The other three, wearing soft spikes, had gone straight t the members’ porch for the drinks and peanuts and payof and gleeful recapitulation of their best shots, but I was loy to real cleats (I love the menacing clatter they make on corcrete and asphalt), which are forbidden on the wooden porch. Also I needed to urinate and to be alone a few minutes. There is something photophobic in me that can stand only so many hours of the unrelieved sunshine of boon companionship and seeks the shade of ill-tempered solitude.
The locker room, newly recarpeted last winter, when in one of the renovations urged by the younger members its friendly old green metal lockers were replaced with expensive, less capacious ones of varnished beechwood, appeared at first empty. But then with a start I saw a naked man emerge from the tiled shower room. He seemed terrifically hairy, and, with his broad chest and bow legs, he crouched, like an animal thinking of pouncing. Seeing me, he also started; he had been no doubt lost in the reverie that follows a shower-the steaminess, the forceful needling water, the face blindly held up to the primeval thrash-as the large rough towel reacquainted him with his tingling surfaces. It startled me to think that the club was now admitting such brutish-looking members: but then I reflected that young men all, even I in my prime, have a brutish aspect, un-evolved since the age of tribal warfare and the naked group hunt for the sacred bear and hairy mammoth.
This menacing shadow in our renovated cave advanced toward me quizzically, blinking and dragging his towel in one hand. “Ben?” he asked in a light, civilized voice. “Aaron Chafetz.”
Of course. My doctor. My new young doctor, unrecognizable in his shaggy skin, and nearsighted without his glasses. My doctor of many years, Ike Fidelman, four years older than I, had had a stroke. It hadn’t much bothered me, since he had always talked out of the side of his mouth, with slurred, impatient diction. But he had abruptly retired and moved to the so-called Oregon Wilderness-Chinese missiles had devastated the cities, the bridges, the Boeing plant-to live with his daughter, who had become a Buddhist priestess.
“Ike,” I had complained into the telephone, “how can you leave me in the lurch like this?”
“It’s no lurch. A great boy is taking over the practice. He’ll be up on all this new stuff.”
“I don’t want all the new stuff.”
Ike had been homeopathic in his approach; Gloria called him the only Jewish Christian Scientist in the medical profession.
“You will when you need it,” he told me. “They do magic with superlasers now, Ben. Thirty years ago I’d have a flipper for a left arm and a bubble in my brain. Good luck. Easy on the coffee, the booze, the fried food, and the young girls.”
Had he forgotten how I had given up, at Gloria’s urging, alcohol and caffeine altogether? In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead, she took an overactive interest in my health, from vitamin pills laid out beside my morning orange juice to a constant nagging about what I put into my mouth.
“Dr. Chafetz,” I said, absurdly formal but unable to address him in any other way. A doctor is a doctor. We thought of shaking hands but thought better of it. Our costumes were disturbingly reversed: usually I was the undressed one. I had never seen his body before; its thickness and hairiness did not go with his thin ascetic face, his somewhat receding hair, his gold wire-frame spectacles. Without the spectacles he had had to come close, to identify me. I ignored the bestially bared body and concentrated on his face, pale and sensitive and shaven. He had a deferential, hushed manner never more so than when he was testing my testicles for hernia and probing my prostate gland with a greased forefinger The last time he had done this it had rather scaldingly hurt, which I wasn’t sure was normal. I had hoped he had not taken my tears for those of erotic gratitude. I can just barely make out, at the fuzzy far rim of my psychosomatic universe, how male homosexuals could get to depend emotionally on penetration of the narrow, fragile anal passageway, which makes the vagina look like a tough old catchall.
Another universe, thinner than a razor blade, sliced into the sinister locker room. Chafetz was a naked Jew, and I a uniformed good German recruited to guard an extermination camp, thus releasing a younger member of the master race to the Russian front, where the Slavs had shown themselves perversely reluctant to embrace the blessings of the Third Reich. The sky was low and smoky day after day. The sun was hiding its face. All color had ebbed from the world save the dull brown of dead underbrush and, nearer at hand, the occasional bright splash of blood. It was Poland in early 1944, winter. Iron ruled the bitter air-the iron of guns and of barbed-wire fences and of the rails upon which the steam engines dragged their crammed human cargo in iron boxcars. Thin snow on the hard earth was quickly flecked with particles of ash. The view from the watchtowers was of monotonous and swampy terrain that in the distance reluctantly lifted in low rows of blue hills that mirrored the low blue clouds, viscid and wavy, close above them. In between lay a bar of silver light, scored by slants of weak sun. Winter rooks circled above snow-dusted fields of stubble.
A sickness had settled in our bowels as the news from the Eastern front, however brazenly presented as strategic triumphs over helpless barbarians, ever more clearly spelled defeat. Allied airplanes, though downed in devastating numbers, kept bombing the homeland: droning flocks of them cruelly seeking to obliterate our wives and innocent children. The mongrel brutes of the Jew-polluted earth were pressing upon us with a sullen weight not all of the Führer’s magic could dispel. A complicity of doom was coming to exist between us and the verminous prisoners. They stank of illness, of vomit and the yellow shit of dysentery, though we endeavored to keep them clean with frequent hosings in the open air, even on those mornings when the piss in the latrines was frozen solid. To this one as he stood nearest to me in the shivering line I said, camaraderie rising to my lips like the acid of nausea: “You will die, sicherlich. Ohne Zweifel, you are going to die. Verstehst du?”
What sick demon inside was making me talk such gibberish? There was no response from the young Jew. Perhaps he was not as young as he seemed at first glance. The young men generally died before the older, who were more gristly, less easily broken, their spirits longer welded to their bodies. This one stared past me, through me, with eyes like globules of black oil, the oil for which the Reich is starving. His white skin in the biting cold had a sallow waxen lustre repugnantly different from the clean pink purity of Aryan skin. His eyes were infuriating in their shining opacity. Even men totally a our mercy were capable, I saw, of insolence.
I continued, “Schwein, you must die, because you are evidence. Loathsome evidence. Abscheulicher Beweis”
Even in the freezing air his waxen skin gave off a warr human aroma. I wondered how many treacheries and ob scene acts in the bunkhouse had kept the fat on his bone There was something horribly animal about the way h hunched neck thrust forward from his white shoulders, with their hideous Jewish epaulets of black hair.
“With all such evidence destroyed” I told him chummi “the world will never believe what we did to you people.” And I fought a nauseating impulse to throw my arm around his shoulders, in a camaraderie of hopelessness, and to fiddle with the hanging weight of his circumcised prick, shaped like a turd leaving a warm ass but bluish-white, its skin thinner and finer than that of a woman’s body anywhere. Instead I lifted my sturdy Mauser rifle and smashed the butt into the side of his expressionless, bestial, liquid-eyed face. He staggered but somehow kept his feet. “Answer when I speak, Jewish swine!” I shouted. The other captives, and the other guards, and even the rooks drifting overhead, did not flinch, as if they were from a still photograph and the two of us from a scratchy, twitching movie. The movie was not black-and-white, for the red smear on the prisoner’s temple grew brighter as I watched, and two rivulets trickled in parallel down across his gaunt cheekbone.