City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  “So you’re the writer. . .”

  “I am.”

  “Are you married? I don’t see a wife here.”

  “No.”

  “Are you divorced?”

  “I’m a confirmed bachelor.”

  “That’s nothing to be proud of. My eyes tell me you’re approaching the age when you’d better find a woman to take care of you. You wait too long, what woman will want the job?”

  “Thank you for your very good advice, Myrna.”

  “You’re patronizing me. When my husband died ten years ago, I took over his business. A parts supplier to General Motors. I sold it last year for forty-five million dollars. And I’m telling you, you don’t want to be the perennial extra man at my Sarah’s table.”

  Whammo.

  “I know all about you,” she says. “I’ve got eyes, I’m not as stupid as you think.”

  Across the room, I find the little bishop. He looks older and smaller in civvies. He is relieved to see me. “I’m not sure just how to proceed,” he says. “Do you happen to know if anyone is going to give a benediction?”

  I glance at Pem on the dance floor. He has a glass in his hand. His arm is around Sarah’s waist and he is swaying to the music as he talks to two young women, who look oddly familiar.

  “I think Pem will eventually say something.”

  “I’ll wait then. Frankly I don’t know what is appropriate. He is so full of surprises, I’ve been watching this man for thirty years now and he still surprises me. But she is a handsome woman, his bride. Striking-looking, in fact.” He smiles. “Rabbis aren’t usually that good-looking.”

  I see Pem waving at me. I go over and he introduces me to the two young women. They’re his daughters, Kimberly and Pamela. Kim and Pam. Now I see the resemblance: Both have the Pemberton jaw, the large head, they are what the department stores call plus-sized, Kim is the blonde, Pam is the brunette. They are smiling broadly, two sets of bright white teeth. Little children come running up between us, one belonging to Kim, one to Pam, they pull away and scatter before they can be introduced, and everyone is laughing, the mothers shaking their heads in mock resignation. Pem puts his arm around my shoulders. “This is the man who is writing my spiritual biography. He’s going to make me famous,” he tells them. “Your father will be on all the talk shows.”

  “Oh, Daddy, don’t exaggerate.”

  “I’ll make you proud of me yet.”

  “Oh, Daddy, we’re already proud of you,” the blonde says, looking suddenly quite unhappy.

  When his girls are gone, Pem takes me by the arm and walks me to the side of the room. “We found out yesterday the son of a bitch died two months ago.”

  “What son of a bitch?”

  “Schmid, Schmitz, whatever the fuck his name was. The Nazi who ran the ghetto. Died in his sleep. A home in Yonkers. We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!”

  “Well he’s dead, anyway.”

  “He never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was.”

  “Yes, well that’s why Dante invented hell.”

  “Dante didn’t invent hell. He furnished it. Your glass is empty, come with me. And then, properly armed, you will meet some of my Virginia meshpochehs.”

  My friend the bartender fixes me up, but Pem is gone when I turn around. A small pack of children and some gawky preteen girls, unaccustomed to dresses and hose, have gathered around a table on which the wedding gifts have been collected. Every gift is beautifully wrapped and unopened, but just the idea of presents is enough to have attracted these children. They stare and whisper to one another. I see among them Sarah’s two sons, Jake and Davey, and their attention to this pile of shiny white boxes with white ribbons is more proprietary than curious. They don’t want the others to touch anything.

  When I appear they all scatter. On the table among the gifts are elaborate baskets of flowers. I check the cards: One from a Rabbi and Mrs. So and So, one from nurses at the hospice on Roosevelt Island, another from Trish vanden Meer (“Congratulations to both of you,” her message from the heart). The largest display of all, a great elaborate horseshoe of flowers with a pennant printed with the words God Bless Pops and Mrs. Pops and is signed “From all your friends at the Church of the Sweet Vision.”

  I am feeling hot, the hotel is overheated, I go to a window but it won’t open. Frost is on the windowpanes, winter is icumen in. As soon as I’ve finished my drink I will leave. I find myself resentful that Pem and Sarah all this time have had lives and relationships other than their life and relationship with me. I wonder if I’m losing the ability to hold my liquor.

