Word Made Flesh

3

Otto Langer, the eldest of Quinsigamond’s last independent cabdrivers, steers his hack into the curbstone of Dunot Boulevard and waits for his fare to climb inside. He does not activate his meter, but reaches instead for the small vial of tranquilizers that rests precariously on the dash-board, Otto’s version of a St. Christopher statuette or lucky pair of fuzzy dice. He spills one of the tiny blue pills into his palm and lifts his hand into the air for the man settling into the backseat to observe.

“I wanted you to see,” Otto says, nervous and distracted. “I have been very conscientious since the last incident. I am doing much better, Doctor. I am feeling like a new man.”

As always, there’s no reply from the rear of the cab, not a grunt of acknowledgment. Otto understands that this is not rudeness per se, but a simple fact of the new methodology. And so he pulls out into Dunot and drives toward downtown without any specific destination in mind. He would feel so much better, could speak with much more clarity, he’s sure, if he had Zwack beside him, buckled in and riding shotgun, as they say. But it is another of the Inspector’s rules that the dummy remain locked in the trunk.

“I had another Gilrein dream last night, Doctor. Excuse, but Doctor—I have been meaning to ask, this is acceptable to you? A man with so many titles. It is hard to know which to use. Herr Doctor? Herr Inspector? Perhaps even Father Emil? Of course, I mean no disrespect …”

A pause, waiting for reassurance even though he knows it will not come. He turns onto Monaldi Way, notes that he’s low on gas, and feels his stomach tighten. Otto’s cab is a restored Bogomil Supreme, the limited edition that came with the sunroof and the tail fins. He’d love to crack open the roof right now. It’s an unusually cool night and he could use the air, but his passenger would have a fit and Otto can’t risk alienating the man right now. Progress could be just around the corner, a time when the nightmares and the migraines will finally cease.

“In the dream,” plunging back in, “Gilrein was again dressed in the Censor’s uniform, but he was not holding the knife this time. In fact, I had the distinct impression that he had misplaced the knife. I thought you might find this significant. You understand, I am not attempting to tell you your work. After all, you are the doctor. And I must stress, once again, how much I appreciate your efforts on my behalf. I still wish you would accept some form of payment.”

The passenger shifts in the enormity of the taxi’s backseat.

“Yes, of course, I realize the conditions of your arrangement with the facility. I researched the term—pro bono. But you must allow me to say, it’s only my opinion of course, the word of an ignorant droshky driver, but the people at the Toth, perhaps they do not realize the treasure they have in such an associate? Again, it is none of my business.”

The passenger gives out a dry cough. Otto flinches and the Bogomil jerks a bit and crosses the center line. He rights the hack as an oncoming motorcycle is forced to skid wide. The biker gives him the finger and a chorus of unintelligible obscenity.

“Forgive me, Doctor. The pills sometimes affect my concentration. And without sleep, well, you can imagine. I have a love-hate relationship with the night shift, Doctor. We avoid the traffic, but there is sometimes a loneliness in the empty streets, you understand? It is a different city at night. All cities are different in the night, yes? And yet, the night is an opportunity. I see things that I would never see in the day. I am witness to a parade of nocturnal oddities. Some of the spectacles are mundane, events that could happen in the glare of the noon hour. But seen at night, they are changed somehow. They take on a new significance. They leave a very different taste. Let me give you an example. Last week, over on French Hill, I saw a dog that had been hit by a car. Killed. A large dog. Enormous. A mastiff, I believe. This is the breed, yes? There was a small girl kneeling by the body of the animal. Just a child. All alone. No more than seven or eight years old, if I am any judge. Dressed in a nightgown. The girl was howling. Crying and shrieking and moaning in a way that I have heard referred to as keening. I am almost certain this was the term. I am sure this sound was what it meant. She was on her knees, bent over the carcass of the beast, her arms trying to lift the dead weight of the thing.”

“Now you would ask, why did I not stop and help the girl, console the poor child? And that question, Doctor, excuse, would show your ignorance of the taxi business and the night shift. You do not get out of your cab. You are only safe inside of your cab.”

