City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  Less agreement from the Department of Justice, the lawyer there somewhat defensive about his handling of the case.

  —a nest of three peregrine falcon chicks, on the ledge of an iron-front window, top floor across the street. Whoever lives there is sensitive to the brood and keeps his shades down. What a great privilege to have them in my binoculars. I can tell when the mother is returning, they are quiet balls of fur. Then all of a sudden, and she may be blocks away, they start squawking, their beaks opening like post diggers, their gullets aimed at the sky. And a moment later there she is winging down the canyon, she’s got a city bird in her talons, a rock dove. Hovering, alights, wing stretched to a fluster of infant demands, holds the prey with one foot, a hail of breast feathers and then she is pecking it apart methodically, pulling off red hanks of flesh and dropping them in those gullets.

  —Suppose this guy works for the Times, a middling career, never gets as high on the ladder as he feels he deserves, you can see it in the set of his mouth. Others are given the plum foreign assignments, top editorships, and with the passing of years his nagging sense of having been badly used sinks into the hunch of his shoulders. Now an ordinary-looking gray-haired man in his late fifties, he has gotten no further than deputy editing one of the lesser sections.

  What finally becomes intolerable is the nature of the corporate judgment, that he will never be a top-grade newspaperman: in unassuageable bitterness, he takes early retirement.

  For the first month or so he is in deep funk, missing the routine, his secret sense of possessiveness of the newspaper, that it was his, and missing too the affronts to his sense of himself, the welter of gossip, the daily ups and downs of small triumphs and defeats. Above all, he misses the feeling of being on the inside.

  But at the same time, the outside perspective reduces everything to reasonable proportion. The paper is not the world, it is a simulacrum of the life of the world, its wars, famines, business, weather, politics, crime, sports, arts, science categorized and worked into stories flattened on folded newsprint. And what he has now if he will only seize it is all of that—but raw, unformed, and unwritten! He is released into the dimensions of unmediated reality.

  So now in the suspense of having done what in his years as a wage slave he has dreamt of, detaching from the institution he has lived by to confront himself in freedom, this man who has never gotten so much as a traffic ticket undertakes the practice of bold, uncharacteristic behavior. He stops shaving, lets his hair grow, pretends to be mad in the street, watching with pleasure as people get out of his way. He remarks rudely on the businessmen climbing out of their limos at the Park Avenue hotels, is boorish in stores and scornful in art galleries. Wandering the West Side piers at night, the dark streets under the sections of elevated railway that have not been torn down, he goes with the tight-skirt whores into the taxi garages, or screws them in fleabag rooms on West Street. He does everything he can think of to break down the unacknowledged presumptions of sixty years of living by the rules.

  But these acts of will do not transform him. Hating himself, he still aches for assignments, servitude, for the small triumph of the Friday paycheck, the camaraderie of the saloon. In desperation he begins a novel but abandons it after a few thousand words. He cannot bring himself to call his still working friends. He stares at his phone waiting for it to ring, knowing it won’t. Mentally they’ve written his obit and set it in type, the actual day of death being no more than the signal to run it.

  It is only when he finds himself considering the idea of phoning his ex-wife that he realizes his life hangs in the balance. He begins seriously to think. And his thought discovers a plan of action for himself the mere contemplation of which is enough to make him feel alive again.

  Newspapers, he decides, tell stories that, with few exceptions, are never completed. There is no end to the stock market story or the story of the power struggle among nations. These stories are unending, bull and bear cycles, war and peace cycles. Elections may be held, someone wins or loses, and parties increase their majorities or lose their majorities, and all of it is in flux, quite temporary, and the lasting effects of legislation are weakened in time by administrations that ignore the law or flout it or revamp it. Games won or lost are succeeded by other games, championship seasons dissolved in free agency and last-place seasons, the cosmologists of the science pages define and redefine the nature of the universe, its size, its dynamics, geologists periodically increase the age of the earth, businesses are bought and sold, looted and resold, merged, spun off bankrupted, renamed, restored. Human enterprise goes on, pulsing with ambitions that can never be satisfied.

