For as nice as Miss Moss had been to him, helpful and generous with her time, she was nevertheless a ghost with gloves and her own fake skin, wrinkled as though it had gone years without pressing, her animosities running about in her like disturbed ants. Joey now regretted changing Madame Mieux into a German. She had lost a lot in the move, and he was reconsidering the point of her presence. Good heavens, he had forgotten her new name as a Frau. Hilda something. That wouldn’t do.
Some of his stories seemed to suit the self that Joseph was fashioning right from the beginning. He remembered the plotlines, the highlights, the deft amusing touches without any difficulty, but other features slipped away in the very moment they were being introduced. As his trees bore fruit he decided he should not let the flesh fatten too far from the core. “Swell to a green pulp,” wasn’t that Miss Moss’s expression? When he had listed his age on his new license, he had added five years, no more, which would give him a little time in Graz or Vienna, the latter a larger presence, a more resounding destination, a better birthplace. Consequently, that flight to London, like the other Joseph’s to Egypt, could be made more graphically perilous and prolonged.
Unfortunately, he also remembered the indistinct document, now carefully hidden away in a closet, that registered his birth in London, and upon which one of his palms was printed, or — no — it was a tiny foot. A footprint. No one need know about it. That path was safely covered. On the other hand, if he wanted to follow some official format when he made out a new one and became born again (as the students at Augs used to say when they had managed to memorize a particularly salient Lutheran fact), he had better dig it out and take another look. His mother would try to monitor everything, and she would not be pleased to think he was altering the date of his birth. Well, this fresher forgery was a problem that, because of the card Miss Moss had made for him, could afford to wait for an opportune time.
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for mean and murderous madness of the sort that Professor Joseph Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum documents daily has been superseded by the horrifying possibility that the species may be rewarded for its follies instead, with citations for crime, awards for cruelty, and medals for madness.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.