A Prayer For No One's Enemy

"Did you get in?"

He turned up the transistor. The Supremes were singing Baby Love. "None'a your damn business, man; a gentleman doesn't talk. " The other one peeled a third stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into his mouth. The sugary immediacy of it stood out for a moment, then disappeared into the wad already filling his left cheek.

"Gentleman? Shit, baby, you're a lotta stuff, but you aren't one of them there. " He snapped fingers.

"D' you check the plugs'n'points like I said? "

He switched stations, stopped. The Rolling Stones were singing I Can't Get No Satisfaction. "I took it into Cranston's, they said it was in the timing. Twenty-seven bucks. "

"Plugs'n' points. "

"Oh, Christ, man, why don't you shine up awreddy. I'm tellin' you what Cranston said. He said it was in the timing, so why d'you keep sayin'plugs 'n' points? "

"Lemme use your comb. "

"Use your own comb. You'got scalp ringworm. "

"Get stuffed! Lemme use your damn comb already!" He pulled the Swedish aluminum comb out of his hip pocket and passed it over. The comb was tapered like a barber's comb. Gum stopped moving for an instant as the other pulled the gray shape through his long brown hair in practiced swirls. He patted his hair and handed the comb back. "y'wanna go up to the Big Boy and get something to eat, clock the action? "

"You gonna fill the tank? "

"Fat chance. "

"No, I don't wanna go up to the Big Boy and drive around and around like red skins at the Little Big Horn and see if that dopey-ass chick of yours is up there. "

"Well, whaddaya wanna do? "

"I don't wanna go up to the Big Boy and go round and round like General Custer, that's for damn sure... "

"I got the picture. Round and round. Ha ha. Very clever. You oughta be in Hollywood -- well what the hell do you wanna do? "

"You seen what's up at The Coronet? "

"I dunno, what is it? "

"That picture about the Jews in Palestine."

"Who's in it? "

"I dunno, Paul Newman, I think. "

"Israel. "

"Okay, Israel, you seen it? "

"No, y'wanna see it?"

"Might as well, nothin'else happening around here. "

"What time's your old lady come home? "

"She picks my father up at seven. "

"That don't answer my question. "

"About seven-thirty. "

"Let's make it. You got money...? "

"Yeah, for me. "

"Jesus, you're a cheap bastard. I thought I was your tight close buddy? "

"You're a leech, baby. "

"Turn off the radio. "

"I'm gonna take it with me. "

"So you ain't gonna tell me if you screwed Donna, huh? "

"None'a your damn business. You wanna tell me if you screwed Patti?"

"Forget it. Plugs'n' points, you'll see."

"C'mon, we'll miss the first show. " So they went to see the picture about the Jews. The one that was supposed to say a very great deal about the Jews. They were both Gentile, and they had no way of knowing in advance that the picture about the Jews said nothing whatever about the Jews. In Palestine, or Israel, or wherever it was that the Jews were.

It wasn't even a particularly good film, but the exploitation had been cunning, and grosses for the first three days had been rewarding. Detroit. Where they make cars. Where Father Coughlin's Church of the Little Flower reposes in sanctified holiness. Population approximately two million; good people, strong, like peasant stock. Where many good jazz men have started, blowing gigs in small roadhouses. Best barbecued spareribs in the world, at the House of Blue Lights. Detroit. Nice town.

The large Jewish Community had turned out to see the film, and though anyone who had been to Israel, or knew the first thing about how a kibbutz functioned, would have laughed it off the screen, for sheer emotionalism it struck the proper chords. With characteristic Hollywood candor, the film stirred a fierce ethnic pride, pointing out in broad strokes: See, them little yids got guts, too; they can fight when they got to. The movie was in the grand, altogether innocent tradition of cinematic flag-waving. It was recommended by Parents' Magazine and won a Photoplay gold medal as fare for the entire family.

The queue that had lined up to see the film stretched from the ticket booth across the front of the building, past a candy store with a window full of popcorn balls in half a dozen different flavors, past a laundromat, around a corner and three-quarters of the way down the block.

It was a quiet crowd. People in lines are always a quiet crowd. Arch and Frank were quiet. They waited, with Arch listening to the transistor, and Frank, Frank Amato, smoking and shuffling.

