Sometimes I wanted to stop. I was so full of wrath then. But I restrained myself. I can imagine here in this prison cell, when three countries want to hang me on their rope with the claim that they aren't fascist countries like us and the flag is no longer a value but only an asset, but it's important to them to hang me on a local rope full of values, they need the myth of the rope wound around my neck, those colors! I can think with perfect equanimity about the white, northern night of late summer in Copenhagen or Jutland, people drinking beer, outside a white night light, clouds and rain streaming, a beautiful and gloomy city, canals, ships past the old port, the stock market building of Copenhagen crowned with giant snakes. Domesticated Viking savagery. And Ebenezer, a jester of death, tells them about a Polish nobility, teaches them a Polish or talmudic song, the number of matchboxes sold in Belarus in the nineteenth century, how many depressions can be counted in Tolstoy's War and Peace, how many Jewish witches were burned at the stake by bored priests in Frankfurt…
Germanwriter stops reading a moment, he peeps at the bright light outside, his tired voice, the venomous light stroking the waves of the sea, the port appears now in its ugliness, the old enclosures reveal their real poverty. And he says: I'm reading because I had to read these things to Ebenezer. And I wonder why? Why did he need me, why was it necessary to read this journal to me too? Is there somebody that I, Obadiah Henkin, can ask for my son?
I want to know how I met Samuel Lipker, said Ebenezer suddenly.
Renate smiled and I looked at Ebenezer. Suddenly he was like a young boy, his eyes were illuminated, some wild freedom danced wildly in them, and his skin grew soft, became thinner, transparent. Read, he said, read from your story.
From Kramer's diary! said the German, unable to hide a thin smile that capered for a second in his eyes.
Tell me about Samuel!
The writer put his glasses back on and scanned the papers.
… Once we played chess. And I beat Ebenezer in five games. Sometime later he asked me to play with him again. I said to him: We played and I beat you but you don't remember anymore. We played a little and he beat me four games in a row. After I racked my brain I discovered that all his games were copies of the games played by famous grandmasters. Somebody transferred some more "Jewish knowledge" to him and I laughed. I liked to look at him, at his hand, at his spirit that moved it. An earthly technical link to a celestial melody. I didn't know but I wanted to be a witness to creation. A witness to the emergence of art. An exalted character is the character of the spectator. Who knows how to see. I called him by name. I also knew Samuel's name and that was almost strange. For us they were numbers, every single one was a number, and nothing else, just like the woman who cleans her house, and-here I quote the Reichsfuhrer-doesn't call the vermin she burns by name. But I couldn't sit for long days with a number without a name. My generosity to him was so simple in its ardor that I couldn't aggravate its rarity anymore. Ebenezer met Samuel Lipker on the day a German civilian, a worker in the camp and a rather decent man named Hans Taufer, shot an apple he held in the mouth of a girl they called Bronya the Beautiful. That was at a discharge party for one of the commanders who was afflicted with a serious liver disease, and in those days, the days of the shameful and unnecessary retreat from Stalingrad where the generals betrayed the Fuhrer and brought upon us the most awful disaster. In those days a party was a plausible excuse to dissipate the amassed gloom a little. It was a lovely dusk, drawn out and reddish, proper and wild in equal measure. Samuel Lipker was part of the Sonderkommando. He was burrowing-that fact I don't know from my own eyes but secondhand-in the mouth of a corpse, found a forgotten gold tooth and hid it. At that time, Ebenezer was standing next to the wire fence whose pillars curved in (I once told Weiss it would be good to create pillars that would look like they were crying outside and not inside) and then the shot that killed Bronya the Beautiful was heard. Hans Taufer didn't kill her on purpose. He was drunk and his hand shook. Ebenezer bent down and Samuel, who was burrowing in the teeth of the dead, also bent down low. Everybody knows how Jews bend down when they hear shots. Their famous survival is ultimately a bovine fear. When they bent over and looked at the window where Bronya the Beautiful was shot each recognized the other. Maybe they smelled, as a trapped animal smells its companion. Samuel crawled to Ebenezer. He gave him a piece of greenish bread, spat on it, and Ebenezer chewed. Samuel evoked longings in Ebenezer, as he told me later. When he saw that evasive and cunning lad he understood he wouldn't be the only one who would give up his life. A terrifying sense that surely also excited him. When he told me, I felt a kind of envy I was forbidden as an SS officer. I envied the love of the beetle for the flea. And because I write only truth I have to examine that. Maybe in Ebenezer's relation to me I was seeking something denied me, I was always flooded by the chill hard hatred of those around me. Even the last sight of the Jews wasn't especially likable. Weiss was busy with his miserable oratorio, drinking wine, and his endless meditation on the distant landscapes. The Ukrainians and the Germans with us were dreadfully simple and coarse. None of them had hands that could shape a box like a Grunwald drawing, a declaration of celestial disbelief in the cosmos and also a disappointed praise of God, and Ebenezer's love was kindled at the sight of a lad who was constantly busy rummaging in the mouths and testicles of corpses that were later burned. Their attraction to one another was for a past that was fictional but absolute as far as they were concerned. The spark that engendered love was, as I said, the sight of the dead Bronya.
And she died very slowly. In the window the sergeants' girl could be seen bowing as if she were made of iron. Very slowly she bent down, very slowly she died, when I wrote to Berlin about that whore, a few months before that (she was indeed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen except for some woman I once saw in a settlement in Palestine, and today I know she's Ebenezer's mother but then of course I didn't know) I didn't get a real answer. The reply I did get stated that I deserved praise for strict preservation of the exalted sexual practices of the German race, but… somebody wrote there, a fuck from behind or in front doesn't matter so much in certain cases of pressure, it said there, an SS sergeant is permitted to relax in one way or another (without specification) that letter was written to me at the height of the contemptible air attack of the Americans, surely of Jewish origin, who didn't understand what their leaders did, that what we were doing here was not only for the Third Reich, but for the whole civilized world. A testimony to their leaders' reconciliation with our acts and vice versa, how hypocritical the way we're punished now, when there are no more Jews in Europe and they may roar in public. When there were a lot of Jews alive they were afraid they'd knock on their locked doors.