Word Made Flesh

10

It’s not so much that Otto Langer places any credence in the childish superstitions attached to Wormland Farm. It’s that he dislikes coming this close to Gilrein’s temporary home. Langer can control himself in Gilrein’s presence inside the neutral confines of the Visitation Diner. But who knows what might occur were the two cabbies to come face-to-face in the shadow of these gloomy woods?

Still, the Inspector has indicated that this is an essential element of the therapy, and who is Langer to disagree with his last possible savior? He pulls the taxi to a stop where a pine tree has been savaged by lightning and the priest appears out of shadow, pulls open the rear door and climbs in.

The momentary glow of the dome light illuminates the interior of the cab and the Inspector can’t help but see Zwack the dummy, Langer’s ventriloquial figure, belted into the front seat next to its master. This is a clear violation of the Inspector’s prescription. The dummy is to be locked in the trunk at all times. But Langer feels he can no longer tell the story without the presence of his oldest companion. And what good is the therapy without the story?

“And how are we tonight?” Langer says and smiles into the rearview.

“I was thinking, wondering really, if perhaps you might like a donut? A nice donut, or maybe a cruller? I know of a place, open all night, everything quite fresh. I could run in, leave the motor idling. You could lock the doors.”

There’s no response from the backseat.

Langer nods and shrugs.

“I just thought I might ask. I feel as if I have been a poor host.”

The Inspector leans forward and puts a hand on the security divider and Langer actually trembles a bit.

“So, no donuts,” Langer says. “Not even a bearclaw?”

The passenger tilts his head forward and raises his eyebrows.

“It is a kind of pastry, you know?” Langer says. “It is not important. Sometimes the sayings, the bits of slang, they can be quite eccentric. I remember when I arrived in the city. The first time I heard the phrase cat got your tongue, I was mortified.”

The Inspector shifts in the seat and tugs at the hem of his tunic. He lets himself sink back and sideways into a corner, folds his arms across his chest as if he were lazing before a fireplace in a remote country home, waiting for the elderly patriarch of a large clan to continue a holiday fable, something that would act as a bridge between the waking and the sleeping lives.

Langer knows this is another sign. So he turns up the heater a notch and clears his throat, glances at his passenger in the mirror one last time and begins to speak in a lower and more formal voice, saying, “So you wish to know about the Censor?”

There are those who would tell you that the Censor rode to the Sweep sitting on the shredder itself, perched atop the stomach of the thing, his legs and arms wrapped around the inverted rectum of the satyr. In point of fact, it seems much more likely that he rode inside a dilapidated Cathar pickup truck whose doors bore the words and the ornate seal of the city. More likely that as the brigade made its way, as silently as possible, down Namesti Avenue, the Censor of Maisel, a bourgeois and a bureaucrat from all we can gather, was bouncing over the cobblestones of the fifth district toward the heart of the ghetto, his stomach much too distraught from lack of sleep and his newfound authority to possibly feast on the hot flesh and blood of lamb or human.

OFFICIAL VEHICLE

MAISEL DEPARTMENT OF SEWER ROOTING

THIS TRUCK STOPS AT ALL REFUSE CHECKPOINTS

When they arrived at Schiller Avenue, the Reapers began to maneuver the Obliterator into place until it came to rest exactly dead-center in the mouth of the street. Some say the machine was as large as a house itself, but let us face facts — it had to, at very least, be small enough to fit through the lanes that lead to the Schiller. And remember that Maisel is a very old city, not known for the enormity of its avenues. Let us say, then, for the sake of creating an image for you, that it was, perhaps, larger than the average cement mixer but much smaller than any of the tenements in the ghetto. It was bulky and angled and painted the color of rust. It sported stenciled lettering here and there, the words DANGER and WARNING in a faded green. It moved on rotors like a tank. Its rear end was composed of a compressor with metal, snakelike coils spiraling from port to port and funnels, mufflers, gauges, exhaust flutes. Extending toward us from the compressor was a vault, a multichambered middle compartment, what some have called the stomach of the beast. Rising out of the top of this midsection, angled backward, was an enormous chute, an upward sloping head, smooth and glossy like the skull of a sea serpent and culminating in a window which could vomit out an endless jet of microscopic, masticated dust. And finally, the most important component, at the front of the machine, facing, always, its helpless prey, the head, the mouth, the jaws into which an entire tree could be fed like a snake into the gob of a mongoose. The mouth was a tremendous window, a boxlike rectangle, as large, I would guess, as a commercial movie screen. Large enough to run from curbstone to curbstone, effectively blocking the only exit out of Schiller Avenue.

