The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  At first there was only one golden wire, then another appeared, and another. People used to stand beneath them happily looking upward. Then they grew used to them and hardly noticed how fast they multiplied. Gradually, on poles that looked like the Cross of Lorraine, on racks projecting from buildings, on great structures that handled their airy crossings like a loom, keeping each independent of the others, they ran through the town like a golden cloth, connecting everything to everything else. When the sun set, Koidanyev looked from a distance like the prisoner of golden spiders in a glowing unearthly dream.

  Following on the multiplication of the golden wires, the sounds of metal upon metal ceased and smoke stopped curling from the few factory chimneys. No one wanted to buy the things they made in Koidanyev anyway, so it was no loss. Who needs a tea tray with the birth dates of five hundred famous rabbis? Or kapok life preservers covered in bright green cloth with pictures printed on them of ostriches reading the encyclopedia?

  As these things disappeared, new things took their places. They were just as useless, but they were consistent with the theme of the telephone and were accorded unquestioning respect and a great deal of capital. From all over the world things poured in of many excellent types and in many different forms, and it was all because of the telephone. At night, when the trade wagons came and went, wondrous items were exchanged, it was presumed, for telephones and what the telephone had wrought.

  In ten years the town tripled in size and grew a hundred times—a thousand times—in wealth. Rotten roof tiles were replaced with those that glowed in the sun. Interiors were plastered, telephones installed, health improved, bodies firmed, faces beautified, rare objects collected. And everyone was grateful to the commission, for through the commission all plans flowed and from the commission came all authority, authenticity, and validation. Every Friday night, on what used to be the Sabbath—the Sabbath was now, as Haskell Samoa put it, shortened—the commission met in public, inviting comment from all who attended. In winter, it met in what had been the synagogue before its transformation into the commission’s magnificent central offices. In summer, it met in the main square, beyond the bell-like clatter of silver and crystal in the restaurants at one end, and near a flower-ringed fountain that the commission artfully moderated to half its normal flow so that during the meetings it was possible to hear the sound of distant telephones singing like birds in a dark forest.

  HASKELL SAMOA, who had brought the telephone to Koidanyev, had founded the commission, and had run everything for a decade, had not let unchallenged power dull his wits. From the dais, he observed the contented citizens taking their seats. Haim ben Ezra Lashkovo, who ran several of Koidanyev’s forty banks, had a new watch, a Patek Philippe. Mrs. Bloomberg, the wife of a telephone company official, was wearing a freshly minted silk dress that clung to her gravity-defying bosom like paint. Abba Bialik, the butcher, now had a thick golden watch chain. Most tellingly, the widow Mallichevska, who until the commission granted her some shares in the telephone company had been so poor that she sewed waxy leaves on her clothing to cover the holes, showed up with a tiara.

  More than the sight of any object, their bearing informed Haskell Samoa of their condition and thus, he was convinced, their opinions. People who worry and suffer do not flow into a room, or a piazza, as these people did, but arrive with the tense movements and careful breathing of someone stalked by a tiger. Koidanyev was doing well, and with concealed satisfaction Haskell Samoa noticed the entrance of Ezekiel Blarma, the last of the old-style rabbis who clung to superstition and rejected the new, and who now breathed anxiously as his eyes sought comfort in the most basic and familiar things—the curve of a rail, the trembling in the water column of the fountain, the arm of a chair. Clearly the things he stood for were not long for this world, and after they were gone the progress of Koidanyev would be untrammeled. At every meeting he had raised tiresome objections that made whole audiences exhale in exasperation. Rabbi Blarma heard those sighs, Haskell Samoa knew, and they weakened his heart. Without a single ally, his doubts would turn with less and less restraint against himself, and then he would die.

  But when he showed up with Jacob Bayer, Haskell Samoa changed both his timetables and his target. The new man was physically a giant, perhaps some sort of bodyguard hired in the delusion that the commission was more impatient than it was. Haskell Samoa studied him. Without giving himself away, hardly turning his head, he harvested the telling details.

