Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  It goes without explaining that my father, coming from ninety-five percent Lutheran Mecklenburg where Catholics were always regarded as clout-worthy bumpkins, was himself a Protestant; and that my mother, whose ancestors had genuflected before generations of monks, priests, feudal abbots, and regnant prince-bishops, was, not coincidentally, a Catholic.

  My father, like most Northerners, had been somewhat infected with those cosmopolitan ideas which have always penetrated Germany through the mongrelized Hanseatic port of Hamburg, although the Hamburg tradition of treason and socialism was completely alien to him. As a result he cared less than perhaps he should have for communion with the State Lutheran Church and formally resigned my infant soul to the sacraments of my mother’s faith. However, as I grew older, he did not fail to caution me privately from time to time against the idolatrous cunning of the cult into which I have been wetted by the priests of St. Boniface in Forchheim.

  I attended mass regularly, passed through the mystical experience of communion quite unmoved, and sought the confessional as infrequently as possible. Even when trapped in the gloom of that small, crepuscular, sweat-smelling booth, I still had enough of the Mecklenburger in me to speak guardedly of private matters, sparing the priest even the smallest detail that might turn his thoughts toward a sexual life forsworn by him but radiantly opening for me. When at the age of seventeen I left my parents’ house to engage with life itself, I shed all religious superstitions while still remaining nominally a Catholic. Only once again in my life did I go to confession and even that was extorted from me by the young woman who became the mother of my children. Being herself a Catholic and hence demanding Catholic rites (to which I was completely amenable and thoroughly indifferent), it was required that I be massively confessed before taking her to wife. It required almost an hour and the priest was no wiser after I left than before I came.

  Not that I was an atheist or ever could be, since it is my nature to abhor all negatives. I am German to the core and no people feels so profound a sense of spirituality, of almost mystical brotherhood and mission as the Teutonic. The concept of soul in Western Europe encompasses only the individual soul, whereas a Nordic much more profoundly comprehends his soul as absorbed into and at one with the immensely vaster folk-soul of the German people—with, in short, the soul of the infinite.

  Contrary to atheism, as I grew older I developed a penetrating interest in religious cults and superstitions. Some years after my departure from Forchheim and two years before the last war, I was to write in one of the highest organs of our press an analytical synthesis of Jewish with Catholic theology. It circulated in the most exalted circles and was found not to be entirely devoid of philosophical merit. During my later service at Auschwitz-Birkenau it gave me much pleasure to send to the church of St. Boniface in Forchheim a small reliquary of Saint John Chrysostom confiscated from—of all persons!—a Jewish antiquarian relocated from Salonika.

  In summary, the child born under my name in Forchheim so many years ago represented in every atom of his blood and flesh and mind a perfect blend of those disparate elements that by merging make the German whole: Mecklenburg and Bavaria, North and South, Protestant and Catholic, artist and peasant, activist and dreamer, blood and soil and soul. I speak with equal fluency not only Low and High German, but also the clipped incisive speech of Prussia and the sturdy drawl of the Bavarian countryside. If there is anywhere a truer German by culture, biological heritage, geographical origins, or emotional confluence, I have not met him yet and long to do so.

  My childhood was a happy one. When I reflect on it now, I realize (as always must be the case) that the security of my young years and the strong formation of my character derived exclusively from my father. He was incontestably the master of his house, as fathers to this day ought to be and aren’t. Although he loved me dearly and gave many outward signs of his affection, he was nonetheless strict and demanding to the utmost. Even for minor infractions of the household rules he did not hesitate to box my ears. Serious offenses brought instant flogging. There was no arguing with him, no talking back, and no discussion of matters concerning which he had come to conclusions. Thus I was saved from those dangerous choices between folly and rectitude which youth is incapable of making without assistance. He knocked all moonshine from my head the instant it began to glow. For this I am grateful to him and revere his memory.

