The next day I woke up with a sharp headache between my eyes. The phone didn't stop ringing. The morning newspapers were hidden by Renate and our cleaning woman under the closets. Sam came to breakfast, jolly. The call from Mr. Schwabe was one of the only ones that felt strange and I said to Renate, Answer that call, and she picked up the phone and gave it right to me and I heard the strident, furious voice of the man even before I put it to my ear. He yelled and I held the phone away while, in my other hand, I held a cup of miracle juice Renate concocted to cure my nausea. He yelled: That man of yours, sir, came to my house, or perhaps you don't know, if I hadn't known you were an honorable man I would have honored you with a duel worthy of the name, and you wouldn't have been left with one ear to cure and even your nostrils would disappear along with what wraps them. I was smoking a pipe, suddenly there was a knock on the door, I opened it, and he stood, he stood there, you hear me? He stood there and smiled, pushed me into a chair and picked up the phone, you hear? And he dialed, I heard distant voices in the receiver, I was scared, and he said into the phone: Talk to Himmler, and he gave me the phone. I heard shouts from the other end, what happened? What happened? She shouted there and I said: Schwabe here, and she said: Who? And I said Schwabe of Badenstrasse and my pipe fell down, it fell down, the pipe, and she said: You're Schwabe of Badenstrasse, where's Sam, I said to her: I'm here and Sam is standing next to me, you listening? And Sam pushed me and yelled: Talk to her! And I'm an old man, what could I do, I said Who is this? And she said Lily! What Lily, I said to her, what joke is this, and she said, A really bad joke, maybe she wept, and who is she, if she's Lily where was she all these years? And then Greta came in, she takes care of me and I love her, she fixes everything, sews, she said: What's happening? And she looked at that man with a hatred I didn't find where to search for it inside me, and Lily says What? What? Is this Schwabe and I yelled: American filth, shit of American soldiers, you left a father in prison, took me years to crawl here, I found your stinking stockings in the empty house, and she laughed, she laughed then too, and the old woman said: Enough, you'll get a stroke, and the phone went dead and that Sam counts out marks for the call, gives them to Greta and she took them, why shouldn't she, but the heart is shaking with shame and even more, I'm furious, eighty-one years old, what do they want, and from me, and I hear Sam or what's-his-name, laughing or yelling and Greta isn't scared of him, no, she's not scared, her they measured for a uniform of real Junkers, her they didn't take out of that music and the pop and the long hair, and Sam told her, Tell how many Reichsmarks you got, those Reichsmarks were brought to you by Jews, and Greta sneered: The Reichsmarks are better from your hand than from anybody else, and he told her the Jews were coming back, and she said, There was no Lily, as if he had asked, but she asked from inside me, And tonight, when she has no teeth in her mouth, and that made the swinish clown laugh, and then he took out a pack of lewd cards from Frankfurt, or Japan, showed me, and said: You see, here's Lily with Jews! You want to buy the pictures? And I, what can I do and even Greta was now yelling with shame, and I explain to him: I'm an old retired soldier, living on a small pension, what do you want from me, and I get mad: Lily? Where was Lily? And he said I came back home, Father, and kisses me, that filth, you hear?
