Middle C (10 page)

On the walls of his attic area were everywhere pinned atrocity pictures, some of them classics: the weeping baby of Nanking or the wailing Vietnamese girl running naked amid other running wailing children on that fatal Route 1 near Trang Bang (even the name a mockery); numerous sepias of dead outlaws with their names on crude signs propped beneath their boots; clips from films that showed what struck the eyes of those who first entered the extermination camps—careless heaps of skins and bones, entirely tangled, exhibiting more knees and elbows than two-pair-to-a-death ought allow—amateurishly aimed shots of the sodden trench-dead as well as bodies hanging over barbed battlefield wire; the bound Vietcong officer, a pistol at the end of a long arm pointed at his head, a picture taken in the act of his execution by a so-called chief of police; then, to add class, the rape of the Sabine women, etchings of chimney sweeps, delicate watercolors of sad solitaries and painted whores; or, for the purposes of education, the consequences of car bombs, mob hits, informers with their genitals wadded in their mouths, traitors hung from lampposts—Mussolini among the many whose bodies were publicly displayed—as were niggers strung, as a lesson, from the limbs of trees; but most were images transient for readers who saw, now with only a slight shock, countless corpses from African famines, African wars, African epidemics, ditto dead from India, ditto China but adding bloats from floods; there were big-eyed potbellied starvelings, wasted victims of disease, fields full of dead Dinka tribesmen, machine-gunned refugees on roads, misguided monks who had set fire to themselves, ghoulishly smoking up a street; and there were lots of Japanese prints that seemed to celebrate rape, paintings and pictures
that glorified war or sanctified lying priests, flattered pompous kings and smugly vicious dictators; still others that celebrated serial killers and tried to put a good face on fat ward politicians or merely reported on the Klansmen, dressed like hotel napkins; the Goya etchings depicting the
Disasters of War
, in poor reproductions to be sure, were all there, as well as Bosches xeroxed in color from an art book, a few stills from snuff films, violent propaganda posters, numerous Doré’s, Grünewalds, a volume of images devoted entirely to the crucifixion, saints suffering on grills or from flights of arrows, details from
Guernica
, examples from Grosz, close-ups of nails penetrating palms, then boards, illustrations in volumes of the Marquis de Sade (one, particularly prized, of a vagina sewn up like a wound); lots of photographs of the dead on battlefields or in burial grounds from
Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War
, many of them tampered with and staged, which created an added interest; there were drawings of medieval implements of torture, each aspect and element precisely labeled, as well as photographs of instruments of persuasion—the iron maiden, thumbscrew, rack—from the collection kept in the Tower of London; paintings of autos-da-fé by the Spanish master, firing squads by Monet, cavalry charges and combatants at the barricades by Delacroix; the guillotine with several of its severed heads was there, as well as emasculations, circumcision ceremonies, buffalo hunts, seal cubs as they were being clubbed, executions of various kinds—by knife, by fire, by gas, by poison, by lethal injection, by trap drop, by jolt, by shot—Indians massacred, natives forced over cliffs, notable assassinations—but only if the victim wasn’t deserving—scalp and shrunken-head collections—as well as wall after wall, not in Skizzen’s room but those depicted out in the world, where rebel soldiers or Warsaw Jews were lined up to be gunned down and photographed after, during, and before by the documentary-minded; close-ups of scattered body parts, many of them less identifiable than steaks or chops, including abattoirs in operation, fine watercolors of slave ships under full sail, a clutch of Salgado gold-mine prints depicting humans toiling in holes more horrible than Dante had imagined (and then had imagined only for the deserving); children huddled in doorways, on grates, coal miners in blackface, breadlines and beaten boxers, women working in sweatshops or shrouded in worshipful crowds, torch-lit Nazi rallies or the faithful as they were being trampled on their way to Mecca, six volumes
of tattoos; and the professor’s prize, an original Koudelka picturing a tipped-over tortoise, dead on a muddy Turkish road, handsomely matted and framed and hung center stage.

With great energy, and with a confident smile, he sent two cans into the cardboard. Such skill, he thought, was seldom seen.

