A Monstrous Complicity

SOUL OF WOOD by Jakov Lind. 190 pages. Grove. $3.95.

These disturbing fables might have as their epigraph the theme of Goya's nightmarish etching cycle, the Caprichos: "The sleep of reason produces monsters." With merciless humor, Goya gave the forms of grotesque man-beasts to 18th century hypocrisies. Jakov Lind, writing cheerily of cannibals and cripples in Nazi Germany, imprisons the reader in sweaty dreams of guilt. The guilt is not merely German. Lind's force lies in his ability to suggest that the sleep of reason in this century produced not only monsters but a monstrous complicity--a pact signed and mutually witnessed by murderers, accessories, victims and the world's bystanders.

Honest Man. Lind, the son of Austrian Jews who were deported and killed by the Nazis, mocks German pretensions of decency with slapstick caricature in the long title story. Wolbricht, the protagonist, prides himself on his honesty. A one-legged veteran of World War I, he is employed by a Jewish couple to care for their paralytic son, Anton. When the parents are ordered off to an extermination camp, he agrees to take care of Anton in return for the lease to their apartment.

After the parents are carted off, does Wolbricht take the easy course and turn Anton over to the authorities? Certainly not: he is honest. At great trouble to himself, he smuggles the boy to the country in a crate and leaves him alone in a mountain cabin with a three-week supply of food. Anton cannot feed himself, of course, being paralytic, but that is not Wolbricht's problem. Thinking well of himself, he returns to the city to sell the apartment lease. But what's this? A bump on his forehead the size of a pigeon's egg. Wolbricht presses the bump in, but pop, it comes out on the back of his head. He presses again. Pop, over one ear. Again. This time on the top of his head. That's better, he can wear his hat over it. No harm done.

In this caricature of conscience, gaily colored symbols jump at the reader like pop-up pictures in a children's book. It must be painful to be a German and read this novella: it is hard enough to read it as a bystander.

What's Noble? Journey into the Night is particularly hallucinatory. Two men are taking an overnight train to Paris. One tells the other in a friendly way that he is a cannibal and intends to eat his companion as soon as he falls asleep. Ridiculous, naturally. No, really, the first man is quite serious. He opens a small satchel and brings out a salt shaker and tools for dismembering a body.

"I don't believe a word of it. You can't saw me up."

"I can't eat you as you are. Sawing's the only way."

Half-mad himself by now, half-asleep, the traveler muses: "Here is a madman, he wants to eat me. At least he wants something. What do I want? Not to eat anybody. Is that so noble?"

The traveler blunders free at last, but the cannibal, too, escapes. "He stepped cautiously down the embankment and vanished in the dark. Like a country doctor on his way to deliver a baby." Evil lives, Lind is saying; it lives.

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