"There's no telling which corner it will come from next-the French corner? No, no, not France. They had their glut of blood in the eighteenth century and they wouldn't mind if it happened, but they wouldn't be the ones to do it. But what about the Russians? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a Russian forgery. And not long ago you were telling me about Kipling."
"Yes, it was Kipling. A wonderful writer," I said. "But somebody put me on to a collection of his letters, and in one of them he was having an angry fit against Einstein. This was early in the century. He said that the Jews had already distorted social reality for their Jewish purposes. But not satisfied with that, Einstein was disfiguring physical reality with his relativity theory, and the Jews were try ing to give a falsifying Jewish twist to the physical universe."
"You'll have to drop Kipling from your list of favorites, then," said Ravelstein.
"No, we can't afford to set up a Jewish Index. For one thing we could never impose it, not even on Jewish readers. Who could ever expect you to drop Celine? By the way, I lent you my copy of his pamphlet '_Les Beaux Draps__'…"
"I never got around to it."
"You have a weakness for the nihilists," I said.
"I suppose it's because they don't tell a lot of high-minded lies. I like the kind who accept nihilism as a condition and live in that condition. It's the intellectual nihilists I can't stand. I prefer the sort who live with their evils, frankly. The natural nihilists."
"Celine recommended that the Jews be exterminated like bacteria. It's the doctor in him, I suppose. In his novels the influence of art is a restraint on him, but in his propaganda he's a killer out and out."
Here this conversation temporarily ended, for once again the quiet ambulance pulled up at Ravelstein's door and the attendants, familiar with the layout, rang the bell of the freight elevator. Ravel-stein had been in and out of the hospital so often that he had arranged with himself to take no notice of it.
Dr. Schley had never discussed Ravelstein's illness with me. He was one of your super-earnest physicians-small, stiff, aquiline, efficient. Such hair as he had left was combed upward stiffly, Iroquois style. He owed me no medical explanations. I was not related to Ravelstein by blood. But by now Schley had seen that Ravelstein and I were very close and he began to pass me silent signals-what a Parisian lady I met decades ago in the ABC music hall taught me to call _chanson а la carpe__. Nobody else seemed ever to have heard this expression but I swore by it-two large fish amid clear bubbles silently communicating by opening their jaws. This was how Dr. Schley notified me that Ravelstein's days were numbered. And Rosamund, too, had said, "This could be Ravelstein's last ride to the hospital." I agreed. And Nikki, naturally, had reached the same conclusion. He put in very long hours, doing errands, taking phone calls. It was Nikki, not the nurses, who shaved Ravelstein with the electric razor while Ravelstein, eyes shut, lolled back his head to lift his chin. A small plastic cup under his nose supplied him with oxygen.
"It doesn't look too good, does it," said Nikki to me in the corridor.
"It doesn't, in fact."
"He has a message for his lawyer. And he told me to send for Morris Herbst."
Well, there was no recovery possible from this disease, as we all knew. When Ravelstein had last been hospitalized he had held impromptu seminars from his hospital bed, presiding brilliantly. The teaching-vaudeville was then still running. Even now his students were sitting in the visitors' lounge under the large skylight-waiting to be sent for-but although he would ask, by name, about one or another of them, he was no longer teaching, or holding court. The fact was that I could already see the early signs of approaching death in his movements-his head becoming a burden to his neck and shoulders, a change in color, especially under the eyes. His opinions were shortened, and there was less concern for your feel ings, so that you were well advised to keep to neutral topics. He said about Vela, "You gave in-you tried to sell me a colored cutout of the woman like the cardboard personalities they used to hang in movie lobbies in the old days. You know, Chick, you sometimes say there's nothing you can't tell me. But you falsified the image of your ex-wife. You'll say that it was done for the sake of marriage but what kind of morality is _that__?"
"That's perfectly true," I said. He had me there, dead to rights. He might have added when I accused him of preferring nihilists to his "more principled" academic contemporaries that at least the nihilists weren't putting forward any petty-bourgeois deformities and falsehoods as examples of high principle and even beauty.
Nikki, Ravelstein's Chinese son who had nothing at all to do with these conversations, was there to wipe his face. Nikki stepped aside only for the technicians who x-rayed Ravelstein or took blood samples. Now and then I put my hand to my friends bald head. I could see that he wanted to be touched. I was surprised to find that there was an invisible stubble on his scalp. He seemed to have decided that total baldness suited him better than thinning hair, and shaved his head as well as his cheeks. Anyway, this head was rolling toward the grave.
"Is it a dark day outside," Ravelstein asked me, "or am I in a gloomy mood?"
"It's not your mood. There's a thick cloud cover."
It wasn't like Ravelstein either to bother with the weather; the weather would adapt itself to whatever the people that mattered were thinking, and he would sometimes criticize me for "checking out the externals"-keeping one eye on the clouds. "You can count on nature doing what nature has been doing forever. Do you think you're going to rush in on Nature and grab off an insight?" he would say. But these bright moments seldom occurred now. More often he looked comatose-and Rosamund would anxiously whisper, "Is he still here?"
There were times when I couldn't answer with confidence. It had been repeatedly made clear that he couldn't survive, and he lay, irregularly breathing with a stand filled with medicine bottles near his head, ranged behind his large conspicuous ears. At times you thought that he preferred to doze his way into death. He would perhaps be following some line of thought he didn't care to discuss. He had devoted himself mainly to the two poles of human life-religion and government, that was how Voltaire had put it. Ravelstein didn't believe that Voltaire was intellectually serious, but now and then he did summarize things conveniently. And Ravelstein, nowadays, would have added that Voltaire, famous for the campaigns he fought-"_Ecrasez l'infame!"__-violently hated Jews. And there was yet another physical difference to note. Ravelstein's extended body was very large, he was nearly six and a half feet tall and his gown, which reached to the ankles of ordinary patients, ended just above his knees. Then his large underlip had an affectionate flexure but his big nose was severe. He was breathing through his mouth. His skin had the texture of cooked farina.
I could see that he was following a trail of Jewish ideas or Jewish essences. It was unusual for him these days, in any conversation, to mention even Plato or Thucydides. He was full of Scripture now. He talked about religion and the difficult project of being man in the fullest sense, of becoming man and nothing but man. Sometimes he was coherent. Most of the time he lost me.
When I mentioned this to Morris Herbst he said, "Well, of course he'll keep talking things out while there's a breath in his body left-and for him this is top priority, because it's connected with the great evil." I well understood what he meant. The war made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live.
That goes straight to your bones.
Other people have some choice of options-their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for "the chosen" there is no choice. Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction. Rismus, which was Professor Davarr's word for viciousness, hatred, determination to be rid of this intrusive population in furnaces or mass graves. We needn't go into this any further. But what persons like Herbst and Ravelstein concluded was that it is impossible to get rid of one's origins, it is impossible not to remain a Jew. The Jews, Ravelstein and Herbst thought, following the line laid down by their teacher Davarr, were historically witnesses to the absence of redemption.