I wanted to leave. "Don't go," said Rabinowitz. "The more people Betty has around her the better. We mustn't leave her alone."
The room was hot and stuffy. Betty refused to open the windows. She had a strange superstitious belief that to let your grief escape into the open air was to betray the dead. I had heard of opening windows to release a dead man's soul, but never of closing them to preserve one's grief.
"I'm so stupid," said Betty, and blew her nose with determination. "But now I'm going to pull myself together and make you some coffee." She stood up. "Or would you prefer something else?"
"Nothing, Betty. Really, nothing at all."
"All right then, coffee."
She rustled into the kitchen with her rumpled dress.
"Does anyone know why he did it?" I asked Rabinowitz.
"Does there have to be a reason?"
"No," I admitted.
"He wasn't destitute. It can't have been that And he wasn't sick. Lipschütz here saw him only two weeks ago."
"Was he able to work?"
"He was able to write. But not to publish. He hadn't been able to publish for years. But that's true of so many writers. It can't have been just that"
"Did he leave a note?"
"No. His face was blue, his tongue was all swollen, and the flies were crawling over his eyeballs. Horrible . . ." Lipschütz gave himself a shake. "The worst of it is that Betty wants to see him."
"Where is he now?"
"At a funeral home, as they call it here. They try to make bodies presentable. Were you ever in such an establishment? Well, stay away. The Americans are a young people; they don't acknowledge death. The dead are made up to look as if they were sleeping. Some are even embalmed."
"Maybe if they put on plenty of make-up ..." I suggested.
"That's what we thought. But in the shape he's in they'd have to lay it on an inch thick. Besides, it's too expensive. It's very expensive to die in America."
"Not in Germany," I said.
"Well, in America it's expensive. We found the cheapest place we could, but even so it's going to cost several hundred dollars."
I saw that Betty's photographs had been rearranged. Moller's picture was no longer among the living. It was still in its gilt frame, but a piece of tulle had been looped around one corner of it. The face was youthful and smiling; the picture had been taken fifteen years before.
Betty brought in cups and saucers and poured coffee from a china pot with little flowers on it Cream and sugar were passed around.
"The funeral is tomorrow," she said. "Will you come?"
"If I can. I had to take off a few hours today."
Betty was beside herself. "You've got to come. Everybody who knew him must be there. It's tomorrow at half past twelve. We chose the lunch hour so everybody could come."
"I'll be there. Where is it?"
"Asher's Funeral Home on Fourteenth Street" said Lipschütz.
"And where is he being buried?" Rabinowitz asked.
"He's being cremated."'
"What?"
"He's being cremated."
"Cremated," I repeated mechanically.
"Yes. The funeral home takes care of it"
"To think of him lying there among total strangers," Betty wailed. "Why couldn't we have had him here with us until the funeral?" She turned to me. "What was it you wanted to know? Who advanced the money for the lawyer? Vriesländer."
"Vriesländer?"
"Of course. Who else has any money? But you'll definitely be there tomorrow?"
"Definitely." What else could I have said?
Rabinowitz took me to the door. "We have to keep stalling Betty," he whispered. "She mustn't see Moller. What's left of him, that is. There's been an autopsy—there always is in cases of suicide. Betty doesn't know. And it's not easy to stop her once she gets an idea. Luckily, Lipschütz managed to slip a sleeping pill into her coffee. We tried to give her tranquilizers, but she wouldn't take them. She thinks it would be betraying Möller. The same as opening the windows. We'll try to smuggle a pill into her breakfast coffee. The early morning is the worst time. You'll be there?"
"Yes. At the funeral home. And then they're cremating him?"
Rabinowitz nodded.
"Where?" I asked. "At the funeral home?"
"I don't think so. Why?"
"What are you talking about so long?" Betty called out to us.
"Good night," Rabinowitz whispered.
XIII
I slept very little that night and left the hotel early in the morning—too early to go to Silvers'. I took the Fifth Avenue bus to the Metropolitan Museum, but it wasn't open. I strolled through Central Park to the Shakespeare Garden, then around the lake to the statue of Schiller. I had seen it once before, but it still seemed an odd thing to find in the middle of New York. No doubt some prosperous German American had donated it years ago. At the moment ir was embellished by a drawing in red chalk: a luxuriant female posterior being raped from behind; by a gentleman in glasses. I retraced my steps, and by then the museum was open.
I had been there several times. It reminded me of my days in the Brussels Museum, and most of all, strangely enough, of the stillness. The endless tortured boredom of my first months there, my constant fear of being discovered, which had only gradually turned to fatalistic resignation— all that seemed to have left me. What remained was .my memory of the eerie silence, the sense of being removed from all reality, as though living in the windless center of a tornado.
