Collected Stories (51 page)

“Some time ago, in the middle of the night, I heard a pounding on my door and the sound of a woman’s voice. I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying. ‘Who can it be?’ I said to myself. ‘Lilith? Namah? Machlath, the daughter of Ketev M’riri?’ Out loud, I called, ‘Madam, you are making a mistake.’ But she continued to bang on the door. Then I heard a groan and someone falling. I did not dare to open the door. I began to look for my matches, only to discover that I was holding them in my hand. Finally, I got out of bed, lit the gas lamp, and put on my dressing gown and slippers. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and my reflection scared me. My face was green and unshaven. I finally opened a door, and there stood a young woman in bare feet, wearing a sable coat over her nightgown. She was pale and her long blond hair was disheveled. ‘Madam, what’s the matter?’ I said.

“ ‘Someone just tried to kill me. I beg you, please let me in. I only want to stay in your room until daylight.’

“I wanted to ask who had tried to kill her, but I saw that she was half frozen. Most probably drunk, too. I let her in and noticed a bracelet with huge diamonds on her wrist. ‘My room is not heated,’ I told her.

“ ‘It’s better than to die in the street.’

“So there we were both of us. But what was I to do with her? I only have one bed. I don’t drink—I’m not allowed to—but a friend had given me a bottle of cognac as a gift, and I had some stale cookies. I gave her a drink and one of the cookies. The liquor seemed to revive her. ‘Madam, do you live in this building?’ I asked.

“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I live on Ujazdowskie Boulevard.’

“I could tell that she was an aristocrat. One word led to another, and I discovered that she was a countess and a widow, and that her lover lived in the building—a wild man, who kept a lion cub as a pet. He, too, was a member of the nobility, but an outcast. He had already served a year in the Citadel, for attempted murder. He could not visit her, because she lived in her mother-in-law’s house, so she came to see him. That night, in a jealous fit, he had beaten her and placed his revolver at her temple. To make a long story short, she had managed to grab her coat and run out of his apartment. She had knocked on the doors of the neighbors, but none of them would let her in, and so she had made her way to the attic.

“ ‘Madam,’ I said to her, ‘your lover is probably still looking for you. Supposing he finds you? I am no longer what one might call a knight.’

“ ‘He won’t dare make a disturbance,’ she said. ‘He’s on parole. I’m through with him for good. Have pity—please don’t put me out in the middle of the night.’

“ ‘How will you get home tomorrow?’ I asked.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of life anyhow, but I don’t want to be killed by him.’

“ ‘Well, I won’t be able to sleep in any case,’ I said. ‘Take my bed and I will rest here in this chair.’

“ ‘No. I wouldn’t do that. You are not young and you don’t look very well. Please, go back to bed and I will sit here.’

“We haggled so long we finally decided to lie down together. ‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ I assured her. ‘I am old and helpless with women.’ She seemed completely convinced.

“What was I saying? Yes, suddenly I find myself in bed with a countess whose lover might break down the door at any moment. I covered us both with the two blankets I have and didn’t bother to build the usual cocoon of odds and ends. I was so wrought up I forgot about the cold. Besides, I felt her closeness. A strange warmth emanated from her body, different from any I had known—or perhaps I had forgotten it. Was my opponent trying a new gambit? In the past few years he had stopped playing with me in earnest. You know, there is such a thing as humorous chess. I have been told that Nimzowitsch often played jokes on his partners. In the old days, Morphy was known as a chess prankster. ‘A fine move,’ I said to my adversary. ‘A masterpiece.’ With that I realized that I knew who her lover was. I had met him on the stairs—a giant of a man, with the face of a murderer. What a funny end for Jacques Kohn—to be finished off by a Polish Othello.

“I began to laugh and she joined in. I embraced her and held her close. She did not resist. Suddenly a miracle happened. I was a man again! Once, on a Thursday evening, I stood near a slaughterhouse in a small village and saw a bull and a cow copulate before they were going to be slaughtered for the Sabbath. Why she consented I will never know. Perhaps it was a way of taking revenge on her lover. She kissed me and whispered endearments. Then we heard heavy footsteps. Someone pounded on the door with his fist. My girl rolled off the bed and lay on the floor. I wanted to recite the prayer for the dying, but I was ashamed before God—and not so much before God as before my mocking opponent. Why grant him this additional pleasure? Even melodrama has its limits.

