WE CAUGHT UP WITH Max and Barbara outside the Administration Building. It was lunch time. Most of the guests were already inside. Gilliatt materialized from behind a snow-covered tree. Barbara’s face was flushed. Either she and Max had become lovers in the short space of an hour or they had been running through the snow, an activity that was characteristic of neither of them. Max turned to us. We froze into a tight tableau, snow-laden around the frozen fountain (imitation Bernini) decorated with figures of nymphs and shepherds. (No satyrs; like all Academy art it was neutral in character.)
“You’ve been smiling,” Max said to Jewel.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“This is not something to be ignored,” Max said. “One hour alone with her ex-husband and she smiles for the first time in months.” He was taking the offensive before she could attack.
Gilliatt moved slyly until he stood almost between the two of them. He was assessing the situation. Then he made a decision. Gesturing toward me, he said, “The Jew works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”
Max’s attack was deflected. “No,” he said, half to Gilliatt, half to me, “Jews aren’t really mysterious—just secretive.”
Gilliatt sensed an antagonist worthy of his imagination. “What do you know about them?” he said. It was a trial gambit.
“Everyone knows about them,” Max said. “They’re the only legacy every country in the world automatically inherits.”
Gilliatt broke into laughter. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see.” And they were squaring off for a lunatic wrestling match of words—with the Jew represented by Wolf Walker as the subject and prize.
“Jews are the eternal aliens,” Gilliatt led off. “Never involved.”
“No—” Max returned. “They always climb to the seats of power. They run everything from behind the throne. How involved can you get?”
Shifting quickly, Gilliatt summoned up some eloquence. “You’re selling them short. Power is not the issue. Because he was unjustly condemned the Jew attacks all injustices. Social reform is his real religion. Judaism is only a masquerade—a facade for the perpetual revolution in every city, every country in which he turns up. The Messiah is the front man for the French or Russian Revolution, for the New Deal.” Advantage Gilliatt.
Return by Max. “But they stand behind the toughest of status quos: money! The money is always concentrated in a few hands. Those are Jewish hands. They hold on to that money if they have to strangle change of any kind. The Jewish motto is: ‘I’m in, shut the door.’”
With a peculiar tenderness Gilliatt said, “But he is the permanent loser. If no one had ever lost before, he would have invented the idea.”
“Wrong! He’s the survivor. Another word for winner. Where are the Hittites? Where are the Phoenicians and all their fine fleets? Gone—while some Jew teaches his child the same Hebrew alphabet taught to Joseph by his father.”
Gilliatt was feeling pressed. I had seen him that way and I recognized the signs. His face was flushed by more than cold. He beat his skinny arms against his sides for warmth but also in a flurry of irritation. Barbara sat on a stone ledge next to Max. Her eyes never left his face. “Solitary,” Gilliatt all but shouted. “He is the most solitary of men. Loneliness is his natural state—as natural to him as exile.”
Max lost his finesse. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Jews are gregarious as sheep. They understand the meaning of the word tribe. When you wander in the desert for forty years you learn to stick together. The family is the first God of the Jews.”
“And the second?” Parry from Gilliatt.
“The Jews themselves!” Thrust from Max.
“Idolatry,” Gilliatt cried out with a mad laugh. “Humanism. One and the same!”
Unexpectedly Max took the lead. I had never heard him speak so well. He was controlled, not excited the way Gilliatt was. Perhaps he had made love to Barbara. The exhaustion of physical love sometimes brings a certain residual control. The thought troubled me—not because of jealousy. I had no proprietary interest in Barbara; only, at the moment, an institutional and executive one. It was Jewel who worried me. She did not seem to be listening at all. Her gaze floated around her and us without direction; she appeared mindless, abstract as one of the fountain nymphs.
“They’re a superstitious people,” Max said. “The Messiah who is to come is more real to them than today’s sunrise or sunset. To them all history is a dialogue between themselves and God.”
“Nonsense!” Gilliatt assumed the defensive position. “A Jew is a Jew even if he never sees the inside of a synagogue. Not God or sunrises! Business, politics! Modern atheism was practically invented by them.”