  It is true that trials are held and defendants are found guilty or innocent. And of course there is the swan song of an obituary. On the other hand, there are major obits, King Leopold’s, Hitler’s or Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s, for example, that do not provide closure simply because the subjects died before they could be put on trial. Simple death is not retribution in such cases. It is not closure when such men die of natural causes without sentence passed upon them that would enact the sacraments of universal moral law. The fact of their death is incidental when their crimes have not been charged to them in the awesome voice of a God-inspired civilization.

  Still, the law could hardly come up with commensurate punishment for such creatures. I myself would send them to the lowest circle of hell and install them at its icy core, where they would be embraced by the scaly arms of Satan, who, over billions of years, would roar his foul excoriating breath into their faces and vomit his foul waste alive with squirmy larvae and dung beetles over them while, languidly, cell by freezing, exquisitely outraged cell, absorbing them into his hideous being. . .

  Ex-Times guy decides that the occupational cynicism of reporters has to do exactly with the incompleteness of stories, especially as justice fails again and again to catch up in time to effect just endings.

  He decides the desire to end a story is powerful within him. His obscure years of work have conferred a moral endowment. His years as a journalist have instructed him in all the delusions, and rationalizations, including righteousness, for doing evil or for covering it up. He has all along been his paper’s curator of the stories that could have been completed but never were. And for what purpose other than the obvious one of this new and thrilling assignment? He will be the closure man.

  In a state of solemn joy and fervent resolve, he calls upon his old colleagues, who, unable to detect in his manner anything different from the colorless drab they have always known, grant him the professional courtesy of access to the clips. In less than a day he has chosen the stories he will complete.

  The first is the story of the former S.S. sergeant living in Cincinnati.

  —When Sarah and Pem arrived in Vilnius, Joshua Gruen was still alive, skull fractured, both arms and several ribs broken. One lung was collapsed, and he’d developed pneumonia. The American chargé d’affaires met them at the airport and rushed them to the hospital. Sarah immediately questioned the adequacy of medical care but had to agree finally that Joshua’s condition made it too dangerous to fly him out. He was in a coma. Permission was asked to trepan him to relieve pressure on the brain. Pem sat with Sarah Blumenthal in the corridor outside the operating room. He said she did not cry or speak but simply stared at the floor. They had flown from Kennedy to Frankfurt, waited two hours for the connecting flight, and had come straight from the Vilnius airport to the hospital. He supposed exhaustion served her as a kind of sedative. He said he closed his eyes and prayed silently for Joshua to pull through but thought that Sarah had probably not prayed.

  They were put up that night in the ambassador’s residence. The ambassador and his wife couldn’t have been kinder. They took care of all the arrangements for shipping the body home. Sarah’s grief was such that a doctor was called in to minister to her. She was sedated for twenty-four hours. In that time Pem went to the hotel where Joshua had been staying and packed his few things. He told me the rab
bi had been reading Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah, Emil Fackenheim’s Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, and Trent’s Last Case, the 1930s English country-house mystery by E. C. Bentley. He said he supposed Joshua had gone back to it as to a classic.

  Also in the hotel room was the rabbi’s notebook in which he had written a careful account of everyone he had spoken to about the ghetto diary. The church where it had been hidden no longer existed—a modern apartment house stood in its place. There were two or three additional names and addresses—presumably people he had not had the opportunity to contact before he was assaulted on the doorstep of the ancient synagogue which stood boarded up on Vokieciu Street, there being no congregants, only visitors, as to a graveyard.

  —Reichsmarschall, I have the honor to report on the status of the work gone forward according to the directive of the Reichsleiter by which the Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question is to establish and maintain a museum for the acquisition, inventory, and ultimate exhibition of items of Judaic historic or anthropologic interest such as libraries, religious artifacts, productions of folk art, and all personal property of intrinsic value.

