Sexus (62 page)

“But I don't care about the religion,” I said.

“The religion is everything,” he said. “If you can't be a good Christian you can't be a good Jew. We are not a people or a race—we're a religion.”

“That's what you say, but I don't believe it. It's more than that. It's as though you were a kind of bacteria. Nothing can explain your survival, certainly not your faith. That's why I'm so curious, why I get excited when I'm with your people. I would like to possess the secret.”

“Well, study your wife,” said he.

“I do but I don't make her out. She's a mystery.”

“But you love her?”

“Yes,” I said, “I love her passionately.”

“And why aren't you with her now? Why do you have the dress sent to her? Who is it that died?”

“Her father,” I answered. “But I never met him,” I added rapidly. “I've never been inside her home.”

“That's bad,” he said. “There's something wrong there. You should go to her. Never mind if she didn't ask you. Go to her! Don't let her be ashamed of her parents. You don't have to go to the funeral, but you should let her see that you care for her family. You are only an accident in her life. When you die the family will go on. They will absorb your blood. We have drunk the blood of every race. We go on like a river. You must not think you are marrying her alone—you are marrying the Jewish race, the Jewish people. We give you life and strength. We nourish you. In the end all peoples will come together. We will have peace. We will make a new world. And there will be room for everybody. . . . No, don't leave her alone now. You will regret it, if you do. She is proud, that's what it is. You must be soft and gentle. You must woo her like a pigeon. Maybe she loves you now, but later she will love you more. She will hold you like a vise. There is no love like that of the Jewish woman for the man she gives her heart to.
Especially if he is of Gentile blood.
It is a great victory for her. It is better for you to surrender than to be the master. . . . You will excuse me for speaking this way, but I know what I am talking about. And I see you are not an ordinary Gentile. You are one of those lost Gentiles—you are searching for something . . . you don't know what exactly. We know your kind. We are not always eager to have your love. We have been betrayed so often. Sometimes it is better to have a good enemy—then we know where we stand. With your kind we are never sure where we stand. You are like water—and we are rocks. You eat us away little by little—not with malice, but with kindness. You lap against us like the waves of the sea. The big waves we can meet—but the gentle lapping, that takes our strength away.”

I was so excited by this unexpected excursus that I had to interrupt his speech.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I know how you feel. You see, we know all about you—but you have everything to learn about us. You can be married a thousand times, to a thousand Jewish women, and still you will not know what we know. We are right inside of you all the time. Bacteria, yes, maybe. If you are strong we support you; if you are weak, we destroy
you. We live not in the world, as it seems to the Gentile, but in the spirit. The world passes away, but the spirit is eternal. My little boy understood that. He wanted to remain pure. The world was not good enough for him. He died of shame—shame for the world. . .”

Some minutes later, when we sauntered out into the violet light of early evening, I saw the ghetto with new eyes. There are Summer nights in New York when the sky is pure azure, when the buildings are immediate and palpable, not only in their substance but in their essence. That dirty streaked light which reveals only the ugliness of factories and sordid tenements disappears very often with sunset, the dust settles down, the contours of the buildings become more sharply defined, like the lineaments of an ogre in a calcium spotlight. Pigeons appear in the sky, wheeling above the rooftops. A cupola bobs up, sometimes out of a Turkish bath. There is always the stately simplicity of St. Mark's in the Bouwerie, the great foreign square abutting Avenue A, the low Dutch buildings above which the ruddy gas tanks loom, the intimate side streets with their incongruous American names, the triangles which bear the stamp of old landmarks, the water front with the Brooklyn shore so close that one can almost recognize the people walking on the other side. All the glamor of New York is squeezed into this pullulating area which is marked off by formaldehyde and sweat and tears. Nothing is so familiar, so intimate, so nostalgic to the New Yorker as this district which he spurns and rejects. The whole of New York should have been one vast ghetto: the poison should have been drained off, the misery apportioned; the joy should have been communicated through every vein and artery. The rest of New York is an abstraction; it is cold,
geometrical, rigid as
rigor mortis
and, I might as well add,
insane
—if one can only stand apart and look at it undauntedly. Only in the beehive can one find the human touch, find that city of sights, sounds, smells which one hunts for in vain beyond the margins of the ghetto. To live outside the pale is to whither and die. Beyond the pale there are only dressed-up cadavers. They are wound up each day, like alarm clocks. They perform like seals; they die like box-office receipts. But in the seething honeycomb there is a growth as of plants, an animal warmth almost suffocating, a vitality which accrues from rubbing and gluing together, a hope which is physical as well as spiritual, a contamination which is dangerous but salutary. Small souls perhaps, burning like tapers, but burning steadily—and capable of throwing portentous shadows on the walls which hem them in.

