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And with that story that connects Licinda, Melissa and Sam,
I came to Lionel's house. Those were embarrassing moments.
Sam looked at me in amazement, and Lionel, Lionel is old but
hasn't changed. The same aristocratic look, wounded and stubborn, the same perplexed imposing figure, the same force. At
the sight of him, some anger that had been burning in me for
many years vanished. All of us loved Melissa. That was the most
ridiculous and sublime thing that had ever happened to me.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, two men became friends on
the decks of two ships on their way to prepare the same kingdom in different places and now, on Melissa's grave, they meet
again, I said, not without an overdramatic expression so foreign
to my nature.

We talked all night. Sam began. He spoke a long time about
Melissa's eternal beauty. And I, I was silent and drank whiskey.

I Joined Sam on his trip to Northampton to see the students
act parts of the play he had produced about a year ago. We flew
in the Ford company plane. The idea that Ford was flying us
there amused him quite a bit. Licinda didn't talk and we looked
at the view below and tried to understand how our paths had
crossed so many years after Melissa died. Below we saw snowcovered fields.

I told Sam what I told you about the Catholic church next
to the chemistry lab. We were guests in the Gillette House. It
was built about a hundred years ago with a contribution by Mr.
Gillette, inventor of the razor blade. The girls of Gillette sang
"Greensleeves" in thin, scary voices. Sam claimed that they looked like Melissa. He also told them: You who will marry the
gods of industry, the leaders of this state, are acting in a drama
about burned curtains of the Ark of the Covenant! They
giggled nervously, and Sam said to Licinda: They're open to
indecent suggestions like Melissa, and she-to her creditdidn't even answer. Sam, who drank a lot that night, lectured
to the students about what there no longer is in Northampton
(and I quote): Samrein or Samuelrein. You're acting in a
drama about my naked mother! They turned their heads in
amazingly delicate embarrassment and one even wept silently.
He asked: Why should you act in a play about a diamond in a
rectum? You know that the man who lay there and thought he
was my father wasn't my father?

Joanna, the granddaughter of Priscilla and Bud, told me: I
feel as if I were chewing my mother's head, blood is flowing
between my legs and I'm laughing. And I, who never heard such
things, especially not from somebody in my family, stroked her
head with a gentleness which, if it had been in me years ago,
would have saved a beloved person from death. I walked with
Sam to the frozen lake. He went with a local rabbi to a meeting
of young Jews. When the rabbi started chatting and talking with
him about the meaning he found in his drama, he grabbed the
rabbi by the ear and bent it. The rabbi couldn't get away from
him and started twisting and shrieking, he bent over and yelled:
Why? Why? Why? And Sam lifted him up, cleaned the snow off
him, and said: I don't know why, sorry, but the rabbi was insulted and his ear burned and a few girls were gliding over the
ice in charming tights, and the view that was so Ukrainian in
Sam's eyes reminded me of my mother and my grandmother,
and I felt I was stumbling again, but I wasn't sorry. Then they
sang Jewish songs in a big house full of young people, and Sam
spoke, and Licinda said to me: I love that Jewish Jesse James,
and I told her I understood because Melissa loved him too.

Sam stood up surprisingly and informed them that he missed
the girls of Gillette. They aren't seeking a messiah in the plains
of Connecticut, he said, they simply belonged, he yelled. We went to the theater. He said something had to be fixed in the
sections that were performed for him, and the girls gave him a
gift of a green cotton shirt that said "Smith College-a hundred
years of superior girls." They played coins like those my mother
played when she was a student here. It was late at night, and
the sound was clear and terrifying. People came from the television station in Hartford to interview him, but he refused to be
interviewed. Licinda bent her thumb hard until it broke, and
Sam bandaged it and said: Tell her how much I love her.
Licinda wept, but maybe she wept because of the pain. When
we came back to New York, there was a storm and we landed in
a cloud of snow. We went to their house and Sam told Lionel
that the gentile girls stood naked in a church and sang his La-
mentsfor the Death of the Jews holding candles and were amazingly
beautiful. Licinda went to the doctor and returned with a cast
on her thumb. At night she lay with a thermometer in her mouth.
Sam kept asking her what her temperature was, and she showed
him her temperature with her fingers, but she didn't take the
thermometer out of her mouth. They stole the destruction from
me, said Sam, they made a play devoid of any risk or dread for the
terrific girls of Gillette, that's how you get rich in America.

