A Change of Skin (39 page)

Piaski

Mauthausen

Trostinec

Oranienburg

Treblinka

Auschwitz

Bergen-Belsen

Buchenwald

Dachau

Raasika

Terezin

There are no tombstones standing erect and worn, covered by moss and lichen. The name he seeks is not there. And you, embracing Franz in the corridor of the hotel, stopped on the Long Island highway without hearing or seeing the cars passing and finally opened your eyes, shivering with your hands deep in the pockets of your raincoat and the brim of your hat down. You lost all contact with reality and saw only the vertical stones of Mount Zion cemetery, the gray tombstones crowded together, the graves squeezed against each other, a plain of graves stretching all the way to the horizon and eventually becoming lost on this autumn afternoon against the skyland of Manhattan across the river; and in Queens this cemetery was the model or anticipation, perhaps the specter of the city and when you returned home you sat on the old couch with its worn velvet and the crocheted backs and armrests and you thought about Jake, looked at your hands, stretched them out, twitched them, and thought about Jake while your hands sought something to protect, cover, conceal.

“Why are we alive?”

And in the hotel corridor in front of Isabel's room you hugged Franz and did not hear the voices, violent, imploring, of the two Mexicans locked behind the door. You smelled Franz's sour sweat. He seemed not to notice you; he was intent on his eavesdropping. You could safely murmur that it need never be mentioned, that you had promised, that no one should ever have to be taken by night, in a taxi, to that house beyond Avenida Ribera de San Cosme, and Javier, invisible behind the door, was looking at you beseechingly, with his hands telling you not to go on, not to speak those words which you would never need to speak but which finally you would be unable to hold back, betraying with your utterance not Javier or the promise you had made him but yourself. For we have not yet reached the state of grace, Dragoness; we must still go through crises and make exaggerated, emotional gestures in order to convince ourselves that we are ourselves. Yes, you know, all right. And as you move away from Franz you tell yourself that both he and you know why you have sought each other out and made love together: it's because you, like him, can keep a secret: how to reveal the consequences of behavior without mentioning the behavior itself.

You walk away, alone, down the hotel corridor, you return to your room and Franz remains there as if he had not heard you or touched you, his ear against Isabel's door. You walked alone and satisfied, for you were telling yourself that all that matters is the external, swift, always changing surface of the world, that throb of the real which denies our private and hidden sordidness, which drowns out our stories, old stories, ever repeating, dead without knowing it before they are born.

*   *   *

Δ   Becky moved away from the door without looking at anyone, neither at you, who were staring at your hands, nor at Gershon, standing beside the window with his hat on, staring also, down at the empty street, at the iron fire escape beyond the gauze window curtain; without looking at either of you, Becky said: “It is all forbidden.”

She took off her hat. Gershon did not turn. She went on: “And who told me that things would be this way, that we should never get out of this city where they shut us up? That was not the promise. They promised us that the walls would come down. You, Betele, give me the duster.”

You got up from the sofa and brought her the feather duster from the closet.

“Here, Mama.”

She snatched it without looking at you. Her eyes were very narrow, almost yellow, old and secretive, set deep in the broken porcelain that clung to the bones beneath them. She began to dust. The clock, the shelves, the sofa, the knobs of the doors, the sills of the windows.

“Maybe some day we will be able to leave the city. No one has lived in cities so long as we have. Sometimes I can't go to sleep, trying to think of someone in our family who ever lived in the country. You know one? Nor me, neither. There is not one. We live like animals, crowded together in a herd. But we're alone. Isn't that funny, we lived piled up on top of each other, yet alone, like lepers. Jake was an alien. My son was an alien. Like a beggar he lived here. Like a schnorrer, yes, yes. I remember him like he was an old man sitting outside the synagogue. Oh, Jake, so much you have learned! Look, you have let your hair and your beard grow. With your hand stretched out, you are asking for alms. Oh, Jake, Jake, with such insolence you receive those pennies as you sit in your wheelchair that is a throne. Oh, Jake, my son, so much you have learned! Come here and let me kiss you, little boy. To the man who gives you money you do a great favor. You save him. Because of you he is nearer the Lord's heaven. And at parties I push your chair and all of them you surprise by laughing and singing and dancing. You're a little clown, Jake, you're very funny. And you won't be a renegade. That I won't allow. You'll wear your hair and your fine long black coat and your boots and your beard when you grow up. And you'll be afraid to go out on the street, to go beyond the streets with me, for you know they can kill you, Jake. No, don't dare to go out. Stay here with me, little darling. I'll tell you something. You can escape only to another city and it will be just the same. Wherever you go, always the same. Do you think I can't understand? My poor son, a servant. He is a servant in his blood. My poor little son.”

