Plexus Page 2

  If I adored Ulric because of his emulation of the masters, I believe I really revered him for playing the role of “the failure.” The man knew how to make music of his failings and failures. In fact, he had the wit and the grace to make it seem as though, next to success, the best thing in life is to be a total failure.

  Which is probably the truth. What redeemed Ulric was a complete lack of ambition. He wasn’t hankering to be recognized: he wanted to be a good painter for the sheer joy of exceling. He loved all the good things of life, and only the good things. He was a sensualist through and through. In playing chess he preferred to play with Chinese pieces, no matter how poor his game might be. It gave him the keenest pleasure merely to handle the ivory pieces. I remember the visits we made to museums in search of old chess boards. Could Ulric have played on a board that once adorned the wall of a medieval castle he would have been in seventh heaven, nor would he have cared ever again whether he won or lost. He chose everything he used with great care—clothes, valises, slippers, lamps, everything. When he picked up an object he caressed it. Whatever could be salvaged was patched or mended or glued together again. He talked about his belongings as some people do about their cats; he gave them his full admiration, even when alone with them. Sometimes I have caught him speaking to them, addressing them, as if they were old friends. What a contrast to Kronski, when I think of it. Kronski, poor, wretched devil, seemed to be living with the discarded bric-a-brac of his ancestors. Nothing was precious to him, nothing had meaning or significance for him. Everything went to pieces in his hands, or became ragged, torn, splotched and sullied. Yet one day—how it came about I never learned—this same Kronski began to paint. He began brilliantly, too. Most brilliantly. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Bold, brilliant colors he used, as if he had just come from Russia. Nor were his subjects lacking in daring and originality. He went at it for eight and ten hours at a stretch, gorging himself before and after, and always singing, whistling, jiggling from one foot to another, always applauding himself. Unfortunately it was just a flash in the pan. Petered out after a few months. After that never a word about painting. Forgot, apparently, that he had ever touched a brush.…

  It was during the period when things were going serenely with us that I made the acquaintance of a rum bird at the Montague Street Library. They knew me well there because I was giving them all kinds of trouble asking for books they didn’t have, urging them to borrow rare or expensive books from other libraries, complaining about the poverty of their stock, the inadequacy of their service, and in general making a nuisance of myself. To make it worse I was always paying huge fines for books overdue or for books lost (which I had appropriated for my own shelves), or for missing pages. Now and then I received a public reprimand, as if I were still a schoolboy, for underlining passages in red ink or for writing comments in the margins. And then one day, searching for some rare books on the circus—why, God knows—I fell into conversation with a scholarly looking man who turned out to be one of the staff. In the course of conversation I learned that he had been to some of the fancy circuses of Europe. The word Médrano escaped his lips. It was virtually Greek to me, but I remembered it. Anyway, I took such a liking to the fellow that there and then I invited him to visit us the next evening. As soon as I got out of the library I called Ulric and begged him to join us. “Did you ever hear of the Cirque Médrano?” I asked.

  To make it short, the next evening was given over almost exclusively to the Cirque Médrano. I was in a daze when the librarian left. “So that’s Europe!” I muttered aloud, over and over. Couldn’t get over it. “And that guy was there… he saw it all. Christ!”

  The librarian came quite frequently, always with some rare books under his arm which he thought I would like to glance at. Usually he brought a bottle along too. Sometimes he would play chess with us, seldom leaving before two or three in the morning. Each time he came I made him talk about Europe: it was his “admission fee.” In fact, I was getting drunk on the subject; I could talk about Europe almost as if I had been there myself. (My father was the same. Though he had never set foot outside of New York, he could talk about London, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Rome as if he had lived abroad all his life.)

