“It couldn’t have been anything else. Even if Hitler is living and is hiding out in the United States, he is not likely to meet his cronies at a cafeteria on Broadway. Besides, the cafeteria belongs to a Jew.”
“I saw him as I am seeing you now.”
“You had a glimpse back in time.”
“Well, let it be so. But since then I have had no rest. I keep thinking about it. If I am destined to lose my mind, this will drive me to it.”
The telephone rang and I jumped up with a start. It was a wrong number. I sat down again. “What about the psychiatrist your lawyer sent you to? Tell it to him and you’ll get full compensation.”
Esther looked at me sidewise and unfriendly. “I know what you mean. I haven’t fallen that low yet.”
V
I was afraid that Esther would continue to call me. I even planned to change my telephone number. But weeks and months passed and I never heard from her or saw her. I didn’t go to the cafeteria. But I often thought about her. How can the brain produce such nightmares? What goes on in that little marrow behind the skull? And what guarantee do I have that the same sort of thing will not happen to me? And how do we know that the human species will not end like this? I have played with the idea that all of humanity suffers from schizophrenia. Along with the atom, the personality of Homo sapiens has been splitting. When it comes to technology, the brain still functions, but in everything else degeneration has begun. They are all insane: the Communists, the Fascists, the preachers of democracy, the writers, the painters, the clergy, the atheists. Soon technology, too, will disintegrate. Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought that it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.
But since insanity has not yet taken over altogether, one has to act as though there were still order—according to Vaihinger’s principle of “as if.” I continued with my scribbling. I delivered manuscripts to the publisher. I lectured. Four times a year, I sent checks to the federal government, the state. What was left after my expenses I put in the savings bank. A teller entered some numbers in my bankbook and this meant that I was provided for. Somebody printed a few lines in a magazine or newspaper, and this signified that my value as a writer had gone up. I saw with amazement that all my efforts turned into paper. My apartment was one big wastepaper basket. From day to day, all this paper was getting drier and more parched. I woke up at night fearful that it would ignite. There was not an hour when I did not hear the sirens of fire engines.
A year after I had last seen Esther, I was going to Toronto to read a paper about Yiddish in the second half of the nineteenth century. I put a few shirts in my valise as well as papers of all kinds, among them one that made me a citizen of the United States. I had enough paper money in my pocket to pay for a taxi to Grand Central. But the taxis seemed to be taken. Those that were not refused to stop. Didn’t the drivers see me? Had I suddenly become one of those who see and are not seen? I decided to take the subway. On my way, I saw Esther. She was not alone but with someone I had known years ago, soon after I arrived in the United States. He was a frequenter of a cafeteria on East Broadway. He used to sit at a table, express opinions, criticize, grumble. He was a small man, with sunken cheeks the color of brick, and bulging eyes. He was angry at the new writers. He belittled the old ones. He rolled his own cigarettes and dropped ashes into the plates from which we ate. Almost two decades had passed since I had last seen him. Suddenly he appears with Esther. He was even holding her arm. I had never seen Esther look so well. She was wearing a new coat, a new hat. She smiled at me and nodded. I wanted to stop her, but my watch showed that it was late. I barely managed to catch the train. In my bedroom, the bed was already made. I undressed and went to sleep.
In the middle of the night, I awoke. My car was being switched, and I almost fell out of bed. I could not sleep any more and I tried to remember the name of the little man I had seen with Esther. But I was unable to. The thing I did remember was that even thirty years ago he had been far from young. He had come to the United States in 1905 after the revolution in Russia. In Europe, he had a reputation as a speaker and public figure. How old must he be now? According to my calculations, he had to be in the late eighties—perhaps even ninety. Is it possible that Esther could be intimate with such an old man? But this evening he had not looked old. The longer I brooded about it in the darkness, the stranger the encounter seemed to me. I even imagined that somewhere in a newspaper I had read that he had died. Do corpses walk around on Broadway? This would mean that Esther, too, was not living. I raised the window shade and sat up and looked out into the night—black, impenetrable, without a moon. A few stars ran along with the train for a while and then they disappeared. A lighted factory emerged; I saw machines but no operators. Then it was swallowed in the darkness and another group of stars began to follow the train. I was turning with the earth on its axis. I was circling with it around the sun and moving in the direction of a constellation whose name I had forgotten. Is there no death? Or is there no life?
