Several of the flat-soled women in tailored suits who walked down Eighth Street could have been Judith Sands. In an age of glaring, crude limelight, she had been able to avoid all familiarity, and her anonymity was preserved by an invisible repellent.
It was as if her novel had been the story of an earthquake by one of its victims; the book once written, and the author with it, seemed to have fallen into a crevice.
This shadowy figure aroused Doctor Mann’s love of conquest. He bought a bottle of champagne and rushed to the address he had been given. There was no name on the bell to the apartment, but he had been told that she lived on the second floor. Doctor Mann climbed the dark stairway and knocked on a dark door. No answer.
He waited and knocked again.
Silence.
He paced the frayed rug. He stared with an ironic smile at the empty niche where the stairway made a turn. When the Village was Italian, the statue of a saint had nestled there. He sat down inside the niche and waited. His ear caught a rustle inside, and it was enough to encourage his verbal gallantry.
He began an interminable monologue like one of the characters in her novel.
Every novelist knows that at one time or another he will be confronted with the incarnation of one of his characters. Whether that character is based on a living person or not, it will draw into its circle those who resemble it. Sooner or later the portrait will attract its twin, by the magnetism of narcissism, and the author will feel this inhabitant of his novel come to life and hear his character speaking as he had imagined.
And so, Doctor Mann, in the same fast liquid monologue she had set down, picked up his own story in Siberia where he had been sent for rebellion against the regime, and where there was nothing to nourish him except books; where his faith in woman’s intuitive knowledge had made him translate Judith Sand’s book into Hebrew; from there to his American wife and children in a modern apartment in Israel and his work with a newspaper which put him in touch with all the plays and books being written.
“You know, my dear Judith Sands, I am not here to frighten you, or violate your privacy. I am not a man visiting a woman. I am a man with a profound love of words. In the words of the Talmud: ‘Kaka tuv… It is written.’ I know you do not like strangers; but, just as you are no stranger to me, I cannot be a stranger to you because I feel that, in a sense, you gave birth to me. I feel you once described a man who was me before I knew who I was, and it was because I recognized him that I was able to be myself. You will recognize me when you see me. I am sure you have already recognized how I think; this mixture in me which makes me feel my way through experience as women do, and yet talk even when I do not wish to talk like an intellectual, a scholar (which is mockery as I do not believe that they know as much as the poet in his delirium). I have grown grey hairs waiting to meet you. I could not find your address or anyone who knew you. Then a taxi driver told me he had just driven uptown a woman who talked as I did, with a man with an English accent, and he said they were going to the opening of his cocktail party; and then I knew you were in New York and had been with T. S. Eliot. Every word you wrote I ate, as if it was manna. Finding one’s self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions, and that is why your doctor put on a wig when he wanted to talk about his loves, and I don’t know why Thomas Mann wrote about Transposed Heads for there are other transpositions of far greater interest, and your story is the most accurate in the world.”
No answer.
But there was a creak of a chair, and a soft footstep on the floor behind the door.
Doctor Mann added: “I am leaving my gifts to you on the door mat. I hope you like champagne.”
“I don’t drink,” said a low, deep voice behind the closed door.
“Well, you can offer it to your friends. Tomorrow I fly back to Israel at nine in the evening, I will come again at five o’clock. Perhaps you will open your door to a man who is going away. And you will see I am no stranger. Remember this, it is good for a writer to meet with the incarnation of a character he has invented. It gives him an affirmation, a substantial proof of his intuitions, divinations. Here I stand before you, talking as you said I might, and reminding you that what may have seemed a ghost in a dream, in your smoke-filled heart at night, is a man who got his knowledge and his degrees from books in a cell in Siberia, and who translated you by the light of a candle.”
“Come back tomorrow. We’ll have coffee together,” said the voice.
The next day he came. But there was no answer to his knock and so he began his monologue: “When you deny me the presence of a writer, you really deny me a part of myself that has not yet been born, and whose existence I need to believe in. I always wanted to be a writer, but I talk too much, it evaporates, or it may be I have not yet decided whether to write as a man or as a woman. But you have been my writer self writing for me. I could talk wastefully, negligently, only because you were there preserving and containing my spirit. When you deny me your presence, you commit spiritual murder, for if I have been for years talking with your words, spending them lavishly, extravagantly, it was only because I believed I could always renew myself at the source. You may feel this was an imposition. No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another. But if you are so skilled with words and have already written me, in a sense you have stolen me, and must return what you stole. You must come out and say: ‘I will go on writing for you. I will be your articulateness. I gave birth to you and I must grant you the fullest expansion of speech.’ And you need me, Judith Sands. You must not stifle yourself behind closed doors. Solitude may rust your words. Silence is not your element. It will asphyxiate you. We need each other! We are indispensable to each other. I to your work and you to my life. Without me spending your words you may not be incited to mint new ones. I am the spendthrift and you the coiner. We cannot live completely apart. And if I speak your character on perhaps a lower key than you had intended, even perhaps with a few false notes, it is because I have never met a writer with perfect pitch. If you refuse to talk to a plain man like me, your ambiguities will become intolerably tenuous, like the end of your book, which I do not understand.”
The door opened halfway. Judith Sands appeared shadowed against the light. Behind her, a chaotic lair, undistinguishable objects in wild disorder. She closed the door upon her cavernous dwelling and gave Doctor Mann her strong, firm hand.
“I am not absolutely certain of the meaning of that end to my book, but I am sure of one thing, that human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.”
As they walked together Doctor Mann asked: “Is it true what they say that you have written another book, that you keep it hidden in cartons, under your bed, that no one has read it?”
“Yes, it is true.”
“Why won’t you let it be read, published? It will shatter your solitude.”
“No, it will only aggravate it. The more they read of me, the louder they deny my existence, the existence of my characters. They say I have only described unique specimens.”
“But I can show you how these specimens reproduced themselves. They are scattered over the world. I will take you to the places where I know your book is a perpetual house guest, always sitting in the library, a guest of honor. You will only meet those who nourished themselves on it, the descendants of your characters.”