by Bellow, Saul
She said, “You’ve always been willing to advise me. I always felt I could turn to you. I’m grateful, Ijah, that you have so much compassion. It’s no secret that my husband is not a supportive individual. He says no to everything I suggest. All money has to be totally separate. ‘I keep mine, you hang on to yours,’ he tells me. He wouldn’t educate the girls beyond high school—as much education as he got. I had to sell Mother’s building—I took the mortgage myself. It’s a shame that the rates were so low then. They’re sky high now. Financially, I took a bath on that deal.”
“Didn’t Raphael advise you?”
“He said I was crazy to spend my whole inheritance on the girls. What would I do in old age? Earl made the same argument. Nobody should be dependent. He says we must all stand on our own two feet.”
“You’re unusually devoted to your daughters….”
I knew only the younger one—Carlotta—who had the dark bangs and the arctic figure of an Eskimo. With me this is not a pejorative. I am fascinated by polar regions and their peoples. Carlotta had long, sharp, painted nails, her look was febrile, her conversation passionate and inconsequent. At a family dinner I attended, she played the piano so crashingly that conversation was out of the question, and when Cousin Pearl asked her to play more softly she burst into tears and locked herself in the toilet. Eunice told me that Carlotta was going to resign from the Peace Corps and join an armed settlement on the West Bank.
Annalou, the older daughter, had steadier ambitions. Her grades hadn’t been good enough for the better medical schools. Cousin Eunice now gave me an astonishing account of her professional education. “I had to pay extra,” she said. “Yes, I had to commit myself to make a big donation to the school.”
“Did you say the Talbot Medical School?”
“That’s what I said. Even to get to talk to the director, a payoff was necessary. You need a clearance from a trustworthy person. I had to promise Scharfer—”
“Which Scharfer?”
“Our cousin Scharfer the fundraiser. You have to have a go-between. Scharfer said he would arrange the interview if I would make a gift first to his_ organization.”
“Under the table, at a medical school?” I said.
“Otherwise I couldn’t get into the director’s office. Well, I made a contribution to Scharfer of twelve-five. His price. And then I had to pledge myself to Talbot for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Over and above tuition?”
“Over and above. You can guess what a medical degree is worth, the income it guarantees. A small school like Talbot, no endowment, has no funding. You can’t hire decent faculty unless you’re competitive in salaries, and you can’t get accreditation without an adequate faculty.”
“So you had to pay?”
“I made a down payment of half, with the balance promised before graduation. No degree until you deliver. It’s one of those concealed interfaces the general public never gets to see.”
“Were you able to manage all this?”
“Even though Annalou was president of her class, word came that they were expecting the final installment. It made me pretty desperate. Bear in mind that I held a five percent mortgage, and the rate is now about fourteen. Earl wouldn’t even talk to me about it. I took the problem to my psychiatrist. His advice was to write to the school director. We formulated a statement—a promise to make good on the twenty-five. I said that I was a person of ‘the highest integrity’ When I went to my lawyer to check out the language, he advised against ‘highest.’ Just ‘integrity’ was enough. So I wrote, ‘On my word as a person of known integrity.’ Then Annalou was allowed to graduate, on the strength of this.”
“And…?”_ said.
My question puzzled her. “A twenty-cent stamp saved me a fortune.”
“You’re not going to pay?”
“I wrote the letter_…” she said.
A difference of emphasis separated us. She sat straighter, rejecting the back of the chair, stiffening herself upward from the base of the spine. Little Eunice had become severely bony, just an old broad, except for the attraction of nobility, the high, prominent profile, the face charged with her mother’s color, part blood, part irrationality. Put together, if you can, the contemporary “smarts” she took pride in with these glimpses of patrician antiquity.
But if one of us was an anachronism, it was myself. Again, Cousin Ijah, holding out. With what motive? For unspecified reasons, I didn’t congratulate Eunice on her exploit. She longed for me to tell her what a clever thing she had done, how dandy it was, and I seemed determined to disappoint her. What could my puzzling balkiness mean?
