Mark Jacobson - The Lampshade

I must say I didnt put much stock in the possibility that a Dominican spiritualist working out of a basement in Union City, New Jersey, would have much to say about a human skin lampshade reputedly made in a Nazi concentration camp. But there I was sitting across from Doa Argentina, a large woman wearing a ceremonial headdress and smoking a pair of cigars, one on either side of her mouth. A friend of mine, a devotee, had recommended the medium, saying that if the lampshade had truly once been part of a person, the spirit would still be present. If so, then Doa Argentina would make contact with it, bring its secrets to light.

There was a bit of desperation in my visit, an anxiety that had been mounting since I had first come into possession of the lampshade, which a friend had purchased at a rummage sale in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Later, after DNA testing proved that the lampshade had been fashioned from the skin of a human being, Id spent many, many months attempting to track down its true nature, its origin and meaning, a search that had taken me halfway around the world. So I was willing, if not too excited, to drive the ten miles from my Brooklyn home, through the Lincoln Tunnel, to Union City, where everyone speaks Spanish, to hear what the mystic had to say.

Doa Argentina, who said she had learned the ways of contacting the dead from her mother, whose portrait could be seen on the wall behind a six-foot-tall plaster of Paris likeness of the Virgin, began the session auspiciously. Taking the lampshade from its box, she took one look and said, Oh, they kill him. This was quite possibly accurate, considering there was every chance the shade had been constructed from the skin of one of the eleven million people, six million Jews among them, who had been killed by the Nazis during their twelve-year reign of terror. On the other hand, spiritualists had their tricks. They like to impress their needy supplicants. I did not know what my friend had told Doa Argentina about the lampshade before Id arrived.

A few moments later, Doa Argentina placed a candle beside the lampshade, which was alarming. After making a number of trips to Buchenwald, the Nazi camp most associated with the lampshade story, and spending much time in New Orleans, where the object had been scavenged from an abandoned building wrecked in the catastrophic hurricane, I had no desire to see it incinerated in the basement of a Jersey spiritualists parlor. This seemed a real possibility as the candle flame grew higher.

Mira! The spirit is strong, Doa Argentina said, taking a chug of rum. It is speaking There was a pause now, as she stiffened in her velveteen chair. Her eyelids were fluttering. He says he says

Id always assumed the skin of the lampshade came from a male, but this was the first time Id heard it identified by the pronoun. Until this moment it had always been an it, a frightening, intentionally depersonalized it.

He says they are all bad to him. They hurt him. They cut him. Stab him with knives. They throw him in the closet. Lock him away. But you you are different. You are kind to him. You give him attention.

Yes. I was paying attention to the lampshade. For months Id thought of little else.

The candle flame shot higher. Doa Argentina swigged more rum. The picture of her mother loomed above. He says he feels safe with you. He wants to stay with you.

Stay with me?

He says he wants to stay with you always. He never wants to leave you.

Youre kidding. Ever since the lampshade had arrived at my door as an unsolicited parcel of terror, Id been trying to get rid of it. It was, I thought, like the black spot in Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island, a dark circle inscribed on a page ripped from a purloined Bible, a floating accusation of ultimate guilt a pirate might find shoved in his breeches some bad night. The idea was to divest yourself of the spot before its curse took hold, to pass it to the next unsuspecting fool, if need be.

He cant stay with me. Thats crazy.

Doa Argentina leveled her gaze at me. For the moment it seemed as if shed separated herself from her trance and had returned to the temporal world. She lowered her voice, as if to keep her thoughts from the spirit.

Por qu? she asked. Por qu he cant stay with you?

Because because it is a Nazi lampshade. It doesnt belong to me. I cant keep a Nazi lampshade.

You dont want him? He is not a Nazi.

I know hes not a Nazi. I know that. Doa Argentina was recommending I keep the lampshade near me as much as possible, to keep it at my bedside. I cant have a Nazi lampshade in my house.

But this is what he wants. You cannot do it? You want me to tell him that he cannot stay with you. That you dont want him.

It isnt that I dont want him. I just cant keep him.

Suddenly this trip to Union City had become very complicated. I couldnt become the permanent guardian of a human skin lampshade. Itor should I now be referring to the shade as he?was a dead person. A murder victim, a former human being, not a curio, a grim collectors item. Id spoken to rabbis, to museum officials, professors, geneticists, policemen, politicians. Dozens of serious people had weighed in with opinions concerning the lampshade and what should be done with it. Now this spiritualist, this lottery number picker, was advocating this radical course of action.

I will tell him, Doa Argentina said, in the manner of a neutral messenger. The candle flame shot higher again. Doa Argentina stared into the fire. She let out a barking sound. If it was a performance, it was a good one. It was a while before she spoke again.

He says there is nothing he can do. It is your choice. He says he leaves his fate to you but it is good.

Good? I replied meekly.

It is good because he trusts you. Youre the only one he has now.

In the fall of 1827, as he was completing his masterwork Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, greatest of all German writers, took a walk through the Ettersberg forest near his home in Weimar. This is a good place to be, the seventy-eight-year-old Goethe told his secretary and biographer, Johann Peter Eckermann, as the two men paused to admire the view. Of late I have thought it would be the last time I should look down from here on the kingdoms of the world, and their splendor. We tend to shrink in domestic confinement. Yet, here we feel great and free as we always ought to be.

One hundred and ten years later, in the spring of 1937, Theodor Eicke, the Obergruppenfhrer of the Waffen-SS Totenkopf Deaths Head division, and Fritz Sauckel, soon to be in charge of the largest contingent of forced workers since the African slave trade, sought to pay tribute to Goethe. As they cleared the Ettersberg forest for the construction of the Buchenwald camp, where fifty-six thousand people would die before April 1945, they ordered that one large oak be left standing. This was said to be Goethes Eiche, or Goethes Oak, the very tree under which the great poet had written his great work. The camp, at the time the largest in the Reich, was built around the tree. It was an arbitrary decision on Eickes part. After all, there was no way of knowing which oak Goethe had actually sat under; the Ettersberg is full of the trees. Indeed, in