City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  Before the German invasion, before the eviction of the Jews, my father, your grandfather, had been an agrarian economist at the university. That meant matters of crops, farm production, and so on. That is why he was a secret consultant of the council. They had to figure out the distribution of foodstuffs allotted by the Germans. Of course there was never enough. It was my father who staked in two empty lots the plan for a community vegetable garden that the council brought to the Germans for their approval.

  My mother had been a doctoral candidate in English language and literature at the same university. When we moved to the ghetto all of that was over. In the beginning my father went off every dawn with the labor details across the bridge to work on the assembly line in the airplane factory, and my mother was designated to teach in the ghetto school. But nothing stayed the same, restrictions followed one another, and more and more of the normal things of life were taken away. So one day the Germans shut down our schools, and after that my mother was assigned like my father to the labor brigades in the city.

  I was warned to stay out of sight. I spent most of my time in our house. My mother had saved several books from confiscation and brought them home to me. The books were kept behind a loose wall board in my room. It was an attic room with a small window I could see from only if I got down on my knees. I studied those books avidly, French and English readers, math workbooks, and histories of European civilization. I relished books from the higher grades and liked to master them. My mama made up assignments from these books and even tests for me to take. I loved tests. I loved her voice as she read my work and graded it and I loved it when we bent over my workbook together in the evening after she made our supper.

  Of course I had one or two friends. Joseph Liebner, who had been a year ahead of me in school and whose father was a baker in the ghetto bakery, and a boy named Nicoli, who shared with me his German-language cowboy novels, and the blond girl Sarah Levin, whose pretty mother, Miriam, taught music and who had told my mother that Sarah had an eye for me, a bit of news that I heard with feigned indifference. In fact every week on Tuesday I went down two blocks to Mrs. Levin’s for my fiddle lesson. The fiddle was kept in her house, though it was mine. Naturally I could never practice. My lesson was also my practice for the lesson. It took place while the men in the carpentry shop next door were still working, so that the sound of the fiddle could not be heard over the noise. At such times Sarah Levin sat in the room, a thin child with pale hair and large eyes that watched me, which I told myself I hated, though of course it made me play smartly.

  Still, most of the time I was alone. I waited for my parents, praying to God they would return from their day’s labor in the city. As they’d come in the door, bringing the cold air with them, perhaps with a bit of smuggled food bartered from the Lithuanians, I would thank God for His beneficence.

  It was in this period of my life I learned from observation of my mother and father what adult love was. That this could be maintained—a presumption of a father’s male powers, a mother’s beauty, her waiting upon him, her reception of him in their bed—when they lived stripped of their lives, enslaved, everything taken from them, I did not understand as something remarkable until years afterward. Now I only accumulated the evidence. The strong attraction between them had nothing to do with me. My mother could not stop looking at her husband. When he was in the room with us she was transfixed. I watched her bosom as she breathed. I noted the thickness of the curve of his forearm under the rolled shirtsleeve. I watched him stand out at the open door and look down the street each way before he permitted them to leave the house. When they readied themselves for work at dawn, he helped my mother with her coat and then she turned and raised the collar of his jacket. Upon each, front and back, was sewn the star of yellow cloth.

  One night I was awakened by what I thought was the wind whistling through the cracks in the attic boards. But it wasn’t the wind, it was screaming. Not from nearby, not from my house—I heard my parents in the room below, the urgent tones of their voices when they thought I couldn’t hear them. I knelt at my window: The sky was alight. My street was quiet, the houses dark, but the sky beyond seemed to be flying upward. I saw the color of flame reflected on my nightshirt and called to my parents. Fire, fire! In moments my mother was with me, leading me back to bed. Shh, she said, it’s all right, we are not on fire, you are safe, go back to sleep. I wrapped myself in the safety of my covers, I folded the pillow over my ears and hummed to myself so as not to hear those screams. It was a terrible sound, though distant, of many screaming voices. I watched the firelight fade on the inside of my eyelids. I fell asleep imagining the screams turning back into the wind, as if drawn up by God, rising to heaven.

