Alas there was but one queen for me, one shekina so to say, and squeeze as I might Suzanne, under my power-led loins, in my tight gripped arms, begging her for more of that, all she gave was so thin now, so dry, so melancholic. Jaya’s simple touch of hand had more wealth than all this psychodrama. Suzanne was even as Hermione, stiff, theatrical, mental. Her mind rules her, and as such Gurdjieff. She seemed so Germanic to me, will absolute will, the Herr with the knout, her lord. Yet she wanted so much to be a woman. And obviously, I was not her Herr. I wondered if she had showed any of her privileges to Michel yet. The smell of her pubic hair, for example, or the big black mole on her left breast-Suzanne’s well-shapen breast-the mole big as a small ring, black and pick, was to be touched only by the highly privileged, and I was, she had assured me, at the moment, and, was forever to remain, the only privileged one. And I felt so jealous; I know how the count could and might have killed Isae.
“You may wonder why I tell you all this.” He must have read my thoughts. “You Indians-Indian thought as such-since the eighteenth century – has usurped our place. We were the priests of the western world. Ever suppressed, pogromed against, they knew and we, of course, knew, we were ultimately to be the victors. The west belongs to the Jew. We the God-carriers of the Mediterranean, if you remember what Mediterranean is, despite Paul Valery and his boasted Latinism. The Mediterranean man includes Ramases II, the great Gilgamesh, and of course, Abrahaim. Yes, that is what Mediterranean means. I have told you the Greeks were Asian Aryans. They had a sense of the occult, of mystery, orphic, dionysian, but no prophets – of the unpronounceable!”. And he let his second foot down and stood up, as if to feel his own true stature, “Moses on Sinai, that’s the only metaphor of man to his maker. All your neutral it, and so on, is c’est la fantasie mon vieux”, and he came and patted me on the back with what seemed, at once, contempt and affection, a father to a son. The Jew, the Father of the World. And every one not his children – only the Jew can be the child of the Jew – the others just his farm worker, farm workers of the lord.
“You have taken our place, “continued Michel, with almost anger, I might even have said hatred, and he went to the glasswindow to see the rocks of the garden, as it were. The atmosphere was at least as angry and vibrant, I am sure, as when Isae might have faced the count. Christianity, especially Catholicism, was even more Green than Jewish – Saint Paul had done his job – thus the Christian was a sort of Indian of the West. And so the ghetto and the incinerators. History smells bad, you know, Attila and Hitler, they are all the same.
The hasid, he worked on the Garden of Eden. His language was prayer. From his prayer grew fruits and forests, and the cattle to slay. He, the hasid, even invented a knife, so gently, it would cut his goat or cow without pain, or almost so. I was now the goat before Michel. I was now his Isaac. He seemed in prayer. I had heard he too had thaumaturgical power—he had healed people. There was no doubt he was a zadik. How could, otherwise, he have come out of the dead?
“From now the story is simple,” he said, going back and taking his seat opposite me. There was no Paris and Poland that evening. No world – two humans face to face, in what seemed an eschatological drama. No Helen of Troy, no Suzanne the problem. It was whether the sacred ship from Delos had come into the harbour or not. Then Socrates would have to take his poison and die. Such the laws of history.
Of course,” exclaimed-Michel, “of course, a count who could be such a good dancer, even were it only the mazurka, could not have satisfied our Helen. This Isae was a Jew and a Hasid. He had seen the Maker face to face. He gave her, Isae gave her, his powerful God. She was infatuated. Under the hitlerian law, she would have been shorn in public, marched in front of people naked, and taken to the firing squad, with the pancarte hanging from her neck: I commingled with a Jew. This is just to set an example, you know. Hitler then had no such power. But Isae knew, for he knew his God well, that she would come to him. And of course she came back to him. The count was a man of his word. He belonged to a different order of nobility than of the French or of the Germans today. The Polish counts were servants of the Black Madonna. They were first Christian, and then Polish. They died fanatically on the field of battle, even as recent history shows us. There could be no Hitler in Poland. A house painter becomes dictator! Impossible. Even a Hindu could become a dictator, a Brahmin,” he laughed, “Could become a dictator, but never a polish house painter.” And Michel smiled at his own joke.
“So, our Isae said to his Helen, not of Troy but of Warsaw, shall we say, and remember she was part Greek too, he said to her: Come my love and we’ll go to India.”
“What?” I said almost standing up in astonishment.
“Yes, he said, did our Isae, India is all peaceful and beautiful and he dreamt of it, a hasid, as his Garden of Eden, you, see that’s our obsession, where everything is positive and good. So thither, my friend, he took her, to his Gandhi and all that. They say he invented many things in India, became a monk.”
