See Under, page 31
Neigel is silent. He has the unexpected decency to turn away from Wasserman, now wincing. I regard the pitiable little Jew. I should have made him more talented, more successful.
And Neigel says quietly, his face averted, “But I stood up for you, Wasserman. I defended you for the sake of my happy memories. How do you like that?” Yes, these words pain little Wasserman even more than the previous ones. Suddenly he grasps that Obersturmbannführer Neigel may be the last person in the world to remember and appreciate his miserable creations. That perhaps simpleminded Neigel, who did not read the venomous criticism leveled against him, regarded Wasserman as Wasserman wished to be regarded. That only with Neigel could Wasserman’s most cherished dreams come true.
“And now that you know,” says Neigel, “there’s something else I’d like to tell you. Not just about your story, but about this experiment.” He starts pacing around the room again and speaks into his clenched fist. One could imagine that he was forcing the words out of his mouth. “You know,” he says at last, “I’ve done some thinking about this over the past few days. About me and you, I mean. This is new for me, and I’d like to understand what’s happening.” And for a moment he stops pacing nervously and stands at his desk, neatly arranging his papers and notebooks. “You despise me,” he says, his back to Wasserman. “It’s like this: you’re a writer and in your eyes I’m a murderer. No, don’t speak now! Naturally in the old world you come from, someone like me was considered a murderer. But the world has changed over the past few years. Maybe you’ve failed to notice, Wasserman. The old world has died and old mankind has died with it. I live in the new world, the future I was promised by the Fuhrer and the Reich. Yes, Scheherazade,” he says, lifting the curtain and looking out, “what we took upon ourselves for the Reich is being carried out for reasons you will never be able to grasp. You and your Jew morality, with your notions of justice. I’m not so good at explaining myself. For that we have philosophers who use their noggins. I am paid to carry out their ideas. And I like my job. At officers’ school in Braunschweig, I was excused by the Reichsführer himself from our ideology course to attend to the cavalry formations for the commencement exercises. I’m better with horses, you see. Still, something got through my noggin, all the same, and I know that you and I belong to different species. Your kind will cease to exist in two or three years’ time, when our plan has been carried through. We’ll survive. The strong will survive and they will determine everything,” he vociferates at the window, and Wasserman’s head nods vigorously on his spindly neck. Neigel turns to him, sees him, and is filled with inexplicable rage. “It will be our country, our air, our idea of justice and what you call morality. We’ll be around for a thousand years, and that’s only the beginning. If anyone comes along with different ideas, they’ll have to fight us. And if we are defeated, it will mean they were right. That’s how it is. And in this war you’re on the losing side. We’re the winners. That’s what they’ll say in the history books my son will read: that we’re the winners.”
Wasserman can contain himself no longer. He jumps to his feet, his beard bristling. He looks pretty ridiculous, I must say. His (slightly muddled) answer is that Neigel is “bitterly mistaken.” In the first place, there is no such thing as old mankind, so how can you speak of new mankind. “Mankind is always mankind, and it’s only mankind’s astrologers who change.” And he and Neigel are both on the same side, the losing side, only Neigel and his friends are willing to “sell themselves for this ephemeral mess of pottage, the illusion of defeating the weak,” whereas, in fact, he, Wasserman, has always known (“The knowledge has been engraved upon my heart and body for thousands of years”) that the bottom line of the cryptic ledger—he does not bother to explain who the accountant is—shows him and Neigel both on the losing side.
Neigel smiles wanly. “You have the nerve—or should I say, the idiocy?—to make such a statement here?”
And the Jew replies, “It is here in this place that you are being defeated with every passing minute. And how terrible, Herr Neigel, that you have made me feel more hopeless than I have ever felt before. Yes, perhaps you know that the soul is a wonderful apparatus, and in it are various courses and passages, all of them irreversible, indeed yes.” And Neigel: “I don’t understand. Please explain.” Wasserman squirms, gets entangled in illustrations, and at length explains that “cruelty, indeed, cruelty, for instance, once you learn it, you may find it difficult to wean yourself thereof. Just as once you learn to swim in the river, you never forget how, or so I have been told by those who swim in the river, and about cruelty, or evil, or the doubt in man, nu, a person cannot be cruel by turns, or evil every third time, or suspicious of his fellow man every fourth, as though evil were an object man carried with him, to take out and use when he pleases, or leave in his pocket if he so prefers, and peace be unto you, my soul. No, I am certain that you, too, have witnessed the fact that cruelty, suspicion, and evil infect all of life. Once you open a loophole for them, they infest the soul like mildew.”
