City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  “No, he was okay, just sort of irrelevant.”

  “Who’d you listen to?”

  “The Dead. Creedence. Dylan, of course. But a few years ago Joshua brought home some of the early recordings with Tommy Dorsey, and I was ready to listen.. . . You know, I really don’t mind answering your question.”

  “It’s sexist. On the other hand I didn’t have a sense about Pem either, at first, that he was an ecclesiastic.”

  “How would you characterize us as a class?”

  “Well, as having a certain self-assurance, a knowledge mastered, a self-positioning for the life instruction of others. And often being hard to talk to naturally, as I seem to be able to talk with both of you.”

  “Rabbis are not priests or ministers. We can run a service, bury the dead and, among the Orthodox, rule on law. But essentially a rabbi is only someone who’s done the reading.”

  “Which you have.”

  “It never stops. . .”

  “But you didn’t grow up religious.”

  “No, my family was nonobservant. I mean, maybe we would go to someone else’s seder for Passover. That was about the most my father could tolerate. Every once in a while my mom grew wistful about it, but she knew better than to bring it up.”

  “So what happened?”

  Sarah cleared her throat. “Well, she died. My mother died. It was sudden. I was in high school at the time. We were living in Chicago—my father had gotten a job teaching Comp Lit at Northwestern—and in the months after her death, I went to an institute in the city that taught Yiddish language and literature. She’s American-born, but when I was a little girl I heard her speak Yiddish with her mother.. . . I think that was the beginning, wanting to speak Yiddish as my mother did, wanting to speak words she spoke with her mother.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  She shook her head. “After I learned the language, I turned political and helped raise money to get Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union. Then as a junior at Harvard I changed my major to Judaic studies. Then the decision to go to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. One thing led to another, it was incremental, unplanned. Only looking back can I see that all together it was inevitable. One continuous stubborn. . . assertion.”

  “Directed even to your father.”

  “Without question. But it was after I met Joshua and we began talking that I realized that ethnicity, incorporating the tradition in yourself, is not enough. That one can do the reading and. . . not even have begun.”

  And then she was quiet, thoughtful, and so that I would not keep staring at her, I turned to the food on my plate. Only after the silence went on did it occur to me that she was composing herself to talk about my pages.

  I said: “Did you—?”

  “I did. I’m very impressed.”

  “Really? I was so—”

  “No, it’s terribly moving. Of course,” she said, “anyone familiar with the literature will recognize that this is the Kovno ghetto you’re talking about, from the Abraham Tory diary?”

  “Yes, I relied heavily on it.”

  “But the Kovno ghetto was larger than you represent.”

  “Yes, I made it not much more than a village. But I wanted that geography. The bridge across to the city. The fort.”

  “And my father was not from Kovno, of course. He was from a village closer to Poland. The Jewish resistance in Poland was more developed than in Lithuania. Those could be Polish Jews you’re talking about, their attitude, that Benno and so on.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I have to say, you must be careful not to oversimplify the way things were. Certainly in the Kovno ghetto they had clandestine military training, for example. They were doing all sorts of rebellious things.”

  “Yes,” I said, my heart beginning to sink.

  “And there was a black market in vodka. The heavy drinkers among the Jews were a danger to the whole community. And you say nothing about soap. My father told me they obsessed on soap—they had none, they risked their lives to smuggle it in, it was as crucial as food.”

  She saw my dismay. “But I was very moved,” she said. “It may be inaccurate, but it’s quite true. I don’t know how, but you caught my father’s voice.” She laid her fork down, folded her hands, and stared at the tablecloth. “He was not appointed a runner, like your little Yehoshua. It was more happenstance than that, because even before he was orphaned, he made himself useful. He was a little fellow and he could dart about. And they came to depend on him. And then, when he was given his official runner’s cap—that was toward the end. And it did save his life. In more ways than one.”

  “How is he managing these days?”

  “He’s in a good, well-run home and they try to keep him occupied.”

  “This is in Chicago?”

  “Yes. He no longer speaks. Of course dementia is never pretty. But when I think of that prodigious intellect I grew up with. . . And he saw it coming before anyone. He detected the signs in himself and resigned from the faculty.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, listen, in one sense it’s a blessing. It would have been too terrible for him to know of Joshua’s death.” Her eyes lowered, she took a sip of wine. “He never asked Josh to do that, to go over there, to find the diary. But that wouldn’t have made any difference. He could never go back himself, it was just something he could not bring himself to do. He loved my husband. And he was proud of us, our calling, as only a parent can be whose children subscribe to a belief. . . that in his view cannot be seriously held.”

  “That’s very Jewish.”

  “Isn’t it?” Her smile broke out.

  “Pem was enormously fond of your husband. I can understand why they hit it off.”

  “Yes.” She opened her shoulder bag on the banquette beside her and began to root about. “Entirely different personalities, but Pem doesn’t fit the mold either—of his tradition, I mean. He somehow lets you know in everything he says that his expectations of the world, or of God, haven’t been satisfied.”

  She withdrew a letter. “At the same time, he seems to be appealing to some court or other not to pass sentence just yet. Gottdrunkener mensch is the phrase that comes to mind, how would you translate it?”

