Stanley Elkin: Boswell

Herlitz looked at me. “Oh, I see. You mean you don’t know him. Well, incipience. He was an inventor of political movements — that was his specialty. Groundfloorism. A familiar figure in every important basement in Europe. He was in on everything. Oh boy, what wasn’t he in on! Communism, Fascism, the Fourteen Points.

“Well, it was tragic. A very sweet man. He used to emphasize that it was life, life which was important, my kindness to you here, now, which counts; your politeness to me in this place at this moment which is all-important. He believed only in surfaces, Schmerler. Oh boy, was he deep! ‘Herlitz,’ he’d say, ’the most important thing is to live with yourself. We do terrible things. Remember, whatever you do in this world you’ve got to forgive it. You’ve got to remind yourself and remind yourself, it’s not your fault.’ Well, everybody took advantage. Moses had Pharaoh, Christ, Judas. Marx, of course, nobody liked. But Schmerler —it was painful to see it.

“Heinmacher — it disgusts me even to say his name — and that other one, Perflidowitz. All right, everyone knew he was a gangster, when he betrayed, nobody could be surprised. And Reuss. Hmm, that such a father could have such a lovely boy! I did him in Berlin in the old days. He’s in monorails, the great monorail developer.”

He waved his finger at me. He took his cane from the desk and touched my chest with it. “All right, now I have something to tell you. Listen. Wait.” He got up and went to the door and opened it. He looked for a moment up and down the corridor and then closed the door, locking it. He motioned for me to pull my chair closer to his. He was not satisfied until we were both sitting behind Fossier’s desk. Then he put his elbow on the desk, and carefully fitting his yellow head into his white cupped palm, he slid the elbow three or four inches forward along the smooth glass top. In this position he turned to me, looking not so much conspiratorial as despairing, his old, baggy skin upwardly taut, like a younger man’s.

“I was the last man on the Continent to remain faithful to Schmerler. Did 1 remain faithful to him! He would have been the loneliest man in Europe if it weren’t for me. Sure. What did they care, Heinmacher and that gang?

“Do you understand the wickedness, the elaborate trap? They helped him with the grand design. Well, grand. That was the irony, it wasn’t grand — just a very, minor experimental Slavic revolution, that’s all, just to keep his hand in. That whole part about the disposition of the Magyar royal family was Heinmacher’s idea. I never said Heinmacher wasn’t clever; of course he’s clever. Imagine. Making shotgun weddings between the royal family and its servants! It would have fouled the blood lines for generations! And then to fail to come forward like that when the gunboats were already in the harbor, not to have prepared the people, the underground press, not even to have told the leaders — Schmerler never suspected the conspiracy against him, the jealousy. To his dying day he thought that anybody who opposed him opposed him on principle. Principle! I’ll give them principle! What a scene. Terrible. They disclaimed everything, everything. He looked like a fool. I’ll never forget that laughter. All right. I admit it I was there. What could I do? As it was I did what I could. We stood there — together — outside the summer palace, waiting for the tanks.

“I will tell you a lesson. Look for the power. The power is always responsible. Well, it was simple. Who had the power in 1923? Perflidowitz and Heinmacher and Reuss, of course. Their sellout was all that was needed to undermine Europe’s confidence in Schmerler. What, finally, do people know about things? These men were professionals. They wanted to ruin him. And I know for a fact that it was Perflidowitz himself who started that shameful name going around— ‘Basement Schmerler!’

“I’ll tell you something. History is the record of great men’s jealousies. That’s all.

“You see, don’t you, they had forgiven themselves. It’s ironic. They took the one thing he stressed again and again and used it against him. They had forgiven themselves in advance for all the evil they would ever do. It gave them their strength.

“What could I do? Could I let this happen? What were my obligations to Schmerler whom I had made— and, through him, to Europe, which he had made? Of course. I murdered Reuss. I killed him. Well, what else could I do? These were civilized men, Europeans. Reason ‘they could cope with; emotion they could cope with. Only barbarity they could not cope with.”

He took his palm away from his head, and the skin dropped slowly into place. “Understand,” he said, “I am not speaking metaphorically. This was no symbolic slaughter. I killed him, stopped his heart, spilled real blood.” He paused, and then, looking down at Fossier’s oldest boy, appeared to study him momentarily. “Chicken plucker,” he said absently.

“So they knew,” he said, turning to me again. “Heinmacher knew, Perflidowitz knew, that one man in Europe anyway was still loyal to Schmerler and would kill to prevent him harm. That took the sting from their jealousy.

“But I betrayed Schmerler, too. My confession is not that I murdered Reuss, but that I have never forgiven myself for murdering Reuss.” He touched my arm. Painfully, it seemed to me, he shook his head, the loose skin and pouches of ancient flesh subtly readjusting themselves. Then I noticed that his right eye, the one he had hidden in his palm, was fluttering involuntarily, the pupil itself seemed to vibrate wildly, while his great, old, almost colorless left eye continued to stare at me. He pushed himself back from the desk.

“It was the clothes,” he said.

He seemed bored, perhaps only tired. The hell with what the papers say, The Reader’s Digest. It takes Barney Baruch longer now to make those millions. And Frost is nobody’s Bobby. He’s beyond even Robert. No financier, no poet, no placement officer ever screwed around with time and got away with it. Herlitz still had the stuff, but it was the old stuff. And if that was the source of awe, it was the source of pity, too. However, I was wrong. He was only waiting until I understood.

“The clothes,” he said. “Your clothes. You dress like a pensioner. You’re — what?”

“James Boswell.”

“No, no, your age. Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Oh,” he said. “Already seventeen.”

Clearly he was disappointed. Perhaps I had first struck him as precocious. It was as if whatever there had still been time for if I were fifteen or sixteen, was out of the question now at seventeen. I was not precocious after all. I was retarded.

“All right,” he said, suddenly energetic. “What do you want?”

Again I didn’t understand.

“From life. From life. Those clothes, those wonderful clothes, that sort of effacement at, what is it, seventeen — all right, even seventeen. Remarkable! You almost prove Hibbler. If he were alive to see you he would dance. Do you know that? Of course not, my baby, how could you know that? Hibbler was the great interpreter of myth. A brilliant man. Pointed out that the animal’s threat to eat a child alive in fairy tales is a euphemism for the sex act. Children have understood that for years. Well, that’s beside the point. You know of course the story of the Emperor’s clothes?

“There was once a proud and foolish Emperor. One day the Emperor had to consult with his tailor regarding his costume for a very special state occasion. Now, in the past the Emperor had been unkind to the little tailor, and the tailor, annoyed at the Emperor’s tyrannies, decided to play a trick on him. ‘Sire,’ the tailor said, ‘I knew you would need them and so I have been working on these for nine months. Wear them, your Highness.’ With that the tailor held out to the Emperor — nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Emperor was confused, but the tailor hastened to reassure him. ‘They are woven of magic thread, your Grace. To fools they appear like rags, or less than rags, but to the genteel eye they have the magnificence that only an Emperor would dare to appear in.’