Part 21 (1/2)

”That's what I mean. I heard you, you were talking about raising the dead.”

”But that's talking like a Christian, isn't it?”

”Oh come, Enoch, stop it.”

”You don't want me to talk like a Jew and you don't want me to talk like a Christian. That leaves the recitation of the Upanishads, I suppose.”

”Don't, Enoch,” she implored.

”Oh, it's not simply a question of don't. Believe me, it's more a question of can't. Not a single chapter. My Sanskrit's rusty, what a pity-”

Vaguely she resisted his tug. ”I knew it, you always end up with ridicule. You make a joke out of everything.”

”A Jewish joke?” he inquired with a twist of his tone.

”You don't think the way an Amba.s.sador ought to think,” she accused.

”Well, I'm not the Amba.s.sador yet. There's time.”

”You haven't recovered, that's the trouble. I'm not stupid, I can see how you've been contaminated-”

”By your not being stupid?”

”Enoch, you're not listening to me seriously.”

”Yes I am. With high seriousness. It's like listening to an epic. As though you were a troubadour.”

”d.a.m.n it!” she said.

”All right, if it's only an access of boredom and you don't mean it theologically. d.a.m.n what?”

”You! That old job you had ruined you. Those ledgers! Those numbers!”

”Ruined,” he said with amiable melancholy.

”Your mind's ruined, your whole sensibility, I can see it. You haven't recovered. As though all of it had to be your fault to satisfy you! That's masochism, you know it is. It's perfectly obvious-you know masochism is a Jewish trait, otherwise the Jews would have disappeared long ago. It's simple ordinary psychology. They're always looking to suffer, and then they turn right around and complain when they do.”

”Simple ordinary psychology,” he repeated.

”Well, I'm a realist!” She thrust her chin up with so lively a movement that her turban slipped free; the little feathers of her sickened hair roamed like animate cilia in the air. ”I've got my name on all those Zionist charity letterheads, haven't I? You know perfectly well how I feel. After all, I'm not an anti-Semite! I've read everything there is on the Dreyfus case!-All I'm saying is it's all over.”

He looked at her dully. ”What's all over?”

”Is that the Socratic method? What do you mean what's all over? The concentration camps are all over!” she almost shouted.

”Your daughter says the same,” he noted languidly.

My mother was scornful. ”Just as though she ever had a single political idea in her head! Well, she's right, for once.”

”I wasn't thinking of politics,” I said humbly.

”I told you she wasn't,” my mother gave out with a click of satisfaction.

”I was only wondering about what you said,” I pursued, ”about how the demonstration would come about. What you were saying before, the extraordinary sign-”

But my mother scowled with annoyance. ”Leave Enoch and his metaphors be, can't you?”

For an answer my stepfather merely groaned. It was an unexpected noise. ”Oh my G.o.d,” he finished it off.

Nevertheless I would not let go, no matter what. He had opened himself to me and he had no right, in my mother's presence, to shut the lid: not, at any rate, after having revealed the combination. ”I was wondering in what sense you thought the dead could be raised,” I patiently probed, ready for anything.

”In what sense! Oh Lord! What a provocation!” my mother complained. ”I'm telling you, leave Enoch alone. He's not going to be Amba.s.sador to the dead, after all! It's all over and he hasn't had anything to do with it for ten years and he still isn't recovered from it, isn't that plain enough?” And she tore the vagrant Taj Mahals from her throat, where they lay fallen and bunched; furiously she shook the silk all around her.

”Put your shawl back on,” Enoch reprimanded. ”You'll cough again. You'll get your disease back.”

”There, that's just the thing I'm driving at. It wasn't a disease you had,” she argued sternly. ”I mean it wasn't gangrene! It was only a job.”

He appeared to be rewarding her with successive satiric nods-a nurse with a recalcitrant patient. ”That's a very practical view of it. -Put your shawl on, will you?”

”It's not just practical, it's the sacred truth,” she continued, but she obeyed him. ”It was only a job and it got you where you are now. That's how you ought to regard it. That's how / regard it,” she resumed.

”Where I am now,” he echoed.

”At the brink of everything!”

”I'm to have what's known as 'a brilliant career,'” he interposed.

”Call it what you want. I know what I call it!”

”You call it Everything.”

”I'm a grabber,” she admitted.

”There's candor for you,” he acknowledged. I almost thought it a pilgrimage of violence that trailed across his eye just then. But in a moment he had diverted it to an ambush somewhat milder. He began, as though they had been speaking of nothing else all the while (though it seemed my mother, at least, had not), ”Do you think the Senate will confirm?”-which made her watchfully bristle.

”We've done what we could,” she said.

”I don't deny it.”

”We've done it all,” she said.

”Down to the last,” he agreed. He fixed on me meditatively, rubbing his blunt nose. His fingers were stiff, square-edged, short, his elbow was looped up high for defense, his mouth was incomprehensible, even invisible. Without our noticing it, night had happened. Already we were sitting in the rush of blueness before the final dark, surveying one another's heads like foreign silhouettes. ”I don't deny it,” Enoch said, feebly, once more: he looked, then-what I could see of him, what I could hear of him, his face and voice disguised by bleakness, and masked, and bound, and put away-he looked altogether what my mother had said of him: separate.

”It's not as though anything stood in your way,” she encouraged him. ”There's no risk now, after all, is there? We've taken care of the risk!”

”We've disposed of the risk,” he corrected her.