by Henry Miller
He swallowed some stale Vichy to clear his throat.
“These relatives of mine had a fine comprehension of the meaning of that saying ‘All the labor of man is for his mouth!’ So, when they had wept themselves dry, they ate and drank. I was only a little chap, then, and it was my lot to finish the beer they left in their glasses. It had a flat, brassy taste, but I was too young to be a connoisseur. I licked it up just the same....”
Dr. Elfenbein listened stoically. He felt that he had a lunatic on his hands, if one could judge by his expression.
“After a few drinks the conversation always veered back to the corpse. I must say that they always had a kind word for the dead. ‘Poor old soul,’ someone would say, ‘he’s better off than we are.’ And, as if by the way of proving it, everyone would thereupon take a good swig. And so it went, doc—guzzling and swilling it—until someone would break out in song, one of those dismal, sentimental ditties that the Germans like to sing en masse.”
He started to hum “The German Fifth” … “When we march we don’t stand still…” Then he leaned forward, beaming with pleasure at the recollection of those warm, cozy funeral parties next door to the cemetery, as it were. The doctor’s trim goatee was almost in his mouth. Indeed, the doctor had a vague misapprehension that Moloch might commence to chew his goatee. He was an insane devil, this loquacious goy.
However, Dr. Elfenbein managed to preserve his composure.
“You enjoyed your funerals, then?” he remarked, lost for an appropriate comment.
“Of course, doc! I never could understand why people object to attending funerals. Funerals never depress me. My own, of course—that’s a different matter. Ho, hum! ‘God giveth, and God taketh away.’ That’s a fair break, ain’t it? Of course it is.”
At this juncture the waiter returned with a tray full of dishes.
“Who’s going to eat all this?” Prigozi exclaimed. He was stupefied by the proportions of the banquet.
“Haven’t I just been explaining the etiquette of the funeral? Shove it down, you’ll feel better. Don’t sit there like a poor rabbi who has neither congregation nor slaughterhouses!”
Dr. Elfenbein gave a start. He disliked such allusions. There was absolutely no need to mention slaughterhouses. He thought Moloch’s mind about as putrid as pork. At the same time he forgot that he had just finished a meal at the other table and fell to—like a priest of the tabernacle.
Moloch maintained a ceaseless flow of talk. His topics were one and all depressing; yet he contrived to infuse a hilarious note. Prigozi acted as though he enjoyed the situation because there was nothing to life anymore but to enjoy oneself.
After a time Dr. Elfenbein, to whom most of the conversation was addressed, found it necessary to register a protest. He felt decidedly uncomfortable. Moloch had just gotten off a string of abusive epithets and had now taken to ranting about the Jews. Dr. Elfenbein had no desire to see a rumpus started.
“My dear man,” he exclaimed, “aren’t these expressions a little too strong?”
“My dear man,” came the mimicking reply, “an editor once said the same thing to me after he had read my manuscript.
” ‘My dear sir,’ I said to him, ‘your words are an insult. A little too strong? My dear fellow, we’re not speaking of mustard!’ “
Moloch carried on in this vein. Prigozi pricked up his ears. He was glad the doctor was getting an earful. He loathed these little Jews who tried to put on dignity by cultivating a beard. They ought to get busy and cultivate their intellects.
Just then he caught Moloch’s words.
“Why, doc,” the latter was saying, “if only two people in the United States felt as I do about these bastards there’d be an insurrection. Hang it all, we have no temperament! How can we go on living with these people and remain passive? We ought to get busy with a razor … slash off a few slices of this juicy respectability. How about it now, doc, how about it?”
Dr. Elfenbein tried making his head wag yes and no at the same time.
“I’m beginning to understand your extravagances. You’re a literary man, I see.”
“Literary! That’s a lousy word to fling at a man.”
Dr. Elfenbein recalled that he had feelings, that those fellings had been insulted—outraged, in fact.
“You might have some consideration,” he said softly, “for the guest you invited to your table.”
Moloch thought this a highly anemic expression of one’s injured feelings. He had been aching for a punch in the jaw. With it all, however, he began to feel sorry for the target of his gibes. He wished he had picked on someone with more guts. What he was after was a free-for-all souffle under the tables, a mouthful of sawdust, and some broken bones. … He wondered whether Prigozi was capable of showing any fight. If he thought it would do him any good he was ready to hand him a wallop.
The situation was saved by the dramatic entrance of a very attractive young lady whom every one seemed eager to recognize or be recognized by. Some got up from their seats and rushed to greet her; others waved and called her by name.
Moloch caught the name, Naomi. A beautiful name, he thought. A beautiful creature, too.
Dispatching her admirers like so many couriers, she came directly over to their table and put her arms around Prigozi’s shoulders.
“Poor fellow,” she murmured—a little ostentatiously, thought Moloch—”what can I say?” Her words of consolation were lost in the clatter of dishes and hubbub created by the actors at the table.
What he caught of her voice sounded ravishing to Moloch. He surveyed her from head to foot. Prigozi was at once eager to introduce the young lady.
