Nexus

  Aren’t you a bit hard on them? Maybe they didn’t have what to give.

  That’s exactly what they said, all of them. But it’s not true. If you don’t have you can borrow—for a friend. Right? Abraham offered up his son, didn’t he?

  That was to Jehovah.

  I wasn’t asking them to make sacrifices. All I asked for was chicken feed—cigarettes, a meal, old clothes. Wait a minute, I want to modify what I said. There were exceptions. There was one lad I remember, one of my messengers … this was after I had quit the telegraph company … when he learned that I was up against it he went and stole for me. He’d bring us a chicken or a few vegetables … sometimes only a candy bar, if that was all he could lay hands on. There were others too, poor like him, or nuts. They didn’t turn their pockets inside out to show me they had nothing. The guys I traveled with had no right to refuse me. None of them had ever starved. We weren’t poor white trash. We all came from decent, comfortable homes. No, maybe it’s the Jew in you that makes you so kind and thoughtful, pardon the way I put it. When a Jew sees a man in distress, hungry, abused, despised, he sees himself. He identifies immediately with the other fellow. Not us. We haven’t tasted enough poverty, misfortune, disgrace, humiliation. We’ve never been pariahs. We’re sitting pretty, we are, lording it over the rest of the world.

  Miller, he said, you must have taken a lot of punishment. No matter what I may think of my own people—they’ve got their faults too, you know—I could never talk about them the way you do about yours. It makes me all the more happy to think you’re going to enjoy yourself for a while. It’s coming to you. But you’ve got to bury the past!

  I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself, you mean. I threw him a tender smile. You know, Reb, I really don’t feel this way all the time. Deep down it still rankles, but on the surface I take people pretty much as they come. What I can’t get over, I guess, is that I had to worm it out of them, everything I got. And what did I get? Crumbs. I exaggerate, of course. Not every one turned me down cold. And those who did probably had a right to act as they did. It was like the pitcher you bring once too often to the well. I sure knew how to make a nuisance of myself. And for a man who’s willing to eat humble pie I was too arrogant. I had a way of rubbing people the wrong way. Especially when asking for help. You see, I’m one of those fools who think that people, friends anyway, ought to divine the fact that one is in need. When you come across a poor, filthy beggar, does he have to make your heart bleed before you toss him a coin? Not if you’re a decent, sensitive being. When you see him with head down, searching the gutter for a discarded butt or a piece of yesterday’s sandwich, you lift up his head, you put your arms around him, especially if he’s crawling with lice, and you say: ‘What is it, friend? Can I be of any help?’ You don’t pass him up with one eye fastened on a bird sitting on a telegraph wire. You don’t make him run after you with hands outstretched. That’s my point. No wonder so many people refuse a beggar when he accosts them. It’s humiliating to be approached that way: it makes you feel guilty. We’re all generous, in our own way. But the moment some one begs something of us our hearts close up.

  Miller, said Reb, visibly moved by this outburst, you’re what I’d call a good Jew.

  Another Jesus, eh?

  Yeah, why not? Jesus was a good Jew, even though we’ve had to suffer for two thousand years because of him.

  The moral is—don’t work too hard at it! Don’t try to be too good.

  One can never do too much, said Reb heatedly.

  Oh yes he can. Do what needs doing, that’s good enough.

  Isn’t it the same thing?

  Almost. The point is that God looks after the world. We should look after one another. If the good Lord had seeded help to run this world He would have given us bigger hearts. Hearts, not brains.

  Jesus, said Reb, but you do talk like a Jew. You remind me of certain scholars I listened to when I was a kid and they were expounding the law. They could jump from one side of the fence to the other, like goats. When you were cold they blew hot, and vice versa. You never knew where you stood with them. Here’s what I mean … Passionate as they were, they always preached moderation. The prophets were the wild men; they were in a class apart. The holy men didn’t rant and rave. They were pure, that’s why. And you’re pure too. I know you are.

  What was there to answer? He was simple, Reb, and in need of a friend. No matter what I said, no matter how I treated him, he acted as if I had enriched him. I was his friend. And he would remain my friend, no matter what.

