Jason Sommer
Mengele Shitting
I. Taking My Name
I walked around New York half-dazed, and what
had happened? Almost nothing, except everything
looked different for the change in a few syllables.
Some hours before, twenty years old, I found out my name
was not my name and wandered, discovering
whatever happens happens in the world
and an altered vision has objects in it:
this octagonal lamppost, that car—
the wrong end of binoculars in their estrangement.
Earlier, the sharp white of a china plate
circumscribing the square of brown honeycake,
laid down by my Aunt Lilly's hand,
which I'd been looking at, seated between my cousins,
when my Uncle Harry—Herschel, Lilly calls him—
started in about my name. I'd breezed in for a meal
from an East Village sublet where I lived on the cheap
with a girl from college, apparently to let
my relatives know just what the thinking was
about the war, who was behind it
and what our demonstrations aimed to do
in addition to airing summer plans to work
driving a cab awhile and go back up to Boston
for some festivals and such. Piqued by something
I said, no doubt, and much about my manner,
my uncle, easy-going usually,
given to after-dinner jokes, laughed suddenly,
tunelessly through thin lips. "Jason Sommer's summer
plans, Jason Sommer, Sommer Sommer," he singsonged.
"You think that is your name—Sommer?"
"Herschel," Aunt Lilly hissed, as he went on:
"Maybe the man who had it didn't need it
anymore and so your father took it."
"Herschel, du herst?" Lilly said.
I wanted to ask him what he meant
but I was used to the etiquette
around survivors. Those who'd been through
the European fire could speak or not,
or any combination of the two. I left—
the evening anyway would not recover
from his tone, which addressed me as American
in a definition other than the one they so desired
for themselves, my uncle and my father,
in Displaced Persons camp, a new definition
Harry learned by living here and having children
for whom he really wanted a softer life than his.
In his voice I was a luxury item no one could afford,
least of all me. He intended this little jolt
I got to be the smallest cost of ignorance
relieved, so much ignorance, so used to it.
But the jolt became a shaking, widening on the subway
home with the hypnotic ticuh-ticuh, ticuh-ticuh
of the train where I remembered a queasy trip
to Canada when at the border I felt my father lie
about his birthplace, his voice odd
as he answered the guard, "Breslau, Germany."
And Harry's melody continued—from every time
I ever heard the faintest hum of what he meant
and what I was now believing, despite my efforts
at reply as I walked under the ordinary signs
enumerating, denominating from walls, store
windows, posts, and poles, seen before and read
on sight, now seen somehow unread.
Harry seemed to say: a person didn't think
and then he did—all I had to do was look around awake,
which is what he learned in hard times even before
the labor camps. As if looking around
had meant anything for Harry when he walked
in front of troops to find landmines and found
no landmines, or when he tried to kill himself
by jumping from a tree and had the branches break
his fall and the fall break his arm, landing
him in dispensary whereby he missed
a fatal deportation. I think that's the story,
which I didn't know then, nor was I so conscious of
how much our own failings trouble us in others,
and especially the young. But he seemed right—
perhaps I hadn't assembled all the evidence
in my possession. I should have known
with what I knew already, or known enough
to ask. Worse still, though, might I have
suspected and pushed away suspicion,
not wanting some ungainly Jewish name,
more easily identifiable even than my face,
ready to say Jew before I was ready
to say it? Though I was not in hiding,
or trying for safe haven as far as I am aware,
I also had an alias instead of another name,
more frankly Jewish-sounding,
an alias that properly pronounced
sounds German, is German.
For days after I wasn't who I thought I was
or said I was aloud, at last only curious to know
how many times I would have to see what was familiar
before it became familiar once again,
when I could stop staring at the edges of things
till they shone, outlined in a buzzing light.
Too much trouble to be dizzy with it always,
I might as well have said some peculiarity in the light
of streetlamps, store-front neon, sun or moon
combined with nerves to account for the effect, let light
be light, lamppost, lamppost. It will do if you
can get others to agree that that's the story.
Last year a river flooded through a graveyard.
The bodies, washed away from their stones, recovered
one by one, massed in an unrecoverable
anonymity. The body can shift past its name
or be shifted as mine was. If it happens
it happens to anyone, and I think now I was fortunate
to discover that my name was not mine
as an absolute possession,
to be refreshed in the knowledge
that what has been given me is given
in the grant of other people's survival,
hard won and conferring on them
the power of occasional contempt,
and if the syllables I thought meant me did not,
I can declare them to be me again—as good as any,
mine to make mine for now, can consider
myself sufficiently blessed
that the places of my exile are so close to home.
II. My Father Concentrates on His Luck
Despite nativity scenes on neighbors' lawns,
it is what we call winter break,
when we are careful and remember,
and I have come home to my parents' house
with my Christian wife and our Jewish children
expecting the usual narrative:
fragments of my father's story
told right to the point of luck.
Ringed by Uzbek soldiers pointing guns,
and they've been shooting people all along,
he's trying to explain without a language
that they understand
that he's no Hungarian, but a Jew.
