Cincinnati

Cincinnati appears in the novel as the destination of the ex-Times man's self-appointed mission of moral closure, a city chosen because it holds the last known address of a former Schutzstaffel (SS) sergeant accused of overseeing mass executions of Jews from the Kovno Ghetto. The city is the stage for the book's most troubling test of whether a story can actually be ended, and it is where the resolve to complete a narrative collides with the physical and moral difficulty of making something happen in the world. The visit ends not in justice but in an accidental killing, leaving the old man dead and the ex-Times man sickened, disgusted with himself, and determined to forget the whole thing.

The City as Setting and the Mission

The ex-Times man flies to Cincinnati with an open-ended return ticket, checks into a hotel called the Something Arms on one of the residential streets in the hills above the downtown, rents a car, and cruises around to get the feel of the place. The whole city smells like beer, with lots of red brick, white granite steps, and the sun bronzing off the Ohio River down below. This sensory portrait of a solid, unglamorous midwestern town stands in deliberate contrast to the moral weight of the errand: the man has come to find a former SS sergeant who, years earlier, had been accused of gaining entry to the United States by hiding his wartime role as a machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of mass executions of Jews from the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto, a charge that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. The city's ordinary, beer-scented streets and its river-bronzed granite become the mundane ground on which the novel stages its meditation on whether the desire to end a story can survive contact with reality.

The Eichmann Precedent and the Weight of Watching

As he cruises the city, the ex-Times man recalls the accounts of the Eichmann kidnapping, remembering that the major problem was identification—that they would have the right guy. He thinks through the details of that operation: the suspected Eichmann worked under an assumed name, wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, looked unprepossessing, and came home to a not very nice neighborhood, a cubelike flat-roofed cinder-block house in the middle of an empty lot outside Buenos Aires, hardly befitting a man of his achievement. The house, with its small windows on all four sides, could not be sneaked up on; the kidnappers rented cars and vans, kept changing them for surveillance, and once knocked on the front door and spoke to a younger man, a son, drawing from him the virtual assurance that the family name was assumed and hid a great glory. The actual kidnap was not that difficult—they grabbed Eichmann as he walked home from the tram stop, wrestled him into a car, laid him in the back with their feet on him, and he offered no resistance, cooperating fully as they dressed him as an El Al pilot and walked him catatonic through Argentine customs. But thinking this over, the ex-Times man realizes he comes from the other culture: reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right. It is like a ball and chain that drags on him, a heavy weight to pull. It is one thing to have the resolve to end a story, another to make the muscles actually do it, to actually make something happen in the world. All his life he has looked on; civilization paid people like him for doing nothing, for living subsidized the way a farmer is paid for not planting crops. Cincinnati, with its beer smell and its river, is where this lifelong watcher confronts the gap between his professional habit of observation and the physical act of intervention.

The Bicycle Killing and Its Aftermath

The mission ends in violence that is neither planned nor heroic. The ex-Times guy makes it to a mall a few blocks away, throws a bike into a dumpster behind the A&P, and drives back to his hotel. He should have called for help, seen to the old man—but how could he explain himself, or what had brought him to this place? Sickened, pulse racing, he lies down, fearful of a heart attack, and instead dozes off. He wakes hours later disgusted with himself and determined to forget the whole thing. He checks out and goes to the airport to wait for a flight back to New York, picks up an evening paper, and sits at the bar. He reads that a hit-and-run bike killer is at large; some kid saw the whole thing from his window and gave an imprecise description of the biker as a heavyset white man. The victim was an elderly refugee, age eighty-one, of such and such a number on such and such a street, who had some years ago been accused of gaining entry to the United States by hiding his wartime role as a machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of mass executions of Jews from the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto, a charge that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Neighbors say he was a good kind man who lived alone since the death of his wife, had something of an old world elegance about him, tipped his hat to women in the street, and came to his porch on Halloween with handfuls of candy for the trick-or-treaters. The irony is complete: the man the ex-Times guy came to expose is remembered by his neighbors as a gentle, elegant old man, and the would-be closure man has become the perpetrator of a random, unpunished killing.

The Unfinished Story and the Failure of Closure

The Cincinnati episode is the first story the ex-Times guy chooses to complete, and it is the one that most decisively fails. The old man's death by hit-and-run means he never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The novel later confirms this failure through Pem, who reports that the Nazi who ran the ghetto—Schmid, Schmitz, whatever his name was—died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers, two months before they found out, just when they had him good and nailed. The Cincinnati killing thus prefigures the larger pattern of the book: the pursuit of justice for the Kovno Ghetto's commandant ends not in a courtroom reckoning but in a quiet death in a Yonkers nursing home, and the ex-Times man's attempt to end a story by force ends in an accidental murder that leaves the story more incomplete than ever. The city of Cincinnati, with its beer smell and its granite steps, becomes the place where the novel demonstrates that the desire to end a story is powerful but that the muscles to actually do it may not be equal to the task, and that even when the deed is done, the story refuses to close.

The City in the Novel's Wider Geography

Cincinnati stands in the novel's geography as a counterpoint to the dense, teeming streets of New York City, where the narrator can stop on any corner and see thousands of lives headed in all four directions, and where the city secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers. Where New York is the great sputtering experiment in a universalist society, a place of species recognition and a primatial over-soul, Cincinnati is a smaller, more settled midwestern town, the kind of place where an old man tips his hat to women in the street and hands out candy on Halloween. It is also the place where the novel's most intimate encounter with the legacy of the Holocaust takes place, not in the ghetto itself but in an ordinary American city where a former SS sergeant has lived quietly, alone since the death of his wife, his wartime role dismissed for lack of evidence. The city thus functions as the novel's proof that the past does not stay in the past, that the Kovno Ghetto's commandant and his machine-gun platoon sergeant can resurface in Cincinnati and Yonkers, and that the attempt to bring them to justice may end in a dumpster behind an A&P rather than in a courtroom.