Neither paid much attention to the sound of engines roaring until the three Volkswagens screamed to a halt directly in front of the theater. Then they looked up, as the doors slammed open and out poured a horde of young boys. They were wearing black. Black turtleneck T-shirts, black slacks, black Beatle boots. The only splash of color on them came from the yellow-and-black armbands, and the form of the swastika on the armbands.

Under the staccato directions of a slim Nordic-looking boy with very bright, wet gray eyes, they began to picket the theater, assembling in drill-formations, carrying signs neatly printed on a hand-press, very sturdy. The signs said:

THIS MOVIE IS COMMUNIST-PRODUCED! BOYCOTT IT! GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! STOP RAPING AMERICA! TRUE AMERICANS SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES! THIS FILM WILL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN! BOYCOTT IT!

and chanting, over and over: "Dirty little Christ-killers, dirty little Christ -- killers... "

killers, dirty little Christ-

In the queue was a sixty-year-old woman; her name was Lilian Goldbosch. She had lost her husband Martin, her older son Shimon, and her younger son Avram in the furnaces of Belsen. She had come to America with eight hundred other refugees on a converted cattle boat, from Liverpool, after five years of hopeless wandering across the desolate face of Europe. She had become a naturalized citizen and had found some stature as a buyer for a piece-goods house, but her reaction to the sight of the always remembered swastika was that of the hunted Jewess who had escaped death-only to find loneliness in a new world. Lilian Goldbosch stared wide-eyed at them, overflowing the sidewalk, inundating her eyes and her thoughts and her sudden this moment reality; arrogant in their militant fanaticism; and as one they came back to her-- for they had never left her -- terror, hatred, rage. Her mind (like a broken clock, whirling, spinning backward in time) sparklike leaped the gap of years, and her tired eyes blazed yellow.

She gave a wretched little scream and hurled herself at the tall blond boy, the leader with the gray eyes.

It was a signal. The crowd broke. A low animal roar. Men flung themselves forward. Women were jostled, and then joined, without reason or pausing to consider it. The muffled sound of souls tom by the sight of stalking (almost goose-stepping) picketers. Before they could stop themselves, the riot was underway.

A burly man in a brown topcoat reached them first. He grabbed the sign from one of the picketers, and with teeth grating behind skinned-- back lips, for an instant an animal, hurled it into the gutter. Another man ripped into the center of the group and snapped a fist into the mouth of one of the boys chanting the slogan. The boy flailed backward, arms windmilling, and he went down on one knee. A foot on the end of gray sharkskin trousers-- seemingly disembodied-- lashed out of the melee. The toe of the shoe took the boy in the groin and thigh. He fell on his back, clutching himself, and they began to stomp him. His body curled inward as they danced their quaint tribal dance on him. If he screamed, it was lost in the roar of the mob.

Also in the queue were two high school boys. Arch; Frank. They had been alone there, among all those people waiting. But now they were part of a social unit, something was happening. Arch and Frank had fallen back for an instant as others rushed forward; others whose synapses were more quickly triggered by what they saw; but now they found their reactions to the violence around them swift and unthinking. Though they had been brushed aside by men on either side, cursing foully, who had left the line to get at the picketers, now they moved toward the mass of struggling bodies, still unaware of what was really taking place. It was a bop, and they felt the sting of participation. But in a moment they had collided with the frantic figure of Lilian Goldbosch, whose nails were raking deep furrows down the cheek of the tall blond boy.

He was braced, legs apart, but did not move as she attacked him. There was a contained, almost Messianic tranquility about him. "Nazi! Nazi! Murd'rer!" she was mouthing, almost incomprehensibly: She slipped into Polish and the sounds became garbled with spittle. Her body writhed back and forth as she lashed out again and again at the boy.

Her arms were syncopated machines of hard work, destructive, coming up and down in a rhythm all their own, a rhythm of which she was unaware. His face was badly ripped, yet he did not move against her.

At that moment the two high school boys, faceless, came at the woman, one from either side; they took her by the biceps, holding her, protecting not the blond boy, but the older woman. Her movements went to spastic as she struggled against them frenziedly. "Let me, let go, let-- " she struggled against them, flashing them a glance of such madness and hatred that for an instant they felt she must think them part of the picketing group, and then-abruptly-her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted into Frank Amato's grasp.

"Thank you...whoever you are," the blond boy said. He started to move away, back through the rioting mob. It was as though he had wanted to take the woman's abuse; as though his purpose had been to martyr himself, to absorb all the hate and frenzy into his body, like a lightning rod sucking up the power of the heavens. Now he moved.

