Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  “Pretty wonderful, ain’t it?” a man with a thick New York accent said to him.”

  “Sure is, hick,” Morty said.

  He turned around and walked down Broadway. Once he left Times Square and was into the Thirties he felt more comfortable, but he was very tired. He walked into the little square at 32nd Street and sat down on a bench to rest. An old woman in a dark cloth coat too warm for the day was across from him. She had on black, broken, high-heeled shoes and white bobbysocks, and sat feeding pigeons from a deep paper sack.

  “Good morning there, mother,” Morty said.

  “Good morning there, tramp,” the woman said.

  Morty sat contentedly, looking from the great complex of department stores to the jerky thrusts of pigeon neck. “I am a traveler from the West who has come a long journey,” he said after a while. “Can you tell me the meaning of life?”

  She looked up and squinted at him, her squeezed eyes enormous and burning behind her rimless, sun-reflecting glasses.

  “I can but I won’t,” she said.

  He stood up, wiping his forehead. “In that case I must be moving on, hi ho Silver.”

  On his right as he went out was a statue of Horace Greeley. “You go West,” he told the statue. The nerve of that guy, he thought.

  He walked down Broadway.

  In the garment district he looked up at the huge windows, enjoying the familial, personal poetry of the names of the firms lettered there.

  Broadway moved into the East Side at 23rd Street, and he began to walk faster. Now he no longer looked around him but moved quickly, excited and urgent and nervous.

  At 17th Street he rushed to the picket railing around the square and closed his hands tightly about two iron-dark spears. His heart pumped violently. The muscles in his throat, contracting, gagged him. He entered Union Square Park.

  It was an open-air forum, the last in New York, one of the last in the world.

  Morty had known about Union Square but until now had stayed away from it, saying it, savoring the idea of it. It would not be like Hyde Park in London, where a man would take your picture on a soapbox for money. It would not be like the Bughouse Square in Chicago, where the high-school boys, smug, mock innocence like jam on their faces, came to bully the speaker, to grab at his pants from behind. This was different. This was serious.

  There were no boxes. That made the difference. It kept the exhibitionists away. He remembered Kachoa, where the king had no throne. He met you at eye level. There the laws were wise, complex fiats issuing as naturally as rote morning salutations between friends. He knew where he would have to come to hear truth when he read about a New York City ordinance that permitted speech-making in the park so long as the speakers were level with their hearers.

  It was not yet eleven, but already the men had begun to gather. They were men just past middle age, in blue work shirts, or tieless in white short-sleeved shirts, the collars spread neat and wide as bibs over the lapels of their jackets. They lounged on benches with newspapers in their laps or sticking out of wide, slack side pockets in their suit coats. It alarmed him to hear them question each other about absent speakers and to see their smiles as each name invoked some old-cronied recognition. If they knew the truth, why, he wondered, would they come back? Then he thought: Why, to relish it; they return to relish it, like old men warmed by any familiar, mutual memory.

  Men continued to gather. They came into the park and waved at acquaintances or stopped to chat with friends with the odd, dignified courtesy of legislators in a cloakroom. There was about the place—in addition to expectancy, which was what Morty brought there—a sort of placidity: an air among them of having shared together something immense and final and incorruptible. Though he had never seen any of these men before, he could almost tell which of them had been labor agitators in the thirties, which had been hit by policemen, or been cellmates, or conspired together in basements.

  An hour had passed and still no one had begun formally to address the crowds. Just after noon Morty leaned toward the man next to him on the bench.

  “When does everything begin?” he asked.

  The man didn’t look at him when he answered. “Too many regulars,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “Somebody who’s never heard it has to be around to listen. Otherwise it’d be like trees falling in the forest. Is a sound made?”

  I’ve never heard it, Morty thought.

  People continued to come into the square. Morty imagined them to be, like the men already there before he had asked his question, fellow connoisseurs.