Recessed several feet within the mouth of the machine were the teeth. This is not an appropriate description of the eviscerating mechanism, however. In fact, there were two industrial beaters, enormous revolving drums, like the enlarged steel rolling pins of some demonic, cannibal baker. The drums were fitted with alternating rows of meticulously honed blades and hooks and when engaged they would spin at a tremendously fast rate of speed, instantly pulverizing, atomizing anything fed into the mouth and pulling all remaining minutiae into the belly of the shredder, where jets of gas-fed flames and an acid bath incinerated debris into lighter-than-air ash. Finally, mounted on either side of the mouth were the hydraulic winches, the lips of the dragon.

Can you begin to picture it, Father? Does an image begin to form in your mind?

Near the entrance to the ghetto, the handful of Ezzenes still awake and seated on our stoops, trying to ignore the humid air playing on the skin like fat, slow flies, looked toward this visitation and then looked to one another for explanation, and, finding none, looked back to the machine, this mutant steel calf, this industrial Trojan horse. Some must have known, must have sensed in the intestines, that a decree had been issued. And, as always, it was read to us by a lackey in leather boots and, always, a jaunty cap on his head decorated with a symbol of the authority which the state had vested in the man. He stood in front of all his hardware, dwarfed by this host of inelegant metal, the city trucks so mismatched and bulky they seemed to be frightening and at the same time, equally comical. Cartoon terrors. And the man, the soldier, a petty bureaucrat elevated to warrior by the gutless sadism of more powerful bureaucrats, he appeared comical as well, a vision from the children’s funny papers given flesh and noise. Much later, the rumors spread as to the man’s identity. There was a school of researchers who felt the soldier was a reservist, a dim scapegoat with little understanding of the mission he would be leading. Other, more pragmatic scholars argued that the military protocol of Old Bohemia did not allow for this, that the individual who stood that twilight before the small brigade would have more reasonably been, at very least, a lieutenant colonel. Today, if you linger in Boz Lustig’s tavern, sooner rather than later, you will hear one of our people launch into a discussion of the July Sweep, with the kind of fervor available only to those who were not there, who did not witness the act nor the aftermath, the type of secondary testifier who will never let his outrage affect his appetite or his sleep. And in the course of this discussion, when attention is turned to the individual who read us the decree that ignited the Erasure, they will call him Meyrink. Meyrink, the Censor of Maisel. I do not know where they came across this name. I only know that at this late date it appears to be fixed in time and that it is some sort of joke whose meaning and humor will always elude me.

We stared at this thin, forgettable man holding the silver clipboard. Stared as if this was the transfiguration we had waited thousands of years to receive. And a communal realization broke through the crowd that this vision was not the long-promised redemption from persecution, but the climax of our centuries of fear and betrayal.

Now some will tell you, with absolute certainty, that had we chosen to run at that first moment, instead of standing to listen to our own death sentence, then more of us might have survived. I can only assure you that the people who spout this nonsense never stood in the nauseating heat of the Schiller that night. Never faced down, for the last time, the persistent nightmare of our birthright. Whether the machine began to feast before we listened or after would have made no difference. The results would have been the same.

We watched as Censor Meyrink popped a whistle between his lips and trilled a signal to his staff of sulky young troopers. The squads jumped down from their trucks and scooters and, in teams of twos and threes, dispatched to every front stoop on Schiller until they’d formed a full circle around the avenue. Then, with their guns held at chest level, they began kicking in the nearest tenement doors with their black boots. The visitors stormed into every apartment and woke the residents with orders screamed in a guttural, disgusted bark. When we did not move quickly enough, they would grab us by our hair or our necks and begin to haul us, push and shove us, out the doors and into the street. The elders infuriated them with a lack of speed and understanding and the state’s bullies threw the aged to the floor, kicked and stomped the fragile and decaying bones of our parents and, on one or two occasions, simply took possession of an old Jew’s body, one thug taking the arms and another the legs, and heaved the patriarch like a sack of spoiled, verminridden grain into the road. They made sure to rip open the nightshirts of our young women, fondling them, groping and laughing as they forced the girls into the avenue. They took a special pleasure in terrifying the children, stooping to shout into their ears that the young ones had been very naughty and now their mothers and fathers must suffer for the children’s sins.

