CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

            THINGS continued to move along on greased cogs.  It was almost like those early days of the Japanese love nest.  If I went for a walk even the dead trees inspired me; if I visited Reb at his store I came back loaded with ideas as well as shirts, ties, gloves and handkerchiefs.  When I ran into the landlady I no longer had to worry about back rent.  We were paid up everywhere now and had we wanted credit we could have had it galore.  Even the Jewish holidays passed pleasantly, with a feast at this house and another at that.  We were deep into the Fall, but it no longer oppressed me as it used to.  The only thing I missed perhaps was a bike.

       I had now had a few more lessons at the wheel and could apply for a driver’s licence any time.  When I had that I would take Mona for a spin, as Reb had urged.  Meanwhile I had made the acquaintance of the negro tenants.  Good people, as Reb had said.  Every time we collected the rents we came home pie-eyed and slap-happy.  One of the tenants, who worked as a Customs inspector, offered to lend me books.  He had an amazing library of erotica all filched from the docks in the course of duty.  Never had I seen so many filthy books, so many dirty photographs.  It made me wonder what the famous Vatican Library contained in the way of forbidden fruit.

       Now and then we went to the theatre, usually to see a foreign play – Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Wedekind, Werfel, Sudermann, Chekov, Andreyev … The Irish players had arrived, bringing with them Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars.  What a playwright, Sean O’Casey!  Nothing like him since Ibsen.

       On a sunny day I’d sit in Fort Greene Park and read a book – Idle days in Patagonia, Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, or The Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno).  If there was a record I wanted to hear which we didn’t have I could borrow from Reb’s collection or from the landlady’s.  When we felt like doing nothing we played chess, Mona and I.  She wasn’t much of a player, but then neither was I.  It was more exciting, I found, to study the games given in chess books – Paul Morphy’s above all.  Or even to read about the evolution of the game, or the interest in it displayed by the Icelanders or the Malayans.

       Not even the thought of seeing the folks – for Thanksgiving – could get me down.  Now I could tell them – it would be only half a lie – that I had been commissioned to write a book.  That I was getting paid for my labours.  How that would tickle them!  I was full of nothing but kind thoughts now.  All the good things that had happened to me were coming to the surface.  I felt like sitting down to write this one and that, thanking him or her for all that had been done for me.  Why not?  And there were places, too, I would have to render thanks to – for yielding me blissful moments.  I was that silly about it all that I made a special trip one day to Madison Square Garden and offered up silent thanks to the walls for the glorious moments I had experienced in the past, watching Buffalo Bill and his Pawnee Indians whooping it up, for the privilege of watching Jim Londos, the little Hercules, toss a giant of a Pole over his head, for the six days bike races and the unbelievable feats of endurance which I had witnessed.

       In these breezy moods, all open to the sky as I was, was it any wonder that, bumping into Mrs. Skolsky on my way in or out, she would stop to look at me with great round eyes as I paused to pass the time of day?  A pause of half or three-quarters of an hour sometimes, during which I unloaded titles of books, outlandish streets, dreams, homing pigeons, tugboats, anything at all, whatever came to mind, and it all came at once, it seemed, because I was happy, relaxed, carefree and in the best of health.  Though I never made a false move, I knew and she knew that what I ought to do was to put my arms around her, kiss her, hug her, make her feel like a woman, not a landlady.  “Yes,” she would say, but with her breasts.  “Yes,” with her soft, warm belly.  “Yes.”  Always yes.  If I had said – “Lift your skirt and show me your pussy!” it would have been yes too.  But I had the sense to avoid such nonsense.  I was content to remain what I appeared to be – a polite, talkative, and somewhat unusual (for a Goy) lodger.  She could have appeared naked before me, with a platter of Kartoffelklöse smothered in black gravy and I wouldn’t have laid a paw on her.