  Walking back to the house I resumed the inner monologue. You see, it’s as simple as that, friendship. What’s the old adage? To have a friend you must be a friend.

  It was hard to see, though, in what way I had been a friend to Reb—or to anybody, for that matter. All I could see was that I was my own best friend—and my own worst enemy.

  Pushing the door open, I had to remark to myself—If you know that much, old fella, you know a lot.

  I took my accustomed place before the machine. Now, said I to myself, you’re back in your own little kingdom. Now you can play God again.

  The drollery of addressing myself thus stopped me. God! As if it were only yesterday that I had left off communing with Him, I found myself conversing with Him as of yore. For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son … And how little we had given in return. What can we offer thee, O Heavenly Father, in return for thy blessings? My heart spoke out, as if, veriest nothing that I was, I had an inkling of the problems which confronted the Creator of the universe. Nor was I ashamed to be thus intimate with my Maker. Was I not part of that immense all which He had made manifest expressly, perhaps, to realize the unlimited bounds of his Being?

  It was ages since I had addressed Him in this intimate fashion. What a difference between those prayers wrung out of sheer despair, when I called on Him for mercy—mercy, not grace!—and the easy duos born of humble understanding! Strange, is it, this mention of earthly-heavenly discourse? It would occur most often when my spirits ran high … when there was little reason, mark this, to show any sign of spirit. Incongruous as it may sound, it was often when the cruel nature of man’s fate smote me between the eyes that my spirit soared. When, like a worm eating his way through the slime, there came the thought, crazy perhaps, that the lowest was linked to the highest. Did they not tell us, when we were young, that God noted the sparrow’s fall? Even if I never quite believed it, I was nevertheless impressed. (Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh—is there anything too hard for me?) Total awareness! Plausible or implausible, it was a great reach of thought. Sometimes, as a kid, when something truly extraordinary occurred, I would exclaim: Did you see that, God? How wonderful to think that He was there, within calling distance! He was a presence then, not a metaphysical abstraction. His spirit pervaded everything; He was of it all and above it all, at one and the same time. And then—thinking about it I assumed an almost seraphic smile—then would come times when, in order not to go stark, raving mad, one simply had to look upon it (upon the absurd, monstrous nature of things) with the eyes of the Creator, He who is responsible for it all and understands it.

  Tapping away—I was on the gallop now—the thought of Creation, of the all-seeing eye, the all-embracing corn-passion, the nearness and farness of God, hung over me like a veil. What a joke to be writing a novel about imaginary characters, imaginary situations! Hadn’t the Lord of the Universe imagined everything? What a farce to lord it over this fictitious realm! Was it for this I had beseeched the Almighty to grant me the gift of words?

  The utter ridiculousness of my position brought me to a halt. Why hurry to bring the book to a close? In my mind it was already finished. I had thought out the imaginary drama to its imaginary end. I could rest a moment, suspended above my ant-like being, and let a few more hairs whiten.

  I fell back into the vacuum (where God is all) with the most delicious sense of relief. I could see it all clearly—my earthly evo
lution, from the larval stage to the present, and even beyond the present. What was the struggle for or toward? Toward union. Perhaps. What else could it mean, this desire to communicate? To reach every one,: high and low, and get an answer back—a devastating thought! To vibrate eternally, like the world lyre. Rather frightening, if pushed to its furthest implications.

  Perhaps I didn’t mean quite that. Enough, perhaps, to establish communication with one’s peers, one’s kindred spirits. But who were they? Where were they? One could only know by letting fly the arrow.

  A picture now obtruded. A picture of the world as a web of magnetic forces. Studding this web like nuclei Were the burning spirits of the earth about whom the various orders of humanity spun like constellations. Due to the hierarchical distribution of powers and aptitudes a sublime harmony reigned. No discord was possible. All the conflict, all the disturbance, all the confusion and disorder to which man vainly endeavored to adjust was meaningless. The intelligence which invested the universe recognized it not. The murderous, the suicidal, the maniacal activity of earthly beings, yea, even their benevolent, their worshipful, their all too humane activities, were illusory. In the magnetic web motion itself was nil. Nothing to go toward, nothing to retreat from, nothing to reach up to. The vast, unending field of force was like a suspended thought, a suspended note. Aeons from now—and what was now?—another thought might replace it. Brrrr! Chilling though it was, I wanted to lie there on the floor of nothingness and forever contemplate the picture of creation.

