22

The expectation that the human race might be destroyed by its disappointed Gods as a punishment for mean and murderous madness of the sort that Professor Joseph Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum documents daily has been superseded by the horrifying possibility that the species may be rewarded for its follies instead, with citations for crime, awards for cruelty, and medals for madness.

During the same week that Professor Joseph Skizzen was preparing his final lectures on Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, the newspapers were carrying reports concerning a celebrated Israeli rabbi who had, at last, solved the greatest theological question presented to the faithful by the Holocaust—namely, why? and six million times why? why? why? … why?

There will be no Judgment Day until we undertake to celebrate it. There was a why for Jews, of course: what had their people done to breach the Covenant so utterly and so reprehensively as to deserve annihilation? There was also a why to trouble Christians unless they could forget that German Catholics and German Lutherans had murdered all those German Jews; unless they could somehow reconcile God’s bloodlust with their own thirst by viewing the Almighty’s malevolence as carte blanche to give heretics and Christ killers what they surely deserved—a punishment long in coming and therefore most acceptable. There should be a similar why put to the followers of Islam about Allah, the One and Only God, because to single out Jews to exterminate, as he obviously had, particularly Polish and German ones among countless equally deserving Spanish, Russian, or American specimens, not to mention oodles of additional infidels of all sorts, is … well … odd … Was Allah merely miming the Christian God Almighty, already an epic anti-Semite? The consequences were especially unexpected because the remnants wound up unwanted on the doorstep of the Palestinians—not, one would think, a result in Allah’s plans. No one has seemed similarly concerned that Joseph Stalin murdered many more millions than Adolf Hitler (Professor Skizzen had ample documentation stuck to flypaper in the south dormers). He had finally decided that the reason for this (apart from left-wing reluctance and unremitting Jewish propaganda) was the absence of an organized state campaign against a specific racial target. In any case, what were all these deities—G-d, Jehovah, and Allah—allegedly up to while their minions were slaying even one soul not to say massacring so many? because they were all responsible, weren’t they (those Gods, that is, that existed)? since their power and their wisdom were such decided particularities of their nature like our height and brain size; they were the culprits, surely, weren’t they? these Notables of the Sky? if not for turning on the gas directly, at least for closing their ears to the hiss, turning their backs to the passing trains, washing their hands lest they be stained, taking a snooze through repeated beatings … yes, every one of those Gods … silent bystanders to innumerable shooting parties held till the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like potatoes, and all that human consciousness, all that awareness—in each victim the very candle of the Lord, it was always said, the very Light asked for at creation—was snuffed … ah yes … snuffed … snuffed … —so that’s what the smoke was.

But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children’s plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls as if they’d pushed the water over by themselves.

Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. “I won’t interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won’t prevent the crucifixion of the Savior.” The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another’s figurative throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment for the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind …? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creeps. His father’s plight had been desperate indeed, for where could one go, really, to stay clean—worse, who could one be to be tolerable?

Many have wondered whether man would survive the catastrophes to come; one alone worried that some just might.

Joseph Skizzen decided that given the constraints of the rabbi’s beliefs his reasoning was ingenious if not otherwise acceptable. Clearly, God had to be absolved. It was not he but Hitler who had to be horrible. Theodicy had excused many of the sufferings of the Jews by insisting that Yahweh was using the enemies of the Chosen as a rod to punish them for irresolution and waywardness. So that part of the explanation was ready-made. Then the rabbi simply borrowed a strategy devised by the wisdom of the East so he could conveniently claim that these persecuted, executed Jews had been previously alive and had died once before. They had been recalled to life by God in order that they might be punished—on account of sins committed in former times—in the hell our world would become for the occasion. It was to be, not the Last, but an Intermediate, Judgment. No doubt the ordeals of the countless slain would be cautionary and contribute to the perfection of the world, an aim of every righteous Jew.

The rabbi was sternly urged to reconsider his suggestion, and, to Joseph Skizzen’s disappointment, he rapidly did so, though with what recalcitrance was not reported. Surely the Holocaust victims did not deserve their fate. This was an objection most effectively aimed. That the rabbi’s solution required a resurrection in the midlife of the world was not an issue for the papers and was not reported, though it might have been raised. Surely theologically prepped reporters would have said that these Jews had been transmigrated, cleverly inserted into unsuspecting wombs by many an innocent but impetuous penis. After all, rotten karma had already humiliated, maimed, impoverished, killed the populations of the world many times by the ring of the bell towers. Professor Skizzen certainly approved of the idea that birth was our first punishment, and that there would most certainly be others. Camp guards who had lost their lives to old age were even now being readied for victimization on future killing grounds.

