City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  —Hesitate to intrude on Sarah’s privacy. Perhaps it’s that seeing her without Pem around I feel just a bit shifty, double-dealing. I have to admit I find her attractive, a not entirely professional feeling, there’s a little of Pem in me as far as my half wanting, or deluding myself to expect, something that is hardly likely to happen. So that’s part of it.

  I’ll be glad when he gets back. Having latched on to the St. Tim’s heist as a story and having befriended the good father, I now find myself at the mercy of his life. What Pem does, and when he chooses to tell me about it, makes me his literary dependent. If I dropped the whole idea, he’d probably be relieved at first, but then resentful for having been abandoned. He likes the attention, even as he worries that I’m stealing something from him—his mind’s life, his being.

  It’s possible.

  But there’s nothing improper in going to the Friday night services at the EJ. This last time, discussion had to do with the concept of the survival of the soul. It was the elderly man, the man whose son carried him up the stairs for the services and came and carried him away at the end, who raised the subject. The rabbi came over to where he sat and sat down next to him and took his palsied hand in her two hands. She said, “The Orthodox believe that there is a soul and that it transcends death and that there will be a time, ‘the end of days,’ when it will be reunited with the resurrected body.” She looked into his eyes and smiled as he nodded solemnly and then she rose and went back to the front of the room.

  “The word soul is a beautiful word, isn’t it?” she said. “It carries so much, it expresses, really, longing for union with God, for the final resolution of all our questioning, the arrival, the profound blessed peace of the radiant answer.”

  “Is it only a word?” someone said.

  Sarah folded her arms. “It’s an idea. Probably as a religious proposition first made by Philo of Alexandria, a Greek Jew who lived at the same time as Jesus. But in his hands it may be more a Greek idea, a Platonic idea, than a Jewish idea. The Christian tradition really goes to town with it, distinctly separating it from the body, the body turning to dust, the soul rising to heaven, and one lives a good righteous life for that reward of the soul’s union with God. The Jewish tradition is less driven by rewards, one lives the righteous life for its own sake, it is an intrinsic good unencumbered by ulterior motives. And we are not generally, so. . . pictorial.”

  Sarah directed a commiserating glance at the old man to soften what she had to say. “Probably because it is an unanswerable theological question, it is something we cannot know, the nature of the soul, it’s a poetical idea that produces much emotion but no knowledge.. . . Reform teaching, for instance, is that yes there is a soul, but it is nothing as literal as the Orthodox believe. And finally the Reconstruction idea dismisses any likelihood that what we might call the individual personality persists in some other form.

  “We’ve spoken of Reconstructionism before. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan devised it as a way out of the theological, doctrinal disputes of such matters on the grounds that they were beyond our knowing. Reconstruction is like linguistic philosophy, it wants to use language only as far as it can make sense. So the theology, ideas of the soul and so on, is considered to be tentative, all dictates as to God and God’s nature are in the suspension of our progressive knowledge, and what we hold to in the meantime is the tradition itself, its folkways, its proven means for structuring life in moral terms and providing beauty and consolation.”

  A young woman, it was the Barnard student, raised her hand. “But what do you think, Rabbi?”

  Sarah stood behind the reader’s desk at the front of the room. The EJ Torah rolled on its spindles lay before her, valanced in a simple prayer shawl, or tallith. I had seen it scrolled open, its edges charred, it was one of those recovered from the Holocaust. She brushed the silken tallith with her fingers as she answered, never once looking up.

