|
Article Excerpt
Since he was an unhappy man every day of his existence, I could not for the life of me figure out why he had finally committed suicide. I made it my project to find out.
They found his body floating in the East River off the 23rd Street Pier in Manhattan, and that was an oddity in itself because he lived on the Upper West Side within hailing distance of the Hudson River at 96th Street. Quite clearly, he had traveled a long way for no apparent reason to kill himself in a strange venue. Or did he come to the decision at the last moment while strolling about aimlessly in foreign parts?
Why did I devote so much of my time to this conundrum? The police did not_ His family, whatever remained of it to speak of, certainly did not_ As for colleagues at work, he didn't have any since he didn't work at a nine-to-five job at a palpable address that might contain flesh-and-blood co-workers.
Friends? Who were they except for me, and since I fancied myself his friend, perhaps his only friend, I decided to delve into the mysteries of human folly that could deprive the world of another soul so soullessly.
My name is--what does it matter? A friend is a friend. Mentioning one's name serves no real purpose. Sometimes it sets up mystical vibes that are a delusion and can even lead the listener into a cul-de-sac.
His name? He didn't have a name. I called him "Bontche the Silent," a pathetic reference to a famous fictional character who suffered all the sticks and stones of this world in abject silence, according to his sentimental creator, a little known Yiddish author named I. L. Peretz. The initials I and L are equally problematical.
Not that Bontche the Silent in the fictional tale committed suicide. It was against his religion. He died in a traffic accident of those years under the fierce tread of galloping steeds in the horse-and-buggy era, the equivalent of being hit by a ten-ton truck in our time, an SUV if you're so inclined.
Our Bontche the Silent, Bontche the Second let's call him, was never at the mercy of such religious strictures. Though it was rumored that he came from a very devout home, his father bearded in the manner of ancient patriarchs, his mother bedecked with heavily wigged hair in the tradition of certain pious wives, he, himself, was a free thinker and an independent soul. Though he obeyed the commandments that determined the relationships between man and man, he paid no heed to the commandments between man and God.
You may ask how did we know what he thought and what sort of philosophy of life guided his actions if he was such an abjectly silent type. A good question. The answer is that he was a writer, a free-lance writer with no formal position on any newspaper or magazine, and he poured out his soul in the written word in a way that he could never do in person-to-person speech.
We could have called him Moses the Second, instead of Bontche the Second, became he was as heavy of speech as the famed liberator, Moses, in the Jewish Bible. But even Moses said a few choice words to the Egyptian taskmaster and to unbrotherly Hebrew slaves and to Jethro and his daughters and certainly to God Himself. The Biblical Moses was, in fact, brazen enough, to tell God, of all people, to repent. Yes--to repent. To repent of his sin in wanting to destroy all the Jewish people at Sinai when they worshiped the Golden Calf. Our Bontche, like Peretz's Bontche, never complained about man or God or to man or to God in common speech. He was not a Moses.
My wife wouldn't give Bontche the time of day. My children acted as if he wasn't alive when he came by to visit. They didn't cotton to his unkempt appearance, to the frayed collar, the tie always askew, the baggy pants, the worn shoes, the faint odor of onions that always emanated from his person, perhaps most of all, the fact that he bit his nails in public unceasingly. In sum, I was the only one who sort of accepted him for what he was, for better or for worse. I can't say why. I too noticed all his faults, but I closed my eyes to them.
How do you make a living from free-lance writing these days if you're a philosopher and a poet and you don't write fictions about sex and mayhem for books or TV and the movies or even commercials on radio and television? How do you survive at a time when hardly anybody reads? It's also a good question.
We would sit together in the study of my suburban home on the North Shore of the Island, and I would ask him these very questions. Bontche the Second would look at me with those soulful eyes of his, socketed in sorrow, eyes that burrowed deep deep in both directions, from the marrow of his brain into my gut, and he would not answer.
Don't think that our meetings were always one-way discussions. When I said at the beginning that he hardly ever spoke, I meant about personal things, about wants, and needs, and money, and women, and he never spoke about anything at all in public. But to me, in private, he did speak about philosophy, about ideas and concepts. He had tons of theories and indulged in copious speculative yearnings about the world and its future. About the travails of the messiah he spoke without end. Bontche the Silent, the Second, was actually transformed almost miraculously by his subject into a veritable Elijah, a John the Baptist, an announcer of coming glory, but more often than not, a disturbing Cassandra forecasting doom.
I reveled in his imaginative flights. It was at those moments that I completely forgot his badly folded collar, his tie askew, and his body odors, and instead centered the full force of my attention on his poetic flights of unimaginable fancy.
Can I possibly give you a whiff of the quality of his mind? It's hard for me because I never recorded his words, and my memory isn't very good anymore. There are people who can recall a conversation they had four years ago almost word for word. I cannot. I'm lucky if I remember the gist of the matter ten minutes later. But word for word? Impossible. What I do recall forever is the emotion created...
|