‘ Those words, ‘high integrity,’ saved you twenty-five thou…?”
“Just ‘integrity.’ I told you, Ijah, I cut out the ‘high.’ “
Well, why shouldn’t Eunice, too, make advantageous use of a fine word? All the words were up for grabs. Her grasp of politics was better than mine. I didn’t like to see the word “integrity” fucked up. I suppose the best reason I could advance was the defense of poetry. That was a stupid reason, given that she was defending her one-breasted body. A metastasis would bankrupt her.
The subject was changed. We talked a little about her husband. He had been busy in Grant Park, on the lakefront. Because of the alarming jump in the crime rate, the park board had decided to cut down concealing shrubbery and demolish the old-style comfort stations. Rapists used the bushes for cover, and women had been stabbed to death in the toilets, so now there were cans of the sentry-box type, admitting only one person at a time. Karger was administering the new installations. So Eunice said with pride, although the account she gave of her husband, when all references were assembled, did not make a favorable impression. Weirdly close-mouthed, he dismissed all attempts at conversation. Conversation not worthwhile. Maybe he was right, I saw his point. On the plus side, he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. He was a stand-up eccentric. His independence appealed to me. He had no act going, anyway. “I have to pay half the rent,” said Eunice. “And also the utilities.” I didn’t buy her hard-luck story. “Why do you stay together?” She explained, “I’m covered by his Blue Cross-Blue Shield….” Most people would have been convinced by this explanation. My response was neutral; I was taking it all under consideration.
When lunch ended, she asked to see what my office was like. “My cousin the genius,” she said, very pleased by the size of the room. I must be important to rate so much space on the fifty-first floor of a great building. “I won’t ask what you do with all these gadgets, documents, and books. For instance, these huge green books. I’m sure it bores you to have to explain.”
The huge faded green books, dating from the beginning of the century, had nothing at all to do with my salaried functions. When I read them I was playing hooky. They were two volumes in the series of reports of the Jesup Expedition, published by the American Museum of Natural History. Siberian ethnography. Fascinating. I was beguiled of my griefs (considerable griefs) by these monographs. Two tribes, the Koryak and the Chukchee, as described by Jochelson and Bogoras, absorbed me totally. Just as old Metzger had been drawn magnetically from the Boston Store (charmed from his clerk’s duties) by bump-and-grinders, so I neglected office work for these books. Political radicals Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogoras (curious Christian names for a pair of Russian Jews) were exiled to Siberia in the 1890s and, in the region where the Soviets later established the worst of their labor camps, Magadan and Kolyma, the two Waldemars devoted years to the study of the native tribes.
About this arctic desert, purified by frosts as severe as fire, I read for my relief as if I were reading the Bible. In winter darkness, even within a Siberian settlement you might be lost if the wind blew you down, for the speed of the snow was such as to bury you before you could recover your feet. If you tied up your dogs you would find them sometimes smothered when you dug them out in the morning. In this dark land you entered the house by a ladder inside the chimney. As th
e snows rose, the dogs climbed up to smell what was cooking. They fought for places at the chimney tops and sometimes fell into the cauldron. There were photographs of dogs crucified, a common form of sacrifice. The powers of darkness surrounded you. A Chukchee informant told Bogoras that there were invisible enemies who beset human beings from all sides, demanding spirits whose mouths were always gaping. The people cringed and gave ransom, buying protection from these raving ghosts.
