Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Hey, cut it out,” I said.

He was swaying in front of me now, as if I were an altarpiece.

“Now cut it out,” I said again. “Just stop it.”

He put his arms around me and pulled me forward and pushed me back to the rhythm of his chant. I felt tight, heavy, blocked, impossibly like some sentient trunk in an attic, filled with things no one would ever use. Suddenly he roared the word “dibbuk” and began to beat my breast.

“Why, you old-timey Polish man. Dibbuks, is it? So that’s the meaning of life. Soul infesters, spiritual viruses, termites in the heart’s old woodwork.” I pulled away from him. “Enough’s enough, Rabbi. Pleased to have met you.” As I stepped out the door, instinctively I kissed my finger and touched it to the mazuzah in exactly the way I had read somewhere that Jews do.

My techniques grow increasingly desperate and bizarre. What is it? Why? I begin to break through. I begin to know the famous. I begin to see them a second time, a third. I am young; I am a young man. How many young men have the lists I have? Yet I become extravagant, bolder, wilder, as though I were without the glands of shame. I am driven to outrages of the spirit. I plunder. I rape. A barbarian of the better neighborhoods, somehow my own victim, too. There is in me a kind of prurience — not sexual, a misappropriated lust, misinformed. I am at large, a subversive in the suburbs. It is startling that I have not been arrested, that I do not languish in jail, that civilization has not brought charges.

Sometimes, when I pass policemen, I feel like dropping little notes in crayon saying, “Catch me before it’s too late!”

June 30, 1958. Los Farronentes, Q. R.

Lano’s incredible sources of supply continue to amaze me. Today a plane with Polish markings landed at the airstrip here. The Chinese pilot had a Maori, a Greek, two Canadians, an Egyptian, a Sherpa and a Pakistani with him.

Lano greeted the others warmly but was furious when he saw the Pakistani. “This man weighs only eight stone,” he shouted. “He weighs only eight stone. Where’s my Turk? I was promised a Turk. How can I make an international revolution if I have no Turk?” He turned to me. “In his country is the famine so to here he comes. Already I feed nine Pakistanis. To make a revolution with so much Pakistanis is very bad.” He turned to the Chinese pilot. “Where is my Turk?”

Although he had been flying a DC-6, the man wore enormous pilot’s goggles over his eyes. The lenses were faintly steamy and behind them his pupils looked like some weird seafood. He stared at Lano sadly.

“Get him to say,” Lano demanded of Dr. Mud.

Dr. Mud said something to the pilot in Chinese.

“This is unnecessary,” the pilot suddenly replied in English. “No Turk could be found. Perhaps next trip. There is a Turk in London who has expressed interest.”

Lano sighed wearily. “I go in the plane,” he said. He climbed into the DC-6 and we heard him moving around inside, shoving aside the heavy wooden crates. “Machine guns,” he shouted. “Hands grenades. Revolvers. Where are my automatic rifles? Never mind, I see them.” He stood in the doorway. “Where are the magazines?”

“With the rifles,” the Chinese pilot said.

“Not those magazines. The magazines. The press.”

“There’s just this,” the pilot said. From his flying jacket he produced a copy of Time and handed it up. Lano took it eagerly and sat down in the cabin of the plane and began to thumb through it very rapidly. “Two paragraphs,” he said dejectedly and stood up. “Here,” he said, “Boswell, from your native land.” He threw the magazine to me.

Tonight, in my tent, I have been reading it. It is the issue of May fifteenth, but I’ve been in the mountains since early April. As I read each of the departments— The Nation, The Hemisphere, The World, People —I began to compose a letter to the editor:

Sir:

We here at The Revolution don’t get much chance to hear about what’s happening to People back in The Nation. We’re kept pretty busy making over The World. Then, too, we don’t often have the opportunity to see The Press, and so miss out on the latest developments in Art, Books, Cinema, Education, Medicine, Religion, Science, Sport and Milestones. So, believe me, when even an old copy of TIME comes through it’s pretty well thumbed, believe me…

I was having a pretty good time. Toward the back, in U.S. Business, there was a picture of William Lome, and I started to read the story. It spoke of Lome glowingly, recounting anecdotes which, despite their familiarity, were interesting, but somehow I couldn’t see the point of the article. It was only after I had almost finished it that I realized that it was an obituary and that William Lome is dead.

Uncle Myles. Lome. Lazaar. Turnover, turnover. Herlitz. Turnover. My parents. Turnover. Turnover. Turnover.

Yesterday I got another chance to speak with Lano.

Rohnspeece came into the tent excited. “It’s Fourth of July,” he told me. “The General is going to give all us Americans a special toast. You better hurry.” He flashed a rag across his boots and raced out. “He’s taking us through the gate himself,” he called back to me.

I wasn’t going. I had been disenchanted for weeks. Jesus, I thought, how do I get involved in these things? There were enough great men around without going into the jungles to look for them. I had made a mistake. It was the thought of being in on something big from the beginning that did it. When I’d first heard about the revolution it was still only a rumor, something plotted in a tavern. Not all the people were even out of jail yet.

Now I wait for one of three things to happen: Lano to win the war; Lano to lose the war; Lano to get me out through one of his complicated channels. “Only the deep wounded can go,” Lano says, and adds, “when there is time.” And ought to add, “And when there are wounded.” There are no wounded, no dead, no missing. We might be in the Catskills waiting out the summer. We sit encamped in these damn mountains and Lano makes his revolution over the radio, sending out phony communiqués about towns taken, bridges blown, labor unions out on sympathy strikes, leaders of the regime committing suicide. He makes up a terrific revolution, Lano. Privately he explains that this is the “Valley Forge phase” of his revolution and that Los Farronentes is our chrysalis. A classicist, Lano.

Dr. Mud came in. “God’s first attribute is His eye,” he said. “Lano will perhaps note the American’s absence.”

“He doesn’t need me. I’m not one of his soldiers.”

Mud shrugged and gave me his mysterious smile.

Dr. Mud is the only genuinely sinister man I have ever met. I’m always looking for the fez which ought to be on his head, the Palm Beach yellow-white suit on his back. I had coffee with him in his tent one night and automatically I found myself switching our paper cups. As far as I can make out he represents “certain foreign interests.”

He shaded his eyes (it is dark in the tent, but whenever he looks at you Dr. Mud shades his eyes) and told me in his amused, Cauco-Asiatic voice, using the upper register tones this time, that it would be better not to anger Lano.

“The shell of the young turtle is hard,” he said, “but exceeding brittle.” (Mud uses a lot of sinister Eastern sayings. I think he makes them up. I have taken to answering him in kind and have gotten pretty good at it.)

“The east wind never blows without first consulting the west wind,” I said.

“Ah,” said Mud, “every ocean climbs mountains to the shore.”