  One night Ulric brought over his large map of Paris (the Métro map) and we all got down on hands and knees to wander through the streets of Paris, visiting the libraries, museums, cathedrals, flower stalls, slaughterhouses, cemeteries, whorehouses, railway stations, bals musettes, les magasins and so on. The next day I was so full up, so full of Europe, I mean, that I couldn’t go to work. It was an old habit of mine to take a day off when I felt like it. I always enjoyed stolen holidays best. It meant getting up at any old hour, loafing about in pajamas, playing records, dipping into books, strolling to the wharf and, after a hearty lunch, going to a matinee. A good vaudeville show was what I liked best, an afternoon in which I would burst my sides laughing. Sometimes, after one of these holidays, it was still more difficult to return to work. In fact, impossible. Mona would conveniently call the boss to inform him that my cold had gotten worse. And he would always say: “Tell him to stay in bed another few days. Take good care of him!”

  “I should think they would be on to you by this time,” Mona would say.

  “They are, honey. Only I’m too good. They can’t do without me.”

  “Some day they’ll send someone over here to see if you’re really ill.”

  “Never answer the doorbell, that’s all. Or tell them I’ve gone to see the doctor.”

  Wonderful while it lasted. Just ducky. I had lost all interest in my job. All I thought of was to begin writing. At the office I did less and less, grew more and more slack. The only applicants I bothered to interview were the suspects. My assistant did the rest. As often as possible I would clear out of the office on the pretext of inspecting the branch offices. I would call on one or two in the heart of town—just to establish an alibi—then duck into a movie. After the movie I would drop in on another branch manager, report to headquarters, and then home. Sometimes I spent the afternoon in an art gallery or at the 42nd Street Library. Sometimes I called on Ulric or else visited a dance hall. I got ill more and more often, and for longer stretches at a time. Things were definitely riding to a fall.

  Mona encouraged my delinquency. She had never liked me in the role of employment manager. “You should be writing,” she would say. “Fine,” I would retort, secretly pleased but putting up a battle to salve my conscience. “Fine! but what will we live on?”

  “Leave that to me!”

  “But we can’t go on swindling and bamboozling people forever.”

  “Swindling? Anybody I borrow from can well afford to lend the money. I’m doing them a favor.”

  I couldn’t see it her way but I would give in. After all, I had no better solution to offer. To wind up the argument I would always say: “Well, I’m not quitting yet.”

  Now and then, on one of these stolen holidays, we would end up on Second Avenue, New York. It was amazing the number of friends I had in this quarter. All Jews, of course, and most of them cracked. But lively company. After a bite at Papa Moskowitz’s we would go to the Café Royal. Here you were sure to find anyone you were looking for.

  One evening as we were strolling along the Avenue, just as I was about to peer into a bookshop window to have another look at Dostoevski—his photo had been hanging in this same window for years—who should greet us but an old friend of Arthur Raymond. Nahoum Yood, no less. Nahoum Yood was a short, fiery man who wrote in Yiddish. He had a face like a sledgehammer. Once you saw it you never forgot it. When he spoke it was always a rush and a babble; the words literally tripped over one another. He not only sputtered like a firecracker but he dribbled and drooled at the same time. His accent, that of the “Litvak,” was atrocious. But his smile was golden—like Jack Johnson’s. It gave his face a sort of Jack-o’-Lantern twist.

  I never saw him in any other condition but effervescent. He had always just discovered
something wonderful, something marvelous, something unheard of. In unloading himself he always gave you a spritz bath, gratis. But it was worth it. This fine spray which he emitted between his front teeth had the same stimulating effect that a needle bath has. Sometimes with the spritz bath came a few caraway seeds.

  Snatching the book which I was carrying under my arm, he shouted: “What are you reading? Ah, Hamsun. Good! Beautiful writer.” He hadn’t even said, “How are you” yet. “We must sit down somewhere and talk. Where are you going? Have you had dinner? I’m hungry.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I want to have a look at Dostoevski.”

