His head nestling in her lap like a swollen viper, the words sieved through Kronski’s mouth like gas escaping through a half-opened cock. It was the weird of the irreducible human atom, the sub-soul wandering in the cellar of collective misery. Dr. Kronski ceased to exist: only the pain and torment remained, functioning as positive and negative electrons in the vast atomic vacuum of a lost personality. In this state of abeyance not even the miraculous Sovietization of the world could rouse a spark of enthusiasm in him. What spoke were the nerves, the ductless glands, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, the little blood vessels lying close to the surface of the skin. The skin itself was just a bag in which were loosely collected a rather messy outfit of bones, muscles, sinews, blood, fat, lymph, bile, urine, dung, and so on. Germs were stewing around in this stinking bag of guts; the germs would win out no matter how brilliantly that cage of dull gray matter called the brain functioned. The body was in hostage to Death, and Dr. Kronski, so vital in the X-ray world of statistics, was just a louse to be cracked under a dirty nail when it came time to surrender his shell. It never occurred to Dr. Kronski, in these fits of genito-urinary depression, that there might be a view of the universe in which death assumed another aspect. He had disembowelled, dissected and chopped to bits so many corpses that death had come to mean something very concrete—a piece of cold meat lying on the mortuary slab, so to say. The light went out and the machine stopped, and after a time it would stink. Voila, it was as plain and simple as that. In death the loveliest creature imaginable was just another piece of extraordinary cold plumbing. He had looked at his wife, just after the gangrene had set in; she might have been a codfish, he intimated, for all the attractiveness she displayed. The thought of the pain she was suffering was overruled by the knowledge of what was going on inside that body. Death had already made his entry and his work was fascinating to behold. Death is always present, he asserted. Death lurks in dark corners, waiting for the opportune moment to raise his head and strike. That is the only real bond we have, he said—the constant presence of death in all of us always.
Mara was quite taken in by all this. She stroked his hair and purred softly as the steady stream, of singing gas parted from his thick bloodless lips. I was more annoyed by her evident sympathy for the sufferer than by the monotony of his weird. The image of Kronski huddled up like a sick goat struck me as distinctly comical. He had swallowed too many empty tin cans. He had nourished himself on discarded automobile parts. He was a walking cemetery of facts and figures. He was dying of statistical indigestion.
«Do you know what you ought to do?» I said quietly. «You ought to kill yourself—now, tonight. You haven’t anything to live for—why kid yourself? We’ll leave you in a little while and you just do away with yourself. You’re a smart alec, you must know a way to do it without making too much of a mess. Really, I think you owe it to the world. As it is, you’re only making a nuisance of yourself.»
These words had an almost electrical effect upon the suffering Dr. Kronski. He actually bounded to his feet in one porpoise-like movement. He clapped his hands and danced a few steps with the grave of a spavined pachyderm. He was ecstatic, in the way that a sewer digger becomes ecstatic when he learns that his wife has given birth to another brat.
«So you want me to get rid of myself, Mister Miller, that’s it, eh? What’s the great hurry? You’re jealous of me, are you? Well, I’m going to disappoint you this time. I’m going to stay alive and make you miserable. I’m going to torture you. One day you’re going to come to me and beg me to give you something to put you out of harm’s way. You’re going to beg me on your knees and I’m going to refuse you.»
«You’re crazy,» I said, stroking him under the chin.
«Oh no I’m not!» he answered, patting my bald knob. «I’m just a neurotic, like all Jews. I won’t ever kill myself, don’t fool yourself. I’ll be at your funeral and I’ll be laughing at you. Maybe you won’t have a funeral. Maybe you’ll be so in debt to me that you’ll have to will me your body when you die. Mister Miller, when I start carving you up there won’t be a crumb left over.»
He reached for a paper knife on the piano and placed the point of it on my diaphragm. He traced an imaginary line of incision and flourished the knife before my eyes.
«That’s how I’ll begin,» he said, «in your guts. First I’ll let out all that romantic nonsense which makes you think you lead a charmed life; then I’ll skin you like a snake so as to get at your calm, peaceful nerves and make them quiver and jump; you’ll be more alive under the knife than you are right now; you’ll look queer with one leg on and one leg off and your head sitting on my mantelpiece with your mouth fixed in a perpetual grin.»
He turned to Mara. «Do you think you’ll still be in love with him when I dress him for the laboratory?»
I turned my back on him and went to the window. It was a typical back view in the Bronx: wooden fences, clothes poles, wash lines, mangy grass plots, serial tenement houses, fire escapes, et cetera. Figures prowled back and forth before the windows in all states of attire. They were getting ready to retire in order to go through with the morrow’s meaningless humdrum. One out of a hundred thousand might escape the general doom; as for the rest it would be an act of mercy if some one came in the night and slit their throats while they slept. To believe that these wretched victims had it in them to create a new world was sheer insanity. I thought of Kronski’s second wife, the one who would eventually go crazy. She was from these parts. Her father ran a stationery stone; the mother lay in bed all day nursing a cancerous womb. Her youngest brother had the sleeping sickness, another was paralyzed, and the oldest one was a mental defective. An intelligently ordered state would have put the whole family out of commission and the house with it… I spat out of the window in disgust. Kronski was standing beside me, his arm around Mara’s waist. «Why not jump it?» I said, throwing my hat out the window.
«What, and make a mess for the neighbors to mop up? No sir, not me. Mister Miller, it seems to me that you’re the one who’s anxious to commit suicide. Why don’t you jump?»
«I’m willing,» I said, «provided you jump with me. Let me show how easy it is. Here, give me your hand…»
«Oh, stop it!» said Mara. «You’re behaving like children. I thought you two were going to help me solve my problem. I’ve got real worries.»
«There are no solutions,» said Kronski glumly. It’s impossible to help your father because he doesn’t want to be helped. He wants to die.»
«But I want to live,» said Mara. «I refuse to be a drudge.»
«That’s what everybody says, but it doesn’t help. Until we overthrow this rotten capitalistic system there’ll be no solution to…»
«That’s all rot,» Mara broke in. «Do you think I’m going to wait for the revolution in order to live my life? Something has to be done now. If I can’t solve it any other way I’ll become a whore—an intelligent one, of course».
«There are no intelligent whores,» said Kronski. «To prostitute the body is a sign of feeble intelligence. Why don’t you use your brains? You’d have a better time of it if you became a spy. Now that’s an idea! I think I could dig up something for you along those lines. I have some pretty good connections in the Party. Of course, you’d have to give up the idea of living with this bird,» and he jerked his thumb in my direction. «But a dame like you,» and he eyed her gloating from head to foot, «could take her pick. How would you like to pose as a countess or a princess?» he added. «A hundred a week and all expenses paid… not so bad, what?»
«I make more than that now,» said Mara, «without the risk of being shot.»
«What?» we both exclaimed at once. She laughed. «You think that’s big money, do you? I need much more than that. If I wanted to I could marry a millionaire to-morrow; I’ve had several offers already.»
«Why don’t you marry one and divorce him quickly,» said Kronski. «You could marry one after another and become a millionairess yourself. Where’s your brains? You don’t mean to tell me you have scruples about such things?»
Mara didn’t know quite how to answer this. All she could think to say was that it was obscene to marry an old derelict for his money.
«And you think you could be a whore!» he said scornfully. «You’re as bad as this guy here—he’s corrupted by bourgeois morality too. Listen, why don’t you train him as your pimp? You’d make a fine romantic
