Authors: Thomas Berger
But for Milton Grossman not even Spanish idiom would serve. There had not, to their memory, ever been such a person, or if there had, no doubt he was overlooked in the terrible struggle against the open fascists on the other side of no-man’s-land and the
fifth columnists behind our own lines.
Of course Schild knew of the wreckers, the anarchists, the hirelings of Trotsky, those worst of all enemies because they are one’s own kind, who extend a hand as comrades and with the other clasp their dagger. The greatness of a cause can be measured by the decadence of its adversaries; we can be proud of the very rottenness of those we have cast out. For all their mumbo-jumbo, and all matters of clerical fascism aside, the Catholics have a valid principle: he who embraces the incorrect faith in ignorance may be saved; only he who knows the true faith and rejects it is certain to be damned. It could never be said that Milton Grossman was ignorant; like Trotsky he was all mind, his mind all blade, and that all edge, the Jewish edge... and behind it, the abysmal weakness.
To continue the inquiry was to make oneself suspect. And needlessly—for Schild asked the questions only to test the answers already in his possession. No doubt the flaw had always been there, waiting for the day when the force of concrete, historical events would burst it wide. But it had been the earlier Milton in whom Schild had seen the Way, who had armed him with the weapons. There was ironical justice, but justice, in turning them now against the too-competent teacher. And his oddest feeling was that in so doing he did Milton an honor greater than he deserved; that in the measure of its being undeserved, Milton would be pleased; that, finally, he deserved to be pleased.
It was then, when he thought of Milton, though dead, though discredited, though renegade, as someone still to be taken into account, that Schild realized his sole defense against insanity was the Party. The acceptance of one’s own complicity in the Party’s crimes was the only escape from knowing oneself a criminal. Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling by the neck: ostensibly Greek, but how much closer to the long, moaning servitude of the Jews, with whom in the end Milton chose to identify.
For he had written Schild one letter from Spain, a strange letter, in the early spring of ’37. Strange even for Milton, who was more talker than writer—“like Sophocles, Jesus of Nazareth, and Hitler,” as he used to say in his Bren-gun voice and then stop to catch breath before throwing it away again, eyes rising through an atmosphere of mixed slyness and purity, “all seekers of oral gratification; you will notice none of us smoked.
O vanitas
!”—and hence never wrote proper letters but rather short scrawls discontinuous in thought and calligraphy, on whatever surface lay at hand and could be mailed, cigarette packages, cereal boxtops, the reverse of one’s own note to him; and in Spain, until now, no letters at all.
This one was pencil, on an unbleached, glazed strip, serrated across the midsection, of—Spanish toilet paper. “If I should not be at large by next Yom Kippur, read this.” On the religious holidays in New York, Milton’s observance was, dragging Schild along, to go to some lunch counter and stuff himself with pork; his ambition at twenty had been to lay a girl between afternoon and evening prayers on the Day of Atonement; he had never yet done this, he said, because he could not determine which was the greater sin, to screw a Jewish girl or to commit racial shame with a shiksah, for which he used the Nazi term
Rassenschande.
Once on that day, sitting on a bench in the middle island of Broadway, watching the promenaders in their best clothes, he said: “When at last the Messiah comes, he will be an anti-Semite.”
The letter therefore fell within the known context, had besides the familiar mordant-shading-into-mortuary wit, the
Galgenhumorische
pun like Mercutio’s: if I should not be
at large,
that is, if I should not be a gross
Mann;
he anticipated his death. Then followed a translated quotation from a Hebrew religious poem of the eleventh century. He had returned to God. Small wonder he could not have made that candid.
But an old mutual admiration of theirs had been Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Dupin’s theory of deception, which he explains by a game of puzzles played upon a map. One player requires his opponent to find the name of a certain town. A novice will invariably choose the “most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by being excessively obvious.”
It was a faith that Milton spoke of, but rather one lost than another gained:
... thou didst vouchsafe to give me a perfect creed, to believe that thou art the God of Truth and thy prophets are true, and when thou didst not place my portion among those who rise up and rebel against thee; among the foolish people who blaspheme thy name; who deride thy law; chide thy servants, and deny the truth of thy prophets. They assume innocence, but underneath is deceit; they make a show of a pure and clean soul, whilst the bright spots of the leper are concealed underneath...