Arch grabbed him by the sleeve. "Hold it a minute...hero! Not s' fast!" The blond boy's mouth began to turn up in an insolent remark, but he caught himself, and instead, with a flowing, completely assured overhand movement, struck the younger boy's hand from his arm.

"My work's done here. " He turned, then, and cupped his hands to his mouth. A piercing whistle leaped above the crowd noises, and as the signal penetrated down through the mob, the swastika-wearers began to disengage themselves with more ferocity. One picketer kicked out, caught an older man in the shin with the tip of a tightly laced barracks boot, and shoved the man back into the crowd. Another boy jabbed a thumb into his opponent's diaphragm and sent the suddenly wheezing attacker sprawling, cutting himself off from further assault.

It went that way all through the crowd as the once-again-chanting picketers moved slowly but methodically toward their cars. It was a handsomely executed tactical maneuver, a strategic withdrawal of class and composure.

Once at the open car doors, they piled back against the black metal bugs, raising arms in an unmistakable Heil! and screamed, almost as one: "America always! To hell with the poisoners! Kill the Jews!"

Pop, Pop! With timing vaguely reminiscent of a Keystone Kops imbroglio, they heaved themselves into the vehicles, and were roaring down the street, around the corner, before the approaching growlers of the police prowl cars (summoned on a major 415) were more than a faint whine approaching from the distance.

On the sidewalk in front of the theater, people -- tears and cursing.for no other release was left to them--burst into

Some kind of battle had been fought here -- and lost. On the sidewalk, someone had clandestinely chalked the symbol. No one moved to scuff it out. None of the picketers had had the free time to do it; the obvious was obvious: someone in the queue had done it.

The subtlest, most effective poison.

Her apartment was an attempt to reassure her crippled spirit that possessions meant security, security meant permanence, and permanence meant the exclusion of sorrow and fear and darkness. She had thrust into every corner of the small one-bedroom apartment every convenience of modern technology, every possible knickknack and gimcrack of oddity, every utensil and luxury of the New World the rooms would hold. Here a 23 " television set, its rabbit-ears askew against the wall...there a dehumidifier, busily purring at the silence...over there a set of Royal Doulton mugs, Pickwick figures cherubically smiling at their own ingenuousness...and a paint-by-the-numbers portrait of Washington astride a white stallion...a lemon glass vase overflowing with swizzle sticks from exotic restaurants...a stack of Life, Time, Look and Holiday magazines...a reclining lounge chair that vibrated...a stereo set with accompanying racks of albums, mostly Offenbach and Richard Strauss...a hide-a-bed sofa with orange and brown throw pillows...a novelty bird whose long beak, when moistened, dipped the creature forward on its wire rack, submerging its face in a glass of water, then pulled it erect, to repeat the performance endlessly...

The jerky movement of the novelty bird in the room, a bad cartoon playing over and over, was intended as reassurance of life still going on; yet it was a cheap, shadowy substitute, and instead of charming the two high school boys who had brought Lilian Goldbosch home, it unsettled them. It made them aware of the faint scent of decay and immolation here; a world within a world, a specie of creative precontinuum in which emotions had palpable massiveness, greater clarity.

The boys helped the still-shaken woman to the sofa, and sat her down heavily. Her face was not old, the lines were adornment rather than devastation, but there was a superimposition of pain on the tidy, even features. Cobwebs on marble. Her hair -- so carefully tended and set every week by a professional: tipped, ratted, back-combed, pampered-was disheveled, limp, as though soaked with sweat. Moist stringlets hung down over one cheek. Her eyes, a light blue, altogether perceptive and lucid, were filmed by a milkiness that might have been tears, and might have been gelatinous anguish. Her mouth seemed moist, as though barely containing a wash of tormented sounds.

The years rolled back for Lilian Goldbosch. Once more she knew the sound of the enclosed van whose exhaust pipes led back into the prisoners'compartment, the awful keee-gl keee-gl keee-gl of the klaxon, rising above the frozen streets; frozen with fear of movement (if I stay quiet, they'll miss me, pass me by). The Doppler-impending approach of the van, its giant presence directly below the window, right at the curb, next to the face and the ears, and then its hissing passage as it swept away, a moving vacuum cleaner of living things, swallowing whole families. With eyes white eggshells in pale faces. And into the rear of that van, the exhaust whispering its sibilant tune of gas and monoxided forever. All this came back to Lilian Goldbosch as she shamefully spaded -- over her memories of the past half hour. Those boys. Their armbands. Her fear. The crowd attacking. The way she had leaped at them. The madness. The fear.