When the community was assembled in the street, packed together like carp in the fishmonger’s barrel, everything suddenly grew quiet and Censor Meyrink stepped farther into the road, his boot heels ticking on the cobblestone. He positioned himself in front of the shredding machine and waited until convinced that all eyes were upon him. Then he took his silver clipboard from under his arm and read to us the Orders of Erasure.

The Bogomil rolls out of the cavern of the downtown financial strip, the small cluster of midget skyscrapers, a lane of flat-faced, reflecting cubes that will one day tell future architects and archaeologists that this was the valley where imagination came to die. Langer exits the shadow of the First Apostle Bank & Trust and the Inspector watches through the safety divider and the wind-shield to find the outline of Gompers Station.

During every drive, they end up, at some point, circling Gompers, and the Inspector wonders if a time will come when the cabdriver will confess the nature of his compulsive attraction to the decrepit train hall. Its hold on him is self-evident. The story slows and Langer’s voice drops toward a whisper. The speed of the taxi decreases to a crawl and the old man stares out at the building as they wind their way round a 36o-degree panorama of obsolescence and decay. Always the same route, a slow and rigid circle around Gompers and then back off into random parts of the city, the speed of both the cab and the story instantly restored to normal.

Technically, the charge leveled against us, the whole community, every baby in the Schiller, even those still asleep in the womb, was the study and dissemination of subversive texts. To the best of my reasoning, back when I used to dwell on minutiae of this sort, back when this kind of obsessive and futile detail would plague me for weeks on end, I would assume by subversive texts the Censor was referring to the nihilistic pamphlets distributed by a small clique of adolescents in the Schiller, among them Fritzi and Kolo who lived with their mother above Loisitschek’s butcher shop. But at times I have also wondered if they could have been referring to that circle of old men, amateur cabalists, hobbyists of the mystical, who spent the last of their days in the back of the Kokoschka bathhouse, exchanging angry commentary on The Fecundation of the Soul.

I ask you, does it really matter? What is the difference between foolish young boys overheated with the first bloom of the darker philosophies and foolish old men enjoying the mysterious algebras of other worlds beyond our own? Both are to be pitied and, to a point, indulged, for one group may learn from their excesses and the other is past the point of being a danger to anyone.

Up until this juncture, the subversive-text provision was an ancient and seldom-prosecuted statute of the old ecclesiastical courts of Maisel. But it had been subsumed into the secular charter under the definitions of treason. And as a treasonous offense, of course, it was punishable by death, to be administered in a manner acceptable to the Magistrates. If there had been some sort of court trial, no one from the Schiller had been invited to it. And the Capital Fires a year later destroyed whatever documentation might have been found.

Still, that night in July, there was no mention made of treason nor of a death sentence. The Orders of Erasure appeared to be a mundane warrant that authorized the search, seizure, and destruction of any and all radical materials circulating throughout the Ezzenes community of Schiller Avenue. But do you haul the largest eviscerator in Old Bohemia to a tiny ghetto in the middle of the night just for a common search and confiscation detail? Whose sense of the dramatic is so inflamed?

I ask you, Doctor, what should we make of the Ezzenes’ capacity for naïveté? We thought they were going to throw our books into the dragon’s mouth.

But at some point, as Meyrink read the Orders, perhaps at some preunderstood moment, some sentence or word sounding a silent alarm, the Reapers, as if animated by an electrical shock, ran for the flatbed truck and began to offload the rolled bundles of cyclone fencing. You know the type of fencing I am referring to? You must know. For another of the great ironies of the Sweep, this one unique to me, is that the fencing was manufactured here in Quin-sigamond. I am not joking. Produced right here in our city. Black Rose Wire and Gable Company. Down on Terezin. A family concern, I understand. Very much a quality product, the wire so fine and yet so unbreakable, so malleable and yet always razor sharp.

