Ravelstein

"Lucky for you," he went on, "you have a vocation. So this is just a side thing. It's not a genuine case of sex-slavery or psychopathology. Of Human Bondage, yes. But for you it's only marginal. You may simply be having fun, and diverting yourself in the pure green innocence of the White Mountains with these minor vices-sex tortures."

"Ever since you burst in on us in Paris she began to say that you and I were carrying on together."

He was stopped cold by this. In the silence I could see this unexpected "information" being processed by an apparatus-I mean this seriously-of great power. That Ravelstein was vastly intelligent is not a challengeable proposition. He was at the head of a school. To several hundred people here and in England, France, and Italy he was exactly that. He interpreted Rousseau to the French, Machiavelli to the Italians, et cetera.

After a pause, he said, "Ha! And by carrying on together does she mean what I think she means? After years of marriage?… How long have you been married?"

"Twelve whole years," I told him.

"Twelve! How pathetic," Ravelstein said. "Like a prison term you sentenced yourself to. You're even a faithful husband. You served day after day after day with no time off for good behavior or applying for parole."

"I was busy with absorbing work," I said. "In the morning she'd put on her clothes and her makeup and then check her hair, her face, and her figure in three different lighted mirrors-dressing room, bathroom, and guest toilet. Then she'd slam out of the front door. I had half a headache and half a heartache. This concentrated my mind."

"She doesn't know how to dress," said Ravelstein. "All those strange materials-what was it she was wearing last year? Ostrich hide?… Finally she accuses you of having a corrupt sex affair with me. What did you say?"

"I laughed like anything. I told her I didn't even know how the act was done, and that I wasn't ready to learn, at my age. It seemed like a joke. Still she didn't believe me…."

"She couldn't believe you," said Ravelstein. "It took too much out of her to invent even this pitiful accusation. Her mental range on that side is extremely limited-though I'm told she's very big in chaos physics."

It was from Abe's telephone network that this information must have come. The old expression "He has more connections than a switchboard" had now been buried under the masses of data heaped up by the wildly expanding communications technology.

Ravelstein had asked his friends everywhere for items about Vela, and he was prepared to tell me much more than I wanted to hear. So that I would clap my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut. But you can't keep your innocence in this age. Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear, or see. Love of scandal makes people ingenious. Vela was ingenious in her science and guiltless in her conduct.

You couldn't, as the intimate and friend of Ravelstein, avoid knowing a great deal more than you had an appetite for. But at a certain depth there were places in your psyche that still belonged to the Middle Ages. Or even to the age of the pyramids or Ur of the Chaldees. Ravelstein told me about Vela's relationships with people I had never heard of till now. He said he was ready to name my rivals but I wouldn't listen. Since she didn't love me I had, with innate biological resourcefulness, holed up behind my desk and finished a few long-postponed projects-quoting Robert Frost to myself: _For I have promises to keep __A_nd miles to go before I sleep.

__

At times changing this to: _For I have recipes to bake __A_nd far to go before I wake.

__

The joke was on me, not on Frost-a sententious old guy whose conversation was mainly about his own doings, about his accomplishments and triumphs. It can't be denied that he was a self-promoter. He had PR genius. But he was a writer of rare gifts, nevertheless.

To hear about Vela's alleged misconduct was destabilizing. I lose my footing, I stumble when I remember what Ravelstein told me about her various affairs. Why were there so many conferences to attend in summer? Why didn't she give me phone numbers where she could be reached? Of course, he wouldn't have been interested in these facts if they hadn't been singular facts. As I have said, Ravelstein was crazy about gossip and his friends were given points for the racy items they brought. And it was not a good idea to assume that he would keep the lid on your confidences. I was not particularly disturbed about this. People are infinitely more clever than they used to be about pursuing your secrets. If they know your secrets they have increased power over you. There's no stopping or checking them. Build as many labyrinths as you like, you're sure to be found out. And of course I was aware that Ravelstein didn't care a damn about "secrets."

But since Ravelstein had a large-scale mental life-and I say this without irony, his interests really were big-he needed to know everything there was to know about his friends and his students, just as a physician pursuing a diagnosis has to see you stripped naked. The comparison breaks down when you remember that the doctor is bound by ethical rules not to gossip about you. Ravelstein was not so bound. When I was a kid in the thirties the notion of the "naked truth" was in the air. "Let's have the naked truth." An Englishwoman named Claire Sheridan wrote a memoir called The Naked Truth. It was appropriate that she should have visited revolutionary Russia, where she seems to have been on familiar terms with Lenin and Trotsky and many other prominent Bolsheviks.

But all this is mere background.

Let's get on with it.

Ravelstein, speaking still of Vela, said, "You make her an offering-beautiful country summers-but she doesn't care about this place, Chick, or she'd spend more time here. And so I find it curious that you should try so hard. However," he continued, "let me say what I see in all this. I see the Jew, the child of immigrants, taking the American premises seriously. You are free to do what you like, and can realize your wishes fully. It's your privilege as an American to buy land and build a house where you live in full enjoyment of your rights. It's true there's nobody here but yourself. So you have built this New Hampshire sanctuary where you're surrounded by your family mementos. Your mother's Russian samovar is a beautiful object. It's thee-ah thee-ah terribly handsome. But it's far far far from the city of Tula-Tula was for samovars as coals were to New castle. Thee-ah thee-ah Tula samovar has never been in such a foreign location of maximum deracination. As for you, Chick, you're making your total American declaration of rights. It's very brave of you to do it but it's also off the wall…. For miles around, you're the only Jew. Your neighbors have one another to rely on. Whom do you have-a gentile wife? You've got a theory-equality before the law. It's a big comfort to have constitutional guarantees on your side, and it's certain to be appreciated by other devotees of the Constitution itself…."

He was enjoying himself. I didn't much mind. To be shown a pattern in my activities diverted me.

"I have to assume also that your tax bill is high…."

"It certainly is. And there are new education assessments yearly."

He said, "I can imagine what sort of education they get here. Have you ever attended a town meeting?"

"Once I did."

"And your high-stepping wife?"

"She was there, too." Before the cycle of obscure or new diseases began, Ravelstein and I had many fun conversations like the above. He seemed to think that I would value his opinion of my activities. Up to a point I did, in fact, find them useful. He said, for instance, that I was anything but risk-averse. And he asked, "I am fascinated by the marriages you've made-you remember Steve Brody, don't you?"

"The guy who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge on a bet."

"That's him-one of those spirited people."

See Plato's Republic, especially Book IV. I did not study those great texts closely, but there wasn't the slightest hope of following Ravelstein's thoughts if you were ignorant of them entirely. I was not really intimidated by them. By now I am as much at home with Plato as with Elmore Leonard.

"There's nothing I say to you that you don't immediately understand," Ravelstein would sometimes declare, but it's possible that he had cultivated the art of conversation with good old Chick and would take special care to go slowly with him. And it's possible also that as a genius educator he knew how much traffic my mind would bear.

In New Hampshire he would press me again and again to repeat old jokes, old gags, and vaudeville routines. "Do me that Jimmy Savvo song." Or else "How does the furious husband bit go, again? The heartbroken man who tells his buddy 'My wife cheats on me."

"Oh, yes. And the buddy says, 'Make love to her every day. Once a day at least. And in a year that will kill her.'

"'No!' The guy is astonished. 'Is that the answer?'"

"'Once a day. That often, she'll never survive…'

"Then a sign is brought on stage. You may remember how that was done. An usher with a round cap and a double row of buttons would carry out a tripod with a sign. In bold print this sign read, 'Fifty-one weeks later.' And then the husband is pushed onstage in a wheelchair by the wife. He looks very weak. Muffled in blankets like an invalid. The wife is blooming. She is dressed for tennis and has the racket under her arm. She fusses over him, tucks him in, kisses him. His eyes are closed. He looks like death. She says, 'Rest, darling, I'll be back after my set-real real soon.' As she strides off the feeble husband brings his hand up to his face and behind his hand in a wonderful vaudeville whisper he says confidentially to the audience, 'She don't know it, but she's got only a week to live.'"

Ravelstein threw his head back at this. Shutting his eyes he flung himself bodily backward into laughter. In my own different style I did the same thing. As I've said before it was our sense of what was funny that brought us together, but that would have been a thin, anemic way to put it. A joyful noise-_immenso giubilo__-an outsize joint agreement picked us up together, and it would get you nowhere to try to formulate it.

In those days, Rosamund had a long ride on the elevated train. She crossed the huge breadth of the city, and she had the faces of her fellow passengers to train her thoughts and feelings on. She brought me the week's mail and the phone messages. For two years she had been my graduate-assistant, typing and faxing for me. Vela was condescending to her and would not even invite her to sit down. I would offer Rosamund a cup of tea and try to make her comfort able. Although slightly threadbare, Rosamund was ultra-neat, but Vela considered her a frumpy little thing. Vela's airs were grandly aristocratic. She bought herself very expensive costumes in strange materials like ostrich hide. One season she bought ostrich only-a large ostrich hat in bushranger style, with follicles from which the feathers had been pulled. She had an ostrich-hide bag slung over her shoulder and ostrich boots and gloves. On her full professor's salary, she had lots of money to spend. Her straight-profiled beauty was the only kind of beauty that mattered.

Vela said, "Your little Rosamund is dying to take care of you."

"I think she believes I'm happily married."

"In that case why does she always bring a bathing suit?"

"Because it's a long hot trip on the El and she enjoys swimming in the lake."

"No, it's because you can see her beautiful figure. Otherwise she'd go swimming at her own end of town."

"She feels safer here."

"You don't spend all your time dictating letters."

"Not all of it." I granted that.

"Well, what do you talk about-Hitler and Stalin?"

These, to Vela, were contemptible topics. Compared to chaos physics, they didn't even exist. And she was born, mind you, within an hour's jet flight of Stalingrad, but her parents had conspired to keep her impeccably innocent of the Wehrmacht and the gulags. Only her own esoteric studies mattered. Still, Vela curiously had a talent for politics. She made certain that people would think well of her. It was her wish that they should see her as a warmhearted, friendly, generous person. Even Ravelstein said of her, "People are flattered by her attentions. She buys the most expensive birthday presents."

"Yes. It's a funny thing how she attracts acquaintances and turns them away from me. I don't feel like getting into a spending con test."

"What are you trying to tell me, Chick, that she's some kind of space alien?"

I was familiar now with Ravelstein's ideas on marriage. People are beaten at last with their solitary longings and intolerable isolation. They need the right, the missing portion to complete themselves, and since they can't realistically hope to find that they must accept a companionable substitute. Recognizing that they can't win, they settle. The marriage of true minds seldom occurs. Love that bears it out even to the edge of doom is not a modern project. But there was, for Ravelstein, nothing to compete with this achievement of the soul. Scholars deny that Sonnet 116 is about the love of men and women but insist that Shakespeare is writing about friendship. The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment-a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress. I mention bohemianism because we need to feel that we are liberated. Ravelstein taught that in the modern condition we are in a weak state. The strong state-and this was what he learned from Socrates-comes to us through nature. At the core of the soul is Eros. Eros is overwhelmingly attracted to the sun. I've probably spoken of this before. If I speak of it again it's because I am never done with Ravelstein and he was never done with Socrates, for whom Eros was at the center of the soul, where the sun nourishes and expands it.

But in some respects I thought better of Vela than Ravelstein did. He was not vulnerable to her sort of charm. I on the other hand continued to see what others saw in her-crossing a room, dressed very expensively, so rapidly planting her toes that her heels hardly ever touched the ground. She had original notions about walking, talking, shrugging, smiling. American acquaintances thought that she was the soul of European gracefulness and elegance. Rosamund herself thought so. I explained that under it all there was really a special kind of attractive clumsiness. But all the prestige, her reputation in her branch of physics, the fat salary she was paid, her inimitable toppling glamour, were too hard for any woman to compete with. Rosamund would say, "What an unusually beautiful woman she is-waist, legs and everything."

"True. But there's a hint of artificiality about it. Like a stratagem. Like a lack of affect."

"Even after such a long marriage?"

I had hoped to make it work with Vela because I had had earlier marriages. But I had more or less given up the fight and for a dozen years or so had made no claims on Vela. In the morning she would slam out of the house and I would turn to my tasks and spend my days at them. Ravelstein, from the other side of the city, checked in on the telephone for an hour or two. At least once a week Rosamund came by public transportation from Ravelstein's end of town. I often suggested that she hire a cab but she said that she preferred the El train. Rosamund said that George, her fiancй, thought the El was perfectly safe. The Transit Authority policed them more effectively here than in New York.

Picking up Ravelstein's habit I taught her the term _louche__-dubious. Nothing like a French word to neutralize an American danger.

Everything just then was going from bad to worse. I had come back after the funeral of my brother in Tallahassee in time to see my surviving brother, Shimon, on what turned out to be the last day of his life. He said to me, "You're wearing a beautiful shirt, Chick-that's got class, the red-and-gray stripe."

We were sitting together on the rattan sofa. His cancer-wasted face wore the usual pert look of good humor.

"But I hear you want to buy a diesel Mercedes. I advise you not to do it," he said. "It'll be nothing but trouble." He was vibrating with the final urgency or restlessness. It was all but over now, so I promised not to buy the diesel. Then he said, after a long exchange of silent looks, that he wanted to climb back into bed. He was too far gone to do this. He had been a ball player once with strong legs, but the muscle now was all gone. I watched from behind, trying to decide whether to intervene. He had nothing left to do his will with. And then his head twisted toward me and his eyeballs turned up-nothing but blind whites. The nurse cried out, "He's leaving us."

Shimon raised his voice and said, "Don't get excited."

This was what he said often to his wife and to his children when they differed or began to quarrel. Not to let things get out of hand was his function in the family. He was unaware that his eyeballs had rolled back into his head. But I had seen this in the dying and knew that he was leaving us-the nurse was right.

After his funeral in the very same week, a few days before my birthday, I was loud and angry, kicking at Vela's bathroom door when I remembered my brother's call for calm, very nearly the last thing he had said. So I left the house. When I came back that night I found a note from Vela; she was sleeping over with Yelena, another Balkan-French woman.

Coming home again the following night I found the house filled with large, colored stickum circles-the green identified my pos sessions, the salmon-colored were glued to hers. The apartment swirled with these large dots. Their colors were abnormal, something gassy or bilious about them; they were identified on the box they came in as "pastel shades." They produced a snowstorm effect-"a meum-tuum blizzard," as I said to Ravelstein.

A team of his students helped me to unpack in the new apartment after I had moved. Rosamund was among them. She was naturally interested in the books I had collected. In the movers' boxes were my college Wordsworth and my Shakespeare and Company _Ulysses__ with the curious errors made by Joyce's Parisian typesetters-not "give us a touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for it," but "give us a tough," says Molly. All because two dogs are copulating in the street below. "How life begins," thinks Leopold Bloom. On this day he and Molly conceive their son, a child who does not live long. In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones. For instance, what Vela must have looked like when she plastered all those objects with pale green and orange stickum dots. To look at them would make you run out screaming. So why does one marry a woman whose final act as a wife is to apply hundreds if not thousands of labels? For that matter, why did Molly marry Leopold Bloom? Her answer was "Well as well him as another."

I had thought of Vela as a beauty impossible to rival. She had worn her skirts tightly tailored on the backsides. She had cavalry cruppers, together with a very fine bust, and the knocking of her heels when she entered a room were like military drums but gave you no clue to what she was feeling or thinking.

Vela had a stiff upper lip. I have always been inclined to give a special diagnostic importance to the upper lip. If there is a despotic tendency it will reveal itself there. When I examine a photograph it is my habit to isolate features. What does this forehead tell you, or the placement of those eyes? Or that mustache? Hitler and Stalin, the classic dictators of our century, wore very different mustaches. Hitler's lip, come to think of it, was extremely conspicuous. A curious fact: Vela's lip stung you when you kissed her.

She had a way of leading you, of showing you how to be a male. This tendency is more common among women than you might suppose. Either she had in mind men she had liked in the past, or she had some male principle of her own to follow, a Jungian masculine counterpart, her particular animus or inborn vision of a man-unconscious, of course.

Ravelstein had no patience for such stuff. He said, "This Jungian shtick comes straight from Radu Grielescu. Vela is a great pal of the Grielescu couple. You used to have dinner with them every other week. Of course you're a writer, you need to meet all kinds of people," said Ravelstein. "That's only natural for a man in your position. People from the sports world, from the movies, musicians, commodity brokers, criminals, too. They're your bread and butter, meat and potatoes."

"Then why shouldn't I dine with Grielescu and his wife?"

"No objection whatever, as long as you're aware of the facts."

"And what are the facts, in their case?"

"Grielescu is making use of you. In the old country he was a fascist. He needs to live that down. The man was a Hitlerite."

"Come, now…"

"Has he ever denied that he belonged to the Iron Guard? "

"It's never come up."

"You haven't brought it up. Do you have any memory of the massacre in Bucharest when they hung people alive on meat hooks in the slaughterhouse and butchered them-skinned them alive?"

One rarely heard Ravelstein speaking of such things. He would now and then refer to "History" in large Hegelian terms, and recommend certain chapters of the Philosophy of History as great fun. With him gloomy conversations on the "full particulars" were extremely rare. "You know Grielescu was a follower of Nae Ionesco, who founded the Iron Guard. Doesn't he ever mention this?"

"Now and then he does speak of Ionesco, but mostly he talks about his days in India and how he studied under a yoga master."

"That's his Eastern glamour fakery. You're much too soft on people, Chick, and it's not entirely innocent, either. You know he's faking. There's an unspoken deal between you…. Must I spell it out?"

As a rule, Ravelstein and I spoke plainly to each other. _Verbum sat sapienti est__. The Grielescus were socially important to Vela. I had a considerable gift for noting the phenomena and I was aware that Vela gave me good marks for being so polite to Radu and always on my best behavior with Mme. Grielescu. My small talk in French with Madame gave Vela great satisfaction. But Ravelstein was taking a very serious view of my relations with these people. When he was dying he seemed to feel it necessary to speak more openly about matters we had never felt it necessary to discuss.

"They use you as their cover," said Ravelstein. "You wouldn't have become chummy with those Jew-haters. But these were Vela's friends, and you put yourself out for them, and you gave Grielescu exactly what he was looking for. As a Romanian nationalist back in the thirties he was violent toward the Jews. He wasn't an Aryan-no, he was a Dacian." [The Dacians were to Romania what the Aryans were to Germany.]

I knew all that, well enough. I was aware also that Grielescu had had a close connection with C. G. Jung, who saw himself as some sort of Aryan Christ. But what is one to do about the learned people from the Balkans who have such an endless diversity of interests and talents-who are scientists and philosophers and also historians and poets, who have studied Sanskrit and Tamil and lectured in the Sorbonne on mythology; who could, if closely questioned, tell you also about persons they had "known slightly" in the paramilitary Jew-hating Iron Guard?