  Jacob Bayer was poor. His clothes not only lacked luster, they were dirty and did not fit. He had no position and did not represent any institution or constituency that would have the power to challenge or intrude. Though he was large, and sometimes large people are natural leaders, he was afraid. He fidgeted, sweated in the cool of the evening, and took occasional very deep breaths. Haskell Samoa counted how many times Jacob Bayer blinked, cleared his throat, and ran his finger along his collar as if to undo a noose. By these measures Jacob Bayer was twice as nervous as a groom who is about to marry a woman whose mother looks like a blowfish. That meant that if Haskell Samoa stayed calm he could pick him off in two or three short exchanges.

  But although he was nervous and not well, at that moment troops were forming on the fields of Jacob Bayer’s soul, horses were being mounted, and trumpets had begun to sound. He was afraid. He had no confidence. He had not even been able to become a rabbi, and at times of stress he had sometimes lost his ability to speak. One thing distinguished him, however, something that Haskell Samoa had missed. Jacob Bayer was constitutionally unable to shrink from a fight, and only in the center of a great battle did he shed the persistent anxiety that surrounded him as if it were aspic and he were an egg.

  Bobbing over the heads of people sitting in front of Jacob Bayer were Haskell Samoa’s white beard and even features, his Eskimo-blue eyes as wet as drowning pools, and his waxen red skin. The slow breathing, the unalterable confidence, and the enthusiastic and chilling amorality of a lover of games were precisely the opposite of everything that was Jacob Bayer. “How am I going to do this?” Jacob Bayer asked himself. He despaired of his powers. His right foot jiggled back and forth so fast that his whole body vibrated until he resembled a man who was riding a motorcycle.

  “THE PURPOSE of the commission,” Haskell Samoa said after the vortnig had called it to order, “is to accept the telephone and reassess the illusions of the past. Today we have, from Minsk, the chief of the municipal telephone system, Avraham Spelchek; from Bialystok, the leading philosopher of the telephone, Zipsehr Tuchisheim; and, from the Frankfurter Technische Hochschule, Professor Katz Voolsamdrek.” The first of these betrayed little emotion at being introduced, the second less, and the third, an absolute stoneface, was calculating how to shatter and recast the proceedings with a belated burst of dominating brilliance.

  Voolsamdrek was so certain of his views that a kind of maelstrom grew around him and glinted in his glassy, angry eyes as he sat with motionless false humility. Zipsehr Tuchisheim, a far less unpleasant character, appeared to Jacob Bayer to be half within this world and half without. Jacob Bayer had walked many versts and shared many dreadful habitations with this kind of wanderer, respected for the unsettling beauty of his bizarre and unfounded views. Spelchek, the least of the three, was a happy and grasping philistine.

  When he considered that he was in the presence of a dictator, a fool, a madman, and a moray eel, Jacob Bayer felt his fear ebb, but how could he debate them, four at a time, before an audience of their adoring partisans? What strategy would he employ? He had never even used a telephone, and would not, therefore, have the ability to impeach its authenticity by the vulpine conversion of its most appealing attributes. What could he say when they alluded to the enrichment of those to whom he was presenting his case? If they were to be the judges, how could he prevail given that for a decade his opposition had been pouring gold into their pockets? No wonder Rabbi Blarma was despondent. Jacob Bayer turned to him as if to say, “I understand,” and Rabbi
Blarma said, “You see, every meeting is the same. He has thousands of experts and each and every one is drunk on the telephone. The more I speak, the more the people hate me. It’s like a living death.”

  “Rabbi,” said Jacob Bayer, “I have known defeat after defeat. I have no family. I will die in a ditch, and people will veer from what is left of me, making a new path a verst from where I lie, until nothing remains to offend them. And these people here, who will judge us, triumph day after day, and will be buried in a cloth of gold.”

  “That’s good?” asked Rabbi Blarma.

  “Well,” said Jacob Bayer, “perhaps it will be to my benefit in God’s eyes that I have built no walls in the dust between the portals where he stands.”

  “They don’t believe in God,” Rabbi Blarma said, gesturing with his head toward the new authorities.

