by Saul Bellow
Some of the other dreams have been only slightly less dreadful. In one I was a sapper with the Army in North Africa. We had arrived in a town, and my task was to render harmless the grenade traps in one of the houses. I crawled through the window, dropped from the clay sill and saw a grenade wired to the door, ridged and ugly. But I did not know where to begin, which wire to touch first. My time was limited; I had other work before me. I began to tremble and perspire and, going to the far end of the room, I aimed my pistol long and carefully at the ridges and fired. When the din subsided, I realized that if I had hit the mark I would have killed myself. But I had scarcely a moment to feel relieved. Pincers in hand, I went forward to cut the first wire.
I recognize in the guide of the first dream an ancient figure, temporarily disguised only to make my dread greater when he revealed himself.
Our first encounter was in a muddy back lane. By day it was a wagon thoroughfare, but at this evening hour only a goat wandered over the cold ruts that had become as hard as the steel rims that made them. Suddenly I heard another set of footsteps added to mine, heavier and grittier, and my premonitions leaped into one fear even before I felt a touch on my back and turned. Then that swollen face that came rapidly toward mine until I felt its bristles and the cold pressure of its nose; the lips kissed me on the temple with a laugh and a groan. Blindly I ran, hearing again the gritting boots. The roused dogs behind the snaggled boards of the fences abandoned themselves to the wildest rage of barking. I ran, stumbling through drifts of ashes, into the street.
Could the fallen man of last week have seen, had he chanced to open his eyes, his death in the face of that policeman who bent over him? We know we are sought and expect to be found. How many forms he takes, the murderer. Frank, or simple, or a man of depth and cultivation, or perhaps prosaic, without distinction. Yet he is the murderer, the stranger who, one day, will drop the smile of courtesy or custom to show you the weapon in his hand, the means of your death. Who does not know him, the one who takes your measure in the street or on the stairs, he whose presence you must ignore in the darkened room if you are to close your eyes and fall asleep, the agent who takes you, in the last unforgiving act, into inexistence? Who does not expect him with the opening of the door; and who, after childhood, thinks of flight or resistance or of laying any but ironic, yes, even welcoming hands on his shoulders when he comes? The moment is for him to choose. He may come at a climax of satisfaction or of evil; he may come as one comes to repair a radio or a faucet; mutely, or to pass the time of day, play a game of cards; or, with no preliminary, colored with horrible anger, reaching out a muffling hand; or, in a mask of calm, hurry you to your last breath, drawn with a stuttering sigh out of his shadow.
How will it be? How? Falling a mile into the wrinkled sea? Or, as I have dreamed, cutting a wire? Or strafed in a river among chopped reeds and turning water, blood leaking through the cloth of the sleeves and shoulders?
I can safely think of such things on a bright afternoon such as this. When they come at night, the heart, like a toad, exudes its fear with a repulsive puff. But toward morning I have a way, also, of holding court on myself, and that is even more intolerable. Half-conscious, I call in a variety of testimony on my case and am confronted by the wrongs, errors, lies, disgraces, and fears of a lifetime. I am forced to pass judgment on myself and to ask questions I would far rather not ask: “What is this for?” and “What am I for?” and “Am I made for this?” My beliefs are inadequate, they do not guard me. I think invariably of the awning of the store on the corner. It gives as much protection against rain and wind as my beliefs give against the chaos I am forced to face. “God does not love those who are unable to sleep soundly,” runs an old saying. In the morning I dress and go about my “business.” I pass one more day no different from the others. Night comes, and I have to face another session of sleep—that “sinister adventure” Baudelaire calls it—and be brought to wakefulness by degrees through a nightmare of reckoning or inventory, my mind flapping like a rag on a clothesline in cold wind.
We had an enormous sunset, a smashing of gaudy colors, apocalyptic reds and purples such as must have appeared on the punished bodies of great saints, blues heavy and rich. I woke Iva, and we watched it, hand in hand. Her hand was cool and sweet I had a slight fever.