“Another time, last winter, I was circling the rotary at Bishop Square and I looked up to the roof of the old train station and at the very top was an enormous burning cross. It looked as if it had been constructed out of two gargantuan telephone poles. And it was blazing. A genuine inferno. I pulled up next to the front steps where a woman was holding a camera, taking pictures of the flaming cross. I rolled down my window and she yelled to me that she was from The Spy, though I had not asked. I nodded to her and drove on. I checked the paper for the next week, but there were no pictures of this curiosity.”

“Do you begin to understand why I both love and, at the same time, hate my job, Doctor?”

There was a night last month. I had just dropped a fare at Camp Litzmann, a warehouse in German Town that sometimes serves as an after-hours club. I was winding my way back to the Visitation when I made a foolish turn down one of the service alleys of the textile park. The price I pay for seeking a shortcut, I know. My way was immediately blocked by a small crowd and they swarmed around me before I could shift into reverse. They were waving money at me, their hands stuffed with bills of every denomination and many countries of origin. I almost panicked, was ready to mow them down before I realized they meant me no harm. They were all locked in a mass gambling frenzy. A man like yourself, Doctor, a counselor, a healer of the mind, surely you know how frightening this kind of mob can initially seem. I shook my head at them as they pounded on my window and in the middle of my protests a space opened before me and I was able to see, for a moment or two, the nature of the sport upon which they wagered. There were two men facing one another within the confines of a chalk circle. They were stripped to the waist. They were connected, one to the other, by a long stretch of rope, the kind of taut, white rope used in the making of drying lines for clothing. The rope was tied at each ankle. It allowed them, at their farthest distance, to reach opposite curves of the chalk circle. They were chasing each other, perpetually maneuvering to intercept one another. And they were both bearing enormous machetes in one hand. A moment after I understood what was happening, one of the players charged his opponent. And in the instant they passed each other, the blade was thrust and found its mark, sliced into the unfortunate combatant and came close to severing his arm from his shoulder.

“I sometimes think that just seeing these things is like having a curse put on my head. Do you agree, Doctor?”

They slow to a stop at a red light and the passenger ignites one of his cigars, a signal that he will not tolerate much more digression.

“Yes, of course, Inspector, I’m wasting your valuable time. I apologize for the foolish ramblings of an old man. I would ask you remember that, even after all these years, the English is a second language to me. It never comes as easily as my native tongue. Gilrein and Miss Jocasta, they grow so impatient with me at times.”

“But where were we last night? Where did we leave off? I know I had come to speak of the July Sweep. As I always do. Everything leads to the Sweep and the Orders of Erasure. This should not surprise though, should it, Doctor? Surely I’m not the only Maisel Jew to obsess on this particular topic? If only I could explain it in the words of my people. It would all be so much more vivid. It would bring the event to life. I know, with as much force of certainty as I know my name, that I could not bear to live through the ordeal again. I no longer have this type of strength. There are times, when I wake from one of the nightmares and I am bathed in the sweat and the tears and the heart is doing things that it should not do, there are times when I wish I could give this burden to someone else. Hand it away. No matter what the consequences. No matter what this would mean regarding the kind of man I have become.”

“I wish on those occasions that I could restage every heinous instant of that night in July, replay it right here on the streets of my new home, for everyone to see and hear and smell, replay it until they could never forget what they had witnessed. No matter how hard they tried.”

For if you yourself, Doctor, yes, even so fine a man as yourself, of great strength and character and learning, if you were to look out that window there, if you were to turn your head and witness what took place in Maisel, in the Schiller Ghetto on the night of the July Sweep, it would never leave you, Doctor. It would change you permanently.

“The best I can do for you, however, is simply tell the story.”

Without any warning, Otto jerks the taxi into a U-turn and his passenger loses his balance and pitches into the door. Otto offers no explanation or apology.