  “But I do,” said Jacob Bayer.

  UP STOOD AVRAHAM SPELCHEK, eyes soft with gratitude and delight as always, for even as he slept he grew more wealthy, and each morning was a surprise of big numbers. “Spectacular things have happened in Minsk,” he said. “And because what happens in Minsk tends to happen shortly thereafter elsewhere, I thought I would report to you some of the advances that you will soon enjoy. For example: When I go to sleep at night, I throw a switch on my telephone that silences the ringer and prevents me from being disturbed. The operator at the exchange solicits information from my callers, and in the morning I have a list of messages from which I can pick and choose like a king.”

  From the oohs and aahs it was clear that everyone in the audience wanted one of these. “To take you to the edge,” Spelchek said, “and give you an idea of the potential of this instrument, in the future the mouthpiece and the earpiece will be joined in a single device, with a handle for holding them both! Looking even further ahead, a new venture founded by Moshe Itzcovitz has received a huge influx of capital for his invention of a sculpted anatomical accessory that attaches to the handle of the mouth-ear unification device, allowing this to be cradled on the shoulder, freeing the hands.

  “It doesn’t stop there. Beneath the main body of the telephone you may someday find a sliding tray with a pad on it and a pen attached by a flexible rubber cord! Brilliant? Yes. And, on top of it, an alphabetically keyed listing of telephone numbers. Ha ha! But that’s just the beginning. Let me tell you about what eventually will be possible.” Everyone’s favorite part was always the wonderful things that did not yet exist.

  “Right now, I can speak to Moscow simply by lifting my telephone and moving my mouth. Thus, I can tell them what the weather is in Minsk, so they can know what they have in store. Or, if the winds go in the opposite direction, they can tell me. Soon, telephone lines will be laid under the sea, alongside telegraph cables, and from capital to capital in Europe. If you are in Brazil, you will be able to know the weather in Bucharest. Think of it! Right now, I can order groceries on the telephone. I don’t have to go out, I can just read the merchants a list and they deliver to my door. Do you realize how much time this will save once everyone does the same? Reading services will someday read newspapers to you over the telephone. Eventually, there won’t have to be books. One person reading a book in a telephone exchange can convey it aloud to thousands of subscribers.

  “The problem we’re grappling with now is mechanizing the network. Eventually you won’t have to use an operator. With mechanized exchanges all you’ll need do is enter a code by tapping electrical pulses automatically with a machine that will be called a dialer.” Haskell Samoa smiled, as if to say, “Everything I have ever believed in has been proved.”

  “Eventually,” Avraham Spelchek said, “no one will have to go anywhere. The roads and streets will be populated only by a corps of delivery workers who will, of course, be called bintlers, and who will dress in red suits with brass buttons and wear little brimless hats. They will drive shiny brown motorized wagons with gold trim and a huge golden strawberry on each side. They will never have to return to offices—they won’t have offices—as they will only need stop at roadside telephones to get lists of what to pick up and deliver.

  “It will be possible for a child to be born in his home, delivered by a doctor telephoning from Burma or Buffalo, for him to have books read to him on the telephone, friends by telephone, and to have all his clothing and food brought to him. The roads will be clogged with bintlers. In hundreds of years, perhaps, telephones may not even need wires. Already, this is possible on a small scale in ships. When the technology is made affordable, each home will have a telephone, about the size of a grand piano, with no wires, and the bintlers will have them in huge motorized wagons. There is no end to the wonders. As for the implications of this, I will leave that to the scientists and philosophers,” he said, looking with intense flattery at his demented colleagues, “because I’m just a businessman.”

  A woman stood. “I would like to say,” she said, falling victim to the amateur’s overwhelming feeling that no one wants to listen, and thus compressing her words and radiating an acute, scarlet-colored shame, “that the other day I wanted to make some p’tcha. I was getting my basket when my husband said, ‘We have a telephone. Why go out?’ So I called Markovich the egg handler and Sam the butcher, who sent over eggs and calves’ feet—I already had garlic—and made my p’tcha without stepping from the house.”