  1. The crating and dispatch via military transport of all such property is simultaneous with the removal of the Jewish source populations from each of the 153 villages, townships, and ghetto districts of the Protectorate (Directives 1051, 1052). This assures the accurate attribution of inventory according to region and province of each and every item from which exhibition items will be chosen, heretofore a particularly complex undertaking given the increasing volume, on a daily basis, of received materials.

  2. Appended is a manifest of collections by category. Numbers of items of each are not supplied, being provisional:

  Torah (Pentateuch) parchment scrolls handwritten, Torah scroll mantles silk, Torah scroll mantles velvet, Torah scroll vestments hammered and engraved silver, Torah scroll crowns engraved chased silver with semiprecious stones, Torah scroll valances silk, Torah scroll valances silk velvet, Torah text pointers silver, Torah text pointers wood, Torah text pointers silver or wood in the shape of small hands with index finger extended, Torah finials engraved silver, Torah finials gilt leaf, Torah binders silk, Torah binders linen, Torah curtains silk, Torah curtains silk velvet, Torah curtains velvet, prayer shawls silk, prayer shawls linen, prayer shawls silk gold embroidered, prayer shawls silk silver embroidered, prayer books daily, prayer books holiday, books midrash (theology), candelabra silver, candelabra brass, mezuzot (door amulets) carved wood, mezuzot leather, Chanukah (holiday) lamps silver, Chanukah lamps pewter, Chanukah lamps brass, dreidlach (children’s spinning tops) wood, dreidlach cast lead, keys synagogue, “eternal” lights pewter, “eternal” lights brass, readers’ desks oak, readers’ desks pine, lecterns oak, lecterns pine, combs burial society, pitchers burial society, shroud cloths burial society, uniforms burial society, banners trade guild, flags trade guild, synagogue ark lions rampant carved wood, synagogue ark lions rampant carved wood painted, alms boxes wood, alms boxes copper, alms boxes silver plated, skullcaps velvet, skullcaps silk, wedding rings gold, engagement rings silver and diamond, ceremonial wedding dishes silver, ceremonial tankards silver, salvers silver, place settings china, place settings silver, serving bowls, cups, saucers crockery, cooking pots iron, cooking pots enameled, kettles iron, skillets iron, cutlery steel, tools carpentry, implements farm, portraits men oil on canvas, portraits women oil on canvas, portraits children oil on canvas, country scenes oil on canvas, country scenes watercolor on paper, hand-colored photographs bride and groom, hand-colored photographs children, hand-colored photographs family groups, cameras, typewriters, book sets uniform binding, books individual, books reference, books art, sheet music bound, sheet music unbound, music instruments stringed, music instruments woodwind, music instruments brass, music instruments percussion, surgical instruments steel, surgical instruments chrome steel, bedsteads wood, bedsteads brass, mattresses horsehair, quilts, duvets, pillows down, pillows cotton, washbasins ceramic, washbasins pewter, evening clothes men, evening clothes women, top hats men, coats men, coats women, suits men, dresses women, wallets leather, purses leather, purses beaded, school uniforms boys, school uniforms girls, combs, cosmetics, hairpins, barrettes, notions, pipes, cigarette cases, cigar cutters, shoes men, shoes women, shoes children, binoculars, opera glasses, eyeglasses, watches wrist, watches pocket, hearing trumpets, inkstands, pens nibbed, pens fountain, stationery plain, stationery embossed, umbrellas, walking sticks wood, walking sticks wood and silver, chessmen ivory, chessmen wood, pull-toys children, dolls children, board games children, wagons children, snow sleds children, paint sets children, composition books children, pencil boxes with pencils children.

