“Who’re you guys?”
Arch did not like him. For a nameless reason, he did not like him. “Friends of a friend of yours.”
Pudgy looked wary. He dumped his books into the back seat, not turning from them. He was getting set to jump inside the car and slam the door, and lock it, and pull out in a hurry. Pudgy was scared.
“Who’s that, what friend?”
Frank moved slightly, to the side. It was almost a pavane, the maneuvering: Pudgy angled himself, his hand went toward the back of the front seat; Arch slid around the edge of the door. Frank’s hand came up onto the roof of the car, near Pudgy’s head. Pudgy’s eyes got milky, fear bubbled up behind him, the taint was in his bloodstream.
“A tall kid, blond hair, you know,” Frank said, his voice was deeper, a trifle threatening, “he was with you the other night at the movie, remember?”
Pudgy’s right cheek tic’d. He knew what was happening. These were Jews. He made his move.
Arch slammed the door. It caught Pudgy at the forearm. He howled. Arch reached across and grabbed him by the ear. Frank sank a fist into Pudgy’s stomach. The air whooshed out of Pudgy and left him flat, very flat, a cardboard cutout that they bundled into the front seat of the Monza, one on either side of him. They started the car, and rolled out of the parking lot. They would take him someplace. Some-place else. Pudgy would tell them who the blond Aryan had been, what his name was, where he could be found.
If they could pump enough air into him to produce sound.
Victor. Rohrer. Victor Rohrer. Blond, tall, solid with no extra flesh on his body, muscles very firm and tight, as though packed from the factory in plastic. Victor Rohrer. A face hewn from lignum vitae, from marble. Eyes chipped gray ice frost from lapis lazuli and allowed to die, harden into leaden cadaverousness. A languid body; without planes or angles; soft, downy-covered with barely visible blond hairs, each one a sensor, a feeler of atmospheres and temperatures, each one a cilium seeing and smelling and knowing the tenor of the situation. A Cardiff Giant, not even remotely human, something cold and breathing, defying Mendelian theories, defying heredity, a creature from another island universe. Muscled and wired, peering at a world of pain and confusion out of gray eyes that had seldom been blue with life. Lips thinned in expectation of silence. Victor. Rohrer. A creation of self, brought forth from its own mind for a need to exist.
Victor Rohrer, organizer of men.
Victor Rohrer, who had never known childhood.
Victor Rohrer, repository of frozen secrets.
Victor Rohrer, wearer of swastikas.
Patron of days and nights; singer of tuneless songs; visionary of clouds and nothingness; avatar of magics and unspoken credos; celebrant of terrors in nights of troubling, scary voices, endlessly threatening; architect of orderly destructions; Victor Rohrer.
“Who are you? Get away from me.”
“We want you to talk to somebody.”
“Punk filth!”
“Don’t make me flatten you, wise guy.”
“Don’t try it; I don’t like hurting people.”
“There’s one of the great laughs of our generation.”
“Come on, Rohrer, get your ass in gear; somebody’s waiting for you.”
“I said: get away from me.”
“We aren’t goons, Rohrer, don’t make us belt you around a little.”
“It would take two of you?”
“If it had to.”
“That isn’t very sportsmanlike.”
“Somewhichway, friend, you don’t make us feel very sporty. Move it, or s’help me I’ll lay this alongside your head.”
“Are you from one of those street gangs?”
“No, we’re just a coupla patriots doing a good deed.”
“I’m tired’a talking. Get it going, Rohrer.”
“You…you’re Jewish, aren’t you? You’re a Jew!”
“I said get going, you bastard! Now!”
And they brought him to Lilian Goldbosch.
Wonder danced in her eyes. A dance of the dead in a bombed-out graveyard; a useless weed growing in a bog. She stared across the room at him. He stood just inside the door, legs close together, arms at his sides, his face as featureless as an expanse of tundra. Only the gray eyes moved in the face, and they did so liquidly, flowing from corner to corner, seeing what was there to be seen.
