City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  it has brought the sad, jeaned lady at the bar’s end her Marlboros,

  given the mirror behind those bottles its particular tarnish

  and, not incidentally, lit us in this neon-blue light of illusory freedom.

  How old was my father, twenty-four, twenty-five?

  Here he was, a sailor, a lover of the sea, steeped in the earth’s muck,

  a young man defending a country not his own,

  a runner run to ground,

  everything he’d made of himself negated somehow in the wholehearted bestowal of his youth

  and with an army of Huns hurdling over his prostrate form.

  Not that he was a political innocent—

  He’d learned from his father, my grandfather Isaac, the printer,

  the sweet values of the civil religion, socialism.

  He knew the German boys who would kill him if he moved were closer to him in what they had to gain or lose

  than they were to the generals, and the regal families who directed them.

  He knew that society was structured vertically not laterally

  and that for a moment before the war had flared across Europe

  not just the artists and intellectuals in the cafés of Paris and Vienna and Berlin

  who wrote their aesthetic manifestos on cloth napkins and held their smoking Gauloises and Navy Cuts between their thumbs and forefingers,

  but the people working in the factories and digging in the coal mines for their pittances

  and the schoolteachers, shop assistants, and streetcar conductors,

  proposed that they were not French or German or Italian but members of the universal working class that spanned all borders

  and was universally enslaved to capitalism

  and its monarchical appurtenances

  and its nationalist ideologies that were pure

  bullshit.

  Ah the twenty-eighth of June, a bitter chill it was when a Serbian, Princip, blew away the Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, but more disastrously the Austrian Socialist party, whose betrayed members were soon enlisting alongside everyone else.

  But my father’s thoughts at this time, I will venture, were as follows:

  his mother, his father, his sweetheart Ruth,

  his sister Sophie, his sister Mollie and, not to make him less human than he was,

  the French girl in the coastal town of Villedieu who had come to draw water from the well in the square where he sat with his mates under the awning of the Café Terrasse de la Gare drinking white wine and eating bread and cheese.

  But what exactly do you think when you think of someone?

  You don’t think in photographs, you don’t think in flashbacks, as the movies claim

  (what else can they do?)

  You may see a gesture that fades before it appears leaving only a sense of its fidelity

  If you hear a voice it is a sample, barely realized more like the sound of a moral nature.

  The thought of someone is a not quite visualized and almost inaudible

  presence in your mind

  —perhaps not even in your mind—

  of your own assembled affections

  an order of sensations very much your own,

  like a wordless song you sing to yourself

  or a fervent prayer you do not bring to speech

  in praise of the unutterable specificity of character.

  The thought of his mother, Ben felt as his own irrepressible adoration of her

  His little Mama, whom he loved to tease and dance around the kitchen

  till whatever wrong thing he had done was washed away in her laughter.

  His quiet Papa, slender and straight, with a head of fine white hair

  and the cheekbones of the Siberian steppes

  was his own intellectual formation

  the assumptions he wasn’t aware of as assumptions that proposed the questions he was likely to ask.

  His sweetheart Ruth was his longing for life the form of his aching loneliness

  The American beauty

  who stood like the Statue of Liberty in his mind

  Steadfast, loyal, Manhattan-born, like himself,

  configured as the promise of the new world,

  and supersedent of the historical disaster that was Europe

  that his immigrant parents had despaired of

  and where he lay pressed against the near trench wall

  with an army of Huns hurdling over his prostrate form.

  This should have been the final moment of our family’s European connection

  when, the advance having gone past him, supporting enemy troops

  came scuttling down the trenches looking for living Allies they could kill

  Food, boots, ammunition they could salvage,

  and my father, hearing them in the adjoining angle of the zigzagged trench

  summoned up a last remembrance of the old world Yiddish

  he’d heard in his childhood on Stanton Street—

  a Germanic dialect to hush and soften and make melodic

  that language of expectorated shrapnel—

  And shouted from cupped hands, re-Prussianed, he hoped, an order to the approaching soldiers

  to stop their goddamn malingering

  and move out before he had their asses court-martialed, or words to that effect,

  Which they did to his astonishment. And then he lay

  against the other trench wall as a few minutes later the Huns leapt over in retreat,

  a counterattack having been mounted which would by midnight leave everything as it had been before

  except of course for the thousands of fresh corpses,

  a fact my father understood when, roused up by the Limeys and the Frogs,

  he climbed over the top and ran forward, bayonet poised into the littered sulfurous hell

  of No-Man’s-Land

  a maniac animal scream issuing from him

  while his mind quietly assured him that the true soul

  is finally left inviolable by circumstance.

  —Perhaps the first songs were lullabies. Perhaps mothers were the first singers. Perhaps they learned to soothe their squirming simian babes by imitating the sounds of moving water, the gurgles, cascades, plashes, puddlings, flows, floods, spurts, spills, gushes, laps, and sucks. Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs.

