CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

            OFTEN when I stepped out for a breath of fresh air I would drop in on Sid Essen to have a chat with him.  Only once did I see a customer enter the place.  Winter or summer it was dark inside and cool – just the right temperature for preserving stiffs.  The two show windows were crammed with shirts faded by the sun and covered with fly specks.

       He was usually in the rear of the store, reading under a dim electric bulb suspended from the ceiling by a long cord from which dangled sheets of tanglefoot flypaper.  He had made himself a comfortable seat by mounting a car seat on two packing boxes.  Beside the boxes was a spittoon which he made use of when he chewed his baccy.  Usually it was a filthy pipe he had between his teeth, sometimes an Owl cigar.  The big heavy cap he removed only when he went to bed.  His coat collar was always white with dandruff and when he blew his nose, which he did frequently – like an elephant trumpeting – he made use of a blue bandanna kerchief a yard wide.

       On the counter near by were piles of books, magazines and newspapers.  He switched from one to the other in accordance with his mood.  Beside this reading matter there was always a box of peanut brittle which he dove into when he got excited.  It was obvious, from his girth, that he was a heavy eater.  His wife, he told me several times, was a divine cook.  It was her most attractive side, from all I gathered.  Though he always supplemented this by saying how well-read she was.

       No matter what time of the day I dropped in he always brought out a bottle.  “Just a snifter,” he would say, flourishing a flask of schnapps or a bottle of vodka.  I’d take a drink to please him.  If I made a face he’s say – “Don’t like it much, do you?  Why don’t you try a drop of rye?”

       One morning, over a tumbler of rye, he repeated his desire to teach me to drive.  “Three lessons is all you’ll need,” he said.  “There’s no sense in letting the car stand idle.  One you get the hang of it you’ll be crazy about it.  Look, why not go for a spin with me Saturday afternoon?  I’ll get someone to mind the store.”

       He was so eager, so insistent, that I couldn’t refuse.

       Come Saturday I met him at the garage.  The big four-door sedan was parked at the kerb.  One look at it and I knew it was too much for me.  However, I had to go through with it.  I took my place at the wheel, manipulated the gears, got acquainted with the gas pedal and the brakes.  A brief lesson.  More instruction was to follow once we were out of town.

       At the wheel Reb became another person.  King now.  Wherever it was we were heading for it was at top speed.  My thighs were aching before we were halfway there, from braking.

       “You see,” he said, taking both hands off the wheel to gesticulate, “there’s nothing to it.  She runs by herself.”  He took his foot off the gas pedal and demonstrated the use of the hand throttle.  Just like running a locomotive.

       On the outskirts of the city we stopped here and there to collect rent money.  He owned a number of houses here and elsewhere farther out.  All in run-down neighbourhoods.  All occupied by negro families.  One had to collect every week, he explained.  Coloured people didn’t know how to handle money.

       In a vacant lot near one of these shacks he gave me further instruction.  This time how to turn round, how to stop suddenly, how to park.  And how to back up.  Very important, backing up, he said.

       The strain of it had me sweating in no time.  “Okay,” he said, “let’s get going.  We’ll hit the speedway soon, then I’ll let her out.  She goes like the wind – you’ll see … Oh, by the way, if ever you get panicky and don’t know what to do, just shut off the motor and slam on the brakes.”

       We came to the speedway, his face beaming now.  He pulled his cap down over his eyes.  “Hang on!” he said, and phttt! we were off.  It seemed to me that we were hardly touching the ground.  I glanced at the speedometer: eighty-five.  He gave her more gas.  “She can do a hundred without feeling it.  Don’t worry, I’ve got her in hand.”

       I said nothing, just braced myself and half closed my eyes.  When we turned off the speedway I suggested that he stop a few minutes and let me stretch my legs.

       “Fun, wasn’t it?” he shouted.

       “You betcha.”

       “Some Sunday,” he said, “after we collect the rents, I’ll take you to a restaurant I know, where they make delicious ducklings.  Or we could go down on the East Side, to a Polish place.  Or how about some Jewish cooking?  Anything you say.  It’s so good to have your company.”

