The telephone rang and it was Mr. Smith. He said, “Come right down. I am waiting for you in the lobby. I’m wearing a hat with a little brush in it and I’ll be holding a copy of the Saturday Evening Post. Make it snappy.”
I went right out into the corridor and began searching for the elevator, but it had vanished. I raced up and down the lengthy corridor; there was not a trace of an elevator. It’s all my cursed nerves, I told myself. The writer within me observed, Literature hasn’t even touched on the fantastic tricks that sick nerves can play on people.
From somewhere, a black maid appeared. I asked her where the elevator was and she shouted something I couldn’t understand. I began searching for the stairs, but at that moment a door opened and someone stepped out of the elevator. I quickly raced inside it. How was this possible? Could nerves render someone blind? Did they possess such hypnotic power? And if they did, could this power perhaps be turned into a force that worked miracles?
For some reason, I had pictured Mr. Smith as being tall, but he turned out to be a runt. He winked at me to follow him; however, I hadn’t yet checked out. The bill came to over forty dollars. I went outside with Mr. Smith and we walked along. During the whole time, he didn’t speak a single word to me. The bridge was crowded with pedestrians. We passed two officials and it seemed to me that Mr. Smith nodded to one of them. They let me pass without a word.
I no longer recall whether the distance to the bus station was long or short. It seems to me that the station was right on the other side of the bridge. The moment we had crossed it, Mr. Smith vanished. I had the anxious premonition that when I got to the bus station Zosia wouldn’t be there. And that’s how it turned out.
The station was small. If she had gone to the ladies’ room, her suitcases would be out here. But there were no suitcases in sight. A catastrophe had occurred. Zosia had my passport. I could no longer return to the States. Nor could I obtain a visa without a passport. According to my calculations, Zosia should have been here more than an hour ago. “Well, this is my finish,” I told myself.
I sat down on a bench and everything within me was mute. To forget my troubles momentarily, I began to add up my remaining money. I counted the bills and even my small change several times and each time I came up with a different total.
Each time the door opened, I trembled. I tried to imagine what might have occurred. Had Zosia been detained at the border? Had she changed her mind at the last minute and ordered the driver to take her to the train going back to New York? Had something happened to the cab and she was in a hospital? After much brooding, I decided to take the bus to Toronto. If Zosia lived, it would be easier for her to phone or wire me at the King Edward Hotel than to reach me here at the bus station.
The door opened and several policemen (or maybe these were border guards) entered. Had they come to arrest me? I began to mumble a prayer to the Almighty, assuming He existed, “Father in heaven, help me! Don’t let me perish!”
I decided to buy the ticket to Toronto. Even to kill oneself it was easier in a hotel than in a bus station. But would they give me a room there without a passport?
The armed men spoke to the ticket seller. It apparently had nothing to do with me. I walked over and asked for a ticket, but the seller gave me a questioning look and his lips formed something like a smile. The policeman stared at me too and also seemed to be holding back laughter. What had happened to me? Had I addressed the ticket seller in Yiddish instead of English?
I repeated my request for the third time and the ticket seller asked, “Where do you think you are?”
At that moment I realized my error. Instead of asking for a ticket to Toronto I had been asking for a ticket to Windsor. Two of the policemen burst out laughing, but one who was older and apparently of a higher rank kept a solemn face and asked me, “You’re from the States, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Just come over from Detroit?”
“Yes.”
Although Mr. Lemkin had admonished me repeatedly not to give my name in such an instance, I immediately revealed my full name along with my address both in Warsaw and in New York, even though the other hadn’t asked for it. I did this, first, because it isn’t my way to deny my identity. Second, there was a bit of logic behind this. It would be better for me to be arrested and deported to Poland than to remain in a strange country without papers and with just enough money to last me one week at most. Apparently, I was far from ready for suicide.
The policemen exchanged brief glances, as if mutely consulting on their next move. The ticket seller asked, “Do you want a one-way ticket or a round trip?”
