Now I must tell you the story of a man I knew as Senor
Bart when I still lived in Argentina. What triggered this peculiar reminiscence
is that for several weeks I have received a flurry of reports that there
has been discovered - in some forgotten vault, I guess, in Switzerland -
enormous heaps of gold purported to have been extracted from the teeth of
the victims alleged to have been "gassed" in such places as Auschwitz.
When I knew Senor Bart in my own youthful days, he was a dreaded sight because
he was a drunk who told some pretty boring stories, with no appreciation
for the fact that there was overload. He didn't know when enough was enough.
I was then working as a sales clerk in a grocery store, and he would lean
across my counter, emit enormous whiskey flags and tell me one more time
that in his glory days, in Switzerland, he used to chum it up with Lenin
who plotted revolution against the Russian aristocracy. He claimed that
he and Lenin were really buddy-buddy, which may or may not have been true.
It could have been; I didn't care; in those days history meant nothing.
I just longed for him to stop telling me stories because I had heard them
before.
Old Bart lived in an old, dilapidated dwelling that was glued to some sort
of little hill in a way that the roof was level with the top. Time and neglect
had covered that roof with thick layers of top soil on which a lot of dandelions
grew, and not infrequently we would observe Bart's cow graze on the dandilions
and make the roof sag badly.
This used to infuriate his landlord who lived deep in the Yerba orchards
and never quite succeeded in marshalling the evidence that old Bart's cow
was grazing on that roof.
Bart simply claimed it wasn't so; the landlord made it up.
The landlord howled that he had EVIDENCE; the cow had left some substance.
But Senor Bart, perfecting chutzpah, would simply turn the accusation on
its head, look innocent, smile through his toothless gums, and ask:
"Are you accusing ME? Did you say cow? Whose cow? How did manure get
on my roof?" Only he didn't say "manure"; his churlish boomerang
was quite a masterpiece in Yiddish.
In that part of the world, this turned into a proverb. Whenever someone
told a lie that was so crude and primitive there was no way around it, it
literally stunk to heaven, the folks would raise their eyebrows, asking:
"How did manure get on your roof?" and people knew how to dismiss
mendacity, considering the source.
That's what will happen, I predict, with this repulsive story about the
gold extracted from some corpses' teeth to "prove" the Holocaust.
It's a yarn that has now been exhausted.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?"