The fear. Again, the fear. Burning, blazing through all of it: the fear! That boy with his imperious blond good looks, the Aryan Superman: could he really know? Could he somehow, this American child, born between clean sheets, with his greatest terror a failing mark in school, could he somehow know what that hated black swastika meant to her, to whole generations, to races of individuals who had worn yellow Stars of David and the word Juden, to shattered spirits and captured hearts who stood on alien roads as Stukas dived, or walked in desolate resignation to already filling mass graves, or labored across nomanslands with shellbursts lighting the way? Could he know, or was this something else...a new thing, that merely looked like the old sickness, the fear?

For the first time in more years than she cared to remember -- had it only been twenty years since all of it? -- Lilian Goldbosch had a surge of desire. Not the gilded wastes she had substituted for caring: not the pathological attention to hair in the latest frosted style, not the temporal acquisition of goods to fill empty rooms, not the television with it gray images, surrogates of life. A want. A need to know. A desire to find out.

Born of an old fear. Was it the same...or something new? She had to know. She was engulfed by desperation. And with the desperation, a shocking realization that she could do something. What, she was not certain. But she had the sensation burning in her that if she could know this blond Gentile youth, could talk to him, this goy, could communicate with him, this stranger, she could find out the answers, know if the evil was coming again, or if it was just another lonely person, trapped within his skin.

"Will you boys do me a favor? " Lilian Goldbosch asked the two who had escorted her home. "Will you help me? "

At first they were confused, but as she talked, as she explained why she had to know, why it was important, they were drawn into a prospect of their times, and finally they nodded, a little hesitantly, the taller of the two saying, "I don't know if it'll do any good, but we'll try and find him for you. "

Then they left. Down the stairs. While she went to wash the tears and streaked mascara from her young-old face.

Frank Amato was of Italian descent. He was a typical child of his times; transistorized, Sanforized, boss gear bomped groovy tuned-in on the music of the spheres, in a Continental belt-back slim-line hopsacking crease-resistant 14 " tapered ineluctable reality that placed him in and of the teenage sub-culture.

Vietnam? Huh? Voter registration in Alabama? Huh? The ethical structure of the universe? Huh? Arch Lennon was a WASP. He had heard the term, but had never applied it to himself. He was a carbon-copy of Frank Amato. He lived day to day, Big Boy to Big Boy, track meet to track meet, and if there were sounds that went boomp in the night they were probably the old man getting up to haul another pop-top out of the Kelvinator.

Military junta? Huh? Limited nuclear retaliation? Huh? The infinitesimal dispensation of Homo sapiens in the disinterested cosmos? Huh? Standing down on the sidewalk outside Lilian Goldbosch's apartment, staring at each other. "That was a smart move. "

"Well, what the hell was I supposed to say? Fer chrissakes, she had aholda my arm, I thought she was gonna bust it. That old lady's nuts."

"So why' d you promise her? Where the hell we gonna find that guy? "

"How should I know? I gave my word. "

"Big deal."

"Maybe not to you, but I gave it just the same. "

"So we try and find that kid, right?"

"Uh... "

"What I thought. I gotta do all the brain work again. Jeezus, man, you are such a nit. "

"D' jou get the license number of any of those cars?"

"Don't be a clown. No, I din't get the number. And even if I did, what'd we do with it? "

"DMV, wouldn't they tell us who it was registered to? "

"Sure. We're gonna walk into the Motor Vehicle Department, just like James Bond, a couple of guys our age, and we're gonna say, Hey who owns this VW. Sure, I can picture it real good. You're a nit,"

"So that's that, "

"I wish, "

"You got something else?"

"Maybe, One of those VWs had a sticker on the windshield, It was an emblem, Pulaski Vocational High School, "

"So one of those guys goes to Pulaski, You know how many inmates they got over there? Maybe a million, "

"It's a start. "

"You're serious about this,"

"Yeah, I'm serious about it,"

"How come? "

"I dunno, she asked, an' I gave her my word. She's an old lady, it won't hurt anything to look a while."

