The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 20

As she said "take all this stuff away" she glanced toward Eunice. It was a heavy glance. "Take this cross from me" was her message. Sighing, she led me to the kitchen.

Scholem Stavis, a Brodsky on his mother's side, was one of the blue-eyed breed of cousins, like s.h.i.+mon and Seckel. When Tanky in that memorable moment at O'Hare Airport had spoken of geniuses in the family-"We had a couple or three"-he was referring also to Scholem, holding the pair of us up to ridicule. "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?" was the category his remark fell into, together with "How many divisions does the Pope have?" Old-style immigrant families had looked eagerly for prodigies. Certain of the children had tried to gratify their hopes. You couldn't blame Tanky for grinning at the failure of such expectations.

Scholem and I, growing up on neighboring streets, attending the same schools, had traded books, and since Scholem had no trivial interests, it was Kant and Sch.e.l.ling all the way, it was Darwin and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and in our senior year in high school it was Oswald Spengler. A whole year was invested in The Decline of the West._ In his letters (Riva gave me a Treasure Island shopping bag to carry them in) Scholem reminded me of these shared interests. He wrote with a dated dignity that I rather appreciated. He sounded just a little like the Constance Garnett translations of Dostoyevsky. He addressed me as "Brodsky." I still prefer the Garnett translations to all later ones. It isn't real Dostoyevsky if it doesn't say, "Just so, Porfiry Petrovitch," or "I wors.h.i.+pped Tanya, as it were." I take a more slam-bang approach to things myself. I have a weakness for modern speed and even a touch of blasphemy. I offer as an example Auden's remark about Rilke, "The greatest lesbian poet since Sappho." Just to emphasize that we can't afford to forget the dissolution of the bonds (announced at Jena, 1806). But of course I didn't dispute the superiority of Dostoyevsky or Beethoven, whom Scholem always mentioned as the t.i.tans. Scholem had been and remained a t.i.tanist. The doc.u.ments I brought home from Rivas pantry kept me up until four in the morning. I didn't sleep at all.

It was Scholem's belief that he had made a discovery in biology that did with Darwin what Newton had done with Copernicus, and what Einstein had done with Newton, and the development and application of Scholem's discovery made possible a breakthrough in philosophy, the first major breakthrough since the Critique of Pure Reason._ I might have predicted from my early recollections of him that Scholem wouldn't do anything by halves. He was made of durable stuff. Wear out? Well, in the course of nature we all wore out, but life would never crack him. In the old days we would walk all over Ravenswood. He could pack more words into a single breath than any talker I ever knew, and in fact he resisted breathing altogether, as an interruption. White-faced, thin, queerly elastic in his gait, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants, he was always ahead of me, in a pale fever. His breath had an odor like boiled milk. As he lectured, a white paste formed in the corners of his mouth. In his visionary state he hardly heard what you were saying, but ran galactic rings around you in a voice stifled with urgency. I thought of him later when I came to read Rimbaud, especially the "Bateau Ivre"-a similar intoxication and storming of the cosmos, only Scholem's way was abstruse, not sensuous. On our walks he would pursue some subject like Kant's death categories, and the walk-pursuit would take us west on Foster Avenue, then south to the great Bohemian Cemetery, then around and around North Park College and back and forth over the bridges of the drainage ca.n.a.l. Continuing our discussion in front of automobile showrooms on Lawrence Avenue, we were not likely to notice our gestures distorted in the plate-gla.s.s windows.

He looked altogether different in the color photo that accompanied the many doc.u.ments he had mailed. His eyebrows were now thick and heavy, color dark, aspect grim, eyes narrowed, mouth compressed and set in deep folds. Scholem hadn't cracked, but you could see how much pressure he had had to withstand. It had driven hard into his face, flattened the hair to his skull. In one of the Holy Sepulchre corners of my apartment, I studied the picture closely. Here was a man really worth examining, an admirable cousin, a fighter made of stern stuff.

By contrast, I seemed to myself a slighter man. I could understand why I had tried my hand at the entertainment business instead, a seriocomic MC on Channel Seven-Second City cabaret stuff, dinner among the hoods and near-hoods at Fritzel's, even cutting a caper on Kupcinet's inane talk show before self-respect counseled me to knock it off. I now took a more balanced view of myself. Still, I recognized that in matters of the intellect I had yielded first honors to Cousin Scholem Stavis. Even now the unwavering intensity of his face, the dilation of his nose breathing fire earthward, tell you what sort of man this is. Since the snapshot was taken near his apartment house, you can see the scope of his challenge, for behind him is residential Chicago, a street of Chicago six-flats, a good address sixty years ago, with all the middle-cla.s.s graces available to builders in the twenties-a terrifying setting for a man like Scholem. Was this a street to write philosophy in? It's because of places like this that I hate the evolutionism that tells us we must die in stages of boredom for the eventual perfection of our species.