  Suddenly, and apparently at no signal, a man sprang up from a bench. He was already talking by the time he gained his feet.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man was saying, “in the City of New York last year two hundred forty-three people were burned to death in fires. Now, that does not take in Westchester County or Newark in New Jersey or the burned populations of Chicago or Montana or any other place on the face of this flammable globe. That’s the City of New York alone. Two hundred forty-three. How many of them husbands, fathers, kids, mothers, wives? And that’s death I’m talking about. How many singed children or limbs burned permanently useless?”

  People moved up to him. Some were smiling.

  “What’s the earth? How did it get here? The earth is the sun. The earth is a spinning fragment of the exploded sun. And I tell you that it is the natural function of the sun to burn. And I tell you that just as the acorn does not fall far from the tree, so too will the earth ever combust from here to eternity.

  “Do not be deceived, my friends, by the notion of a ‘cooling earth.’ That’s nothing but the cant phrase of sophist scientists—”

  “You tell ’em, Smoky Joe,” a man called good-naturedly from the crowd.

  The speaker ignored him.

  “…the cant phrase of sophist scientists. Don’t be lulled by it. As the one million people destroyed on the slopes of Etna were lulled. As the thousands charred beneath Vesuvius were lulled.”

  “Smoky Joe thinks the Empire State Building will erupt one day,” a man shouted.

  “Or as the natives of Chicago were lulled. Or Hiroshima. Or any of a hundred other places I could name.” He turned to the heckler. “Wise guy. It will. One day it will. What do you think? Do you know what the combined total of fire-insurance premiums is on the Empire State Building each year? One million…”

  “…six hundred and ninety thousand,” the crowd joined him, familiar with the figure, “four hundred seventy-two dollars…”

  “…fourteen cents,” the speaker said, finishing just behind the crowd.

  “Let him speak,” Morty shouted.

  “Thank you, sir,” the speaker said, “but they don’t bother me. Those bums don’t bother me. All right. What do you think? Those guys know what they’re doing they shell out like that. Everything burns. Where are your houses of yesteryear? Where are they? Gone. Burned down. What are your majestic ruins of Rome and Athens? Burned buildings! I’ve inspected them. I’ve been there and inspected them and they make me sick.

  “The kindling point of human flesh is fifty-five degrees lower than the kindling point of a varnished hardwood floor, did you know that?”

  “We know it, Smoky Joe,” said a man through cupped hands. “You told us last week.” Others near him grinned and clapped him on the back.

  “What are we thinking about, friends? What are we thinking about to let this holocaust continue? And it will continue. Mark my words. It will continue. What’s the answer?” Smoky Joe made himself taller as he challenged them. He grinned.

  “It’s not a case of fighting fire with fire, let me tell you,” he said, and Morty, sick, knew it was a joke he had made a hundred times before. The speaker stooped for a moment and drew something out of a large cardboard file near his feet. Standing, he held out a mat on which had been mounted half a dozen box-camera photographs. They appeared to be views of a rather strange-looking house. He thumped the photographs with a thick fing
er. “The Fire Commissioner knows the answer. The Real Estate Board knows the answer. The construction interests know the answer,” he said, building to a climax. “And Smoky Joe has lived in the answer…”

  “…twenty-four years,” the crowd yelled, anticipating him.

  “…-four years,” Smoky Joe echoed. “And what is the answer? It’s processed tin. Processed-tin walls. Processed-tin floors. Processed-tin doors and ceilings. Simple? Yes. Fallible? Yes. I’m very frank. It’ll burn. Everything will. But—after you’ve all been charred, marred and scarred in those Japanesey parchment-and-paper-dolls’ houses you call homes, the chances are a million to one that old Smoky Joe will be sitting back, high, dry and cool in his processed-tin strongbox!” He pounded his photographs again.

  “Cool you’ll be,” a man said,“—in winter.”

  “I already said it’s not infallible. But suppose there is a fire. Now, it can’t start in those processed-tin floors, walls, ceilings or doors, but let’s suppose for the sake of argument that you’ve gone to bed and your wife is still up reading in the living room and she’s smoking a cigarette, and she gets sleepy and her burning cigarette falls on her housecoat and starts a fire. Well, you’re sound asleep, but you smell the smoke and you get up to see what’s what, and you see all the furniture in the living room is burning. That could happen. Well, what do you do? All you do is go back into your bedroom and slam the processed-tin door and forget about it!”

  “What about your wife, Smoky?”

  “My wife is dead in a fire. Don’t make jokes about my wife.”

  “Oh no,” Morty said softly. “Oh no.”

  “He always uses the same example,” a man explained. “He always uses the same example, and that guy always asks the same question.”

  Morty shouldered his way out of the crowd, seeing, suddenly projected on the grass, his shadow, the knapsack making a kind of hump on his back.

  While he had been listening to the man who believed in fire, other groups had formed.

  A dozen voices competed against each other, and Morty moved along the curving cement walks behind the backs of the crowds. It was like a holiday. Small children climbed over benches or darted in and out of groups, like dwarfs with messages.

  In the crowds, constricted, clumsy under his knapsack, he brushed against the shoulders of other men and felt a queer, muffled shock, as though someone had stepped on an artificial leg he used, or struck him in a glass eye. He shoved against people—collecting randomly now, drawn to the speakers by some curious abeyance of the will, as men pause before one booth rather than another at a fair. He stepped over a low iron railing onto a soft noman’s-land of grass. A policeman waved him away. He moved back into the voices.

  He stopped to listen to a man with a beard, and it struck him that the man appeared not so much to address those men already listening to him as the others—those passing by in low-geared, imposed shuffle, or already settled in small, thickish bands around other speakers. He did not speak or persuade so much as call his oration, the ideas strangely shouted in an unthinking excitement, like someone with another’s umbrella rushing to a doorway to call after the guest who has left it behind.

  “People waste time,” the man shouted. “They’re fools. It’s simple. I never ask questions. Notice that. No one’s ever heard me ask a question. The most perfidious instrument in all human language is the question.

  “Look at your great teachers. ‘Verily I say unto you,’ Christ says. The Ten Commandments are not questions. Not one sentence in the Declaration of Independence is a question. No valuable literature or great human or divine instrument is ever interrogative. Sermons! Declarations! Commandments! Marvelous!

  “There is no room or time in life for questions. Questions are the breeding ground of dissension, atheistic pestilence and war. I tell you that when I hear men talking together and one man asks another a question, I want to go up and shake that man!

  “Look at your tragic secular literature: Faust is punished for asking questions. Oedipus is. Hell is a questioner’s answer. Nature’s sinuous and hideous serpent forms a question mark as he writhes along the ground. So did he in Paradise! So does he in Hades!

  “Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies, the poet says. No one has ever heard me ask questions.”

  “What do you do when you’re lost?” a man asked.

  “Who gets lost?” the bearded man roared.

  Morty pulled away, turning carefully, conscious again of the heavy pack, feeling clumsy.

  “When do you speak?” a boy said, coming up to him. He was young, vaguely tough. “I been here a hundred times. I never heard you speak.”

  He pushed past the boy.

  Five men stood casually before a lamppost. One, jacketless, his bare arms slackly ribbed with long, stretched veins, addressed the others in a husky, conversational tone. Morty could not be sure whether he was a speaker or someone who had come there to chat with the others.

  “Forty years I had a store in The Bronx,” he said, “and I tell you the important thing is the right mark-up.”

  Another interrupted him. “That’s all very well. Of course, mark-up is important—”

  “The right mark-up, I said.”

  “All right, the right mark-up, but more important is knowing how much of an item to stock.”

  “No, no,” a third said, “it’s the timing, knowing when to sell what. You got to understand the needs of the neighborhood.”

