“WELL, YOU BASTARD,” GILLIATT said, “it’s over.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said. As I said it I realized it was the truth.
“Not as long as I’ve been waiting for you.”
“And—”
“You’ve done it.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
He flashed his famous death’s head grin. “Look around,” he said. “That’s your work.”
Automatically I obeyed. The fire had done its worst by then. Most of the buildings were half-ruins, crackling and smoking in fiery repose. Under different circumstances they could be rebuilt in short order. Now, however, they would stay as they were, strange as Stonehenge, until someone bought the land and cleared it of its mysterious debris. The wind was quiet and the smoke hung in the night air as if painted there. The mixed choir of voices to which I’d been listening was now a muted murmur. I could not distinguish any coherent words. I doubted if anyone else could.
But it was the sight of Gilliatt that was the raw shock. It was not just that he was so disheveled, his usually neat suit grimy with fire-soot and his shirt cuffs (French) torn. The striped tie he wore was askew on his throat. He looked like a young Negro executive caught in a race riot. It was, however, the bare black fact of him that brought me to the horror of what was happening and of what I’d done. It was a visceral understanding, automatic, instinctive. I think if he were not so obviously primed to accuse me I would have beaten him to it. But his direct attack paralyzed me for the moment.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it out.”
“Where’s Barbara?”
“You knew she’d do something like this!”
“Is she dead?”
“They’re still looking for her. It was a thorough job. Soaked everything in kerosene first. It’s finished, anyway. So let’s finish with you and me.” His mouth opened into a broad smite—not his face, just his mouth. “It doesn’t matter how things begin. Only how they end, right? Isn’t that what that camera-lunatic said to you this morning? Well, let’s end it right. Let’s give the Jew and the Negro the right send-off.” As he spoke he backed off toward the Residence Quarters behind me, from which Jewel had vanished only a few moments before. I followed him. I saw no reason not to, so it is hard to say whose will was in control. Allowing myself to feel the weariness in my muscles and bones I sat down on the steps and leaned my back against the wet and charred beams that supported the terrace.
“What do we know about each other, anyway? Nothing!
“I have been eloquent on the subject of the Jew before—and I will be again, you can rely on that. I’ll get to the Jewness of the Jew later. But first: The Blackness of the Negro. From the start I was a fundamentalist. I knew I’d been born dead. I was black, wasn’t I? All of us paralyzed together in black streets. But I didn’t stay paralyzed long. I was in search of the myth almost as soon as I could talk and walk. And by the time I could think—Wow! I would stare at the jeweled blackness, my own or anyone else’s, in amazement. Think of it! To be black. To be all colors at once. And to be the unwitting and unwilling heir to an instinctive mythology as old as that of the Jews and maybe more profound.
“It was the secret life I led. Publicly I was black. But secretly I was a philosopher of blackness, I was a metaphysical investigator of the reverberations of blackness in the human—and inhuman—soul. All those years I led different lives—but the real life was the exploration of blackness. Did you know I once went to sea? That’s right! The Merchant Marine. I was the only black man on the ship. I wanted to see how that would be. Now, of course, everyone knows there are no such things as white men. How could there be an absence of color? A human negative? A world of minus-one? Ridiculous! At the same time not everyone is black. It’s a paradox I tried to figure out then, but I still haven’t. Oh, God, the hunger I had to know all there was to know of the past of blackness. Of what it meant in common language. Even though it was all so awful.(Awful: capable of inspiring awe.)
“Example: If spotless refers to white, does black mean spotful? (And how far is that from spiteful?) In what society, old or new, is the word black associated with purity, my friend Wolf, tell me that? These were the questions to which I addressed myself in my secret life. Have you ever heard the expression—in any language—the blackness of innocence? As black as the driven snow? When has a ‘coal-black heart’ meant goodness?
“In how many hundreds of years will ‘blackest of intentions’ be taken to mean good will? I had made a great discovery. The black man was a victim of slavers, and landlords, rednecks and merchants. But he was also a victim of language and imagery.
