A Change of Skin (60 page)

“Thank you, sir, thank you. I would never have ventured to put it quite so myself, but you are right. Let me tell you something. When I was very young, like all of us I was a believer. But the faith that I had sucked in with my mother's milk merely returned to me a clear reflection of my deformity, for our faith is a mirror that reflects ourselves, it is a shadow we cast, one that follows us so persistently that we can escape it only by great effort. Faith makes us, therefore, place our reliance and even our very being upon the fundament of appearances, and takes its conviction not from the invisible but precisely from what is always seen. And for me, obviously, such dependency would have been fatal. For a time I consoled myself with the thought that perhaps I had been chosen for a miracle of transfiguration. But eventually I came to the end of my patience and decided to renounce entirely the possibility that some day I might be a guest at a wedding where there would be only water and I would turn it into wine. I abandoned my childhood faith, in exchange for knowledge. And I discovered then that knowledge is secret, that it has two faces, one of which, twisted and deformed perhaps as my body or perhaps as strong and beautiful as my hands, has been kept hidden by what we call civilization since the very beginning of what we call civilization. That therefore knowledge asks questions that cannot be answered, for half of existence is denied it, unless it descends into the buried world where the truth of creation is yet to be found, even after so many centuries. It was a surprising discovery, young sir. It changed my whole life.”

“A contagious discovery, Herr Urs. When Ulrich and I went to your room, we felt ourselves surrounded by something infectious that we could neither touch nor name.”

“Freedom, young sir, simply courageous human freedom. The freedom of the committed and dedicated rebel, which someday will infect the entire world.” My little man moved his fingers rapidly, delicately, as if he were playing a piano. “Full liberty induces sickness in us, of course, for we have always believed that we are healthy only when our liberty is limited.”

“You weren't free, none of you, goddamn you!” Jakob shouts at Boston Boy or maybe at the manikin on my knee or maybe at myself, I am not sure which. “You were slaves! You were Germans, Germans! Phantoms hunting across the wasteland armed with the asinine jawbones of a sheep Volk!”

“Ach,” the little man smiles sadly, “why are your friends always so raucous? Things are not quite so simple as he seems to think. I suggest that you avoid most firmly the road that he has chosen. One must keep in mind, after all, that there are certain risks which if we dare to hazard them lead to reward far greater than any wealth. I left my works hanging in the room where I died, my only gift to the world, the sum and meaning of all my days, yet without the slightest expectation that they would be greeted by applause. The idea of triumphant success was altogether foreign to me. Do you believe that I wanted to evangelize the world, tempt it, bribe it, convert it? Oh, no, no, never, my young friend. I never offered youth a change of soul, nor did I suggest to the cities of the desert that they abandon their obeisant servility. I believe, quite the contrary, that everything that survives feasts eventually, when the opportune moment comes, upon the fruits of its tenacity. My triumph was not, is not in the noisy world but far from it, alien and isolated. My freedom is precisely my isolation and my victory is to hold myself apart, identifying with no one and with nothing except, perhaps, nothingness itself. I am, so to speak, young sir, a dark star that wanders along through the darkness of space casting invisible light upon those who are far away and bathed in the stolid sun, contaminating them, infecting them, as you so aptly put it. If I should allow myself to be touched by other lives, to mix and fuse into their mass, I would instantly cease to be who I am. I can tempt only because no one can recognize me. I die the moment I am discovered moving through this emotional chaos with which men comfort themselves for their misery and console themselves for my apartness. For I have done what none of them has ever dared to do. And no one knows, nor will I tell, whether my punishment may not be my reward.”

White Rabbit slowly advances in her glistening brocade robes, her hair mussed and her eyes vacant. As she passes Jakob, he stops and holds her. “No, Jeanne. Don't go near him.”

My little man stretches out his beautiful hands. “She need not come near me. I laugh at distance, my friend.” I make his small fingers caress the satin of his dressing gown. “Ah,” he says softly to White Rabbit. “So we meet again.”

