It’s very sweet. Now that the wedding nears, Odilo is altogether gentler. He has stopped having tantrums. No longer is his chimpanzee required to do the housework naked, and on all fours. Herta responds with gratitude, and with an apparently unbounded tenderness, never seen before. . . . Erotic rapture, it transpires, is in a sense a reptilian condition. The higher mind, the soul, the princes of the faculties—they absent themselves. And so, too, most emphatically, does the reptile brain. Let me think about it. When reptile brains get together, they want to do harm from a position of safety. But when it’s just their b dies, they
seem to want to do good, and close up, with maximum risk to the self. I don’t know. I’m still there, in their bed, and I like it; but the oozy ecstasy belongs to Odilo, that glistening lizard, and to Herta, that glistening lizardess, in their world of succulent slime, where no words are necessary: you just croak and hum. . . . Their love life is steadily divesting itself of all irregularities. For instance, they used to play a kind of game (about twice a week, or rather more often if Odilo put his foot down), where she must lie still and show no sign of life, throughout. Similarly, he used to take a healthy interest in his wife’s bowel movements, as is meet. But that’s all behind him now. When she weeps and sulks, he dries her tears with kisses, and not with a punch in the breasts. And nowadays she hardly cries at all: the wedding is only weeks away. Less and less often, though still pretty regularly (say most nights), Odilo quits his pact of reptiles and, with enthusiasm, seeks his herds of friends: their strength in musky numbers, their heat of hide and stall. We shout and we drool, with the distorted faces of babies; individually we have no power or courage, but together we form a glowing mass. Often the night’s play begins with us going out and helping Jews. Odilo, Herta, and I are officially on our honeymoon now but in fact we’re going nowhere. Except back to Berlin, for the wedding.
My position on the Jews has always been without ambiguity. I like them. I am, I would say, one of nature’s philo-Semites. It’s their eyes I particularly admire. That glossy, heated look. An exoticism that points toward the transcendent—who knows? Anyway, why talk about their qualities? I am childless; but the Jews are my children and I love them as a parent should, which is to say that I don’t love them for their qualities (remarkable as these seem to me to be, naturally), and only wish them to exist, and to flourish, and to have their right to life and love.
I remember names and faces, names I heard called at dawn gatherings in town squares, or by empty fuel pits and antitank ditches, or under the light of policemen’s bonfires, or in waiting zones, in train stations, in green fields at night. And names I saw on printed lists, quotas, manifests. Lonka and Mania, and Zonka and Netka, Liebish, Feigele, Aizik, Yaacov, Motl, and Matla, and Zipora, and Margalit. Back from Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz, from Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Theresienstadt, from Buchenwald and Belsen and Majdanek, from Belzec, from Chelmno, from Treblinka, from Sobibor.
The sick smile that Odilo sported throughout his wedding day seems, in retrospect, all too appropriate. I kept seeing this leer of his, the leer of a wary yokel, reflected in the numerous little mirrors set around Herta’s marriage crown (traditional: to ward off evil spirits, and so on). Yes, his smile was a good commentary on the occasion; ditto the painfully explosive backslaps delivered by his many new men friends. How else should a person look, while, in the course of a single ceremony, he kisses everything goodbye—just blows it all away in a prodigal storm of confetti and rice? She gave me the wreath of myrtle, the saffron and cinnamon, the bread, the butter, and the rest of it. And I gave her all my power. We switched our rings from the fourth finger of the left hand to the fourth finger of the right. They said it was an auspicious marriage moon: it was rising. But I could see that the moon above my head was really on the wane. Hence the unbearable blows to back and shoulder. Hence the coprophagic smile. Hence Herta’s triumphal laughter.