Here in the museum, everything had already been done, Sumerian to now. Even to his deaf ears the quiet was a special one, the ultimate after such noise. Here the buzzing demand could stop. Staring at the left-behind bowls and spoons, the sarcophagi, he found relief, even a kind of joy. It would go on, the suffering, but it could stop. What he should have been, of course, was a rabbi.
So, at least, they’d said to him in the kibbutz—where action was daily, and anointment even of their “own” barely rabbinical—and the ills of the world beyond frankly a Gentile matter, scarcely at the moment even the province of God. But those men back there were the businessmen of retribution. They saw “rabbi” in him because they unwittingly agreed with his own father’s low estimate of his brains (as he did himself)—and rabbis who were not too intelligent were the preference of businessmen everywhere.
But there was another kind of man out there again in the desert now, more modern even than the chemists. On his way home, he’d stopped off in London, to talk that over with Austin.
“But that’s the military, isn’t it,” said Austin, leaning back in the Spartan rocker he’d had set in his very formal office—of the sort, he had just remarked, with which the wiser foundations concealed the revolutionary nature of their benefices even from themselves.
“You’re not surprised?”
“At you—and that? Should I be?”
In two years abroad himself, Austin hadn’t changed a whit; all his attributes could merely now be seen foreshortened, in the way of any man who rightfully becomes what he had promised to be. Still, David chided himself as stupid for not having seen this before. “I am. Surprised at myself.”
Austin looked out across the square, at what he had pointed out as the only building more purely Adam than this one—the Chase Bank. “What’ll you be doing for them—if you go?”
“Radio communications. And allied—arts.”
“For how long?”
“As I please. But I must take on citizenship. And a kind of…contract. For some years.”
“Will you be home long?”
“Just to tell him. I never can write him. And to see how he is.”
“Hear he’s in a wheelchair. But going out more than he has in years. Warren wrote me.”
“He can still walk. But he conserves it, for the evenings. When he writes, Ruth says. Ruth’s home.”
“She came through here on her way,” said Austin. “To stay?”
“She did a ballet, down under. On the Wallabies, she called it. Says that’s Australian slang for an uncertain path.”
Both laughed.
“She’s the clearest of any of us,” Austin said. “I’m not sure why.”
“Cheeriest?” said David, hand on his box—though he thought he had heard right.
“That too,” said Austin. “Out there in the Negev—what about your tin ear?”
He had smiled; it was so characteristic of Austin, to give him only one. “They’ll take me.” He had got up to poke the fire in the grate. “Think Simon will be pleased?”
“How like him you are, Diddy. Must be your sizes, that we never saw it.”
“Am I?” The box squawked, which it did sometimes, when David swallowed. “I think I admire him more—than anyone does. More than—Walter.” He dug playfully at Austin. “More even than you.”
“So things are better there,” said Austin quickly. “You call him Simon, now.”
“My ambition is even greater,” he’d said. “To call him Si.”
“Has anyone, ever?”
“My—foolish mother.”
“I never thought her—that.”
“The dead—are foolish.” He bent over the coal grate. “Nothing to be done with this fire.”
“Why, that’s the equivalent of a Second Secretary’s fire! You should see a Prime Minister’s. Barely any at all.”
Each leaned back, testing the overtones of the other.
“But that’s an American rocker,” David said. “You can’t be going to stay on forever in this green drool. And how do you feel about Israel, by the way? From here.”
“From the land of old White Papers, d’you mean? Well, I’ll tell you. First you see—well, there’s yaws. Still a lot of yaws in the world, and the Foundation has always been very concerned with it. ‘Yaws, Mr. Fenno,’ the old head here told me when I first came. ‘Yaws has always been our pigeon here. We’re also rather proud of getting the Iranian Muslims to stop using arsenic depilatory. Poisons the wells. Ah yes, we’ve always been very international.’” Austin rocked. “So we gave him a larger office and a smaller fire, and he’s scarcely noticed yet that our sights have shifted. To diseases of the atom, you might say. Preventive medicine is what we’re after. We’re not as interested in cures, any more. But we’re still very international.” He stopped rocking. “So you’ll forgive me if the glories of Israel scarcely engage me at all.”
“Goddammit, Aussie. Don’t scold.”
Here in the museum, waiting for the person who, from countless assignations here, he almost identified with the place’s cool, post-Vesuvian repose, David leaned forward to peer at a card in front of a small ewer from the Euphrates—and gave the fire in Berkeley Square another poke. “OK, Aussie. But what about—the six million?” His box always gave it a sibilance, almost a trill, as if they were in there, trying to get out. “Do we just leave them, to their museums?”
“The dead aren’t foolish,” Austin had said sharply. Not unless we make them so.”
But Aussie had never been sharp in his life, except when he wasn’t sure.
“God. I congratulate you, Aussie. As the first of us to achieve the long view. You Christian.” He had smiled, to soften it
“You—muscular Jew.” Austin smiled too. “I can see what the desert does. You never used to swear. You never even used to mention God.”
A clerk had come in then with the tea and gone out again, a long English girl, in dun worsted.
“Do all the women here dress in those darks? Like the Sunday night soup we had at school.”
