The stories you write, said Sam as if he were continuing a conversation he had started years ago, are still lifes, beautiful and dead. You're too respectable, Lionel, you're not young, your words have no proper story and you're waiting for a story in all the wrong places, and you let every fucking Jew fuck your wife.
Not everyone, said Lionel.
Everyone, Sam repeated.
This is a fascinating city. See how arrogant its snow is, added Samuel. You're searching for humiliation, Lionel, you're selling Samuel Lipker to a German woman. Look at your city, there's no melancholy eaten by moss in it as in the city where Joseph Rayna begat Samuel Lipker on a miserable actress, you measure others' pain with a yardstick. What do your tears know except what they have to glean from a city where everybody passes through like a Cossack in a pogrom? You searched for a son in the wrong place, you dismantle the enemy into elements, produce with your hands-or Lily demonstrates to you-a disaster that was supposed to happen to you and happened to me and her. And without you, Lionel! That yardstick! Grasp. Like loving Lily through me. I read in a book that Paul Klee the artist said that creation is to turn the unseen into the seen. Ebenezer would perform with me in nightclubs. I led him on a rope like a trained monkey. He really was the last survivor of the Jews and they really did all die, they don't know they died, but they died. He recited the words and they thought he was talking about something that once was. They didn't understand that he was talking about what maybe wasn't.
Tape / -
On a Wednesday shrouded in a doughy dust in the air, Sam left the house and walked as if he had some purpose. Lionel and Lily sat and read an article that appeared that day in the Atlantic. Lionel sat with his eyes shut and Lily read him his own article. He wasn't smiling and was listening intently. Tired birds were seen dying on branches heavy with dust. He met Riba-Riba at the corner of Thirteenth Street, next to the weaving machine shop. Riba-Riba's neck looked thin, her head was crowned with a splendid mane of hair, and when he told her how beautiful was the back of her neck in the distance, she giggled nervously. At the sight of her smile, he could sense that the end of the story that hadn't yet started wouldn't be especially pleasant, but since he was waiting again for a funeral that hadn't passed, something in him longed for a well-done rite, and Riba-Riba, with the embarrassed and defeated smile, may have been the proper answer to the sight of the birds that weren't birds of gold at all and looked as if they would land in a little while and die from the heavy heat. Riba-Riba said: When I presented the evening of Irish songs at the university, I waited for you, Sam, I waited awfully, and you fell asleep. Sam said: I was tired. When she said she was going to see a matinee performance of a Tennessee Williams play, he told her he'd go with her. He asked her to buy him a ticket for the seat behind her. Since her father owned a nightclub and her mother was a well-known Irish Gypsy, it wasn't hard for her to get tickets. She said: It's awful sexy to sit like that, so he chewed on her ear and kept her from seeing the play. Through her hair, he saw his mother acting on the stage. Outside stood Joseph Rayna with a bouquet of flowers and seeds of Samuel Lipker poured on his eyelashes. The actors were welltrained, they raised their voices in the right places and knew how to structure the pauses precisely. The critics' florid words hanging on the walls of the lobby suddenly began to be possible. But something rebelled in him, and he may have fallen asleep or chewed Riba-Riba's ear again if he hadn't sensed that all those days, all those years, he had wanted to do something those people were doing now on the stage, but not like his mother, or those actors, to do that as Joseph Rayna acting the lover, at the house where his mother acted for the indifferent walls. What he wanted more than anything in the world was to stand there and stage Ebenezer, himself, Weiss, Kramer, Lionel, and Lily. In other words, to stage the world that almost was and only Ebenezer remembered it.
When they went out, it was raining a warm spray. Sam pushed Riba-Riba to the entrance of a dark office building and fucked her standing up. She bit her lips and because she felt both humiliated and blissful, she asked Sam for a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth and acted as if she were in a silent movie. After he snatched the cigarette butt out of her mouth and threw it toward the entrance, they broke apart, she combed her hair, and then they went into a cafeteria. Sam glanced indifferently at the gigantic Camel cigarette belching smoke rings at the news making its way around the old New York Times building. Opposite was a gigantic Paramount ad showing Duke Ellington smiling along with Frank Sinatra.
When they went out, the misty rain was still falling. Sam started talking about death as a gesture. She wasn't sure and saw a church altar and Sam raising her up before God with white skin and blue eyes. Sam said: They indulge with embellished words. Try to depict life as if it's possible to resurrect life. Riba-Riba shook with some vague fear and hugged Sam. She said in a voice that was too loud: We started from love standing up and we'll end with a true feeling, and he said: Say "we screwed," and she blushed and said the word and then Sam became serious and kissed her face. Her mouth tasted of mint, toothpaste, and potatoes. They passed by a funeral home and Riba-Riba was afraid to go in with him, but he insisted and they went in.
In the splendid and darkened room lay a well-dressed corpse, painted and made up and even its shoes were polished. Soft, melancholy music with something metallic was heard in the background. A woman dressed in black and enveloped in a delicate black silk scarf raised the hem of the scarf a little and looked at Sam. She didn't look at Riba-Riba and she immediately dropped the scarf. Sam smiled at her sympathetically, but the woman only shook her head with a domesticated sadness and looked at the dead man. A crushed odor of flowers that may also have been artificial rose in his nose. A person in a costume that looked like a blend of an official uniform and a frock coat entered, stood next to the woman, and with profound and gloomy understanding looked at the body. With a hand that almost succeeded in trembling, he brushed two hairs off the dead man's brow and with careful gentleness he brushed the patent leather of his left shoe with a handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The woman, who was still staring at the dead man, whispered something none of them could hear. And then more people in black came into the room and stood next to the woman. One of them wiped a tear from his eye and put the tear in a handkerchief and the handkerchief in a pocket that was apparently reserved for tears. The person standing next to the man with the tear took a scrap of paper out of his overcoat pocket, put on his glasses, and read a poem in a monotonous voice. The poem was written by the deceased before he died, he emphasized sadly. The poem was a trade balance of a small company called A. B. Lin, in Long Island. It said that life is a conglomerate of big joys and little events. The last words of the poem were: "Melina, Melina, go in your Caddy to the sea and see for me the scene of sunset I haven't seen in twenty years." The woman didn't budge. Sam smiled but the man didn't smile back. They looked at Sam and Riba-Riba and tried to recall what side of the family they belonged to.