The Horse Adjutant
The Panther Jim Boring T he tattoo is faded with age, and the leaping panther is no longer a glossy black but a more muted darkness on the old man’s arm. Still, it speaks of a time long ago when a young man marked him- self with the image and the spirit of the creature. The panther covers a still earlier tattoo, a set of numbers that once seemed to mark a young boy for certain death. We sit together, side by side, on Leon Schagrin’s couch – a yellow legal pad in my lap, a small otto- man before us that drifts back and forth as one or the other of us rests our heels on it. Nearly every Friday for a year and a half we sit like this, enduring un-
Leon Schagrin with Jim Boring Kabassa, Beer and the Manuscript 2011
endurable memories. Behind us the window looks out onto a park-like setting and a tennis court – always empty. The small condominium apartment is neat and clean. The nameplate on the louvered door reads, Leon and Betty Schagrin. Here live two unlikely survivors of a great man-made horror, the attempted exter- mination of an entire people. The history of that attempt is well-documented and preserved in both collective and individual memory. The poignant eloquence of Anne Frank and the vivid remembrance of Elie Weisel among so many others have created a tapestry of cruelty, terror and also humanity that humbles us before the awful and the wonderful possibilities in human nature. This is one more of those horror stories – different only in the particulars from the plague that descended on all of Europe at a time not so very long ago in historical terms but now nearly passed the lifetimes of the survivors of the generation that lived through it. We are far enough from those times and events to know that whatever lessons they might have taught us have not been learned. The hope that social institutions would be formed to prevent and deter genocidal atrocities has not been realized. The blind- fold of Justice seems now to prevent her from finding her way to those who so des- perately need the impartial fairness that same blindfold once symbolized. And yet we work and continue to hope that one day our better angels will prevail. Indeed, hope is the belief that we have better angels. This is the story of Leon Schagrin, a boy visited by both demons and angels.
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