Chapter 13
Rai was glad that Mike arrived early. She would not have been able to sustain her pout for much longer. She rather enjoyed pouting, but it was so out of character that it required a conscious effort.
“Hello, ma chère.”
“What the fuck, Mike. How can you be so happy all the time?”
“I am not always happy.” He sat gently next to her on the stands.
“Well, you’re fucking smiling every time I see you. And I don’t like it. Life sucks. So how do you smile when life sucks so much?”
“But life is funny.”
“And horrible.”
“Often, the horrible is the most funny.”
“Don’t fucking patronize me.”
“Patronize?”
“Like I’m stupid or some shit.”
“I would not say this if I think you are stupid.” He looked at her with the kind eyes that she had wanted from him. “I cannot teach you lessons, but only things you already know. And you know this: life is absurd. Sometimes good, sometimes horrible, but always absurd. But one can laugh at the absurd. So I laugh.”
“You really think that?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it is an absurd idea, and it makes me laugh. Maybe I pretend to believe it because it makes me happy. Who can know?”
“Come on!” Sometimes, Rai just wished Mike would just say what he meant.
“Let me tell you a story,” he began slowly. As Rai waited, she remembered why she always came to talk with Mike: regardless of her worries during the day, she forgot them in their conversations. “I learned to laugh in Siberia. The most absurd place on Earth. Where if you cannot learn to laugh at the mud and the pain and the cold and the evil of people, then you will die. Those who came back can laugh at anything.” Rai wondered how he could say such words without losing the playful sparkle in his eyes. “Though perhaps many now laugh in a mental asylum.”
“Is that true?”
“About laughter in mental asylums? Of course–”
“Shut up. I mean about you and the Gulag.”
“Perhaps.” He smiled again. Rai liked Mike. Even loved him, in the way you can love a distant relative. And she knew that his words were always kind, and that there was something true about them. He was guileless, that was it. A truly good man. But the stories he told circulated under so many layers of irony that she never knew if their truth was of the factual kind. Today, she did not want irony. She wanted to hear that everything would be OK.
“You’re such a pain in the ass, Mike.”
Mike made a small bow with his head, pretending that she was only joking with him, then turned back to the game.
Rai felt the pedantry in her voice, but she pushed on anyway. “Mike, you’ve just made an outrageous claim. You said a prison camp taught you to laugh. So let’s hear the defense.”
Mike sighed. “You may not think that this story is funny, Helen, but it made me laugh for many days. So I will tell you:
“It was spring, the season for mud in Yakutsk. The mud can be two, even three feet deep, and it is very, very sticky. It exhausts one to walk through it, and it is very slow. That spring, the guards made us work many, many hours, planting crops. I do not remember what plant. Wheat, I think. Before dawn, we would slog into the mud. Step, slog, step, stick. It was bad work, and we did not come home until after dark. Then we were too tired to move. We could not run away because the mud would trap us. It was better than any fence.”
“This isn’t funny. It’s horrible.”
“It is both, Helen. There was an old man who was a prisoner with us. I believe he was a professor, or perhaps a writer. But an old man, an intellectual. A Jew, I think. Not a man made for the fields. One day, we all heard him scream, and then he fell into the mud. He had died of a heart attack.” Rai winced. “The doctor came, and pronounced him dead, but now it was three hours after he had fallen. When the guards told us to take him to the graveyard, we found that he could not move. He was stuck up to his waist in the mud, and it had begun to harden around him, because it was a hot, dry day.”
Mike had begun to smile, as if anticipating the punch line. Rai could not see how this was going to be funny.
“Next the guards called for the tractor, and they tied a rope to him to pull him out. But the tractor slipped in the mud. It could get no traction. The professor would not move. Even in death, it seems, he had found a way to resist the authorities.”
Mike chuckled. Rai wondered how this kind, good-hearted man could laugh at a dead Jew caught in the mud.
“By now, it was 9 at night, and dark was coming, so the guards told us to plant a cross by him and leave him in the field. A cross, by a Jew in an atheist state.” Mike shook his head in bemusement. “We put it there, but as we left the field, we saw vultures circling. We were sad, because the professor was a friend, and we did not want vultures to eat him. Then one of the men joked that the vultures were from the Party. And you know, I think it was true.
