Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

His nights, he told me, were a constant tour of hell. I loathed his use of the story of the distinguished poet in the context of the solution of the Semitic problem. I also suffered quite a bit from the fact that I had to put the rare and only copy of the Divine Comedy in a closet next to haberdashery, between suits and shirts. But authority as we know goes down while responsibility goes up, and so I had the honor of obeying one whose words disgusted me, and I had to listen to confused and meaningless speeches about the descent of the Muslims, whom I wanted to lead in our war against the British and the Russians, vis-a-vis Dante. The word Muslims rises here in my mind in view of the fact that they started then, to my displeasure, to call worn-out Jews Musulmen. Weiss claimed that the Muslims wouldn't forgive the distinguished poet for putting Mohammed and his son Ali in hell while he hung their intestines at the entrance. As somebody who saw pigs like Captain Roehm who lusted after men-in a moment of drunkenness, Weiss had the nerve to tell me that it was he who recruited the Fuhrer into the party-hanged on hooks like butchered meat, I had to rise above myself not to challenge that claim. I told him, But Salah-a-Din was put along with "infidels" like Homer and Virgil in a corner of infidels who had a great soul, and he said, Yes, yes, but Homer wasn't a Christian and I said, And us? We're different Christians, we belong to the SS Reiterstandarten, sifting the nobility from the filth, burning the dirt, our faith dear Weiss, as Rosenberg put it, is pure chauvinism; Jesus's mother served as a temple and with the support of an important priest, she bore a German soldier with fair hair and blue eyes from the tribes of the Germans in the Roman army who moved north from the Carpathians, and we became Gutglaubig: people with pure German faith of Nordic origin and not talmudist Yids filled with remorse and when we drive in our shining Horick and Maubach cars, we present a powerful future and not some primitive and frustrated Christianity, but Weiss didn't answer me. In his heart I know he detested me, I could see his mousy eyes looking at me with distrust, he knew very well that every word he said to me would be reported to Berlin, in his own heart he feared our illustrious Wotan customs that bore us in sublime excitement to the pure German soil to ancient altars or to the light of torches in a strong song of brotherhood. He was and still is a traditionalist, he commands death that smells Christian. My obedient nature often impelled me to those clashes with Weiss despite the fact that I was almost anonymous in our hierarchy while he-the miserable Christian-was called by his first name by Goring and Goebbels, Dr. Frick, Ley, and Kerl who knew him from the days when the Fuhrer was in prison. His SS card had three digits, two or three numbers behind the Reichsfuhrer. But I already said, my obedience was my first nature and not some random careerist blindness. We'd sniff each other all the time, each trying to discover his companion's secrets, "his companion," from my point of view should be written in quotation marks. I wrote before that I had a special privilege of seeing him sleeping at seven twenty in the morning and so I could also see the special way he woke up. The servant on duty who was usually a Pole, with his always delicate and beautiful hands-Weiss knew how to select handsome young men to serve him-would remove the blanket and stick a cigarette between his master's lips. And then he would carefully light the cigarette, wait until his master started sucking the smoke a little and his eyes would then express buds of waking. When he got out of bed he'd do it with a concentrated and frozen and maybe even savage leap. On the way to the warm bath, prepared for him in time, with the cigarette in his mouth, he'd open his old book of Walter von der Poloida or the poem of Ludwig and would read the book through its binding. He would immediately sink into recitation and by the time he entered the bathroom, the water was lukewarm. After a year he was able to repeat word for word what he hadn't read that morning. But to the same extent he was able to shout at me that he didn't consider the attempt plausible to restore to the modern world of the Third Reich the old-fashioned exalted aura of ancient German gods. Those gods too, he told me once with typical sincerity-sent word for word to my superiors in Berlin-impose infinite chains on man, impose too great a burden on a pure organism that, more than it loves or is enslaved to the gods, is enslaved to ritual. What we are trying to create, he said, is a ritual and not a myth. And I of course was filled with honest, maybe even patriotic, grievance.

After one of Weiss's endless one-way arguments with me (I was silent then with outstanding nobility) he showed me as a gesture of reconcilia tion-he apparently detested the instructions sent from Berlin as a result of my letters-a small wooden box and asked me with a jocularity steeped in horrifying transparent malice, what I thought of that box, I looked, the box opened to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I felt the box in my hands, felt my eyes fill with tears, I said to him: I haven't seen such a marvelous creation in many years, and that was truly true.

He lit an Egyptian cigarette whose delicate smell blazed up in my nose, drank wine from a bottle he used to keep in front of him. Those expensive cigarettes he used to chain-smoke and would put them out on his hand. For some reason he wouldn't crush the cigarettes in the many ashtrays heaped up in his room. I looked at the box again, outside, through the windowpane hazed with gray smoke. The landscape was gray, desolate, monotonous, and gloomy. This was not the proper place to show a rare creation of art. I asked Weiss if he had bought that box on one of his tours of duty in the East where he had served many years earlier as an agent for oriental objets d'art, something he'd do between his frequent appearances as an understudy opera singer in provincial towns whose names were known for not appearing on maps. He chuckled at me and said-something I of course understood immediately was not true-Mr. Beautiful People, those works are created here!

Then he told me about some ludicrous Jew who could do magic with wood. My friends in Berlin, he told me with a smile and a hint that didn't escape me, compete, after knocking themselves out about certain letters that come to them from here about ideological instability, institutional instability. Kramer, brotherhood of the leaders, for who'll get a box, who'll get a grandfather clock, who'll get an intricate frame smeared with endless lacquers and the secret of their blend isn't understood by the most famous experts.

And I'm there… Perfection evokes in me a dreadful sense of quiet bliss. I told him excitedly, without responding to his hints: Goethe said that the greatest virtue a man can reach is amazement, and I, I feel now a mastery and modesty of endless amazement, that's an enlightened and special work of art, can that be done by a blind man?

Can a bloodthirsty Jew, a perverse mutation, create that work? Weiss smiled and went on sipping the French wine and immediately, as an answer characteristic of him, with red eyes of drunkenness, started reciting to me the Niebelungenlied shrouded in tragic fates.

I went outside, the gigantic courtyard was empty. I had to find the Jew. I didn't ask Weiss, I knew he'd despise me too gracefully. I'm capable of smelling them from afar. And he was indeed sitting in the small storeroom under the guardroom that was never used, under a bare bulb hanging on an electrical cord at a table heaped with tin boxes full of liquids, pieces of wood, paste, planes, hammers, nails, and other objects scattered in imploring disorder. My look was apparently especially bold since he looked aside, froze on the spot, and stayed like that. With my supple cane I signaled to him to go outside. He obeyed immediately, blinked his malicious eyes, and from far away in the gray air, smelling the approaching odor of a Yid, two hundred purebred dogs started barking in their kennels.