  “It comes true already,” Haskell Samoa stated, as Spelchek glowed. Haskell Samoa then pointed to an old man in back of Jacob Bayer, but as Jacob Bayer was in the line of sight, he stood, blotting out the tiny man behind him.

  “So?” he said.

  “So, what?” Haskell Samoa asked.

  “So what? So what if organ-grinders’ monkeys clog the roads with package-filled motorized carriages? So what if Markovich the egg handler gives his eggs to a bintler and the bintler brings them to Mrs. Hoo-Ha? So what if you can switch off your telephone and not be disturbed? You can save some steps by not having a telephone in the first place. So what if someone reads you books on the telephone? Better to read a book by yourself. So what if you can stay all the time in your house? What about your legs? You have them for a reason, and your horse, if you have one, will become ill if you don’t ride him. So what if your house has wires or doesn’t have wires? My house doesn’t have wires now. I don’t even have a house. Can you boil water with the telephone? Will it warm you like a fire on a cold night? Can you embrace it like a woman? If you pick it up, will you feel the sun on your face, hear the birds in the trees, see and feel the wind moving across a lake or whipping and thrashing a wheat field into what I suppose, never having seen it, looks like the sea? Will the telephone sit in your lap, like a child, or sleep in your arms, like a baby? Will you love it? Will it love you? Will you cry for its beauty, and sob when it passes? Will it have a scent like pine tar or salt air or rose? Will it speak fearlessly like the prophets, and hold fast as truth takes its sharp turns? Will it show courage in the face of danger and death? Will it make a single line of poetry? Or bake a single loaf of bread?”

  “Stop!” shouted Haskell Samoa, his body, no less than everyone else’s, shaking with anger and indignation. “What are you saying? Why are you saying it?” Whatever stratagem he had thought to employ, he had forgotten. He was merely enraged.

  “I am speaking,” Jacob Bayer said, “of things that are great and never ending, that require a lifetime of work to do right, that are God’s gift to man and fill the world with their abundance, that have not changed in thousands of years and never will. And what I am saying is that, although you can add the telephone to them, and enjoy it for its miracles, such as they are—and they are, indeed, minuscule—you cannot emphasize it and concentrate upon it as you do without attendant disaster. This thing that you greet with erotic and worshipful enthusiasm, and the wealth it brings in train, are the golden calf. You are worshipping what you have made, which is shallow and dead, and have averted your eyes from the world you have been given, which is magnificent and full. It shows in your lives, in you
r town, in the arrest of all the normal rhythms that you have arrested, and in the sins you have committed and that you deny.”

  This kind of challenge was Jacob Bayer’s talent and his curse, the reason he was thrown from one town after another and why he could bear it. Now would come the war, to which he would have to steel himself because he had faith not in arguments but in creation. As others rose to marshal their strengths, he would choke his into silence and defeat because he did not believe in man’s power, and could not bring himself to inflate with it.

  As if sensing this, Zipsehr Tuchisheim announced magisterially, “You don’t understand.”

  His was as much of a challenge as Jacob Bayer’s, and the silence that followed was a better introduction for Zipsehr than a brass fanfare. When finally he began to speak, even the birds had stopped singing. He was, after all, the chief philosopher of Bialystok, who had been the telephone’s loving advocate since, five years after the fact, news of its invention had appeared as a two-sentence article in a Bialystok newspaper, under an advertisement for esrogs.

  “What is it, exactly, that I do not understand?” Jacob Bayer asked.

  “That the telephone is the most important aspect of our lives, that it is changing the very nature of man, ending history as we know it, and setting us upon a divine plane. It will bring immortality, solve all riddles, open all doors, protect us from want, and show us the way. It is the key to perfection, and is itself divine.”

  Hearts rose. Deep breaths were taken. Everyone expected that Jacob Bayer would have to bow to this fervent declaration, but he didn’t.

  “Excuse me, please,” he said. “I believe you stated, did you not, that the telephone is divine?”

  “Yes,” Zipsehr answered.

  “Meaning that it is, or has the attributes of, a god?”