A Walker in the City (17 page)

We used to go round and round it, reading in turns all I had suddenly begun to write that year. It was the summer of my graduation from high school, the beginning of that cardinal summer at sixteen when, day after day, wild with gratitude and surprise, I began to take in what I would live for. He must have been a very young man then, not long out of the city college to which I in my turn would be going that fall; but very offhand, forever drawling out sarcasms when he thought I needed taking down, he seemed to me very settled and wise in that thin, weary way he had; he never paid a compliment to your face. Every warm full June afternoon that last week of high school, I would wait for him on Evergreen Avenue, staring and staring at the trees lining the quiet "American" streets beautiful with gray frame houses and brownstones, and then we would walk past the German ice-cream parlors and up Bushwick Avenue in that extraordinary summer's peace under the awnings, stop at his house to hear Kreisler and Casals, and at last, steadily mounting the hill that led into Highland Park past Trommer's Brewery, go up to the reservoir through the cemetery, in which he once pointed out the place where a little group of Chinese lay all to themselves.

It always astonished me that he took so much trouble; he had never been a teacher of mine. But that last week, proctoring our final examination in Spanish, he had refused me permission to leave the room when I had turned in my papers before the closing bell, and when I had asked for something to read, he had flung me some more yellow test paper, and in his weary unamiable way, had said: "I suppose you can write? Write something!"

It had been about a violin. Walking along the street I had seen an old violin in a pawnshop window. It was snowing; people walked on every side of me, huddled against the storm; but I stood in front of that despised and neglected violin, remembering all the hands through which it had passed. I had shown it to him then and there, and he had read it with a grin; and still grinning, had taken me off to lunch; and that thin, weary, bitter grin more and more pronounced each day of that last week I ever saw him, he would lend me autobiographies by Russian Jews, picture books by Marc Chagall, and leading me off to Highland Park for a walk around the reservoir, make me read aloud from my notebook essays and poems and sketches.

Those June afternoons, it was the water lapping against the fence I kept listening for under the unexpected sound of my own voice. There was an old leftover rowboat, chained to the fence, that you could sometimes see the caretaker riding up and down in, dredging the old reservoir of its muck. I would listen for the boat restlessly beating at the fence, for the cries of children in the park, for anything that would take me away from the harsh exultant pain of hearing my own voice ring out on that quiet path.

Just below the path, raising their heads above the endless white crosses of a soldier's cemetery, were strange red flowers. I did not know their names. But when a sudden breeze scudded along the water, and on one long and single breath of wind the dust flew up from the graveled path and a castoff newspaper flew onto the webbed wire fence, those red flowers along the bottom of the hill would wave and shake and thrash on each other as if they were bleeding together, red pouring on red. From the path to those flowers just below, the way was a plunging fall. In the unbearable stillness of the almost empty park, once you had stopped reading, silence itself took over—a silence so keen, so heartbreakingly firm and implacable across the wide, endlessly wide surface of the water and the long even glare of the sun on the path, that it seemed to come out of the very middle of the air.

 

That summer I had my first regular job. Carrying a blue canvas bag in which I kept a book for private reading, I went about the streets of middle Brooklyn all through the long blazing afternoons picking‹ up specimens from drugstores to be delivered to a urinalysis lab on Nostrand Avenue. Between drugstores on my route I often stopped to read in various small parks along the way. I remember how that faint distant odor curiously reminiscent of stale ground-up peanuts clung to the blue surface of the
David Copperfield
I was always reading on the job, and that whenever I got lost in reading and rode far past my destination, usually found that I had used up the carfare the boss had given me and that I would have to walk it the rest of the way. But then, in the brilliant heat, the jars and flasks wrapped in brown paper bags tinkling against each other as I walked, that faint odor of stale ground-up peanuts lingering along the cracks in the pavement, I gave myself to those streets I was lost in as if I were swimming in the weather.

It was the intense silence and heat of those summer streets that delivered me to all my joy. Whenever I guiltily thrust
David Copperfield
back into my canvas bag and started out fresh from some strange streetcar crossing, I would rush off in a panic, thinking only of the time I had lost and what the boss would say. Then the silence of summer would fall on the top of my head, cleaving me through and through, as if the front of my face alone were rushing ahead to the next drugstore on my list, while my spine dawdled in amazement. There was suddenly anywhere to go now; I had the whole long afternoon to walk around in. My summer's time had come; my own time had come at last. There was a deep aromatic coolness behind the awning of each new drugstore that was made up of cleanness and camphor and the toilet water seeping out of the vials on the counter, of the thick black type and the priestly face on Father John's Cough Medicine, of the clink of an empty spoon against the smooth top of the soda fountain counter, of the dry fizz of soda water backing out of the taps, of the stiff "American" dignity and starched linen jackets on all those strange new Gentile druggists. The insides of all drugstores summer afternoons were hermetically deep. When I walked into one under the awning, out of the glare, it was like floating down to the bottom of a lake with my eyes wide open among the rushes.

That particular great day in the heat, the unending heat, I was walking somewhere off Gates Avenue, and saw that they had unfurled awnings even over the El stations. I could hear the plash of a fountain in a school courtyard across the street; one whole side of that block was lined with trees. How hot it was that afternoon. The dust never stirred on the leaves of the nearest trees; the pavements were so fierce that I kept walking under the awnings of chain groceries to cool my breath and to sniff at the fresh watered celery stalks on the open stands and the clean, shaded interiors that smelled of coffee beans and of biscuits. When I walked back into the sun, every mica dot glittered in the pavement. From time to time, the hot streets were racked by some dry, distant thunder from the El. How hot it was that afternoon, how silent and hot. As I started down that lonely stretch of sidewalk somewhere off Gates Avenue, everything moved so slowly that I could almost count the drops of sweat bubbling on a girl's upper lip, the sounds of my heart dreamily pounding into my ears from the end of a long corridor as she passed me, breasts rustling in her blouse, her blouse gleaming in the sun like a second sheath of skin. All around me the city seemed entirely at rest. There were so few passers-by that I could feel the awnings over the shops pulling away from me in amazement and scorn, was queerer and more alone to myself than ever as I passed up that street with a trickle from some loosened jar seeping out of my bag.