“The brute behind the door continued beating it, and I was astounded that it did not give way. He kicked it with his foot. The door creaked but held. I was terrified, yet something in me could not help laughing. Then the racket stopped. Othello had left.

“Next morning, I took the countess’s bracelet to a pawnshop. With the money I received, I bought my heroine a dress, underwear, and shoes. The dress didn’t fit, neither did the shoes, but all she needed to do was get to a taxi—provided, of course, that her lover did not waylay her on the steps. Curious, but the man vanished that night and never reappeared.

“Before she left, she kissed me and urged me to call her, but I’m not that much of a fool. As the Talmud says, ‘A miracle doesn’t happen every day.’

“And you know, Kafka, young as he was, was possessed by the same inhibitions that plague me in my old age. They impeded him in everything he did—in sex as well as in his writing. He craved love and fled from it. He wrote a sentence and immediately crossed it out. Otto Weininger was like that, too—mad and a genius. I met him in Vienna—he spouted aphorisms and paradoxes. One of his sayings I will never forget: ‘God did not create the bedbug.’ You have to know Vienna to really understand these words. Yet who did create the bedbug?

“Ah, there’s Bamberg! Look at the way he waddles along on his short legs, a corpse refusing to rest in its grave. It might be a good idea to start a club for insomniac corpses. Why does he prowl around all night? What good are the cabarets to him? The doctors gave him up years ago when we were still in Berlin. Not that it prevented him from sitting in the Romanisches Café until four o’clock in the morning, chatting with the prostitutes. Once, Granat, the actor, announced that he was giving a party—a real orgy—at his house, and among others he invited Bamberg. Granat instructed each man to bring a lady—either his wife or a friend. But Bamberg had neither wife nor mistress, and so he paid a harlot to accompany him. He had to buy her an evening dress for the occasion. The company consisted exclusively of writers, professors, philosophers, and the usual intellectual hangers-on. They all had the same idea as Bamberg—they hired prostitutes. I was there, too. I escorted an actress from Prague, whom I had known a long time. Do you know Granat? A savage. He drinks cognac like soda water, and can eat an omelette of ten eggs. As soon as the guests arrived, he stripped and began dancing madly around with the whores, just to impress his highbrow visitors. At first, the intellectuals sat on chairs and stared. After a while, they began to discuss sex. Schopenhauer said this … Nietzsche said that. Anyone who hadn’t witnessed it would find it difficult to imagine how ridiculous such geniuses can be. In the midst of it all, Bamberg was taken ill. He turned as green as grass and broke out in a sweat. ‘Jacques,’ he said, ‘I’m finished. A good place to die.’ He was having a kidney or a gall-bladder attack. I half carried him out and got him to a hospital. By the way, can you lend me a zloty?”

“Two.”

“What! Have you robbed Bank Polski?”

“I sold a story.”

“Congratulations. Let’s have supper together. You will be my guest.”

II

While we were eating, Bamberg came over to our table. He was a little man, emaciated as a consumptive, bent over and bowlegged. He was wearing patent-leather shoes, and spats. On his pointed skull lay a few gray hairs. One eye was larger than the other—red, bulging, frightened by its own vision. He leaned against our table on his bony little hands and said in his cackling voice, “Jacques, yesterday I read your Kafka’s
Castle
. Interesting, very interesting, but what is he driving at? It’s too long for a dream. Allegories should be short.”

Jacques Kohn quickly swallowed the food he was chewing. “Sit down,” he said. “A master does not have to follow the rules.”

“There are some rules even a master must follow. No novel should be longer than
War and Peace
. Even
War and Peace
is too long. If the Bible consisted of eighteen volumes, it would long since have been forgotten.”

“The Talmud has thirty-six volumes, and the Jews have not forgotten it.”

“Jews remember too much. That is our misfortune. It is two thousand years since we were driven out of the Holy Land, and now we are trying to get back in. Insane, isn’t it? If our literature would only reflect this insanity, it would be great. But our literature is uncannily sane. Well, enough of that.”