       No, I was far too happy, far too content, to be thinking about chance fucks.  As I say, the only thing I truly missed was the bike.  Reb’s car, which he wanted me to consider as my own, meant nothing.  Any more than would a limousine with a chauffeur to tote me around.  Not even a passage to Europe meant much to me now.  For the moment I had no need of Europe.  Nice to dream about it, talk about, wonder about it.  But it was good right where I was.  To sit down each day and tap out a few pages, to read the books I wanted to read, hear the music I craved, take a walk, see a show, smoke a cigar if I wanted to – what more could I ask for?  There were no longer any squabbles over Stasia, no more peeking and spying, no more sitting up nights and waiting.  Everything was running true to form, including Mona.  Soon I might even look forward to hearing her talk about her childhood that mysterious no-man’s-land which lay between us.  To see her marching home with arms loaded, her cheeks rosy, her eyes sparkling – what did it matter where she was coming from or how she had spent the day?  She was happy, I was happy.  Even the birds in the garden were happy.  All day long they sang, and when evening came they pointed their beaks at us and in their cheep-cheep language they said to one another – “See, there’s a happy couple!  Let’s sing for them before we go to sleep.”

       Finally the day came when I was to take Mona for an outing.  I was now qualified to drive alone, in Reb’s opinion.  It’s one thing, however, to pass a test and quite another to have your wife put her life in your hands.  Backing out of the garage made me nervous as a cat.  The damned thing was too huge, too lumbering; it had too much power.  I was in a sweat lest it run away with us.  Every few miles I brought it to a halt – always where there was room to make a clean start! – in order to calm down.  I chose the side roads whenever possible, but they always led back to the main highway.  By the time we were twenty miles out I was soaked with perspiration.  I had hoped to go to Bluepoint, where I had passed such marvellous vacations as a boy, but we never made it.  It was just as well too, for when I did visit it later I was heartbroken; it had changed beyond all recognition.

       Stretched out on the side of the road, watching the other idiots drive by, I vowed I would never drive again.  Mona was delighted by my discomfiture.  “You’re not cut out for it,” she said.  I agreed.  “I wouldn’t even know what to do if we had a blow-out,” I said.

       “What would you do?” she asked.

       “Get out and walk,” I replied.

       “Just like you,” she said.

       “Don’t tell Reb how I feel about it,” I begged.  “He thinks he’s doing us a great favour.  I wouldn’t want to let him down.”

       “Must we go there for dinner this evening?”

       “Of course.”

       “Let’s leave early then.”

       “Easier said than done,” I replied.

       On the way back we had car trouble.  Fortunately a truck driver came to the rescue.  Then I smashed into the rear end of a beaten-up jalopy, but the driver didn’t seem to mind.  Then the garage – how was I to snook her into that narrow passageway?  I got halfway in, changed my mind, and in backing out narrowly missed colliding with a moving van.  I left it standing half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter.  “Fuck you!” I muttered.  “Make it on your own!”

       We had only a block or two to walk.  With each step away from the monster I felt more and more relieved.  Happy to be trotting along all in one piece, I thanked God for having made me a mechanical dope, and perhaps a dope in other respects as well.  There were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, and there were the wizards of the mechanical age.  I belonged to the age of roller skates and velocipedes.  How lucky to have good arms and legs, nimble feet, a sharp appetite!  I could walk to California and back, on my own two feet.  As for travelling at seventy-five an hour, I could go faster than that – in dream.  I could go to Mars and back in the wink of an eye, and no blow-outs….

 

It was our first meal with the Essens.  We had never met Mrs. Essen before, nor Reb’s son and daughter.  They were waiting for us, the table spread, the candles lit, the fire going, and a wonderful aroma coming from the kitchen.

       “Have a drink!” said Reb first thing, holding out two glasses of heavy port.  “How was it?  Did you get nervous?”

       “Not a bit,” said I.  “We went all the way to Bluepoint.”

       “Next time it’ll be Montauk Point.”