       In Long Island City we made a detour to buy some provision: herring, smoked white fish, begels, lachs, sour pickles, corn bread, sweet butter, honey, walnuts and niggertoes, huge red onions, garlic, kasha, and so on.

       “If we don’t do anything else we eat well,” he said.  “Good food, good music, good talk – what else does one need?”

       “A good wife, maybe,” I said rather thoughtlessly.

       “I’ve got a good wife, only we’re temperamentally unsuited to one another.  I’m too common for her.  Too much of a roust-about.”

       “You don’t strike me that way,” said I.

       “I’m pulling in my horns … getting old, I guess.  Once I was pretty handy with my dukes.  That got me into heaps of trouble.  I used to gamble a lot too.  Bad, if you have a wife like mine.  By the way, do you ever play the horses?  I still place a few bets now and then.  I can’t promise to make you a millionaire but I can always double your money for you.  Let me know any time; your money’s safe with me, remember that.”

       We were pulling into Greenpoint.  The sight of the gas tanks provoked a sentimental twinge.  Now and then a church right out of Russia. The street names became more and more familiar.

       “Would you mind stopping in front of 181 Devoe Street?” I asked.

       “Sure, why not?  Know someone there?”

       “Used to.  My first sweetheart.  I’d like to have one look at the house, that’s all.”

       Automatically he came down hard on the gas pedal.  A stop light stared us in the face.  He went right through. “Signs mean nothing to me,” he said, “but don’t follow my example.”

       At 181 I got out, took my hat off (as if visiting a grave) and approached the railing in front of the grass plot.  I looked up at the parlour floor windows; the shades were down, as always.  My heart began to go clip-clop the same as years ago when, looking up at the windows, I hoped and prayed to catch sight of her shadow moving about.  Only for a brief moment or two would I stand there, then off again.  Sometimes I’d walk around the block three or four times – just in case.  (“You poor bugger,” I said to myself, “you’re still walking around that block.”)

       As I turned back to the car the gate in the basement clicked.  An elderly woman stuck her head out.  I went up to her and, almost tremblingly, I asked if any of the Giffords still lived in the neighbourhood.

       She looked at me intently – as f she had seen an apparition, it seemed to me – then replied: “Heavens no! They moved away years ago.”

       That froze me.

       “Why,” she said, “did you know them?”

       “One of them, yes, but I don’t suppose she’d remember me.  Una was her name.  Do you know what’s become of her?”

       “They went to Florid.”  (They, she said.  Not she.)

       “Thanks.  Thank you very much!”  I doffed my hat, as if to a Sister of Mercy.

       As I put my hand on the car door she called out: “Mister! Mister, if you’d like to know more about Una there’s a lady down the block could tell you….”

       “Never mind,” I said.  “It’s not important.”

       Tears were welling up, stupid though it was.

       “What’s the matter?” said Reb.

       “Nothing, nothing.  Memories, that’s all.”

       He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a flask.  I took a swig of the remedy for everything; it was pure firewater.  I gasped.

       “It never fails,” he said.  “Feel better now?”

       “You bet.”  And the next moment I found myself saying – “Christ!  To think one can still feel these things.  It beats me.  What would have happened if she had appeared – with her child?  It hurts.  It still hurts.  Don’t ask me why.  She belonged to me, that’s all I can tell you.”

       “Must have been quite an affair.”  The word affair rubbed me the wrong way.

       “No,” I said, “it was pure abortion.  An assassination.  I might as well have been in love with Queen Guinevere.  I let myself down, do you understand?  It was bad.  I’ll never get over it, I guess.  Shit!  Why talk about it?”

       He kept quiet, the good Reb.  Looked straight ahead and gave her more gas.

       After a time he said very simply – “You should write about it some time.”  To which I replied – “Never!  I could never find words for it.”

       At the corner, where the stationary store was, I got out.

       “Let’s do it again soon, eh?” said Reb, extending his big hairy mitt.  “Next time I’ll introduce you to my coloured friends.”

       I walked up the street, past the iron hitching posts, the wide lawns, the big verandahs.  Still thinking of Una Gifford.  If only it were possible to see her once again … one look, no more.  Then close the book – forever.