Bamberg straightened himself, scowling with the effort. With his tiny steps, he shuffled away from the table. He went over to the gramophone and put on a dance record. It was known in the writers’ club that he had not written a word in years. In his old age, he was learning to dance, influenced by the philosophy of his friend Dr. Mitzkin, the author of
The Entropy of Reason
. In this book Dr. Mitzkin attempted to prove that the human intellect is bankrupt and that true wisdom can only be reached through passion.

Jacques Kohn shook his head. “Half-pint Hamlet. Kafka was afraid of becoming a Bamberg—that is why he destroyed himself.”

“Did the countess ever call you?” I asked.

Jacques Kohn took his monocle out of his pocket and put it in place. “And what if she did? In my life, everything turns into words. All talk, talk. This is actually Dr. Mitzkin’s philosophy—man will end up as a word machine. He will eat words, drink words, marry words, poison himself with words. Come to think of it, Dr. Mitzkin was also present at Granat’s orgy. He came to practice what he preached, but he could just as well have written
The Entropy of Passion
. Yes, the countess does call me from time to time. She, too, is an intellectual, but without intellect. As a matter of fact, although women do their best to reveal the charms of their bodies, they know just as little about the meaning of sex as they do about the intellect.

“Take Madam Tschissik. What did she ever have, except a body? But just try asking her what a body really is. Now she’s ugly. When she was an actress in the Prague days, she still had something. I was her leading man. She was a tiny little talent. We came to Prague to make some money and found a genius waiting for us—
Homo sapiens
in his highest degree of self-torture. Kafka wanted to be a Jew, but he didn’t know how. He wanted to live, but he didn’t know this, either. ‘Franz,’ I said to him once, ‘you are a young man. Do what we all do.’ There was a brother I knew in Prague, and I persuaded him to go there with me. He was still a virgin. I’d rather not speak about the girl he was engaged to. He was sunk to the neck in the bourgeois swamp. The Jews of his circle had one ideal—to become Gentiles, and not Czech Gentiles but German Gentiles. To make it short, I talked him into the adventure. I took him to a dark alley in the former ghetto and there was the brothel. We went up the crooked steps. I opened the door and it looked like a stage set: the whores, the pimps, the guests, the madam. I will never forget that moment. Kafka began to shake, and pulled at my sleeve. Then he turned and ran down the steps so quickly I was afraid he would break a leg. Once on the street, he stopped and vomited like a schoolboy. On the way back, we passed an old synagogue, and Kafka began to speak about the golem. Kafka believed in the golem, and even that the future might well bring another one. There must be magic words that can turn a piece of clay into a living being. Did not God, according to the Cabala, create the world by uttering holy words? In the beginning was the Logos.

“Yes, it’s all one big chess game. All my life I have been afraid of death, but now that I’m on the threshold of the grave I’ve stopped being afraid. It’s clear, my partner wants to play a slow game. He’ll go on taking my pieces one by one. First he removed my appeal as an actor and turned me into a so-called writer. He’d no sooner done that than he provided me with writer’s cramp. His next move was to deprive me of my potency. Yet I know he’s far from checkmate, and this gives me strength. It’s cold in my room—let it be cold. I have no supper—I won’t die without it. He sabotages me and I sabotage him. Some time ago, I was returning home late at night. The frost burned outside, and suddenly I realized that I had lost my key. I woke up the janitor, but he had no spare key. He stank of vodka, and his dog bit my foot. In former years I would have been desperate, but this time I said to my opponent, ‘If you want me to catch pneumonia, it’s all right with me.’ I left the house and decided to go to the Vienna station. The wind almost carried me away. I would have had to wait at least three-quarters of an hour for the streetcar at that time of night. I passed by the actors’ union and saw a light in a window. I decided to go in. Perhaps I could spend the night there. On the steps I hit something with my shoe and heard a ringing sound. I bent down and picked up a key. It was mine! The chance of finding a key on the dark stairs of this building is one in a billion, but it seems that my opponent was afraid I might give up the ghost before he was ready. Fatalism? Call it fatalism if you like.”