       Mrs. Essen now engaged us in talk.  She was a good soul, as Reb had said.  Perhaps a trifle too refined.  A dead area somewhere.  Probably in the behind.

       I noticed that she hardly ever addressed her husband.  Now and then she reproved him for his rudeness or for his bad language.  One could see at a glance that there was nothing between them any more.

       Mona had made an impression on the two youngsters, who were in their teens.  (Evidently they had never come across a type like her before.)  The daughter was overweight, plain-looking, and endowed with extraordinary piano legs which she did her best to hide every time she sat down.  She blushed a great deal.  As for the son, he was one of those precocious kids who talk too much, know too much, laugh too much, and always say the wrong thing.  Full of excess energy, excitable, he was always knocking things over or stepping on someone’s toes.  A genuine pipperoo, with a mind that jumped like a kangaroo.

       When I asked if he still went to synagogue he made a wry face, pinched his nostril with two fingers, and made as if pulling the chain.  His mother quickly explained that they had switched to Ethical Culture.  It pleased her to learn that in the past I too had frequented the meetings of this society.

       “Let’s have some more to drink,” said Reb, obviously fed up with talk of Ethical Culture, New Thought, Baha’I and such fol de rol.

       We had some more of his tawny port.  It was good, but too heavy.  “After dinner,” he said, “we’ll play for you.”  He meant himself and the boy.  (It’ll be horrible, I thought to myself.)  I asked if he was far advanced, the boy.  “He’s not a Mischa Elman yet, that’s for sure.”  He turned to his wife.  “Isn’t dinner soon ready?”

       She rose in stately fashion, smoothed her hair back from her brow, and headed straight for the kitchen.  Almost like a somnambulist.

       “Let’s pull up the table,” said Reb.  “You people must be famished.”

       She was a good cook, Mrs. Essen, but too lavish.  There was enough food on the table for twice as many as we were.  The wine was lousy.  Jews seldom had a taste for good wine, I observed to myself.  With the coffee and dessert came Kümmel and Benedictine.  Mona’s spirits rose.  She loved liqueurs.  Mrs. Essen, I noticed, drank nothing but water.  Reb, on the other hand, had been helping himself liberally.  He was slightly inebriated, I would say.  His talk was thick, his gestures loose and floppy.  It was good to see him thus; he was himself, at least.  Mrs. Essen, of course, pretended not to be aware of his condition.  But the son was delighted; he enjoyed seeing his old man make a fool of himself.

       It was a rather strange, rather eerie ambience.  Now and again Mrs. Essen tried to lift the conversation to a higher level.  She even brought up Henry James – her idea of a controversial subject, no doubt – but it was no go.  Reb had the upper hand.  He swore freely now and called the rabbi a dope.  No talky-talk for him.  Fisticuffs and wrestling, as he called it, was his line now.  He was giving us the low-down on Benny Leonard, his idol, and excoriating Strangler Lewis, whom he loathed.

       To needle him, I said: “And what about Redcap Wilson?”  (He had worked for me once as a night messenger.  A deaf-mute, if I remember right.)

       He brushed him off with – “A third-rater, a punk.”

       “Like Battling Nelson,” I said.

       Mrs. Essen intervened at this point to suggest that we withdraw to the other room, the parlour.  “You can talk more comfortably there,” she said.

       With this Sid Essen slammed his fist down hard.  “Why move?” he shouted.  “Aren’t we doing all right here?  You want us to change the conversation, that’s what.”  He reached for the Kümmel.  “Here, let’s have a little more, everybody.  It’s good, what?”

       Mrs. Essen and her daughter rose to clear the table.  They did it silently and efficiently, as my mother and sister would have, leaving only the bottles and glasses on the table.

       Reb nudged me to confide in what he thought was a whisper – “Soon as she sees me enjoying myself she clamps down on me.  That’s women for you.”

       “Come on, Dad,” said the boy, “let’s get the fiddles out.”

