The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (49 page)

I was rushed to the great dome in a cab, and went in. A wonderful work of religious architecture—Bruant in the seventeenth century, Mansart in the eighteenth. I took note of its grandeur intermittently. There were gaps in which the dome was no more to me than an egg cup, owing to my hectic excitement—derangement. The stains were growing under my arms. Loss of moisture dried my throat. I went to get information about the taxis of the Marne and had the corner pointed out to me. The drivers had not yet begun to arrive. I had to wander about for half an hour or so, and I climbed up to the first _щtage__ to look down in the crypt of the Chapelle Saint-JщrЇme. Hoo! what grandeur, what beauties! Such arches and columns and statuary, and floating and galloping frescoes. And the floor so sweetly tessellated. I wanted to kiss it. And also the mournful words ofNapol eon from Saint Helena. _”Je dщsire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords dt la Seine__ in the middle ofthat nation, _ce peuple Franчais,__ that I loved so much.” Now Napoleon was crammed under thirty-five tons of polished porphyry or alizarin in a shape suggestive of Roman pomp.

As I was descending the stairs I took out Miss Rodinson’s envelope, and I felt distinctly topsy-turvy, somewhat intoxicated, as I read the letter from Eunice—that was all it contained. Here came Tanky’s third wish: that I write once again to Judge Eiler to request that the final months of his prison term be served in a halfway house in Las Vegas. In a halfway house, Eunice explained, you had minimal supervision. You signed out in the morning, and signed in again at night. The day was your own, to attend to private business. Eunice wrote, “I think that prison has been a tremendous learning experience for my brother. As he is very intelligent, under it all, he has already absorbed everything there was to absorb from jail. You might try that on the judge, phrasing it in your own way.”

Well, to phrase it in my own way, the great fish tottered on the grandiose staircase, filled with drunken darkness and hearing the turbulent seas. An inner voice told him, “This is it!” and he felt like opening a great crimson mouth and tearing the paper with his teeth.

I wanted to send back a message, too: “I am not Cousin Schmuck, I am a great fish who can grant wishes and in whom there are colossal powers!”

Instead I calmed myself by tearing Eunice’s notepaper six, eight, ten times, and then seeking discipline in a wastepaper basket. By the time I reached the gathering place, my emotions were more settled, although not entirely normal. There was a certain amount of looping and veering still.

Upward of a hundred delegates had gathered in the taxi corner, if gathered is the word to apply to such a crowd of restless exotics. There were people from all the corners of the earth. They wore caps, uniforms, military insignia, batik pants, Peruvian hats, pantaloons, wrinkled Indian breeches, crimson gowns from Africa, kilts from Scotland, skirts from Greece, Sikh turbans. The whole gathering reminded me of the great UN meeting that Khrushchev and Castro had attended, and where I had seen Nehru in his lovely white garments with a red rose in his lapel and a sort of baker’s cap on his head—I had been present when Khrushchev pulled off his shoe to bang his desk in anger.

Then it came to me how geography had been taught in the Chicago schools when I was a kid. We were issued a series of booklets: “Our Little Japanese Cousins,”

“Our Little Moroccan Cousins,”

“Our Little Russian Cousins,”

“Our Little Spanish Cousins.” I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita, and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all (as Tanky was very intelligent “under it all”). We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to bomb the hell out of the place. It’s unlikely that Japanese children had been provided with books about their little American cousins. The Chicago Board of Education had never thought to look into this.

Two French nonagenarians were present, survivors of 1914. They were the center of much eager attention. A most agreeable occasion, I thought, or would have thought if I had been less agitated.

I didn’t see Scholem anywhere. I suppose I should have told Miss Rodinson to phone his Chicago number for information, but they would have asked who was calling, and for what purpose. I wasn’t sorry to have come to this mighty hall. In fact I wouldn’t have missed it. But I was emotionally primed for a meeting with Scholem. I had even prepared some words to say to him. I couldn’t bear to miss him. I came out of the crowd and circled it. The delegates were already being conducted to their meeting place, and I stationed myself strategically near a door. The gorgeous costumes increased the confusion.

