Trust (33 page)

He stopped; my mother stood on the threshold.

"Then you
are
waiting for the Messiah," I murmured once more.

He looked at his wife and answered without consciousness of any irony. "The Messiah and I wait together. The Messiah waits too."

"Waits for what?" I had to say; plainly it was what he wanted.

His reply was quick. "Revenge," said my stepfather. "Revenge on Europe. We wait for that."

"And if it doesn't happen soon?"

He nearly smiled. "Well wait anyhow."

"Then you'll wait till the conversion of the Jews!" my mother threw in with unprovoked perturbation, shaking the loosened tail of her shawl: two or three of the Taj Mahals curled round her neck. "You'll wait till the dead come running out of their graves!"

"Why not?" he said, calmly enough. "Haven't you come running out of your bed?"

"I had to hear," she confessed. "I had to hear what you were saying."

"We were talking about Noah's ark," I volunteered, and since this was the precise but incredible fact, suddenly laughed. "There's a riddle about that," I finished obscurely, not sure I remembered it: but even if I had, my mother would have interrupted the telling of it. And then I felt foolish at having wanted, childishly, to tell it.

"My eye you were!" she said. "You were talking about the Messiah. I distinctly heard Enoch say the Messiah. I suppose it was some sort of blasphemy." Her teasing was half merry and half grim. "When it comes to the Messiah you won't find Enoch any different from all the other Jews. They won't admit the Messiah's already
come.
"

"Evangelist Allegra," Enoch said.

"Jews are a very stiff-necked people. —That's a Bible phrase, you know," said my mother. "They always want religion
their
way." She swung round the cactus pots and stationed herself behind Enoch's chair, encircling his head. Her fingers scratched along his jowl. "Ouch, you haven't shaved. You never shave when you don't work. You're simply too lazy. Grow a beard and you'll be a patriarch, you know that, Enoch? I mean you would if you had any descendants."

"It's quite enough for me to have had ancestors," he said.

"You see!" she cried. "Racial pride! You're all alike!" She turned to me to pursue her odd comedy more emphatically. "Next thing he'll remind me how my ancestors were running around in the forest primeval with their bodies painted blue when his were—were I don't know what."

"Writing the Commentaries on the Commentaries," he mildly supplied.

"Well, what did it get you anyhow?" she sniffed. "The ghetto, that's all."

"The ghetto," he said in a voice familiar with its lines.

"That's why you talk of revenge on Europe. All those beautiful cathedrals! All those saints! And for the sake of a single little misplaced tribe, you'd throw the whole thing over!"

"A pogrom against the gentiles," he summed it up. "Try to live till that day; it's as good as immortality."

But her good humor was inexplicably thick with danger. "Now you're talking like a Jew. Don't talk like a Jew, Enoch."

"How shall I talk?"

"I don't know. Not that way."

"Was I muttering from the Zohar all unawares?"

"Not that way," she said again. "You sound—" She gave a great calloused sigh. "You sound
separate.
"

He pulled her round to him. "Well, not from you, Allegra."

"What I mean is, don't talk religion."

"I never talk religion. I only talk metaphor."

"That's what I mean. I heard you, you were talking about raising the dead."

"But that's talking like a Christian, isn't it?"

"Oh come, Enoch, stop it."

"You don't want me to talk like a Jew and you don't want me to talk like a Christian. That leaves the recitation of the Upanishads, I suppose."

"Don't, Enoch," she implored.

"Oh, it's not simply a question of don't. Believe me, it's more a question of can't. Not a single chapter. My Sanskrit's rusty, what a pity—"

Vaguely she resisted his tug. "I knew it, you always end up with ridicule. You make a joke out of everything."

"A Jewish joke?" he inquired with a twist of his tone.

"You don't think the way an Ambassador ought to think," she accused.

"Well, I'm not the Ambassador yet. There's time."

"You haven't recovered, that's the trouble. I'm not
stupid,
I can see how you've been contaminated—"

"By your not being stupid?"

"Enoch, you're not listening to me seriously."

"Yes I am. With high seriousness. It's like listening to an epic. As though you were a troubadour."

"Damn it!" she said.