Mostly, though, from every place not already tacked or pasted, clippings were loosely pinned or taped so that they would have fluttered had there ever been a draft, as they did wave a little when Skizzen passed or delivered one of his kicks, dangling for quite a ways down the wall in overlapping layers sometimes, even stuck to flypaper Skizzen had cannily suspended from the ceiling; the whole crowd requiring him to duck if he didn’t want his head and neck tickled; and giving to the room a cavey cachelike feeling, as if some creature, fond of collecting, lived there and only sallied forth like the jackdaw to find and fetch back bright things; or, in this case, cuttings from the tree of evil, for which purpose paper shears had been put in every room of the large house, every room including entry, bath, and laundry, because you never knew when you might come upon something, and Skizzen had learned not to put off the opportunity, or delay the acquisition, since he had, early on and before this present remedy, forgotten where he had seen a particular picture or news item and was sadly unable to locate it again. He vividly remembered, too, how he had lost an image on a handout by postponing its extraction when he should have scissored it out while he was still standing on the front stoop holding in his shocked hand a leaflet bearing a grotesque beard and a text attacking the Amish because they were receiving special privileges, which allowed them their own schools; when children, whose God-loving parents were faithful members of the Church of Christ’s Angelic Messengers, were called truants when kept from class and made to study—by a sick and godforsaken society—demonically inspired views of the development of life.

Next door, though the room was doorless and open to all those who found their way there, was the library, three of its walls lined by crude plank-and-brick cases crammed with books bearing witness to the inhumanity of man; especially a complete set of the lives of the saints, the
Newgate Calendars
, several on the history of the church, the many-volumed
International Military Trials
in an ugly library binding (for sale at a very reasonable price by the Superintendent of Documents
of the U.S. Government Printing Office), and several on the practice of slavery through the centuries translated from Arabic, lives of the Caesars, careers of the Medici, biographies of feminists, the fate of the gypsies, Armenians, or the American Indians, and, of course, tome after tome on holocausts and pogroms, exterminations and racial cleansings from then to now, where on one page he could feed on names like Major Dr. Huhnemoerder, Oberst von Reurmont, Gruppenfuehrer Nebe, OKW Chef Kgf, and General Grosch; however, the library did not merely hold works on barbaric rites and cruel customs or on spying, strikebreaking, lynching, pillaging, raping, but on counterfeiting, colluding, cheating, exploiting, blackmailing and extorting, absconding, suborning, skimming, embezzling, and other white-collar crimes as well: proof through news reports, through ideas, images, and action, of the wholly fallen and utterly depraved condition of our race—Slavs killing Slavs, Kurds killing Kurds—testimony that Joseph Skizzen augmented, on the few ritual occasions he allowed himself to observe, by his reciting aloud, while standing at what he deemed was the center of his collection, alternatively from a random page of some volume chosen similarly, or from a news bulletin pulled down blindly from whatever stalactite came to hand; although he did occasionally cheat in favor of
The Newgate Calendar
, from which he would read with relish accounts of crimes like that of Catherine Hayes, who contrived, by egging on several of her many paramours, to have her husband’s head cut off, in the punishment by which the righteous were seen to be even more wicked than the criminal.

When the wretched woman had finished her devotions, an iron chain was put round her body, with which she was fixed to a stake near the gallows. On these occasions, when women were burnt for petty treason, it was customary to strangle them, by means of a rope passed round the neck, and pulled by the executioner, so that they were dead before the flames reached the body. But this woman was literally burnt alive; for the executioner letting go the rope sooner than usual, in consequence of the flames reaching his hands, the fire burnt fiercely round her, and the spectators beheld her pushing the faggots from her, while she rent the air with her cries and lamentations. Other faggots were instantly thrown on her; but she survived amidst the flames for a considerable time, and her body was not perfectly reduced to ashes in less than three hours
.

Joseph Skizzen put his whole heart into his voice, happy no one would hear him, satisfied that no one would ever see his collection either; for he was no Jonathan Edwards, although his tones were dark, round, ripe, and juicy as olives, because he had no interest in the redemption of the masses whose moral improvement was quite fruitless in any case. He did privately admit, and thus absolve himself of it, that Joseph Skizzen was a man who enjoyed the repeated proofs that his views were right.

The drug trade and all it entailed, including bribery and money laundering, bored him—Joseph Skizzen had to confess to that partiality and to the fact that the relative absence of this and similarly vulgar forms of criminal business, as well as many of the brutalities of ordinary life that rarely reached the papers, was a serious flaw in his collection and, presumably, in his character as well. But who would know or care? That was a comfort. His work had been protected from its critics.

None more severe than he, when he missed his target and the can rattled through its vulgar leap toward the dormer ceiling.

Movies that would pan a camera about a serial killer’s poster-lined room (or a delinquent adolescent’s sometimes), after the police had invaded it, in order to astonish the audience’s eyes as police eyes presumably were, would cause Skizzen an unpleasant twinge on account of the situation’s distant similarity, especially when the lens would dwell on newspaper clippings, lists with circled names, or photographs of Charles Manson, but he bore such surprises well and avoided them altogether when that was possible.

