The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  THE CONVERSATION

  We twisted up together in New York. Intimacy was insult; love could hate. Then I went away. Years passed. He came to visit. It wasn’t easy to talk. Finally I mentioned a pornographic movie. He said,“Which pornographic movie?” I said, “You distinguish carefully among them?” He didn’t smile. As if to spare my feelings, he began talking about New York. The complexities, the intensities. I listened with humble attention, trying to remember the title of the pornographic movie. Naked bodies came to mind, agitating to the impulses of community. If I’d remembered the title, I’d have screamed it. But I couldn’t remember. He went on, the Metropolis of Total Excitement flying out of his mouth. Later, I asked him to see the other rooms in my house. It was a corny gesture. But he stood right up and made an urbane shrug, suggesting revulsion or eagerness. I led him out of the foyer. When we came to my study I pushed the windows wide. “Trees, birds,” I said. He grinned a mellow hook and didn’t glance at the view. He said, “Do you know about Sartre’s study?” I said, “No; so what.” He said, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s study gives out upon great Parisian avenues. They converge in his desk. Endless human traffic converges in Jean-Paul Sartre’s desk.” I said, “Actually, I hate trees and birds. They make me sick.” He giggled, poked my arm, told me to go fuck myself. “Why?” I asked. He said, “Because you’re deficient in social hormones.” I laughed, “That’s the title of the pornographic movie. Social Hormones.” I laughed, but his remark felt incisive; I couldn’t be sure what he meant. In the foyer again, I shook his hand, slapped his back. He was rattling goodbyes, edging out the door, looking at me with exhilaration.

  THE SNAKE

  The road, crowded by woods on either side, turned whimsically as a line of smoke, taking its own peculiar way, unpredictable, inevitable as fate, but I continued driving hard, pressing it until I’d go too fast and have to slow suddenly, holding the turn until I could press again, fast, faster. It was like that for hours. Me against it. I was tired. She was bored, nervous, giddy. Whenever I said anything, she’d say, “Awfully Jewish of you.” She giggled, tried to read a magazine, brushed her hair. I smoked cigarettes, attacked the road, and stopped talking to her. She played with the radio knobs, pulled up her skirt, stroked her legs. Then I noticed a brown snake. I stopped the car. “Drive over it,” she said. “Don’t you leave this car.” I left the car. She moaned, “Please.” The snake was thicker than my foot. Blinkless eyes; medals of mud against its sides; tiny sticks of grass embedded in the mud. Ants crawled across the scales. She said, “Please.” Her voice was bright, meaningless, far away. I crouched and reached slowly — toward the neck — a necessity. It would fill my fist; whip; hiss. She yelled, “My mother was bitten by a brown snake like that, you New York asshole.” I grabbed it. I screamed. She tumbled out of the car. I lifted the snake. It hung. It was a dead snake. We got back into the car and sat there quietly. Then I asked her to marry me. She said, “O.K.” We laughed and fucked until dark.

  LIVER

  “Everything is fine,” I said. My mother said,“I hope so.” I said,“It is, it is.” My mother said, “I hope so.” I said, “Everything is wonderful. Couldn’t be better. How do you feel?” My mother said, “Like a knife is pulling out of my liver.”

  Trotsky’s Garden

  TROTSKY IS WRITING. He will mention his love of life and his unqualified faith in dialectical materialism. He will mention Natasha, the strip of green outside his window, his invincible atheism, and he will contemplate his death. It is morning. Trotsky sits at his wooden desk. He looks at letters and a blotter. The Mexican sun burns in the green outside his window, just opened by Natasha. Trotsky notices. Natasha and the green slide into his writing. A man will strike Trotsky in the head with a pickax. Trotsky’s sons — murdered — are mentioned in the writing. From Russia to Mexico, friends, secretaries, and bodyguards — murdered — are mentioned in the writing. In Berlin, where he sent her for psychoanalysis, his daughter killed herself. The pen does not cease or grovel in individuals. Trotsky will mention his faith in dialectical materialism, his faith in meaning. His mother suffered difficulties in reading; she crouched over novels and said, “Beta, alpha …” Trotsky says:

  If I could begin all over, I would try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist.

