Prologue to an Essay on Wit, Through a Glass Darkly

Forgive me this small digression (though by way of disclaimer, forthwith revealed the bare mechanics of this digression: an anecdote that takes the form of a haunting dialogue with a long lost relative, ostensibly disruptive to our theme and placed erratically on an entirely separate point along the space-time continuum, instead intends first to take us on a nostalgic trip triggered by a photo to a mystery steeped in WWII, then pauses a moment to remind us about the amorphous nature of evil -- though readers shall be spared any and all earthshatteringly profound philosophical insights -- by which point we will, we hope, be fully prepared to return full circle to the theme of the day in our well beloved lizard cage):

This evening I picked up a black-and-white photo, barely faded but for some sepia leakage in its righthand corner, that featured a band of young men who might've been the brawny, well-groomed members of a 1940s football team. Some smile, some rest on each others shoulders, some stand defiant. Behind them, a brick wall. Nothing more.

Turning it over, I noted that it was marked in the elegant inked script of a long lost family prankster. Above the date --10 Nov., 1939 -- he wrote "This is not a football team!"En francais, with typical wit, a message that echoes Magritte, crossed with Roberto Benigni.

Indeed not. The prankster's writing belongs to my grandfather, the member of the group perched bottom right in the photo, splaying his legs as he leans in with a brash elegance and a mustache that combine to suggest a dose of panache no nazi could ever quell. The scene was pictured a good month into the group's detention at an internship camp, where prisoners identified as Jewish stewed, awaiting deportation to the extermination camps of Germany and the east.

But it was early days yet. No one knew what evil might come. No one could imagine.

A letter a month later sent to his newlywed brother-in-law who languished in another prison -- the paper shared for space with a friend-- tells in coded messages of mingled hope and despair. Short phrases. Words lingering alone without clauses and context.

"When next we meet we can't wait to congtratulate you," the friend writes. "When next we meet. It will take time. Everything takes time."

The words, speaking aloud across the ages into minds attuned to more mundane things, come acompanied with a shudder. Of the photographed group, only my grandfather and another man escaped deportation. The rest, as far as we know, never returned.

Some say now that they dared to see evil when evil declared itself. Except they called it luck. A distant cousin who just celebrated his 85th told me last night, over a second glass of rose taken in a blur of twinkling candles, how his survival turned on fortune. He had read Mein Kampf at age 16, he said, so when the warnings of arrests began to come a year later -- a trickle of news from a baker, a tidbit from the wife of a local policeman -- he knew to take his mother and head for refuge to the locked, empty apartment in which he'd minutes earlier performed a spot of electrical work. Days later mother and son headed south toward the free zone. Just shy of the border, a delay of minutes kept them from their rendez-vous -- the momentary glitch that spared them from a Gestapo ambush that swept up who knows how many other hunted souls.

And so, back to our gulag among the pagodas, the better to introduce Burma's particular genius for gallows humor, where the line is fine between cynicism and free for all rotten tomato-throwing -- either they cry into their beer that all the country is a jail, or they cackle aloud that Rangoon is a city of house arrests. Perhaps it was the other way round.

Gallows humor, methinks, shines a mirror at reality and reveals it absurd. And if absurdity be the stuff of reality, then Burmese, or my grandfather, long ago learned to watch with a certain detachment the freak show unfurling all around them. Now if only they could get to the other side of the cage...