Chance Meetings

by William Saroyan

  This is something all writers will understand.

  It is so good to have the day’s work done that just to be out in the street, free, and to be walking, is a great joy.

  I look into windows, especially into the windows of bookstores, which in Paris also sell maps and gifts and all sorts of other things, and are not strictly speaking bookstores at all. But the secondhand book stores, they are really book stores, and so I soon knew where they were and I went to them every day.

  One of the best was at the end of Lamartine, just across Poissoniére, where Lamartine becomes Montholon. This store had a good assortment of old books in English, and I enjoyed browsing through them, and choosing two or three at one franc each, or about twenty cents each, although some of the very best books were only fifty centimes each, or a dime.

  The owner himself was about seventy-four years of age, and for three years we were courteous friends, although we never exchanged any words excepting routine French ones.

  Then, one day he came to me and said in the Armenian language, “I have been told you are Saroyan, is that true?”

  We became new friends, but by doing so we lost something that I am not sure wasn’t better.

  Chapter 34

  The way to remember people is systematically by time and place, but that’s only done, or attempted, when the one who is remembering is doing it for a purpose, for the record, for the archives even, or for his memoirs, or for his autobiography, or for a history of the world he knew, or a history of the human race he met and experienced, and he wants everything to be in the kind of sensible order that does not exist in nature, is not permitted to exist in nature.

  Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

  This morning a man remembers riding a wagon somewhere vague and hearing the man holding the reins make a sound to the horse, and tonight this same man remembers seeing a stranger a week ago in the street, whom he instantly believed he had seen in precisely the same manner, somewhere in a street, twenty or thirty years ago, and even then, as now, he had thought the words “my father,” and hadn’t paid much attention to the man the first time or the second time, or to his having thought the same words both times, or without thinking about his father for longer than that instant, and going on to other thoughts and memories and dreams of words, meanings, and mysteries.

  The world to every new arrival is an instantaneous grab-bag of known and unknown people, ideas, declarations, secrets, purposes, menaces, joys, comedians, sorrows, jokes, songs, sounds, and punctuation marks from such creatures as birds, who come and go freely to trees, fences, and porch railings. Messages from such animals as rabbits, squirrels, gophers, all with fascinating ways of being, and incredible eyes. Free animals, not like cats and dogs captured in the house and family, or like cows and horses, goats and sheep, unknowingly living to serve and feed human beings.

  In the midst of all this, there he is suddenly, himself, beginning to become acquainted with the truth of that strange reality. Himself. That which he has once seen, he begins to notice that he can see again, for having seen it at all, the first time. Seen then, and now, because it is there now, and was there then, in itself, and in him, and he remembers it, sometimes on purpose, sometimes helplessly.

  And so, theoretically, any writer who is concerned about a chronicle of people he has met is expected to refer to them chronologically. In the case of certain loud eccentrics in the world of art and expression, a beginning is made at the very beginning, and a famous painter, for instance, says he remembers suddenly becoming himself when his father’s sperm met his mother’s ovum, and wham, as he put it, there he was, wild in the eye, and forever after looking. Looking at everybody and everything, and then painting it the way he saw it, which is the truthful way, he said, not the way it seems to be at all. All things are distorted, he said, everything is a part of a huge distortion, the whole universe is a distortion, a tearing to pieces of things that were perhaps once whole, and an exploding of these terrible pieces, and a terrible drowning of them in terrible oceans a billion times larger than Lake Wahtoke in 1919, near Fresno.

  And then this terrible eccentric—myself of course, just invented—goes on to say that memory follows no rules, and thus, the owner of the bookshop on Montholon, whom I took to be a Frenchman, who turned out to be an Armenian, began to fade as the smiling gentleman at his desk accepting small coins for old books, a real friend, somebody memory would hang onto for a long time. And soon after the revelation, talking in Armenian each time we met, the quiet man seemed to be forgotten, seemed even never to have existed, and of course it is the quiet man who is memorable, and the other who is only another talking compatriot, proud and respectful.