“You must understand, Herr Doctor, what I need to tell you is that to this day, my homeland, the cursed city of my birth, is alive inside of me. This is how I feel day and night. This is what I live with. The waters of the Zevlika rushing through my veins. The portals of the hunger tower sitting behind my eyes. My brain is nothing but the street of my youth, the cul-de-sac of the Ezzenes.”

“Maisel is the most superstitious city on the earth, Doctor. You must know some of our legends — the water spirits of the River Z. The headless Templar. The alchemist Mladtus who was pulled through the floorboards of his house straight into hell. Yes, you have heard the tales? In your own youth, perhaps? Ghost stories told in the dark by overexcited children? Allow me now to tell you a new story, Doctor. One to put the old myths in perspective.”

I was not always a cabdriver, Inspector. Does this surprise you? Back in Maisel, I was a biloquist. A common street performer. What you would call a ventriloquist. For the most part, I was self-taught. In my early youth I had studied the ghetto clowns who worked in Old Loew Square. My father had died before my birth. We lived with my mother’s family in the Schiller Ghetto. Before coming to Quinsigamond, I lived all of my life in the Schiller. So it is as something of an expert that I tell you that of all the Jews in all of Old Bohemia, the Schiller Jews were, perhaps, the poorest. And the most despised. You have heard something, no doubt, about the decade of pogroms in Maisel? Most of those attacks were on the Schiller Ghetto.

My people could be called neither Orthodox nor Reformed. We were more of a sect set apart, looked upon suspiciously, at times, even by the larger Jewish community. Or is this just an old man’s paranoia? If so, Doctor, I feel I have earned it. We were called the Ezzenes. We were, by and large, all progeny of the Hasidim of Maccabean times. Perhaps the best way to explain, to define, our specific bond would be to say that we built our lives around a basic, unshakable cosmology which involved a complicated tradition of gnostic belief that one day God would speak to us directly. No more need for prophets nor dreams nor glossolalia. From God’s lips to our ears in a language we would both share. Over generations this dogma became mingled with an intense respect for the liberty and dignity and imagination of all peoples, a code of what you might call inalienable rights, as well as a strict, intractable adherence to a unilateral pacifism.

The Schiller was the heart, and, I am forced to add, the soul, of the entire Jewish Quarter of Maisel. It was simply a complex of adjoining tenements on a small spit of an alley — a dead end, you would say — off Namesti Avenue. There were thirteen rickety buildings in all and they formed a kind of horseshoe at the end of the alley, six buildings on either side of the street and one long, narrow, bridging unit at the far end. I had a friend, a very funny young man and, I will admit, something of a troublemaker. He called this building the pelvis. Do you understand? The way it was positioned, joining one side of the street to the other. Such a character. He lived in the bridging building. As did I. The entire complex backed up to the banks of the Zevlika River and each spring there was a dreadful problem with the water rats and other vermin. Understand that the buildings were quite old and of questionable construction. They were continually undergoing repair, but all of these measures were just temporary stopgaps in the general decay of the structures.

As you might imagine, each family within our community crammed as many people as possible into their small home. We slept five and six to a bed. And that was if you were fortunate enough to have drawn a bedroom. We slumbered in kitchens and lavatories, on couches and in chairs — I had a cousin, Jaromir was his name, famous for being able to find an uncrowded corner and slip into a restful doze while standing up. Like a horse, we would laugh. And, to be honest, some of the men did take to calling him pony-boy. But it was always used in an affectionate way. Never cruelly or without warmth.

There was often a shortage of food. This should not surprise you. You are familiar, I am sure, a man of your intelligence and curiosity could not help but be familiar, with the story of the Maisel blockades and the rationing. It is something you always come close to being accustomed to, the stomach always churning. The slow fatigue of the long-hungry.