  Unlike the women of England, who consider any form of work beneath them if there is so much as a single servingwoman in the house, my mother did all of her own cooking, using the girl only to peel and pare and measure out ingredients and clean away the waste. She did her own marketing and spent long hours rolling her special yellow Nudeln to the thinness of paper itself. Like all German brides of her class she brought to her husband an overwhelming dowry in linens and cotton goods, which she kept in an immense cabinet especially built for their storage, always redolent of cleanliness. Soiled linen she sent to the attic. So ample was my father’s dowry supply that only six times a year did the laundress come to assist my mother in washing the attic’s contents and refilling the cabinet once more.

  The floors were washed daily, the front steps scrubbed, the bedding aired, the porcelain stove polished, the furniture dusted—and not, I assure you, with a feather-wand, which only scatters dirt and never removes it, but with clean discarded oil-dipped underwear, which in its new state absorbed filth even more effectively than in its old. Our lace curtains my mother never entrusted to a laundress, taking care of them herself: ten separate cleansings in fresh water four times each year. Each spring she went to the cleaner with her feather-quilts (plumeaux, we called them then in fatuous imitation of the French) and stayed the whole day while their contents were removed and cleaned and dried. Thus she made certain that my father received back into their white envelopes the same feathers he had sent, and in their original quantity.

  Since internal injuries suffered at my birth prevented her from having more children, she dedicated her complete existence to son and husband. Gladly she paid to my father the same respect he required and received from his fellow townsmen, always referring to him in the presence of outsiders or even the servant girl as Herr Professor Grieben. In those days it was considered not only undignified but quite improper for a husband to open the door for his wife like a gigolo, or to allow her to precede him into a room, or to carry her parcels on the street like a servant, or to pay her other of those shallow mincing courtesies which now have become so commonplace as to lose whatever meaning was intended for them. Instead of pantomime my mother received from her husband absolute fidelity, the shelter of his solid house, sufficient allowance for nourishing food and warm clothes, the assistance of a servant girl who slept in the attic, the use of his carriage, and the dignity of his name and position.

  Always at meals the platter was brought directly to my father. First he cut off the servant girl’s portion and dismissed her with it to the kitchen. Then he served my mother and me and himself. No one touched fork to food until my father gave the command by taking his first bite. At the end of the meal my mother herself took the leftovers straight from table to the pantry where they were locked away to avoid pilferage. She carried the key in her apron pocket.

  When at the end of his day’s engagements my father wearily trod the stairway from the lower floor of the house in which his classes were conducted, my mother already had for him his slippers, his smoking jacket, his well-packed meerschaum, a pillow for his back, and his newspaper. This was her joy, her happiness complete, her life’s fulfillment.

  In 1943, in his sixty-third year and the thirty-fifth of his marriage, a Party member in good standing since 1938, my father while on a business trip to Munich was killed in a raid by American planes, which did not hesitate to wage a war of undisguised terror against defenseless civil inhabitants of the most beautiful city in all South Germany—a city never again to be seen by the eyes of man as once it was. From that moment forward the whole purpose and meaning of my mothe
r’s life was extinguished. She mourned him for the rest of her days. What modern woman in this whorehouse of an occupied nation called Germany can match the quality of her “new freedom” against the nobility, the sweetness, the deep profound contentment of my mother’s life?

  I cannot think of her to this day without recalling, while tears fill my eyes, the most beautiful lines Goethe ever wrote:

  Early a woman should learn to serve, for that is her calling;

  Since through service alone she finally comes to governing,

  Comes to the due command that is hers of right in the household

  Early the sister must wait on her brother, and wait on her parents;

  Life must be always with her a perpetual coming and going

  Or be a lifting and carrying, making and doing for others.

  Happy for her be she accustomed to think no way is too grievous,

  And if the hours of the night be to her as the hours of the daytime;

  If she find never a needle too fine, nor a labor too trifling;

  Wholly forgetful of self, and caring but to live in others!

