You cannot understand, or you can understand better than anybody, how strange it is for a person like me to write these things. My background, my position, everything I was and did didn't prepare me for this week, but when you visited us, something snapped in me that may have been lying inside me for many years, that damn intimacy, almost despair, was born, something like closeness, to people who hundreds of years ago had cleared the forests of New England, burned in a foreign fire. As if I wanted to restore to Christianity what Sam Lipp, Lionel, and even you hold in your hand-some profound hatred, a shadow of a jealous and cruel God.
Before he ran away from the hall with Eliahu Wiggs's slap stuck to his face, he managed to take a few cookies. He stood at the cloakroom and with trembling hands he tried to put on the coat. He held the cookies in his mouth so his hands would be free. Eliahu Wiggs, furious, came out and yelled at him, but Sam couldn't answer him because his mouth was full of cookies. And suddenly I saw how two people could be hungrier than I ever knew. Eliahu wanted to slap Sam's face again, but the sight of the cookies was so attractive that he started weeping, quietly, and his hand that wanted to hit stuck to his body again, he turned his face right and left, and I thought: Those aren't the artificial tears Sam talked about before. With his skinny hand, he grabbed one cookie from Sam's mouth and started chomping it hungrily, and Sam held the cookies tight in his mouth and Eliahu wanted more and had to bring his thin, beautiful face close to Sam's mouth to snatch more, and suddenly it didn't matter what I or others saw, he put his face close and bit and Sam almost kissed him on the mouth and the two of them hugged or wrestled, and tears rolled on their cheeks and then Eliahu Wiggs pulled away, tears flowing on his cheeks, and disappeared into the hall.
We got into a taxi and Sam wanted to sleep for an hour, paid the driver in advance, apologized to him and me, and fell asleep. I sat and pondered what I was doing with him in a taxi, at night, in the cold, and the driver talked about the weather and about the near-accident of the Swissair flight at Kennedy Airport when he went there earlier, and then Sam woke up and asked the driver if he had aftershave and Sam got aftershave from the driver and sprayed a little on his face and told him to drive home.
I took Sam to my house. He and Licinda stayed with us for three days. We looked at them yearningly. My wife hugged him, drank too much, and said: If you want, you can marry Melissa, and she passed out. We took her to the hospital and she's been there for a month. I sit at her side and ask myself, What disaster did I bring down on her and on me? and I have no answer.
Yours,
A. M. Brooks
Tape / -
Greta Garbo as Ninotchka goes into a restaurant. She says to the waiter: Give me coffee without cream. A few minutes later, the waiter comes back and says: We have no cream, Madame. Is it all right without milk?
In my reflection she is I, she's my memory, she's the fact that maybe it will finally be revealed that I had no father. Not Nehemiah, not Joseph, an impure spirit of holiness entered my mother in the river. The river is my father. Old is my mother and cruel. Samuel is my son. Where are you, dear Samuel?
Tape / -
Dear Obadiah,
Some time ago, my phone rang at home and Sam Lipp, who was on the line, informed me that he had come to town and was living in a Lebensborn inn.
The name Lebensborn naturally made me shudder. When I hung up, I said to myself: There can't be a hotel with that name in our city. I took the phone book and scanned it and to my amazement I found a hotel called Ludwigshaus-Lebensborn. I assume the name doesn't mean much to you. But Samuel wasn't so innocent. During the war, Lebensborn was a pretty shady institution, yet was maintained by the heads of the party and called "Institute for the Improvement of the Race." In fact, it was a completely establishment whorehouse led by none other than the Reichsfuhrer in person. Aryan girls and officers were brought there, mainly SS officers of impeccable race and they could copulate and create a new generation of pure Aryans. According to my father (to his credit he had total contempt for the place), those were adulterous, purely bestial encounters, and human beings, said my father, could savor there the taste of protected, and even more important, legal promiscuity. In other words: Those were establishment, organized, numbered flirtations, and women whose husbands were on the front for a long time could come there anonymously (only the authorities knew who they were) and copulate with the best of the German men. According to my father, the institution was quite varied-and here you can hear the party member speaking-but at least here, unlike Paris, there weren't naked whores on skates with naked men running after them and falling and getting up and trying to catch them. There weren't impotent old men there peeping through the cracks. It was, my father added, an institution that was basically filthy, but clean in its operation, solid, even if full of adultery they called patriotic. I didn't ask him what he thought about that last word, maybe Friedrich did.
I told Sam I was coming immediately, and he said, and I could hear his smile on the phone: Don't rush, I've got something to do in the meantime. Maybe he was trying to hint to me that old patriots were still copulating there with heavenly girls. I put on my coat and went. He was waiting for me in what remained of a splendid lobby reminiscent of the old days. The building, like our famous cathedral, had never been blown up. He asked: Did you get a letter from Mr. Brooks, my first wife's father? I answered yes, and he said: That great man! We were sitting in his room. From the window Schiller Park could be seen, I used to play there as a child. We were sipping sherry from a bottle Sam had ordered earlier. The area was familiar to me from years gone by, and it had been a long time since I had set foot in that part of the city. Sam tried to explain something to me that was hard for me to understand, he said: Once I invented setting watches backward. Then I lived in reverse time and that's how the disease of forgetting was born, that lasted four years. My key was with Ebenezer and Ebenezer's key was with me. At Kennedy Airport I exchanged the ticket because I was afraid to fly to Israel, I wanted first to be in a place where they invented the key to my reverse time, so I would come to Israel and not somebody else.
The taste of the sherry, the sight of the park, a sweet memory of my childhood, imbued in me an absurd sense that everything became real only because it was said. If he had told me the moon was a rectangle, I would have accepted it as fact, so I could also see my mother sitting on a bench in Schiller Park, reading a newspaper or a book. I heard the voices of the old people who lived in the hotel and the voices came through the walls, maybe they were singing. It was hard to hear what song they were singing. Sam was a child whose mother called him to come to her and gave him candy. And so we were able to penetrate into areas of a place whose logic was different from the logic we were used to. We didn't yet know where we were and what the date was, and we talked, each one separately, but together, about the other's childhood as if we had exchanged identities. So we dialed together and somebody picked up the phone and said Schwabe here, and I said: This is Sam Lipp, a friend of Lily Schwabe, and the old man didn't even make a sound of amazement or resentment and said Yes, and what can I do for you, and I said to him: Lily, Lily your daughter, and he said You must have the wrong number sir, these days people get a lot of wrong numbers, and after a long time when I didn't let him off the line he admitted he once had a daughter named Lily, but not anymore. I'm an old man, he added, living on a small pension, living in my own apartment, he didn't hang up, maybe he tried not to be amazed, waited and I don't know exactly what he waited for, there was no longing or acceptance in his voice, and when I hung up, Sam said: Maybe he really is the man who knows who a disaster happened to.