But in these streets Cousin Scholem actually did write philosophy. Before he was twenty-five years old he had already broken new ground. He told me that he had made the first real advance since the eighteenth century. But before he could finish his masterpiece the j.a.panese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the logic of his revolutionary discoveries in biology, philosophy, and world history made it necessary for him to enter the armed forces-as a volunteer, of course. I worked hard over the pages he had sent, trying to understand the biological and world-historical grounds of all this. The evolution of gametes and zygotes; the splitting of plants in monocotyledons and dicotyledons, of the animals into annelids and vertebrates-these were familiar to me. When he moved from these into a discussion of the biological foundations of modern politics, it was only my goodwill that he took with him, not my understanding. The great landma.s.ses were held by pa.s.sive, receptive nations. Smaller states were the aggressive impregnating forces. No resume would help; I'd have to read the full text, he wrote. But Right and Left, he wished to tell me now, were epiphenomena. The main current would turn finally into a broad, centrist, free evolutionary continuum which was just beginning to reveal its promise in the Western democracies. From this it is easy to see why Scholem enlisted. He came to the defense not only of democracy but also of his theories.

He was an infantry rifleman and fought in France and Belgium. When American and Russian forces met on the Elbe and cut the German armies in two, Cousin Scholem was in one of the patrols that crossed the river. Russian and American fighting men cheered, drank, danced, wept, and embraced. Not hard to imagine the special state of a Northwest Side Chicago kid whose parents emigrated from Russia and who finds himself a fighter in Torgau, in the homeland of Kant and Beethoven, a nation that had organized and carried out the ma.s.s murder of Jews. I noted just a while ago that an Ijah Brodsky, his rapt soul given over to the Chukchee and the Koryak, could not be certain that his thoughts were the most_ curious in the mental ma.s.s gathered within the First National building, at the forefront of American capitalism in its subtlest contemporary phase. Well, neither can one be certain that among the embracing, weeping, boozing soldiers whooping it up in Torgau (nor do I omit the girls who were with the Russian troops, nor the old women who sat cooling their feet in the river-very swift at that point) there wasn't someone else equally preoccupied with biological and historical theories. But Cousin Scholem in the land of... well, Spengler-why should we leave out Spengler, whose parallels between antiquity and modernity had worked us up intolerably when we were boys in Ravenswood?-Cousin Scholem had not only read world history, not merely thought it and untied some of its most stupefying, paralyzing knots and tangles just before enlisting, he was also personally, effectively experiencing it as a rifleman. Soldiers of both armies, Scholem in the midst of them, took an oath to be friends forever, never to forget each other, and to build a peaceful world.

For years after this my cousin was busy with organizational work, appeals to governments, activities at the UN, and international conferences. He went to Russia with an American delegation and in the Kremlin handed to Khrushchev the map used by his patrol as it approached the Elbe-a gift from the American people to the Russian people, and an earnest of amity.

The completion and publication of his work, which he considered to be the only genuine contribution to pure philosophy in the twentieth century, had to be postponed.

For some twenty years Cousin Scholem was a taxicab driver in Chicago. He was now retired, a pensioner of the cab company, living on the North Side. He was not, however, living quietly. Recently he had undergone cancer surgery at the VA hospital. The doctors told him that he would soon be dead. This was why I had received so much mail from him, a pile of doc.u.ments containing reproductions from Stars and Stripes,_ pictures of the embracing troops at Torgau, photostats of official letters, and final statements, both political and personal. I had a second and then a third look at the recent picture of Scholem-the inward squint of his narrow eyes, the emotional power of his face. He had meant to have a significant life. He believed that his death, too, would be significant. I myself sometimes think what humankind will be like when I am gone, and I can't say that I foresee any special effects from my final disappearance, whereas Cousin Scholem has an emotional conviction of achievement, and believes that his influence will continue for the honor and dignity of our species. I came presently to his valedictory statement. He makes many special requests, some of them ceremonial. He wants to be buried at Torgau on the Elbe, close to the monument commemorating the defeat of the n.a.z.i forces. He asks that his burial service begin with a reading from the conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov_ in the Garnett translation. He asks that the burial service end with the playing of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the Solti recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. He writes out the inscription for his headstone. It identifies him by the enduring intellectual gift he leaves to mankind, and by his partic.i.p.ation in the historic oath. He concludes with John 12:24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Appended to the valedictory is a letter from the Department of the Army, Office of the Adjutant General, advising Mr. Stavis that he will have to find out what rules the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) has governing the bringing into their country of human remains for the purpose of burial. Inquiries may be made at the GDR chancery in Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C. As for expenses, the liability of the U. S. government is unfortunately restricted, and it cannot pay for the transportation of Scholem's body, much less for the pa.s.sage or his mourning family. Allowances for cemeteries and burial plots may be available through the Veterans Administration. The letter is decent and sympathetic.

Of course, the colonel who signs it can't be expected to know how remarkable a person Scholem Stavis is.

There is a final communication, concerning a gathering next year in Paris (September 1984) to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Marne. This will honor the taxi drivers who took part in the defense of the city by carrying fighting men to the front. Cabbies from all countries have been invited to this event, even pedal-cab drivers from Southeast Asia. The grand procession will form near Napoleon's tomb and then follow the route taken in 1914. Scholem means to salute the last of the venerable taxicabs on display in the Invalides. As a member of the planning committee, he will soon go to Paris to take part in the preparations for this event. On the way home he will stop in New York City, where he will call upon the five permanent members of the Security Council to ask them to respect the spirit of the great day at Torgau, and to take a warm farewell of everybody. He will visit the French UN delegation at nine-thirty A.M., the Soviet Union at eleven, China at twelve-thirty, Great Britain at two P.M., the U.S.A. at half past three. At five P.M. he will pay his respects to the Secretary General. Then return to Chicago and a "new life"-the life promised in John 12:24.

