Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:14:12 -0500
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
Subject: In the War of the Land

"In the War of the Land"

by

Timothy Stillman

All they had was each other. 1942 Warsaw ghetto, and the lives of people
took a certain darkness that was never to be transcended, and a man and
boy hid together in an attic of dark felt and deeper umber, where there
was only the rudeness of the boards and the splinters, and the plainness
and the wear and tear of their clothes. Bearded the man. Scruffled, the
boy. Inside the other factions of hands this would be considered wrong.
But now with the tribute of a flashlight and the penumbra of a small
almost melted candle stub, there was only a season springing up in the
heart. The last earth man and boy would know. When they came, when the
uniforms grained them into the Jew's night eyes always to be night,
always to be lack of humanity, and the craziness began, and boy and man,
Dimitri and Samuel, experienced first love of this kind, first extended
shadow heart reaching out to what before they would have disdained, out
of hand..

For all was shadow this long night, where the knives came and the windows
were exploded, along with the eyes of the people rounded up, on this
table top of nightmare, where there were no more folding and no more
laughter and no more instant pains that could seize the arm and heal
themselves hopefully tomorrow, all the distinguishing marks, and all the
painful realities and autumn coming on, and the night that was hit by
dying horses and food partaken in slashes and knives, and screams of
merriment and devilment, and everything for Dimitri and Samuel stopped
and started at their flesh, at their fingertips and their ragged hair and
their clothing too thin of material for want of winter, where there was
only the hiding.

And in the hiding there was only a man of 25 and a boy of 16, and
whatever pages were to be read were to be read only in their partially
unclothed bodies, as they huddled together in the sky of stars in a night
that had bended arms round them and was sucking the life out of them,
with claustrophobic images and dreams of already being buried in the
ground, alive, and words whispered around them like ghosts of time that
did not see plenty ever again, and want itself would be under the
category of plenty, for the words were spirits that held the ultimate
dissatisfaction--and yet something more-- in the heart of the
sounds--Treblinka, Belsen-Belsen, places that had shivers and ice in
their sounds, and so man and boy turned to each other and read clock
faces in their dark equally dark big soulful eyes as autumn night ticked
endlessly, if they were lucky, to winter..

They spoke little, of death never, of the walls, of the prisons never, of
the bodies they had seen and the death of the spirit, and it was only the
country of their dissatisfaction that kept them more than crumbled
together against each other, like charred and beribboned paper, all there
for the need of past and the need of future, all the drinks that needed
something somnambulistic, such as a Golem to protect them, to protect the
Jews who had lived as they had because they had to have lived this way,
nomads and dreamers and holders of holy books and holy words, and
scholars who declared ancient texts and tomes and now the boy and man
were in the center of the ghetto, where they had not eaten, save for
offal, for days and nights, where their stomachs felt like ruffians with
sick slimy cold bottomed shoes were roaming around deep in there. And
patience was all they had and the man held the boy's head against his
starveling chest and the boy nestled into that man's starveling chest,
and they sang little nursery songs from long ago memories, and they were
a puzzle piece put there for alms, for dirt and for grime, and for the
little nestlings that give a man and a boy no hope, but more than a sweet
and solemn going away.

For they had made love, yes, as best they could, in the cramped space, in
the double space of stars that were seen from the rent in the boards of
the V ceiling to the left of them and over the boy's shoulder, as they
were restrained in the small space, and the need of lips to lips to cover
the screaming that held in the lungs, as man and boy in darkness explored
the caked incense of each other, the sweat and the fear and the sadness
and the desperation, for they did not know each other, the man had been
in the attic first, when the boy climbed up there in his too big shoes
and opened the door to the space where the darkness that was to be home
lay and was afraid as was the boy. Gasp for gasp. Kill or be killed.
Hearts lept. Something finally to do!

