400
PARTISAN REVIEW
a bone in such a dry wrist. A nose like a saint's. The face of Jesus.
He whispered. Everyone leaned over to hear. He was Feingold's
voice: the voice Feingold was waiting for.
"Come to modern times,'" the voice urged. "Come to
yesterday." Lucy was right: she could tell a refugee in an instant,
even before she heard any accent. They all reminded her of her
father. She put away this insight (the resemblance of Presbyte–
rian ministers to Hilter refugees) to talk over with Feingold
later: it was nicely analytical, it had enough mystery to satisfy.
"Yesterday," the refugee said, "the eyes of God were shut." And
Lucy saw him shut his hidden eyes in their tunnels. "Shut," he
said, " like iron doors" -a voice of such nobility that Lucy
thought immediately of that eerie passage in Genesis where the
voice of the Lord God walks in the Garden in the cool of the day
and calls to Adam, "Where are you?"
They all listened with a terrible intensity. Again Lucy
looked around.
It
pained her how intense Jews could be, though
she too was intense. But she was intense because her brain was
roiling with ardor, she wooed mind-pictures, she was a novelist.
They
were intense all the time; she supposed the grocers among
them were as intense as any novelist; was it because they had
been Chosen, was it because they pitied themselves every
breathing moment?
Pity and shock stood in all their faces.
The refugee was telling a story. " I witnessed it," he said, "I
am the witness." Horror; sadism; corpses. As if-Lucy took the
image from the elusive wind that was his voice in its whisper–
as if hundreds and hundreds of Crucifixions were all happening
at once. She visualized a hillside with multitudes of crosses, and
bodies dropping down from big bloody nails. Every Jew was
Jesus. That was the only way Lucy could get hold of it:
otherwise it was only a movie. She had seen all the movies, the
truth was she could feel nothing. That same bulldozer shoveling
those same sticks of skeletons, that same little boy in a cap with
twisted mouth and his hands in the air-if there had been a
camera at the Crucifixion Christianity would collapse, no one
would ever feel anything about it. Cruelty came out of the
imagination, and had to be witnessed by the imagination.