“Jeanne. Jeanne.” Jakob seems shaken by confusion. He searches for words while the little man on my knee polishes his tiny fingernails on the quilted silk lapels of his dressing gown. “Jeanne,” Jakob says finally, “don't be afraid of your visions. Love your menstruation and your seizures, Jeanne, your orgasms give you life and health. I swear that, Jeanne. And they give life and health to me, too. Don't feel ashamed. Don't be afraid. Don't run away to that false world of words that can be mastered so easily. What is hard, Jeanne, is to master the real, damned, unfortunate world of horrible shame and silence and defeat et cetera.”

White Rabbit advances and touches the blue pagoda and dragons of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke's red dressing gown. She lets her fingers touch, and she stands motionless. Jakob does not dare move either. But he speaks to her, softly, earnestly: “Don't believe their lies, Jeanne. No poet is a prophet of torture. No philosophy proclaims the justice of murder. They speak of evil, Jeanne, so that we may see it before us and accept it as part of life so that we will corrupt ourselves with it, Jeanne, and in our isolation from each other it may overcome us. Jeanne, don't let yourself be defeated, my love. Neither your body nor your thought will be evil if you let yourself love, if you touch and let yourself be touched. He's afraid, Jeanne. Always remember that he is afraid. He doesn't want life to come near him. He wants to save himself alone. Alone and through the evidences of death that offer him his illusion of being…”

“My dear young sir!” Herr Urs says politely. “Everything is permitted, after all.” Jeanne steps back from him with an expression of loathing and falls upon the floor twisted, strangled, vomiting out the testicles of goats and devils transformed into hairy worms. Jakob covers her vomit with one hand. “Yes,” he replies to the little man on my knee, “all life is permitted. But not death. Not death!” Jeanne laughs and groans and her heart beats wildly and she trembles from head to foot. With a certain difficulty, my little man crosses his legs.

“Heresie, Treeson, Wytchcrafte, Belial, True Libertee, Namon, Bludthyrstee, Homicide,” cries White Rabbit, the tormented nun. She clutches her sumptuous robes and asks us to throw her into the river. She writhes on the floor murmuring “Fyre, Sulfure, Darkness, and a most Abominable Stink.” Jakob holds her in his arms and makes himself part of her convulsion. He puts his lips to her clenched teeth and whispers, “No, Jeanne, not you and I. Your suffering will be a chance for greatness. You and I shall struggle against ourselves, Jeanne. We'll try and fail and try again and fail again, and go on to the end of all the ancient contradictions in order to live and repeal them, ridding ourselves of our old skin and exchanging it for the fresh new skin of the new contradictions, those that will await us then. We shall struggle alone, without hurting others, neither faces nor crosses, neither heads nor tails, neither eagles nor suns.”

“I fear that won't suffice, young man. No, it will never be enough. You will be forgiven much too easily. What I suggest is that you do what can never be forgiven. Only so do you make it worthwhile to humiliate yourself seeking redemption.”

“A man doesn't need victims merely to abandon solitude,” Jakob whispers in White Rabbit's ear. She murmurs the simple words of childhood: “Mother? Father? Papa? Juanita? Vacation? Vacation?” She points her finger at the little man on my knee. At seated blond Boston Boy. Now, her fist closing, at the window. By the movement of her body she begs the window to come nearer and offer her, though she has lost the strength to speak, an opportunity to flee. Jakob caresses her gently. “Don't give up, Jeanne. He says that his power is in his isolation, but he must have victims to escape solitude. Believe in me, Jeanne. Believe what I tell you. We shall oppose his collective violence with our individual violence. We shall make history with our lives so that he cannot make history with our deaths.”

The little man laughs. “There will always be a power, an order, an enthusiasm that will permit me to win my converts. How foolish people are, with their drums and bands, their flags and parades. So raucous, so raucous. Bah, who needs a black shirt? It's enough to wear mere flannels. Caesar needs no disguise. He is Caesar, and he knows it. If he is mistaken for the plebe in the street, all the better. He can melt into the mass on the street, then, and invisibly attain what he seeks. And I shall be at his side.”

“We will be fallen masters, but our own masters,” Jakob whispers, turning White Rabbit's face tenderly between his hands. “Constant pain and great happiness we will have. I promise you only that.” “But I don't feel anything, Jakob,” she replies. “There are sores on my nipples but I don't feel them. I don't feel the fire burning my feet, or the nails in my palms…”

“Pah, promises, indeed,” the little man chuckles. “From afar I shall tempt you to abandon every promise you have ever made. Come to me. I too am eternal.”

