Leaving, I roamed the streets until after midnight. Scattered snowflakes had begun to fall; I welcomed them with a feeling of relief, for they cooled my burning lips. New questions were rising inside me. The dance that evening had opened the old wellsprings in my bowels, the ones I thought had been stanched. I realized that the entrails of a Cretan are not easily emptied. Inside me were terrible ancestors who had not eaten as much meat or drunk as much wine as they craved, nor kissed as many women as they desired, and now they were bounding up fiercely in order to prevent me—and themselves—from dying. Truly, what business did Buddha have in Crete, what could he hope for . . . in Crete?
I gazed at the snowflakes eddying in the light of the streetlamps; they reminded me of the Javanese man and woman I had seen that evening, of the innumerable men and women who enact the dance—the pursuit, the battle, the desire—and in the final figure unite in order to engender a son and insure their immortality. The thirst for immortality is far more invincible than the thirst for death.
Completely exhausted, I lay down to go to sleep. And as frequently is my good fortune when my waking mind is tormented with questions and unable to find a way out, along came slumber to simplify them all and transform them into a tale. Such is the crown of the dormant stock of truth when it blossoms.
I dreamed that I was climbing a mountain. I had my crook across my shoulders in the manner of Cretan shepherds, and I was singing. I remember it was a folk song I loved very much:
I sowed a pepper seed on Margaro’s lips.
It sprouted thickly, became a giant plant
—mown now by Greeks, carried by Turks,
and threshed by Margaro astride her mount.
Suddenly an old man darted out of a cave. His sleeves were tucked up, his hands covered with clay. Placing his finger on his lips to silence me, he commanded in a stern voice, “Stop singing! I want quiet! Can’t you see I’m working?” (Here he indicated his hands.)
“What are you making?” I asked him.
“Can’t you see for yourself? Inside this cave I am fashioning the Redeemed.”
“The Redeemed? Who is redeemed?” I cried, and the old wounds began to flow again inside me.
“He who perceives, loves, and lives the totality!” replied the old man, hurriedly burrowing again into his cave.
“He who conceives, loves, and lives the totality . . .” All the next day I kept repeating those words from my dream, never tiring of them. Was this God’s voice, I wondered, the voice which can be heard only at night when the loquacious brain has finally closed its mouth? I had always placed faith in the advice which the hours of darkness give us. Surely the night is more profound and holy than that nincompoop the day. The night takes pity on man.
Several days went by. As so often in my life, those two sleepless demons the Yes and the No were wrestling and scuffling inside me. Every time I find an answer to the questions tormenting me, I always accept it with uneasiness because I know that this answer, without fail, will spawn new questions. Thus the hunt conducted by the two demons inside me has no end. It seems that each answer hides future questions in the folds of its temporary certainty. That is why I always view its coming not with relief but with hidden disquietude.
Christ had hidden the seed of Buddha, thrust deep down within Him. What, I wondered, was Buddha hiding, wrapped deep inside his yellow robe?
One rainy Sunday I was promenading slowly in a museum, looking at fierce African masks made of wood, hide, and human skulls. In an effort to unravel the mystery of masks, I said to myself, The mask is our true face; we are these monsters with their bloody mouths, hanging lips, and horrifying eyes. A repulsive mask howls behind the beautiful features of the woman we love, chaos behind the visible world, Buddha behind Christ’s gentle face. Sometimes in the terrible moments of love, hate, or death the deceptive charm vanishes and we view truth’s frightening countenance. With a shudder I remembered the Irish lass inside that little chapel atop the Cretan mountain. As my lips touched hers, it seemed that her face turned to rot and oozed away, revealing a horrible, tormented, swooning monkey which filled me with disgust and fright. Ever since that day I have restrained myself, though with difficulty, from baring the true faces of mankind, because then love, courtesy, and mutual understanding would disappear. I pretend to believe in mankind’s faces, and in this way I am able to live with my fellow human beings.
