Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Khardov had almost finished eating and the boy still had not asked him about the medallion. “Khardov,” he said — he had been told to call him Khardov, not Father—“Khardov, why do I have this?” He pointed to his shirt under which the flat, cool part of the medallion lay against his chest.

He thought for a moment that Khardov might not understand him. He could have been pointing at his heart.

“You have it because it is yours, sir,” Khardov said softly.

This had been (though he could not understand now how naïve he had been; there should have been dozens of times when the subject of the medallion would have come up) the first time he could remember speaking to Khardov about it. Strangely, he had experienced a deep satisfaction in Khardov’s answer. It seemed an absolute confirmation of his own discovery the night before when he had taken the medallion, like the heart from his chest, to examine it beneath the lamp.

Until then, like all children, he’d had no real sense of his own being. His self he had simply accepted with the other natural facts of the world, something which had always existed. But his father’s answer, that he had the medallion because it was his, provided him with an insight into his own uniqueness. It was as if the center of the universe had suddenly and inexplicably shifted. No longer a part of it, he sensed irreconcilable differences between himself and it, but like a castaway who suddenly finds himself on an island to which he is bound only by the physics of geography, he felt an amused tolerance of customs and conditions arrived at through no consultation with himself, and for which he could never be made to answer. Relieved somehow of burdens he had been made to feel only when they had been lifted from him, he experienced a heady freedom. Of course. It was his . He was himself.

One afternoon, not long after his interview with Khardov, he returned from his classes to find a package on his bed. Inside were the richest, finest clothes he had ever seen. There were trousers of so deep a blue that they appeared black. Along the seams stitches were so closely set against each other that they seemed a single fat, stranded thread. “Tailors have gone blind making these,” Khardov boasted to him. There were jackets with wool so thick he could not bunch it in his fist, and high black stockings with silk so sheer that his legs looked gray in them. The heavy shoes he found beneath the bed were of a rich, pungent leather, the color of horses’ saddles on state occasions. He did not wonder where the clothes had come from, or even if they were for him. He put them on quickly and went to stand before the shard of mirror in the kitchen. By standing back far enough he could see, except for his face, his whole reflection. Pleased, he thought of the medallion settled comfortably, with himself inside the heavy clothes.

Behind him Khardov came up and placed himself against the kitchen door with his hands at his sides and his head slightly forward on his neck. “Do I look well, Khardov?” he asked without turning around.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied. “You look splendid.”

His awareness of himself was confused now with a new deep consciousness of the medallion he wore. It seemed to him that the medallion, even more than himself, had achieved an insular security beneath the fine clothes. It had become inviolate, immured, like the precious metal in Khardov’s casket, not so much by the thickness of the covering as by the implicit delicacy of its surroundings. One ripped valuables from a paper bag, but did not touch the pearl at the throat of the great lady fallen in the street.

He discovered later that the packages he frequently found on his bed were paid for by the steady depletion of the gold and silver in Khardov’s box. It was almost as if it , rather than Khardov, were his benefactor (as a young boy he thought of the power of the metals to transform themselves into visible symbols he could wear as somehow self-generative, an implicit condition built comfortably into the very premise of wealth), for as he grew and his needs multiplied, it was, as he by that time knew, only at the expense of the wealth that glittered beneath the ornate surfaces of the carved casket that they were met. Khardov no longer sat in the dark back room solacing his fingers in the rich depths of the box, stirring the opulent shards as he ate his lunch. One day, of course, their little treasury was empty and there were no more packages. As a child he had thought of the metals as fragments broken by main force from heavy sheets of silver and gold, and it saddened him to realize that even these were susceptible of a further and final depletion. He had become used to the silky luxury of the gifts and it was a disappointment to him that they should stop; but in a way, forced as he was to wear clothing that was still fine though no longer new, he was made aware of a subtle shift in his status which was not at all unpleasant to him. With use, the clothing, too substantial ever to become threadbare, gradually lost its gloss, its stiff novelty. An aura of respectable solidity settled over it. The jackets and suits were not old, but aged, and had about them now an aspect of classic and somewhat ancient fashionableness, and although Khardov still managed to find money for fresh and expensive linen — this, somehow, was perishable, like the brittle and yellowing paper notes Khardov traded to obtain it — its silken crispness seemed only to deepen the musty gentility of the rest of his clothing.

Thinking now of the clothes always in relation to the thick casket and its contents, he began to view his life as a syllogism proceeding with a calm deliberateness from the premise of the medallion. From the first the medallion had seemed to hint at some mystery about himself which sooner or later he would have to solve. Even the handsome clothes which had drained the box had gone, not so much to dress him, as to set off the medallion, as though all arrangements in his life were controlled finally by the eccentric object which hung about his neck. There was something curiously effeminate about his position, ludicrously not unlike a woman’s commitment to a strangely colored handbag which, accessory to nothing, makes ceaseless demands on her wardrobe. He told Khardov about his feelings, and although the old man laughed he had seemed angry. Later Khardov came to him. “You were right, sir,” he said. “It was perceptive in you to see that. The poor man’s rags are given outright, but golden raiments are always lent. They are a responsibility. If this seems to diminish you, remember they are a responsibility only the very few can have.”

Increasingly he enjoyed going out among the few people he knew. It may have seemed to others that he glided too smoothly among them. Like a man on ice skates nodding to friends who stand by less sure of themselves, he went from one to the other, asking of this one’s health, desiring to be remembered to that one’s family. He sensed that others hung back from him and assumed at first that it was his dress, so different from their own, which had made him seem somehow too forbidding and caused their caution, forcing them apart from him, as one steps aside for a man in a uniform one has never worn. He understood later, however, that his interest must have seemed patronizing to them, and he was hurt that they should misinterpret his sincere affection. Gradually, though, he concluded that their suspicion of him was not entirely unjustified, that he had held something of himself in reserve. It was, he decided, a flaw in his character. He resolved to correct it. But once, after he was a grown man, a mistress of his, having had too much to drink, refused to use his name in talking to him. Instead, she kept on calling him “Jehovah.” Finally, in some anger, he asked her why she did this. “Because,” she said, “you show me only your behind.”