City of God (24 page)

But my father's thoughts at this time, I will venture, were as follows:

his mother, his father, his sweetheart Ruth,

his sister Sophie, his sister Mollie and, not to make him less human than he was,

the French girl in the coastal town of Villedieu who had come to draw water from the well
in the square where he sat with his mates under the awning of the Café Terrasse de la Gare drinking white wine and eating bread and cheese.

But what exactly do you think when you think of someone?

You don't think in photographs, you don't think in flashbacks, as the movies claim
(what else can they do?)

You may see a gesture that fades before it appears leaving only a sense of its fidelity

If you hear a voice it is a sample, barely realized more like the sound of a moral nature.

The thought of someone is a not quite visualized and almost inaudible
presence in your mind
—perhaps not even in your mind—

of your own assembled affections

an order of sensations very much your own,

like a wordless song you sing to yourself

or a fervent prayer you do not bring to speech

in praise of the unutterable specificity of character.

The thought of his mother, Ben felt as his own irrepressible adoration of her

His little Mama, whom he loved to tease and dance around the kitchen

till whatever wrong thing he had done was washed away in her laughter.

His quiet Papa, slender and straight, with a head of fine white hair
and the cheekbones of the Siberian steppes

was his own intellectual formation
the assumptions he wasn't aware of as assumptions that proposed the questions he was likely to ask.

His sweetheart Ruth was his longing for life the form of his aching loneliness

The American beauty
who stood like the Statue of Liberty in his mind

Steadfast, loyal, Manhattan-born, like himself,

configured as the promise of the new world,

and supersedent of the historical disaster that was Europe

that his immigrant parents had despaired of

and where he lay pressed against the near trench wall

with an army of Huns hurdling over his prostrate form.

This should have been the final moment of our family's European connection

when, the advance having gone past him, supporting enemy troops

came scuttling down the trenches looking for living Allies they could kill

Food, boots, ammunition they could salvage,

and my father, hearing them in the adjoining angle of the zigzagged trench

summoned up a last remembrance of the old world Yiddish

he'd heard in his childhood on Stanton Street—

a Germanic dialect to hush and soften and make melodic

that language of expectorated shrapnel—

And shouted from cupped hands, re-Prussianed, he hoped, an order to the approaching soldiers
to stop their goddamn malingering

and move out before he had their asses court-martialed, or words to that effect,

Which they did to his astonishment. And then he lay

against the other trench wall as a few minutes later the Huns leapt over in retreat,

a counterattack having been mounted which would by midnight leave everything as it had been before

except of course for the thousands of fresh corpses,

a fact my father understood when, roused up by the Limeys and the Frogs,

he climbed over the top and ran forward, bayonet poised into the littered sulfurous hell
of No-Man's-Land

a maniac animal scream issuing from him

while his mind quietly assured him that the true soul

is finally left inviolable by circumstance.

—Perhaps the first songs were lullabies. Perhaps mothers were the first singers. Perhaps they learned to soothe their squirming simian babes by imitating the sounds of moving water, the gurgles, cascades, plashes, puddlings, flows, floods, spurts, spills, gushes, laps, and sucks. Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs.

There is the endless delight we take in new beings. . . and there is the antediluvian rage they evoke by their blind, screaming, shitting, and pissing helplessness. So the songs for them are two-faced, lulling in the gentle maternal voice but viciously surrealistic in the words. Rock a bye, baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all.. . . Imagine falling through a tree, your legs locked and your arms tightly bound to your sides. Imagine falling down into the world with your little head bongoing against the boughs and the twigs, and branches whipping across your ears as if you were a xylophone. Imagine being born. Lullabies urge us to go to sleep at the same time they enact for us the terror of waking. In this way we learn for our own sake the immanence in all feelings of their opposite. The Bible, too, speaks of this as the Fall.

—Things Noah Would Have to Have Two Of:
Dung beetles. Absolutely essential. Let's see. . . forty days and nights of rain plus a hundred and fifty of swollen waters. . . all together about six and a third months on board living with camels, horses, lions, jackals, wild asses, goats, sheep, hedgehogs, boars, meerkats, caracals, wolves, warthogs, jerboas. . . hmmm. You would know better than to shovel that stuff overboard, when the waters receded you would need topsoil. Still, that's lots of work for just two dung beetles, even in their generations. Better make it four.