  “My husband, Rabbi Gruen, said to me once, ‘Reconstruction is only a start.’ He meant that by its means we can presume to examine every element of the tradition without bias and decide what to dispense with and what to keep. But not merely for the sake of making linguistic sense, not for the cherishing of beauty, or consolation, not for preserving our cultural identity for its own sake, because that finally is insufficient, a theology in neutral, idling. No, you subject the tradition to your irreverence to get back to where it began, only that, back down to the ground level of simple. . . unmediated awe. It is there, which is necessarily the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God’s presence in the fact of our consciousness. . . and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything—it is that constancy of awe we hope for, a pre-Scriptural state as alive to us as the contemporary moment, and which, of course, comes with absolutely no guarantees. That is where we begin . . .”—Ex-Times guy flies to Cincinnati with an open-ended return. Checks in at a hotel, the Something Arms, on one of the residential streets in the hills above the downtown. Rents a car, cruises around to get the feel of the place. Whole city smells like beer. Lots of red brick, white granite steps, sun bronzing off the Ohio River down below. He remembers from accounts of the Eichmann kidnapping that the major problem was identification. That they would have the right guy. Took a while. The suspected Eichmann worked under an assumed name. Wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, looked unprepossessing, came home to a not very nice neighborhood, a cubelike flat-roofed cinder-block house in the middle of an empty lot outside Buenos Aires. Hardly befitting a man of his achievement. On the other hand, with its small windows on all four sides, it could not be sneaked up on. He could enfilade the entire lot. They rented cars, vans, kept changing them, for the surveillance. Suspect came home the same time every evening. During the day they wore work clothes, and once knocked on the front door, spoke to a younger man, a son. Such pride of family. Drew from him the virtual assurance that the family name was assumed and hid a great glory. So they decided to make the move. The actual kidnap not that difficult, it was dusk, they grabbed Eichmann as he walked home from the tram stop, wrestled him into a car, and laid him in the back with their feet on him. It was not neat, even close to being bungled, but he offered no resistance. Strangely acquiescent, Eichmann. Cooperated fully as they gave him a shot of something, dressed him as an El Al pilot, and walked him catatonic through Argentine customs along with the rest of the crew.

  But thinking this over, ex-Times guy realizes he comes from the other culture. Reporting the fact, getting the story. That culture. Getting the spelling right. It is like a ball and chain, it drags on him. A heavy weight to pull, it is one thing to have the resolve to end a story, another to make the muscles actually do it. Actually make something happen in the world. All his life he has looked on. Civilization paid people like him for doing nothing. For living subsidized, the way a farmer is paid for not planting crops.

  Knows in his heart that what was most difficult for the Israelis is easy for him, and sadly he concludes all the necessary detective work by looking in the hotel phone book and finding the assumed name and the address. So now the time has come. He must pass over to the other side. He must break through the inertia of his soul. Something akin to transfiguration. His excitement vanished, he is only mournful as he drives aimlessly around Cincinnati avoiding his destination, feeling like a fool. Feeling hapless. Has absolutely no idea of how to proceed. Notes the styles of the residential gardens, the shrubbery pruned and sculpted obdeltoid, napiform, cuneate, even pandurate. Odd to see these big, well-cared-for houses standing in green gardens filled with the smell of beer.

