A CLASSICAL REBIRTH
STERN, A STORY BY DAVID
A CLASSICAL REBIRTH A STORY BY DAVID STERN Kastnerr, a professor of Greek at Columbia University, had been mugged the night before; however, he had entirely forgotten the incident by...
...Where...
...The top was still screwed on tightly...
...Eventually, Kastnerr stopped...
...Kastnerr listened, distracted...
...But money, Kastnerr decided, was more crucial than sentiment...
...Kastnerr yelled into the phone...
...His coat had fallen off one shoulder and, twisted around his belly, appeared similar to a toga...
...We're sitting in your chair, we're reading your papers and books...
...This man, therefore, was Kastnerr in the year 25 following his coming to Columbia...
...He saw nothing...
...A single policeman still stood guard before the glass doors, but people were moving in and out of the building, and Kastnerr simply walked inside among them...
...Th hus the middle period of his life commenced...
...He couldn't talk...
...Then he remembered he recalled each detail of the mugging but it was too late...
...All afternoon and evening, he searched for a gun in the tired, dusty French-Spanish village...
...He looked up again...
...Hamilton glowed dimly, as if it were an enchanted castle under seige...
...By the time he had arrived at this unanswerable question, he had also reached 116th Street, climbed the hill to Broadway, and ascended College Walk towards his office in Hamilton Hall on the Amsterdam end of the campus...
...After midnight, and several more bottles of wine, they strolled through the foreign silent streets...
...He wormed his way three or four people closer to Hamilton through a hook-eye of breasts, elbows, and stomachs, but could get no closer...
...A girl had climbed atop the portico which rose on Doric columns before Hamilton's doors, and standing there, was haranguing the mob...
...As if it were moving in slow, retarded motion, he watched it cruise forward, dive, and crash into the helmet of a policeman...
...For what, or to what, he didn't know or care...
...An urge to travel suddenly seized Kastnerr...
...Did you see his needle...
...He reflected for a moment: either he could beg the agent to let him on the train for no thing, or he could walk home...
...Having given his life over to the study of literature of ancient Greece...
...Why my office...
...convinced that he had won the argument and equally certain that his friend was lost to all hope...
...More letters, documents, and finally, a visa followed...
...Kastnerr could not grasp their intentions: whether they were trying to keep those within inside and refusing to let them out, or whether they were preventing the mob from also rushing in, in order to join those inside...
...Unfortunately, no customs officials were present...
...She floated above hiifi also weightless, a vision, an Aphrodite...
...Kastnerr recalled his father, the vehemence with which he would spit over his left shoulder whenever he passed a cemetery, and the terrors of the evil eye about which he had warned his son...
...Saint-Mille, he discovered to his immense surprise, was a football stadium...
...He robbed my wallet...
...Of course, I gave him my wallet...
...He wasn't the first-born, anyhow...
...What have 1 done that they should do this to me...
...At least, I do...
...The phone rang again, and with what seemed to him a kind of inhuman strength, he pulled himself over to its side and lifted the receiver to his ear...
...Occasionally, however, he gets out of hand and makes a chaos of this world...
...His fingers trembled in a palsy before he finally unscrewed the top...
...This was punishment...
...You must remember...
...But even if he had been the first-born: Kastnerr envisioned the Angel of Death in the person of a young, voluptuous girl, her breasts heavy and swaying fly naked above him and point her finger down at him...
...The bartender asked him if he wanted another drink, the girl shoved her pelvis at him again, and Kastnerr's lips ordered a second whiskey...
...There is no telling how he ever found his way back to his apartment that night...
...Ariane," Kastnerr moaned, and in one instant, he was back in Hamburg, Paris, and Istanbul...
...His fingers moved along the keys as if he were a blind man reading the writing on the wall...
...They're im portant, they're holy books...
...The mob in whose center Kast nerr stood began to rock backward and to move away...
...Perhaps salvation next...
...Kastnerr blew up...
...Get out...
...He had a gun...
...But there was no telling...
...A wave mixed of nausea and disgust rose in Kastnerr's stomach...
...Kastnerr felt so good he decided to begin work immediately...
...What about the night before...
...The keys to his office, Kastnerr discovered, were unnecessary...
...You better start giving a shit about dropping napalm on Viet namese babies...
...When the sun rose again over Manhattan, Kastnerr, who had not slept for two days, watched it climb over the pillared heights of Butler Library and found himself, inexplicably, reciting in Hebrew the blessing over the new day, pulling the words out of nowhere...
...Kastnerr, however, watched his father disappear down the street, recognized the regularity of the old man's walk, and suddenly realized that, although he had long since given up all belief in his father's faith, he had nevertheless preserved all the forms of regularity which were nothing less than the routine of pious observance he had inherited from his father, though stripped of his father's zealous belief...