The fact was that I enjoyed watching Grielescu. He had so many tics. He was a fidgeting, pipe-digging, pipe-stuffing smoker, pushing wire cleaners into the stem of his briar or paring away at the carbon cake in the bowl. He was short and bald, but he let his back hair grow long; it bushed out over his collar. His scalp, wide-open as an estuary, was heavily veined; it looked congested. Very unlike Ravelstein's green-oval-melon baldness. While he dithered over his woolly-bear pipe cleaners Grielescu would continue to spell out some esoteric topic or other. His brows were bushy and his broad face was prepared for an exchange of ideas. But there was no exchange, for he was off inwardly on some topic from myth or history about which you had nothing to tell him. I didn't mind at all. I don't like the responsibilities that come when you have to do the talking. But everybody has something like a lawn of random knowledge, and it's very pleasant to have it kept watered and green for you. Sometimes Radu talked about Siberian shamanism; or then again it might be marriage customs in primitive Australia. It was assumed that you had come to listen or to learn from Radu. Mme. Grielescu had even arranged the parlor furniture with this in mind. "This was how he steered the conversation away from his fascist record," said Ravelstein. "But the record nevertheless shows what he wrote about the Jew-syphilis that infected the high civilization of the Balkans."

He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism. It's hard to say how political Mme. Grielescu had been. My guess is that in prewar days she was a stylish beauty, an upper-class flapper. You could easily picture her in a cloche hat stepping out of a limo. Women who wore good clothes and vivid lipstick generally had no politics. These European ladies monitored the social behavior of their husbands-the males of their set. Men existed to hold doors open and draw back dining-room chairs.

Mme. Grielescu was never altogether well. To judge by her wrinkles she was over sixty, unhappy about it but also very exacting with men-a walking manual of etiquette. It was impossible to guess what she knew about her husband's Iron Guard past. In the late thirties, when the Germans had conquered France, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, Grielescu became something of a cultural big shot in London and later he cut a figure in Lisbon under the Salazar dictatorship.

But by now his midcentury politics were dead and buried. When Vela and I dined out with the Grielescus the conversation was not about war and politics but about archaic history or mythology. The professor with a white silk turtleneck shirt under his dinner jacket pulled chairs out for the ladies and pinned their corsages for them. His hands shook. He fussed over the champagne. "He paid the bill in cash from a wad of fifties. No credit cards."

"I can't see him at the bank drawing money," said Ravelstein.

"Probably he sends his secretary to cash a check. Anyhow, he pays with clean, unwrinkled currency. He doesn't even count, he drops a bundle of green bills and makes a 'take it all away' gesture. Then he rushes to the other side of the table to light his wife's cigarette. There's all the gallantry, the _hommages__, a standing order at the florist's for roses, and the hand-kissing and bowing."

"All done in French. And there's a different standard for Americans. And you're a Jew, besides. The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth. Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them. The Jew myth is connected with conspiracy theory. The Protocols of Zion for instance. And your Radu has written books, endless books, about myth. So what do you want with mythology, anyway, Chick? Do you expect to be tapped one of these days and be told that you have now become an elder of Zion? Just give a thought now and then to those people on the meat hooks."

Ravelstein and I endlessly discussed the Balkan fix I was in, but in continuing this narrative, I see that I have to begin by closing out Vela. She has to be disposed of for once and for all. This is not as simple as you might suppose. She was gorgeous and beautifully dressed and memorably made up. On the telephone she chirped like Papagena. Ravelstein was almost alone in describing her as a tasteless dresser. He saw her as a superior manager of the externals. In political terms it could be said that she was out to be elected by a landslide. But Ravelstein did not agree. "Once you begin to suspect her, the whole production falls apart," he said. "Too much rational planning." But then he added, "She was right to throw you out."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you would have murdered her eventually." He didn't say this gloomily. To him the thought of such a murder was a good thing. It did me credit. "She had a sex-hex on you, so you had to be thinking of a violent death for her. She chose the worst moment possible, just after the deaths of both your brothers, to tell you she was filing for a divorce."

Ravelstein would frequently say to me, "There's something in the way you tell anecdotes that gets to me, Chick. But you need a real subject. I'd like you to write me up, after I'm gone…."

"It depends, doesn't it, on who beats whom to the barn?"

"Let's not have any bullshit about it. You know perfectly well that I'm about to die…."

Of course I knew it. Indeed I did.

"You could do a really fine memoir. It's not just a request," he added. "I'm laying this on you as an obligation. Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you've had a few glasses of wine and you're laid back and making remarks. I love listening when you are freewheeling about Edmund Wilson or John Berry-man or Whittaker Chambers when you were hired at _Time__ in the morning and fired by him before lunch. I've often thought how well you deal with a story when you're laid back."

There was no way I could refuse to do this. He clearly didn't want me to write about his ideas. He had expounded those fully himself and they're available in his theoretical books. I make myself responsible for the person, therefore, and since I can't depict him without a certain amount of self-involvement my presence on the margins will have to be tolerated.

Death was closing in on him and it was transmitting the usual advance reminders, telling me first of all that in preparation for his end I should not forget that I was his senior by some years. At my advanced age my every third thought should be of death. But the odd thing was that I was now the husband of Rosamund, one of Ravelstein's students. And Ravelstein was such a paradoxical character, you see, that one of the effects of his friendship was to make me unaware of the oddity of my condition-in my seventies I was married to a young woman. "It's odd only when you view the thing from the outside," said Ravelstein. "She fell in love with you and that was why there was no stopping her."

In choosing me or setting me up to write this memoir, he obliged me to consider my death as well as his. And not only his death from shingles, Guillain-Barrй, etc., but a good many other deaths as well. It was collection time for an entire generation. For instance: I was on the very day of this conversation sitting with Ravelstein in his extravagant, lavish bedroom. The drape was pulled aside from the east window and we faced the wide-open blue of the shoreless Lake.

"What do you think when we look in this direction?" said Ravel stein.

"I think of good old-or bad old-Rakhmiel Kogon," I said.

"He has more of a grip on you than he has on me," said Ravelstein.

Maybe so. Still, I couldn't look in that direction-eastward-without seeing Kogon's apartment building, and then you'd count upward or downward trying to locate the tenth floor, but you could never be certain that you were looking at the right window. Rakhmiel, who had figured since the forties in my life and since the fifties in Ravelstein's would be one of the crowd taking off at intervals. You never knew who would be next. He had had several kinds of major surgery: his prostate gland had been removed last year-Rakhmiel said he'd never had much use for it anyway. I did not feel myself to be in the threatened category for I'd fallen in love with a young woman and had married her. So I was not quite ready to deal with the departing contingent. It was one of those curious moments of illumination that I don't feel I can pass over. Rakhmiel was highly educated, but to what end? Every corner of his apartment was stuffed with books. Every morning, Rakhmiel sat down and wrote in green ink.

Rakhmiel was neither a large man nor a healthy one, but he was physically conspicuous just the same-compact and dense, highhanded, tyrannically fixated, opinionated. His mind was made up once and for all upon hundreds of subjects and maybe this was the sign that he had completed his course. I felt I was summing him up for an obituary. It is possible that I was trying to replace Ravelstein with Rakhmiel so that I wouldn't have to think about Ravelstein's death. I would much rather think of Rakhmiel's death. So I re viewed his life and his works for a sketch on him while Ravelstein lay on his pillow with eyes shut, thinking thoughts of his own.

Rakhmiel was, or had been once, a redhead, but the red hair had worn away and what remained was a reddish complexion-in medieval physiology, sanguine: hot and dry. Or, better yet, choleric. His face wore a police expression and he often looked, walking fast, as if he were on a case-on his way to serve a warrant or make a pinch. His conversation, I thought, had an interrogatory tone. Very articulate, he spoke in complete sentences, at high speed and very impatiently. When you came to know him better you would understand that there were two conspicuous foreign elements in his makeup-one German and the other British. The German part of him was Weimar-style toughness. I suppose I knew Weimar in its nightclub version. Postwar Europe of the twenties was sold on hardness. The war veterans were hard, the political leaders were hard. Hardest of all of course was Lenin, ordering hangings and shootings. Hitler entered the competition when he took power in the thirties. Immediately he had Captain Roehm and other Nazi colleagues shot. Rakhmiel and I would at one time discuss this sort of thing quite often.

Lots of bitter facts, too horrible for contemporaries to contemplate. We can't actually bring ourselves to acknowledge them. Our souls aren't strong enough to bear that. And yet one can't give oneself a pass. A man like Rakhmiel would feel obligated to face up to the fact that this viciousness was universal. He believed that everybody had his share of it. You could find these murderous impulses in any person of mature years. In certain cases, like Rakhmiel's own, you could identify them in your physical structure as equivalents not necessarily of war but of widespread Russian, German, French, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Balkan shameful enormities.

Well, there was the Germanic side of him. Then there was the Brit component. Rakhmiel, whose name translates as "Save me, God" or "Be merciful, God, unto me," had also modeled himself on English dons and in time became a don himself. He had been in England during the war. He was blitzed in London, where he was gathering and interpreting intelligence. Then he taught at the Lon don School of Economics. Later he was an Oxford professor and divided his time between England and the U. S. He was the author of many learned books. He wrote daily, copiously, endlessly, and without hesitation, in his green ink. "The Intellectuals" were his principal subject, and in style he was Johnsonian. Sometimes he would remind you of Edmund Burke, but mostly it was Samuel Johnson whose tone you heard. I see nothing wrong with this. The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.

The arts of disguise are so well developed that you are sure to undercount the number of bastards you have known. Not even a genius like Rakhmiel was able to conceal the storminess or, if you prefer, the wickedness of his nature. He had ideas of decency which went back to the novels of Dickens, but he had wicked REMs-I borrow the term from the sleep specialists-wide-awake rapid eye movements. He looked like an irritable and highly volatile English clubman, very red in the face. In America, where people are not familiar with such types, his idiosyncrasies were bound to be misunderstood. People saw a dumpy, slightly paunchy but strong, short man in very old tweeds. To be ill-dressed is a donnish tradition going back to the Middle Ages, and at Oxford and Cambridge you still saw the holes in academic gowns patched with Scotch tape. There was a noticeable sourness coming from Rakhmiel Kogon's clothing. He looked like a tyrant, with the tyranny baked into his face. This was not well dissembled with meekness and Christian forbearance, or with civility. He wore a fedora when he went out and carried a heavy stick-"to hit the peasants with," he used to joke. And it was a joke, because his strong subject was civility. With civility he had opened up a new vein and everybody in the university world was mining it.

Rakhmiel was anything but simpleminded. My belief is that on the side he grew a little herb garden of good, generous feelings. He hoped, especially when he was wooing a new friend, that he could pass for a very decent man. He was also very learned. When you first came into his apartment your respect for him grew. On his shelves there were full sets of Max Weber and all the Gumplowitches and Ratzenhofers. He owned the collected works of Henry James and of Dickens and the histories of Gibbon's Rome and Hume's England as well as encyclopedias of religion and masses of sociology books. Useful for propping up windows when the sash cord broke, I used to say. There was also the green ink. No other color was used. The green was his exclusive trademark.

Ravelstein shouted with laughter when we came to this. He said, "That's how I want to be treated, too. That's it. I want you to show me as you see me, without softeners or sweeteners."

Ravelstein, after he had read my sketch of Kogon, said that should have commented on his sex life-a major omission, he believed. He told me authoritatively, "You've missed it-Kogon is attracted to men." When I asked for some proof of this he said that So-and-so, a graduate student, swore up and down that one night when they had drunk too much, Rakhmiel tried to kiss him. It was hard to think of Kogon as a kisser and I said that never in a thousand years could I picture Rakhmiel forcing his way on someone. "Then you've been brainwashed," said Ravelstein. Nothing in this line was too improbable for him, but I failed in every attempt to visualize Rakhmiel kissing anyone. I couldn't even picture him kissing his old mother. He would shout at her without mercy and then he would say, "She's deaf…." But I don't believe she was at all deaf, his bewildered mama.

Back from the hospital, Ravelstein was doing reasonably well. Of course he couldn't beat his infection but he said, "I'm in no hurry to die." His social life flourished. In his best days he flew like a hawk, as he himself said. "But now I flutter like those wild turkeys on your place in New Hampshire."

He could walk well enough, though his sense of balance was off.

He could also dress and feed himself, shave, brush his teeth (he wore an upper plate), tie his shoes, and run the steam-fizzing espresso machine-too big for the grooved enamel of the kitchen sink. His hands shook hardest when there was an extra-delicate operation to perform, like finding an eyehole with the tip of the shoelace. He was barely strong enough to wear his general-staff fur-lined suede coat that dragged on the ground when I helped him put it on. He could no longer reset his watch and had to ask Nikki or me to do it.

He was, however, still giving parties on nights when his team the Bulls were on TV. And now and then he took his student favorites to a dinner party at Acropolis on Halsted Street. The waiters there gave him power handshakes and called out, "Hey, lookit, the Professor!" They urged him to drink olive oil neat, by the glass. "Too late to save your hair, Prof, but still the best medicine."

We went also to a dining club downtown: Les Atouts-the Trump Cards. There Abe had a longtime gentlemanly connection with M. Kurbanski-accent on the ban. M. Kurbanski, the Serbian owner-manager, went abroad several times a year. He was preparing to retire to a villa on the Dalmatian coast.

He had a fine full front-head and belly matching a very impressive wide, short-nosed, breath-held pale face. His hair was combed straight back. He wore a cutaway coat. Altogether he gave Ravelstein the pleasure of feeling that he was dealing with a civilized man.

Ravelstein would say to me, "What's your take on Kurbanski?"

"Well, he's a Franco-Serbian gentleman who offers local people membership in his dining club east of Michigan Boulevard."

"What kind of war record has he got?"

"He says he fought the Germans. He belonged to the Maquis."

"They'd all tell you that. But I don't think he was a Communist," said Ravelstein. "To hear them describe it, they were all freedom fighters on the mountaintops. What's your bottom-dollar hunch about Kurbanski?"

"If he were up against it he could put a bullet through his head," I said. "That's more like it. I agree with you. But under it all he's a superior mвitre d'," said Ravelstein. "Who's going to dispute him if he claims he was a guerrilla in his glory days and fought the Germans?"

"That's why he wears such a sad and distant look. So what's left?" Ravelstein said. "The Jewish question."

"Not to be a Jew was very desirable in those times, a big asset. One never knows. But the big thing with Kurbanski is being French."

"Yes. We come into his establishment and he chats us up in French. And this courtesy is possible, though we are Jews, because we can answer in acceptable French…."

"I like to hear you when you're drunk, Chick, talking and sketching freestyle. You're right to insist that Kurbanski has a sad look…."

Ravelstein had come to agree that it was important to note how people looked. Their ideas are not enough-their theoretical convictions and political views. If you don't take into account their haircuts, the hang of their pants, their taste in skirts and blouses, their style of driving a car or eating a dinner, your knowledge is in complete.

"One of your best pieces, Chick, is the one about Khrushchev at the UN pulling off his shoe and banging it on the table. And almost as good is your sketch of Bobby Kennedy, when he was the Senator from New York. He took you along on his Washington rounds, didn't he?"

"Yes. For one whole week…"

"Now that was one of your sketches that held my interest," said Ravelstein. "That his Senate office was like a shrine to his brother-a huge painting of Jack on the wall. And there was something savage about his mourning…."

"Vengeful, was what I said."

"Lyndon Johnson was the enemy, wasn't he. They had gotten rid of him by making him vice president-a kind of errand boy. But then he was Jack's successor. And Bobby needed arms to retake the White House. Full of hate. They were very handsome men, both brothers. Bob was half the size of Jack," Ravelstein said, "but an alley fighter. Most amusing of all were those walks from the Senate office building to the Capitol. Those were wonderful questions he asked you-like, 'Tell me about Henry Adams.'

'Brief me on H. L. Mencken.' If he was going to be President, he thought he should know about Mencken."

It thrilled Ravelstein to talk about celebrities. At Idlewild, once, he had spotted Elizabeth Taylor and for the better part of an hour tracked her through the crowds. It especially pleased him to have recognized her. Because she was so faded, it took some doing. She seemed to know that her glamour was gone.

"You didn't try to talk to her?"

"Uh-uhn."

"As a best-selling author you were on equal footing with other celebrities." But no. He and I were sitting, as we had sat for years, in his living room, and he was in his Japanese gown. It fell away from his body on all sides. His bare legs were like prize-winning marrows because his ankles were so swollen-"That fucking edema!" he said. The top half of Ravelstein was as lively as ever. But the disease was gaining on him, and he knew it as well as any doctor. Not only did he talk more about the memoir I was appointed to write but he had curious things to tell me. About the persistence of sexual feelings, for instance. "I've never gotten so hot," he said. "And it's too late in the day for partners. I have to ease myself…."

"What do you do?"

"A hand-job. What else is there? At this stage, I'm humanly out of the running." The thought of it made me flinch. "I'm fatally polluted. I think a lot about those pretty boys in Paris. If they catch the disease they often go back to their mothers, who care for them. My old lady is a poor thing, now. Last time I saw her I asked, 'Do you know me?' and she said, 'Of course. You're the fellow who wrote that famous best-seller everybody talks about.'"

"You told me that."

"Well, it's worth repeating. Her second husband is also in a finishing school for nonagenarians. I'll beat them both, though. At this rate, I'll reach the finish line before my mom. Maybe I'll be waiting for her."

"That's aimed at me, isn't it?"

"Well, Chick, you've often talked about the life to come."

"And you're a self-described atheist, since no philosopher can believe in God. But this is no belief with me. It's only that my amateur survey shows that nine people out often expect to see their parents in the life to come. But am I prepared to spend eternity with them? I suspect I'm not. What I'd prefer would be to be accepted to study the universe, under God's direction. There's nothing original about this, unless it is after all a tremendous thing to grasp the collective longing of billions of people."

"Well, we'll soon find out, you and I, Chick."

"Why? Do you see the signs of it in me?"

"I do, yes, to be frank about it."

As if he were ever anything else.

Oddly enough, I didn't mind hearing this from him. He might, however, have given a thought to Rosamund. He was at times not quite clear about my connection to her-naturally disoriented by his illness. He had assumed the role of the benevolent intercessor, counselor, arranger. This was, in part, due to the influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the political theorist and reformer. But he had initially been drawn to Jean-Jacques by his strong belief in the love that knits persons and societies together. At times he might admit that Rousseau, the genius and innovator whose ideas-his great mind-had powerfully dominated European society for more than a century, was (almost necessarily) himself a nutcase. To get a bit closer to the principal topic here, he had been taken by surprise when he learned that in marrying Rosamund I had not bothered to consult him. I was willing to admit that he might know more about me than I myself knew, but I was not about to put myself in his custody and rely on him to run my life for me. It would also be unjust to Rosamund. I shan't make speeches here about dignity, autonomy, and all the rest of that. She and I had been together for something like a year before Ravelstein knew that we were what tabloid journalists would call "an item." I have to say, however, that when we did get married he was quite good-natured about it, showing no resentment. People were doing naturally what people always had done. The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether. I was perfectly willing to amuse him by being typical, true to form. In the final months he reviewed his opinions of his close friends and favorite students and found that he had been right about them all along. I had never told him that I had fallen in love with Rosamund because he would have laughed, and told me that I was being an idiot. It's very important, however, to understand that he was not one of those people for whom love has been debunked and punctured-for whom it is a historical, Romantic myth long in dying but today finally dead. He thought-no, he saw-that every soul was looking for its peculiar other, longing for its complement. I'm not going to describe Eros, et cetera, as he saw it. I've done too much of that already: but there is a certain irreducible splendor about it without which we would not be quite human. Love is the highest function of our species-its vocation. This simply can't be set aside in considering Ravelstein. He never forgot this conviction. It figures in all his judgments.

