body, your own beloved and maddening body with its quirks and birthmarks, its trick knee or double-jointed thumb, its scars each with its own story; the body that you and others have nursed through colds and fevers; the body whose digestive processes have provided the visceral rhythm for your days; the body that it has been your goal in life to feed and clothe and shelter; the body that only your mother and your lovers know better than you. They will burn your brain with its magnificent network of neurons, in which are stored memories and hard-earned philosophies, books you have read and sights you have seen, the endearments you used for others and the concept of yourself as an individual being, that inviolable essence of yourself so deeply personal that it can never be articulated. They will put you in the oven and they will burn you, and the only thing that distinguishes them from the monsters of the Grimm tales is that they will not eat you afterward. In all other respects, they are monsters, with the faces of businessmen and bullies, monsters literal and insane; they will yawn as you go up the chimney.
[Subject pauses to refold statement.]
This is not what happened to me, obviously. This is what [happened to my aunt Sarah, whom I loved dearly. Or rather, this is what I imagine happened to her. There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain. There is no way to know what they felt, those millions who were given no chance at survival. I can only speculate. And even I, a Jew—yes, I am a Jew, Dr. Swenson, and my entire family was murdered by the Nazis—even I can only imagine a pale facsimile of what it must have been like.
But I do know that there is no justification. No possible rationalization for what the Nazis did, for what civilian Germans permitted and encouraged to happen.
And yet: you. Here you are. You have the temerity to sit in my home, at my table, with your lights and your cameras and your questions and your historical credentials. You dare to seek some explanation. You dare to record the stories of the butchers and those who abetted them. You dare to seek some exoneration of a people who committed wholesale slaughter of an entire race!
Take your things and get out of my house.
I said, get out. Now.
Get out, I said! Get out of my house!
37
AFTER THIS UTTER DISASTER, TRUDY WANTS NOTHING more than to go lie down in a very dark room for a very long time. But of course this is impossible: she has a seminar to teach, and even though Mr. Goldmann’s interview has been, to put it politely, truncated, Trudy must still scramble if she is to make it to the university for her class. So she leaves Mr. Goldmann’s house immediately as ordered, waiting on the porch for Thomas to pack his equipment. She hangs her head when she hears him coming outside; she can’t bear to look at his face, to find even a trace of triumph there.
Thomas touches her shoulder.
Are you all right? he asks.
I’m fine, says Trudy, staring over at her car. Just late.
She starts to walk down the steps. Thomas’s cart bumps along the risers behind her.
God, that was terrible, he says. I never would have expected—
I’m sorry, Thomas, but I really have to go.
Trudy.
Yes?
Try not to take it too much to heart, what he said. It wasn’t your fault.
Trudy feels the treacherous sting of tears behind her eyes. She quickens her pace until she is nearly running toward her car. As she opens its door, she raises a backward hand in farewell and calls, I’ll be in touch later, okay?
She pulls away from the curb with a rattle of salt. The temperature has risen during her sojourn at Mr. Goldmann’s house and the roads are safer now, but they are also clogged with lunch-hour commuters and people getting a belated start on their day. Trudy drives like a maniac, weaving in and out of lanes, cutting off trucks, smacking her horn whenever she encounters somebody making too slow a turn or lingering at a four-way stop.
Come on, come on! she yells when she hits the snarled traffic on the bridge over the Mississippi.
She parks aslant in her space in the faculty lot and runs clumsily through the basement hallway of the History building, thump-slap, thump-slap, her unlaced boot threatening to come off her foot with each step. She