“I hear music,” Boston Boy interrupts.

“Be quiet, my young friend. Listen to it and enjoy it and keep quiet.”

“I see light falling around us.”

“Idiot, you see nothing of the kind. No one is talking to you.”

“Herr Urs, you have told me of my temptations. My homeland. My blood, my imagination and my memory, even my love. Tell me … No, excuse me. That's the master of ceremonies' line.”

“Fool, imbecile, you have no right to ask questions now. You have been condemned.”

“I? And what of you, who infected me?”

“As he has infected every servile bellhop who stands in the lobby of every hotel awaiting his precious tip,” pronounces Judge Morgana, advancing.

“As he has infected every teenage Fascist who stands, disguised as a Tyrolean youth or a Bavarian maiden, on the German frontier with a fistful of shuttlecocks that he throws at passing cars in order to preserve the memory of Germany's greatness and the hope that she will be great again, that the little map of Germany today will become once again the map of Germany's vast dream.” Jakob holds White Rabbit tight in his arms. “Tell me,” he says to her softly, “where was your home?”

“In Holland, sir. Father. John. Vacation. We will take the train and go on a long vacation.”

“And you?” to Morgana.

“From beyond the Oder, sir. We had traveled south, also by train, to Czechoslovakia, and as I was getting down from the truck that took us to the fortress, I dropped my doll and its head broke. I remember I cried. Someone touched my head.”

“And you?” to Rose Ass.

“Bratislava, on the Danube. I can hardly remember it. I was a child. The dogs were howling. It was cold. They undressed us and separated us and someone made a bitter joke, Arbeit Macht Kalt.”

“And I? I the son of Hanna Werner who died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in October 1944? I, her son Jakob, who at the age of two weeks was sent from Terezin to Treblinka? And you, the rest of you, the chorus of the children's opera at Theresienstadt, didn't you admire the efficiency and dedication of your captors? Weren't you pleased by the excellent construction of your prisons? Didn't you feel warm and protected by your guards' fanatic attention to the least detail? Could you ever point accusingly to the slightest want of foresight, to the slightest frivolity in the treatment you received? My God, what did you want? To live in a cell built by Franz Jellinek was to be safer than on a Lufthansa flight.”

“Bah!” snorts Herr Urs. “The ghetto has contaminated all of you. And the infection of the ghetto is real infection.” His hands are out of my control now. They touch the keyboard of an invisible piano, trip off grotesque fluttering arpeggios, strike violent chords, tap a sentimental melody. “Neurosis was born in the ghetto. By fear out of ridicule.” He stares at his fingernails and becomes silent Tired-eyed White Rabbit, sitting now beside the fireplace, exhausted but serene, wrapped like a magician in her opulent robes, finally looks at him neither afraid nor attracted:

“No. You don't understand anything. The ghetto taught us that nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever resolved. Everything has to be lived and relived and relived, over and over, again and again.”

“Yes. You may be right.” The little man on my knee is becoming every moment softer, yet more rigid, between my supporting hands. “Just once, only once, my dear friends, I myself lost my calm patience and succumbed to the temptation to live life over again.” I set him down on the floor and his legs double under him like rags. “Pride blinded me. Just once, to be sure, yet that was enough. Before that I had lived with true humility. But that one time, having flesh, I was weak. I wanted an immediate demonstration of my powers. I betrayed my role, which ought to have been one of simple, steadfast waiting. The role of pride so strong it could survive by itself alone, supported by no act, by nothing.” I raise his arms over his head and make him walk, feebly, tottering, an infant of twelve or thirteen months, toward the trunk. “I decided to take the chance. To die simply that I might return to life on the third day and prove who I was, that there was at least one other Savior, not merely one.” I lead him to the trunk and wrap him in the red silk coverlet. “And on the third day, I did indeed rise. I came out of the refrigerator and took some pills and went back to my room and covered myself with my sheet, my face with a pillow. And waited. And now … Gute Nacht, meine Herren und Damen. Ich muss Caligari werden. Ich muss nach Hause gehen.” I cover the yellow face of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke with a little cloak.