When they were young, he was young, and when they came for the young, he went.
Liberation was the midnight middlestair hush of January 1945 it was JanI remember it better than the birth of no children my all of no kinder it’s said how the Soviets were teenagers the Red Army’s Ukrainian front their 322nd Infantry it was Agnesz couldn’t believe they had so many of them you joked what’s wrong you asked with maybe the 321st the rifles of Kursk and the Carnival birthday parade pomp Weimarhuge and grander Whymore the many happy returns of the Bug Army the 6th Corps when my cousin Franz came back from the War the first World One with medals made of laundrysoap coffee cocoa and tea a hero with the reserve divisions the Conta Corps Beskides Corps echt Germans under the command of Marshal Koniev though by then I was already summering far away from you on a march out to Loslau Agnesz if you know it outside the fence beyond the electricless chainlink they put up around the backyard lot blown through with fastfood cartons and bags will that be paper or plastic Gristedes the God of the Greeks of Homer and Pseudo-trismegistus Marx the burgerboxes and Kennedy tubs of friedchicken my brittle skin my Torahskin the parchment flaking the house the burnt corpse-brick and the hoofdrum hymn I’ll have the supersized Spanish goatloin the dogs Prinz the cheap Presbytesized meat barking the Paris radio from which we first heard wind of the Faust of Gounod with the strings and the winds and the news from the west of Berlin the static and crackle of Chancellortalk the boycott of vom Rath the secretary my father’s für Elise he had to let go with the books she kept for her son those ledgers illustrated with pictures of dragons and Ostmark dragoons atop the horses of Karl May and in the spaceships of Kurd Laßwitz those giant pigs octopi and the gigantic lesbian Teppichfresser Kraken Kranken Seuchengefahr because nu as they say assistedliving isn’t living anymore just press the button and the Russians come in on horseback with sirens the exhaustflagged ambulette driven by illegal Ukrainians and inhome help they call it is a stranger’s home you pay rent on to die in crematoria blasts through the night not torching flesh but the structures themselves lungs kidneys and liver I bought outright this building the paper’s right here the blatt the leafy daf stuffed into this pillow I stole from Columbus Marrano Medical the last time I was sick was decades ago has their postmark stamp their tattoo on its case I had croup cough pneumonia Durchfall too the stain of how the hospital saved me Blocks 20 21 28 blocked again lately but all they gave me was aspirin charcoal tablets and scabies the women who died for the gynecologist Clauberg in Block 10 20 21 shrieking the same to the ear as the boom of the tanks in bloom and the infantry howitzer mortars it’s too schädling schande embarrassing to return it to which clinic blocks away too weak to walk not enough shellstrong exoroach for the mamzer Presbyterians their doctors always Mengele younger and younger their faces Asian Indian Pakistandoffish my face falling to puddle its age on the floor on the winter earth you wanted to just kneeldown and kiss it you needed to hug them the soldiers then rip their medal hearts from their chests dripping to the floor that’s her ceiling to stain the Virgin Marryme Puerto Dominican girl’s sheets her boyfriend’s a dealer on the Appellplatz the dellplatz the hellplatz a plotzing horseflag hung over the horizon the Blutbanner burn of Oma’s Walter Scott the son of Hermann und Dorothea we traded German quotations with the officers’ moustaches red and black and laughing so much younger than me who was even younger than them more starved too diseased marching due west through the Russian Ukrainians the 322nd hour that at last was our address our heightweightnumber no more of these recreations redactions reinterpretations reinventions revisions revised and revisionary all of these storied stories untold and yet told wasted breath bombedaway tired Köln Deutz-tired traintired shiptired the haunt and stalk of the 1st Ukrainian front was tired Major General his name was Brooklyn Yashechkin Grishaev with the wineskin stomach the water we drank too fast to swell the last gram of bread drambread bloodcolored like jam the last leaven Liberationthirsty Liberation-hungry liberté égalité fratricide mounted bareback on Stalinback saddled with night if it’s night and how would Birkenau know Brzezinka Ostland lost-land cost to benefit ratio the racinate poliofairies and the gypsyrades with their reincarnated cutraterapethethroat FKL survivoresses the blokowa kurva cures wandering around offering their syphilis up to the horses the whorses the worst of them the versteppung vershtupping Ukrainians no better than the Poles save they’re saviors the Musclemen the Musclessmen the boneless chickenfingered men the Moslemen the only good Muslims that’s how bad Iran without blood without claim we brought with us our suitcases thirty fifty kilos I weighed what fifteen twenty skinwrapped skintrunked shrunken and marked chalked pulverized bone no more images imaginings no more stories tattooed on my lips in a milk that was ink the winter spent at the foot of Mont Blanc while my father did business I