He read aloud: “”I am the Resurrection and the Life.“” It was a blunt statement, wasn’t it?-a remarkable claim of power, and consolation. Words carved into a weatherworn gravestone from the year 1928.
Jacob’s voice was playful but hoarse. Nicotine had scorched the interior of his mouth. He was thinking how, when Herschel had been still in school, years ago, he’d been working with his son here and he’d read these very words aloud to Herschel and Herschel had scratched his head asking what the hell was that-“”Rez-rectshun‘“-and Jacob said it meant that a Messiah had come to save the Christians, only the Christians; also it meant that the Christians expected to be resurrected in their own bodies, when Jesus Christ returned to earth.
Herschel made a sniggering noise, perplexed.
“What th‘ fuck bodiez, Pa? Like, dead bodiez inna grave?”
Yes, that was it. Dead bodies in graves.
Herschel laughed his breathy heehaw laugh. As if this was a joke. Jacob Schwart had to smile: his elder, illiterate son had an eye for the tragic farce of human delusion as perceptive as that of the great German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. He did!
“Jeezus, Pa, they’d be nasty-lookin, eh? An how in fuckin hell they gonna get out?”
Herschel struck the rounded curve of a grave with the flat of his shovel as if to waken, and to mock, whatever lay inside, beneath the grass.
God damn: he missed Herschel. Now his son (whom he’d been barely able to stomach, in fact) had been missing for months, now Jacob missed Herschel like something eaten out of his gut. To Anna he might grunt, “All of that, that we had then. Gone with him.”
Anna did not reply. Yet Anna knew what Jacob meant.
All that we had then, when we were young. In the old country. When Herschel was born. Before the Nazis. Gone.
Here was a theory: Herschel had been hunted down like a dog, shot in a ditch by Chautauqua County sheriff’s deputies. Gestapo. They would claim self-defense. “Resisting arrest.” In the mountains, it might’ve been. Often you heard gunfire from the mountains-“hunters.”
Herschel hadn’t been armed, so far as Jacob knew. Maybe a knife. Nothing more. He’d been shot, left to bleed to death in a ditch. Residents of Milburn would never forgive Herschel for beating and scarring their Nazi-sons.
“I will exact justice. I will not be unarmed.”
It was a freezing spring! A hell of a spring. Too many funerals, the gravedigger was kept busy. This accursed year 1949. He missed his younger son, too. The puny whining one with the skin rashes-“August.”
“August”-named for a favorite, older uncle of Anna’s who had died at about the time Anna and Jacob were married.
For a while he was furious with August for behaving so insolently and stupidly and running off where Jacob Schwart could not find him to talk sense into him but then it seemed to him only logical, August too had been taken from him, to render Jacob Schwart helpless. For hadn’t the boy been beaten, streaming blood from a nasty gash in his face…
A slow-witted boy but a good worker. A good son. And August could read, at least. August could do grade-school arithmetic.
“I will not be unarmed…I will not be ”meek.“”
Strange, and terrible: the paralysis that had overcome those declared enemies of the German Reich. Like hypnotized creatures, as the predator approaches. Hitler had not obfuscated. Hitler had been forthright, unambiguous. Jacob Schwart had forced himself to read Mein Kampf. At least, he had read into Mein Kampf. The lunatic certainty! The passion! My battle, my campaign. My struggle. My war.
Set beside Hitler’s rantings, and Hitler’s demon logic, how flimsy, how vulnerable, how merely words were the great works of philosophy! How merely words the dream of mankind for a god!
Among his enemies here in the Chautauqua Valley, Jacob Schwart would not be hypnotized. He would not be surprised, and he would not be unarmed. History would not repeat itself.
He blamed his enemies for this, too: that he, Jacob Schwart, a refined and educated individual, formerly a citizen of Germany, should be forced to behave in such a barbaric manner.
He, a former math teacher at a prestigious boys’ school. A former respected employee of a most distinguished Munich printing firm specializing in scientific publications.
Now, a gravedigger. A caretaker of these others, his enemies.
Their Christian cemetery he must maintain. Their grave sites he must keep trimmed. Crosses!-crucifixions!-ridiculous stone angels!
He maintained the graves, oh yes. When no one observed there was Jacob Schwart “watering” the graves with his hot-acid piss.
He and Herschel, years ago. Laughing wild as braying donkeys.
Gus had never. You couldn’t joke with Gus, like that. Pissing with his father, unzipping his trousers and taking out his penis, the boy would be mortified, embarrassed. More like a girl, Jacob thought.
That was his shame, he had lost his sons.
For this, he would come to blame the Township board. For it was too confusing otherwise.
“You will see. Soon, your blind eyes will be blasted open.”
He’d memorized their names. They were Madrick, Drury, Simcoe, Harwell, McCarren, Boyd…He wasn’t sure of their faces but he knew names and he could learn where they lived, if necessary.
So grateful, sirs. Thank you sirs!
Rural idiots. Wrinkling their noses at his smell. Seeing that he was unshaven, a troll-man with a broken back, twisting his cloth cap in his hands…In pity of him, in contempt of him, explaining to him shameless in their duplicity that the budget, the budget was, budget cuts were, maybe next year Jacob, possibly next year we will see Jacob. Thank you for coming in, Jacob!
Some kind of a long gun he would purchase. A deer rifle, or a shotgun. He had money saved. In the First Bank of Chautauqua, he had nearly two hundred dollars saved.
“”Genocide‘ it is called. You are young now, you are ignorant and are being falsely educated in that school but one day you must know. In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. You must hide your weakness, Rebecca!“
He spoke with alarming vehemence. As if she had dared to doubt him. Though in fact she was nodding, yes Pa.
No idea what he was saying. Uneasy that in his excitement he might spit at her. For he chewed an enormous wad of tobacco, acid juices leaked down his chin. The more vehemently he spoke the more spittle flew from his lips. And if he should lapse into one of his coughing spasms…
“You are listening, Rebecca? You are hearing me?”
His sorrow was, he had no sons remaining. He had been castrated, unmanned. His shame.
Only the girl. He must love the wretched girl, he had no one else.
And so he told her, he lapsed into telling her, in the evenings sometimes, couldn’t recall what he’d said or when he’d begun instructing her, how in Europe their enemies had wished not only to kill him and his kind “as in an action of war” but to exterminate them utterly. For they were believed to be “pollutants”-“toxins.” And so it was not merely war, which is a political action, but genocide, which is a moral, you might say a metaphysical action. For genocide, if carried out, is an action that time cannot undo.
“Here is a puzzle worthy of Zeno: that, in history, there can be actions that history-all of ”time‘-cannot undo.“
A profound statement. Yet the girl merely stared at him.
Damn, she annoyed him! Awkward child with skin olive-dark as his own. A Gypsy look. Beautiful dark-luminous eyes. Not-young eyes. Anna was to blame, obscurely he blamed Anna for the girl. Not that he did not love the girl of course. But, who knows why, in a family a mother is blamed sometimes, simply for giving birth.