       “Get ‘em out, who’s stopping you?” shouted Reb.  “But don’t play off key, it drives me nuts.”

       We adjourned to the parlour, where we spread ourselves about on sofas and easy chairs.  I didn’t care what they played or how.  I was a bit swacked myself from all the cheap wine and the liqueurs.

       While the musicians tuned up fruit cake was passed around, then walnuts and shelled pecans.

       It was a duet from Haydn which they had chosen as a starter.  With the opening bar they were off base.  But they stuck to their guns, hoping, I suppose, that eventually they would get in step.  It was horripilating, the way they hacked and sawed away.  Along towards the middle the old man broke down.  “Damn it!” he yelled, flinging the fiddle on to a chair.  “It sounds god-awful.  We’re not in form, I guess.  As for you,” he turned on his son, “you’d better practise some more before you play for anybody.”

       He looked around as if searching for the bottle, but catching a grim look from his wife he slunk into an easy chair.  He mumbled apologetically that he was getting rusty.  Nobody said anything.  He yawned loudly.  “Why not a game of chess?” he said wearily.

       Mrs. Essen spoke up.  “Please, not tonight!”

       He dragged himself to his feet.  “It’s stuffy in here,” he said.  “I’m taking a walk.  Don’t run away!  I’ll be back soon.”

       When he had gone Mrs. Essen tried to account for his unseemly conduct.  “He’s lost interest in everything; he’s alone too much.”  She spoke almost as if he were already deceased.

       Said the son: “He ought to take a vacation.”

       “Yes,” said the daughter, “we’re trying to get him to visit Palestine.”

       “Why not send him to Paris?” said Mona.  “That would liven him up.”

       The boy began to laugh hysterically.

       “What’s the matter?” I asked.

       He laughed even harder.  Then he said: “If he ever got to Paris we’d never see him again.”

       “Now, now!” said the mother.

       “You know Dad, he’d go plumb crazy, what with all the girls, the cafés, the …”

       “What a way to talk!” said Mrs. Essen.

       “You don’t know him,” the boy retorted.  “I do.  He wants to live.  So do I.”

       “Why not send the two of them abroad?” said Mona.  “The father would look after the son and the son after the father.”

       At this point the doorbell rang.  It was a neighbour who had heard that we were visiting the Essens and had come to make our acquaintance.

       “This is Mr. Elfenbein,” said Mrs. Essen.  She didn’t seem too delighted to see him.

       With elbows bent and hands clasped Mr. Elfenbein came forward to greet us.  His face was radiant, the perspiration was dripping from his brow.

       “What a privilege!” he exclaimed, making a little bow, then clasping our hands and wringing them vigorously.  “I have heard so much about you, I hope you will pardon the invasion.  Do you speak Yiddish perhaps – or Russe?”  He hunched his shoulders and moved his head from side to side, the eyes following like compass needles.  He fixed me with a grin.  “Mrs. Skolsky tells me you are fond of Cantor Sirota….”

       I felt like a bird released from its cage.  I went up to Mr. Elfenbein and gave him a good hug.

       “From Minsk or Pinsk?” I said.

       “From the land of the Moabites,” he replied.

       He gave me a beamish look and stroked his beard.  The boy put a glass of Kümmel in his hand. There was a stray lock of hair on the crown of Mr. Elfenbein’s baldish head; it stood up like a corkscrew.  He drained the glass of Kümmel and accepted a piece of fruit cake.  Again, he clasped his hands over his breast.

