That each of the perpetrators could die only once was, for Albert, a powerful argument against a natural state of justice. How many times would each member of the executive board of the corporation need to die to make up for the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of people? How weak the mechanism for exacting revenge we have been granted, and how unimaginative our solutions, he’d said to Cecelia, who took a more measured approach: Punishment was imperfect because it required concessions to the humanity of the punishers. Of course there was no natural state of justice—justice was a human creation, and relied entirely on human behavior to define its parameters and enforce its boundaries. To think otherwise was naïve. Were it in her power to dole out torture, to do so would erase her own humanity, turn her into a monstrosity, and pervert the very rights she’d sworn to protect.
Albert interviewed a number of witnesses, including Jewish survivors of camps at Fünfteichen and Markstädt, which had supplied the bulk of the labor to the armament factories in Poland. Among the stories he recorded: a Polish Jew, Janusz Stern, assigned to work at a Krupp factory and beaten to death on the factory floor for laughing at a joke. Albert crisscrossed southeastern Poland searching for an electrician’s apprentice, the lone surviving non-German eyewitness, but in the end could only determine that he’d disappeared near the Russian front.
Albert worked two years on the case. Krupp’s sentence: twelve years and forfeiture of property. Not even three years later, General John McCloy ordered that Krupp was to be freed from Landsberg, his property restored. The only thing worse than a Nazi was a communist, and Stalin’s shadow was creeping across the continent. The U.S. needed a strong, industrialized Germany between the Reds and the free people of Western Europe. Cecelia Goetz was right. Justice is a concession to the humanity of the punishers. If we were made to atone for the sins of our fathers, there’d be no one left.
I understand now that my father was trying to atone. He might not have burned and broken his body, but his illogical fears, the terrors that controlled his movements through the world, were punishments, daily reminders of his sin. His books were shrines to the death of Janusz Stern. Every crooked word he wrote was an act of remembrance. Every malformed character, every faulty structure, every looping metafictional roller coaster. For decades he failed to write a single word of truth, and that was his lasting memorial to what he’d witnessed in that Krupp factory. The book he hated most, the one he always said was the biggest lie of all, the one that made him famous, made him wealthy, and forced him to create yet another version of himself in order to deal with the praise, Slingshot, was the story of a Jewish teacher who escaped the Nazis, set in Poland in 1944. All those years he was writing negatives, reverse images. The more he lied, the more books he sold. A person could be forgiven for thinking that the whole world is inside out.
29.
The air had frozen and cracked open so that it could spontaneously generate snow without need of the clunky cloud-based apparatus, a spectacular advance in meteorological destruction, a full-bore whitewash, wall-to-wall cotton sludge, a ubiquitous visual plane that induced in my father an acute claustrophobia because he couldn’t—yes, it was true—see his hand in front of his face. Whiteout conditions! he thought (he couldn’t help himself from naming everything, however banal; he was sure that even as he drew his final breath he would be cataloguing the room, Table, Chair, Wife, Window, and his dying words would be something profound like Ceiling Fan) and went on to consider that on the ice caps this was how explorers died, lashed together by a length of rope, sausage links snaking blindly around in wobbly parabolas, spirograph patterns, tangled knots that enfolded the fools in their open-air tomb, though it was easier to recover the corpses when the thaw arrived several months later …
He wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Didn’t he? The streets at that moment safer than they’d been in years, and he was never more than thirty feet from the door of a building, though the physical insistence of the storm was extraordinary, fire-hose-level insistent. Since his last step he’d been suffocated, encased in Styrofoam, buried alive, disinterred, drawn and quartered, plunged whole into an icy lake, battered by shovels, whipped and spun and trampled and given a righteous slap on the ass to get the lungs fired up again, and when he ventured forth another tenuous step into the void, perhaps following John in a northernward direction, perhaps charting his own new trail west to the Hudson, matters of velocity and heading having been delegated to the murky realm of telepathy and Tarot, cardinal points having become remnants of a lost age, he had the sense that he very well could be stepping off a cliff. On the upside, he was pretty sure that the mental patient chasing them wouldn’t be faring any better.
Well, he was mostly right about that. The counterman from the Cosmic, who, with all the precision of an inadequately tranquilized rhino, had come weaving across the hospital lobby at John, plowing into chairs, flattening a revolving wire stand of reproductive health brochures, his bruised brain a tangle of sparking wires that resolved into carbonized, half-formed curses, many of which, if salvaged, might have proved innovative, even poetic, packed as his quiver was with a broad spectrum of linguistic twists and cultural biases, and had, bummer for him, caught the attentions of the off-duty cop, Mr. Mustache, Officer Kissler when on the beat, not just another stick of lobby furniture to be trashed by our mercury-tongued counterman as he prepared to sing his polyphonic aria of profanities, which had begun