  I left him standing there talking excitedly to Mona with both hands (and feet). I plunked myself in front of Dostoevski’s portrait, as I had done before many a time, to study his familiar physiognomy anew. I thought of my friend Lou Jacobs who used to doff his hat every time he passed a statue of Shakespeare. It was something more than a bow or salute I made to Dostoevski. It was more like a prayer, a prayer that he would unlock the secret of revelation. Such a plain, homely face, he had. So Slavic, so moujik-like. The face of a man who might pass unnoticed in a crowd. (Nahoum Yood looked much more the writer than did the great Dostoevski.) I stood there, as always, trying to penetrate the mystery of the being lurking behind the doughy mass of features. All I could read clearly was sorrow and obstinacy. A man who obviously preferred the lowly life, a man fresh from prison. I lost myself in contemplation. Finally I saw only the artist, the tragic, unprecedented artist who had created a veritable pantheon of characters, figures such as had never been heard of before and never would be again, each one of them more real, more potent, more mysterious, more inscrutable than all the mad Czars and all the cruel, wicked Popes put together.

  Suddenly I felt Nahoum Yood’s heavy hand on my shoulder. His eyes were dancing, his mouth ringed with saliva. The battered derby which he wore indoors and out had come down over his eyes, giving him a comical and an almost maniacal look.

  “Mysterium!” he shouted. “Mysterium! Mysterium!”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You haven’t read it?” he yelled. What looked like a crowd began to gather round us, one of those crowds which spring up from nowhere as soon as a hawker begins to advertise his wares.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked blandly.

  “About your Knut Hamsun. The greatest book he ever wrote—Mysterium it is called, in German.”

  “He means Mysteries,” said Mona.

  “Yes, Mysteries,” cried Nahoum Yood.

  “He’s just been telling me all about it,” said Mona. “It does sound wonderful.”

  “More wonderful than A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings?”

  Nahoum Yood burst in: “That, that is nothing. For Growth of the Soil they gave him the Nobel Prize. For Mysterium nobody even knows about it. Look, let me explain.…” He paused, turned halfway round and spat. “No, better not to explain. Go to your Carnegie chewing gum library and ask for it. How do you say it in English? Mysteries? Almost the same—but Mysterium is better. More mysterischer, nicht?” He gave one of his broad trolley track smiles and with that the brim of his hat fell over his eyes.

  Suddenly he realized that he had collected an audience. “Go home!” he shouted, raising both arms to shoo the crowd away. “Are we selling shoelaces here? What is it with you? Must I rent a hall to speak a few words in private to a friend? This is not Russia. Go home… shool!” And again he brandished his arms.

  No one budged. They simply smiled indulgently. Apparently they knew him well, this Nahoum Yood. One of them spoke up in Yiddish. Nahoum Yood gave a sad complacent sort of smile and looked at us helplessly.

  “They want that I should recite to them something in Yiddish.”

  “Fine,” I said, “why don’t you?”

  He smiled again, sheepishly this time. “They are like children,” he said. “Wait, I will tell them a fable. You know what is a fable, don’t you? This is a fable about a green horse with three legs. I can only tell it in Yiddish… you will excuse me.”

  The moment he began talking Yiddish his whole countenance changed. He put on such a serious, mournful look that I thought he would burst into tears any moment. But when I looked at his audience I saw that they were chuckling and giggling. The more serious and mournful his expression, the more jovial his listeners grew. Finally they were doubled up with laughter. Nahoum Yood never so much as cracked a smile. He finished with a dead-pan look in the midst of gales of laughter.

  “Now,” he said, turning his back on his audience and grasping us each by the arm, “now we will go somewhere and hear some music. I know a little place on Hester Street, in a cellar. Roumanian gypsies. We will have a little wine and some Mysterium, yes? You have money? I have only twenty-three cents.” He smiled again, this time like a huge cranberry pie. On the way he was constantly tipping his hat to this one and that. Sometimes he would stop and engage a friend in earnest conversation for a few minutes. “Excuse me,” he would say, running back to us breathless, “but I thought maybe I could borrow a little money. That was the editor of a Yiddish paper—but he’s even broker than I am. You have a little money, yes? Next time I will treat.”

