Besides, the barbershop isn’t far from the corridor where the black-haired girl is working on the statistical survey of the victims in the ghetto uprising. You might stick your fragrant and freshly Brylcreemed head in the door and casually ask how things are going (she’s shown me the number tattooed on her arm, a barely legible blue spot on the very smooth skin with tender-blue veins; still and all, it’s a sign of intimacy, an earnest of a burgeoning human relationship). Perhaps you can offer her the happiness of falling in love with her: Love bade me welcome, and the dead soul lived again . . .

perhaps she’ll sing you something in Polish, something full of yearning, welling up out of mashed labials. Maybe even something in Yiddish (while my Brylcreem-smooth skull lies in her lap), tender Yiddish songs as in Bessarabia long ago. Di bist sheyn in maine oign, sheyner fin der velt—ikh hob on dir nisht kain khazuren, alles mir gefeit. Meyg zain tserrisn dus neyzale, meygst hubn seykhele vi an eyzele; Di bist sheyn in maine oign, sheyner fin der velt . . . That would be nice, that would snuff out a lot, that would be balm for my heart, the old shard . . .

you see, it’s under great stress here, my heart. Pastor Kneipp’s alternating baths make it pound in my tonsils a good dozen times a day. In the barbershop, for instance, they have a shoeshine boy and clown (as a back-court fool, so to speak, a caricature of all the postwar German lemur traits), a little boy they picked up somewhere: a wild, lice-ridden tatterdemalion, an unspeakably repulsive blob of slime, pesky as a blowfly, leechy as a crab louse, a microbe apprentice, pederastically fingered, pickled in gonococci like an eel in green—you must have seen with what democratic openness this basement rat throws himself at the victors—you must have watched it. It goes like this: The door opens, but not far enough for a chief of the Praetorian Guard. He does not merely enter, he towers his way in. Everyone in the barbershop is awestruck (especially me: I’ve been subpoenaed as a witness for the prosecution, but still and all, that’s just a hairsbreadth away from being a defendant—and here I am, frivolously having my hair pomaded). The Praetorian bulks into the room. His skull is wedged in a helmet polished like plexiglass. A helmet of the avenging angels, it almost bangs against the ceiling. The barbers’ razors tremble at the throats of the hygiene-deficient, who, choked by their white towels, peer up at the avenging angel . . .

and he, the avenging angel, stomps closer in waxed lace-up boots with thick rubber soles. Under his Grail-castle helmet, his kisser floats on the chin strap: T-bone-steak-fed America, sprouting from violent Lithuanian seed in Iowa, Irish madness in the brain, Dutch narrow-mindedness in the blood, Puritanical witch-burning fanaticism in the eyes, chewing gum between the crushing nutcracker jaws. He snorts from his nostrils like a bull of Colchis. His thorax, squeezed upward by a ten-inch-wide motorcyclist belt, is swollen like a barrage balloon over whose tip a truck is accidentally driving. A rubber club dangles from his wrist over the sausage-stuffed white cotton glove . . .