The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 30

And then, had it been right to turn on a man of his stature and stick him with a clich? But one good thing about Victor was that he was very light on your venial sins, especially the feminine ones. Still, in that case, he might have obliged her, might have spoken the words she wanted to hear. He didn't need to worry that she might make use of them later, against him.

The lake came very close to sh.o.r.e along the Outer Drive and made mad charges on the pilings and the beaches, rus.h.i.+ng horribly white out of the hundreds of miles of darkness they had just crossed in the Cessna.

At Howard Street the white mausoleums and enormous Celtic crosses faced the water. It was a shame to spoil such fine real estate with graves. She disliked this stretch of the road and said to the driver, "This is a favorite speed trap for the cops." He didn't wish to answer. "Now please take me to the Orrington," she said.

She drove her car home from the garage, and had to park in a rut some distance from the curb because her driveway hadn't been cleared.

The house was dark. n.o.body there. Her first fear was that Alfred had come and taken the girls away. She let herself into the warm hallway, pus.h.i.+ng the handsome heavy white door against the resistance of a living creature: Sukie, of course, the poor old thing, not too deaf to hear the scratch of Katrina's key.

Lighted, the living room showed that Soolie and Pearl had been cutting composition paper after school. Probably Ysole had ordered them to do it. Their habit was to force you to give them commands. But where had they gone? Katrina looked in the kitchen for a message. Nothing on the bulletin board. Nothing on the dining-room table. She rang Alfred's number. If he was there, he didn't answer. She telephoned Dorothea and after two rings there came Dotey's little recording, which Katrina had never heard with such dislike-Dotey being playful: "When the vibrations of the gong subside, kindly leave your name and message." The gong, to go with the bed, was also Chinese. Katrina said, "Dotey, where the h.e.l.l are my kids?" Immediately she depressed the b.u.t.ton, and when the dial tone resumed, she dialed Lieutenant Krieggstein. No one there. She considered next whether to try her lawyer. He sharply disliked being bothered at home. Just now this was not a consideration. What did matter was that she had nothing to tell him except that she feared her children had been abducted by their father while she was gone.... Gone where? Flying with her lover.

Sukie had followed her to the kitchen and pressed against her, needing to be taken out. Absentmindedly tender, Katrina stroked the animal's black neck. The fur was thick, but it was flimsy to the touch. Might as well walk her while 1 think what to do, Katrina decided, and clipped the leash to Sukie's collar. All the neighbors had been shoveled out; only the Goliger house was still under snow. The dog relieved herself at once. Obviously, no one had thought of her all day. Katrina went to the corner in her slow, hip-rich gait, the hat pushed back from her forehead-so very tired she hardly noticed the cold. Her face was aching with the strains of the day. Had Ysole taken the girls home with her? To the church bingo? That was the least likely conjecture of all.

Turning back from the corner, she saw a car parking in front of her house. Because its lights shone into her eyes, she couldn't identify it. She began trotting in her ostrich-skin boots, pulling the dog by the leash, saying, "Come on, girl. Come on."

The children were being lifted over the snow heaps and set down on the sidewalk. She recognized Krieggstein by his fedora. Also his storm coat, bulky and hampering, and his movements.

"Where did you go? Where have you been? There was no message."

"I took the children to dinner."

"Soolie. Pearl.... What kind of day did you have?" said Katrina.

They answered nothing at all, but Krieggstein said, "We had a great outing at Burger King. They don't fry like the other fast-food joints, they grill their meat. Then we stopped at Baskin-Robbins and bought a quart of chocolate marshmallow mousse. Good stuff."

"Did you just walk in and find them?"

"No, I took over from your Negro woman. You called her, didn't you?"

"Of course I did."

"I arranged to come by," said Krieggstein. "Didn't she tell you that?"

"She let me think she was taking off at five o'clock."

"Her idea of a joke," said Krieggstein. "I asked her to tell you that I'd be here."

"Oh, thank you, Sam."

In the hallway he helped her off with her coat. They removed it from her weary body.

Katrina's mind at that moment made an important connection. Why should Victor declare, "I love you"? For her sake, he went on the road. Would he have made such a journey for any other reason? If he was like FDR, whose death Stalin had hastened by forcing him to come to Yalta, to Teheran, why would a woman who claimed to love him impose such hards.h.i.+ps on him?

"Whose violin is this?" said Krieggstein. "I never saw a fiddle here before."