I hear, I told him, and I drink another cup Renate gave me and my head is bursting. And he yells into the receiver, an old man with manly telephone power, I think for no good reason you were waiting for me, that Sam tells me, you sat in pajamas and waited, and I say: I wasn't waiting, I'm cheating death, I don't sleep at night because eighty-one-year-olds die at night, and he says, Waiting for death? Germans die standing up, sir, he told me, the filth, at three in the morning, nineteen seventythree, and he tells me: Your daughter is a whore of Jews, and I yelclass="underline" I don't have a daughter because I really don't, and he says a mothball of a woman and I remember every word, mothball of a woman, with a pedigreed womb, sing! He orders me and pushes Greta into the armchair where she was sitting and can't get into any deeper, and that friend of yours, tells me Take the cards, and hits me and kisses Greta on her toothless mouth and goes…
After Herr Schwabe hung up, Sam said with a calm that drove me crazy: Afterward I left his house and waited until the police car came. And then, after he said that, he fell asleep in his chair. I looked at him and suddenly my headache vanished. There's nothing like the sight of a lost person to cure a headache after such a night of drinking and humiliation. Renate took off his shoes and together we dragged him to the sofa, and the cleaning woman covered him and he slept for five straight hours. And then the evening papers came. When he woke up, we were busy reading. I wouldn't say those were especially thrilling moments. The papers made it clear that, at long last, my real face was revealed. The would-be rightist papers hinted at bitter things about my past and my dubious morals, and the so-called leftist papers explained without a shadow of a doubt that in the war I played much higher roles than had been thought. Of course, it was all formulated so that I can't sue anybody, and if I protested the injustice and the empty charge, I would look even more foolish.
They threatened me by phone, and friends who tried to encourage me said things like: I do understand you. Or: In your circumstances, it's easy to understand why, and so on… All of them hypocrites and flatterers. I decided to appear in a television interview and at least try to refute some of the charges against me. The producer of our television news is an old friend of mine. We were in school together, we once traveled together to Italy, Greece, and South America. He arranged that interview. It was an act of courage and resolution on his part.
In the television studio, I sat with Sam in the producer's office, the woman who prepared the report looked at Sam with wicked eyes and asked embarrassing questions. When she smiled she looked like a person who has started missing herself. Then I was interviewed and I returned home. I could have been interviewed in my house, but I wanted to be interviewed in the studio to impart much more credibility to my words, as if it wasn't only I who was talking, but the communications media. Sam drank hot chocolate and sat in front of the turned-off television. When the interview with me was broadcast, he turned on the television. We sat and didn't say a word, Renate smiled once and then averted her eyes and looked at Sam watching the program and her eyes suddenly became cold as steel.
And here are some news clippings for you.
… in his television appearance, he chose not to apologize. Nor did he try to cover up. He told candidly, and that candor has to be appreciated, how years ago he met a person who performed in nightclubs and was called the Last Jew, and about a fellow named Samuel Lipker who would lead him. He told how he investigated that person and now that Samuel-the American director Sam Lipp-came to our city, he swept him up into his world of horrors and made him act in his presence the commander who commanded both Sam Lipp and the one he called the Last Jew. Maybe what he said was candid, but equally unconvincing. Candor isn't necessarily a substitute for truth. Candor, like good intentions, is sometimes the road to hell. The poetic license our praised writer permits himself this time went beyond the boundary of good taste… On the contrary, the amazement about the past was even sharpened, his persistence in writing a book he can never write and doesn't write evokes a sense of intellectual impotence, ideological shallowness, and fear of critical readers, for if the book is so important to him, why did he write his other books? It is hard to accept as logical the fact of the clock set backward, the story about the fellow whose anger justifies disgraceful behavior in a nightclub and hectoring an old man, imprisoned in the past, who lives on a small pension, struck and pestered by a distinguished writer and a guest from America. Virgil (the moderator-A.S.) asked our writer why he had to go to a fortuneteller before his last trip to the United States, and didn't even get a satisfactory answer. Why does a writer try to pretend to be a beautiful person without delusions, when he secretly believes in superstitions of a clock set backward and secretly consults a fortuneteller. In his articles, he attacks the ignorance of what he calls worshippers of stars and signs. Our writer is caught here in naked hypocrisy!.. Great amazement… As for the intellectual integrity of a writer whose past was restored without pangs of conscience, and along with streetwalkers, profiteers, and pimps, he presents a shameful play about the resurrection of the Reich, when in the same week, he writes a trenchant article against performing the Passion in Bayreuth, because as he puts it, it is a basic and profound insult to human moral values and to the Jewish nation.