“All right, let’s drop it. But stop talking about her, will you? Then I won’t say anything to hurt you.”
Though she hadn’t explicitly asked me not to visit The Iron Cauldron I kept away out of consideration for her wishes. I suspected that Anastasia spent much of her time there daily, that during Mona’s swings the two were always together somewhere. In roundabout ways I would hear of their visits to the museums and art galleries, to the studios of Village artists, of their expeditions to the waterfront, where Anastasia made sketches of boats and skyline, of the hours they spent at the library doing research. In a way the change was good for Mona. Gave her something new to think about. She had little knowledge of painting, and Anastasia apparently was delighted to act as her mentor. There were veiled references occasionally to the portrait Anastasia intended to make of Mona.
She had never done a realistic portrait of anyone, it seems, and she was especially reluctant to do a resemblance of Mona.
There were days when Anastasia was incapable of doing a thing, when she was prostrate and had to be nursed like an infant. Any trifling event could bring them on, these fits of malaise. Sometimes they occurred because Mona had spoken foolishly or irreverently of one of Anastasia’s beloved idols. Modigliani and El Greco, for example, were painters about whom she would allow no one, not even Mona, to say the wrong thing. She was very fond of Utrillo, too, but she did not venerate him. He was “a lost soul,” like herself: still on the “human” level. Whereas Giotto, Grünewald, the Chinese and the Japanese masters, these were on a different livel, represented a higher order. (Not so bad, her taste!) She had no respect whatever for American artists. I gathered. Except for John Marin, whom she described as limited but profound. What almost endeared her to me was the discovery that she always carried with her Alice in Wonderland and the Tao Tê Ching. Later she was to include a volume of Rimbaud. But of that later.…
I was still making the rounds, or going through the motions. Now and then I sold a set of books without trying. I worked at it only four or five hours a day, always ready to knock off when dinner time came. Usually I would look over the cards and choose a prospect who lived a good distance away, in some run down suburb, some bleak and barren hole in New Jersey or out on Long Island. I did this partly to kill time and partly to get completely off the track. Always, when heading for some dingy spot (which only a dotty book salesman would think of visiting!), I found that I would be assailed by the most unexpected memories of dear, beloved places I had known as a boy. It was a sort of inverse law of association at work. The more drab and commonplace the milieu, the more bizarre and wonderful were these unbidden associations. I could almost wager that if I headed of a morning for Hackensack or Canarsie, or some rabbit hole on Staten Island, by evening I would find myself at Sheepshead Bay, or Bluepoint, or Lake Pocotopaug. If I didn’t have the carfare to make a long haul I would hitchhike, trusting to luck that I would run into someone—“some friendly face”—who would stake me to a meal and the fare back. I rode with the tide. It didn’t matter where I ended up nor when I got home, because Mona would be sure to arrive after me. I was writing things down in my head again, not feverishly as before but calmly, evenly, like a reporter or correspondent who had oodles of time and a generous expense account. It was wonderful to let things happen as they would. Now and then sailing along on even keel, I would blow into some outlandish town, pick a shop at random—plumber or undertaker, it made no difference—and launch into my sales talk. I hadn’t the least thought of making a sale, nor even of “keeping my hand in,” as they say. No, I was merely curious to see the effect my words would have on a complete nobody. I had the feeling that I was a man descended from another planet. If the poor victim felt disinclined to discuss the merits of our loose leaf encyclopedia I would talk his language, whatever it was, even if it were nothing but cold corpses. Like that I often found myself lunching with a congenial soul with whom I hadn’t a thing in common. The farther away from myself I got the more certain I was to have an inspiration. Suddenly, perhaps in the midst of a sentence, the decision would be made and off I’d scoot. Off searching for that spot which I had known in the past, a very definite, a very marvelous past. The trick was to get back to that precious spot and see if I could reconstitute the being I once was. A queer game—and full of surprises. Sometimes I returned to our room as a little boy dressed in men’s clothes. Yes, sometimes I was little Henry through and through, thinking like him, feeling like him, acting like him.