But know that there were fine times as well. We were, in every regard, a community like any other and closer than most. I have always felt the cliché to be true — suffering binds people more tightly than joy. Even a righteous joy. We made our world within the Schiller. We had our own small customs and habits. As if we were, indeed, a larger family. A tenacious clan cleaving together in too small a space. We kept our own markets on Schiller. Our own butcher shop, of course. There was a small school for the young children. More of a nursery perhaps, but they were taught the old fables. When there was paper and ink, we even printed a small weekly news sheet. In our own tongue, of course. If you can believe me, there was even a library. It is true. I am in a position to know. Better than any other, I assure you. We were poor, but never ignorant. There was no illiteracy that I knew of. At least not among the men. We came to think of ourselves as separate even from the other Jews of the Quarter. And I have often wondered if this is not at least part of the sin we were punished for. For there must have been a sin. It is unthinkable to accept what happened without an impetus. Without a logic, however abstract, somewhere deep in the mind of God. Ah, I see your face. You seem surprised that I use the word. Surely, you’ve heard me use it before? My stories about the Independents’ Collective and our battle against the Red and the Black? No? I am sure I must have.

In any event, you are familiar with the July Sweep, Doctor? I am quite sure it was reported even here in Quinsigamond. The pogrom to end all pogroms, yes? Some dramatic phrase like this? They must have interrupted your soap operas and football games to mention the July Sweep? There must have been notice in the World Digest section of The Spy? A paragraph at least?

Even Hermann Kinsky lost family to the Sweep. Even one as connected and feared as Kinsky was vulnerable to this particular purge. Can you imagine, sir, if the shadow of the Sweep could penetrate into the armor of a mythical animal like Kinsky, what it could do to the people of the Schiller? I have heard it asked — never here, not in this city. Who beyond a refugee would give this much thought to the whole affair? — Was there no indication of what was coming? Yes, of course, there was indication. We talked for weeks of nothing else. The street attacks were increasing daily. And the brutality of those attacks likewise escalated. Our merchants had their shanties set ablaze, first in the middle of the night and later, as the spring progressed, in broad daylight, with customers in the midst of transaction, children around their feet. Our old men were pulled from the steps of the temple as they exited, knocked to the ground and dragged through the square, spit upon, kicked and whipped and cracked with the nightsticks. The attackers were young men like many of your associates, Doctor. I mean no insult. I simply mean to describe, you understand, their age, their bachelorhood. And many of them were known to be from the government police. They did not wear their uniforms. At first. For a time, the attempt was made to give the impression that these attacks were independent actions. Unsanctioned. Officially disapproved of.

In fact, the attacks were just a prelude. Just a cheap coming attraction for the main event.

The night of the July Sweep was a stifling one, airless from dawn. Most of my people could not sleep. They sat on their stoops, wilted and fatigued, waiting for the heat to break, hoping for a reprieve from the oppressiveness of the humidity.

What they received instead was a visit from Satan himself. Leading a convoy whose purpose the average man or woman, even those of the most depraved nature, could not imagine.

The brigade was actually something of a ragtag troupe. I have heard they were all volunteers and I tend to believe this. It is rumored that they had a communal nickname, that they called themselves the Reapers. Like a sports team or a fraternal order. They came in a variety of utility vehicles borrowed from the city garage. Some even drove jeeps and motor scooters privately stolen just for the occasion. None of the young men or women wore their badges that night, though each carried their government-issued machine pistols.

There is a myth that the Reapers assembled in some secluded corner of Devetsil Park prior to the raid, that they performed some sort of bonding ritual to strengthen them for what was to come. I have heard it said that they liberated an infant lamb from one of the farms out beyond the Polish Quarter and formed a circle around the mewing and terrified animal and slaughtered it, gutted the quaking newborn from throat to entrails. That each soldier took a bite of the steaming heart and passed it down the line. I have also heard a version of this story in which the sacrificial victim was a newly born baby, a human child, just hours old and spirited out of the convent at St. Wenceslas Abbey. I mention these tales for your consideration, Inspector. You are the man obsessed with puzzles and myths. For myself, I only know that the Reapers were first spotted that evening already on the march, snaking their way toward the fifth district under cover of the over-heated night.

The rear of their cavalcade was brought up by an ancient, paint-spattered flatbed truck carrying as much cyclone fencing as could be strapped upon its apron. And the very last float in the parade was the crown jewel of the procession, so large and beautiful, in fact, that it looked like it could not have belonged with such a shabby convoy as preceded it.

