They knew best, of course: what human form would triumph and who would serve under them. Their certainty was in the love of their father and the supremacy of their archetypes. Their music soared over the babble of the masses. They were all tall and sleek, muscular and agile. Their skin was smooth, fresh; their hair like the sun. Their eyes were blue and vivid, the deep promise of the ocean. They were my brothers; they were right.
I was born in 1929. We lived in a small hut on a hill overlooking a moderate village, far from the cities. The ground was sparse, chunky with rock, difficult to farm. Just beyond the horizon to the southeast Poland lay, though I do not remember ever traveling there, or ever hearing anyone speak of it except in dismissive tones: we were Germans.
A few of the villagers made their living by coaxing potatoes from the rough soil; most earned their income from various crafts. My father was a tanner of animal hides, and a Talmudic scholar. My mother and sisters were dark and strong; when I was very young I thought them richly beautiful, but as time passed I came to know better.
My grandfather asked me, when I was but three years old, what I wanted to be when I grew up.
“The opposite,” I replied.
“Of what?” he laughed.
“Of me,” I said.
When I was five my father died of an ailing heart. He had stopped studying the Talmud the year before, when my grandfather died, saying that it was no longer of any use. I was quietly glad when he put his books away for good: seeing his old, heavily lined face leaning over yellowed tomes embarrassed me, and his fetish for ancient words struck me, even then, as foolish.
Shortly after my old father’s death, I saw my new father’s face in the newspaper. My new father lived in Berlin. His features were sharp and clean, his eyes penetrating. He was bare of the kind of long, silly beard my old father had worn. I thought my new father was gorgeous and radiant.
He was the prince of a wise clan of new men who reclassified the world and recast its future. The old world teemed with parasites, he said, who murdered Christ and contaminated German culture and aspirations. It was being bled dry by foreign leeches, who spouted religious lies. The new world would be pure and white and unpolluted.
I read my father’s words and thought, I must lose my skin; it lies.
And in the weeks following, I pored over every word that tumbled from my father’s lips — at least those that I could secretly acquire. I could never read them in my mother’s house; they were always borrowed texts, begged newspapers and journals from other villagers. Some of the reading was too difficult for my young eyes, and I would have to ask someone to speak it aloud. The words were knives that scraped away the dark molds covering the truth. They were severe and elemental, and when I read them, or heard them, they were choruses in my mind. They were the unsparing and musical prophesies of a man who cared so passionately for the future of the highest race that he would let nothing debase it. They named the villainous and sketched the warm contours of a dream. Only one people could survive.
My mother stopped combing her hair after her husband died, and it became ratted and snarled. Cloaked always in black, and silent, she lifelessly cared for my sisters and me, selling off her husband’s many books, as well as his tanning equipment, for income. I was glad: her husband’s occupation was a trade of stripping flesh, and its gear and tackle, scattered about our hut and land, smelled of death and blood, impure. And the books were all fairy tales, barren promises from an old and diseased deity; they stank of the hopes of an impure race.
And when I heard my father’s voice; when I first bathed in the liquid speech of my father’s tongue, singing over the wires strung across the countryside, splashing out from a small glowing box in the village; and when that music washed over me, cradled me, caressed me: I knew, I knew, that my father had not died, that my father was no wretched tanner of hides, that I was no son of an archaeologist of dead words. I knew that I was of another seed, clean, white, eyes blue and intense. And from that day I saw my mother for what she was: a wizened thing, black and devious, a disfigurement, the rabbi’s whore. And I knew that I was of another womb.
Months passed, becoming years. One day my father in Berlin decreed that the imposters should be marked with a yellow badge, an emblem of their corruption. My guardian, who was not my mother, took me down to the village hall, along with the other girls she supervised, and who also lived in my house. We stood in line, before soldiers who sat behind tables and who issued stars the stain of a dog’s urine. I had never seen my father’s other children before; they were lovely to behold, tall, eloquent in their physical grace, proudly wearing uniforms that were clean and crisp and which hinted at their omnipotence. The woman who kept my house and cooked my meals took her star, and those of the girls who also lived in my house. Then one of the children of the Berlin Prince held out a badge for me, and I stepped back.