When he went to the Delmonico Hotel, I went with him.
People were sitting around tables with bottles of wine and soda on
them and turkeys and plates of pastry and vegetables and sweets.
At the head table sat about ten dignitaries, and one of them said:
Here's Sam Lipp, who has at long last deigned to honor us with
his presence. And Sam, the focus of all eyes, stopped for a moment and asked in a loud voice: Where do I go? And the man said
to him: To the table marked "Children of the Camp." I stayed at
the end of the hall next to the journalists and in the distance I
could understand how uneasy he was. Later he told me that when
he sat there, he saw those people as they had been in April 'fortyfive. With Ebenezer's eyes he saw them, and they were all dead,
he added. When they applauded him, he stood up and applauded
them. People at the head table talked, one after another. Behind
them hung a sign: "Twenty-five Years of Liberation," and a gigantic picture of a concentration camp hung there. And then
Sam got up went to the stage, whispered with one of the dignitaries, and the man smiled and there was a hush and Sam picked up
the microphone, started walking back and forth, eyes fixed on the
hundreds of people sitting around turkey and bottles of wine, and
said: I was born in the wrong place, because they put me at the
wrong table. I wasn't born in a camp but in my mother's house.
Why are the tables arranged like that? Why not by professions:
tooth extractors, gravediggers, experts in diamonds, in gold teeth?

The murmuring in the hall started right from the start.
You're the only family I've got, he said, not paying attention to
what was going on, except for Mr. Brooks, the father of my beloved Melissa, but she didn't wait for me either. What nerve is
it to assemble every year like this? We should have devastated
Europe and not be eating turkey, but we didn't. We should have
destroyed America, who threw us to the dogs, but we're getting
rich and living off her. We had Einstein and Oppenheimer and
Teller, why didn't we ask them to devastate the Western world
instead of Hiroshima? SS Kramer was more reliable. Until the last
minute, he knew who the enemy was and what he had to do.
Ebenezer knew too and as far as he's concerned, you're all dead.

He looked at them. After a few minutes, he started singing
and they joined in, one by one, and sang a song called "Nieder-
landisches Dankgebet" as if he had hypnotized them. The head
table sang too. They stood like slaughtered peacocks who had
remained alive a few seconds, their eyes shut and sang innocently and devotedly, and the hall shook and the microphone
whistled and screeched, and only the man sitting next to Sam
looked pale and waved his hands, his name (I know because I
saw him on television) was Eliahu Wiggs. He pushed Sam and
slapped his face and the hubbub prevailed and Sam went on
singing and everybody went on singing and then they assaulted
the tables like a routed army and we left there.

You cannot understand, or you can understand better than
anybody, how strange it is for a person like me to write these
things. My background, my position, everything I was and did didn't prepare me for this week, but when you visited us, something snapped in me that may have been lying inside me for
many years, that damn intimacy, almost despair, was born,
something like closeness, to people who hundreds of years ago
had cleared the forests of New England, burned in a foreign
fire. As if I wanted to restore to Christianity what Sam Lipp,
Lionel, and even you hold in your hand-some profound hatred,
a shadow of a jealous and cruel God.

Before he ran away from the hall with Eliahu Wiggs's slap
stuck to his face, he managed to take a few cookies. He stood at
the cloakroom and with trembling hands he tried to put on the
coat. He held the cookies in his mouth so his hands would be
free. Eliahu Wiggs, furious, came out and yelled at him, but Sam
couldn't answer him because his mouth was full of cookies. And
suddenly I saw how two people could be hungrier than I ever
knew. Eliahu wanted to slap Sam's face again, but the sight of the
cookies was so attractive that he started weeping, quietly, and his
hand that wanted to hit stuck to his body again, he turned his
face right and left, and I thought: Those aren't the artificial tears
Sam talked about before. With his skinny hand, he grabbed one
cookie from Sam's mouth and started chomping it hungrily, and
Sam held the cookies tight in his mouth and Eliahu wanted more
and had to bring his thin, beautiful face close to Sam's mouth to
snatch more, and suddenly it didn't matter what I or others saw,
he put his face close and bit and Sam almost kissed him on the
mouth and the two of them hugged or wrestled, and tears rolled
on their cheeks and then Eliahu Wiggs pulled away, tears flowing
on his cheeks, and disappeared into the hall.