"All right, if it's only an access of boredom and you don't mean it theologically. Damn what?"

"You! That old job you had
ruined
you. Those ledgers! Those numbers!"

"Ruined," he said with amiable melancholy.

"Your mind's ruined, your whole sensibility, I can
see
it. You haven't recovered. As though all of it had to be
your
fault to satisfy you! That's masochism, you know it is. It's perfectly obvious—you
know
masochism is a Jewish trait, otherwise the Jews would have disappeared long ago. It's simple ordinary psychology. They're always looking to suffer, and then they turn right around and complain when they do."

"Simple ordinary psychology," he repeated.

"Well, I'm a realist!" She thrust her chin up with so lively a movement that her turban slipped free; the little feathers of her sickened hair roamed like animate cilia in the air. "I've got my name on all those Zionist charity letterheads, haven't I? You know perfectly well how I feel. After all, I'm not an anti-Semite! I've read everything there is on the Dreyfus case!—All I'm saying is it's all over."

He looked at her dully. "What's all over?"

"Is that the Socratic method? What do you mean what's all over? The concentration camps are all over!" she almost shouted.

"Your daughter says the same," he noted languidly.

My mother was scornful. "Just as though she ever had a single political idea in her head! Well, she's right, for once."

"I wasn't thinking of politics," I said humbly.

"I told you she wasn't," my mother gave out with a click of satisfaction.

"I was only wondering about what you said," I pursued, "about how the demonstration would come about. What you were saying before, the extraordinary sign—"

But my mother scowled with annoyance. "Leave Enoch and his metaphors be, can't you?"

For an answer my stepfather merely groaned. It was an unexpected noise. "Oh my God," he finished it off.

Nevertheless I would not let go, no matter what. He had opened himself to me and he had no right, in my mother's presence, to shut the lid: not, at any rate, after having revealed the combination. "I was wondering in what sense you thought the dead could be raised," I patiently probed, ready for anything.

"In what sense! Oh Lord! What a provocation!" my mother complained. "I'm telling you, leave Enoch alone. He's not going to be Ambassador to the dead, after all! It's all over and he hasn't had anything to do with it for ten years and he still isn't recovered from it, isn't that plain enough?" And she tore the vagrant Taj Mahals from her throat, where they lay fallen and bunched; furiously she shook the silk all around her.

"Put your shawl back on," Enoch reprimanded. "You'll cough again. You'll get your disease back."

"There, that's just the thing I'm driving at. It wasn't a disease
you
had," she argued sternly. "I mean it wasn't gangrene! It was only a job."

He appeared to be rewarding her with successive satiric nods—a nurse with a recalcitrant patient. "That's a very practical view of it. —Put your shawl
on,
will you?"

"It's not just practical, it's the sacred truth," she continued, but she obeyed him. "It was only a job and it got you where you are now. That's how you ought to regard it. That's how / regard it," she resumed.

"Where I am now," he echoed.

"At the brink of everything!"

"I'm to have what's known as 'a brilliant career,'" he interposed.

"Call it what you want. I know what I call it!"

"You call it Everything."

"I'm a grabber," she admitted.

"There's candor for you," he acknowledged. I almost thought it a pilgrimage of violence that trailed across his eye just then. But in a moment he had diverted it to an ambush somewhat milder. He began, as though they had been speaking of nothing else all the while (though it seemed my mother, at least, had not), "Do you think the Senate will confirm?"—which made her watchfully bristle.

"We've done what we could," she said.

"I don't deny it."

"We've done it all," she said.

"Down to the last," he agreed. He fixed on me meditatively, rubbing his blunt nose. His fingers were stiff, square-edged, short, his elbow was looped up high for defense, his mouth was incomprehensible, even invisible. Without our noticing it, night had happened. Already we were sitting in the rush of blueness before the final dark, surveying one another's heads like foreign silhouettes. "I don't deny it," Enoch said, feebly, once more: he looked, then—what I could see of him, what I could hear of him, his face and voice disguised by bleakness, and masked, and bound, and put away—he looked altogether what my mother had said of him: separate.

"It's not as though anything stood in your way," she encouraged him. "There's no risk now, after all, is there? We've taken care of the risk!"