January 28
We did not have a bad time at my father’s house. My stepmother was cordial; my father did not pry. We left at ten o’clock. Iva did not tell me until today that, as she was preparing to go, my stepmother gave her an envelope containing a card congratulating us on our anniversary and a check.
“Now, Joseph, don’t be angry,” Iva said. “We can use the money. We both need things.”
“I’m not angry.”
“They wanted to give us a present. It was nice of them. You need a new shirt. And some shorts. I can’t keep darning them.” She laughed. “There’s no place for another patch.”
“Whatever you like,” I said, putting a strand of hair behind her ear.
I was glad enough to have escaped the usual interview with my father, which begins, as a rule, with his taking me aside and saying, “Have I told you about Gartner’s boy, the youngest, the one who was studying chemistry? They’ve taken him out of school. He has an excellent job in a war plant. You remember him.”
Indeed I do.
This means that I, too, should have been a chemist or physicist or engineer. A nonprofessional education is something the middle classes can ill afford. It is an investment bound to fail. And, in the strictest sense, it is not necessary, for any intelligent man can pick up all he needs to know. My father, for instance, never went to college, and yet he can keep up his end of a conversation with a quotation from Shakespeare—“Pause, now, and weigh thy values with an equal hand,” “A loan oft loses both itself and friend,” the passage beginning, “Yes, young boy,” from King John.
My accomplishments, he acknowledges, are wider than his; my opportunities were greater. But bread and butter come first. Besides, professional men are also sometimes cultured. Take George Sachs, now (our family doctor in Montreal), who was a scholar and even wrote a book in his spare time. (A pamphlet for the Quebec Musical Society: The Medical Facts about Beethoven’s Deafness.) My father’s justification is, however, that I have prepared myself for the kind of life I shall never be able to lead. And, where my abiding obsession formerly was to carry out my plans, I know now that I shall have to settle for very, very little. That is, I shall have to accept very little, for there is no question of settling. Personal choice does not count for much these days.
January 29
As I was passing Vanaker’s favorite dumping yard, I saw on a bush, amid the bottles, a pair of socks that had a familiar look. I took one of them off and examined it. It was mine. There could be no doubt about it; I had bought several pairs in this pattern about a year ago. To make doubly sure, I took one of the socks home and compared it with the others. It was the same in every detail. Perhaps he did steal Iva’s perfume. I had been unwilling to believe it before. Vanaker, Mrs. Briggs tells me, has a good job in a garage. Sunday mornings, when we see him leaving for church, he is well dressed. What can have inspired this theft of my worn socks? I said nothing about it to Iva, but wrapped the evidence in a piece of paper and threw it away.
January 30
I wrote to Abt without mentioning his pamphlet. He is sure to be angry.
January 31
Slight letup in the cold. The fury of cleanliness. One of my shirts came back from the laundry without a single button. I must complain.
February 1
Near Sixty-third and Stony Island I ran into Alf Steidler, whom I hadn’t seen in years. He had heard that I had been drafted, and I had heard the same news about him. “They turned me down,” he said. “Bad teeth, bad heart, and emotionally unsuitable. Mostly the last. Jack Brill was bait, though.”
“Did they take him?”
“In December. He’s going to be a bombardier.”
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“What are you doing so far from Huron Street?”
“I’ve been up to see my brother in the hospital. He smashed his cab last Thursday.”
“Too bad. Is he hurt much?”
“Oh, no, he damaged his looks a little, that’s all.”
I said I was sorry to hear it.
“That’s the way the breaks run,” said Steidler. “Doesn’t make much difference, now that he’s married. It won’t interfere with his wolfing around.”
“I didn’t know he was married.”
“How would you? It didn’t make the front pages.”
“I’m trying to say that I’m surprised. Who …?”
“Wilma. He married the kid.”
“The girl I saw him with at the Paxton?”
“That’s the one.”
Whenever I meet Steidler, I think of Rameau’s nephew, described by Diderot as “… un (personnage) composé de hauteur et de bassesse, de bon sens et de déraison.” But, less emphatic, more sentimental (after his own fashion), and not nearly as shrewd.