  “Display. Display is everything,” a fourth joined in. “In the proper package you could sell a rat on a stick.”

  “I don’t know,” the last man said. “I think good will. Good will is very important.”

  Morty left them and went toward a tall, gray-haired woman a few yards away.

  “The salvation of the world,” she said calmly, “can only lie in the successful efforts of our organization to bring to bear as a practical, major influence in all the underdeveloped nations, as well as in all the presently constituted world powers, free and iron curtain, the noble principles of the universal Republican party!”

  When he turned away he saw the boy who had asked when he would speak. A friend was with him, and the two of them pointed to Perlmutter. The boy who had spoken nudged his friend expectantly.

  Morty went toward the largest group he had yet seen, the people standing in a sort of deep, shapeless huddle. They shifted from foot to foot like people dancing in place and craned their necks back and forth nervously, endlessly, evidently trying to obtain some momentary view of the speaker hidden amongst them. They reminded Morty of the pigeons he had seen the old lady feeding in the park. Maybe this time, he thought, and moved closer. From where he stood, still at the perimeter of the crowd, he couldn’t hear the speaker. He would have moved away, but just then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the two boys were still following him. To get away from them he pushed harshly against the people straining to get a look at the speaker. When they saw he wore a knapsack they dropped back, intimidated and docile, and then closed around him again as though pouring in to fill up an imaginary wake.

  Now he was surrounded, and apparently no closer to the speaker he still could not hear. He lunged forward, the canvas hump climbing unsmoothly on his back, and pushed through the final ring of people. There, in the center of the crowd, was a tiny man, shirtless, bald, explaining, in a thin, wavering voice pitched like a whisper, the tattoos that completely covered his torso and arms and hands and face and skull. It was as if he had been impossibly wrapped in a tight, shiny oriental rug. He raised his left arm and pointed with a tattooed finger to tattooed hair etched into his shaved armpit.

  Morty stumbled past him without looking and, arms extended, reached into the crowd behind the man, jabbing at them stiffly to make them move.

  When he emerged, the boys were waiting for him. Now there were four of them.

  One came forward as if to speak to him, and another reached out to touch the pack on his back. Morty jerked violently away. S
omewhere he had lost his stick. He only realized it now that he meant to strike them with it. They continued to trail him in a sort of sneering casualness, and he turned on them.

  “I am not defenseless,” he said. “Stop following me.”

  “It’s a free park, ain’t it?” one said. “When are you going to speak? Are you going to speak or ain’t you?”

  “People must…” a voice said suddenly, clearly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” So abruptly had the voice broken into all their consciousnesses that even the boys looked away to see its source.

  “It’s the Professor,” someone at the edge of one of the groups said, and Morty could see the sudden turning of a dozen heads, faces slamming alert.

  “Where?” one asked.

  “There. It’s the Professor. The Professor is going to speak.”

  The groups dissolved, the speakers around whom they had been standing suddenly abandoned in mid-sentence, their mouths still open in stunned discouragement. Thirty feet away Morty saw the tattooed man appear as the crowd around him broke up. He had put on a hat and was buttoning his shirt.

  Morty stumbled after the rushing crowds, but his knapsack was an almost unbearable weight now and he could not keep up. Already the crowds had re-formed into a single mass. Morty caught up and tried to push through but they shoved him back, his assertiveness, even his knapsack, no longer seeming to have any effect on them.

  “People must serve…” the voice sang out, hopelessly hidden from Morty. He was struck by its precision and strength and clarity, by the wholesome sweetness of its range and timbre. He could not really tell if it was the voice of a man or a woman. It could even have been a child’s.

  “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, trying to say,” it went on.

  This would be it, Morty thought, alarmed and startled and pleased. This would be it and it would be worth it. That was the incredible thing. For a moment he regretted the ordinance that forbade platforms, but then he realized it made no difference that he couldn’t see the speaker.