“Ah, this is a waste of words,” says Neigel. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” But his mocking smile looks strangely hollow (“The smile was a slough, I observed!”), so it is difficult to understand his need to pursue this philosophical discussion, which is beginning to bore me. “Are certain passages—I mean—do you think any passages of the, um, soul might be reversible?” “You can easily get rid of grief, of compassion, Herr Neigel, and the love of mankind, the wonderful capacity of fools to believe in mankind, in spite of everything. And the operation will be almost painless.” “But can you bring them back again?” asks Neigel, his eyes fixed on Wasserman. “I hope so,” Wasserman replies, and to himself, or to me, he says these unintelligible words: “After all, this is my mission, Shleimeleh, for this I am staging my comedy here.”
There’s no time to absorb this and respond. The plot continues of its own accord. Neigel at this point will be forced to say—in answer to what Wasserman said about love and compassion—what we all expect him to say, namely, the old cliché. “You’d be surprised, Wasserman, but we in the SS, or most of us anyway, are model family men, we love our wives and children—”
“For now,” says Wasserman wearily, “for now you love them.” (“Oy, how sick I was of Keizler’s heartrending professions of love for his wife and their three little cherubs, and the sweet canary in the cage. How thoroughly repulsive it was!”) But Neigel, a missionary explaining the principles of the new religion to a savage, is undaunted. “We pledge our love to the Führer, the Reich, and the family. In that order. These three loves sustain us when we carry out our orders.” And again the Jew jumps up, waving his hand and screaming in a whiny, broken voice, “Someday—when the order comes—your people will rise up and slaughter their wives and families!” And he cackles convulsively, “The order! The order!”
Neigel regards him with a trace of mockery, but he controls himself, and waits for the outburst to pass. He then explains his position, admitting (“I won’t deny it”) that the “movement” ideology is harsh and extreme at times, but this, after all, is its only chance to succeed, “unlike other movements and revolutions and ideas that are doomed because they compromise at every step with human weakness!” though he is willing to acknowledge that “there have been cases of nervous collapse among us. It’s no secret. I myself was acquainted with an excellent officer who committed suicide because he began to have nightmares about murdering his wife and daughters, of all things. But every war has its deserters and cowards and traitors!” And at this point I am forced to put into his mouth a piece of factual testimony from Himmler’s 1943 address in Poznan: “When one hundred or five hundred or a thousand corpses are lying side by side, to continue to be decent human beings anyhow, this—with a few exceptions, the result of human weakness—is what makes us strong.”
“And we are all fighting this war, Wasserman,” says Neigel in a strained, almost husky voice. “Things are not as simple as they may seem to you inside the camp. Because when we kill mothers and children, we have to be strong, as the Reichsführer said. In our souls, that is. We have to be strong. To make decisions. And no one else can know about it. It’s a silent war, fought by each of us. Yes, there are some types, of course, like Staukeh, for instance, who get a sort of sick pleasure out of it. There’s that type, too. But a real SS officer isn’t supposed to enjoy his work. Did you know that sometimes Himmler himself comes out to watch us when we make the selections, to see whether our feelings show? You didn’t know? Well, he does. It’s a secret war, I tell you. The winner is one who can walk the line … who can understand that the party demands sacrifice. Because we are on the front line here, between two kinds of humanity … and we are exposed to certain dangers, and in order to be a good officer, sometimes, as I said, you have to make decisions, like sending a part of this … of this machine out on leave,” and he places two stiff fingers next to his heart. “Suspend it till the war is over … and then you put it back and enjoy the new Reich … and I want to tell you something no one else knows, it’s all right to tell you, because with you it’s different.”