The geography of mental travel can’t be the same from century to century; the realms of gold move away. They float into the past. Anyway, a wonderful silence formed around me in my office as I read about these tribes and their spirits and shamans—it doubled, quadrupled. It became a tenfold silence, right in the middle of the Loop. My windows look toward Grant Park. Now and then I rested my eyes on the lakefront, where Cousin Karger had sheared away the flowering shrubs to deprive sex maniacs of their cover, and set up narrow single-occupancy toilets. The monumental park, and the yacht basin, with sleek boats owned by lawyers and corporate executives. Sexual brutalities weekdays, at anchor; on Sundays the same frenzied erotomaniacs sail peacefully with the wife and kids. And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the agonies of final dissolution (and this is the suspense_ referred to some pages back) depends on what you think, feel, and will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the kabbalistic skill you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formations. My intuition is that the Koryak and the Chukchee lead me in the right direction.
So I go into trances over Bogoras and Jochelson at the office. Nobody bothers me much. At conference time I wake up. I become seerlike and the associates like to listen to my analyses. I was right about Brazil, right about Iran. I foresaw the revolution of the mullahs, which the president’s advisers did not. But my views had to be rejected. Returns so huge for the lending institutions, and protected by government guarantees—I couldn’t expect my recommendations to be accepted. My reward is to be praised as “deep” and “brilliant.” Where the kids in Logan Square used to see the eyes of an orangutan, my colleagues see the gaze of a clairvoyant. Nobody comes right out with it, but everybody reads my reports and the main thing is that I am left alone to pursue my spiritual investigation. I pore over an old photograph of Yukaghir women on the bank of the Nalemna River. The far shore barren—snow, rocks, spindling trees. The women are squatting, stringing a catch of big whitefish piled in the foreground, working with needle and thread at thirty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Their labor makes them sweat so that they take off their fur bodices and are half naked. They even thrust large cakes of snow into their bosoms.” Primitive women overheating at thirty below and cooling their breasts with snow lumps. As I read I ask myself who in this building, this up-up-upward skyscraper containing thousands, has the strangest imaginations. Who knows what secret ideas others are having, the dreams of these bankers, lawyers, career women—their fancies and mantic visions? They themselves couldn’t bring them out, frightened by their crazy intensity. Human beings, by definition, half the time mad.
So who will mind if I eat up these books? Actually, I am rereading them. My first acquaintance with them goes back many years. I was piano player in a bar near the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. I even sang some specialty numbers, one of which was “The Princess Papooli Has Plenty Papaya.” I was rooming with my cousin Ezekiel on the wrong side of the tracks. Zeke, called Seckel in the family, was then lecturing in primitive languages at the state university, but his main enterprise took him to the north woods every week. He drove off each Wednesday in his dusty Plymouth to record Mohican folktales. He had found some Mohican survivors and, in the upper peninsula, he did just as Jochelson had done, with the assistance of his wife, Dr. Dina Brodsky, in eastern Siberia. Seckel assured me that this Dr. Brodsky was a cousin. At the turn of the century, the two Jochelsons had come to New York City to work at the American Museum of Natural History with Franz Boas. Seckel insisted that at that time Dr. Brodsky had looked up the family.
Why were the Jews such avid anthropologists? Among the founders of the science were Durkheim and Lщvy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Boas, Sapir, Lowie. They may have believed that they were demystifiers, that science was their motive and that their ultimate aim was to increase universalism. I don’t see it that way myself. A truer explanation is the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence. This of course was the situation of Eastern Jews. The Western ones were prancing and preening like learned Germans. And were Polish and Russian Jews (in disgrace with civilized judgment, afflicted with tuberculosis and diseased eyes) so far from the imagination of savage practices? They didn’t have to make a Symbolist decision to derange their senses; they were born that way. Exotics going out to do science upon exotics. And then it all came out in Rabbinic-Germanic or Cartesian-Talmudic forms.
Cousin Seckel, by the way, had no theorizing bent. His talent was for picking up strange languages. He went down to the Louisiana bayou country to learn an Indian dialect from its last speaker, who was moribund. In a matter of months he spoke the language perfectly. So on his deathbed, the old Indian at last had somebody to talk to, and when he was gone there was only Seckel in possession of the words. The tribe lived on in him alone. I learned one of the Indian love songs from him: “Haiy’hee, y’heey’ho_—Kiss me before you go.” He urged me to play it in the cocktail lounge. He passed on to me also a recipe for Creole jam-balaya (ham, rice, crawfish, peppers, chicken, and tomatoes), which as a single man I have no occasion to cook. He had great skill also as a maker of primitive cat’s cradles, and had a learned paper on Indian string-figures to his credit. Some of these cat’s cradles I can still manage myself, when there are kids to entertain.