In any case, it wasn’t I who found Scholem. I couldn’t have. He was too greatly changed—emaciated. It was he who spotted me. A man being helped by a young woman—his daughter, as it turned out—glanced up into my face. He stopped and said, “I don’t dream much because I don’t sleep much, but if I’m not having hallucinations, this is my cousin Ijah.”

Yes yes! It was Ijah! And here was Scholem. He no longer resembled the older man of the Instamatic color photo, the person who squinted inward under heavy brows. Because he had lost much weight his face was wasted, and the tightening of the skin brought back his youthful look. Much less doomed and fanatical than the man in the picture, who breathed prophetic fire. There seemed a kind of clear innocence about him. The size of his eyes was exceptional—like the eyes of a newborn infant in the first presentation
of genio
_ and
figura.
_ And suddenly I thought: What have I done? How do you tell a man like this that you have money for him? Am I supposed to say that I bring him the money he can bury himself with?

Scholem was speaking, saying to his daughter, “My cousin!” And to me he said, “You live abroad, Ijah? You got my mailings? Now I understand—you didn’t answer because you wanted to surprise me. I have to make a speech, to greet the delegates. You’ll sit with my daughter. We’ll talk later.”

“Of course….”

I’d get the girl’s help; I’d inform her of the Eckstine grant. She’d prepare her father for the news.

Then I felt robbed of strength, all at once. Doesn’t existence lay too much on us? I had remembered, observed, studied the cousins, and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and to keep me as I had been. I had failed to include myself among them, and suddenly I was billed for this oversight. At the presentation of this bill, I became bizarrely weak in the legs. And when the girl, noticing that I seemed unable to walk, offered me her arm, I wanted to say, “What d’you mean? I need no help. I still play a full set of tennis every day.” Instead I passed my arm through hers and she led us both down the corridor.

ZETLAND: BY A CHARACTER WITNESS

YES, 1 KNEW THE GUY. We were boys in Chicago. He was wonderful. At fourteen, when we became friends, he had things already worked out and would willingly tell you how everything had come about. It went like this: First the earth was molten elements and glowed in space. Then hot rains fell. Steaming seas were formed. For half the earth’s history, the seas were azoic, and then life began. In other words, first there was astronomy, and then geology, and by and by there was biology, and biology was followed by evolution. Next came prehistory and then history—epics and epic heroes, great ages, great men; then smaller ages with smaller men; then classical antiquity, the Hebrews, Rome, feudalism, papacy, renascence, rationalism, the industrial revolution, science, democracy, and so on. All this Zetland got out of books in the late twenties, in the Midwest. He was a clever kid. His bookishness pleased everyone. Over pale-blue eyes, which sometimes looked strained, he wore big goggles. He had full lips and big boyish teeth, widely spaced. Sandy hair, combed straight back, exposed a large forehead. The skin of his round face often looked tight. He was short, heavyish, strongly built but not in good health. At seven years old he had had peritonitis and pneumonia at the same time, followed by pleurisy, emphysema, and TB. His recovery was complete, but he was never free from minor ailments. His skin was peculiar. He was not allowed to be in the sun for long. Exposure to sunlight caused cloudy brown subcutaneous bruises, brownish iridescences. So, often, while the sun shone, he drew the shades and read in his room by lamplight. But he was not at all an invalid. Though he played only on cloudy days, his tennis was good, and he swam a thoughtful breast-stroke with frog motions and a froggy underlip. He played the fiddle and was a good sight reader.

