Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

BUSINESS LIFE

My uncle invested his money in a beauty parlor, began to make a little profit — and the union representative came. My uncle promised to hire union workers soon as the mortgage was paid. Pickets arrived. Back and forth with their signs in front of the beauty parlor. My uncle brought them coffee. They talked about their troubles.A picketer didn’t have a soft job. Long apprenticeship; pay wasn’t good; and morning to evening, march, march, march, screaming insults at my uncle’s customers. The signs didn’t look heavy, but try to carry one all day. My uncle agreed: a sign is heavy. Anyhow, business improved. After a while the union bombed the beauty parlor, set fire to my uncle’s car, and beat up my aunt. This was reported in the newspaper. Business became much better. My uncle negotiated for a second beauty parlor. One afternoon a picketer leaned against the window of the beauty parlor and lit a cigarette. My uncle started to phone the union, but he hadn’t forgotten his life in Russia, his hatred of informers. He put down the phone. The image of that man — slouched against the window, smoking, not carrying the picket sign so that people could read it — seethed in my uncle like moral poison. He soon developed a chronic stomach disturbance. Next came ulcers, doctors, hospitals — all the miseries of a life in business.

LITERARY CRITICISM

Photographs of suspected Jews — men, women, children with hair, teeth, etc. — are available in great sufficiency. If you demand one, either you hate, or do not understand, Borges’s critical point, which is that any reader knows stories of this exquisitely general kind. Besides, Borges made his story not from photographable reality — your Polish relatives whose undernourished kosher height never exceeded five feet six inches — but from a stupid story called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” My aunt, a schoolgirl, was bleeding on the ground with her mother and father in Brest Litovsk.

SHRUBLESS CRAGS

The Prisoner of Chillon, by Lord Byron, isn’t essentially different from “The Secret Miracle.” It, too, is about a condemned prisoner who becomes ecstatic. Suddenly, after years in a dungeon, Bonnivard transcends his mortality:

What next befell me then and there

I know not well — I never knew—

First came the loss of light, and air ,

And then of darkness too :

I had no thought, no feeling — none —

Among the stones I stood a stone ,

And was, scarce conscious what I wist,

As shrubless crags within the mist ;

For all was blank, and bleak, and grey ;

It was not night — it was not day ;

It was not even the dungeon-light ,

So hateful to my heavy sight ,

But vacancy absorbing space ,

And fixedness — without a place .

Like Hladík, in a state of intensified absence, he is a presence.

SONG

Byronic romanticism entered the Russian soul, at the deepest level, as evidenced in the beloved folk song “Oi yoi, the shrubless crags.”

BLOSSOMS

Metaphysical possibilities — Hladík, Bonnivard — as inherent in the world, are appreciated by Wordsworth when he focuses on shrubless crags and imagines them spiritual entities, theoretical men who neither live nor die. They hover in the mist of universal mind, or the moods of finitude. In a snowstorm outside Smolensk, fighting the Nazis, my uncle was hit in the head by shrapnel, carried to a hospital, and dropped in the dead ward. That night a Jewish woman, who was a surgeon and colonel in the Russian army, discovered him when she left the operating room and, to smoke a cigarette, retreated to the dead ward. A vague moan, “Mama,” reached her from shadowy rows of corpses. She ordered a search. Nurses running down the rows, pressing back eyelids, listening at mouth holes, located my uncle. The body wasn’t dead; more you couldn’t say. The surgeon stepped on her cigarette. “I’ll operate.” My uncle lived, a hero of the people, guaranteed every right of Russian citizenship. At his first opportunity he fled, walking from Russia to Italy through the confusion of ruined cities; stealing by night across the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Austria; starving, pursued by dogs and police, and always repeating to himself the address of his sister in lower Manhattan. When he got to America he struggled for years, with little English and great anxiety, to make money. Today he owns racetracks and a chain of beauty parlors. He drives a Lincoln Continental. Though he speaks six languages, he isn’t much of a conversationalist, but likes a good joke, especially if it comes from life — how, for example, during a Chinese dinner, his brother-in-law’s appendix ruptured. Both his sons are doctors and drive Jaguars. He reminds them that his life was saved by a woman less than five feet tall who, during the battle of Smolensk, performed miraculous surgery while standing on ammunition boxes. It could seem, now that he’s a big shot, he gives lessons in humility. But how else to defend himself against happiness? He sees terrifying vulnerability in the blossoms of nachas.

THE SCREAMS OF CHILDREN

The New Testament is the best condemned-prisoner story. Jesus, a “suspected” Jew, sublimates at the deadly moment. In two ways, then, he is like Jaromir Hladík. Insofar as the Gestapo gives birth to the ecstatic Hladík, he and Jesus are similar in yet another way. Both are victims of parental ambivalence, which tends to give birth to death. One could savor distinctions here, but the prophetic Kafka hurries me away: humanity, he says, is the growth of death force. For reasons of discretion the trains rolled before dawn, routed through the outskirts of Prague. Nevertheless, you could hear the screams of children.

BLACK BREAD, BUTTER, ONION

The black bread should be Pechter’s, but the firm went out of business, so substitute bialys from the bakery on Grand Street, between Essex and Clinton, on the right heading toward the river, not SoHo. With your thumb, gouge and tear bialys open along the circumference. Butter bialys. Insert onion slices. Do this about 3:00 a.m., at the glass-topped table in my parents’ dining room, after a heavy date in Greenwich Village. My parents should be asleep in their bedroom, twenty feet away. Since my father is dead, imagine him. He snores. He cries out against murderous assailants. I could never catch his exact words. Think what scares you most, then eat, eat. The New York Times , purchased minutes ago at the kiosk in Sheridan Square, is fresh; it lies beside the plate of bialys. As you eat, you read. Light a cigarette. Coffee, in the gray pot, waits on the stove. Don’t let it boil. Occasional street noises — sirens, cats — should penetrate the Venetian blinds and thick, deeply pleated drapes of the living-room windows. The tender, powdery surface of the bialys is dented by your fingertips, which bear odors of sex; also butter, onion, dough, tobacco, newsprint, and coffee. The whole city is in your nose, but go outside and eat the last bialy while strolling on Cherry Street. The neighborhood is Mafia-controlled; completely safe. You will be seen from tenement windows and recognized. Smoke another cigarette. Take your time. Your father cries out in his sleep, but he was born in Europe. For a native American kid, there is nothing to worry about. Even if you eat half a dozen bialys, with an onion and coffee, you will sleep like a baby.

ALIENATION

In his essay “On the Jewish Question,” written in exile, Karl Marx — an alienated Jew assuming the voice of a Hegelienated Jew — says, “Money is the jealous god of Israel.” He means, by this oblique smear, the Virgin is a prostitute, her child is capitalism. Hence, it is Jesus — not the exiled Karl Marx — who objectifies alienation. And why not? The life of Jesus, described early and late by the absence of his father, is nothing less than the negation of negation. Marx never gives the least attention to the journey of the Magi, the mystery on the bestial floor, or the ultimate figure of Jesus in the excruciating pictorial epitome. For an execution Roman-style — with three prisoners and ritual paraphernalia — there is Lord Byron’s letter.