Saul Bellow - The Victim

Allbee, preoccupied with the dwindling violets and grays of twilight and the swarms of light, seemed also to find this comical.

“Well, you’ve got nothing on me,” he said.

“You think not?”

“You’re just as much of a monster to me.”

“I am?”

“Hell, yes. Well, you look like Caliban in the first place,” Allbee said, more serious than not. “But that’s not all I mean. You personally, you’re just one out of many. Many kinds. You wouldn’t be able to see that. Sometimes I feel — and I’m saying this seriously — I feel as if I were in a sort of Egyptian darkness. You know, Moses punished the Egyptians with darkness. And that’s how I often think of this. When I was born, when I was a boy, everything was different. We thought it would be daylight forever. Do you know, one of my ancestors was Governor Winthrop. Governor Winthrop!” His voice vibrated fiercely; there was a repressed laugh in it. “I’m a fine one to be talking about tradition, you must be saying. But still I was born into it. And try to imagine how New York affects me. Isn’t it preposterous? It’s really as if the children of Caliban were running everything. You go down in the subway and Caliban gives you two nickels for your dime. You go home and he has a candy store in the street where you were born. The old breeds are out. The streets are named after them. But what are they themselves? Just remnants.”

“I see how it is; you’re actually an aristocrat,” said Leven-thal.

“It may not strike you as it struck me,” said Allbee. “But I go into the library once in a while, to look around, and last week I saw a book about Thoreau and Emerson by a man named Lipschitz…”

“What of it?”

“A name like that?” Allbee said this with great earnestness. “After all, it seems to me that people of such background simply couldn’t understand…”

“Of all the goddamned nonsense!” shouted Leventhal. “Look, I’ve got things to attend to. I have a phone call to make. It’s important. Tell me what in the name of hell you want and make it snappy.”

“I assure you, I wasn’t trying to be malicious. I was only discussing this…”

“I assure you, you were trying, I assure you!” Leventhal flung out. “Now what are you after? Probably a few bucks for whisky.”

Allbee laughed aloud. “They say drinking is only another kind of disease,” he said. “Like heart disease or syphilis. You wouldn’t be so hard on anyone with heart disease, would you? You’d be more sympathetic. They even say crime is only a sort of disease and if you had more hospitals you’d need fewer prisons. Look how many murderers are let off and get treatment instead of execution. If they’re sick it’s not their fault. Why can’t you take that attitude?”

“Why?” Leventhal involuntarily repeated. He was bewildered.

“Because you’ve got to blame me, that’s why,” said Allbee. “You won’t assume that it isn’t entirely my fault. It’s necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get. It doesn’t enter your mind, does it — that a man might not be able to help being hammered down? What do you say? Maybe he can’t help himself? No, if a man is down, a man like me, it’s his fault. If he suffers, he’s being punished. There’s no evil in life itself. And do you know what? It’s a Jewish point of view. You’ll find it all over the Bible. God doesn’t make mistakes. He’s the department of weights and measures. If you’re okay, he’s okay, too. That’s what Job’s friends come and say to him. But I’ll tell you something. We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there’s no denying that evil is as real as sunshine. Take it from me, I know what I’m talking about. To you the whole thing is that I must deserve what I get. That leaves your hands clean and it’s unnecessary for you to bother yourself. Not that I’m asking you to feel sorry for me, but you sure can’t understand what makes a man drink.”

“All right, so I can’t. What then? What did you stop me for, to tell me that?”

“No, you never could and I’ll tell you why. Because you people take care of yourselves before everything. You keep your spirit under lock and key. That’s the way you’re brought up. You make it your business assistant, and it’s safe and tame and never leads you toward anything risky. Nothing dangerous and nothing glorious. Nothing ever tempts you to dissolve yourself. What for? What’s in it? No percentage.”

Leventhal’s expression was uncomprehending and horrified. His forehead was wrinkled. His heart beat agonizingly, and he faltered out, “I don’t see how you can talk that way. That’s just talk. Millions of us have been killed. What about that?”

He seemed to be waiting for a reply, but before it could be given he turned and walked away rapidly, leaving Allbee alone under the lamp.

LEVENTHAL strode home blindly and rapidly, his stout body shaken by the unaccustomed gait. Perspiration ran from his bushy, lusterless hair over his dark skin. He was thinking that he should have done something, slammed Allbee on the head, not let him off. He felt he had answered stupidly, although he did not know what he should have told him; he was unable to remember all that had been said. But as the first throbs of anger began to pass into soreness, it began to appear to him that he had known all along, all through the conversation, what to do and had failed to do it, that he had been unequal to what was plain, clear, and necessary. “I ought to have done it,” he thought, “even if it meant murdering him.”

Just then, the blink of a yellow light in the middle of the street started him into a trot. An eddy of exhaust gas caught him in the face. He was behind a bus. A tearing of gears carried it forward, and he came up on the curb, breathless. He rested a moment and then went on, gradually slowing to his ordinary pace. His head ached. There was a spot between his eyes that was particularly painful; the skin itself was tender. He pressed it. It seemed to have been the dead center of all his staring and concentration. He felt that his nerves were worse than ever and that his rage had done him harm, affected his very blood. He had an impression of bad blood as something black, thick, briny, caused by sickness or lust or excessive anger. His heart quickened again. He cast a glance behind. Several people were going in the other direction. “Let him better not come near me,” he muttered. His brain was clearer, and the single thought of murder that had risen in it was gone. However, he regretted not having hit Allbee and would almost have welcomed another chance. What was the use of wasting words on such people? Hit them! That was all they understood. A woman in the movies whom Mary had asked to remove her hat, two or three years ago, had turned around and uttered some insult about the “gall of Jews.” Woman or no, Leventhal had had a powerful desire to drive his fist into her head, tear the hat off. He had afterwards argued with Mary that there were times when that should be done. “Where would it get you?” was Mary’s answer. Practically, she was right, no doubt; she knew the value of staying cool. But he regretted it. Oh, how he sometimes regretted not slapping off that hat. With his father it had at least been “ gib mir die groschke ,” a potentially real compensation. “But what about me?” Leventhal asked with an arrested upward glance of his large meditative eyes. There was a murky redness in the clouds, absorbed from the neon lights and the clock tower on Fifth Avenue. His father had believed in getting his due, at any rate. And there was a certain wisdom in that. You couldn’t say you were master of yourself when there were so many people by whom you could be humiliated. As for Mary, she must have been thinking, in answering, of the night he had pushed her, years ago in Baltimore. Perhaps she wanted to remind him of it. Of course, there was no excuse for that. But he still felt that the woman’s hat should have been snatched off and hurled away.