The community as a whole was attempting to listen to the legalese and babble being proclaimed much too fast by Meyrink and at the same time trying to watch as the unmarked soldiers wrapped us in the fencing. They ran down the length of the avenue, unspooling the taut rolls of chicken wire the way you would unfurl a flag, past Haus Reuben, Haus Simeon, and on, separating the people from their homes, making the corner at Haus Levi, and returning toward the front of the alley and the patiently waiting monster. We thought they were fencing us out of our homes. That they would search each apartment for the mythical subversive tracts and, in the bargain, help themselves to whatever humble trinkets they might find. At worst, some of the pessimists believed we were finally being relocated, that the city was taking our street by eminent domain and shipping us to a place even more removed and destitute.

And yet, if this was to be the case, why the need for the expurgating machine? Did none of us look beyond the Censor at the hardware flanking him and wonder why they had gone to the bother of hauling this demon through the sickeningly hot night in order to threaten a roadful of pacifist Jews?

It was only after Meyrink spit out his last words — something about “the security and sovereignty of Old Bohemia”—and clapped the clipboard under his arm and did an awkward goose step past the shredder, outside the net of fencing, that our panic began to simmer.

And when the Reapers hooked the free ends of the fence to the winches and turned them on and the fencing immediately began to retract, to condense, to roll itself up upon the drums, to pull inward and force the entire community in upon itself, this was when the panic exploded into full boil, into hysteria and the madness of primal, undiluted terror.

As the motors of the shredding machine were switched on and the grinding of the various movable parts began to mix with the screams of the crowd, the outer edge of my people began to feel the first sting of the wire, the thin steel strips cutting into their faces, their arms and legs and backs and bellies and genitals. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to go. We were trapped within the net of the fence. And the net was closing in on itself. We were mashed one against the other. And the horrific chaos within the web was growing more atrocious with each passing instant.

Can you imagine, Inspector, what the next three hours were like? That is how long we agree it took to complete the Erasure. Can you imagine what took place within the corral in that time? Within the minds of the trapped, clawing at sky and ground and lattice to get free? Clawing finally at one another out of desperation and even out of basic physics, out of the way the body was being manipulated by the force of the wire net pulling forward, pulling inevitably toward the mouth of the eviscerating beast.

Immediately, in the first seconds of constriction, some made the mistake of trying to climb up the fence. But they were betrayed by the flexibility of the construct. And even if the makeshift netting instantly began to bend back down on top of them, this did not stop the Reapers from firing a spray of artillery at the would-be escapees. It was like a fishbowl. There was literally no place to hide. Boys and girls climbed up their fathers’ backs and shoulders, trying to jump, to heave themselves over the barbed top of the fence, only to be shot by the State’s marksmen. One young mother simply gathered her infant into her chest and squatted down in the midst of the tumult until she disappeared under the cover of swarming bodies.

Contrary to what you sometimes hear from witnesses of sudden calamities and unexpected holocausts — car crashes, gasoline fires, earthquakes, this kind of thing — there was no slowed-down rhythm to the events of the next several minutes. There was no music hidden within the mix of the screams and the shouting and the sound of rifle discharge and the underlying purr of the Obliterator. There was no seemingly choreographed dance taking place in the heart of the instantly convulsing street, bodies smashing up against bodies in a thousand desperate and futile attempts at escape, people falling at different speeds, in different directions, like icons of a children’s game suddenly knocked from a table.