  Dialectical materialism, in the heat of the day, draws a pickax from its raincoat. Some say “rusty ax.” Others say “ice pick.” Trotsky himself noticed nothing — it descended from behind — but he will bite the assassin’s hand. He is writing that if he lived again, he would avoid mistakes. The sun, as it did yesterday and will tomorrow, is shining. Trotsky loves the green outside his window and flourishes it in his writing. We shout, “O.K., Trotsky, no time for poems.” He cannot hear us. His poem is a march of corpses, the din is terrific. Feet are beating in his writing. The sun is in the green in his writing. Sedova, the aristocrat, lifts her elbow for photographers. “See? A bullet made that ugly scratch. My old man isn’t nobody. Yesterday they machine-gunned our bedroom.” She means, From revolution to Mexico, Trotsky is pursued by his inventions. Trotsky himself says that he put the idea of exile into the ear of Stalin’s spy; hence, into the mind of Stalin. In effect, Trotsky exiled Trotsky and machine-gunned his bedroom. Now, writing that one cannot be reborn until one is dead — and look: it sits beside him with a raincoat and pickax. It makes nervous conversation about alphabetical materialism. Suddenly Trotsky is fighting, not writing. Blood runs into his eyes. Nevertheless, he catches the personal fact. Who said Lenin is morally repulsive, and Stalin is a savage who hates ideas, and Parvus is a fat, fleshy bulldog head? Trotsky said these things. Now the assassin’s hand is in his teeth. With fury of intimacy, Trotsky bites. This hand wanted to remind him of something. But what? On the wall outside, the guards carry rifles and binoculars. They are gossiping in the sun when Trotsky screams. They see him standing in the window, bleeding and blind, a figure of history. “What?” he screams. The assassin is behind him, bent, sobbing like a child as he sucks his mutilated hand. The guards are running on the wall with their rifles and binoculars. Freud lights a cigar and contemplates this tableau. He says, “Trotsky and I were neighbors in Vienna.” Trotsky admired Freud. He sent him his best daughter. Now Trotsky shouts in the window: “What does it mean? Such heat. In such heat a raincoat …” Trotsky flings toward his wooden desk. He needs only seconds to write: “On hot days in Mexico beware of raincoats.”

  Anabella’s Hat

  1

  The butler says, “Lord Byron jumped out of the carriage and walked away.” Annabella appeared next. The butler says, “The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, her countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.” A scarf, twisted about her head, was bunched up in imitation of a hat. Others report the arrival, among them Lord Byron. His memoirs were burned. One who read them claims Lord Byron took Annabella before dinner. They withdrew after dinner and lay in a four-poster bed near a fireplace. The crimson curtains of the bed, quickened by firelight, made flickering blood-colored walls. Lord Byron imagined himself within the membranes of a giant stomach. “I am in hell,” he screamed. Annabella crept downstairs, hid in the kitchen, and later begged medical advice. Assured that Lord Byron was mysterious, not mad, she hired investigative agents. A year passes. The incontinent Lord Byron flees to the Continent. His affair with his sister, consummated before the marriage, is being noised about. People cut him at parties. He flees; soon thereafter, dies in Greece. Annabella’s agents rush into the room. Lord Byron’s servant — a bad — tempered man named Fletcher — draws his sabre but they beat him unconscious and rip the boot from Lord Byron’s crippled foot. They saw a hoof of great beauty, subtly united with the fetlock. The memoirs — where Lord Byron mentioned it — were burned at Annabella’s insistence. Now, sufficient to say, in the mass of Byroniana — letters, scholarship, gossip — no ex
tended reference to his hoof exists.