“They consider themselves unique. God’s chosen people. Therefore, superior. And they have chosen themselves as spokesmen for man. The only problem is—they’re lousy spokesmen. The ultimate masochists. Naturally acquainted with pain. They speak for pain, not joy; death, not life.”
“Ridiculous,” Gilliatt said. The real danger of the Jew is his secret of renewal. We learned the idea of Easter from this damned Jewish Phoenix. He invented resurrection while on the earth because he had to—he was always being destroyed. The country they call Israel is only the latest style in resurrections. There will be others.”
Gilliatt had regained his ironic composure. While his manner was more naturally suited to the attack he was discovering a certain grace in the defensive response. Max was an habitual attacker of many targets; nihilism was his mother tongue. But Gilliatt’s thought, his imagery and his passions had been profoundly engaged by only one antagonist. He had the technical security of the professional.
“Why be afraid of his renewal?” Max said. “The Jew is passive to the point of paralysis.”
“You misunderstand his subtle style of activity. When you push against him, he gives—only to mislead you. His bags are always packed.”
“Except that he assimilates. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Max hesitated. “When the exile ended in—” he came to a complete stop.
“Babylon?” Gilliatt suggested helpfully.
“Sixty percent stayed. Only forty percent went back to rebuild the temple.”
“One percent would have been enough,” Gilliatt replied. “Our recent German buddies understood that. It is always the small, select minority that survives Jewish suicide—by which I mean assimilation—or murder—by which I mean murder. What you might have said,” he was taking the lead again, “is that they survive because they’re loyal to nothing but each other.”
“False! Since Judas,” Max said, “they’ve sold each other down the river for a dollar.”
“A dollar doesn’t buy what it used to.”
Apparently sensing the subtlety of Gilliatt’s seeming ambivalence, Max tried to imitate it. It came out clumsily. “They are a subtle and devious people,” he said. “They understand patience and silence.”
Gilliatt roared into laughter. It was a strange sound in that quiet white afternoon. It broke something, some invisible webbing that had tied this unlikely group together on the edge of a frozen fountain. Max sat down next to Barbara and began turning a knob on his camera. Above them the nymphs and shepherds continued their frigid chase. Jewel looked at me helplessly; she was asking something of me. She no longer bloomed under my gaze. It was as if the few moments of forbidden smiling she had indulged in with me had aged her decades, instantly. The child she carried was aging, too. The years and centuries of Jewish history that were the subject of this mad debate had aged us all.
“Silence?” The word was the tag end of Gilliatt’s laughter. “But they talk endlessly. Words are their mother’s milk—and their weapon. They think they can get anything they want through language—and they speak them all. They would drown the world in words if they had their way. The people of the book? No! The people of the word. One hundred billion words. Words without end, forever and ever. Amen!”
A dryness in the corners of my mouth, a distant, internal pulse hinting at anger revealed Gilliatt’s not very hidden method. It had not occurred to me that the insane dialogue could anger me—enough, perhaps, to make me lose my control. It had undoubtedly occurred to Gilliatt. He saw Max and Jewel as godsends, aids in his campaign to unseat me. If the most sustained of his vitriolic monologues had always failed, perhaps a dialogue would succeed: particularly one performed before my ex-wife and her new husband—correction, her new … what?
What pleasure a smashing punch in the mouth would give my ambitious assistant! With what triumph he would lick the salty blood from his lips! I had a sudden urge to strike out. But it would not be a physical blow. My desire was childish—perhaps designed to inspire respect in Jewel’s eyes. The weapon I chose was the one Gilliatt had just been describing with such bitter zest: words.