SOLOMON BEN GABIROL
,
died Valencia, c. 1057
Lichenko stayed. To keep him was to abet a desertion from the Soviet Union. To turn him in was an admission that the hideous sacrifices which had gone into his making were not finally criminal, but useless. Milton had never been able to forgive a confusion of the two.
L
ICHENKO STAYED. AND IN
that staying Schild ironically discovered a focus for that energy he had ever kept on call against the grand mission. For he was, or had been, a romantic, a man to whom time now and past were ancillary to time’s end, and while he saw history as a continuous process and within that process himself as nothing, with the other eye he looked on the personal life as a series of choices culminating in an absolute, a supreme of either victory or martyrdom, a storming of some Winter Palace or a fell day like that in 1933 when the Gestapo was unleashed on the German Communist Party.
Instead, his future had arrived in the form of—Lichenko; and time had stopped. Schatzi, who for all his shrewdness had not known of Lichenko until the beating, for all his eccentricity was a good Communist and had made his report; and what he, for all his hatefulness yet a hero of the camps, thought of the newest traitor did not figure in Schild’s reveries so markedly as that Schatzi’s long-held, unjust, fantastic suspicions of him had been confirmed and, finally, that, for the first time personally liable for an actual crime, he felt less guilt than serenity and lacked absolutely the sense of being hunted.
And most corrupt, his sense of humor had despite his efforts to brook it begun to prevail over the conscience. Lichenko’s invalidism had required only his attendance to be supremely ludicrous—to be, in fact, lunatic. Objectively the situation was simply a Russian slob nursed by a nervous Jew; the first was not ill, but the second was; and since each in his present arrangement was necessary to the other in just that condition, both were mad.
Or perhaps only Schild was, for he noticed that Lichenko these days never laughed; indeed, since entering into permanent bed, and despite his abominable appearance, he had developed a dignified gravity which one who knew only the earlier Lichenko would have believed impossible. One lunchtime when, carrying the loaded tray and an under-arm burden of newspapers and magazines, Schild had difficulty at the door, Lichenko sprang from the sheets to his relief, showing not only vigor but incredible strength for so small a man: he took the heavy tray in one hand and the papers in the other and, studying
Life’s
cover tit-girl as he went, walked silently, stately, to the bed as if it were the high altar in St. Basil’s and he Patriarch; and immediately upon reclining was again the man so infirm that Schild must needs not only spoon the mashed potatoes into his mouth but also support his head simultaneously. Lunacy, to be sure, but Lichenko’s were not so much the doings of a lunatic—Schild realized, as he heard himself laughing without accompaniment from his patient—as those of a sane man who is humoring a lunatic.
Similarly, Lichenko of an evening had invented a new amusement. He had fallen off his taste for public reading and even for cards. As to the former, he had been disillusioned by the knowledge that Skeezix lived in time, more or less relative to the limited days of actual people, had years ago at the beginning of the story been a baby, was now in his twenties, would grow old. Since fictional persons are a lie to begin with, he said, they are only interesting if they stick to it and do not pretend to have the dull troubles of real people; otherwise you did better to have true stories, which of course are always boring but then don’t pretend not to be. Like—he broke off to peer at Schild in a kind of suspicion and remark that it was possible he, Schild, would not agree, and immediately launched an attack on L’il Abner from the opposing ground: nobody could tell him an American peasant acted in that fashion.
As to the cards, it was immoral to win from a man ignorant of the game; had he known that at the outset he would not have played; he might even return the winnings, as he was not a
gengster,
unless—again he stopped abruptly as if to give prominence to his expression, which was this time a sneer; one so broad, however, that surely its purpose was rather mock than serious. And again Schild laughed, and again Lichenko’s face returned to wood.