  In the morning the word came that the Germans had burned down the hospital. When I say the hospital, you must not imagine the sort of modern high-rise facility we have here. It was a cluster of houses that had been refashioned by opening walls and tying the buildings together with lumber so as to provide three wards of bunk beds, one for men, one for women, one for children, as well as some examining rooms, a small ill-equipped operating room, and a dispensary. The Germans surrounded the hospital, boarded up the doors and windows and, with over sixty-five people inside, including twenty-three children, set the place on fire. These are numbers indelible in my mind. Sixty-five. Twenty-three. Some of the patients had been ill with typhus and they feared the contagion, the decimation of the labor supply. So this was their solution, to burn everyone alive, including the staff. All the next day smoke rose over the town. The sky was overcast, the weather unnaturally warm. The smoke lingered like fog. My eyes smarted, I coughed to expel the smoke. I imagined I’d inhaled the smoke of the dead, and perhaps I had. At dawn, everyone had to go off to work as usual. In the evening, after the workers returned, though it was illegal to gather in numbers, several men slipped into the rabbi’s house next door to say Kaddish for the murdered souls.

  This was not the first of the so-called actions by the Germans. There were and would be others, sudden, unannounced sweeps of the houses, when they trucked people to the old fort on the river west of the city to be murdered. They had these bouts of efficiency. But with this particular horror, my father resigned from his role with the council. He had found his complicity in a life of helpless subjugation no longer endurable. There was a secret meeting of the council the next night after the fire, and when he came back, I was upstairs supposedly asleep but as awake and alert as I could be. A silence while my mother put the bread and soup before him. He pushed the dish away.

  “Tomorrow is the monthly meeting with the Germans,” he told her. “The council will make a formal protest. It would apply moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror.” His voice was uncharacteristically leaden, toneless.

  “What would you have it do?” my mother asked. She spoke softly. I could hardly hear her.

  “Above and beyond the fact of our systematic slavery, they like to surprise us,” my father said. His voice grew louder, angrier. “They like to amuse themselves. Schmitz, that jackal who runs things”—this was the chief S.S. officer—“how can the council bear to look at him, speak with him, as if he is human? This ritual pretense of a common humanity to which we have to subscribe if we hope to outlast them! As if we are the caretakers of madmen who must never be told they are mad. Schmitz and the others will be laughing to themselves while affecting civilized conversation. They will say it is wartime and things that are regrettable are nonetheless unavoidable. They will go on to discuss the flour and potato allocations as the next order of business.”

  “Ari, shah,” my mother said. “You’ll wake him.”

  “I can no longer endure this!”

  That cry of despair I will never forget, not only for the clenching of my boy’s heart that my father was, truly and in fact, without the resources to protect us, but for the piercing illumination it brought to me of my physical self as game for a predator. He went on about this effect of our history: that w
e had lived among them, the Christians, for generation upon generation, only to see ourselves bent and twisted to the shape of their hatred. We had been turned into Jews so that they could be Christians.

  Now exactly what happened after this I cannot tell you. It was perhaps two or three months after the fire, emotions had become numb. The shock had worn off in the routine of work, secret meetings, secret prayers on the part of the religious. The return once more to the hope of outlasting them, to hanging on until liberation came. There had been rumors of the defeat of the Nazi armies in Africa. It was in this period that my parents failed to return home from their labor. To this day I don’t know the circumstances. One morning at dawn, as usual, he helped her with her coat, she turned up his collar against the cold, they both kissed their son. They gave me the usual instructions for the day. And they opened the door into the dark morning and closed the door behind them and I never saw them again.