       I walked on, past the house, past more iron negroes with pink watermelon mouths and striped blouses, past more stately mansions, more ivy-coloured porches and verandahs.  Florida, no less.  Why not Cornwall, or Avalon, or the Castle of Carbonek?  I began to chant to myself … “There was never knight in all this world so noble, so unselfish …”  And then a dreadful thought took hold of me.  Marco!  Dangling from the ceiling of my brain was Marco who had hanged himself.  A thousand times he had told her, Mona, of his love; a thousand times he had played the fool; a thousand times he had warned her he would kill himself if he could not find favour in her eyes.  And she had laughed at him, ridiculed him, scorned him, humiliated him.  No matter what she said or did he continued to abase himself, continued to lavish gifts upon her; the very sight of her, the sound of her mocking laugh, made him cringe and fawn.  Yet nothing could kill his love, his adoration.  When she dismissed him he would return to his garret to write jokes.  (He made his living, poor devil, selling jokes to magazines.)  And every penny he earned he turned over to her, and she took it without so much as a thank you.  (“Go now, dog!”)  One morning he was found hanging from a rafter in his miserable garret.  No message.  Just a body swinging in the gloom and the dust.  His last joke.

       And when she broke the news to me I said – “Marco?  What’s Marco to me?”

       She wept bitter, bitter tears.  All I could say by way of comforting her was: “He would have done it anyway sooner or later.  He was the type.”

       And she had replied: “You’re cruel, you have no heart.”

       It was true, I was heartless.  But there were others whom she was treating equally abominably.  In my cruel, heartless way I had reminded her of them, saying – “Who’s next?”  She ran out of the room with hands over her ears.  Horrible.  Too horrible.

       Inhaling the fragrance of the syringes, the bougainvilleas, the heavy red roses, I thought to myself – “Maybe that poor devil Marco loved her as I once loved Una Gifford.  Maybe he believed that by a miracle her scorn and disdain would one day be converted into love, that she would see him for what he was, a great bleeding heart bursting with tenderness and forgiveness.  Perhaps each night, when he returned to his room, he had gone down on his knees and prayed.  (But no answer.)  Did I not groan too each night on climbing into bed?  Did I not also pray?  And how!  It was disgraceful, such praying, such begging, such whimpering!  If only a Voice had said: “It is hopeless, you are not the man for her.”  I might have given up, I might have made way for someone else.  Or at least cursed the God who had dealt me such a fate.

       Poor Marco!  Begging not to be loved but to be permitted to love.  And condemned to make jokes!  Only now do I realize what you suffered, what you endured, dear Marco.  Now you can enjoy her – from above.  You can watch over her day and night.  If in life she never saw you as you were, you at least may see how now for what she is.  You had too much heart for that frail body.  Guinevere herself was unworthy of the great love she inspired.  But then a queen steps so lightly, even when crushing a louse….

 

The table was set, dinner waiting for me when I walked in.  She was in an unusually good mood, Mona.

       “How was it?  Did you enjoy yourself?” she cried, throwing her arms around me.

       I noticed the flowers standing in the vase and the bottle of wine beside my plate.  Napoleon’s favourite wine, which he drank even at St. Helena.

       “What does it mean?” I asked.

       She was bubbling over with joy.  “It means that Pop thinks the first fifty pages are wonderful.  He was all enthusiasm.”

       “He was, eh?  Tell me about it.  What did he say exactly?”

       She was so stunned herself that she couldn’t remember much now.  We sat down to eat.  “Eat at bit,” I said, “it will come back.”

       “Oh yes,” she exclaimed, “I do remember this … He said it reminded him a little of the early Melville … and of Dreiser too.”

       I gulped.

       “Yes, and of Lafcadio Hearn.”

       “What?  Pop’s read him too?”

       “I told you, Val, that he was a great reader.”

       “You don’t think he was spoofing, do you?”

       “Not at all.  He was dead serious.  He’s really intrigued, I tell you.”

       I poured the wine.  “Did Pop buy this?”

       “No, I did.”

       “How did you know it was Napoleon’s favourite wine?”

       “The man who sold it to me told me so.”

       I took a good sip.

