Kafka Was the Rage (11 page)

The day was sunny and cold, as if Brooklyn had been preserved in a refrigerator for us. Saul was silent for the first few minutes, digesting his mother’s absence, adjusting his breathing. He wore a navy blue knitted cap she had insisted on and a heavy, dark, timeless-looking overcoat, like a chesterfield. I had never seen the coat before—it must have been his father’s. It was too big for him and muffled his gestures.

Poor thing, he said, still going back to his mother, it’s hard on her. She’s an intelligent person, yet all her impulses are maternal and stereotypical. She feels the falseness of her position, but she can’t help it. She struggles against the stereotype like a woman in labor, but nothing new comes forth.

At the entrance to the park a vendor was selling kosher frankfurters and knishes. The knishes smelled good, but under the circumstances—under what circumstances?—I didn’t think it was the right time to eat a knish. With the sun buttering it up, the park was warmer than the street. Though most of the trees were bare, there were enough evergreens scattered around to keep the landscape from looking stripped or naked. Children raced by on skates and bikes, like leaves blowing. People walked dogs and there were squirrels and pigeons along the path.

She keeps running baths for me, Saul said. She tries to drown my thoughts, like kittens.

I was studying him out of the corner of my eye, trying to gauge how sick he was. I didn’t feel that I could ask him—his sickness had become a part of his secretiveness, his Jewishness, which was even more
pronounced now that he was back in Brooklyn at his mother’s house. He didn’t look sick, yet there was something in his voice—a remote hilarity—that hadn’t been there before. Also—and this was a detail I would notice—his sentence rhythms were different.

Though I hadn’t been in Prospect Park for more than ten years, I knew it well. When I was eight or nine I was a great reader of Tarzan books and Prospect Park was later to become my jungle, my Africa. With the odd literalness of young boys I took the word
prospect
in a different sense, as referring to my own prospects, which were as yet wide open.

I used to bicycle to the park from my side of Brooklyn. It was several miles, but this was nothing on my bike. I chased butterflies with a net and mounted them on cardboard squares. Sometimes I rented a boat with money from my newspaper route and rowed to the end of the lake. What I liked especially about Prospect Park was the fact that, once you were well inside, you couldn’t see buildings, as you always did in Central Park.

You know, I said to Saul, I used to play here.

So did I, he said. I probably saw you.

What did you think of me? How did I impress you?

Look at that silly goy, he said. What a goyish bicycle.

I used to catch butterflies. I rowed a boat.

He smiled. Yes, you would. If I had seen you I would have pitied and envied you.

He was looking around at the park as if he was taking notes, summing it up, trying to arrive at a definition of the ideal park. He was comparing this one to other parks he had only read about: the Bois de Boulogne,
the English Gardens in Munich, the Boboli in Florence. His peculiarities made him so real that I could have hugged him.

The path rose up to a little hill and I noticed that Saul was breathing hard. He was staring, too, staring at the pavement as if he had to concentrate on walking. This was the first real sign of his sickness and it seemed crazy to go on keeping quiet about it. Saul, I said, what is actually the matter with you? How long will it be until you can come back?

He took me by the arm, as if I was the one who was sick, and drew me off the path to a bench overlooking the lake. The bench was placed with an unerring sense of rightness. All by itself on a little curve of the bank, it was overhung by a tree that seemed to embrace it.

Imagine, Saul said when we had settled ourselves, that you’re a character in a well-written and original novel, a person remarkable for your poise, wit, and presence of mind.

Gladly, I said. I can think of several such novels, dozens of them, in fact. But what am I to be poised and witty about?

About not making a fuss, he said. I want you to enter into a conspiracy with me, to join a movement, sign a manifesto, against the making of fusses.

This was alarming, but I kept up the sprightliness. Why should I make a fuss?

He pulled off the knitted cap. It wasn’t that cold in the sun. His hair was standing up in a funny way. He said, I’m not coming back.

His words went into my head like a shooting pain and I looked away across the lake. People were strolling along a path on the other side. The lake wasn’t very
wide here and I could see the calm, parklike expressions on their faces. A little boy came up from behind us and threw a stone into the water. A pigeon pecked at a candy wrapper and the wind rustled a dismembered newspaper in the wire trash basket. The homeliness of the park, its sweetness, was so piercing that I felt I had been wasting my life.