“When I got back from the sea voyage of two years among the non-existent white men I contrived a sexual relationship with a lovely young white girl chosen because she was an anthropologist and a linguist. We moved into her little apartment and I began a two-year program of tormenting her with my findings regarding the mythology and language of blackness. (She was Jewish, of course.) I would come home one evening and after an excellent dinner prepared by her tired but willing hands would casually drop the remark, ‘Do you think it would have been possible for the fellow in Treasure Island to hand the death warrant to his mate in the form of a white spot?’
“Or if she brought a friend of hers over for the evening, a nurse with the unlikely name of Bland, I would ask, ‘Miss Bland, do you think there will ever be a time when the coming of the white dawn will bring terror and despair to your invalid patients and the fall of black night will be welcomed as desperate relief after the long day of pain?’
“But all this joking was to cover my own black pain. I searched furiously—while my young anthropological beauty was out earning our daily bread—for some sign of benevolent, or at least indifferent, blackness in nature. There were no black trees. Some butterflies had black segments on their wings but none were all black. Things turned black in nature when corruption touched them, that was true—but not much consolation. There were animals and fish that were all black: cats (bad luck) and sharks. Many insects, of course. Bulls and stallions. These last gave some hope—except for the fact that the white stallion is the breeder’s delight, as well as the pleasure of small children rooting for the good. No, all in all, nature failed me in my search almost as badly as language and myth did. Only in the recurring images of night and death did I find my blackness totally accepted.
“I gloated over the white man William Shakespeare and the bitter teasing of his ‘dark lady’ in the sonnets. (London Bridge is falling down, my black lady?) If the word fair was switched with the word black the results would be fascinating. (Listen, you treat me black and I’ll treat you black, right?) I had no interest in sociology, in historicity, in race relations. I was obsessed by the raw metaphysical thing in its natural, primitive thingness. If blackness was the issue then I wanted to understand blackness—not all that peripheral stuff. Liberating black people was one thing. But liberating the idea, the reality, the thing of blackness from its bonds of image, imagination, metaphor and myth—that too would be a great liberation.”
Behind Gilliatt the night sky was beginning to quiver with tiny points of starlight beaming through the haze of snow. On the ground in the interstices of stones and snow small fires glowed, having somehow leaped the distance from the burning houses to the little clumps of grass. We were the survivors of a civilization, loitering in burning ruins, telling each other remembered legends. Gilliatt’s exhaustion was gone. I had never seen him so exhilarated. “No matter what I did,” he continued, “or where I looked, blackness remained the property of death and night. With a sideways nod to evil, fear, mourning, sadness, mystery. In short, blackness was what happened when the eyes were closed. Now that’s a hell of a way to go through the day. (I won’t even mention the horrors that have been done in the gleam of whiteness. That’s where hypocrisy meets paradox.) You can see where this was leading me, Wolf, can’t you? I can tell by the Hebraic glint of intelligence in your brown eyes that you do. It led me to the question of choice. Already we can see the Academy waiting in the distance. Blackness cannot be changed. You cannot choose it, you cannot reject it. Yet I swear I looked in the black mirror and knew my own innocence.
“That was when I began a life-long interest in your people. Choice was your inheritance. Weren’t you chosen, first of all? And then forced to choose over and over again. Chameleon of history, owning no color at all, you could change to protective coloration at the drop of a threat.
“Your existence was an insult to my skin. Blackness is unchangeable. But the Jews have invented a way of changing without ever changing at all. I should have known I would meet you when I got here.” The familiar cool Gilliatt had melted in the fire. He was all heat now.
“And I should have known,” he said, “that you were a spy for Brand.” He paused, a parody of his old arsenal of ironic effects.
“Brand,” he said. “Isn’t that a Jewish name?”
But neither of us smiled. I thought: when did we become so obsessed with spies and spying? When we first realized how complex we ourselves were? Or at that moment when we first realized how little we could know about the intentions of others?