He often spoke well of Rosamund. He said she was earnest, hard-working, had a good mind. She was a pretty and lively young woman. Young women, he said, were burdened by what he called "glamour maintenance." Nature, furthermore, gave them a longing for children, and therefore for marriage, for the stability requisite for family life. And this, together with a mass of other things, disabled them for philosophy.

"There are young women who think they can keep a husband alive forever," he said.

"Do you think that covers Rosamund's case? I almost never think of my calendar-years. I'm forever hiking across the same plateau with no end in sight."

"There are significant facts that have to be lived with but you don't have to let them engross you."

When he referred to his sickness it was almost always in this oblique way. Ravelstein was making his final arrangements. Nobody volunteered to talk to him about them. The one exception was Nikki. But Nikki was, in a special sense, family. If Ravelstein had a family it would be an exotic one, because he had no use for families.

Nikki, the handsome Chinese prince, would inherit. The rest of us in one degree or another were not heirs but friends.

In the last months of his life Ravelstein did the things he had a ways done. He met his classes, he organized conferences. When it was beyond his strength to give lectures, he invited his friends to give them: Foundation money was always available. His bald head at the center of the front row dominated these events. When a lecture ended, he was invariably the first to ask a question.

This became protocol. Everyone waited for him to kick off the discussion. At the beginning of the fall term he was still quite active, though when I escorted him to the campus from the apartment he had to stop at every other corner to catch his breath.

I recall that flocks of parrots had descended on a clump of trees that grew edible red berries. These parrots, thought to be the descendants of a pair of caged birds that had escaped, built their long, sac-like nests in the lake-front park and later colonized the alleys. In these bird tenements that hung from utility poles, hundreds of green parrots lived.

"What are we looking at?" said Ravelstein, turning his outsized round eyes on me.

"We're looking at parrots."

"Sure we are, but I never thought I'd see the likes of this. What a noise they make."

"Well, there used to be only rats, mice, and gray squirrels-now there are raccoons in the alleys and even possums-a new garbage-based ecology in the big cities…"

"You mean the urban jungle is no longer a metaphor," he said. "It really jangles me to listen to these noisy green birds from the tropics. Doesn't the snow get them down?"

"It doesn't seem to."

Nothing got them down. The noisy green birds threshing and bickering in the leaves, scattering snow, gorging on berries held Ravelstein's attention longer than I had expected. He had little interest in natural life. Human beings absorbed him entirely. To lose yourself in grasses, leaves, winds, birds, or beasts was an evasion of higher duties. And I think the birds held his attention unusually long because they were not merely feeding, but gorging, and he was a voracious eater himself. Or had been one. His meals were now mainly social, conversational occasions. He was dining out nightly. Nikki couldn't cook for all the people who were flying in to see Ravelstein.

Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition but he didn't want it to be known. I remember how much it shocked him when his nurse walked in-the room was full of friends. She said, "It's time for your AZT."

He said to me the next day, "I could have killed the woman." He was still enraged. "Don't they give those people any training?"

"They're from the ghetto," said Nikki.

"Ghetto nothing!" Ravelstein said. "Ghetto Jews had highly developed feelings, civilized nerves-thousands of years of training. They had communities and laws. 'Ghetto' is an ignorant newspaper term. It's not a ghetto that they come from, it's a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil."

One day he said to me, "Chick, I need a check drawn. It's not a lot. Five hundred bucks."

"Why can't you write it yourself?"

"I want to avoid trouble with Nikki. He'd see it on the check stub."

"All right. How do you want it drawn?"

"Make it out to cash."

There was no need to ask Ravelstein to elaborate. "I've written the address out," he said, and handed me a slip of paper.

"Consider it done."

"I'll cut you a check."

"Don't give it a thought," I said.

I wondered whether some visitor hadn't pinched a cigarette lighter or some other _bibelot__, and Ravelstein was paying ransom. But I decided it wasn't worth pursuing. He had already told me about his sharp increase in sexual feeling. He'd say, "I feel hot, and what am I supposed to do with it? And some of these kids have a singular sympathy with you. They've got the complete picture. I would never have expected death to be such a weird aphrodisiac. I don't know why I'm unloading this on you. Maybe I think this is in formation you should have."

I have a life-time habit of putting things off. Of course I knew Ravelstein was in the end zone, that he didn't have long to live. But when Nikki told me that Morris Herbst was coming to town I felt I was on notice to pull myself together.

Ravelstein and Morris Herbst were on the phone every day. With Ravelstein's assistance, Morris, a widower, had managed to bring up two children. Ravelstein was, somehow, in love with their late mother, and spoke of her with singular respect and admiration. He described to me her "dramatic white face, black eyes, a beautiful and sexually open but not promiscuous nature." Nothing in the sexual line is prohibited anymore, but the challenge is to hold your own against the general sexual anarchy. Ravelstein admired Herbst's late wife, loved her. She was the one woman whose photograph he carried in his wallet. So it was entirely natural that he should be a second father to her children. He dug up scholarships and found campus jobs for them, vetted their friends, and made certain that they read the essential classics.

It was Nikki who told me about the photo of Nehamah. "It's there with the credit and Blue Cross cards," he said. "You know that he goes for people who have basic passions-who make the tears come to his eyes. With Abe that counts more than anything."

If Ravelstein didn't often talk about Nehamah Herbst the reason was that in the last months of her life, he and Morris had built a cult of sorts around her. Abe had spent much time with her in the final weeks, and she had spoken freely about secret and intimate matters. Though he couldn't be trusted to respect confidences, he never told me what he and Nehamah had talked about.

Nehamah's mother came over from Mea Sha'arim and begged her daughter to have an orthodox ceremony performed.

"What, on my deathbed?"

"Yes. For the sake of your children you must. I am here to save them."

But one almost never gets the real thing, Ravelstein sometimes said. What truly matters has to be revealed, never performed. But only a handful of human beings have the imagination and the qualities of character to live by the true Eros. Nehamah not only refused to see the orthodox rabbi her mother had brought to her deathbed, but never spoke to her again, and without her daughter's goodbye the old woman flew back to Mea Sha'arim. "Nehamah was pure and she was immovable," Ravelstein said in the low voice of infinite respect.

I am trying as well as I can to transmit the singular connection between Ravelstein and Morris Herbst. For thirty or forty years they were in daily contact. "Now that there is moolah for every purpose, I have the satisfaction of being in touch, of talking to Morris without a thought of the expense," Ravelstein told me. Anyway, he never opened the telephone bills, Nikki said. Those were paid by Legg Mason, the vast investment firm in the East that managed his money. Abe told Nikki, who opened the mail, "I don't like the electronic printouts, I'm certainly not about to study them. Don't bring anything up, don't hand me a statement unless the principal falls below ten million." Here, Nikki's oriental reserve was blown away. He couldn't stop laughing. "Not a penny less than ten big ones," he said. He was open with me because I never pressed him-we never spoke of money. He would have been-let's see, now, what would he have been? "Affronted" is the suitable word. He had his own kind of princely Asiatic mildness, but if you were to offend him Nikki would tear your head off.

Morris Herbst, to get back to him, was at the top of Ravelstein's guest list for every conference he organized. He was the first to be invited and the first to accept. He read a paper at each and every one of Ravelstein's events. He had a reflective, settled, stable air and spoke deliberately without hurry or nervousness. With his square white beard-no mustache-he had the look of a Michigan farmer I had known fifty years ago. Herbst too had studied with Professor Davarr, but without Greek he could never call himself a genuine Davarr product. He taught Goethe, he had written a book about _Elective Affinities__, but the curious fact was-and there were always curious facts-he had a weakness too for cards and dice and was often in Las Vegas. Ravelstein had an extra-high regard for reckless plungers. And I too had a good opinion of Herbst. I couldn't say why. He gambled, he lost his head when he played Twenty-one, and though he mourned his wife he also chased women, but he never made any false claims about himself.

Yes, he had kept the family, just as he promised Nehamah, but the children knew all the details of his womanizing, his love affairs. There was always some lady or other camping in the house after Nehamah died, and women telephoned him from all parts of the country. He had a calm manner-a four-square way of sitting tight. His white hair was both curly and wavy and his color high. He looked well but he owed his life to cardiac surgery. And when you put a question to him, you had to wait while he organized his answer. He might sit tight, considering his reply (several times I clocked him) for as long as five minutes. He was a sober and circumspect conversationalist. German-born, he specialized in Ger man thinkers. He was never as keen on them as he was on women but since the death of his wife he had had one durable love affair with a woman whose none-too-patient husband had to put up with their long nightly telephone calls. Without the telephone, what would Morris's spiritual life have been? Ravelstein preferred the French expression. He said "I wouldn't call Morris a chaser. He's a real _homme а femmes__. If it's not a vocation, it's nothing."

Five years ago, the surgeons had told Herbst his heart was used up. He was wait-listed for a transplant with a very high priority. He had no more than a week to go when a motorcyclist from Missouri was killed in a crash. The boy's organs were harvested. Technically these transplants are an immense achievement. The human side of the thing is that Morris carries another man's heart in his chest. One might accept a skin graft from a compatible stranger. But the heart, we would be inclined to agree, is a different matter. The heart is a mystery. If you've seen your own heart on a video screen, as millions by now have done, convulsing and opening rhythmically, you may have wondered why this persistent muscle is so faithful in its function from the uterus to the last breath. This rhythmic gripping and relaxing blindly goes on. Why? How? And who was it now that prolonged Morris Herbst's life-a harum-scarum adolescent speed demon from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about whom Herbst knew nothing. Nothing fits here except the old industrial slogan: "The parts are interchangeable." This brings modern reality home to us.

During the war, it often came home to me that the Russian troops driving Hitler's army back through Poland did it all on canned pork from Chicago.

Why pork? Well, it is appropriate in this case. Morris was a believing Jew-not fully orthodox but more or less observant. And this freestyle Jew owes his existence to the heart from the bosom of a young man who lost control of his bike-I don t know the actual circumstances of his death. All I really know is that surgical technicians took out the boy's heart and it now replaced the faltering heart in Herbst's breast. Herbst would tell me that it brought foreign impulses and sensations into his life.

I asked him what that meant.

Seated and circumspect, his hands on his knees, his pale look gone with the leaky heart that had been killing him, the white hair curled around his now ruddy face, he said about himself that just then he felt like the Santa Claus in the department store asking kid dies what they wanted for Christmas. Because at the center of his "physical plant" (his own term for it) his borrowed heart had taken over, and he felt that a different temperament had come with it-boyish, heedless, not just willing but glad to take a risk. "I feel a little like that fellow who calls himself Evel Knievel and jumps his Honda bike over sixteen beer barrels."

I understood this, oddly enough, because at the time I was being treated by a physical therapist who told me that the main organs of the body were surrounded by charged energies and that she, the therapist, was then and there in touch with my gall bladder. I said, "But I no longer have a gall bladder. It's been taken out."

"Sure, but those energies remain-and they'll be there as long as you live," she told me.

I bring this up, with a touch of agnosticism, because I was asked to believe that it was not the young man's heart alone that had changed bodies. The organs are also repositories of the shadows or the assertive impulses-anxious or happy as the case may be, and these had come into Herbst's body with the new heart. They now would need to come to terms with the forces of their new setting.

If this were a kidney or a pancreatic transplant it would be different. But the heart carries so many connotations; it's the center of man's emotions-his higher life.

At any rate, Morris, a German Jew, was saved by this Missouri boy. And I had to restrain myself from questioning him about a heart originally Christian or Gentile, with its shadow energies and its rhythms-how did it adapt itself to Jewish needs or peculiarities, pains and ideas? At this point I could not discuss the subject with Ravelstein. He was in no condition to turn his thoughts in that direction.

The most I dared to do was to ask Morris in the most tentative way about the transplant. He said that in all states when you were issued a driver's license you were asked to check a box agreeing or declining to be an organ donor. "In half a second the kid made an X-what the hell, why not! So the heart was flown east and the surgery was done at Mass General."

"And you don't know anything else about the kid?"

"Very little. I wrote a thank-you letter to his parents."

"What did you tell them, if you don't mind saying?"

"I told them, honestly, how grateful I was, and I came on as a straightforward American so they wouldn't have to worry that their boy's heart was keeping some foreign creep alive…

"It must give you second thoughts, on the road, when you're suddenly surrounded by a gang of young guys on bikes, with scarves, caps, and goggles."

"I'm always braced for that."

"Did the boy's family answer?"

"Not so much as a postcard. But they must be glad his heart is living on." He turned his face downward with a tentative look. His fingers spread on the temple propped up his head-as if he were looking for answers in the motif of Ravelstein's Persian carpet, or doping out a singular message there about the miraculous extension he was given. I had no hope invested in the carpet. I fell back on the language of big-city politics-a strange fix had been put in. And so life-that is, what one incessantly saw, the pictures produced by life-continued. This was related to something I had said to Ravelstein.

When he asked me what view I took of death, how I imagined it, I said that the pictures would stop. Evidently I saw as pictures what Americans refer to as Experience. I wasn't at the moment thinking of the pictures newly available, recently offered by technology-the kind of tour one now might take of one's digestive tract, or of the heart. The heart-only a group of muscles after all. But how tenacious they are, starting to beat in the womb, and going in rhythm for as long as a century. In Herbst's case it had petered out in his fifties, and the transplant would keep him going into his eighties.

He signed himself into the hospital once a year for tests. But by and large his life went on as before. He looked kindly, tolerant, open-minded. His benevolent, silent clock of a face with its clean, curly white border of beard was calm and healthy. He looked women over very closely, checked out their figures, their breasts, legs, their hairstyles. He was one of those men who appreciate, who can do justice to, the qualities of women. His appraisals didn't seem to make anyone uneasy. He took a disinterested pleasure in sizing women up. But his manner was quiet, he didn't make a production of it, and few were annoyed by his interest.

When Herbst arrived I made myself scarce. Friends for nearly half a century, Abe and Morris would have a world of things to say to each other. Ravelstein was calling from his bed, "Bring him here." The Pratesi sheets had been pulled out at the corners and the mink coverlet, beautifully cured and soft, had fallen to the floor. On the walls, the paintings somehow were never hanging straight. All the good antique pieces in the room were piled with clothing and with manuscripts and letters. The letters always made me think of the controversies he was involved in-the powerful unforgiving enemies he had made in the academic world. He didn't care a damn about any of them.

Herbst stooped at the bedside and hugged Ravelstein.

"Chick, pull up a seat for Morris, won't you.'

I brought forward the round-backed leather Italian chair. You tended to forget that Herbst was kept alive by his transplant. He looked well enough to attend to normal needs. I half suspected for a moment that Ravelstein preferred him, his oldest friend, to be an invalid. But that thought was very brief. It was unlike Ravelstein to play around like that. He was dying, of course, but there wasn't going to be any sickroom business. He needed-he wanted-to talk.

I got out, leaving the friends together in what Ravelstein had furnished as a kind of bedroom fit for a man of his stature. Almost immediately I heard the two of them laughing loudly-they were telling each other the best (the crudest, the raunchiest) jokes they had heard lately. The solemn "last days of Socrates" atmosphere was not Ravelstein's style. This was not the time to be somebody else-not even Socrates. You wanted more than ever to be what you had always been. He wasn't about to fool away his declining hours being somebody else.

When they settled down for their private talk I went home and reported the day's events to Rosamund. She had been on the phone with the woman who was typing her dissertation. She'd be giving her doctoral lecture in a few weeks. She had studied for five years with Ravelstein, so that if I needed to know what Machiavelli owed to Livy I had only to ask this slender, handsome young woman with the long blue eyes. I cared little these days about Machiavelli's debts. What was more important and tremendously comforting to me was that there was nothing I could say to this woman that she wouldn't understand.

"Did Herbst arrive? They must have so much to say to each other."

"I don't doubt that they do, but they had a few dirty jokes to tell each other first. It's an odd occasion from any angle. There's Herbst with another man's heart beating away in his chest and Ravelstein has already said goodbye to him. In a way jokes are more suitable than a conversation on the soul and immortality. To find out what happens after you stop breathing you have to buy a ticket."

"To die?"

"Well, is there any other way to get the information?"

"Did Nikki tell you that Dr. Schley is sending Ravelstein back to the hospital?"

"I'm surprised," I said. "He's just learned to walk again. You thought he'd at least have a year more."

"Didn't you?" said Rosamund.

"Sure, but he wouldn't want it to just drag on. In the hospital he'll have more protection from friends and well-wishers."

"He's far more sociable than you, Chick. He enjoys company."

It was not merely a matter of company. People brought their problems to him as well, as if from his deathbed you could expect something approaching divine information.

The door to Ravelstein's bedroom stood open and I could see our friend Battle's long back-hair resting on his mountainous shoulders, and his natty, ankle-high boots. I didn't have his face fully before me but his wife was evidently crying. She was bent forward. Those couldn't have been anything but tears. I had great respect for Mrs. Battle and was very fond of her husband.

The Battles were Ravelstein fans. They never attended his public lectures and I doubt they read his books, but they took him very seriously. When Battle retired some years ago, he and his wife moved across the state line into the Wisconsin woods, living very simply, а la Thoreau. When they were in town Ravelstein liked to dine with them at our Serbian-French club.

I had made the discovery that if you put people in a comic light they became more likable-if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got along much better with him, thereafter partly because you were aware that you were the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.

After they had gone Ravelstein said to me (he was coiled up with some internal amusement) that the purpose of their visit was to get his advice.

"About what?"

"They came to talk to me about their suicide plans. They apologized for troubling me. At such a time…"

"I should think so," I said.

"Don't be too hard on them, Chick. With older people suicide fantasies are common enough. I think they were serious."

"They thought they were being serious."

"Because I'm dying I had the same thought, naturally. This is a hell of a time for people to be bringing me their problems. They put it in the 'just suppose' form. Did I think that in the abstract, at their time of life, and all the rest of it, they would be well advised…?"

"A suicide pact?"

"Battle made the argument and she filled it out and added the sensible comment. They said I was the only person they trusted enough and who wouldn't be satirical with them."

"So you come to a man who would rather not die and you put your case for suicide to him."

"Battle has been hinting at it for weeks. He's a very intelligent per son, but he has too much character to overcome. His character makes him inarticulate. She's the more sensible one, and she came wearing a plain blue suit with rows of buttons down the front. She's a little thing. Or is it the supersized husband that makes her look tiny? Anyway, she has a pretty, upward-looking small Brit face. I think that when kids look at her they must see a lovely, sympathetic face…."

"So what's their complaint?"

"The complaint is that they're getting old. All educated people make the same mistake-they think that nature and solitude are good for them. Nature and solitude are poison," said Ravelstein. "Poor Battle and his wife are depressed by the woods. That's the first observation to be made."

"What did you tell them?"

"I said they had done right to take it up with me. More people should get advice when they're suicidal. They feel that way because there's no community, no one to talk to."

"Maybe it's their idea of a tribute-as if they were saying that life without their friend Ravelstein would lose its value," I said.