  After my father’s death my mother gave up our house in Forchheim and went to live with her niece, my cousin, on a small inherited farm property near Erlangen. I was by that time stationed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, so burdened with wartime responsibilities that I could not leave them even to pay a son’s last respects at his father’s grave. Nonetheless I found time to write each week to my mother and she to me. From her letters I perceived how impossible it was for two lone women to plough and plant and harvest even that modest acreage, or properly to care for the few animals that remained to them, or to cut the winter’s wood without which they must freeze. When she begged my assistance in finding deportees to keep the farm going, I did not hesitate to arrange with a good SS comrade for two Frenchmen and a Jew (masquerading as a Pole) to be sent to Erlangen, where my mother met and brought them to the farm.

  So far as I can discover they were treated more gently than they deserved. At the very least they were better off than in the camp from which they had been requisitioned. They worked humane hours as prescribed by regulations and slept in the barn loft. If they did not eat luxuriously neither did anyone else in Germany in that last bitter year of our struggle. Certainly my mother and cousin had neither the strength, the desire, nor the temperament to treat them brutally.

  In any event, the Jew—or the Pole or whatever they chose to call him—made such insulting suggestions to my cousin that she felt compelled to report him to the appropriate authority as required by law. The Volkssturm investigated, secured corroborative evidence, took him away with them and shot him—again as required by law.

  When the Americans swarmed over Bavaria in the spring of 1945 (while I still struggled through central Germany), one of my mother’s Frenchmen demonstrated that sense of gratitude that so endears his race to the world by reporting her to the occupation forces for “abusive conduct” toward the dead Jew. A full detail of occupation heroes stormed off at once to the farm, ransacked the house, and subjected my mother and cousin to the most atrocious interrogations. The sergeant in charge carried orders for my mother’s arrest and removal to Erlangen. While she retired to her room to dress and pack, the Americans amused themselves with looting.

  My mother did not return to them. Stunned by a world gone mad, she lay down on her bed and quietly permitted her heart to burst. The last sound to reach her dying ears mingled the crash of porcelain with bawdy shouts and rowdy songs in the coarse world-accent of the new Rome.

  Thus the fate of a German wife and mother.

  ♦ 3 ♦

  I meet Death in the woods and swoon to his enchantment, his cruelty, his love

  My Christian names, derived from Beethoven, Wagner, and Bach, reveal my father’s intention to make of his son a composer or, at very least, a musician. But I was a restless, vigorous, sometimes moody lad, more given to nature’s symphonics—the fluting pipes of river, field, and forest—than those performed in concert halls. Although I achieved a certain degree of proficiency with the violin, and regularly played with the Orchester-Luitpold II. my heart was not in it.

  My marks at the Volksschule and later at the Gymnasium Luitpold II were erratic. When the subject was presented in such a way as to ignite the fires of inner vision, none of my schoolmates could hope to surpass me. But when, as far too often was the case, through failure of imagination my professor turned into nagging pedagogue, I sank to mediocrity or worse, proving once more, as already it had been proved so many times before, that truth is more purely apprehended through submission to the soul’s blinding rage to feel than by crafty manipulation of a halved and yellow-coiled slow-seeping mass of copulating worms that only thinks.

  If one bypasses altogether the so-called intellectual process and succeeds instead emotionally to sense the inner meaning of observed reality, the edifice of truth no longer is discovered ploddingly and piece by piece, but instantaneously, bursting over the mind like the crash of streaming galaxies—truth entire revealed in a single ray of intuition’s blazing sun. It is what we call thinking with the blood, an experience quite unknown to Western minds, which still slaver like bitches in heat for the idiot’s dream of wedding Eucharist to Enlightenment.

  To give but one personal example among many: Despite inclinations toward music and philosophy, I felt most at home in the world of physical action. I enjoyed gymnastics, belonged to a marching club, hiked with boys always older and stronger than myself, and loved especially to hunt. My father’s belief that boys should early learn the use of firearms impelled him to give me at the age of six a smallbore single-shot rifle—a Hauserman, I think it was—and to instruct me in its use through long sessions of target practice. Until I reached the age of ten that beautiful gun was never aimed at living flesh.

