dermined, hollowed out, the ground
taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind.
Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse,
something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to
overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of
balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you
totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath
your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of
enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your
love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats.
Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in
his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice.
While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there
is no such thing as blood and no such things as a skeleton beneath the
covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people
live.
If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you
become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right
yourself. Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an
unnatural gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world
to-day who understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the
Chinese. If it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a
strange predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are
considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and
durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep
then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That
means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to
be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this
company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal
conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no
longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the
dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.
In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the
dead end. At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great
recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole
negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass
to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was
a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have
always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls on,
the stars roll on, but men:
the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image
of the one and only one.
If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go
on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then
another curious thing happens. It's as though one had actually died and
actually been resurrected again, one lives a super-normal life, like the
Chinese. That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy,
unnaturally indifferent. The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a
flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time.
If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a
man is run down by a street car right before your eyes you keep on walking
just as though nothing had happened;
if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you
yourself take no interest in the slaughter. And so on and so on. Life
becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the
passing show. Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own
included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human
sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil. You care
so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything.
At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous
pace. This tool is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar
button just as well as to a cause. There is no fundamental, unalterable
difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of
your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a
diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which
attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die
and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is
yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow;
you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about
you.
Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time
that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the
nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening,
I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the
woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I
look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the
white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born
as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O'Rourke, the company
detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the snow was
on the ground and the air chill frost. And O'Rourke talking interminably
about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the
Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject of
stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot
between mine so that I couldn't budge. And then, seizing the lapel of my
coat, he would bring his face dose to mine and talk into my eyes, each word
boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us standing
in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow
blowing down, and O'Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to
get off his chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings
out of the comer of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the
two of us standing in Yorkville or on Alien Street or on Broadway. Always it
seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his
banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture
that man had ever created. While he was talking about finger-prints I might
be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just
back of his black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had
been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made
it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we passed from
the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on,
beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the
Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and
woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to
sit and listen to other people's stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and
distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it
happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his
tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and "receive", it was only
natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to
harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I could
chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there
and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep
listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the world,
from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues,
worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of
the poorest among them with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were
written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the ten
commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like
the Lord's Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover
the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to
listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was
a rare one, was to walk the streets alone ... to walk the streets at night
when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me.
Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and
nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest
architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from
these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an
army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery. In a year, reckoning it
modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty
thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would
be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town.
What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they
want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would
they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make
the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum,
from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash of hunger
could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the
fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all
goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the
loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest
steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with
O'Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like
listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as one can
whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with,
so, listening to O'Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would
stop talking and say "what'll you have to eat?" In the midst of the most
gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure
to get at a certain place farther up the line and wonder too what sort of
vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would
order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I slept with
my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be
wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had
the bad habit of letting things slide - the important things, I mean. Fresh
coffee was important - and fresh bacon with eggs. If she were knocked up
again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was
fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs. I could put up
with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have
something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing,
something appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he
had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I
am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would
have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity. I am certain that
after his wounds had healed he wouldn't have given a damn about the
tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon
a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.
Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of
his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And
this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which
eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal
limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction.
At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of
Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there
comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen
despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon
another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One
thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the
streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The
streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of
the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which
are null and void.
In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a
sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the
greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can
remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who
designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind,
standing at a certain comer; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can
remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you
what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one man
in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be
me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast
of the field. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men
struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb
which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a
stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in
the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or
I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all
stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would
encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no
life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have
meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but
this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely peripheral,
the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me.
Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking
about me as years ago I had looked about me;
again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the minute
details which only the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like
coming down from Mars. What race of men is this, I asked myself. What does
it mean? And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was
snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and
incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation
of belonging to another planet. From the top of the Empire State Building I
looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they
were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human
lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail's pace,
each one doubtless fulfilling his micro-cosmic destiny. In their fruitless
desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and
boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had
suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their
senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were these
little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I
thought to myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay,
demented ones who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would
breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked. Perhaps
in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might
flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling
creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be
demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has
happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten
thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy
may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now
passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life
with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on dosing
the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a
marvellous life there had once been on this continent which he is now
inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will
ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history
was composed. Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day.
Any day of my life - back there - would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny,
microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back ...
At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn't bounce out of bed. I lay there
till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep - how could I
sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already
due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already
buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden
stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and
repeat yesterday's song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out.
Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. Mondays I got my
allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to
her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on.
I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't time enough. I put on the torn
shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she
were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the
subway. I got to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen
calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call
there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at
once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between
calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of
advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook who is trying to sneak
back under a false name. Behind me are the cards and ledgers containing the
name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad
ones are starred in red ink;
some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is
crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms,
camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away - not
that we don't need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just
won't do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied
hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He's seventy now and
would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation,
but we can't take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New
York is the dead line. The telephone rings and it's a smooth secretary from
the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn't I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into
his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so. What did he
do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of course. O'Mara, my
assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him
of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy
throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful
looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to
persuade me to take her on. She's a whore clean through and I know if I put
her on there'll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building
uptown - because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few
cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it
were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says
one of the boys I've just hired has Parkinson's disease. I've been so busy I
haven't had a chance to go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all
the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O'Rourke tells me. He's been
having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch
time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me,
as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants
to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can't keep the
force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New
York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed
for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief societies have
been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don't even last an
hour. It's a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it's
totally unnecessary. But that's not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as
Kipling says. I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone
ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting
bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I
have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc. All
the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then
chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for
it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of
communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly,
so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be
appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour, unless the messenger
to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the
whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas
blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the
directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph
Company, and maybe the telegram reads "Mother dying, come at once", but the
clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages,
spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet
such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you
will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of
course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a
messenger's job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the
docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats
to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, for the
kindness and consideration shown. And then one day everybody will be
heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O'Rourke will be
asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down
if it cost ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will issue an
order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four days he
will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the job. And
because it's getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce I'm on
the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would have hired
him if he hadn't broken down and confessed that he was a she. And to make it
worse Valeska takes "it" under her wing, takes "it" home that night and
under pretense of sympathy gives "it" a thorough examination, including a
vaginal exploration with the index finger of the right hand. And the
nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly
attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the
lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath
me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers
were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my
body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a
huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly,
pitilessly. This eye so wide awake seemed to have made all my other
faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take
in the drama of the world.
If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be
extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which
would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change
to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to
swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried
fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by
candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change
to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand
years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to
forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing,
something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I
wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I
wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of
annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I
wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or
else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night
which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and
trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly
incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to
listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to
englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only
terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested
of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless
as the earth itself.
It was just about a week before Valeska committed suicide that I ran
into Mara. The week or two preceding that event was a veritable nightmare. A
series of sudden deaths and strange encounters with women. First of all
there was Pauline Janowski, a little Jewess of sixteen or seventeen who was
without a home and without friends or relatives. She came to the office
looking for a job. It was towards dosing time and I didn't have the heart to
turn her down cold. For some reason or other I took it into my head to bring
her home for dinner and if possible try to persuade the wife to put her up
for a while. What attracted me to her was her passion for Balzac. All the
way home she was talking to me about Lost Illusions. The car was packed and
we were jammed so tight together that it didn't make any difference what we
were talking about because we were both thinking of only one thing. My wife
of course was stupefied to see me standing at the door with a beautiful
young girl. She was polite and courteous in her frigid way but I could see
immediately that it was no use asking her to put the girl up. It was about
all she could do to sit through the dinner with us. As soon as we had
finished she excused herself and went to the movies. The girl started to
weep. We were still sitting at the table, the dishes piled up in front of
us. I went over to her and I put my arms around her. I felt genuinely sorry
for her and I was perplexed as to what to do for her. Suddenly she threw her
arms around my neck and she kissed me passionately. We stood there for a
long while embracing each other and then I thought to myself no, it's a
crime, and besides maybe the wife didn't go to the movies at all, maybe
she'll be ducking back any minute. I told the kid to pull herself together,
that we'd take a trolley ride somewhere. I saw the child's bank lying on the
mantelpiece and I took it to the toilet and emptied it silently. There was
only about seventy-five cents in it. We got on a trolley and went to the
beach. Finally we found a deserted spot and we lay down in the sand. She was
hysterically passionate and there was nothing to do but to do it. I thought
she would reproach me afterwards, but she didn't. We lay there a while and
she began talking about Balzac again. It seems she had ambitions to be a
writer herself. I asked her what she was going to do. She said she hadn't
the least idea. When we got up to go she asked me to put her on the highway.
