I think that the message got out over the telekinetic grapevine that Forty-second Street was an experience best savored in the dead of night. That’s why the streets were still bustling at four A.M. First of all, the merchants were all phobic about closing down for the evening. This was a land of light and the vendors were, at the time, mostly emigrants from Eastern Europe who had escaped the totalitarian darkness. But they hadn’t gotten away soon enough to salvage their own temperaments. A single shuttered souvenir store in the night was thought to be an unbalancing black eye upon the mercantile experiment that had given most of these men back their dignity. What’s more, their backgrounds afforded them good reason to be afraid of the dark. Possibly they lived with estranged wives and children in their Queens or Long Island homes. Maybe the wives and the kids failed to share their absolute faith in the paramountcy of commodities, and their elation in the delicacy of the hard sell. They were lonely men themselves. They became addicted to the deepest, most fluorescently gloomy nocturnal hours, as they sat there in their stalls drinking cups of coffee brewed on hot plates in the back, courting the angel of emphysema, and talking to themselves unabashedly at a schizophrenic clip.
These guys were getting in their sanity-preserving REM innings, sitting in their stores, dead awake, dreaming of their imports. I heard them mention retail prices. I heard them ticking off phone orders in their waking sleep. These men knew evil, but they knew that even evil could be bought and sold.
They were the sort of men who, in an expansive early-dawn mood, could afford to say, “What you’ll never know, I forgot,” and mean it in the compassionate and charitable sense because life is such a comedy that after a lifetime of this you have to smile. You have to have affliction for the people who come here on the often.
Such as yourself for the sake of, as I see, that you are starting out a young man and what are you in college with your life in front of you at this hour of the morning in a place like this, a cut-rate tobacco, and book, and comic store? We had Holy Books when I was your age. We read them at dawn.
But I know that it is difficult and this is, what is this thing you would call what we have here on Broadway in the middle of the city? This is legend. This is biblical. This is Shock City, which is what the zoning commission refused to license as the name of a naked dancing tavern across the street here. This is what was the title of what my brother-in-law was asking for money to send his kids to upstate—I think he said Thunder Camp. That’s what this is, Thunder Camp. So, show me the book if you want me to sell it to you for the sake of maybe I have already read it and I could save you the trouble, in the same vein that I go to the movies like everyone else, and there is big fellow who rides on a horse, and he speaks as though he is not from this country, and not from a country that anyone else is from, even though his name is John Wayne. And he is the one who most Americans uphold in the highest regard without war service, or political office, or he ever did anything except maybe he partially overcame his speech impediment.
For the sake of conversation, consider that I cannot be what I sell even though I, as a salesman, sell foremost myself, which is the first law of making a buck. But in this country, you are the identity of the one who sells you your identity. Which would mean that you would be me if I would sell you that book. Possibly, then, I should introduce myself, maybe? I’m Blind Isaac Goldovsky—it’s just a nickname—from Gdansk. Sixty-four years old. Married with three daughters and no grandchildren—they can’t make up their minds; what can you tell them? I live in Mineola and the Italians weren’t bad enough, now we have the blacks. I’m ahead of the game in behalf of if you start right now at your age, you should end up in your dreams anywhere in advance of what I’ll be worth in my grave. This is, let me tell you, just the tip of the icepick that you see in the shop here. Let me see that book, if you wanna buy it.
That? Thomas Mann? Death in Venice? That is where the dying man falls in love on the beach in Italy during the plague with the young boy, but not in any depraved sense, but, let’s face it, every death cries out for an angel. Why should the Reaper carry off everything that a man has built, lock, and stock, and legacy? The dying man is ready to leave off and consign his rights to his own body, but why can’t he leave a little bit of his humanity behind with the boy? Right? Aw, forget it, you can have that book for free. Now shut up and get the hell outta here, will ya?
4.
Assia
Ted has gone to sea. A complete spoken sentence involves endless vacillation. Earlier, he managed to tell her that this morning after the police had left, he couldn’t stand to be alone in the apartment and could not quiet his hands from shaking long enough to dial the telephone. He located his brain center and his brave face down at the fairgrounds, of all places. He found the Tinkers, the ones who had set up over the summer and fall with a one-horse giddy-go-round. Before they could make off to warmer climes, the high sheriff turned up with a tax bill. The Tinkers, England’s Wandering Jews, possessed of the same genius for evoking rumor and maintaining their own standard of roving poverty, while respecting only the law of their own obscure Moses, took the tax for a joke until the deputies came and confiscated the wheels from their wagons. They had no choice but to winter over on the fairgrounds, with their entire lives idle on blocks, and all of them going on about how the high sheriff had not the jurisdiction to deny them God’s gift of the open road. Ted didn’t describe the setting, but Assia was interested enough to elaborate through her own mind’s eye. She saw bits of summer refuse and flattened candy cartons, blowing about in a vortex. Three old men were standing there, fidgeting around their trash fire. They noticed Ted coming up the way. They capped their bottles and put them back in their pockets. They stood away from the fire.
