‘And I asked myself,’ said O’Hare, ‘what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What’s the point of any of it?’
‘Good questions,’ I said softly, and I put myself close to a pair of heavy fire-tongs.
‘And then somebody sent me a copy of that newspaper with the story of how you were still alive,’ said O’Hare, and he relived for me the cruel excitement the story had given him. ‘And then it hit me ĄX ‘ he said, ‘why I was alive, and what the main thing was I was supposed to do.’
He took a step toward me, his eyes wide. ‘Here I come, Campbell, out of the past’
‘How do you do?’ I said.
‘You know what you are to me, Campbell?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re pure evil,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely pure evil.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You’re right ĄX it is a kind of compliment,’ he said. ‘Usually a bad man’s got some good in him ĄX almost as much good as evil. But you ĄX ‘ he said, ‘you’re the pure thing. For all the good there is in you, you might as well be the Devil’
‘Maybe I am the Devil,’ I said.
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,’ he said.
‘What do you plan to do to me?’ I asked him.
‘Take you apart,’ he said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, rolling his shoulders, loosening them. ‘When I heard you were alive, I knew it was something I had to do. There wasn’t any way out’ he said. ‘It had to end like this.’
‘I don’t see why,’ I said.
‘Then, by God, I’ll show you why,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you, by God, I was born just to take you apart, right here and now.’ He called me a yellow-belly. He called me a Nazi. And then he called me the most offensive compound word in the English language.
So I broke his good right arm with the fire-tongs.
That is the only violent act I ever committed in what has now been a long, long life. I met O’Hare in single combat, and I beat him. Beating him was easy. O’Hare was so drugged by booze and fantasies of good triumphing over evil that he hadn’t expected me to defend myself.
When he realized that he’d been hit, that the dragon meant to give St. George a real tussle, he looked very surprised.
‘So that’s the way you want to play ĄX ‘ he said.
And then the agony of a multiple fracture suffused his nervous system, and tears came to his eyes.
‘Get out,’ I said. ‘Or do you want me to break your other arm, and your head, too?’ I put the tip of the fire-tongs by his right temple, and I said, ‘And I’ll take the gun or the knife or whatever it is before you go’
He shook his head. The pain was so awful that he could not speak.
‘You’re not armed?’ I said.
He shook his head again. ‘Fair fight,’ he said thickly. ‘Fair.’
I patted his pockets, and there weren’t any weapons on him. St. George had expected to take the dragon apart with his bare hands!
‘You poor, silly, drunk, one-armed sonofabitch!’ I said. I tore down the tent in my doorway, kicked out the zigzag of boards. I shoved O’Hare through the opening, onto the landing outside.
The railing stopped O’Hare, and he gazed down the stairwell, down a beckoning helix to the patch of sure death below.
‘I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!’ I said. ‘Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!’ I said. ‘That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.’
‘There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,’ I said, ‘but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all lands of ugliness so attractive.
‘It’s that part of an imbecile,’ I said, ‘that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.’
Whether it was my words or humiliation or booze or surgical shock that made O’Hare throw up, I do not know. Throw up he did. He flashed the hash down the stairwell from four stories up.
‘Clean it up,’ I said.
He faced me, his eyes still filled with undiluted hatred. ‘I’ll get you yet, brother,’ he said.
‘That may be,’ I said. ‘But it won’t change your destiny of bankruptcies, frozen-custard, too many children, termites, and no cash. If you want to be a soldier in the Legions of God so much,’ I told him, ‘try the Salvation Army.’
And O’Hare went away.
44: ‘Kahm-boo…’
It is a common experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail. A theory I propose to myself on such occasions is that I am in jail because I could not bring myself to walk through or leap over another man’s vomit. I am referring to the vomit of Bernard B. O’Hare on the foyer floor at the foot of the stairwell.
I left my attic shortly after O’Hare did. There was nothing to keep me there. I took a memento with me, quite by accident. As I left my attic, I kicked something over the threshold and onto the landing. I picked it up. It was a pawn from the chess set I had carved from a broom handle.
I put it in my pocket. I have it still. As I slipped it into my pocket, the stench of the public nuisance O’Hare had created reached me.
As I descended the stairs, the stench grew worse.
When I reached the landing outside the door of young Dr. Abraham Epstein, a man who had spent his childhood in Auschwitz, the stench stopped me.
The next thing I knew, I was knocking on Dr. Epstein’s door.
The Doctor came to the door in bathrobe and pajamas. His feet were bare. He was startled to see me.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Could I come in?’ I said.
‘This is a medical matter?’ he said. There was a chain across the door.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Personal-political.’
‘It can’t wait?’ he said.
‘I’d rather it didn’t,’ I said.
‘Give me an idea of what this is all about,’ he said.
‘I want to go to Israel to stand trial,’ I said.
‘You what?’ he said.
‘I want to be tried for my crimes against humanity,’ I said. ‘I’m willing to go.’
‘Why come to me?’ he said.
‘I thought you might know somebody ĄX somebody who’d like to be notified,’ I said.
‘I’m not a representative of Israel,’ he said. ‘I’m an American. Tomorrow you can find all the Israelis you want.’
‘I’d like to surrender to an Auschwitzer,’ I said.
This made him mad. ‘Then find one who thinks about Auschwitz all the time he said. ‘There are plenty who think about nothing else. I never think about it!’
And he slammed the door.
I froze again, frustrated in the one purpose I’d been able to imagine for myself. What Epstein had said about Israelis being available in the morning was surely true ĄX
But there was still the night to get through, and I could not move.
Epstein talked to his mother inside. They talked in German.
I heard only bits of what they said. Epstein was telling his mother what had just happened.
One thing I did hear that impressed me was their use of my last name, the sound of my last name.
‘Kahm-boo,’ they said again and again. That was Campbell to them.
That was the undiluted evil in me, the evil that had had its effect on millions, the disgusting creature good people wanted dead and underground ĄX
‘Kahm-boo.’
Epstein’s mother got so excited about Kahm-boo and what he was up to now, that she came to the door. I’m sure that she did not expect to see Kahm-boo himself. She wanted only to loathe and wonder at the air he had lately displaced.
She opened the door, her son right behind her, telling her not to do it. She almost fainted at the sight of Kahm-boo himself, Kahm-boo in a state of catalepsis.
Epstein pushed her aside, came out as though to attack me.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said. ‘Get the hell away from here!’
When I did not move, did not reply, did not even blink, did not even seem to breathe, he began to understand that I was a medical problem after all.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he lamented.
Like a friendly robot, I let him lead me inside. He took me back into the kitchen area of his flat, sat me down at a white table there.