Often, talking to utter strangers out there on the fringe of the world, there would suddenly leap to mind an image of the two of them, Mona and ’Stasia, parading through the Village or swinging through the revolving door of a museum with those crazy puppets in their arms. And then I would say a curious thing to myself—sotto voce, of course. I would say, and smile wanly as I did so: “And where do I come in?” Moving around on the bleak periphery, among zombies and dodoes, I had gotten the idea that I was cut off. Always, in closing a door, I had the impression that the door was locked behind me, that I would have to find another way to get back. Get back where?
There was something ridiculous and grotesque about this double image which obtruded at the most unexpected moments. I saw the two of them garbed in outlandish fashion—’Stasia in her overalls and hobnailed boots and Lady Precious Stream in her fluttering cape, her hair streaming loose like a mane. They were always talking simultaneously, and about utterly different things; they made strange grimaces and wild gesticulations; they walked with two utterly different rhythms, one like an auk, the other like a panther.
Whenever I went deep enough into my childhood I was no longer outside, on the fringe, but snugly inside, like a pip in the fleshy heart of a ripe piece of fruit. I might be standing in front of Annie Meinken’s candy shop, in the old 14th Ward, my nose pressed against the windowpane, my eyes aglitter at the sight of some chocolate-covered soldiers. That abstract noun, “the world,” hadn’t yet penetrated my consciousness. Everything was real, concrete, individuated, but neither fully named nor wholly delineated. I was and things were. Space was limitless, time was not yet. Annie Meinken was a person who always leaned far over the counter to put things in my hand, who patted me on the head, who smiled at me, who said I was such a good little fellow, and sometimes ran out into the street to kiss me goodbye, though we lived only a few doors away.
I honestly think that at times, out there on the fringe, when I got very quiet and still, I half expected someone to behave towards me exactly as Annie Meinken used to. Maybe I was running off to those faraway places of my childhood just to receive again that piece of candy, that smile, that embarrassing parting kiss. I was indeed an idealist. An incurable one. (An idealist is one who wants to turn the wheels back. He remembers too well what was given him; he doesn’t think of what he himself might give. The world sours imperceptibly, but the process begins virtually from the moment one thinks in terms of “the world.”
Strange thoughts, strange meanderings—for a book salesman. In my portfolio was locked the key to all human knowledge. Presumably. And wisdom, like Winchester, only forty miles away. Nothing in all the world so dead as this compendium of knowledge. To spiel it off about the foraminifera, about the infrared rays, about the bacteria that lie bedded in every cell—what a baboon I must have been! Naturally a Picodiribibi would have done far better! So might a dead jackass with a phonograph in its guts. To read in the subway, or on an open trolley, about Prust the founder of Prussia—what a profitless pastime! Far better, if one had to read, to listen to that madman who said: “How sweet it is to hate one’s native land and eagerly await its annihilation.”
Yes, in addition to the dummies, the bindings, and all the other paraphernalia which crammed my brief case, I usually carried a book with me, a book so removed from the tenor of my daily life that it was more like a tattoo mark on the sole of a convict’s left foot. “WE HAVE NOT YET DECIDED THE QUESTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AND YOU WANT TO EAT!” A sentence like this j
umping out of a book in the dreary wasteland could decide the whole course of my day. I can see myself all over again slamming the book shut, jumping up like a startled buck, and exclaiming aloud: “Where in hell are we?” And then bolting. It might have been the edge of a swamp where they had let me off, it might have been the beginning of one of those interminable rows of all-look-alike suburban homes or the very portals of an insane asylum. No matter—on, on, head down, jaws working feverishly, grunts, squeals of delight, ruminations, discoveries, illuminations. Because of that blitz phrase. Especially the “and you want to eat!” part of it. It was ages before I discovered who had originated this marvelous exclamation. All I knew then, all that mattered, was that I was back in Russia, that I was with kindred spirits, that I was completely possessed by such an esoteric proposition as the debatable existence of God.