And there was the need for the reset teeth, for the revenge that drove
the spikes deeply into the wheels of what they thought they were, what
they thought they would have become if there had been the letting, and
knife in boy's hand and Molotov cocktail in man's hand, there at the
ready, eager to explode, because it was the need of power over innocence,
in the heart of them, the Germans having taken men from the ghetto and
made them choose, made THEM chose among their own people, and the boy
rushed the two inches to the man and stumbled into him and they clutched
like in war that was need of contact, need of something that would
resemble the stasis that would always be less true to them than anything
inside them, dropping weapons, save themselves, which seemed more than
their names and their personalities, though they had no names, no
personalities anymore; it was clutching, and man or boy clutched first,
sexuality did matter, words of body spoken silently mattered, hiding in
each other mattered, the form of each did not, desperate, silent tears,
already fugitives and knowing the game of such, and they held for heat
and they held for companionship, for the boy had never been with a girl
and had never thought once of being with another male, for the man had
been married, and had seen his wife disappear bone by bone, her heart
sicker and sicker, and her face bathed in terrible sweat of the endless
numbers of rats plagues that ran through here, this poor ground always,
but this was their home, and now it didn't matter if the boy was ashamed
of himself for kissing the man or the man kissing the boy, it did not
matter the delineations of their sins, or the shame they should have felt
in their religion for what they had done that first night together. Shame
left easily. Like God's pulling away his shadow even from this.

What was important was the boy had no name and the man had the boy and he
opened the boy's poor ragged pangs, unbuttoned them and took out the
boy's still small penis even when it erected, the man thinking an errant
thought of how the other boys must have made fun of him, this almost man
and still a small penis, and the man caressed it, and desired so
desperately to be ten and free again, and the boy pushed away from him
for just a moment and then held to him and his shoulders as though there
were all the thoughts of patience and need and workaday and home from
school, and there for services, and back home for meals of the land
served with cold milk, and mama in her shawl and father in his poor suit
sitting there that broken legged table, with their son and speaking of
the day and the routine and the dirtiness of it all, the way the Jews
always had to take what they were given and then pushed onward, pushed
onto some one else who did not want them either, but the milk, mama and
papa and home, was cold and the plate of food was good and filling and
greasy and loud in its comfort even in bed when the boy masturbated
himself and knew it was wrong and ate the gravy off the guilt, trying to
assuage it, but never managing to tackle the meat itself.

And then in the stories, and then in the routines, and then in the
something beyond this world, and then in a God of such wrath and judgment
who doled out nothing but pain, and made JEWS TURN ON EACH OTHER, for the
man had seen the laughter of the one named Hermann who had taken up with
the German jailers and had laughed at his neighbors as he herded them
like cattle into little rooms to be interrogated, and his price for this,
this traitor, this goyim? An ear of corn, yes, an ear of corn, for every
fifty neighbors, neighbors he had lived with, spoken to, broken bread
with, rounded up and taken into a room, Hermann's eyes averted from
them, a little tiny shame at least, where there were those oily faces and
black jack boots and nothing to say to them when they come out because
they never come out, and thinking how soon till we in our star attic are
caught, and the boy felt the man's mouth on him, and the breath was rank
and the boy put his hands onto the man's long black hair and lay in the
man's arms in the cramped of it, and there was nothing but seasons
rolling inside their heads, and boy could become woman, and woman could
become wife, and man could become girl and girl could become wife to the
boy some day, and the man felt his own hard penis and he put jerkily the
boy's hand to it and the boy felt the stiffness the fullness a giant's
compared to his own and they rolled together quietly and they muffled
each other's sighs, and they were one and nothing mattered but the weal
of the traitors and the blessed hope of those who planned escape from
here.

From here to somewhere where there was a macadam sun rise in the middle
of a knife bloody stuck deeply in the sky:

That was all that they had ever had to hope for. All the world knew them
and all the world hated them and they wished to get to Israel and they
wished to go home but they would not go home, because there were thunder
masses of clouds on horizons that made a beaded sun like the beard of a
God laughing at them with such alacrity and such meanness that it was all
a store front congregation and the God, the shop keeper, persuaded by
coins from either side, it did not matter to Him, for He could be on the
Nazi side, the God could be on the Ghetto side, the God could kill the
boy and man for what they did and what they did again and again the last
two weeks hiding in this attic, dying little by little and then lot by
lot, or could just sit there and let them, already smiling at their
consigning themselves to hell for a tab end bit of pleasure, foolish
humans, and there was no salt and there was no bread and there somehow
somehow was God that permitted boy and man together, and the cum to spurt
into the man's mouth, and the boy to push his hips and his groin in and
out harder and harder faster and faster to loose himself into the man, to
hide his seed and thus hide himself into the man....

