Boswell (2 page)

On his tour he went chiefly to the high schools, sometimes notifying them only hours before his arrival. In that last phase he ranged all over the world, hitting each continent except Africa, where he hoped finally to spend the most time but which he never reached due to his tragic death. (Lane, the sociologist, is just
one
scientist who directly attributes the generally backward condition of Africa to the fact that Herlitz did not get there in time to guide its potentially great men.) At any rate, Herlitz ranged the world. In each country the government itself put its most rapid transportation at Herlitz’s disposal. Within the borders of a given country he was flown gratis at top speed wherever he wished to go. (Indeed, in the last days he became something of a political football. Governments looked upon Herlitz as a sort of natural resource, and, jealous that other countries might use his services to their disadvantage, did all they could to delay his departures. I make no charges, but it is well within the bounds of reason that Western Civilization may have been in rare accord when it caused these delays. Motivated by the white man’s traditional fear of the black man, there may have been a gentlemen’s agreement to “Keep Herlitz out of Africa!”)

To whatever city or town or hamlet Herlitz came, there would be assembled its children. These he would pass before, looking into their faces for some sign which only he could recognize. Before some individual child he would stop, scrutinizing the face carefully, and, still operating on some principle which only he understood (it was not brilliance; often quite ordinary people were singled out by Herlitz for special attention), he might point toward the child and say something to an aide who walked beside him with a clipboard. In this way he managed before he died to look into the faces of many of the world’s children. Frequently, if he found no individual “subjects” (Herlitz’s term), he might categorize an entire group before he went off. “These kids, farmers!” he might say, or, “Barbers.” “Realtors,” he might say, “the rest, salesmen.”

So I met Herlitz when I was still young and he was, perhaps, the oldest man I had ever seen.

Why did he pick me? There was no question about it, not even the hesitation and the staring I had heard about. I was not even standing in the front row. There were five lines of us stretched across the outside entrance to the assembly hall. I stood in the fourth—to the side. Yet that man picked me out as though no one else were there. Had what really happened been that I had picked
him
out, trapped him with my eyes? What does that mean? A seventeen-year-old with seventeen-year-old empty eyes to hold the eyes of a man like that? Impossible! What was it in my face? What sign of intelligence or hint of destiny that had escaped teachers, relatives, friends, that had slipped by even myself who looked for it, who peered nightly into the bathroom mirror as one looks into a microscope, had he seen as clear and there as a light in a window? What hint of character, gleam of heroism, finger to plug dikes, nose to sniff smoke, eye to see flame, mouth to shape warnings, had that man come upon when I, conscious but careless of finger, nose, eye and mouth, had, in the awful anonymity of my youth, signed my raffle tickets academically, with no thought to win? I felt like the thief on the Cross, shaken by an unuttered “Who, me?”, my very unlikeliness (but not
that
unlikely) suddenly the stamp of my identity. My first thought as Herlitz stepped, no, pressed, through the ranks, shouldering aside in his ruthless, old man’s way the more and most likely in order to reach me, was, Why, he’s a fraud.

But then, of course, he couldn’t be. After all, even if -picking me were a stunt, the ultimate act of arbitrary power, transmogrification of frog into prince, why, at least he could
see
prince somewhere within the rolls and folds of frog flap. Anyway, this is what I thought then, when I still lived behind my adolescent pimples and worried (even after I had fathered a child) whether girls would kiss me. But in a way, that kind of skill still amazes me. Any sort of insight does. I am mystified, too, by music coming from portable radios, and by the novelist’s induction of character through a description of his hero’s bone structure. I remember one book I read where everyone in a family was against a proposed daughter-in- law because when they met her they all felt she looked sickly. I can never tell when someone looks sickly. Broken bones, yes, because that’s surface. Blindness, arthritis, mumps and measles. Beyond that I cannot go. Some can. I can’t. Maybe that’s why I must talk to people, ask them leading questions, put them in contrived situations, turn the pressure on. I want to hear them yell for help. That I can understand. I suppose Herlitz saw all this. That Herlitz!