  He drives past the S.S. man’s address a couple of times, the house the same as the others on this hill street, though slightly more modest. Decides he can accomplish nothing from a car, he can’t see anything just driving past and it is too dangerous to pull up, no cars are parked on the street, everyone who lives here has a driveway, a garage. Keeps going, drives down the terraces into the lower city, and in a riverside neighborhood of porched cottages and clapb
oard houses sees a yard sale going on and, without knowing why, stops and takes a look. Among the peeling painted kitchen chairs and the used books and the couch with sprung springs and the other crap, sees a bike, a three-speed 28-inch wheel, only the third speed works and the rear tire is soft, but he buys it for twenty dollars. Goes to a garage, gets air for the tire, and has himself a working surveillance bike. Beginning to feel at home in Cincinnati. He goes back up the hills, parks in a shopping mall, takes the bike out of the car, takes off his jacket, tie, rolls his sleeves up, his trousers, and he’s on his way. He is a graying, overweight, middle-aged man getting in his workout, puffing up the hills, cruising down, waving at the kids in the yards. He figures he does this a few days the same time every day, nobody will notice him anymore. Begins to think about buying a gun. Something to fit in his pocket. That will be tricky. Probably do better to go across the river to Kentucky. Still, there are laws, the gun shops keep records. A knife, then? Some sort of hunting knife from a sporting goods store. Or one of those underwater harpoons that the divers use to spear fish. Carry it in a case. Walk right up to the door. And so he is thinking imaginatively and not without pleasure and is feeling better about himself and coasting down a hill now in the right neighborhood. . . but somehow loses his bearings, the bike wobbles and he is able to right himself only by bouncing up on the sidewalk but at the same time going faster than he should. . . and a man appears, coming down the path from his house and turns onto the sidewalk, unhearing, unseeing, a heavyset elderly man with a cane. . . and later the ex-Times guy can’t remember if he shouted Look out or just shouted, unable to understand how someone, even someone that old, could be so unseeing, so unhearing. . . but he does remember the catastrophic impact, and the fedora, the man was wearing a hat that flew up, and the white hair rising the body already falling but turned now facing him, the black-rimmed glasses askew over his chin, the terrified milky eyes, and a good clear complexion for such an old man, jowly, florid, healthy. . . but simultaneously the back of the head hitting the brick retaining wall of the man’s own lawn with a thwack, a burlesque konk, the comic human body always looking for the opportunity of expression, and there was this unwanted sudden intimacy as he fell on top of the man together with him on the sidewalk, smelling his onion breath, hearing the hiss from his throat, feeling the nap of his cashmere jacket, and finding the man’s plaid muffler in his own mouth. . . his nausea rising, the nausea of shock but also disgust, using the man’s body to push himself upright, pressing the man’s shoulders against the sidewalk, and rising, feeling the disgust of death before he knew that it was death, because now here was his bike upturned, with the front wheel spinning in the air and the handlebars lopsided, and the palms of his hands were scraped raw, Jesus Christ, the old fool! and now realizing a certain stillness at his feet, an absence of response from the pole of pain to the pole of laughter, a vacuum in the world’s vitality in the exact shape of the still hump lying before him. . . because the man was dead, suddenly unequivocally dead, as if there hadn’t been that much life left to him in the first place, it was all instantaneous, no rattle in the throat, no blood, no mute imploring eyes, just a suddenly achieved open-mouthed cadaverousness. . . outraged now at this calamitous idiot, didn’t you see me? didn’t you hear me shout? shouting now at the dead form, outraged, insulted, shaking with umbrage, righting his bike, jerking at the unaligned handlebars. . . and around him the street is empty and quiet. . . and as if to punish the old fool for doing this, for making such a mess of his transfigured intent, he mounts his bike and rides off wobblingly down the hill, the rear wheel scraping with every rotation against the bike frame.

  That’s the scene. Ex-Times guy makes it to the mall a few blocks away, throws the bike into a dumpster behind the A&P, and drives back to his hotel. He should have called for help, seen to the old man—but how could he explain himself, or what had brought him to this place? Sickened, pulse racing, he lies down, fearful of a heart attack. Instead he dozes off. Wakes hours later disgusted with himself and determined to forget the whole thing. He checks out and goes to the airport to wait for a flight back to New York. Picks up an evening paper and sits at the bar. Reads that a hit-and-run bike killer is at large. Some kid saw the whole thing from his window. Imprecise description of biker, a heavyset white man. The victim an elderly refugee, age eighty-one, of such and such a number on such and such a street, who had some years ago been accused of gaining entry to the United States by hiding his wartime role as a machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of mass executions of Jews from the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto, a charge that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Neighbors say. . . he was a good kind man. . . who lived alone since the death of his wife. . . had something of an old world elegance about him. . . tipped his hat to women in the street. . . came to his porch on Halloween with handfuls of candy for the trick-or-treaters.