"We've disposed of the risk," he corrected her.

"All right then! You're safe. You're absolutely safe."

Safe: it was the word she had used long ago, in flight from Europe, in flight from Nick; only then she had used it for me.

Enoch, behold, was safe. The word had been transferred to him like a quality. Did it mean that I was robbed of it?—that "safe," like some gold-plated school award, some little shiny molded Rome-muscled statuette, the only one of its honorable kind, had to pass from winner to winner, to be conferred only at the expense of someone else's having to give it up? However it was, Enoch, at least, had the coveted thing—he was safe. My mother had dubbed him safe; but also she had dubbed him separate. For if he were not altogether and actually separate he could not be altogether and actually safe: I saw him as one of those whose natures forbid them to partake of the profane, whom no persuasion and no temptation can absolve from their strict flagellations. Yet my mother made him partake and even indulge (the bird of the world lay steaming, stuffed with hierarchical dumplings, on the exquisite table of her imagination—dead but not in vain; dead but savory; she meant to have a good meal of it yet), she insisted on it, he was to be Ambassador, and not to the country of the murdered. So he was neither safe nor separate, I observed, from his wife, who took his apocalyptic captivity no more seriously than she would have taken a report of his indigestion—having no trouble with the feast herself, she failed to be roiled; and being in a manner Christian, she could do what Enoch-the-Jew had no notion of: she could eat her god. Poor Enoch! He was an apostate. His god ate him.

For what could it have been other than a dybbuk which had entered him and had taken hold of his escaped Babylonian intellect and his infidel compassion?—the dybbuk of all the lost dead, the dybbuk of the martyrs, the dybbuk of the slaughtered millions, the dybbuk of cinder and smoke, the succubus Europa who lay crouched at his organ with her teeth in his bludgeoned tissue? Rapt Enoch! I comprehended him at last. I saw what he waited for, the extraordinary sign, the consecrated, demonstration, which he did not dare to name Messiah. He was waiting for the deliverance of history. I saw him: he had been formed at Creation, he had been witness at Sinai, and he went on raptly waiting as those obsessed by timelessness always wait. He kept his bare secret vigil as devotedly as the high priest of the Temple in the moment of the utterance of the Name of Names with the Holy of Holies. He awaited justice for the wicked and mercy for the destroyed. He awaited the oblivion of devouring Europe. He awaited the just estimate of the yet-to-be-born. —How else am I to put it? In the long, long, long, long memory of history (put it this way) the dead are at last resurrected: even at the price of sublime civilization. It is the exactly balanced irony of vengeance that only the wronged survive. Where now is Assyria? Who sleeps under the pyramids? Where has sleekbooted Caesar gone? Who afterward will recall the cathedrals of the Rhine? History (put it this way) is the Paradise of the lost. When we remember the martyrs we bring on the Messiah.

Well, how else
am
I to put it? What ate Enoch was no metaphor, in spite of what he claimed for it. And he did not believe in his own aphorisms. Why? Because he took them for mere prayer.

It was, as I have said, night. My stepfather stood up and stretched and opened
Anna Karenina
and read out the first sentence: "All happy families are alike," he said, crashing it into triviality. It was trivial, trivial. He took his wife firmly by the arm and went into the house.

And she, my mother, freshly fed on the bird of the world?

My mother was waiting for the Messiah too—only she thought he would come dressed as an Ambassador named Enoch Vand.

The next day I determined to see William.

This was not easy to arrange. I could not telephone him, in the regular way, for an appointment at his office; it was my mother who was his client and not, by any stretch, myself; and anyhow it was not on a matter of law that I had need of him. Whether I had need of him at all was itself a question, but, like my mother, I suddenly found myself valuing his sanity. Enoch, who was on all things reasonable, was at the same time not precisely "sane," since it was his habit to avoid a discussion by having a vision. If a part of his mind, exposed too long to the curious, began after awhile to feel the chill of too much airing, he merely shut it off and opened another part; he was as full of valves of this sort as a trumpet—as, in fact, the Last Trump, of which it may without offense to anyone be assumed that the notes are many and odd.