He was taking off his storm coat, pulling down his gun-bulging jacket, smoothing his parboiled face, rubbing his frost-red eyes.

She had been right when she had said in the Cessna, "You don't even mind too much." Victor had denied it. But he could do nothing else. Her guess was that he longed to be dying. Dying would illuminate. There were ideas closely a.s.sociated with dying which only dying could reveal. He probably felt that he had postponed too long; although he loved her, he couldn't postpone much longer.

"Did you call the psychiatrist?" she said.

"I did better than that, Trina. The receptionist said you were going to be charged for the hour anyway, so I went and had a talk with the guy."

11 Me_ charged? Alfred_ will be charged. Did he talk to you?"

"Give me some credit. You don't make the grade of police lieutenant by dumb bungling. I gave him an impression of stability. He and I speak the same language. Working on my Ph. D. in criminology, we understood each other. I said you couldn't come because you had a female-type emergency. You had to go to the gynecologist. I came instead, as a friend of the family. / know what bad mothers are. My experiences as police officer: cocaine mothers, nymphomaniacs, armed prost.i.tutes, alcoholic mothers. He could take it from me what a stable person you are."

"I'll go to the kitchen. The girls want their dessert."

They had set out the bowls and spoons. She took the scoop to the chocolate marshmallow mousse. They didn't say, "Where have you been, Mother?" She was not called upon for any alibis. Their small faces with identical bangs communicated nothing. They did have curious eyes, science-fiction eyes that dazzled and also threatened from afar. Wrangel might have seen that, too. Emissaries from another planet, grown from seeds that dropped from outer s.p.a.ce, little invaders with iridium in their skulls. Victor was right, you know, about the way that Star Wars_ flicks corrupted everybody, implanted mistrust of your own flesh and blood. Well, okay, but now 1 see how to extricate my elephant.

She returned to Krieggstein to thank him, and to get rid of him. He wanted to stay and bask in her grat.i.tude. "How good it was of you to stand by me," she said. "Ysole gave me a scare, and I thought that Alfred would come and s.n.a.t.c.h the kids."

"I'd do anything for you, Katrina," said Krieggstein. "Just now you're all wrapped up in Victor-how is he, by the way?-and I don't expect anything for my loyalty. No strings attached...."

Well, Katrina had to admit that Dotey was right on target. Krieggstein was presenting himself as a successor, humble but determined. Maybe he was_ a cop, and not a loony with guns. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's a.s.sume he was the real thing. He was getting his degree in criminology. He was going to be chief of police, head of the FBI, he might make J. Edgar Hoover himself look insignificant-he was off the wall, nevertheless. Since Alfred had removed all the art objects, the house had felt very bare, but with a man like Krieggstein she'd learn what bareness could really be.

"Right now, the most considerate thing you could do, Sam, would be to slip out of the house and let me be. I'll just lock the door and I'll take a bath. I have to have a bath, then send the kids to bed and take a sleeping pill."

"Sorry," said Krieggstein. "In the present state of your emotions I have no business to say anything of an intimate nature...."

She rose, and handed him his storm coat. "Anything of an intimate nature now, Sam, and I'll break down completely." She put her hands over her ears, saying, "I'll go to pieces under your very eyes."

MOSBY'S MEMOIRS THE BIRDS CHIRPED AWAY. Fweet, Fweet, Bootchee-Fweet. Doing all the things naturalists say they do. Expressing abysmal depths of aggression, which only Man-Stupid Man-heard as innocence. We feel everything is so innocent-because our wickedness is so fearful. Oh, very fearful!

Mr. Willis Mosby, after his siesta, gazing down-mountain at the town of Oaxaca where all were snoozing still-mouths, rumps, long black Indian hair, the antique beauty photographically celebrated by Eisenstein in Thunder over Mexico._ Mr. Mosby-Dr. Mosby really; erudite, maybe even profound; thought much, accomplished much-had made some of the most interesting mistakes a man could make in the twentieth century. He was in Oaxaca now to write his memoirs. He had a grant for the purpose, from the Guggenheim Foundation. And why not?

Bougainvillea poured down the hillside, and the hummingbirds were spinning. Mosby felt ill with all this whirling, these colors, fragrances, ready to topple on him. Liveliness, beauty, seemed very dangerous. Mortal danger. Maybe he had drunk too much mescal at lunch (beer, also). Behind the green and red of Nature, dull black seemed to be thickly laid like mirror backing.

