"No," I said.
"You're pure evil," he said. "You're absolutely pure evil."
"Thank you," I said.
"You're right--it is a kind of compliment," he said. "Usually a bad man's got some good in him--almost as much good as evil. But you--" he said, "you're the pure thing. For all the good there is in you, you might as well be the Devil."
"Maybe I am the Devil," I said.
"Don't think I haven't thought of that," he said.
"What do you plan to do to me?" I asked him.
"Take you apart," he said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, rolling his shoulders, loosening them. "When I heard you were alive, I knew it was something I had to do. There wasn't any way out," he said. "It had to end like this."
"I don't see why," I said.
"Then, by God, I'll show you why," he said. "I'll show you, by God, I was born just to take you apart, right here and now." He called me a yellow-belly. He called me a Nazi. And then he called me the most offensive compound word in the English language.
So I broke his good right arm with the fire-tongs.
That is the only violent act I ever committed in what has now been a long, long life. I met O'Hare in single combat, and I beat him. Beating him was easy. O'Hare was so drugged by booze and fantasies of good triumphing over evil that he hadn't expected me to defend myself.
When he realized that he'd been hit, that the dragon meant to give St. George a real tussle, he looked very surprised.
"So that's the way you want to play--" he said.
And then the agony of a multiple fracture suffused his nervous system, and tears came to his eyes.
"Get out," I said. "Or do you want me to break your other arm, and your head, too?" I put the tip of the fire-tongs by his right temple, and I said, "And I'll take the gun or the knife or whatever it is before you go."
He shook his head. The pain was so awful that he could not speak.
"You're not armed?" I said.
He shook his head again. "Fair fight," he said thickly. "Fair."
I patted his pockets, and there weren't any weapons on him. St. George had expected to take the dragon apart with his bare hands!
"You poor, silly, drunk, one-armed sonofabitch!" I said. I tore down the tent in my doorway, kicked out the zigzag of boards. I shoved O'Hare through the opening, onto the landing outside.
The railing stopped O'Hare, and he gazed down the stairwell, down a beckoning helix to the patch of sure death below.
"I'm not your destiny, or the Devil, either!" I said. "Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve!" I said. "That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
"It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly."
Whether it was my words or humiliation or booze or surgical shock that made O'Hare throw up, I do not know. Throw up he did. He flashed the hash down the stairwell from four stories up.
"Clean it up," I said.
He faced me, his eyes still filled with undiluted hatred. "I'll get you yet, brother," he said.
"That may be," I said. "But it won't change your destiny of bankruptcies, frozen-custard, too many children, termites, and no cash. If you want to be a soldier in the Legions of God so much," I told him, "try the Salvation Army."
And O'Hare went away.
44
"KAHM-BOO ..."
IT IS A COMMON experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail. A theory I propose to myself on such occasions is that I am in jail because I could not bring myself to walk through or leap over another man's vomit. I am referring to the vomit of Bernard B. O'Hare on the foyer floor at the foot of the stairwell.
I left my attic shortly after O'Hare did. There was nothing to keep me there. I took a memento with me, quite by accident. As I left my attic, I kicked something over the threshold and onto the landing. I picked it up. It was a pawn from the chess set I had carved from a broom handle.
I put it in my pocket. I have it still. As I slipped it into my pocket, the stench of the public nuisance O'Hare had created reached me.
As I descended the stairs, the stench grew worse.
When I reached the landing outside the door of young Dr. Abraham Epstein, a man who had spent his childhood in Auschwitz, the stench stopped me.
The next thing I knew, I was knocking on Dr. Epstein's door.
The Doctor came to the door in bathrobe and pajamas. His feet were bare. He was startled to see me.
"Yes?" he said.
"Could I come in?" I said.
"This is a medical matter?" he said. There was a chain across the door.
"No," I said. "Personal--political."
"It can't wait?" he said
"I'd rather it didn't," I said.
"Give me an idea of what this is all about," he said.
"I want to go to Israel to stand trial," I said.
"You what?" he said.
"I want to be tried for my crimes against humanity," I said. "I'm willing to go."
"Why come to me?" he said.
"I thought you might know somebody--somebody who'd like to be notified," I said.
"I'm not a representative of Israel," he said. "I'm an American. Tomorrow you can find all the Israelis you want."
"I'd like to surrender to an Auschwitzer," I said. This made him mad. "Then find one who thinks about Auschwitz all the time!" he said. "There are plenty who think about nothing else. I never think about it!"
And he slammed the door.
I froze again, frustrated in the one purpose I'd been able to imagine for myself. What Epstein had said about Israelis being available in the morning was surely true--
But there was still the night to get through, and I could not move.
Epstein talked to his mother inside. They talked in German.
I heard only bits of what they said. Epstein was telling his mother what had just happened.