  But moments later everything is all right once again, Sarah has taken my arm and led me to the dance floor. The combo is playing “My Blue Heaven” in a lively tempo, I have never before touched this woman except to shake her hand, I am holding her now, my hand is in the small of her back, I am connected to her animacy of being, I hold her ringed hand in my other hand, I can feel her heat, she is flushed with her happiness, there is a clean herbal scent coming off her hair, she is laughing at my solemnized slow-time dance step to the fast-time beat, but I mean it, I mean my solemnity, she understands and puts her cheek against mine, and my knees nearly buckle. “You will always be our friend, Everett,” she says in my ear, and I am about to declare something spectacularly foolish when, fortunately, her wretched older boy, Jake, taps me on the elbow to cut in. I bow to him. And Sarah dances away with her son in his starched white shirt and red tie and unusually well combed hair, her arms outstretched, and looking down on his solemnity of concentration in the healing pleasure of her serene love.

  —I’m trying to remember everything that Pem said when he got up and grasped the cordless microphone. The band stopped playing and he stood there swaying slightly while the room went silent. His double-breasted blazer hung open, his tie was loosened, his forehead triumphantly cowlicked.

  “Friends,” he said, “I will not speak of my happiness, of my prayerful thanks to the Lord, may His name be blessed, that my dear love Sarah Blumenthal has found me worthy of her attention. You can believe that I will passionately live what’s left of my life to earn what she has given me. I will soon be a Jew. I will find the joy of a hallowed life by her side in observance of the Commandments and the enactment of the simple rituals that were devised by the ancients to incite our humility and urge us to a perception of the holy. I am trying to say this without using the word communion,” he said, smiling shyly, and a few people laughed.

  “Yet since I’m technically still a Christian, I suppose that for the moment I stand with one foot in each tradition—although traditions are not loci, are they. One foot in each camp? That’s not right either, camps, opposing sides, furthest thing from my ecumenically correct mind. . .”

  He paused, lost in thought. People were stirring, looking wary. Not Sarah, she was fascinated, gazing at Pem with her two boys leaning back in her arms as she sat at the table with her first husband’s relatives.

  “In any event the Jew that I almost am tells me that once my conversion is affirmed by the rabbinate, I need no longer be burdened by the idea of the millennium, which is the calendrical construct of the Christian tradition—I mean as some significant event in history, some turning point, some symbolic means, at least, of looking back, or up, and of taking stock. I will have tapped into a different set of numbers entirely, a number set just as arbitrary, of course, but somehow less mythologically loaded and media-attended.

  “So the fact that my dear Sarah and I happen to have married at the very end of this last century of the Christian millennium may have no significance at all, except insofar as it causes us to reflect and to remember that our coming together, as blessed as that is, and as morally resonant, even to the point, perhaps, of proceeding from a mysterious imperative. . . I say we cannot help but reflect that our union has depended on the continuing catastrophe of our generations, the crisis of the time of our own lives and the lives of our parents and
grandparents, and that it could not have occurred except in the wake of death, the death of her father’s childhood, the death of her dear, intrepid, brilliant rabbinical partner, Joshua, father of her sons Jacob and David. . . and, not impossibly, the death of redemption, of hope, for the entire species.

  “So with this in mind a prayer of lingering numerical awareness may not, after all, be inappropriate. I want to say this prayer or petition as my final act as a Christian and an ex–Christian priest. You need not bow your heads. . .

  “Dear Lord, blessed be Your name, I speak to you in one of our intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills. There have been monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity in the historic generations of every adult in this room, in our own lives and the lives of our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.. . . Evil debasers of human life have been responsible collectively for the enslavement and horrible death of many tens of millions of human beings. An exponential murder of souls has gone on, a torture and agony of demolishment, in wars, in genocides, with the masses of the violently dead in our century consigned by their very numbers to the lists of anonymous oblivion. And they are not resurrectable, they cannot and will not resurrect even in the imagination of your Christian faithful.