Lilian Goldbosch walked across the room toward him. Victor Rohrer did not move. Behind him, Arch and Frank closed the door softly. They stood like paladins, one on either side of the door. They watched—with intense fascination—what was happening in this silently humming room. As different worlds paused for an eternal moment.
They did not fully comprehend what it was, but so completely had the blond boy and the old woman absorbed each other’s presence, that for now they—the ones who had effected the meeting—were gone, invisible, out of phase, no more a part of the life generated in the room than the mad little bird that dipped its beak in water, agonizingly straightened, rocked and dipped again, endlessly.
She walked up, very close to him. Where she had scratched him, his face was still marked. She reached up, involuntarily fascinated, and made as if to touch him. He moved back an inch, and she caught herself.
“You are very young.”
It was said in appraisal, with a tinge of amazement, not a hue of poetry anywhere in it; an attempt to codify the reality of this creature, Victor Rohrer.
He said nothing, but a faint softness came to his mouth, as if he knew another truth. On another face, it might have been a sneer.
“Do you know me?” she asked. “Who I am?”
He was extremely polite, as if she were a supplicant and it had fallen to him to maintain decorum and form with her. “You’re the woman who attacked me.”
Her lips tightened. The memory was still fresh, an eroded fall on a volcanic hillside she had thought incapable of being ravaged again. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I’ve come to expect it. From you people.”
“My people…”
“Jews.”
“Oh. Yes. I’m Jewish.”
He smiled knowledgeably. “Yes, I know. It says everything, doesn’t it?”
“Why do you do this thing? Why do you walk around and tell people to hate one another?”
“I don’t hate you.”
She stared at him warily; there had to be more. There was.
“How can one hate a plague of locusts, or a pack rat that lives in the walls? I don’t hate, I’m merely an exterminator.”
“Where did you get these ideas? Why does a boy your age fool around with this kind of thing, do you know what went on in the world twenty-five years ago, do you know all the sorrow and death this kind of thinking brought?”
“Not enough. He was a madman, but he had the right idea about the Juden. He had the final solution, but he made mistakes.”
His face was perfectly calm. He was not reciting cant, he was delivering a theory he had worked out, logically, completely, finally.
“How did you get so much sickness in you?”
“It is a matter of opinion which of us is diseased. I choose to believe you are the cancer.”
“What do your parents think of this?”
A hot little spot of red appeared high on his cheeks. “Their opinions are of very little concern to me.”
“Do they know about what you do?”
“I’m getting tired of this. Are you going to tell these two punks to let me go, or will I have to put up with more abuse from you and your kind?” His face was getting slightly flushed now. “Do you wonder that we want to purge you, purify the country of your filth? When you constantly prove what we say is so?”
Lilian Goldbosch turned to the two boys by the door. “Do you know where he lives?” Arch nodded. “I want to see his mother and father. Will you take me there?” Again, Arch nodded. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand. I can’t find out from him. I’ll have to ask there.”
Flames burned up suddenly in Victor Rohrer’s eyes. “You’ll stay away from my home!”
“I’ll get my purse,” she said, softly.
He went for her. His hands came out and up and he was on her, hurling her backward, over a footstool, and they went into a heap, the woman thrashing frantically, and Victor Rohrer coldly, dispassionately trying to strangle her.
Arch and Frank moved quickly.
Frank grabbed Rohrer around the throat in a hammerlock, and without ceremony or warning, Arch lifted a marble ashtray from an end table and swung it in an arc. The ashtray smacked across the side of Victor Rohrer’s head with an audible sound, and he suddenly tilted to the left and fell past Lilian Goldbosch.
He was not unconscious, Arch had pulled his punch, but he was dazed. He sat on the floor, moving his head as if it belonged to somebody else. The two high school boys attended the woman. She struggled to pick herself up, and they helped her to her feet.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked.
She leaned against Arch, and automatically her hand went to her hair, to tidy it. But the movement was only half-formed, as if all those narcissistic acts she had used to make her life livable were now frippery. Her breathing was jagged, and red marks circled her larynx where Rohrer had fastened on tightly.
