Erasure (9 page)

It’s 1933 and Ernst Barlach is cracking his knuckles while the cup of tea on the table in front of him cools. “My hands hurt so much these days,” he says.

Paul Klee nods, sips his tea. He is saddened himself. He has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. “They are calling me a Siberian Jew.”

“Who is? Das Schwarze Korps?”

“Who else? And they are burning any books which contain pictures of our work. They call me a Slavic lunatic.”

“They’re correct about both of us.”

Ernst laughs.

Eckhart: You know I have a novel, Adolf.

Hitler: Do tell, Dietrich.

Eckhart: I call it
The Morning.
The main character is essentially myself. The character is an unrecognized literary genius wbo is addicted, but manages quite well the sweet gift of morphine.

Hitler: I hope it is as powerful as your volume of poems. Such anguish and sheer beauty those verses offer the reader.

Eckhart: It irks me no end that the whole of my recognition rests on the translation of that damn Norwegian. I actually hate
Peer Gynt.

Hitler: Oh, but how you transformed it. Now, it speaks to the German soul. That is why it is so popular with the people. And what the work led you to, your patriotic writings and how you’ve unveiled the Jews for what they are. I will fight the trolls with you.

Eckhart: They will destroy German culture if we let them.

Hitler: Then we will not let them.

Eckhart: I am
ein Judenfresser.

Hitler: Me, too.

Eckhart: I can’t believe we lost the war. These pamphlets of mine however will show our people why we lost and that the enemy we sbould fear most was not in the trenches.

Hitler: What is this one called?

Eckhart: I call this one
Judaism in and out of Us.

Hitler: I liked
Austria under Judah’s Star.

Eckhart: Everyone seemed to like that one. I sent
This is the Jew
to a professor and he sent it back to me with a note telling me it is full of hate. So, I wrote back. I wrote, “It is said that the German schoolmaster won the war of 1866. The professor of 1914 lost the World War.”

Hitler: You told him.

Eckhart: I have an idea for a newspaper, a weekly that I plan to call,
Auf gut Deutsch.
And I have been thinking. You should join the Thule Society.

Hitler: I am already a member.

Eckhart: Shall we recite the motto together?

Hitler and Eckhart:
Remember that you are German. Keep your blood pure.

Somehow these notes for a novel came to me on my flight back to Los Angeles. The faces of those nuts in front of my sister’s clinic served as inspiration. But I must admit to a profound fascination with Hitler’s relationship to art and how he so reminded me of so many of the artistic purists I had come to know. But those faces, washed with hate and fear, wanting so badly to control others, their potato eyes so vacant, their mouths near frothing. I could still hear them calling my sister a murderer. Their voices had the scratch of overuse, like the twisting of metal.

On the plane I read a review in the
Atlantic Monthly
or
Harpers
of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ runaway bestseller
We’s Lives In Da Ghetto:

Juanita Mae Jenkins has written a masterpiece of African American literature. One can actually hear the voices of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black America.

The story begins with Sharonda F’rinda Johnson who lives the typical Black life in an unnamed ghetto in America. Sharonda is fifteen and pregnant with her third child, by a third father. She lives with her drug addict mother and her mentally deficient, basketball playing brother Juneboy. When Juneboy is killed in a driveby by a rival gang, the bullet passing through his cherished Michael Jordon autographed basketball, Sharonda watches her mother’s wailing grief and decides she must have some voice in the culture.

Sharonda becomes a hooker to make enough money to take dance classes at the community center. In tap class, her athletic prowess is noticed by the producer of a Broadway show and she is discovered. She rises to the top, buys her mother a house, but her limitations catch up with her and she comes plummeting back to earth.

The twists and turns of the novel are fascinating, but the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude. The ghetto is painted in all its exotic wonder. Predators prowl, innocents are eaten. But the novel is finally not dark, as we leave the story, with Sharonda trying to raise enough money to get her babies back from the state. Sharonda, finally, is the epitome of the black matriarchal symbol of strength.

“Is something wrong?” the woman seated beside me asked.

It was raining when I arrived in Los Angeles. A real Southern California rain, which washed away hillsides and homes, flooded parts of Newport and Long Beach and backed up traffic on every freeway. I found that I was restless during my drive home, not because of the sea of unmoving tail-lights in front of me, and not because of my having two more weeks of the semester left to teach, but because something was gnawing at me. I didn’t know what it was; I had seen or heard something that struck me as wrong. I let it go; what else could I do? I finally made it to Santa Monica and my house, where I brushed my teeth, not so hard, as per instructions of the dentist, through his hygienist, as I never got to see the big man himself, but just hard enough to interrupt the formation of the plaque that was eating me away from the inside, and went to bed. My head on my pillow, I had a dream. First, of my father telling me the stories of how Paul Robeson once broke into song in Miss Madsen’s Tea Room at the beach and how Paul Laurence Dunbar would stroll the pier reciting poetry, and then I was alone on that very pier, younger, but not so young that I was afraid of being alone there so late. The moon was full and bright and there was a corona about it. Way out, under the shine of the moon on the water, I imagined I could see the surface disturbed by a school of bluefish. Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush. “Are you asking for my help?” I asked her, but she just talked on, saying things I didn’t understand, but the quality of them left no question as to her anxiety. “Is it Mother?” I asked, but this too was met with chatter that, as soon as she spoke it, I forgot it. Until she said, “Did you see him?” I stopped her and asked, “See whom?” But she laughed at me for having said
whom
and would not come back to the subject. Then I awoke.

All propositions are of equal value.

The following morning, after a walk through the large back room that served as my woodshop, I got around to going through my mail and, as I expected, there was a letter from my agent, whom I had for some time been wondering whether to keep, as he seemed painfully, for me at least, resigned to the fact that my work was not commercial enough to make any real money. This was undoubtedly true, but nonetheless it seemed a part of his job to foster some kind of optimistic delusion on my part. Still, he was willing to take my work for what little return he saw. The letter from him was short, merely introducing the letter that had been sent to him, namely a rejection of my latest novel: