Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

“See?” she said. “I’ll break your wrist.”

Under the table he kicked at her. She let go of him.

“You son of a bitch, I’ll break your face for that.” She started to scratch him. He struck her wildly and she began to cry. The little boy had rushed over and was pulling at Feldman’s suit jacket. The woman behind the bar came over with a billy club she had taken from some hiding place, and began to hit Feldman on his neck and chest. The girl recovered and pulled him from the booth. She sat on his chest, her legs straddling his body as a jockey rides a horse, thighs spread wide, knees up. Her body was exposed to him. He smelled her cunt. He saw it. They beat him until he was unconscious.

The men from the factories lifted him from the floor where he lay and carried him into the street. It was dark now. Under the lamplight they marched with him. Children ran behind and chanted strange songs. He heard the voices even in his sleep, and dreamed that he was an Egyptian king awaking in the underworld. About him were the treasures, the artifacts with which his people mocked his death. He was betrayed, forsaken. He screamed he was not dead and for answer heard their laughter as they retreated through the dark passage.

Before he died Feldman awoke in an alley. The pains in his stomach were more severe than ever. He knew he was dying. On his torn jacket was a note, scribbled in an angry hand: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN, it said.

He thought of the doctor’s somber face telling him more than a year ago that he was going to die. He thought of his family and the way they looked at him, delicately anticipating in his every sudden move something breaking inside himself, and of the admiration in all their eyes, and the unmasked hope that it would never come to this for them, but that if it should, if it ever should, it would come with grace. But nothing came gracefully — not to heroes.

In the alley, before the dawn, by the waiting garbage, by the coffee grounds in their cups of wasted orange hemispheres, by the torn packages of frozen fish, by the greased, ripped labels of hollow cans, by the cold and hardened fat, by the jagged scraps of flesh around the nibbled bones, and the coagulated blood of cow and lamb, Feldman saw the cunt one last time and raised himself and crawled in the darkness toward a fence to sit upright against it. He tugged at his jacket to straighten it, tugged at the note appended to him like a price tag: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN. He did not have the strength to pull the tag from his jacket. Smiling, he thought sadly of the dying hero.

Long before he began to wonder about it in any important way, he felt the weight of it, the familiar tug of it against his chest as he moved forward, its heavy, gentle arc as it swung, pendent, from the golden chain about his throat. In bed he felt it like a warm hand pressing against his heart.

What surprised him later was that he had never questioned it, that it had always seemed a quite natural extension of his own body. It had not occurred to him to take it off even in the bath. He could recall lying back in the warm water, somnolent and comfortable, just conscious of its dull glint beneath the surface. Though he enjoyed the subtle shift of its weight in the water, its slow, careful displacements as he moved in the bath, he didn’t really think about it, even as a toy. When he stood and reached for the towel hanging from the curtainless rod above the tub, the medallion, like a metal moon, would catch the light of the electric bulb, and sifting it in its complex corrugated surfaces, throw off thick rings of bright yellow which seemed to sear themselves into his outstretched, upraised hands.

He could not remember when it was he had first looked at it as a thing apart, having properties of its own. Once, as a child in the gymnasium, a classmate had grabbed it as they were running in a game and had held him by it. He felt the pressure of the golden links on the back of his neck. The boy pulled steadily on the medallion and he lurched forward clumsily. Then the boy, grasping the chain in his fists, drew him toward him, hand over hand, as one might draw a rope up a well. When he could feel the other’s face, abrasive against his own, the boy released him suddenly and backed away, pointing at the spinning medallion unsnarling on his chest.

The figures on the medallion were as familiar to him as the features on his face, but for this reason he had been strangely unconscious of them, accepting them through long accommodation, nothing else. One night, shortly after the scene in the gymnasium, he took the medallion from beneath his pajama shirt, and holding it underneath the lamp by his bed, studied it. His finger traced the medallion’s outline, a shield large as a man’s hand. It was made of a thick, crusted gold, almost the color of leather, and its surface bristled with figures in sharp relief. At one edge an animal — perhaps a lion — reared, its body rampant, its front legs pawing the air fiercely, its head angry and turned strangely on its body in vicious confrontation. At the medallion’s center a knight sat stiffly, canted crazily on a horse’s back, and reached a mailed fist toward the thick-feathered legs of an eagle just above his head. The eagle’s head, in profile, hung at a queer angle from the long, naked neck, distended in fright. Its wings seemed to beat the heavy air in a clumsy desperation. Its eye, almost human, and in proportion larger than anything else on the shield, seemed, unlike the dangerously clawed, enraged lion, or the thick-walled mail of the stiff, awkward knight, vulnerable, open to unendurable pain and fright. Its talons clutched a crown shape which somehow in its anguish the eagle appeared to have forgotten it held, as though it protected itself from its attackers absent-mindedly, still clutching some irrelevant baggage. The figures emerged from a field of gradually diminishing darkness, the background, a deep gold the color of old brass, finally exploding in a sunburst of yellow in the eagle’s golden eye.

He had replaced it carefully inside his pajamas and from that time thought of it no longer as a part of his own body but rather as something merged with it, yet isolate: not part of him, but his , like a glass eye or an ivory limb.

He decided to ask his father about it. He and Khardov lived together at the back of Khardov’s shop. He had been a craftsman in precious metals, but the wars and revolutions had ruined his trade and now he repaired watches. In the dark back room where Khardov ate his lunch, even there not out of earshot of the noisy watches, the old man chewed on the raw, doughy bread and spoke to him.

“Time,” he said hoarsely. “Time, time, time,” he said, shrugging, jerking his thumb in the direction of the watches.

The boy looked uneasily at the dark curtain that separated their apartment from the shop.

“Listen to them chattering.” He drew the back of his hand across his cheek where a piece of moist bread had stuck to it. “Even the wars, even the wars, once leisurely and provisional with the news of battle a hard ride three days off, the capital always the last place to fall. Even the wars,” he said, his voice trailing off. He looked at the boy. “Where are your sieges today?” he asked him. “Where are your pitched tents, your massive bivouacs like queer cities of the poor outside the walls? The terrible armies and the gentle, gentle soldiers? Who storms a summer palace now? Isn’t that right, sir? Doesn’t that strike you as right?”

The boy nodded, confused.

“It is to be understood then, sir, that the new national product is the pocket watch. A cheap, sturdy symbol of the times, isn’t that right? And a practical symbol, too. More than the old icons, or the glazed four-color pictures of the dead presidents from the papers.” As Khardov spoke he held in his lap a carved, heavy casket in which were still the last precious shavings from the great times. He had pushed back the lid which slid on smooth wooden rails and let one hand loll idly in the dark box, as a man in a boat trails his hand in cool water. The boy could not see it but he knew that in Khardov’s fingers were the shapeless golden chips, the fragments of platinum and chunks of splintered silver, like the pebbled residuum of some lavish flood.