Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  He thought of the doctor’s somber face telling him more than a year ago that he was going to die. He thought of his family and the way they looked at him, delicately anticipating in his every sudden move something breaking inside himself, and of the admiration in all their eyes, and the unmasked hope that it would never come to this for them, but that if it should, if it ever should, it would come with grace. But nothing came gracefully—not to heroes.

  In the alley, before the dawn, by the waiting garbage, by the coffee grounds in their cups of wasted orange hemispheres, by the torn packages of frozen fish, by the greased, ripped labels of hollow cans, by the cold and hardened fat, by the jagged scraps of flesh around the nibbled bones, and the coagulated blood of cow and lamb, Feldman saw the cunt one last time and raised himself and crawled in the darkness toward a fence to sit upright against it. He tugged at his jacket to straighten it, tugged at the note appended to him like a price tag: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN. He did not have the strength to pull the tag from his jacket. Smiling, he thought sadly of the dying hero.

  ON A FIELD, RAMPANT

  Long before he began to wonder about it in any important way, he felt the weight of it, the familiar tug of it against his chest as he moved forward, its heavy, gentle arc as it swung, pendent, from the golden chain about his throat. In bed he felt it like a warm hand pressing against his heart.

  What surprised him later was that he had never questioned it, that it had always seemed a quite natural extension of his own body. It had not occurred to him to take it off even in the bath. He could recall lying back in the warm water, somnolent and comfortable, just conscious of its dull glint beneath the surface. Though he enjoyed the subtle shift of its weight in the water, its slow, careful displacements as he moved in the bath, he didn’t really think about it, even as a toy. When he stood and reached for the towel hanging from the curtainless rod above the tub, the medallion, like a metal moon, would catch the light of the electric bulb, and sifting it in its complex corrugated surfaces, throw off thick rings of bright yellow which seemed to sear themselves into his outstretched, upraised hands.

  He could not remember when it was he had first looked at it as a thing apart, having properties of its own. Once, as a child in the gymnasium, a classmate had grabbed it as they were running in a game and had held him by it. He felt the pressure of the golden links on the back of his neck. The boy pulled steadily on the medallion and he lurched forward clumsily. Then the boy, grasping the chain in his fists, drew him toward him, hand over hand, as one might draw a rope up a well. When he could feel the other’s face, abrasive against his own, the boy released him suddenly and backed away, pointing at the spinning medallion unsnarling on his chest.

  The figures on the medallion were as familiar to him as the features on his face, but for this reason he had been strangely unconscious of them, accepting them through long accommodation, nothing else. One night, shortly after the scene in the gymnasium, he took the medallion from beneath his pajama shirt, and holding it underneath the lamp by his bed, studied it. His finger traced the medallion’s outline, a shield large as a man’s hand. It was made of a thick, crusted gold, almost the color of leather, and its surface bristled with figures in sharp relief. At one edge an animal—perhaps a lion—reared, its body rampant, its front legs pawing the air fiercely, its head angry and turned strangely on its body in vicious confrontation. At the medallion’s center a knight sat stiffly, canted crazily on a horse’s back, and reached a mailed fist toward the thick-feathered legs of an eagle just above his head. The eagle’s head, in profile, hung at a queer angle from the long, naked neck, distended in fright. Its wings seemed to beat the heavy air in a clumsy desperation. Its eye, almost human, and in proportion larger than anything else on the shield, seemed, unlike the dangerously clawed, enraged lion, or the thick-walled mail of the stiff, awkward knight, vulnerable, open to unendurable pain and fright. Its talons clutched a crown shape which somehow in its anguish the eagle appeared to have forgotten it held, as though it protected itself from its attackers absent-mindedly, still clutching some irrelevant baggage. The figures emerged from a field of gradually diminishing darkness, the background, a deep gold the color of old brass, finally exploding in a sunburst of yellow in the eagle’s golden eye.

  He had replaced it carefully inside his pajamas and from that time thought of it no longer as a part of his own body but rather as something merged with it, yet isolate: not part of him, but his, like a glass eye or an ivory limb.

  He decided to ask his father about it. He and Khardov lived together at the back of Khardov’s shop. He had been a craftsman in precious metals, but the wars and revolutions had ruined his trade and now he repaired watches. In the dark back room where Khardov ate his lunch, even there not out of earshot of the noisy watches, the old man chewed on the raw, doughy bread and spoke to him.

  “Time,” he said hoarsely. “Time, time, time,” he said, shrugging, jerking his thumb in the direction of the watches.

  The boy looked uneasily at the dark curtain that separated their apartment from the shop.

  “Listen to them chattering.” He drew the back of his hand across his cheek where a piece of moist bread had stuck to it. “Even the wars, even the wars, once leisurely and provisional with the news of battle a hard ride three days off, the capital always the last place to fall. Even the wars,” he said, his voice trailing off. He looked at the boy. “Where are your sieges today?” he asked him. “Where are your pitched tents, your massive bivouacs like queer cities of the poor outside the walls? The terrible armies and the gentle, gentle soldiers? Who storms a summer palace now? Isn’t that right, sir? Doesn’t that strike you as right?”

  The boy nodded, confused.

  “It is to be understood then, sir, that the new national product is the pocket watch. A cheap, sturdy symbol of the times, isn’t that right? And a practical symbol, too. More than the old icons, or the glazed four-color pictures of the dead presidents from the papers.” As Khardov spoke he held in his lap a carved, heavy casket in which were still the last precious shavings from the great times. He had pushed back the lid which slid on smooth wooden rails and let one hand loll idly in the dark box, as a man in a boat trails his hand in cool water. The boy could not see it but he knew that in Khardov’s fingers were the shapeless golden chips, the fragments of platinum and chunks of splintered silver, like the pebbled residuum of some lavish flood.

  Khardov had almost finished eating and the boy still had not asked him about the medallion. “Khardov,” he said—he had been told to call him Khardov, not Father—“Khardov, why do I have this?” He pointed to his shirt under which the flat, cool part of the medallion lay against his chest.

  He thought for a moment that Khardov might not understand him. He could have been pointing at his heart.

  “You have it because it is yours, sir,” Khardov said softly.

  This had been (though he could not understand now how naïve he had been; there should have been dozens of times when the subject of the medallion would have come up) the first time he could remember speaking to Khardov about it. Strangely, he had experienced a deep satisfaction in Khardov’s answer. It seemed an absolute confirmation of his own discovery the night before when he had taken the medallion, like the heart from his chest, to examine it beneath the lamp.

  Until then, like all children, he’d had no real sense of his own being. His self he had simply accepted with the other natural facts of the world, something which had always existed. But his father’s answer, that he had the medallion because it was his, provided him with an insight into his own uniqueness. It was as if the center of the universe had suddenly and inexplicably shifted. No longer a part of it, he sensed irreconcilable differences between himself and it, but like a castaway who suddenly finds himself on an island to which he is bound only by the physics of geography, he felt an amused tolerance of customs and conditions arrived at through no consultation with himself, and for which he could never be made to answe
r. Relieved somehow of burdens he had been made to feel only when they had been lifted from him, he experienced a heady freedom. Of course. It was his. He was himself.

  One afternoon, not long after his interview with Khardov, he returned from his classes to find a package on his bed. Inside were the richest, finest clothes he had ever seen. There were trousers of so deep a blue that they appeared black. Along the seams stitches were so closely set against each other that they seemed a single fat, stranded thread. “Tailors have gone blind making these,” Khardov boasted to him. There were jackets with wool so thick he could not bunch it in his fist, and high black stockings with silk so sheer that his legs looked gray in them. The heavy shoes he found beneath the bed were of a rich, pungent leather, the color of horses’ saddles on state occasions. He did not wonder where the clothes had come from, or even if they were for him. He put them on quickly and went to stand before the shard of mirror in the kitchen. By standing back far enough he could see, except for his face, his whole reflection. Pleased, he thought of the medallion settled comfortably, with himself inside the heavy clothes.

  Behind him Khardov came up and placed himself against the kitchen door with his hands at his sides and his head slightly forward on his neck. “Do I look well, Khardov?” he asked without turning around.

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied. “You look splendid.”

  His awareness of himself was confused now with a new deep consciousness of the medallion he wore. It seemed to him that the medallion, even more than himself, had achieved an insular security beneath the fine clothes. It had become inviolate, immured, like the precious metal in Khardov’s casket, not so much by the thickness of the covering as by the implicit delicacy of its surroundings. One ripped valuables from a paper bag, but did not touch the pearl at the throat of the great lady fallen in the street.

  He discovered later that the packages he frequently found on his bed were paid for by the steady depletion of the gold and silver in Khardov’s box. It was almost as if it, rather than Khardov, were his benefactor (as a young boy he thought of the power of the metals to transform themselves into visible symbols he could wear as somehow self-generative, an implicit condition built comfortably into the very premise of wealth), for as he grew and his needs multiplied, it was, as he by that time knew, only at the expense of the wealth that glittered beneath the ornate surfaces of the carved casket that they were met. Khardov no longer sat in the dark back room solacing his fingers in the rich depths of the box, stirring the opulent shards as he ate his lunch. One day, of course, their little treasury was empty and there were no more packages. As a child he had thought of the metals as fragments broken by main force from heavy sheets of silver and gold, and it saddened him to realize that even these were susceptible of a further and final depletion. He had become used to the silky luxury of the gifts and it was a disappointment to him that they should stop; but in a way, forced as he was to wear clothing that was still fine though no longer new, he was made aware of a subtle shift in his status which was not at all unpleasant to him. With use, the clothing, too substantial ever to become threadbare, gradually lost its gloss, its stiff novelty. An aura of respectable solidity settled over it. The jackets and suits were not old, but aged, and had about them now an aspect of classic and somewhat ancient fashionableness, and although Khardov still managed to find money for fresh and expensive linen—this, somehow, was perishable, like the brittle and yellowing paper notes Khardov traded to obtain it—its silken crispness seemed only to deepen the musty gentility of the rest of his clothing.