When you hear the word chaos, what does it summon in your mind? Do you call up some clinical, perhaps mathematical, definition of disorder? An elaborate lack of categorization? The mundane clutter of a sloppy room? Let me give you something better, or, at very least, something more vivid, meatier. My gift to you. From this day forward, think instead of a thousand panicking individuals, packed into square yards of street space, in the stillness of a humid July night, bodies pushing against each other in a discordant sway. Now picture this scene placed under an additional amount of pressure, as if some essential measure of oxygen was forced out the skin of the atmosphere and escaped into the cold void of space and was replaced by a denser, more oppressive substance, a previously unknown element that felt exactly like the palm of God breaking through the sky to crush his people into the ground, but slowly, with all the time and restraint available to an omnipotent entity. I am trying to make you feel how it felt that night, in that place. I am trying, knowing, from the start, that this is an impossible task. I say imagine, but somehow I need you to do more than imagine. I need you to put yourself there, in the Schiller, in the street, trapped up against other bodies, a small sea of bodies, no passageways out, no lane that will lead you to safety. I use this word—imagine—as if it were a kind of miraculous prayer, some type of witch’s incantation. As if it has a power that we both know it does not. It is a word. Nothing more. It cannot do what it is not made to do.

Isn’t this tragic, Father? Have you never felt this was a tragic thing? That all we have between us is langauge. And it is never enough. Never. Not once. Not for one precious instant. And we go on anyway. Every moment. Acting as if it is enough.

Imagine, I say, the sound of the shredder’s engine igniting, the rumble that reverberated from the mouth of the Schiller down to the face of the bridging tenement and echoed back to wash over us. Imagine knowing, in that instant, what would follow — the immediate panic, the trampling, the sound of a chorus of gunfire erupting, the sound of 206 thousand bones being ground into pulp.

Let me attempt to do the impossible now. Let me try to explain the unexplainable. To give an image to the unthinkable.

One night, years ago, when I first came to Quinsigamond, when the plague of the insomnia and the migraines was only just beginning and I had not yet found a way to drive the taxi while afflicted, I chanced to turn on the television that Gilrein had given to me. It was four o’clock in the morning and I came across a documentary — I assume it was a documentary — in black and white and at times out of focus, as if the camera had been hidden for some reason. The pictures showed a series of dead horses, all of them hung, suspended by the neck, from enormous steel hooks, the hooks, in turn, mounted inside a conveying belt. And the belt moving toward a slaughtering station, a white-tiled room, a laboratory of infinite efficiency, the product of much study and brilliant analysis where an automated series of coordinated band saws and guillotines and rotary blades and serrated grinding wheels would converge on the line of dead animals and the most appropriate tool would be instantly matched to the correct part of the horse’s anatomy. And in a matter of minutes, the animal would be perfectly rendered into a kind of mealy silt to be packaged as dog food.

I watched these pictures. I was paralysed. In a fever state. Incapable of turning off the television. And yet unable to make my eyes close.

I want you to understand, Doctor — those pictures were but a silhouette of what took place in the Schiller Ghetto on that night in July.

The bodies fell, piling up higher and even buried near the bottom, even in the midst of the screaming and the confusion now pushed up to insanity, one could smell the stink of diesel and blood and excrement as the shredder began to feed on this ant-heap of writhing flesh.

The ones closest to the mouth of the expurgator were, of course, the first to be hauled inside. It is said — though how anyone would know remains unexplained — that Rabbi Gruen was the initial victim to be erased. He entered the mouth of the beast headfirst. The spinning hooks pierced his skull instantly and pulled the whole of the body inward, where the first of the whirling razors began to transform our rabbi into an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle. The flesh of Gruen was yanked forward and devoured by orbiting shards of honed steel. The very substance of his corporeal being was …

What words shall we use, my friend? Disassembled? Disassociated? Decompiled? Are any of them useful in the least? Is there another that might serve us better?

Once tiny enough to pass the gullet of the demon, the remains were then spit into the acid and brimstone of its stomach. Broken down with flame and chemical. Artificially evaporated into common dust and blown out the anus of the gorgon. Into the humidity-choked air to settle between the cobbles of Namesti Avenue. Obliterated? Annihilated?

Erased.

And the rest followed. Man and woman. Child and adult. The Ezzenes were sucked like porridge into the yap of the State’s mascot. I would have thought the screams would reach the farthest edges of the city.

But no one came to the see the reason for our cries. No one came to witness the Erasure of the Schiller. And now I’m forced to ask you, my Inspector, since there is no one left to ask — what did they think the next day, the next week, the next time they passed our street and we were no longer present? What did they tell themselves about where we had gone?