Every morning before daybreak these aborigines who carved the masks raced up the nearest hill and called the sun—entreated it—to appear, trembling lest by some chance it might fail to come again. Rain for them was full of male spirits who entered the earth and made it fruitful; lightning flashes were the angry glances of the invisible Chief. The leaves on the trees spoke, just like the lips of men, and several aged women understood what they said. A river, when these aborigines crossed it, drew them to it in order to drown them, but they gathered up momentum, strode through the current with utmost speed, and doubled over in laughter when they reached the opposite bank, because they had come through safely. All things spoke, hungered, heard, had gender, coupled. The air was densely filled with spirits of the dead; in order to push them aside these people spread and churned their arms when they walked, as though they were swimming. This is why they saw the real so clearly behind the apparent, why they bared the eternal mask behind the ephemeral face.
A girl came, stood next to me, and began looking, like myself, at the masks. For a moment I was ready to leave, for I always feel a certain annoyance when I am alone, looking at something which moves me, and someone else comes to look at it too. She was short and chubby, with high bosom, strong chin, hawklike nose, and eyes with huge eyelashes.
Turning, she cast a protracted, searching glance at me, as though I too were a mask.
“Are you an African?” she asked me.
I laughed.
“Not entirely,” I replied. “Only my heart.”
“Your face too,” she said. “And your hands. . . . I’m Jewish.”
“A terrifying race,” I said to tease her. “Dangerous. Apparently it wants to save the world. . . . Are you still awaiting the Messiah?”
“No. He’s come.”
“The Messiah?”
“Yes, the Messiah.”
I laughed again. “When? Where? What’s his name?”
“Lenin.”
Her voice had suddenly become deep, her eyes somber.
Lenin! For an instant it seemed that all the masks in front of me stirred and clapped open their massive jaws. Without speaking, the girl glanced out through the window at the blackened sky.
Yes, Lenin was another new savior, I reflected, another new savior created by the enslaved, hungry, and oppressed to enable them to bear slavery, hunger, and oppression—another new mask for mankind’s despair and hope.
“I know another Messiah who delivers man from hunger and also from satiety, from injustice and also from justice. And what is most important, from all Messiahs.”
“And his name is . . .”
“Buddha!”
She smiled disdainfully, then said in an angry voice, “I’ve heard of him. He’s a ghost. My Messiah is made of flesh and blood.”
She had flared up. The acrid odor of her sweating body mounted from her open blouse. For an instant my eyes turned leaden.
“Do not be angry,” I said, touching her arm. “You’re a woman, I’m a man; we can come to understand each other.”
She glared at me through half-closed eyes, her brows quivering.
“This place is a graveyard,” she said, looking now at the masks, the wooden gods, the strange, exotic armor all around us. “A graveyard. I’m suffocating in here. It’s raining outside. Come, let’s get wet!”
We spent hours in the rain walking beneath the trees of the large park. She had returned from Russia just a few days before—from paradise—and her whole being was steaming with love and savage hate. Her name was Itka.
I listened to her. At first I offered objections,
but I soon realized that faith rules from an elevated level above man’s head, and that reason is unable to touch it. I let her go on speaking, therefore, let her demolish and rebuild the world.
Evening drew on. The pedestrians thinned out; lights were lit. Houses, men, and trees suddenly appeared to be drowning in the illumined rainfall.
“I’m tired,” said the girl, leaning on my arm. “Let’s go to my room.”
Leaving the park, we proceeded through narrow lanes and reached a working-class neighborhood.
“You’ll meet three friends of mine. Tonight we’ll all have tea together. One is a painter. She wrestles with her pigments, makes something, then rips it up. She is searching, but she doesn’t know what for. ‘When I’ve found it,’ she says, ‘then I’ll discover what I’m after.’ Her name is Dina and she’s Jewish. The other is an actress. She’s searching just like Dina. She enters every character she plays, but when she comes out again, she tears herself to pieces. Her name is Lia; she’s Jewish too. The third is very beautiful, also very affected and spoiled. Her rich father keeps giving her money and she orders evening gowns, buys perfume, chooses the men she wants, and sleeps with them. Her name is Rosa; she isn’t Jewish, she’s Viennese. I like her, I don’t know why . . .”