How do you mime Jew
to those with no idea of what a Jew is?
In an old joke the most Asian-looking
would break into Yiddish,
"Jewish? Funny you don't look Jewish,"
but these are only going to shoot until—
as in some old joke
the Red Army Captain—Weinstein—
does save the day in Yiddish,
"Du bist noch a Yid?" and in Uzbek,
calling them off, so all that can follow
will follow, eventually even me.
III. Speaking of the Lost
I cannot look at Lilly as I ask
my father about his younger brother Shmuel,
whom she knew only a little,
the brother also of her husband Harry
sitting on my left. Of these
survivors of slave-labor and war,
her history may be the worst,
and she never speaks of it, not of Auschwitz
or the brothers of her own she lost there,
so it's her eyes I avoid as I break the etiquette
forbidding anyone to ask for speech
when speech is memory and memory is pain.
Alone among them, I try to think of myself
as an adult with a right to speak, a man
who has paid a price and waited long enough,
and I have children of my own, off somewhere
in the house with their mother and my mother,
but I feel like a child demanding a story,
teased with the half-promise of my father's
stories, wanting the one he cannot tell—
the one which has been told to him
by witnesses in that vague way they have
of passing on essentials only, the barest news.
I want whatever else can be recovered
to hold Shmuel at the center of a final scene,
but Harry and my father have begun
now with the boyhood of someone
who is already the hero of a tale—
handsome as he was tall, as strong as he was both,
at home in the forests around Kustanovice,
gifted with understanding the language of animals,
and I continue romance to the end,
imagining him a wild creature,
gnawing his very life away to be free
of the trap, undoing the web of barbed wire
over the window of—not a cattle car,
I knew already—a Karlsruhe freight, one hundred
tons, a number chalked up outside
on the weathered boards, forcing himself
out awkwardly, dropping—how far down?—to the water.
If they suffer memory for me,
maybe I can give them something in return,
the date they need to commemorate
the true anniversary of Shmuel's death
with yahrzeit candles—my bookishness of use
to them with S.S. diaries, maps of train routes.
As they grow older, more and more
they want the ritual.
I want the discipline of facts,
about that train to Auschwitz, to anchor Shmuel
in the drift of others' memory where he swims
across an unnamed river to his death
in a flood of gunfire on the farther shore.
I have a plan to follow rivers
if only on the maps, until they intersect
the lines of track, and I will have the place
he died among those crossings.
How many trestle bridges can there be,
crossing as the rivers bend?
I run to get an ordinary atlas,
which shows the possibilities in blue
meandering lines and red lettering:
The Tisza, too soon out of Munkács, or the Latorica,
Laborec, Ondava, Topl'a, Torysa,
as if I could name a river to go back along
against the current of forgetting.
Nervous, I talk and talk, babbling over
the map of Eastern Europe between us on the table:
how, rate by time equaling distance, the date
must lead to the place, but either will give the other,
how at first I thought that it was winter,
filling in with images from movies,
the shot man tumbling down the incline
of the tracks, or rolling into snow.
May Lilly says abruptly May
between the 20th and the 22d,
two days, two nights to Auschwitz
from the station at the brickworks.
She was on the transport. She was there.
Nobody looks stunned that she has harbored this
for more than forty years. No voice but mine
determined to recover Shmuel,
to rescue the hero from her silence.
How could she have kept it all these years?
Lilly, there was shooting. The train was halted
on a trestle bridge—think, the 20th,
the 21st, day or night?—
Brakes shrieking. Polizei shouting in German.
The splashing below in the water.
Surely she would recall which day that was?
No, says Lilly mildly, there was shooting
many times, many times the train would stop
without a reason. In our car, everyone,
old people and children, pressed together.
The women held rags out of the window to catch
rainwater we could drink. The train had many cars.
No one thing happened I could tell from where I was.
IV. Lilly, Reparations
Aunt Lilly, Lilly, Liteshu
your sisters called you sometimes
in those heavy accents.
Like all of those connected
to my father, you had several names
in the several languages
of the old region, most had
American names, too.
No one had more names than my father
since he had been on the run.
Lilly, I wanted to give you something
for my bad thoughts as a child,
my conjuring with your name
when I tried to give a name
to fear—precocious research
in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews
and I had you in with Lilith,
Jewish bogey woman
from Babylonian originals
Lilit, Lilu.
She was Adam's
before the mother
of us all. Just as my father's brother,
mild Herschel, Uncle Harry,
was no match for you,
Lilith was stronger than Adam,
first wife, fierce and sexy,
who left him flat in an argument
over who got the top in copulation,
flying off to breed demons
from nocturnal emissions, screeching
in the Lilah, semitic night,
against whom grandmothers incanted
and posted protective charms
to save the infants
over whom she had power.
* * * * *
I thought you might kill children,
you had such anger. Shmutz! Shmutz!
You screamed down the street
at your son Steven
who would pick up junk
from the gutter or
the garbage cans—
an oily piece of a sparkplug,
smacked from his hand—
Dirt! Dirt!—
the guts of a music box,
the head of a doll,
lead weights inside to tip the eyes
open and shut.