"Well, they're dear people," said Ravelstein. "They dreamed up this occult way of letting me know that I didn't have to go it alone."

"Obviously they talk about you all the time, and you may have become their absent referee."

"So that if I died they might as well be dead, too," said Ravelstein, but this was his way of making light of the subject. He loved gossip but the interest he took in people would be hard to describe. He had a curious intuitive ability but with him it wasn't so much analysis as it was divination that you sensed when he talked about personalities, or groped them out.

"What I said was that it was a mistake to make suicide a matter of argument or debate. To reason for or against life is kid stuff."

"You have great authority with both of the Battles, and if you said don't do it, they wouldn't do it."

"That's not my style, Chick, to lay down the law."

This was certainly untrue.

"They wanted to be taken seriously," he said. "But of course they weren't. They wanted to amuse me with their double-suicide routine."

That was more like it.

"I told them they had had a great love affair. A classic."

"And they shouldn't bring love into disrepute," I said.

"Something like that," said Ravelstein. "You've heard the story. After one dance with Battle, whom she had never met before, she left her husband. She stepped into Battle's arms and that was that. In that same instant, both parties recognized that their respective marriages were ended…. He was strong on the tennis court and on the dance floor but he was no seducer, and she was not an unfaithful wife. He said he would be waiting for her at the airport…

"Where was that again?"

"In Brazil. And they've had a happy life."

"I remember now. Their plane was struck by lightning. They had to land in Uruguay. So for many years they were together-forty years without a letdown. The Battles count on me to summarize things, so I obliged and told them their own story. Among millions or hundreds of millions of people they alone lucked out. They had a great love affair and decades of effortless happiness. Each amused the other with his or her eccentricities. How could they bear to cheapen it with a suicide…? I could see that Mrs. Battle was hearing what she hoped to hear. She wanted me to make the case for continuing to live."

"But Battle was not completely satisfied-is that it?"

"That's right, Chick. He wanted a discussion about suicide and nihilism. I've often thought that suicide fantasies and murder fantasies balance each other in the mental economy of civilized people. Battle's not a professor through and through, but he feels a responsibility to square himself with nihilism. He doesn't know much about nihilism but it's in the air. He said something about successful people being prone to suicide-seeing through the illusions of success and doing away with themselves…"

"If you dislike existence then death is your release. You can call this nihilism, if you like."

"Yes. American-style-without the abyss," said Ravelstein. "But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world-the world as it existed for that person."

All at once Ravelstein was annoyed with me. At least he was speaking with an angry emphasis. Perhaps I was still smiling at the Battles and it might have seemed to him that I was dissociating myself from the view that you destroyed an entire world when you destroyed yourself. As if I would threaten to destroy a world-I who lived to see the phenomena, who believe that the heart of things is shown in the surface of those things. I always said-in answering Ravelstein's question "What do you imagine death will be like?" — "The pictures will stop." Meaning, again, that in the surface of things you saw the heart of things.

To the end, Ravelstein attracted lots of visitors. Few reached his bedroom-Nikki saw to that. But among those who mattered was Sam Pargiter, whose presence was oddly significant. He was one of my close friends. Through me he had read Abe's famous book and attended his public lectures and came also to some of our joint seminars. He highly valued Ravelstein's opinions and his jokes. With a large _No Smoking__ sign behind him, Ravelstein lit cigarettes with his Dunhill flame as he lectured, saying, "If you leave because you hate tobacco more than you love ideas, you won't be missed." He said this with such comic sharpness and good nature that Pargiter then and there fell in love with him and asked me to introduce him to this witty man. I told Ravelstein that my friend Sam Pargiter wanted to meet him.

"Well, we'll make you a double team of totally bald friends," said Ravelstein. Ravelstein did not reproach me for this but it was clear from his way of putting it that since time was now very short I shouldn't bring him new acquaintances.

"Did you say he was a Catholic priest?"

"Once, he was," I said. "He applied for a release. He's a Catholic still…. You have a Jesuit friend yourself-Trimble."

"Trimble and I shared a flat in Paris and we often went out together. But he was a Davarr student like me and we spoke the same language."

"Well, I haven't discussed this with Sam Pargiter but you can be sure that he comes here because he's read you and you can be sure also that he would never try to pull off a ninth-inning conversion."

I discover, looking back, that I was curiously concerned with the people who came to see Ravelstein in his last days and, along the walls of the room, form the largely silent group of witnesses. He no longer had the strength to accept or reject visitors. Of some of them I could say that he didn't at all want them to be there. One of his long-time rivals, Smith, appeared with a new wife who coached the professor at the bedside, "Say that you love him. Go on-say it." And the man lamely said, "I love you," when it was perfectly plain that he loathed him. They loathed each other. Ravelstein broke through this impossible moment with a golden smile but he was no longer capable of intervening. Clearly Smith was angry with his latest wife. Nobody had the authority to order the Smiths to leave the bedside. So it was just as well that Pargiter, whose presences, as I was dying, I would have welcomed, was sitting by the door. Pargiter came to comfort or witness-very simply, to sit along the walls and do a job, largely tacit, of being there.

Those of whom he had a genuine need came regularly. The Floods, for instance, husband and wife, a couple to whom Ravelstein and Nikki were greatly attached. Flood was part of the university administration-community relations were his special responsibility. He represented the University at City Hall and supervised the campus security system-the university police reported to him. Scandal management was one of his assignments. He was a complex, feeling, earnest, and good-hearted man. God knows how many unpleasant matters he had taken care of for the University community. Nor did you have to belong to that community to be taken up by him. There was a Greek restaurant proprietor whose daughter's life Flood saved by arranging surgery at the last possible dangerous moment. All over the city he had a quiet reputation as "a man you could turn to in a pinch." He had done favors for Ravelstein and for me. At home, the Floods' doors, like Ravelstein's own, were open. People came and went with a minimum of challenge or formality. Gilda Flood and her husband very simply loved each other. More than any other human connection this naive (but indispensable) one was valued by Ravelstein. One doesn't have to spell this out. I am simply noting the variety of visitors drawn to Ravelstein's bedside so that when he roused himself to look at them along the walls, he would be comforted to see people with whom he was familiar, with whom he had affinities-something like relatives-the nearest thing to family available.

Toward the end Ravelstein was often impatient with me. He had learned from Professor Davarr that modern people-and, in some ways, I was a modern person-made things too easy for themselves.

And it did them no harm to be called to account-to prune back the persistent overgrowth of delusion. So he could be direct without offense.

Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us. If I didn't deserve the ruler for opinion X, I clearly deserved a double rap on the knuckles for Y. The older you grow the worse the discoveries you make about yourself. He would have put to better use the years _I__ was allotted. To acknowledge the plain facts is the least one can do. He thought I was being flippant about the sin of suicide when I said he had given the Battles a very Jewish answer. But then he relented, saying, "Anyway, you can credit me with having saved two lives."

I have at any rate, with Rosamund's help, kept my promise to Ravelstein. He died six years ago, just as the High Holidays were beginning. When I said Kaddish for my parents, I had him in mind, too. And during the memorial service-Yizkor-I began even to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it-how to deal with his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing, and playfully savaging his students. But that isn't much more than his natural history. Others saw him as bizarre, perverse-grinning, smoking, lecturing, overbearing, impatient, but to me he was brilliant and charming. Out to undermine the social sciences or other university specialties. He was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways. About these he was entirely frank with me, with all his close friends. He was considered, to use a term from the past, an invert. Not a "gay." He despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of "gay pride." There were times when I simply didn't know what to make of his confidences. But then he had chosen me to do his portrait, and when he spoke to me he spoke intimately but also for the record. To lose your head was the great-souled thing to do. I suppose that even in this age people will understand the term "great-souled," though it is not the standing challenge it used to be. Ravelstein in any case counted confidently on my ability to describe him. "You can do it easy," he said to me. I agreed-more or less.

The rule for the dead is that they should be forgotten. After burial there is a universal gradual progress toward oblivion. But with Ravelstein this didn't altogether work. He claimed and filled a more conspicuous space in Rosamund's life as well as mine. She remembered a text from her schooldays that went "Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone."

To Ravelstein this would have been the usual high-minded high-school kabibble.

Still, in his own shaggy way, Ravelstein had without question been one of those "noblest people." But for me the challenge of portraying him (what an olden-days' word "portraying" has become) by and by turned into a burden. Rosamund, however, believed that I was exactly right for the job. And in fact I went through a rehearsal of my own with death. But at that time we were only considering Ravelstein's death.

"It's just a matter of getting started," she said. "As he said, it's the premier _pas qui coute__."

"Yes. Some French Ravelstein equivalent of bottled-in-bond or sur papier timbre, in perfect legal order, solemnized by the state."

"There it is-exactly the joke-tone he hoped you'd take. You can leave it to others to comment on his ideas."

"Oh, I intend to. I'm going to leave intellectual matters to the experts."

"All you need is to get yourself in the right position."

But as the months-years-went by, I couldn't for the life of me find this starting point. "It should be easy. 'Easily or not at all,' or as what's-his-name said, 'If it isn't like birdsong, it ain't right."

Rosamund occasionally answered, "Do Ravelstein and birdsong mix? Somehow they don't."

With exchanges of this sort, years went by, and it became apparent that I was unable to begin, that I faced a humongous obstacle. Rosamund no longer offered encouragement or advice. It was wise of her to let me be.

We continued, however, to talk almost daily about Ravelstein. It was I who recalled his basketball evening parties, the student dinners in Greektown, his shopping expeditions, and the racy but serious seminars he used to do. Another woman might have pressed me unpleasantly. "After all, he was a dear friend and you swore you'd do this," or, "In the life-to-come he's disappointed." But Rosamund understood all too well that I thought of this myself, and oppressively too often. I sometimes imagined him in his shroud, lying next to the father he had hated. Ravelstein used to say, "That hysterical man who beat my bare bottom and shrieked gibberish-and later, no matter how well I did he'd hold it against me that I never made Phi Beta Kappa. 'So you published a book and it was well received-but no Phi Beta Kappa?'"

Rosamund would only say, "If you did no more than this Phi Beta Kappa sketch it would cheer Ravelstein in the afterlife."

And my answer to this was, "Ravelstein didn't believe in an afterlife. And if he does exist somewhere, what possible pleasure could it give him to remember his dumbhead father or any part of what we call our mortal span? I'm the one who imagines seeing the dead parents on the other side. And brothers, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles…"

Rosamund often nodded. She admitted that she had a similar tendency. She sometimes added, "I ask myself what they're doing in the life-to-come."

"If you could take a poll on the subject you'd find that a majority of us expect to see their dead, whom they loved and continue to love-the very people they had, now and then, cheated and sometimes despised or hated or habitually lied to. Not you, Rosamund, you're exceptionally honest. But even Ravelstein, a man who was too hard to have such illusions, said… He gave himself away when he told me that of all the people close to him I was the likeliest to follow him soon-to follow him _where__? Would I catch up with him, and would we see each other?"

"You can't build too much on remarks like that," said Rosamund.

"It's easy enough to argue that childish love is the source of these illusions. This is my way of admitting that half a century later I feel I haven't seen the last of my mother. Freud would have trashed this as sentimental and inane. But Freud was a doctor, and nineteenth-century doctors were rough on the sentiments. They'd say the human being represented chemical components worth about sixty-two cents-they were severe rationalists and tough guys."

"But Ravelstein was far from simpleminded," said Rosamund.

"Of course he was. But let's go a step or two further-I'll let you in on a kinky thought. I wonder what might happen. If I were to write my memoir of Ravelstein there would be no barrier between death and me."

Rosamund laughed outright at this. "Do you mean that your du ties would end, and there would be no reason to live on? ' "No, no. Luckily I'd still have you to live for, Rosamund. What I'm probably trying to say is that in Ravelstein's view I may have nothing more to do in this life than to commemorate him."

"That is an odd thought for anyone to have."

"He felt he was giving me a great subject-the subject of subjects. And that is an odd thought. But I've never assumed that I was a rational, modern person. A rational person wouldn't be meeting his dead in the gloaming-wherever the gloaming is."

"All the same," said Rosamund, "the fact that it's so persistent makes it something to reckon with."

"And why me? In less than a minute I can name five people better qualified."

"About his ideas, yes," said Rosamund. "But they mightn't have the color to put into it. Also-you two became friends late in life and, as a rule, older people don't form such attachments…."

Perhaps she meant, also, that the old didn't fall in love. They weren't apt to blunder into the magnetic field where they had no business to be.

"For a year or two Ravelstein kept after me because Vela and I saw Radu Grielescu and his wife so often," I said to Rosamund.

"They entertained you?"

"They took us to good restaurants-the most expensive ones, anyway. Vela loved all the hand-kissing, bowing, fussing over the ladies, the corsages, and the toasting. She was terribly pleased. Grielescu put on such a show. Ravelstein was extremely curious about those evenings. He said that Radu had belonged to the Iron Guard. I paid no particular attention to this. I didn't get the drift, and that bothered Ravelstein."

"You didn't spot him for a Nazi?" Rosamund said.

"Ravelstein went a step further and told me that Grielescu about ten years ago had been scheduled to lecture in Jerusalem but that the invitation was canceled. Somehow even this didn't register with me. I must have been too busy to put it together. I do shut off my receptors sometimes and decide, somehow, not to see what there is to be seen. Ravelstein noticed that, naturally. I was the one who failed to notice.

"Ravelstein wanted to know just what Grielescu's line was like and I told him that at dinner he lectured about archaic history, he stuffed his pipe, and lit lots of matches. You grip your pipe to keep it from shaking, and then the fingers with the match tremble twice as hard. He kept stuffing the pipe with the rebellious tobacco. When it didn't stay stuffed, he didn't have enough thumb-power to pack it down. How could such a person be politically dangerous? His jacket cuffs come down over his knuckles."

Rosamund said, "My guess is that being seen in public with you was worth a lot to Grielescu. But this is how you do things, Chick: the observations you make crowd out the main point."

"That's exactly what Ravelstein eventually told me. And how curious it was that I let myself be used like that."

"You wanted to please your wife. You wanted her good opinion. And Ravelstein probably felt that you were letting yourself be conned. Taking the easy way out..

"I suppose I said to myself that this was some Frenchy-Balkan absurdity. Somehow I couldn't take Balkan fascists seriously. When the check came, Radu sprang out of his chair to grab it. It became a game that I never once get the tab. And one of the things that got me was how he always paid with clean, unwrinkled, fresh-from-the-bank currency, and he never seemed to look at the amount of the bill. If you grew up in the Depression, you wouldn't miss such a thing."

"And you entertained Ravelstein with your descriptions."

"I tried to. But he waved away the pipes and mannerisms. He was waiting for me to come out of the fog."

"Well, you were his appointed biographer. That you were slow on the uptake couldn't have pleased him."

"Of course not. When he told me that Radu's invitation to Jerusalem had been canceled I didn't even ask for the particulars. I see that I missed the boat."

"Well, when he chose you to write about him he didn't think you had no faults," said Rosamund.

"About the basics we agreed as closely as we could, considering my ignorance," I told her. "He had the support of the classics. I certainly did not, but when I was wrong I didn't put my energy where my errors were. I learned later in life how foolish it was to insist that you had been right."

"You needed to be right and you couldn't get by and be right, also," said Rosamund.

"Vela's plan was that Grielescu should replace Ravelstein. In Paris, when Abe rushed into our room and surprised her in her slip, she ran for the bathroom-she had a strange way of running, hippity-hop on her tiptoes-and she locked the door. Then the time came when she told me we couldn't see Ravelstein anymore."

"That was very odd," said Rosamund. In speaking of Vela she was always proper and circumspect. "Was this when Vela sent for her mother? Did she bring her to Paris?"

"No, no. The old girl had died a couple years before this. Your hunch is right, though. She relied on her mother to cover the-what should I call them-the human relations. She had no such skills herself. Anyway, the old girl loathed me. Having a Jewish son-in-law poisoned her old age."

"Now you've put your finger on the real subject," said Rosamund.

"You've given lots of thought to all kinds of problems, except the most important one. You began with the Jewish question," she said.

"Of course that's what this conversation is circling-what it means to the Jews that so many others, millions of others, willed their death. The rest of humankind expelled them. Hitler was on record as having said that once he was in power he would have gal lows, in rows, put up at the Marienplatz in Munich and the Jews, to the last Jew, would be hung there. It was the Jews that were Hitler's ticket to power. He didn't have, nor did he need, any other program. He became Chancellor by uniting Germany and much of the rest of Europe against the Jews. Anyway, insofar as this relates to Grielescu, I don't think he was a malevolent Jew-hater, but when he was called upon to declare himself, he declared himself. He had a vote and he voted. As Ravelstein saw it I refused to do the unpleasant work of thinking it all through."

"You didn't know where to begin?"

"Well, I had a Jewish life to lead in the American language, and that's not a language that's helpful with dark thoughts."

"Did you ever talk to Ravelstein about this power of viciousness?"

"I may have. Abe's character was far more cheerful than mine-a wide-open broad-daylight outlook. He was more like a normal person. But also he was anything but innocent."

"I did Thucydides with him," said Rosamund. "And I can re member what he had to say about the plague in Athens and the dumping of dead parents or sisters on the funeral pyres of strangers. But as for linking this with the masses of dead in the twentieth century-that wasn't something he did in class. Can you remember anything he might have said?"

"How do you suppose," I asked Rosamund, "that a man like Ravelstein might match up his existence-his daily awareness that he is dying-with the fact that his attention now is drawn to the many millions who were destroyed in this century. I am not thinking here of the fighting men or of peasants, kulaks, bourgeois, or party members or those designated as people eligible for forced labor, for death in the Gulags or fascist concentration camps-people easy to round up and send away in cattle cars. These would not normally have attracted Ravelstein's attention. They were the usual 'losers,' people whom governments had no reason to be concerned with-what somebody called a 'quicksand society' which sucked its victims down and drowned or suffocated them. The shortest way with such people was to get rid of them, turn them into corpses. There were also the Jews who had lost the right to exist and were told as much by their executioners-'There is no reason why you should not die.' And so from the Gulag in Russian Asia to the Atlantic Coast, there was a record of destruction or something like a death-disseminating anarchy. You had to think of these hundreds of thousands of mil lions destroyed on ideological grounds-that is, with some pretext of rationality. A rationale had considerable value as a manifestation of order or firmness of purpose. But the maddest forms of nihilism are the most strict German military ones. According to Davarr, who was a very great analyst, German militarism produced the extremest and most horrible nihilism. For the rank-and-file this led to the bloodiest and craziest kind of _revanchist__ murderous zeal. Because it was implicit in carrying out orders that all responsibility went back to the top, the source of all orders. And everybody was thus absolved. They were crazies through and through. And this was the Wehrmacht way of getting around responsibility for their crimes. Suppose there were civilian methods to attenuate guilty conduct, Ravelstein told me. Adding, 'But here I'm talking through my hat.' On all topics he had firm views but toward the end, when he referred obliquely to his condition he was more often sad than ironic, wasn't he, Rosie?"

"He wouldn't let himself sink into sadness for long, either."

"Well, but there was a general willingness to live with the destruction of millions. It was like the mood of the century to accept it. In combat you were covered by the special allowances made for soldiers. But I'm thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century-I don't know how else to put it-underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts."

