City of God (22 page)

And so that was my decision. And now each day life seemed more and more tenuous, with the Germans visibly agitated, fearful, and more and more dangerous as the front advanced toward us. One night in my cot I heard what I thought was distant thunder. I looked out the window and saw faint diffusions of light momentarily graying out the starry sky. In the morning Barbanel told me it was artillery I had heard, maybe as close as sixty or seventy miles away.

At this time the work details were suspended and people were no longer marched across the bridge into the city. Smoke no longer rose from the smokestacks of the military plants. Guards were put in place around the entire perimeter of the ghetto. And the escapes contrived by the partisans were no longer possible.

Of course under these conditions my courier runs through the old viaduct were out of the question. I was actually prepared to go one
afternoon when, standing with Barbanel at the open cistern in the stone house, I heard distant German voices coming up from the bowels of the viaduct. “Well that is that,” Barbanel said, and set the cistern cover back in place.

We all knew something dire was about to happen. And soon enough the day came. All at once truckloads of troops were coming across the bridge. I ran for all I was worth to tell them at the council. It was my last mission as a runner. And it didn't matter. The news was blaring out of their loudspeakers in that terrible bureaucratic language of theirs. We were given fifteen minutes to gather our belongings. Soldiers ran down the streets, burst into the houses, clubbing people who didn't move fast enough. Buildings were set afire. All this by the directive of Commandant Schmitz. I couldn't see as much as I could hear. People were screaming, crying out, there was shooting. We were herded into the square. Miss Margolin had two infants in her arms, holding them in wraps with their heads hidden. People were clutching at Dr. Koenig, asking him to do something. The poor man held his head high, his silvered hair lifted in the wind, and he stood there as helpless as the rest of us. Mr. Barbanel I couldn't see anywhere, and then I did see him, walking in the crowd with his arm around an elderly man.

In our entirety we were paraded across the bridge, through the city, to the railroad station. The Lithuanian citizenry watched us from the sidewalks. Some of them laughed, some jeered. Some just went about their business as if it were an ordinary day. In all the confusion and shouting, either in the street, avoiding the rifle butts of the soldiers, or in the railroad depot when I was climbing into the boxcar, I lost my runner's cap with the military brim. But I didn't realize it until the car doors were swung shut and the bolts were slammed into place and we were there in the blackness. I was furious that I could not lift my arms to see if the cap was still on my head, although I knew that it wasn't. I had seen some people I knew climb into the same car, but I didn't know where Mr. Barbanel was, whether he was in the car, too, or Greta Margolin or Dr. Koenig or any one of the other boys. The car lurched and began to move. People were wailing, calling out, Where are you? to one another in the darkness, demanding to know what was going on, what was the meaning of this outrage. But I knew the meaning. I was locked up in a boxcar in a long train of boxcars of the
packed standing and swaying living dead. And I was the star runner no longer.

—Pem hits Park Avenue and finds a new doorman. Young Hispanic who gravely goes to the house phone. . .

My home once. Ten rooms on a high floor which somehow never had any sunlight.

Hiya, poopsie.

I haven't much time, Pem. What is it you want?

My clothes.

Thank goodness.

Not everything, my blazer, some ties and shirts. A carry-on.

I'd like all your things out of here.

So, the monsieur with whom you are forging your fate? He is to arrive then?

That's none of your business.

Sincerely, Trish, he is a very lucky
homme.

And of course you want some money.

If that is what is in your heart, my child.

She takes one of those long lady numbers from the cigarette box on the credenza. In truth she has added poundage, Trish. A bit hippy now, though still elegant. Holds the arm of the cigarette hand at the elbow. Pale blue strand of smoke rises past the Vlaminck flowers.

My father says you haven't answered his letter.

Going back to the bedrooms: I will, Trish. Really I will.

It must surely have been intimacy if I can't remember it.

—What do we mean to say when we say. . .
even if all the possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all?
So that if Mr. Einstein himself were to come to the successful end of all his experiments, if all his brilliant physics were carried to the triumphant end and he was not destined like the Moses of science to die
before reaching that Promised Land. . . we would still be left just where we started?