He appeals for financial a.s.sistance in the name of mankind itself, referring again to the dignity of humanity in this century.

Lesser doc.u.ments contain statements on nuclear disarmament and on the hopeful prospects for an eventual reconciliation between the superpowers, in the spirit of Torgau. At three A. M. my head is not clear enough to study them.

Sleep is out of the question, so instead of going to bed I make myself some strong coffee. No use sacking out; I'd only go on thinking.

Insomnia is not a word I apply to the sharp thrills of deep-night clarity that come to me. During the day the fusspot habits of a lifetime prevent real discovery. I have learned to be grateful for the night hours that harrow the nerves and tear up the veins-"lying in restless ecstasy." To want this, and to bear it, you need a strong soul.

I lie down with the coffee in one of my Syrian corners (I didn't intend to create this Oriental environment; how did it come into existence?), lie down in proximity to the smooth, lighted, empty moon surface of the Outer Drive to consider what I might do for Cousin Scholem. Why do anything? Why not just refer him to the good-intentions department? After he had been in the good-intentions chamber five or six times, I could almost feel that I had done something for him. The usual techniques of evasion would not, however, work in Cousin Scholem's case. The son of Jewish immigrants (his father was in the egg business in Fulton Market), Cousin Scholem was determined to find support in Nature and History for freedom and to mitigate, check, or banish the fear of death that governs the species-convulses it. He was, moreover, a patriotic American (a terribly antiquated affect) and a world citizen. Above all he wanted to affirm that all would be well, to make a distinguished gift, to bless mankind. In all this Scholem fitted the cla.s.sical norm for Jews of the diaspora. Against the Chicago background of boardrooms and back rooms, of fraud, arson, a.s.sa.s.sination, hit men, bag men, the ideology of decency disseminated from unseen sources of power-the moral law, never thicker, in Chicago, than onionskin or tissue paper-was now a gas as rare as argon. Anyway, think of him, perhaps the most powerful mind ever to be placed behind the wheel of a cab, his pa.s.sengers descendants of Belial who made II Corinthians look sick, and Scholem amid unparalleled decadence being ever more pure in thought. The effort gave him a malignant tumor. I have also been convinced always that the strain of driving ten hours a day in city traffic is enough to give you cancer. It's the enforced immobility that does it; and there's also the aggravated ill will, the reflux of fury released by organisms, and perhaps by mechanisms, too.

But what could I do for Scholem? I couldn't go running to his house and ring the bell after thirty years of estrangement. I couldn't bring financial a.s.sistance-I don't have the money to print so many thousands of pages. He would need a hundred thousand at least, and he might expect Ijah to conjure it out of the barren air of the Loop. Didn't Ijah belong to a crack team of elite financial a.n.a.lysts? But Cousin Ijah was not one of the operators who had grabbed off any of the big money available for "intellectual" projects or enlightened reforms, the political grant-getters who have millions to play with.

Also I shrank from sitting down with him in his six-flat parlor to discuss his life's work. I didn't have the language it required. My college biology would be of no use. My Spengler was deader than the Bohemian Cemetery where we discussed the great questions (dignified surroundings, ma.s.sy tombs, decaying flowers).

I didn't have a language to share with Cousin Motty, either, to open my full mind to him; and from his side Cousin Scholem couldn't enlist my support for his philosophical system until I had qualified myself by years of study. So little time was left that it was out of the question. In the circ.u.mstances, all I could do was to try to raise funds to have him buried in East Germany. The Communists, needing hard currency so badly, would not turn down a reasonable proposition. And toward morning, as I washed and shaved, I remembered that there was a cousin in Elgin, Illinois-not a close cousin, but one with whom I had always had friendly and even affectionate relations. He might be able to help. The affections have to manage as they can at a time so abnormal. They are kept alive in storage, as it were, for one doesn't often see their objects. These mental hydro-ponic growths can, however, be curiously durable and tenacious. People seem able to keep one another on "hold" for decades or scores of years. Separations like these have a flavor of eternity. One interpretation of "having no contemporaries" is that all valuable a.s.sociations are kept in a time-arrested state. Those who are absent seem to sense that they have not lost their value for you. The relations.h.i.+p is played ritardando_ on a trance instrument of which the rest of the orchestra is only subliminally aware.

The person 1 refer to was still there, in Elgin. Mendy Eckstine, once a freelance journalist and advertising man, was now semiretired. He and Scholem Stavis were from altogether different spheres. Eckstine had been my pool-hall, boxing, jazz-club cousin. Mendy had had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time. Born in Muskingum, Ohio, where his father ran a gents' furnis.h.i.+ngs shop, he attended a Chicago high school and grew up a lively, slangy man who specialized in baseball players, vaudeville performers, trumpeters and boogie-woogie musicians, gamblers, con artists, city hall small-rackets types. The rube shrewdie was a type he dearly loved-"Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick." Mendy's densely curled hair was combed straight up, his cheeks were high, damaged by acne, healed to a patchy whiteness. He had a wonderful start of the head, to declare that he was about to set the record straight. He used to make this movement when he laid down his cigarette on the edge of the pool table of the University of Wisconsin Rathskeller and picked up his cue to study his next shot. From Mendy as from Seckel 1 had learned songs. He loved hick jazz numbers like "Sounds a Little Goofus to Me," and in particular, Oh, the cows went dry and the hens wouldn't lay When he played on his ole cornet._ Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fas.h.i.+on as a work of art. The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out. In the late thirties he and I went to the fights together, or the Club de Lisa for jazz.