I date this particular conversation about two years after Ravelstein's death. After the Guillain-Barrй he had worked very hard at walking and recovering the use of his hands. He knew that he had to surrender, to decline but he did it selectively. It didn't matter that he was unable to operate the coffee grinder, but he did need his hand skills for shaving, writing notes, dressing, smoking, signing checks. Few fail to recognize that if you don't apply yourself to recovery you're a basket case, a goner. On the morning of the day when he and I had come upon the parrot-filled holly bushes where the birds were feeding on red berries and scattering the snow, the hospital bed with the steel triangle was being dismantled and removed from Ravelstein's bedroom. "Thanks be to Somebody," he had said when it sank from sight in the freight elevator. "I never want to see that bosun's rig again."

He was walking independently-not yet altogether firm, but a Lazarus case if there ever was one. You're just back from the dead, and you run into an entire tribe of green parrots, tropical animals surviving a Midwestern winter. Ravelstein grinned at me and said, "They even have a Jew look to them." Then, though he took almost no interest in natural science, he asked me once again how they had become so numerous. Suddenly I became the nature expert. So I described them again: those were slim sacks hanging from trees and from the crossbars of the timber, power-line supports. Like over stretched nylon stockings, those nesting tenements where eggs were hatched, drooped as much as thirty feet. "Those nests make you think of Eastside tenements," I said to him.

"Let's get Nikki to drive us over for a look. Where are the head quarters?"

"Jackson Park. But there's a big colony in an alley off Fifty-fourth Street."

But we never did go to see the parrot tenements, the swaying, layered tubes where they nested. Instead, Ravelstein told me when I next met him that he and Nikki were flying to Paris.

"But what do you want to do that for?"

I could see that I had asked a stupid and offensive question, and that Ravelstein was disappointed in me. But it was his way to cover for his closest friends. And it was natural that he should cover for me. "The people at the hospital tell me it's all right to go."

"Do they?" I said.

The doctors' reasoning was transparent. Although Ravelstein was dying he was still fit enough to fly. Paris was one of his great pleasures: He had close friends there and many kinds of unfinished human business. If he wanted so badly to go, why not let him? The doctors figured that a trip of ten days couldn't do much damage. For myself, twenty-five hours of air travel would have been too fatiguing, but Ravelstein would ride through the airports in wheelchairs and, unlike me, he flew first class. To go a bit deeper, I'm afraid I must admit that it seemed to me an unserious thing for a dying man to be doing. And nobody knew what "fit enough to fly" meant in a case like Ravelstein's. Was he flying in a 727, or were there powerful wings hidden under his coat?

And though I do think that Ravelstein was disappointed in me, I don't believe that he was surprised. It was a standing premise between us that there was to be nothing hidden or too shameful to confess, and there was nothing I couldn't tell Ravelstein. Partly this meant that there was scarcely anything he wouldn't have detected on his own. So he would have understood also that I looked down on Paris, rather. There is a Jewish freethinker's saying about Paris-_wie Gott in Frankreich__. Meaning that even God took his holidays in France. Why? Because the French are atheists and among them God himself could be carefree, a _flвneur__, like any tourist.

What I failed even toward the last to understand was that Ravel stein had a second, a supplementary life in Paris. He came back more cheerful from this brief farewell excursion, saying nothing about his French friends but with an air of having done what he should have done.

I was told, however, that Dr. Schley had now ordered Ravelstein to go back to the hospital for "further tests." Nikki confirmed this but added that the room Ravelstein wanted would be unavailable till early next week. On Sunday afternoon he gave a party-pizza and beer, picnic style, with paper cups and plates. He had bought new video equipment-_dernier cri__, he said (even I preferred that to "state-of-the-art")-and singers and instrumentalists were exhibited at full length and with a kind of tropical jungle-light immediacy. The film Ravelstein had chosen to run was one of his favorites-Rossini's _Italian Maiden in Algiers__. The panels on which the players and singers appeared were flat, thin, tall, wide, unendurably real-art re-armed by technology, as Ravelstein said. The faces of the singers colored like Venetian glass and the cameras taking you into their beautiful dark eyes and even into their teeth. Ravelstein in his camel-hair bathrobe was in his lounge chair ad miring and explaining the new equipment-and also making fun of the ignorance of the laity. But he wasn't up to it and kept pressing the mute button to make himself heard. In the end it was simply too much for him, and Nikki helped him up and led him out, saying, "It's too much excitement. He thought he could skip his siesta just this once. But he can't."

The video on mute and Ravelstein himself, silent and perhaps reviewing the facts of disease and death from an unfamiliar angle, followed Nikki out. We led him back to his bedroom with its sleigh-bed and eiderdown silk quilts. When he lay back on the pillows I covered him with all the linens and the silks.

The apartment soon emptied. When latecomers turned up, Nikki pressed the button to hold the elevator door open and said, "Abe would have been so happy to see you but he's on all kinds of drugs and doesn't know whether he's coming or going."

Next day, when Ravelstein brought up the subject I said, "Nikki was very tactful. He wouldn't answer any questions. But the party folded pretty quickly."

"He never answers questions, does he. There are silent questions in every corner but he doesn't acknowledge them. That takes a certain amount of strength."

"He switched off the new video. I don't think I'd know how to do that."

During Ravelstein's last days at home I often kept him company in the morning. Because I lived in the same block and followed no regular schedule I would come by after breakfast. Nikki, whose usual bedtime was 4 a.m. would be fast asleep until 10, whereas Ravelstein dozed because he had no company and lay with his large knees asprawl. The doctors drugged (tranquilized) him, but this didn't stop him from thinking-considering various problems in their dawn-aspect. And even when he was dozing you could learn a lot about him by watching his peculiar Jewish face. You couldn't imagine an odder container for his odd intellect. Somehow his singular, total, almost geological baldness implied that there was nothing hidden about him. He would say-as usual preferring to say it in French-that he had had a _succиs fou__, but now he was facing the cemetery.

Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself as my teacher. Well, that was his trade-he was an educator. He never presented himself as a philosopher-professors of philosophy were not philosophers. He had had a philosophical training and had learned how a philosophical life should be lived. That was what philosophy was about, and this was why one read Plato. If he had to choose between Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources of higher life, he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem. But in his last days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks.

When I commented on this change he was annoyed with me. "Why not talk about them?" he said. "In the South they still talk about the War Between the States much more than a century ago but in our own time millions were destroyed, most of them no different from you. From us. We mustn't turn our backs on them.

Moses communicated with God, who gave him instructions, and the connection has lasted for millennia."

Ravelstein went on for quite a while in this way. He said that the Jews had been used to give the entire species a measure of human viciousness. "You tell people that a new great era will begin if you abolish the ruling class or the bourgeoisie, if you rationalize the means of production, if you use euthanasia on the incurables. To minds so prepared you then propose that the Jews be destroyed. And they make a substantial start. They kill more than half of the European Jews-and you and I, Chick, belong to the remainder." These are not Ravelstein's actual words. I am paraphrasing. What he said was that we, as Jews, now knew what was possible.

"There's no telling which corner it will come from next-the French corner? No, no, not France. They had their glut of blood in the eighteenth century and they wouldn't mind if it happened, but they wouldn't be the ones to do it. But what about the Russians? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a Russian forgery. And not long ago you were telling me about Kipling."

"Yes, it was Kipling. A wonderful writer," I said. "But somebody put me on to a collection of his letters, and in one of them he was having an angry fit against Einstein. This was early in the century. He said that the Jews had already distorted social reality for their Jewish purposes. But not satisfied with that, Einstein was disfiguring physical reality with his relativity theory, and the Jews were try ing to give a falsifying Jewish twist to the physical universe."

"You'll have to drop Kipling from your list of favorites, then," said Ravelstein.

"No, we can't afford to set up a Jewish Index. For one thing we could never impose it, not even on Jewish readers. Who could ever expect you to drop Celine? By the way, I lent you my copy of his pamphlet '_Les Beaux Draps__'…"

"I never got around to it."

"You have a weakness for the nihilists," I said.

"I suppose it's because they don't tell a lot of high-minded lies. I like the kind who accept nihilism as a condition and live in that condition. It's the intellectual nihilists I can't stand. I prefer the sort who live with their evils, frankly. The natural nihilists."

"Celine recommended that the Jews be exterminated like bacteria. It's the doctor in him, I suppose. In his novels the influence of art is a restraint on him, but in his propaganda he's a killer out and out."

Here this conversation temporarily ended, for once again the quiet ambulance pulled up at Ravelstein's door and the attendants, familiar with the layout, rang the bell of the freight elevator. Ravel-stein had been in and out of the hospital so often that he had arranged with himself to take no notice of it.

Dr. Schley had never discussed Ravelstein's illness with me. He was one of your super-earnest physicians-small, stiff, aquiline, efficient. Such hair as he had left was combed upward stiffly, Iroquois style. He owed me no medical explanations. I was not related to Ravelstein by blood. But by now Schley had seen that Ravelstein and I were very close and he began to pass me silent signals-what a Parisian lady I met decades ago in the ABC music hall taught me to call _chanson а la carpe__. Nobody else seemed ever to have heard this expression but I swore by it-two large fish amid clear bubbles silently communicating by opening their jaws. This was how Dr. Schley notified me that Ravelstein's days were numbered. And Rosamund, too, had said, "This could be Ravelstein's last ride to the hospital." I agreed. And Nikki, naturally, had reached the same conclusion. He put in very long hours, doing errands, taking phone calls. It was Nikki, not the nurses, who shaved Ravelstein with the electric razor while Ravelstein, eyes shut, lolled back his head to lift his chin. A small plastic cup under his nose supplied him with oxygen.

"It doesn't look too good, does it," said Nikki to me in the corridor.

"It doesn't, in fact."

"He has a message for his lawyer. And he told me to send for Morris Herbst."

Well, there was no recovery possible from this disease, as we all knew. When Ravelstein had last been hospitalized he had held impromptu seminars from his hospital bed, presiding brilliantly. The teaching-vaudeville was then still running. Even now his students were sitting in the visitors' lounge under the large skylight-waiting to be sent for-but although he would ask, by name, about one or another of them, he was no longer teaching, or holding court. The fact was that I could already see the early signs of approaching death in his movements-his head becoming a burden to his neck and shoulders, a change in color, especially under the eyes. His opinions were shortened, and there was less concern for your feel ings, so that you were well advised to keep to neutral topics. He said about Vela, "You gave in-you tried to sell me a colored cutout of the woman like the cardboard personalities they used to hang in movie lobbies in the old days. You know, Chick, you sometimes say there's nothing you can't tell me. But you falsified the image of your ex-wife. You'll say that it was done for the sake of marriage but what kind of morality is _that__?"

"That's perfectly true," I said. He had me there, dead to rights. He might have added when I accused him of preferring nihilists to his "more principled" academic contemporaries that at least the nihilists weren't putting forward any petty-bourgeois deformities and falsehoods as examples of high principle and even beauty.

Nikki, Ravelstein's Chinese son who had nothing at all to do with these conversations, was there to wipe his face. Nikki stepped aside only for the technicians who x-rayed Ravelstein or took blood samples. Now and then I put my hand to my friends bald head. I could see that he wanted to be touched. I was surprised to find that there was an invisible stubble on his scalp. He seemed to have decided that total baldness suited him better than thinning hair, and shaved his head as well as his cheeks. Anyway, this head was rolling toward the grave.

"Is it a dark day outside," Ravelstein asked me, "or am I in a gloomy mood?"

"It's not your mood. There's a thick cloud cover."

It wasn't like Ravelstein either to bother with the weather; the weather would adapt itself to whatever the people that mattered were thinking, and he would sometimes criticize me for "checking out the externals"-keeping one eye on the clouds. "You can count on nature doing what nature has been doing forever. Do you think you're going to rush in on Nature and grab off an insight?" he would say. But these bright moments seldom occurred now. More often he looked comatose-and Rosamund would anxiously whisper, "Is he still here?"

There were times when I couldn't answer with confidence. It had been repeatedly made clear that he couldn't survive, and he lay, irregularly breathing with a stand filled with medicine bottles near his head, ranged behind his large conspicuous ears. At times you thought that he preferred to doze his way into death. He would perhaps be following some line of thought he didn't care to discuss. He had devoted himself mainly to the two poles of human life-religion and government, that was how Voltaire had put it. Ravelstein didn't believe that Voltaire was intellectually serious, but now and then he did summarize things conveniently. And Ravelstein, nowadays, would have added that Voltaire, famous for the campaigns he fought-"_Ecrasez l'infame!"__-violently hated Jews. And there was yet another physical difference to note. Ravelstein's extended body was very large, he was nearly six and a half feet tall and his gown, which reached to the ankles of ordinary patients, ended just above his knees. Then his large underlip had an affectionate flexure but his big nose was severe. He was breathing through his mouth. His skin had the texture of cooked farina.

I could see that he was following a trail of Jewish ideas or Jewish essences. It was unusual for him these days, in any conversation, to mention even Plato or Thucydides. He was full of Scripture now. He talked about religion and the difficult project of being man in the fullest sense, of becoming man and nothing but man. Sometimes he was coherent. Most of the time he lost me.

When I mentioned this to Morris Herbst he said, "Well, of course he'll keep talking things out while there's a breath in his body left-and for him this is top priority, because it's connected with the great evil." I well understood what he meant. The war made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live.

That goes straight to your bones.

Other people have some choice of options-their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for "the chosen" there is no choice. Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction. Rismus, which was Professor Davarr's word for viciousness, hatred, determination to be rid of this intrusive population in furnaces or mass graves. We needn't go into this any further. But what persons like Herbst and Ravelstein concluded was that it is impossible to get rid of one's origins, it is impossible not to remain a Jew. The Jews, Ravelstein and Herbst thought, following the line laid down by their teacher Davarr, were historically witnesses to the absence of redemption.

So as he was dying, thinking of these questions, Ravelstein formulated what he would say but was not able to deliver his conclusions. And one of these conclusions was that a Jew should take a deep interest in the history of the Jews-in their principles of justice, for instance. But not every problem can be solved. And what _could__ Ravelstein have done?

But anyway he wouldn't be here to do it. In that case what was the most significant suggestion he could make to friends? He began to talk about the approaching high holidays and directed me to take Rosamund to the synagogue. Herbst was certain that Ravelstein was indicating the way which was best for the Jews, who had nothing of greater value than this religious legacy.

Herbst and Ravelstein had been close as students forty years ago, and I could do worse than turn to Herbst for guidance. But if I began to ask questions, I would become involved in self-explanation and I had no stomach for this. Ravelstein was dying-he lay wrapped at full length, eyes shut. He was either asleep or thinking what had to be thought in these last days. My feeling was that he was trying to do all that could be done in these final moments-done, I mean, for the people under his care, for his pupils. Now I was too old to be a pupil, and Ravelstein didn't believe in adult education. It was far too late for me to Platonize. And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

Ravelstein sometimes said that I was a sleepwalker by choice, but this didn't mean that I was unteachable, just that it was up to me to decide when I would be ready to make my moves.

You might tell me something of great importance, and I would understand it well enough, but refuse entirely to take it in. This was no ordinary stubbornness.

Now there are few people you can discuss such matters with. Too bad about that. Since we are so often called upon for judgments, we naturally coarsen them by constant use or abuse. Then of course you see nothing original, nothing new; you are, in the end, no longer moved by any face, or any person. Now this was where Ravelstein had come in. He turned your face again toward the original. He forced you to reopen what you had closed.

I went so far one day as to dictate some notes on this subject and my then-secretary Rosamund made an unusual personal comment. She said, "I think I understand what you are talking about." I was persuaded by and by that it was really so.

Nikki, Ravelstein's heir and his chief mourner-the rivals were numerous-occupied his flat, just around the corner. There was a grassy space between his apartment building and ours where little kids tumbled and learned to throw and catch. From my bedroom window I looked across to what had once been Ravelstein's place. You saw the lights. There were no more parties. Worse still, Rosamund rightly said, "The whole neighborhood has become a cemetery. The community of your dead. You can't even take a walk without pointing out the doors and windows of old friends and acquaintances. We can't go around the block without your remembering old pals and girlfriends. Ravelstein was a dear friend-one in a million. But he would say that you were carrying an overload of depression."

She felt that we must move away. We had the house in New Hampshire and a three-year invitation by a university in Boston to give the courses (as well as I could, alone) that Ravelstein and I had given together. Rosamund and I were offered comfortable quarters in the Back Bay area. She would manage the move, I needn't worry about that. Since the Back Bay apartment was fully furnished, we could sublet the Midwest one. It would still be possible to come back if the East didn't suit us. And we needn't dread looking across the grassy lots straight into Ravelstein's windows.

"And as a special treat…" Rosamund held up the slick colored travel literature-sunny beaches, wooded hilltops, palm trees, native fishermen. A Caribbean holiday was what she was proposing. We'd unpack in Boston and dump the cardboard boxes in which our goods were packed. Then we'd fly to Saint Martin via San Juan. There we'd float idle, dream in the warm sea, recharging our vital batteries.

"Where did you get all that glamorous travel propaganda, Rosamund? Saint Martin, eh? Isn't that where the Durkins go?"

"Never mind. They're good friends. They can see exactly what you need."

"The West Indies will strip away all those layers of stress, and suddenly I'll be restored, and well and strong enough to write the Ravelstein memoir."

"I'm not suggesting a working holiday," said Rosamund. "I sup pose you've been in the Caribbean."

"Yes."

"And you don't like it? "

"It's one huge tropical slum But I go mostly by Puerto Rico. Big gambling joints, a huge smelly lagoon, dark and muddy-un happy welfare-looking native crowds. Then the Europeans arriving in charter flights. And what they carry home with them is the feeling that the Americans have made a mess of things and that Castro deserves the support of independent intelligent Scandinavians and Dutchmen."

But in the end Rosamund had her way. I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own. The Durkins recommended a small apartment on the beach. The baggage was checked through-all the summer rags, papers, swimsuits, sunscreen, sandals, bug repellents. San Juan seemed more glamorous, around the seashore at any rate. We had time to kill between flights and we killed it at the bar of the grand hotel. There we sat beside a hard-drinking American who told us that his wife had been struck down by an unidentified disease. This man said that he commuted between Dallas, where he owned a business, and the great industrial-sized San Juan hospital where she was being treated. For some weeks she had been unable to speak, perhaps to hear-who could say. She was unconscious. She wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, open her eyes. "She don't respond. I feel like a damn fool, talking at her."

When our bus was ready, we left him at the bar. He looked a lot like a red sandstone bluff with an overhang of bleached grass. Rosamund couldn't bear to abandon him, so miserable-she is like that. But he didn't answer our goodbyes.

About half an hour later, landing in Saint Martin, we passed through the immigration hangar, a vast Quonset hut of corrugated green metal-everything in the tropics seemed to me to have a pro visional character. Before an official counter under sizzling lights we lined up to pay a fee and have our passports stamped. Then we got into a cab and were driven to the French end of the island. Our landlady was short with us because we had kept her up so late. A little after we had gotten into bed a furious man arrived, kicked and punched her door, screaming that he would kill her. I said, "If the security-chain doesn't hold this may end in murder." But the cops came in a car with a flashing lamp on the roof and took him away.