Said she thought she would go to Cleveland or some place. It was after
midnight when I left her standing in front of a gasoline station. She had
about thirty-five cents in her pocket-book. As I started homeward I began
cursing my wife for the mean son of a bitch that she was. I wished to Christ
it was she whom I had left standing on the highway with no place to go to. I
knew that when I got back she wouldn't even mention the girl's name.
I got back and she was waiting up for me. I thought she was going to
give me hell again. But no, she had waited up because there was an important
message from O'Rourke. I was to telephone him soon as I got home. However, I
decided not to telephone. I decided to get undressed and go to bed. Just
when I had gotten comfortably settled the telephone rang. It was O'Rourke.
There was a telegram for me at the office - he wanted to know if he should
open it and read it to me. I said of course. Thetelegram was signed Monica.
It was from Buffalo. Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the
morning with her mother's body. I thanked him and went back to bed. No
questions from the wife. I lay there wondering what to do. If I were to
comply with the request that would mean starting things all over again. I
had just been thanking my stars that I had gotten rid of Monica. And now she
was coming back with her mother's corpse. Tears and reconciliation. No, I
didn't like the prospect at all. Supposing I didn't show up ? What then ?
There was always somebody around to take care of a corpse. Especially if the
bereaved were an attractive young blonde with sparkling blue eyes. I
wondered if she'd go back to her job in the restaurant. If she hadn't known
Greek and Latin I would never have been mixed up with her. But my curiosity
got the better of me. And then she was so god-damn poor, that too got me.
Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if her hands hadn't smelled greasy. That
was the fly in the ointment - the greasy hands. I remember the first night I
met her and we strolled through the park. She was ravishing to look at, and
she was alert and intelligent. It was just the time when women were wearing
short skirts and she wore them to advantage. I used to go to the restaurant
night after night just to watch her moving around, watch her bending over to
serve or stooping down to pick up a fork. And with the beautiful legs and
the bewitching eyes a marvellous line about Homer, with the pork and
sauerkraut a verse of Sapho's, the Latin conjugations, the Odes of Pindar,
with the dessert perhaps the Rubaiyat or Cynara. But the greasy hands and
the frowsy bed in the boarding house opposite the market place - Whew! I
couldn't stomach it. The more I shunned her the more clinging she became.
Ten page letters about love with footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra. And
then suddenly silence and me congratulating myself heartily. No, I couldn't
bring myself to go to the Grand Central Station in the morning. I rolled
over and I fell sound asleep. In the morning I would get the wife to
telephone the office and say I was ill. I hadn't been ill now for over a
week ~ it was coming to me.
At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office. He wants me
to have lunch with him ... there's an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet. The
girl turns out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like an
Egyptian. She's hot stuff and the two of us are working on her at once. As I
was supposed to be ill I decided not to return to the office but to take a
stroll through the East Side. Kronski was going back to cover me up. We
shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways. I headed
towards the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost
immediately. I sat on the edge of a pier with my legs dangling over the
stringpiece. A scow passed with a load of red bricks. Suddenly Monica came
to my mind. Monica arriving at the Grand Central Station with a corpse. A
corpse f.o.b. New York! It seemed so incongruous and ridiculous that I burst
out laughing. What had she done with it? Had she checked it or had she left
it on a siding? No doubt she was cursing me out roundly. I wondered what she
would really think if she could have imagined me sitting there at the dock
with my legs dangling over the stringpiece. It was warm and sultry despite
the breeze that was blowing off the river. I began to snooze. As I dozed off
Pauline came to my mind. I imagined her walking along the highway with her
hand up. She was a brave kid, no doubt about it. Funny that she didn't seem
to worry about getting knocked up. Maybe she was so desperate she didn't
care. And Balzac! That too was highly incongruous. Why Balzac? Well, that
was her affair. Anyway she'd have enough to eat with, until she met another
guy. But a kid like that thinking about becoming a writer! Well, why not?
Everybody had illusions of one sort or another. Monica too wanted to be a
writer. Everybody was becoming a writer. A writer! Jesus, how futile it
seemed!
