A Man Lies Dreaming (37 page)

Masturbated last night on my bunk thinking of Isabella Rubinstein.

Ship’s Journal, 27th November 1939

Approaching Gibraltar. The air feels warmer. Spain on our left, Morocco on our right. Tangier. Made me think of Leni and whether she ever finished making her film. It all seems very distant now. A strange day, the mood subdued. Towards lunchtime I took a constitutional on board deck and, skirting a pile of thick rope lying quite dangerously in my path, I thought I saw a face I knew. It was only for a moment, across the crowded deck, so I could have been mistaken.

I hope for both our sakes I was!

Ship’s Journal, 28th November 1939

… ‘I thought it was you,’ he said.

The Mediterranean. Weather continues to grow warm and rather pleasant. Crossed Gibraltar around midnight. I was on deck, at the stern. A clear night, black-blue with a myriad of stars.

Soft footsteps. I had been anticipating them. I turned, affected a smile. ‘Morhaim,’ I said, with loathing.

‘Wolf.’

We stood regarding each other in silence. The deck quiet, we were obscured by upright pipes, carrying the stench of the sleepers down below.

‘So,’ I said, at last.

‘I won’t ask how you made it on board,’ he said. ‘Or, in God’s name, why!’

‘Why are
you
here?’ I said. He gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘Where else would I go?’ he said. ‘My country has been devoured by vultures.’

I shrugged. ‘We’ve all got problems, Morhaim.’

‘You shit. Tell me something,
Wolf
. Did you kill them?’

‘Who?’

‘The girls.’

‘You know damn well I didn’t!’

‘How many people
did
you kill?’ he said, softly. ‘How many
would
you have killed, had you been elected to office?’

‘You want to play what-ifs, Morhaim?’ I said. ‘You Jews spend far too much time in your own imagination.’

He laughed. ‘Us Jews,’ he said. I did not like his tone, or what he was implying.

‘So?’ I said, again. ‘
Nu
? What do you want,
Inspector
?’

‘Do you know who did it?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘Some boy.’

‘What happened to him?’

I didn’t say anything and he laughed again. I don’t think there was any real joy in his laughter. It was as if he had forgotten how to laugh. I looked at him and saw only a bitter, tired old Jew. He had no power any more.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

He had a gun. It was aimed at me. I remember the night; it was so clear and, for a moment, quiet. A lone seagull flew in a parabola overhead. ‘Give me one reason why not.’

My hand edged to the small of my back. ‘I’ll give you two,’ I said.

Ship’s Journal, 29th November 1939

Wonderful weather! Passing Sardinia. Hebrew word of the day is
sof
, meaning ending. Also
aliyah
, which means the immigration of the Jews to Palestine. Played cards, lost two shillings. I am beginning to smell – we all do. In the latrines an argument over who is a Jew, some suggestion not everyone on board may be kosher. ‘Easy way to tell,’ I said. Pissing against the wall in a row, we all had a good laugh. I looked at my Jew dick in my hand almost in affection.

Read Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
. Have read better, by worse.

Ship’s Journal, 30th November 1939

Listened to the BBC World Service on the radio in the afternoon. Disturbing news. Third assassination attempt on now-PM Oswald Mosley: a bomb hidden in Number 10. There is no confirmation yet if Mosley is dead or alive. Not that I care, much. Mutterings on board, concern for those Jews left in England – we lucky few represent but a small fraction of the whole.

Taurus
keeps apace but the
Salvador
is flagging behind. Past Sicily, approaching Greece. Weather is balmy. Hebrew word of the day is
ley’da
, meaning birth.

Ship’s Journal, 1st December 1939

Greece. A lot of small and rather pleasant-looking islands. We are heading towards Cyprus. Heard on the wireless that Mosley is in critical condition in hospital. Palestinian terrorists sought in connection with the bombing. A cheer on the deck. Saw the ITO man, Goodman, talking intensely to a woman who bore a strikingly familiar face.

‘A Jewish woman sought in connection with the bombing worked as a maid at Number 10 under an assumed identity. The police appeal to the public …’

Went past Goodman and the girl. She had a humourless face, her father’s cruelty. I smiled at her politely and doffed my hat as I walked past, with the sense of an ending. ‘Judith,’ I said.

‘Do I know you?’

‘No,’ I said, and walked away.

Hebrew word of the day is
machaneh
, meaning camp.

Ship’s Journal, 2nd December 1939

Skirted Cyprus. Palestine full steam ahead.

…

Opening and closing doors Shomer tumbles through half-worlds and fraction-worlds, ‘No, this isn’t it,’ falling down trapdoors and out through endless corridors, ‘No, this isn’t it, either,’ for how long he cannot tell, for there is no time here, where there is no space, until:

He opens the door and steps onto a beach. The sand is yellow, coarse. Dust fills the sky. The air is humid, warm, scented with citrus trees and late blooming jasmine. On the horizon the first star appears: Venus, which in Hebrew is called
Noga
, meaning light.

The night is quiet, peaceful. He looks up, to the darkening sky, as more stars come into being overhead. And for a moment it seems to him a woman and two children hover there, outlined in light, and that they’re waving: but he can’t be sure and in another moment they’re gone.

The sea is calm. In the distance, the lights of a town. Shomer stands still, breathes in this wondrous air. ‘This must be it,’ he says to Yenkl; but Yenkl is no longer with him.

Shomer stands on the shore of that sea on that ancient land and looks out over the water. He sees a ship gliding into safe harbour as the sun fades in the east.