“An old flame,” he said, and a deep flush spread over his features, intensifying his ugliness. He drew up a chair and begged the girl to sit beside him. They fell into an easy conversation in which Naomi did most of the talking. The other two looked on, content to listen, and thoroughly charmed by her dark voice and vivacious gestures.
When she had expressed all the conventional thoughts which she believed the occasion demanded, she quite suddenly ceased talking. No one knew just what to say. The silence became awkward.
“Perhaps I’m intruding,” she said.
“Oh, no!” the others responded in one voice.
“You two,” said Naomi, like a perfect coquette, “you look terrible!”
Simple and commonplace as this remark was, Moloch was instantly flattered. To be included in such a mark of concern was a tribute. He was at a loss to know just how Prigozi took it.... “An old flame”! Huh! Impossible!
That Naomi was a Jewess was without question, but it was a type he had seldom encountered before; certainly never in this utter loveliness, never with quite such unique blandishments. She was Oriental rather than Jewish, Egyptian rather than Semitic. Quick to idealize her, he pictured her in his mind as an exotic offshoot from the ancient Alexandrian world, a raven-haired waif steeped in the wisdom of the cult of Aphrodite; nurtured in a foreign tongue pregnant with mystery and ardor.
The effect of her charms upon Prigozi was to alter his speech habits. He talked now with a mouthful of marbles. He thought it improved his diction. No one else gained this impression.
Voices were speaking to Prigozi. They had nothing to say about the Bible (which had formed a prominent part in the conversation), or Christian lunatics, or poets like Stanley, who could jabber endlessly about Ecclesiastes. The voices in him were tongues of flame. “It is better to marry than to burn,” they whimpered.
He stole shy glances at Naomi. Her mouth was cherry-ripe, her eyes dark as kohl. Her supple limbs were bursting with vigor. Tremors flew up and down his spine as he thought of Naomi lying beside him, comforting him, weeping for him. … He had traveled such a distance, in his thoughts, he was disgusted with himself.
Naomi studied the other two as she carried on a tepid conversation with Dr. Elfenbein. The latter’s existence was scarcely noted anymore; he was like a vegetable which one knows is in t
he garden, but ignores until it is time to pull it up by the roots.
Men came over from time to time, intruding long enough to win her smile, or extract a faint promise. Naomi was like a doe which has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. The glances she received were so many spears aimed at her heart. She was at a loss how to appease her hungry admirers.
Presently Ptigozi excused himself and hurried away from the table. Moloch followed him. They went down a flight of stairs to the lavatory. Moloch thought he detected Naomi staring at him. Her eyes were imploring him to hasten back—so he thought.
In the lavatory Prigozi turned and looked at his companion with sorrowful, sunken eyes.
He came to the point at once.
“You want her, don’t you?”
Moloch was somewhat taken back.
“Go ahead, take her, but… but don’t tell her in front of me how much you care for her.” His voice was unsteady. “Do you hear?” he repeated, advancing closer. “Don’t tell her in front of me. … I couldn’t stand that.”
Moloch tried to feign disinterest. He spoke of Naomi’s charms as if he were criticizing a piece of marble.
Prigozi was sinister and preemptory.
“You can’t put that over on me, Dion. I don’t want her, understand? You’ve got a chance … go and take her before I change my mind.”
“Change your mind?”
“Listen! I said you had a chance. So you have, but it’s a small one. Remember, in her eyes you’re a goy. Better strike while the iron’s hot.”
“What the hell is he insinuating?” thought Moloch, knowing that a goy is always five leagues behind when talking to a member of the chosen race.
“Damn it!” he blurted out. “I’ve a good mind to go back in there and take her off under your nose—just to prove to you that I can pull the trick.”
“That’s what I want you to do. You couldn’t find a better girl than Naomi.” Prigozi gave out a deep sigh.
“Look here, Sid, what’s the meaning of all this? What are you up to? There’s something queer about this.”
“Well, what do you make of it?” Prigozi answered readily. “You don’t think I want her, do you?”
“That’s the second time you’ve asked me that. What’s eating you? God damn it! Don’t stand there gaping at me!”
Prigozi hesitated. Was it worthwhile making things clear to this goy? In some ways Moloch was just like all the other goyim.
“I want you to get rid of that nigger you’re running around with. Does that satisfy you?” he announced.
“The nigger? God, is that all he has on his mind?” thought Moloch. He smiled benignantly. If that was all that bothered Prigozi, what made him so damned persistent about Naomi? What made him talk the way he did?
Prigozi read his thoughts. He was a block ahead of him, in fact. “Let him worry,” he thought. Then he said aloud:
“How on earth do you ever expect to amount to anything with that mulatto tied to your coattails? Do you know what I’ve been thinking about you? I believe you’re crazy enough to marry Valeska. Man, you’re tied up with a she-devil now—isn’t that bad enough? What will you do with a darky in your home? You’ll be ostracized, do you realize that? You won’t have any friends, you understand? Nobody … nobody.”
This speech struck Moloch as so amusing that he let out a sidesplitting guffaw.
“You’re getting worked up about a trifle, Sid. Who said I was going to run off with Valeska?”
Prigozi looked resolutely unconvinced.
“Why, look here,” Moloch flew on, “Valeska told me only the other day if ever I was stuck for a place to bring someone I could use her flat.... Do you get that? Does that look as if I were going to elope with her?”
It was Prigozi’s turn to laugh immoderately.
“You try that some night… just try it! Ho, ho, ho! Go ahead, try it! You’ll never bring a Jane out of her place alive. You’re going to get your throat cut as sure as I stand here. Jesus, you must be a simpleton to believe everything she tells you. Who ever heard of a thing like that?”
He laughed more heartily. Tears came to his eyes.
“Ah, shush!” said Moloch. “Let’s go back upstairs and take Naomi out of here. This joint’s full of bedbugs.”
About fifty years ago a French archaeologist discovered in the city of Jerusalem one of the very few relics of the first temple of the Lord. The relic which Clermont Ganneau discovered was an inscription on the post of the balustrade surrounding the second part of the sacred quadrangle. It read:
“No Gentile shall pass this gate on pain of death.”
This pile of magnificence which Solomon caused to be erected, and which, it has been alleged, has ever been of vast significance to the Masons, had a life, as we know, of about four hundred years. The Babylonian, Nebuchadnezzar, demolished it completely, taking the Jews with him into captivity. In relating this historical incident, H. G. Wells adds—”making of them a cultured and civilized people.”
Surrounded by spurious descendants of the Babylonian captivity, Naomi sat at the table enveloped in a golden silence which weighed on her fragile tympani like a purple hippogriff. Her figure bore a faint resemblance to the beautiful Byzantine moths in silk and fur who emerge unexpectedly from the foul hallways of Hester and Forsyth Streets.
Outside, a small car with a family of nine in it drew up to the curb. The mother, who was suckling an infant, hastily slung a discolored teat over her shoulder. It was a whale of a teat, full of pap. An enormous udder, like a sack of flour.
The entire family trooped inside. Madeira and Cluny laces jostled against pretzels and pieces of knockwurst. Alaskan seals, with a grandiloquent gesture, swept up clots of sawdust, matted with spittle and salami rind. Satin dresses, cut like an open barouche, made a hissing noise as they swished against tables and chairs. Pitiful old men, venders of shoelaces and pencils, moved like paralytics through the throng of chattering cormorants. It is this same crablike gait one observes on Friday evenings when, worn with toil and suffering, shaken with palsy, they join the procession that pours into the synagogue. On this day of the week, when the people of Israel give themselves up to lamentation, and dream in their beards of that Ark of the Covenant which has never been found, the whole East Side opens up like a festering wound, alive with the maggots of corruption.
“Truly,” thought Moloch, feasting his eyes on this guano field of sybarites, “if the Germans are the Chinese of Europe, these wretches are the lice and ticks of mankind.”
He asked himself what Naomi had in common with this offal that swirled about her like bloated cauliflower. What affinity existed between her and the evil-smelling crowds who were belched like sewer gas from the subways, who streamed back from the battlefields of toil like defeated army corps?
Naomi’s delicate touch, resting on Moloch’s arm like an apparition, caused him to take in the presence of an additional member of the party.
This personage had a sad Jewish face of a mystagogue. He was a writer, of dubious fame, who wrote fables in Yiddish for the newspapers. The slugs who frequented the Cafe Royal pretended, over a bottle of seltzer and a snack of pastrami, to enjoy his conundrums.
This man was a bundle of animation. His hands were continually busy mopping the perspiration from his nose and brow. He was always in a sweat. His mind, too, was in a state of continual eruption. Moloch could not but notice his fingers. They were not the soft, tuberous growths of a tailor (such as Dr. Elfenbein displayed) that reminded him unpleasantly of white lard. On the contrary, they were firm, spatulate extensions that promised to grasp hold of life and wring its filthy neck.
This conundrum, whose fables were as pointless as his fingertips and mocking as his grinning skull, had the articulated sprightliness of a skeleton dangling in a dime museum. He laughed when there was no reason to laugh, and when he recited an anecdote, or one of his countless fables, the gloom of Egypt settled on his brow.<
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This sidesplitting cadaver, who went to bed each night with one of the Classics (Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn), was in the toils of a devastating passion. Between the hours of five and seven in the evening he wrote love lyrics. They were not written for the daily press, nor yet for book publishers, but to console himself for the folly of his passion. He waited regularly every night until Naomi had retired to her room, which was but a stone’s throw from the Royal. Then he would tiptoe to her landing and slip a poem under her door. Sometimes he left a flower, which would wither during the night, and dissipate its fragrance. No word about these gifts was ever exchanged. Naomi read them wistfully, touched by the psalmody of his Hebrew heart, yet unable to fathom the mystery of his ugliness.
This Gorgon, whose love was like the sigh at sunrise of the Colossus at Memnon, excited Moloch by reason of his eclecticism. Who would surmise, when he buried his terrible fist in the bowels of the Talmud, or clung like a convert to the sacred skirts of Mahomet, that he intended thereby to caress the face of his beloved with the tips of his rigid wings?