“One-way,” I said.
I assumed that the policeman would continue his interrogation and I even considered the fact that it would be a waste of money to buy a ticket if I was to be arrested, but the officials began to discuss other matters among themselves and seemed to have forgotten about me. I paid the fare and was handed my ticket. In a way, I was disappointed that I hadn’t been detained on the spot. I was convinced that they would do this later, before I boarded my bus. They surely had to understand that I had crossed the border illegally. I didn’t have a piece of luggage with me.
I sat down again, and after a while the policemen left and the station began to fill up with passengers who were apparently bound for Toronto, too. Suddenly, I spotted Zosia. Someone carried in her valises and she handed the man a tip. I stood up and Zosia said to me, “They detained me at the frontier. They suspected me of being a Communist agitator, those idiots.”
Nine
1
It was all in the past—the examination by the American consul in Toronto (not unlike the examination by the American consul in Warsaw), Zosia’s congratulations, her wishes and kisses. As always when something propitious happens to me, I asked my inner I, my ego, superego, id, or whatever it should be called if I was finally happy. But they kept diplomatically silent. It seemed that I had a great talent for suffering, but no positive achievement could ever satisfy me. What was there to rejoice about? The skeptic in me, the nihilist and protester, quoted the words of Ecclesiastes: “Of laughter I said it is madness and of mirth what doeth it?” I was still a Yiddish writer who hadn’t made it, estranged from everything and everybody. I could live neither with God nor without Him. I had no faith in the institution of marriage, neither could I stand my bachelor’s loneliness.
We had eaten a combination of lunch and supper in a noisy little restaurant and then walked all the way back to the King Edward Hotel. For some reason Zosia kept on stopping at shop windows. I asked her what she was searching for but she didn’t give me a clear answer. Her feet must have been hurting because she lingered at windows displaying ladies’ shoes. I offered to wait until she got herself a pair of shoes but she assured me that she had comfortable shoes in her luggage. Besides, the stores were closing.
Night had fallen when we finally returned to the hotel. In all the excitement of getting the visa I had almost forgotten that Zosia and I had come here with an unspoken agreement to deliver her from the disgrace of remaining a virgin at an age when other women had husbands or lovers or both. I was anxious to keep my silent promise both for her sake and my own male vanity, but from the very beginning of our journey I was aware that something like an antisexual dybbuk had taken hold of me. A spiteful spirit was telling me that agreements of this kind are not only morally wrong but physiologically precarious as well. Sex, like art, cannot be made to order—at least not in my case. The little desire I had for Zosia that evening when we planned our trip together had vanished almost immediately and I began to feel something akin to hostility for that old maid who was clinging to me like a parasite. What shame, I thought, to have to depend on the little blood and the few nerves that evoke the erection! Unlike the other limbs of the body, the penis has the autonomy to function or not to function according to its ethical and aesthetic likes and dislikes. The cabalists called this organ “the sign of the holy covenant.” It bore the name yesod, t
he same as one of the ten spheres of the divine emanation. What I really felt now was a kind of negative erection, if one may use an expression like this. My penis tried to steal into hiding, to become shrunken, to sabotage and punish me for daring to make a decision without its consent, to become a benefactor on its account. The resolver in me had resolved that I owed Zosia nothing. I had to remain completely passive, not take the slightest initiative. Let me imagine, I said to myself, that they actually arrested me in Windsor that late afternoon and that I am in a Canadian prison now.
Both of us were tired from the long walk and we decided to take a rest. Zosia had gone to her room to lie down for half an hour, and I tried to do the same in my room but I could not even doze, let alone sleep. I closed my eyes but they too had become autonomous and opened by themselves. If there is such a thing as Nirvana, let me try it right now, I decided. Zosia must have read my mind. My phone rang and it was she, stuttering and asking, “What became of our plan?”
“What plan?” I asked with a choked voice.
