Herzog (24 page)

    Of course Zipporah, that realist, was right to refuse Father Herzog. He wanted to run bootleg whisky to the border, and get into the big time. He and Voplonsky borrowed from moneylenders, and loaded a truck with cases. But they never reached Rouses Point. They were hijacked, beaten up, and left in a ditch. Father Herzog took the worse beating because he resisted. The hijackers tore his clothes, knocked out one of his teeth, and trampled him.

    He and Voplonsky the blacksmith returned to Montreal on foot. He stopped at Voplonsky's shop to clean up, but there was not much he could do about his swollen bloody eye. He had a gap in his teeth. His coat was torn and his shirt and undergarment were bloodstained.

    That was how he entered the dark kitchen on Napoleon Street. We were all there. It was gloomy March, and anyway the light seldom reached that room. It was like a cavern. We were like cave dwellers.

    "Sarah!" he said. "Children!" He showed his cut face. He spread his arms so we could see his tatters, and the white of his body under them. Then he turned his pockets inside out-empty. As he did this, he began to cry, and the children standing about him all cried. It was more than I could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him-a father, a sacred being, a king. Yes, he was a king to us. My heart was suffocated by this horror. T thought I would die of it. Whom did I ever love as I loved them?

    Then Father Herzog told his story.

    "They were waiting for us. The road was blocked. They dragged us from the truck. They took everything."

    "Why did you fight?" said Mother Herzog.

    "Everything we had... all I borrowed!"

    "They might have killed you."

    "They had handkerchiefs over their faces. I thought I recognized..."

    Mama was incredulous.

    "Landtsleit?

    Impossible. No Jews could do this to a Jew."

    "No?" cried Papa. "Why not! Who says not!

    Why shouldn't they!"

    "Not Jews! Never!" Mama said. "Never. Never!

    They couldn't have the heart. Never!"

    "Children-don't cry. And poor Voplonsky-he could barely creep into bed."

    "Yonah," said Mama, "you must give up this whole thing."

    "How will we live? We have to live."

    He began to tell the story of his life, from childhood to this day. He wept as he told it.

    Put out at four years old to study, away from home. Eaten by lice. Half starved in the Yeshivah as a boy. He shaved, became a modern European. He worked in Kremenchug for his aunt as a young man. He had a fool's paradise in Petersburg for ten years, on forged papers. Then he sat in prison with common criminals. Escaped to America.

    Starved. Cleaned stables. Begged. Lived in fear.

    A baal-chov comalw a debtor. Shadowed by the police. Taking in drunken boarders. His wife a servant. And this was what he brought home to his children. This was what he could show them-his rags, his bruises.

    Herzog, wrapped in his cheap paisley robe, brooded with clouded eyes. Under his bare feet was a small strip of carpet. His elbows rested on the fragile desk and his head hung down. He had written only a few lines to Nachman.

    I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities-yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering. We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the program of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else-to whom can this matter? So many millions-multitudes-go down in terrible pain.

    And, at that, moral suffering is denied, these days.

    Personalities are good only for comic relief.

    But I am still a slave to Papa's pain. The way Father Herzog spoke of himself! That could make one laugh. His I had such dignity.

    "You must give it up," Mama cried. "You must!"

    "What should I do, then! Work for the burial society? Like a man of seventy? Only fit to sit at deathbeds?

    I?

    Wash corpses?

    I?

    Or should I go to the cemetery and wheedle mourners for a nickel? To say El malai rachamim. I?

    Let the earth open and swallow me up!"

    "Come, Yonah," said Mama in her earnest persuasive way. "I'll put a compress on your eye. Come, lie down."

    "How can I?"

    "No, you must."

    "How will the children eat?"

    "Come-you must lie down awhile. Take off that shirt."

    She sat by the bed, silent. He lay in the gray room, on the iron bedstead, covered with the worn red Russian blanket-his handsome forehead, his level nose, the brown mustache. As he had from that dark corridor, Moses now contemplated those two figures.

    Nachman, he began again to write, but stopped. How was he to reach Nachman with a letter? He would do better to advertise in the Village Voice.

    But, then, to whom would he send the other letters he was drafting?

    He concluded that Nachman's wife was dead. Yes, that must be it. That slender, thin-legged girl with the dark brows that rose high and recurved again beside her eyes, and the wide mouth which curved down at the corners-she had committed suicide, and Nachman ran away because (who could blame him) he would have had to tell Moses all about it. Poor thing, poor thing-she too must be in the cemetery.

THE telephone rang-five, eight, ten peals.

    Herzog looked at his watch. The time astonished him-nearly six o'clock. Where had the day gone? The phone went on ringing, drilling away at him. He didn't want to pick it up. But there were two children, after all-he was a father, and he must answer. He reached for the instrument, therefore, and heard Ramona-the cheerful voice of Ramona calling him to a life of pleasure on the thrilling wires of New York. And not simple pleasure but metaphysical, transcendent pleasure- pleasure which answered the riddle of human existence. That was Ramona-no mere sensualist, but a theoretician, almost a priestess, in her Spanish costumes adapted to American needs, and her flowers, her really beautiful teeth, her red cheeks, and her thick, kinky, exciting black hair.

    "Hello-Moses? What number is this?"

    "This is the Armenian Relief."

    "Oh, Moses! It's you!"

    "I'm the only man you know old enough to remember the Armenian Relief."

    "Last time you said it was the City Morgue. You must be feeling more cheerful. This is Ramona...."

    "Of course." Who else has the voice that lifts so light from height to height with foreign charm. "The Spanish lady."

    "La navaja en la liga."

    "Why, Ramona, I never felt less threatened by knives."

    "You sound positively high."

    "I haven't spoken to a soul all day."

