He kicked me in the ribs, holding Resi off with one hand. That’s for Ansel Brewer,’ he said, ‘run over by a Tiger tank at Aachen.’
He kicked me again. ‘That’s for Eddie McCarty, cut in two by a burp gun in the Ardennes,’ he said. ‘Eddie was gonna be a doctor.’
He drew back his big foot to kick me in the head. ‘And this one ĄX ‘ he said, and that’s the last I heard. The kick was for somebody else who’d been killed in war. It knocked me cold.
Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.
‘I’m one guy who hasn’t forgot that war,’ he said to me, though I could not hear him. ‘Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell ĄX but not me.
‘I brought you this,’ he said, ‘so you could save everybody a lot of trouble.’
And he left.
Resi put (he noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it ĄX but that is another story.
As for my own story:
I regained consciousness on a ruptured studio couch in a damp, overheated room that was hung with mildewed Nazi banners. There was a cardboard fireplace, a dime-store’s idea of how to have a merry Christmas. In it were cardboard birch logs, a green electric light and cellophane tongues of eternal fire.
Over this fireplace was a chromo of Adolf Hitler. It was swathed in black silk.
I myself was stripped to my olive-drab underwear, covered with a bedspread of simulated leopard skin. I groaned and sat up, skyrockets going off in my skull. I looked down at the leopard skin and mumbled something.
‘What did you say, darling?’ said Resi. She was sitting right beside the cot, though I hadn’t seen her until she spoke.
‘Don’t tell me ĄX ‘ I said, drawing the leopard skin closer about me, ‘I’ve joined the Hottentots.’
27: Finders Keepers …
My research assistants here, lively, keen young people, have provided me with a photostat of a story in the New York Times, telling of the death of Lazlo Szombathy, the man who killed himself with the rope intended for me.
So I didn’t dream that, either.
Szombathy did the big trick the night after I was beaten up.
He had come to this country after being a Freedom Fighter against the Russians in Hungary, according to the Times. He was a fratricide, according to the Times, having shot his brother Miklos, Second Minister of Education in Hungary.
Before he gave himself the big sleep, Szombathy wrote a note and pinned it to his trouser leg. There was nothing in the note about his having killed his brother.
His complaint was that he had been a respected veterinarian in Hungary, but that he was not permitted to practice in America. He had bitter things to say about freedom in America. He thought it was illusory.
In a final fandango of paranoia and masochism, Szombathy closed his note with a hint that he knew how to cure cancer. American doctors laughed at him, he said, whenever he tried to tell them how.
So much for Szombathy.
As for the room where I awakened after my beating: it was the cellar that had been furnished for the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution by the late August Krapptauer, the cellar of Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Somewhere upstairs a printing press was running, turning out copies of The White Christian Minuteman.
From some other chamber in the cellar, partly soundproofed, came the idiotically monotonous banging of target practice.
After my beating, I had been given first aid by young Dr. Abraham Epstein, the doctor in my building who had pronounced Krapptauer dead. From Epstein’s apartment, Resi had called Dr. Jones for help and advice.
‘Why Jones?’ I said.
‘He was the only person in this country I knew I could trust,’ said Resi. ‘He was the only person I knew for sure was on your side.’
‘What is life without friends?’ I said.
I have no recollection of it, but Resi tells me that I regained consciousness in Epstein’s apartment. Jones picked Resi and me up in his limousine, took me to a hospital, where I was X-rayed. I had three broken ribs taped up. After that I was taken to Jones’ cellar and bedded down.
‘Why here?’ I said.
‘It’s safe,’ said ResL
‘From what?’ I said.
‘The Jews,’ she said.
The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, Jones’ chauffeur, now came in with a tray of eggs, toast, and scalding coffee. He set it down on a table for me.
‘Headache?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Take a aspirin,’ he said.
‘Thank you for the advice,’ I said.
‘Most things in this world don’t work ĄX ‘ he said, ‘but aspirin do.’
‘The ĄX the Republic of Israel really wants me ĄX ‘ I said to Resi in groping disbelief, ‘to ĄX to try me for ĄX for what the paper said?’
‘Dr. Jones says the American Government won’t let you go’ said Resi, ‘but that the Jews will send men to kidnap you, the way they did Adolf Eichmann.’
‘Such a piffling prisoner ĄX ‘ I murmured.
‘Ain’t like just having a Jew here and a Jew there after you,’ said the Black Fuehrer.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘they got a country now. I mean, they got Jewish battleships, they got Jewish airplanes, they got Jewish tanks. They got Jewish everything out after you but a Jewish hydrogen bomb.’
‘Who in God’s name is doing that shooting?’ I said. ‘Can’t he stop until my head feels a little better?’
‘That’s your friend,’ said Resi.
‘Dr. Jones?’ I said.
‘George Kraft,’ she said.
‘Kraft?’ I said. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘He’s coming with us,’ said Resi.
‘To where?’ I said.
‘It’s all been decided,’ said Resi. ‘Everybody agrees, darling, the best thing is for us to get out of the country. Dr. Jones has made arrangements.’
‘What sort of arrangements?’ I said.
‘He has a friend with an airplane. As soon as you’re well enough, darling, we get on the plane, fly to some divine place where you aren’t known, and well start life all over again.’
28: Target …
I went to see George Kraft, there in Jones basement. I found him standing at the head of a long corridor, the far end of which was packed with sandbags. Pinned to the sandbags was a target in the shape of a man.
The target was a caricature of a cigar-smoking Jew. The Jew was standing on broken crosses and little naked women. In one hand the Jew held a bag of money labeled International Banking. In the other hand he held a Russian flag. From the pockets of his suit, little fathers, mothers, and children in scale with the naked women under his feet, cried out for mercy.
All these details were not evident from the far end of the shooting gallery, but it wasn’t necessary for me to approach the target in order to know about them,
I had drawn the target in about 1941.
Millions of copies of the target were run off in Germany. It had so delighted my superiors that I was given a bonus of a ten-pound ham, thirty gallons of gasoline, and a week’s all-expenses-paid vacation for my wife and myself at the Schreiberhaus in Riesengebirge.
I must admit that this target represents an excess of zeal, since I was not working as a graphic artist for the Nazis. I offer it in evidence against myself. I presume my authorship of it is news even to the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals. I submit, however, that I drew the monster in order to establish myself even more solidly as a Nazi. I overdrew it, with an effect that would have been ludicrous anywhere but in Germany or Jones basement, and I drew it far more amateurishly than I can really draw.
It succeeded, nonetheless.
I was flabbergasted by its success. The Hitler Youth and S.S. recruits fired at almost nothing else, and I even got a letter of thanks for the targets from Heinrich Himmler.
‘It has improved my marksmanship a hundred per cent,’ he wrote. ‘What pure Aryan can look at that wonderful target,’ he said, ‘and not shoot to kill?’
Watching Kraft pop away at that target, I understood its popularity for the first time. The amateurishness of it made it look like something drawn on the wall of a public lavatory; it recalled the stink, diseased twilight, humid resonance, and vile privacy of a stall in a public lavatory ĄX echoed exactly the soul’s condition in a man at war.
I had drawn better than I knew.
Kraft, oblivious to me in my leopard skin, fired again. He was using a Luger as big as a siege howitzer. It was chambered and bored for mere twenty-two’s however, making anti-climactic, peewee bangs. Kraft fired again, and a sandbag two feet to the left of the target’s head bled sand.