  Thinking now of the clothes always in relation to the thick casket and its contents, he began to view his life as a syllogism proceeding with a calm deliberateness from the premise of the medallion. From the first the medallion had seemed to hint at some mystery about himself which sooner or later he would have to solve. Even the handsome clothes which had drained the box had gone, not so much to dress him, as to set off the medallion, as though all arrangements in his life were controlled finally by the eccentric object which hung about his neck. There was something curiously effeminate about his position, ludicrously not unlike a woman’s commitment to a strangely colored handbag which, accessory to nothing, makes ceaseless demands on her wardrobe. He told Khardov about his feelings, and although the old man laughed he had seemed angry. Later Khardov came to him. “You were right, sir,” he said. “It was perceptive in you to see that. The poor man’s rags are given outright, but golden raiments are always lent. They are a responsibility. If this seems to diminish you, remember they are a responsibility only the very few can have.”

  Increasingly he enjoyed going out among the few people he knew. It may have seemed to others that he glided too smoothly among them. Like a man on ice skates nodding to friends who stand by less sure of themselves, he went from one to the other, asking of this one’s health, desiring to be remembered to that one’s family. He sensed that others hung back from him and assumed at first that it was his dress, so different from their own, which had made him seem somehow too forbidding and caused their caution, forcing them apart from him, as one steps aside for a man in a uniform one has never worn. He understood later, however, that his interest must have seemed patronizing to them, and he was hurt that they should misinterpret his sincere affection. Gradually, though, he concluded that their suspicion of him was not entirely unjustified, that he had held something of himself in reserve. It was, he decided, a flaw in his character. He resolved to correct it. But once, after he was a grown man, a mistress of his, having had too much to drink, refused to use his name in talking to him. Instead, she kept on calling him “Jehovah.” Finally, in some anger, he asked her why she did this. “Because,” she said, “you show me only your behind.”

  In the evenings, even from the first, he read a good deal. Khardov brought him the books—elaborate, heavy treatises on government; heroic, copious histories of an older world; statements of political philosophy; royalist tracts; the diaries and secret papers of personages in famous courts; and novels, many novels. It was the novels which he read with an increasing absorption. Gradually he began to return more and more of the other books unread and to demand of Khardov that he bring him still more novels. These were always romances, books with involved, old-fashioned plots. He had no illusions about their art, but he experienced a never diminishing satisfaction and excitement in the stories of depressed but golden lovers whose difficulties were invariably that they lived in worlds of frozen status. He read with a double tension. Delighted with the tales of the sons of struggling merchants, of traveling circus performers, and the strong, tanned boys of gamekeepers, he sensed in them, in their careful language, in their unaccountable benevolence in worlds fraught with evil and terror, in their almost jejune resistance to temptation, what their petite, soprano-throated girl friends sensed in them—a quality, an essence which would not submerge, which popped like a cork to the surface in even the wildest storms and displacements of their condition. For him it was not the wart or mole or scarlet pimpernel which in the last act of their drama finally brought recognition even from the enemy who stood to lose because the prince was found. It was not the superficial deformity, scar of quality so important to others that was important to him. It was rather a concept, the validity of which he came increasingly to recognize as he raced through the novels—a concept of blood itself. He knew his man long before the dullard others did, spotting them their familiarity with the telltale wound inflicted on the inner thigh by ruffians at birth. A man’s blood was his character, he knew. At the same time he experienced a real anxiety that for once the heroine would not find out in time, that the gypsy would be killed before things could work themselves out. But it was not the hero’s marriage which he longed for; he did not yearn for the pale and distant princess. He wanted one thing for the hero, one thing only. He wanted restoration. To him it was a daring and delicious word. He said it under his breath.

  It was a pleasant life, but he knew, even from the beginning, th
at the sense of special condition he felt so deeply was not forever to be enjoyed passively. All right, he reasoned. I have known for a long time that I am different. But I know no more about myself than does a small child. I have no facts.

  Instead of gratitude to Khardov he felt a growing resentment. The quality, the essence he could identify so easily in the heroes he read about, he recognized in himself. He was something—a prince of the blood—something other than what he seemed. To be grateful for a few fine clothes, for Khardov’s open deference, for the leisure he enjoyed, for the promise swinging on his chest, was foolish. Like feeling gratitude toward the clerk who hands out the money when one makes a withdrawal from the bank. What he wanted now, needed, was not the small change of personal assurance, nor Khardov’s blank checks on his specialness—conspiratorial drafts on a vague but somehow splendid future. He needed only what his blood demanded: restoration. If one wanted it for stranger/heroes in foolish romances, one insisted upon it for oneself.

  Toward his twentieth year he went to Khardov.

  “Look here, Khardov,” he said. “You’ve been hinting at things long enough. What is it you know?”

  “Don’t be angry, sir. Please.”

  “Angry? Of course I’m angry. You act more like a family retainer than a father. The things you know. Who are you? What am I to you?”

  “Haven’t I provided? I’m not rich, you know that. But I have provided. You’ve never wanted.”

  “I know that. I know all that. You’ve been very kind. But there are too many things I don’t understand. Please, Khardov. What do you know about me?”

  “I know that you are worthy to be who you are.”

  “Who is that?”