...They crashed into the doors of Hamilton and shattered the glass...
...Go on...
...The most valuable object he owned was his typewriter specifically, a special, irreplaceable ball upon whose surface were engraved the letters of the Greek alphabet, and for which Kastnerr had paid a skilled Greek metal worker nearly a thousand dollars...
...There was no answer...
...What do you mean, my time's up...
...Kastnerr, at the close of his second quarter century, more closely resembled the Kastnerr of the year one of his first twenty-five years...
...For Kastnerr was, in part, still enamored of those memories...
...He also resolved, if he should live, to write another letter to Ariane and ex plain...
...This past it stretched back even earlier than the years of his caesura rose before him in discontinuous, abrupt images, in fragments and remnants of sentences, phrases, and words, all of them as if inscribed upon a roll of ancient parchment which had been eaten away in part and decayed in part and now was no more than a cluster of holes separated one from the other by the thin, brittle remains of animal skin...
...Home, " he finally muttered to himself...
...retribution for his sins, and vengeance for having left his father's faith...
...Kastnerr dropped to his knees and crawled under the rug...
...Once he arrived at the Spanish border, however, he realized that he had no papers and would have to bribe the customs officials...
...The guy you gave your wallet to...
...Since there appeared to be no admission charge, he simply walked inside and sat down high in the stands...
...Kastnerr had shrivelled into the dried skin of a rotten apple...
...Kastnerr typed on all night...
...Papa?'' he whispered into the receiver...
...The bottom lobby was a dismal mess...
...There was laughter in his office...
...In the dense blackness ahead of him, he began to discern a gleaming, round point which, as he approached, scraping his knees on the splinters of the wooden floor, swiftly enlarged into the shape of a golden sphere...
...Whose blood...
...A week later, after finding that he did not particularly care for Spanish women, Kastnerr bought, with two banknotes he had procured upon the black market in exchange for a silver cigarette case, a boat ticket to Turkey...
...Without it, he couldn't type...
...he fell forward, saw the earth rising to overwhelm him, but with a burst of obstinate energy, righted himself and escaped...
...That was a silly thing to cry out, he immediately realized...
...Plugging in the type writer cord, he sat down, closed his eyes, and began to type in Greek...
...What happened then...
...The classicist began to cry...
...Shrunken was the tall, handsome lover...
...The faces of the policemen swelled in rage...
...On my way home...
...And because of rabbinic, Talmudic nonsense...
...Shut up with your threats...
...Time to go home," and he stumbled down Broadway to the subway...
...His laughter echoed through the empty room...
...Suddenly his eyes caught the point of its sharp top gleaming out from beneath a candy wrapper at the typewriter's side...
...When the record moaned forth...
...0 God of my father's bible, the other gods have mouths but they do not speak...
...He didn't care...
...He could not get to his office, and therefore, he could not get to work...
...From the gates of Hell or to the portals of heaven, it did not make the least difference...
...Kastnerr decided, once and forever, to dedicate himself to the gods...
...Stick that up your ass...
...He stared at the girl, she shoved her pelvis at him, and Kastnerr heard his lips say, " A whiskey...
...The testicles, which had been cupped by a thousand hands, had sagged and shrivelled...
...Kastnerr, first of all, was the only child of an inflexibly Orthodox German rabbi who kicked his son out of his house when he first discovered him studying the forbidden wisdom of the Greeks...
...But Kastnerr couldn't understand what they were doing here now, staring down the mob each time it surged forward, beating their nightsticks rhythmically in their palms, running in place, in curi ous steps that looked more like what he had always imagined was the dance step of the tragic chorus...
...thought Kastnerr...
...His eyes fixed upon its formidable, Olympian shape, Kastnerr stepped through the door frame and walked over to it...
...If he couldn't type, he couldn't work...
...What street were you mugged on...
...He was not, however, afraid to try anything once...
...Wasn't it mad, hopelessly insane...
...Kastnerr recalled the passage in the Iliad where Ares wounds Aphrodite'in the arm and Zeus later washes the wound clean with nectar...
...Neither Ariane, nor Catherine, nor Anne-Marie would have recognized him...
...But where, may 1 ask, does the Revolution speak from...
...At 6 A.M., they kicked Kastnerr, dead drunk, out of the bar...
...First it was too early, then it was too late...
...He was a junkie...
...Kastnerr, like a chthonic god, roared in joy from beneath the rug...
...Don't wise-ass, Kastnerr...
...But then, so had KastTh...
...In my office " The voice on the other end suddenly dropped into deep, booming laughter...
...The interior of the machine was hollow...
...Stepping off the train, which had carried him there from Hamburg on a Saturday afternoon at three, he lit up a cigarette and strolled down the Faubourg Rue St...
