the Jew gets blackballed from the country club

2: "Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! DIRTY JEW! DIRTY JEW!"

Erik gave his mother one last look -- a look she knew very well the meaning of -- and stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. She'd won, and she knew it -- but damned if he was going to sit down like a good boy, and fill in that form with thoroughness, veracity and obedience. Not right now.

It was too dispiriting -- too much one point on a continuous thread of hate, bile, bigotry and abuse, stretching out from one end to the other of eternity. The latest point -- bringing to mind the first instance, the first time he'd understood that some folk could hate him, because they needed someone to hate.

He didn't need, or want, to think about it. Thanks, Mamma! There it was, though, large as life -- the night they'd come for Jakob, to Erik's childhood home in Hamburg, in the middle of the night. Not the Stasi, certainly not the polished, plumed and booted Gestapo -- the Lehnsherrs, prosperous bourgeois Jews, merited no such pomp.

Regular local police, that was all, and a concocted charge of worker mistreatment, at Jakob's furniture manufacture workshop, his production facility that made cheap gewgaws and tchotkes for the working poor. The first step, in a process that led into confiscation of property and internment. Not that Erik had understood this, at eleven.

Not that he remembered, at least. What he remembered was Edie. Edie had understood very well, that it had begun, inexorable -- and she had lost her mind. Lost it sufficiently, to fly at one of the officers in a rage, to come to the defence of her husband.

The result was blood streaked across her blanched face, where the policeman had broken her nose. And without that, perhaps they'd only have taken Jakob for the time being. A point for Edie, then: at least her fury had kept them together.

What Erik remembered next was stars, and broken glass -- little flashes and glitches of memory, beautiful and horrible. All three of them, dragged out onto the street, the stars in the dark night sky impassively witnessing their screams, the slaps, the slamming door of their lovely cherished comfortable house. And the glass, where the officer with the scratch across his face -- from Edie -- had used his nightstick on every beautiful bit of stained glass, in the doors and windows of the entrance hall and portico.

Not exactly Kristallnacht, no. A smaller, earlier, personal trauma. It was quite enough, to have to shoulder and remember. And not even finished, at that point.

It had only needed their next-door neighbour, opening up her bed-chamber's shutters to lean out and howl her approval, to put the final seal on the nightmare pantomime, the horror of the moment. All synthetic smiles and oily courtesy, normally, that old bag: but now, the fat, wrinkled old bully hung out of the window-frame, slobbering with glee, her sagging, pendulous, leathery-nippled teats falling out of her dirty nightdress, and her knobbly old fingers lifting up its folds to work frantically away at her rubbery, deformed, over-used clit. It was almost lost in the heaving poundage of her folds of cellulite and stretchmarks, mapped with broken spider-veins and sweaty pus-weeping pressure-sores.

Her monstrously obese nudity, flopped over the windowsill, was enough in itself to scar Erik for life. And perhaps had been a deciding factor in his resolute, undiluted homosexuality.

There was drool slobbering down her chin, as she wanked away with the pleasure of hatred, of tearing down in order to be one up. As she howled into the night, while the prim stars looked down. Ululating, a perfect gargoyle fright.

"Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew! DIRTY JEW! DIRTY JEW!"

* Erik may possibly have PTSD. As a self-elected Englishman, complete with the stiffest of upper lips, he couldn't possibly say.