“He is the complete Nazi,” she said breathlessly. “He has eaten the Nazi cake, and digested it; he is one of them. It is the old fear, the same one, the very same one, come again. Dear God, we will see it again, the way it was before.”
She began to sob. From an empty room within the structure of her soul, tears that had dried years before were called on, and would not come. Ludicrously, she rasped and wheezed, and when nothing came to her eyes, she swallowed hard and bit her lip. In a while she stopped.
“We must take him home,” she said. “I want to talk to his parents.”
They got Victor Rohrer under the arms, and they lifted him. He staggered and bobbled, but between them they got him downstairs and into the car. Arch sat in back with him, and Lilian Goldbosch stared straight ahead through the windshield, even when they finally pulled up in front of Rohrer’s house in the suburb, Berkeley.
“We’re here,” Frank said to her. She started, and looked around slowly. It was a neat, unprepossessing house, set in a line among many such houses. It escaped a total loss of identity by a certain warmth of landscaping: dwarf Japanese trees dotting the front lawn, a carefully trimmed hedge that ran down the property line on one side, ivy holding fast to a corner of the house with several years of climbing having brought it just under the second-floor windows. An ordinary house, in an ordinary town.
“Okay, Rohrer, out.”
Victor Rohrer went wild! His face contorted. The cold logical animosity of the cool reasoning racist was suddenly washed away. He began speaking in a thin, venomous tone, the words slipping out between knife-edge lips; they did not hiss, but they might as well have; he did not scream, but it had the same shocking effect.
“Kike filth. How much longer do you think you’re going to be able to push people around like this? All of you, just like you, with your rotten poisonous filth, trying to take over, trying to tell people what to do; you ought to be killed, every one of you, slaughtered like pigs, I’d do it myself if I could. You’ll see, your day is coming, the final day for you…”
It was rasped out with such intensity, Lilian Goldbosch sat straight, tensed, unable to move, it was a voice from the past. Her body began to tremble. It was the old fear, the one that years of war and years of peace had put in a grave she now found had always been too shallow. The corpse of that fear had clawed its way up out of the dirt and massed dead flesh of the communal grave, and was again walking the world.
Arch reached across and opened the door. He shoved Victor Rohrer before him. Frank and Lilian Goldbosch joined them as they walked up the front drive toward the little house.
“I’ve found my answer,” Lilian Goldbosch said, terror in her voice. “It is the old fear, the terrible one, the one that destroys worlds. And he is the first of them…but there will be many more…many…”
Her eyes were dull as they reached the front door. Rohrer spun about, slapping Arch’s hand off his arm. “You aren’t going to meet them! I won’t allow you in! This isn’t a Jew-run town, I’ll have you arrested for kidnapping, for breaking and entering…”
Lilian looked past him.
Past him, to the lintel of the door.
And the fear suddenly drained out of her face.
Victor Rohrer saw her expression, and half-turned his head. Arch and Frank looked in the direction of Lilian Goldbosch’s stare. Attached to the lintel of the door, at a slant, was a tubular ornament of shiny brass. Near the top of the face of the ornament was a small hole, through which Arch and Frank could see some strange lettering.
Lilian Goldbosch said, “Shaddai,” reached across Victor Rohrer and touched the tiny hole, then withdrew her hand and kissed the fingertips. Her face had been transformed. She no longer looked as though darkness was on its way.
Victor Rohrer made no move toward her.
“That is a fine mezuzah, Victor,” she said, softly, looking at him now with complete control of the situation. She started to turn away. “Come along, boys, I don’t need to see Victor’s parents now: I understand.”
They stared at Rohrer. He suddenly looked like a hunted animal. All his cool polite self-possession was gone. He was sweating. Alone. He stood, suddenly, on his own doorstep, next to a tubular ornament on a right doorpost, alone. Afraid.