"Hey, Frank? "

"What? "

"What's this all about?"

"I dunno, but those bastards were lousy, an'I gave my word. "

"Okay; I'll help, But I gotta get home now, my folks oughta be back by now, and we can't do anything till tomorrow anyhow, "

"Stay loose. See ya. "

"See ya. Don't get in any trouble, double-oh-seven. "

"Stick it, "

They didn't know which one they would find, or even if they would recognize him when they did find him. But one of the wearers of the swastika attended Pulaski Vocational, and Pulaski Vocational went all year round, Summer, winter, night and day, it turned out students who knew more about carburetors, chassis dynamometers, metal lathes and printed circuitry than they did about THE CANTERBURY TALES, scoria and pumice, the theory of vectors and the fact that Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to fall in the Revolutionary War. It was a great gray stone Coventry of a school, where young boys went in unmarked, and emerged some years later all punched and coded to fit into the System, with fringe benefits and an approximate date of death IBM'd by the group insurance company.

Chances were good the boy-- whichever boy it turned out to be -- was still attending classes, even though it was summer, and Arch and Frank were free. So they waited, and they watched, And finally, they found one of them,

An acne-speckled, pudgy-hipped specimen in a baggy orange velour pullover.

He came out of the school, and Arch recognized him. "There, the pear-shaped one, in the orange. " They followed him into the parking lot. The car he unlocked was a Monza, a late model. If they watched for the VW they would have missed him.

"Hey!" Frank came up behind him. The pudgy turned. He had beady little eyes, like a marmoset. The face was fleshy, with many small inflamed areas where he had shaved and the skin had broken out. There was a wasted look about him, as though he had been used up, and cast away. Even to Arch and Frank, the look of intense intelligence was missing from the pudgy's expression.

"Who' re you guys? " Arch did not like him. For a nameless reason, he did not like him. "Friends of a friend of yours." Pudgy looked wary. He dumped his books into the back seat, not turning from them. He was getting set to jump inside the car and slam the door, and lock it, and pullout in a hurry. Pudgy was scared.

"Who's that, what friend? " Frank moved slightly, to the side. It was almost a pavane, the maneuvering: Pudgy angled himself, his hand went toward the back of the front seat; Arch slid around the edge of the door. Frank's hand came up onto the roof of the car, near Pudgy's head. Pudgy's eyes got milky, fear bubbled up behind him, the taint was in his bloodstream.

"A tall kid, blond hair, you know, " Frank said, his voice was deeper, a trifle threatening, "he was with you the other night at the movie, remember? "

Pudgy's right cheek tic' d. He knew what was happening. These were Jews. He made his move. Arch slammed the door. It caught Pudgy at the forearm. He howled. Arch reached across and grabbed him by the ear. Frank sank a fist into Pudgy's stomach. The air whooshed out of Pudgy and left him flat, very flat, a cardboard cutout that they bundled into the front seat of the Monza, one on either side of him. They started the car, and rolled out of the parking lot. They would take him someplace. Someplace else. Pudgy would tell them who the blond Aryan had been, what his name was, where he could be found.

If they could pump enough air into him to produce sound.

Victor. Rohrer. Victor Rohrer. Blond, tall, solid, with no extra flesh on his body, muscles very firm and tight, as though packed from the factory in plastic. Victor Rohrer. A face hewn from lignum vitae, from marble. Eyes chipped gray ice frost from lapis lazuli and allowed to die, harden into leaden cadaverousness. A body languorous, soft, downy-covered, with barely visible blond hairs, each one a sensor, a feeler of atmospheres and temperatures, each one a cilium, seeing and smelling and knowing the tenor of the situation. A Cardiff Giant, not even remotely, human, something cold and breathing, defying Mendelian theories, defying heredity, a creature from another island universe. Muscled and wired and gray eyes that had sometime never been blue with life. Lips thinned in expectation of silence. Victor. Rohrer. A creation of self, brought forth from its own mind for a need to exist.

Victor Rohrer, organizer of men. Victor Rohrer, who had never known childhood. Victor Rohrer, repository of frozen secrets. Victor Rohrer, wearer of swastikas. Patron of days and nights; singer of silent songs; visionary of clouds and nothingness; avatar of magics and unspoken credos; celebrant of terrors in nights of endless murmurings; architect of orderly destructions; Victor Rohrer.