“I watched you seduce Barbara—set the wheels in motion—your plan to destroy the whole system if you couldn’t have your way.” I stood up and brushed the clinging snow from my trousers. I would have liked to have struck back at him, violently. But I was struggling just then with a sense of anger at myself, anger at having succumbed even for a moment to a partisan feeling, as I had earlier when the fire had first broken out. It had been a lie anyway. I was not looking for any easy yes or no. Max was absolutely right. He’d found no yesses or noes in his Lazarus-land. Well, I wanted none either. Except, of course, for Jewel. I’d chosen for her because I loved her. But that exception was my own human weakness. It had nothing to do with the truth. And at least part of the truth was that by saving Jewel, I had neglected to save Barbara—and by that simple omission the Academy had been lost. That was Gilliatt’s truth, anyway. And it would serve until the whole truth came along. God, what a jungle of saving it was once you started. Still, his accusation of intention could not be allowed to stand as reasonable.
“You’re crazy,” I said, hearing the weakness in the epithet as I said it.
“Maybe. But a certain truth is available even to a crazy man. You destroyed this Academy. Have the guts to admit it. Your gigantic Jewish pride let you play God with your blonde piece of a wife and that poor mixed-up mistress. If you’d devoted yourself to the grief-stricken girl you were responsible for instead of screwing and settling the wife you weren’t responsible for you could have saved everything.”
I couldn’t take it any more. I began to walk away from this black tirade. In the corner of my eye I saw his angry arm swing wide in an arc that encompassed all of the burning grounds.
“Everything!” he shouted after me.
I turned, slipping in the soft snow. Stung past normal endurance I turned and shouted, “You’re right. It is pride. Pride at being accused.” The words rang in the frozen air. “How could it not be? That’s the way it’s always been. Who in the hell are we, these Jews of yours? There is nothing, no sort of crime or disaster, natural, man-made or supernatural, for which we have not been held responsible at one time or another. How could this not create a fantastic egotism as well as a supreme shame? Pride? If we had not been a chosen people to start with, Abraham’s descendants would have chosen themselves after a few centuries of such flattering persecution. Think of it,” I said. “To be held—sooner or later—responsible for everything: wars, unexplainable deaths, plagues, depressions, revolutions—the murder of God, Himself. It’s enough to turn anyone’s head! That’s why I have the guts to take on myself the accusations of my enemies. Even this final one. I am used to such sturm und drang. You understand me perfectly, Gilliatt. As a Jew I was born into a drama—if conflict is what makes events dramatic. I am the creature of opposites. History and my next-door neighbors are so eager to define me that I am forced to choose myself over and over again each day. No choice lasts more than a day. And all choices last forever. New pressures arise with every sun. And every choice I make contains its opposite. There is only one absolute. My talent (our talent) for existence. I am the fever and ferment of your cities. Try and imagine them without me! Magnificently successful as an individual I represent failure en masse, failure so extreme that it is raised to a higher power and becomes a kind of success—in time. So I also, apparently, have a talent for death. (There goes my one absolute!) At least your blackness is your absolute. You know in what name you’re being destroyed, even if it’s an insanity. But I—I am the Burning Bush. Even while I’m burned by the fires around me I speak, and I refuse to be destroyed.
“Tonight, I heard the houses, the trees, the rocks. I heard them all speak tonight from the fire. I tell you, Gilliatt, we are not here to pass judgment. Forget Brand! To hell with Rath! I tell you we’re here to remember those who forget—we’re here to let the mystery happen. To let the Bush burn—to let the voice speak. To sanctify the ground in case there is no God, or in case He forgets—to sanctify the ground for each other and ourselves at least once before we disappear underneath it.”
A clangor of bells surprised the air. It must be eight o’clock. There was no one in the bell tower, of course. The bells were automated. They clanged and vibrated in the acrid air. The two of us stood still for the moment, surprised by ourselves and by the bells. We looked across the hardening snow, I in my passionate confusion of concerns, past and present, he in his immutable blackness. I closed my eyes, pressing the fatigue away in a brilliant kaleidoscope with my thumb and third finger. When I opened my eyes the colors faded gradually. Gilliatt was gone. We were, for the moment, finished with each other.