“When we woke, they sent us to the same field again. As we came close to that cross, we saw five vultures around the professor. All flapped their wings and made the sound that vultures make.” He tried to caw in imitation, but he could not, because he had begun to laugh. “As we approached, they did not leave. They just flapped their wings harder and harder.” He could only get out several words between each laugh. “And then I came close, and I saw that the mud had imprisoned the legs of the vultures. They could not fly away. They could not even get to the professor to eat him!”
Mike exploded with laughter. “What’s so funny?” Rai yelled furiously while he gasped for air. “The old man died. A Jew. In prison. It’s tragic!” Then she couldn’t help herself; she began to laugh with him. Not because she suddenly found the story comical, but because his laughter was so contagious that she could not contain herself.
Finally, after several minutes — an error on the field, when the first baseman had looked curiously at them and been whacked by a throw from shortstop, extended the laughter even more — they finally stopped to catch their breath.
After another minute, Rai could breathe again. “Seriously, Mike. It’s not funny.” She wiped a tear from her eye. Her makeup looked like hell, she was sure. Philosophical failure, sweat, and hysteria could not be good for her appearance. “You’ve got no respect for the poor guy’s death. How would he feel right now?”
“He’d probably laugh harder than we. The professor had a great sense of humor. You know a joke he told us?”
“I dunno if I wanna hear.”
“A man arrives at a prison camp, yes? On the train. And an old prisoner asks him, ‘how long is your sentence?’
“The new prisoner says, ‘Five years. Five long years…’
“So the old prisoner asks, ‘What did you do?’
“And the new prisoner says, ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
“ ‘No, that can’t be,’ says the old prisoner. ‘For “absolutely nothing” they give ten years…’ ”
“That’s not fucking funny, Mike,” Rai declared through barely supressed laughter.
“I know what you want to say, my dear. Tragedy is a serious thing. We must treat it seriously.”
“Exactly.”
“Sephardi or not, Helen, you are very American.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Rai did not understand why, but the comment sounded vaguely insulting.
“Americans believe tragedy is all tears, but when I grew up, tragedy was a part of every day. Like dinner. Every day, a dose of tragedy.” Now Mike spoke sincerely, a tone Rai did not expect, and more smoothly than he had as he had told the story, as if he had said these lines before. “But there are some dinners where the family is sad, and there are others where you laugh so hard that you can barely eat. Maybe this is not a good example. But some tragedies are grim, but others are absurd and funny. We must laugh at the absurd ones, because otherwise they will kill us. Misery is always there. One must laugh whenever he can.”
“But at a dead Jew in the mud?”
“Americans go to the movies to laugh, but you are very serious people. Perhaps you do not need to laugh so much because life is not so hard. I do not know.”
“I appreciate the concern, but don’t lecture me.”
“I am not…”
“Here’s the thing. Maybe you don’t always have to go and commit suicide over every tragedy, but you gotta take it seriously. Otherwise… it just feels mean. Like, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being miserable. Part of my life, like it or not. It’s like, I dunno, it’s what Pechorin does, right? Even if he is a rat bastard, there’s something there. If I can make a good story outta my misery, it’ll be a story and it won’t suck as much. Maybe I can laugh too, and that’s cool. But that’s just about me. So it isn’t cruel. Boring, maybe, ‘cause there ain’t zippo going on in my life, but not cruel. Or maybe it is, but I’m allowed to be cruel to me. It’s different with other people’s suffering. It’s serious. You gotta recognize that it matters.”
“Of course!” Mike was almost taken aback. “But listen to what you say: ‘it is serious’ and ‘it matters.’ I know that in English these ideas are the same, but yet, they are not. Because many things are serious that do not matter at all. Look at the face of a doorman at an expensive building. He must be very, very serious, no? Yet even he will admit that his job does not matter. While funny things — they are not ‘serious,’ you say — can matter very much.”
“Like what?”
“Like Don Quixote. What book matters more? Yet you will laugh every page. Shakespeare often, too.”
“Those are stories.”
“Yet you told me how important stories are to you, and I also told a story.” Mike looked at her significantly, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain.