What else could he see? My clothes? I dress like a sergeant in civvies—seven-ninety-five slacks in
Webster’s-New-Collegiate Dictionary-cover
blue, wastepaper-basket green, woodwork brown; two-ninety-five white short-sleeve shirts, or white short-sleeve shirts with speckles of color; brown Toby Tyler shoes. That I was an only child? Really, this is embarrassing. It is not my method to speak of myself—or rather, of my past. I find I can barely remember it. At any rate, since I cannot speak uncritically if I speak at length, I will speak briefly.

My name is James Boswell. My parents are dead. My mother, poor woman, died when I was seven and left me to be raised by my father until I was ten. Then he died. My father left me his taste in clothes and his sister with whom I lived until I was fourteen, when she died. A sister of my mother brought me along until I was sixteen. She died and I reverted back to my father’s side, where a bachelor uncle took me the rest of the way.

I am thirty-five years old, but I have a son twenty. He was born out of wedlock to a fifteen-year-old girl who died bearing him. Her parents took my child in exchange ’ for their own. He knows me and who I am.

That kind of childhood gives a kid a pretty solid taste in funerals, but not much else. Of course, a real knowledge of funerals is no small thing. In a way, it qualifies one for life. It gives one, too, a certain sense of transience. Maybe that helps to explain my fascination with famous men. The famous are not transients at all, and this is odd. They spend so much time being guests one might think there would be something impermanent about them, but it’s not so. Of course they die, but I don’t mean that. Everybody dies. And all this wailing about Ozymandias is a pile of crap. They remember his name, yes? They get it right in the papers, no?

Herlitz shouldered the others aside and came right toward me. “Him,” he said, pointing at me with his cane. “Come,” he said. “Come, come.” He turned to Kohler, the principal. “We can be alone, where?”

I trailed behind the two of them, and every so often Kohler would pause, turn around, and look at me. I knew he was trying to remember my name, who played no piano, who made no speeches in the assembly hall, who shot no baskets. “Come. Come,” Herlitz said, although Kohler led us. He seemed to say it as much to himself as to Kohler or me, as though he were dissatisfied with a merely implicit urgency. The great, I remember thinking, are articulate. I followed Herlitz, his checkered jacket in the heavily dated Clark Gable style, his white, widely belled trousers, his old man’s white shoes. From behind, his impatience manifest in the angry taps of his cane, he suggested something strongly imperial, a cousin of the prince, an arch archduke. The high school corridor might have been the czar’s green lawn, Herlitz’s cane, a croquet mallet.

Kohler stopped. “You may use Mr. Fossier’s office.” He opened the door and Herlitz went in. I stood clumsily just inside the threshold, feeling as I have in doctors’ examining rooms when faced with more than one chair to sit in. Herlitz was as alien in that office as I was myself, of course—more, presumably, since I had been there before and he had not. But the great, as I say, are used to being guests, used to using other people’s facilities. He took command easily behind Fossier’s desk, placing his cane carefully across the faces of Fossier’s children beaming ceilingward beneath the desk’s glass top.

“Come,” Herlitz said angrily. I sat across the room from him primly, feeling queerly like a woman.

Herlitz glared at me without speaking.

It’s a test, I thought, afraid even of shifting in the chair. Look, my life was on the line. I knew his reputation. Suppose I made a mistake. Suppose I accidentally sat down as an actor would sit down, or maybe even as the secretary I felt like. Suppose Herlitz wasn’t that good. Suppose he couldn’t see that it wasn’t really me sitting there. I had to trust him, had to trust his test. I thought of the examining room again, remembering the seemingly dissociated questions of doctors who had quizzed me. You have a pain in your back. “Do you like bananas?” the doctor asks. Your elbow tingles. “Have you ever been sued by a Frenchman?” he wants to know. We don’t see how, but they’re able to tell a great deal from our answers.

Herlitz continued to stare at me. “Do you know Freud?” he asked finally, speaking so softly I could barely hear him.

“The psychiatrist,” I said.

“One of the five greatest Jews,” Herlitz said.

I nodded agreeably.

“Name them,” he said.

I could not seem to speak. I looked at Herlitz guiltily, shaking my head. This man who before had struck me as so impatient suddenly seemed content, massively placid and serene. We might have been passengers together in an open car, riding smoothly at dusk past beautiful fields.

“Moses,” he said. He seemed to exhale the word.

“Moses, yes,” I said.

“Christ,” he said.

“Christ.”

“Marx,” he said.

“Marx.”

