Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

2

Lord Byron published amazing poems. He had sexual union with his sister. Then came the wedding. Afterward, with Annabella and her maid, he rode forty miles from Seaham Church to Halnaby Hall, where he honeymooned. It is said the day was cold and Lord Byron despised the cold, but nothing is reported as to where he sat in the carriage — beside Annabella or beside the maid, or if Annabella sat between, with the meat and bags and wine opposed. Fletcher, a sullen lout, refused to say a word. He galloped behind the carriage. It isn’t known if the maid was acquainted with Lord Byron, or if they sat as strangers pressed, he by she, at turns in the road. Reported then, as here reported, Lord Byron was cold. Annabella’s head, round as an Esquimau’s, was conservative of temperature. It is known that Lord Byron’s head, examined the previous year by the craniologist Spurzheim, was a structure of antithetical dispositions. The rest is inevitable. Indifferent to cold or hot — by nature, virtuous — the Annabella head through intimate contiguity with the crippled, incestuous bisexual caused him to feel dialectically cold, Satanic, probably squashed by the maid. It is rumored that he began shrieking, then stamping the carriage floor viciously with his hoof.

GIVING NOTICE

A few days prior to the event, my cousin said, “I’m not going through with it. Call off the bar mitzvah.” My uncle said, “You’re crazy.” My aunt said, “I think so.” He’d already reserved the banquet hall, said my uncle, with a big deposit; already paid the rabbis, the caterers, the orchestra. Flying in from everywhere in the Americas and Canada were relatives and friends. My aunt said, “Deposit. Relatives.” My cousin said, “Do I know the meaning of even ten Hebrew words? Is the bar mitzvah a Jewish ceremony? Do I believe in God?” My aunt said, “Get serious.” My uncle said, “Shut up. The crazy is talking to me.” My aunt said, “You, too, must be crazy.” My cousin said, “Call it off.” My uncle said, “I listened. Now you listen. When the anti-Semites come to kill your mother, will it be nice to say you aren’t a bar mitzvah? Don’t you want to be counted?” My cousin pulled open his shirt. “Look,” he cried. My aunt said,“I can’t talk so I can’t look.”“Look,” he screamed. Green, iridescent Stars of David had grown from his nipples. My uncle collapsed on the wall-to-wall carpet. Looking, my aunt said, “I can’t talk so I refuse to look at your crazy tits.” That night my uncle sent telegrams throughout the Western Hemisphere. He explained, with regrets, that his son didn’t believe in God, so the bar mitzvah was canceled. Then he pulled my cousin’s five-hundred-dollar racing bike into the driveway, mangled the handlebars, kicked out the spokes, and left it for the neighborhood to notice.

A SUSPECTED JEW

Jaromir Hladík is suspected of being a Jew, imprisoned by the Gestapo, sentenced to death. In his prison cell, despite terror and confusion, he becomes ecstatic, then indistinguishable from his ecstasy. He is, in short, an ecstasy — the incarnation of a metaphysical state. Borges wrote this story. He calls it “The Secret Miracle.” Whatever you call it, says Gramsci, it exemplifies the ideological hegemony of the ruling class. In the mediating figure Jaromir Hladík, absolute misery translates into the consolations of redemptive esthesis. It follows, then, the Gestapo, an organization of death, gives birth to “The Ecstatic Hladík”—or, to be precise, “The Secret Miracle.” Borges, master of controlled estrangement, makes it impossible to feel that Jaromir Hladík — say, a suspected Jew of average height, with bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, gentle musical voice — physically and exactly disintegrates (as intimated in the final sentences) between a hard stone wall and the impact of specific bullets.

THE SUBJECT AT THE VANISHING POINT

My grandfather — less than average height — had bad teeth, gray hair, nervous cough, tinted spectacles, delicate fingers, and a gentle musical voice. To appear confident and authentic, worthy of attention by clerks in the visa office, he memorized the required information — his mother’s maiden name, the addresses of relatives in America — and, walking down the street, he felt constantly in his coat pockets to be sure that he had photos of himself, wife, daughter, enough money for the required bribes, and the necessary papers — documents from America, passports, birth certificates, and an essay by himself in praise of Poland — when a pogrom started. Doors and windows slammed shut. The robots were coming. Alone in a strange street, he couldn’t tell which way to go. At every corner was death. Suddenly — for good or ill isn’t known — somebody flung him into a cellar. Others died. He, bleeding and semiconscious, hidden in a cellar, survived the pogrom. That day he didn’t get a visa to leave Poland. He was a tailor — short, thin-boned. Even in a winter coat, easy to fling. He crawled amid rats and dirt, collecting his papers. When night came and Poland lay snoring in the street, he climbed out of the cellar and ran home. Wife and daughter ministered to his wounds.All thanked God that he was alive. But it was too late to get a visa. The Nazis came with the meaning of history — what flings you into a cellar saves you for bullets. I don’t say, in the historical dialectic, individual life reduces to hideous idiocy. I’m talking about my grandfather, my grandmother, and my aunt. It seems to me, in the dialectic, individual life reduces not even to hideous idiocy.

MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES

His idea about labor power came to him while he strode back and forth in his room in Paris and smoked cigarettes. Indeed, striding back and forth, he smoked cigarettes, but striding, smoking, whistling, etc., are contingent activities. What matters is the stage of development in the class struggle when it is possible for a person to think seriously — to have an idea — about labor power. Certainly, in Paris, Karl Marx strode, for example, smoking cigarettes. Now and then, he strode to the window, pushed it open to free the room of smoke and listen for developments. But the precisely particular determinants of consciousness, within the class struggle, are material circumstances. Intuitively, perhaps, Karl Marx felt the burden of determined consciousness in the black, thick hair thrusting from the top of his head like implications and slithering down his chest and back to converge at his crotch, like a conclusion. But, even scrutinizing the hair beneath his fingernails (very like the historical grain in wood), he detected nothing beyond mute, inexorable flux until — striding, smoking — he pushed open his window and noticed Monsieur Grandbouche, his landlord, a figure of bourgeois pieties, who shouted, “When will you pay the rent, my hairball?” Karl Marx strode back and forth and smoked. La question Grandbouche burned in his roots, like the residue of a summer rainstorm, quickening the dialectical material of his struggling circumstances. Hair twisted from his ears and whistling nostrils. Angry messages. An idea was occurring. Indeterminable millions would die. Indeterminable millions would eat. Thus, a Parisian landlord, frightened by a smoky blotch in the window, shouted a pathetic joke in the spirit of nervous conviviality, and as a result, his descendants would be torn to pieces, for he’d epitomized material circumstances by shouting — across generations of Grandbouche — an idea, intensified by repercussions, echoed in concussions of Marxian canons, tearing fascist ligament even in the jungles of the East. Voilà, implicit in a landlord’s shout is the death rattle of his children’s children.