“But I am not like them!” I protested.
The soldiers looked at each other, and laughed.
“I am of you, not of her!” I screamed.
The soldiers shook their heads, and laughed harder. One of them handed the badge to the woman who supervised me. She took it without comment, and began dragging me away as I pleaded, “It is a mistake! Ask my father! Ask my father!”
And in night’s cradle, I dreamed:
I am lying in my bed, awake, when I hear them calling me; my brothers, the wolves. I hear the whispered snore of the old woman, and the sighs of her daughters, in the dark room. I slip silently out of bed and tread across the floor on padded feet; they go on sleeping.
I step outside, into the moonlight. It is a cold blue wash that makes the skin on my bare arms glow. I take off my sleeping gown and toss it on the step. Falling to my hands and knees, I begin crawling up the wooded hill behind the hut. At first the climb is hard, for I am but a boy and weak; then my arms and legs lengthen, and grow thick with muscle and rich with silver hair — and I am running, sprinting through the forest hills, shooting toward the peak with mercurial strength. I can hear my brothers all around now, their songs flying through the trees, their dark music silencing the other animals of the forest.
I crash into a clearing at the peak.
My brothers are all there, sinewy and sleek, their fur the reflection of the moon, their jaws open and their eyes hungry. All of my brothers, hundreds; and they see me, and embrace me, and kiss me, and whisper, “We’ve been waiting for you since the beginning.”
They, all of us, grow quiet; time stops. The strongest among them looks down the hill, the highest around, toward the southeast. I follow his gaze, and wonder what he sees, longs for. His reply is voiceless but fills my head: it is a corrupted land, a race of grinning thieves. They do not know we are coming: we will rend their throats between our teeth.
My heart races. We begin down the mountain, a furious blur of speed and purpose.
Every time the whore sewed the badge on my jacket, I ripped it off.
I desperately wanted to talk to somebody about this terrible confusion, this tragic switching of blood and appearance, but there was no one. I could only lie awake at night, and try to imagine what wrong had taken place. Was there some clandestine adoption, the result of verbal sorcery? Was I snatched from my father’s nursery, hustled away in the night by a dark-skinned conjuror? I could not imagine that my father had abandoned me, or all thoughts of me, entirely; he must, I knew, pray at night for my safe return, my homecoming. In my dreams he would come into our village, leading a grand battalion of his sons, my brothers, their banners of spiders waving from poles hoisted high above them, the metered thumping of their boots announcing their arrival; and he would walk up to the door of my cottage, and open it with strong hands; and I would be sitting by the fire, and feeling the gust of wind at my back, turn, and see him; and our eyes would lock. And I would bolt up from the bench, and run, and run to him, gathered up in his massive arms, kissing his lips and mustache, burying my face in his chest, weeping for sheer joy.
And then I would wake up. The dark-haired hag would feed me a meal of potatoes, sometimes an egg.
They did begin coming, my brothers; at first in small bands riding through, with all due noise and heraldry. They would post new proclamations from my father in Berlin about the village, and then depart. They made the old men, the groveling Talmudists like the man who married the hag who cared for me, scamper into their paltry huts, like cockroaches scurrying in the light.
As the months passed, they began coming in larger groups, ferreting out the insects. They started with the aged ones, the Torah tricksters, my mother’s pimp. Their dancing filled me with glee.
I dreamed:
I am at the opera house in Munich, in the balcony. I am nestled in my father’s lap; next to us sits my mother, regal and lovely. Her fingers are weaving softly through my blond hair. Thousands of Germans fill the seats below, pretending to view the opera, but often craning to glimpse us in admiration, in awe. The music tonight is Wagner; my mother knows the melodies by heart, and hums along as the soprano sings. My father’s foot taps out the rhythms, as if directing them.