Conversation appeared as the new entertainment. It was hardly more, being Lichenko’s questions and Schild’s answers; but it was not less, and since Schild had never known speech could be employed for amusement, at least not by him—he had listened to Milton; in both the Party and the Army the human sound was used only to assent to orders from above and command what lay below; to St. George it was the minimum of small-talk to get rid of him; his parents and sister had been great talkers in disregard of the defenseless tympanum, which was why he was not—since his voice had no resonance in this small room with the peaked ceiling which in the corners joined the wall a scant five feet above the floor, crowded with furniture and now with the warm congestion of dependent humanity; although Lichenko was not ill, it
did
make a difference to him that Schild was there to serve—these were reasons enough, if still morally inadmissible, why he should enjoy their mutual discourse.
But more important was the fact that after the initial ten minutes at Lovett’s they had never really talked. An ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union, that person who to an American existed only in theory, he had had one under his roof for three weeks and never yet found the propitious moment to ask: what is it like, the experience of that citizenship? Indeed, to place the query was not only an opportunity but, in the present context, an obligation, just as in Party circles in America one was under the reverse imperative
not
to question the mysterious figures who were manifestly Russian but carried passports bearing names like T. Smith.
Before the beating, Lichenko had obviously never been in the mood for talk; he had been eating, or sleeping, or washing, or scratching, or hanging over magazines or the chessboard; and that was the answer to the question never asked: there was no question about life in the USSR, it was life with incessant activity and without doubt, and even a deserter from it, one who could not meet its demands, yet carried with him its energy. In his very exploitation of Schild, Lichenko honored his society: a bourgeois gone bad would not have had the guts to go so far.
As to the other question—why had he deserted?—the science of dialectics admitted no such concern; Schild was not permitted to receive it into his mind; a person was either this or that; if that, he should either be ignored or destroyed; the alternative, if one did neither of these, was to relate it to the fact that oneself was lost. And this Schild had already done.
Now that conversation had finally come, it was appropriately on the theme of, not Lichenko, but Schild; not on the simple deserter but on the more complex; and Lichenko’s half of it was so shrewd that Schild briefly considered whether after all he had not been wrong about him.
According to Schild’s wristwatch—which was strapped to Lichenko’s bony arm, having been the stake in one last game of cards before the no-gaming resolution went into effect—the time measured seven in the evening. The tray had been washed and lay gleaming on the dressertop, against next morning’s breakfast time when it would vanish briefly to reappear heavy with eggs, melting yellow in the centers, and oatmeal porridge slushed with milk and sugar; in the end compartment, two pieces of white bread, thick as bricks, coated so lavishly with golden butter you could not lift them without smearing your fingers, which was as pleasant a sensation as running your hands over a woman, and though he knew that with this abundance the Americans had developed a culture of eating—it was some old law or another that when there was overproduction on the one hand and a shortage of markets on the other, a society tried to fill the gap with elaborate manners—and while he approved of this whole lovely ensemble of errors, he could not forbear from licking his hands. And Nathan made no objection.
That, indeed, was Schild’s reaction to all of life, so far as Lichenko could see, and he wondered again why a man with such tolerance would join a band of evil thugs whose only difference from the other group just defeated lay in the latter’s being German. Although there were German Communists, too, and surely many among them who were but lately Nazis, and wait and see if it was not exactly those who were raised to power in the East Sector. Ah, Nathan, you fool!, you who were rightly so quick to act when Vasya disgraced your house, in the big things you are truly like the silly comic strips you so dearly love to read. Look into the mirror and you will see the living Small Abner.
Though not hurt (and it was an awful strain to continue to pretend he had been; actors justly earned higher wages than a fellow who operated a lathe); although in fantastically better physical condition than he had ever before enjoyed (for the first time he had hopes of one day becoming handsomely stout), the kind it was shameful to have to hide under a mock illness rather than announce with much noise and movement; in spite of the great rewards at hand and the greater ones in promise (if the United States proved but a vain dream, then perhaps merely some sleepy hamlet in the Black Forest and a German woman with a nice round ass and a little craft like decorating Christmas-tree ornaments, and a garden of cabbage and beets—if one lived too high he got only boils and the gout) ...despite every reason for being up and about, for seizing life and making it groan, he had instead chosen to play the sick hog. And it had begun to work.