  There is the endless delight we take in new beings. . . and there is the antediluvian rage they evoke by their blind, screaming, shitting, and pissing helplessness. So the songs for them are two-faced, lulling in the gentle maternal voice but viciously surrealistic in the words. Rock a bye, baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all.. . . Imagine falling through a tree, your legs locked and your arms tightly bound to your sides. Imagine falling down into the world with your little head bongoing against the boughs and the twigs, and branches whipping across your ears as if you were a xylophone. Imagine being born. Lullabies urge us to go to sleep at the same time they enact for us the terror of waking. In this way we learn for our own sake the immanence in all feelings of their opposite. The Bible, too, speaks of this as the Fall.

  —Things Noah Would Have to Have Two Of: Dung beetles. Absolutely essential. Let’s see. . . forty days and nights of rain plus a hundred and fifty of swollen waters. . . all together about six and a third months on board living with camels, horses, lions, jackals, wild asses, goats, sheep, hedgehogs, boars, meerkats, caracals, wolves, warthogs, jerboas. . . hmmm. You would know better than to shovel that stuff overboard, when the waters receded you would need topsoil. Still, that’s lots of work for just two dung beetles, even in their generations. Better make it four.

  —And, Jesus Christ, the desert! the sun so hot, all that sucking swamp
of after-flood, great placental slides of steaming slime, quagmires, concaving basins bubbling at their drain, lakes turning sodden with all their suffocating, swimming creatures flipping and flailing to fossilized death, schools of dead fish carpeting the earth, the soil drying, caking, cracking, the footage firming, and all that after-flood baking away into a merciless desert strewn with boulders, channeled with wadis, and with multitudes of bacterial creatures self-inventing in the ferment of rotting fish scale: this is the native terrain of all of us, the spiritual source, not on the white Arctic wastes of ice did the genius for religion assert itself, but here, on the plains of worn-to-microcrystal quartz blowing about under the sun into pebbly dustdevils and sandstorms that blackened the sky, all of it dictating a culture of nomadic herding, cloaks, and veiled head clothing. Forty days for Jesus in the desert—what is it about the number forty?—Moses and Elias too had been out there for their forty, and all of them, bag and baggage, the Habirus wandering around for forty years, the hot Saharan sand in their mouths, the sun of the Negev, the red rock, with the sandstone cliffs scoured into discs and altar stones, pinnacles and fluted columns, and the pathetic little water holes oased from the rocks, every one of God’s company coming down to drink and eat of the dates. . . our spiritual home, each rock an oven to bake bread, a terrain covering more of the earth than Europe, a geological mirror of the dark breathless bottom of the briny sea, with its own stock of adaptables, naturally. . . its brine shrimp whose eggs could live dormant in the clay for years between rains, its sandmites and toads, its darling beetles and jewel wasps, scorpions and locusts, beady-eyed snakes and horned toads and frilled lizards, its desert rats, sandfish, skinks and moles and fennec foxes. And every one of these brainless adaptors knowing to stay out of the midday sun, burrow in the sand, nest at the root of the cactus, and wait for evening to hunt for food, trap their prey or crunch it in their mandibles or sting it to death, or for the early morning to let the dew roll down their crustaceous backs into their scummy mouths, lots of company for Christ in the desert with maybe the owl at night hooting from the highest transom of the mountain cave with a brown spiny mouse trembling in its talons.

  —I was squeezed tight against the sealed door, inhaling the historic odors in the wood of hay, of hide, and with my lips pressed to a thin plane of slatted air of the ordinary, indifferent earth outside.

  The plane of air was heated by light, cooled by the darkness, and so I was able to count off the days and nights. I detected the first light of dawn by a changing sensation on my tongue. I could occasionally hear something as well, such as the lowing of a cow at dusk, distant and almost indistinct amid the moans and prayers of the people around me.

  Since the catastrophe was ours alone, it did not impinge on the traditional practices of railroad transport. Periodically the train was shunted to a sidetrack and left to sit there hour after hour, deaf to all our importunings and cries of despair, or it would creep forward, but then drift backward to stop in the silence of the impassive night, only to be suddenly on its way, creaking and shuddering through the switches, back on track, where it would clump along like some dumb and dogged beast of the Mitteleuropa peasantry.

  We were one boxcar of a long train of boxcars of the packed standing and swaying, living and dying and stiffened dead. Each car was the traditional, standard carriage for freight, seven-point-one meters in length, three and three-quarter meters wide, with a battened roof slightly saddled for runoff, and set on a steel chassis with four flanged Krupp Steelwork wheels at European track gauge, and with coupling mechanisms front and back. A common sight, absurdly homely, top-heavy things, their wooden sides painted rust or olive green, weathered links of them waiting in every train yard of the continent, or grinding and rattling through the countryside, through villages at three in the morning under a cold moon, shivering, banging away in the sweeps of wind coming off the wide valleys, these commonest transports for the businesses of nations arousing the lean, visibly ribbed dogs of the villages to run alongside, and yelp and leap into the air and snap their jaws at the stench in their nostrils.