Assia left the refrigerator door yawning open so there would be no need to comment on the frugality of the dead.
“Would anyone like tea?” she asked. They both jumped when she touched the match to the gas jet. She didn’t mind Ted having friends, but she wasn’t about to abide him having an adulator who made no move to abandon a temperately burning house at four o’clock in the morning, when much that needed to be said between the house’s master and its new mistress had to go voiceless in his presence. Once the pot was on and the blue flame was prominent enough to visually insinuate the pyre that she should have liked to stoke underneath Abdiel’s arse, she said, “I think that I’ll get ready for bed.” Neither of them looked away from the gas jet.
Assia went into the nursery to check on the babies. Their breathing was absolutely synchronized, the boy taking the upbeat and the little girl the downbeat. She took off her dress, leaving on her bra and panties, and slipped into her clear blue chiffon bed gown, which was just oceanic enough, she thought, to appeal to a poet, a poet lost off the deep end. She wanted to be reasonable. She wanted, despite everything, to be sympathetic. But if she could not appeal to Ted’s heart because an old occupant had unexpectantly arrived for an unexpected visit, then she would have no choice but to appeal to his blood. And Sylvia, his old salt, his former first mate, could prove no match for Assia in navigating the lava streams of the circulatory system. She and Ted would have had a house full of children by now. She checked herself in Sylvia’s mirror, sidelong, to see if her stomach was showing.
Her nightgown was transparent and ended almost at the hips. Her strapless bra and her plicated, snow-colored panties showed through. Ted took no notice when she returned to the kitchen. Abdiel’s Islamic eyes remained on the flame. He still didn’t make any move to leave. He had said less than Ted today. This must have been why he was still waiting here when simple protocol and every hint that Assia could drop were directing him toward the door. He could speak in seven languages. He had degrees like other men have suit jackets. All day, he had been mulling through his extensive archive of argot, literature, and adjusted theology. Here at the suicide of the eleventh hour, compelled by exhaustion, he at last started to speak.
He said, “You’re thinking like i
t’s an experiment, aren’t you, Ted? Like a first draft that exploded?”
How did this man presume? Ted didn’t say anything.
“I am thinking that it was somehow more calculated than that.”
Calculated? Ted still didn’t answer. The teapot was beginning to sound.
“You have heard of the periodic law?”
No response from Ted. Assia wasn’t sure what the periodic law was.
“Progressing from the heaviest to the lightest elements,” Abdiel said, “physical properties reoccur until the behaviors of all of the elements are mimicking one another. Her loneliness had become that elemental. It permeated everything. Over time, it formed the links in her cage. She had no choice but to take out her sequestered rage on herself. Chasing her tail, she created a maelstrom.”
What the hell?
“All surviving elements mimic one another while the element that initiated the chain reaction recedes, having done its work. Do you understand?”
“Madness,” Ted whispered.
“Yes and no.”
The teapot was shrieking. Assia left the room.
He finally came into the nursery. She hadn’t heard the door and was afraid that he had put Abdiel up on the sofa for the night. Ted couldn’t sleep and she didn’t dare let herself. He spoke haltingly of listening in on the war over the radio when he was a boy. The broadcasts, he said, were prone to staticky silences as reporters took cover. Ted said that he often feared that the end result of the war would be to rip the English language, mother tongue to the free world, out by its roots. That it would become another casualty of war.
“Ted?”
“Hmm?”
“I listened to that war, too. We came over from Germany and the wireless was our last link with the world. I felt possessive toward the war. I’d watched it get started in the streets of Berlin. I couldn’t take sides, though. The British were keeping us under armed guard. They flew their own flag over our kibbutzim. Say what you want about the Jews, it was the British who continued to believe, against all evidence, that they were the chosen people. They controlled the immigration. They put down the uprisings. They executed the leaders. They enforced their curfew for years. Dusk to dawn, Ted. They didn’t even allow us our night. Do you know what that war on the radio meant to us?”
Ted said, “No.”
“It was our last liberty. Do you want me to stop talking?”
“No.”
“I know that it’s a strange time for me to be getting things off my chest.”
“It’s all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. After the war, the survivors came by the thousands, any way that they could. They looked at the block and tower compound. They looked at the miles of wire. Some of them fainted dead away. The Promised Land looked just like Auschwitz. Everyone could tell, just by the architecture, that there was going to be a war in this place. It wasn’t a setting built with peace in mind. We needed living room and that was the same as saying that we needed to fulfill the prophecies. We needed to push toward the Dead Sea. And as for the British, they were proud, but then again they were exhausted, they were sad, and they were broke. They weren’t going to fight our war for us and we couldn’t wait for them to leave. The sooner they abandoned us, the sooner we would be either dead or free. My father . . .”
“What about your father?”
“My father went into the Haganah. After he left, I never saw him again. Except for one time.”
“When?”