Mosby did not feel quite well; his teeth, gripped tight, made the muscles stand out in his handsome, elderly tanned jaws. He had fine blue eyes, light-pained, direct, intelligent, disbelieving; hair still thick, parted in the middle; and strong vertical grooves between the brows, beneath the nostrils, and at the back of the neck.

The time had come to put some humor into the memoirs. So far it had been: Fundamentalist family in Missouri-Father the successful builder-Early schooling-The State University-Rhodes Scholars.h.i.+p-Intellectual friends.h.i.+ps-What I learned from Professor Collingwood-Empire and the mental vigor of Britain-My unorthodox interpretation of John Locke-I work for William Randolph Hearst in Spain-The personality of General FrancoRadical friends.h.i.+ps in New York-Wartime service with the OSS-The limited vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt-Comte, Proudhon, and Marx revisited-de Tocqueville once again.

Nothing very funny here. And yet thousands of students and others would tell you, "Mosby had a great sense of humor." Would tell their children, "This Mosby in the OSS," or "Willis Mosby, who was in Toledo with me when the Alcazar fell, made me die laughing."

"I shall never forget Mosby's observations on Harold Laski."

"On packing the Supreme Court."

"On the Russian purge trials."

"On Hitler."

So it was certainly high time to do something. He had given it some consideration. He would say, when they sent down his ice from the hotel bar (he was in a cottage below the main building, flowers heaped upon it; envying a little the unenc.u.mbered mountains of the Sierra Madre) and when he had chilled his mescal-warm, it tasted rotten-he would write that in 1947, when he was living in Paris, he knew any number of singular people. He knew the Comte de la Mine-Creve, who sheltered Gary Davis the World Citizen after the World Citizen had burnt his pa.s.sport publicly. He knew Mr. Julian Huxley at UNESCO. He discussed social theory with Mr. Lvi-Straus but was not invited to dinner-they ate at the Muse de l'Homme. Sartre refused to meet with him; he thought all Americans, Negroes excepted, were secret agents. Mosby for his part suspected all Russians abroad of working for the GPU. Mosby knew French well; extremely fluent in Spanish; quite good in German. But the French cannot identify originality in foreigners. That is the curse of an old civilization. It is a heavier planet. Its best minds must double their horsepower to overcome the gravitational field of tradition. Only a few will ever fly. To fly away from Descartes. To fly away from the political anachronisms of left, center, and right persisting since 1789. Mosby found these French exceedingly ba.n.a.l. These French found him lean and tight. In well-tailored clothes, elegant and dry, his good Western skin, pale eyes, strong nose, handsome mouth, and virile creases. Un type sec._ Both sides-Mosby and the French, that is-with highly developed att.i.tudes. Both, he was lately beginning to concede, quite wrong. Possibly equidistant from the truth, but lying in different sectors of error. The French were worse off because their errors were collective. Mine, Mosby believed, were at least peculiar. The French were furious over the collapse in ] 940 of La France Pourrie,_ their lack of military will, the extensive collaboration, the ma.s.sive deportations unopposed (the Danes, even the Bulgarians_ resisted Jewish deportations), and, finally, over the humiliation of liberation by the Allies. Mosby, in the OSS, had information to support such views. Within the State Department, too, he had university colleagues-former students and old acquaintances. He had expected a high postwar appointment, for which, as director of counterespionage in Latin America, he was ideally qualified. But Dean Acheson personally disliked him. Nor did Dulles approve. Mosby, a fanatic about ideas,_ displeased the inst.i.tutional gentry. He had said that the Foreign Service was staffed by rejects of the power structure. Young gentlemen from good Eastern colleges who couldn't make it as Wall Street lawyers were allowed to interpret the alleged interests of their cla.s.s in the State Department bureaucracy. In foreign consulates they could be rude to displaced persons and indulge their country-club anti-Semitism, which was dying out even in the country clubs. Besides, Mosby had sympathized with the Burnham position on managerialism, declaring, during the war, that the n.a.z.is were winning because they had made their managerial revolution first. No Allied combination could conquer, with its obsolete industrialism, a nation which had reached a new state of history and tapped the power of the inevitable, etc. And then Mosby, holding forth in Was.h.i.+ngton, among the elite Scotch drinkers, stated absolutely that however deplorable the concentration camps had been, they showed at least the rationality of German political ideas. The Americans had no such ideas. They didn't know what they were doing. No design existed. The British were not much better. The Hamburg fire-bombing, he argued in his clipped style, in full declarative phrases, betrayed the idiotic emptiness and planlessness of Western leaders.h.i.+p. Finally, he said that when Acheson blew his nose there were maggots in his handkerchief.

