The Inspector shifts in the seat and tugs at the hem of his tunic. He lets himself sink back and sideways into a corner, folds his arms across his chest as if he were lazing before a fireplace in a remote country home, waiting for the elderly patriarch of a large clan to continue a holiday fable, something that would act as a bridge between the waking and the sleeping lives.
Langer knows this is another sign. So he turns up the heater a notch and clears his throat, glances at his passenger in the mirror one last time and begins to speak in a lower and more formal voice, saying, “So you wish to know about the Censor?”
There are those who would tell you that the Censor rode to the Sweep sitting on the shredder itself, perched atop the stomach of the thing, his legs and arms wrapped around the inverted rectum of the satyr. In point of fact, it seems much more likely that he rode inside a dilapidated Cathar pickup truck whose doors bore the words and the ornate seal of the city. More likely that as the brigade made its way, as silently as possible, down Namesti Avenue, the Censor of Maisel, a bourgeois and a bureaucrat from all we can gather, was bouncing over the cobblestones of the fifth district toward the heart of the ghetto, his stomach much too distraught from lack of sleep and his newfound authority to possibly feast on the hot flesh and blood of lamb or human.
OFFICIAL VEHICLE
MAISEL DEPARTMENT OF SEWER ROOTING
THIS TRUCK STOPS AT ALL REFUSE CHECKPOINTS
When they arrived at Schiller Avenue, the Reapers began to maneuver the Obliterator into place until it came to rest exactly dead-center in the mouth of the street. Some say the machine was as large as a house itself, but let us face facts — it had to, at very least, be small enough to fit through the lanes that lead to the Schiller. And remember that Maisel is a very old city, not known for the enormity of its avenues. Let us say, then, for the sake of creating an image for you, that it was, perhaps, larger than the average cement mixer but much smaller than any of the tenements in the ghetto. It was bulky and angled and painted the color of rust. It sported stenciled lettering here and there, the words DANGER and WARNING in a faded green. It moved on rotors like a tank. Its rear end was composed of a compressor with metal, snakelike coils spiraling from port to port and funnels, mufflers, gauges, exhaust flutes. Extending toward us from the compressor was a vault, a multichambered middle compartment, what some have called the stomach of the beast. Rising out of the top of this midsection, angled backward, was an enormous chute, an upward sloping head, smooth and glossy like the skull of a sea serpent and culminating in a window which could vomit out an endless jet of microscopic, masticated dust. And finally, the most important component, at the front of the machine, facing, always, its helpless prey, the head, the mouth, the jaws into which an entire tree could be fed like a snake into the gob of a mongoose. The mouth was a tremendous window, a boxlike rectangle, as large, I would guess, as a commercial movie screen. Large enough to run from curbstone to curbstone, effectively blocking the only exit out of Schiller Avenue.
Recessed several feet within the mouth of the machine were the teeth. This is not an appropriate description of the eviscerating mechanism, however. In fact, there were two industrial beaters, enormous revolving drums, like the enlarged steel rolling pins of some demonic, cannibal baker. The drums were fitted with alternating rows of meticulously honed blades and hooks and when engaged they would spin at a tremendously fast rate of speed, instantly pulverizing, atomizing anything fed into the mouth and pulling all remaining minutiae into the belly of the shredder, where jets of gas-fed flames and an acid bath incinerated debris into lighter-than-air ash. Finally, mounted on either side of the mouth were the hydraulic winches, the lips of the dragon.
Can you begin to picture it, Father? Does an image begin to form in your mind?
Near the entrance to the ghetto, the handful of Ezzenes still awake and seated on our stoops, trying to ignore the humid air playing on the skin like fat, slow flies, looked toward this visitation and then looked to one another for explanation, and, finding none, looked back to the machine, this mutant steel calf, this industrial Trojan horse. Some must have known, must have sensed in the intestines, that a decree had been issued. And, as always, it was read to us by a lackey in leather boots and, always, a jaunty cap on his head decorated with a symbol of the authority which the state had vested in the man. He stood in front of all his hardware, dwarfed by this host of inelegant metal, the city trucks so mismatched and bulky they seemed to be frightening and at the same time, equally comical. Cartoon terrors. And the man, the soldier, a petty bureaucrat elevated to warrior by the gutless sadism of more powerful bureaucrats, he appeared comical as well, a vision from the children’s funny papers given flesh and noise. Much later, the rumors spread as to the man’s identity. There was a school of researchers who felt the soldier was a reservist, a dim scapegoat with little understanding of the mission he would be leading. Other, more pragmatic scholars argued that the military protocol of Old Bohemia did not allow for this, that the individual who stood that twilight before the small brigade would have more reasonably been, at very least, a lieutenant colonel. Today, if you linger in Boz Lustig’s tavern, sooner rather than later, you will hear one of our people launch into a discussion of the July Sweep, with the kind of fervor available only to those who were not there, who did not witness the act nor the aftermath, the type of secondary testifier who will never let his outrage affect his appetite or his sleep. And in the course of this discussion, when attention is turned to the individual who read us the decree that ignited the Erasure, they will call him Meyrink. Meyrink, the Censor of Maisel. I do not know where they came across this name. I only know that at this late date it appears to be fixed in time and that it is some sort of joke whose meaning and humor will always elude me.
We stared at this thin, forgettable man holding the silver clipboard. Stared as if this was the transfiguration we had waited thousands of years to receive. And a communal realization broke through the crowd that this vision was not the long-promised redemption from persecution, but the climax of our centuries of fear and betrayal.
Now some will tell you, with absolute certainty, that had we chosen to run at that first moment, instead of standing to listen to our own death sentence, then more of us might have survived. I can only assure you that the people who spout this nonsense never stood in the nauseating heat of the Schiller that night. Never faced down, for the last time, the persistent nightmare of our birthright. Whether the machine began to feast before we listened or after would have made no difference. The results would have been the same.
We watched as Censor Meyrink popped a whistle between his lips and trilled a signal to his staff of sulky young troopers. The squads jumped down from their trucks and scooters and, in teams of twos and threes, dispatched to every front stoop on Schiller until they’d formed a full circle around the avenue. Then, with their guns held at chest level, they began kicking in the nearest tenement doors with their black boots. The visitors stormed into every apartment and woke the residents with orders screamed in a guttural, disgusted bark. When we did not move quickly enough, they would grab us by our hair or our necks and begin to haul us, push and shove us, out the doors and into the street. The elders infuriated them with a lack of speed and understanding and the state’s bullies threw the aged to the floor, kicked and stomped the fragile and decaying bones of our parents and, on one or two occasions, simply took possession of an old Jew’s body, one thug taking the arms and another the legs, and heaved the patriarch like a sack of spoiled, verminridden grain into the road. They made sure to rip open the nightshirts of our young women, fondling them, groping and laughing as they forced the girls into the avenue. They took a special pleasure in terrifying the children, stooping to shout into their ears that the young ones had been very naughty and now their mothers and fathers must suffer for the children’s sins.