       “Well?”

       “Never tasted anything better.  And Napoleon drank this every day?  Lucky devil!”

       “Val,” she said, “you’ve got to coach me a bit if I’m to answer some of the questions Pop puts me.”

       “I thought you knew all the answers.”

       “Today he was talking grammar and rhetoric.  I don’t know a thing about grammar and rhetoric.”

       “Neither do I, to be honest.  You went to school, didn’t you?  A graduate of Wellesley should know something …”

       “You know I never went to college.”

       “You said you did.”

       “Maybe I did when I first met you.  I didn’t want you to think me ignorant.”

       “Hell,” I said, “it wouldn’t have mattered to me if you hadn’t finished grammar school.  I have no respect for learning.  It’s sheer crap, this business of grammar and rhetoric.  The less you know about such things the better.  Especially if you’re a writer.”

       “But supposing he points out errors.  What then?”

       “Say – ‘Maybe you’re right.  I’ll think about it.’  Or better yet, say – ‘How would you phrase it?’  Then you’ve got him on the defensive, see?”

       “I wish you were in my place sometimes.”

       “So do I.  Then I’d know if the bugger was sincere or not.”

       “Today,” she said, ignoring the remark, “he was talking about Europe.  It was as if he were reading my thoughts.  He was talking about American writers who had lived and studied abroad.  Said it was important to live in such an atmosphere, that it nourished the soul.”

       “What else did he say?”

       She hesitated a moment before coming out with it.

       “He said that if I completed the book he would give me the money to stay in Europe for a year or two.”

       “Wonderful,” I said.  “But what about your invalid mother?  Me, in other words.”

       She had thought of that too.  “I’ll probably have to kill her off.”  She added that whatever he forked up would surely be enough to see the both of us through.  Pop was generous.

       “You see,” she said, “I wasn’t wrong about Pop.  Val, I don’t want to push you, but …”

       “You wish I would hurry and finish the book, eh?”

       “Yes.  How long do you think it will take?”

       I said I hadn’t the slightest idea.

       “Three months?”

       “I don’t know.”

       “Is it all clear, what you have to do?”

       “No, it isn’t.”

       “Doesn’t that bother you?”

       “Of course.  But what can I do?  I’m forging ahead as best I know how.”

       “You won’t go off the trolley?”

       “If I do I’ll get back on again.  I hope so, anyway.”

       “You do want to go to Europe, don’t you?”

       I gave her a long look before answering.

       “Do I want to go to Europe?  Woman, I want to go everywhere … Asia, Africa, Australia, Peru, Mexico, Siam, Arabia, Java, Borneo … Tibet too, and China.  Once we take off I want to stay away for good.  I want to forget that I was ever born here.  I want to keep moving, wandering, roaming the world.  I want to go to the end of every road….”

       “And when will you write?”

       “As I go along.”

       “Val, you’re a dreamer.”

       “Sure I am.  But I’m an active dreamer.  There’s a difference.”

       Then I added: “We’re all dreamers, only some of us wake up in time to put down a few words.  Certainly I want to write.  But I don’t think it’s the end-all and be-all.  How shall I put it?  Writing is like the caca that you make in your sleep.  Delicious caca, to be sure, but first comes life, then the caca.  Life is change, movement, quest … a going forward to meet the unknown, the unexpected.  Only a very few men can say of themselves – ‘I have lived!’  That’s why we have books – so that men may live vicariously.  But when the author also lives vicariously – !”

       She broke in.  “When I listen to you sometimes, Val, I feel that you want to live a thousand lives in one.  You’re eternally dissatisfied – with life as it is, with yourself, with just about everything.  You’re a Mongol.  You belong on the steppes of Central Asia.”

       “You know,” I said, getting worked up now, “one of the reasons why I feel so disjointed is that there’s a little of everything in me.  I can put myself in any period and feel at home in it.  When I read about the Renaissance I feel like a man of the Renaissance; when I read about one of the Chinese dynasties I feel exactly like a Chinese of that epoch.  Whatever the race, the period, the people, Egyptian, Aztec, Hindu or Chaldean, I’m thoroughly in it, and it’s always a rich, tapestried world whose wonders are inexhaustible.  That’s what I crave – a humanly created world, a world responsive to man’s thoughts, man’s dreams, man’s desires.  What gets me about this life of ours, this American life, is that we kill everything we touch.  Talk of the Mongols and the Huns – they were cavaliers compared to us.  This is a hideous, empty desolate land.  I see my compatriots through the eyes of my ancestors.  I see clean through them – and they’re hollow, worn-eaten….”