  I do know that around this time a notice was posted in the ghetto—the Germans were calling for a hundred intelligentsia for special work as curators and catalogers in the city archives. Mama and Papa discussed this. She was against volunteering, arguing that the Germans could not be trusted. Papa’s view was that it was a reasonable risk to take and that he should sign on. He believed if he had such a job he would see people he knew and could make contact with the Resistance. My mother said she wanted us to survive. My father said while any decision they made could be the last, of one thing he was certain, and that was how it would end for everyone who remained in the ghetto.

  Well of course my mother was right, it was another of the Germans’ murderous deceptions: The intelligentsia who had given their credentials for archival work were trucked out of the city to the old fort by the river and shot to death. But if my father was among them, what about my mother, who would not have volunteered? Or had she after all? But that would have been too reckless, both of them taking a chance with their lives and leaving a small boy behind. Perhaps if he had volunteered, she had been implicated in some way and taken off too before she could flee. Perhaps they had been murdered for other reasons having nothing to do with this question. I didn’t know.

  But there was another possibility—that they were still alive, that they had managed to escape and join the partisans. It was Rabbi Grynspan from next door who told me this on the very evening my parents didn’t return. “Come quickly, you must not stay here,” he said. “You are technically an orphan, though of course your parents are alive in the forest and will come back for you, may the Lord, Blessed be He, show them the way.”

  “They went with the Resistance?”

  “Yes.” This after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Well why couldn’t they take me with them?”

  “They thought you would be safer here. Quickly, no more talk. Unattended children the Nazis do not tolerate. You will be provided, never mind books, take your sweater, these shirts, wrap these things in your coat and come with me.”

  Thereafter, I lived knowing Mama and Papa were dead but at the same time waiting for them to come rescue me. I knew they were dead because they wouldn’t have thought I’d be safer alone in the ghetto than with them. But I thought they were alive, because the rabbi had confirmed what my father had said, that he wanted to make contact with the Resistance. I lived in this irresolute state of mind for a considerable time, knowing in my heart they were dead, but always looking up from what I was doing to see if they had come for me. It was a long time before I stopped thinking of them altogether.

  —If Albert is right, there is consolation to be derived from the planets. For example, that they’re all spheroid, that none of them are shaped like dice or the cardboards laundered shirts come folded on. And thinking about their formation—how, from amorphous furious swirls of cosmic dust and gas, everything spins out and cools and organizes itself into a gravitationally operating solar system.. . . And that this has apparently happened elsewhere, that there are billions of galaxies with stars beyond number, so that even if a fraction of stars have orbiting planets with moons in orbit around them. . . a few planets, at least, may have the water necessary for the intelligent life that could be suffering the same metaphysical crisis that deranges us. So we have that to feel good about.

  —Sarah Blumenthal’s Conversation with Her Father

  The rabbi took me to the council offices. Several children were there. Some were crying. I sat among them on the floor and leaned back against the wall and watched and listened. The council staff were begging everyone to be quiet. One man at a desk was typing. He had a typewriter because it was the council. I liked the clear, precise clack of the typewriter keys. I fell asleep for a while. When I awoke the other children were gone, the room was quiet, and a woman was kneeling before me. “You have a new name now,” she said, smiling. “A nice name, too. Yehoshua. Go ahead, say it.”

  “Yehoshua.”

  “That’s right. Yehoshua Mendelssohn. That is you from now on. It is the name you must answer to, and this is your registration that says you are now him that you will carry always in your pocket, all right? In case anyone asks? You live in Demokratu Street. I will take you there. It is pretty, it looks onto the vegetable garden.”

  The woman took my bundle and held my hand as if I were a baby and walked with me through the ghetto. Her palm was damp with fear, but she would not let go. She stopped in front of the door of a small house. “You have a grandfather,” she told me, and then she knocked at the door.

  The so-called grandfather was a tailor named Srebnitsky, a thin illtempered man, somewhat stooped, with gray hair curling from under his cap and with narrow shoulders over which a shirt and vest hung loosely. A musty smell came from him which I thought of as grandfather smell. He had pale blue eyes that glimmered with water. But the most powerful impression he made on me was that he was a stranger.