       “Such a pleasure,” he said, “to make the acquaintance of an intelligent Goy.  A Goy who writes books and talks to the birds.  Who reads the Russians and observes Yom Kippur.  And has the sense to marry a girl from Bukovina … a Tzigane, no less.  And an actress!  Where is that loafer, Sid? Is he drunk again?”  He looked around like a wise old owl about to hoot.  “Nun, if a man studies all his life and then discovers that he is an idiot, is he right?  The answer is Yes and No.  We say in our village that a man must cultivate his own nonsense, not somebody else’s.  And in the Cabala it says … But we mustn’t split hairs right away.  From Minsk came the mink coats and from Pinsk nothing but misery.  A Jew from the Corridor is a Jew whom the devil never touches.  Moishe Echt was such a Jew.  My cousin, in other words.  Always in trouble with the rabbi.  When winter came he locked himself in the granary.  He was a harness maker….”

       He stopped abruptly and gave me a Satanic smile.

       “In the Book of Job,” I began.

       “Make it Revelations,” he said.  “It’s more ectoplasmic.”

       Mona began to giggle.  Mrs. Essen discreetly withdrew.  Only the boy remained.  He was making signs behind Mr. Elfenbein’s back, as if ringing a telephone attached to his temple.

       “When you begin a new opus,” Mr. Elfenbein was saying, “in what language do you pray first?”

       “In the language of our fathers,” I replied instanter.  “Abraham, Isaac, Ezekiel, Nehemiah….”

       “And David and Solomon, and Ruth and Esther,” he chimed in.

       The boy now refilled Mr. Elfenbein’s glass and again he drained it in one gulp.

       “A fine young gangster he will grow to be,” said Mr. Elfenbein, smacking his lips.  “Already he knows nothing from nothing.  A malamed he should be – if he had his wits.  Do you remember in Tried and Punished …?”

       “You mean Crime and Punishment,” said young Essen.

       “In Russian it is The Crime and its Punishment.  Now take a back seat and don’t make faces behind my back.  I know I’m meshuggah, but this gentleman doesn’t.  Let him find out for himself.  Isn’t that so, Mr. Gentleman?”  He made a mock bow.

       “When a Jew turns from his religion,” he went on, thinking of Mrs. Essen, no doubt, “it’s like fat turning to water.  Better to become a Christian than one of these milk and water –“   He cut himself short, mindful of the proprieties.  “A Christian is a Jew with a crucifix in his hand.  He can’t forget that we killed him, Jesus, who was a Jew like any other Jew, only more fanatical.  To read Tolstoy you don’t have to be a Christian; a Jew understands him just as well.  What was good about Tolstoy was that he finally got the courage to run away from his wife … and to give his money away.  The lunatic is blessed; he doesn’t care about money.  Christians are only make-believe lunatics; they carry life insurance as well as beads and prayer books.  A Jew doesn’t walk about with the Psalms; he knows them by heart.  Even when he’s selling shoe laces he’s humming a verse to himself.  When the Gentile sings a hymn it sounds like he’s making war.  Onward Christian Soldiers!  How does it go -?  Marching as to war.  Was as to?  They’re always making war – with a sabre in one hand and a crucifix in the other.”

       Mona now rose to draw closer.  Mr. Elfenbein extended his hands, as if to a dancing partner.  He sized her up from head to toe, like an auctioneer.  Then he said: “And what did you play in last, my rose of Sharon?”

       “The Green Cockatoo,” she replied.  (Tic-tac-toe.)

       “And before that?”

       “The Goat Song, Liliom … Saint Joan.”

       “Stop!”  He put up his hand.  “The Dybbuk is better suited to your temperament.  More gynaecological.  Now what was that play of Sudermann’s?  No matter.  Ah yes … Magda.  You’re a Magda, not a Monna Vanna.  I ask you, how would I look in The God of Vengeance?  Am I a Schildkraut or a Ben Ami?  Give me Siberia to play, not The Servant in the House!”  He chucked her under the chin.  “You remind me a little of Elissa Landi.  Yes, with a touch of Nazimova perhaps.  If you had more weight, you could be another Modjeska.  Hedda Gabler, that’s for you.  My favourite is The Wild Duck.  After that The Playboy of the Western World.  But not in Yiddish, God forbid!”

