Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Appended to the valedictory is a letter from the Department of the Army, Office of the Adjutant General, advising Mr. Stavis that he will have to find out what rules the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) has governing the bringing into their country of human remains for the purpose of burial. Inquiries may be made at the GDR chancery in Washington, D. C. As for expenses, the liability of the U. S. government is unfortunately restricted, and it cannot pay for the transportation of Scholem’s body, much less for the passage or his mourning family. Allowances for cemeteries and burial plots may be available through the Veterans Administration. The letter is decent and sympathetic.

Of course, the colonel who signs it can’t be expected to know how remarkable a person Scholem Stavis is.

There is a final communication, concerning a gathering next year in Paris (September 1984) to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Marne. This will honor the taxi drivers who took part in the defense of the city by carrying fighting men to the front. Cabbies from all countries have been invited to this event, even pedal-cab drivers from Southeast Asia. The grand procession will form near Napoleon’s tomb and then follow the route taken in 1914. Scholem means to salute the last of the venerable taxicabs on display in the Invalides. As a member of the planning committee, he will soon go to Paris to take part in the preparations for this event. On the way home he will stop in New York City, where he will call upon the five permanent members of the Security Council to ask them to respect the spirit of the great day at Torgau, and to take a warm farewell of everybody. He will visit the French UN delegation at nine-thirty A.M., the Soviet Union at eleven, China at twelve-thirty, Great Britain at two P.M., the U.S.A. at half past three. At five P.M. he will pay his respects to the Secretary General. Then return to Chicago and a “new life”—the life promised in John 12:24.

He appeals for financial assistance in the name of mankind itself, referring again to the dignity of humanity in this century.

Lesser documents contain statements on nuclear disarmament and on the hopeful prospects for an eventual reconciliation between the superpowers, in the spirit of Torgau. At three A. M. my head is not clear enough to study them.

Sleep is out of the question, so instead of going to bed I make myself some strong coffee. No use sacking out; I’d only go on thinking.

Insomnia is not a word I apply to the sharp thrills of deep-night clarity that come to me. During the day the fusspot habits of a lifetime prevent real discovery. I have learned to be grateful for the night hours that harrow the nerves and tear up the veins—“lying in restless ecstasy.” To want this, and to bear it, you need a strong soul.

I lie down with the coffee in one of my Syrian corners (I didn’t intend to create this Oriental environment; how did it come into existence?), lie down in proximity to the smooth, lighted, empty moon surface of the Outer Drive to consider what I might do for Cousin Scholem. Why do anything? Why not just refer him to the good-intentions department? After he had been in the good-intentions chamber five or six times, I could almost feel that I had done something for him. The usual techniques of evasion would not, however, work in Cousin Scholem’s case. The son of Jewish immigrants (his father was in the egg business in Fulton Market), Cousin Scholem was determined to find support in Nature and History for freedom and to mitigate, check, or banish the fear of death that governs the species—convulses it. He was, moreover, a patriotic American (a terribly antiquated affect) and a world citizen. Above all he wanted to affirm that all would be well, to make a distinguished gift, to bless mankind. In all this Scholem fitted the classical norm for Jews of the diaspora. Against the Chicago background of boardrooms and back rooms, of fraud, arson, assassination, hit men, bag men, the ideology of decency disseminated from unseen sources of power—the moral law, never thicker, in Chicago, than onionskin or tissue paper—was now a gas as rare as argon. Anyway, think of him, perhaps the most powerful mind ever to be placed behind the wheel of a cab, his passengers descendants of Belial who made II Corinthians look sick, and Scholem amid unparalleled decadence being ever more pure in thought. The effort gave him a malignant tumor. I have also been convinced always that the strain of driving ten hours a day in city traffic is enough to give you cancer. It’s the enforced immobility that does it; and there’s also the aggravated ill will, the reflux of fury released by organisms, and perhaps by mechanisms, too.

But what could I do for Scholem? I couldn’t go running to his house and ring the bell after thirty years of estrangement. I couldn’t bring financial assistance—I don’t have the money to print so many thousands of pages. He would need a hundred thousand at least, and he might expect Ijah to conjure it out of the barren air of the Loop. Didn’t Ijah belong to a crack team of elite financial analysts? But Cousin Ijah was not one of the operators who had grabbed off any of the big money available for “intellectual” projects or enlightened reforms, the political grant-getters who have millions to play with.

Also I shrank from sitting down with him in his six-flat parlor to discuss his life’s work. I didn’t have the language it required. My college biology would be of no use. My Spengler was deader than the Bohemian Cemetery where we discussed the great questions (dignified surroundings, massy tombs, decaying flowers).

I didn’t have a language to share with Cousin Motty, either, to open my full mind to him; and from his side Cousin Scholem couldn’t enlist my support for his philosophical system until I had qualified myself by years of study. So little time was left that it was out of the question. In the circumstances, all I could do was to try to raise funds to have him buried in East Germany. The Communists, needing hard currency so badly, would not turn down a reasonable proposition. And toward morning, as I washed and shaved, I remembered that there was a cousin in Elgin, Illinois—not a close cousin, but one with whom I had always had friendly and even affectionate relations. He might be able to help. The affections have to manage as they can at a time so abnormal. They are kept alive in storage, as it were, for one doesn’t often see their objects. These mental hydro-ponic growths can, however, be curiously durable and tenacious. People seem able to keep one another on “hold” for decades or scores of years. Separations like these have a flavor of eternity. One interpretation of “having no contemporaries” is that all valuable associations are kept in a time-arrested state. Those who are absent seem to sense that they have not lost their value for you. The relationship is played ritardando on a trance instrument of which the rest of the orchestra is only subliminally aware.

The person I refer to was still there, in Elgin. Mendy Eckstine, once a freelance journalist and advertising man, was now semiretired. He and Scholem Stavis were from altogether different spheres. Eckstine had been my pool-hall, boxing, jazz-club cousin. Mendy had had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time. Born in Muskingum, Ohio, where his father ran a gents’ furnishings shop, he attended a Chicago high school and grew up a lively, slangy man who specialized in baseball players, vaudeville performers, trumpeters and boogie-woogie musicians, gamblers, con artists, city hall small-rackets types. The rube shrewdie was a type he dearly loved—“Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.” Mendy’s densely curled hair was combed straight up, his cheeks were high, damaged by acne, healed to a patchy whiteness. He had a wonderful start of the head, to declare that he was about to set the record straight. He used to make this movement when he laid down his cigarette on the edge of the pool table of the University of Wisconsin Rathskeller and picked up his cue to study his next shot. From Mendy as from Seckel I had learned songs. He loved hick jazz numbers like “Sounds a Little Goofus to Me,” and in particular, Oh, the cows went dry and the hens wouldn’t lay When he played on his ole cornet.