In Babylon. Marcel Moring

      MARCEL MÖRING

      IN BABYLON

      Translated from the Dutch by Stacey Knecht

       Dedication

      To Hanneke and my parents

       Epigraph

      ‘Trees have roots. Jews have legs.’

      

      ISAAC DEUTSCHER

      

      ‘Our civilisation is characterised by the word “progress’”. Progress is its form rather than making progress one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

      ‘I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.’

      

      LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Culture and Value

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE

Travellers

Sauerkraut

There is a God

The Kotzker

Who’s There?

A Land of Milk and Butter

       Zeno

       PART TWO

       On Our Way (to the Middle)

       The Second Law of Thermodynamics

       Lacrima Christi

       The Tower

       Quid Pro Quo

       This is Germany

       PART THREE/FOUR

       Punishment

       A Fairy Tale

       Long Ago and Far Away

       Fathers and Sons

       The Depths of the Depths

       PART FIVE

       Stranger

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

Part One

       Travellers

      THE LAST TIME I ever saw Uncle Herman, he was lying on a king-size bed in the finest room at the Hotel Memphis, in the company of six people: the hotel manager, a doctor, two police officers with crackling walkie-talkies, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and me. The manager conferred with the policemen about how the matter might be settled as discreetly as possible, the doctor stood at the foot of the bed regarding my uncle with a look of mild disgust, and I did nothing. It was just past midnight and Herman lay stretched out, his white body sinewy and taut, on that crumpled white catafalque. He was naked and dead.

      He had sent up for a woman. She had arrived, and less than an hour later his life was over. When I got there the young hooker, a small blond thing with crimped hair and childishly painted lips, sat hunched in one of the two white leather chairs next to the ubiquitous hotel writing table. She stared at the carpet, mumbling softly. Uncle Herman lay on his back on the big bed, his pubic hair still glistening with … all right, with the juices of love, a condom rolled halfway down his wrinkled sex like a misplaced clown’s nose. His pale, old man’s body, the tanned face with the shock of grey hair and the large, slightly hooked nose evoked the image of a warrior fallen in battle and laid in state, here, on this dishevelled altar.

      I stood in that room and thought of what Zeno, with a touch of bitterness in his voice, had once said, long ago, that you could plot family histories on a graph, as a line that rippled up and down, up and down, up and down; people made their fortune, their offspring benefited from that fortune, the third generation squandered it all, and the family returned to the bottom of the curve and began working its way back up. An endless cycle of profit and loss, wealth and poverty, rise and fall. Except for the history of our family, Zeno had said, that was a whole other thing. Our family history could best be compared to a railway timetable: one person left, and while he was on his way, another returned, and while he was