Tell me, Inspector, how do I describe for you what has come, inevitably, to be the central monstrosity of our hideous myth? How do I make it both technically accurate, conveying the fact of the machine — the truth of its existence in this world, that it was born of etchings and blueprints and the draftsman’s toil, that it was constructed from prefabricated metals, assembled by men in greasy coveralls, that it was powered by the common internal combustion engine and that it fed on diesel fuel, that it operated with the same grinding noise, belched the same noxious exhaust as any piece of heavy industrial equipment — how do I tell you this and, at the same time, express to you what that fact signifies, the enormity of this creature’s monstrousness, how its purpose that night in July elevated it to something greater than a machine, larger than a piece of equipment, made it into a steel metaphor, transformed it into the demon which had been waiting for us since the expulsion from the garden?

As always, we start with a name. There is no existence without the naming. To name is to create. So let us bring the demon to life once again, Doctor. The machine was called the Pulpmeister. I am not being humorous. I am not being perverse. Though I can see where you might think so. No, this is the truth. The Pulpmeister. Were you to obtain one of the catalogs routinely mailed to the larger lumber corporations, you would find an entire section devoted to all makes and models of this beast. At heart, it was nothing but an industrial tree shredder that had been wildly enlarged and customized. This was, ostensibly, the machine’s only purpose, the on-site pulping of raw wood. I am told there are sales films in which the larger models are shown to transform enormous sections of fallen redwood forests into mountains of soft, sandy powder. No doubt you have seen tiny versions of this particular piece of equipment. Last August, after that particularly costly windstorm, the city had the machines everywhere. You could find them on every avenue where a tree had succumbed or a large branch broken away. Surely you have seen the public arborists in their deep green jumpsuits, their yellow helmets and their heavy gloves, parking their pet monster in the street, proudly setting up their orange cones supposedly to ward off traffic, though I tend to think that the purpose of the cones is actually to draw the attention of the passersby—look at our machine, look closely at our obliterating devil, see the teeth, see the speed with which it can make nothing out of something.

But just in case you are ignorant of the beast, Doctor, I will play Jonah for you and describe my monster. First let me say, the shredder which came to visit the Schiller that night was very likely the largest that has ever been constructed. And this is what leads the professional theorists to their refrain of full governmental knowledge and consent. For who, the reasoning goes, could have ordered the customized construction of such a monstrosity but the Ministry of Public Works itself? No fanatical death squad operating on its own could have afforded such a luxurious and opulent tool.

Something about the thing itself was decadent. Something about its very design seemed to send a message. There is, I believe, a saying in this country about using a Howitzer to kill a housefly. At first I believed that was the case in the July Sweep. A matter of overkill. The inevitable result when zealous despisement breeds with an insane egotism. But later, thinking about the use of the machine, thinking about the process, the particular way the disappearance was performed, no, Doctor, there was more to it. There was a brilliance behind the manuever. Because one of the simplest lessons of history is that slaughter alone is not enough. Even in the case of the most brutal and inclusive slaughter. No, Doctor. One must wipe out all trace of the despised. One must obliterate the remains. One must make any and all evidence vanish in such an absolute way that you are left free to begin denying that the despised ever existed in the first place.

For a time, you may have to argue with the memories of the neighbors. But if you are obsessive enough, meticulous enough, even memory can be manipulated in the end. If you eradicate until there is nothing left to eradicate, there will be nothing for the cantankerous to point to. And even reasonable men and women will come to accept your version of the truth.

The passenger places a hand lightly on Otto’s shoulder.

“Is our time up already?” Otto asks. “So soon? But I have not even begun, Doctor.”

The hand is removed.

“Very well then. You are the boss, as they say.”

The passenger secures the high buttons on the collar of his tunic and raps on the window to signal that Otto should pull over. Otto steers the cab to the curb, doesn’t bother to shift into park. The passenger exits the taxi without payment or goodbye and disappears down an alley into one of the labyrinths of Bangkok Park.