Among the defeated French, Mosby admitted that he had a galled spirit. (His jokes were not too bad.) And of course he drank a lot. He worked on Marx and Tocqueville, and he drank. He would not cease from mental strife. The Comte de la Mine-Creve (Mosby's own improvisation on a n.o.ble and ancient name) kept him in PX booze and exchanged his money on the black market for him. He described his swindles and was very entertaining.

Mosby now wished to say, in the vein of Sir Harold Nicolson or Santayana or Bertrand Russell, writers for whose memoirs he had the greatest admiration, that Paris in 1947, like half a Noah's ark, was waiting for the second of each kind to arrive. There was one of everything. Something of this sort. Especially among Americans. The city was very bitter, grim; the Seine looked and smelled like medicine. At an American party, a former student of French from Minnesota, now running a shady enterprise, an agency which specialized in bribery, private undercover investigations, and procuring broads for VIPs, said something highly emotional about the City of Man, about the meaning of Europe for Americans, the American failure to preserve human scale. Not omitting to work in Man the Measure. And every other tag he could bring back from Randall's Making of the Modern Mind_ or Readings in the Intellectual History of_ Europe._ "I was tempted," Mosby meant to say (the ice arrived in a gla.s.s jar with tongs; the natives no longer wore the dirty white drawers of the past). "Tempted..." He rubbed his forehead, which projected like the back of an observation car. "To tell this sententious little drunkard and gyp artist, formerly a pacifist and vegetarian, follower of Gandhi at the University of Minnesota, now driving a very handsome Bentley to the Tour d'Argent to eat duck l'orange. Tempted to say, 'Yes, but we come here across the Atlantic to relax a bit in the past. To recall what Ezra Pound had once said. That we would make another Venice, just for the h.e.l.l of it, in the Jersey marshes any time we liked. Toying. To divert ourselves in the time of colossal mastery to come. Reproducing anything, for fun. Baboons trained to row will bring us in gondolas to discussions of astrophysics. Where folks burn garbage now, and fatten pigs and junk their old machines, we will debark to hear a concert.' "

Mosby the thinker, like other busy men, never had time for music. Poetry was not his cup of tea. Members of Congress, cabinet officers, organization men, Pentagon planners, party leaders, presidents had no such interests. They could not be what they were and read Eliot, hear Vivaldi, Cimarosa. But they planned that others might enjoy these things and benefit by their power. Mosby perhaps had more in common with political leaders and joint chiefs and presidents. At least, they were in his thoughts more often than Cimarosa and Eliot. With hate, he pondered their mistakes, their shallowness. Lectured on Locke to show them up. Except by the will of the majority, unambiguously expressed, there was no legitimate power. The only absolute democrat in America (perhaps in the world-although who can know what there is in the world, among so many billions of minds and souls) was Willis Mosby. Notwithstanding his terse, dry, intolerant style of conversation (more precisely, examination), his lank dignity of person, his aristocratic bones. Dark long nostrils hinting at the afflictions that needed the strength you could see in his jaws. And, finally, the light-pained eyes.

A most peculiar, ingenious, hungry, aspiring, and heartbroken animal, who, by calling himself Man, thinks he can escape being what he really is. Not a matter of his definition, in the last a.n.a.lysis, but of his being. Let him say what he likes.

Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the n.o.bleness of life Is to do thus._ Thus_ being love. Or any other sublime option. (Mosby knew his Shakespeare anyway. There_ was a difference from the president. And of the vice president he said, "I wouldn't trust him to make me a pill. A has-been druggist!") With sober lips he sipped the mescal, the servant in the coa.r.s.e orange s.h.i.+rt enriched by metal b.u.t.tons reminding him that the car was coming at four o'clock to take him to Mitla, to visit the ruins.

"Yo mismo soy una ruina, "_ Mosby joked.

The stout Indian, giving only so much of a smile-no more-withdrew with quiet courtesy. Perhaps I was fis.h.i.+ng, Mosby considered. Wanted him to say I was not_ a ruin. But how could he? Seeing that for him I am_ one.