       I took the bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and refilled the glasses.  There was enough for one good swallow.

       “To Napoleon!” I said. “A man who lived life to the fullest.”

       “Val, you frighten me sometimes, the way you speak about America.  Do you really hate it that much?”

       “Maybe it’s love,” I said.  “Inverted love.  I don’t know.”

       “I hope you’re not going to work any of that off in the novel.”

       “Don’t worry.  The novel will be about as unreal as the land it comes from.  I won’t have to say – ‘All the characters in this book are fictitious’ or whatever it is they put in the front of books.  Nobody will recognize anybody, the author least of all.  A good thing it will be in your name.  What a joke if it turned out to be a best-seller!  If reporters came knocking at the door to interview you!”

       The thought of this terrified her.  She didn’t think it funny at all.

       “Oh,” I said, “you called me a dreamer a moment ago.  Let me read you a passage – it’s short – from The Hill of Dreams.  You should read the book some time; it’s a dream of a book.”

       I went to the bookshelf and opened to the passage I had in mind.

       “He’s just been telling me about Milton’s Lycidas, why it was probably the most perfect piece of pure literature in existence.  Then says Machen: ‘Literature is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words.’  But here’s the passage … it follows right after that: ‘And yet there was something more; besides the logical thought, which was often a hindrance, a troublesome though inseparable accident, besides the sensation, always a pleasure and a delight, besides those there were the indefinable, inexpressible images which all fine literature summons to the mind.  As the chemist in his experiments is sometimes astonished to find unknown, unexpected elements in the crucible or the receiver, as the world of material things is considered by some a thin veil of the immaterial universe, so he who reads wonderful prose or verse is conscious of suggestions that cannot be put into words, which do not rise from the logical sense, which are rather parallel to than connected with the sensuous delight.  The world so disclosed is rather the world of dreams, rather the world in which children sometimes live, instantly appearing, and instantly vanishing away, a world beyond all expression or analysis, neither of the intellect nor of the senses …’.”

       “It is beautiful,” she said, as I put the book down.  “But don’t you try to write like that.  Let Arthur Machen write that way, if he wishes.  You write your own way.”

       I sat down at the table again.  A bottle of Chartreuse was standing beside my coffee.  As I poured a thimbleful of the fiery green liqueur into my glass, I said: “There’s only one thing missing now: a Harem.”

       “Pop supplied the Chartreuse,” she said.  “He was so delighted with those pages.”

       “Let’s hope he’ll like the next fifty pages as much.”

       “You’re not writing the book for him, Val.  You’re writing it for us.”

       “That’s true,” I said.  “I forget that sometimes.”

       It occurred to me then that I hadn’t told her anything yet about the outline of the real book.  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I began.  “Or should I?  Maybe I ought to keep it to myself a while longer.”

       She begged me not to tease.

       “All right, I’ll tell you.  It’s about the book I intend to write one day.  I’ve got the notes for it all written out.  I wrote you a long letter about it, when you were in Vienna or God knows where.  I couldn’t send the letter because you gave me no address.  Yes, this will really be a book … a huge one.  About you and me.”

       “Didn’t you keep the letter?”

       “No.  I tore it up.  Your fault!  But I’ve got the notes.  Only I won’t show them to you yet.”

       “Why?”

       “Because I don’t want any comments.  Besides, if we talk about it I may never write the book.  Also, there are some things I wouldn’t want you to know about until I had written them out.”

       “You can trust me,” she said.  She began to plead with me.

       “No use,” I said, “you’ll have to wait.”

       “But supposing the notes get lost?”

       “I could write them all over again.  That doesn’t worry me in the least.”

       She was getting miffed now.  After all, if the book was about her as well as myself … And so on.  But I remained adamant.