"What do you think?" said Rosamund. I remember saying that this might be normal for the climate. Gorgeous but unstable.

I refused to be captivated by the place. Maybe it was old age. I used to be a cheerful traveler but now I sniff at the linen when I lie down. Here I scented the detergent powder in the sheets and pillow cases, and the septic tank beneath the bathroom.

But we woke to a clear tropical morning with lizards and roosters. On the ocean, straight in front of us the yachts towed their dinghies. Planes at the airfield took off and landed. But the beach was fine, firm, broad, with a border of trees and flowering shrubs, and there were crowds of yellow moths traveling. On the inland side of the house there was a rich tree, heavy with a crop of limes. Behind was a steep hill.

For our morning coffee we walked to the far end of the main street. French of a sort was spoken in the bistros and bakeries. We sat on the _terrasse__ taking in the sights. What was there to see here? Or to do? To begin with we'd buy the daily essentials. Then we'd swim. Waves were seldom seen in the bay. You could float on your back by the hour, or lie drying in the sand. Also, you could stroll along the waterline and inspect the topless women-sunning or exhibiting their breasts. Being natural, I suppose. But the eyes of these women informed you that if you spoke to them, they would not answer.

By the time we walked back, the lunch spots were opening. Ribs, chicken, and lobster were offered at about twenty grills that were crowded together, with flames spurting straight up, more flame than you needed for sensible cooking. Each and every joint had its own grinning tout, shouting, laughing and holding up live lobsters, swinging them by the antennae or the tail. If some part of the creature fetched loose and fell to the ground, that was part of the fun.

"Let's get away from this," said Rosamund. She complained about the barbecue smoke. It made her eyes smart. But what she couldn't bear was the torture of the lobsters. Back in New Hampshire when she saw salamanders in the road she picked them up and carried them to safety. I would say, "They may not want to be where you put them." It was wrong of me to tease her for her humane impulses. Tender-mindedness is an uncomfortable problem for all parties. The tender-minded leave it to the less feeling to say, "It's the law of life. We must eat. And aren't the crustaceans themselves cannibalistic?" But all this is evasion. You sprinkle your "interpretation" with schoolbook science. Do these armored lobsters regenerate the claws they lose? This seems to be why we have science classes, as a cover for our heartlessness. Or to refine it, at least. Polonius is at a dinner, not where he eats but is eaten by worms-the payoff for a lifetime of dinners.

You can't apply your humane tape measure to any effect. Before you can fend them off your dead suddenly have surrounded you. What would Ravelstein have said about this? He would have said, "Girlish queasiness." Meaning, perhaps, "She is a tender-minded human being and must work things out for herself. Such a matter has to be thought through by every adult. As for the red salamanders, perhaps they could go into a spaghetti sauce…."

On Saint Martin we were at the lower-eastern-end of the bay, in a two-story house. Below us a tourist family from the North of France took over the garden. They were _en famille__ while we had no special need of it. It was the beach that interested us, just beyond the low wall. We were about thirty feet from the water's edge. A glass-bottomed boat took tourists on a regular schedule to the coral reef just to the north.

I was grateful for the bay. It gave us an enclosure. I am thankful for boundaries. I am fond of having the lines drawn around me. I wasn't here to battle the seas but to swim and to float quietly. To open my mind to Ravelstein. Often Rosamund towed or carried me in water just shoulder-high. She put her arms under me and walked back and forth. She was not a strong young woman-she didn't have to be. Sea water seems more buoyant, you don't have to work to keep afloat, as you would in a lake or pond. Rosamund is slender in build, not skinny, not abrupt. She wears her brown hair down to the shoulders. It's like a limitless asset. Her long eyes turn out to be blue, not the brown her dark hair would lead you to expect. The music she sang as she sailed my body through the water was from Handel's _Solomon__. We had heard it in Budapest a few months earlier. "Live forever," she sang. "Happy-happy Solomon." This chorus sung by her single voice had the rustling sea water under it. Lying on her forearms I saw the moths, pale yellow in slow spinning clusters of hundreds. This must have been breeding time for them. And over the main drag was a cloud of barbecue smoke, and the touts, the children of Belial, laughing blinded by the sun would be swinging live lobsters by the antenna to tempt the tourists.

I felt that I would never take this tropical paradise to my heart. Instead, as Rosamund in her lovely voice sang "Live-for-ever," I thought of Ravelstein in his grave, all his gifts, his endlessly diverting character, and his intellect entirely motionless. I don't suppose that when he directed me to write an account of his life he expected me to settle for what was characteristic-characteristic of me, is what I mean, naturally.

Rosamund and I now changed places, and I carried her through the water, the sand underfoot ridged as the surface of the sea was rippled, and inside the mouth the hard palate had its ridges too. "Shall we stop at Le Forgeron on the way home and reserve a table for tonight? It's about five minutes away on the beach."

Roxie Durkin had given us a note to M. Bйdier, who ran the joint. Rosamund had already signed us up for dinner. In the matter of restaurants you could trust the Durkins. They had seen a lot of Ravelstein in his last years. We had often dined together in Greektown or at Kurbanski's club.

The Durkins had been very thoughtful. Only one favor they had asked for in return. Durkin, a lawyer, had brought some fat volumes to Saint Martin and he had forgotten to copy out several pas sages related to a case he would soon be trying. He had asked us, as a special favor, to look them up and send them by e-mail. Rosamund had several times reminded me of these bound volumes. The landlady had a servant carry them up to our small apartment.

That evening we walked to Le Forgeron along the cooling beach. Shoes and sandals were carried by Rosamund in a reticule. We put them on before entering the gate from the ocean side. There was water trickling pleasantly into the garden-vines and shrubs, flowers. Mme. Bйdier, working in the kitchen, took no notice of us. M. Bйdier looked at Roxie's pleasant familiar note without real interest. He was a large, bald, thick-built man, organized physically with a kind of violence. His message, if it could be put in words, would have run: "I am prepared to do everything a customer [un client] may desire but I am under tremendous pressure and may blow up at any time." He was the sole waiter, and the place was filling up. There was no other helper. His wife did all the cooking. But the tourists, one was given to understand, were not their social equals.

I was aware of the influence of Ravelstein when I made such a sketch. It may as well be admitted that he often figured in daily events. This was because of the power of his personality. It was also because his life had more inner structure than mine, and I had become dependent on his power of ordering experience-it may be that he also wanted to persist. And for his part, he also needed me. Also, many people want to be rid of the dead. I, on the contrary, have a way of hanging on to them. My persistent hunch-it should be clear by now-is that they are not gone for good. Ravelstein himself would have dismissed such notions as childish. Well, perhaps they are. But I am not arguing a case, I am simply reporting. I know one loses mental respectability by acknowledging such fantasies. Even I, you see, yield to accepted opinion. But there may be simple explanations for the persistence of Ravelstein in my daily life. When he died I began to see that it had become my habit to tell him what had happened since we last met.

Nevertheless he had strange ways of turning up, and I shan't pre tend that he didn't come in obliquely from wherever it was that he continued to exist. This should not take the form of a discussion of life-after-death. I am not inclined to argue. It's only that I can't sit on information simply because it's not intellectually respectable in formation.

Now-what did M. Bйdier of the Forgeron recommend tonight? The red snapper, served cold with mayonnaise. Rosamund ordered some other fish. Neither dish was well cooked. The snapper at room temperature was clammy. The mayonnaise was like zinc ointment.

"How is it?" Rosamund asked.

"Underdone."

Tasting it, she agreed that it wasn't cooked through. It was raw at the center.

"Tell the _patron__ about it. You can speak to him in French."

"His English is better. People don't like to be trapped in dummy conversations. Why should he chat me up in French? I can take a Berlitz course, he'll think."

I could not finish the snapper. Dinner was endless.

Rosamund said, "It's an off night-they can't cook such bad food in a beautiful location like this."

You couldn't serve inedible dinners by this warm, still tropical water, with a moon to back up the setting. A restaurant ten minutes by foot from your apartment would have been a bride's dream-no shopping, peeling, cooking, serving, washing, or garbage disposal.

Toward midnight there was a lull in the air traffic. I had very soon learned how many privately owned planes came into the local airfield-a revelation of the wealth and the piloting skills of a considerable population of Americans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Hondurans, and even Italian and French sportsmen-people who liked their reality to follow their thoughts. One thought of a place and in a matter of hours one could be in that place. In the sixteenth century, Spanish sea journeys lasted sometimes for months. Today you could play golf in Venezuela and dine the same evening in the Yucatan. Back to Pasadena in the morning, in time to catch the Orange Bowl.

When you begin to entertain such thoughts about people rich enough to buzz around and lay out their itineraries and figure gas mileage-very soon you may recognize that the air-hours fatigue you will feel is _your__ fatigue.

The fact was that Bйdier of the Forgeron had infected me.

When I complained of tiredness and low energy, Rosamund told me that it was the accumulation of fatigue aggravated by worry and grief. She, too, was still grieving for poor Ravelstein, destroyed by his reckless sex habits. Rosamund did not dismiss your com plaints-she gave them her full attention without irritability. She said that holidays often began with such burdensome and heavy feelings. She stroked my face affectionately and told me I must catch up on my sleep.

I did just that but felt no better. The toxin carried by the fish was heat resistant, I was to learn, and more boiling or baking could not neutralize it. As it was explained to me later in Boston, the cigua toxin was quickly excreted by the body but not before it had radically damaged the nervous system. Very much like Ravelstein's Guillain-Barrй syndrome. Among the first symptoms is a sudden distaste for food. I even disliked the look of it. I came to loathe all food odors. For dinner I could eat only cornflakes with a bit of milk. I kept telling Rosamund that this was all to the good. I was losing unwanted weight. Like everyone in the U. S., I said, I was grossly overfed.

The French family in the apartment below had come from Rouen to be easy and hang loose, unbuckled in the tropics. They swam in the smooth sea; so did Rosamund and I. We dried ourselves on the beach, chatting pleasantly. But the odors rising from their kitchen were becoming unbearable. I said to Rosamund, "What kind of shit are they cooking?"

"Is it as bad as that?" said Rosamund.

Then I lectured her on the decline of French cooking. "You used to be able to get good food in any _bistrot__. Maybe tourism has brought down the standards. Or isn't it possible that the disappearance of the peasantry is ruining French cookery?"

"One of the pleasures of living with you, Chick, is that you have so many thoughts on every subject. But you seem to have lost your appetite entirely. I have one theory myself: you've been so strained-overstrained, wrung out-that this peaceful place is too peaceful for you. You're just wound up too tight." She was evidently worried by the force and violence of my reactions.

"I have to get away from this awful food stink."

"Let's go out then."

"Yes, let's go. _You__ need a meal, Rosamund-you should have a good dinner. I have no appetite, but I'd like you to eat." My nights on this island had been restless-my heart misbehaving. I had increased the doses of quinine prescribed by Dr. Schley, the cardiologist. I swallowed tablets with glasses of quinine water. My head was clear enough but I complained of numbness in the soles of the feet. "Kind of an unpleasant thrill goes through my feet," I said.

"Perhaps it's the way you sit. Try to work standing. Maybe you're overdoing the quinine," said Rosamund.

"Dr. Schley said I could take any amount for the arrhythmia-the fibrillations-Good God! Everybody sounds like a doctor these days."

We walked on the beach to avoid the stink of the chicken and lobster stalls on the main street. At Le Forgeron the patron, lounging outside, pretended to be looking out to sea and didn't return my greeting. "Five thousand miles from France and he's been emancipated from _politesse__," I said.

"We've stopped eating there…."

"_Machts nicht__. He's a pig who was taught manners, but they didn't take. Terrible people everywhere. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's asshole."

I didn't know how sick I was. All I knew was that I was fitfully irritable or somehow out of whack-a bit deranged. I was aware that I was repeating myself and that Rosamund was distressed. She was wondering what to do. Probably she blamed herself for bringing me here. One of my obsessions is perhaps worth describing. I often said to Rosamund that one of the problems of aging was the speeding up of time. The days flashed by "like subway stations passed by the express train." I often mentioned "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" to illustrate this for Rosamund. Child-days are very long but in old age they fly past "faster than the weaver's shuttle" as Job says.

And Ivan Ilyich also mentions the slow rise of a stone thrown into the air. "When it returns to earth it accelerates at thirty-two feet per second per second." You are controlled by gravitational magnetism and the whole universe is involved in this speeding up of your end. If only we could bring back the full days we knew as kids. But we became too familiar with the data of experience, I suggest. Our way of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt style-that is, in increasingly abstract forms-speeds up experiences into a dangerously topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy. Our need for rapid disposal eliminates the details that bewitch, hold, or delay the children. Art is one rescue from this chaotic acceleration. Meter in poetry, tempo in music, form and color in painting. But we do feel that we are speeding earthward, crashing into our graves. "If these were just words," I said to Rosamund. "But I feel it every day. Powerless thinking itself eats up what is left of life…."

Poor Rosamund, she had to listen to such stuff night after night, at dinner-and this Caribbean holiday was to have been a romantic holiday, something of an additional honeymoon.

"Did you discuss this with Ravelstein?" she said.

"Well… yes, I did."

"What did he say to you?"

"He said that Ivan Ilyich had made a _marriage de convenance__, and that if he and his wife had loved each other things would have looked different."

"The poor things did hate each other," said Rosamund. "Reading that story is like crossing a mountain of broken glass. It's an ordeal." She was very intelligent, Rosamund. We could not only talk to each other but could also count on being understood.

We now turned to the volumes our friend Durkin had asked us to look up, working together on the pages he had asked us to copy out for him. It was a short chore, really, and Rosamund did most of the work. There were no copying machines for volumes of this size. I read the extracts aloud, and Rosamund took them down on her word processor. I had started out with little interest in the material, but I was very quickly absorbed in it. Not the legal side of it, the copyright suit filed by Durkin's client. The author of the journal on which the book was based was an American physician who had spent years in the New Guinea rain forest under a research grant from the National Institute of Something-or-other, and spoke the pidgin or island lingo. That he wrote well made his report all the more effective-super-memorable at times. He described a cliffside covered with great flowers as a "crimson orchid waterfall." There were many near-purple passages, but you felt he was responding to the purple of nature. He had a firm scientific aim and the entire article was important-humanly binding. He started out by describing the shortage of protein in the diet of the tribes he had studied. He said that in the primitive wars, the natives couldn't afford to waste the bodies of their enemies.

Such scientific speculation was not my primary interest. I have several times mentioned that ordinary daily particulars were my specialty. Ravelstein also had several times pointed this out, not the noumena, or "things in themselves"-I left all that kind of thing to the Kants of this world. Black headless bodies in a jungle where crimson orchids stream downward for hundreds of feet _would__ be phenomena, wouldn't they. The men were freshly killed and be headed. The heads were set aside. The researcher who recorded all this said they were a currency used in wife-purchase. That's why headhunters hunt heads. But this American researcher had been attracted to the streamside ambush not by the struggling fighters but by the smell of roasting meat. "Just like a kitchen smell back home-a wholesome joint in the oven. Or a Thanksgiving turkey. Just as appetizing. Human flesh, too, can get you in the salivary glands… the warriors offered me some of their human shish-kebab. The victims were turned on their bellies. The ground was rich in red blood. The victors thought my facial expressions killingly funny. They said, 'Why, it's only meat, like any other meat. '" And indeed the writer went on more than was necessary about the appetizing fragrance. The hunters said that if they had been ambushed the other guys would have been cooking and eating them. With us, this might have been a rationalization. With them it was a fact of life. The jungles do not abound in game. Hunters often are exhausted and in critical need of a meal. The American goes on to speculate about Leningrad in the days when the Nazis besieged it, and to speak also of Japanese soldiers cut off in the Philippine jungles, eating their own dead, and mentions also the South American athletes whose plane crashed in the Andes. And surely our own nihilists who tell you that everything is permitted would have to agree that cannibalism is perfectly logical. "But what made the difficulty for me," writes the U. S. researcher, "was the savory smell of roast human thigh, cut from the corpse that still bled in this paradise of flowers. This was the hard thing for me. Not the heads which the fighters carry when they went a-courting, and swung them by the dusty hair."

Rosamund, now seeing that I really was sick-though I denied it-walked miles through the smoke and fire of curbside grills looking for a Thanksgiving turkey. None was to be found. The skinny local hens seemed to be growing hair, not feathers. At the bottom of a freezer in the market, she found packages of stony drumsticks and wings. She said they looked much worse when they were thawed. On this island of yams and coconuts there were no cooking greens. Nevertheless she managed after hours of effort to produce a chicken soup. Out of gratitude I tried to make a joke of my failure to get it down-remembering an immigrant mother of my childhood who cried out, "My Joey can't eat an ice-cream cone. He turns his head away from it. If he won't lick an ice cream, he's got to be dying! "

Perhaps because I felt the tropics as a death threat my instinct was to look for the comic angle in any question which had to be considered. For one thing I kept thinking that the ground was more porous here. It was not as solid as it was up north. It must be hard to bury somebody in this rotting coral soil. I was not going to take up this crazy topic with Rosamund. Rosamund was blaming herself for having sold me on this delightful holiday-but I knew I could trust her to do the right thing. I was feeling very odd, but I told myself that this was a malaise I had brought from the north-a kind of un easiness or dislocation-something like the metaphysical miseries. Years ago when I had found myself stranded in Puerto Rico for a long stretch I had felt the same kind of noncomfort in the tropical surroundings-smells of trapped brine and decaying marine matter rising from the lagoons-the strange stinks of jungle plant-life and rotting animal matter. The mongoose in Puerto Rico was as common as street dogs elsewhere. You don t think of animals so large living along the roads and the village backstreets.

There were bursts of tribal music from the town at night. The roosters cut short your sleep. But I wasn't sleeping much, and could eat only corn flakes. I complained of the tap water and Rosamund, now very worried, went often to the shop to carry back heavy bottles of water.

I was obviously sick but I couldn't let it be said that I was. I felt that I was having abnormal thoughts, and by and by it became apparent that I was worrying away at the problem of evolution. Of course I believed in evolution-who could refuse to accept the thousands of proofs? What was not obvious was that it had happened through random changes as so many scientific true believers were convinced. "_Anything__ can happen, given time enough, and billions of years give you time for all the mistakes and blind alleys." Watson, the geneticist, had laid down the law on this. But as I said to Rosamund, arguing still with Watson, if you took into account the subtle resources of the body, thousands of them, too subtle to be accidental, Watson was talking rough carpentry-boys woodshop or manual training, not fine cabinet work.

In retrospect I'm sorry-I grieve for Rosamund, who now saw that I was sick. She tried to prepare remedies in her little kitchen. She cooked dinners that I would normally have eaten with pleasure. But the meat in the market was gross. When she made soups, I couldn't bear to swallow a spoonful. The French family below went on cooking shit dishes it maddened me to smell.

"How can nice, decent, agreeable, civil people bring themselves to cook-and eat! — such a stinking mess!"

Rosamund said, "It would upset them if I were to ask for the windows to be shut. But don't you think you should see a doctor? There's a French doctor down the road. We've seen his shingle dozens of times."