When Joseph Skizzen’s scissors had saved these hypotheses for his museum, they almost immediately encountered other, less theoretical, more painfully real catastrophes: in the Union of South Africa, Sri Lanka, Serbia, and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Palestine, in Rwanda, Colombia, and the Congo, the criminal consequence of tribal animosities of every kind and degree of virulence, in India, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, in Bosnia, Croatia, Turkey, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Timor, in whatever they were presently calling Burma or Siam, in Somalia, Fiji, Chechnya, Ireland, Algeria, and Zaire … which, Joseph knew, was only to begin strife’s roll call, and without the solace of an ending.

With all our ironies under lock and key, Joseph thought, might we not find a way to praise this rabbinical folly; indeed, we could return to Erasmus himself and read how “man’s mind is much more taken with appearances than with reality. This can be easily and surely tested by going to church.” But Erasmus does not let the philosophers off either.

They “are reverenced for their beards and the fur on their gowns. They announce that they alone are wise, and that the rest of men are only passing shadows. Their folly is a pleasant one. They frame countless worlds, and measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as with thumb and line. They unhesitatingly explain the causes of lightning, winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable things. One would think that they had access to the secrets of nature, who is the maker of all things, or that they had just come from a council of the gods. Actually, nature laughs uproariously at them all the time.” Yet it is not easy to find a funny bone in a charnel house. In the country of the mind there are calamities, not of the same kind, but equally worthy of our distress. The slaughter of reason is as regular as that of cows at an abattoir. This extraordinary human gift—the ability to think—is rarely used to recommend a calm and caring life, or even to find a just harmony among the needs of men. It appeared to Professor Skizzen, now, that reason was no more than an instrument of human appetites, the way our teeth and tummies are, precisely as some philosophers had suggested (though he had at first resisted them). The intellect was not the Columbus of ideal ends, the designer of legitimate aims, or the motivator of moral action. Instead, when it was not busy making money or in the inventive service of military might, or creating calcifying conveniences and debilitating amusements, it was being begged to justify envy’s slanders, spite’s pettiness, resentment’s cruelty, power’s enjoyment, and greed’s greed, or asked to excuse lying, ineptitude, or brazenly manipulative ideologies, and sent to the aid of gross indifference or fashioned as a shield against pity, and support for a mercilessness exceeding any our boiling pots have for their lobsters or our guns for their game.

Each one of us shall perish. That is the good news. Our race, however, may survive. That is the bad news. Those who have perished will be beyond suffering and will not mind. That is the good news. Those who live later will care quite a lot about living and pay a great price for their desire. That is the bad news. The race shall survive for there are greater calamities to come. To die like flies is not how the flies will put it.

The first movement of Webern’s symphony is followed by a second that is a candrizans of the first. Maybe that is how it will be. From Adam to Armageddon and back again. At the end of the world two humans will be left—so to say, standing—evE (whose palidromic name is perfect for the part), and madA, whose spelling is not so felicitous), and they shall live in a valley between mountains of slag and hills of reeking corpses, at first fully uniformed with passion aplenty to rape one another turn and turn about, and, only at the last orgasmic gasp, buck naked, sated, and ignorant as worms.

It occurred to Professor Skizzen that the problem with his sentence was: it wasn’t a full twelve-tone row. What really obsessed him was the perpetual variation of a single idea that so perfectly suited music based on twelve tones.

First I felt mankind must perish; then I feared it might not.

Not quite. The right number of words, but he had repeated “I.” How predictable. But he admired the m’s and f’s. Terse. To the point. Direct. Like a blow. Modest if it weren’t for the pronoun. Semicolon though?

First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might not.

He had a feeling of great relief before he wondered what he might do with his wayward thoughts if he had no sentence to focus on. Would they dwell upon his coming confrontation and his almost certain ouster from the college? He needed to practice. He was rusty. His fingers were like stuck keys. When had he eaten last? Something green from the garden that Miriam must have mislaid. In F-sharp. No. There was no longer any key. Was “not” too unstressed for an end that was—well—another beginning?

First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might survive.

But were the “he” and “Skizzen” tones sufficiently distinct? As far as that goes, were “mankind” and “it”? Pronouns were merely pseudonyms trying to be names. He had gotten close, but the sentence’s purity was not complete. It was not pure enough for Webern. Webern, who loved purity and order as much as the Führer did. The Inhumanity Museum was not pure because you would always find, in the neglected corners of these accounts, some helpless decency; and the evidence was not really ordered, only gathered in randomly disposed bunches and hung upside down like drying plants. Anton von Webern, he told his students, believed that the musical world his forefathers knew had dissolved and that a new order was necessary, one that would not tolerate cracks where weeds might grow. Wagner, who pushed tonality as far as Liszt would lead him, died, Kinder, in what year? a show of hands? Ai … In 1883, in the moment, I like to think, that Anton von Webern appeared. Tonality was kaputt. Adherence to the twelve-tone row was salvation.