  “God-bombed.”

  “That’ll do. He can be exhausting to be with, the father.”

  “I’ll say.”

  We laughed at that. “In fact he has gone and done something entirely uncalled-for, if not presumptuous. But he’s a dear, good friend,” she said, and unfolded Pem’s letter and read it to me.

  His search for the ghetto diary had taken him to Moscow.

  —When St. Tim’s was deconsecrated, Pem was left unassigned while the See wondered what to do with him. His first response was to assign himself to a hospice on Roosevelt Island, where he did a lot of the dirty work for the indigent dying as a kind of self-imposed penance, though without entirely understanding what he should feel penitent about. Perhaps that he was not himself dying. Yet death there had a kind of normality to it, it was reliably routine, some patients were weeks away, some days, some just hours, and everything was processional in the manner of life’s other marked events such as christenings or college graduations. He noticed of the regular nurses and nurses’ aides that they came to work as cheerfully as anyone else, as if the ready availability of dying people for their ministrations were the evidence of a healthy economy.

  Pem had chosen the hospice across the East River as an appropriate dead end for his professional life. He was already working around in his thinking to a meaningful transition, to what he did not yet know, but he felt himself changing, and if he had any faith left, it was his conviction that when the brass cross of St. Tim’s appeared on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, something momentous was announced. This was not a proposition he was prepared to argue with anyone—he had regretted mentioning it to me because, on the one hand, it belonged to a mode of thought characteristic of the ancient
prophetic communications which he could no longer countenance and, on the other, because he felt, with the stunning power of superstition, that to discuss it, to speak of it, was for it to lose its light. He did not think of the sign as necessarily unearthly but as so cryptic as to render the motives of the human beings who had arranged it entirely beside the point.

  Betrayable in speech, and positioned on the edge of unreason, his given sign was a challenge to his behavior. He must keep his own counsel, even as far as Sarah Blumenthal was concerned. His sign was ambiguous, he had recognized it for what it was but not for what it was instructing him to do. He felt that when he should confide in her he would know it without question, but in the meantime he had to be patient and attentive and alive to his life, the person on whom nothing is lost. He could hope that a revelation was evolving, that it was a slow process, and it might be manifest even in the moans of the dying. From the very beginning, even before the cross had been stolen, the events at St. Tim’s had turned him into a detective of sorts, and that’s what he’d decided his life must seriously become, a truly humble, dogged act of detection.

  After hearing Pem’s letter to Sarah, I wonder if revelation comes not like light to the eye but as an imposed ordering of that part of the self so deeply interior that it is anonymous.

  —I’ve a pretty good idea of the father’s walking routes now, today I begin at Union Square Park, I see the rat-poison skull-and-crossbones warnings planted in the grass. . . and on its west side, down the steps, is the truer park, the farmers’ market, with its banks of potted flowers, office trees, truck farm produce from New Jersey. . . brilliant color fields of pears and apples, spinach, kale, carrots in the sunlight. . . anything organic in Manhattan draws crowds. . . the brisk, unsentimental exchanges between buyer and seller rehashing the first act of civilization. . . and west along Fourteenth, the venue for cheap clothes hanging from pipe racks on the sidewalk, big hand-crayoned sale signs in the windows, tables with hats and gloves for the coming winter, the ceilings of the stores strung with luggage. . . the traffic crawling by, big fumy buses, the smells of pizza, sidewalk incense free for the breathing. . . down Seventh past the double-parked parameds of St. Vincent’s, with distant sirens on their way tolling the truth of eternal emergency. . . and, slanting eastward along Greenwich Avenue, Mexican and Indian restaurants, coffee ritual places. . . long-gray-haired man with little dog on a leash, three black kids, their voluminous jeans falling off their hips, thin blond young woman kneeling to tend to baby in stroller, stopped-in-traffic truck driver looking down at her, his arm dangling over his cab door. . . across the street one of the paranoidally fenced community gardens behind which soars the towered Romanesque strawberry-red Jefferson Market Courthouse, recalling the last century, when, given the great identity problem of the new world, every conceivable architecture rose from the sidewalks of New York, Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish, Belle Epoque, and Tenement. . . and across arterial Sixth Avenue along miserable, wretched Eighth Street once the glory of bohemian intellect, with the best bookstore in New York, now the venue of shoes and phony antique clothing, the boomboxed hatchbacks from New Jersey zooming up to the curb. . . south on sedate lower Fifth to Washington Square, with its competing performers, a limber black comedian in the center ring, he’s brought his own sound system and, at the edges, sideshows of various strumming adenoidally voiced Dylan clones, each with his loyal group around him. . . and so in and out of the city’s lightness and darkness, each neighborhood its own truth, with another kind of life to give you. . . and finally up Second, typically wide avenue of the East Side, past the Ukrainian hall and restaurant, I turn right down this sunless East Village street to have a look at what’s become of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal. A piously aspiring brownstone steeple that was probably the tallest thing in the neighborhood when it was built. Recessed behind its tiny churchyard and all jammed in now between the tenements, the street at each end colored up with the signs of rent-payers—cleaners, bodega, bar, checks cashed. . . the few gravestones in the patchy grass have sagged over the years like shoulders bowed in grief. . . and all of it, including the graves, now a theater company.