  —I will say, posthumously, that Europe is the world’s sore affliction, that you in America who have taken the best that Europe has to offer while hoping to avoid the worst are, in your indigenously American phrase, “whistling Dixie.” All your God-drenched thinking replicates the religious structures built out of the hallucinatory life of the ancient Near East by European clericists, all your social frictions are the inheritance of colonialist slave-making economies of European businessmen, all your metaphysical conundrums were concocted for you by European intellectuals, and you have now come across the ocean into two world wars conceived by European politicians and so have installed in your republic just the militarist mind-state that has kept our cities burning since the days of Hadrian.

  Why do I tell you this? My own genius as a twentieth-century philosopher of language, insofar as it has been recognized by those in your country who are capable of understanding me, could be said, like Ludwig van Beethoven’s, to be redemptive. Europeans or not, a few of us have done some good. I have tried to save language and thought from the aphasic minds of our philosophers. I have for example distinguished things, which inertly exist or just lie there, from facts, which are the propositions of things in relationship, in much the same spirit that Flaubert (who, though a Frenchman, is worthy of our respect) discovered how things were brought to life in his fiction by having them interact with other things. A wheel is a thing, not a fact, and a paving stone is a thing, not a fact, but if the wheel rolls over the paving stone, they both come to life as a fact. Even if it is a fact solely in his own mind. Sun is just a noun and window is just a noun, but if the sun shines through the window, together they are jolted into propositional life.

  So to distinguish things from facts. . . may not seem like much at first glance. However, by similar techniques of analysis, I’ve reclaimed language for what it can reasonably do, and thereby defined everything beyond its limits as responsive only to our dumb awe. What this means is that I have liberated your thought from the heavy chains of European culture. The nonsensical idealism of Kant, Hegel? Done, kaput! The metaphysical gibberish of everyone from Plotinus to Descartes? Swept away as so much clutter in the house. My achievement in the interest of the given nature of the world is equivalent to Einstein’s. We are both revolutionaries, he in having overthrown the false cosmology of Newton, I in having upended Plato and all his descendants.

  Of course I am interested only in truth, not glory. I leave glory to others. But I do have to wonder why, having returned to the mind of modern man the serenity of the carpenter at his bench, the composure of the farmer in his field, I am not recognized by clerks in the bookstores. I do not begrudge Einstein his stardom, it was to be expected given the naive respect for the scientific mode of thought in our century. But, to tell you the truth, the old walrus is not all that profound in his thinking.

  In fact let me tell you something about the theoretical physics of not only Einstein but those other Europeans you Americans have elevated to a celebrity far beyond my own—Planck, Rutherford, Fermi, deBroglie, Bohr, and so on.. . . They have a method, no doubt of that, a righteous empiricism that is in great repute. But their proprietorship of the universe offends me. They have no more use for the old philosophers than I have, but only because they pre
sume to take their place. I ask you—what could be more basic to meaning than the proposition that a thing cannot be both itself and not itself? Is that not the beginning of all logic, does it not in fact express the fundamental structure of the human mind? Yet here they do one experiment proving that light is composed of a stream of light packets or particles or quanta. . . and follow this with another experiment proving that these quanta have the properties not of particles but of waves. Depending how, in the submicroscopic realm, you choose to observe or measure light, so will it respond as one or the other: Light partakes of mutually exclusive states of being!

  Oh these European scientists, migod, my mind caves at the thought, the thought—they insist this is the fact—that not only light but all matter, in its submicroscopic essence, all the stolid carpentry of the earth, is similarly indeterminate. The thickest most inert oaken log, for example, is vulnerable to the electron chaos within its oakenness and, given enough time, could be penetrated by the slight pressure of your finger!

  Is this magic? you ask, and I reply with a cry of despair that it is worse, it is science.

  You who study the star clusters, the galaxies, the planets and their moons, you who tread the earth and date its rocks, you who sift the sands of the desert and plumb the depths of the ocean for the blind creatures living there. . . I invite you, I challenge you, to come with me, as Dante went with Virgil, I am your guide to the infernal shambles of human reason, the shattered, unassembleable fractions of consciousness. . . the dreck of the real, our wrecked romance with God. This new hell is where our inquiry begins.