He was walking independently-not yet altogether firm, but a Lazarus case if there ever was one. You're just back from the dead, and you run into an entire tribe of green parrots, tropical animals surviving a Midwestern winter. Ravelstein grinned at me and said, "They even have a Jew look to them." Then, though he took almost no interest in natural science, he asked me once again how they had become so numerous. Suddenly I became the nature expert. So I described them again: those were slim sacks hanging from trees and from the crossbars of the timber, power-line supports. Like over stretched nylon stockings, those nesting tenements where eggs were hatched, drooped as much as thirty feet. "Those nests make you think of Eastside tenements," I said to him.
"Let's get Nikki to drive us over for a look. Where are the head quarters?"
"Jackson Park. But there's a big colony in an alley off Fifty-fourth Street."
But we never did go to see the parrot tenements, the swaying, layered tubes where they nested. Instead, Ravelstein told me when I next met him that he and Nikki were flying to Paris.
"But what do you want to do that for?"
I could see that I had asked a stupid and offensive question, and that Ravelstein was disappointed in me. But it was his way to cover for his closest friends. And it was natural that he should cover for me. "The people at the hospital tell me it's all right to go."
"Do they?" I said.
The doctors' reasoning was transparent. Although Ravelstein was dying he was still fit enough to fly. Paris was one of his great pleasures: He had close friends there and many kinds of unfinished human business. If he wanted so badly to go, why not let him? The doctors figured that a trip of ten days couldn't do much damage. For myself, twenty-five hours of air travel would have been too fatiguing, but Ravelstein would ride through the airports in wheelchairs and, unlike me, he flew first class. To go a bit deeper, I'm afraid I must admit that it seemed to me an unserious thing for a dying man to be doing. And nobody knew what "fit enough to fly" meant in a case like Ravelstein's. Was he flying in a 727, or were there powerful wings hidden under his coat?
And though I do think that Ravelstein was disappointed in me, I don't believe that he was surprised. It was a standing premise between us that there was to be nothing hidden or too shameful to confess, and there was nothing I couldn't tell Ravelstein. Partly this meant that there was scarcely anything he wouldn't have detected on his own. So he would have understood also that I looked down on Paris, rather. There is a Jewish freethinker's saying about Paris-_wie Gott in Frankreich__. Meaning that even God took his holidays in France. Why? Because the French are atheists and among them God himself could be carefree, a _flвneur__, like any tourist.
What I failed even toward the last to understand was that Ravel stein had a second, a supplementary life in Paris. He came back more cheerful from this brief farewell excursion, saying nothing about his French friends but with an air of having done what he should have done.
I was told, however, that Dr. Schley had now ordered Ravelstein to go back to the hospital for "further tests." Nikki confirmed this but added that the room Ravelstein wanted would be unavailable till early next week. On Sunday afternoon he gave a party-pizza and beer, picnic style, with paper cups and plates. He had bought new video equipment-_dernier cri__, he said (even I preferred that to "state-of-the-art")-and singers and instrumentalists were exhibited at full length and with a kind of tropical jungle-light immediacy. The film Ravelstein had chosen to run was one of his favorites-Rossini's _Italian Maiden in Algiers__. The panels on which the players and singers appeared were flat, thin, tall, wide, unendurably real-art re-armed by technology, as Ravelstein said. The faces of the singers colored like Venetian glass and the cameras taking you into their beautiful dark eyes and even into their teeth. Ravelstein in his camel-hair bathrobe was in his lounge chair ad miring and explaining the new equipment-and also making fun of the ignorance of the laity. But he wasn't up to it and kept pressing the mute button to make himself heard. In the end it was simply too much for him, and Nikki helped him up and led him out, saying, "It's too much excitement. He thought he could skip his siesta just this once. But he can't."
The video on mute and Ravelstein himself, silent and perhaps reviewing the facts of disease and death from an unfamiliar angle, followed Nikki out. We led him back to his bedroom with its sleigh-bed and eiderdown silk quilts. When he lay back on the pillows I covered him with all the linens and the silks.
The apartment soon emptied. When latecomers turned up, Nikki pressed the button to hold the elevator door open and said, "Abe would have been so happy to see you but he's on all kinds of drugs and doesn't know whether he's coming or going."
Next day, when Ravelstein brought up the subject I said, "Nikki was very tactful. He wouldn't answer any questions. But the party folded pretty quickly."
"He never answers questions, does he. There are silent questions in every corner but he doesn't acknowledge them. That takes a certain amount of strength."
"He switched off the new video. I don't think I'd know how to do that."
During Ravelstein's last days at home I often kept him company in the morning. Because I lived in the same block and followed no regular schedule I would come by after breakfast. Nikki, whose usual bedtime was 4 a.m. would be fast asleep until 10, whereas Ravelstein dozed because he had no company and lay with his large knees asprawl. The doctors drugged (tranquilized) him, but this didn't stop him from thinking-considering various problems in their dawn-aspect. And even when he was dozing you could learn a lot about him by watching his peculiar Jewish face. You couldn't imagine an odder container for his odd intellect. Somehow his singular, total, almost geological baldness implied that there was nothing hidden about him. He would say-as usual preferring to say it in French-that he had had a _succиs fou__, but now he was facing the cemetery.
Though I was his senior by some years he saw himself as my teacher. Well, that was his trade-he was an educator. He never presented himself as a philosopher-professors of philosophy were not philosophers. He had had a philosophical training and had learned how a philosophical life should be lived. That was what philosophy was about, and this was why one read Plato. If he had to choose between Athens and Jerusalem, among us the two main sources of higher life, he chose Athens, while full of respect for Jerusalem. But in his last days it was the Jews he wanted to talk about, not the Greeks.
When I commented on this change he was annoyed with me. "Why not talk about them?" he said. "In the South they still talk about the War Between the States much more than a century ago but in our own time millions were destroyed, most of them no different from you. From us. We mustn't turn our backs on them.
Moses communicated with God, who gave him instructions, and the connection has lasted for millennia."
Ravelstein went on for quite a while in this way. He said that the Jews had been used to give the entire species a measure of human viciousness. "You tell people that a new great era will begin if you abolish the ruling class or the bourgeoisie, if you rationalize the means of production, if you use euthanasia on the incurables. To minds so prepared you then propose that the Jews be destroyed. And they make a substantial start. They kill more than half of the European Jews-and you and I, Chick, belong to the remainder." These are not Ravelstein's actual words. I am paraphrasing. What he said was that we, as Jews, now knew what was possible.