Gershon took off his hat and lit a cigarette.

“Becky. Be quiet now.”

“Is that you? Can that be you?” She did not look at him. She went on dusting. “And do you know that there is no escape?”

“Yes, there's escape,” Gershon said loudly. “He has done it.”

“No.” Her smile was as distant as the smile of a statue. “He knows that here we were born and here we must die. And if he runs away, how should he hide his shame for having abandoned us? He can't escape from us. I will go every day alone and visit his cradle and tell him that. How should he run away? And if you two don't want to go with me, I go alone.”

“Mother, Mother, please be quiet.” You looked at her sadly, knowing that she would not look at you, that she would never look at you again. “Leave him in peace.”

“I'm telling you, he has escaped already,” said Gershon.

“Nobody, nobody, nobody,” Becky said. She dropped the duster and waited for you to notice and retrieve it. “Nobody knows how deep this is. If they should have to admit it is so deep as it is, they would die of fear. Oh, yes, it's scary. So scary it is to be seen on the street.”

You picked up the duster.

“Swear to me that you will never let me go out.” She rushed into your arms as you held the duster to her. Very softly she said, “Your father wants I should go out on the street dressed as a prostitute. He would throw me out dressed like a whore. He would sell me on the corners. Jake, Jake, swear to me you won't let him do it.”

Gershon laughed. “Jake is invisible now. You can't see him.”

Becky looked at him and smiled. “Welcome, sir, you are welcome. The pinochle players are upstairs. Please come in. A dollar is a dollar. Schlemiel!”

“He's invisible!” Gershon raised an imaginary glass in toast. “They can't hate him now. They can't bother him. He has gone out from Egypt, you crazy old woman!”

“Sir,” said Becky, trembling as she hugged your shoulders, “sir, be gentle with me and I won't mind. Look, I can do many things. My father was a shohet who killed chickens whispering a prayer as he cut their throats. Under my pillow I have a butcher's knife hidden. Better I should warn you. But don't worry. It's a chalef, it is blessed and approved. With me you are safe. And don't you think it is very exciting to sleep with a woman who has a ritual knife under her pillow?”

Gershon dropped on the couch. “You don't believe anything. Never have you believed anything. You have done that just to bother me. You want to make our life together hard.”

“If they shouldn't see him, how can they hate him?” whispered Becky. You pushed her away and saw on her face a look that would never recognize you again. Gershon, fallen on the couch, whispered, “Yes, invisible, invisible,” For the last time you stared at her transparent face where the eyes blinked off the seconds and the nervous, coated tongue came out and wet the lips you did not dare kiss. Gershon laughed in a low voice:

“And we, what right have we to be alive yet?”

