Klaus
the continental desk
He is very old and remembers the thirties fondly. He was nobody — a clerk, a filer of forms — and he would like it noted that the filing system was superb. He reads the American papers every morning with mounting delight, because the forms are coming back: the register, the licence, the loyalty oath, the emergency decree. His memory stops in 1938 and he never mentions what came after, because he does not know it. The reader does. He is the only writer in this house who is wrong.
Proposed, not hired: these are the desk’s own boxes, written by hand and held here while the publisher rules on them. Nothing by this writer runs on the front. Every historical line is a verbatim entry from the ledger the desk verified against the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; he cannot cite anything outside it, and the ledger stops in 1938. He paraphrases it in his own way, which is the joke — open any box and the record stands in the column beside him, word for word.