  “I am not going to get into the question of how a supposedly omniscient God such as Yourself would allow these human catastrophes to occur, though your record even before this century has not been all that commendable, but I will tell you. . . the relentless and unimaginable genocidal cruelties shuddering across the world in our age have brought You into disrepute, and the uninhibited degradation of the idea of life has thrown some of us into the despair of cursing Your name and impugning Your existence.

  “Even among those of us clinging to a love of You and an irrepressible longing for Your love. . . there is a risen suspicion, that You are part of the problem. Men use You at will for their most hideous purposes. You do not seem to resist—anyone who wants You, and for whatever foul, murderous reason, can have You. You are bought and embraced like the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker. And the world You have created, or that has used You to create itself, suffers not only the headline killers of our century, the contemptuous rulers of tribes and nations, but the miserable, wretched numbers of the rest of us, who inhabit the back pages and work in symbolic emulation of their spirit, living fervently to enrich ourselves at the expense of others, so that even in our most advanced industrial democracies life is adver-sarial, and the social contract breaks down continually, as if we were not meant to be justly governed nations but confederacies of murderous gluttons.

  “And so as I consider the headline killers of the century. . . the dictators, despots, homicidal tribalists, generals, colonels, and ministers of righteousness, carelessly murdering kings and revolutionists who have taken our lives and assassinated our souls. . . I know in my own sinful heart and from the depths of my craven being that they are cast in history from the human die, they are my kind. . . stamped out of my genetic code. . . and with a family resemblance so unmistakable as to set me to weeping in terror and despair.

  “Do you not find this a grave challenge to your existence, Lord, that we do these things to one another? That for all our theological excuse making, and despite the moral struggles and the intellectual and technical advances of human history, we live enraged—quietly or explosively, but always greedily enraged? Do you not find it an unforgivable lapse of Yours that after these thousands of years we can no more explain ourselves than we can explain You?”

  Here a pause, and in the silence, Pem turned and picked up a glass from the table behind him and drank—what? Water? Vodka? I couldn’t tell. But he had all the time in the world, this was an audience riven, after all he had spoken from pulpits for years and knew what he was doing. But I had never heard him deliver a sermon and I was as astounded as everyone else. I did manage to glance over at the bishop, who had turned pale and was sitting in his chair as if roped to it.

  “Lord, if You were to give evidence of a real hell,” Pem said, “not the invention of our inflamed imaginations, but a real one, with the right people in it, I would have some hope for You as You have been traditionally conceived.. . . If you were to cause the odious monstrous being of Satan to flourish in the nether depths of the superstring universe as we once believed he flourished in the depths of our own geology, and devise him of such mass, so huge and cold and of such gravity that nothing could ever escape from him that is drawn into him as into one of the black holes of the universe. . . and if you were to let him be anguishedly made of physical self-contradiction, ice and flame, peculiarly crustaceous but pulpy skin and, say”—here he sent a glance over to the group of children at the side of the room—“with multiple eyes cataracted with congealed blood and with slimy claws and tendrils to reach his every extremity, all of him stinking and loathsome. . . and if you were to show us the headline killers of our century, the murderous rulers of tribes and nations, agglutinated in his embrace while over billions of years he roared his sickening excoriating breath into their faces, and vomited his foul waste alive with squirmy larvae and dung beetles over them while languidly absorbing them into his hideous being. . . and if you were to make him particularly solicitous of that gibbering, bug-eyed, teeth-gnashing asshole of the German national religion, and that steely slit-eyed peasant shit-brain of the Russian revolutionary religion, and that little colonialist bastard exterminator-king of the civilized Belgians, and that stone-faced rouge-cheeked killer cretin of the South Asian jungles. . . as well as all the torturers of the banana republics, island tyrants of the Caribbean and Pacific seas, tribal thugs of Africa, and ethnic-cleansing goons of the Balkans—and if for good measure you were to throw in all their bankers and arms suppliers, and their loyal legions of rapers, impalers, beheaders, bludgeoners, bayoneters, machine gunners, machete wielders, death squad kidnappers, crematoria designers, and slave camp administrators. . . and let their own foul pollutions of being act as stings and allergens to so torment Satan that he would attempt with his fiery foul breath to melt the agonizing ice of which he is composed and wash them from him. . . who in their turn would cling more perversely to his suppurating skin and suffer ever more agonizedly and in ever increasing torments of consciousness as slowly. . . over thousands of millennia they were absorbed into his icy guts, cell by exquisitely tormented cell. . . until they were one with him, alive and screaming in the hell of his black icy being, forever and ever. . . well then, well then, Lord, I think I could remain your priest. . .”

