Boswell Read Free Page A

cane, he suggested something strongly imperial, a cousin of the prince, an arch archduke. The high school corridor might have been the czar’s green lawn, Herlitz’s cane, a croquet mallet.
    Kohler stopped. “You may use Mr. Fossier’s office.” He opened the door and Herlitz went in. I stood clumsily just inside the threshold, feeling as I have in doctors’ examining rooms when faced with more than one chair to sit in. Herlitz was as alien in that office as I was myself, of course—more, presumably, since I had been there before and he had not. But the great, as I say, are used to being guests, used to using other people’s facilities. He took command easily behind Fossier’s desk, placing his cane carefully across the faces of Fossier’s children beaming ceilingward beneath the desk’s glass top.
    “Come,” Herlitz said angrily. I sat across the room from him primly, feeling queerly like a woman.
    Herlitz glared at me without speaking.
    It’s a test, I thought, afraid even of shifting in the chair. Look, my life was on the line. I knew his reputation. Suppose I made a mistake. Suppose I accidentally sat down as an actor would sit down, or maybe even as the secretary I felt like. Suppose Herlitz wasn’t that good. Suppose he couldn’t see that it wasn’t really me sitting there. I had to trust him, had to trust his test. I thought of the examining room again, remembering the seemingly dissociated questions of doctors who had quizzed me. You have a pain in your back. “Do you like bananas?” the doctor asks. Your elbow tingles. “Have you ever been sued by a Frenchman?” he wants to know. We don’t see how, but they’re able to tell a great deal from our answers.
    Herlitz continued to stare at me. “Do you know Freud?” he asked finally, speaking so softly I could barely hear him.
    “The psychiatrist,” I said.
    “One of the five greatest Jews,” Herlitz said.
    I nodded agreeably.
    “Name them,” he said.
    I could not seem to speak. I looked at Herlitz guiltily, shaking my head. This man who before had struck me as so impatient suddenly seemed content, massively placid and serene. We might have been passengers together in an open car, riding smoothly at dusk past beautiful fields.
    “Moses,” he said. He seemed to exhale the word.
    “Moses, yes,” I said.
    “Christ,” he said.
    “Christ.”
    “Marx,” he said.
    “Marx.”
    “Einstein,” he said.
    “Einstein.”
    “And Freud.”
    I nodded again, but not just agreeably this time. I could not tell what had come over me.
    “Only Freud and Einstein I knew,” he said. “I just missed Marx.”
    “You know Einstein?” I said.
    “Einstein only twelve people in the world understand. I know ten of them.” He leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “We can’t waste time. I killed a man.”
    I stared at him.
    “Okay,” he said, “here’s how it happened. It was in connection with Schmerler.”
    “Schmerler.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “You killed him?”
    “Killed Schmerler? What are you talking about? I loved Schmerler.” He sighed. “I did him early. There have been many great men since but I’m proudest of him, I think.” He coughed. “He was my baby,” he said shyly.
    “I don’t know Schmerler,” I said.
    “Who knew Schmerler? I told him a million times, ’Schmerler, you’re an enigma, Schmerler.’ It was a shame he didn’t make himself understood better. He could have been the biggest name in the Zionist Movement. But no, he had to insist upon making the Jewish Homeland in Northern Ireland. He used to argue with Weizmann night and day. ‘Weizmann,’ he says, ‘your Jew isn’t basically a desert-oriented guy.’ That was Schmerler for you. If you say you don’t know him, there’s your clue. He was always correct in principle, in theory. Mao used to call him ‘The On-Paper Tiger.’”
    Herlitz looked at me. “Oh, I see. You mean you don’t know him. Well, incipience. He was an inventor of