Rai sat forward and rested her chin on her hands. She wondered if Mike’s story were true — he never talked about his past, and suddenly, he was telling her about the Gulag? He’d probably just read it somewhere. But it was interesting, even if not literally true. She had to admit that she felt better than she had half an hour ago, that that’s what she had wanted. She looked out onto the skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue.
After an inning of silence, Mike spoke up. “Perhaps I am too bold, Helen, but may I ask you a difficult question?”
“I guess.”
“Why do you not go home? I would miss you, yes, but I believe that you are not happy.”
Rai shrugged at the question and raised the left side of her mouth in an uncertain smile. “Was Myshkin happy? Or Nikolai Appolonovich? I dunno. Prob’ly not.” She looked out over the game, unsure why people running around in circles could inspire such loud cheers. “It’s not like I’m looking for pity or anything, but I got a lot more to complain about than anybody in these books.” She tapped the pack beside her. “But am I happy? Is anybody?”
“You could have a different life. Your parents would accept you home, yes?”
“Home? That’d be pointless. At least here I can pretend my life means something. It’s just that life sucks and that’s that. Like you said, I just gotta learn to laugh at it ‘stead of getting all worked up.”
“Each day I understand better why you like these books. Once I thought they were not for a young woman.”
“C’mon. You told me yourself that all teenagers are just characters that got lost on the way to a Chekhov play. Look. It’s like I understand that life’s tragic. All those yuppie fucks over there–” she pointed to the apartments of the Upper East Side “–can pretend life’s cool and happy, but even for them, it’s not. Ever look at one of those skinny bitches out walking her dog, or yelling at the kids? She’s miserable. And the men’re even worse with their scotch and tittie bars when their wives aren’t looking. ‘Cause it doesn’t matter how rich you are. People still die and your kids still hate you and someday you’re gonna die in a car wreck. It’s just the human fucking condition.”
Rai had allowed her carefully cultivated irony down as she spoke, so Mike’s sudden laugh shocked her. “Of course! You are right!” He slapped her on the back.
“So if I’m right, don’t laugh at me.” Rai felt hurt.
“I laugh because you are right. These ‘yuppies,’ as you say, they do not see that life is sad. But you see through the lie, you see it is absurd. So you can laugh. Yes, you are very, very smart, Helen.”
“Thanks, Mike…” The hurt feelings were almost instantly forgotten.
Rai looked thoughtfully out over the field, allowing herself a vague pride at Mike’s last comment. She had always found softball boring, but the game they were watching seemed particularly empty; even the players seemed unexcited. She needed to change the subject. “You know what I’ve been thinking about? This Emma Bovary person. The French babe you told me about. That’s her name, right? She sounds a lot like Z.”
Mike shook his head in a confusion bred from more from the uneven segue. “You say many things that I cannot understand. Your friend is very little like Emma Bovary, I think. In fact, if he were rich, he is the sort of man with whom she might have fallen in love. The danger, the fear, yes?”
“It’s kind of his spirit that’s the same. I mean, Z can talk all he wants about ‘social being determining consciousness,’ but…”
“He does know his Marx well.”
“Yeah, so he claims he’s such a historical materialist, but y’know how he really works? He sees words in a book, and he wants to make them real. I mean, I don’t think he even loves women, or sex. He loves that stupid Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.”
“Neruda. Of course.”
“And does he really empathize with the poor? Care about justice or whatever? I don’t think so. He doesn’t even like people. He just thinks the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is cool. He reads a book, thinks, whoa, cool, I gotta do that, and then he does it. So that’s why he’s like Emma.”
“They both love words more than life, so then they wish to make literature into reality.”
“So what happened to this Emma chick?”
“You must read the book, Helen.” He returned his attention to the field, where the game had become exciting as they had been lost in conversation. It seemed to be the last inning; the team at bat was on a run, and with each score, they counted down the runs to a tie. But then: two quick outs, and it appeared the comeback was over. A small woman came to bat, and the outfield pulled in to protect against a blooper. On the first pitch, she knocked it way over their heads. Two runs scored, and her team rushed onto the field in victory.
“Score one for the chicks.”
“They should not approach so closely. Finally, I begin to understand this game.”
The outfielders on the losing team shouted invective across the field, each blaming the others for their bad position. Rai laughed at them, and not with her kindest tone. Finally, the diamond cleared and two more teams arranged themselves for their game.