And Wasserman stares at him, and understands immediately, as I do, what has been happening here in this “White Room,” under the reign of absolute physio-literary laws. Because both of us, Wasserman and myself, have waived the writer’s foremost obligation, that of delineating his characters, and because we prefer to dismiss or delay our involvement with Neigel for the time being, he has cleverly and subtly taken advantage of our distaste for him in order to expand the terrain of his personality, the Lebensraum of his limited, posterlike existence within us, and to annex more and more character traits, levels of depth, biographical details, and logical considerations, in a word, vitality, which is what now enables him to tell Wasserman that “in the past few months, due to a certain incident of a private nature,” he has been fighting that secret war here, and winning it anew each day, and again he says what Wasserman has also been saying in his own way: “These things are not as simple as they seem.”
Wasserman sighs and rubs his tired eyes, and answers in a weak, weary voice. Replaceable parts, he says, which can be taken out and put back later, exist only in machines, whereas “the self, Herr Neigel, the soul, the brain and heart, ai, these do not fall into the category of machinery, unless you take a part out and turn it into a machine with your own hands. In that case, it would be very difficult indeed to repair the damage, because to do so you would need a soul, or someone who has a soul to love you.” Only, between machines, he continues, love cannot exist. And he who turns himself into a machine will quickly discern that everyone around him is made the same way, and those who are made differently he will not even be able to see, or else he will want to be rid of them. “One can, Herr Neigel, be exceedingly cynical and say that we are all machines, automatons, digesting and reproducing and thinking and speaking, so that even our love for the wife of our bosom, our noble and eternal love, could mayhap, begging your pardon, fit another foot just as well, if, heaven forbid, a disaster befell our darling. And if instead of our child, whom we sometimes love till it chokes our throats, another child had been born to us, we would have loved it just as dearly. In short, the vessels we are equipped with in life, our pots and pans and paraphernalia, are by and large the same, only the world infuses them with its sundry fare, and as such—we are machines and automatons, only there is a trace of something else within us, I know not what to call it, and that is effort. Indeed, the effort we make on behalf of this particular woman, or this particular child, the evanescent spark that flashes between two evanescent creatures like us and no other two, ai, that same exuberance which brings us into each other’s sphere I will call ‘choice.’ And inasmuch as choice is given to us so rarely, we must never relinquish it … that is what I wished to say, but everything is becoming so complicated and twisted, nu, well … I am not accustomed to making speeches either … forgive this mawkishness …” And he stops, ablush. They would have gone on arguing for hours, those two. I could see that. They were still worked up. But what interested me now was the story. The story, and the way the writer had succeeded in “infecting Neigel with humanity,” clear and simple. But first I had to ask Anshel Wasserman to let me in on that “incident of a private nature” the German had alluded to; only, Wasserman was truly shocked by my request and he categorically refused. (“I cannot rush matters, you understand! After all, we have an obligation to our story, the story as a living, breathing creature, a mysterious, lovely, and delicate creature we must not twist or break to suit our own impetuous whims, lest we bring forth a kind of zhibaleh, or fetus that drops out of its mother in the seventh month, making us murderers, murderers of a living story …”)
“And now, Herr Neigel,” pronounces Anshel Wasserman, “if you wish, I will tell you my story.”
Neigel grumbles that he isn’t sure he wants to hear it anymore, but he folds his arms and orders Wasserman to begin. The writer opens his notebook. I alone can see that there is only one word written there. One word. Nu nu, I tell myself, I have a feeling Neigel isn’t going to be satisfied with the rate of delivery.
“Begging your pardon, I will not read much to you this evening,” says Wasserman, and Neigel glances at his watch. “There’s not much time left anyway, after all your clever tricks!” he answers angrily, unable to refrain from asking Wasserman again, “Is Paula really dead?” And Wasserman replies, “Of course. Only, she is still among us, as I told you before.” “Tell me,” asks Neigel caustically, “how do you propose to bring it off? Artistically, that is—how can she be alive and dead at the same time?” And Wasserman answers, “What choice have I, Herr Neigel? Maybe you would understand better if you found yourself, heaven forbid, in my situation. Because when all your dear ones are dead and gone, you are forced to enlist them as they are.” “Is that so?” asks Neigel suspiciously, but he says no more. Wasserman coughs self-importantly, and takes a deep breath.