“Einstein,” he said.

“Einstein.”

“And Freud.”

I nodded again, but not just agreeably this time. I could not tell what had come over me.

“Only Freud and Einstein I knew,” he said. “I just missed Marx.”

“You know Einstein?” I said.

“Einstein only twelve people in the world understand. I know ten of them.” He leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “We can’t waste time. I killed a man.”

I stared at him.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s how it happened. It was in connection with Schmerler.”

“Schmerler.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You killed him?”

“Killed Schmerler? What are you talking about? I loved Schmerler.” He sighed. “I did him early. There have been many great men since but I’m proudest of him, I think.” He coughed. “He was my baby,” he said shyly.

“I don’t know Schmerler,” I said.

“Who knew Schmerler? I told him a million times, ’Schmerler, you’re an enigma, Schmerler.’ It was a shame he didn’t make himself understood better. He could have been the biggest name in the Zionist Movement. But no,
he
had to insist upon making the Jewish Homeland in Northern Ireland. He used to argue with Weizmann night and day. ‘Weizmann,’ he says, ‘your Jew isn’t basically a desert-oriented guy.’ That was Schmerler for you. If you say you don’t know him, there’s your clue. He was always correct in principle, in theory. Mao used to call him ‘The On-Paper Tiger.’”

Herlitz looked at me. “Oh, I see. You mean you don’t
know
him. Well,
incipience.
He was an inventor of political movements—that was his specialty. Groundfloorism. A familiar figure in every important basement in Europe. He was in on everything. Oh boy, what wasn’t he in on! Communism, Fascism, the Fourteen Points.

“Well, it was tragic. A very sweet man. He used to emphasize that it was life,
life
which was important, my kindness to you here, now, which counts; your politeness to me in this place at this moment which is all-important. He believed only in surfaces, Schmerler. Oh boy, was he deep! ‘Herlitz,’ he’d say, ’the most important thing is to live with yourself. We do terrible things. Remember, whatever you do in this world you’ve got to forgive it. You’ve got to remind yourself and remind yourself, it’s not your fault.’ Well, everybody took advantage. Moses had Pharaoh, Christ, Judas. Marx, of course, nobody liked. But
Schmerler
—it was painful to see it.

“Heinmacher—it disgusts me even to say his name—and that other one, Perflidowitz. All right, everyone knew he was a gangster, when he betrayed, nobody could be surprised. And Reuss. Hmm, that such a father could have such a lovely boy! I did him in Berlin in the old days. He’s in monorails, the great monorail developer.”

He waved his finger at me. He took his cane from the desk and touched my chest with it. “All right, now I have something to tell you. Listen. Wait.” He got up and went to the door and opened it. He looked for a moment up and down the corridor and then closed the door, locking it. He motioned for me to pull my chair closer to his. He was not satisfied until we were both sitting behind Fossier’s desk. Then he put his elbow on the desk, and carefully fitting his yellow head into his white cupped palm, he slid the elbow three or four inches forward along the smooth glass top. In this position he turned to me, looking not so much conspiratorial as despairing, his old, baggy skin upwardly taut, like a younger man’s.

“I was the last man on the Continent to remain faithful to Schmerler. Did
1
remain faithful to him! He would have been the loneliest man in Europe if it weren’t for me. Sure. What did
they
care, Heinmacher and that gang?

“Do you understand the wickedness, the elaborate trap? They helped him with the grand design. Well,
grand.
That was the irony, it
wasn’t
grand—just a very, minor experimental Slavic revolution, that’s all, just to keep his hand in. That whole part about the disposition of the Magyar royal family was Heinmacher’s idea. I never said Heinmacher wasn’t clever; of course he’s clever. Imagine. Making shotgun weddings between the royal family and its servants! It would have fouled the blood lines for generations! And then to fail to come forward like that when the gunboats were already in the harbor, not to have prepared the people, the underground press, not even to have told the leaders—Schmerler never suspected the conspiracy against him,
the jealousy.
To his dying day he thought that anybody who opposed him opposed him on principle. Principle! I’ll give them principle! What a scene. Terrible. They disclaimed everything, everything. He looked like a fool. I’ll never forget that laughter. All right. I admit it I was there. What could I do? As it was I did what I could. We stood there—together—outside the summer palace, waiting for the tanks.