smirk suggesting that he, rather like me, saw in this scene great untapped comic potential, I tore it open, put the red diary (“My Trip”) into one of my jacket pockets and the brown diary (“Travels Abroad”) into the other, and then quickly left the hotel with George, who all this while, submerged in his malice, racked by God only knew what unendurable fantasies of restitution and revenge, had sat in a chair close by the door smoking cigarette after cigarette, observing the brisk stirrings of another busy day in the sedate, attractive lobby of a four-star Jewish hotel whose prosperous guests and resourceful staff were, of course, utterly indifferent to the misery caused him by their matter-of-factly manageable existence.
As we stepped into the bright sunlight, I surveyed the cars parked along the street to see if Pipik might be in one of them, hiding the way he’d hidden in his “vehicle” as a Chicago detective. I saw a figure standing on the roof of the YMCA building across the street from the hotel. It could be him, he could be anywhere — and for a moment I
9 FORGERY, PARANOIA, DISINFORMATION, LIES
Before stepping into the taxi I quickly checked out the driver, a tiny Turkish-looking Jew a foot and a half shorter than Pipik or me and crowned with ten times more wiry black hair than the two of us possessed together. His English was less than rudimentary, and once we were in the cab George had to repeat our destination to him in Hebrew. We were as good as alone in that cab, and so between the hotel and the courtroom, I told George Ziad everything that I should have told him the day before. He listened silently and, to my astonishment, did not seem startled or at all incredulous to learn that there had been another “me” in Jerusalem all the while he’d assumed that there was only the one with whom he had been to graduate school three decades earlier. He wasn’t even ruffled (he who enjoyed so few moments without his veins and arteries visibly vibrating) when I tried to diagnose for him the perverse impulse that had led me to masquerade before his wife and his son as the Diasporist fanatic tendering manic homage to Irving Berlin.
“No apologies necessary,” he replied in a calmly cutting voice.
“You are still who you were. Always on the stage. How could I have failed to remember? You’re an actor, an amusing actor performing endlessly for the admiration of his friends. You’re a satirist, always looking for the laugh, and how can a satirist be expected to suppress himself with a raving, ranting, slobbering Arab?”
“I don’t know these days what I am,” I said. “What I did was stupid — stupid and inexplicable — and I’m sorry. It was the last thing Anna and Michael needed.”
“But what about what
So no more was said by either of us during the remaining few minutes before we reached the courtroom, and whether George was a deluded madman or a cunning liar — or a great comic artist in his own right — or whether the network of intrigue he claimed to represent existed (and whether a man so out of control and continually at the breaking point could be its representative) I had no way now of finding out.
At the courthouse, when George hopped out of his side of the taxi before I even had a chance to pay the driver, I believed I’d never see him again. Yet there he was, already at the back of the courtroom, when I slipped inside a minute or two later. Quickly catching hold of my hand, he whispered, “You’re the Dostoyevsky of disinformation,” and only then proceeded past me to look for a seat by himself.
The courtroom that morning was less than half full. According to
I’d got a set of earphones at the desk by the entrance door and, slipping them over my head, turned the dial to the channel for the English translation of the proceedings. It was a minute or two, however, before I could take in what one of the judges — the chief judge, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Levin — was saying to the witness on the stand. He was the first witness of the day, a compactly built, sturdy-looking Jewish man in his late sixties, whose substantial head — a weighty boulder onto which a pair of thick spectacles had incongruously been set — was stacked squarely atop a torso of cement building blocks. He wore slacks and a surprisingly sporty red and black pullover sweater, something in which a clean-cut young athlete might show up for a date, and his hands, a laborer’s hands, a dock- worker’s hands, hands that looked hard as nails, were fastened to the lip of the lectern with the impassioned, bottled-up nervous ferocity of a heavyweight bursting to catapult into battle at the sound of the bell.
His name was Eliahu Rosenberg and this was not his first round in court with Demjanjuk, as I knew from a startling photograph in the Demjanjuk clipping file that had caught my attention the day I’d arrived, one in which a friendly, grinning Demjanjuk is warmly offering Rosenberg his hand to shake. The photograph had been taken about a year before, on the seventh day of the trial, when Rosenberg was asked by the prosecution to leave the witness stand and step up to the defendant’s chair, some twenty feet away, to make his identification. Rosenberg had been called to testify as one of seven prosecution witnesses who claimed to recognize John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio, as the Ivan the Terrible they had known while they were prisoners at Treblinka. According to Rosenberg, he and Ivan, both men then in their early twenties, had worked in close proximity every day for nearly a year, Ivan as the guard who operated the gas chamber and supervised the detail of Jewish prisoners, the “death commandos,” whose job was to empty the gas chamber of corpses, to clean it of urine and excrement so as to make it ready for the gassing of the next shipment of Jews, and to whitewash the walls, outside as well as inside, so as to cover over the bloodstains (for Ivan and the other guards oftentimes drew blood while driving the Jews into the gas with knives and clubs and iron pipes). Twenty-one-year-old Eliahu Rosenberg, recently of Warsaw, was one of the death commandos, those thirty or so living Jews whose other job, after each gassing, was carrying on stretchers — running all the while at top speed — the naked corpses of the freshly killed Jews to the open-air “roast” where, after their gold teeth were extracted for the German state treasury by the prisoner “dentist,” the bodies were skillfully piled to be incinerated, children and women at the bottom for kindling, and men at the top, where they ignited more easily.
Now, eleven months later, Rosenberg had been surprisingly recalled, this time by the defense, in the midst of its summing up. The judge was telling Rosenberg, “You will listen carefully to the questions put to you and you will reply and confine yourself to the questions put to you. You will not enter into polemics nor will you lose your self-control as, unfortunately, happened more than once in the course of your testimony —”
But, as I have said, during my first few minutes inside the courtroom, I could not focus on the English translation coming through my headphones, not with young Demjanjuk in the row before me, mine to maintain surveillance over, mine to sit by and protect — if protection was indeed warranted — from the machinating Moishe Pipik, and not with these two diaries filling my pockets.