I took things from him,
anyone could.
He was available to force,
one of those people who limply
allowed so much
it was a challenge
not to bully him.
He was a version
of what I would understand
a Jew to be.
His may have been the first
life in which I was a bystander.
The two of us, small boys,
the women chattering away
around us on the sidewalk
of St. John's Place in Brooklyn.
You took him between parked cars—
the matter-of-fact, casual
power of it!—
down with his pants,
you tickled his penis and he peed.
* * * * *
Something was owed you for what
had been taken, and what had been taken?
Your mother and father, four brothers,
grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins,
most of the family and every thing,
any love that might be unafraid,
the momentum of the everyday,
sleeping along too deeply even to dream
catastrophe. What was owed
in compensation, then?
Whatever could be restored.
Your sisters. Whatever came after
that would compensate. A husband
from a fiancé who survived,
children to be named for the dead. Who owed it?
God, the Germans, the children themselves.
Was it paid? Herschel returned,
the Germans gave some money,
children were given, and given
the names of the dead. No.
* * * * *
I, too, have something insufficient to give,
a complicated gift likely to give offense,
or perhaps no gift at all
since I hope you'll never see these words.
Your pardon, Lilly, anyway
for bringing these things up again,
also for retelling
what you know better than anyone,
out here where others listen,
as if it were something of my own.
But what I have for you
that you will not have heard,
even if you kept up with news
disinterred about the camps,
a dark gleam of shards
embedded in the midden of the rest,
concerns the later life
of the murderous Doctor Mengele
who selected you for life
on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
within several moments
of sending to the gas
your parents and small brother.
I have the story from a dear man,
the most reliable of witnesses,
who has held Mengele's bones
in his own hands—
the bastard is dead, Lilly,
the best evidence indicates.
The bastard. The monster.
* * * * *
There may be hints that God exists in some diminished form, humorous.
At the railhead Lilly saw him first, the binary motion of the stick,
among the stumbling shoals raused from the boxcars,
doling general death and fishing for his special interests—
twins, any anomaly: the hunchback father and clubfooted son—
unrhythmic metronome sending people to the left or right
onto different lines—death, life, death, death, death death, death—
or with a jerk of the thumb, a flick of the finger in white kid gloves,
arms in a half embrace of himself, left arm across his waist propping
the right, which moved only from the wrist as he parted the living stream,
fingertip flick of the finger, jerk of the thumb, or conducting with that baton,
humming opera, tall Lilly thought and handsome, in his monocle and
gloves—
not merely handsome, courtly in the way my aunt described him.
Because survivors say some of the worst of the dailiness
the S.S. enforced involved the bowels,
because in terror of the latrines at night or too weak or diarrheal anyway,
people relieved themselves in the precious containers they used for soup,
or, kept at attention for hours at roll call, soiled themselves where they stood—
or at the work details, no break provided, and begging requests refused—
bear with me, Lilly, there is a reason for the coprology, and this is it:
Years later after his brief internment, every day a new name when the Americans
called the roll, after his release undetected and all the years of names,
Ullman, Holman, Gregor, Gregori, Hochbicler, Gerhard, Alvez, and the rest,
he acquired the habit, a kind of grooming out of fear, of biting on his moustache-ends,
severing bits of hair and swallowing, but since he was not animal enough to cough it up,
the hair lodged in his lower bowel and grew and grew as he kept chewing
until it valved the passage closed with a hairball, tricho-bezoar,
an asylum condition usually of the stomach—but in this case happily otherwise.
So Mengele shitting would have to lean forward with his precise fingers in his rectum
to guide stools past, sometimes, of course, not stools but a pouring over his hands,
hot as his own insides, bathing him as he should be bathed.
Lilly, rejoice in what he felt arriving at the dispensary in Jundiai, Brazil,
the filth of the surroundings bad enough (the town itself, the outer office)—
a surgeon, too, to shudder at, small-town absurd in cowboy boots,
but worst of all when he reached the sanctum of the operating room, around the walls
he saw disposable rubber gloves adhering to tiles, drying for re-use. But he had little
choice.
Here he would be cut open to get at what he thought was cancer.
So, Lilly, a kind of symmetry that will pass for justice in its absence,
irony's schadenfreude, ours by interpretation of what occurs,
as good as construing Providence out of the luck of chance survival—
yours, say, Harry's, or my father's—or constructing a God
who happens to care for some and takes care of others with a little quittance.
In Dante effluvia doesn't seem that much, serious enough for the Inferno—
Canto 18, Ring 8, Trench 2—frauds swim it.
Who would wish for hell just to have Mengele in it?
What Mengele did was not done to him, nothing was done to him by anyone,
but he was unhappy, abandoned, fearful, startled at the least sound:
a car backfiring, being addressed by someone unexpectedly—
a small hell in the body, such as the innocent also experience,
and that hand, which motioned thousands toward death,
those fingers reaching up his ass for years,
this thing I tell you that few people know.
Other People's Troubles, University of Chicago Press, 1997