The Collected Stories Page 17

  SHRUBLESS CRAGS

  The Prisoner of Chillon, by Lord Byron, isn’t essentially different from “The Secret Miracle.” It, too, is about a condemned prisoner who becomes ecstatic. Suddenly, after years in a dungeon, Bonnivard transcends his mortality:

  What next befell me then and there

  I know not well — I never knew—

  First came the loss of light, and air,

  And then of darkness too:

  I had no thought, no feeling — none—

  Among the stones I stood a stone,

  And was, scarce conscious what I wist,

  As shrubless crags within the mist;

  For all was blank, and bleak, and grey;

  It was not night — it was not day;

  It was not even the dungeon-light,

  So hateful to my heavy sight,

  But vacancy absorbing space,

  And fixedness — without a place.

  Like Hladík, in a state of intensified absence, he is a presence.

  SONG

  Byronic romanticism entered the Russian soul, at the deepest level, as evidenced in the beloved folk song “Oi yoi, the shrubless crags.”

  BLOSSOMS

  Metaphysical possibilities — Hladík, Bonnivard — as inherent in the world, are appreciated by Wordsworth when he focuses on shrubless crags and imagines them spiritual entities, theoretical men who neither live nor die. They hover in the mist of universal mind, or the moods of finitude. In a snowstorm outside Smolensk, fighting the Nazis, my uncle was hit in the head by shrapnel, carried to a hospital, and dropped in the dead ward. That night a Jewish woman, who was a surgeon and colonel in the Russian army, discovered him when she left the operating room and, to smoke a cigarette, retreated to the dead ward. A vague moan, “Mama,” reached her from shadowy rows of corpses. She ordered a search. Nurses running down the rows, pressing back eyelids, listening at mouth holes, located my uncle. The body wasn’t dead; more you couldn’t say. The surgeon stepped on her cigarette. “I’ll operate.” My uncle lived, a hero of the people, guaranteed every right of Russian citizenship. At his first opportunity he fled, walking from Russia to Italy through the confusion of ruined cities; stealing by night across the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Austria; starving, pursued by dogs and police, and always repeating to himself the address of his sister in lower Manhattan. When he got to America he struggled for years, with little English and great anxiety, to make money. Today he owns racetracks and a chain of beauty parlors. He drives a Lincoln Continental. Though he speaks six languages, he isn’t much of a conversationalist, but likes a good joke, especially if it comes from life — how, for example, during a Chinese dinner, his brother-in-law’s appendix ruptured. Both his sons are doctors and drive Jaguars. He reminds them that his life was saved by a woman less than five feet tall who, during the battle of Smolensk, performed miraculous surgery while standing on ammunition boxes. It could seem, now that he’s a big shot, he gives lessons in humility. But how else to defend himself against happiness? He sees terrifying vulnerability in the blossoms of nachas.

  THE SCREAMS OF CHILDREN

  The New Testament is the best condemned-prisoner story. Jesus, a “suspected” Jew, sublimates at the deadly moment. In two ways, then, he is like Jaromir Hladík. Insofar as the Gestapo gives birth to the ecstatic Hladík, he and Jesus are similar in yet another way. Both are victims of parental ambivalence, which tends to give birth to death. One could savor distinctions here, but the prophetic Kafka hurries me away: humanity, he says, is the growth of death force. For reasons of discretion the trains rolled before dawn, routed through the outskirts of Prague. Nevertheless, you could hear the screams of children.

  BLACK BREAD, BUTTER, ONION

  The black bread should be Pechter’s, but the firm went out of business, so substitute bialys from the bakery on Grand Street, between Essex and Clinton, on the right heading toward the river, not SoHo. With your thumb, gouge and tear bialys open along the circumference. Butter bialys. Insert onion slices. Do this about 3:00 a.m., at the glass-topped table in my parents’ dining room, after a heavy date in Greenwich Village. My parents should be asleep in their bedroom, twenty feet away. Since my father is dead, imagine him. He snores. He cries out against murderous assailants. I could never catch his exact words. Think what scares you most, then eat, eat. The New York Times, purchased minutes ago at the kiosk in Sheridan Square, is fresh; it lies beside the plate of bialys. As you eat, you read. Light a cigarette. Coffee, in the gray pot, waits on the stove. Don’t let it boil. Occasional street noises — sirens, cats — should penetrate the Venetian blinds and thick, deeply pleated drapes of the living-room windows. The tender, powdery surface of the bialys is dented by your fingertips, which bear odors of sex; also butter, onion, dough, tobacco, newsprint, and coffee. The whole city is in your nose, but go outside and eat the last bialy while strolling on Cherry Street. The neighborhood is Mafia-controlled; completely safe. You will be seen from tenement windows and recognized. Smoke another cigarette. Take your time. Your father cries out in his sleep, but he was born in Europe. For a native American kid, there is nothing to worry about. Even if you eat half a dozen bialys, with an onion and coffee, you will sleep like a baby.