...The night be fore was the night of the mugging...
...I had dinner with a friend...
...Oh, not much...
...Books and papers had been thrown off the shelves on to the floor...
...He stood there motionless while it grew dark...
...In the classicist today, there remained not the least trace of the 13 12%, to be exact intermediate years...
...At any rate, they hadn't mentioned the typewriter, so it was most probable they hadn't touched it...
...When his alarm clock rang at seven forty-five, he stirred uneasily in bed, as if astonished to discover himself there and equally uncertain if the bed were his own...
...And what had he carried in his wallet...
...Until one September morning in 1939, he awoke to a bull horn which was ordering all aliens to report to a certain place called Saint-Mille...
...If they did, he'd kill them...
...He didn't have any change either...
...He looked up, directly into the barrel of a gun...
...Deliver me...
...He did no classical research, but then, after he had sold the Longinus, he no longer had any books...
...This realization was more than a little disturbing to a man of Kastnerr's regularity...
...Kastnerr remembered the Herrs Warburg and Panofsky sipping wine together...
...but otherwise, he continued, even learned to excel, in his irregular life...
...but when he discovered that Hamilton was open, he was nevertheless so astonished he suspected that he was dreaming...
...The feeling of lateness was even more disorienting than the weightlessness, and Kastnerr wished he could trade the former back for the latter...
...And without any of the books as well...
...He dreamt of a leopard, its jaws open and hungry, stalking the jungle, and of the leopard taut and vigorous, leaping upon its prey...
...He thirsted for blood...
...Kastnerr, while he dreamt, cried real tears...
...M y office...
...Yet he had to move...
...God damn it...
...I don't remember...
...He sold the remainder of his stolen manuscripts, including his prize text, which he had even hoped to keep for himself, a rare copy of Longinus' Philosophi et Rhetoris, printed in Salmuri in 1663 by the mad classicist and printer Tanaquillus Fabrus...
...He listened to the two voices until they were indistinguish able...
...Time to move on, to America...
...Kastnerr walked back to Times Square and stood on the island in the middle of the street until a black drunk, the first person he had yet seen that night, stumbled by...
...From the top of his eye, Kastnerr suddenly saw a rock fly over his head...
...Kastnerr found himself reaching up towards her body on his tiptoes...
...I'm in your office...
...There had been an older brother, Aryeleh, who had died when Kastnerr was four...
...but he also realized that it was too late to do that...
...It was far too late...
...or so he had intended them at the time...
...And now, without the wallet, those memories, the rotted, melancholic years of his past, rose up to curse him...
...No , we have saved each other...
...1 don't want to talk about it...
...Good bye, Kastnerr...
...White, black...
...Maybe he was white...
...Fora second, he thought he saw the figure of the god walking over the horizon...
...Another round of laughter from his office...
...A sudden gasp fell from his mouth...
...Kastnerr searched all morning and afternoon...
...That, however, was the sole thing Kastnerr could not do...
...He had unknowingly, innocently passed over the line...
...He stayed up all night, gambled away his money, and slept all day...
...but he knew he didn't have enough money to reach America, and so he went to Turkey...
...The wallet had been something else which until now he had not understood...
...What, however, he thought for the second time, was this business about blood...
...Honore until he met a young, saucy redhead named Ariane whom he accompanied to a tiny hotel where the two fornicated the remainder of the Sabbath afternoon...
...Suddenly, there was knocking on the door...
...Oh, the Revolution," Kastnerr repeated, breathing a sigh of relief...
...The voice waited...
...He watched the beast tumble into the depths of the earth, lie there furious at having been captured, and then growl audaciously into the barrel of a gun aimed directly between its eyes...
...How tedious...
...He shouldn't pay the least attention...
...Something hit him on the back...
...Kastnerr laughed again and went to bed...
...He could feel the violent pounding of the policeman's heart, as if he were holding him in his palm like a sparrow with his thumb atop its pulse...
...He nearly forgot all his Greek, Latin, and Indo-European philology, except that the time was too short to forget everything...
...Dismissing the events of the previous day as no more than an unpleasant dream, Kastnerr chose one official who appeared especially humble, bribed him with his gold watch, and crossed over to Spain...
...Whenever he closed his eyes, he heard either the voice of his father warning him that whoever says, I will sin and repent, can never repent...
...He was certain he was going mad...
...I made a mistake...
...I have saved you," Kastnerr said to the little deity...
...he hissed...
...Two women, a ten-year-old girl, a woman and a dog...
...He had to become someone...
...I don't give a shit about the Rev olution, either," he screamed back...
...Who...
...While you drank wine, they were dropping napalm on Vietnamese babies...
...The Revolution speaks from your office...
