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.