  It came to me presently that the element of creation, where writing was concerned, had little to do with thought. A tree does not search for its fruits, it grows them. To write, I concluded, was to garner the fruits of the imagination, to grow into the life of the mind like a tree putting forth leaves.

  Profound or not, it was a comforting thought. At one bound I was sitting in the lap of the gods. I heard laughter all about me. No need to play God. No need to astound any one. Take the lyre and pluck a silvery note. Above all the commotion, even above the sound of laughter, there was music. Perpetual music. That was the meaning of the supreme intelligence which invested creation.

  I came sliding down the ladder in a hurry. And this was the lovely, lovely thought which had me by the hair … You there, pretending to be dead and crucified, yon there, with your terrible historia de calamitatis, why not reenact it in the spirit of play? Why not tell it over to yourself and extract a little music from it? Are they real, your wounds? Are they still alive, still fresh? Or are they so much literary nail polish? Comes the cadenza…

  Kiss me, kiss me, again. We were eighteen or nineteen then, MacGregor and I, and the girl he had brought to the party was studying to become an opera singer.

  She was sensitive, attractive, the best he had found so far, he ever would find, for that matter. She loved him passionately. She loved him though she knew he was frivolous and faithless. When he said in his easy, thoughtless way—I’m crazy about you!—she swooned. There was this song between them which he never tired of hearing. Sing it again, won’t you? No one can sing it like you. And she would sing it, again and again. Kiss me, kiss me, again. It always gave me a pang to hear her sing it, but this night I thought my heart would break. For this night, seated in a far corner of the room, seemingly as far from me as she could get, sat the divine, the unattainable Una Gifford, a thousand times more beautiful than MacGregor’s prima donna, a thousand times more mysterious, and a thousand thousand times beyond any reach of mine. Kiss me, kiss me, again! How the words pierced me! And not a soul in that boisterous, merry-making group was aware of my agony. The fiddler approaches, blithe, debonair, his cheek glued to the instrument, and drawing out each phrase on muted strings, he plays it—softly in my ear.

  Kiss me … kiss me … a … again. Not another note can I take. Pushing him aside, I bolt.

  Down the street I run, the tears streaming down my cheeks. At the corner I come upon a horse wandering in the middle of the street. The most forlorn, broken-down nag ever a man laid eyes on. I try to speak to this lost quadruped—it’s not a horse any more, not even an animal. For a moment I thought it understood. For one long moment it looked me full in the face. Then, terrified, it let out a blood-curdling neigh and took to its heels. Desolate, I made a noise like a rusty sleighbell, and slumped to the ground. Sounds of revelry filled the empty street. They fell on my ears like the din from a barracks full of drunken Soldiers. It was for me they were giving the party. And she was there, my beloved, snow-blonde, starry-eyed, forever unattainable. Queen of the Arctic. No one else regarded her thus. Only me.

  A long ago wound, this one. Not too much blood connected with it. Worse to follow. Much, much worse. Isn’t it funny how the faster they come, the more one expects them—yes, expects them!—to be bigger, bloodier, more painful, more devastating. And they always are.

  I closed the book of memory. Yes, there was music to be extracted from those old wounds. But the time was not yet. Let them’ fester awhile in the dark. Once we reached Europe I would grow a new body and a new soul. What were the sufferings of a Brooklyn boy to the inheritors of the Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, the extermination of the Albigensians, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Huguenots, the French Revolution, the never ending persecution of the Jews, the invasions of the Huns, the coming of the Turks, the rains of frogs and locusts, the unspeakable doings of the Vatican, the irruption of regicides and sex-bedeviled queens, of feeble-minded monarchs, of Robespierres and Saint Justs, of Hohenstauffens and Hohenzollerns, of rat chasers and bone crushers? What could a few soulful haemorrhoids of American vintage mean to the Raskolnikovs and Karamazovs of old Europe?

  I saw myself standing on a table top, an insignificant pouter pigeon dropping his little white pellets of pigeon shit. A table top named Europe, around which the monarchs of the soul were gathered, oblivious of the aches and pains of the New World. What could I possibly say to them in this white pouter pigeon language? What could any one reared in an atmosphere of peace, abundance and security say to the sons and daughters of martyrs? True, we had the same forbears, the identical nameless ancestors who had been torn on the rack, burned at the stake driven from pillar to post, but—the memory of their fate no longer burned in us; we had turned our backs upon this harrowing past, we had grown new shoots from the charred stump of the parental tree. Nurtured by the waters of Lethe, we had become a thankless race of ingrates, devoid of an umbilical cord, slap-happy after the fashion of syntheticos.

  Soon, dear men of Europe, we will be with you in the flesh. We are coming—with our handsome valises, our gilt-edged passports, our hundred dollar bills, our travelers’ insurance policies, our guide books, our humdrum opinions, our petty prejudices, our half-baked judgments, our posy spectacles which lead us to believe that all is well, that everything comes out right in the end, that God is Love and Mind is all. When you see us as we are, when you hear us chatter like magpies, you will know that you have lost nothing by remaining where you are. You will have no cause to envy our fresh new bodies, our rich red blood. Have pity on us who are so raw, so brittle, so vulnerable, so blisteringly new and untarnished! We wither fast…

  20.

  As the time for our departure drew close, my head full of streets, battlefields, monuments, cathedrals, Spring waxing like a Dravidian moon, heart beating wilder, dreams more proliferous, every cell in my body was shouting Hosanna. Mornings when, intoxicated by the fragrance of Spring, Mrs. Skolsky threw open her windows, Sirota’s piercing voice (Reizei, rezei!) was already summoning me. It was no longer the old familiar Sirota but a delirious muezzin sending forth canticles to the sun. I no longer cared about the meaning of his words, whether a curse or a lament, I made up my own. Accept our thanks, O nameless Being divine … ! Following him like one of the devout, my lips moving mutely to the rhythm of his words, I Swayed to and fro, rocked on my heels, fluttered my eye-lashes, splattered myself with ashes, scattered gems and diadems in all directions, genuflected,
and with the last eerie notes, rose on tip toe to fling them heavenward. Then, right arm raised, tip of forefinger lightly touching the crown of my head, I would slowly revolve about the axis of bliss, my lips making the sound of the Jew’s harp. As from a tree shaking off its wintry slumber, the butterflies swarmed from my noggin crying Hosanna, Hosanna to the Highest! Jacob I blessed and Ezekiel, and in turn Rachel, Sarah, Ruth and Esther. Oh how warming, how truly heartening, was that music drifting through the open windows! Thank you, dear landlady, I shall remember you in my dreams! Thank you, robin red breast, for flaming past this morning! Thank you, brother darkies, your day is coming! Thank you, dear Reb, I shall pray for you in some ruined synagogue! Thank you, early morning blossoms, that you should honor me with your delicate perfume! Zov, Toft, Giml, Biml … hear, hear, he is singing, the cantor of cantors! Praise be to the Lord! Glory to King David! And to Solomon resplendent in his wisdom! The sea opens before us, the eagles point the way. Yet another note, beloved cantor … a high and piercing one! Let it shatter the breast-plate of the High Priest! Let it drown the screams of the damned!

  And he did it, my wonderful, wonderful cantor cantati-bus. Bless you, O son of Israel! Bless you!

  Aren’t you slightly mad this morning?

  Yes, yes, that I am. But I could be madder. Why not? When a prisoner is released from his cell should he not go mad? I’ve served six lifetimes plus thirty-five and a half years and thirteen days. Now they release me. Pray God, it is not too late!

  I took her by the two hands and made a low bow, as if to begin the minuet.

  It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won’t you? It would be like a benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been!

  I leaned out the window and inhaled a deep draught of Spring. (It was such a morning as Shelley would have chosen for a poem.) Anything special for breakfast this morning? I turned round to face her. Just think—no more slaving, no more begging, no more cheating, no more pleading and coaxing. Free to walk, free to talk, free to think, free to dream. Free, free, free!