The Glatstein Chronicles (5 page)

The sunbather seemed somewhat put out with me. His broken nose, a collapsed, wooden ruin, snorted like a locomotive. It vexed him that I, alone of all the passengers, should not have known who he was. His companion, apparently some sort of manager, gave me a pleading look, miming me to stay away from his bread-and-butter. The sunbather fell silent, but then suddenly bestirred himself and, in open defiance of his Man Friday, laced into me, this time not sparing any words. Man Friday decided that he couldn’t just lie there while his bread-and-butter was holding forth, so he sat up, the better to keep an eye on him.

“How come you don’t know me?” said the sunbather. “Don’t you go to the fights? You know who Barney Ross is? Well, I could have been a second Barney, if that black guy hadn’t stopped me—
a finster yor af im.
” (The Yiddish curse was for my benefit). “A black year on his black head. I could take anyone down, but when it came to that guy, nothing worked. So I gave up boxing and opened a little store, but the store failed. Then my mother, may she rest in peace, died, so now I’ve decided to make a comeback. Yesiree, a comeback!”

Man Friday glared at his Hercules. He screwed up his face as if he had stomach cramps, but my interlocutor continued undaunted.

“The press mustn’t find out about this. I’m going first to Paris, then to London, and after a few fights in Europe, I’m going back to get even. Damn him! Imagine, winning all those fights and then getting stopped by a black man. And you wanna know how come I know Yiddish? What am I, a Turk? I came over from Poland when I was twelve. My mother, may she rest in peace, was a pious woman. She couldn’t make me
daven
—no way would I pray! But I did wear those fringes, the
tsitsis.
”

The greasy lotion dripped from his chin and from his collapsed nose. He fell back on his lounge, while the manager, who hadn’t uttered a word, lay back on his side. But the fighter wasn’t done yet. Again, he sat up abruptly, leaned head and shoulder toward me, and said, this time entirely in Yiddish: “Say, what kind of Jewish bastards are walking around on this ship anyway? They’d eat shit rather than admit that they’re Jews. One Hitler isn’t enough for them, the bastards.”

Man Friday cocked an eye and the prizefighter lapsed into silence. He fell back on the lounge, and began, rapidly, to chew his gum.

Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth. Under the impact of the everyday, we tend to lose the sense of drama, tragic or comic, that is everyone’s portion. The child’s sense of wonderment dulls. You become the measure of all things, the star of the play, with everyone else reduced to bit players, mere extras in the great ego-drama which plays itself out in a million boring scenes that thrill no one else but you, the lead actor. Only when death cuts one of them down like a tree in a forest do you realize that your nearest and dearest have had dramas of their own. At that point you approach the empty space and try to reconstruct the missing life. You realize that it was full of incident. Trading anecdotes about the deceased, you see that he was the star in his own drama. But had this ever occurred to you when you caught sight of your wife sunk in a daydream, or your children lost in reverie by the window? You take them for granted as backup for your life, as satellites revolving around your planet.

Aboard ship it is different: there each person is a fresh discovery, every new face shines in the limelight. Though you may be as important as Moses, you get used to the idea that everyone else has a story to tell. During all those years when you had no idea of their existence, your fellow passengers were busy leading lives of their own, and naturally they are eager to share the details.

My Danish friend was orphaned at a young age and never knew either of his parents. He knocked around on his own and from early on put his little hands to work to earn his keep, since he couldn’t depend on the kindness of relatives to whom a piece of bread was as precious as gold. He had much to tell and he wanted to tell it all at once, but he would rein himself in and begin with his first moment of self-awareness, which occurred when he lost his faith.

When he was a boy, faith burned in him like the flames of a hundred church candles. Every crucifix was a fiery thorn in his flesh. His heart yearned for the one who had died nailed to the cross and for the holy virgin who had given this martyr-god to the world. Then one day his fishing village was shaken by a horrible tragedy. A fishing boat capsized, drowning all eighteen aboard. The wailing of the mothers, fathers, brides, children, wives, and the peals of the church bell in the center of town ringing out the misfortune—this was familiar from all the ballads about the hazards of life on the sea. One need only recall Charles Kingsley’s “Three Fishers”:

Drownings are not uncommon in fishing villages, but when they occur they send a shudder down your spine and children stare terrified at the waters lapping the shore as they would at a cold-blooded murderer.