       Knowing very well that she would turn the place upside down in order to lay hands on the notes, I gave her to understand that I had left them at my parents’ home.  “I put them where they’ll never find them,” I said.  I could tell from the look she gave me that she wasn’t taken in by this.  Whatever her move was, she pretended to be resigned, to think no more of it.

       To sweeten the atmosphere I told her that if the book ever got written, if it ever saw the light of day, she would find herself immortalized.  And since that sounded a bit grandiloquent I added – “You may not always recognize yourself but I promise you this, when I get through with your portrait you’ll never be forgotten.”

       She seemed moved by this.  “You sound awfully sure of yourself,” she said.

       “I have reason to.  This book I’ve lived.  I can begin anywhere and find my way around.  It’s like a lawn with a thousand sprinklers: all I need do is turn on the faucet.”  I tapped my head.  “It’s all there, in invisible … I mean indelible … ink.”

       “Are you going to tell the truth – about us?”

       “I certainly am.  About everyone, not just us.”

       “And you think there’ll be a publisher for such a book?”

       “I haven’t thought about that,” I replied.  “First I’ve got to write it.”

       “You’ll finish the novel first, I hope?”

       “Absolutely.  Maybe the play too.”

       “The play?  Oh Val, that would be wonderful.”

       That ended the conversation.

       Once again the disturbing thought arose: how long will this peace and quiet last?  It was almost too good, the way things were going.  I thought of Hokusai, his ups and downs, his nine hundred and forty-seven changes of address, his perseverance, his incredible production.  What a life!  And I, I was only on the threshold.  Only if I lived to be ninety or a hundred would I have something to show for my labours.

       Another almost equally disturbing thought entered my head.  Would I ever write anything acceptable?

       The answer which came at once to my lips was: “Fuck a duck!”

       Still another thought now came to my mind.  Why was I so obsessed about truth?

       And the answer to that also came clear and clean.  Because there is only the truth and nothing but the truth.

       But a wee small voice objected, saying: “Literature is something else again.”

       Then to hell with literature!  The book of life, that’s what I would write.

       And whose name will you sign to it?

       The Creator’s.

       That seemed to settle the matter.

 

The thought of one day tackling such a book – the book of life – kept me tossing all night.  It was there before my closed eyes, like the Fata Morgana of legend.  Now that I had vowed to make it a reality, it loomed far bigger, far more difficult of accomplishment than when I had spoken about it.  It seemed overwhelming, indeed.  Nevertheless, I was certain of one thing – it would flow once I began it.  It wouldn’t be a matter of squeezing out drops and trickles.  I thought of that first book I had written, about the twelve messengers.  What a miscarriage!  I had made a little progress since then, even if no one but myself knew it.  But what a waste of material that was!  My theme should have been the whole eighty or a hundred thousand whom I had hired and fired during those sizzling cosmococcic years.  No wonder I was constantly losing my voice.  Merely to talk to that many people was a feat.  But it wasn’t the talk alone, it was their faces, the expressions they wore – grief, anger, deceit, cunning, malice, treachery, gratitude, envy, and so on – as if, instead of human beings, I were dealing with totemistic creatures: the fox, the lynx, the jackal, the crow, the lemming, the magpie, the dove, the musk-ox, the snake, the crocodile, the hyena, the mongoose, the owl … Their images were still fresh in my memory, the good and the bad, the crooks and the liars, the cripples, the maniacs, the tramps, the gamblers, the leeches, the perverts, the saints, the martyrs, all of them, the ordinary ones and the extraordinary ones.  Even down to a certain lieutenant of the Horse Guards whose face had been so mutilated – by the Reds or the Blacks – that when he laughed he wept and when he wept he jubilated.  And the Greek with the long equine face, a scholar unquestionably, who wanted to read from Prometheus Bound – or was it Unbound?  Why was it, much as I liked him, that he always roused my scorn and ridicule?  How much more interesting and more lovable was that wall-eyed Egyptian with sex on the brain!  Always in hot water, especially if he failed to jerk off once or twice a day.  And that Lesbian, Iliad, she called herself – why Iliad? – so lovely, so demure, so coy … an excellent musician too.  I know because she brought her fiddle to the office one evening and played for me.  And after she had rendered her Bach, her Mozart, her Paganini repertoire, she has the gall to inform me that she’s tired of being a Lesbian, wants to be a whore, and wouldn’t I please find her a better office building to work in, one where she could drum up a little business.