...and then the man took out his own penis and the boy looked at him
masturbate himself, and thought of their tiny larder, the larder of the
little house whose attic this was, and how the man had to steel himself
to go down there and to take a bit more of the sparse food at a time,
moldy cheese and old beans left cold on a plate and unsalted maggoty meat
on a table of people who were never coming back, not too much, not too
noticeable, in case the SS came in, and looked and made book on it, and
suggested to each other, or was it a cat and mouse game from the start?
Would the men with the well oiled guns and the destiny of the world in
their step and their faces so smarmy and self righteous and self
satisfied, would they know the boy and man were up there? Had then seen
through chinks in the wooden floor of the attic what they were doing?
Would they take them at the most embarrassing time possible?

Would they drag them out like cattle and have them perform like cattle in
the dusty street for the other cattle to see and to laugh at and to be
sickened by and to come to the realization that this was indeed an ugly a
brutish race, to give up the generations of fighting against what they
knew was not so, but now, but now, when the men in black took the clothes
from off the boy and man, would it be then, the crucible no longer blew
in flames? That there was no longer the endless march for some sort of
destination though there was no destination that ever stopped, that ever
seized into a modicum of petition where the wisdom didn't have to be
skinflint, to a land of milk and honey where you could put down your
roots, and all of this destroyed because a man saw his wife die bit by
bit with cholera, and a boy saw his mama and papa--

--do not think it, do not, hold to the man, explore in the mind's mirror
that this man is fine looking, though you could not really see him in the
dark, nor could he see you, not enough for each to tell what the other
looked like, not knowing each other before this, not knowing they had
snaggly teeth that made them not smile, as most of the village had
snaggly teeth that made them not smile, none would have to worry about
that again; only that the man was ropy veined and the boy was a starling
in almost man's skin but still hairless on chest and only a fine down on
his legs. Both wore heavy boots they never took off. They desired washing
so desperately. The stink was almost unbearable for a long time, till
they got used to it.

The man would in a day's time go downstairs, jumping down from the hole
onto the wood floor in this house that was their whole world, to get a
bit of food, to get a dipper of ancient brackish water from a white
chipped jug with a dusty faded rose painted on its left side, on the
sink, and then the process of standing on a chair and handing it to the
boy, then pushing away the chair as the man hauled himself back to the
attic--in night always in night, and in the mirror of their making love
to each other as they wafted down the virtually inedible food and sucked
sparingly at the bitter tin cup of the awful tasting slimy water, they
would be the other, they would escape this way, seed in the other's
mouth, swallowed, begun to, both of them, after the boy almost retched
the first time, and the man to like the taste at once though he had never
tasted it before, then both to like it....

...in escape, man became boy and boy became man and boy became girl and
man became woman and they danced in their imagination, and they sang pain
in their songs and they strove to push themselves out of their bodies,
and the man was thinking then of the boy's buttocks as they lay one
endless night for the night was endless even with the watery sunlight
coming through in these deeper winter and winter days and huddled close
and pretend at love and somehow became at least theoretically love, but
if it were over, if man could go free, and boy too, they would walk away
from each other and never look back, so they thought now, for they had to
think that or the mice that nibbled at their brains like cheese would
surely do the work of Treblinka and Belsen-Belsen, that had become the
unidentified unsubstantiated rumored yet somehow hopeful nightmare words
in the populace of the ghetto, that had become curse words and words of
awe and words to sing crying children to sleep at night.

Words that had a certain discernible justice and freedom in them, as
though there were no fighters and no fires and no bullets and no fear and
no corpses and no man and boy fucking this night as best they could in
their little ladle positions as the wintry moon sneaked in and bathed
their sallow sick skin bone white and the man entered the boy and the boy
tried to cry but there were no tears in him, there was no passion in them
anymore, the man pulled out, not having been in far, not wanting to hurt
the boy, and knowing now they had pretended there was still seed in their
cummings, pretended there was still the desire for sex, that there was
still passion of some sort, life of some sort, inside them, that there
was any kind of hunger at all, but they had been forcing it all for some
time, but now to acknowledge there was only weakness, in this attic that
was made mathematically with boards cut just so, so the boards would fit
together and the thing would be as the workman, the farmer, the
mathematician, the teacher, the iron worker, whomever, wanted it to be...