Eighteen drowned was a considerable haul, even for the piratical North Sea, and all of Denmark was in a frenzy. A prominent clergyman was sent down from Copenhagen to eulogize the unfortunate fishermen. When he learned that the drowned men had belonged to another Christian denomination, he condemned them to eternal damnation because they had impudently strayed from the true path. The priest’s eulogy caused a scandal and all the newspapers seethed. The priest’s sermon was salt on the widows’ wounds. They wailed like cats at the thought of their husbands, fathers, and brothers roasting in eternal fires of hell. It was then that our young Scandinavian spat on belief and set out for America.

My new Danish friend spoke with great passion. He was one of those introspective types, with a dash of Dostoyevsky, though he was no epileptic but rather, physically vigorous. Religion, God, Woman, Purpose, Afterlife—he was burdened by a mass of confused ideas, and spoke of his loss of faith with heavy heart. Although he pretended to have closed a chapter in his life, faith was as necessary for him as breathing, eating, or sleeping. It was such people whom Mary Baker Eddy must have had in mind when she founded her theological laboratory of Christian Science.

He became a Socialist, transferring his passion from God to a faith in human brotherhood, especially the brotherhood of the proletariat. The austere, overintellectualized Karl Marx, with his precise, almost mathematical social axioms, became the young Dane’s fount of inspiration. He yearned for the utopian Red heaven, but his hopes were dashed when first the British Socialists and then the Germans began—here he apologized—“to shit all over themselves,” and all that remained of his one-time political faith was an interest in the cooperative movement and a hope in Roosevelt.

But he was getting ahead of himself. When he first came to America he worked like a mule in small factories. Then came the awful war, and he saw action as a seaman. After the war he was finally able to escape from a life in the miserable shops and became something of an intellectual, with a refined profession, though his bones still ached from all the days and nights of hard physical labor so that he almost lacked the strength to enjoy his new status. Still, going from sweatshop to teaching was like entering the millennium, like paradise on earth. “When you’re a teacher in a middle school instead of a workhorse in a factory, you come home and—the devil take it—there’s time to look into a book and to think about the mysteries of the world. As the poet Dehmel said, ‘
Nur zeit, zeit, zeit
’—let there only be time, time, time.” He confided that with a refined profession also came “a better class of friends.”

He would never forget his dear friend, now deceased, a priest and “jewel of a man.” He may not have been a Marxist, but he had an ingrained sense of justice. A true American, he interpreted strictly the declaration that all men are created equal. This priest had an odd weakness for globes. He was a geographer and had amassed a wonderful collection, the most beautiful globes of their kind, which he loved to spin while contemplating the variety of lands and peoples and God’s blessing on all.

One day, our Dane noticed a new acquisition that was exceptionally beautiful, an artistic triumph. “This must be the globe you have been looking for all your life,” he exclaimed. “Why, it’s exquisite! Who made it for you?”

“Nobody,” the priest said simply. “It created itself.”

The Dane thought the priest had lost his mind, but the latter stuck to his guns, insisting that the globe was indeed self-created, until, taking pity at last on his atheist friend, he said: “When it comes to this wooden globe, which is merely a mechanical representation of the earth, you cannot believe that it created itself. Yet when it comes to the great, big, beautiful, wonderful universe, with its millions of stars and planets, you are willing to swear by Darwin and Marx that this miraculous world created itself, out of thin air.”

“Now wasn’t that a superb lesson in religion?” the Dane said with a smile, “Slightly primitive perhaps, but moving in its child’s logic. That’s how he was—a man of faith to the end, until he departed this life.”