And then it came. All the way down that street, there seemed to be nothing but myself with a bag, the blazingly hot and empty afternoon, and silence through which I pressed my way. But the large shadow on the pavement was me, the music in my head was me, the indescribable joy I felt was me. I was so happy, I could not tell what I felt apart from the evenness of the heat in which I walked. The sweat poured out of my body in relief. I was me, me, me, and it was summer.

 

N
OTICE
: A
NYONE PLACING ANY ENCUMBRANCE ON THIS BALCONY WILL BE FINED TEN DOLLARS
. Now, when I Sat on the fire escape evenings after work, the sky was the mirror of the book in my hand. I could have shown those open pages to the roofs and have read them back from the clouds moving over my head. From that private perch, everything in sight now loosed itself from its containing hard edges in space and came back to me as a single line of words burning across the page. Half-past five on a summer day—at my back I could smell soupgreens being put into the pot—just that hour which in the tense autumn of school beginning again or in the blindness of winter at the bottom of the year is so dark, but which now brims over with light you can breathe and breathe in with the iron grit flaking off the sign on the fire escape: N
OTICE
: A
NYONE PLACING ANY ENCUMBRANCE ON THIS BALCONY WILL BE FINED TEN DOLLARS.

Look how much light there is. It does not matter now that your bottom itches to the pebbly stone on the windowsill; that the sun is so fierce, it burns your feet on the iron planks; that when you get up to stretch your legs, the heat makes you so dizzy, you can see yourself falling down the red-painted ladders that chase each other to the street. For now a single line of English words takes you up slowly, and slowly carries you across the page to where, each time you reach its end, you have to catch your breath and look away—the pleasure is unbearable, it is so full.

 

But when that which is perfect
is
come, then that which is in part
shall
be done away.

When I
was
a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know
even
as also I am known.

 

The man from whom I had accepted the little blue volume on the Fifth Avenue steps of the Library had said to me in Yiddish, searching my face doubtfully: "You
are
a Jew? You will really look into it?" No, I was not really looking into it; I could not read more than two or three pages at a time without turning away in excitement and shame. Would the old women across the street ever have believed it? But how square and hardy the words looked in their even black type. Each seemed to burn separately in the sun as I nervously flipped the pages and then turned back to where the book most naturally lay flat:
For now we see through a glass, darkly.
Each time my eye fell on that square even black type, the sentence began to move in the sun. It rose up, a smoking frame of dark glass above the highest roofs, steadily and joyfully burning, as, reading aloud to myself, I tasted the Tightness of each word on my tongue.

It was like heaping my own arms with gifts. There were images I did not understand, but which fell on my mind with such slow opening grandeur that once I distinctly heard the clean and fundamental cracking of trees. First the image, then the thing; first the word in its taste and smell and touch, then the thing it meant, when you were calm enough to look. Images were instantaneous; the meaning alone could be like the unyielding metal taste when you bit on an empty spoon. The initial shock of that language left no room in my head for anything else. But now, each day I turned back to that little blue testament, I had that same sense of instant connectedness I had already noticed in myself to the exclamation
O altitudo!
in a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne; to the chapter on the cathedral in Lawrence's
The Rainbow;
to the opening line of Henry Vaughan's "The World,"

 

I saw Eternity the other night

 

that haunted me from the day I came on it in an anthology; to Blake's

 

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?;

 

to the opening lines of
A Farewell to Arms,
indescribably dry and beautiful with the light on those pebbles in the plain; to
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,
where I knew as soon as I came on the line

 

Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain
from its shroud in the dark brown fields uprisen.

 

that I had found another writer I could instinctively trust.

First the image, then the sense. First those clouds moving blue and white across the nearest roofs; and then—O
altitudo!,
the journey into that other land of
flax,
of summer, eternal summer, through which
he
had walked, wrapped in a blue and white prayer shawl, and, still looking back at me with the heartbreaking smile of recognition from a fellow Jew, had said:
The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

Offended in him? I had known him instantly. Surely I had been waiting for him all my life—our own Yeshua, misunderstood by his own, like me, but the very embodiment of everything I had waited so long to hear from a Jew—a great contempt for the minute daily business of the world; a deep and joyful turning back into our own spirit. It was
he,
I thought, who would resolve for me at last the ambiguity and the long ache of being a Jew—Yeshua, our own long-lost Jesus, speaking straight to the mind and heart at once. For that voice, that exultantly fiery and tender voice, there were no gaps between images and things, for constantly walking before the Lord, he remained all energy and mind, thrust his soul into every corner of the world, and passing gaily under every yoke, remained free to seek our God in His expected place.

How long I had been waiting for him, how long: like metal for a magnet to raise it. I had recognized him immediately, and all over: that exaltation; those thorny images that cut you with their overriding fervor and gave you the husk of every word along with the kernel; that furious old Jewish impatience with
Success,
with comfort, with eating, with the rich, with the whole shabby superficial fashionable world itself; that fatigue, as of a man having constantly to make his way up and down the world on foot; and then that sternness and love that gushed out of him when he turned to the others and said: