In the midst of these reflections Kronski reminded me in a loud voice that he had run into Sheldon. “He wanted to pay you a visit, the blinking idiot, but I put him off. . . . I think he wanted to lend you some money.”
Crazy Sheldon! Curious that I should have thought of him on my way home. Money, yes. . . I had had a hunch Sheldon would be lending me money again. I had no idea what I owed him. I never expected to pay him back—neither did he. I took what he offered because it made him happy. He was as mad as a hare, but cunning and wily, practical withal. He had fastened himself to me like a leech, for some obscure reason of his own which I never even tried to fathom.
What fascinated me about Sheldon were the grimaces he made. And the way he gurgled when he spoke. It was as though an invisible hand were strangling him. To be sure, he had had some terrible experiences—in the murderous ghetto of Cracow where he was reared. There was one incident I would never forget: it had occurred during a pogrom just before he escaped from Poland. He had rushed home in a panic during the butchering which was taking place in the street to find the room full of soldiers. His sister, who was pregnant, was lying on the floor, violated by one soldier after another. His mother and father, their arms trussed behind them, were compelled to watch this horrible performance. Sheldon, completely beside himself, had thrown himself on the soldiers and was cut down with a saber. When he came to his mother and father were dead; his sister’s body was lying naked beside them, her belly ripped open and stuffed with straw.
We were walking through Tompkins Square the night he first related this story to me. (He repeated it a number of times subsequently, always in exactly the same way, even down to the words he used. And each time my hair stood on end and a cold shiver ran down my spine.) But that first evening, on concluding the story, I observed a queer change come over him. He was making those grimaces which I mentioned. It was as if he were trying to whistle and couldn’t. His eyes, which were unusually small, sandy, inflamed, shrank to the size of two BB bullets. There was nothing to be seen between the lids but two burning pupils which bored clean through me. I had the most uncanny feeling when, grasping my arm and bringing his face close to mine, he began making a choking, gurgling sound which finally culminated in a noise very much like a peanut whistle. His emotions were so overpowering that for a few minutes, the while clutching me feverishly and pressing his face close to mine, there issued from his throat no recognizable human sound, nothing in the faintest resembling what we call speech. But what a language it was, this gurgling, hissing, choking, whistling frenzy! I couldn’t turn my face away, even if I had wanted to; nor could I break his grip, because he had me in a vise. I wondered how long it would last, and would he throw a fit afterwards. But no!—when the emotion had subsided he began to talk in a calm, low voice, in a most matter-of-fact tone, indeed, quite as if nothing had occurred. We had resumed our stride and were making for the other end of the park. He was talking about the jewels which he had so cleverly swallowed, the value that had been put upon them, the way the emeralds and the rubies sparkled, how economically he lived, the insurance policies he sold in his spare time, and other seemingly unrelated facts and incidents.
He related these things, as I say, in an unnaturally subdued vein, in an almost monotonous tone of voice, except that, now and then, when he came to the end of a sentence, he would raise his voice and end unintentionally on an interrogation point. Meanwhile, however, his manner was undergoing a drastic change. He was becoming, as best I can explain it, lynxlike. All that he was narrating seemed directed towards some invisible presence. He was only using me, as a listener, so it seemed, to make known in a sly, insinuating fashion things which this “other” person, present but invisible, might construe in his or her own way. “Sheldon is not a fool,” he was saying in this oblique, glancing language. “Sheldon has not forgotten certain little tricks which were played on him. Sheldon is behaving like a gentleman now, very comme il faut, but he is not asleep . . . no, Sheldon is always on the qui vive. Sheldon can play the fox when he needs to. Sheldon can wear nice clothes, like everybody else, and behave most courteously. Sheldon is amiable, always ready to be of service. Sheldon is kind to little children, even to Polish children. Sheldon does not ask for anything. Sheldon is very quiet, very calm, very well-behaved . . . BUT BEWARE!!!” And then to my surprise Sheldon whistled . . . a long, clear whistle which was intended, I have no doubt, as a warning to the invisible one. Beware the day! It was as clear as that, his whistle. Beware, because Sheldon is preparing something superdiabolical, something which the clumsy brain of a Polack could never imagine or invent. Sheldon has not been idle all these years. . . .
The money lending had come about quite naturally. It began that evening over a cup of coffee. As usual I had only five or ten cents in my pocket and was therefore obliged to let Sheldon take the check. The idea of the employment manager being without spending money was so inconceivable to Sheldon that for a moment I feared he would pawn all his jewels.
“Five dollars will be enough, Sheldon,” said I, “if you insist on lending me something.”
An expression of disgust came over Sheldon’s face. “Oh no, oh no-O-O!” he exclaimed in a shrill, grating voice which rose almost to a whistle. “Sheldon will never give five dollars. No-oo, Mr. Miller, Sheldon will give fifty dollars!”
And by God, with that he did fish out fifty dollars, in fives and singles. Again he put on his lynxlike air, looking beyond me as he doled the money out, and mumbling something between his teeth about showing someone what sort of man he, Sheldon, was.
“But Sheldon, I’ll be broke again tomorrow,” I said, pausing to see what effect this would produce.
Sheldon smiled—a cagey, cunning smile, as if he were sharing some great secret with me.
“Then Sheldon will give you another fifty dollars tomorrow,” he said, bringing the words out with a queer hissing effect.
“I have no idea when you will get the money back,” I then informed him.
In answer to this Sheldon produced three greasy bankbooks from his inside pocket. The deposits totaled over two thousand dollars. From his vest pockets he extracted a few rings whose stones glittered like the authentic thing.
“This is nothing,” he said. “Sheldon is not telling all.”
This was the beginning of our relationship, a rather strange one for the employment manager of a cosmococcic corporation. I wondered sometimes if other employment managers enjoyed these advantages. When I met with them occasionally at luncheons I felt more like a messenger boy than a personnel manager. I could never muster that dignity and self-importance in which they appeared to be perpetually enshrouded. They never seemed to look me in the eye when I spoke, but always at my baggy trousers, my run-down shoes, my torn, soiled shirt or the holes in my hat. If I told them an innocent little story they made so much of it that I was embarrassed. They were tremendously impressed, for example, when I told them about a certain messenger in the Broad Street office who, while waiting for his calls, would read Dante, Homer and Thomas Aquinas in the original. They didn’t wait to hear that he had been a professor once in a university in Bologna, that he had tried to commit suicide because he had lost his wife and three children in a railroad accident, that he had lost his memory and had arrived in America with another man’s passport, and that only after he had been working as a messenger for six months had he recovered his identity. That he had found the work agreeable, that he preferred to remain a messenger, that he wished to remain unknown—these things would have sounded too fantastic for their ears. All they could seize and marvel at was the fact that a “messenger,” in uniform, was able to read the classics in the original. Now and then I would borrow a ten-spot from one of them, after relating one of these amusing incidents, never intending to repay of course. I felt compelled to extract some little token from them—for my services as entertainer. And what hemming and hawing they resorted to before coughing up these trivial sums! What a contrast to the easy touches I made amo
ng the “goofy” messengers!
Reflections of this order always excited me to the breaking point. Ten minutes of introspective reverie and I was bursting to write a book. I thought of Mona. If only for her sake I ought to begin. And where would I begin? In this room which was like the lobby of an insane asylum? Begin with Kronski looking over my shoulder?
Somewhere I had read recently about an abandoned city of Burma, the ancient capital of a region where, in the compass of a hundred miles, there once flourished eight thousand thriving temples. The whole area was now empty of inhabitants, had been so for a thousand years or more. Only a few lone priests, probably half-crazed, were now to be found among the empty temples. Serpents and bats and owls infested the sacred edifices; at night the jackals howled amidst the ruins.
Why should this picture of desolation cause me such painful depression? Why should eight thousand empty, ruined temples awaken such anguish? People die, races disappear, religions fade away: it is in the order of things. But that something of beauty should remain, and be powerless to affect, powerless to attract us, was an enigma which weighed me down. For I had not even begun to build! In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another. In some freakish way I and the goofy messengers who were to aid me were prowling about the abandoned places of the spirit like the jackals which howled at night. We wandered amidst the halls of an ethereal edifice, a dream stupa, which would be abandoned before it could take earthly shape. In Burma the invader had been responsible for driving the spirit of man into the ground. It had happened over and over in the history of man and it was explicable. But what prevented us, the dreamers of this continent, from giving form and substance to our fabulous edifices? The race of visionary architects was as good as extinct. The genius of man had been canalized and directed into other channels. So it was said. I could not accept it. I have looked at the separate stones, the girders, the portals, the windows which even in buildings are like the eyes of the soul; I have looked at them as I have looked at separate pages of these books, and I have seen one architecture informing the lives of our people, be it in book, in law, in stone, in custom; I saw that it was created (seen first in the mind) then objectified, given light, air and space, given purpose and significance, given a rhythm which would rise and fall, a growth from seed to flourishing tree, a decline from shriveled leaf and branch to seed again, and a compost to nourish the seed. I saw this continent as other continents before and after: creations in every sense of the word, including the very catastrophes which would make their existence forgotten. . . .
After Kronski and Ghompal had retired I felt so wide awake, so stimulated by the thoughts which were racing through my head that I felt impelled to go for a long walk. As I was putting on my things I looked at myself in the mirror. I made that whistling grimace of Sheldon’s and felicitated myself on my powers of mimicry. Once upon a time I had thought I might make a good clown. There was a chap in school who passed as my twin brother; we were very close to one another and later, when we had graduated, we formed a club of twelve which we called the Xerxes Society. We two possessed all the initiative—the others were just so much slag and driftwood. In desperation sometimes George Marshall and I would perform for the others, an impromptu clowning which kept the others in stitches. Later I used to think of these moments as having quite a tragic quality. The dependency of the others was really pathetic: it was a foretaste of the general inertia and apathy which I was to encounter all through life. Thinking of George Marshall, I began to make more faces; I did it so well that I began to get a little frightened of myself. For suddenly I remembered the day when for the first time in my life I looked into the mirror and realized that I was gazing at a stranger. It was after I had been to the theater with George Marshall and MacGregor. George Marshall had said something that night which disturbed me profoundly. I was angry with him for his stupidity, but I couldn’t deny that he had put his finger on a sore spot. He had said something which made me realize that our twinship was over, that in fact we would become enemies henceforth. And he was right, though the reasons he had given were false. From that day forth I began to ridicule my bosom friend George Marshall. I wanted to be the opposite of him in every way. It was like the splitting of a chromosome.
George Marshall remained in the world, with it, of it; he took root and grew like a tree, and there was no doubt but that he had found his place and with it a relatively full measure of happiness. But as I looked in the mirror that night, disowning my own image, I knew that what George Marshall had predicted about my future was only superficially correct. George Marshall had never really understood me; the moment he suspected I was different he had renounced me.
I was still looking at myself as these memories flitted through my head. My face had grown sad and thoughtful. I was no longer looking at my image but at the image of a memory of myself at another moment—when sitting on a stoop one night listening to a Hindu “boy” named Tawde. Tawde too had said something that night which had provoked in me a profound disturbance. But Tawde had said it as a friend. He was holding my hand, the way Hindus do. A passer-by looking at us might have thought we were making love. Tawde was trying to make me see things in a different light. What baffled him was that I was “good at heart” and yet. . . I was creating sorrow all about me. Tawde wanted me to be true to myself, that self which he recognized and accepted as my “true” self. He seemed to have no awareness of the complexity of my nature, or if he did he attached no importance to it. He didn’t understand why I should be dissatisfied with my position in life, particularly when I was doing so much good. That one could be thoroughly disgusted with being a mere instrument of good was unthinkable to him. He didn’t realize that I was only a blind instrument, that I was merely obeying the law of inertia, and that I hated inertia even if it meant being good.
I left Tawde that night in a state of despair. I loathed the thought of being surrounded by dumb clucks who would hold my hand and comfort me in order to keep me in chains. A sinister gaiety came over me as I drew farther away from him; instead of going home I went instinctively to the furnished room where the waitress lived with whom I was carrying on a romantic affair. She came to the door in her nightshirt, begging me not to go upstairs with her because of the hour. We went inside, in the hallway, and leaned against the radiator to keep warm. In a few minutes I had it out and was giving it to her as best I could in that strained position. She was trembling with fear and pleasure. When it was over she reproached me for being inconsiderate. “Why do you do these things?” she whispered, snuggled close against me. I ran off, leaving her standing at the foot of the stairs with a bewildered expression. As I raced through the street a phrase repeated itself over and over: “Which is the true self?”
It was this phrase which accompanied me now, racing through the morbid streets of the Bronx. Why was I racing? What was driving me on at this pace? I slowed down, as if to let the demon overtake me. . . .
If you persist in throttling your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms. You will always be able to say with perfect sincerity: “I don’t know what I want to do in life.” You can push yourself clean through the filament of life and come out at the wrong end of the telescope, seeing everything beyond you, out of grasp, and diabolically twisted. From then on the game’s up. Whichever direction you take you will find yourself in a hall of mirrors; you will race like a madman, searching for an exit, to find that you are surrounded only by distorted images of your own sweet self.
What I disliked most in George Marshall, in Kronski, in Tawde and the incalculable hosts which they represented, was their surface seriousness. The truly serious person is gay, almost nonchalant. I despised people who, because they lacked their own proper ballast, took on the problems of the wo
rld. The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them. I am speaking of the great majority, not of the emancipated few who, having thought things through, are privileged to identify themselves with all humanity and thus enjoy that greatest of all luxuries: service.
There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in—work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play, and which just because it has no raison d’être other than itself is the supreme motivating power in life. Has anyone ever said that God created the universe in order to provide work for Himself? By a chain of circumstances having nothing to do with reason or intelligence I had become like the others—a drudge. I had the comfortless excuse that by my labors I was supporting a wife and child. That it was a flimsy excuse I knew, because if I were to drop dead on the morrow they would go on living somehow or other. To stop everything, and play at being myself, why not? The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning—a completely fatuous, egocentric notion!—was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all.
The world would only begin to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became—myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it till death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it “life.” If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and the end-all, you got a blank look for answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, “the plugs in harness,” had no time for such idle questions. “You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?” This query, which was supposed to be a stopgap, and which had already been answered, if not in the absolute negative at least in a disturbingly relative negative by those who knew, was a clue to all the other questions which followed in a veritable Euclidean suite. From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity—creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life—not the simulacrum which those about me worshiped.