Cousin Mendy was the man to approach on Scholem's behalf because there was a fund, somewhere, set up by a relative dead these many years, the last of his branch. As I understood its provisions, this fund was set up to make essential family loans and also to pay for the education of poor relations, if they were gifted, perhaps even for their higher cultural activities. Vague about it myself, I was sure that Mendy would know, and I quickly got hold of him on the telephone. He said he would come downtown next day, delighted, he told me, to have a talk. "Been far too long, old buddy."

The fund was the legacy of an older Eckstine, Arcadius, called Artie. Artie, of whom nothing was expected and who had never in his life tied his shoelaces, not because he was too stout (he was only plump) but because he announced to the world that he was _dgag,__ had come into some money toward the end of his life.

Before the Revolution, he had brought to America a Russian schoolboy's version of Pushkin's life, and he gave Pushkin recitations incomprehensible to us. Modern experience had never touched him. Viewed from above, Artie's round, brownish-fair head was the head of a boy, combed with boyish innocence. He grew somewhat puffy in the cheeks and eyelids. His eyes were kiwi green. He lost one of his fingers in a barbed-wire factory in 1917. Perhaps he sacrificed it to avoid the draft. There is a "cabinet portrait" of Artie and his widowed mother, taken about seventy years ago. He poses with his thumb under his lapel. His mother, Tanya, is stout, short, and Oriental. Although she looks composed, her face is in reality inflated with laughter. Why? Well, if her legs are so plump and short that they don't reach the floor, the cause is a comical deficiency in the physical world, ludicrously incapable of adapting itself to Aunt Tanya. Tanya's second marriage was to a millionaire junkman, prominent in his synagogue, a plain man and strictly Orthodox. Tanya, a movie fan, loved Clark Gable and never missed a performance of Gone with the Wind._ "Oy, Clark Gebble, I love him so!"

Her old husband was the first to die. She followed in her mideighties, five years later. At the time of her death, Artie was a traveler in dehydrated applesauce and was demonstrating his product in a small downstate department store when the news came. He and his wife, a childless couple, retired at once. He said he would resume his study of philosophy, in which he had majored at Ann Arbor G.o.d knows how many years ago, but the management of his property and money kept him from the books. He used to say to me, "Ijah, wot is your opinion of Chon Dewey-ha?"

When these Eckstine cousins died, it was learned that a fund for higher studies had been set up under the will-a sort of foundation, said Mendy.

"And has it been used?"

"Very little."

"Could we get money out of it for Scholem Stavis?"

He said, "That depends," implying that he might be able to swing it.

I had prepared an exhibit for him. He quickly grasped the essentials of Scholem's case. "There wouldn't be money enough to publish his life's work. And how do we find out whether he really is to Darwin what Newton was to Copernicus?"

"It would be hard for us to decide."

"Who would you ask?" said Mendy "We'd have to retain a few specialists. My confidence in academics is not too great."

You think they'd steal from a defenseless genius-amateur?" Contact with inspiration often disturbs your steady worker...."

"a.s.suming that Scholem is inspired. Artie and his missis didn't live long enough to enjoy their inheritance. I wouldn't like to blow too much of their dough on a brainstorm," said Mendy. "I'd have more confidence in Scholem if he weren't so statuesque."

People nowadays don't trust you if you don't show them your trivial humanity-Leopold Bloom in the outhouse, his rising stink, his wife's goat udders, or whatever. The chosen standards for common humanity have moved toward this lower range of facts.

"Besides," said Mendy, "what's all this Christianity? Why does he have to quote from the most anti-Semitic of the Gospels? After what we've been through, that's not the direction to take."

"For all I know, he may be the heir of Immanuel Kant and can't accept an all-Jewish outlook. He's also an American claiming his natural right to an important position in the history of knowledge."

"Even so," said Mendy, "what's this asking to be buried behind the iron curtain? Doesn't he know what Jew-haters those Russians are-right up there with the Germans? Does he think by lying there that he'll soak up all that hate like blotting paper? Cure them? Maybe he thinks he can-he and n.o.body else."

He was working himself up to accuse Scholem of megalomania. These psychological terms lying around, tempting us to use them, are a menace. They should all be shoveled into trucks and taken to the dump.