  Thus, Girard became Jirayr, and the real language of human beings, unspoken, became Armenian, spoken.

  Chapter 35

  The very first time I reached Paris, in April or May of the year of 1935, I had been met at Gare St-Lazare by a short excited Frenchman who looked more as if he might be English or German, for he was thick and intensely earnest, as if he were engaged in very important business, possibly spying or secret service, and he wore a black derby.

  I used to be able to know from a fair distance if somebody was concerned about meeting me, and this happened when I saw this man, who had a piece of paper in his hand. I didn’t know that I was to be met at the railway station at all, although at Southampton somebody from a travel agency had rounded up six or seven of us and had put us into one compartment of the train to London, where we were again met by another travel man who put us into a bus which took us to an unnamed small hotel where bed and breakfast cost about the equivalent of a dollar and a half.

  Those were the days, one might say. I certainly felt as if I were a rich millionaire, as the joke goes.

  Now, at the Paris railway station, here was this man, looking for somebody.

  I walked straight up to him, and he said, “Saroyan?”

  He pronounced the name in the European manner, which is the proper way to pronounce it.

  He then said, “Welcome to Paris. I have an excellent room waiting for you, at the Atlantic Hotel on Rue Londres, shall we walk?”

  I had only one suitcase, which he felt obliged to seize, and so we went out and walked to the hotel. It never occurred to me that this walk meant a little profit to him, a profit of perhaps as much as half a dollar, for he had been provided with taxi money.

  He got me into the hotel, I liked the room, he told me about my next train connection, the following morning at a convenient hour, to Vienna, where I would be met again and escorted to a hotel.

  “I shall come here an hour before train time tomorrow,” he said, and bowed, removing his derby as he did so, and I thought, “Boy, it’s good to be famous. This is just like in a movie. Here I am a world traveler, honored on all sides by people who smile at me and look at my picture in my passport, and then at me, and write my name very carefully in the register, and they know, they suspect, that this is not just a common name, this name is a famous name, it belongs to a man of the world, a man of art, a writer, an observer, a thinker, one of the immortals. Me.”

  And only half-kidding. I felt simultaneously elated and very nearly exhausted, for I tend to react intensely to everything and everybody I reach. The result is that days of ocean travel, hours of walks in London, hundreds of people on the Channel boat, on the train, in the station, in the Paris streets, all of these people, all of these scenes come to me with great force and make a powerful impact—something I had never before noticed, although in a lesser degree it had always been going on.

  I have many times seen men not unlike the man in the black derby who met me at Gare St.-Lazare, and I have invariably considered each of them a friend, with a little larceny in his nature. Nothing spectacular, just a slightly cut corner, a walk of two blocks with a suitcase, carried by the man himself, in order to save, and thus to have, about half a
dollar.

  The innocence of these people has always impressed me as being even better if not quite as pure as the innocence of people who have not been tempted.

  There was a floating crap game in the summer of 1922 in Fresno, in which the take of the house was dropped into a cigar box by an Armenian boy whose nickname was Turk. During a big game in a big room at the Sequoia Hotel, Turk would remove the take from the various pots, so that soon the cigar box would have a total of at least two hundred dollars in it.

  Well, when the game was robbed by four masked bandits, Turk refused to give up the cigar box saying, “You can’t take this, this is the take.”

  That’s innocence. But of course the box was taken. And Turk felt that he had let himself down by not losing his life in refusing to give up the box.

  Chapter 36

  I worked on a vineyard with a retired Armenian wrestler named Nazaret Torosian one year, and he is one of the few people I believe I have ever learned a little something or other from, for he frequently stopped in his work to say, “If your opponent gets a headlock on you, feel out the action of his muscles, and when the pattern of tension and relaxation is known, wait for the next instant of relaxation, and then leap upward with all the force you can manage, and I think you will find that you can break free from his hold upon your head.”