  Gothic lettering over the doors, Theater of St. Tim’s. They’re playing Chekhov’s The Seagull.

  “Well, after all,” I remember Pem saying, “wasn’t drama born from religion? Exit gods, enter ordinary Greeks. Not to scant the polytheists of the mystery cults, they knew a thing or two, among which was how to put on a good show, with lots of music to go with the fucking and drinking. But over the long haul, we’ve probably done better with Sophocles.”

  —B. the film director in New York to get me to write a screenplay for him. We went to dinner and this was the story he wanted me to write—it was, he said, a story from “life,” in fact his life, which is why he felt it had such authority: A couple of years before, he’d cast an actress in a movie in which she was to be badly mutilated by a sociopath who ranged through the neighborhood climbing fire escapes and opening windows to prey on beautiful unattached young women. Women who’d come to the big city to find a job and make a life—sad, winsome girls leaving a small town of grief behind them, having perhaps lost a soldier boyfriend to a war, or a pair of parents on a small farm. . . but anyway in the city now, the film being an homage to the forties film noir. B. wanted that forties deep-shadow black and white that told you how dark and inhospitable the world was.

  And this actress, a lissome, long-legged, almost pretty girl, a little vague in a sexy way, with a good head of hair, she tested well and was cheap, she was just out of one of the New York acting programs, and this was her first movie and he gave her the role of the woman who lives to tell the tale, becoming romantically involved with the detective on the case who visits her in the hospital, and so on. B. cast this actress from some instinct having nothing to do with practicality, she felt right to him for this part in a way he didn’t bother to analyze. He is not analytical in any event. And, well, they shoot the scene, the sociopath climbs up the fire escape and into the window of her boardinghouse room, because this is a past-tense movie, you see, when there were boardinghouses and poor neat clean girls took rooms in them. . . and the guy looms over her bed and she screams in terror and he doesn’t rape her because that’s not what the sex is in these movies, the sex is the horror, and he bends over her and begins to chew up her face with his big sharpened teeth and. . . a couple of takes and it’s a wrap, it’s gone so well and they don’t have any budget to speak of, B. shoots the film in eight weeks. When it opens the critics notice her, though not crazy about B.’s work, he has done some respectable things, they tax him for wasting his time.

  The actress pins everything on her good notices in this bad film, she can go to New York and do some Off Broadway thing, but her agent tells her to stick it out, there’s work out here, film, TV.. . . So she stays, she’s dating this one or that one, getting her name in a column every once in a while, but she misses out on one thing after another, not much happens, her agent not able to land her jobs. . . and one night she comes home just a little tipsy, she’s got an apartment in West Hollywood, and a maniac is inside waiting for her, a real one. He pins her down on the floor and bites off her nose.

  “I mean, this is no movie,” B. tells me, “this is what actually happens! She screams, someone hears her, they get the guy, pull him off her, but the poor kid never recovers her sanity, she is today living with her prosthetic nose in a state asylum!” For a while it was a private sanitarium, but then the studio decided they’d done all they could, an in-house lawyer figured they are not finally responsible if some creep sees her mutilated in a film and decides this is her karma. But, B. tells me, and this is important, that it was never established that the maniac had seen the film! “Knowing what I know now,” he says, “I’ll guarantee that he didn’t see the film! I mean, are these crazies capable of sitting still for two hours to watch a movie? I send the kid flowers every week, I worry about her, that it’s not over yet. For all I know the guy’s in
the same institution, male psycho division, separated from her only by a dormitory fence. For all I know he’s biding his time till he can get to her again.”

  So, B. asks me, what was the instinct that told him to cast the girl in the role—some specific vulnerability she flashed, a genome of her own doom, what? What did he see in her without even thinking about it—that’s what bothers him. Earlier in his career he’d cast an actor to die of a heart attack who’d gone and done just that, and once, for a western, an Indian war thing, an actor he cast as a cavalry officer skewered by an Indian spear impaled himself on an iron fence-post in front of his apartment house after he fell drunk out of his third-floor window.

  “I must foresee things,” B. tells me with that Hollywood gift for effortless self-anointment. “I must have foreseen the fate of that poor girl.” He shakes his head, stares at the tablecloth. “But how? What is my moral scorecard here? What do I know and when do I know it?”

  “So, let’s see if I have this right,” I say. “You want to make a movie about a man who makes a movie with an actress whose fate in the movie is repeated in her real life, except that her real life is a movie that you are making with another actress about how your movies foretell real life—is that the idea?”

  “It is positively occult, isn’t it. A genuine occult mystery. Like it’s screening right here in my own soul. I can’t tell you how strange this is. It’s the biggest picture of my career.”

  “Well, it could be something, all right, but—”

  “I came right to you. With your philosophical bent, how could I think of anyone else?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “And put another nose in harm’s way?”

  “Oh. Oh. . .” Ruminating. “I see what you’re saying. Not to worry. I’ll find someone who isn’t right for the part: I’ll cast against type.”