William Gass - Middle C

Joey’s new driver’s license already felt legitimate where it hid as it should in the wallet he had stuck in his hip pocket. Feeling it there made him calmer when he drove, if not more competent, and as the car rose over the low hills he saw endless possibilities in every barn and silo, as he had in his recent journey through his own past, since every memory was made of many elements, each of which had or could be given a diverting history. He felt front porches fill with people he could then pretend to know. Smaller roads kept crossing or leaving the highway, and he could travel over any one of them simply by turning his wheel to drive down the lane of the damaged piano or visit the day when his dad had disappeared (for public consumption, Joseph would call him “dad”), the bobbies arriving at their door as though Dad were dead or in dreadful trouble; or he could stop to admire the greeting-card view of his first Christmas in America or even revisit Debbie’s wedding in the backyard of the groom’s potato patch. For that miserable affair he could collect clichés and stereotypes like the stamps he had only today learned to lift from envelopes.

The Skizzen family had been driven to a small severe church for a ceremony that was simple and soon over, distressing Miriam, who of course was upset to be the sole Catholic in the crowd and often taken to be Jewish in the bargain. It was also clear that her daughter was the only member of this refugee family the groom’s was inclined to adopt. Deborah wore a dress her mother had made for her and was given away by her brother, who was consequently compelled to be civil. She looked pretty in the way brides must, beaming like an ad and smooth as a counterpane. Afterward the congregation drove out into the country where, in a farmyard, the bride and groom recapitulated kisses.

After a decent interval the dismal couple departed for their prepackaged life with only one JUST MARRIED sign on their car and no tin cans to rattle at their rears. In a few days they would return to the family property where the groom’s inheritance was being prematurely forked over like one of their hills of potatoes. Joseph determined to think of his new in-laws as small-town bovines who mooed when you pulled their tails and then blew smoke from their noses. As cartoons he could endure the folks they really were, people calm in their convictions, as secure about the direction of their life as a train about the destination of its track, and this serenity unsettled Joey, who admitted in dark moments to being envious as well as scornful of it, because the regularities of his own life had been so routinely interrupted and because it depended on an indifference to the wider world that was tended as carefully as one of their spud-filled fields.

But, if ignorance brings bliss, as he had recently learned, it is still smart to be satisfied. When he complained to Miriam about the complacency of his about-to-be in-laws, she told him he wouldn’t have liked Austrians then, because they knew to a napkin how life should go on, what was right and what was wrong — be honest, work hard, trust God — everybody knew these things, they knew them, but they often didn’t do them because honesty meant you couldn’t steal and cheat and get ahead of others by using damnable devices. Hard work was hard, that’s why it was called hard, so few people wanted to do it, though they knew they should, they knew to trust God, too, which was the most difficult, since it meant accepting the troubles that made up much of life, accepting them and getting on, even when you were uprooted, bombed, and abandoned.

As she had been, she was once more prepared to tell him.

During Joseph’s many pensive moments in the library, he had an opportunity to reflect upon his own unearned sense of superiority. He began to realize that his friends would see him as they saw a Christmas package, decorated to entice but wrapped to conceal. By giving himself youthful myths and minor mystifications, he had donned, in effect, a powdered wig and a false nose and thereby could actually remain far away in his actual unoperatic life, doing nothing they might imagine, feeling nothing they could share, still pure as plain blue sky. Unsmudged by the smoke from a single chimney.

For as nice as Miss Moss had been to him, helpful and generous with her time, she was nevertheless a ghost with gloves and her own fake skin, wrinkled as though it had gone years without pressing, her animosities running about in her like disturbed ants. Joey now regretted changing Madame Mieux into a German. She had lost a lot in the move, and he was reconsidering the point of her presence. Good heavens, he had forgotten her new name as a Frau. Hilda something. That wouldn’t do.

Some of his stories seemed to suit the self that Joseph was fashioning right from the beginning. He remembered the plotlines, the highlights, the deft amusing touches without any difficulty, but other features slipped away in the very moment they were being introduced. As his trees bore fruit he decided he should not let the flesh fatten too far from the core. “Swell to a green pulp,” wasn’t that Miss Moss’s expression? When he had listed his age on his new license, he had added five years, no more, which would give him a little time in Graz or Vienna, the latter a larger presence, a more resounding destination, a better birthplace. Consequently, that flight to London, like the other Joseph’s to Egypt, could be made more graphically perilous and prolonged.

Unfortunately, he also remembered the indistinct document, now carefully hidden away in a closet, that registered his birth in London, and upon which one of his palms was printed, or — no — it was a tiny foot. A footprint. No one need know about it. That path was safely covered. On the other hand, if he wanted to follow some official format when he made out a new one and became born again (as the students at Augs used to say when they had managed to memorize a particularly salient Lutheran fact), he had better dig it out and take another look. His mother would try to monitor everything, and she would not be pleased to think he was altering the date of his birth. Well, this fresher forgery was a problem that, because of the card Miss Moss had made for him, could afford to wait for an opportune time.

The expectation that the human race might be destroyed by its disappointed Gods as a punishment for mean and murderous madness of the sort that Professor Joseph Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum documents daily has been superseded by the horrifying possibility that the species may be rewarded for its follies instead, with citations for crime, awards for cruelty, and medals for madness.

During the same week that Professor Joseph Skizzen was preparing his final lectures on Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron , the newspapers were carrying reports concerning a celebrated Israeli rabbi who had, at last, solved the greatest theological question presented to the faithful by the Holocaust — namely, why? and six million times why? why? why? … why?

There will be no Judgment Day until we undertake to celebrate it. There was a why for Jews, of course: what had their people done to breach the Covenant so utterly and so reprehensively as to deserve annihilation? There was also a why to trouble Christians unless they could forget that German Catholics and German Lutherans had murdered all those German Jews; unless they could somehow reconcile God’s bloodlust with their own thirst by viewing the Almighty’s malevolence as carte blanche to give heretics and Christ killers what they surely deserved — a punishment long in coming and therefore most acceptable. There should be a similar why put to the followers of Islam about Allah, the One and Only God, because to single out Jews to exterminate, as he obviously had, particularly Polish and German ones among countless equally deserving Spanish, Russian, or American specimens, not to mention oodles of additional infidels of all sorts, is … well … odd … Was Allah merely miming the Christian God Almighty, already an epic anti-Semite? The consequences were especially unexpected because the remnants wound up unwanted on the doorstep of the Palestinians — not, one would think, a result in Allah’s plans. No one has seemed similarly concerned that Joseph Stalin murdered many more millions than Adolf Hitler (Professor Skizzen had ample documentation stuck to flypaper in the south dormers). He had finally decided that the reason for this (apart from left-wing reluctance and unremitting Jewish propaganda) was the absence of an organized state campaign against a specific racial target. In any case, what were all these deities — G-d, Jehovah, and Allah — allegedly up to while their minions were slaying even one soul not to say massacring so many? because they were all responsible, weren’t they (those Gods, that is, that existed)? since their power and their wisdom were such decided particularities of their nature like our height and brain size; they were the culprits, surely, weren’t they? these Notables of the Sky? if not for turning on the gas directly, at least for closing their ears to the hiss, turning their backs to the passing trains, washing their hands lest they be stained, taking a snooze through repeated beatings … yes, every one of those Gods … silent bystanders to innumerable shooting parties held till the bodies of the dead lay in heaps like potatoes, and all that human consciousness, all that awareness — in each victim the very candle of the Lord, it was always said, the very Light asked for at creation — was snuffed … ah yes … snuffed … snuffed … —so that’s what the smoke was.