Strange Wine (30 page)

There was a soft bubbling sound from the dying thing that had been the pronger, Berne, and then silence in the charnel house.

Silence, despite the continued howling of 26 Krystabel Parsons. The sounds she made were so overwhelming, so gigantic, so inhuman, that they became like the ticking of a clock in a silent room, the thrum of power in a sleeping city. Unheard.

Verna heard it all, but had no idea what had happened. She dropped to her knees, and crawled toward what she thought was the iris. She touched something wet and pulpy with the fingertips of her left hand. She kept crawling. She touched something still-warm but unmoving with the fingertips of her right hand, and felt along the thing till she came to hands imbedded in soft, rubbery ruin. To her right she could faintly hear the sound of something humming, and she knew the sound: an e-scalpel, still slicing, even when it could do no more damage.

Then she had crawled to an opening, and she felt with her hands and it seemed to be a bin, a large bin, with its door open. She crawled inside and curled up, and pulled the door closed behind her, and lay there quietly.

And not much later there was the sound of movement in the operating room as others who had been detained for reasons Verna would never know, came and lifted 26 Krystabel Parsons, and carried her away, still howling like a dog, howling more intensely as she saw each new person, knowing eventually she would see the thing she feared seeing the most. The reflection of herself as she would be in the moment of her dying; and knowing she would still be sane enough to understand and appreciate it.

From extreme long shot, establishing; trucking in to medium shot, it looks like this:

Viewed through the tracking devices of PIX’s port authority clearance security system, the Long Drive vessel sits in its pit, then slowly begins to rise out of its berth. White mist, or possibly steam, or possibly ionized fog billows out of the pit as the vessel leaves. The great ship rises toward the sky as we move in steadily on it. We continue forward, angle tilting up to hold the Long Driver in medium shot, then a fast zoom in on the glowing hide of the ship, and dissolve through to a medium shot, establishing the interior.

Everyone is comfortable. Everyone is watching the planet Earth drop away like a stained-glass window through a trapdoor. The fisheye-lens of the stateroom iris shows WorldsEnd and PIX and the polar emptiness and the mottled ball of the decaying Earth as they whirl away into the darkness.

Everyone sees. They see the ship around them, they see one another, they see the pages of the books they read, and they see the visions of their hopes for good things at the end of this voyage. They all see.

Moving in on one passenger, we see she is blind. She sits with her body formally erect, her hands at her sides. She wears her clothing well, and apart from the dark smudges that show beneath the edge of the stylish opaque band covering her eyes, she is a remarkably attractive woman. Into tight closeup. And we see that much of her grace and attractiveness comes from the sense of overwhelming peace and containment her features convey.

Hold the closeup as we study her face, and marvel at how relaxed she seems. We must pity her, because we know that blindness, not being able to see, is a terrible curse. And we decide she must be a remarkable woman to have reconciled such a tragic state with continued existence.

We think that if we were denied sight, we would certainly commit suicide. As the darkness of the universe surrounds the vessel bound for other places.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, 1790

Another thing that disturbs me about the rise of illiteracy in this country: Readers, the few who remain, have had their intellectual taste bastardized so systematically that for many people there is an inability to read anything subtler than one of those dreary gothic novels or something by Harold Robbins. “Quick reads” such as
Jaws
and
Oliver’s Story
become the level at which readers can grasp entertainment. Indirection, careful omission of explicits, subtlety go by the boards.

I’ve found more and more frequently these days that even fairly intelligent people reading good books come to the end of a story with a quizzical expression on their faces. Unless they have been told with nailed-down precision that John dies in the fire and Joan marries Bernice and the secret message in the codex was that we are all alien property, many readers have no idea what the point of the story might have been.

Such has been the case with the short story you are about to read. It demands knowledge of a well-known historical fact. A common fact that every immigrant to this country before 1955 knew as well as…well, as well as his own name. I suppose I could say that this story is about the guilt of the survivor and
tell
you the fact you need to know…but I won’t.

I won’t, because I think if you care enough to want to know what this story says (and it says something about which I care passionately), then you will ask your Lithuanian grandmother or your Russian uncle or your Polish grandpoppa. Or anyone who went through the horror of World War II in Europe.

And perhaps the quote below will help, or at least alarm you. God, I hope so, otherwise we’re in deep trouble.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana,
The Life of Reason

The demitasse cup of thick, sludgy espresso stopped midway between the saucer and Patrick Fenton’s slightly parted lips. His arm froze and he felt cold; as if beads of fever-sweat covered his forehead. He stared past his luncheon companions, across the tiny French restaurant, through the front window that faced onto East 56th Street, eyes widened; as the old man strode by outside.

“Jesus Christ!” he said, almost whispering in wonder.

“What’s the matter?” Damon said, looking worried.

Fenton’s hand began to shake. He set the cup down very carefully. Damon continued to stare at him with concern. Then Katherine perceived the luncheon had come to a halt and she looked back and forth between them. “What’s happening?”

Fenton pulled his napkin off his lap and wiped his upper lip. “I can’t believe what I just saw. It couldn’t be.”

Damon shoved his plate away and leaned forward. He had been the only one Fenton had communicated with during the month in the hospital; they were good friends. “Tell me.”

“Forget it. I didn’t see it.”

Katherine was getting impatient. “I don’t think it’s nice to play these nasty little word games. Just because I’m facing the kitchen and you’re not, is no reason to taunt me. What
did
you see, Pat?”

Fenton sipped water. He took a long pause, then said, “I was a clerk at the Nuremberg trials in forty-six. You know. There was an officer, an
Oberstleutnant
. Johann Hagen. He was in charge of the mass grave digging detail at Bergen-Belsen. He did things to women and small boys with a pickax. He was hung in June of 1946. I was there. I saw him hang.”

