“Orderly.” “Quiet.” “Dignified.” “Brave.” Herschel says these words softly, as if to impress me with his solemnity. This is the sort of report which touches him: it is Hermann Graebe’s much quoted description of the death pit near Dubno, and I repeated these words for just that reason. No one can complain of Herschel’s response. They were brave. They were dignified and orderly. They were impressively superior to the criminals who killed them—to Hermann Graebe himself, the German engineer who witnessed it all and wrote about it so straightforwardly, with a kind of wonder, as if he had observed the smother of a hive of bees. This engineer reminds me of Kafka’s neutral note-taker whose account of the punishment machine in The Penal Colony is so harrowing. (Culp, alas, is my personal and particular sting.) Anyway, one cannot deny Herschel his point. These people were brave. They were dignified and orderly. They were. They died in noble difference from the Hun. Yet should they have been so peaceful and quiet. Henry, I ask him. Or should they have been screaming and clawing at the heavens till the sky ran red? Shouldn’t they have scattered, those hundreds, in every direction like a flock of chickens from a stone? The Jews in Warsaw died, too, Herschel, but for days they occupied an army. Herschel smiles in that tentative soft way he has. He has learned to expect the return of my mind like a swing, but he has not gotten used to the arc of it. I tell him that their bravery was the bravery of the bullock who dies beneath the yoke, but Henry will not accept my comparison. These poor people had only one choice, he tells me—how they would leave life—and they chose nobly. While the Nazis were subtracting from the total of humanity, in every sense, their victims were acting to its credit, and balancing the books. Bal-balancing the books! No, Hershey, no. The Germans should have had to sweep those bodies up like a cup of spilled rice. And they had no brooms, see? They would have had to pick every piece up between tweezing nails. Who pays you to die with patience, Hersch, eh? Death does. They were brave—sure. Dignified. Yet they went into the ground like sacks of fertilizer. Polite as patients, all right, and as though disciplined by their doctors, they kicked up no fuss and died quietly as a wind. Herschel offers me another smile like the last chocolate on the plate. It tells me that my observations are appreciated, although they do not change him. He loses his opinions no better than I lose weight. If, since the day Nietzsche composed the cliché and advanced the hope, Henry, all real belief in God is gone like the last garrulous guest, then it stands to reason that, following the Holocaust, all real belief in Man must wither too. His jaw moves slowly shut behind his jowls. Someone has slipped the last smile from its little paper cuff. Of course I cannot mean what I say, so he is wondering what my motive is. Well, I am l’enfant terrible d’un certain âge.