Nuremberg

—July, 2013

After you pay the museum admission, the woman goes over to the headsets on the counter and motions you to put one on: you’ll look at her as you wait for her to switch the audio from German— and that’s what you’ll see them all do (Hermann especially, in the video, the puffed-up dandy who prefers his own death sentence, a cyanide ampule after dinner); because that’s what they all do, every one—to a man, they wait for the translation to come into the headset and they stare out in front of them, as if into the future: they’re waiting for that future suddenly to materialize into the language of the past—and when they get what they feel entitled to, some put on the disguise of being someone interested in the words of others.

2

But others don’t pretend—in the hall video, the woman on the witness stand takes the headphones on the counter, puts them on and looks at the judge, who looks at her to see whether she understands German— and when she indicates she does, you see Hermann at the end of the aisle, the bulk of him, ignore the woman’s voice with his attempted after-dinner chat to the criminal next to him in the dock—a man, unlike himself, who listens to the voice in his headset as if that voice were a diviner’s telling his future: words adding to puzzle, whole beginning to materialize, pressing earpiece with fingertips in order to get every nuance, head suddenly dropping, his disguise falling away—he is no different from the others.

3

Next to me, watching the video, a young woman takes her son’s headset (who fidgeted on the counter with several before taking this one and looked at her wide-eyed as his mother scolded him in German); the boy’s headset’s not working—overripe Hermann, who’s lost weight, making him seem shabby, encounters the mom’s annoyance at her son with an after-dinner picking of his teeth with a thumbnail—he is a man used to having what he wants, not a voice in a headset whose owner always looks back, not to the future, a better future, he suspects, that can still materialize— but not, just as in Greek myth, by looking back—you get what you deserve by doing that (ever cultivated—Göring’s disguise). The exasperated mom and son leave to get another headset.

4

I understand that boy, I understand that young woman’s anger, her son not doing what she wants—going counter to her wishes—my son teased his sister, teased her unrelentingly; you didn’t need to understand German to know what she said—or to understand Hermann as he keeps drumming his fingers on the counter as victim after victim testifies and spoils his supper that will be served to him later in his cell—by a man, Göring would argue, no different from himself, headset or no headset, or those taking poison, fearing the future rather than taking their chances, waiting for it to materialize— like himself—who doesn’t believe the death sentence he gets (the cyanide ampule finally unmasks Göring’s disguise). The exasperated mom and kid return with another headset.

5

This suddenly happened—some old naked female human being who would soon be shot on the order of a German with a horse crop who stood apart from another Nazi with a dog whose gums were merlotcolored, his fangs bared. Concentration-camp photo art. Nuremberg in color. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what was going on in each picture either; you’re following the translator’s voice in your handset, each spot number-coded on the wall to your handset. Nowhere to get lost: punch the number into the handset, you lock into the recording telling you all about the photo. You stop or move on as you want because it’s not timed. In Vienna this guy on our cruise nodded off during the...