Walk down any street in the soft violet light. Make the mind blank. A thousand sensations assault you at once from every direction. Here man is still furred and feathered; here cyst and quartz still speak. There are audible, voluble buildings with sheet-metal visors and windows that sweat; places of worship too, where the children drape themselves about the porticoes like contortionists; rolling, ambulant streets where nothing stands still, nothing is fixed, nothing is comprehensible except through the eyes and mind of a dreamer. Hallucinating streets too, where suddenly all is silence, all is barren, as if after the passing of a plague. Streets that cough, streets that throb like a fevered temple, streets to die on and not a soul take notice. Strange, frangipanic streets, in which attar of roses mingles with the acrid bite of leek and scallion. Slippered streets, which echo with the pat and slap of lazy feet. Streets out of Euclid, which can be explained only by logic and theorem . . .

Pervading all, suspended between the layers of the skin like a distillate of ruddy smoke, is the secondary sexual sweat—pubic, Orphic, mammalian—a heavy incense smuggled in by night on velvet pads of musk. No one is immune, not even the Mongolian idiot. It washes over you like the brush and passage of camisoled breasts. In a light rain it makes an invisible ethereal mud. It is of every hour, even when rabbits
are boiled to a stew. It glistens in the tubes, the follicles, the papillaries. As the earth slowly wheels, the stoops and banisters turn and the children with them; in the murky haze of sultry nights all that is terrene, volupt and fatidical hums like a zither. A heavy wheel plated with fodder and feather beds, with little sweet-oil lamps and drops of pure animal sweat. All goes round and round, creaking, wobbling, lumbering, whimpering sometimes, but round and round and round. Then, if you become very still, standing on a stoop, for instance, and carefully think no thoughts, a myopic, bestial clarity besets your vision. There is a wheel, there are spokes, and there is a hub. And in the center of the hub there is—exactly nothing. It is where the grease goes, and the axle. And you are there, in the center of nothingness, sentient, fully expanded, whirring with the whir of planetary wheels. Everything becomes alive and meaningful, even yesterday's snot which clings to the doorknob. Everything sags and droops, is mossed with wear and care; everything has been looked at thousands of times, rubbed and caressed by the occipital eye. . .

A man of an olden race standing in a stone trance. He smells the food which his ancestors cooked in the millenary past: the chicken, the liver paste, the stuffed fish, the herrings, the eiderdown ducks. He has lived with them and they have lived in him. Feathers float through the air, the feathers of winged creatures caged in crates—as it was in Ur, in Babylon, in Egypt and Palestine. The same shiny silks, blacks turning green with age: the silks of other times, of other cities, other ghettos, other pogroms. Now and then a coffee grinder or a samovar, a little wooden casket for spices, for the myrrh and aloes of the East. Little strips of carpet—from the souks and bazaars, from the emporiums of the Levant; bits of astrakhan, laces, shawls, nubias, and petticoats of flaming, flouncing flamingo. Some bring their birds, their little pets—warm, tender things pulsing with tremulous beat, learning no new language, no new melodies, but pining away, droopy, listless, languishing in their superheated cages suspended above the fire escapes. The iron balconies are festooned with meat and bedding, with plants and pets—a crawling still life in which even the rust is rapturously eaten
away. With the cool of the evening the young are exposed like eggplants; they lie back under the stars, lulled to dream by the obscene jabberwocky of the American street. Below, in wooden casks, are the pickles floating in brine. Without the pickle, the pretzel, the Turkish sweets, the ghetto would be without savor. Bread of every variety, with seeds and without. White, black, brown, even gray bread—of all weights, all consistencies . . .