  ALIENATION

  In his essay “On the Jewish Question,” written in exile, Karl Marx — an alienated Jew assuming the voice of a Hegelienated Jew — says, “Money is the jealous god of Israel.” He means, by this oblique smear, the Virgin is a prostitute, her child is capitalism. Hence, it is Jesus — not the exiled Karl Marx — who objectifies alienation. And why not? The life of Jesus, described early and late by the absence of his father, is nothing less than the negation of negation. Marx never gives the least attention to the journey of the Magi, the mystery on the bestial floor, or the ultimate figure of Jesus in the excruciating pictorial epitome. For an execution Roman-style — with three prisoners and ritual paraphernalia — there is Lord Byron’s letter.

  LORD BYRON’S LETTER

  “The day before I left Rome I saw three robbers guillotined. The ceremony — including the masqued priests; the half-naked executioners; the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of the blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads — is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty ‘new drop’ and dog-like agony of infliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence. Two of these men behaved calmly enough, but the first of the three died with great terror and reluctance. What was very horrible, he would not lie down; then his neck was too large for the aperture, and the priest was obliged to drown his exclamations by still louder exhortations. The head was off before the eye could trace the blow; but from an attempt to draw back the head, notwithstanding it was held forward by the hair, the first head was cut off close to the ears: the other two were taken off more cleanly. It is better than the oriental way, and (I should think) than the axe of our ancestors. The pain seems little, and yet the effect to the spectator, and the preparation to the criminal, is very striking and chilling. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty, and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glass (I was close, but was determined to see, as one should see every thing, once, with attention); the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent), I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could.”

  SPECIES BEING

  Casual precision, lucidity, complexity of nuance, smooth coherent speed. I admire the phrase “great terror and reluctance.” It makes the prisoner’s interior reality and his exterior — or social — reality simultaneous. Surely he felt more than reluctance. But the word stands in contrast to “great terror” and thus acquires the specifically social quality of great terror suffered by an individual at the center of public drama. He could collapse and dissolve into his great terror, but doesn’t. Nor does he become
ecstatic. Instead, sensitive to the crowd, he tries to join it by conveying an idea of himself — as also watching, like the crowd, a man who is about to get his head chopped off, who is in great terror and who — reluctantly — is himself. He owes the crowd his head. He knows the crowd will have his head. The crowd didn’t go to the trouble of gathering itself around him for nothing. He wants to indicate that he is not the sort who is indifferent to what the crowd wants, but after all, it is his head it wants. Of course he is in no position not to provide it. The crowd sees that he has brought it with him. He would like, just the same, to suggest that he is “reluctant” to do so. At the last instant, he loses poise and pulls back. The result is a messy chor, a bad show. Ethics and aesthetics are inextricable. All this, and much more, is intimated in Byron’s letter. Though it is infected, slightly, by ironical preciosity, the letter was written to somebody; therefore, like the prisoner, it participates in a consciousness other than its own; by attitudinizing, it suggests that it sees itself. This is Byron’s concession to society; it is justified by his honesty — the childlike, high-spirited allegiance to the facts of the occasion inside and outside his head. Compared to the sneering, sarcastic, bludgeoning verbosity of Karl Marx, who walked in Paris, it isn’t easy to believe the latter’s idea of humanity as social essence is either witty or attractive.

  DOSTOEVSKY

  In Dostoevsky’s story, a condemned prisoner — at the penultimate instant before a firing squad — is reprieved by the czar. Dostoevsky says it was his own experience. The reprieve was announced, he says, and the firing squad — not the prisoner Dostoevsky — sublimated. What follows? In life and art at once, the czar is a champion of imaginative forms. For condemned prisoners — which is all of us — the czar, a true aristocrat, is godlike in his manifestations. Astonishing, arbitrary, inscrutable. More evil than good — but thus are we saved. From above! Of course, in historical fact the czar and his family were slaughtered. Trotsky considered this “action” indispensable. Stalin’s considerations, regarding Trotsky and his family, were identical. It is impossible to live with or without fictions.

  THE NIGHT I BECAME A MARXIST

  I heard a voice, turned, saw nobody, walked on, heard the voice again, but didn’t turn. Nobody would be there. Or somebody would. In either case — very frightened — I walked faster, stiffened back and neck, expecting a blow, anxious to swivel about, but not doing it until I could no longer, and, walking quickly, stiffly, swiveling to look back, walk on, I noticed street lamps were smashed, blackness took sections of everything, signs were unreadable, windows glossy blotches, doorways like sighs issuing from unimaginable interiors. I felt absolutely outside, savage, and I’d have begun running, but there was the park, the streets beyond. I continued to walk, swivel, walk, saving power, holding self — and then, hearing it, whirled, dropped into a crouch, legs wide, fists raised. I’d have seen nothing, nobody, but — crouched low — realized, suddenly, I was face to face with it, shorter than a midget, speaking mouth, teeth like knives: “Always having fun, aren’t you? Night after night, dancing, drinking, fucking. Fun, fun, fun.”