  “Yes, sir,” I used to say, “but in leaping up is it not possible that the top of my head will strike the bottom of his head, his chin, and be considered a foul?”

  “No, sir,” the retired wrestler would reply. “In making your break for freedom, the force of your movement automatically drives him out of the line of your released head, but let us say that somehow or other his chin is in fact directly in line with your head, and that the top of your head does strike him on the bottom of his chin—all the better, my boy. Don’t worry about it, you will scarcely feel the impact, whereas he may be pushed close to unconsciousness by the force under his chin.”

  “Yes, sir,” I used to say, “I’ll remember that.”

  And so we might not speak again for ten minutes, or even twenty, and now and then not even for an hour, because pruning muscat vines calls for a certain amount of concentration, and at the same time in noticing the beauty of the structure of the vine one tends to fall silent.

  But sooner or later the Armenian wrestler would stand up straight and say, “If you are on the mat, and he’s sprawling all over you to keep your back flat on the mat so that he may win the round, God help you, that’s all I can say.”

  “Yes, of course,” I used to say, “but is there nothing I can do to stop him from keeping my back flat on the mat?”

  “Yes, there is,” the old wrestler would say, “but it isn’t easy, it is almost impossible, everything happens very swiftly in wrestling, and when you are off balance in that manner, where is your strength to come from? You are flat, and you have nothing to hold your strength together upon, for a counterattack. But there is one thing you can do, and again it is something more in the realm of art than athletics, and I myself in a long career of professional wrestling was able to do it only perhaps half a dozen times out of at least a hundred opportunities.”

  “And what is that?” I would ask.

  “Disappear,” Nazaret Torosian would say. “And I mean just that. Disappear, out from under. How it happens I have never been able to understand, and I have studied the matter from every possible angle. My wrestling weight was 240 pounds, all muscle, bone, and cartilege, and so we know that this is a great deal of body to cause to disappear, and yet, that is precisely what happened at least half a dozen times. I was flat on my back and my opponent—once he was Strangler Lewis himself, another time he was Jimmy Londos, and another time he was Stanislaus Szabisco—and then suddenly I was not flat on my back, I was up, on my feet, and he was just turning to see where I had gone. So I invariably thought to myself, Now, how did that happen? And of course I went on and won the round. The matches in those days were the best two out of three, as I think you may remember.”

  “Yes,” I would reply. “Yes, sir, I do remember, but after you had given the matter a great deal of thought, what did you conclude? How did it happen that you were able to disappear in that manner? What was it that permitted that impossible disappearance?”

  “Well,” Nazaret said, “I finally decided that it was Christianity. Jesus did it. Our blessed babe worked another miracle. It is not for nothing that we are the first nation in the world to accept Jesus. It was Christianity that did it.”

  “Yes, sir,” I used to say, “but your opponents, they also were Christians, every one of them.”

  The wrestler would look up and consider what I had said, and then he would say, “What you say is true, but we are Armenian Christians, and that gives us just the edge we need. An Irish Christian, a Greek Christian, a Polish Christian—Jesus will help them, but only after he has helped an Armenian Christian.”

  I have never had occasion to use any of the wrestler’s advice, however.

  Or so I seem to believe, at any rate.

  But who says I am a Christian? With me, in religion, it has got to be all or none, and none is just an edge too little and belittling. Chance meetings with living saints and sons of bitches go on and on.

  A Note on the Author

  William Saroyan (1908–1981) was an internationally renowned Armenian American writer, playwright, and humanitarian. He achieved great popularity in the thirties, forties, and fifties through his hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, memoirs, and essays. In 1939, Saroyan was the first American writer to win both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life. He famously refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that “Commerce should not patronize art.” He died near his hometown of Fresno at the age of seventy-two.

  Discover books by William Saroyan published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/WilliamSaroyan

  Boys and Girls Together

  Chance Meetings

  The Laughing Matter

  Rock Wagram

  Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1978 William Saroyan

  Used with permission of Stanford University

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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  eISBN: 9781448214815

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