Or so it seemed to Anton, since he got along quite well in the Vienna of the Nazis, where he taught (for a pittance) until the Americans began to bomb it; where he had his exquisite short works performed (to minuscule audiences); and where prizes (involving no money) were pinned to his chest like a general’s medals. He was a von Webern, a German patriot, his soul grew as the territories of the state did; he dreamed, as did the Führer, of lands lapping at both oceans and admired the purity of some races. The frowns of the authorities and neglect by everyone else eventually silenced the sound of his music, yet his person and his position seemed safe. Ah, mein Klasse, reality is not a twelve-tone row, reality is a sly trickster, a Münchhausen, a femme fatale; because this mild mystical man, Anton Webern, this master of the minute, this Moses of the new commandments, he had a son-in-law, how could he help it? his daughter was not a violin, so (he thought) to prove to herself that she was not one of Daddy’s instruments she married a cheapjack scoundrel, a man who, after the war, traded on the black market not like an ordinary person wanting a bit of butter but like an entrepreneur, making more money than his eyes could understand, buying this stocking, selling that cigarette, what could Anton Webern, good quiet agreeable follower of the Führer, do? anyway the war was over, order was everywhere disgraced, and the composer himself, fleeing American bombs, did I not say? had come to live with his daughter south of Salzburg, a city you, mein Klasse, should know admirable things about—and do you know any? show hands … ai … it’s awful how you are; and there, in this little town of Mittersill, having dined with his daughter, her children, and this grievous mistake-making son-out-law, Webern went considerately to the porch for a smoke—a postprandial cigar—you will have read, heard, a cigarette, no no, a large cigar—and instead stepped into an ambush set by American soldiers for a black marketer who happened to be the very husband Anton’s daughter had chosen to hurt the composer—you will have heard, you will have read, that there was a curfew Anton inadvertently violated, not at all, nonsense, and did he look brainy out there like Arnold Schoenberg? or willowy, beautiful, like Alban Berg? what a name, eh? Alban Berg! Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, what names! no, he was a stoopy muddy-booted peasant who had a hangdog habit, very misleading, but just such a habit of hanging the dog nevertheless. The cigar did not glint, perhaps nothing glinted in the deepening dusk, perhaps it glowed, there was a gesture, a sudden turn, particulars are suspiciously lacking, and some GI, some Greedy Impulse, shot him dead when he turned with a pistol perceived to be in his hand, and this great man of minimal music died as if executed enjoying his last smoke, a picture that may be responsible for the cigarette it is said—you may have heard—he lit up.

Like fog, the professor liked to thicken his Viennese aura by addressing his class from time to time as mein Klasse or to employ unfamiliar word orders. This might remind you—no, of course not, it will not remind you, it reminds me—of another victim of horrible happenstance, one Bruno Schulz—you have had an acquaintance heretofore? how many hands? It was Skizzen’s habit to ask such a question—how many hands?—and he continued to do so more determinedly after he learned that the campus called him Professor Namedrop, because it didn’t hurt his enrollments to be a college character. Moreover, a few students were happy to make the acquaintance of some of these folks on whose behalf he called for a show of hands, as though he were arresting the answers, and even the scoffers loved the stories that followed the unrecognizable name in his lectures—incidents often full of gore and general calamity. They didn’t mind being convicted of ignorance. Had every hand gone up, what would the professor have done with his anticipated and mock disappointment? ai … that no one had ever heard of the creature in question, ai … or knew anything about its name: the person some lout had shot, some loose lady had betrayed, some poet bitten by one of his own rhymes, some thinker clubbed by a thuggish thought.

Skizzen was also overly fond of the cute, riddling, or trick question. Do you know what the letters SS stand for? They stand for the Schoenberg/Stravinsky polarity. They stand for the opposition of the German musical tradition to Frenchified Russki danceatune music. Grinning, the professor would leave it at that—for the nonce.

