Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Victor’s mind was also at work, although you couldn’t say that he was thinking. Something soft and heavy seemed to have been spread over his body. It resembled the lead apron laid over you by X-ray technicians. Victor was stretched under this suave deadly weight and feeling as you felt when waking from a deep sleep—unable to lift your arm. On the field, in the winter light, the standing machines were paler than the air, and the entire airport stood in a frame of snow, looking like a steel engraving. It reminded him of the Lower East Side in—oh, about 1912. The boys (ancients today, those who were alive) were reading the Pentateuch. The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven. V’hinei malachi elohim —behold the angels of God going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him. Jacob was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no “long ago.” It was all now. The cellar classroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging from the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down. This did not have to be interpreted. It came about in a trance, as if under the leaden weight of the flexible apron. Now the plane was starting its takeoff run, and soon the NO SMOKING sign would be turned off. Victor would have liked to smoke, but the weight of his hands made any movement impossible.

It wasn’t like him to cherish such recollections, although he had them, and they had lately been more frequent. He began now to remember that his mother had given him the windpipe of a goose after drying it in the Dutch oven of the coal stove, and that he had cut a notch in the windpipe with his father’s straight razor and made a whistle of it. When it was done, he disliked it. Even when dry it had kept its terrible red color, and it was very harsh to the touch and had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This was not exactly Marx’s nightmare of history from which mankind had to be liberated. The raw fowl taste was nasty. The angels on the fire escape, however, were very pleasing, and his consciousness of them, while it was four thousand years old, had also been exactly contemporary. Different ideas of time and space had not yet been imposed upon him. One comprehensive light contained everybody. Among the rest—parents, patriarchs, angels, God—there was yourself. Victor did not feel bound to get to the bottom of this; it was only a trance, probably an effect of fatigue and injury. He gave a side thought to Mass. General, where a tumor had been lifted out of a well of blood in his belly, and he reminded himself that he was still a convalescent—reminded himself also that Baudelaire had believed the artist to be always in a spiritually convalescent state. (This really was Baudelaire Day; just a while ago it had been the touch that brought the dead to life.) Only just returned from the shadow of death, the convalescent inhaled with delight the close human odors of the plane. Pollution didn’t matter, the state of a convalescent being the state of a child drunk with impressions. Genius must be the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will. Victor knew all this like the palm of his hand or the nose on his face. By combining the strength of a man (analytic power) with the ecstasy of a child you could discover the New. What God’s Revelation implied was that the Jews (his children) would obstinately will (with mature intelligence) the divine adult promise. This would earn them the hatred of the whole world. They were always archaic, and they were always contemporary—we could sort that out later.

But now suppose that this should not be convalescence but something else, and that he should be on the circuit not because he was recovering but because he was losing ground. Falling apart? This was where Katrina entered the picture. Hers was the touch that resurrected, or that reunited, reintegrated his otherwise separating physical powers. He asked himself: That she turns me on, does that mean that I love her, or does it simply mean that she belongs to the class of women that turn me on? He didn’t like the question he was asking. But he was having many difficult sensations, innumerable impressions of winter, winters of seven decades superimposed. The winter world even brought him a sound, not for the ear but for some other organ. And none of this was clearly communicable, nor indeed worth communicating. It was simply part of the continuing life of every human being. Everybody was filled with visions that had been repressed, and amassed involuntarily, and when you were sick they were harder to disperse.

“I can tell you, now that we’re in the air, Victor, that I am relieved. I wasn’t sure we’d get back.” The banking plane gave them a single glimpse of Lake Erie slanting green to the right, and then rose into dark-gray snow clouds. It was a bumpy flight. The headwind was strong. “Have I ever told you about my housekeeper’s husband? He’s a handsome old Negro who used to be a dining-car waiter. Now he gambles. Impressive to look at. Ysole’s afraid of him.”

“Why are we discussing him?”

“I wonder if I shouldn’t have a talk with her husband about Ysole. If she takes money from Alfred, my ex-husband, if she should testify against me in the case, it would be serious. Alfred’s lawyer could bring out that she raised me, and therefore has my number.”

“Would she want to harm you as much as that?”

“Well, she’s always been somewhat cracked. She used to call herself a conjure -woman. She’s shrewd and full of the devil.”

“I wonder why we’re flying at this altitude. By now we should have been above the clouds,” said Victor.

They had fifteen minutes of open sky and then dropped back again into the darkness. “Yes, why are we so low?” said Katrina. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

The seat-belt sign went on and the pilot announced, “Owing to the weather, O’Hare Airport is closed, briefly. We will be landing in Detroit in five minutes.”

“I can’t be stuck in Detroit!” said Katrina.

“Easy, Katrina. In Chicago it isn’t even one o’clock. We’ll probably sit on the ground awhile and take right off again.”

Suddenly fields were visible beneath—warehouses, hangars, highways, water. The landing gear came into position as Katrina, watching from the ground, had often seen it do, when the belly of the Boeing opened and the black bristling innards descended. Victor was able to stop one of the busy stewardesses, and she told them that it was a bad scene in Chicago. “Blitzed by snow.”

When they disembarked they found themselves immediately in a crowd of grounded passengers. Once you got into such a crowd your fear was that you’d never get out. How lucky that Victor was not fazed. He was going forward in that rising-falling gait of his, his brows resembling the shelf mushrooms that grow on old tree trunks. For her part, Katrina was paralyzed by tension. Signs signified little. BAGGAGE CLAIM: there was no baggage. She was carrying Vanessa’s precious fiddle. TERMINAL: Why should Victor limp all the way to the terminal only to be sent back to some gate? “There should be agents here to give information.”

“No way. They’re not organized for this,” said Victor. “And we can’t get near the phones. They’re lined up ten deep. Let’s see if we can find two seats and try to figure out what to do.”

It was slow going. Alternate blasts of chill from the gates and heat from the blowers caught them about the legs and in the face. They found a single seat, and Victor sat himself down. He had that superlative imperturbability in the face of accident and local disturbances that Katrina was welcome to share if she could. Beila seemed to have learned how to do it. Trina had not acquired the knack. Victor laid his heel on the duffel bag. The violin case he took between his legs. With his stick he improvised a barrier to keep people from tripping over him.