A Walker in the City Read online

  That particular great day in the heat, the unending heat, I was walking somewhere off Gates Avenue, and saw that they had unfurled awnings even over the El stations. I could hear the plash of a fountain in a school courtyard across the street; one whole side of that block was lined with trees. How hot it was that afternoon. The dust never stirred on the leaves of the nearest trees; the pavements were so fierce that I kept walking under the awnings of chain groceries to cool my breath and to sniff at the fresh watered celery stalks on the open stands and the clean, shaded interiors that smelled of coffee beans and of biscuits. When I walked back into the sun, every mica dot glittered in the pavement. From time to time, the hot streets were racked by some dry, distant thunder from the El. How hot it was that afternoon, how silent and hot. As I started down that lonely stretch of sidewalk somewhere off Gates Avenue, everything moved so slowly that I could almost count the drops of sweat bubbling on a girl's upper lip, the sounds of my heart dreamily pounding into my ears from the end of a long corridor as she passed me, breasts rustling in her blouse, her blouse gleaming in the sun like a second sheath of skin. All around me the city seemed entirely at rest. There were so few passers-by that I could feel the awnings over the shops pulling away from me in amazement and scorn, was queerer and more alone to myself than ever as I passed up that street with a trickle from some loosened jar seeping out of my bag.

  And then it came. All the way down that street, there seemed to be nothing but myself with a bag, the blazingly hot and empty afternoon, and silence through which I pressed my way. But the large shadow on the pavement was me, the music in my head was me, the indescribable joy I felt was me. I was so happy, I could not tell what I felt apart from the evenness of the heat in which I walked. The sweat poured out of my body in relief. I was me, me, me, and it was summer.

  NOTICE: ANYONE PLACING ANY ENCUMBRANCE ON THIS BALCONY WILL BE FINED TEN DOLLARS. Now, when I Sat on the fire escape evenings after work, the sky was the mirror of the book in my hand. I could have shown those open pages to the roofs and have read them back from the clouds moving over my head. From that private perch, everything in sight now loosed itself from its containing hard edges in space and came back to me as a single line of words burning across the page. Half-past five on a summer day—at my back I could smell soupgreens being put into the pot—just that hour which in the tense autumn of school beginning again or in the blindness of winter at the bottom of the year is so dark, but which now brims over with light you can breathe and breathe in with the iron grit flaking off the sign on the fire escape: NOTICE: ANYONE PLACING ANY ENCUMBRANCE ON THIS BALCONY WILL BE FINED TEN DOLLARS.

  Look how much light there is. It does not matter now that your bottom itches to the pebbly stone on the windowsill; that the sun is so fierce, it burns your feet on the iron planks; that when you get up to stretch your legs, the heat makes you so dizzy, you can see yourself falling down the red-painted ladders that chase each other to the street. For now a single line of English words takes you up slowly, and slowly carries you across the page to where, each time you reach its end, you have to catch your breath and look away—the pleasure is unbearable, it is so full.

  But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  The man from whom I had accepted the little blue volume on the Fifth Avenue steps of the Library had said to me in Yiddish, searching my face doubtfully: "You are a Jew? You will really look into it?" No, I was not really looking into it; I could not read more than two or three pages at a time without turning away in excitement and shame. Would the old women across the street ever have believed it? But how square and hardy the words looked in their even black type. Each seemed to burn separately in the sun as I nervously flipped the pages and then turned back to where the book most naturally lay flat: For now we see through a glass, darkly. Each time my eye fell on that square even black type, the sentence began to move in the sun. It rose up, a smoking frame of dark glass above the highest roofs, steadily and joyfully burning, as, reading aloud to myself, I tasted the Tightness of each word on my tongue.

  It was like heaping my own arms with gifts. There were images I did not understand, but which fell on my mind with such slow opening grandeur that once I distinctly heard the clean and fundamental cracking of trees. First the image, then the thing; first the word in its taste and smell and touch, then the thing it meant, when you were calm enough to look. Images were instantaneous; the meaning alone could be like the unyielding metal taste when you bit on an empty spoon. The initial shock of that language left no room in my head for anything else. But now, each day I turned back to that little blue testament, I had that same sense of instant connectedness I had already noticed in myself to the exclamation O altitudo! in a quotation from Sir Thomas Browne; to the chapter on the cathedral in Lawrence's The Rainbow; to the opening line of Henry Vaughan's "The World,"

  I saw Eternity the other night

  that haunted me from the day I came on it in an anthology; to Blake's

  When the stars threw down their spears

  And water'd heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?;

  to the opening lines of A Farewell to Arms, indescribably dry and beautiful with the light on those pebbles in the plain; to When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, where I knew as soon as I came on the line

  Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain

  from its shroud in the dark brown fields uprisen.

  that I had found another writer I could instinctively trust.