“We worked in the forest” (reads Wasserman from the empty notebook). “The mine was deep and musty, constructed with tunnel after tunnel full of strange mystery, which gave off a smell of mildew and the dung of foxes and rabbits. The tunnels led to the hall of friendship. There we would meet of an evening after the day’s work, to converse and enjoy each other’s company. Old friends were with us, as well as new companions, recently recruited by our good Otto. The years that have gone by since last we met—fifty years or more!—have greatly changed us, engraved bad tidings upon our faces, and sown the seeds of old age and death in the folds of our skin. But the most important thing of all remains unchanged, with all its charm and vigor, and time, it seems, has no dominion over it, that is, the desire to do good unto those who are in need, and to have compassion on those in need of compassion, to love those who need love. And with us were Otto and Paula and Albert Fried, ai, Fried had received the honor of a doctor’s mortarboard! He, it seems, has aged more than any of us, and ‘Golden Hands’ Sergei was with us, too, still aloof, always busy, with the same peculiar walk, as though his neck were made of delicate glass, and Harotian, too, is with us, ai, Harotian the Armenian, world-renowned magician and wonder-worker! From Ludwig van Beethoven’s loft to the banks of the Ganges in India. The same Harotian who had been miraculously rescued when the Turks fell upon his small village like a cloud of locusts, to slaughter and plunder, oy, Herr Neigel, see his sad visage, see the horrible sights engraved therein! …”
Neigel merely hums. Wasserman regards him briefly and continues: “Harotian, no longer a youth, has performed his magic everywhere. He was, it seems, the only member of the band lucky enough to amass a small fortune before the war … but when war broke out, it found Harotian in the city of Warsaw, and the gates were closed unto him, and he cursed his evil fate, ai, his magic was of no avail this time, and I will tell you a secret: for some years now Harotian has refrained from his truly wonderful magic, the magic he performed as a youth with the Children of the Heart, and now his tricks are naught but legerdemain, this for reasons of his own about which I will tell you presently. In short, Harotian was detained in Warsaw, in the Jewish ghetto, in other words, and was forced to lend a dissenting shoulder to the building of the wall round and round us, and he stood apart from us and despised us, I believe, but what choice was left him? And for his living Harotian performed his magic tricks in return for a feast at the weddings of the rich, or at the elegant Britannia Club. Our Harotian, you will recall, Herr Neigel, had captivated all his spectators in bygone days. Who could make a piano vanish together with the pianist? Harotian! Who could saw a maiden in half, heaven forbid, inside her bath? Harotian again! There is no summons of magic Harotian failed to answer. But in the ghetto, fortune did not smile upon him. Imagine, we had seen these performances so often we were sick of them. We knew all the folds in his red velvet jacket, and all the hidden pockets in his yellow tie, and the pouch with the double lining and the illusive saw. All these we knew till they tired us. But most fantastic of all was the trick with the vanishing piano, which Harotian refused to perform for us in the ghetto, his reason being that it would be wrong to show a person vanishing into thin air when so many were vanishing around us every day, and they not even pianists. Eppes, we knew it was only an excuse on his part, because to do the trick Harotian needed a stage with a trapdoor, and in the ghetto there was only one such door—in the gallows box at the Paviak, which was our prison.”
Neigel, with half-shut eyes, says quietly, “I’m beginning to catch on now. Ah! You’re trying to arouse my pity, Scheissemeister, is that it? A kind of revenge by way of a story? What sort of childish game are you playing with me here? For your own sake, Wasserman, for your own sake, I hope I’m wrong!”
Wasserman wears a look of astonishment, but says nothing in reply. (“He hit me below the belt, the brute, and did not miss his mark! He must have possessed the spirit of prophecy to understand how ‘twould sour a children’s writer’s heart to be called ‘childish’!”)