"Who are you? Get away from me. "

"We want you to talk to somebody. "

"Punk filth!"

"Don't make me flatten you, wise guy. "

"Don't try it; I don't like hurting people. "

"There's one of the great laughs of our generation. "

"Come on, Rohrer, get your ass in gear; somebody's waiting for you. "

"I said: get away from me. "

"We aren't goons, Rohrer, don't make us belt you around a little. "

"It would take two of you?"

"If it had to. "

"That isn't very sportsmanlike. "

"Somewhichway, friend, you don't make us feel very sporty. Move it, or s' help me I'll lay this alongside your head. "

"Are you from one of those street gangs? "

"No, we're just a coupla patriots doing a good deed. "

"I'm tired' a talking. Get it going, Rohrer. "

"You...you're Jewish, aren't you? "

"I said get going, you bastard! Now!" And they brought him to Lilian Goldbosch.

Wonder danced in her eyes. A dance of the dead in a bombed-out graveyard; a useless weed growing in a bog. She stared across the room at him. He stood just inside the door, legs close together, arms at his sides, his face as featureless as an expanse of tundra. Only the gray eyes moved in the face, and they did so liquidly, flowing from comer to comer, seeing what was there to be seen.

Lilian Goldbosch walked across the room toward him. Victor Rohrer did not move. Behind him, Arch and Frank closed the door softly. They stood like paladins, one on either side of the door. They watched -- with intense fascination -- what was happening in this silently humming room. As different worlds paused for an eternal moment.

They did not fully comprehend what it was, but so completely had the blond boy and the old woman absorbed each other's presence that for now they-- the ones who had effected the meeting-were gone, invisible, out of phase no more a part of the life generated in the room than the mad little bird that dipped its beak in water, agonizingly straightened, rocked and dipped again, endlessly.

She walked up, very close to him. Where she had scratched him, his face was still marked. She reached up, involuntarily fascinated, and made as if to touch him. He moved back an inch, and she caught herself.

"You are very young. " It was said in appraisal, with a tinge of amazement, not a hue of poetry anywhere in it; an attempt to codify the reality bf this creature, Victor Rohrer.

He said nothing, but a faint softness came to his mouth, as if he knew another truth. On another face, it might have been a sneer.

"Do you know me? " she asked. "Who I am? "

He was extremely polite, as if she were a supplicant and it had fallen to him to maintain decorum and form with her. "You're the woman who attacked me. "

Her lips tightened. The memory was still fresh, an eroded fall on a volcanic hillside she had thought incapable of being ravaged again. "I'm sorry about that. "

"I've come to expect it. From you people. "

"My people... " "Jews. "

"Oh. Yes. I'm Jewish."

He smiled knowledgeably. "Yes, I know. It says everything, doesn't it? "

"Why do you do this thing? Why do you walk around and tell people to hate one another? "

"I don't hate you. " She stared at him warily; there had to be more.

There was. "How can one hate a plague of locusts, or a packrat that lives in the walls? I don't hate, I'm merely an exterminator. "

"Where did you get these ideas? Why does a boy your age fool around with this kind of thing, do you know what went on in the world twenty-five years ago, do you know all the sorrow and death this kind of thinking brought?"

"Not enough. He was a madman, but he had the right idea about the Juden. He had the final solution, but he made mistakes. "

His face was perfectly calm. He was not reciting cant, he was delivering a theory he had worked out, logically, completely, finally.

"How did you get so much sickness in you? "

"It is a matter of opinion which of us is diseased. I choose to believe you are the cancer. "

"What do your parents think of this? " A hot little spot of red appeared high on his cheeks. "Their opinions are of very little concern to me. "

"Do they know about what you do? "

"I'm getting tired of this. Are you going to tell these two punks to let me go, or will I have to put up with more abuse from you and your kind? " His face was getting slightly flushed now. "Do you wonder that we want to purge you, purify the country of your filth? When you constantly prove what we say is so? "

Lilian Goldbosch turned to the two boys by the door. "Do you know where he lives? "

Arch nodded. "I want to see his mother and father. Will you take me there?"

Again, Arch nodded. "He doesn't know. He doesn't understand. I can't find out from him. I'll have to ask there."

Flames burned up suddenly in Victor Rohrer's eyes. "You'll stay away from my home!"