..but the boy and man and those of their kind hauled off in trucks,
stolen from, raped in the street below and all through the town, the
trains hauling masses of people off, all of them were no longer allowed
to fit into this world, all of them were at angles they were never meant
to be, even when all the harsh, all the history had conflagrated them,
there had been this yes, but these people had never experienced this
right at their faces, had never had it shaft its knife blades into them
so deeply, so drastically, so hugely, which really told you something,
and if Treblinka and Belsen-Belsen were the places to be taken to, there
might be a community there, there might be a haven there, it might be on
this earth or another or something more grand, something effluvial,
something that would allow the tight white balled hot eyes and the
hurtful skin and the ache in the bones to cease, to ease, to feel good
again, to let the skin breathe and the heart be glad it was beating, and
the end of the guns whistling bullets through the night, these places
might be the promised land, might be the land that Moses never got to be
in because God IS A BASTARD, after forty years in the wilderness, and
then God stopping the endless walk, demanding all men and boys who had
not been circumcised be circumcised now and the foreskins left in a hill
in the desert to honor their bizarre God, and after that shame, then God
making them walk on and on, all blood and pain untold, and on and Moses
not getting to enter the promised land, what kind of GOD WAS
THAT?????????? GOD WAS A NAZI. God was a cheat and a liar and a hater and
a double crosser. To hell with God. What has he ever done for us? What?
Had us scrape our penises in the desert? How crazy is that? What did he
do with that hill of foreskins in the hot stinking desert? Perish the
image.

And man and boy lay against each other and man and boy had their pants
down and man and boy were sinking into a hopeless sleep of hope, and man
recited scripture without it mattering, without their knowing what they
were saying, Talmud and God breathing life and Golems to protect, only
the monster turned its talents onto its creators, was God the Golem?, and
the beauty of God's creation and the constant anger and wrath of God,
and man and boy with their naked legs and penises pressed against each
other, so helpless, the man who had been burly and strong now as weak and
thin as the boy who had become even weaker and thinner than he had been
before, and mice were eating into their brains and their bodies were hot
with fever like the man's wife's had been as he had wet the face cloth
and put it onto her forehead and bathed her face with whatever cold water
he could find, and the man and the boy had their arms around each other,
and they were less than the mighty machine that was out there and soon in
here to eat them alive, to take them to the promised land where their
might be hope, their dry throats even in sleep pleaded with the
implacable for water, and in the man's and boy's mind was the same
vision of this--

--a long continuous road that would never end, that would never cease,
and they were more than words in a pretty bound book, and they were less
than the Nazis, and the Nazis were less than the Jewish God and the
Jewish God let this happen always through history happen, the chosen
ones, but this time it might be different, this time their God might not
be a God of fire and death, this time it might be ended, and they might
find a place to stand and be and work and grow and love again, love even
beyond all possibility one would now think, their God who loved them so
insidiously....the Nazis might do us all a favor..they might kill
God...now wouldn't that be rich?...

...there was a door smashed open below and hurried boot steps, and
nauseous voices giving nauseous orders, shrill and Teutonic and evil, but
the boy and man, each having his hands on the others' humble flaccid
privates slept onward, and the wintry moon shone bone light on their
starved straggled bodies heaped together already, as the wood covering
was pressed and thrown away and the attic was climbed up to on the chair,
by a man who represented legions always and never ending, who broke and
destroyed and hailed and fucked and sang sick songs and slaughtered
because it was their right to do so, and tried to make the world their
own because it was so taught, it is always so taught, therefore not
seeing these two spent shadows as so extra ordinarily precious, so
impossibly valuable, so one of a kind and non replaceable ever in the
history or the future creation, as very human, hands lifted the equally
human tableau, shepherd and lamb sculpture, in a field of stars and space
and cold freshness and warm hearts and freedom and eternity of peace all
their own where no one could hurt them or part them again, the human
hands none too gently hauled at them and let them crash unawakened, still
clutched together as though welded so, to the wood floor of the kitchen
below, for this is life, as it always has been, as it always will be, in
one way or another.

the end


Timothy Stillman
comewinter@earthlink.net