       They were all there parading before me as of yore – with their tics, their grimaces, their supplications, their sly little tricks.  Every day they were dumped on my desk out of a huge flour sack, it seemed – they, their troubles, their problems, their aches and pains.  Maybe when I was selected for this odious job someone had tipped off the big Scrabblebuster and said: “Keep this man good and busy!  Put his feet in the mud of reality, make his hair stand on end, feed him bird lime, destroy his every last illusion!”  And whether he had been tipped off or not, that old Scrabblebuster had done just that.  That and a little more.  He made me acquainted with grief and sorrow.    However … among the thousands who came and went, who begged, whistled and wept before me naked, bereft, making their last call, as it were, before turning themselves in at the slaughterhouse, there appeared now and then a jewel of a guy, usually from some far off place, a Turk perhaps or a Persian.  And like that, there happened along one day this Ali something or other, a Mohammedan, who had acquired a divine calligraphy somewhere in the desert, and after he gets to know me, know that I am a man with big ears, he writes me a letter, a letter, a letter thirty-two pages long, with never a mistake, never a comma or a semi-colon missing, and in it he explains (as if it were important for me to know) that the miracles of Christ – he went into them one by one – were not miracles at all, that they had all been performed before, even the Resurrection, by unknown men, men who understood the laws of nature, laws which, he insisted, our scientists know nothing about, but which were eternal laws and could be demonstrated to produce so-called miracles whenever the right man came along – and he, Ali, was in possession of the secret, but I was not to make it known because he, Ali, had chosen to be a messenger and “wear the badge of servitude” for a reason known only to him and Allah, bless his name, but when the time came I had only to say the word and so forth and so on….

       How had I managed to leave out all these divine behemoths and the ruckus they were constantly creating, me up on the carpet every few days to explain this and explain that, as if I had instigated their peculiar, inexplicably screwy behaviour.  Yeah, what a job trying to convince the big shot (with the brain of a midget) that the flower of America was seeded from the loins of these crackpots, these monsters, these hair-brained idiots who, whatever the mischief, were possessed of strange talents such as the ability to read the Cabala backwards, multiply ten columns of figures at a time or sit on a cake of ice and manifest signs of fever.  None of these explanations, of course, could alleviate the horrendous fact that an elderly woman had been raped the night before by a swarthy devil delivering a death message.

       It was tough.  I never could make things clear to him.  Any more than I could present the case for Tobachnikov, the Talmudic student, who was the nearest replica of the living Christ that ever walked the streets of New York with Happy Easter messages in his hand.  How could I say to him, this owl of a boss: “This devil needs help.  His mother is dying of cancer his father peddles shoelaces all day, the pigeons are crippled.  (The ones that used to make the synagogue their home.)  He needs a raise.  He needs food in his belly.”

       To astonish him or intrigue him, I would sometimes relate little anecdotes about my messengers, always using the past tense as if about someone who had once been in the service (though he was there all the time, right up my sleeve, securely hidden away in Px or FU office.)  Yes, I’d say, he was the accompanist of Johanna Gadski, when they were on tour in the Black Forest.  Yes (about another), he once worked with Pasteur at the famous Institute in Paris.  Yes (still another), he went back to India to finish his History of the World in four languages.  Yes (a parting shot), he was one of the greatest jockeys that ever lived; made a fortune after he left us, then fell down an elevator shaft and smashed his skull.

       And what was the inevitable response?  “Very interesting, indeed.  Keep up the good work.  Remember, hire nothing but nice clean boys from good families.  No Jews, no cripples, no ex-convicts.  We want to be proud of our messenger force.”

       “Yes, sir!”

       “And by the way, see that you clean out all these niggers you’ve got on the force.  We don’t want our clients to be scared out of their wits.”

       “Yes, sir!”