There were images that had nowhere to hang but in his head, images he remembered from books but of which he had no other copy; particularly one, from a strangely beautiful illuminated manuscript called
The Hours of Catherine of Cleves
, that depicted the martyrdom of Saint Erasmus. The presumptive saint lies on a raised plank, naked except for a loincloth. His abdomen has been opened and his intestines attached to a windlass erected above him. Thereupon, like a length of sausage or a length of rope, his innards are being wound by two figures, one
male, one possibly female, each working hard to turn the spokes, their faces, however, averted from the scene. The saint does not appear to have wrists or hands. Eight turns have already been taken. The sky is empty except for a few clouds; the earth is empty except for two hills and some small yellow flowers. Around this painting, framed like a picture, is a delicate thin line made of curlicues and a field of tiny petals stalked by imaginary butterflies. At the bottom a small boy wearing a collar of thin sticks is riding a hobbyhorse.

His curiosity aroused by this calamitous vision, Skizzen sought more bio concerning Saint Erasmus. One source simply said that “although he existed, almost nothing is known about him.” This sentence stayed with Skizzen as stubbornly as the piteous illumination. What a blessed condition Erasmus must have enjoyed! Although he existed, almost nothing was known of him. Although nothing was known of him, as a saint, he existed. He existed, yet he had lived such a saintly life there was nothing of him to be known. Still another authority was not as sanguine. It claimed that the cult of Erasmus spread with such success that twelve hundred years later the martyr was invoked as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, whoever they were, and had become patron saint of sailors as well as kids who had colic. What was known, during those hundreds of years, was not known of the saint but of some figure he had thrown about himself as you would a ghostly garment or a costume for the dance. Proudly, Professor Skizzen pasted Erasmus in his memory book. A.d. 300. He was sprayed with tar and set alight. He was jailed, rescued by an angel, disemboweled. On a day in a.d. He died for me.

So as time and life passed, Professor Joseph Skizzen took care of Miriam, with whom he still lived; he played his piano, once a nice one; he prepared his classes and dealt with his students, studied Liszt, obsessively rewrote his sentence—now in its seven hundredth version—or clipped affronts to reason, evidences of evil action or ill feeling, from books, papers, periodicals, and elsewhere, most of them to paste in albums organized in terms of Flaws, Crimes, and Consequences, though many of the more lurid were strung up like victims on lengths of flypaper, nothing but reports of riots on one, high treasons on another, political corruption, poaching, strip mining, or deforestation on still others, and in order not to play favorites, he decorated a specially selected string
with unspeakable deeds done by Jews, among them—in honor of his would-be forgotten father—the abandonment of the family.

Professor Joseph Skizzen’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by his fear that it will quite comfortably continue
.

7

Rudi had not left his family in the lurch, Miriam told the children at first, frightened of the effect the truth would have upon them. It was Raymond Scofield who had done that. Rudi had, she insisted, gone to America, where he would find work and, in due course, a pleasant place to bring them. After the second year, this lie could no longer be lengthened. Who knew what foul thing had befallen him in that faraway barbaric country of cowboys? And when they sailed for the States, that was the story in charge: their dear father had been killed by wild beasts, outlaws, or Indians in New York or Canada. He had doubtless been buried on the lone prairie, because neither the immigration authorities nor any of the refugee organizations had any record of a Rudi Skizzen or a Yankel Fixel or a Raymond Scofield. But, by the children, this was no more believed than Santa Claus, though the pretense was for a while maintained. We should have gone to Halifax, Miriam said, that’s where your father is. But Miriam and her children were now in the hands of the system, so they went to a tiny two-bus town in Ohio, where they lived in a very small house at the edge of whatever civilization there was; Miriam got a routine job making rubber dishpans; the kids rode hand-me-down bikes to a very small school; Miriam caught one of the buses to work where she made friends readily; and life in Woodbine, Ohio, was safe, calm, regular, and quiet. About her occupation, Miriam always said it
was better than the laundry. She still smelled of something, but it was no longer soap. Debbie loved her school where she soon had plenty of chums and took up cheering the boys at their American sports. When Debbie jumped up and down her breasts bobbed beguilingly beneath her sweater, and that was the real reason for the acrobatics, Joey felt. He liked Debbie better younger when she was without them and their gentle wobble. Imagine being popular for such a reason or made happy because you stuck out.