“Other wools are still for export. It’s called ‘utility.’”
“She looks useful. Just don’t marry one of ’em.”
“No—I—No,” said Austin.
“Oh,” said David, “I see. Anyone I know?”
Even if the girl was from home it wasn’t likely, and he’d had his own reasons for not pursuing that line.
“We’re not the only ones interested,” Aussie was saying, “in disarmament through world law. Guess who sent me a paper he’s just published on the subject. Edwin. Edwin Halecsy.”
“Well, he’s a lawyer. Still wants to be buddies, I suppose.”
“You know—I think he never did. Oh I know why he sent it to me—something personal.” Suddenly Austin got up to stare out at the morning gloom. “It’s a remarkable paper. I wonder now. Did he even want me to see in it—what I saw.”
“Bright guy. Far brighter than me. Maybe even than thee. What’s so strange?”
“Nothing about the article itself. It’s superb. Unless one happens to think, as I do—that your father wrote it.”
The clerk tiptoed in for the tray. “Be sure you have your own elevenses, Miss Fry,” said Austin, and watched her close the door. “Do you think Edwin could possibly have any…have you ever thought he might have something…on…your father?”
David’s first concern was for his box. In the hazards of assisted speech, it sometimes spoke aloud for him what he hadn’t known he breathed. Nothing, Austin, that I can tell even you.
Here in the museum, a week later, he breathed easier. Even if one day he were to speak aloud, unaware, what he’d so long kept to himself, in that presence he was waiting for he needn’t worry. Behind her back, should he conceivably ever need to—he could shout it aloud.
Back there in London, he’d said merely, “Judges—all have secretaries. Or maybe retirement’s made him—quix-ot-ic.” The box had a bad time with that one. “You probably heard
though—that Edwin never got to live in the house.”
“I didn’t…I mean—yes, of course. But—why?”
“Anna. She said if he did, she’d leave.”
Austin had turned from the window. The green fug they lived in over there had lowered even his gilded looks to pallor. “Aussie, you look off-color. How’s your wound?”
“That war? I never think of it.” He slapped David on the back. “Come on. Time for a quick one, before your plane.”
In the pub, he downed a whisky, then a pint whose mug he clicked against David’s. “To Anna. To Anna my hosh.”
At the plane—for he couldn’t seem to let David go—he said, “Maybe. I need a touch of your desert. I can’t seem to help people except from a distance. Whereas you people—you all have to be there.”
“Should I’ve been a rabbi, you think?”
Austin put down David’s bag he was carrying up the ramp, “Now I am surprised.”
“Not—at the other? You never did say.”
“I always thought—it would have to come out in you, some way. Ever since—that day I barged in.”
It had never been mentioned between them—that Austin had inadvertently seen the house the morning after his own rampage, and had guessed it to be his.
“In envy, believe me,” said Austin. “I can only—whatever it is we Fennos do. I can’t rage.”
The plane was delayed.
“I’ve got to tell Walter too,” said David.
“He’s not well enough to go with you?”
“Well enough to do anything he really wants to. But he won’t. He thinks as you do, Austin.”
“How?”
“That it’s the deafness coming out in me. At last.”
The plane was ready.
“I’ll be home tonight.”
“Write me once in a while,” said Austin. “Not like you do Walter. But—write.”
“I’m accumulating so many people—to leave,” said David.
“Give them all my love,” said Austin. “Especially Anna.”
“Too many, maybe,” said David.
“Can’t have too many, sometimes,” said Austin. “Nest of Fennos, even here.”
“You’re not wanting to—leave the clan?”
“Not joining it,” said Austin. “I might manage that.”
They shook hands.
“You’re OK, bo? Sure?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Austin. “I’m always all right.”
Two days home, and his own decision had been settled, if he had ever doubted it. Out in the desert, all his former clownish gesture must have melted away without his noticing, under the noble attrition of life in those winds. His huge frame, sweating western rivers, had energy left only for the classic services to his own body. The days and nights, no matter how modern of intent, cut their way between sand and the oasis of a cup, from midnight’s planetary cold to noon’s high, solar scarecrow, and always suggesting a truth muffled by the impedimenta of cities—that life was classic everywhere.
Whereas one night in that cat’s cradle of balances, the family house, and all his awkward clapping and stomping had returned to him, doors to be opened, matches to be struck, geehaw up from the chair, down, and all more wildly than in other men, the whole repertoire of acts of obligation by which civilized men placated the other, a whole vocabulary of nonviolence against what Austin had rightly called it—rage. In the desert, not to waste one dog’s life was almost enough. Here he would explode again one day, with the violence of keeping still. It was his bad luck to have found that out about himself, just in time to tell this girl.
She was Sumerian, in her silences. He watched her coming down the long aisle to meet him here, a woman of that ancient stillness, made for him now. In silhouette she was Egyptian, but taller and not black or swarthy, a slender girl with a scarab’s clarity, dressed in pale fresco colors that suited the ages, but made bisque and blond by being alive.