  His house consisted of two rooms, a front and a back, and a small alcove that served for a kitchen. I was to sleep on a daybed in the front room, where the tailor maintained his business.

  “So, I have a grandson,” he said, not smiling. “Thus God in His wisdom provides. May I hope He will give me a daughter and son-in-law as well? And why not a wife as long as He’s at it?” He spoke not to me but seemingly to the work in his hands, or perhaps to the hands themselves, which were long, smooth, and nimble and therefore fascinating, because they seemed so much younger than the rest of him. The needle flew through the cloth, in and out, and perfectly straight lines of stitches grew with amazing speed.

  As the weeks passed I took on the duty of sweeping the floor of the bits of thread and shreds of rags that accumulated there. But nothing could be thrown out, everything went back in the rag bin. The garments brought to the tailor were threadbare coats, dresses, trousers that he would mend or tear down and reconstruct, somehow, with his bits of thread and rags from his rag bin, so that they could be worn again, at least for a little while. There was no money exchanged with the customers, there was scrip. More often there was barter. The Germans couldn’t police that very well. A carpenter whose jacket he mended fixed a shutter so that it would close properly. A woman whose coat he lined left some soup.

  The only book in the house was a Bible, so I took to reading it closely. I found some of it puzzling. Assuming the old man was pious, I began to ask questions of him. Gleams of triumph came to Srebnitsky’s watery eyes. With relish he pointed out the contradictions and absurdities of the biblical text. “Look closely at what you’re reading,” he said. “The dates tell you. When this happened, when that happened. Samuel could not have written Samuel any more than Moses could have written Moses. How could they themselves know when they had died? Stories, nonsense, all of it. Pious fraud. And in the beginning? In the beginning—what? Who is talking, who is being addressed? Who was there? Where is the voucher? The people who made up these stories knew even less than we do. You want God? Don’t look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a fl
ea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That’s the kind of God you’re dealing with.”

  I found myself oddly comforted by these remarks. I’d always had doubts myself about the biblical God, as I do to this day, as you well know and, I hope, forgive. Also, the old man’s attitude reminded me of my father, who was a Zionist and a man of science, although he observed the Sabbath and the High Holy Days. But in addition there was a kind of hidden compliment in the regard the old man had to have had for me by talking to me as a person who was capable of using his own mind, thinking for himself and taking nothing on faith even though I was just a boy.

  Most of the time, though, there was no conversation from Srebnitsky. Hour after hour he sat hunched at his worktable by the window, his beautiful hands playing a kind of nimble deaf-and-dumb speech in my mind. The concentration of his gaze on this small field of cloth, over which his hands spoke, I thought of as his defiance of all the lies of God and his obstinate refusal to succumb to the despair that swept through the ghetto in waves, like the fever.

  His sewing machine had been taken from him, the loss of which he cursed every day. Their concession to his trade was to leave him his scissors and needles and boxes of notions and skeins of thread. Also his two human figures on wheeled stands, one male, one female, constructed in wire from the waist up. These tailor’s dummies were often the objects of my contemplation. Though they could be seen through, I felt them as real presences in the room. I realized how little it took for something to appear human. Sometimes the dummies would get moved around and I would be startled coming upon them unexpectedly, mistaking them for real people. I fantasized their indifference, that nothing could hurt them. You could hang them, shoot them, you could hammer them into a shapeless clump, pull and twist them into one long strand of wire, and they wouldn’t feel it, nor would they care. Being inanimate was an enviable, even transcendent, state in my thinking. Yet at the same time I had no difficulty imagining the dummies talking to each other. I liked to wheel them into a conversational position after the tailor had retired and just before I myself lay down to sleep: Well here it is evening, time to rest, the man would say to the woman. Yes, she would answer, and tomorrow the sun will surely come and shine its warmth upon us.