    "I meant to call you, but the shop was very busy. Where were you yesterday?"

    "Yesterday? Where was I-let me see...."

    "I thought you took a powder."

    "Me? How could that be?"

    "You mean, you wouldn't run out on me?" Run out on fragrant, sexual, high-minded Ramona? Never in a million years. Ramona had passed through the hell of profligacy and attained the seriousness of pleasure. For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days. Ramona, however, does not believe in any sin but the sin against the body, for her the true and only temple of the spirit.

    "But you did leave town yesterday," said Ramona.

    "How do you know-are you having me tailed by a private eye?"

    "Miss Schwartz saw you in Grand Central with a valise in your hand."

    "Who? That little Miss Schwartz, in your shop?"

    "That's right."

    "Well, what do you know..." Herzog would not discuss it further.

    Ramona said, "Perhaps some lovely woman scared you on the train, and you turned back to your Ramona."

    "Oh..." said Herzog.

    Her theme was her power to make him happy. Thinking of Ramona with her intoxicating eyes and robust breasts, her short but gentle legs, her Carmen airs, thievishly seductive, her skill in the sack (defeating invisible rivals), he felt she did not exaggerate. The facts supported her claim.

    "Well, were you running away?" she said.

    "Why should I? You're a marvelous woman, Ramona."

    "In that case you're being very odd, Moses."

    "Well, I suppose I am one of the odder beasts."

    "But I know better than to be proud and demanding.

    Life has taught me to be humble."

    Moses shut his eyes and raised his brows. Here we go.

    "Perhaps you feel a natural superiority because of your education."

    "Education! But I don't know anything..."

    "Your accomplishments. You're in Who's Who.

    I'm only a merchant-a petit-bourgeois type."

    "You don't really believe this. Ramona."

    "Then why do you keep aloof, and make me chase you?

    I realize you want to play the field. After great disappointments, I've done it myself, for ego-reinforcement."

    "A high-minded intellectual ninny, square ..."

    "Who?"

    "Myself, I mean."

    She went on. "But as one recovers self-confidence, one learns the simple strength of simple desires."

    Please, Ramona, Moses wanted to say-you're lovely, fragrant, sexual, good to touch-everything.

    But these lectures! For the love of God, Ramona, shut it up. But she went on. Herzog looked up at the ceiling. The spiders had the moldings under intensive cultivation, like the banks of the Rhine. Instead of grapes, encapsulated bugs hung in clusters.

    I brought all this on myself by telling Ramona the story of my life-how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster. But a man who has made so many mistakes can't afford to ignore the corrections of his friends. Friends like Sandor, that humped rat. Or like Valentine, the moral megalomaniac and prophet in Israel. To all such, one is well advised to listen. Scolding is better than nothing. At least it's company.

    Ramona paused, and Herzog said, "It's true-I have a lot to learn."

    But I am diligent. I work at it and show steady improvement. I expect to be in great shape on my deathbed. The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me.... I will join the Y. m. c. a. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity.

    "Are you listening?" said Ramona.

    "Of course."

    "What did I just say."

    "That I have to trust my instincts more."

    "I said I wanted you to come to dinner."

    "Oh."

    "If only I were a bitch! Then you'd hang on every word."

    "But I was going to ask you... to come to an Italian restaurant." He was clumsily inventing. At times he was cruelly absent-minded.

    "I've shopped already," said Ramona.

    "But how, if that snooping Miss Schwartz with the blue spectacles saw me running away in Grand Central...?"

    "Did I expect you? I figured you had to go to New Haven for the day-to the Yale library, or some other place.... Please come. Join me for dinner. I'll have to eat alone if you don't."

    "Why, where's your aunt?"

    Ramona had her father's elderly sister living with her.

    "She's gone to visit the cousins in Hartford."

    "Ah-I see." He thought that old Aunt Tamara must be well used to taking these trips on short notice.

    "My aunt understands such things," said Ramona.

    "Besides, she likes you so much."

    And she thinks I'm a fine new prospect.

    Besides, one must make sacrifices for a husbandless niece who has a troubled love life. Just before meeting Herzog, Ramona had broken off with an assistant television producer named George Hoberly who was hard hit, in a pitiable state-close to hysteria. As Ramona explained it, old Aunt Tamara was Hoberly's great sympathizer-advised him, consoled him as well as an old woman could. At the same time, she was almost as excited about Herzog as Ramona herself.

    Meditating on Aunt Tamara, Moses thought he now could better understand Aunt Zelda. The female passion for secrecy and double games. For we must eat our fruit from the wily serpent's jaws.

    Still, Herzog observed that Ramona had genuine family feeling, and of this he approved. She seemed really fond of her aunt. Tamara was the daughter of a Polish Czarist official something-or-other (what harm could there be in making him a general?). Ramona said about her, "She is very jeune fille Russe" coman excellent description. Aunt Tamara was docile, girlish, sensitive, impulsive.

    Whenever she spoke of Papa and Mama and her teachers and the Conservatoire her dry breast filled, and the collarbones stood out tightly. She seemed still to be trying to decide whether to have a concert career against her Papa's wishes. Herzog, listening with serious looks, could not establish whether she had given a recital at the Salle Gaveau or wanted to give a recital. Old women from Eastern Europe with dyed hair and senseless cameo brooches had easy access to his affections.

    "Well, then, are you coming or not?" said Ramona.

    "Why are you so hard to pin down?"

    "I shouldn't go out-I have a lot to do-letters to write."

    "What letters! You're such a mystery man. What are these important letters? Business? Perhaps you should discuss it with me, if it is business. Or a lawyer, if you don't trust me. But you have to eat, anyway. Or perhaps you don't eat when you're alone."