Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Mosby realized that compassion should be felt. But passing in the night the locked, gleaming car, and seeing huddled Lustgarten, sleeping, covered with two coats, on the majestic seat, like Jonah inside Leviathan, Mosby could not say in candor that what he experienced was sympathy. Rather he reflected that this shoe salesman, in America attached to foreign doctrines, who could not relinquish Europe in the New World, was now, in Paris, sleeping in the Cadillac, encased in this gorgeous Fisher Body from Detroit. At home exotic, in Europe a Yankee. His timing was off. He recognized this himself. But believed, in general, that he was too early. A pioneer. For instance, he said, in a voice that creaked with shy assertiveness, the French were only now beginning to be Marxians. He had gone through it all years ago. What did these people know! Ask them about the Shakhty Engineers! About Lenin’s Democratic Centralism! About the Moscow Trials! About “Social Fascism”! They were ignorant. The Revolution having been totally betrayed, these Europeans suddenly discovered Marx and Lenin. “Eureka!” he said in a high voice. And it was the cold war, beneath it all.

For should America lose, the French intellectuals were preparing to collaborate with Russia. And should America win they could still be free, defiant radicals under American protection.

“You sound like a patriot,” said Mosby.

“Well, in a way I am,” said Lustgarten. “But I am getting to be objective. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘If you were outside the world, if you, Lustgarten, didn’t exist as a man, what would your opinion be of this or that?’”

“Disembodied truth.”

“I guess that’s what it is.”

“And what are you going to do about the Cadillac?” said Mosby.

“I’m sending it to Spain. We can sell it in Barcelona.”

“But you have to get it there.”

“Through Andorra. It’s all arranged. Klonsky is driving it.”

Klonsky was a Polish Belgian in the hotel. One of Lustgartens associates, congenitally dishonest, Mosby thought. Kinky hair, wrinkled eyes like Greek olives, and a cat nose and cat lips. He wore Russian boots.

But no sooner had Klonsky departed for Andorra than Lustgarten received a marvelous offer for the car. A capitalist in Utrecht wanted it at once and would take care of all excise problems. He had all the necessary tuyaux, unlimited drag. Lustgarten wired Klonsky in Andorra to stop. He raced down on the night train, recovered the Cadillac, and started driving back at once. There was no time to lose. But after sitting up all night on the rapide, Lustgarten was drowsy in the warmth of the Pyrenees and fell asleep at the wheel. He was lucky, he later said, for the car went down a mountainside and might have missed the stone wall that stopped it. He was only a foot or two from death when he was awakened by the crash. The car was destroyed. It was not insured.

Still faintly smiling, Lustgarten, with his sling and cane, came to Mosby’s café table on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Sat down. Removed his hat from dazzling black hair. Asked permission to rest his injured foot on a chair. “Is this a private conversation?” he said.

Mosby had been chatting with Alfred Ruskin, an American poet. Ruskin, though some of his front teeth were missing, spoke very clearly and swiftly. A perfectly charming man. Inveterately theoretical. He had been saying, for instance, that France had shot its collaborationist poets. America, which had no poets to spare, put Ezra Pound in Saint Elizabeth’s. He then went on to say, barely acknowledging Lustgarten, that America had had no history, was not a historical society. His proof was from Hegel. According to Hegel, history was the history of wars and revolutions. The United States had had only one revolution and very few wars. Therefore it was historically empty. Practically a vacuum.

Ruskin also used Mosby’s conveniences at the hotel, being too fastidious for his own latrine in the Algerian backstreets of the Left Bank. And when he emerged from the bathroom he invariably had a topic sentence.

“I have discovered the main defect of Kierkegaard.”

Or, “Pascal was terrified by universal emptiness, but Valéry says the difference between empty space and space in a bottle is only quantitative, and there is nothing intrinsically terrifying about quantity. What is your view?”

We do not live in bottles—Mosby’s reply.

Lustgarten said, when Ruskin left us, “Who is that fellow? He mooched you for the coffee.”

“Ruskin,” said Mosby.

“That is Ruskin?”

“Yes, why?”

“I hear my wife was going out with Ruskin while I was in the hospital.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t believe such rumors,” said Mosby. “A cup of coffee, an aperitif together, maybe.”

“When a man is down on his luck,” said Lustgarten, “it’s the rare woman who won’t give him hell in addition.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Mosby replied.

And then, as Mosby in Oaxaca recalled, shifting his seat from the sun—for he was already far too red, and his face, bones, eyes, seemed curiously thirsty—Lustgarten had said, “It’s been a terrible experience.”

“Undoubtedly so, Lustgarten. It must have been frightening.”

“What crashed was my last stake. It involved family. Too bad in a way that I wasn’t killed. My insurance would at least have covered my kid brother’s loss. And my mother and uncle.”

Mosby had no wish to see a man in tears. He did not care to sit through these moments of suffering. Such unmastered emotion was abhorrent. Though perhaps the violence of this abomination might have told Mosby something about his own moral constitution. Perhaps Lustgarten did not want his face to be working. Or tried to subdue his agitation, seeing from Mosby’s austere, though not unkind, silence that this was not his way. Mosby was by taste a Senecan. At least he admired Spanish masculinity—the varonil of Lorca. The clavel varonil, the manly red carnation, the clear classic hardness of honorable control.

“You sold the wreck for junk, I assume?”

“Klonsky took care of it. Now look, Mosby. I’m through with that. I was reading, thinking, in the hospital. I came over to make a pile. Like the gold rush. I really don’t know what got into me. Trudy and I were just sitting around during the war. I was too old for the draft. And we both wanted action. She in music. Or life. Excitement. You know, dreaming at Montclair Teachers’ College of the Big Time. I wanted to make it possible for her. Keep up with the world, or something. But really—in my hospital bed I realized—I was right the first time. I am a socialist. A natural idealist. Reading about Attlee, I felt at home again. It became clear that I am still a political animal.”

Mosby wished to say, “No, Lustgarten. You’re a dandier of swarthy little babies. You’re a piggyback man—a giddyap horsie. You’re a sweet old Jewish Daddy.” But he said nothing.

“And I also read,” said Lustgarten, “about Tito. Maybe the Tito alternative is the real one. Perhaps there is hope for socialism somewhere between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav type of leadership. I feel it my duty,” Lustgarten told Mosby, “to investigate. I’m thinking of going to Belgrade.”

“As what?”

“As a matter of fact, that’s where you could come in,” said Lustgarten. “If you would be so kind. You’re not just a scholar. You wrote a book on Plato, I’ve been told.”

“On the Laws.”

“And other books. But in addition you know the Movement. Lots of people. More connections than a switchboard….”

The slang of the forties.

“You know people at the New Leader?”

“Not my type of paper,” said Mosby. “I’m actually a political conservative. Not what you would call a Rotten Liberal but an out-and-out conservative. I shook Franco’s hand, you know.”