"I'll get my purse, " she said, softly. He went for her. His hands came out and up and he was on her, hurling her backward, over a footstool, and they went into a heap, the woman thrashing frantically, and Victor Rohrer coldly, dispassionately trying to strangle her.

Arch and Frank moved quickly. Frank grabbed Rohrer around the throat in a hammerlock, and without ceremony or warning, Arch lifted a marble ashtray from an end table and swung it in an arc. The ashtray smacked across the side of Victor Rohrer's head with an audible sound, and he suddenly tilted to the left and fell past Lilian Goldbosch.

He was not unconscious, Arch had pulled his punch, but he was dazed. He sat on the floor, moving his head as if it belonged to somebody else. The two high school boys attended the woman. She struggled to pick herself up, and they helped her to her feet.

"Are you okay? " Frank asked. She leaned against Arch, and automatically her hand went to her hair, to tidy it. But the movement was only half-formed, as if all those narcissistic acts she had used to make her life livable were now frippery. Her breathing was jagged, and red marks circled her larynx where Rohrer had fastened on tightly.

"He is the complete Nazi, " she husked. "He has eaten the Nazi cake, and digested it; he is one of them. It is the old fear, the same one, the very same one, come again. Dear God, we will see it again, the way it was before. "

She began to sob. From an empty room within the structure of her soul, tears that had dried years before were called on, and would not come. Ludicrously, she rasped and wheezed, and when nothing came to her eyes, she swallowed hard and bit her lip. In a while she had stopped.

"We must take him home, " she said. "I want to talk to his parents." They got Victor Rohrer under the arms, and they lifted him. He staggered and bobbled, but between them they got him downstairs and into the car. Arch sat in back with him, and Lilian Goldbosch stared straight ahead through the windshield, even when they finally pulled up in front of Rohrer's house in the suburb, Berkeley.

"We're here," Frank said to her. She started, and looked around slowly. It was a neat, unprepossessing house, set in a line among many such houses. It escaped a total loss of identity by a certain warmth of landscaping: dwarf Japanese trees dotting the front lawn, a carefully trimmed hedge that ran down the property line on one side, ivy holding fast to a comer of the house with several years of climbing having brought it just under the second-floor windows. An ordinary house, in an ordinary town.

"Okay, Rohrer, out." Victor Rohrer went wild! His face contorted. The cold logical animosity of the cool reasoning racist was suddenly washed away. He began speaking in a thin, venomous tone, the words slipping out between knife -- edge lips; they did not hiss, but they might as well have; he did not scream, but it had the same shocking effect.

"Kike filth. How much longer do you think you're going to be able to push people around like this? All of you, just like you, with your rotten poisonous filth, trying to take over, trying to tell people what to do; you ought to be killed, every one of you, slaughtered like pigs, I'd do it myself if I could. You'll see, your day is coming, the final day for you... "

It was rasped out with such intensity, Lilian Goldbosch sat straight, tensed, unable to move, it was a voice from the past. Her body began to tremble. It was the old fear, the one that years of war and years of peace had put in a grave she now found had always been too shallow. The corpse of that fear had clawed its way up out of the dirt and massed dead flesh of the communal grave, and was again walking the world.

Arch reached across and opened the door. He shoved Victor Rohrer before him. Frank and Lilian Goldbosch joined them as they walked up the front drive toward the little house.

"I've found my answer, " Lilian Goldbosch said, terror in her voice. "It is the old fear, the terrible one, the one that destroys worlds. And he is the first of them...but there will be many more...many... "

Her eyes were dull as they reached the front door. Rohrer spun about, slapping Arch's hand off his arm. "You aren't going to meet them! I won't allow you in! This isn't a Jew-run town, I'll have you arrested for kidnapping, for breaking and entering... "

Lilian looked past him. Past him, to the lintel of the door. And the fear suddenly drained out of her face. Victor Rohrer saw her expression, and half-turned his head. Arch and Frank looked in the direction of Lilian Goldbosch's stare. Attached to the lintel of the door, at a slant, was a tubular ornament of shiny brass. Near the top of the face of the ornament was a small hole, through which Arch and Frank could see some strange lettering.

Lilian Goldbosch said, "Shaddai," reached across Victor Rohrer and touched the tiny hole, then withdrew her hand and kissed the fingertips. Her face had been transformed. She no longer looked as though darkness was on its way.