Actually she’d been made for him, and for herself, by the most mundane potters, necromancers and slaves that fortune could assemble to rouse a mute beauty. Twenty doctors had worked in vain to unstop those ears and at any slightest advance in otology were pressed by her family to work on; twenty others had unlocked the tongue. The subtly retracted profile came from the father, one of those equivocally red-gold Jews who so often came from the borderlines of overlapping frontiers—Alsace, or the edges of the Ukraine, or of Friesland, or the alpes maritimes; when she turned front-face, she revealed the Polish blades of cheekbones got from a mother whose ancestors claimed South Germany for five generations. She was no more of a mixture than anyone, but early muteness and its treatment had made of her a kind of ornament which could be turned more than other people, from side to side. Her residual quietness allowed it. Mind—which she had (and stubbornness) was a surprise, and on the instant forgotten again. Under that astral voice, people said of her, how could one remember it? He had no real knowledge of that voice, only of the stillness of which even when speaking she was never quite dredged—that flaw which to others made her too fairy tale, too much the doll reawakened. Which to him made her his. She could hear nothing at all. Against that his own deafness was an oaf’s, braw and mechanical.
She had flown in from the family’s country place; ordinarily, by their wish, she never flew, even from there. In the city, she lived almost across from here in her own apartment at the Stanhope, in one of those exquisitely pale, neutral decors which decorators managed for rich Jews who weren’t quite past being ashamed of their feelings. Her family had had it done for her, a display box by which they might show themselves and the world that they were proud of her as she was. No doubt they were as much against her marrying him—for the social defeat of her having to marry her like—as his own father would be, for deeper reasons. He had already slept there across the street, ridiculously but peacefully, in a round bed with silvered headboard, shaped like a nut. He thought that in his long absence, no one else had. Tonight, whatever they decided, he knew he would sleep there again. None of this made the difference.
The real fairy tale, which would be so for him forever, was in the concrete circle they made between them past anything the normal could do, in the quick of their own persons. Talking with never a voice or even a parting of lips, and the box at his side silent. Conversing with eyes and hands only, in the language he’d been forbidden in his childhood and she had taught him—the manual alphabet of the deaf and dumb. They’d met first on the bench in front of the color organ at the Modern Museum, in the darkly curtained alcove where everybody sat in front of those visions as silent as she. She enjoyed that equality, she said later. He couldn’t claim to have suspected she was deaf, during the minutes after he became aware of her. She’d known it of him at once, by his box. She had been the first to speak, with a hand-pattern on the air—to which he had shaken his head. But he’d known at once, by that vibration of nerve messages and tension clues which were the data of the deaf, that she wasn’t to be pitied. At the end of his first lesson in her alphabet, he had signaled this to her, his big hands painfully slow. “You remind me of my sister, Ruth.”
She saw him now, down a long aisle between glass cases of amphora, and he strode to her. They embraced, mouth and arms, but the real kiss was in the hands, like other people’s tongues. Then they had to part, so that they could speak…
“So you flew,” he said. “Was it like a piano?”
She didn’t answer at once. Even when they were only lipreading, as now, he had a larger, freer economy of words. Words to her were spells, or pearls excreted out of the inner nacre of being. His little share of outer hearing made all the difference; he could waste.
“You wrote,” she said.
He knew what she meant—that he’d never before written as fully or as well as in these last months. Yet he had told her none of his intentions, recounting only the daily. “Walter said the same.”
They were voicing, waiting to work their way back to privacy lik
e any long-parted lovers, and spoke no further in any mode until they had traveled through several galleries, to a favorite bench. Few came here, except a curator passing on to the better eighteenth-century rooms, or perhaps some connoisseur who had noticed that the large window, which framed rear lawns declining softly to the western barrier, did it in exquisite lithograph, as if outside there was the antiquarian future, and in this room the real present, thudding with quiet, in which one could hear an old century speaking, now.
The air outside there was mezzotint, the lawns carefully printed and bordered under the rare jonquil light of that future spring. She sat down in front of it, in the room’s four o’clock shadow, of say 1754. Her silence became either age. How could he begin to explain to her what was her rival now?
They had once had a little ceremony on meeting here, in memory of that other bench on which she had first explained to him the other alphabet. When she didn’t begin as usual, he felt that fear of change, fear of no change, which was the dread of all homecomings, and began the ritual himself, taking her role. “Do you not know it?” he said, his lips moving slowly and carefully, the way she had first said it to him. “Dac tyl ol o gy?”
She was trembling, at his ash-burnt skin maybe, or the white nudity of his lower face. Just before coming he’d shaved off the flowing beard and moustache of a land where a man could newly choose to be one of the chosen, biblical and military, young and a patriarch too. But she wouldn’t have been able to read his mouth.
“‘There’s a one handed sys tem,’ you said.” He took her hands in his. “‘But most people use both. Like from the Dal gar no alpha bet. I could teach it to you. And all our signs.’” He took one of her hands, molding it into the In hoc signo sign—second and third fingers up, fourth and fifth bent under the thumb. “‘There. It’s the sign the saints make, but to us it is the letter U.’” She’d taught him all the little academic jokes and devices of the science. “‘And the sign for the word and is the quick est like a rabbit nibbling.’” He made four extended fingers vibrate muzzle-fashion, against a thumb. “‘There.’”
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