  2

  Lord Byron published amazing poems. He had sexual union with his sister. Then came the wedding. Afterward, with Annabella and her maid, he rode forty miles from Seaham Church to Halnaby Hall, where he honeymooned. It is said the day was cold and Lord Byron despised the cold, but nothing is reported as to where he sat in the carriage — beside Annabella or beside the maid, or if Annabella sat between, with the meat and bags and wine opposed. Fletcher, a sullen lout, refused to say a word. He galloped behind the carriage. It isn’t known if the maid was acquainted with Lord Byron, or if they sat as strangers pressed, he by she, at turns in the road. Reported then, as here reported, Lord Byron was cold. Annabella’s head, round as an Esquimau’s, was conservative of temperature. It is known that Lord Byron’s head, examined the previous year by the craniologist Spurzheim, was a structure of antithetical dispositions. The rest is inevitable. Indifferent to cold or hot — by nature, virtuous — the Annabella head through intimate contiguity with the crippled, incestuous bisexual caused him to feel dialectically cold, Satanic, probably squashed by the maid. It is rumored that he began shrieking, then stamping the carriage floor viciously with his hoof.

  I Would Have Saved Them if I Could

  GIVING NOTICE

  A few days prior to the event, my cousin said, “I’m not going through with it. Call off the bar mitzvah.” My uncle said, “You’re crazy.” My aunt said, “I think so.” He’d already reserved the banquet hall, said my uncle, with a big deposit; already paid the rabbis, the caterers, the orchestra. Flying in from everywhere in the Americas and Canada were relatives and friends. My aunt said, “Deposit. Relatives.” My cousin said, “Do I know the meaning of even ten Hebrew words? Is the bar mitzvah a Jewish ceremony? Do I believe in God?” My aunt said, “Get serious.” My uncle said, “Shut up. The crazy is talking to me.” My aunt said, “You, too, must be crazy.” My cousin said, “Call it off.” My uncle said, “I listened. Now you listen. When the anti-Semites come to kill your mother, will it be nice to say you aren’t a bar mitzvah? Don’t you want to be counted?” My cousin pulled open his shirt. “Look,” he cried. My aunt said,“I can’t talk so I can’t look.”“Look,” he screamed. Green, iridescent Stars of David had grown from his nipples. My uncle collapsed on the wall-to-wall carpet. Looking, my aunt said, “I can’t talk so I refuse to look at your crazy tits.” That night my uncle sent telegrams throughout the Western Hemisphere. He explained, with regrets, that his son didn’t believe in God, so the bar mitzvah was canceled. Then he pulled my cousin’s five-hundred-dollar racing bike into the driveway, mangled the handlebars, kicked out the spokes, and left it for the neighborhood to notice.

  A SUSPECTED JEW

  Jaromir Hladík is suspected of being a Jew, imprisoned by the Gestapo, sentenced to death. In his prison cell, despite terror and confusion, he becomes ecstatic, then indistinguishable from his ecstasy. He is, in short, an ecstasy — the incarnation of a metaphysical state. Borges wrote this story. He calls it “The Secret Miracle.” Whatever you call it, says Gramsci, it exemplifies the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. In the mediating figure Jaromir Hladík, absolute misery translates into the consolations of redemptive esthesis. It follows, then, the Gestapo, an organization of death, gives birth to “The Ecstatic Hladík”—or, to be precise, “The Secret Miracle.” Borges, master of controlled estrangement, makes it impossible to feel that Jaromir Hladík — say, a suspected Jew of average height, with bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, gentle musical voice — physically and exactly disintegrates (as intimated in the final sentences) between a hard stone wall and the impact of specific bullets.

  THE SUBJECT AT THE VANISHING POINT

  My grandfather — less than average height — had bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, and a gentle musical voice. To appear confident and authentic, worthy of attention by clerks in the visa office, he memorized the required information — his mother’s maiden name, the addresses of relatives in America — and, walking down the street, he felt constantly in his coat pockets to be sure that he had photos of himself, wife, daughter, enough money for the required bribes, and the necessary papers — documents from America, passports, birth certificates, and an essay by himself in praise of Poland — when a pogrom started. Doors and windows slammed shut. The robots were coming. Alone in a strange street, he couldn’t tell which way to go. At every corner was death. Suddenly — for good or ill isn’t known — somebody flung him into a cellar. Others died. He, bleeding and semiconscious, hidden in a cellar, survived the pogrom. That day he didn’t get a visa to leave Poland. He was a tailor — short, thin-boned. Even in a winter coat, easy to fling. He crawled amid rats and dirt, collecting his papers. When night came and Poland lay snoring in the street, he climbed out of the cellar and ran home. Wife and daughter ministered to his wounds.All thanked God that he was alive. But it was too late to get a visa. The Nazis came with the meaning of history — what flings you into a cellar saves you for bullets. I don’t say, in the historical dialectic, individual life reduces to hideous idiocy. I’m talking about my grandfather, my grandmother, and my aunt. It seems to me, in the dialectic, individual life reduces not even to hideous idiocy.

  MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES

  His idea about labor power came to him while he strode back and forth in his room in Paris and smoked cigarettes. Indeed, striding back and forth, he smoked cigarettes, but striding, smoking, whistling, etc., are contingent activities. What matters is the stage of development in the class struggle when it is possible for a person to think seriously — to have an idea — about labor power. Certainly, in Paris, Karl Marx strode, for example, smoking cigarettes. Now and then, he strode to the window, pushed it open to free the room of smoke and listen for developments. But the precisely particular determinants of consciousness, within the class struggle, are material circumstances. Intuitively, perhaps, Karl Marx felt the burden of determined consciousness in the black, thick hair thrusting from the top of his head like implications and slithering down his chest and back to converge at his crotch, like a conclusion. But, even scrutinizing the hair beneath his fingernails (very like the historical grain in wood), he detected nothing beyond mute, inexorable flux until — striding, smoking — he pushed open his window and noticed Monsieur Grandbouche, his landlord, a figure of bourgeois pieties, who shouted, “When will you pay the rent, my hairball?” Karl Marx strode back and forth and smoked. La question Grandbouche burned in his roots, like the residue of a summer rainstorm, quickening the dialectical material of his struggling circumstances. Hair twisted from his ears and whistling nostrils. Angry messages. An idea was occurring. Indeterminable millions would die. Indeterminable millions would eat. Thus, a Parisian landlord, frightened by a smoky blotch in the window, shouted a pathetic joke in the spirit of nervous conviviality, and as a result, his descendants would be torn to pieces, for he’d epitomized material circumstances by shouting — across generations of Grandbouche — an idea, intensified by repercussions, echoed in concussions of Marxian canons, tearing fascist ligament even in the jungles of the East. Voilà, implicit in a landlord’s shout is the death rattle of his children’s children.

  BUSINESS LIFE

  My uncle invested his money in a beauty parlor, began to make a little profit — and the union representative came. My uncle promised to hire union workers soon as the mortgage was paid. Pickets arrived. Back and forth with their signs in front of the beauty parlor. My uncle brought them coffee. They talked about their troubles.A picketer didn’t have a soft job. Long apprenticeship; pay wasn’t good; and morning to evening, march, march, march, screaming insults at my uncle’s customers. The signs didn’t look heavy, but try to carry one all day. My uncle agreed: a sign is heavy. Anyhow, business improved. After a while the union bombed the beauty parlor, set fire to my uncle’s car, and beat up my aunt. This was reported in the newspaper. Business became much better. My
uncle negotiated for a second beauty parlor. One afternoon a picketer leaned against the window of the beauty parlor and lit a cigarette. My uncle started to phone the union, but he hadn’t forgotten his life in Russia, his hatred of informers. He put down the phone. The image of that man — slouched against the window, smoking, not carrying the picket sign so that people could read it — seethed in my uncle like moral poison. He soon developed a chronic stomach disturbance. Next came ulcers, doctors, hospitals — all the miseries of a life in business.

  LITERARY CRITICISM

  Photographs of suspected Jews — men, women, children with hair, teeth, etc. — are available in great sufficiency. If you demand one, either you hate, or do not understand, Borges’s critical point, which is that any reader knows stories of this exquisitely general kind. Besides, Borges made his story not from photographable reality — your Polish relatives whose undernourished kosher height never exceeded five feet six inches — but from a stupid story called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” My aunt, a schoolgirl, was bleeding on the ground with her mother and father in Brest Litovsk.