MANES SPERBER
53
ing bell of the streetcar, perhaps not even hearing it. A policeman
hurled himself at him and began pounding his neck and shoulders
with his fists. As the man slowly turned round, the fists in gray
woolen gloves landed on his brow and chin .
In the last light of that gloomy autumn day I stared at the
gloves and at the victim staggering from the blows, making no effort
either to defend himself or to flee. And the many curious onlookers–
why did none of them intervene? Finally the policeman released his
victim, who lurched back to the sidewalk and disappeared in the
thick crowd .
My memory has retained this sorry incident since September
1931 in all its details, so that I could effortlessly reenact it on that
spot. At each of the countless discussions about the Soviet Union in
which I later participated in Berlin, it persistently came to my mind.
But for ten years I suppressed it like a shameful secret and later
made it the experience of a character in one of my novels, as the
"dark point" in the consciousness of a German communist who was
later to be liquidated in Moscow when he refused to be cast in the
role of provocateur, spy, and saboteur in one of Stalin's show trials.
One night on the way home, our path crossed that of a big man
holding with both hands a long sack slung over his back. He walked
slowly- the burden must have been unusually heavy. The sight of
him frightened me . Even Lisa, usually so quick to speak, hesitated
before she gave her explanation: the man was an illegal burier of
corpses, an old but still strong, very religious Jew, who brought the
bodies of pious, fellow believers to the Jewish cemetery, so that they
might be buried in hallowed ground with the proper prayers and
rituals. Naturally the police knew what was going on, but they let
these fanatics alone . Perhaps a few militia officers had been bribed.
Since early youth I had been horrified by funeral ceremonies,
with their feeble rituals of mourning and consolation, with the
corpse dressed and laid out like a doll which one could not identify
with the recently departed. Dead bodies are unclean; they should be
isolated from the living. Anyone who has lived survives in the
thoughts and also in the bodies of his descendents . All this had been
impressed upon me while I was still a child in the shtetl.
What would happen to this corpse which the old man was haul–
ing through Moscow was a matter of indifference to me. But for long
hours that nightmarish image remained with me, and did not fade
even after I had freed myself from the mood and returned to reality.