A stout young man, round-backed, Seckel had a Hasidic pallor. His plump face wore earnest lines, and the creases of his forehead resembled the frets of a musical instrument. Dark hair covered his head in virile curls, somewhat dusty from his five-hundred-mile weekly trips to Indian country. Seckel didn’t bathe much, didn’t often change his underclothes. It didn’t matter to the woman who loved him. She was Dutch, Jennie Bouwsma, and carried her books in a rucksack. She appears in my memory wearing a tarn and knee socks, legs half bare and looking inflamed in the Wisconsin winter. While in the sack with Seckel, she shouted out loudly. There were no doors, only curtains in our little rooms. Seckel hurried back and forth. His calves and buttocks were strongly developed, white, muscular. I wonder how this classic musculature got into the family.
We rented from the widow of a locomotive engineer. We had the ground floor of an old frame house.
The only book that Seckel picked up that year was The Last of the Mohicans,_ of which he would read the first chapter to put himself to sleep. On the theoretical side, he said he was a pluralist. Marxism was out._ He also denied the possibility of a science of history—he took a strong position on this. He described himself as a Diffusionist. All culture was invented once,_ and spread from a single source. He had actually read G. Elliot Smith and was committed to a theory of the Egyptian origins of everything.
His sleepy eyes were deceiving. Their dazed look was a screen for labors of linguistics that never stopped. His dimples did double duty, for they were sometimes critical (I refer here to the modern crisis, the source of the suspense)._ I ran into Seckel in Mexico City in 1947, not too long before he died. He was leading a delegation of Indians who knew no Spanish, and since no one in the Mexican civil service could speak their lingo, Seckel was their interpreter and no doubt the instigator of their complaints as well. These silent Indians, men in sombreros and white droopy drawers, the black hair growing at the corners of their lips, came out of the sun, which was their element, into the colonnades of the government building.
All this I remember. The one thing I forget is what I myself was doing in Mexico.
It was through Seckel, via Dr. Dina Brodsky, that I learned of the work of Waldema
r Jochelson (presumably a cousin by marriage) on the Koryak. At a ladies’ auxiliary sale I bought a charming book called To the Ends of the Earth_ (by John Perkins and the American Museum of Natural History), and found in it a chapter on the tribes of eastern Siberia. Then I recalled the monographs I had first seen years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, and borrowed the two Jesup volumes from the Regenstein Library. The women of Koryak myth, I read, were able to detach their genitalia when necessary and hang them up on the trees; and Raven, an unearthly comedian, the mythic father of the tribe, when he explored his wife’s innards, entering her from behind, found himself first of all standing in a vast chamber. In contemplating such inventions or fantasies, one should bear in mind how hard a life the Koryak led, how they struggled to survive. In winter the fishermen had to hack holes in solid ice to a depth of six feet to drop their lines in the river. Overnight these holes were filled and frozen again. Koryak huts were cramped. A woman, however, was roomy. The tribe’s mythic mother was palatial.
Very sympathetic to me (I’m sure she isn’t being merely nosy), my assistant, Miss Rodinson, comes into the office to ask why I have been bent over at the window for an hour, apparently staring down into Monroe Street. It’s only that these giant mat-green monographs borrowed from the Regenstein are hard to hold, and I rest them on the windowsill. In the eagerness of her sympathy Miss Rodinson perhaps wishes she might enter my thoughts, make herself useful. But what help can she be? Better not enter this lusterless pelagic green, the gateway to a savage Siberia that no longer exists.