We were on the porch having a glass of wine before the dinner I would be unable to get down. I ate the stuffed olives Rosamund put out. I like them stuffed with anchovies, Spanish-style. Here only the pimiento ones were available. You couldn't study a Caribbean evening sky without thinking of God, I was finding. Nor think of God without your own dead coming into it. Then you renewed your connection with your dead and ended by making as honest an estimate as you could bear-reviewing a lifetime of activities, affections, attachments. In this I didn't do at all well.

And as I owed it to Rosamund to do everything possible to get to the scientific bottom of things, I went next day to see the doctor. Americans don't take much stock in foreign medicine. They're inclined to think that a French doctor will say you have a _crise de foie__ and must cut down your intake of red wine. The doctor down the way had nothing to say about wine. He told me, however, that I had a case of dengue. Well, that wasn't too bad. Dengue is a tropical dis ase carried by mosquitoes; you treat it with quinine. So I added local quinine to the Quinaglute the American doctor-Schley, the very doctor who had scolded Ravelstein for smoking minutes after he was released from intensive care-had prescribed to keep my heart from running away with me.

Rosamund went once more to the pharmacy-a three-mile round trip without protection from the sun. She seemed partly re assured by the French doctor's diagnosis. However serious dengue might be it was treatable.

The neighbors, whose dinner stinks drove me up the wall offered their help. They said they stood ready to drive me to the hospital at the town of M. forty kilometers away. The road was scenic but jammed, as I was well aware, with decayed farm vehicles and _guaguas__ (buses).

The doctor was mild, "understated,' as we say, not inclined to make melodramatic diagnoses. I decided therefore to accept my dengue without fuss and drink the quinine mixture he prescribed. Rosamund and I read _Antony and Cleopatra__ together, recalling Ravelstein's dictum that without great politics the passions could not be represented. Rosamund wept when Antony said, "I am dying Egypt, dying," and when Cleopatra put the asp to her breast. After this we got into bed and slept, but not for long.

On the cool tile of the bathroom I fainted. It was dark and I had been groping myself out of the room when I fell. Rosamund couldn't lift or roll me onto the bed. She ran down to wake the land lady, who immediately telephoned for an ambulance. When I was told that the ambulance was on its way, I said I'd never agree to go to the hospital. I had seen enough of such places. Colonial medicine, especially in the tropics, was very chancy.

Rosamund said, "You _must__." But when she saw how obstinate I was she went down again to call the doctor on the landlady's telephone. He was five minutes down the road. Very decent about be ing wakened, he shone his flashlight down my throat and into my eyes. Two burly orderlies now filled up the doorway with a furled stretcher. These black men in coveralls had already begun opening the stretcher on the floor when I stopped them saying, "I ain't going nowhere."

Rosamund asked the doctor for an opinion and he said, "Well, it isn't absolutely _nйcessaire__ if he is so opposed." He sent the ambulance away. It didn't make a great difference to the orderlies, who left in silence. It was the engine of the ambulance that did the snarling.

We somehow got rid of the rest of the night, and in daylight, without a mention of breakfast, I sat outside looking toward the black reefs-atmosphere and water doing what they always do. One of the attractions of the season were the clouds of pale moths, a soft yellow variety. They were not big nor were they beautifully marked, hovering out to sea and back, again to the vegetation.

Rosamund was below, using the landlady's telephone, which had never before been available to us. The landlady would take no messages for us. Guests were not allowed to make calls. But I was sick now, and she didn't want me to croak on the premises. I thought this must be apparent to Rosamund as well and oddly enough I had almost no feeling one way or another. The sun hadn't risen yet and there was just light enough to distinguish fluid from solid-a sea-a kind of flatness, and a corresponding inner emptiness. Only Rosamund, normally flexible, ladylike, deferential, and genteel now revealed (no question about it) an underlying hardness and the will that showed how well prepared she was to deal with the bad character of the landlady and the bureaucratic hard-heartedness of the airline's telephone staff. And when she climbed upstairs she said, smiling slightly, "We go back early tomorrow. There are plenty of seats out of San Juan because it's Thanksgiving Day. The flights to San Juan were the problem. But I said it was a medical emergency. They say they'll have a wheelchair waiting."

A wheelchair! I would never have guessed I was as sick as all that. It turned out that inexperienced Rosamund saw the facts more clearly than anyone. I never anticipated crises or emergencies.

Could we count on a taxi so early in the morning? Yes. For one thing, because the all-business, middle-aged, handsome, severe Afro-Caribbean landlady had taken note last night of the ambulance and the doctor. Probably she had had a word with the conscientious, not entirely truthful young Frenchman. But she didn't need his warning; one look at my wrinkled, bad-luck, pre-dawn face on the outdoor staircase would have been enough.

Rosamund, frightened by now, was only too glad to leave. Her pale-dark face was now reset for Boston, with its thousands of doctors. She seemed to have gotten the message: It was certain death to stay on the island. She asked me, "Which books and papers do we dump?" This was easy enough. "Let's get rid of all the heavy volumes. And especially Browning's _Collected Poems__." I had turned against Browning. I classed him now with the cuisine and the French neighbors.

What I wouldn't discard was my friend Durkin's magazine-the cannibal number. I was hung up on the roasting human flesh, on the cannibals and the severed heads looking upward from the blood-sprinkled grass at the orchid-covered cliffs. The human flesh being eaten crowded into my-I admit it-contaminated consciousness. It was my sickness that made me peculiarly susceptible. I wouldn't have left these pages behind for anything. I could plead sickness as my cover. But they disappeared during the flight.

The relief registered by our sternly handsome landlady said it all. How pleased, how proud she was of getting rid of me. Let him go and die elsewhere-in a taxi or a plane. She got up before dawn to see us off. The French neighbors also turned out. They must have been awakened by the ambulance the night before with its sirens and flashing lights. With kind hearts and sorrow they wished us well and waved goodbye. Decent people, after all. The landlady's goodbye signified "Get lost." In her place I might have agreed. In the five-o'clock light she waved goodbye-well out of that!

Rosamund, speaking of our foiled holiday, said, "What a night mare." In the rattling speeding taxi, she said goodbye to the island with a kind of wild relief. She was at least going to be rid of the masked motorcyclist who once or twice a week took over the main street. He was all gotten up in leather and a Buck Rogers helmet.

His big teeth were bared and set. The police disappeared when he made his sweep. People scattered when he came flying. He roared back and forth in storms of dust, and he'd surely kill the pedestrians. "The town crazy man," Rosamund called him. "I won't have him to worry about, coming and going to the pharmacy," she said.

At the vast green metal shed of the airport covering thousands of square feet, Rosamund helped me, the sick man, into the waiting wheelchair. I sat in it, feeling imbecilized, and signed traveler's checks in my lap, to pay the exit fees. I felt I didn't actually need a wheelchair. I was still able to walk, I said to Rosamund, and gave her a demonstration by climbing the many stairs into the aircraft. Then down again in San Juan, where I fell gratefully into the second waiting wheelchair. Most of the luggage was piled around my feet and on my knees. But then there was the passport inspection, for which I had to stand up. Worst of all was the customs examination. Rosamund had to get the large suitcases and garment bags from the carousel to the inspection tables-open them, answer questions, then lock them again and haul them down to be reloaded for the U. S. flight. She didn't have the male grip, the necessary muscle. And here I discovered that once and for all I was no longer the able-bodied passenger I once had been. Rosamund said to the inspectors that I was unwell, but they didn't particularly heed her.

It was Thanksgiving Day and the plane was more than half empty. The attendant said I might want to stretch out and led us to the rear, where she pushed back the arms of a row of seats. I asked for water and then more water. I had never been so thirsty. The chief steward, who had dengue in the South Pacific during the war, had many savvy things to say. He offered to give me oxygen. Rosamund urged me to take it but I asked only for more water.

She, meanwhile, was trying to reach my Boston doctors on the telephone. There were two of these-the "primary" one and the cardiologist. The cardiologist, on the golf course, couldn't be reached; the "primary' doctor had gone to New Hampshire for a family dinner.

I recall during the flight I began again to talk about the young friend of Grielescu who was murdered in a stall of the men's room.

"You've already told me about him."

"When was that?"

"Not very long ago."

"I don't seem to be able to rid my mind of him. I won't mention him again. But I think I've connected him to Ravelstein, somehow. You see, I didn't like Grielescu but I did find him a funny man, and to Ravelstein this was a cop-out, and it was also characteristic of me. To say he was amusing was to give him a pass. But he was suspect-thought to be in league with killers. I can't seem to get a tight grip on the meat-hook people."

Rosamund tried hard to be attentive. She encouraged me to talk. She was worried sick.

"He died in the middle of the act-easing himself. They shot him at close range. Ravelstein believed that it was one of my typical errors…."

"Was he saying that Grielescu was tied in with murderers?"

"Exactly. He said that I should have known better."

"But this murder took place after Ravelstein died."

"He had made the right call, nevertheless. This famous bookish scholar Grielescu, he was saying, was after all a Nazi." Trying to get me off the Grielescu merry-go-round, Rosamund said, "What common ground did you share?"

"He used to quote me to myself." He had dug up a statement I had made about modern disenchantment. Under the debris of modern ideas the world was still there to be rediscovered. And his way of putting it was that the gray net of abstraction covering the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that served our _cultural__ ends has become the world in our eyes. We needed to have alternate visions, a diversity of views-and he meant views not bossed by ideas. He saw it as a question of words: "values,"

"life styles,"

"relativism." I agreed, up to a point. We need to know-our deep human need, however, can't be satisfied by these terms. We can't climb out of the pit of "culture" and the "ideas" that supposedly express it. The right words would be a great help. But even more, a gift for reading reality-the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it.

"But then, from left field, or do I mean right field, Ravelstein urges everyone to read Celine. Well, by all means. Celine was wildly gifted, but he was also a wild lunatic, and before the war he published his Bagatelles pour un massacre. In this pamphlet Celine cried out against and denounced the Jews who had occupied and raped France. To many in France, it was Jewry that was the enemy, not Germany. Hitler-this was in 1937-would liberate France from the Jewish occupation. The English, who were allied with Jewry, plotted with it to destroy _la France__. It had already become a Jewish house of prostitution. _Un lupanar Juif-Bordel de Dieu__. The Dreyfus Case was brought back again. The authorities received millions of poison-pen letters from anti-Dreyfusard Jew-haters. I agreed with Ravelstein that Celine wouldn't pretend that he took no part in Hitler's Final Solution. Nor would I trade the short-stop Grielescu for the right-fielder Celine. When you put it in baseball lingo you can see how insane it was."

Rosamund was humoring me. I had never been quite so sick as this. And it never occurred to me that I was sick. Unwell, yes; it was obvious that I was out of order. But I had lived long enough to be able to say that I was not dying but ailing. A reactionary secret society might determine that the time had come for you to die-a camarilla of your countrymen voted that you must be assassinated. And so a study was made of your program. This would be described as political but in fact it was the will to viciousness. An erratic playboy scholar who had regular habits sat down to attend to a natural necessity-the daily thing-and was shot by an assassin in the next cubicle and died in an instant.

Rosamund was all for going from the airport direct to the hospital.

But I insisted on heading for home. Once in bed I'd be okay. Of course, I couldn't see myself. I was past knowing how high my fever was-bent on showing how perfectly well I was. Rosamund gave in and stacked our bags and boxes into the trunk of the cab. At the other end of the ride it was obviously out of the question to haul the luggage upstairs after the fare was paid, and the driver, seeing trouble, took his money and rushed away. Our trouble was obvious to him, but not to me. I crept upstairs and got into bed.

"Glad to leave that vile isle," I said to Rosamund. "Can it still be the same day? Is it about twelve? We took off at dawn. 'The hand of time is on the prick of noon,' as Mercutio said-one of Ravelstein's favorite lines from Shakespeare."

Under my blankets feeling safe and well, I told Rosamund that a good sleep was all I needed. But it was early afternoon-not bed time. Rosamund couldn't agree that sleep was the answer. By some faculty invisible to me she recognized that I was in desperate trouble. "You would have died in your sleep," she later said, and she went on trying to reach the doctors. "Thanksgiving is a family day-it's playtime, golf-time."

Rosamund kept herself in good shape. She meditated, she at tended yoga classes. She could touch her temple with her toe. But she had overstrained herself with the luggage from Saint Martin. She managed somehow to drag it up the stairs to the apartment on the third floor. You'd never have thought that she had the muscle for it.

It was easier to do this, she said, than to get help from the hospital. None of her calls were answered. On holidays, when the doctors are off, the residents are supposed to cover for them. "Well, it isn't as urgent as you think," I said. "You can talk to the doctors tomorrow." But it was clear to Rosamund that I didn't know what I was saying. If I had stayed on in Saint Martin I should have died before morning. If I had missed the connecting flight from Puerto Rico I would have died in San Juan. And if I had had my way about a good night's sleep in my own bed I'd have been a goner. Rosamund said that without oxygen I couldn't have survived the night.

As the sun went down, the crows were sounding their klaxons. Here they have become city birds. Some French poet had called them _les corbeaux delicieux__-but who? I doubt that even Ravelstein would have known. My mind could no longer follow itself. But I was certain that my pillows and quilt would save me.

But Rosamund had reached her father in upstate New York by phone. "Think who is the most influential person you can reach," he told her. "Ask for his help."

In my address book Rosamund luckily found the home number of Dr. Starling, the man who had brought us to Boston. When she told him what was happening, he said, "Within ten minutes you will hear from Andras, the hospital director. Keep your line clear." Very soon Dr. Andras, a very old man, was questioning Rosamund about my symptoms; then he said he was sending an ambulance to bring me in. Rosamund told him that in the Caribbean I had re fused to get into the ambulance. The old director asked if he could talk to me about this? Well, yes, I told him I was comfortable where I was, in my own bed, but to please my wife I would agree to be examined by the doctors. But I wouldn't be carried out on a stretcher. Foolishly negotiating, I agreed to be a passenger.

"Done!" said Dr. Andras. "We need you here right away."

So sitting next to the driver I was taken by the ambulance with lights twirling and throaty siren sobs to the emergency room. There I was wheeled on a gurney into a corner where I was examined by several doctors. I have no coherent knowledge of what followed. I mainly remember that I was immediately put on oxygen. This was followed by an extended delay. Some said I should go immediately to cardiac intensive care. Others thought that breathing was the problem. The nurse put an oxygen mask over my face, which I kept pushing away. Rosamund was there to look after me. She said, "You've got to have the oxygen, Chick, and I don't want them to tie your hands."

"But I'm suffocating," I said.

I have my own version of what was happening. There was a doc tor in charge who did not wear a white coat but was in shirt sleeves. Talkative and technical, he had a high color and in a casual manner he described my condition. In such circumstances men and women arise, appear, they materialize. This talkative doctor seemed to be talking about technicalities which had no bearing on my condition. But I misunderstood entirely what was happening. I was sent to cardiac intensive care and there, that same night, I had a heart failure. But I have no memory of this. Nor of the pulmonary intensive care unit to which I was moved. Rosamund tells me that both my lungs were, to use the clinical term, whited out by pneumonia. A machine did my breathing for me-tubes down my throat, up my nose.

I didn't know where I was, nor was I aware that Rosamund slept beside me in a reclining chair. She often spent her nights among the relatives camping in intensive care during the crises of sons or sisters. During the first ten days Rosamund didn't go home. She ate the scraps of food she found on trays. She refused to go to the cafeteria lest I should die while she was eating. When the nurses under stood this they began to feed her.

All this I learned later. I was certainly not aware that I was fighting for life. During these weeks I was heavily dosed with Verset. One effect of this drug is to suspend all mental life. I didn't consider whether I was dead or alive. All appearances (the external world) were canceled. My late brothers, both of them, drew near, once. They wore their customary shirts, neckties, shoes, the suits their tailors made for them. My father was in the background. He didn't come forward. My brothers indicated that they were satisfied with their condition. I didn't call out to my father. He knew what the rules were. I didn't see the point in asking questions. Feeling myself more than halfway there, I was not urgently curious. I wanted in formation, but the answers could wait. Then my brothers with drew, or were withdrawn. I did not think of myself as a dying man. My head was full of delusions, hallucinations, cockeyed causes and effects. Verset is said to deaden the memory. But my memory has always been tenacious. I can remember being turned often. Some nurse or orderly who knew what he was doing pounded me on the back and ordered me to cough.

I had visited Ravelstein and other friends and relatives in the intensive care units of various hospitals and with the natural stupidity of a sound, healthy man had sometimes considered that I might one day be the person strapped down, plugged into the life-supporting machines.

But I was now the dying man. My lungs had failed. A machine did my breathing for me. Unconscious, I had no more idea of death than the dead have. But my head (I assume that it was the head) was full of visions, delusions, hallucinations. These were not dreams or nightmares. Nightmares have an escape hatch…

Mostly I recall that I was wandering about, having a heavy time of it. In one of my visions I am on a city street looking for the place where I am supposed to pass the night. At last I find it. I enter what was long ago, in the twenties, a movie palace. The ticket booth is boarded up. But just behind it, on a tile floor that slopes upward are folding army cots. There is no film being shown. The hundreds of seats are empty. But I understand that the air in here is specially treated and that it will be good for your lungs to breathe it in. You get medical points toward your recovery for spending the night here. So I join half a dozen others and lie down. My wife is supposed to pick me up in the morning. The car is in a parking lot nearby. Nobody here is sleepy. Nor are the men talkative. They get up. They mooch about the lobby or sit on the edge of a cot. The floor hasn't been mopped in fifty years or more. There is no heat. You sleep fully dressed in your buttoned overcoat. Hats, caps, and shoes are not removed.

Even before my release from the intensive care unit, I climbed out of bed thinking that I was in New Hampshire and that one of my granddaughters was skiing around the house. I was annoyed with her parents for not having brought her in to see her grandfather. It was a winter morning, or so I thought. Actually, it must have been the middle of the night, but the sun seemed to be shining on the snow. I climbed over the bedrail without noticing that I was attached by tubes and needles to hanging flasks containing all kinds of intravenous mixtures. I saw as if they were someone else's my bare feet on the sunny floor. They seemed unwilling to bear my weight but I forced them to obey my will. Then I fell, landing on my back. At first I felt no pain. What vexed me was that I couldn't get out of bed and walk to the window. As I lay helpless, an orderly ran up and said, "I heard you were a troublemaker.'

One of the doctors said that my back was so inflamed that it looked like a forest fire seen from the air. The doctors put me through a CAT scan. It seemed to me that I was on a crowded trolley car and that I was being stifled and pushed from behind. I begged to be let out. But nobody was willing to oblige me.

I was then on very heavy doses of blood thinner and my fall was dangerous. I was bleeding internally. The nurses put me into a restraining vest. I asked my grown sons to call a taxi. I said I'd be better off at home, soaking in the bath. "In five minutes I could be there," I said. "It's just around the corner."

Often it seemed to me that I was just underneath Kenmore Square in Boston. The oddity of these hallucinatory surroundings was in a way liberating. I wonder sometimes whether at the threshold of death I may not have been entertaining myself lightheartedly, like any normal person, enjoying these preposterous delusions-fictions which did not have to be invented.