On my first visit to the Metropolitan I was afraid that other memories would rise up in me, but this museum seemed to enfold me in the same sheltering stillness. Even the furious battle scenes on the walls seemed to emanate peace, a peace that had something metaphysical about it, a peace removed from time. Here in these rooms I suddenly had the pure and boundless feeling of life that the Hindus call "samadhi," a feeling one never quite loses once one has known it One knows forever after that life is eternal and that we, too, can partake of eternal life if only we succeed in sloughing off the snakeskin of the ego and in understanding that death is transformation. I had had this insight while looking at El Greco's sublimely somber view of Toledo, which hangs directly beside his much larger portrait of the Grand Inquisitor, that prototype of the Gestapo and of all the tortures in the world. I did not know whether there was any connection between the two; in that luminous moment I felt that all things were at once connected and unconnected, and that connections, coherence, were nothing but a human crutch, half He and half imponderable truth. But what was the difference between an imponderable truth and an imponderable lie?
I had not come to the museum by accident. Moller's death had shaken me more than I would have expected. At first it had not touched me deeply; so many of my friends and acquaintances had killed themselves in the last few years. Hasenclever, held by idiotic bureaucrats in a French internment camp when it was known that the Germans would be there any moment, had preferred to take his own life rather than fall into their hands. That was easy enough to understand. This was different. Moller was not in danger; he was saved. Yet he had not wished to go on living. I tried to tell myself that his motives must have been purely personal, but I knew that this voluntary death concerned us all. The thought of Moller pursued me and left me no peace. That was why I was here, going from picture to picture until I came to the El Grecos.
Today the painting of Toledo seemed dull and lifeless. It may have been the light, but more likely it was my own state of mind. When I had first seen this picture, I had not been looking for it; today I had come to it for comfort, and that is no way to approach a work of art Works of art are not nurses. The picture did not speak; it revealed nothing, neither of eternal nor of temporal life. It was beautiful, self-contained in its repose, but when I looked for life in it in order to shake off the thought of death, there was a funereal quality in its spectral light. By contrast, the enormous picture, of the Grand Inquisitor, with its cool reds and obsessive eyes, seemed radiant as neve
r before, as though it had suddenly come to life after all the centuries. It dominated the room with its power. It was not dead; it would never die. Torture was eternal. Fear was undying. No one was ever saved. Then I knew what had killed Moller.
I went on through endless rooms till I came to the Chinese bronzes. There was one piece I was especially fond of, a robin's-egg-blue bowl. It was not polished- like the jagged green Chou pieces belonging to the magnificent altar in the center of the room. I would nave liked to hold it in my hands for a few minutes, but all these bronzes were enclosed in glass cases, and for good reason, for even the barest trace of sweat on one's hands would have -damaged them a little. I stood there awhile, imagining that I was holding it The effect on me was strangely soothing.
This was a low-priced funeral home, but regardless of the price all such places breathe the same false pathos. I felt so crushed by the atmosphere of refined solemnity—the festoons of crepe, the bereaved glances, the potted plants and canned organ music—that it came almost as a relief when Betty burst into loud, uncontrollable sobs.
I knew I was being unreasonable. How would it be possible to avoid pathos at a funeral? For how can a group of people be expected to react with natural dignity to so shocking and inconceivable an event as death, or to dispel, though they themselves despise it, a feeling of secret satisfaction that someone else, not they, is lying in that hideous polished casket. And besides, I was obsessed by the thought of the crematorium. It left me no peace. I decided that if the funeral party was driving to the crematorium after the ceremony—as was the custom in Europe—I would decline to go. Or, rather, I would just disappear.
Lipschütz delivered the funeral address, I didn't listen. The air was close, and my head was swimming with the smell of the flowers on the casket. I saw Vriesländer and Rabinowitz. Some thirty people had come, half of them unknown to me. I recognized several writers and actors. The Koller sisters, with their flamboyant hair, were sitting with the Vriesländers. Kahn and Carmen were there, but not together. I had the impression that she slept through Lipschütz's address.
When it was all over, two women in black gloves appeared at either end of the casket, lifted it up with a dexterity suggestive of executioner's helpers, and, walking, silently on rubber soles, carried it down the aisle. They passed close to me, my stomach nearly turned over, and then to my surprise I felt that there were tears in my eyes.
We filed out. I looked around; the casket had disappeared. In the doorway I found myself next to Vriesländer. I wondered if this was the.right time to thank him for the loan.
"Won't you come with us?" he asked. "I've got my car."
"Where to?" I asked in a panic.
"To Betty's. She's made us a bite to eat."
"I haven't got too much time."
"It's lunch hour. You don't have to stay long. Just so she sees you've come. It means a great deal to her."
Rabinowitz, the Koller twins, Kahn, and Carmen rode along with us. "It was the only way to prevent her from seeing Moller," said Rabinowitz. "We invited ourselves to her place after the ceremony. It was Meyer's idea, and she fell for it. Her hospitality won out She got up at six o'clock to cook for us. That kept her busy until an hour ago, thank goodness."
