Collected Stories

his memoirs—perhaps he was gaga—strangely illogical. When, over London, a Zeppelin was shot down, the bodies of Germans were seen to fall, and the brutal men in the street horribly cheered, Russell wept, and had there not been a beautiful woman to console him in bed that night, this heartlessness of mankind would have broken him utterly. What was omitted was the fact that these same Germans who fell from the Zeppelin had come to bomb the city. They were going to blow up the brutes in the street, explode the lovers. This Mosby saw.

It was earnestly to be hoped—this was the mescal attempting to invade his language—that Mosby would avoid the common fate of intellectuals. The Lustgarten digression should help. The correction of pride by laughter.

There were twenty minutes yet before the chauffeur came to take the party to Mitla, to the ruins. Mosby had time to continue. To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.

“What did they feed their foreign VIPs?”

And Lustgarten shyly bitter—the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby—said, “It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn’t understand the deal. I thought we were invited, as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate shit fried in rancid oil.”

“Why didn’t you run away?” asked Mosby.

“How? Where?”

“Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?”

“How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket.”

“And no money?”

“Are you kidding? Dead broke. In Macedonia. Near Skoplje. Bug-stung, starved, and running to the latrine all night. Laboring on the roads all day, with pus in my eyes, too.”

“No first aid?”

“They may have had the first, but they didn’t have the second.”

Mosby though it best to say nothing of Trudy. She had divorced Lustgarten.

Commiseration, of course.

Mosby shaking his head.

Lustgarten with a certain skinny dignity walking away. He himself seemed amused by his encounters with capitalism and socialism.

The end? Not quite. There was a coda: The thing had quite good form.

Lustgarten and Mosby met again. Five years later. Mosby enters an elevator in New York. Express to the forty-seventh floor, the executive dining room of the Rangeley Foundation. There is one other passenger, and it is Lustgarten. Grinning. He is himself again, filled out once more.

“Lustgarten!”

“Willis Mosby!”

“How are you, Lustgarten?”

“I’m great. Things are completely different. I’m happy. Successful. Married. Children.”

“In New York?”

“Wouldn’t live in the U. S. again. It’s godawful. Inhuman. I’m visiting.”

Without a blink in its brilliancy, without a hitch in its smooth, regulated power, the elevator containing only the two of us was going up. The same Lustgarten. Strong words, vocal insufficiency, the Zapotec nose, and under it the frog smile, the kindly gills.

“Where are you going now?”

“Up to Fortune,” said Lustgarten. “I want to sell them a story.”

He was on the wrong elevator. This one was not going to Fortune. I told him so. Perhaps I had not changed either. A voice which for many years had informed people of their errors said, “You’ll have to go down again. The other bank of elevators.”

At the forty-seventh floor we emerged together.

“Where are you settled now?”

“In Algiers,” said Lustgarten. “We have a Laundromat there.”

“We?”

“Klonsky and I. You remember Klonsky?”

They had gone legitimate. They were washing burnooses. He was married to Klonsky’s sister. I saw her picture. The image of Klonsky, a cat-faced woman, head ferociously encased in kinky hair, Picasso eyes at different levels, sharp teeth. If fish, dozing in the reefs, had nightmares, they would be of such teeth. The children also were young Klonskys. Lustgarten had the snapshots in his wallet of North African leather. As he beamed, Mosby recognized that pride in his success was Lustgartens opiate, his artificial paradise.

“I thought,” said Lustgarten, “that Fortune might like a piece on how we made it in North Africa.”

We then shook hands again. Mine the hand that had shaken Franco’s hand his that had slept on the wheel of the Cadillac. The lighted case opened for him. He entered in. It shut.

Thereafter, of course, the Algerians threw out the French, expelled the Jews. And Jewish-Daddy-Lustgarten must have moved on. Passionate fatherhood. He loved those children. For Plato this child-breeding is the lowest level of creativity.

Still, Mosby thought, under the influence of mescal, my parents begot me like a committee of two.

From a feeling of remotion, though he realized that the car for Mitla had arrived, a shining conveyance waited, he noted the following as he gazed at the afternoon mountains:

Until he was some years old
People took care of him
Cooled his soup, sang, chirked,
Drew on his long stockings,
Carried him upstairs sleeping.
He recalls at the green lakeside
His father’s solemn navel,
Nipples like dog’s eyes in the hair
Mother’s thigh with wisteria of blue veins.
After they retired to death,
He conducted his own business
Not too modestly, not too well.
But here he is, smoking in Mexico
Considering the brown mountains
Whose fat laps are rolling
On the skulls of whole families.

Two Welsh women were his companions. One was very ancient, lank. The Wellington of lady travelers. Or like C. Aubrey Smith, the actor who used to command Gurkha regiments in movies about India. A great nose, a gaunt jaw, a pleated lip, a considerable mustache. The other was younger. She had a small dewlap, but her cheeks were round and dark eyes witty. A very satisfactory pair. Decent was the word. English traits. Like many Americans, Mosby desired such traits for himself. Yes, he was pleased with the Welsh ladies. Though the guide was unsuitable. Overweening. His fat cheeks a red pottery color. And he drove too fast.

The first stop was at Tule. They got out to inspect the celebrated Tule tree in the churchyard. This monument of vegetation, intricately and densely convolved, a green cypress, more than two thousand years old, roots in a vanished lake bottom, older than the religion of this little heap of white and gloom, this charming peasant