       The theatre was his pet subject evidently.  He had been an actor years ago, first in Rummeldumvitza or some hole like that, then at the Thalia on the Bowery.  It was there he met Ben Ami.  And somewhere else Blance Yurka.  He had also known Vesta Tilley, odd thing.  And David Warfield.  He thought Androcles and the Lion was a gem, but didn’t care much for Shaw’s other plays.  He was very fond of Ben Jonson and Marlowe, and of Hasenclever and von Hoffmansthal.

       “Beautiful women rarely make good actresses,” he was saying.  “There should always be a defect of some kind – a longish nose or the eyes a little mis-focused.  The best is to have an unusual voice.  People always remember the voice.  Pauline Lord’s, for example.”  He turned to Mona.  “You have a good voice too.  It has brown sugar in it and cloves and nutmeg.  The worst is the American voice – no soul in it.  Jacob Ben Ami had a marvellous voice … like good soup … never turned rancid.  But he dragged it around like a tortoise.  A woman should cultivate the voice above everything.  She should also think more, about what the play means … not about her exquisite postillion … I mean posterior.  Jewish actresses have too much flesh usually; when they walk across the stage they shake like jelly.  But they have sorrow in their voices … Sorge.  They don’t have to imagine that a devil is pulling a breast off with hot pincers.  Yes, sin and sorrow are the best ingredients.  And a bit of phantasmus.  Like in Webster or Marlowe.  A shoemaker who talks to the Devil every time he goes to the water closet.  Or falls in love with a beanstalk, as in Moldavia.  The Irish players are full of lunatics and drunkards, and the nonsense they talk is holy nonsense.  The Irish are poets always, especially when they know nothing.  They have been tortured too, maybe not as much as the Jews, but enough.  No one likes to eat potatoes three times a day or use a pitchfork for a toothpick.  Great actors, the Irish.  Born chimpanzees.  The British are too refined, too mentalized.  A masculine race, but castrated….”

       A commotion was going on at the door.  It was Sid Essen returning from his walk with a couple of mangy-looking cats he had rescued.  His wife was trying to shoo them out.

       “Elfenbein!” he shouted, waving his cap.  “Greetings!  How did you get here?”

       “How should I get here?  By my two feet, no?”  He took a step forward.  “Let me smell your breath!”

       “Go ‘way, go ‘way!  When have you seen me drunk?”

       “When you are too happy – or not so happy.”

       “A great pal, Elfenbein,” said Reb, slinging an arm around his shoulder affectionately.  “The Yiddish King Lear, that’s what he is … What’s the matter, the glasses are empty.”

       “Like your mind,” said Elfenbein.  “Drink of the spirit.  Like Moses.  From the rock gushes water, from the bottle only foolishness.  Shame on you, son of Zwifel, to be so thirsty.”

       The conversation became scattered.  Mrs. Essen had got rid of the cats, cleaned up the mess they had made in the hallway, and was once again smoothing her hair back from her brow.  A lady, every inch of her.  No rancour, no recriminations.  Gelded, in that super-refined, ethical-culturish way.  She took a seat by the window, hoping no doubt that the conversation would take a more rational turn.  She was fond of Mr. Elfenbein, but he distressed her with his Old World talk, his crazy grimaces, his stale jokes.

       The Yiddish King Lear was now beyond all bridling.  He had launched into a lengthy monologue on the Zend Avestas, with occasional sideswipes at the Book of Etiquette, Jewish presumably, though from the references he made to it it might as well have been Chinese.  He had just finished saying that, according to Zoroaster, man had been chosen to continue the work of creation.  Then he added: “Man is nothing unless he is a collaborator.  God is not kept alive by prayers and injections.  The Jew has forgotten all this – and the Gentile is a spiritual cripple.”

       A confused discussion followed these statements, much to Elfenbein’s amusement.  In the midst of it he began singing at the top of his lungs – “Rumeinie, Rumeinie, Rumeinie … a mameligele … a pastramele … a karnatsele … un a gleizele wine, Aha!”