She fell silent for a moment, but then: “Maybe because I’d like to resemble her. Who knows?”
I pretended that I had not heard, but inside myself I was secretly delighted to hear the voice of the eternal feminine surging above ideas, above all theories about destroying and rebuilding the world.
The friends were already there. Rosa had brought sweets and fruit. The table was set and they were waiting, Rosa applying lipstick, stretched out on the divan, while the other two read greedily from a newspaper they held open in front of them. People were seething again, the world was feverish.
As I watched the four savage souls around me, I kept thinking, Bless my fate for always throwing me among Jews; I believe they suit me much better than Christians.
The three girls let out a cry when we entered. They had not expected a man.
“I don’t even know his name,” Itka said with a laugh. “I found him in the Ethnological Museum. He’s a mask.”
Rosa shifted her position; the air filled with scent. The aura of warm breaths and impatient youth made me ill at ease. I don’t know why, but being in the midst of so many female breasts, so many insatiable eyes and painted lips, filled me with shyness and fear. I would have preferred to leave, but the tea was brought and we seated ourselves on pillows on the floor, our knees touching. Now, so many years later, I remember nothing from that entire evening—that evening which weighed so heavily upon my life—except Itka talking with ardor about Moscow, the red capital of the world, and Rosa laughing and redoing her lips because she had drunk tea, and the other two girls staring goggle-eyed and saying nothing.
Night fell. The three girls got up to leave. I got up with them, but Itka squeezed my arm and signaled me to stay. I stayed. That night Buddha began to grow pale within me. I realized that night that the world is not a specter; that the body of woman is warm, hard, and filled with the waters of immortality; that death does not exist.
I stayed with her for many nights. She did not utter a single word about love, the heart not daring to distract our hallowed, naked games with its sighs and vows. Nothing but bodies now, like animals, we battled and then rolled headlong into sleep, exhausted and joyous. Ah, Buddha, Buddha! I kept thinking, and I laughed.
What a relief when the flesh does not embroil itself in spiritual concerns but remains on earth, pure and unsullied, like an animal! Christianity soiled the union of man and woman by stigmatizing it as a sin. Whereas formerly it was a holy act, a joyous submission to God’s will, in the Christian’s terror-shaken soul it degenerated into a transgression. Before Christ, sex was a red apple; along came Christ, and a worm entered that apple and began to eat it.
I gazed with admiration at this fiery girl. The entire night she was an insatiable male-eating beast with every bit of her soul turned into flesh, the entire day a flame of the utmost purity. She reminded me of an extraordinary woman, likewise either all body or all soul: Saint Teresa. One day the nuns of her convent saw her voraciously gorging herself with a roast partridge. The simple-hearted nuns were scandalized, but Saint Teresa laughed. “At prayer-time, pray,” she said, “at partridge-time, partridge!” She gave herself completely to each of her acts, nourishing her body and her soul with equal voracity.
Itka played with me all the night, but when day came, she puckered her brows and eyed me with hatred. “Aren’t you ashamed to be comfortable and well off?” she kept asking me. “Not to be hungry, not to shiver in wintertime, not to have shoes which are worn through? Aren’t you ashamed to stroll through the streets and say to yourself, ‘The world is fine, I like it’?”
“I don’t say, ‘The world is fine, I like it.’ I say, ‘The world is a phantasmagoria. Hunger, cold, shoes (with or without holes) are phantasmagorias. A breeze will blow and dispel them all!’ That’s what I say!”
She charged me in a frenzy and sealed my mouth with her palm.
“Silence! Silence! I don’t want to hear a word more! Can it be true then that all you who are well off don’t have hearts with which to feel compassion? Don’t any of you have eyes to see with? Come and see!”
Taking me, she led me through the proletarian quarter. Everyone knew her. Slipping into the wretched hovels, she showed me the hungry children, the weeping mothers, the unemployed men sitting there in silence biting their lips. When I asked them questions, they eyed me from tip to toe and then turned away their faces.
“Why don’t they talk?” I demanded of Itka. “Why?”