Damon stared across at his old friend. Fenton was in his early sixties, almost bald now, and he had been sick. “Take it easy, Pat.”

“I just saw him walk past that window.”

They stared at him for a moment. Damon cleared his throat, moved his coffee cup, cleared his throat again. Katherine continued chewing and looked at each of them without speaking. Finally, when the light failed to fade from Fenton’s eyes, she said, “You must be mistaken.”

He spoke softly, without argument. “I’m not mistaken. You don’t see a man hang and ever forget his face.”

Damon laid a hand on Fenton’s wrist. “Take it easy. It’s getting dark. A resemblance, that’s all.”

“No.”

They sat that way for a long time, and Fenton continued to stare out the window. Finally, he started to speak, but the words caught in his throat. He gasped and moaned softly. His eyes widened at something seen outside on the sidewalk. Damon turned with difficulty–he was an extremely fat man, a successful attorney–and looked out the window.

Katherine turned and looked. The street was thronged with late afternoon crowds hurrying to get inside before the darkness that promised rain could envelop them. “What now?” she said.

“Another one,” Fenton said. “Another one. Dear God, what’s happening…?”

“What do you mean: another one?”

“Katherine,” Damon said snappishly, “shut up. Pat, what was it?”

Fenton was holding himself, arms wrapped around his body like a straitjacket. “Kreichbaum.” He said the name the way an internist would say
inoperable
. “From Treblinka. They shot him in forty-five. A monster; bonfires, furnaces, fire was his medium. They shot him.”

“Yes? And…?” Katherine let the question hang.

“He just walked by that window, going toward Fifth Avenue.”

“Pat, you’ve got to stop this,” Damon said.

Fenton just stared, saying nothing. Then, after a moment, he moaned again. They didn’t turn, they just watched him. “Kupsch,” he said. Softly, very softly. And after a few seconds, he said, “Stackmann.” Shadows deepened in the little French restaurant. They were the only ones left dining, and their food had grown as cold as the tablecloths. “Oh, God,” Fenton said, “Rademacher.”

Then he leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair, and screamed, “What kind of street
is
this?!”

Damon tried to reach across to touch him, to get him to sit down, but Fenton was spiraling toward hysteria. “What kind of day is this, where am I? They’re dead, all of them! They went to the gallows or the wall thirty years ago. I was a young man, I saw it, all of it…what’s happening here today?”

They tried to stop him as he pushed past them and ran out into the street.

It was almost totally dark now, even in late afternoon. As though charcoal dust had been softly sifted down over the city. Crowds moved past him, jostling him. Only the pale purple glow of the dead Nazi war criminals who walked slowly past him provided illumination.

He saw them all, one by one, as they walked past, strolling in both directions, free as the air, saying nothing, hands empty, wearing good shoes.

He tried to grab one of them, Wichmann, as he came by. But the tall, dark-haired Nazi shrugged him off, smiled at the yellow armband Fenton wore, smiled at the six-pointed star on the armband, and shoved past, walking free.

“Changed at Ellis Island!” Fenton screamed at Wichmann’s retreating back. “I had nothing to do with it!”

Then he saw the purple glow beginning to form around him.

The street became night.

A dear man who wrote under the name “H. H. Hollis” died in a Houston hospital a week or two ago as I write this. The wife of a good friend of mine, a young woman, very young, went in for an exploratory and they opened her up and took a look and closed her up again and just shook their heads. She’ll not be with us long. So young, and talented. Joe Oles’s son had happen to him what happened to Willis Kaw’s son in this story. It’s what they mean when they say a “
real
tragedy.” A guy I’ve known for over twenty years hit a snowy patch on a Michigan road last December and missed missing a telephone pole by less than a foot. It cost him his life.

There’s a scene out of a Kerouac novel in which a guy goes to visit a famous poet, and he asks him, “What’s it all about? What’s the secret of life, man? Is there an answer?”

And the poet thinks about it for a moment, and purses his lips in contemplation–because that’s a big one–and he goes to the window and looks out at the city. And finally he turns around and says, “You know, there’s an awful lot of bastards out there.”

I’ll be
damned
if I can make any sense out of life. It gets more complex the longer I keep breathing. And everything I thought I knew for sure keeps coming up for grabs, keeps changing and shifting like one of those oil-seep toys you can buy that change color and shape from moment to moment depending on how you hold it. Most of the time it seems to be an insane universe, filled with pain. Then, every once in a bit, some moment of joy or love or true friendship presents itself, and you get the strength to maintain, to go on a little longer.

Maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maintaining.

Hell, I don’t know. Maybe there
is
a better life. And maybe
this
is the better life. What a pisser
that’d
be!

“Only a few go mad.

The sky moves in its whiteness

Like the withered hand of an old king.

God shall not forget us.

Who made the sky knows of our love.”

Kenneth Patchen, “The Snow is Deep on the Ground”

“The story of the one-legged messenger is that his other leg is walking on the far side of death. ‘What seems to be over there?’ they ask him. ‘Just emptiness?’ ‘No,’ he says. ‘Something before that, with no name.’”

W. S. Merwin, “Nothing Began as It Is”

Two whipcord-lean California highway patrolmen supported Willis Kaw between them, leading him from the cruiser to the blanket-covered shape in the middle of the Pacific Coast Highway. The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket. He heard one of the onlookers say, “She was thrown all that way, oh it’s awful,” and he didn’t want them to show him his daughter.

But he had to make the identification, and one of the cops held him securely as the other went to one knee and pulled back the blanket. He recognized the jade pendant he had given her for graduation. It was all he recognized.