       “You see,” he said, when the hubbub had subsided, “even in a liberal household it’s dangerous to introduce ideas.  Time was when such talk was music to one’s ears.  The Rabbi would take a hair and with a knife like a razor he would split it into a thousand hairs.  Nobody had to agree with him; it was an exercise.  It sharpened the mind and made us forget the terror.  If the music played you needed no partner; you danced with Zov, Toft, Giml.  Now when we argue we put bandages over our eyes.  We go to see Tomashevsy and we weep like pigs.  We don’t know any more who is Pechorin or Aksakov.  If on the stage a Jew visits a bordel – perhaps he lost his way! – everyone blushes for the author.  But a good Jew can sit in the slaughterhouse and think only of Jehovah.  Once in Bucuresti I saw a hold man finish a bottle of vodka all by himself, and then he talked for three hours without stopping.  He talked of Satan.  He made him so repulsive that I could smell him.  When I left the café everything looked Satanic to me.  I had to go to a public house, excuse me, to get rid of the sulphur.  It glowed like a furnace in there; the women looked like pink angels.  Even the Madame, who was really a vulture.  Such a time I had that night!  All because the Tzaddik had taken too much vodka.

       “Yes, it’s good to sin once in a while, but not to make a pig of yourself.  Sin with eyes open.  Drown yourself in the pleasures of the flesh, but hang on by a hair.  The Bible is full of patriarchs who indulged the flesh but never lost sight of the one God.  Our forefathers were men of sprit, but they had meat on their bones.  One could take a concubine and still have respect for one’s wife.  After all, it was at the door of the temple that the harlot learned her trade.  Yes, sin was real then, and Satan too.  Now we have ethics, and our children become garment manufacturers, gangsters, concert performers.  Soon they will be making trapeze artists of them and hockey players….”

       “Yes,” said Reb from the depths of his armchair, “now we are less than nothing.  Once we had pride….”

       Elfenbein cut in.  “Now we have the Jew who talks like the Gentile, who says nothing matters but success.  The Jew who sends his boy to a military academy so that he can learn how to kill his fellow Jew.  The daughter he sends to Hollywood, to make a name for herself, as a Hungarian or Roumanian, by showing her nakedness.  Instead of great rabbis we have heavyweight prize-fighters.  We even have homosexuals now, weh is mir.  Soon we will have Jewish Cossacks.”

       Like a refrain, Reb sighed: “The God of Abraham is no more.”

       “Let them show their nakedness,” said Elfenbein, “but not pretend that they are heathen.  Let them remember their fathers who were pedlars and scholars and who fell like chaff under the heels of the hooligans.”

       On and on he went, leaping from subject to subject like a chamois in thin air.  Names like Mordecai and Ahasuerus dropped from his lips, together with Lady Windermere’s Fan and Sodom and Gororrah.  In one breath he expatiated on The Shoemaker’s Holiday and the lost tribes of Israel.  And always, like a summer complaint, he came back to the sickness of the Gentiles, which he likened unto eine Archkrankheit.  Egypt all over again, but without grandeur, without miracles.  And this sickness was now in the brain.  Maggots and poppy seed.  Even the Jews were looking forward to the day of resurrection.  For them, he said, it would be like war without dum-dum bullets.

       He was swept along by his own words now.  And drinking only Seltzer water.  The word bliss, which he had let fall, seemed to cause an explosion in his head.  What was bliss?  A long sleep in the Fallopian tubes.  Or – Huns without Shrecklichkeit.  The Danube always blue, as in a Strauss waltz.  Yes, he admitted, in the Pentateuch there was much nonsense written, but it had a logic.  The Book of Numbers was not all horseradish.  It had teleological excitement.  As for circumcision, one might just as well talk about chopped spinach, for all the importance it had.  The synagogues smelled of chemicals and roach powder.  The Amalekites were the spiritual cockroaches of their time, like the Anabaptists of today.  “No wonder,” he exclaimed, giving us a frightening wink, “that everything is in a state of ‘chassis’.  How true were the words of the Tzaddik who said: ‘Apart from Him there is nothing that is really clear.’”