Perhaps Mosby did not have a light touch. Still, he thought he did have an eye for certain kinds of comedy. And he must_ find a way to relieve the rigor of this account of his mental wars. Besides, he could really remember that in Paris at that time people, one after another, revealed themselves in a comic light. He was then seeing things that way. Rue Jacob, rue Bonaparte, rue du Bac, rue de Verneuil, Htel de l'Universit-filled with funny people.

He began by setting down a name: l.u.s.tgarten. Yes, there was the man he wanted. Hymen l.u.s.tgarten, a Marxist, or former Marxist, from New Jersey. From Newark, I think. He had been a shoe salesman, and belonged to any number of heretical, fanatical, Bolshevistic groups. He had been a Leninist, a Trot-skyist, then a follower of Hugo Oehler, then of Thomas Stamm, and finally of an Italian named Salemme who gave up politics to become a painter, an abstractionist. l.u.s.tgarten also gave up politics. He wanted now to be successful in business-rich. Believing that the nights he had spent poring over Das Kapital_ and Lenin's State and Revolution_ would give him an edge in business dealings. We were staying in the same hotel. I couldn't at first make out what he and his wife were doing. Presently I understood. The black market. This was not then reprehensible. Postwar Europe was like that. Refugees, adventurers, GIs. Even the Comte de la M.-C. Europe still shuddering from the blows it had received. Governments new, uncertain, infirm. No reason to respect their authority. American soldiers led the way. Flamboyant business schemes. Machines, whole factories, stolen, treasures s.h.i.+pped home. An American colonel in the lumber business started to saw up the Black Forest and send it to Wisconsin. And, of course, n.a.z.is concealing their concentration-camp loot. Jewels sunk in Austrian lakes. Artworks hidden. Gold extracted from teeth in extermination camps, melted into ingots and mortared like bricks into the walls of houses. Incredibly huge fortunes to be made, and l.u.s.tgarten intended to make one of them. Unfortunately, he was incompetent.

You could see at once that there was no harm in him. Despite the bold revolutionary a.s.sociations, and fierceness of doctrine. Theoretical willingness to slay cla.s.s enemies. But l.u.s.tgarten could not even hold his own with pushy people in a p.i.s.soir._ Strangely meek, stout, swarthy, kindly, grinning with mulberry lips, a froggy, curving mouth which produced wrinkles like gills between the ears and the grin. And perhaps, Mosby thought, he comes to mind in Mexico because of his Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec look, squat and black-haired, the tip of his nose turned downward and the black nostrils shyly widening when his friendly smile was accepted. And a bit sick with the treachery, the awfulness of life but, respectfully persistent, bound to get his share. Efficiency was his style-action, determination, but a wicked incompetence trembled within. Wrong calling. Wrong choice. A bad mistake. But he was persistent.

His conversation amused me, in the dining room. He was proud of his revolutionary activities, which had consisted mainly of cranking the mimeograph machine. Internal Bulletins. Thousands of pages of recondite examination of fine points of doctrine for the members.h.i.+p. Whether the American working cla.s.s should give material_ aid to the Loyalist Government of Spain, controlled as that was by Stalinists and other cla.s.s enemies and traitors. You had to fight Franco, and you had to fight Stalin as well. There was, of course, no material aid to give. But had_ there been any, should_ it have been given? This purely theoretical problem caused splits and expulsions. I always kept myself informed of these curious agonies of sectarianism, Mosby wrote. The single effort made by Spanish Republicans to purchase arms in the United States was thwarted by that friend of liberty Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who allowed one s.h.i.+p, the Mar Cantdbrico,_ to be loaded but set the Coast Guard after it to turn it back to port. It was, I believe, that genius_ of diplomacy, Mr. Cordell Hull, who was responsible, but the decision, of course, was referred to FDR whom Huey Long amusingly called Franklin de la No!_ But perhaps the most refined of these internal discussions left of left, the doc.u.ments for which were turned out on the machine by that Jimmy Higgins, the tubby devoted party-worker Mr. l.u.s.tgarten, had to do with the Finnish war. Here the painful point of doctrine to be resolved was whether a Workers' State like the Soviet Union, even if it was a degenerate_ Workers' State, a product of the Thermidorian Reaction following the glorious Proletarian Revolution of 1917, could wage an Imperialistic War. For only the bourgeoisie could be Imperialistic. Technically, Stalinism could not be Imperialism. By definition. What then should a Revolutionary Party say to the Finns? Should they resist Russia or not? The Russians were monsters but they would expropriate the Mannerheim White-Guardist landowners and move, painful though it might be, in the correct historical direction. This, as a sect-watcher, I greatly relished. But it was too foreign a subtlety for many of the sectarians. Who were, after all, Americans. Pragmatists at heart. It was too_ far out for l.u.s.tgarten. He decided, after the war, to become (it shouldn't be hard) a rich man. Took his savings and, I believe his wife said, his mother's savings, and went abroad to build a fortune.