Victor Rohrer made no move toward her. "That is a fine mezuzah, Victor, " she said, softly, looking at him now with complete control of the situation. She started to turn away. "Come along, boys, I don't need to see Victor's parents now: I understand. "

They stared at Rohrer. He suddenly looked like a hunted animal. All his cool polite self- possession was gone. He was sweating. Alone, he stood, suddenly, on his own doorstep, next to a tubular ornament on a right doorpost, alone. Afraid.

Lilian paused a moment, turned back to Victor Rohrer. "It is true no one has a happy childhood, Victor. But we all have to live, to go on. Yours must not have been nice, but...try to live, Victor. You aren't my enemy, neither am I your enemy. "

She walked down the steps, turned once more and said, kindly, as an afterthought, "I will say a prayer for you. "

Bewildered, Arch and Frank looked at Victor Rohrer for a long moment. They saw a man of dust. A scarecrow. An emptiness where a person had stood a moment before. This old woman, with incomprehensible words and a sudden sureness, had hamstrung him, cut the nerves from his body, emptied him like a container of murky liquid.

With a soft sound of panic, Victor Rohrer hurled himself off the front steps, and ran across the yard, disappearing in a moment. He was gone, and the three of them stood there, looking at the afternoon.

"What did you say to him? " Arch said. "That word you said. What was it? " Lilian Goldbosch turned and walked to the car. They came and held the door for her. She was regal. When she looked up at the boys, she smiled. "Shaddai. The name of the Lord. From Deuteronomy. "

Then she got in, and they closed the door. Out of sight of Lilian Goldbosch, where she sat calmly, waiting to be driven home, Arch and Frank stared at each other. Total confusion. Something had happened here, but they had no idea what it was.

Then they got in the car and drove her home. She thanked them, and asked them to call on her again, any time. They could not bring themselves to ask what had happened, because they felt they should be smart enough to know; but they didn't know.

Outside, they looked at each other, and abruptly, just like that, everything that had gone before in their lives seemed somehow trivial. The dancing, the girls, the cars, the school that taught them nothing, the aimless days and nights of movies and cursing and picnics and drag races and ball games, all of it, seemed terribly inconsequential, next to this puzzle they had become part of.

"Shuh-die, "Arch said, looking at Frank. "And that other word: muh-zooz -- what it was. " They went to see a boy they knew, in their class, a boy they had never had occasion to talk to before. His name was Arnie Sugarman, and he told them three things.

When they got back to Lilian Goldbosch's apartment, they knew something was wrong the moment they approached the door. It was open, and the sound of classical music came from within. They shoved the door open completely, and looked in.

She was lying half on the sofa, half on the floor. He had used a steam iron on her, and there was blood everywhere. They entered the room, avoiding the sight, avoiding the mass of pulped meat that had been her face before he had beaten her again, and again, and again, in a senseless violence that had no beginning and no end. The two high school boys went to the telephone, and Frank dialed the operator.

"Puh-police, please...I want to report a, uh, a murder... " Lilian Goldbosch lay twisted and final; the terror that had pursued her across the world, through the years -- the terror she had momentarily escaped -- had at last found her and added her to the total that could never be totaled. She had found her answer, twenty-five years too late.

In the room, the only movement was a small bird with a comic beak that dipped itself in water, straightened, and then, agonizingly, repeated the process, over and over and over...

Hunkered down in an alley, where they would find him, Victor Rohrer stared out of mad eyes. Eyes as huge as golden suns, eyes that whirled with fiery little points of light. Eyes that could no longer see.

See his past, his childhood, when they had used names to hurt him. When his parents had been funny little people who talked with accents. When he had been friendless...for that reason.

For the reason of the mezuzah on the lintel. The little holy object on the lintel, the ornament that contained the little rectangle of parchment with its twenty-two lines of Hebrew from Deuteronomy.

Back behind huge garbage cans spilling refuse, in the sick-sweet rotting odor of the alley, Victor Rohrer sat with knees drawn up, staring at his limp hands, the way a fetus "sees" its limp, relaxed hands before its face. Quiet in there, inside Victor Rohrer. Quiet for the first time. Quiet after a long time of shrieking and sound and siren wails inside a skull that had offered no defense, no protection.

Victor Rohrer and Lilian Goldbosch, both Juden, both stalked; and on an afternoon in Detroit... ...both had answered with their lives a question that had never even existed, much less been asked, by two high school boys who now had begun to suspect...

...no one escapes, when night begins to fall.