“I don’t want to talk about that. But I can tell you that after he left, I worked in the hospital without any training. There was a lot to live through. The Arab Legion shut down the road one night. We were running out of supplies. Many of the patients were in agony, but we had to hold back on the morphine that the British had left us. We didn’t have anything else to kill ourselves with, in case the Arabs broke through. If we were soldiers, we could have shot ourselves. But we were medical personnel. To do that to anyone, even ourselves, would have gone against our oaths.”
“Would you have done it?” Ted asked.
“Shot myself?”
“Overdosed.”
“In that context, yes,” she said. “The minute that they broke through the line, we would have already been dead or worse. Then they brought in a pregnant woman, wounded in a convoy. She wore a mourning dress, shredded. One arm gone. She went into labor. Do you want me to stop now?”
“No, keep talking.”
“We stood over her, begging her to breathe. Begging her to push. She cried out, ‘Saadni!’ That’s Arabic. ‘Help me.’ She was a Mata Hari. An infiltrator. She was an Arab woman and she hadn’t been hit by a shell, as we had thought. When we got her clothes off, we found that the burned material of the homemade bomb was attached to her abdomen. And she lived just long enough to see the crown of her baby’s head. It came out warm and blue. And dead. That killed us. It just killed us. I was the one who had . . . I was the one who had to take it and put it in a supply box by the mother’s cot and cover it with a blanket. It smelled just like life. There was no blanket small enough. I was looking around for a clean one to cut. And then someone said, ‘Look.’ And I looked. The disk of the placenta was coming out of the dead mother’s womb. Then the gush of the fetal membranes. There it was. There was the blanket for her baby.”
She waited for him to respond, but he said nothing.
“I asked you if you wanted me to stop.”
“It’s all right,” Ted said.
“No, it’s not all right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” she asked, hearing her own voice growing sharper.
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“Talk anymore,” he said.
“Are you going to do that?”
“What?”
“Are you going to do to me what she did to you? Because she didn’t die on you, Ted, she deserted you. In the war, there were those who grew too shocked or exhausted to go on. Some of them had lost loved ones. We really couldn’t blame them.”
“Blame them for what?” Ted asked.
“They killed themselves without permission. Sometimes it was a morphine overdose. Sometimes, you would open a supply closet and they would be hanging there like a suit. There was the danger of contagion. You could catch their death. We were there to save living lives. So we had the wounded soldiers get up from their bunks and shoot their corpses. We beat them with the shovels before we buried them. We didn’t mark their graves.”
There was one more thing to say.
“I have our baby, Ted,” she said.
In spite of herself, she had almost fallen asleep before he answered. “What do I do?” he said.
“Pity her and leave it be.”
“I’m not sure that I even loved her.”
“Good. It’s the wrong time to start.”
“I thought that death was something that happened when you die.”
“Are you going to let her kill you, too?”
“No.”
“And me? And the baby?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“Assia?”
“Yes?”
“She knew exactly what to do.”
“No, she didn’t, that’s in your mind. She didn’t have anything planned. It happened. She was confused and sick.”
“No, she knew.”
“She knew what?”
“She knew that this was one thing that I wouldn’t get over. She knew that all poets are in love with death.”
“Then be something else.”
“Be what?”
“Why don’t you be a man, Ted?”
And she dreams of wind in the drapery downstairs in the building’s foyer. A ghost sonata in the crinoline. She sees the opening bar graph of the stairwell. It is tarned over with sunlight. There are male voices above, speaking in flat conversational tones. There is someth
ing amiss, but not alarmingly so. She can hear the footfalls of hard-soled brogans. The transistor static. Ted enters now. He begins to climb the stairs, looking sleepless as a golem.
The door to Ted and Sylvia’s flat is open. There are uniformed policemen standing about and an officious type, older and more self-possessed, with fox-colored earmuffs complementing the ashen gray of his mustache. The apartment smells, wutheringly, of the machine shop or the auto mechanic’s garage, although the windows are wide open. Ted comes through the door. She sees him stiffen at the grip of the weather. It’s the same extravagant dirty trick he had thought he’d left outside. There’s a plush black Asian-print laundry bag extending out of the stove. Assia reads his features. What in God’s name is the washing doing in the belly of the stove?
“Who are you?” the obvious official in charge asks Ted, folding his arms and taking a Solomon’s stance.
When Assia first met him, he would introduce himself as “Ted Hughes, Cambridge,” sticking out his big mitt and jaw. Now he says, “Ted Hughes, BBC,” blinking and tearing, rubbing the sun out of his eyes.
“BBC?” The official’s accent places him in Sheffield or the environs. He’s another Yorkshire man. He turns toward the window, giving Ted his back. “You can get our statement at the garrison, and you should have known without coming here that we wouldn’t speak to you. We think that we’ve made it clear enough. We don’t want the press at our crime scenes. Are you radio or telly?”
“Husband.”
“Eh? Husband?”
“Husband. I live here.”
The official turns to look at him. “If you live here, where have you been?”
“We have another residence in Devon.”
“Have you?” He bites at his mustache. “So that’s where you were last night while your wife was here?”
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