One thing I did hear that impressed me was their use of my last name, the sound of my last name.
"Kahm-boo," they said again and again. That was Campbell to them.
That was the undiluted evil in me, the evil that had had its effect on millions, the disgusting creature good people wanted dead and underground--
"Kahm-boo."
Epstein's mother got so excited about Kahm-boo and what he was up to now, that she came to the door. I'm sure that she did not expect to see Kahm-boo himself. She wanted only to loathe and wonder at the air he had lately displaced.
She opened the door, her son right behind her, telling her not to do it. She almost fainted at the sight of Kahm-boo himself, Kahm-boo in a state of catalepsis.
Epstein pushed her aside, came out as though to attack me.
"What do you think you're doing?" he said. "Get the hell away from here!"
When I did not move, did not reply, did not even blink, did not even seem to breathe, he began to understand that I was a medical problem after all.
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" he lamented.
Like a friendly robot, I let him lead me inside. He took me back into the kitchen area of his flat, sat me down at a white table there.
"Can you hear me?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Do you know who I am--where you are?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Have you ever been like this before?" he said. "No," I said.
"You need a psychiatrist," he said. "I'm no psychiatrist."
"I told you what I need," I said. "Call up somebody--not a psychia
trist. Call up somebody who wants to give me a trial."
Epstein and his mother, a very old woman, argued back and forth about what to do with me. His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.
"This is not the first time you've seen eyes like that," she said to her son in German, "not the first man you've seen who could not move unless someone told him where to move, who longed for someone to tell him what to do next, who would do anything anyone told him to do next. You saw thousands of them at Auschwitz."
"I don't remember," said Epstein tautly.
"All right--" said his mother, "then let me remember. I can remember. Every minute I can remember.
"And, as one who remembers," said his mother, "let me say that what he asks for he should have. Call someone."
"Who will I call?" said Epstein. "I'm not a Zionist. I'm an anti-Zionist. I'm not even that. I never think about it. I'm a physician. I don't know anybody who's still looking for revenge. I have nothing but contempt for them. Go away. You've come to the wrong place."
"Call somebody," said his mother.
"You still want revenge?" he asked her.
"Yes," she said.
He put his face close to mine. "And you really want to be punished?" he said.
"I want to be tried,"I said.
"It's all play-acting," he said, exasperated with both of us. "It proves nothing!"
"Call somebody," said his mother.
Epstein threw up his hands. "All right! All right! I will call Sam. I will tell him he can be a great Zionist hero. He always wanted to be a great Zionist hero."
What Sam's last name was I never found out. Dr. Epstein called him from the front room of the flat while I remained in the kitchen with Epstein's old mother.
His mother sat down at the table, faced me, rested her arms on the table, studied my face with melancholy curiosity and satisfaction.
"They took all the light bulbs," she said in German.
"What?" I said.
"The people who broke into your apartment--they took all the light bulbs from the stairway," she said.
"Um," I said.
"In Germany, too," she said. "Pardon me?" I said.
"That was one of the things--when the S.S. or the Gestapo came and took somebody away--" she said.
"I don't understand," I said.
"Other people would come into the building, wanting to do something patriotic," she said. "And that was one of the things they always did. Somebody always took the light bulbs." She shook her head. "Such a strange thing for somebody always to do."
Dr. Epstein came back into the kitchen dusting his hands. "All right--" he said, "three heroes will be here shortly--a tailor, a watchmaker, and pediatrician--all delighted to play the part of Israeli parachutists."
"Thank you," I said.
The three came for me in about twenty minutes. They had no weapons, and no status as agents of Israel or as agents of anything but themselves. The only status they had was what my infamy and my anxiousness to surrender to somebody, to almost anybody, gave them.
What my arrest amounted to was a bed for the rest of the night--in the tailor's apartment, as it happened. The next morning, the three surrendered me, with my permission, to Israeli officials.
When the three came for me at Dr. Epstein's apartment, they banged on the front door loudly.
The instant they did that, I felt enormously relieved. I felt happy.
"You're all right now?" said Epstein, before he let them in.
"Yes, thank you, Doctor," I said. "You still want to go?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"He has to go," said his mother. And then she leaned closer to me, across the kitchen table. She crooned something in German, made it sound like a fragment of a ditty remembered from a happy childhood.
What she crooned was this, a command she had heard over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz--had heard many times a day for years.
"Leichentrager zu Wache," she crooned.
A beautiful language, isn't it?
Translation?
"Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." That's what that old woman crooned to me.
45
THE TORTOISE AND
THE HARE ...
So HERE I AM in Israel, of my own free will, though my cell is locked and my guards have guns.
My story is told, and none too soon--for tomorrow my trial begins. The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art. There will be no more time for writing. Adventuring I must go again.
There are many to testify against me. None to testify for me.