Within a year he had lost it all. He was cheated. By a German partner, in particular. But also he was caught smuggling by Belgian authorities.

When Mosby met him (Mosby speaking of himself in the third person as Henry Adams had done in The Education of Henry Adams)_-when Mosby met him, l.u.s.tgarten was working for the American army, employed by Graves Registration. Something to do with the procurement of crosses. Or with supervision of the lawns. Official employment gave l.u.s.tgarten PX privileges. He was rebuilding his financial foundations by the illegal sale of cigarettes. He dealt also in gas-ration coupons which the French government, anxious to obtain dollars, would give you if you exchanged your money at the legal rate. The gas coupons were sold on the black market. The l.u.s.tgartens, husband and wife, persuaded Mosby to do this once. For them, he cashed his dollars at the bank, not with la Mine-Creve. The occasion seemed important. Mosby gathered that l.u.s.tgarten had to drive at once to Munich. He had gone into the dental-supply business there with a German dentist who now denied that they had ever been partners.

Many consultations between l.u.s.tgarten (in his international intriguer's trench coat, ill-fitting; head, neck, and shoulders sloping backward in a froggy curve) and his wife, a young woman in an eyelet-lace blouse and black velveteen skirt, a velveteen ribbon tied on her round, healthy neck. l.u.s.tgarten, on the circular floor of the bank, explaining as they stood apart. And sweating blood; being reasonable with Trudy, detail by tortuous detail. It grated away poor l.u.s.tgartens patience. Hands feebly remonstrating. For she asked female questions or raised objections which gave him agonies of patient rationality. Only there was nothing rational to begin with. That is, he had had no legal right to go into business with the German. All such arrangements had to be licensed by the military government. It was a black-market partners.h.i.+p and when it began to show a profit, the German threw l.u.s.tgarten out. With what they call impunity. Germany as a whole having discerned the limits of all civilized systems of punishment as compared with the unbounded possibilities of crime. The bank in Paris, where these explanations between l.u.s.tgarten and Trudy were taking place, had an interior of some sort of red porphyry. Like raw meat. A color which bourgeois France seemed to have vested with ideas of potency, mettle, and grandeur. In the Invalides also, Napoleon's sarcophagus was of polished red stone, a great, swooping, polished cradle containing the little green corpse. (We have the testimony of M. Rideau, the Bonapartist historian, as to the color.) As for the living Bonaparte, Mosby felt, with Auguste Comte, that he had been an anachronism. The Revolution was historically necessary. It was socially justified. Politically, economically, it was a move toward industrial democracy. But the Napoleonic drama itself belonged to an archaic category of personal ambitions, feudal ideas of war. Older than feudalism. Older than Rome. The commander at the head of armies-nothing rational to recommend it. Society, increasingly rational in its organization, did not need it. But humankind evidently desired it. War is a luxurious pleasure. Grant the first premise of hedonism and you must accept the rest also. Rational foundations of modernity are cunningly accepted by man as the launching platform of ever wilder irrationalities.

Mosby, writing these reflections in a blue-green color of ink which might have been extracted from the landscape. As his liquor had been extracted from the green spikes of the mescal, the curious sharp, dark-green fleshy limbs of the plant covering the fields.

The dollars, the francs, the gas rations, the bank like the beefsteak mine in which W. C. Fields invested, and shrinking but persistent dark l.u.s.tgarten getting into his little car on the sodden Parisian street. There were few cars then in Paris. Plenty of parking s.p.a.ce. And the streets were so yellow, gray, wrinkled, dismal. But the French were even then ferociously telling the world that they had the savoir-vivre,_ the gai savoir._ Especially Americans, haunted by their Protestant ethic, had to hear this. My G.o.d-sit down, sip wine, taste cheese, break bread, hear music, know love, stop running, and learn ancient life-wisdom from Europe. At any rate, l.u.s.tgarten buckled up his trench coat, pulled down his big hoodlum's fedora. He was bunched up in the seat. Small brown hands holding the steering wheel of the Simca Huit, and the grinning despair with which he waved.