  CONCLUSION

  Long before ruling-class, ideological superstructures, there were myths describing ecstasies like those of Jaromir Hladík and Jesus. Nymphs and beautiful boys, fleeing murderous gods, were always sublimating into flowers, trees, rivers, heavenly constellations, etc. The earliest stories, then, already convey an exhilarating apprehension of the world as incessantly created of incessant death. Nothing changes. Stories, myths, ideologies, flowers, rivers, heavenly constellations are the phonemes of a mysterious logos; and the lights of our cultural memory, as upon the surface of black primeval water, flicker and slide into innumerable qualifications. But Jaromir Hladík, among substantial millions, is dead. From a certain point of view, none of this shit matters anymore.

  Hello Jack

  JACK PHONED.

  I said hello Jack.

  He said he was going to the hospital.

  I said all right I’ll go with you.

  I asked if I should phone his wife. They weren’t living together.

  He said he wanted me to know where he was. He didn’t want me to do anything.

  I said you’re the boss. What’s wrong? I made my voice little.

  He yelled let’s not talk about it. I’m in the hospital.

  I said you said that you had to go to the hospital. Little words. Cheepee cheepee cheepee. His wife couldn’t stand him. I knew plenty.

  I said hello Jack and rushed to the hospital.

  I had a bad foot. Every step was a wolf bite.

  But Jack was in the hospital. He was the boss.

  Jack phoned so I said hello taxicab. He’d do the same for me. We were old friends from Novgorod. Nothing to think about.

  Taxi. Taxi.

  In the hospital I noticed everyone was dead. Then a nurse was walking. I yelled rooms rooms rooms.

  She said she personally didn’t build the hospital.

  I said so where’s Jack?

  She said he was in a room with another man.

  In a hall I was running.

  I saw Jack. Compared to the other man, Jack was Mr. Universe. What the Mongolians did to one grandmother the Germans did to the other. They made a big blond Chinese Jew His wife hated him. She was from Budapest. I didn’t say anything.

  What’s with that man I said. I limped to a chair and took the shoe off my bad foot. The other man was blankets up to a face the color of chicken fat. His eyes were sticking out like swords.

  Jack said the man was recovering from pneumonia. I didn’t say anything.

  If you ask me that man finished recovering I said. I put my shoe on Jack’s bed.

  Jack said what’s the matter with your foot?

  Nothing I said.

  The man heard us. He said virus.

  My foot was sweating.

  Jack said virus is different from plain pneumonia.

  I rubbed my foot. Poo I said. Open a window.

  Jack said don’t do anything. It’s not important.

  I said how much are they paying you to stay here? Stinks is not important?

  I hopped to the window in one shoe and asked the virus I’m opening the window.

  His eyes didn’t move. They looked like a sign: BE QUIET. BE QUIET. Two killers, shining, pushing. He said virus.

  I asked him again I’m opening this window so it will stop stinking.

  He said virus.

  A little snow came in. You couldn’t notice. Like feathers. Nothing. It melted on the radiator. The virus didn’t complain. Only a maniac would complain. The virus looked at the ceiling as if a movie was playing there. I looked too. I knew there was no movie on the ceiling but I looked. I was right. Jack was happier with the window open. Why not? He was a man with a friend. He began a speech why he was in the hospital.

  He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. This. That. He fell down at work. In his stomach a pain. So his union sent him to the hospital.

  Talk talk talk. I knew plenty.

  I said I’m glad you want to talk.

  He said is it wrong to talk?

  I said tell me if what you have is serious and forgive me for laughing. A friend can laugh.

  He said you think it’s not serious?

  I said to you serious is to the world ridiculous. Sure an enemy wouldn’t laugh. He doesn’t care so he can care. You have no sense of proportion. I rubbed my foot.

  The other man said virus.

  Jack said nobody told him not to talk.

  I said maybe you would like to sing.

  He began to sing. Ya-ya-ya.

  The man said virus.

  Me too. Ya — ya — ya.

  All of a sudden the virus pushes his blankets on the floor and gets out of bed. His gown was pinched in his behind. His legs were bones, his face green. Like a tomato. I thought he was a tomato not a virus. He walked out of the room.

  We stopped singing.

  I said he went to the toilet
.

  Jack said a toilet is behind the door over there. He didn’t go to the toilet.

  I said how do you know? Maybe he doesn’t like that toilet.

  Jack said he didn’t go to the toilet.

  I said he’ll be back in a minute. He went to another toilet because he didn’t want us to hear him make a tinkle.

  Jack said he didn’t go to any toilet.

  I said all right. Then he recovered. Why should he pay another penny? He recovered. Stop the clock. A motel is cheaper. I noticed I had a headache.

  Jack gave me a face like Genghis Khan. A rock with eye slits. I could see the tomato was my fault. I could see it in the rock.

  I said I know how it is Jack. You come in with trouble and they put you with a virus. Look at my foot. Is that sweat Jack? It’s sweat believe me. Jack’s wife hated him.A small skinny from night school. Hair and pimples.

  She used to read to him from Goethe. He couldn’t understand a word so they got married. When Jack had a hard-on she would vomit. He called her The Stomach. He used to say I’m going home now to The Stomach. I knew plenty. I said what do you say about my foot?

  He said he phoned me so I would walk on my rotten foot. Then he grabbed my shoe and went to the window. A guy like him makes life meaningless.