Lilian paused a moment, turned back to Victor Rohrer. “It is true no one has a happy childhood, Victor. But we all have to live, to go on. Yours must not have been nice, but…try to live, Victor. You aren’t my enemy, neither am I your enemy.”
She walked down the steps, turned once more and said, kindly, as an afterthought, “I will say a prayer for you.”
Bewildered, Arch and Frank looked at Victor Rohrer for a long moment. They saw a man of dust. A scarecrow. An emptiness where a person had stood a moment before. This old woman, with incomprehensible words and a sudden sureness, had hamstrung him, cut the nerves from his body, emptied him like a container of murky liquid.
With a soft sound of panic, Victor Rohrer hurled himself off the front steps, and ran across the yard, disappearing in a moment. He was gone, and the three of them stood there, looking at the afternoon.
“What did you say to him?” Arch said. “That word you said. What was it?”
Lilian Goldbosch turned and walked to the car. They came and held the door for her. She was regal. When she looked up at the boys, she smiled. “Shaddai. The name of the Lord. From Deuteronomy.”
Then she got in, and they closed the door. Out of sight of Lilian Goldbosch, where she sat calmly, waiting to be driven home, Arch and Frank stared at each other. Total confusion. Something had happened here, but they had no idea what it was.
Then they got in the car, and drove her home. She thanked them, and asked them to call on her again, any time. They could not bring themselves to ask what had happened, because they felt they should be smart enough to know; but they didn’t know.
Outside, they looked at each other, and abruptly, just like that, everything that had gone before in their lives seemed somehow trivial. The dancing, the girls, the cars, the school that taught them nothing, the aimless days and nights of movies and cursing and picnics and drag races and ball games, all of it, seemed terribly inconsequential, next to this puzzle they had become part of.
“Shuh-die,” Arch said, looking at Frank.
“And that other word: muh-zooz—what it was.”
They went to see a boy they knew, in their class, a boy they had never had occasion to talk to before. His name was Arnie Sugarman, and he told them three things.
When they got back to Lilian Goldbosch’s apartment, they knew something was wrong the moment they approached the door. It was open, and the sound of classical music came from within. They shoved the doo
r open completely, and looked in.
She was lying half on the sofa, half on the floor. He had used a steam iron on her, and there was blood everywhere. They entered the room, avoiding the sight, avoiding the mass of pulped meat that had been her face before he had beaten her again, and again, and again, in a senseless violence that had no beginning and no end. The two high school boys went to the telephone, and Frank dialed the operator.
“Puh-police, please…I want to report a, uh, a murder…”
Lilian Goldbosch lay twisted and final; the terror that had pursued her across the world, through the years—the terror she had momentarily escaped—had at last found her and added her to the total that could never be totaled. She had found her answer, twenty-five years too late.
In the room, the only movement was a small bird with a comic beak that dipped itself in water, straightened, and then, agonizingly, repeated the process, over and over and over…
Hunkered in an alley, where they would find him, Victor Rohrer stared out of mad eyes. Eyes as huge as golden suns, eyes that whirled with fiery little points of light. Eyes that could no longer see.
See his past, his childhood, when they had used names to hurt him. When his parents had been funny little people who talked with accents. When he had been friendless…for that reason.
For the reason of the mezuzah on the lintel. The little holy object on the lintel, the ornament that contained the little rectangle of parchment with its twenty-two lines of Hebrew from Deuteronomy.
Back behind huge garbage cans spilling refuse, in the sick-sweet rotting odor of the alley, Victor Rohrer sat with knees drawn up, staring at his limp hands, the way a fetus “sees” its limp, relaxed hands before its face. Quiet in there, inside Victor Rohrer. Quiet for the first time. Quiet after a long time of shrieking and sound and siren wails inside a skull that had offered no defense, no protection.
Victor Rohrer and Lilian Goldbosch, both Juden, both stalked; and on an afternoon in Detroit…
…both had answered with their lives a question that had never even existed, much less been asked, by two high school boys who now had begun to suspect…
…no one escapes, when night begins to fall.
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