It was interesting to consider Mendy's own development. He was very intelligent, though you might not think so if you had observed how he had dramatized himself as a middle American of the Hoover or early Roosevelt period. He pursued the idiocies and even the pains of his Protestant models, misfortunes like the estrangement of husbands and wives, s.e.xual self-punishment. He would get drunk in the Loop and arrive swacked on the commuter train, like other Americans. He bought an English bulldog that irritated his wife to madness. He and his motherin-law elaborated all the comical American eccentricities of mutual dislike. She went down to the cellar when he was at home and after he had gone to bed she came up to make herself a cup of cocoa in the kitchen. He would say to me, "I sent her to a nutritionist because I couldn't understand how she could look so well and rosy on a diet of sweet rolls and cocoa." (Histrionics, I guess, had kept her in splendid condition.) Mendy made an ally of his young son; they went on fis.h.i.+ng trips and visited Civil War battlegrounds. He was a man-and-boy Midwesterner, living out of a W C. Fields script. And yet in the eyes under that snap-brim fedora there had always been a mixture of Jewish lights, and in his sixties he was visibly more Jewish. And, as I have said, the American model he had adopted was now utterly obsolete. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were infinitely more modern than the Punkin Crick smart alecks. Mendy was not returning to the religion of his fathers, far from it, but in semiretirement, stuck out there in Elgin, he must have been as hard up for comprehension as Cousin Motty had been in the locker room of his club.

Accordingly, it didn't surprise him that I should take so much interest in cousins. His own interest was stirred. Unless I misinterpreted the expression of his now malformed, lumpy, warm face, he was appealing to me to extend this interest to him. He wished to draw nearer.

"You aren't being sentimental, are you, Ijah, because you and Scholem went on such wonderful walks together? You'd probably be able to judge if you read his blockbusting book. They didn't hire dummies at the Rand Corporation-someday I'll ask you to tell me about that super think tank."

"I'd rather call it sympathy, not soft sentiment."

In the moral sphere, a wild ignorance, utter anarchy.

Mendy said, "If you tried talking to him, he'd lecture you from on high, wouldn't he? Since you don't understand about these zygotes and gametes, you'd be forced to sit and listen...."

What Mendy intended to say was that he and I-_we__ could understand each other, owing to our common ilk. Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it._ Odd that it_ should begin to roll toward oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy. However, our democracy was pa.s.s. The new_ democracy with its new_ abstractions was cruelly disheartening. Being an American always had been something of an abstract project. You came as an immigrant. You were offered a most reasonable proposition and you said yes to it. You were found._ With the new abstractions you were lost._ They demanded a shocking abandonment of personal judgment. Take Eunice's letter to the medical school as an example. By using the word "integrity" you could cheat with a good conscience. Schooled in the new abstractions, you no longer had to worry about truth and falsehood, good and evil. What excused you from good and evil was the effort you put into schooling. You worked hard at your limited lesson, you learned it, and you were forever in the clear. You could say, for instance, "Guilt has to die. Human beings are ent.i.tled to guiltless pleasure." Having learned this valuable lesson, you could now accept the f.u.c.king of your daughters, which in the past would have choked you. You were compensated by the gratification of a lesson well learned. Well, there's the new thoughtfulness for you. And it's possibly on our capacity for thoughtfulness that our survival depends-all the rational decisions that have to be made. And listen here, I am not digressing at all. Cousin Scholem was a n.o.ble creature who lived in the forests of old_ thoughtfulness. An excellent kind of creature, if indeed he was the real thing. Cousin Mendy suggested that he was not. Cousin Mendy wished to remind me that he and I were representatives of a peculiar Jewish and American development (wiped out by history) and had infinitely more in common than any superannuated prodigy could ever understand.

"I want to do something for Scholem, Mendy."

"I'm not sure we can spend Cousin Artie's money to bury him in East Germany."

"Fair enough. Now, suppose you raise the money to have his great work read... find a biologist to vet it. And a philosopher and a historian."

"Maybe so. I'll take it up with the executors. I'll get back to you," said Mendy.

I divined from this that he himself was all of the executors.

"I have to go abroad," I said. "I may even see Scholem in Paris. His valedictory letter mentions a trip to plan the taxis-of-the-Marne business."

I gave Mendy Miss Rodinson's number.

"Flying the Concorde, I suppose," said Mendy. Devoid of envy. I would have been glad of his company.

I stopped in Was.h.i.+ngton to confer with International Monetary Fund people about the intended resumption of loans from commercial banks to the Brazilians. I found time to spend a few hours at the Library of Congress, looking for Bogoras and Jochelson material, and to get inquiries under way at the East German chancery. Then I telephoned my former wife at National Public Radio. Isabel has become one of its most familiar voices. After three marriages, she has resumed her maiden name. I sometimes hear it after the prancing music of the program's signature: "We will now hear from our correspondent Isabel Greenspan in Was.h.i.+ngton." I invited her to have dinner with me. She said no, offended perhaps that I hadn't called earlier from Chicago. She said she would come to the Hay-Adams Hotel to have a drink with me.

The thought persistently suggested by Isabel when we meet is that man is the not-yet-stabilized animal. By this I mean not only that defective, diseased, abortive types are common (Isabel is neither defective nor sick, by the way) but that the majority of human beings will never attain equilibrium and that they are by nature captious, fretful, irritable, uncomfortable, looking for relief from their travail and angry that it does not come. A woman like Isabel, determined to make an impression of perfect balance, reflects this unhappy instability. She identifies me with errors she has freed herself from; she measures her progress by our ever-more-apparent divergence. Clever enough to be a member of the Mensa (high-IQ) society, and, on the air, a charming person, she is always somewhat somber with me, as if she weren't altogether satisfied with her "insights." As a national figure in a program offering enlightened interpretation to millions of listeners, Sable is "committed,"

"engaged"; but as an intelligent woman, she is secretly rueful about this enlightenment.