I dozed off... When I woke up I had an erection. The sun seemed to be
burning right into my fly. I got up and I washed my face at a drinking
fountain. It was still as hot and sultry as ever. The asphalt was soft as
mush, the flies were biting, the garbage was rotting in the gutter. I walked
about between the pushcarts and looked at things with an empty eye. I had a
sort of lingering hard-on all the while, but no definite object in mind. It
was only when I got back to Second Avenue that I suddenly remembered the
Egyptian Jewess from lunch time. I remembered her saying that she lived over
the Russian Restaurant near Twelfth Street. Still I hadn't any definite idea
of what I was going to do. Just browsing about, killing time. My feet
nevertheless were dragging me northward, towards Fourteenth Street. When I
got abreast of the Russian restaurant I paused a moment and then I ran up
the stairs three at a time. The hall door was open. I climbed up a couple of
flights scanning the names on the doors. She was on the top floor and there
was a man's name under hers. I knocked softly. No answer. I knocked again, a
little harder. This time I heard some one moving about. Then a voice dose to
the door asking who is it and at the same time the knob turning. I pushed
the door open and stumbled into the darkened room. Stumbled right into her
arms and felt her naked under the half-opened kimono. She must have come out
of a sound sleep and only half realized who was holding her in his arms.
When she realized it was me she tried to break away but I had her tight and
I began kissing her passionately and at the same time backing her up towards
the couch near the window. She mumbled something about the door being open
but I wasn't taking any chance on letting her slip out of my arms. So I made
a slight detour and little by little I edged her towards the door and made
her shove it with her ass. I locked it with my one free hand and then I
moved her into the centre of the room and with the free hand I unbuttoned my
fly and got my pecker out and into position. She was so drugged with sleep
that it was almost like working on an automation. I could see too that she
was enjoying the idea of being fucked half asleep. The only thing was that
every time I made a lunge she grew more wide awake. And as she grew more
conscious she became more frightened. It was difficult to know how to put
her to sleep again without losing a good fuck. I managed to tumble her on to
the couch without losing ground and she was hot as hell now, twisting and
squirming like an eel. From the time I had started to maul her I don't think
she had opened her eyes once. I kept saying to myself- "an Egyptian fuck ...
an Egyptian fuck" - and so as not to shoot off immediately I deliberately
began thinking about the corpse that Monica had dragged to the Grand Central
Station and about the thirty-five cents that I had left with Pauline on the
highway. Then bango! a loud knock on the door and with that she opens her
eyes and looks at me in utmost terror. I started to pull away quickly but to
my surprise she held me tight. "Don't move", she whispered in my ear.
"Wait!" There was another loud knock and then I heard Kronski's voice saying
"It's me, Thelma ... it's me Izzy." At that I almost burst out laughing. We
slumped back again into a natural position and as her eyes softly closed I
moved it around inside her, gently so as not to wake her up again. It was
one of the most wonderful fucks I ever had in my life. I thought it was
going to last forever. Whenever I felt in danger of going off I would stop
moving and think - think for example of where I would like to spend my
vacation, if I got one, or think of the shirts lying in the bureau drawer,
or the patch in the bedroom carpet just at the foot of the bed. Kronski was
still standing at the door -1 could hear him changing about from one
position to another. Every time I became aware of him standing there I
jibbed her a little for good measure and in her half sleep she answered
back, humorously, as though she understood what I meant by this put-and-take
language. I didn't dare to think what she might be thinking or I'd have come
immediately. Sometimes I skirted dangerously close to it, but the saving
trick was always Monica and the corpse at the Grand Central Station. The
thought of that, the humorousness of it, I mean, acted like a cold douche.
When it was all over she opened her eyes wide and stared at me, as
though she were taking me in for the first time. I hadn't a word to say to
her; the only thought in my head was to get out as quickly as possible. As
we were washing up I noticed a note on the floor near the door. It was from
Kronski. His wife had just been taken to the hospital - he wanted her to
meet him at the hospital. I felt relieved! it meant that I could break away
without wasting any words.
The next day I had a telephone call from Kronski. His wife had died on
the operating table. That evening I went home for dinner; we were still at
the table when the bell rang. There was Kronski standing at the gate looking
absolutely sunk. It was always difficult for me to oner words of condolence;
with him it was absolutely impossible. I listened to my wife uttering
her trite words of sympathy and I felt more than ever disgusted with her.
"Let's get out of here," I said.
We walked along in absolute silence for a while. At the park we turned
in and headed for the meadows. There was a heavy mist which made it
impossible to see a yard ahead. Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he
began to sob. I stopped and turned my head away. When