The prosecution intends to begin, I'm told, by playing recordings of the worst of my broadcasts, so the most pitiless witness against me will be myself.
Bernard B. O'Hare is in town at his own expense, annoying the prosecution with the feverish irrelevance of all he has to say.
So, too, is Heinz Schildknecht, my erstwhile best friend and doubles partner, the man whose motorcycle I stole. My lawyer says that Heinz is full of venom for me, and that Heinz, surprisingly, will make a credible witness. Whence this respectability for Heinz, who, after all, worked at a desk next to mine in the Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment?
Surprise: Heinz is a Jew, a member of the anti-Nazi underground during the war, an Israeli agent after the war and up to the present time.
And he can prove it.
Good for Heinz!
Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D., and Iona Potapov alias George Kraft, can't come to my trial, both serving in a United States Federal Prison, as they are. They have both sent affidavits, however.
The affidavits of Dr. Jones and Kraft-Potapov aren't much help, to say the least.
Dr. Jones declares under oath that I am a saint and a martyr in the holy Nazi cause. He says, too, that I have the most perfect set of Aryan teeth he's ever seen outside of photographs of Hitler.
Kraft-Potapov declares under oath that Russian intelligence was never able to turn up any proof that I had been an American agent. He offers the opinion that I was an ardent Nazi, but that I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams.
The three men who took me into custody in Dr. Epstein's apartment are on hand for the trial--the tailor, the watchmaker, and the pediatrician--on an even more bootless junket than Bernard B. O'Hare's.
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.--this is your life!
My Israeli lawyer, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has had all my New York mail forwarded here, hoping unreasonably to find in that mail some proof of my innocence.
Hi ho.
Three letters came today.
I shall open them now, reporting their contents one by one.
Hope springs eternal, they say, in the human breast. It springs eternal, at any rate, in the breast of Dobrowitz, which is, I suppose, why he costs so much.
All that I need to be a free man, says Dobrowitz, is the barest proof that there was such a person as Frank Wirtanen, and that Wirtanen made me an American spy.
Well now--about the letters for today:
The first starts off warmly enough. "Dear Friend" it calls me, in spite of all the evil things I am said to have done. It assumes that I am a teacher. I explained in an earlier chapter, I believe, how my name happened to find its way onto a list of supposed educators, how I became recipient of mail promoting materials useful to those in charge of training the young.
The letter at hand is from "Creative Playthings, Inc."
Dear Friend: [Creative Playthings says to me, here in a Jerusalem jail] Would you like to foster a creative environment for your students in their own homes? What happens to them after they leave school certainly is important. You may have a child under your direction an average of 25 waking hours per week, but the parents guide him for 45 hours. What a parent does with these hours can complicate or facilitate your program.
We believe the kind of toys Creativ
e Playthings sponsors will genuinely stimulate--in the home--the creative environment you, as an early childhood leader, are trying to foster.
How can Creative Playthings' toys in the home do this?
Such toys can provide for the physical needs of growing children. Such toys help a child discover and experiment with life in the home and community. Such toys promote opportunities for individual expression which may be lacking in the group life of the school.
Such toys help the child work off aggressions. ...
To which I reply:
Dear Friends: As one who has experienced extensively with life in the home and community, using real people in true-to-life situations, I doubt that any playthings could prepare a child for one millionth of what is going to hit him in the teeth, ready or not.
My own feeling is that a child should start experimenting with real people and real communities from the moment of birth, if possible. If, for some reason, these materials are not available, then playthings must be used.
But not bland, pleasing, smooth, easily manipulated playthings like those in your brochure, friends! Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.
As for children's working off aggressions, I'm against it. They are going to need all the aggressions they can contain for ultimate release in the adult world. Name one great man in history who did not go boiling and bubbling through childhood with a lashed-down safety valve.
Let me tell you that the children in my charge for an average of twenty-five hours a week are not likely to lose their keen edge during the forty-five hours they spend with their parents. They aren't moving hand-carved animals on and off a Noah's Ark, believe me. They are spying on real grownups all the time, learning what they fight about, what they're greedy for, how they satisfy their greed, why and how they lie, what makes them go crazy, the different ways they go crazy, and so on.
I cannot predict the fields in which these children of mine will succeed, but I guarantee success for them without exception, anywhere in the civilized world.
Yours for realistic pedagogy,
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
The second letter?
It, too, addresses Howard W. Campbell, Jr., as "Dear Friend," proving that at least two out of three letter writers today aren't sore at Howard W. Campbell, Jr., at all. The letter is from a stockbroker in Toronto, Canada. It is addressed to the capitalistic aspect of me.
It wants me to buy stock in a tungsten mine in Manitoba. Before I did that, I would have to know more about the company. I would have to know in particular whether it had a capable and reputable management.