I thought about what Esther had told me of seeing Hitler in the cafeteria. It had seemed utter nonsense, but now I began to reappraise the idea. If time and space are nothing more than forms of perception, as Kant argues, and quality, quantity, causality are only categories of thinking, why shouldn’t Hitler confer with his Nazis in a cafeteria on Broadway? Esther didn’t sound insane. She had seen a piece of reality that the heavenly censorship prohibits as a rule. She had caught a glimpse behind the curtain of the phenomena. I regretted that I had not asked for more details.
In Toronto, I had little time to ponder these matters, but when I returned to New York I went to the cafeteria for some private investigation. I met only one man I knew: a rabbi who had become an agnostic and given up his job. I asked him about Esther. He said, “The pretty little woman who used to come here?”
“Yes.”
“I heard that she committed suicide.”
“When—how?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps we are not speaking about the same person.”
No matter how many questions I asked and how much I described Esther, everything remained vague. Some young woman who used to come here had turned on the gas and made an end of herself—that was all the ex-rabbi could tell me.
I decided not to rest until I knew for certain what had happened to Esther and also to that half writer, half politician I remembered from East Broadway. But I grew busier from day to day. The cafeteria closed. The neighborhood changed. Years have passed and I have never seen Esther again. Yes, corpses do walk on Broadway. But why did Esther choose that particular corpse? She could have got a better bargain even in this world.
Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus
The Joke
I
WHY should a Polish Jew in New York publish a literary magazine in German? The magazine, Das Wort, was supposed to come out every three months but barely made it three times a year and sometimes only twice—a little volume of ninety-six pages. None of the German writers who appeared there were known to me. Hitler was already in power and these writers were all refugees. Manuscripts came from Paris, Switzerland, London, and even Australia. The stories were ponderous, with sentences whole pages long. No matter how I tried, I could not finish one of them. The poems had neither rhyme nor rhythm, and as far as I could judge they had no content.
The publisher, Liebkind Bendel, came from Galicia, had lived for years in Vienna, and had become rich here in New York on the stock market and in real estate. He had liquidated all his stocks about six months before the 1929 crash, and at a time when money was a rarity he possessed a lot of cash, with which he bought buildings.
We became acquainted because Liebkind Bendel was planning to publish a magazine like Das Wort in Yiddish; he wanted me to be his editor. We met m
any times in restaurants, cafés, and also in Liebkind Bendel’s apartment on Riverside Drive. He was a tiny man with a narrow skull without a single hair, a long face, a pointed nose, a longish chin, and small, almost feminine hands and feet. His eyes were yellow, like amber. He seemed to me like a ten-year-old boy on whom someone had put the head of an adult. He wore gaudy clothes—gold brocade ties. Liebkind Bendel had many interests. He collected autographs and manuscripts, bought antiques, belonged to chess clubs, and considered himself a gourmet and a Don Juan. He liked gadgets—watches that were also calendars, fountain pens with flashlights. He bet on the horses, drank cognac, had a huge collection of erotic literature. He was always working on a plan—to save humanity, to give Palestine back to the Jews, to reform family life, to turn matchmaking into a science and an art. One pet idea was a lottery for which the prize would be a beautiful girl—a Miss America or a Miss Universe.
Liebkind Bendel had a German wife, Friedel, no taller than he but broad, with black curly hair. She was the daughter of a laundress and a railroad worker in Hamburg; both her parents were Aryan, but Friedel looked Jewish. For years she had been writing a dissertation on Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare. She did all the work at home and in addition was her husband’s secretary. He also had a mistress, Sarah, a widow and the mother of an insane daughter. Sarah lived in Brownsville. Liebkind Bendel once introduced me to her.