I raised my hand as if to indicate that I wished to make a statement. “If the object may become the subject for a moment,” I began, “I’d like to say a few words—of agreement.” I paused for the suitable effect of surprise. Gilliatt sat down on the rim of the fountain without bothering to brush off the snow. “I am more ambitious than either of you. I accept both of your arguments, on every point. But never just one! I will take upon myself the arguments of all my enemies—but it must be all. If I am devious I insist on being open in my speech. If I speak for pain instead of joy, I also rise endlessly with hope from my ashes. And I mean this sincerely—” As I spoke I realized that a literal sincerity had overtaken me as I spoke. My voice rang with it. “The Jew is everything you say—but never half of what you both accuse. In short, he embodies all.” (While poor Solomon was being clubbed down in his strike for justice, some Leipzig banker died for his money.) “We have been chosen, if not by God then by man, to be completely human … and to be refused humanity. What kind of life is it to be asked every day: who are you? Or: what do you want to be? Surely such things can be settled once and for all. But, no, not us. And whichever way we might decide, they’ve been burning us—one way or another and at pretty decent intervals—for our decision. It’s been centuries and even fires don’t stop the process. I am the Burning Bush.” (This directly to Gilliatt.) “Even while I’m burned by the fires around me, I speak and I’m not destroyed.”
The mid-day bells began to ring, surprising the snow-filled air. There was a slow and heavy fall now of thick flakes. They filled the air like hundreds of small white birds, silent in their descent. “You see, then,” I continued to the accompaniment of the clanging bells, “why I am well-fitted for my present position. Choosing life, choosing death—that’s second nature to me.”
As I spoke Max had been scooping up snow from the balustrade of the fountain and absently packing it, tossing it from one hand to another. Suddenly he executed a half-turn and lightly threw a small snowball at Gilliatt. It caught him on the shoulder.
“It’s not just words,” Max said to Gilliatt, as if he had thrown the snowball to attract his attention. “It’s the goddamned morality.” Taking his cue, Gilliatt grabbed a handful of snow and started to mold it. He was grinning his favorite skeletal grin.
“There’s no morality without words,” he replied. “Not even for them.” He threw his swiftly packed snowball at Max, but missed him entirely. It landed on Barbara’s leg. Max was already at work on his second one. Barbara giggled softly.
“They’re the moral bug to the world. They can’t let people just live.” Max threw this one with enough force against Gilliatt’s chest to make him stand up and back away as he groped on the ground for more snow.
“That’s their mission: the gadflies to you and me.” Splat! Gilliatt’s missile landed on Jewel’s arm. He had terrible aim. Jewel jumped up and took refuge around the curve of the fountain. Barbara followed her. They crouched there like two nymphs fallen from the statuary.
“Hey,” I called out. But no one listened. It was war!
“Your trouble is: you take them seriously.” Smash! Direct hit on Gilliatt’s nose. The first on-the-nose score of the skirmish.
“I refuse to take them at all!” Squash. This one landed right on Max’s left ear. It turned bright red.
“They’re the last gasp of the past,” Ouch! A crotch shot that made Gilliatt double over. He straightened up and unleashed a response that smacked Max on the temple.
“They’re always the last gasp,” Gilliatt grunted. “That’s why they survive.”
The snowballs were flying like giant hailstones. From their protected vantage point the two women were hurling their own at random. It was a mad scene—a white slapstick of spraying snow and muttered philosophical curses. I decided it had gone far enough. I ran into the center and started to yell something, I didn’t quite know what. But it didn’t matter, because a fat snowball caught me right on the mouth and splattered all over my face. It was a bitter cold wetness that stung my cheeks and burned my right eye where some snow seeped in under the too-slowly-shut lids. But the natural reaction of rage never came. Instead, as the blood rushed to my face I realized the insane nature of the game I was playing with Gilliatt. As if to underscore my rush of fear, the doors of the Administration Building opened and the guests began to file out. Their lunch was over and a most unusual sight was about to greet them. I didn’t know which guides were on duty but I did not want to encounter them in any case. Unless I regained my control over the day, Gilliatt would have an uncontested victory at the Board of Management meeting. Max and Jewel’s arrival had been just the distraction he needed. Across the fountain I caught a glimpse of Jewel. Her eyes were wide and frightened. She looked stunned, stricken; yet her manner was somehow independent of the recent event. I whirled around stumbling in the loose snow and stalked off, as if summoned by the bells back to my difficult but reasonable tasks.