Richard Weiner: The Game for Real

The bundle of Mr. Steel’s virtues were dying of shame for the fact that police stations don’t have someone who plugs the madmen’s mugs.

“Do you have any objections to our releasing this person?”

Mr. Steel indicated with a shrug of his shoulders that it wasn’t even worth asking.

“Is there something you wish to add?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Steel said with cheerful zeal. “Charenton asylum.”

“You may go,” the commissioner responded with a very polite gesture, but in a voice so stern that Mr. Steel, having initiated his own gesture, froze at the voice.

“Unless. .”

“Unless?” Mr. Steel repeated, unsettled.

In a single leap toward our fellow, who was standing there with his arms hanging down, the commissioner seized him in a half nelson. At the same time he hunched over slightly, and hunched over in this way he turned his head toward Mr. Steel, who was walking away, and roared:

“Hold on! — Come here.”

A livid Mr. Steel came over.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

“The slap that you didn’t deliver at Benedictine Mill. . finish it off, you scoundrel!”

“Finish it off, scoundrel,” he stamped, as Mr. Steel was looking around helplessly. “That’s an order.”

And Mr. Steel’s hand rose without his assistance, and it landed on the face of the motionless person, who didn’t even blink. Who didn’t blink, not even afterwards, when he sensed that the commissioner, having released his arms, had drawn himself up and nestled in close to him.

“You may go,” he commanded Mr. Steel again, and when the latter made a move, the former attached himself to him like one soldier joining another in formation, and he accompanied him to the door, which he opened. There he turned to face him and repeated, “You may go,” only a bit more tersely and as though put out.

Behind the slammed door, a few inches of light fell. It fell upon the point where even the false modesty of angels turns to ice.

Without moving so much as a step, the commissioner turned around, he had an enormous smile on his lips, he threw open his arms and called out:

“Come!”

Then the other fellow, having thrown his cap carelessly on, started running headlong, his head so hammered with joy it weighed it down, you’d say he was like a ram attacking an impossible rampart, but which he knocked down by faith, not suspecting that this was not enough.

And, in fact, there was this:

When he’d finished running and looked up in order to rest in those open arms, he spotted a young redheaded man with a tousled mop of hair and a hard look that, instead of open arms, showed him the door and said:

“All I know is the law — I have to — it’s firm.”

Our fellow threw himself into his arms; the commissioner shrank back:

“What’s this now? Why?” he asked tenderly, but he swiftly straightened himself up and stamped:

“Get out!”

The day was dazzling, and it was having a laugh with the lustrous parts of Mr. Steel’s car. A policeman was making his rounds as though he were looking after it, this car. His surprise at the arrestee coming out gave way to professional neutrality.

For the old-timer — for it was an old-timer coming out of the station immediately after Mr. Steel — this neutrality inspired such confidence that he stopped to revel in the bright day; never before had he stepped into such sunlight. At the same time, and if it were possible still more devastatingly, he was reveling in the astonishingly luminous certainty that he took no pride in himself. He didn’t even know how he’d pulled off that little step beyond, that little step from there to a still newer certainty, though this time only darkly illuminated: that is, the certainty that he was invulnerable.

Mr. Steel was already sitting in his automobile; he was stretching out his arm to pull the door shut. But that other fellow jumped forward and closed it with delicate courtesy and a bow:

“Votre serviteur!”

Had he perhaps forgotten his hand on the handle? When the car lunged forward he had a hell of a time keeping on his feet.

The policeman hooked his right hand to his belt and caught sight of him as he staggered.

“ Pauvre vieux! ” he guffawed in unstressed arsis, so it didn’t really count.

The day was dazzling, and no longer having Mr. Steel’s automobile to kid around with it took our old-timer by the hand and led him to the nearby embankment, down the platform, a little ways and a little more, along the row of tugboats meditating on winter ports and on the loves of the neighboring shipbuilders’ teenage children. — And it was the waterfront where they sheared dogs. And there was one shearer whose exclamations had become the crystallization of the real, around which the crystals of the irrevocable things of life crowded of their own accord.

“You, old man. . hold him for me.”

It was walking there with weaned step. Some mutt. He was supposed to grab it head-on, and he had to crouch down. The animal held still. The muzzle was so close to his mouth that it cooled his parch. It was an oblique, black muzzle, all warty, but so tidy. How, dear God, is one to remain in this tidiness of the mute face and not move toward the eyes, toward the eyes with reddish pupils that didn’t shy away? What am I saying, didn’t shy away! Patiently, fervently, quietly, they were seeking other eyes, to speak with them mutely! They spotted each other, and they said nothing to one another, except: “We live.”

They were saying to each other, “We live, we live, we live,” while that other fellow there was shearing.

At last they let the dog go. It shivered. The old-timer took his unlearned walk further along, not looking back. But because the call “here boy, here boy” didn’t fade behind him, at length he did look back, and he saw that the dog was following him. He waited for it to catch up, and when it had, it squatted to crap in front of him. He tried to turn its head toward the customer; she was calling for it. The dog resisted. Again he saw its reddish pupils, beautifully starry and even more beautifully mute. They demanded no answer; there was nothing they would want to know. And their incuriosity was so colossal that there could be no doubt: only eyes that had already grasped everything could be so very incurious. The old man was gazing for the first time into eyes that showed no fear, for the first time into a gaze that only looked.

He turned its head, and in the end he turned the whole thing, that it might make up its mind to return to its owner. And leaving it this way, he set off more quickly.

“Here boy, here boy,” he heard again.

He looked back. The animal was hurrying after him. The day was dazzling in its stone-like reality.

(August 1930–February 1931)