When Saul said he wasn’t coming back, I was sure that he had tuberculosis. It was thin, intense people like him who got it. He would have to go to a dry climate, Arizona or New Mexico. I said, It’s TB you have, isn’t it?

He was squeezing the knitted cap in his hands. He plucked a white cat hair from the nap and let it fall from his fingers. No, he said, I haven’t got TB. If it were only that. His lips went on moving silently beneath his mustache and as I watched it flutter, I wondered whether he would cut it off now that he was sick. A phrase came into my head: The quality of mercy is not strained.

Saul looked around as if he was afraid of being overheard. He put his hand up and felt his hair. I have leukemia, he said.

Leukemia? I said. The word was so unexpected. It seemed raucous to me, as if a bird—a tropical bird, a parakeet or a toucan—had cried out from one of the bare trees.

I know, he said, I know. Why should I have leukemia? Where did it come from? How did it find me? He made a fist with his left hand and clapped his right hand over it as if he was corking a bottle.

Slow down, I said, you’re going too fast. What makes you think you have leukemia? How can you be so sure? You can’t get leukemia just by saying it.

I was talking nonsense, yet I hoped to believe it. Let’s go back and start from the beginning, I said. You felt sick and you went to the doctor. He examined you, took blood, a urine specimen, and so on and sent them to the laboratory. Then you went back again and he told you that you have leukemia? This is what actually happened?

If we reconstructed the circumstances, two critics, two close readers like us, we might find that the doctor and the lab technicians had made an unwarranted assumption. Saul loved to point out unwarranted assumptions. Sometimes he read books just for the pleasure of laughing at their logic.

I know what you’re thinking, he said. I went through the same progression. You’re going to tell me that they misread the evidence—as if it was a poem. You’re going to remind me of
Seven Types of Ambiguity
. But there is no ambiguity—I’ve got leukemia. Believe me—I’ve got it.

I didn’t know whether I believed him or not. We never believe such things until they’re over. You need leisure to think about tragedy. Maybe you can face it only in the absence of the person, after the fact. Or you can do it only when you yourself are in despair.

You know what it’s like? Saul said, coming out of nowhere like that? It’s like getting a threatening letter from someone you don’t even know. When the doctor pronounced the word
leukemia
, I nearly slapped him in the face. I screamed Fuck! and Shit! But what good does it do to go on like that? I don’t see why I should disease the way I speak.

I realize, he went on—he was talking in a rush—I realize that to make a fuss is a normal reaction, but why should we? We’re not ordinary people, you and I—I
don’t see why we should feel obliged to become ordinary now.

He had worked it all out. Like his mother, he had taken a position, developed a strategy. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He made it into a rhetorical gesture. What I’m asking you to do, he said, is to go on being yourself. I need you to be yourself—don’t turn pious on me. For the sake of our old conversations, for the sake of our friendship—for the sake of literature, if you like—don’t speak to me in a hushed voice. Don’t patronize me.

Saul—I began, and he said, Shh. He pushed my voice back into my body, like somebody stuffing a pillow into a pillowcase. I threw my head up, like those boys in P.S. 44, and tried to gasp out an answer—but he wouldn’t let me. He raised his hand, and there was a terrific authority in the gesture—he had acquired so much authority.

We stared, or glared, at each other. Wait a minute, I said. Hold on. Can’t I have a little outburst?

He dropped his hand. He put it into his pocket to immobilize it. No, he said. No, you can’t.

We lapsed into a tender silence in which I went on silently arguing with him. He had talked himself into believing he had leukemia. He had overresearched the subject, like the review. Of course I was arguing with myself as much as with him.

All right, Saul, I said. I won’t quarrel with you, because neither of us knows what we’re talking about. But just remember this—no diagnosis is final or exhaustive. Whatever you have, there’s a treatment for it. This is not the Middle Ages. The tragic sense of life is all well and good, but your mother’s right—you think too much. Thinking is a form of hypochondria.

He laughed. Yes, he said, you and my mother. He gazed out over the lake as if he expected to see her rowing there. My mother thinks that literature is killing me, that Kafka, Lawrence, and Céline have undermined my resistance. She thinks I have brain fever, like Kirillov or Raskolnikov. Whatever happened to brain fever?