“What a Hindu monk? A bizarre story.”
“Yes, a bizarre, story. A Jew first, then a theosophist, then a Christian, finally a Hindu monk –”
“Now tell me, how did this happen, according to your legend?
“I asked some men of your country, working at the CNRS. They told me little, they knew little. One man amongst them had a father who was a theosophist. And he heard of Isae. Zimmeramn and his monkship. Yes, and a disciple of Krishnamurti, a devotee of one Ramana Maharishi, and finally a worker with Gandhi. So I’ve heard. Have you not heard of him?
“Zimmeramn, Zimmeramn,” I said, never. Besides my father was on the British side. How would he have known of someone with Gandhi?
“Anyhow, and again I’ve heard, it was Gandhi’s last spinning wheel, a great invention – an Indian one – was one of Isae Zimmeraman’s make. And our Indian at the CNRS, whose father is a minister in some state in India, in Madras I think, even said, Mahatma Gandhi had given his elegant instrument of spinning one of the first, rare ones, a gift to Chiang Kai-shek. So, who knows, if this polish Jew’s spinning machine is not singing away with some of Mao’s comrade maidens in Szechwan. Thus, life, my friend, with his hasid life.”
“But Helen – what happened to her? You never completed that story.”
“In this paradise of his, this Eden of the World, India, people certainly are angels – as Suzanne and her mother never stop discoursing to me. For these two ladies, you are only next to God, you understand. Well, well, let us leave that part out.”
“Yes, let us!”
“Anyway, evidently the Hindus do not know much of microbes. So, this Isolde, in the land of enchantment, drank no magical potion, but water from an infected well. She had typhoid. Nobody had told her to take an inoculation against such an event.”
“So?”
“So, she had typhoid. And Isae duly telegraphed to the count. He had, the count had, even in those days, an aero plane company. So he hopped and hopped to India in four or five days – you know in those days, there was no night flying. And he reached Bangalore.”
“Oh, Bangalore. I know Bangalore.”
“Well, so much the better. However, the lady lay flat in her bed, in the outskirts of Isae’s factory – for he was the first to start an electrical factory in India – the British did not like it, but there was a good and strong maharaja, a saint, I am told, who gave Isae all the money he needed to build a factory –”
“But I thought Isae was with Gandhi –”
“That was later. So, Helen, like a tolstoyan heroine, lay on one side, the hunchbacked thaumaturgical Jew, and on the other, the elegant polish count, whose family had fought many battles, including the one at Sadowa, in the fourteenth century with the Russians and between the two, she gave up her Ghost, as the fairy tales would say. And she was cremated. And her ashes later thrown into the Ganga. The count now took the two daughters back to Poland – war was still far away – Hitler had only marched to the Rhine, you understand, and
the French panicked and ran –”
“Oh, yes, but the French show extreme courage when faced with real danger, never with near danger – like we Hindus do,” I said. “When the Japs were coming we were all so frightened – we ran from Madras for our lives. But the Japs never came –”
“But Hitler marched into Poland – and you know the rest of the story. At that time, I was happily just over twelve.”
“Why happily?”
“Because later they took from the ghetto all the very old and the very young. They left me because I was thirteen and took Sasha, my brother, seven years of age –”
“What did they do with them?”
“You innocent,” he said, very angry. “They sent them to the gas chamber immediately. Thus my uncle and my younger brother, Sasha, preceded us into paradise….”
“And Isae, what happended to him, at that time?”
“He must have sat in rapt meditation, in holy harmony, as the Hasidim say – before one of your many saints, maybe talking of the brotherhood of man, of non-violence, and what not. Later, so my count in Paris told me, his mother and sister went to Birkenau, like I did where the count’s brother-in-law worked, in a chemical factory”
“What happended to the count?”
“His time too must have come. One never heard of him either.”
“So ends the story,” said Michel, stamping his feet, as if all was said.
“One more thing, please?”
“Yes –”
“Well, well, in this paradise he found that there were thieves too. So some poor fellow, whose good Indian habit was to steal, I suppose one day coming home, thus I’ve heard from one of your countrymen who’d read it in one of your Indian newspapers – so Isae coming home and finding his rupees gone – is rupee the money in India?”
“Yes, it is.”
“ – his rupees gone, Isae in a nice bourgeois manner slapped his servant. So, the poor fellow whose habit was to steal, I imagine, cried and howled. Confessed he had done it. So that our Isae, who’d read a lot of Tolstoy – you know, we Poles read Russian very well – Isae, the saint, then said unto him, Pardon me, brother? And not able to sleep night after night, after night, went, so I was told, to a nearby Hindu temple, a temple of Shiva, donned the ochre coloured robeand so became a Hindu monk. Could one become a Hindu monk so easily? No ordination, etc.?”
