The Book of Skulls (20 page)

Then I became aware that someone had entered my room. The door, opening, closing. Footsteps. This, too, I accepted as part of the fantasy. Without looking around, I decided that Oliver must have come to me, and in a dreamy acid-high way I became convinced that it
was
Oliver, it necessarily
had
to be Oliver, so that I was thrown into confusion for an instant when eventually I turned and saw Eli. He was sitting quietly against the far wall. He had merely appeared depressed on his earlier visit, but now—ten minutes later? half an hour?—he seemed utterly disintegrated. Downcast eyes, slumping shoulders. “I don’t understand,” he said hollowly, “how this confessional thing can have any value, real, symbolic, metaphorical, or otherwise. I thought I understood it when Frater Javier first spoke to us, but now I can’t dig it. Is this what we must do in order to deliver ourselves from death? Why? Why?”

“Because they ask it,” I said.

“What of that?”

“It’s a matter of obedience. Out of obedience grows discipline, out of discipline grows control, out of control grows the power to conquer the forces of decay. Obedience is anti-entropic. Entropy is our enemy.”

“How glib you are,” he said.

“Glibness isn’t a sin.”

He laughed and made no reply. I could see that he was on the thin edge, walking the razor-sharp line between sanity and madness, and I, who had teetered on that edge all my life, was not going to be the one to nudge him. Time passed. My vision of myself and Oliver receded and became unreal. I bore no grudge against Eli for that; this night belonged to him. Ultimately he started to tell me about an essay he had written when he was sixteen, in his senior year in high school, an essay on the moral collapse of the Western Roman Empire as reflected in the degeneration of Latin into the various Romance languages. He remembered a good deal of what he had written even now, quoting lengthy chunks of it, and I listened with half an ear, giving him the polite pretense of attention but nothing more, for although the essay sounded brilliant to me, a remarkable performance for a scholar of any age and certainly astonishing for a boy of sixteen to have written, I did not at that particular moment have any vast desire to hear about the subtle ethical implications to be found in the patterns of evolution of French, Spanish, and Italian. But gradually I comprehended Eli’s motives for telling me this story and paid closer heed: he was, in fact, making confession to me. For he had written that essay for submission to a contest sponsored by some prestigious learned society and had won, receiving thereby a valuable scholarship that had underwritten his college tuition. Indeed, he had built his entire academic career on that piece, for it had been reprinted in a major philological journal and had made him a celebrity in that small scholastic realm. Though only a freshman, he was mentioned admiringly in the footnotes of other scholars; the gates of all libraries were open to him; he would not have had the opportunity to find the very manuscript that had led us to the House of Skulls had he not written the masterly essay on which his fame depended. And—so he told me in the same expressionless tone with which, moments before, he had been expounding on irregular verbs—the essential concept of that thesis had not been his own work. He had stolen it.