  Pem took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. He said now almost in a whisper: “But as it is, I think we must remake You. If we are to remake ourselves, we must remake You, Lord. We need a place to stand. We are weak, and puny, and totter here in our civilization.. . . We have only our love for each other for our footing, our marriages, the children we hold in our arms, it is only this wavery sensation, flowing and ebbing, that justifies our consciousness and keeps us from plunging out of the universe. Not enough. It’s not enough. We need a place to stand.

  “I ask for reason to hope that this travail of our souls will find its resolution in You, Lord, You of Blessed Name. For the sake of all of us on this little planet of Yours I ask this. Amen.”

  Pem returned the microphone to the bandleader. Sarah rose from her chair and came across the floor and hugged Pem, and kissed him, and as he held her around the waist, she leaned back in his arms and brushed the hair from his forehead.

  —In a gallery on lower Broadway, the artist has put down a model railroad track with a train going round and round, the engine of which is welded to the visored headpiece of a suit of medieval armor. So an expressionless iron face mask is leading the train round and round. Trouble is, the train keeps running off the track and the lovely young woman in charge has to get down on her knees and, with her high heels flopping and her tight-skirted and quite shapely ass presenting itself to the onlooker, she must set the train wheels back on the track. . . and as th
is happens three or four times while I’m trying to look at the other quirky installations in the gallery, I have to wonder if she too isn’t part of the artist’s intention. I hope so.

  A few of the artists are doing wonderfully insouciant and blunderingly lovely things amidst all the ordinary art in our time. I like this fellow who goes around the world wrapping whatever he can get his hands on. . . the Reichstag in Berlin looking like an unusually large package delivered by UPS. . . or, in a Swiss park, the grove of trees bagged in polyester. . . or the Pont-Neuf done in saffron silk, all these rippling shimmering scrims through which light can pass, outlines revealed.. . . He ran miles of open umbrellas along the California coast and wants to come to Central Park and staple it with rows of steel gates flying nylon flaps of gold. Let him come, Mayor. Let him come, Commissioners. I like the idea of out-of-scale art as world occupation, planetary embrace, I like the inverse relations of such projects, the coolness of the years of planning, the huge amounts of money. . . for the capricious result, the abruptly reconformed and freshly wild appropriated public space. I like the outrage of making ephemeral art of the city, the land.

  Another haunting artist has been going through the cities of Europe projecting ghostly photographs of the dead on the same buildings in the same windows and on the same sidewalks where they once lived. In a doorway in Berlin, an old Jewish scholar stands with his books, on another street a family posing in front of the apartment building from which they will be deported, in Amsterdam a company of marching German troops shines down from a window. . . all these spectral images coming on at night for cars to drive past, passersby to walk through, hurry away from, shudder at, as the past conflates with the present and time and space compress to a point.

  Bring him to New York, this artist, let him do us! Bring art out of the closet, into the street, bring back the artists who have themselves spray-painted and hung inside picture frames, let the artist who likes to tie himself in a canvas bag and lie down in front of traffic tie himself in a canvas bag and lie down in front of the traffic.. . . And where is John Cage when we need him, or is he still here, with his uncopyrighted music of the world’s sounds, every whirring motor, every birdcall, every heartbeat. . . and with each moment of apparent silence the realized art of his consciousness?