"Bon voyage, l.u.s.tgarten."

His Zapotec nose, his teeth like white pomegranate seeds. With a sob of the gears he took off for devastated Germany.

Reconstruction is big business. You demolish a society, you decrease the population, and off you go again. New fortunes. l.u.s.tgarten may have felt, qua_ Jew, that he had a right to grow rich in the German boom. That all Jews had natural claims beyond the Rhine. On land enriched by Jewish ashes. And you never could be sure, seated on a sofa, that it was not stuffed or upholstered with Jewish hair. And he would not use German soap. He washed his hands, Trudy told Mosby, with Lifebuoy from the PX.

Trudy, a graduate of Montclair Teachers' College in New Jersey, knew French, studied composition, had hoped to work with someone like Nadia Boulanger, but was obliged to settle for less. From the bank, as l.u.s.tgarten drove away in a kind of doomed, latently tearful daring in the rain-drenched street, Trudy invited Mosby to the Salle Pleyel, to hear a Czech pianist performing Schnberg. This man, with muscular baldness, worked very hard upon the keys. The difficulty of his enterprise alone came through-the labor of culture, the trouble it took to preserve art in tragic Europe, the devoted drill. Trudy had a nice face for concerts. Her odor was agreeable. She shone. In the left half of her countenance, one eye kept wandering. Stone-hearted Mosby, making fun of flesh and blood, of these little humanities with their short inventories of bad and good. The poor Czech in his blazer with chased b.u.t.tons and the muscles of his forehead rising in protest against tabula rasa-the bare skull.

Mosby could abstract himself on such occasions. Shut out the piano. Continue thinking about Comte. Begone, old priests and feudal soldiers! Go, with Theology and Metaphysics! And in the Posicive Epoch Enlightened Woman would begin to play her part, vigilant, preventing the managers of the new society from abusing their powers. Over Labor, the Supreme Good.

Embroidering the trees, the birds of Mexico, looking at Mosby, and the hummingbird, so neat in its l.u.s.t, vibrating tinily, and the lizard on the soil drinking heat with its belly. To bless small creatures is supposed to be real good.

Yes, this l.u.s.tgarten was a funny man. Cheated in Germany, licked by the partner, and impatient with his slow progress in Graves Registration, he decided to import a Cadillac. Among the new postwar millionaires of Europe there was a big demand for Cadillacs. The French government, moving slowly, had not yet taken measures against such imports for rapid resale. In 1947, no tax prevented such transactions. l.u.s.tgarten got his family in Newark to s.h.i.+p a new Cadillac. Something like four thousand dollars was raised by his brother, his mother, his mother's brother for the purpose. The car was sent. The customer was waiting. A down payment had already been given. A double profit was expected. Only, on the day the car was unloaded at Le Havre new regulations went into effect. The Cadillac could not be sold. l.u.s.tgarten was stuck with it. He couldn't even afford to buy gas. The l.u.s.tgartens were seen one day moving out of the hotel, into the car. Mrs. l.u.s.tgarten went to live with musical friends. Mosby offered l.u.s.tgarten the use of his sink for was.h.i.+ng and shaving. Weary l.u.s.tgarten, defeated, depressed, frightened at last by his own plunging, sc.r.a.ped at his bristles, mornings, with a modest cricket noise, while sighing. All that money-mother's savings, brother's pension. No wonder his eyelids turned blue. And his smile, like a spinster's sachet, the last fragrance ebbed out long ago in the trousseau never used. But the long batrachian lips continued smiling.

Mosby realized that compa.s.sion should be felt. But pa.s.sing in the night the locked, gleaming car, and seeing huddled l.u.s.tgarten, sleeping, covered with two coats, on the majestic seat, like Jonah inside Leviathan, Mosby could not say in candor that what he experienced was sympathy. Rather he reflected that this shoe salesman, in America attached to foreign doctrines, who could not relinquish Europe in the New World, was now, in Paris, sleeping in the Cadillac, encased in this gorgeous Fisher Body from Detroit. At home exotic, in Europe a Yankee. His timing was off. He recognized this himself. But believed, in general, that he was too early. A pioneer. For instance, he said, in a voice that creaked with shy a.s.sertiveness, the French were only now beginning to be Marxians. He had gone through it all years ago. What did these people know! Ask them about the Shakhty Engineers! About Lenin's Democratic Centralism! About the Moscow Trials! About "Social Fascism"! They were ignorant. The Revolution having been totally betrayed, these Europeans suddenly discovered Marx and Lenin. "Eureka!" he said in a high voice. And it was the cold war, beneath it all.