He carried a match to the stump of his cigar, sucking. His black hair, freshly cut, was combed back in the usual way, as though painted on, flush against the rising hump of his head. It gave his face, with its contrasting long cheeks, jutting bones and fleshy nose and lips, a curious bareness. He looked very pale, almost limy in the dusty sunlight under the El pillars. He was shaved and powdered, and he wore a new striped tie. But his once natty coat was frayed, the brown belt looked greenish.
“How’s our old school chum Morris?” he asked.
“Abt? He’s doing very well; he’s in Washington.”
“And what about you?”
“I’m waiting for the Army call. What are you doing, Alf?”
“Oh, the same. Still trying to lead a genteel life. WPA folded, you know. It was good going for a couple of years. I was an honored artist of the republic. First I was in the theater, you remember. Then I organized a water ballet for the parks system, and after that I led a chorus in a settlement house. Say, but I started at the bottom. My first job was digging up a street. I had to explain to the people who asked me what I was working at that I was a geologist. Ha, ha! Then I was a smoke watcher.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Up in the West Side factory district I sat on a roof with a chart of six shades of smoke and watched the chimneys eight hours a day. Then the theater project. Anyway, the whole business folded up, and I went out to the Coast. Say, there’s a Thompson’s down the way. How about a cup of coffee? Good. It’s been years since I saw you. The gay old Coast. I went out with some ideas and tried to get in to see Lubitsch, but I couldn’t find anyone to introduce me. Christ, it’s mad out there. It’s the world’s greatest loony-bin. Ever been on the Coast?”
“Never.”
“Christ, stay away from it, it’s murder. But then, if you want to see what the life of the country can wash up, take the trip. I’ve been around a little bit. But in L.A. they conned me for my fifty bucks as though I’d been a baby. Of course, I’m drawn into different circles than you. Well, I was broke, so I wired my mother and got twenty bucks and a note about how slow the beauty-parlor business was. That was a tricky week. I had to go to work for a while, to raise some money.” He looked at me somberly, a decayed Spanish prince with a splayed nose and a long upper lip covered with bristles. His blue eyes grew darker. “I didn’t have it easy.
“One nice thing about the Coast, though” he added, brightening, “the nooky situation is awfully good where there aren’t too many soldiers. You whistle for it. Did you read about that silly trial? Now, there was something really funny. If we were more civilized we’d put it on the stage. This Canadian officer kept that girl in a hotel. But it was just brotherly, she said. He called her his little strumpet. ‘Crumpet, you mean,’ said the prosecutor. Right then and there he must have known his case was gone. ‘No,’ she insists, ‘strumpet. It’s a kind of biscuit the British like.’ ” Alf laughed, holding the sugar shaker and spoon suspended over his cup. “Well, they wouldn’t convict anybody on that sort of evidence.” He reached forward to hand me the sugar, revealing a rolled copy of Variety in his coat pocket. He was lulled by the joke; musing, smiling, he stirred and sipped, and then wet a fresh cigar along his underlip.
At twenty-eight, he was old-fashioned. He had all the ways of a theatrical generation that was already at the point of death when, in his high-school days, he had cut classes to admire its aging comedians in the mangy splendor of the Oriental. He grew up behind his mother’s beauty shop. When I knew him well, at sixteen, he was already a stage gentleman, and rose at two every day to breakfast on tea and sardines. He spent his evenings at the Arrow, amid amateur talk of Magda and Desire Under the Elms. He played in all the local productions, was Joxur in Juno and the Paycock and did Cyrano for a triumphant week (which he never forgot) at the school auditorium.
“I wouldn’t have come back from the Coast,” he said. “But my number came up; the board called me. It’s a good sign for the country that I was rejected. They’d deserve to lose if they put me in their Army. The psychiatrist asked me what I did, and I replied, ‘To be perfectly frank, I’ve been a deadbeat all my life.’ He said, ‘How do you think you’ll get along in the Army?’ and I answered, ‘Now, what do you think, doctor?’ ”
“You said that?”