The ghetto! A marble table top with a basket of bread. A bottle of seltzer water, preferably blue. A soup with egg drops. And two men talking. Talking, talking, talking, with burning cigarettes hanging from their blanched lips. Nearby a cellar with music: strange instruments, strange costumes, strange airs. The birds begin to warble, the air becomes overheated, the bread piles up, the seltzer bottles smoke and sweat. Words are dragged like ermine through the spittled sawdust; growling, guttural dogs paw the air. Spangled women choked with tiaras doze heavily in their richly upholstered caskets of flesh. The magnetic fury of lust concentrates in dark, mahogany eyes.

In another cellar an old man sits in his overcoat on a pile of wood, counting his coal. He sits in the dark, as he did in Cracow, stroking his beard. His life is all coal and wood, little voyages from darkness to daylight. In his ears is still the ring of hoofs on cobbled streets, the sound of shrieks and screams, the clatter of sabers, the splash of bullets against a blank wall. In the cinema, in the synagogue, in the coffeehouse, wherever one sits, two kinds of music playing—one bitter, one sweet. One sits in the middle of a river called Nostalgia. A river filled with little souvenirs gathered from the wreckage of the world. Souvenirs of the homeless, of birds of refuge building again and again with sticks and twigs. Everywhere broken nests, eggshells, fledglings with twisted necks and dead eyes staring into space. Nostalgic river dreams under tin copings, under rusty sheds, under capsized boats. A world of mutilated hopes, of strangled aspirations, of bulletproof starvation. A world where even the warm breath of life has to be smuggled in, where gems big as pigeons' hearts are traded for a yard of space, an ounce of freedom. All is compounded
into a familiar liver paste which is swallowed on a tasteless wafer. In one gulp there is swallowed down five thousand years of bitterness, five thousand years of ashes, five thousand years of broken twigs, smashed eggshells, strangled fledglings. . .

In the deep subcellar of the human heart the dolorous twang of the iron harp rings out.

Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, somber, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.

For seven days and nights I was alone. I began to think that she had left me. Twice she telephoned, but she sounded far away, lost, swallowed up by grief. I remembered Mr. Eisenstein's words. I wondered, wondered if she had been reclaimed.

Then one day, towards closing time, she stepped out of the elevator and stood before me. She was all in black except for a mauve turban which gave her an exotic cast. A transformation had taken place. The eyes had grown still softer, the skin more translucent. Her figure had become seductively suave, her carriage more majestic. She had the poise of a somnambulist.

For a moment I could scarcely believe my eyes. There was something hypnotic about her. She radiated power, magnetism, enchantment. She was like one of those Italian women of the Renaissance who gaze at you steadily with enigmatic
smile from a canvas which recedes into infinity. In those few strides which she took before throwing herself into my arms I felt a gulf, such as I had never known could exist between two people, closing up. It was as though the earth had opened up between us, as if, by a supreme and magical effort of will, she had leaped the void and rejoined me. The ground on which she stood a moment ago fell away, slipped into a past altogether unknown to me, just as the shelf of a continent slips into the sea. Nothing so clear and tangible as this formulated itself in my mind then; it was only afterwards, because I rehearsed this moment time and again later, that I understood the nature of our reunion.

Her whole body felt strangely different, as I pressed her close. It was the body of a creature who had been reborn. It was an entirely new body that she surrendered, new because it contained some element which hitherto had been missing. It was, strange as it may seem to say so, as if she had returned with her soul—and not her private, individual soul, but the soul of her race. She seemed to be offering it to me, like a talisman.