For should America lose, the French intellectuals were preparing to collaborate with Russia. And should America win they could still be free, defiant radicals under American protection.

"You sound like a patriot," said Mosby.

"Well, in a way I am," said l.u.s.tgarten. "But I am getting to be objective. Sometimes I say to myself, 'If you were outside the world, if you, l.u.s.tgarten, didn't exist as a man, what would your opinion be of this or that?' "

"Disembodied truth."

"I guess that's what it is."

"And what are you going to do about the Cadillac?" said Mosby.

"I'm sending it to Spain. We can sell it in Barcelona."

"But you have to get it there."

"Through Andorra. It's all arranged. Klonsky is driving it."

Klonsky was a Polish Belgian in the hotel. One of l.u.s.tgartens a.s.sociates, congenitally dishonest, Mosby thought. Kinky hair, wrinkled eyes like Greek olives, and a cat nose and cat lips. He wore Russian boots.

But no sooner had Klonsky departed for Andorra than l.u.s.tgarten received a marvelous offer for the car. A capitalist in Utrecht wanted it at once and would take care of all excise problems. He had all the necessary tuyaux,_ unlimited drag. l.u.s.tgarten wired Klonsky in Andorra to stop. He raced down on the night train, recovered the Cadillac, and started driving back at once. There was no time to lose. But after sitting up all night on the rapide,_ l.u.s.tgarten was drowsy in the warmth of the Pyrenees and fell asleep at the wheel. He was lucky, he later said, for the car went down a mountainside and might have missed the stone wall that stopped it. He was only a foot or two from death when he was awakened by the crash. The car was destroyed. It was not insured.

Still faintly smiling, l.u.s.tgarten, with his sling and cane, came to Mosby's caf table on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Sat down. Removed his hat from dazzling black hair. Asked permission to rest his injured foot on a chair. "Is this a private conversation?" he said.

Mosby had been chatting with Alfred Ruskin, an American poet. Ruskin, though some of his front teeth were missing, spoke very clearly and swiftly. A perfectly charming man. Inveterately theoretical. He had been saying, for instance, that France had shot its collaborationist poets. America, which had no poets to spare, put Ezra Pound in Saint Elizabeth's. He then went on to say, barely acknowledging l.u.s.tgarten, that America had had no history, was not a historical society. His proof was from Hegel. According to Hegel, history was the history of wars and revolutions. The United States had had only one revolution and very few wars. Therefore it was historically empty. Practically a vacuum.

Ruskin also used Mosby's conveniences at the hotel, being too fastidious for his own latrine in the Algerian backstreets of the Left Bank. And when he emerged from the bathroom he invariably had a topic sentence.

"I have discovered the main defect of Kierkegaard."

Or, "Pascal was terrified by universal emptiness, but Valry says the difference between empty s.p.a.ce and s.p.a.ce in a bottle is only quant.i.tative, and there is nothing intrinsically terrifying about quant.i.ty. What is your view?"

We do not live in bottles-Mosby's reply.

l.u.s.tgarten said, when Ruskin left us, "Who is that fellow? He mooched you for the coffee."

"Ruskin," said Mosby.

"That_ is Ruskin?"

"Yes, why?"

"I hear my wife was going out with Ruskin while I was in the hospital."

"Oh, I wouldn't believe such rumors," said Mosby. "A cup of coffee, an aperitif together, maybe."

"When a man is down on his luck," said l.u.s.tgarten, "it's the rare woman who won't give him h.e.l.l in addition."

"Sorry to hear it," Mosby replied.

And then, as Mosby in Oaxaca recalled, s.h.i.+fting his seat from the sun-for he was already far too red, and his face, bones, eyes, seemed curiously thirsty-l.u.s.tgarten had said, "It's been a terrible experience."

"Undoubtedly so, l.u.s.tgarten. It must have been frightening."

"What crashed was my last stake. It involved family. Too bad in a way that I wasn't killed. My insurance would at least have covered my kid brother's loss. And my mother and uncle."