  After the first or second day I began to gnaw on the slot in the siding through which I breathed the outside air or, as I thought, the wide expanse, as far as the horizon, beyond it, infinitely extending, of destinies not of this train. I had no purpose in mind, it merely seemed reasonable to mouth the hard wood hour after hour without stopping, except of course when I passed out and slept. When I was fortunate enough to have an actual splinter come away in my mouth, I chewed it for food. For water I had one night the wind-driven rain, like cold needles on the tip of my tongue. As I worked away, I found myself listening to the clacking wheels, applying rhythms to them, making up songs in my head to go with the rhythms, but somehow these songs were in my mother’s voice, or my father’s, and the voices were really more in the nature of evanescent images of my mother and father, and the images more like fleeting sensations of their beings, momentary apperceptions of their moral natures, which caused me to call out, as if they could be brought to resolution as my whole real mother and father. For my trouble I found myself returned to the mindless incessant clacking of the train wheels. I reasoned that if I could gnaw an opening large enough to climb through, they would be happy to greet me, these flange wheels that would flip me along one to the other and end my life sharply and cleanly.

  But then someone directly at my back, a girl who had wept and wept the first day so that my shirt was wet by her tears, but had since then only whimpered in a high pitch almost like a cat, and, among the shifting stiffened bodies, had come to hold her arms around my waist, with her cheek pressed between my shoulder blades—this girl, with no warning sound, died, and, the train rocketing around a curve, her legs sank under her, and her arms slid over my hips and down around my knees so that I was pulled by her weight down a few inches to where I found myself looking through the slot through which I had breathed the air outside.

  A blur, brush, a woods so close to the railroad embankment that leaves slapped against the siding, a dense woods so thick as to create shadows dark as night. Then suddenly a broad sunlit vista of a green field with a house and barn in the distance. “A farm!” I called. “Now a road. A horse and wagon.” And so I broadcast the news of the world to those who would listen. Birch trees. A brook. Women, children culling potatoes. A river. A stationmaster lighting his pipe.

  Among the people in my car whom I had seen climbing into it before me were some I knew. When I sensed from the smell of soot and the appearance of a track yard that the journey was coming to its end, it seemed to me important to recall who they were: Mr. and Mrs. Liebner and their son, Joseph, who had been a year ahead of me in school, the twin old-maid sisters Chana and Deborah Diamond, the baker Mr. Licht, a Dr. Hornfeld, recently arrived, who had gone to work with Dr. Koenig in the little hospital, my friend Nicoli who shared with me his German-language cowboy novels, and the blond girl Sarah Levin with her pretty mother, Miriam, the music teacher, who had told my mother that Sarah had an eye for me. I could not see them now. They might have been there with me, but they were of the past. Even had I been able to turn and look behind me, what of them would I have recognized at this time of their degradation, when like myself they had been sundered from their names, when their beings were undone, when whatever they had been was in process of industrial transfiguration, when all together we were no more than a suspension of disjunctive torments of the living dying and stiffened dead of that boxcar?

  —We arranged to meet for lunch at the Luxembourg, on West Seventieth Street. Fortunately it was not crowded this particular afternoon—it tends to be noisy with its art deco banquettes, mirrored and tiled walls—but the usual attractive clientele were there, on the youngish side, but commanding attention as people whom you might not know but who nevertheless looked familiar, as if you ought to have known who they were. The point is, she fit right in, she was wearing a smart gray suit, a black blouse, her neck was unadorned, her smartly cut hair was combed
back to show her ears, which are quite small, and she was vibrant and alive to the place, leaning forward for our exchanges, holding her knife and fork above her plate as she spoke, and the chardonnay having brought a flush to her cheeks.

  “You don’t know what a luxury this is, lunch out.”

  “Liberation.”

  “Now that the boys are in school all day. But still, it’s usually a sandwich at my desk, or a working lunch with papers all over the place.”

  She has a melodic alto voice, a lovely laugh. This was really the first time I’d seen her without Pem. I had given her the ghetto material to read and she was to tell me what she thought. There’s a softness about her not quite up to aerobic fashion, but it’s very attractive, it’s her, Sarah, unapologetically, a suggestion of fullness under the chin, thin line or two around the neck, maternal bosom. And when her face was in repose or she became thoughtful, it was, God help me, sexy as hell. This had to be part of Pem’s feeling for her, that she is a woman unmoved by the profane but urgently available in a holy union. Certainly there is no diffidence about her. She is direct, forthright, though oddly her small gold-rimmed eyeglasses make her seem even more youthful than she is—I would say she is nearing forty—and perhaps overly solemnized by Pem’s description of her grief, I am repeatedly startled by her charm and the astonishing blue of her eyes and the infectious smile that breaks out and, for an instant, ambiguously suggests itself as prelude to tears. I think now she is, after all, the Sarah Blumenthal of the Heist section.

  I wanted to ask what a woman like her was doing in a place like the rabbinate.

  “Yes?” She waited.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “No, what were you going to say?”

  “Stupid question.”

  “Go ahead, Everett.” She smiled. “I’m asked it every day, usually by older men.”

  “What,” I said, trying to recover, “if you like Frank Sinatra?”

  Laughing. “Sinatra? Where did he come from? That wasn’t—”

  “Sure it was. And I know the answer. You listened to rock. Your generation tried to bury Sinatra.”