sat in Dorota’s lap fireside sucking the nib of a fountainpen after supper I wandered Chamonix the blank ice fields and the snowedover tenniscourts the hotel’s library with its foreign words taking their ink on my tongue like my father’s ashes the cold blue of a suckling kid the Shema O Izrael the Satmar said Hear how my son’s dead alvás in Hungarian in the arms of the Russian Ukrainians they said the Kaddish the emes mamash gevaltalk the whinnying neighs of the horses arrived they wouldn’t even approach that’s how disgusting we stank the saltlick the sugarlumps of our pimples and pocks and bubonic breasts our cysts and our boils the Tableaux Vivants set in Egypt and Palestine among the Caucuses or Carpathians that were so faraway and pretty onstage at the theater the hillhumps of the horsecamels arrived and arriving the droms flying their earflags their tailflags and the manes of the Russians whom we called The Russians but were actually Coney Island Brooklyn Ukrainians just born into the culture the Wissenschaft of it all the tums and the glooms glom the dead gathering up like a widow the sheaves of my women Dorota and Agnesz Doris the Kultur and Bildung of lading the massing my father installed on the executive board of the Rhenish-Westphalia Verband the Reichsverband onboard the trains the boats the executive planes you forget the strength of the horse the hoofhod power the gallop and trot the barrowbacked Spanish get my goat what a language I had none of that Babel the mauscheln the rabble ratalk the Yiddish Yissish the Hebrew Ivrit the High Slavimaic despite being Auschwitz and Uptown I’m a city person a Yecca a Piefke as they said in Dachau our Sabbath was Sunday with organ and Rindfleisch a German a Goyman like Berlin as much as Vienna a man of the auto not the ass or the Russian I’ve had frankfurters in Hamburg and hamburgers in Frankfurt Français and Yiddish I had to learn Hebrew here in a night class CUNY studying the desertalk also sprach the Urlock after I learned this language say Shakespeare in Kraus’ translation Queens College tutored by a kruller a Kraut with a cup of coffee served atop Chaucer then over lunch would do Talmud a bissele Wissele tick on my own later with a greenhorn in greenjeans a Pollack I bought pastrami for corned-beef with a side of pickle you get it mthafcka you understand that I knew nothing of this Appellwaiting dizzy without roll or furl of schedule the Ordnung the vertiginous Seder this grubby grubber gribnes schmaltz only refinement luxury Jesus we owned a Rubens or was it a Rembrandt a Vermerely it was natural I played the violin on the roof of the piano and took Latin to Greece Kaffeeklatsches mit Kuchen a Bechstein with original bench an imitation Duiffopruggar we owned a first edition of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften kept under glass a snoglobe alongside the traintracks laced under and around the trunk of our Weihnukkabaum we had one of those tinseled too the spring day Fascism began to be spelled with an sch and our Führer won his election even among the voters of the camps as vast as the house six floors high we had dying in here locked in here I can’t don’t remember won’t whoever locked me in maybe myself serves me right Links the instructions the onlyfollowingorders the ordure only the ordersfollowingorders appeals with the lawyers young everyone’s yarmulked younger they don’t know from old workmanship Louis Quatorze was what we had over there L’État c’est moi it’s said the Empire desk a door up on new condo construction sawhorses the kit shelves and the bed just a barracks mattress a kippah on wheels hauled to my room that rents as a studio the brownstone’s black dead middle freezing no windows open only shattered hung with shutters in shards in triangles and stars over Manhattan forgotten on high I’m going going soon to be gone the ball outta the park like they do in the Bronx Uptown the B Train to 145th Street a few Blocks 7away from where I fled to get back to the ghetto never born into London Amsterdam Cologne Coloniabandoned no more of that muddyweed muster the Appell’s core barren eve of Christ’s night into morning this morning Christ’s birthday mine too Shabbos the Sabbath with the ecumenical presents the roaches and rats bowed and candled eight of them so refined so natürlich gemütlicker mein Arsch a bicycle marionette an edition of the Fables of Lessing one year then the next a little book of letters on Arab numismatics by this Reiske whose birthday I shared a luxurious exchange a pursuit of ideas of ideals the always omnilingual chatter of cultured bankers brokers the booms and blasts of their battleship wives the only men among us Mustermenn Clustermen the tumultuous crowd rankling rankless and rowless unnamed and unnumbered the fencefaced barbtoothed and bowlmouthed we owned a flush toilet all two of them one for each kissing cheek the burble of the Rhine the bubbling Rhein Vorder and Hinter the Rijn the Lake Constance summers at Basel I mean the Loregoddamnedlei I survived was in theater and the theater of politics who was the cousin who knew Brecht to survive to the end to mourn Heideggerian I knew a Marion Heidegger once for a hopeful for the Paris Opera mezzo soprano this fall into trapdoor nothingness the void t