“Sure, I was being honest. I’d never be any damned good to them. I’d set an all-time record for gold-bricking. It’s up to you normal bastards to do the fighting. I said, ‘What do you think?’ and he took another look at my papers and said, ‘They’ve got you down for a bad heart, here. Well, this will make it final.’ And he wrote down, ‘Schizoid Type.’ That would mean I was in the split-pea soup, wouldn’t it? I looked it up. You think a guy can tell by looking at you? Or because you tell him you’re a dead-beat? That isn’t enough, is it?”
“No,” I said, “they need more evidence than that; it isn’t enough. Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, I’m not worried, don’t kid yourself.” His glasses duplicated the triangular flame of another match. “They wouldn’t know what to make of me, because I’m not your average guy. I know that. Why, I couldn’t fight. It isn’t my line. My line is getting by.”
“How do you get by, Alf?”
“It’s a wonder to me. But every January swings around, somehow, and there I am; I’ve come through. But I don’t know how. I work a little, sponge a little, gamble a little. I suppose I am a deadbeat. Or will be till I am what I want to become. Well, I entertain the people I sponge from. That’s something, anyhow.”
“You expect me to pay for your coffee?” I said.
“You, Joseph? This is Dutch treat. What a corny joke!” He looked offended.
“I was referring to the entertainment.”
“Oh. One of these days I expect an opening. …”
“I didn’t mean anything by that,” I said.
“Forget it. Who holds your bad jokes against you? Did you see me in any of the Federal productions?
“I wasn’t bad. A big improvement over the old days. Roxanne! Remember? Ha, ha! Well, it’s in the family. Have you ever heard my old lady sing, were you ever around when that happened? Oh, you’ve missed something. My brother writes songs, too. He just wrote one for the United Nations. It’s called ‘Let’s Link Hands Across the Ocean.’ He keeps bothering me to do something about it. He’s sure it would make the Hit Parade. Now he wants me to go to New York on the insurance money. Wilma’s against it.”
“Do you intend to go?”
“A year ago I would have gone like a shot. But since Wilma’s against it … I owe the girl a good turn. I got her into trouble a few years ago. Phil hung a shiner on her when they were living together for taking twenty dollars out of his pocket. Only she didn’t take it. I took it.”
“Did you confess?”
“Confess! It would spoil my credit with him forever. I was sure they’d make it up by and by. He gave her an aw
ful pasting. She cried. …”
“Were you there when it happened?”
“Right in the room. I couldn’t butt in.”
“What about the money?”
“I pinned it on a false hope. I suppose you think that’s terrible, huh? Well, this may sound hard, and you may not believe it, but they’re more human when they’re fighting. Besides, it was like a movie. He suffered remorse, she forgave him because he was her man, and so on. They got a big kick out of it. I know. I was their go-between. But now she says she’s the one who should take the song to New York, if anyone goes. I guess she sees herself in Tin-Pan Alley, her face streaked with tears. …”
“Oh, it can’t be that bad.”
“Can’t it, though? You don’t know the type. Let me show you. She hides overnight in a publisher’s broom closet and surprises Mr. Snaith-Hawkins himself in the morning. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Oh, for my sake, Sir, listen to this. My husband wrote it.’ As he sternly refuses, she throws herself at his feet, and he says, ‘Come now, my girl.’ Not a bad man, you see. ‘It’s not only for my sake, but for Democracy and …’ as she goes on, he relents. ‘You shouldn’t be lying on the floor, my dear. Here, take this chair. I’ll have Mr. Trubshevsky run through it’ (the score)—Just wait.” (I had tried to interrupt)—“Trubshevsky plays; Snaith-Hawkins frowns, strokes his beard. His expression changes. Trubshevsky pounds in ecstasy. They sing together, ‘Let’s link hands,’ et cetera. ‘This is great, positively!’ exclaims Snaith-Hawkins. And Trubshevsky, enthusiastically, his eyes shining, ‘Your husband is a genius, Madam, positively.’ ‘There, don’t cry, my dear,’ says Snaith-Hawkins. ‘Oh, Sir, you can’t understand. All those years of struggle, driving a cab, working at his music after supper.’ They’re overcome. You see?” said Steidler. “That’s how they think. She’ll probably go. It’s money thrown away. Well, he won’t be satisfied otherwise.”