Years later, did I say? Why yes—only yesterday, so to speak, I found out who the author was. At the same time I learned that another man, a contemporary, had written thus of his nation, the great Russian nation: “We belong to the number of those nations which, so to speak, do not enter into the structure of mankind but exist only in order to teach the world an important lesson of some sort.”
But I am not going to speak of yesterday or the day before yesterday. I am going to speak of a time which has no beginning nor end, a time moreover which with all the other kinds of time that filled the empty spaces of my days.…
The way of ships, and of men in general, is the zigzag path. The drunkard moves in curves, like the planets. But the man who has no destination moves in a time and space continuum which is uniquely his own and in which God is ever present. “For the time being”—inscrutable phrase!—he is always there. There with the grand cosmocrator, so to speak. Clear? Very well, it is Monday, let us say. “And you want to eat?” Instanter the stars begin to chime, the reindeer paw the turf; their blue icicles sparkle in the noonday sun. Whooshing it through the Nevsky Prospekt, I make my way to the inner circle, the brief case under my arm. In my hand is a little bag of candy, a gift from Annie Meinken. A solemn question has just been propounded:
“We have not yet decided the question of the existence of God.…”
It is at this point I always enter. I’m on my own time now. God’s time, in other words. Which is always “for the time being.” To hear me you would think I were a member of the Holy Synod—the Holy Philharmonic Synod. It isn’t necessary for me to tune in: I’ve been in tune since the dawn of time. Utter clarity is what marks my performance. I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.
The comrades are relaxed and at ease. No bomb will go off until I give the order. On my right is Dostoevski; on my left the Emperor Anathema. Every member of the group has distinguished himself in some spectacular manner. I am the only one “without portfolio.” I am the Uitlander; I hail from “the fringe,” that is to say, from the trouble-bubble cauldron.
“Comrades, it is said that a problem confronts us.…” (I always begin with this stock phrase.) I look about me, calm, self-possessed, before launching into my plaidoyer. “Comrades, let us rivet our most concentrated attention for a moment on that wholly ecumenical question——”
“Which is?” barks the Emperor Anathema.
“Which is nothing less than this: If there were no God, would we be here?”
Above the cries of Rot! and Rubbish! I follow with ease the sound of my own voice intoning the sacred texts buried in my heart. I am at ease because I have nothing to prove. I have only to recite what I learned by rote in off moments. That we are together and privileged to discuss the existence of God, this in itself is conclusive evidence for me that we are basking in the sunshine of His presence. I do not speak “as if” He were present, I speak “because” He is present. I am back in that eternal sanctuary where the the word “food” always comes up. I am back because of that.
“And you want to eat?”
I address the comrades passionately now. “Why not?” I begin. “Do we insult our Maker by eating what He has provided for us? Do you think He will vanish because we fill our bellies? Eat, I beg you. Eat heartily! The Lord our God has all time in which to reveal Himself. You pretend that you wish to decide the matter of His existence. Useless, dear comrades, it was decided long ago, before there even was a world. Reason alone informs us that if there be a problem there must be something real which brings it to birth. It is not for us to decide whether or not God exists, it is for God to say whether or not we exist” (Dog! Have you anything to say?” I shouted in the Emperor Anathema’s ear.) “Whether to eat or not before deciding the issue, is that, I ask you, a metaphysical question? Does a hungry man debate whether he is to eat or not? We are all famished: we hunger and thirst for that which gave us life, else we would not be assembled here. To imagine that by giving a mere Yes or No the grand problem will be settled for eternity is sheer madness. We have not.