       And I would go back to my perch, do a little shuffling, scramble them up a bit, but never fire a soul, not even if he were as black as the ace of spades.

       How did I ever manage to leave them out of the messenger book, al these lovely dementia praecox cases, these star rovers, these diamond-backed logicians, these battle-scarred epileptics, thieves, pimps, whores, defrocked priests and students of the Talmud, the Cabala and the Sacred Books of the East?  Novels!  As if one could write about such matters, such specimens, in a novel.  Where, in such a work, would one place the heart, the liver, the optic nerve, the pancreas or the gall bladder?  They were not fictions, they were alive, every one of them and, besides being riddled with disease, they ate and drank every day, they made water, they defecated, fornicated, robbed, murdered, gave false testimony, betrayed their fellow-men, put their children out to work, their sisters to whoring, their mothers to begging, their fathers to peddle shoelaces or collar buttons and to bring home cigarette butts, old newspapers and a few coppers from the blind man’s tin cup.  What place is there in a novel for such goings on?

       Yes, it was beautiful coming away from Town Hall of a snowy night, after hearing the Little Symphony perform.  So civilized in there, such discreet applause, such knowing comments.  And now the light touch of snow, cabs pulling up and darting away, the lights sparkling, splintering like icicles, and Monsieur Barrère and his little group sneaking out the back entrance to give a private recital at the home of some wealthy denizen of Park Avenue.  A thousand paths leading away from the concert hall and in each one a tragic figure silently pursues his destiny.  Paths criss-crossing everywhere: the low and the mighty, the meek and the tyrannical, the haves and the have nots.

       Yes, many’s the night I attended a recital in one of these hallowed musical morgues and each time I walked out I thought not of the music I had heard but of one of my foundlings, one of the bleeding cosmoccic crew I had hired or fired that day and the memory of whom neither Haydn, Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Beelzebub, Schubert, Paganini or any of the wind, string, horn or cymbal clan of musikers could dispel.  I could see him, poor devil, leaving the office with his messenger suit wrapped in a brown parcel, heading for the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge, where he would board a train for Freshpond Road or Pitkin Avenue, or maybe Kosciusko Street, there to descend into the swarm, grab a sour pickle, dodge a kick in the ass, peel the potatoes, clean the lice out of the bedding and say a prayer for his great grandfather who had died at the hand of a drunken Pole because the sight of a beard floating in the wind was anathema to him.  I could also see myself walking along Pitkin Avenue, or Kosciusko Street, searching for a certain hovel, or was it a kennel, and thinking to myself how lucky to be born a Gentile and speak English so well.  (Is this still Brooklyn?  Where am I?)  Sometimes I could smell the clams in the bay, or perhaps it was the sewer water.  And wherever I went, searching for the lost and the damned, there were always fire escapes loaded with bedding, and from the bedding there fell like wounded cherubim an assortment of lice, bedbugs, brown beetles, cockroaches and the scaly rinds of yesterday’s salami.  Now and then I would treat myself to a succulent sour pickle or a smoked herring wrapped in newspaper.  Those big fat pretzels, how good they were!  The women all had red hands and blue fingers – from the cold, from scrubbing and washing and rinsing.  (But the son, a genius already, would have long, tapering fingers with calloused tips.  Soon he would be playing in Carnegie Hall.)  Nowhere in the upholstered Gentile world I hailed from had I ever run into a genius, or even a near-genius.  Even a bookshop was hard to find.  Calendars, yes, oodles of them, supplied by the butcher or grocer.  Never a Holbein, a Carpaccio, a Hiroshige, a Giotto, nor even a Rembrandt.  Whistler, possibly but only his mother, that placid-looking creature all in black with hands folded in her lap, so resigned, so eminently respectable  No, never anything among us dreary Christians that smelled of art.  But luscious pork stores with tripe and gizzards of every variety.  And of course linoleums, brooms, flower pots.  Everything from the animal and vegetable kingdom, plus hardware, German cheesecake, knackwurst and sauerkraut.  A church on every block, a sad-looking affair, such as only Lutherans and Presbyterians can bring forth from the depths of their sterilized faith.  And Christ was a carpenter!  He had built a church, but not of sticks and stones.