I found myself in a vast cellar. Its brick walls had been painted ages ago. In places they still were as white as cottage cheese. But the cheese had grown soiled. The place was lighted by fluorescent tubes-table after table after table of thrift-shop items, women's clothing, mainly, donated to the hospital for resale: underwear, stockings, sweaters, scarves, skirts. An infinity of tables. The place made me think of Filene's Basement, where customers would soon be pushing and quarreling over bargains. But no one was here to fight. In the far distance were young women who seemed to be volunteers doing charitable work. I was sitting, trapped, among hundreds of leather lounge chairs. Escape from this grimy-cheese corner was out of the question. Behind me, huge pipes came through the ceiling and sank into the ground.

I was painfully preoccupied with the restraining vest or pullover I was forced to wear. This hot khaki vest was constricting-it was killing me, binding me to death. I tried, and failed, to unravel it. I thought, If only I could get one of those Social Registry charity volunteers to bring a knife or a pair of shears! But they were several city blocks away, and they'd never hear me. I was in a far, far corner surrounded by BarcaLoungers.

Another memorable experience was this: A male hospital attendant on a stepladder is hanging Christmas tinsel, mistletoe, and evergreen clippings on the wall fixtures. This attendant doesn't much care for me. He was the one who had called me a troublemaker. But that didn't stop me from taking note of him. Taking note is part of my job description. Existence is-or was-the job. So I watched him on the three-step ladder-his sloping shoulders and wide backside. Then he came down and carried his ladder to the next pillar. More tinsel and prickly evergreen.

Off to the side there was another old fellow, small, nervous, and fretful, going back and forth in carpet slippers. He was my neigh bor. His living quarters opened at the end of my room, but he wouldn't acknowledge me. He had a thinnish beard, his nose was like a plastic pot-scraper, and he wore a beret. He would have to be an artist. But it seemed to me that his features were entirely lacking in interest.

After a time, I recalled that I had seen him on television. He was an artist, much respected. He lectured while drawing. His themes were fashionable-environmentalism, holistic flower essences, and so on. His sketches were vague, suggesting love of and responsibility for our natural surroundings. On a blackboard he first produced a hazy sea surface, and then with the side of his chalk he created the illusion of a lurking face-the wavy hair of a woman, like cooked rhubarb, glimpses of nature that hinted at a human presence-something mythic or, equally likely, a projection. Maybe an undine or a Rhine maiden. You couldn't actually accuse this fellow of mystification or superstition. All you could nail him for was self-importance and self-gratification-_suffisance__, in French. I like _suffisance__ better than smugness, just as I prefer the English suffocating to the French _suffoquant__-_Tout sujfoquant et blкme__. (Verlaine?) If you're choking, why worry about being pale?

This Ananias, or false prophet (artist), was settled here-he had a narrow apartment along the side of the hospital building. His quarters were around the corner, so I couldn't see them from my bed. I had a glimpse of his bookcases and a green wall-to-wall car pet. The Christmas tinsel attendant was very deferential to the artist, who, for his part, took no notice of me. Nil! I wasn't allowed to register an impression. By which I mean only that I didn't fit into any of his concepts.

This TV _artiste__, anyway, had the air of being long settled here, but it soon was evident that he was leaving that day. Cardboard boxes were carried out of his flat-or wing. The movers were stacking items. The books were disappearing from the shelves, the shelves themselves were dismantled in a tremendous hurry. A van was backed in and swiftly loaded, and then in a long green-gold gown the artist's old wife came out, stooped, and was helped into the cab of the truck. She wore a silk hat. The TV artist stuck his carpet slippers into the pockets of his topcoat, he put on loafers and crawled in beside her.

The male attendant was there to see him off, and then he said to me, "You're next. We need the space, and my orders are to get you out this minute." Immediately a crew dismantled the shelves and took everything to pieces. The surroundings were knocked down like theater flats. Nothing was left. A moving van meanwhile backed in, and my street clothes, my Borsalino, electric razor, toilet articles, CDs, et cetera, were stuffed into supermarket shopping bags. I was helped into a wheelchair and lifted into a trailer truck. There I found an office-no, a nurse's station, small but complete, with electric lights. The tailgate came up; the upper doors were not shut and the van roared directly underground, down into a tunnel. It continued for a time at top speed. Then we stopped, the giant engine idling. It went on idling.

There was only one nurse in attendance. She saw that I was agitated and offered to shave me. I admitted I could use a shave. She therefore lathered me and did the job with a disposable Schick or Gillette. Few nurses understand how to shave a man. They lay on the foam without softening the beard first as old-time barbers used to do with hot towels. When you haven't been soaped and soaked the scraping blade pulls the stubble and your face stings.

I said to the nurse that I was expecting my wife Rosamund at four o'clock, and it was already well past four on the big circular clock. "Where do you think we are?" The nurse couldn't say. My guess was that we were underneath Kenmore Square in Boston, and if they had stopped the engine idling we would have been able to hear the Green Line subway trains. It was now going on six o'clock, whether a. m. or p. m. who could say? We were now docking slowly beside a pedestrian passageway where people-not too many-went up into the street or came down from it.

"You look a little like an Indian brave," the nurse said. "Also you've lost so much weight that you're more wrinkled, and the beard grows inside the furrows. It's hard to get at. Were you stout once?"

"No, but my build has changed many times. I always looked better sitting than standing," I said, and despite my sad heart I laughed.

She wasn't able to make anything of these remarks.

And there had been no van. I had had to vacate my room-it was urgently needed-and I was moved in the night to another part of the hospital. "Where have you been?" I said to Rosamund when she arrived. I was annoyed with her. But she explained that she had suddenly sat up in bed wide awake and uneasy about me. She telephoned the intensive care unit, learned that I had been transferred, jumped into a cab and rushed over.

"It's evening," I said.

"No, it's dawn."

"And where am I?"

The attending nurse was remarkably quick and sympathetic. She pulled the curtain around my bed and said to my wife, "Take off your shoes and get in with him. A few hours of sleep are what you need. Both of you."

One more brief vision, for purposes of orientation.

Vela figures in this one.

So here are the two of us on exhibit for all the world to judge. Her open, elegant hand directs attention to my uneasy posture.

She and I find ourselves in this scenario standing before the polished stone wall of a bank interior-an investment bank. On this occasion we were again on the outs. But I had come to the bank to meet at her request. She was escorted by a Spanish-looking and very elegant man in his mid-to late-twenties. A third man was present as well, a banker who spoke in French. Before us, set into the glamorous marble wall, were two coins. One a U. S. dime, the other a silver dollar with a diameter often or twelve feet.

Vela introduced me to the Spanish companion. It wasn't much of an introduction, since he did not acknowledge me. She then said, explaining simply, "Until now I never had any experience of glamorous sex before, and I figured, in what you always call the sexual revolution, I should have a sample of it-to find out for once what I was deprived of with you."

I said, "It's like a huge rabbit hutch, millions of rabbits, with the does sampling all the buck rabbits."

But this first phase of the meeting was quickly behind us. Its purpose, evidently, was to fill me with guilt and inject me with a mental solvent or softener.

"Can you tell me where we are?" I asked. "And why we are meeting here in front of these coins? They signify-what?"

Then the banker came forward and said that over a period of years the dime on the right would turn into the dollar with the ten-foot diameter.

"How long will it take?"

"A century or a little more."

"Well, I don't doubt the arithmetic is right-but for whom would this be done?"

"For yourself," said Vela.

"Me? And how do you figure?"

"Through cryonics," she said. "A person lets himself be frozen and stored. A century later they thaw him or her back to life. Don't you remember that we read in a tabloid how Howard Hughes had himself frozen and would be thawed and revived when they found a cure for the disease which was killing him? This is called cryonics."

"Let's hear what you want me to do. Guesswork is no use. What have you got in mind-when would you like me frozen?"

"You'd do it now. I'd go later. Then we'd wake up together in the twenty-second century."

The gray glow and the high polish of the marble slabs were calculated to persuade anybody of eternal dollar stability. But it was also the facade of a cold-storage plant-or crypt. This was foolish, perhaps. Your body would be stacked with other investors behind the marble facade. You would lie in a lab with technician-priests who tended you generation after generation, regulating the temperature, the moisture, and keeping tabs on your condition.

"You'd live again," Vela said. "Figure the compound interest per million. We would both live."

"Companions of old age?…"

The bank man, actually wearing a cutaway coat, said in a practiced voice, "By then the life span will be upward of two hundred years."

"It's the only chance for our marriage," Vela told me.

There was a certain Serbian grace note (B-flat A, B-flat C) at the great word "marriage."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Vela! This is no way to approach the subject of death. To postpone it for a century solves nothing."

I must remind you that I had already died and risen again, and there was a curious distance in my mind between the old way of seeing (false) and the new way (strange but liberating).

English was not Vela's first language, and she couldn't reformulate anything because so much effort had gone into composing the formulations she put forward. All she could do was repeat what had been said. She again stated the facts as she understood them, which didn't advance the discussion.

I told her, "I can't do this."

"Why can't you do this?"

"You're asking me to commit suicide. Suicide is forbidden."

"By who is suicide forbidden?"

"It's against my religion. Jews don't commit suicide unless they lose the siege as they did at Masada, or are about to be hacked to pieces, as in the Crusades. Then they put their children to death before they kill themselves."

"You never fall back on religion except to win an argument," said Vela.

"Suppose you turn around and sue the bank, as soon as I'm frozen," I said. "And then you claim my estate because I'm dead. They can't prove that I might be thawed out and restored to life. Or do you think they'd bring me back just to win the lawsuit? The whole case argued before some judge who couldn't find his ass with both hands?"

When lawsuits were mentioned the bank's representative went pale and in a way I sympathized with him, although I wasn't well, myself, my heart having sunk so low.

"You owe me this," said Vela.

What did she mean? But it is a principle with me not to argue with irrational people. I simply shook my head and repeated, "It can't be done, it can't be, and I won't do it."

"No?"

"You don't understand what you're asking," I said.

"No?"

"You mean by the way you say it that _I __don't know what _I'm__ doing. Fair enough." I was never more out of line than when we stood together in the judge's chambers to be married. An old school friend I had invited to the wedding was greatly taken with Vela. He whispered in my ear, as the judge was looking for the marriage service in his book, "Even if this doesn't last six months, even if it's only a month, it's still worth it-with a bosom and hips and a face like hers."

Resuming the dialogue in the bank with Vela, I could hear myself saying, with the conviction of ultimate seriousness, "I adjusted myself long ago to dying a natural death, like everybody else. I've seen plenty of dying in my time, and I'm prepared for it. Maybe I've been a little too imaginative about the grave-the dampness and the cold. I've pictured it in too much detail and maybe feel a little too much-feel abnormally-for the dead. But there's not a chance in the world of convincing me to put myself in the hands of experimental science. I feel insulted by your proposition. But if you could induce me to marry you, perhaps you feel that I can also be talked into being frozen for a century."

"Yes, I do think you owe me something," said Vela, on top of what I was saying.

One of our difficulties, and a source of much misunderstanding, was that my outlook was incomprehensible to her. Dogs can understand a joke. Cats never, but never, have occasion to laugh. Vela, when others were laughing, would join in. But if cues were lacking ("This is funny"), she didn't smile. And I, when I amused a dinner table, was suspected by her of making her the butt of my jokes.

I may not have been aware, when I believed myself to be in a bank, with a small dime and a huge dollar set in polished marble, that in the real world my life was being saved. Doctors by drugs, nurses by tending me, technicians with their skills, were working to assist me. When or if I was saved, I would go on with my life.

And if it hadn't been for the article about Howard Hughes, Vela would not have suggested that being frozen for a century was a wonderful idea-that she would do lewd things with the Spanish boyfriend (by the way, he never had said so much as good morning to me) while I lay frozen, a block of ice, awaiting resuscitation or resurrection.

And I did not doubt the reality of this bank, these coins, those companions-Vela, her Spanish stud, the investment counselor, and Vela's remarks about the sexual revolution.

"That meeting in the bank you believe in," my wife, Rosamund, the real wife, later said, after I had described the moment to her. "Why would it be always the _worst__ things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to talk you out of being sadistic to yourself."

"Yes," I agreed. "It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience. This is what we go through, and it's what existence is like. The brain is a mirror and reflects the world. Of course we see pictures, not the real thing, but the pictures are dear to us, we come to love them even though we are aware how distorting an organ the mirror-brain is. But this is not the moment to turn metaphysical."

I was the sort of intensive care patient the staff would have made book on, if they had been the gambling sort. But these were people too serious to lay bets on whether you would survive. I'd run into some of them later in other departments of the hospital, and they'd say, "Ah, so you made it-wonderful! I wouldn't have guessed you would. Well… that was quite a fight you put up. I wouldn't have given two cents for your life."

And so… _hasta la vista__. We'll see each other in the life to come.

If these encounters had been longer (although I preferred them to be as short as possible) I should have mentioned my wife, given her due credit. Here and there a specialist materialized who had noted her: "What a pretty woman."

"How devoted she was." Often the relatives of the dying are like dazzled birds confused by the lights over center field, flying blind. But that was not the case with Rosamund. To save me she would have done whatever it was necessary to do. That was why, for her, the intensive care staff stretched the rules. They had a wide and complex knowledge of brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, and wives. In my case survival was not a likely option, and she seemed to be backing a loser. To some others, mainly women, it would have seemed that Rosamund was keeping me on this side of the death-line.

Was love credited among these women with saving lives? If they were answering the questions of a pollster they'd have denied it. As Ravelstein had famously said, American nihilism was nihilism without the abyss. Love should by rights-or by modern lights-be seen today as a discredited passion, but the nurses in intensive care on the front line of death were more open to pure feelings than those who worked in the quieter corridors. And Rosamund, this slender, dark-haired, straight-nosed beauty was paradoxically recognizable as a natural. Although highly educated-a Ph. D., too smart to be taken in-she loved her husband. Love found secret support among these nurses in the end zone, eighty percent of whose cases ended in the morgue. The staff stretched the rules for her-for us. She was allowed to sleep beside the bed, in my cubicle.

When I graduated from the ICU they let Rosamund give a little supper. Dr. Bertolucci brought the pasta marinara from home. I sat up and ate a few forkfuls and lectured on cannibalism in New Guinea, where butchered enemies were roasted beside cliffs where they had tropical flowers dropping hundreds of feet, like waterfalls.

When I was sent down from intensive care, Rosamund was still allowed to come and go, free from all restrictions. After dinner she drove home in the Crown Vic. To reassure me she said, "It's stable, it's dependable. It's the cop car of choice, and I feel safe in it at a stoplight. For all the bad actors know, I'm a plainclothes police officer, and I carry a gun."

Even so, the side window was shattered one night in the parking lot behind our building. Nor did she like nightly to see the rats sit ting in rows where they could see and smell the odors of the restaurant on Beacon Street. "They're in rows like the jury in the jury box," she'd say, "and their eyes pick up all the light there is."

When she had limped up to the third floor the cat was there to greet her, or to accuse her of neglect. He was a country cat and had lived on mice and chipmunks and on birds. He now spent his days watching the grackles, blue jays, and giant crows. These look much bigger than crows in the woods-perhaps because of the smaller scale of domesticated city plants. Late in the afternoon they sound off from our rooftop like metal-saws.

I suppose it served some biological purpose but I was not interested. I was deaf to theory just then-just as I refused to think of what I was doing as a struggle for existence. If I had stopped to consider it, I would have been aware that I was underground digging myself out with bare hands. Some would have thought well of my tenacity or loyalty to life. To me it was no such thing-it was as dull as potatoes.

Rosamund after looking into the bare fridge (there was no time to shop) chewed some cheese rinds and then with her hair protected by a tall cone of turkish towels she stood under a hot shower. In bed, she telephoned her parents and chatted with them. Her alarm was set for seven, and she was at the hospital very early in the morning. She could name all the drugs prescribed for me, and the doctors found that she could tell them how I had reacted to each one, what I was allergic to, or what my blood-pressure readings had been the day before yesterday. There was an extended sorting apparatus in the pretty woman's head. She told me, confidently, that we would live to be very old, well into the coming century. She said I was a prodigy. I saw myself rather as a sort of freak.

There was no subject raised which she didn't immediately understand. Ravelstein would have been well pleased with her. Of course he'd never had my advantage, the access to her that I had. And after the crisis Rosamund said she never doubted that I would survive. And I seemed to believe that I wouldn't die because I had things to do. Ravelstein expected me to make good on my promise to write the memoir he had commissioned. To keep my word I'd have to live. Of course there was an obvious corollary: Once the memoir was written, I lost my protection, and I became as expend able as anybody else.

"But that couldn't apply to you," said Rosamund. "Once you had felt your way _up__ to it, nothing could have held you back. Besides, you'd survive for my sake."

I often recalled asking Ravelstein which of his friends were likely to follow him soon. "To keep you company," was the way I put it. And after he had thoroughly examined my color, my wrinkles, my looks, he said that I was the likeliest to follow. He was like that. If you asked him to be direct he wouldn't spare you. His clarity was like a fast-freezing fluid. Did he mean that I would be the first of his friends to join him in the afterlife? This was what the tone of our exchange suggested. But then he didn't believe in an afterlife. Plato, by whom he was guided in such matters, often spoke of a life-to-come but it was difficult to say how seriously he took this. I was not about to get into the rink with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics. One bump of his powerful belly and I'd be out of the brilliant ring and back again in the noisy dark.

He had, however, asked me what I imagined death would be like-and when I said that the pictures would stop he reflected seriously on my answer, came to a full stop, and considered what I might mean by this. No one can give up on the pictures-the pictures might, yes they might continue. I wonder if anyone believes that the grave is all there is. No one can give up on the pictures. The pictures must and will continue. If Ravelstein the atheist-materialist had implicitly told me that he would see me sooner or later, he meant that he did not accept the grave to be _the__ end. Nobody can and nobody does accept this. We just _talk__ tough.

So when I made my remark about the pictures, Ravelstein had given me his explosive laugh-stammer: "Har har." But he had some regard-some respect for the answer.

But then he let himself go so far as to say, "You look as if you might by and by be joining me."

This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures _do__ stop.

Roughly forty percent of intensive care patients die in the intensive care unit. Of the remainder some twenty percent are permanently disabled. These invalids are sent to what the health industry calls "chronic care facilities." They can never be expected to lead nor mal lives. The rest, the lucky ones, are said to be "on the floor."

On the floor, I was no longer attended by the ICU team of physicians. Worn out by hundreds of hours in the unit, two of them now stopped by to say that they were going on holiday. Because I was one of their great successes they looked me up on the floor to say good bye. Dr. Alba brought chicken soup from her own kitchen. Dr. Bertolucci's gift was a homemade lasagna dish and a supplement of meatballs in tomato sauce, like the one I had eaten in intensive care. I was still unable to feed myself. The spoon shook in my hand and rattled the dish; I couldn't bring it to my mouth. Dr. Bertolucci came to dine with Rosamund and me. Far from normal, I kept bringing the conversation back to the subject of cannibalism. But Dr. Bertolucci was very pleased with me saying, "You're just about out of the woods." He had saved my life. I was sitting up, eating a dinner the doctor himself had cooked, and chatting, nattering away. Rosamund too was pleased and excited. This was my first night on the floor, and I wouldn't be going to a chronic care institution to begin a cripple's life.