“They are talking, they’re bellowing—but how can the likes of you hear them? Never fear, however. One day you’ll hear them well enough!” She riveted her eyes upon me, hoping to see that mankind’s suffering had penetrated.
But I answered mockingly, “What a shame that I too don’t suck some kind of gumdrop to sweeten my breath, one of those delicious products of mankind’s confectionery art: God, fatherland, or your favorite, Karl Marx. Once I met the happiest man in the world; he sucked two gumdrops at once, Christ and Marx. By being a fanatic Christian and also a fanatic communist he solved all of life’s problems, both the mundane and the celestial.”
I had begun in jest, but as I spoke, I felt compassion and bitterness weighing down my soul. Out of a false sense of self-respect, however, I did not wish to divulge this, and I persisted in opposing her and taking pride in my refusal to find consolation by sucking gumdrops.
“I don’t want any such comforts. Every faith promising rewards and happiness seems to me a cowardly consolation, good for dotards, weaklings, and vegetarians.”
“I’m not a dotard, and I’m not a cripple or a vegetarian,” my companion angrily retorted. “Stop your swaggering. Your Buddha is a gumdrop just like the rest. And what’s more, I want you to know that I never want to hear you or see you again!”
Tossing her head in a furor, she abandoned my arm, turned into the first street we came to, and left me.
But in the evening her thick Jewish lips would be smiling. “Whatever we said during the day—water over the dam,” she used to declare with a laugh. “Now it’s nighttime!”
We parted each morning. She went to the factory where she worked; I had acquired the habit of taking solitary walks through the slums. I did not want to go there any more in Itka’s presence, for when I was with her, my self-respect made me resist and keep my heart closed. When I was alone, however, man’s suffering ceased to be a phantasmagoria. It was no longer a shade, but a real, famished body that wailed and bled.
Lord God, do not give man all he can endure! I had never known that so much suffering, so much hunger and injustice existed in the world. Never until this time had I confronted this horrible face of need at such close hand. Another table of laws was in force here, with hate as the primary duty. The Ten Comma
ndments had to change here; they had already changed. Love, hate, war, and morality had taken on new meanings. One day I saw an emaciated young woman lying on the pavement. Her tattered dress had crept up indecently, revealing her nudity. Feeling sorry for her, I stopped to tell her to pull down her dress. “You are not decent,” I said. She shrugged her shoulders, and a sarcastic laugh rent her lips. “I’m hungry and you talk about being decent. Modesty is for the rich.”
I could not bear so much horror—cheeks hollowed out from hunger, tiny children digging in garbage pails to find a scrap of refuse to eat, their abdomens green and swollen, their shanks nothing but bones wrapped in yellow hide. Some leaned on crutches because their legs were unable to support them; and some had beards growing on their unfledged cheeks.
Unable to stand it any longer, I averted my eyes to keep from seeing—because I felt ashamed.
This I remember well: before compassionating mankind, I felt this inner shame. I was ashamed to see mankind’s suffering while I toiled to transform all this horror into a spectacle both ephemeral and vain. I told myself that none of this was true. I must not be led astray into believing, like some simple, naïve person. No, hunger and satiety, joy and sorrow, life and death—all were specters! I said this over and over again, but as I saw the hungry, crying children and the women with their sunken cheeks and their eyes so filled with hate and pain, my heart gradually began to melt. It was with great emotion that I observed this unforeseen change within me. At first, shame throbbed in my heart, afterwards compassion—I began to feel the suffering of others as my own suffering. Next came indignation, then the thirst for justice, and above all else, a sense of responsibility. I am to blame for all the hunger and injustice in the world, I told myself; the responsibility is mine.
What should I do? I saw that my duty was shifting. The world was broadening, need getting out of hand, and duty felt imprisoned and suffocated in one small body, one small soul. What should I do? Which direction should I take? Deep within me already I knew what I ought to do, but I dared not reveal it. This road seemed against my nature, and I was not certain whether man, by means of love and effort, was capable of surpassing his natural disposition. But I meditated the question. Did he, I wondered, have so much creative force? If he did, then he was left with no possible justification if in critical moments he neglected to smash his limitations.