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.