Betty opened the door for us, and the Koller twins disappeared into the kitchen with her. The china and cutlery were laid out in neat piles, and Betty had brought out her best linen tablecloth. It was as though she had thrown the full force of her grief into" her preparations for this buffet lunch. Rabinowitz took refuge in his always latent academicism. "The funeral repast," he informed me, "is a strange custom, harking back to the earliest times. . . ."
What a German! I thought, listening to his lecture with half an ear and looking for a chance to get away. The twins appeared with enormous platters of sardines, tuna-fish salad, and chopped chicken liver. I saw Meyer slyly pinching one of them in her very alluring rear end. Life had begun to stir again. It was marvelous or revolting, depending on how you looked at it
I spent the afternoon being educated by Silvers. We rehearsed a little maneuver. I was to come in and announce that a picture, which was actually in the adjoining room, had been sent out that one of the Rockefellers, Fords, or Mellons had wanted to look at it I had to repeat my little speech until it sounded absolutely convincing. "You can't imagine," said Silvers, "how effective that is. Snobbery and envy are an art dealer's most reliable allies. The mere fact that a multimillionaire is interested in a picture makes it more desirable to common mortals."
"But what about the buyers who really love paintings?"
"Real collectors? They're a dying race. Today people collect as an investment or as a status symbol."
"Suppose somebody who didn't have much money wanted to buy a picture because he sincerely loved it—would you come down on the price?"
Silvers stroked his beard. "It would be easy for me to lie. But the truth is no. Your poor man can go to the Metropolitan every day and look at great paintings to his heart's content."
"That might not satisfy him," I objected. "He might want to have it in his own home so he can worship it at any time, day or night"
"Then he should buy a print," said Silvers, unmoved. "The offset prints they make today are so good that even collectors have been known to take them for originals."
Of course there was no point in this discussion. I was only trying to keep my mind off something else. Just as I was leaving Betty's, Carmen had suddenly blurted out: "Poor Mr. Möller, now he's burning in the crematorium." My first reaction had been irritation at the idiocy of referring to a corpse as "Mister." But what stayed with me like a toothache was the thought of the crematorium. To me, a crematorium was no vague image. I knew. I knew how on contact with the fire the body was convulsed as though in a last terrible access of pain, how the hair burst into a flaming aureole, and the face turned into a final, hideous grimace. I knew how eyes looked in the fire.
"Let me tell you a story," said Silvers. "Old Oppenheimer had a fine collection, but all he got out of it was trouble. Two of his best pictures were stolen. He got them back, but then he was so worried that he doubled his insurance, and that comes to a lot of money. Besides, he really loved his pictures, and wouldn't have felt compensated by the insurance money. He was so afraid of burglary that he didn't dare to leave the house. In the end he hit on a solution: he sold the whole collection to a museum here in New York. All at once he felt free, he could travel as much as he pleased, he had money in the bank, and when he wanted to see his pictures he went to the museum. He was always making jokes about collectors. Prisoners, he called them, free men who didn't know any better than to lock themselves up." Silvers laughed. "He had something there."
I burned with envy as I contemplated Silvers. What a comfortable existence! He had turned the agonizing flame of artistic creation into a cozy chimney fire, to be enjoyed with irony and cynicism. And whenever he grew bored with his life of sybaritic ease, he could find excitement in the heady battle of buying and selling. Ordinarily I had my doubts: would I really want to live like that? But that day I envied him. I was afraid of going back to my gray hotel room.
The moment I turned the corner I saw the Rolls-Royce outside the hotel and hastened my step for fear of missing Natasha.
"Here he comes," she said as I entered the lobby. "Should we give him some vodka?"
"Too hot," I said. "This town is a Turkish bath."
"Then let's go somewhere and cool off. I've got the Rolls again until eleven."
As usual, I reckoned up my finances. "Where do we go?"
She laughed. "Not to the Pavilion. How about a hamburger in the park?"
"With Coca-Cola?"
"The European gentleman can have beer."
"She wanted me to come along," said Melikov. "But I've been invited to Leopold's."
"For a wedding or funeral?" Natasha asked.
"A business conference. One of our guests wants to leave and move into an apartment I'm supposed to talk him out of it.
Boss's orders."
"What boss?" I asked.
"The owner of this hotel."
"You make it sound like the Ritz. Who is this mysterious boss? Have I ever seen him?"
"No," said Melikov curtly.
"A gangster," said Natasha.
Melikov looked around. "You shouldn't talk like that, Natasha. It's unhealthy."
"I know him. I used to live here. He's fat and greasy, and his suits are tight, and he wanted to sleep with me."
"Natasha!"
"All right, Vladimir. We'll change the subject, but he did want to sleep with me."
"Who doesn't?" Melikov was smiling again.
"Always the wrong ones, Vladimir, that's the hell of it.
Shadows in Paradise Page 12
