Mother Night

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 — 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.

'Try opening your eyes the next time you fire,' I said.

'Oh' he said, putting the pistol down, 'you're up and around.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Too bad what happened,' he said.

'I thought so,' I said.

'Maybe it's for the best, though,' he said. 'Maybe well all wind up thanking God it happened.'

'How so?' I said.

'It's jarred us out of our ruts,' he said.

'That's for certain,' I said.

'When you get out of this country with your girl, get yourself new surroundings, a new identity, you'll start writing again,' he said, 'and you'll write ten times better than you ever did before. Think of the maturity you'll be bringing to your writing!'

'My head aches too much just now — ' I said.

'It'll stop aching soon,' he said. 'It isn't broken and it's filled with a heartbreakingly clear understanding of the self and the world.'

'Um,' I said.

'And I'm going to be a better painter for the change, too,' he said. 'I've never seen the tropics before — that brutal glut of color, that visible, audible heat — '

'What's this about the tropics?' I said.

'I thought that's where we'd go,' he said. 'That's where Resi wants to go, too.'

'You're coming, too?' I said.

'Do you mind?' he said.

'People have certainly been active while I slept,' I said.

'Was that wrong of us?' said Kraft. 'Did we plan anything that would be bad for you?'

'George — ' I said, 'why should you throw in your lot with us? Why should you come down into this cellar with the black beetles, too? You have no enemies. Stay with us, George, and you'll deserve every enemy I have.'

He put his hand on my shoulder, looked deep into my eyes. 'Howard — ' he said, 'when my wife died, I had no allegiance to anything on earth. I, too, was a meaningless fragment of a nation of two.

'And then I discovered something I had never known before — what a true friend was,' he said. 'I throw my lot in with you gladly, friend. Nothing else interests me. Nothing else attracts me in the least. With your permission, my paints and I would like nothing better than to go with you wherever Fate takes you next.'

'This — this is friendship indeed,' I said.

'I hope so,' he said.