       Oof!  He was getting winded, but there was more to come.  He made a phosphorescent leap now from the depths of his trampoline.  There were a few great souls whose names he had to mention: they belonged to another order.  Barbusse, Tagore, Romain Rolland, Péguy, for example.  The friends of humanity.  Heroic souls, all of them.  Even America was capable of producing a humanitarian soul, witness Eugene V. Debs.  There are mice, he said, who wear the uniforms of field marshals and gods who move in our midst like beggars.  The Bible swarmed with moral and spiritual giants.  Who could compare to King David?  Who was so magnificent, yet wise, as Solomon?  The lion of Judah was still alive and snorting.  No anaesthetic could put this lion permanently to sleep.  “We are coming,” said he, “to a time when even the heaviest artillery will be caught with spiders’ webs and armies melt like snow.  Ideas are crumbling, like old walls.  The world shrinks, like the skin of a lychee nut, and men press together like wet sacks mildewed with fear.  When the prophets give out the stones must speak.  The patriarchs needed no megaphones.  They stood still and waited for the Lord to appear unto them.  Now we hop about like frogs, from one cesspool to another, and talk gibberish.  Satan has stretched his net over the world and we leap out like fish ready for the frying pan.  Man was set down in the midst of a garden, naked and dreamless.  To each creature was given his place, his condition.  Know thy place! was the commandment.  Not ‘Know thyself!’  The worm becomes a butterfly only when it becomes intoxicated with the splendour and magnificence of life.

       “We have surrendered to despair.  Ecstasy has given way to drunkenness.  A man who is intoxicated with life sees visions, not snakes.  He has no hangovers.  Nowadays we have a blue bird in every home – corked or bottled.  Sometimes it’s called Old Kentucky, sometimes it’s a licence number – Vat 69.  All poisonous, even when diluted.”

       He paused to squirt some Seltzer water in his glass.  Reb was sound asleep.  He wore a look of absolute bliss, as if he had seen Mt. Sinai.

       “There now,” said Elfenbein, raising his glass, “let us drink to the wonders of the Western World.  May they soon be no more!  It’s getting late and I have monopolized the floor.  Next time we will discuss more ecumenical subjects.  Maybe I will tell you about my Carmen Sylva days.  I mean the café, not the Queen.  Though I can say that I once slept in her palace … in the stable, that is.  Remind me to tell you more about Jacob Ben Ami.  He was much more than a voice….”

       As we were taking leave he asked if he could see us to our door.  “With pleasure,” I said.

       Walking down the street he stopped to give vent to an inspiration.  “May I suggest,” he said, “that if you have not yet fixed on a title for your book that you call it This Gentile World?  It would be most appropriate even if it makes no sense.  Use a nom de plume like Boguslavsky – that will confuse the reader still more.

       “I am not always so voluble,” he added, “but you, the two of you, are the Grenze type, and for a derelict from Transylvania that is like an aperitif.  I always wanted to write novels, foolish ones, like Dickens.  The Mr. Pickwick kind.  Instead I became a playboy.  Well, I will say goodnight now.  Elfenbein is my pseudonym; the real name would astonish you.  Look up Deuteronomy, Chapter thirteen.  ‘If there arise among you a – ‘.”  He was seized with a violent fit of sneezing.  “The Seltzer water!” he exclaimed.  “Maybe I should go to a Turkish bath.  It’s time for another influenza epidemic.  Goodnight now!  Onward as to war!  Don’t forget the lion of Judah!  You can see him in the movies, when the music starts up.”  He imitated the growl.  “That,” he said, “is to show that he is still awake.”