She talked to me about Chicago, with which, in certain respects, she identified me. "White machine aldermen tying the black mayor in knots while they strip the city of its last buck. While you, of course, see it all. You always see it all. But you'd rather go on mooning." There was a noteworthy difference in Sable this afternoon. At c.o.c.ktail time, she was made up like the dawn of day. Her dark color was the departing night. She was more perfumed than the dawn. It was otherwise a very good resemblance. No denying that she is an attractive woman. She was dressed in dark, tea-colored silk with a formal design in scarlet. She didn't always make herself so attractive for our meetings.

Vain to pretend that I "see it all," but what she meant when she said "mooning" was quite clear. It had two distinct and a.s.sociated meanings: (1) my special preoccupations, and (2) my lifelong dream-connection with Virgie Dunton ne Miletas, the eight-fingered concert harpist. Despite her congenital defect, Virgie had mastered the entire harp repertoire, omitting a few impossible works, and had a successful career. It's perfectly true that I had never been cured of my feeling for Virgie-her black eyes, her round face, its whiteness, its frontal tendency, its feminine emanations, the a.s.surances of humanity or pledges of kindness which came from it. Even the slight mutilation of her short nose-it was the result of a car accident; she refused plastic surgery-was an attraction. It's perfectly true that for me the word "female" had its most significant representation in her. Whenever possible, I attended her concerts; I walked in her neighborhood in hopes of running into her, imagined that I saw her in department stores. Chance meetings-five in thirty years-were remembered in minute actuality. When her husband, a heavy drinker, lent me Galbraith's book on his accomplishments in India, I read every word of it, and this can only be explained by the swollen affect or cathexis that had developed. Virgie Miletas, the Venus of rudimentary thumbs, with her electric binding power, was the real object of Sable's "you'd rather go on mooning." The perfect happiness I might have known with Mrs. Miletas-Dunton, like the longed-for union of sundered beings in the love myth of Aristophanes-I refrain from invoking the higher Eros described by Socrates during the long runs of the blatting El trains that used to carry me, the inspired philosophy student, from Van Buren Street and its hockshops to Sixty-third Street and its throng of junkies-was an artificial love dream and Sable was quite right to despise it.

At the Hay-Adams, where we were drinking gin and tonic, Sable now made a comment which was surprising, nothing like her usual insights, which were not. She said, "I don't think mooning is such a satisfactory word. To be more exact, you have an exuberance that you keep to yourself. You have a crazy high energy absolutely peculiar to you. Because of this high charge you can defy the plain dirty facts that other people have to suffer through, whether they like it or not. What you are is an exuberance-h.o.a.rder, Ijah. You live on your exuberant h.o.a.rd. It would kill you to be depressed, as others are."

This was a curious attack. There was something to it. I gave her full credit for this. I preferred, however, to think it over at leisure instead of answering at once. So I started to talk to her about Cousin Scholem. I described his case to her. If he were to be interviewed on National Public Radio and received the attention he deserved (the war hero-philosopher-cabby), he might succeed in stimulating the interest and, more important, the queer generosity of the public. Sable rejected this immediately. She said he'd be too heavy. If he announced that in him Kant and Darwin had a successor at last, listeners would say, Who is this nut! She admitted that the taxis of the Marne would be rich in human interest, but the celebration would not take place until 1984; it was still a year away. She also observed that her program didn't encourage fundraising initiatives. She said, "Are you sure the man is really dying? You have only his word for it."

"That's a heartless question," I said.

"Maybe it is. You've always been soft about cousins, though. The immediate family threw a chill on your exuberance, and you simply turned to the cousins. I used to think you'd open every drawer in the morgue if somebody told you that there was a cousin to be found. Ask yourself how many of them would come looking for you."

This made me smile. Sable always had had a strong sense of humor.

She said also, "At a time when the nuclear family is breaking up, what's this excitement about collateral relatives?"

The only answer I could make came from left field. I said, "Before the First World War, Europe was governed by a royalty of cousins."

"Yes? That came out real good, didn't it?"

"There are people who think ofthat time as a golden age-the last of the old douceur de vivre,_ and so on."

But I didn't really mean it. The millennial history of nihilism culminated in 1914, and the brutality of Verdun and Tannenberg was a prelude to the even greater destruction that began in 1939. So here again is the all-pervading suspense_-the seams of history opening, the bonds in dissolution (Hegel), the constraints of centuries removed. Unless your head is hard, this will give you nothing but dizzy fits, but if you don't yield to fits you may be carried into a kind of freedom. Disorder, if it doesn't murder you, brings certain opportunities. You wouldn't guess that when I sit in my Holy Sepulchre apartment at night (the surroundings that puzzled Eunice's mind when she came to visit: "All these Oriental rugs and lamps, and so many books," she said), wouldn't guess that I am concentrating on strategies for pouncing pa.s.sionately on the freedom made possible by dissolution. Hundreds of books, but only half a shelf of those that matter. You don't get more goodness from more knowledge. One of the writers I often turn to concentrates on pa.s.sion. He invites you to consider love and hate. He denies that hate is blind. On the contrary, hate is perspicuous. If you let hate germinate, it will eat its way inward and consume your very being, it will intensify reflection. It doesn't blind, it increases lucidity, it opens a man up; it makes him reach out and concentrates his being so that he is able to grasp himself. Love, too, is clear-eyed and not blind. True love is not delusive. Like hate, it is a primal source. But love is hard to come by. Hate is in tremendous supply. And evidently you endanger your being by waiting for the rarer pa.s.sion. So you must have confidence in hate, which is so abundant, and embrace it with your whole soul, if you hope to achieve any clarity at all.