He stands there like a man suspended. Or, perhaps, like a man released.

…

The
Exodus
arrived in Jaffa as the sun was setting. They waited on board ship until officials came. An argument broke out. On the shore people gathered, waiting for them. At last something was decided, small boats came towards them in a fleet, shouts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German and English, a scramble to get off, along the wharves sacks filled with oranges awaiting export, stamped
Jaffa
.

On the shore they formed again into queues and there again waited their turn with the officials. The man waited in line meekly. When it was his turn he handed over his documentation and after careful examination a stamp was placed on the page. The man smiled his thanks.

‘Welcome to Palestine,’ the official said.

…

In that other time and place, the camp prepares to wake for another day of work and death. Beyond the walls, perhaps, the war continues. There is a rumour that the Red Army is advancing on the camp, intent on liberation, but will it be today, tomorrow, in an hour, in a year? The camp prepares for waking as it has done every day, in every block the inmates rise preparing for inspection. The prisoners rise but for the ones who had expired in the night. Slowly they shuffle, these skeletal men. Ka-Tzetnik wrote of Auschwitz, ‘It was another planet’, but later in life he went back on himself. ‘
Auschwitz was not created by the devil,’ he wrote, ‘but by men, like you, or me.
’

…

In the morning they came for Shomer, but Shomer wasn’t there.

THE END

In 1888, the leading Yiddish novelist Sholem Aleichem launched an extraordinary attack on the
shund
writer whose pen name was, simply, Shomer. This remarkable document
, Shomers Mishpet
(‘Shomer’s Trial’), ran to many pages, and categorised Shomer’s writing as being ‘ignorantly composed, poorly constructed, highly repetitious [and] morally bankrupt’.

Why Sholem Aleichem – the leading writer of his time – should feel the need to launch such a bitter attack on a humble purveyor of
shund
, or pulp fiction, is perhaps a mystery. Whatever the cause, Shomer – at the time a prolific author of hundreds of novels and plays – is now all but unknown, while Sholem Aleichem’s place in literature remains assured.

This Shomer died, peacefully, in New York City in 1905. Thankfully, he never saw the Holocaust that was about to erupt some three decades later.

How does one write the Holocaust? In
Chapter 8
, two prisoners briefly discuss that question. Prisoner 174517 is, of course, Primo Levi, whose
If This Is A Man
(1947) remains one of the defining works of Holocaust literature. His ‘opponent’, prisoner 135633, wrote under the name Ka-Tzetnik (a word which means ‘concentration camp inmate’), including the infamous novel
House of Dolls
, which first described the Nazi ‘Joy Divisions’, or camp brothels where women were kept as sexual slaves. Where Levi is cool and dignified, Ka-Tzetnik burns with the clear-eyed madness of a
shund
writer. His books were ‘often lurid novel-memoirs, works that shock the reader with grotesque scenes of torture, perverse sexuality, and cannibalism,’ noted David Mikics in
Tablet
magazine, adding: ‘
House of Dolls
is, unavoidably, Holocaust porn.’

During the 1920s, Adolf Hitler used the
nom de guerre
of ‘Wolf’ (‘Adolf’ means, literally, ‘Noble Wolf’). Though countless books have been written about him, so much yet remains uncertain, shrouded in rumour and misinformation and propaganda. Certainly, it seems clear that he was an abused child; that his experience as a runner in the First World War led to that extraordinary scene (described in
Chapter 10
) where his blindness was seemingly cured by the psychiatrist, Edmund Forster; and that, though women were powerfully attracted to him, his relationship with them was far from simple.

Kershaw, in his vast, two-volume biography of Hitler, is surprisingly reticent about the question of Hitler’s sexuality. While discussing the experiences recounted by Hitler’s friend August ‘Gustl’ Kubizek (in
Adolf Hitler, My Childhood Friend
, published in 1951), Kershaw concludes that ‘Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gave way to sordid sadomasochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies.’

Indeed, in their highly entertaining and scurrilously gossipy
Hitler and Women
, Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting note that ‘Investigating the private life and sexual inclinations of Adolf Hitler has been like trying to work one’s way through an Elizabethan maze built on a tidal mudflat.’ They go on, however, to discuss Hitler’s ‘copulation business’ with some considerable, if often suspect, detail.

Many erstwhile Nazis weave their way through this novel. Of these, Josef Kramer (
Chapter 2
) was a ruthless concentration camp guard who was eventually put in charge of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and later became the commandant of the Bergen-Belsen death camp. He was executed by hanging after the war.

Ilse Koch (
Chapter 2
) was known as ‘The Beast of Buchenwald’. She was notorious for acts of violence and sadism against prisoners, and was accused of taking mementos off the corpses of her victims – including using their skin to make lampshades. She committed suicide in prison in 1967. She was also the inspiration behind the ‘classic’ Nazisploitation film
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
and its sequels.

Klaus Barbie (
Chapter 6
) was known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, where he was the head of the local Gestapo. He was known for torturing prisoners, including the use of electroshock and severe sexual abuse. Some prisoners were skinned alive. He was behind the deportation of some 14,000 Jews to the death camps. After the war, Barbie worked for American intelligence in its battle against communism. He emigrated to South America, and while there it was rumoured he was behind the eventual capture and murder of the revolutionary Che Guevara. He was finally extradited to France in 1983, and was convicted for war crimes in 1987. He died in prison.