“I don’t think it’s so easy.”
“Well, anyway, that’s the legend. He knew his mother was dead and his sister as well. They had some news through the underground which worked between India and Eastern Europe.”
“Oh, was there such an organization?”
“Well, if you Mireille, worked in Greece, and communicated with England this too was possible between India and Poland, especially through Persia and Soviet Russia –”
“And then?”
“And then came the deluge. We were swept away till Stalingrad. Then we were cooked, you understand, cooked as lamb or hen. And when we had turned into ash, my dear fellow, it grew potatoes. Potatoes and turnips, all over Germany today. You could ask a potato: How much chemical from the Levi and the Katz do you have? It might sit up, the potato might, as in a cartoon, and say: Why, I have 0.3% of the Levi’s and all of the Katz’s and does it taste good, you ask of Herr Gobolodo Kommin, and Goboldo Kommin will say: it tastes schon, schon. Heavenly, Yes, that’s our Europe. Yes, that’s it.”
“Thus, he, Isae, went back to the source,” I said in mischief, smiling.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Hasidism, from what little I know of it and of what you have said, came late to Judaism.”
“Not quite. But if it were so?”
“Anyway, your Scholem says it.”
“Perhaps. But I do not remember.”
“So Hasidism was influenced by the Christian mystics.”
“Maybe.”
“And Christian mysticism, I repeat, by Plotinus.”
“So?”
“And the roots of Plotinus?”
“Of course, India, “ he snarled with bitterness.
“Thus–”
“He went back to the source!”
“Does Hinduism alone contain the Truth?”
“No.”
“No. Then what does?”
“The Truth.”
“Are you a Hindu?”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“A seeker, a simple seeker. But who knows maybe. Truth is peruvain.” And we both laughed.
“Then what is true Hinduism?”
“He who goes beyond Hindusim, like –”
“Yes, like –”
“a true Christian, one who has gone beyond theology, like Jakob Boehme, like Eckhart, and –”
“And –”
“Like the Sufis in Islam – like Rumi – could you say the same thing, of your Jews?”
“Maybe not – but of the Hasidim, yes.”
“So, you see, we meet again.”
He was kicking the coffee table, pushing it back and forth, Sisyphus style. Not to hear what the coffee table was saying, but to say what his shoe would like to say to the coffee table.
“The goys,” he said, “are never so dead serious as you and I.” And after a moment of tense silence, he continued, “There was, you know, once upon a time, a great Russian prophet. He did not like the Jews either. But he had faced the gallows, therefore love oozed out of him, so to say. So our Feodor Dostoevsky has called Europe – and not Russia, because Russia is holy – Stalin is now a czarevitch, etc, etc – well, well, Dostoevsky has called Europe, a cemetery.” The he stopped, did Michel, and with commiseration asked: “How did you land in this cemetery?”
“A good question, Michel. But, I will answer it another time. It is getting late. You know the princess and my sister are waiting for me. At home.”
“Well, of course!” And as we rose together, Michel suddenly put his head against me gently, and sobbed and sobbed. Wiping his tears, he said : “I had to tell all this to someone. Who is there I can say it to? For that Isae might have been me. It’s the legend which I have told to myself again and again, on the bunkers of Birkenau and in the Kabe, the hospital, even on the last day before the Russians came. I have told this story often to my bunker fellows, that they too could dream of a countess and a noble count, and of the Jews who went to Paradise. India then meant for us paradise indeed – with Mahathma Gandhi – we believed in him then.”
“Yet, my good Michel, just three years later, our Hindus and Muslims massacred each other, two million of them, the same way, may be in a less methodical mode, not being Germanic. We did not even have the gas chambers to dispose of people – in a civilized way. They, the Hindu and the Muslim, cut the throats, the breast – their heads smashed, their penis severed, bodies stoned, the women, their babies gouged out of the their pregnant bellies, yes, noses cut, the Hindu and the Muslim did this to one another in our paradise –”
“So you mean there is no paradise!”
“None. None. None, despite Madame La Fosse and her great guru, Rene Guenon.”
“So you mean we shall never find what we seek.”
“Never. Never the way we seek it. Indeed there is no paradise. But-but-there must be – the Truth.”
And this time we both stood still, staring at pure, concentric space. And Michel then ran his fingers on my back, enfolding me, with a tenderness, a concern, I had never known before, and never known since, of any man.
“I wonder what is happening to Isae now?” I said, to break the silence. “Maybe he is dead.”
5 Indian Masters Page 8