We got into a taxi and Sam wanted to sleep for an hour, paid
the driver in advance, apologized to him and me, and fell asleep.
I sat and pondered what I was doing with him in a taxi, at night,
in the cold, and the driver talked about the weather and about
the near-accident of the Swissair flight at Kennedy Airport when
he went there earlier, and then Sam woke up and asked the
driver if he had aftershave and Sam got aftershave from the driver
and sprayed a little on his face and told him to drive home.

I took Sam to my house. He and Licinda stayed with us for
three days. We looked at them yearningly. My wife hugged him,
drank too much, and said: If you want, you can marry Melissa,
and she passed out. We took her to the hospital and she's been
there for a month. I sit at her side and ask myself, What disaster did I bring down on her and on me? and I have no answer.

Yours,

A. M. Brooks

Tape / -

Greta Garbo as Ninotchka goes into a restaurant. She says to the waiter:
Give me coffee without cream. A few minutes later, the waiter comes back
and says: We have no cream, Madame. Is it all right without milk?

In my reflection she is I, she's my memory, she's the fact that maybe it will
finally be revealed that I had no father. Not Nehemiah, not Joseph, an impure
spirit of holiness entered my mother in the river. The river is my father. Old
is my mother and cruel. Samuel is my son. Where are you, dear Samuel?

Tape / -

Dear Obadiah,

Some time ago, my phone rang at home and Sam Lipp, who
was on the line, informed me that he had come to town and was
living in a Lebensborn inn.

The name Lebensborn naturally made me shudder. When I
hung up, I said to myself: There can't be a hotel with that name
in our city. I took the phone book and scanned it and to my
amazement I found a hotel called Ludwigshaus-Lebensborn. I
assume the name doesn't mean much to you. But Samuel
wasn't so innocent. During the war, Lebensborn was a pretty
shady institution, yet was maintained by the heads of the party
and called "Institute for the Improvement of the Race." In fact,
it was a completely establishment whorehouse led by none
other than the Reichsfuhrer in person. Aryan girls and officers
were brought there, mainly SS officers of impeccable race and
they could copulate and create a new generation of pure Aryans.
According to my father (to his credit he had total contempt for the place), those were adulterous, purely bestial encounters,
and human beings, said my father, could savor there the taste of
protected, and even more important, legal promiscuity. In other
words: Those were establishment, organized, numbered flirtations, and women whose husbands were on the front for a long
time could come there anonymously (only the authorities knew
who they were) and copulate with the best of the German men.
According to my father, the institution was quite varied-and
here you can hear the party member speaking-but at least
here, unlike Paris, there weren't naked whores on skates with
naked men running after them and falling and getting up and
trying to catch them. There weren't impotent old men there
peeping through the cracks. It was, my father added, an institution that was basically filthy, but clean in its operation, solid,
even if full of adultery they called patriotic. I didn't ask him
what he thought about that last word, maybe Friedrich did.

I told Sam I was coming immediately, and he said, and I
could hear his smile on the phone: Don't rush, I've got something to do in the meantime. Maybe he was trying to hint to me
that old patriots were still copulating there with heavenly girls.
I put on my coat and went. He was waiting for me in what remained of a splendid lobby reminiscent of the old days. The
building, like our famous cathedral, had never been blown up.
He asked: Did you get a letter from Mr. Brooks, my first wife's
father? I answered yes, and he said: That great man! We were
sitting in his room. From the window Schiller Park could be
seen, I used to play there as a child. We were sipping sherry
from a bottle Sam had ordered earlier. The area was familiar to
me from years gone by, and it had been a long time since I had
set foot in that part of the city. Sam tried to explain something
to me that was hard for me to understand, he said: Once I invented setting watches backward. Then I lived in reverse time
and that's how the disease of forgetting was born, that lasted
four years. My key was with Ebenezer and Ebenezer's key was
with me. At Kennedy Airport I exchanged the ticket because I
was afraid to fly to Israel, I wanted first to be in a place where they invented the key to my reverse time, so I would come to
Israel and not somebody else.