…” (I paused and turned to the one on my right. “And you, Fyodor Mihailovich, have you nothing to say?) We have not come together to settle an absurd problem. We are here, comrades, because outside this room, in the world, as they call it, there is no place in which to mention the Holy Name. We are the chosen ones, and we are united ecumenically. Does God wish to see children suffer? Such a question may be asked here. Is evil necessary? That too may be asked. It may also be asked whether we have the right to expect a Paradise here and now, or whether eternality is preferable to immortality. We may even debate whether Our Lord Jesus Christ is of our divine nature only or of two consubstantially harmonious natures, human and divine. We have all suffered more than is usual for mortal beings to endure. We have all achieved an appreciable degree of emancipation. Some of you have revealed the depths of the human soul in a manner and to a degree never before heard of. We are all living outside our time, the forerunners of a new era, of a new order of mankind. We know that nothing is to be hoped for on the present world level. The end of historical man is upon us. The future will be in terms of eternity, and of freedom, and of love. The resurrection of man will be ushered in with our aid; the dead will rise from their graves clothed in radiant flesh and sinew, and we shall have communion, real everlasting communion, with all who once were: with those who made history and with those who had no history. Instead of myth and fable we shall have everlasting reality. All that now passes for science will fall away; there will be no need to search for the clue to reality because all will be real and durable, naked to the eye of the soul, transparent as the waters of Shiloh. Eat, I beg you, and drink to your heart’s content. Taboos are not of God’s making. Nor murder and lust. Nor jealousy and envy. Though we are assembled here as men, we are bound through the divine spirit. When we take leave of one another we shall return to the world of chaos, to the realm of space which no amount of activity can exhaust. We are not of this world, nor are we yet of the world to come, except in thought and spirit. Our place is on the threshold of eternity; our function is that of prime movers. It is our privilege to be crucified in the name of freedom. We shall water our graves with our own blood. No task can be too great for us to assume. We are the true revolutionaries since we do not baptize with the blood of others but with our own blood, freely shed. We shall create no new covenants, impose no new laws, establish no new government. We shall permit the dead to bury the dead. The quick and the dead will soon be separated. Life eternal is rushing back to fill the empty cup of sorrow. Man will rise from his bed of ignorance and suffering with a song on his lips. He will stand forth in all the radiance of his godhood. Murder in every form will disappear forever. For the time being.…”
The moment this inscrutable phrase rose to my lips the inner music, the concordance, ceased. I was back in double rhythm again, aware of what I was doing, analyzing my thoughts, my motives, my deeds. I could hear Dostoevski speaking, but I was no longer there with him, I was getting only the overtones. What’s more, I could shut him off whenever I pleased. I was no longer running in that parallel
timeless time. Now the world was indeed empty, drab, woebegone. Chaos and cruelty ran hand in hand. I was as grotesque and ridiculous now as those two lost sisters who were presumably running through the Village with puppets in their arms.
By the time night falls, and I start to trek it back, an overpowering loneliness has gripped me. It does not surprise me in the least to find, on returning to the room, a telephone message from Mona saying that her dear “friend” is ill and that she must stay with her the night. Tomorrow it will be another story, and the day after another.
Everything is happening to ‘Stasia at once. One day she is ordered to move because she talks too loudly in her sleep; another day, in another room, she is visited by a ghost and forced to flee in the night. On another occasion a drunkard attempts to rape her. Or else she is grilled by a plain-clothes man at three in the morning. It is inevitable that she should think of herself as a marked woman. She takes to sleeping in the daytime and roaming the streets by night; she passes long hours at the cafeteria which never closes, writing her poems on the marble-topped table, a sandwich in her hand and a plate of untouched food beside her. Some days she is the Slav, speaking with a genuine Slavic accent: other days she is the boy-girl from Montana’s snowy peaks, the nymph who must straddle a horse, even if only in Central Park. Her talk becomes more and more incoherent, and she knows it, but in Russian, as she always says it, “nothing matters.” At times she refuses to use the toilet—insists on doing her little jobs in the chamber pot, which of course she forgets to empty. As for the portrait of Mona which she had begun, it now resembles the work of a maniac. (It is Mona herself who confesses this.) She is almost beside herself, Mona. Her friend is deteriorating under her own eyes. But it will pass. All will be well again, provided she stands by her faithfully, nurses her, soothes her tortured spirit, wipes her ass, if need be. But she must never allow her to feel that she is deserted. What matter, she asks, if she has to remain three or four nights a week with her friend? Is not Anastasia the all-in-all?