  But finally, as it was bound to, came the day when, gun in hand, I found myself alone in the summer forest, treading its needled paths like a ghost. The sun in its slow descent filtered great cathedral-moats of gold through latticed boughs of pine and birch and maple. It was that time of day—or afternoon—when the forest’s breath, sun-stunned, yearning for night, impalpably swoons to the slow pulsations of blood and time and silence. No leaf moves. The wild pig slumbers. The fox pants softly in shadowed repose. The hare dreams at the lip of his warren. The bird makes no sound.

  Suddenly the void of this tremendous silence was shattered by a squirrel whose chatter broke the peace, mocked the natural law, and ridiculed the universe. He clung firmly to a slender limb, tail whisking in glad excitement, throat swelling with imprecations, head darting from side to side to judge my reactions. His eyes, fixed brightly on mine, held no fright, no anger. Rather they ridiculed me. They were gay.

  Vaguely I remember lifting the rifle in careful aim, but I have no recollection at all of pulling the trigger. I remember only the squirrel’s astonishment—and mine—as gunfire crashed through the forest, ricocheted from tree to tree like a panicked stag, and then fled stuttering into distant hills until all sound died.

  His first surprise cut short by still greater marvels, my squirrel seemed to turn his attention lingeringly inward, as if contemplating there a miracle, some secret revelation, a private anguish hitherto unfelt, a wonder too strange, too urgent, too poignant to be shared. Slowly his back arched like that of a languid cat. Gently his paws relaxed their hold on the bark. His dreaming body swayed toward the sun and me, and this frightened him, and for a moment he righted himself. But the dream held on. Slowly and with immense regret he surrendered to it. He fell at my feet, a small dying creature whose intentions had been misread, whose confidence had been abused.

  My first feeling was bewilderment. I hadn’t intended to spoil his life. I’d wanted only to train my gun on something that moved and now, in fainting submission, the victim of my curiosity lay at my feet. His eyes, already preoccupied with dying, fixed on my own a gaze so steady, so intent, so baffled, so sternly inquisitive as to make my pres
ence above him a greater mystery than his own on the ground.

  His blood and pain had no connection with me. He attributed them to God or accident or some unknown still-hidden enemy. He regarded me only as a fellow creature, perhaps even a fellow victim, chosen by fate to share with him this strange miracle of fading light and universes done to death. We stood not as huntsman and quarry hut as brothers impaled together on a single shaft of pain, equally savoring its cause, its purpose, its dark repellent beauty.

  Hoping to comfort him, to soothe his anxious speculations, I sank to my knees beside him. He stirred, parted his head from the earth and let it fall back again. As I drew closer it rose again, higher this time, slowly turning to the point of my approach until the small, urgently inquiring snout pointed upward to the angle of my descending face. Then, as my hand reached out to stroke him, and without forewarning of any kind, he screamed.

  Startled and perhaps frightened also, I leapt to my feet. For him, at least, the mystery was solved. He had recognized the enemy. The wild despair of his cry, lingering like death in the somnolent air, yielded only to the hiss of blood in my ears and the sharp dickering of teeth as his small head pillowed itself once more against the earth.

  I stepped backward to relieve his fears, but to him I was death and even my slightest movement a threat. His legs exploded to frenzy, three of them stabbing the air in mad gavotte, a single forepaw digging the earth. Mobilized by that one limb he began to pivot on his thigh, slowly and counterclockwise and always away from me, small clouds of dust ascending, harsh gasps exploding into cries.

  Horror surged through my bowels. Panic marshalled its intolerable pressure behind the staring ovals of my eyes. I reloaded my gun and fired point-blank. Aimed at his head, the bullet smashed his buttocks. He pivoted no longer, but still he lived, still his forepaws clawed the air, still his eyes—those terrible eyes so filled with fear and supplication—clung to mine. I threw my rifle butt at his head and missed. I rushed in to crush his skull.