The neighborhood was largely Polish and Ukrainian, Swedish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Lutheran. The Jews were few and the streets tough. Bungalows and brick three-flats were the buildings. Back stairs and porches were made of crude gray lumber. The trees were cottonwood elms and ailanthus, the grass was crabgrass, the bushes lilacs, the flowers sunflowers and elephant-ears. The heat was corrosive, the cold like a guillotine as you waited for the streetcar. The family, Zet’s bullheaded father and two maiden aunts who were “practical nurses” with housebound patients (dying, usually), read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture. He was encouraged to be a little intellectual. So, in short pants, he was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the Esterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau), bereft of gods (like Nietzsche), devoted to the heart and to the law of love (like Tolstoy). He was earnest (the early shadow of his father’s grimness), but he was playful, too. Not only did he study Hume and Kant but he discovered Dada and Surrealism as his voice was changing. The mischievous project of covering the great monuments of Paris in mattress ticking appealed to him. He talked about the importance of the ridiculous, the paradox of playful sublimity. Dostoyevsky, he lectured me, had it right. The intellectual (petty bourgeois-plebeian) was a megalomaniac. Living in a kennel, his thoughts embraced the universe. Hence the funny agonies. And remember Nietzsche, the
gai savoir.
_ And Heine and the “Aristophanes of Heaven.” He was a learned adolescent, was Zetland.

Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars. Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space. It was where trains arrived; where mail orders were dispatched. But on the lagoon, with turning boats, the water and the sky clear green, pure blue, the boring power of a great manufacturing center arrested (there was no smoke, the mills were crippled—industrial distress benefited the atmosphere), Zet recited “Upon the honeyed middle of the night…” Polack children threw rocks and crab apples from the shore.

Studying his French, German, math, and music. In his room a bust of Beethoven, a lithograph of Schubert (also with round specs) sitting at the piano, moving his friends’ hearts. The shades were drawn, the lamp burned. In the alley, peddlers’ horses wore straw hats to ward off sunstroke. Zet warded off the prairies, the real estate, the business and labor of Chicago. He boned away at his Kant. Just as assiduously, he read Breton and Tristan Tzara. He quoted, “The earth is blue, like an orange.” And he propounded questions of all sorts.

Had Lenin really expected democratic centralism to work within the Bolshevik party? Was Dewey’s argument in
Human Nature and Conduct
_ unassailable? Was the “significant form” position fruitful for painting? What was the future of primitivism in art?

Zetland wrote surrealist poems of his own:
Plum lips suck the green of sleeping hills…
_ or:
Foaming rabbis rub electrical fish!
_

The Zetland apartment was roomy, inconvenient, in the standard gloomy style of 1910. Built-in buffets and china closets, a wainscot in the dining room with Dutch platters, a gas log in the fireplace, and two stained-glass small windows above the mantelpiece. A windup Victrola played “Eli, Eli,” the
Peer Gynt
_ Suite. Chaliapin sang “The Flea” from
Faust,
_ Galli-Curci the “Bell Song” from _Lakmщ,__ and there were Russian soldiers’ choruses. Surly Max Zetland gave his family “everything,” he said. Old Zetland had been an immigrant. His start in life was slow. He learned the egg business in the poultry market on Fulton Street. But he rose to be assistant buyer in a large department store downtown: imported cheeses, Czech ham, British biscuits and jams—fancy goods. He was built like a fullback, with a black cleft in the chin and a long mouth. You would wear yourself out to win this mouth from its permanent expression of disapproval. He disapproved because he
knew life.
_ His first wife, Elias’s mother, died in the flu epidemic of 1918. By his second wife old Zetland had a feebleminded daughter. The second Mrs. Zetland died of cancer of the brain. The third wife, a cousin of the second, was much younger. She came from New York; she had worked on Seventh Avenue; she had a
past.
_ Because of this
past
_ Max Zetland gave way to jealousy and made nasty scenes, breaking dishes and shouting brutally.
“Des histoiress, “
_ said Zet, then practicing his French. Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes—not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking brass Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the
Tribune,
_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more or less
in Ordnung.
_ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer—he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in shoeboxes and served with tea.