No Heroes (12 page)

I didn't let myself go like some people. They got overridden by lice and by pimples. They didn't look like humans. I exchanged one week of bread for a little comb and a mirror. That was my black market. I had it all the time. Nobody else used it. The lice was very bad but I didn't have lice. I cut my hair myself for style a little. And my uniform I make nicer. Always I try to look a little good. I am still very vain.

I tried to help people in little ways. I made dresses from burlap sacks so they look healthy. It was important to look healthy. If not, to the clinic and you die. In camp you want them to think you are healthy. I exchange my potatoes for beets, and I use the beets to rub on my face for color. I look a little better. This I do for the others who aren't so good. Who are maybe a little sick. Beets. It makes good color of the cheek.

After the war I met a woman on the Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn. She is hugging and crying and saying I am an angel. She tells this to Rita. I am not an angel. I did terrible things. I was lucky.

Sometimes I worry if I can pull this off. I leave my writing desk in tears. Will people care that a gentile is writing about the Holocaust? Am I appropriating Jewish material? Am I respectful enough? Why am I doing it in the first place? The questions continue endlessly, the writer's self-torture at three
A.M.
There were no Jews where I grew up. As a kid I thought they were the same as Christians only they went to church on Saturday. I married the first Jew I met.

I remember a local woman whose husband beat her repeatedly for twenty years. He once shot her brother for trying to protect her. After that no one bothered the couple again. He eventually beat her so badly that she was hospitalized for several weeks and he went to prison. The husband was released a broken man, having aged hard in every way. His wife suffered brain damage from his last beating and required significant care. Because neither of them could work, the state sent them a monthly check, a form-of welfare that reminded me of war reparations.

I call Arthur and ask if he has looked into compensation. The subject pisses him off mightily.

“No,” he says. “I have no interest in money from the Germans or the Poles. My wife says take the money and give it to the kids. Let the grandchildren go to college. On what, I ask you? On the lives of their great-grandparents? If a murderer pays me money for killing my brother, it makes me dirty. You pay twenty-five dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars, two hundred fifty thousand dollars—then you're okay. You've paid off your debt. And what after they pay me off? What do I tell my mother and father if I should see them in Heaven? Hi mother, they paid me off. They paid me off! That money is dirty. That money is fricking dirty.

“And Sonny, I know them. They are cheapskates. If they pay me back wages for slave labor, they will charge me room and board for concentration camp.”

The other day a man in the video store reminded me that we knew each other thirty years ago. His name was engraved on a small oval of polished brass attached to his belt near the buckle. The last time I saw Jimmy Joe his hair hung past his shoulders. He played guitar in the county's only rock band, drove a red GTO, and had girlfriends galore.

“Since you left,” Jimmy Joe said, “I got married and divorced three times. Right now I want a wife that runs around on me. That way she ain't bothering me at home.”

“My wife don't bother me much.”

“See there, probably is running around.”

“Think I should ask her?” I said.

“You really want to know if she is?”

“Don't reckon,” I said. “Long as she comes home, it's her life, ain't it.”

“Son, you always was smart.” Jimmy Joe lowered his voice, and glanced rapidly around to ensure privacy. “You want to burn one out back?”

“No,” I said. “Pot doesn't do for me what I want done anymore.”

“That's downheartening,” he said. “What is it you want done, Chris?”

“I don't know. I tried everything and nothing did a good enough job. I quit all of it.”

“Maybe it's you.”

“You're pretty smart, too, Jimmy Joe. What are you up to these days? Still playing guitar? You were the best around.”

“Had to put it down, son. Just gave up on it. Went to barber school and moved to Lexington, but came back home.”

“How come?” I said.

“Too many heads to cut.” loo many:

“Yes, it's a big town and I like to do the same thing over and over. Same job, same heads, same food. Shoot, I'm here renting the same movie for the hundredth time. I'd save money buying it off of them.”

“What movie?”

” Taxi Driver.
Ever seen it?”

“It's a good one,” I said. “You should get
Mean Streets.
Same guy made it. Same actor, too.”

“No, got to rent this one. I love that Bickle, T. That's what it says on the back of his jacket you know—Bickle, T. I got it stenciled on one of mine. I tried to get people to start calling me that, but it didn't work. You can't pick your own nickname. That's one of the rules. You ain't got a cigarette do you?”

“No, I quit.”

“Me, too,” he said. “But I ran out of nerve pills and figured I might as well smoke.”

“You get nervous, Jimmy Joe?”

“As a cliff rat, son. As a cliff rat.”

“I never heard of that kind.”

“Me neither. But any rat that lives on a cliff would be nervous. See how my skin is kindly orange-colored?”

He pulled back his sleeve to show his arm, surprising me with its distinct orange hue. He turned his hands over.

“Palms, too,” he said. “That's what normal skin is supposed to look like, son. It's from taking a lot of carotene. That's why they call carrots carrots, on account of the color. It's supposed to calm you down.”

“I didn't know that.”

“People are starting to get knowledged about it. You know, the Internet and whatnot.”

“You're on the Internet?”

“Why, sure. Best thing that's come in here since town water. That e-mail cooks with gas, don't it.”

“It's all right.”

“All right? I figured you'd be all over that.”

“Well,” I said. “It bugs me sometimes. It's permanent as a letter, but spontaneous as a phone call. It's good to exchange information, but not communication.”

“Son, you ain't changed a bit.”

“Hey,” I said. “You seen Harley around?”

“That's one old boy could use some carotene. I pity the world if Harley gets saved. He'll dry a river out and wear the preacher down. I got to go, son, I can't be dark getting home. Makes me nervous to drive at night.”

“All right,” I said. “See ya.”

He strode away clutching the video. I envied Jimmy Joe for knowing exactly what he wanted—the comfort of familiarity. You can drive five hundred miles in any direction and eat the same food, put the same gas in your car, sleep at the same hotel, watch the same TV show, and admire the same bland print screwed to the wall. Freedom is terrifying.
Taxi Driver
is soothing.

The food dispersed to the prisoners was lousy. Sometimes the soup we got was decent. In the evening you could stand and get coffee. It wasn't really coffee, just black water, but it was hot. They take some corn, roast it, then brew it, and make coffee out of it. You could drink it. It tasted bitter, but it had some nutrients in it.

I am waiting to get coffee in a long line of prisoners standing in front of the kitchen. Naturally the Jewish Police were keeping order, so a guy wouldn't go twice for food. They're walking back and forth with whips, about six feet long, like for animals. Every so often the whip goes over the prisoner's head. Everybody knows that. We are standing and—pow— the end of the whip takes my eye. It came over the back of the head. The tip hit my eye. That's it. I was blind from then on.

The worst thing was being alone.

I was lucky. I was never beaten up. My finger was hit once with a hammer. Just for fun. I was working on something in the paper factory and I put my finger there, and he came and hit me. It broke the finger. It was not that I was punished. He was just playing. The hammer was laying there next to me so he picked it up and hit. I was not physically abused. But I saw killing, a lot of killing.

That was the worst thing.

Two activities that give me genuine happiness are writing alone in a room and walking alone in the woods. In Kentucky I combined them by hiding a series of collapsible camp chairs among the trees. Each morning I walked a different route, moving from one chair to another. I also began writing longhand in small notebooks, exactly as I'd written many years before, recording prolonged journal entries about daily events. I had no plan, no hope, no motive to my writing. It was merely a habit that evolved into a discipline. I tried to write what came to mind. Sometimes I sat for hours without writing a single word.