I wasn't about to take this up with Sable, although she would be capable of discussing it. She was still talking about my weakness for cousins. She said, "If you had cared about me as you do about all those goofy, half-a.s.sed cousins, and such, we never would have divorced."

"Such" was a dig at Virgie.

Was Sable hinting that we try again? Was this why she had come painted like the dawn and so beautifully dressed? I felt quite flattered.

In the morning I went to Dulles and flew out on the Concorde. The International Monetary Fund was waiting for the Brazilian parliament to make up its mind. I jotted some notes toward my report and then I was free to think of other matters. I considered whether Sable was priming me to make her a proposal. I liked what she had said about h.o.a.rded exuberance. Her opinion was that, through the cousins, through Virgie, I indulged my taste for the easier affects. I lacked true modern severity. Maybe she believed that I satisfied an artist's needs by visits to old galleries, walking through museums of beauty, happy with the charms of kins.h.i.+p, quite contented with painted relics, not tough enough for rapture in its strongest forms, not purified by nihilistic fire.

And about marriage... single life was tiresome. There were, however, unpleasant considerations in marriage that must not be avoided. What would I do in Was.h.i.+ngton? What would Sable do if she came to live in Chicago? No, she wouldn't be willing to move. We'd be flying back and forth, commuting. To spell the matter out, item by item, Sable had become a public-opinion molder. Public opinion is power. She belonged to a group that held great power. It was not the kind of power I cared about. While her people were not worse jerks than their conservative opposites, they were nevertheless jerks, more numerous in her profession than in other fields, and disagreeably influential.

I was now in Paris, pulling up in front of the Montalembert. I had given up a hotel I liked better when I found c.o.c.kroaches in my luggage, black ones that had recrossed the Atlantic with me and came out all set to conquer Chicago.

I inspected the room at the Montalembert and then walked down the rue du Bac to the Seine. Marvelous how much good these monumental capitals can do an American, still. I almost felt that here the sun itself should take a monumental form, something like the Mexican calendar stone, to s.h.i.+ne on the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie, the Pont Neuf, and other medieval relics.

Returning to the hotel after dinner, I found a message from Miss Rodinson in Chicago. "Eckstine fund will grant ten thousand dollars to Mr. Stavis."

Good for Cousin Mendy! I now had news for Scholem, and since he would be at the Invalides tomorrow if he was alive and had made it to Paris for the planning session, I would have more than mere sympathy to offer when we met after so many decades. Mendy meant the grant to be used to determine whether Scholem's pure philosophy, grounded in science, was all that he claimed it to be, an advance on the Critique of Pure Reason. _ Immediately I began to devise ways to get around Mendy. I could choose Scholem's readers myself. I would offer them small sums-they didn't deserve fat fees anyway, those academic nitwits. (Angry with them, you see, because they had done so little to prevent the U. S. from sinking into decadence; I blamed them, in fact, for hastening our degradation.) Five experts at two hundred bucks apiece, whom I would pay myself, would allow me to give the entire ten grand to Scholem. By using my clout in Was.h.i.+ngton, I might get a burial permit out of the East Germans for two or three thousand, bribes included. That would leave money enough for transportation and last rites. For if Scholem had a clairvoyant conviction that his burial at Torgau would shrink the world's swollen madness to a small pellet, it might be worth a try. Interred at Waldheim in Chicago, beside the pounding truck traffic of Harlem Avenue, one could not hope to have any effect.

To catch up with European time, I stayed up late playing solitaire with a pack of outsized cards that made eyegla.s.ses unnecessary and this put me in a frame of mind to get into bed without a fit of exuberance. Given calm and poise, I can_ understand my situation. Musing back and forth over the cards, I understood Sable's complaint that I had ruined our marriage by denying it a transfusion of exuberance. Speaking of my sentiments for the cousins, she referred indirectly to the mystery of being a Jew. Sable had a handsome Jewish nose, perhaps a little too much of one. Also, she had conspicuously offered her legs to my gaze, knowing my weakness for them. She had a well-turned bosom, a smooth throat, good hips, and legs still capable of kicking in the bedroom-I used to refer to "your skip-rope legs." Now, then, had Sable continued through three marriages to think of me as her only true husband, or was she trying her strength one last time against her rival from (Egyptian) Alexandria? Guiltless Virgie was the hate of her life, and hate made you perspicuous, failing love. Heidegger would have approved. His idea had, as it were, infected me. I was beginning to be obsessed with the two pa.s.sions that made you perspicuous. Love there isn't too much of; hate is as ubiquitous as nitrogen or carbon. Maybe hate is inherent in matter itself and is therefore a component of our bones; our very blood is perhaps swollen with it. For moral coldness in the arctic range I had found a physical image in the Siberian environment of the Koryak and the Chukchee the sub polar desert whose frosts are as severe as fire, a fit location for slave-labor camps.

