Sunday. I’ve just received a fax.
“If a writer is going to meditate on fate, somebody should be reading Job softly in the background, the ‘story of a simple man.’ I had just run across a sentence for you while I was reading it this morning and wondering whether to get up and send it off to you, when the doorbell rang, around eight. Job was at the door, your Gypsy. His wife and child are in the hospital in Romania, he needs money. He’d already heard that you’re not here but in America. I had 180 marks on me, so I gave him a towel to wash up with, made him breakfast, and then we headed for the bank. I took out four hundred. Why not more? He’s learned that pleading beggar’s look well, kisses my hand, thanks God. For what? For fifty more to bring the kids a little something. And for his father? I still had thirty left, and I held on to it. All the while I was thinking how it’s no wonder bicycles disappear, and that it’s not just contrary to convention but to nature itself to be alone. And this old house seemed a huge luxury to me. I turned taciturn and unfriendly, Job still running through my mind. I couldn’t deal with very basic reality.
“Fate is simply life that you have to change. But that doesn’t happen often. There’s a passage in Roth — it comes when Mendel Singer’s son Shemeriah is fleeing from the military, just before he’s led across the border: ‘Shemeriah drank some schnapps, he felt hot, but calm. He had never felt so safe before; he knew that he was living through one of those strange moments when a man has to shape his fate no less than the great forces that assigned it to him.’”
I’ve been trying to pay my telephone bill. For questions they give you a number to call. Beneath it the line: “We’re here to help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” I’ve been unable to reach anybody — I mean no human being. After the first message you punch a number, after the next another one, and so on and so forth, from message to message. After I’d worked my way through the menu of five punched numbers, it looped back around to the start. I began all over again, pressed one number several times and finally ended up with a message that promised me “assistance” at last. “We’re sorry,” the voice said. “All our lines are busy.” I should try later. But I had no idea how I had managed to get even that far along in the chain.
On Wednesday I went out to Fire Island with C. We stopped in Brooklyn to pick up his wife’s car from the repair shop. C. wove through the streets of Hasidic Crown Heights, as far as the border with the Puerto Rican section. Repairs that would run fifteen hundred in Manhattan cost only five hundred dollars here, C. said, and laughed long and hard.
I stared at the men in their hats, sidelocks, dark glasses, and caftans. They move no more quickly or agilely than other people, but in that garb they seem to, since one unconsciously takes them to be much older than they are. But often what emerges from behind the glasses, under the hat brim, between the side-locks is a child’s face. Or is it the contrast to the black men leaning against the wall beside the garage? There must be ten different Hasidic groups. Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the chief rabbi of the Lubavitchers, whom many held, and still hold, to be the Messiah. Now that he is dead they say they were simply not worthy of him.
“If somebody believes, then he believes,” C. exclaimed. “There’s nothing you can do,” and he laughed as if he had saved another thousand dollars.
He told me about his grandmother, who was the grand dame of Elberfeld back in the twenties. Before 1933 she contributed two million marks to Hitler. She was convinced that when Hitler said Jews, he didn’t mean German Jews but the other ones, the Jews in Galicia. “It took a long time for her to abandon her belief.” He laughed again.
“If we were to understand the Holocaust as fate,” C. added, “that would also mean it could be repeated and we wouldn’t have to ask who did it. There is a difference between saying, ‘the fate of the Jews’ or ‘what the Germans did to the Jews,’ you know?”
T. called. They’re driving west in a rental from “Junk Body, A-1 Motor.” Just outside New York, as they put it, they got into trouble. T. thought she was photographing a group of actors. They were Amish people. “They don’t drive cars,” she said, “don’t have refrigerators, electric lights, no TV, no chemical fertilizers, no telephone. And you know what the craziest part is? They’re completely right, from a practical point of view.”
“I read in last week’s Newsweek,” I said, “that churchgoers are statistically much less likely to have heart trouble.”
“There, you see,” she said. “Another miracle.”
As I came up out of the subway today a man thrust a piece of paper into my hand — nothing religious, not an ad, as the man proudly announced. Instead: “9 ways to find peace of mind.” Under point one it reads: “Nursing a grudge depresses your level of happiness by 50 % on average.” This is followed by less concrete suggestions: You need to cooperate with life, avoid self-pity, but also not expect too much of yourself, etc. Point seven demands the reactivation of “old-fashioned virtues”: love, faithfulness, thrift, church attendance. The culmination is point nine: “Find something bigger than you are that you can believe in.” It claims that self-absorbed materialistic people are less happy on average than those who are religious and act out of altruism. In a study by Duke University the latter folks achieved “top happiness rates.”
On the day after the NASA press conference announcing that traces of organic life had been found in the rocks of Mars, the Japanese guy at the sushi counter asked me a question. But I didn’t understand because of his thick accent. Finally he wrote it down for me on a napkin: Did I believe in God? “No,” I said, “I don’t believe in God.” He turned to a black man who was waiting for his take-out order. Of course he believed in God, he exclaimed. “Who made us if not the Lord?” He was angry at the Japanese guy because he didn’t believe in God. The sushi chef asked me another question I couldn’t understand. And wrote on the napkin again: “UFO.” He believed in them. And me? I shook my head again. What did I believe in, he wanted to know. My mouth was full, and so I had time to think about it. “I believe,” I said, “that the fish here is really fresh and tastes good.” He beamed at me.
Along with my bill I got a fortune cookie whose baked-in message read: “A little patience is often better than a lot of good ideas.” I stood in the elevator and wondered what that might mean in my case, for my time here was slowly running out. As always I stared at the round buttons with their illuminated floor numbers. Twelve was followed by fourteen. No thirteenth floor is listed. The owners’ tribute to fate — to put it in a conciliatory mood?
“I really do understand,” I said to Mr. Neitherkorn after telling him about my lunchtime conversation, “that it feels good to be able to turn to God at any time. But isn’t it also a matter of self-dignity not to be talked into some consoling Band-Aid?”
“Consolation?” he asked. “For what?”
“That everything’s pretty much an accident, our whole existence.”
“Do you think so?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s the alternative?”
This morning a woman called me. She spoke German, gave me her name, and asked how long I’d be renting the room. “Until the end of December,” I replied. Then she could move in with Mr. Neitherkorn at the start of the New Year, she said. She’d have to arrange that with him, but I doubted that he’d be keeping the apartment himself much longer. “He’s just organizing a few things yet.”