Aha! The sin of Eli Steinfeld! No trifling sexual peccadillo, no boyhood adventure in buggery or mutual masturbation, no incestuous snuggling with his mildly protesting mother, but rather an intellectual crime, the most damning of all. Little wonder he had held back from admitting it. Now, though, he poured forth the incriminating truth. His father, he said, lunching one afternoon in an Automat on Sixth Avenue, had happened to notice a small, gray, faded man sitting by himself, exploring a thick, unwieldy book. It was an arcane volume on linguistic analysis, Sommerfelt’s
Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Language,
a title that would have meant nothing whatever to the elder Steinfeld had he not just a short while before forked out $16.50, no trivial sum in that family, to buy a copy for Eli, who felt he could not live much longer without it. The shock of recognition, then, at the sight of that bulky quarto. Upwelling of parental pride: my son the philologist. An introduction follows. Conversation. Immediate rapport; one middle-aged refugee in an Automat has nothing to fear from another. “My son,” says Mr. Stein-feld, “he’s reading that same book!” Expressions of delight. The other is a native of Rumania, formerly professor of linguistics at the University of Cluj; he had fled that land in 1939, hoping to enter Palestine but arriving instead, by a roundabout route through the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Canada, in the United States. Unable to secure an academic appointment anywhere, he lives in quiet poverty on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, holding whatever jobs he can find: dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, proofreader for a short-lived Rumanian newspaper, mimeograph operator for a displaced-persons information service, and so on. All the while he is diligently preparing his life’s work, a structural and philosophical analysis of the decay of Latin in early medieval times. The manuscript now is virtually complete in Rumanian, he tells Eli’s father, and he has begun the necessary translation into English, but the work goes very slowly for him, since even now he is not at home in English, his head being so thoroughly stuffed with other languages. He dreams of finishing the book, finding a publisher for it, and retiring to Israel on the proceeds. “I should like to meet your boy,” the Rumanian says abruptly. Instant emanations of suspicion from Eli’s father. Is this some kind of pervert? A molester, a fondler? No! This is a decent Jewish man, a scholar, a
melamed,
a member of the international fellowship of victims; how could he mean any harm to Eli? Telephone numbers are exchanged. A meeting is negotiated. Eli goes to the Rumanian’s apartment: one tiny room, crammed with books, manuscripts, learned periodicals in a dozen languages. Here, read this, the worthy man says, this and this and this, my essays, my theories; and he thrusts papers into Eli’s hands, onionskin sheets closely typed, single spaced, no margins. Eli goes home, he reads, his mind expands. Far out! This little old man has it all together! Inflamed, Eli vows to learn Rumanian, to be his new friend’s amanuensis, to help him translate his masterwork as quickly as possible. Feverishly the two, the boy and the old man, plan collaborations. They build castles in Rumania. Eli, out of his own money, has the manuscripts Xeroxed, so that some
goy
in the next apartment, falling asleep over a cigarette, does not wipe out this lifetime of scholarship in a mindless conflagration. Every day after school Eli hurries to the little cluttered room. Then one afternoon no one answers his knock. Calamity! The janitor is summoned, grumbling, whiskey-breathed; he uses his master key to open the door; within lies the Rumanian, yellow-faced, stiff. A society of refugees pays for the funeral. A nephew, mysteriously unmentioned previously, materializes and carts off every book, every manuscript, to a fate unknown. Eli is left with the Xeroxes. What now? How can he be the vehicle through which this work is made known to mankind? Ah! The essay contest for the scholarship! He sits possessed at his typewriter, hour after hour. The distinction in his own mind between himself and his departed acquaintance becomes uncertain. They are collaborators now; through me, Eli thinks, this great man speaks from the grave. The essay is finished and there is no doubt in Eli’s mind of its worth; it is plainly a masterpiece. Moreover he has the special pleasure of knowing that he has salvaged the life’s work of an unjustly neglected scholar. He submits the required six copies to the contest committee; in the spring the registered letter comes, notifying him he has won; he is summoned into marble halls to receive a scroll, a check for more money than he can imagine, and the excited congratulations of a panel of distinguished academics. Shortly afterward comes the first request from a professional journal for a contribution. His career is launched. Only later does Eli realize that in his triumphant essay he has, somehow, forgotten entirely to credit the author of the work on which his ideas are based. Not an acknowledgment, not a footnote, not a single citation anywhere.

This error of omission abashes him, but he feels it is too late to remedy the oversight, nor does the giving of proper credit become any easier for him as the months pass, as his essay gets into print, as the scholarly discussion of it begins. He lives in terror of the moment when some elderly Rumanian will arise, clutching a parcel of obscure journals published in prewar Bucharest, and cry out that this impudent young man has shamelessly rifled the thought of his late and distinguished colleague, the unfortunate Dr. Nicolescu. But no accusing Rumanian arises. Years have gone by; the essay is universally accepted as Eli’s own; as the end of his undergraduate days approaches, several major universities vie for the honor of having him do advanced study on their faculty.

And this sordid episode, Eli said in conclusion, could serve as metaphor of his whole intellectual life—all of it fake, no depth, the key ideas borrowed. He had gone a long way on a knack for making synthesis masquerade as originality, plus a certain undeniable skill in assimilating the syntax of archaic languages, but he had made no real contribution to mankind’s store of knowledge, none, which at his age would be pardonable had he not fraudulently gained a premature reputation as the most penetrating thinker to enter the field of linguistics since Benjamin Whorf. And what was he, in truth? A golem, a construct, a walking Potemkin Village of philology. Miracles of insight now were expected of him, and what could he give? He had nothing left to offer, he told me bitterly. He had long ago used up the last of the Rumanian’s manuscripts.