Put all this together, and my idyll of Virgie Miletas might be construed as a fainthearted evasion of the reigning coldness.

Well, I could have told Sable that she couldn't win against an unconsummated amour_ of so many years. It's after all the woman you didn't_ have whose effect is mortal.

I concede, however, that the real challenge is to capture and tame wickedness. Without this you remain suspended. At the mercy of the suspense over the new emergence of spirit...

But on this I sacked out.

In the morning on my breakfast tray was an express envelope from Miss Rodinson. I was in no mood to open it now; it might contain information about a professional engagement, and I didn't want that. I was on my way to the Invalides to meet with Scholem, if he had made it there. The world cabbies' organizing session, attended, as I noted in Le Monde,_ by some two hundred delegates from fifty countries, would begin at eleven o'clock. I put Miss Rodinson's mail in my pocket with my wallet and my pa.s.sport.

? e_ I was rushed to the great dome in a cab, and went in. A wonderful work of religious architecture-Bruant in the seventeenth century, Mansart in the eighteenth. I took note of its grandeur intermittently. There were gaps in which the dome was no more to me than an egg cup, owing to my hectic excitement-derangement. The stains were growing under my arms. Loss of moisture dried my throat. I went to get information about the taxis of the Marne and had the corner pointed out to me. The drivers had not yet begun to arrive. I had to wander about for half an hour or so, and I climbed up to the first _tage__ to look down in the crypt of the Chapelle Saint-Jrme. Hoo! what grandeur, what beauties! Such arches and columns and statuary, and floating and galloping frescoes. And the floor so sweetly tessellated. I wanted to kiss it. And also the mournful words ofNapol eon from Saint Helena. _"Je dsire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords dt la Seine__ in the middle ofthat nation, _ce peuple Franais,__ that I loved so much." Now Napoleon was crammed under thirty-five tons of polished porphyry or alizarin in a shape suggestive of Roman pomp.

As I was descending the stairs I took out Miss Rodinson's envelope, and I felt distinctly topsy-turvy, somewhat intoxicated, as I read the letter from Eunice-that was all it contained. Here came Tanky's third wish: that I write once again to Judge Eiler to request that the final months of his prison term be served in a halfway house in Las Vegas. In a halfway house, Eunice explained, you had minimal supervision. You signed out in the morning, and signed in again at night. The day was your own, to attend to private business. Eunice wrote, "I think that prison has been a tremendous learning experience for my brother. As he is very intelligent, under it all, he has already absorbed everything there was to absorb from jail. You might try that on the judge, phrasing it in your own way."

Well, to phrase it in my own way, the great fish tottered on the grandiose staircase, filled with drunken darkness and hearing the turbulent seas. An inner voice told him, "This is it!" and he felt like opening a great crimson mouth and tearing the paper with his teeth.

I wanted to send back a message, too: "I am not Cousin Schmuck, I am a great fish who can grant wishes and in whom there are colossal powers!"

Instead I calmed myself by tearing Eunice's notepaper six, eight, ten times, and then seeking discipline in a wastepaper basket. By the time I reached the gathering place, my emotions were more settled, although not entirely normal. There was a certain amount of looping and veering still.

Upward of a hundred delegates had gathered in the taxi corner, if gathered is the word to apply to such a crowd of restless exotics. There were people from all the corners of the earth. They wore caps, uniforms, military insignia, batik pants, Peruvian hats, pantaloons, wrinkled Indian breeches, crimson gowns from Africa, kilts from Scotland, skirts from Greece, Sikh turbans. The whole gathering reminded me of the great UN meeting that Khrushchev and Castro had attended, and where I had seen Nehru in his lovely white garments with a red rose in his lapel and a sort of baker's cap on his head-I had been present when Khrushchev pulled off his shoe to bang his desk in anger.

Then it came to me how geography had been taught in the Chicago schools when I was a kid. We were issued a series of booklets: "Our Little j.a.panese Cousins,"

"Our Little Moroccan Cousins,"

"Our Little Russian Cousins,"

"Our Little Spanish Cousins." I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita, and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all (as Tanky was very intelligent "under it all"). We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to bomb the h.e.l.l out of the place. It's unlikely that j.a.panese children had been provided with books about their little American cousins. The Chicago Board of Education had never thought to look into this.

Two French nonagenarians were present, survivors of 1914. They were the center of much eager attention. A most agreeable occasion, I thought, or would have thought if I had been less agitated.

I didn't see Scholem anywhere. I suppose I should have told Miss Rodinson to phone his Chicago number for information, but they would have asked who was calling, and for what purpose. I wasn't sorry to have come to this mighty hall. In fact I wouldn't have missed it. But I was emotionally primed for a meeting with Scholem. I had even prepared some words to say to him. I couldn't bear to miss him. I came out of the crowd and circled it. The delegates were already being conducted to their meeting place, and I stationed myself strategically near a door. The gorgeous costumes increased the confusion.

In any case, it wasn't I who found Scholem. I couldn't have. He was too greatly changed-emaciated. It was he who spotted me. A man being helped by a young woman-his daughter, as it turned out-glanced up into my face. He stopped and said, "I don't dream much because I don't sleep much, but if I'm not having hallucinations, this is my cousin Ijah."