Liebkind Bendel’s only language was Yiddish. To those who didn’t know Yiddish he spoke a lingo that combined Yiddish, German, and English. He had a talent for mangling words. It didn’t take me long to realize that he had no connection with literature. The real editor of Das Wort was Friedel. The Yiddish version never came to be, but something attracted me to that playful little man. Perhaps it was that I could not fathom him. Every time I thought I knew him, some new whim popped up.
Liebkind Bendel often spoke about his correspondence with an old and famous Hebrew writer, Dr. Alexander Walden, a philosopher who had lived for years in Berlin. There he edited a Hebrew encyclopedia, whose early volumes appeared before the First World War. The publication of this encyclopedia dragged on for so many years that it became a joke. It was said that the last volume would appear after the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead, when the names included in it would have three dates: the day of birth, the day of death, and the day of arising from the grave.
From the beginning, the encyclopedia had been supported by a Berlin Maecenas, Dan Kniaster, now an old man in his eighties. Although Alexander Walden was supported by Dan Kniaster, he acted like a rich man. He had a large apartment around the Kurfürstendamm, owned many paintings, kept a butler. When he was young, a miracle had happened to Alexander Walden: the daughter of a Jewish multimillionaire, a relative of the Tietzs and the Warburgs, Mathilda Oppenheimer, had fallen in love with him. She lived with him only a few months and then divorced him. But the knowledge that Dr. Alexander Walden had for a time been the husband of a German heiress and wrote in German made the Hebraists stand in awe of him. Since he ignored them, they accused him of being a snob. He avoided even speaking Yiddish, though he was the son of a rabbi from a small village in Poland. He was said to be on intimate terms with Einstein, Freud, and Bergson.
Why Liebkind Bendel was eager to correspond with Dr. Alexander Walden is not clear to me to this day. Dr. Walden had the reputation of not answering letters, and Liebkind Bendel liked to show that no one could defy him. He wrote, asking Alexander Walden to contribute to Das Wort. His letters were ignored. He sent long cables, but still Dr. Walden kept silent. At this, Liebkind Bendel resolved to get a letter from Dr. Walden at any price.
In New York, Liebkind Bendel met a Hebrew bibliographer, Dov Ben Zev, who had become half blind from too much reading. Dov Ben Zev knew by heart almost every word Dr. Walden had written. Liebkind Bendel invited Dov Ben Zev to his apartment, had Friedel prepare a supper of blintzes and sour cream, and with the two of them worked out an elaborate scheme. A letter was sent to Dr. Walden, supposedly written by a wealthy girl in New York, a connection of the Lehmans’ and the Schiffs’, an heiress to many millions—Miss Eleanor Seligman-Braude. It was a letter full of love and admiration for Dr. Walden’s works and personality. The knowledge of Dr. Walden’s writings was Dov Ben Zev’s, the classic German was Freidel’s, and the flattery was Liebkind Bendel’s.
Liebkind Bendel grasped correctly that in spite of his age Dr. Walden still dreamed of a new rich match. What could be better bait than an American millionairess, unmarried and deeply immersed in Dr. Walden’s work? Almost immediately came an airmail handwritten letter eight pages long. Dr. Walden answered love with love. He wanted to come to New York.
Friedel never wrote more than the one letter; she protested that the whole business was an ugly trick and would have nothing more to do with it. But Liebkind Bendel got hold of an old refugee from Germany, a Frau Inge Schuldiener, who was willing to collaborate with him. A correspondence began that lasted from 1933 to 1938. During these years, only one thing kept Dr. Walden from arriving in New York—the fact that he suffered severely from seasickness. In 1937, Dan Kniaster, his property in Berlin about to be confiscated, his business taken over by his sons, had moved to London. He took Dr. Walden with him. On the short trip across the Channel, Dr. Walden became so sick that he had to be carried off the boat at Dover on a stretcher.