  At the Roumanian place I ran into one of my exmessengers, Dave Olinski. He used to work as a night messenger in the Grand Street office. I remembered him well because the night the office was robbed and the safe turned upside down, Olinski had been beaten to within an inch of his life. (As a matter of fact, I had taken it for granted that he was dead.) It was at his own request that I had put him in that office; because it was a foreign quarter, and because he could speak about eight languages, Olinski thought he would earn a lot in tips. Everybody detested him, including the men he worked with. Every time I ran into him he would chew my ear off about Tel Aviv. It was always Tel Aviv and Boulogne-sur-Mer. (He carried about with him post cards of all the ports the boats had stopped at. But most of the cards were of Tel Aviv.) Anyway, before the “accidents,” I once sent him to Canarsie, where there was a “plage.” I used the word “plage” because every time Olinski spoke of Boulogne-sur-Mer, he mentioned the bloody “plage” where he had gone bathing.

  Since he left our employ, he was telling me, he had become an insurance salesman. In fact, he hadn’t exchanged more than a few words when he began trying to sell me a policy. Much as I disliked the fellow, I made no move to shut him off. I thought it might do him good to practice on me. So, much to Nahoum Yood’s disgust, I let him babble on, pretending that perhaps I would also want accident, health and fire insurance too. Meanwhile, Olinski had ordered drinks and pastry for us. Mona had left the table to engage the proprietress in conversation. In the midst of it a lawyer named Mannie Hirsch walked in—another friend of Arthur Raymond. He was passionate about music, and particularly passionate about Scriabin. It took Olinski, who had been drawn into the conversation against his will, quite a while to understand who it was we were talking about. When he learned that it was only a composer he showed profound disgust. Shouldn’t we go maybe to a quieter place, he wondered. I explained to him that that was impossible, that he should hurry up and explain everything to me quickly before we left. Mannie Hirsch hadn’t stopped talking from the time he sat down. Presently Olinski launched into his routine talk, switching from one policy to another; he had to talk quite loudly in order to drown out Mannie Hirsch’s voice. I listened to the two of them at the same time. Nahoum Yood was trying to listen with one ear cupped. Finally he broke into an hysterical fit of laughter. Without a word he began reciting one of his fables—in Yiddish. Still Olinski kept on talking, this time very low, but even faster than before, because every minute was precious. Even when the whole place began to roar with laughter Olinski kept on selling me one policy after another.

  When I at last told him that I would have to think it over, he acted as if he had been mortally injured. “But I have explained everything clearly, Mr. Miller,” he whined.

  “But I already have
two insurance policies,” I lied.

  “That’s all right,” he retorted, “We will cash them in and get better ones.”

  “That’s what I want to think about,” I countered.

  “But there is nothing to think about, Mr. Miller.”

  “I’m not sure that I understood it all,” I said. “Maybe you’d better come to my home tomorrow night,” and therewith I wrote down a false address for him.

  “You’re sure you will be home, Mr. Miller?”

  “If I’m not I will telephone.”

  “But I have no telephone, Mr. Miller.”

  “Then I will send you a telegram.”

  “But I already made two appointments for tomorrow evening.”

  “Then make it the next night,” I said, thoroughly unperturbed by all this palaver. “Or,” I added maliciously, “you could come to see me after midnight, if that’s convenient. We’re always up till two or three in the morning.”

  “I’m afraid that would be too late,” said Olinski, looking more and more disconsolate.

  “Well, let’s see,” I said, looking meditative and scratching my head. “Supposing we meet right here a week from today? Say half-past nine sharp.”

  “Not here, Mr. Miller, please.”

  “O.K. then, wherever you like. Send me a post card in a day or so. And bring all the policies with you, yes?”

  During this last chitchat Olinski had risen from the table and was holding my hand in parting. When he turned round to gather up his papers he discovered that Mannie Hirsch was drawing animals on them. Nahoum Yood was writing a poem—in Yiddish—on another. He was so disturbed by this unexpected turn of events that he began shouting at them in several languages at once. He was getting purple with rage. In a moment the bouncer, who was a Greek and ex-wrestler, had Olinski by the seat of the pants and was giving him the bum’s rush. The proprietress shook her fist in his face as he went through the doorway headfirst. In the street the Greek went through his pockets, extracted a few bills, brought them to the proprietress who made change for him and threw the remaining coins at Olinski who was now on his hands and knees, behaving as if he had the cramps.