The officer who sees the corpses all around wipes sweat from his brow and thinks he has no choice but to bow to Ebenezer and he does, as if he were viewing a natural force, gallops on a horse, Jehu King of Israel a chariot too fast, and Ebenezer stands up too fast, pickling for four years, and yet too fast, and he thinks, Toward what? They lived in those blocks? He has no satisfactory answer. To what? Hard to know. He has to organize a journey of dying people. To bring them quickly to some sanity. So they won't eat with their fingers and won't be so alarmed. Kramer is sitting there, he could have shot him.
A waste of a bullet, thought the officer.
I'm a carpenter, aren't I? said Ebenezer as if continuing innocently, I understand wood, huts, screws, nails. These are excellent huts but they're not meant to accommodate a thousand people in one hut without heat or toilets. I'm not complaining, he added, and the Red Cross man tried to laugh.
Why not? asked the officer.
I don't know, said Ebenezer.
Beyond the grove appeared people in civilian clothes. Their faces furious, led like a rebellious flock, kicking and cursing. Farmers brought to German Poland at the beginning of the war, one of them dressed like a rich man, bags under his eyes, tall and pale. British soldiers are leading them. A few of them stand still and the soldiers urge them on. Then they stop and wait for instructions. A mixture of orders from a microphone in English, German, Yiddish, makes that unreal moment concrete. The orders are barked out unreliably, thinks Ebenezer, they haven't imagined where they're going, they should put Kramer in charge! The civilians, who had lived in the area for years, are expecting a salvo of shots that will destroy them. They're shaking before the rifle barrels in the hands of the soldiers. Nobody bothers to explain to them. They're led to the giant pits that were dug a few days before and they think that here they'll be shot here. But instead of burying themselves they're assigned to bury those they didn't have time to burn. Abomination appears on their faces, so some of them were filled with indifferent heroism; not to yell or plead. In silence they worked, in silence they vomited, in silence they understood the respectinducing sight of Kramer. When they passed by Ebenezer Schneerson they saw the first person in their life who lived in peace on an alien planet. Until today, they hadn't seen such human beings up close, but only as miniaturized geometric shapes. They had to lower their eyes. Kramer didn't hesitate to sneer at their look. Ebenezer still thought they were only lords with bad timing. That was a perplexing moment from Samuel's point of view, who's the stumbling block here and who would change places with whom?!
Ebenezer thought: Never did they know a real shame of humiliation, if they had known they would go into those graves and not come out. But Kramer knew them (and Ebenezer) very well, thought Samuel, Ebenezer is trying to locate himself: I'm the memory of things. I'm a crapper of the Poles. I'm a hidden light Gold told about before he died. I'm an electromagnetic equation. I hover in the wind. A music room of symbols. The culture room where Bronya the Beautiful was shot with an apple in her mouth. The girlfriend of entertainers from the east. Barefoot, almost tired, they fell asleep trying to make Kramer laugh. He stood, in his hand a gun aimed at them and they tried to sing comic songs. In the searing cold of the evening, in the light of the nearby glow of the explosions, but then Kramer fell asleep standing up, the gun in his hand and bliss on his face. How do you understand that sight?
A week before the end, Sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss agreed to fix the Fuhrer's frame. And Ebenezer was assigned to fix it. Ebenezer tries to locate things. The entertainers were killed in an air raid on the way from the camp to Hathausen. Everybody kept Jewish prayer books in their cases to sell after the defeat. Like Samuel, they're also living in the future already. Ebenezer hasn't yet moved, Kramer is sitting and watching his Jew. Samuel is lusting for the wallets of the British soldiers. Kramer's Jew doesn't understand why they tied the commander's hands, Kramer isn't used to being tied. And then a Jewish soldier of the British army barked, at Kramer he barked, to emphasize the gravity of the moment, to defend himself with hostility, because of the need to disguise himself as a dog, and Kramer smiled, calm, he knows Jewish dogs, an inflexible and inelegant race, the soldier can't see what Ebenezer saw, the twilight darkened now and only Ebenezer, who had learned in childhood to see the eyes of jackals in the dark, saw Kramer's glowing eyes.
You and I, he said.
Then he looked at the darkening horizon. The charm in it earlier vanished. A reddish winding spark looked threaded like a shoelace. Two poplars were still seen blurry in the distance, beyond the grove that was no longer seen, and further away the small church was seen. Look at the new church, said Ebenezer.
It was here all the time, said Samuel.
I didn't see it until now, said Ebenezer.
You didn't look, said Samuel.
And it was here?
All the time, said Samuel.
Funny, said Ebenezer.
But Samuel also understood that Ebenezer was now thinking about the railroad car that brought him here because then, in the railroad car, the years he had had before ended. Then the church was seen and afterward was wiped out like all the memories and now it was new. Samuel smiled at the food now brought in open railroad cars. A plunder of food lighted by hurricane lamps and spotlights. A fresh lemon fell to the ground, and when a German tried to pick it up he was kicked by a soldier who tried to laugh and didn't laugh. But the German didn't want to straighten up now. There was no point. Somebody yelled: Get up, and Ebenezer said to the English captain: You really think I'm a joke about an elephant?
The Englishman said to him: I don't think you're a joke about an elephant, Mr. Schneerson. I do, said Ebenezer. They brought me and I remember now. Who am I who remembers? Don't know. There was a floor. And German soldiers and Jewish forced laborers from Vilna were still alive. The first hut they built around me. I arranged the joints, I put in the nails, I supervised the work, from inside, and they built the walls around me. That's how you trap an elephant, isn't it? You draw a trap around him and he's inside. Maybe I'm still building the hut the tank is destroying. And what now? Go know, my back is turned to Kramer, who sees me in the dark even if his hands are tied.
You're not alone, said the Englishman, who had known something about psychology before the war and once in London saw Sigmund Freud get into a black car driven by a young woman. There was no joy in his voice when Ebenezer tried to stitch the tatters of dark with leaps of words. The glowing light of the hurricane lamps and the spotlights covered the area and distanced it from him. The man on the microphone almost pleaded: You've got to be free! You've got to be free! Free? Without Kramer? That's absurd, said Ebenezer.
It will cost a lot, he said afterward to the officer. Women were still hiding in the huts, peeping out, scared. Skeletons in pajamas dropped after eating the first time, typhus will eat them, he said in English, officials and doctors ran around here and there. DDT showers operated vigorously. A tank fed the motor of the generator that operated the electricity. The Germans who had been brought to Germanify Poland dug in silence and buried the dead in the dark. Nobody paid attention to them anymore.