My talkative friend went on with his story, telling me that he was past forty when he married. His wife, a quiet woman almost his age, was content to be a housewife. She cheered his evenings at home, and in due course, twins arrived, a beautiful, blue-eyed boy and girl. Needless to say, he was wild with joy. He had found purpose in life. Life was crazy. You ran around like a hen, pecking for food, peck-peck, knowing that sooner or later someone was going to come along and wring your neck. Still, you kept going, and crazy as life was, you wanted to be a father, a husband, a grandfather, as well as a citizen in good standing, so peck-peck, you kept pecking away like a hen.

“Tell me, Gladdy, my friend,” he said with sudden intimacy, devising a diminutive of my surname, “is there an afterlife? Or is it all just an empty dream, and the foolish hen lays down to die and sleeps forever? Well,” he sighed, “the twins didn’t live long, only three days, and both died almost at the very same instant. You know the reason—mother and father over forty. But biological facts don’t heal the wound.

“I stood there looking at the lifeless little faces,” he continued, “grieving over my loss, until the last rays of the setting sun fell on their waxen figures and, all at once, I saw a great light. These infants—this little boy and this little girl—were miniature man and wife, my own father and mother who had abandoned me so early in life. Now they had made themselves visible to me in order to restore my lost faith. The dolls’ faces smiled serenely and I bowed my head at the revelation. When I told this to my wife, she made no response. She was in a state of shock, and her melancholy silence lasted several months. But my suffering was peaceful because I had my faith back with renewed clarity.

“Well, to make a long story short, we had another child that, mercifully, lived, but my wife became seriously ill. Doctors advised her to return to her native town in Denmark, and she’s been there with the child ever since. Every summer now, for the past six years, I’ve been going over there to be with them.”

His was no easy life, to be sure. His wife was an invalid, albeit gentle and devoted. In the course of his summer visits, they slept together only five or six times, and that was it for the year. He was no longer a young man and couldn’t change his ways, even in the face of the temptation that came his way in the shape of the fluttery middle-school girls, who thrust their young breasts right up to his nose, making his head spin. He was aware of what went on in schools between male teachers and female students, all those stories about orgies. But he was self-?disciplined, not for nothing was he Scandinavian. One had to be very careful not to slip. So each day he went home to his room, to his old maidservant, who cooked him his meals, to his dog, his radio, and his books on cooperatives.

I asked him to join me for a drink. “No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t drink, just the occasional beer, and I only smoke four or five cigarettes a day.” And, he added, whenever sinful thoughts invaded his mind, teasing him and disturbing his equanimity, he thought, who knows, perhaps if he were younger he might act on the impulse and write to his wife, explaining everything clearly and explicitly. She would understand and forgive him.

“But, Gladdy my friend,” he said, winding up his tale, “I’m losing my hair and teeth, and something else doesn’t work as well as it did in my younger days. I’ll just have to get used to it. The only question is: Are we making fools of ourselves? Is there an afterlife, or is the joke on us?”

All that night I thought about the twins and the reborn father and mother who had sentenced themselves to nine months of anxious gestation and to a second death so that they might bring a measure of hope and encouragement to their orphaned son. It was like some Hasidic tale, but with a Scandinavian twist and a whiff of salt air, joined to a death-fugue, rising and falling with the waves of the sea. I even attempted to write a poem about this, but it came out sounding more like John Masefield than a proper Yiddish poem.

Only one and a half days out to sea, and already I feel released from obligations to family, society, even from the gamut of political credos with which, for professional reasons, I had found it necessary to stock my brain, merely to sustain myself, earning me my livelihood—a modest share of oxygen to fill my lungs and drink sufficient to water my gut. It was for just such “luxuries” (though perhaps also for the roof over my head, a garment to cover myself, a bit of warmth, and a wife) that I immersed myself in all those poisonous ideologies.

There was a time, years back, when for me introspection meant philosophizing about the meaning of existence, a private pleasure, like the cud chewing of a self-absorbed and sated cow in a sunny meadow. But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. “I think, therefore I am” is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotskyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist. Hecklers shout down from the gallery, demanding to know, “Are you with us, or with our enemies?” Events move so quickly that
we
and
the enemy
shift kaleidoscopically, and yesterday’s friends change into today’s foes too swiftly to let you catch your breath.