  First the image, then the sense. First those clouds moving blue and white across the nearest roofs; and then—O altitudo!, the journey into that other land of flax, of summer, eternal summer, through which he had walked, wrapped in a blue and white prayer shawl, and, still looking back at me with the heartbreaking smile of recognition from a fellow Jew, had said: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

  And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

  Offended in him? I had known him instantly. Surely I had been waiting for him all my life—our own Yeshua, misunderstood by his own, like me, but the very embodiment of everything I had waited so long to hear from a Jew—a great contempt for the minute daily business of the world; a deep and joyful turning back into our own spirit. It was he, I thought, who would resolve for me at last the ambiguity and the long ache of being a Jew—Yeshua, our own long-lost Jesus, speaking straight to the mind and heart at once. For that voice, that exultantly fiery and tender voice, there were no gaps between images and things, for constantly walking before the Lord, he remained all energy and mind, thrust his soul into every corner of the world, and passing gaily under every yoke, remained free to seek our God in His expected place.

  How long I had been waiting for him, how long: like metal for a magnet to raise it. I had recognized him immediately, and all over: that exaltation; those thorny images that cut you with their overriding fervor and gave you the husk of every word along with the kernel; that furious old Jewish impatience with Success, with comfort, with eating, with the rich, with the whole shabby superficial fashionable world itself; that fatigue, as of a man having constantly to make his way up and down the world on foot; and then that sternness and love that gushed out of him when he turned to the others and said:

  For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

  Yeshua my Yeshua! What had he to do with those who killed his own and worshiped him as God? Why would they c
all him only by that smooth Greek name of Jesus? He was Yeshua, my own Reb Yeshua, of whose terrible death I could never read without bursting into tears—Yeshua, our own Yeshua, the most natural of us all, the most direct, the most enchanted, and as he sprang up from the heart of poor Jews, all the dearer to me because he could now return to his own kind: and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

  Ripeness filled our kitchen even at supper time. The room was so wild with light, it made me tremble; I could not believe my eyes. In the sink a great sandy pile of radishes, lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, and scallions broke up on their stark greens and reds the harshness of the world's daily monotony. The window shade by the sewing machine was drawn, its tab baking in the sun. Through the screen came the chant of the score being called up from the last handball game below. Our front door was open, to let in air; you could hear the boys on the roof scuffing their shoes against the gravel. Then, my father home to the smell of paint in the hall, we sat down to chopped cucumbers floating in the ice-cold borscht, radishes and tomatoes and lettuce in sour cream, a mound of corn just out of the pot steaming on the table, the butter slowly melting in a cracked blue soup plate—breathing hard against the heat, we sat down together at last.

  Daylight at evening. The whitewashed walls have turned yellow in great golden combs, as if the butter dribbling down our chins from each new piece of corn we lovingly prepare with butter and salt were oozing down the walls. The kitchen is quiet under the fatigue blown in from the parched streets—so quiet that in this strangely drawn-out light, the sun hot on our backs, we seem to be eating hand in hand. "How hot it is still! How hot still!" The silence and calm press on me with a painful joy. I cannot wait to get out into the streets tonight, I cannot wait. Each unnatural moment of silence says that something is going on outside. Something is about to happen. The sound of an impending explosion waits in the summer night.

  In the open, now. The sun hanging below the end of each block hits me in the face. They have opened the fire hydrants and have put up a revolving shower in the middle of the street, and kids stripped to their underwear run squealing in and out of the feebly sputtering drops. "Mama! Look at me, Mama!" Where the gutter is wet now, it glistens like rhinestones; where dry, it is blue. Halfway down the block a horse lies dead in the gutter, a cloud of flies buzzing at his eyes. A little carousel has drawn up next to the grocery. The hurdy-gurdy skips whole notes at a time, as if it were being pressed and squeezed out of shape each time the wooden horses with long straw manes come round again. The pony glumly relieves himself in his traces, and the sparrows float down from the telephone wires to peck and peck at each fresh steaming mound of manure, and the smell of the milk scum from the great open cans outside the grocery is suddenly joined, on a passing breath of wind, to the smell of varnish and brine from the barrels outside the warehouse on Bristol Street. Westward, on the streets that lead to the park, the dusty trees of heaven droop in the sun. You can smell Brownsville's tiredness in the air like smoke. Slowly, how slowly now, the pigeons rise and fall in their unchanging orbits as they go round and round the roofs, the enigmatic spire of the church, and brush against the aged sycamore with sharp leaves.

  And now there is time. This light will not go out until I have lodged it in every crack and corner of me first.

  There was a new public library I liked to walk out to right after supper, when the streets were still full of light. It was to the north of the Italians, just off the El on Broadway, in the "American" district of old frame houses and brownstones and German ice-cream parlors and quiet tree-lined streets where I went to high school. Everything about that library was good, for it was usually empty and cool behind its awnings, and the shelves were packed with books that not many people ever seemed to take away. But even better was the long walk out of Brownsville to reach it.