So, Bruno Schulz—you wonder what is the connection?—he was a writer and a draftsman after all, not a musician—so you should wonder at my claim to relevance. He wrote great Polish prose. He drew nudes—you naughties would like that. One of his drawings depicts a dwarfish man and a hurdy-gurdy—that exhausts his relationship to music. As far as we know. And how far do we know? Anyhow, Schulz is another example of what happens to greatness in this world of ours. Like Webern—shot as a dark marketer by some stupid corn-fed pop-singing assassin who at least had the decency to drink himself to death during the years that followed, from guilt, we may like to imagine. Only the Pole’s case was worse and more so. It happened—Schulz’s life—the lesson of his life, our lesson for today—it happened in Drohobycz which was a small provincial town like Webern’s Mittersill, but located in Galicia, not Austria—you know where is Galicia? nah, no hands—well, it is now the western Ukraine, a region also rich in composers, artists, scholars, and oh yes influential Jews including the founder of Hasidism, a movement of which you know? how many? show hands? nein? with a name like Bruno sewn on him you’d never think … of Jews. They slid slowly away from their faith, the Schulz family, in evidence of which I cite Bruno’s mother, who changed her name from Hendel to Henrietta, though what would be the use? what? well, I spare you Schulz’s low-level life, except he wrote wonders, pictured domineering women, drew men down around the women’s ankles like sagging socks.

Misfortune would not leave Bruno Schulz alone. Early in World War One—eh? … many hands for World War One …? six, twelve … congratulations … his house and the family store were burned, as they say, to the basement. In the middle of the thirties, his brother-in-law suddenly died, and Schulz became responsible for the welfare of a bereft sister, son, and cousin. But let us skip the merely syrupy third movement to enjoy the finale. In 1939 Poland is eaten by the two hogs wallowing in their sties nearby. The Nazis devoured the eastern half, and the Reds swallowed what was left in the west, including a little morsel called Drohobycz. This annexation ended Schulz’s publishing career, as meager as it was, for the Soviet Union specialized in propaganda and hero worship, neither of which our writer had any talent for. Two years passed—one wonders how—and the hammer and sickle was raised to affront the dawn and claim ownership of each dismal day.

Then the Nazis invaded Russia and the Huns came. They were far worse for the Jews than the Reds had been because the Gestapo sat behind the city’s desks and made dangerous its streets and corners. Among these minions was a man with a murderous past, a man alas from Vienna, a man named Felix Landau … one of many but one to remember … Happy Landau … called by some Franz, more acceptably German, Franz is … well … how fluid names were, then as now—people, places, identities, owners—no matter … whether Franz or Felix he was a man who eliminated Jews the way he moved his bowels. For a slice of bread and a bowl of soup, Bruno Schulz painted the walls of this art lover’s villa, including the nursery … Landau had commandeered the house from another Jew … it was later known as the Villa Landau, isn’t that—as you say—a hoot … and there he had multiplied himself, imagine … now his son had a room with a crib and a wall full of happy Felix-like scenes from the brothers Grimm … actually a princess, a horse-drawn carriage (Schulz had done a lot of those), two dwarfs (a lot of misshapen souls as well) … anyway, do not let the nursery be a surprise, they always do this—barbarians do—they go forth, they occupy, they consume, they multiply. Moreover, Felix bragged among his thuggish friends about the talented little slave who colored walls for him, a miserable painter who must have wondered what it meant to be actually a submissive man rather than a dreamed and drawn one.

Political criminals require accomplices—their power is based upon obedience, obedience upon dependency, upon bribes, threats, promises, rewards—consequently: so that his sister might live, Schulz acquiesced; so that her son would survive, Schulz said sir; so that a cousin could continue, Schulz kowtowed; and so that Schulz should gain a brief reprieve for himself as well, he took care to please his captor with his painting. On walls stolen from a Jew, another Jew depicted reassuring fairy scenes for the child of a man who murdered Jews and thereby earned a smidge of notoriety; moreover a man who, not as merely an afterthought, had a nice family he considerately looked after. Meanwhile, the Polish underground had not been idle. They provided the highly valued Bruno Schulz with forged documents designed to facilitate his escape from Galicia. He was to become an Aryan. His papers so described him. He was to leave Drohobycz, where he was known, and hide away someplace—someplace elsewhere—in the guise of a person of good blood and docile character who would therefore not write or draw or dream of washing a woman’s feet. Meanwhile, a German officer—a genuine Nazi, too, another Gestapo goon, with his Luger handy at his hip, a man whose name we know as Karl Günther—unlike the GI whom the Americans hid in anonymity—had grown envious of Landau’s gifted lackey, and, during a roundup of leftover Jews on November 19, 1942, shot Schulz in the head while he was bearing home a loaf of bread.

I have heard it said: All dead are identical. Do not choose but one to mourn. Broken toys are broken toys, and useless legs aren’t legs.

Thus Bruno Schulz—born an Austrian, raised a Pole, and about to become a Gentile—though a freethinker—died a Jew. Shot in the street. Who, do you suppose, picked up, dusted, carried off, broke, greased, ate his loaf of bread? Hands? Hands now. Please show.

Cassandras have been misunderstood. They bring good news. That is why they are not believed. It is the liars who promise us salvation. We believe them.