“We were supposed to celebrate.”
“Come in and we will celebrate.”
“All right, I will dress.” And she hung up.
What does she have to dress for? I murmured to myself. Or does she mean undress? I waited what seemed to me a long time and she still did not appear. What is she doing in there? Preparing like a bride? I was impatient for her to come in—not in order to fulfill my self-imposed obligation but to void it once and for all. I could neither lie nor sit and I began to pace back and forth. I stopped at the window and looked out at the street seven flights below. How dark the city was! All the stores were closed. A single man, seemingly drunk, passed by on the sidewalk. He swayed and gesticulated. I envied this tramp. No one expected anything of him; he was free to spend the night as he pleased. I heard a knocking on my door and I rushed to open it. On the other side of the threshold stood Zosia in a black nightgown (or was it a negligee?) and silver slippers. For the first time she wore a trace of makeup, discreetly applied, her nose powdered, and a redness in her cheeks which might have been rouge. She had even changed her hairdo. “Unconditional surrender,” the phrase so often used at the end of World War II, went through my mind. She smiled, half-frightened, with that naïvete which sometimes shows up in even the most shrewd woman. They understand as little about men as men understand them, I thought. She had armed herself with that weapon which had never yet conquered anyone. I heard her say, “Today should be a holiday for us.”
“How beautiful you look! Come in.”
“A day like this happens once in a lifetime.”
This was no longer the same Zosia who admired Baudelaire for being the only poet and thinker who could tell the world the full dismal truth, but an old maid who had decided to lose her virginity at any price. I sat down on my bed and I offered her the chair nearby. In one way or another I had to inflate her confidence in me and in my masculine prowess, and I said, “I don’t think that you made such a fuss when you got your visa.”
“What? I got mine at a time when I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to go to America. I have told you already, I had someone who I thought I could love and who loved me. Leaving for America was actually more my father’s plan than mine. What could I have expected to find in America besides extreme loneliness? But you are a writer, you have a brother here, a newspaper that publishes you, a milieu. You will grow.”
“No, Zosia, I’m completely alone.”
“Today I don’t want to hear this. Wait, I have a surprise for you.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“This morning I bought a bottle of champagne especially for this occasion. The chambermaid saw me come in with it, and she brought me a bucket with ice. It has already melted but the water is still cold.”
“Really, you needn’t have done this.”
“Can I bring it in?”
“Yes, if you want.”
She went out and did not close the door, but left it half open. She dallied longer than would have been necessary to bring the bottle from one room to another in the same corridor. After a long while she came back. I got up to take the bucket from her and my hands trembled so that I almost dropped it. She said, “Where do you get a corkscrew in a place like this?”
I took the bottle out of the bucket and let the water drip back in order not to wet the rug. I could see that it was not corked but sealed with a foil wrapper that could be easily removed. I had barely begun to unwrap the foil when I heard a pop. The stopper sprang off and the wine began to fizz over its neck and my hand. Zosia screamed and ran to the bathroom, coming back with two glasses, while the champagne kept on running over my hand and onto the rug. Perhaps the champagne would help me, flashed through my mind, as I poured one glass for Zosia and one for myself. I clinked my glass to hers and gulped it down like medicine. Usually when I drank an alcoholic beverage, even wine, I had to eat something with it—a cookie, a pretzel, a piece of bread. But this time I wanted to get drunk. It occurred to me that this might have been Zosia’s aim in buying this gift—to make me drunk as the daughters did to Lot.
We had emptied the bottle. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed and Zosia on the chair opposite. She crossed her legs and for a split second I saw she was naked under her fancy garment. I was waiting for my drunkenness to ascend from the stomach to the brain, but I felt that the opposite was happening—it descended from my brain to my stomach. I remained tense, sober, attentive to the slightest variation in my moods. I heard Zosia say, “I’ve read nothing of yours, but for some reason I believe in your talent. The trouble is that what a human being is, no one will ever be able to describe. What is a human being, eh?”