One morning in the summer of 1938, I was called to the pay telephone downstairs in my rooming house at seven o’clock. I had gone to sleep late, and it took me some time to get into my bathrobe and slippers and to go down the three flights of stairs. Liebkind Bendel was calling. “Did I wake you, huh?” he screamed. “I’m in a jam. I haven’t slept a wink all night. If you won’t help me, I’m ruined. Liebkind Bendel is a goner. You can say Kaddish for me.”
“What happened?”
“Dr. Walden is arriving by plane. Frau Schuldiener got a telegram for Eleanor from London. He sent her a thousand kisses!”
It took a few seconds for me to realize what was happening. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Disguise myself as an heiress?”
“Oy! Have I made a mess of things! If I weren’t afraid that war would break out any day, I would run away to Europe. What shall I do? I am crazy. I should be shut up in a madhouse. Somebody has to meet him.”
“Eleanor could be in California.”
“But she has just assured him she was staying in the city this summer. Anyway, her address is a furnished room in the West Eighties. He will know immediately that this is not the apartment of a millionairess. He has her telephone number, and Frau Schuldiener will answer and all hell will break loose. She is a Jaecki and has no sense of humor.”
“I doubt if even God could help you.”
“What shall I do—kill myself with suicide? Until now he has been afraid to fly. Suddenly the old idiot got courage. I am ready to donate a million dollars to Rabbi Meir, the miracle worker, that his plane should fall into the ocean. But God and I are not pals. The two of us have until eight this evening.”
“Please don’t make me a partner in your adventures.”
“You are the only one of my friends who knows about it. Last night Friedel was so angry she threatened me with divorce. That schlemiel Dov Ben Zev is in the hospital. I telephoned the Hebraists, but Dr. Walden slighted them so long they have become his bloody enemies. He didn’t even make hotel reservations. He most probably expects Eleanor to lead him to the wedding canopy straight from the airport.”
“Really, I cannot help you.”
“At least let’s have breakfast together—if I can’t talk to someone, I’ll lose my mind. What time do you want to eat?”
“I want to sleep, not to eat.”
“Me, too. I took three pills last night. I hear that Dan Kniaster left Germany without a pfennig. He’s an old has-been of eighty-five. His sons are real Prussians, assimilationists, half converted. If war breaks out, this Dr. Walden will become a burden on my neck. And how can I explain thi
ngs to him? He may get a stroke.”
We left it that we would meet at eleven o’clock in a restaurant on Broadway. I returned to bed but not to sleep. I half dozed, half laughed to myself, playing with a solution—not because of any loyalty to Liebkind Bendel but in the same way that I sometimes tried to solve a puzzle in a newspaper.
II
At the restaurant, I hardly recognized Liebkind Bendel. Even though he wore a yellow jacket, a red shirt, and a tie with golden dots, his face looked as pale as after an illness. He was twisting a long cigar between his lips and he had already ordered cognac. He sat on the edge of his chair. Before I managed to sit down, he called to me. “I’ve found a way out, but you must help me. Eleanor has just perished in an airplane crash. I spoke to Frau Schuldiener and she will back me up. All you have to do is wait for that old skirt chaser at the airport and get him into a hotel. Tell him you are Eleanor’s friend or nephew. I will take a room for him and pay the bill for a month in advance. After that I am not responsible. Let him go back to London to find himself a daughter of a lord.”
“You could pose as Eleanor’s friend as well as I.”
“I can’t do it. He’d cling to me like a leech. What can he get from you—your manuscripts? You will spend a few hours with him and he won’t bother you any more. If worst comes to worse, I’ll pay his fare back to England. You will be saving my life and I will never forget it. Don’t give him your address. Tell him you live in Chicago or Miami. There was a time when I would have given a fortune to be in his company half an hour, but I have lost the appetite. I am afraid of him. I’m sure that the minute I see him and he utters the name Eleanor I’ll burst out laughing. As a matter of fact, I have been sitting here laughing to myself. The waiter thought I had gone out of my mind.”
“Bendel, I cannot do it.”
“Is this your last word?”
The Collected Stories Page 41