When the performance concludes, the orchestra plays waltzes, and the conductor gestures our family down to play for the audience. I wrap my arms around my father’s neck as he takes my mother’s hands; and we three swirl and glide and spin, dizzy, under the wash of lights and applause. My heart is too full for my small chest; I fear that I might faint, delirious.
Later, home, my mother and father bundle me into a downy bed, and sit beside me. My mother is singing softly from the evening’s songs. My father loosens his tie and takes it off. He unfastens his shirt buttons down to his waist, pulls up his undershirt. He frees one large and doughy breast, covered with blond hair, dotted with an appled nipple that is thick and leaking. I open my mouth. He leans over and I begin drinking, licking and swallowing, until my belly is warm, until I slip, and sleep, and drown in the milk of my father.
When my brothers would come I would see them, and run up to them, and cover them with my kisses. I embarrassed them, I know, with such open displays of affection, but I could not contain myself. Over the months they came more and more often, and the population of our village began to dwindle.
I dreamed:
My father is the sun; my mother, the ocean.
And after I had waited; after I had dreamed of them since my birth, one day, one day, as I was sitting, and waiting, on the porch of my cottage: I saw them come to the village, and into it, and then through it; they began marching up the hill toward my home. And I knew that they had come for me.
I ran in to tell the witch and her daughters that I was leaving. Sitting at the table, she whirled about, aghast — we could hear the sound of marching feet outside — and slapped me hard across the face, stunning me into silence. Tears stung my eyes as she grabbed my wrist and growled for her bitches to follow her; she then began rushing to the back of the hut with me in rough tow.
There, in the kitchen, she ripped up the floorboards in the center of the room with her one free hand, and ordered her daughters down into the dark hollow; her other hand held its clamp on me. I began twisting and writhing to break free, but she was strong, and I was but a boy — and still terrified of the savagery of her earlier violence.
We could hear voices just outside then, as the men grew close and talked, joked amongst themselves.
My keeper hurled me into the hole, and jumped in after me. She pulled the floorboards back into place, over our heads, and we were engulfed in darkness as the hammering against the front door started. I tried to call out, but her thick arm snaked around my chest, and her calloused palm clamped over my mouth, as the sound of wood splintering, and then crashing, exploded all around us.
I could hear them, pounding through the house, their boots echoing on the floorboards, the sounds of things falling and shattering, their shouts — my brothers, my liberators. I could not breathe: my keeper was choking me with her arm, smothering me with her gnarled hand, and I could taste the rancid sweat on her fingers. It was dark and hot and moist there, and I thought I heard someone crying as the blackness began to consume me. My keeper was wet with greasy sweat, and she began to stink: of things rank and ugly, of things decaying, of dead things — and I could feel the thick sludge in my stomach bubble, and rise up. And I knew that I would die, strangled on my own vomit. I knew that I would perish, with the cockroaches under the floorboards, while my saviors searched vainly for me. I knew that I would lie lifeless under the earth, long after my brothers had given up hope and left.
So to save my life I bit down, as hard as I could, on the fingers between my teeth. At the same moment I leapt up, battering my head through the floorboards, into the room.
I do not remember all of what happened next; the details are smoke in my mind. The soldiers, my brothers, stormed into the room, their rifles pointed and ready, as I crawled over the floor. And I ran to them; I ran to them, and hid behind the tallest one. And I pointed down at the cockroaches still huddled in the hollow, now exposed, and screamed, “There they are! There they are!”
The soldiers, my brothers, seized them, and hauled them out; and I heard the sounds of dogs howling, though we had none. I saw a young girl lying on the floor, her skirt pulled up over her face; and I heard the sound of my brothers’ laughter, resonant and hearty. I glimpsed an old lady, her blouse torn open and her sagging flesh exposed; and I heard the groans of a pig, begging, though we had none. And then the girls and the lady were gone, and the soldiers, my brothers, turned their backs to me; and I heard a voice, the wail of a small boy, sobbing, “Take me with you please take me with you take me home.”