I did not answer. I seemed to have missed the question. For one fraction of a moment my mind remained blank. Then I realized what she had said, and I answered, “A caricature of God, a parody of the spirit, the only entity in Creation which could be called a lie.”
2
The master of spite, as I call the special adversary of lovemaking, had had his way. The first half of the night Zosia was willing but I was inhibited. After I gave up all hope and had an hour of sleep, my potency came back as strongly as ever but then Zosia became possessed by the same dybbuk. She pressed her legs together and my bony knees could not separate them. I reproached her contradictory behavior but she said to me, “I can’t help it.” She informed me that exactly the same thing happened to her on that night when she had tried to give herself to that professor in Warsaw. I had gotten so accustomed to the games of the adversary in me and in those near to me that I stopped being surprised. I had already learned that our genitals, which in the language of the vulgar are synonyms of stupidity and insensitivity, are actually the expression of the human soul, defiant of lechery, the most ardent defenders of true love.
Day was breaking when we both gave up and Zosia went back to her room. In the morning we had breakfast in the dining room of the hotel, trying to make conversation about Hitler, Mussolini, the civil war in Spain. We avoided looking into each other’s eyes. It was clear to both of us that our planned journey together was over. Zosia had gotten information about her return to the U.S.A. at the desk. She intended to travel directly from Toronto to Boston and I was to take the train to New York. Both of our trains were leaving in the evening and we had the whole day to ourselves. We checked out from the hotel after lunch, leaving our luggage in the storage room—partners to a disenchantment we could never forget.
I was told that Spadina Avenue was the center of Yiddishism in Toronto, and there we went. I again strolled on Krochmalna Street—the same shabby buildings, the same pushcarts and vendors of half-rotten fruit, the familiar smells of the sewer, soup kitchens, freshly baked bagels, smoke from the chimneys. I imagined that I heard the singsong of cheder boys reciting the Pentateuch and the wailing of women at a funeral. A little rag dealer with a yellow face and a yellow beard was leading a cart harnessed to an emaciated horse with short legs and a long tail. A mixture
of resignation and wisdom looked out of its dark eyes, as old and as humble as the never-ending Jewish Exile.
Zosia was saying to me, “Oh, I was determined, and I still am, to return to Jewishness, but of what shall my Jewishness consist? If there is no God and if the Bible is a lie, in what way is a Jew a Jew?”
“He is a Jew by virtue of the fact that he isn’t a Gentile,” I said, just to say something.
“Maybe I should leave everything and go to Palestine?” Zosia asked. She spoke to me, to herself, and mostly in order to show that her mind could be occupied with things other than with our common disgrace. I said, “Unless you were to shave your head, don a bonnet, and marry some yeshivah student from Mea Shearim, all your problems would remain unresolved even in Palestine.”
“Oh, I am lost. You are lost, too, but at least you received a Jewish upbringing. You know the Talmud and all the rest. You belong to these Yiddishists whether you want to or not. I am a total stranger here. I’m psychotic to boot. Last night, after I had fallen asleep in my room, I heard my father’s voice. He yelled at me so loud that I was afraid you would hear it next door. He seized me by the throat and tried to strangle me. I’m seriously afraid that I will soon be committed to an asylum.”
“No, Zosia, our so-called nerves are not madness but a true realization of the many misfortunes which lurk before us and of all the barriers that stand between us and our notions of happiness.”
“What? They may lead to insanity. My father had a sister who went insane in her later years. She convinced herself that her husband was trying to poison her. I suspect that my father’s conversion was an act of lunacy, too. This thing with Reuben Mecheles is finished. I shouldn’t have started up with him in the first place. I’ll go back to Boston to my professor and maybe we’ll get through the few years left to her and to me. You see already that love and sex aren’t for me. Come, let’s have a cup of coffee.”
Love and Exile Page 34