  —Of great songs, standards, composers will tell you the basic principle of their composition: Keep it simple. The simpler, the better. You want untrained voices to handle it in the shower, in the kitchen. Try to keep the tune in one octave. Stick with the four basic chords and avoid tricky rhythms. These composers may not know that this is the aesthetic of the church hymn. They may not know that hymns were the first hits. But they know that hymns and their realm of discourse ennoble or idealize life, express its pieties, and are in themselves totally proper and appropriate for all ears. And so most popular ballads are, in their characteristic romanticism, secularized hymns.

  The principle of keeping it simple suggests why many standards sound alike. One might even say a song can’t become a standard unless it is reminiscent of existing standards. Maybe this is why we feel a new good song has the characteristic of seeming, on first hearing, always to have existed. In a sense it has. Just as we in our own minds seem to have always existed regardless of the date of our birth, a standard suggests itself as having been around all along, God-given, and waiting only for the proper historical moment in which to make itself available for our singing.

  —Finding the ghetto archive seems to have transformed Pem. Eastern Europe has slimmed him down, he is still substantial, but his bulk seems more contained if not exactly muscled, he moves more fluidly and looks put together, washed and groomed, perhaps because he’s cut his hair, rid himself of the ponytail, and now that his stomach is somewhat flattened his trousers don’t droop over his shoe tops. Is there renewed vitality, mimetic elation moving through him? I’m persuaded that setting off on a quest, a self-appointed mission, and succeeding can surprise a fellow out of his usual humors. That he’s actually done something! I won’t mention this to either of them, but there is a literary template here, call it Christian knighthood, and the fact that his lady is Sarah Blumenthal, a rabbi, a widow who lives with her two children on the Upper West Side, is what makes it possible.

  Also, something darker here, something he wouldn’t allow himself to feel, a successful competition with a dead man.

  He had only the names in Joshua Gruen’s notebook. Vilnius, once Vilna, is a heavily rebuilt city, given World War II and the Soviet taste for high-rises. A picturesque river with grassy banks winding through it. The Neris. Same river my little runner Yehoshua speaks of.

  What did it feel like to be in this town of history architecturally erased, but still there in the buried bones, and in the brains of the children, their ethnic resolve booming like the football they kicked through the schoolyard? He took the streetcar that stopped outside his hotel door, and the bell rang and the car swung around corners and the pantograph flashed like lightning and Pem felt the menace lurking under the town’s modernity, the old historic demons with their sharpened pitchforks riding around in the latest-model cars and taking their business lunches in the fine restaurants.

  He hunted down every name listed in Joshua’s notebook—people Joshua had seen and not yet seen—and made no headway. The church had long since disappeared in which the priest Father Petrauskas had agreed to hide the ghetto diary. The
father himself was no longer alive. The site of the church was now given over to a six-story apartment house with terraces.

  The chargé d’affaires at the American embassy remembered Pem and arranged an appointment for him with a priest at the office of the Vilna diocese, but that too yielded nothing. The Russians had torn up the city and its German defenders in 1944 and not much was left after that but rubble.

  One afternoon—he didn’t know what it could possibly accomplish—Pem took a cab to that little burned-out synagogue in the poor part of town in front of whose doors Sarah’s husband was fatally beaten. The synagogue was being preserved by the city as a ruin. Pem talked to the caretaker, an elderly Lithuanian woman, who spoke a broken English, and he paid twelve litas to stand inside the doors and see the remnants of dark wood reading desks and pews arranged in a square around a central table. A wrought-iron frame with sconces hung over the room. Sunlight pouring through the fallen-in roof lit up the dust suspended there, motionless, as if set in place permanently by the conflagration of years before.

  The old woman remembered the incident of the American who was beaten. It was dark, she was in her cottage behind the synagogue, and she heard shouts and screams. It was she who found Joshua bleeding in front of the doors. She called the police.

  Before that she had heard someone knocking on the synagogue doors, and if the knocking had continued she would with some irritation have gone out and around to the front of the museum—that is what she called the synagogue, the Jewish museum—and told whoever it was that it was closed. But then she heard the shouts.