—And, Jesus Christ, the desert! the sun so hot, all that sucking swamp of after-flood, great placental slides of steaming slime, quagmires, concaving basins bubbling at their drain, lakes turning sodden with all their suffocating, swimming creatures flipping and flailing to fossilized death, schools of dead fish carpeting the earth, the soil drying, caking, cracking, the footage firming, and all that after-flood baking away into a merciless desert strewn with boulders, channeled with wadis, and with multitudes of bacterial creatures self-inventing in the ferment of rotting fish scale: this is the native terrain of all of us, the spiritual source, not on the white Arctic wastes of ice did the genius for religion assert itself, but here, on the plains of worn-to-microcrystal quartz blowing about under the sun into pebbly dustdevils and sandstorms that blackened the sky, all of it dictating a culture of nomadic herding, cloaks, and veiled head clothing. Forty days for Jesus in the desert—what is it about the number forty?—Moses and Elias too had been out there for their forty, and all of them, bag and baggage, the Habirus wandering around for forty years, the hot Saharan sand in their mouths, the sun of the Negev, the red rock, with the sandstone cliffs scoured into discs and altar stones, pinnacles and fluted columns, and the pathetic little water holes oased from the rocks, every one of God's company coming down to drink and eat of the dates. . . our spiritual home, each rock an oven to bake bread, a terrain covering more of the earth than Europe, a geological mirror of the dark breathless bottom of the briny sea, with its own stock of adaptables, naturally. . . its brine shrimp whose eggs could live dormant in the clay for years between rains, its sandmites and toads, its darling beetles and jewel wasps, scorpions and locusts, beady-eyed snakes and horned toads and frilled lizards, its desert rats, sandfish, skinks and moles and fennec foxes. And every one of these brainless adaptors knowing to stay out of the midday sun, burrow in the sand, nest at the root of the cactus, and wait for evening to hunt for food, trap their prey or crunch it in their mandibles or sting it to death, or for the early morning to let the dew roll down their crustaceous backs into their scummy mouths, lots of company for Christ in the desert with maybe the owl at night hooting from the highest transom of the mountain cave with a brown spiny mouse trembling in its
talons.

—I was squeezed tight against the sealed door, inhaling the historic odors in the wood of hay, of hide, and with my lips pressed to a thin plane of slatted air of the ordinary, indifferent earth outside.

The plane of air was heated by light, cooled by the darkness, and so I was able to count off the days and nights. I detected the first light of dawn by a changing sensation on my tongue. I could occasionally hear something as well, such as the lowing of a cow at dusk, distant and almost indistinct amid the moans and prayers of the people around me.

Since the catastrophe was ours alone, it did not impinge on the traditional practices of railroad transport. Periodically the train was shunted to a sidetrack and left to sit there hour after hour, deaf to all our importunings and cries of despair, or it would creep forward, but then drift backward to stop in the silence of the impassive night, only to be suddenly on its way, creaking and shuddering through the switches, back on track, where it would clump along like some dumb and dogged beast of the Mitteleuropa peasantry.

We were one boxcar of a long train of boxcars of the packed standing and swaying, living and dying and stiffened dead. Each car was the traditional, standard carriage for freight, seven-point-one meters in length, three and three-quarter meters wide, with a battened roof slightly saddled for runoff, and set on a steel chassis with four flanged Krupp Steelwork wheels at European track gauge, and with coupling mechanisms front and back. A common sight, absurdly homely, top-heavy things, their wooden sides painted rust or olive green, weathered links of them waiting in every train yard of the continent, or grinding and rattling through the countryside, through villages at three in the morning under a cold moon, shivering, banging away in the sweeps of wind coming off the wide valleys, these commonest transports for the businesses of nations arousing the lean, visibly ribbed dogs of the villages to run alongside, and yelp and leap into the air and snap their jaws at the stench in their nostrils.

After the first or second day I began to gnaw on the slot in the siding through which I breathed the outside air or, as I thought, the wide expanse, as far as the horizon, beyond it, infinitely extending, of destinies not of this train. I had no purpose in mind, it merely seemed
reasonable to mouth the hard wood hour after hour without stopping, except of course when I passed out and slept. When I was fortunate enough to have an actual splinter come away in my mouth, I chewed it for food. For water I had one night the wind-driven rain, like cold needles on the tip of my tongue. As I worked away, I found myself listening to the clacking wheels, applying rhythms to them, making up songs in my head to go with the rhythms, but somehow these songs were in my mother's voice, or my father's, and the voices were really more in the nature of evanescent images of my mother and father, and the images more like fleeting sensations of their beings, momentary apperceptions of their moral natures, which caused me to call out, as if they could be brought to resolution as my whole real mother and father. For my trouble I found myself returned to the mindless incessant clacking of the train wheels. I reasoned that if I could gnaw an opening large enough to climb through, they would be happy to greet me, these flange wheels that would flip me along one to the other and end my life sharply and cleanly.