So,
bitte,
what is our problem? Not the nature of the universe, therefore, but. . . what? The mind in consideration of itself? The self that proposes the world is everything that is, but finds itself excluded from that proposition? The I or self that can theoretically ascertain everything about the world except who and what it itself is—as the subject of its own thinking? Where can it be found? Where is it located? No more can be said on its behalf than that it is merely a presumption of the faculty of language, a syntactical conceit. It is the grammatical observation of the state of affairs it calls the world. If it stops constructing propositions, if it ceases to map the factual relations of the world with language, in what way can it be known to exist? Yet at the same time there is no world apart from the I's discernment, is there? All of us, the multitudinous selves who are mere phantom presumptions of language, no more than that, nevertheless contain all the experience of the world. I look for an appropriate image: the mirrors of a giant fun house from which there is no exit? Utterances echoing one over another forever down a bottomless cistern? But these are insufficient, being spatial. Consciousness is not in space, it does not exist in space, nor when it thinks of itself is its depth dimensional to any number it can conceive. Yet everything that exists, exists through us in the formulations of our world-containing selves.

So that is the problem, the solipsistic consciousness without which there is no world yet which is itself filled to its limits with the world and therefore unable to step outside the world to see itself in it. By this paradox I propose a merger of the real world that exists apart from my perception of it and the world that cannot exist except for my mind's perception of it. And since I grant you too the rule of this solipsistic kingdom of everything that is the case, we then have the paradox in three dimensions of what might be called democratic solipsism, each of us exclusive total ruler of the world that depends on our mind for existence. . . and none of us able to discernibly exist except as subject of others' consciousness.

Admittedly, this is a strange and seemingly self-contradictory idea coming from the Wittgenstein who would strip from philosophy all its meaningless metaphysical nonsense.

Yet I know you Americans obsess about God. And by my language game I am trying to tell you something very simple: Perhaps the most poetic description of our tormented human consciousness that is of, yet not in, the world is found in the term
original sin.

As I said in my
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. . .
speaking of the idea of the immortality of the human soul. . .

6.4312.
Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies
outside
space and time. . .

6.44.
Not
how
the world is, is the mystical but
that
it is. . .

6.52.
We feel that even if
all possible
scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

Parenthetically, I ask you to remember please that this was a very young man's work, written mostly on the front lines with the Austrian army during World War I, where I had requested combat duty hoping for death. The pages on which I wrote were smeared with mud and the pencil shook in my fist. The light of Very flares and shellbursts let me see what I was writing. Under fire, I became terrified as an animal but in the midst of my trembling I defined courage as, and took it in, the conviction that one's true world-creating, world-created soul. . . is finally inviolable by circumstance.

—Author's Bio

Everett appears as a small boy child

In the lying-in hospital no bigger than a brownstone

on the corner of Mt. Eden Avenue and Morris Avenue

the borough of the Bronx, the city of New York in the year 19–.

I was a breech baby, the first of many difficulties

I gave my mother, Ruth, a resolute woman, a gifted pianist

who had at a much earlier age fallen in love with a dreamer

Her original experience of the difficult race of men,

an impetuous ensign-in-training at the Webb Naval Academy on the Harlem River

my father, Ben, who in the First World War would leap over the fence

and break into the army canteen where my mother was serving coffee and doughnuts

to the doughboys, and risk death in the wrong white uniform

to see to it that nobody interfered with her.

This was romance, though of a distracted kind

and to a pattern established earlier, when they were in high school together.

He would see her going out in the evening with some boy

to have some ice cream while the sky was still a sunlit blue over the darkened trees of Crotona Park

and come over to them, who had not asked her out himself,

and threaten the boy with chin-to-chin pugnacity

if he did not treat my mother Ruth with respect

thus ruining the date, casting a pall over her evening

with his impertinent proprietary attitude

There in the Bronx in the early part of the century

when the streets were wide and new and the trees were young in the parks

and the red brick granite-trimmed apartment houses with their small courtyards
were clean and redemptive

for the immigrant families who had managed to escape the wretched tenements of the Lower East Side,

And such courtship as was waged by Ben my father

was not yet construed as the bio-behavioral imperative to distribute his genes

Though of course Ruth married him and he did,

To my brother, Ronald, appearing in 19–

And to me eight and a half years later

a year of the Great Depression when not that many children could be afforded

least of all to Ben and Ruth,

and, I think now, to another child somewhere between us