The Collected Stories

connoisseur. He went to Washington to try to get a visa for a Jewish writer in Germany, and there he became a partner in a factory that produced airplane parts. The owner was a Jew from Poland who was in the leather business and had not the slightest knowledge of aviation. I had begun to realize that the world of economy, industry, and so-called practical matters was not much more substantial than that of literature and philosophy.
    One day when I came home after lunch, I found a message that Dr. Walden had called. I telephoned him and I heard a stammering and a wheezing. He spoke to me in Germanized Yiddish. He mispronounced my name. He said, “Please come over. I am
kaput.
”
    Liebkind Bendel had put Dr. Walden in an Orthodox Jewish hotel downtown, though the two of us lived uptown. I suspected that he wanted to keep him as far away as possible. I took the subway to Lafayette Street and walked over to the hotel. The lobby was full of rabbis. They seemed to be having a conference. They strolled up and down in their long gaberdines and velvet hats. They gesticulated, clutched at their beards, and all spoke at the same time. The elevator stopped at each floor and through the open doors I saw a bride being photographed in her wedding dress, yeshiva boys packing prayer books and shawls, and waiters in skullcaps cleaning up after a banquet. I knocked on Dr. Walden’s door. He appeared in a burgundy-red bathrobe down to his ankles. It was covered with spots. He wore scuffed slippers. The room reeked of tobacco, valerian drops, and the rancid smell of illness. He looked bloated, old, confused. He asked, “Are you Mr.—what is the name—the editor of
Jugend
?”
    I told him my name.
    “Do you write for that jargon
Tageblatt
?”
    I gave him the name of my newspaper.
    “Well—
ja.
”
    After Dr. Walden tried again and again to speak to me in German, he finally changed to Yiddish, with all the inflections and pronunciations of the village he came from. He said, “What kind of calamity is this? Why all of a sudden did she fly to California? For years I could not make up my mind whether to take this trip or not. Like Kant, I suffer from travel phobia. A friend of mine, Professor Mondek, a relative of the famous Mondek, gave me pills but they prevented me from urinating. I was sure my end had come. A fine thing, I thought, if the airplane arrives to New York with me dead. Instead, she is gone. I just cannot grasp it. I asked someone and he had not heard of this plane crash. I called her number and an old woman answered. She must be deaf and senile—she sounded incoherent. Who was the other little man who met me at the airport?”
    “Lipman Geiger.”
    “Geiger—a grandson of Abraham Geiger? The Geigers don’t speak Yiddish. Most of them are converted.”
    “This Geiger comes from Poland.”
    “What was his connection with Miss Eleanor Seligman-Braude?”
    “Friends.”
    “I am completely bewildered.” Dr. Walden spoke half to me, half to himself. “I know English from reading Shakespeare. I have read
The Tempest
in the original a number of times. It is Shakespeare’s greatest work. Each line is deeply symbolic. A masterpiece in every way. Caliban is actually Hitler. But here they speak an English that sounds like Chinese. I don’t understand a single word they say. Did Miss Eleanor Seligman-Braude have any family?”
    “Distant relatives. But as far as I know she kept away from them.”
    “What will happen to her fortune? Usually rich people leave a will. Not that I have any interest in such matters—absolutely none. And what about the body? Isn’t there going to be a funeral in New York?”
    “Her body is somewhere in the ocean.”
    “Do they fly from California to New York over the ocean?”
    “It seems that instead of east the plane flew west.”
    “How could this be? Where was this crash reported? In what newspaper? When?”
    “All I know is what Lipman Geiger told me. He was her friend, not I.”
    “What? A riddle, a riddle. One should not go against one’s own nature. Once, Immanuel Kant was about to take a trip from Königsberg to some other town in Prussia. He had traveled only a short distance when there was rain, lightning, and thunder, and he immediately gave orders to turn back. Somewhere I knew all the time that this trip would be a fiasco. I have nothing to do here—absolutely nothing. But I cannot fly back to London in my present condition. To go by ship would be even worse. I