A monstrous silence descended. I could not bear to look at him. This had been more than a confession; it had been hara-kiri. Eli had destroyed himself in front of me. I had always been a little suspicious, yes, of Eli’s supposed profundity, for though he undoubtedly had a fine mind his perceptions all struck me in an odd way as having come to him at second hand; yet I had never imagined this of him, this theft, this imposture. What could I say to him now? Cluck my tongue, priestlike, and tell him, Yes, my child, you have sinned grievously? He knew that. Tell him that God would forgive him, for God is love? I didn’t believe that myself. Perhaps I might try a dose of Goethe, saying, Redemption from sin through good works is still available, Eli, go forth and drain marshes and build hospitals and write some brilliant essays that aren’t stolen and all will be well for you. He sat there, waiting for absolution, waiting for The Word that would lift the yoke from him. His face was blank, his eyes devastated. I wished he had confessed some meaningless fleshly sin. Oliver had plugged his playmate, nothing more, a sin that to me was no sin at all, only jolly good fun; Oliver’s anguish thus was unreal, a product of the conflict between his body’s natural desires and the conditioning society had imposed. In the Athens of Pericles he would have had nothing to confess. Timothy’s sin, whatever it was, had surely been something equally shallow, sprouting not from moral absolutes but from local tribal taboos: perhaps he had slept with a serving wench, perhaps he had spied on his parents’ copulations. My own was a more complex transgression, for I had taken joy in the doom of others, I perhaps had even engineered the doom of others, but even that was a subtle Jamesian sort of thing, in the last analysis fairly insubstantial. Not this. If plagiarism lay at the core of Eli’s glittering scholastic attainments, then nothing lay at the core of Eli: he was hollow, he was empty, and what absolution could anyone offer him for that? Well, Eli had had his cop-out earlier in the evening, and now I had mine. I rose, I went to him, I took his hands in mine and lifted him to his feet, and I said magic words to him:
contrition, atonement, forgiveness, redemption.
Strive ever toward the light, Eli. No soul is damned for all eternity. Work hard, apply yourself, persevere, seek self-understanding, and there will be divine mercy for you, because your weakness comes from Him and He will not chastise you for it if you show Him you are able to transcend it. He nodded remotely and left me. I thought of the Ninth Mystery and wondered if I would ever see him again.

I paced my room a long while, brooding. Then Satan inflamed me and I went to call on Oliver.

39. Oliver

“I know the story,” Ned said. “I know the whole bit.” Smiling shyly at me. Soft eyes, cow eyes, looking into mine. “You don’t need to be afraid of being what you are, Oliver. You mustn’t ever be afraid of what you are. Can’t you see how important it is to get to know yourself, to get into your head as far as you can go, and then
to act on what you find in there
? But instead so many people set up dumb walls between themselves and themselves, walls made out of useless abstractions. A lot of Thou Shalt Nots and Thou Dost Not Dares. Why? What good is any of that?” His face was glowing. A tempter, a devil. Eli must have told him everything. Karl and me, me and Karl. I wanted to smash Eli’s head for him. Ned circled around me, grinning, moving like a cat, like a wrestler about to spring. He kept his voice low, almost a crooning tone. “Come on, Ol. Loosen up. LuAnn won’t find out. I don’t play kiss and tell. Let’s go, Ol, let’s do it, let’s
do it.
We’re not strangers. We’ve kept apart long enough. This is you, Oliver, this is the real you in there who wants to get out, and this is the moment for you to let him come out. Will you, Ol? Will you? Now? Here’s your chance. Here I am.” And he came close to me. Looked up at me. Short little Ned, chest-high to me. His fingers lightly running along my forearm. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t touch me, Ned.” He continued to smile. To stroke me. “Don’t refuse me,” he whispered. “Don’t deny me. Because if you do, you’ll be denying yourself, you’ll be refusing to accept the reality of your own existence, and you can’t do that, Oliver, can you? Not if you want to live forever. I’m a station you’ve got to pass through on your journey. We’ve both known that for years, down deep. Now it surfaces, Ol. Now everything surfaces, everything converges, all time runs to now, Ol, this place, this room, this night. Yes? Yes? Say yes. Oliver. Say yes!”