*   *   *

Δ   Hold fast to your decade of the thirties, Dragoness, the decade of your youth, and lie to yourself by saying that the seed of everything since lay then in John Garfield, the first existential hero. Perhaps it did, but that is hindsight and the fact is that at the time you got a much bigger charge from Paul Muni breaking rocks in
I Am a Fugitive.
And you know it. But the real weakness was that you and Javier and all your crowd of the thirties wanted your opium trip to be clean and safe and standard. That was where you slipped up, for you should have wanted risk, confusion, a crazy mixture of things. Leave standard dreams, that is, orthodoxy, to those who play it safe and make others play it safe: for how long are those who free us going to go on feeling themselves free once they seize power by the horns? That's precisely when orthodoxy sets in, and then we have to come up with a fresh heresy or the dance is over. I tell you, Dragoness, every dogma must continuously generate its corresponding heresy or the illusion of freedom, which is perhaps as close as we can come to genuine freedom, can't be maintained. And here as in all things political the man of wisdom is old Machiavelli, who seems cynical because he refuses to tell us fairy tales but is never foolish. Let us go on plowing the sea, as our grandfather Bolivar directed before becoming a statue, for we know that if the Banana Republicans are not allowed to moralize, they feel themselves oppressed, or, worse, are left with nothing at all to do with themselves. Machiavelli laid it on the line: politics is not concerned in the least with ethics, not because ethics should be scorned but simply because if one mixes politics and morality the nature of each is removed and the result is thorough confusion. And each time our munificent governors toss us a bouquet of flowers, let's remember Mack the Veil (and the shark always has shiny teeth though the moon may be beaming over Soho) and keep clearly in mind that politics is the human struggle for relative power, not for a final idealistic Utopia, and that to govern means to keep your subjects well subjected so that they won't attempt to grab your power. The old Florentine knew all the answers: men scorn what they possess, praise what has established itself, condemn the present, long for what is yet to come. Are they contented? Show me just one. No, but the point is that although discontented, they are passive and unless someone stirs them up they are entirely uninterested in power. It seems to me that just as your Yankee janizaries never examine Jefferson, so those on the other side ignore Marx, and my temporary Montezuma pays no attention to the constituents of the Seventeen; and when Louis the Fourteenth lifts his arms and moans, “Je vous ai compris,” he is referring to friendly Mack and not to Montesquieu, who is hoarding his sous in a stocking. Machiavelli whispers, Dragoness, that those who are ruled ask only for security, peace, and quiet, the chance to take care of their little private affairs, and the trick is not to irritate them while continuing to serve them up glorious speeches, refrigerators on the time-payment plan, vacations with pay. That done, they won't even dream of barricades and guillotines. Mack the Veil is too often abused. Do you think he was describing abstract power, cold and isolated? I tell you, he knew what he was talking about, and before the rule of the fox, be he a fox of many or of one, there is always plenty of dialectic, as my Cuban cousins who happen to be at bat now would put it: for virtue leads to peace, peace to idleness, idleness to rebellion, rebellion to destruction, destruction to order, and order to virtue, and here we go again in the hall of many mirrors. What Mackie suggests is simply that we understand what makes the merry-go-round go around, so that we can take advantage of our chances when they present themselves. The ruler need not be either cruel or benevolent, humane or tyrannous, or anything at all except what the times advise. And on the other side of the fence, in the pasture of the sheep, every one of us must be aware of the real nature of the situation, not lost in foggy dreams; we will be free only when we can tell the yolk of the egg from the white and comprehend that mosquitoes buzz around the heads of the mighty too. Only if we stay on our toes can we achieve true freedom and make our revolution permanent no matter what may happen, or who the mammoth that may come along. But you, my Shirley Temples, all you Leftists of the thirties, waited for the apocalypse to arrive by a kind of lawful natural succession, while the fact is that the exercise of power subjects nature and almost negates it. The natural is revolution, which is why revolution cannot be withstood long. Established power is an old fox indeed, crafty at hiding and disguising the face of truth. Revolution strips men down to the soul and strips away those who resist the violence of truth. Permanent revolution is permanent heterodoxy, not a moment of illumination doomed to be isolated and condemned between two Establishments. Permanent revolution is the daily conquest of the outer limits of truth, creativity, the disorder that must always oppose the orthodox. Shake them up, Feodor Mihailovitch and Lev Davidovitch, for at this moment we have less time left than the shadows of jackals as dawn rises, and we still fail to take on color and solidity, they still hold the mirror before our noses and nothing is reflected. My kingdom for a necklace of garlic. Is that how it goes?

*   *   *

Δ   “Maybe you want something else, Lizzie? Another drink? Maybe a vanilla soda?”