I do not know what happened to the lady, or the girls; as for myself, I went on a long train ride.
I thought I would be going to my father’s house in Berlin, but we stopped at a camp in the woods first. My brothers lived there, and some of my sisters; I told them that I loved them, and was glad to see them, but that I still had to get to my father’s house, for he would be waiting. They laughed, and told me my father was long gone and away, and might not come back. When they tease, older brothers can be sometimes cruel.
I had to live among the leeches and parasites, and work for my food, but I understood, for there was no other room, and even in families, every little member must contribute what he can.
Because the camp was in the woods, there were many insects; my hair housed many, and the skin there began to itch and bleed.
After many days had passed, and the blood and pus oozing from my scalp grew into trickles down the back of my neck, one of my brothers took notice. Grinning, he took my hand, and led me to the doctor’s office.
The doctor lived at the far end of the camp, and had a wonderful office. Opera, blaring from a phonograph, filled the room as my brother and I entered. The doctor, who was kind and old, sat behind a massive desk, studying papers over the rim of his spectacles, smoking a pipe that scented the room with burning cherries. He peered up, and our eyes — his blue and radiant, mine brown and dull — met. After a moment my gaze traveled upward, resting on a portion of the wall overlooking his chair, where a painting was suspended, hovering, glowing.
It was a portrait of my father.
And I staggered forward, weeping, moaning again and again, “Daddy Daddy bring me home. O bring me home.”
I fainted; and when my eyes opened I was lying on a couch. Above me the kindly doctor’s face gazed down. On my head I felt a pressure; I reached up, and found it covered with bandages. The doctor smiled.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“You’re welcome, young man,” he replied.
We looked at each other for a long time, saying nothing. I thought his face wise and handsome; it was graced with deeply etched, fluid lines, and his temples were flecked with streaks of gray. His scent was rich with tobacco and perfume, his breath warm with liqueur. His eyes were aqua — the Mediterranean — and searching. At long last he inhaled deeply, and spoke: “What do you want?”
“To see my father,” I replied without hesitation, my eyes flickering up toward the painting on the wall. “To lose this skin, to replace these eyes. To return home. To lie in my father’s arms as my father’s son.”
The good doctor exhaled slowly, and turned away. “Other boys, and a few girls; they did not want it. You do.” He turned back, and gazed at me, his eyes narrowing, as though trying to see something undetectable. “What a strange and special boy you are.” As a gentle smile crept across his face, as he adjusted his glasses and checked the bandages wrapped around my head, he murmured, “It can be done.”
“Then do this thing do it do it,” I whispered.
I made numerous visits to the doctor’s office. At first we just talked, of many things, and nothing; the soothing melody of his voice reminded me of my father’s, safe and constant. Then he asked me to swallow things; I was hungry, and I did not mind. And then the doctor told me stories, and sang me lullabies, and I slept. It was eternal; I did not dream. He had told me it would require facing pain, and death. I did not mind. I did not dream. I slept.
He splashed chemicals onto my hair and head and flamed out all dark color. The pain seared my scalp but I did not mind.
And when it dried my hair was the color of the sun.
He stretched out my arms and legs with ropes and pulleys. And the torture of my joints and bones wracked me, but I did not mind.
For when the fractures knitted I stood, and was tall.
And when my eyes — those hateful dark orbs — were closed, he scooped them out, and refilled the sockets with the flesh of my father’s children. And when I woke, and opened my lids, there was only fire, and blackness; I could not see the doctor standing before me. But I did not mind. For I heard his voice, announcing the gift he had bestowed, saying, “Your eyes are blue; they are the ocean.”
And I was glad and reached out for him, groping, my hands grasping at the air until they found him; I wrapped my arms around his neck.
I hobble about tall, led by another’s hand. In me sings Electra’s triumphant song, again and again: O holy light! O glorious chariot of the sun! O earth! O night, that till this moment filled my eyes! Now all is freedom, eyes may open. . . .
This story first appeared in Carolina Quarterly and is reprinted with permission.
— Ed.