  How wonderful it was in the still suspended evening light to go past the police station on East New York and come out into the clinging damp sweetness of Italian cheese. The way to the borders of Brownsville there was always heavy with blocks of indistinguishable furniture stores, monument works, wholesale hardware shops. Block after block was lined with bedroom sets, granite tombstones, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, store fixtures, cash registers. It was like taking one last good look around before you said good-by. As the sun bore down on new kitchen ranges and refrigerators, I seemed to hear the clang of all those heavily smooth surfaces against the fiery windows, to feel myself pulled down endless corridors of tombstones, cash registers, maple beds, maple love seats, maple vanity tables. But at the police station, the green lamps on each side of the door, the detectives lounging along the street, the smell from the dark, damp, leaky steps that led down to the public toilets below, instantly proclaimed the end of Brownsville.

  Ahead, the Italians' streets suddenly reared up into hills, all the trolley car lines flew apart into wild plunging crossroads—the way to anywhere, it seemed to me then. And in the steady heat, the different parts of me racing each other in excitement, the sweat already sweet on my face, still tasting on my lips the corn and salt and butter, I would dash over the tree-lined island at the crossroads, and on that boulevard so sharp with sun that I could never understand why the new red-brick walk of the Catholic church felt so cool as I passed, I crossed over into the Italian district.

  I still had a certain suspicion of the Italians—surely they were all Fascists to a man? Every grocery window seemed to have a picture of Mussolini frowning under a feather-tipped helmet, every drugstore beneath the old-fashioned gold letters pasted on the window a colored lithograph of the Madonna with a luminescent heart showing through a blue gown. What I liked best in the windows were the thickly printed opera posters, topped by tiny photographs of singers with olive-bronze faces. Their long straight noses jutted aloofly, defying me to understand them. But despite the buzz of unfamiliar words ending in the letter i, I could at least make contact with LA FORZA DEL DESTINO. In the air was that high overriding damp sweetness of Italian cheese, then something peppery. In a butcher shop window at the corner of Pacific Street long incredibly thin sausage rings were strung around a horizontal bar. The clumps of red and brown meat dripping off those sausage rings always stayed with me until I left the Italians at Fulton Street—did they eat such things?

  Usually, at that hour of the early evening when I passed through on my way to the new library, they were all still at supper. The streets were strangely empty except for an old man in a white cap who sat on the curb sucking at a twisted Italian cigar. I felt I was passing through a deserted town and knocking my head against each door to call the inhabitants out. It was a poor neighborhood, poor as ours. Yet all the houses and stores there, the very lettering of the signs AVVOCATO FARMACIA LATTERIA tantalized me by their foreignness. Everything there looked smaller and sleepier than it did in Brownsville. There was a kind of mild, infinitely soothing smell of flour and cheese mildly rotting in the evening sun. You could almost taste the cheese in the sweat you licked off your lips, could feel your whole body licking and tasting at the damp inner quietness that came out of the stores. The heat seemed to melt down every hard corner in sight.

  Beyond Atlantic Avenue the sun glared and glared on broken glass lining the high stone walls of a Catholic reformatory that went all around the block. Barbed wire rose up on the other side of the wall, and oddly serene above the broken glass, very tall trees. Behind those walls, I had always heard, lived "bad girls" under the supervision of nuns. We knew what all that broken glass meant. The girls stole out every night and were lifted over the walls every morning by their laughing boy friends. We knew. The place was a prison house of the dark and hypocritical Catholic religion. Whenever I heard the great bell in the yard clanging for prayers as I passed, I had the same image in my mind of endless barren courts of narrow rooms, in each of which a girl in a prison smock looked up with pale hatred at a nun.

  And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds

  And binding with briars my joys an
d desires

  Jesus! I would say to myself with hoped-for scorn, Look at my Yeshua! How I wanted to get on to my library, to get on beyond that high stone wall lined with the jagged ends of broken milk bottles; never to have to look back at that red-bricked church that reared itself up across from the borders of Brownsville like a fortress. Once, on the evening before an examination, I had gone into that church, had tried vaguely to pray, but had been so intimidated by the perpetual twilight, the remoteness of the freezing white altar and the Italian women in kerchiefs around me, that at a low murmuring out of a confession box near the door I had run away. Yet how lonely it always was passing under the wall—as if I were just about to be flung against it by a wave of my own thought.

  Ahead of me now the black web of the Fulton Street El. On the other side of the BANCA COMMERCIALE, two long even pavements still raw with sunlight at seven o'clock of a summer evening take me straight through the German and Irish "American" neighborhoods. I could never decide whether it was all those brownstones and blue and gray frame houses or the sight of the library serenely waiting for me that made up the greatest pleasure of that early evening walk. As soon as I got out from under the darkness of the El on Fulton Street, I was catapulted into tranquillity.