Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,19
thrashed me so hard, his cut opened and blood poured out. I heard my mother scream, ‘Stop it, you are splashing blood all over the clean walls.’ ”
• • •
Her boss was on the phone, feet on his desk, rolling a piece of Scotch tape between his fingers.
“What about Blazer? Why don’t we publish Ezra Blazer anymore? Hilly wouldn’t know literature if it went down on him.”
Alice dropped a file into the wire tray outside his door and kneeled to fiddle with the strap on her shoe.
“No. No! I didn’t say that. Hilly’s full of shit. I said we’d do a million for the new book plus two-fifty for the backlist, even though it’s unearned by more than the value of your house in fucking Montauk. Does that sound ‘prudent’ to you?”
• • •
In Germany today, this notion of “prominent” Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of “famous” Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello.”
“How are you, Mary-Alice?”
“I’m all right. You?”
“I’m fine. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You sure you’re all right? You sound a little blue.”
“I am a little blue. But it’s nothing. Don’t worry. How’s your book?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Who knows if it’s any good. It’s a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things. Describing the door someone just walked through. It’s brown, the hinges are squeaky . . . Who gives a shit? It’s a door.”
“ ‘Endeavors in art require a lot of patience,’ ” Alice said finally. She could hear the frogs croaking.
“Memory like a steel trap, Mealy Potatoes.”
• • •
The camp was between forty and fifty acres (six hundred metres by four hundred) and was divided into two main sections and four subsections. The “upper camp”—or Camp II—included the gas chambers, the installations for the disposal of the corpses (lime-pits at first, then huge iron racks for burning, known as “roasts”), and the barracks for the Totenjuden, the Jewish work-groups. One of the barracks was for males, another, later, for females. The men carried and burned the bodies; the twelve girls cooked and washed.
The “lower camp” or Camp I was subdivided into three sections, rigidly separated by barbed-wire fences, which, like the outer fences, were interwoven with pine branches for camouflage. The first section contained the unloading ramp and the square—Sortierungsplatz—where the first selections were made; the fake hospital (the Lazarett) where the old and sick were shot instead of gassed; the undressing barracks where the victims stripped, left their clothes, had their hair cut off if they were women, and were internally searched for hidden valuables; and finally the “Road to Heaven”. This, starting at the exit from the women’s and children’s undressing barrack, was a path ten-feet wide with ten-foot fences of barbed wire on each side (again thickly camouflaged with branches, constantly renewed, through which one could neither see out nor in), through which the naked prisoners, in rows of five, had to run the hundred metres up the hill to the “baths”—the gas chambers—and where, when, as happened frequently, the gassing mechanism broke down, they had to stand waiting their turn for hours at a time.
• • •
She was about to send off an email rejecting another novel written in the second person when her screen went black and the air-conditioning sputtered out, leaving behind a dim, primordial silence.
“Fuck,” said her boss, down the hall.
An hour later she and her colleagues were still bent over stalled paperwork in the dank-growing air when he came around scowling and told them all that they could go home, if they could get there.
Twenty-one flights down in the lobby, firefighters milled around the sealed elevator bank, eyes raised to the halted dials. On Fifty-Seventh Street, cars jockeyed for a path through the lightless intersections while the number of pedestrians seemed to have quadrupled since morning. Just north of Columbus Circle, where a self-appointed traffic conductor worked in mirrored sunglasses and shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, the line for Mister Softee ran the length of the block. Longer still were the lines to use the old-fashioned phone booths earning another stay of execution: people approached them warily, even