It really is absurd, he said—that old chestnut, the absurd. Look at me—he slapped his arms and legs—why, I’ve hardly used this body. It’s the shoddy manufacture of the times—I’m practically new and obsolete already. My mother keeps turning to me, waiting for me to explain this absurdity away. I’m such a good explainer. He frowned; he shook his head at his mother. Her will, he said, is a terrible force.

I opened my mouth without knowing what I was going to say and he put his fingers over my lips. It was an astonishingly intimate thing for him to do, like a kiss. You know, he said, I feel so smart. All at once, I understand everything. For example, I see now that the world is a more beautiful place than I had supposed. Look at this park—I’ve never noticed it. If I had my life to live over again, I’d read more Wordsworth.

He hooked his arms over the back of the bench and crossed his legs. He was settling down into himself. It was clear that he wanted to do the talking, so I sat back and listened. The facts could wait; I could argue with him later. He seemed comfortable now, in full flood, like his old self. I was already thinking in terms of his old self.

Another thing I’ve realized, he said, is that it’s harder for a Jew to die. Forgive me for falling back on the chosen, but there’s a certain truth in the old boast. It’s harder for us because we expect more; we need more. How irresponsible, how careless it is to die so
soon. It’s such an unintelligent thing to do. We become doctors to prevent death, lawyers to outlaw it, writers to rage against it. But if you’re not Jewish, it’s different. It may not be quite so bad, so costly. You can die gracefully, athletically, with a thin-lipped smile and a straight nose. A blond death, a swan dive, a cool immersion. You can die without an accent, without dentalizing.

He paused, listening to the echo of this little speech. He seemed pleased with himself. Words, words, words, he said, that’s the only medicine. With an abrupt gesture, he pulled on the knitted cap. My thinking cap, he said. I’ve got to get back and work on the review. Deadlines!

We got up and walked out of the park. We hadn’t gone very far. He slapped me on the back. You’re a starcher, he said, skinny but strong. You can fight them off, the Kafkas. Hit them in the kishkas. And remember to read the nature poets—a pastoral a day keeps the doctor away. Don’t be so proud of your anxiety.

I was going to walk him home, but he insisted on taking me to the subway. We stood at the top of the stairs and our eyes met for the last time. His were filled with an immense kindness. I apologize, he said, for bossing you around. You see how it is. I can’t tell this particular story—I can only edit it.

Saul, I said, I’m confused. I can’t think.

Me neither, he said. As Tolstoy remarked when he was dying, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.

Listen, I said, I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll try to sort it out.

He didn’t answer. He was looking down the subway steps, which he would never descend again. We
stood there without moving while life hummed around us, while traffic rushed by and the sun glinted off the store windows.

No, he said at last. I’d rather you didn’t come back. You were terrific today, and so was I—but tomorrow we’d be terrible.

Terrible? I said. I don’t know—maybe. Would it be so terrible to be terrible?

He thought about this. He turned it over in his mind, the levels of terribleness. You have no idea how busy I am, he said. They tell me there isn’t much time, and I want to finish the review. I’d like to be published.

I knew that wasn’t the real reason. He wouldn’t let me come back because he couldn’t bear the simplicity of being sick, the ordinariness of it. He didn’t know how to be ordinary; he had been taught that he was special. To be ordinary might lead to sentimentality, and he was more afraid of sentimentality than he was of being alone.
Sentimental
was the cruelest word in literary criticism. It was a goyish trait, like getting drunk. At that moment, Saul reminded me of a man who is asked on his deathbed to embrace a religion and refuses. There was to be no relenting. For the first time, I saw, with a kind of horror, that books had been everything to him.

He had invited me to stand outside the event with him, as a fellow critic—but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t that intellectual. His situation brought out all the homeliness in me, the sloppiness. My feelings had no style. To Saul, my sympathy would have seemed almost bestial, the disorderly impulse of a more primitive civilization. He had always been lofty and distant—why should he change now? It was typical of him to give a new meaning to the expression
critically ill
. If I thought
he was escaping into literature, I had to remind myself that literature had been our only intimacy.