...around them, the leather bound volumes of the Institute's library had glowed like the ashes of a dying fire...
...Be cause your time's up...
...You better start giving a shit...
...Four years later, the aged Rabbi'Kastnerr repented of his earlier actions, searched his son out, and came knocking on his door to forgive him for his transgressions...
...Unlike Kastnerr, however, the HenProfessor, as he called himself, kept to his room and worked all day and night...
...Now the evil eye had averted his good...
...His eyes narrowed, his fist rose above his head...
...How do you know he was a junkie, Kastnerr...
...There were endless diversions in Istanbul...
...After packing his belongings, and among them his small collection of Greek texts, he walked confidently out the front door of his paternal home, secured a position for himself at the Warburg Institute, and began his remarkable ascendancy as a classicist...
...He had a gun...
...Kastnerr cherished classical Greece no less because it was dead and, perhaps, precisely because he need never fear that it would leap up suddenly and surprise him...
...As it pounced, its legs stretched boldly in the air, Kastnerr saw himself in the leopard...
...In the groin...
...In fact, the first article that Kastnerr had published after his arrival in New York, "Exceptional Caesuras in the Iliad," had suggested, very radically at the time, that the caesura was so irregular as either to defy discussion or, conversely, as to be nonexistent...
...Still not taking his eyes off her, he brought the glass to his lips, drank it down in one gulp, and placed it back on the bar counter...
...Thus his wallet: with it, Kastnerr possessed weight and without it, none...
...The stadium, in fact, reminded him of a Roman amphitheater, and he found himself wishing for gladiatorial combat...
...He therefore tried everything...
...It alone was the sole object he had managed to keep over the years, the single vestige of the period of his caesura, and Kastnerr treasured the wallet over nearly all his possessions...
...More annoyed than comforted by the memory, Kastnerr slammed the door behind him, walked out through the front lobby to Riverside Drive, and then down Riverside, against the wind, to 116th Street...
...It was irreplaceable...
...By y the time he had made his way the seventy blocks uptown and reached 116th Street, it was close to nine...
...He sagged...
...A full peal of laughter, of high feminine giggles...
...Occasionally, in the midst of an unusually oppressive hangover, he remembered his resolution to repent was it some kind of vow he had inadvertently once made to his father...
...Until he suddenly discovered upon the parchment, amid the cluster of holes, a single phrase which had miraculously remained intact, and which, he realized at the identical moment, was the same phrase his father, or the voice which sounded to him like his father's, had been crying at him: He alone who says, ' 7 will sin and then repent,'' is never granted the time to repent...
...Yet even this Kastnerr, whom his most devoted admirers considered the greatest living classicist, could get no closer than a dozen feet to Hamilton Hall, past the mob of students, nonstudents, workers, and professors, all milling about furiously and blocking his way...
...Don't order us around...
...He himself was a curious sight, as strange perhaps as any of the mythical beasts he had ever evoked in his lectures...
...To emigrate...
...After the fifth drink, a hand moved up his thigh toward his crotch...
...You better talk about it...
...Then Kastnerr dreamt of himself dead and buried in a long rolling meadow filled with statues of the gods and heroes...
...It too was empty but in its barrenness, and in the harsh, glaring brightness of its streetlights, the street seemed almost an apparition, a vision of blankness...
...1 have come home...
...Kastnerr laughed at and taunted the Herr Professor's audacity...
...A friend, Kastnerr...
...And where were books to be gotten in Turkey...
...Gone was the flowing black beard which had distinguished the young emigre in Paris or in Istanbul...
...He regretted having mailed the letter to Ariane...
...His hand shot back to his rear, to touch his wallet, as if to reassure himself...
...You're not, remember that...
...As it happened, he stopped upon a patch of green on the far side of the campus, opposite Hamilton...
...On its front window, painted black save for a tiny circle in its center, were lettered in gold: TOPLESS BOTTOMLESS GIRLS Kastnerr stood outside and squinted through the tiny, clear circle...
...All he was absolutely certain of was that now he was fully awake...
...Surrounded by thousands of other aliens, Kastnerr wasn't very comfortable, and especially in a football stadium...
...For the past twenty-five years, Kastnerr had led a life of absolute unerring regularity in order, he believed, to atone for the absolute irregularity of the thirteen preceding years...
...He couldn't find it...
...Of course, he could still read Hebrew...
...He sensed disorder...
...On the sixth floor, before he approached his office, Kastnerr stopped in the men's room and washed his face...
...Probably in some dope addict's room in Harlem, or lying discarded and forlorn in a gutter, or but the wallet had already vanished from before his eyes...
...He treasured the fullness of the leather and its tawny suppleness...
...No, he didn't shoot me...
...There were more Arianes, more Catherines, and more Anne-Maries...
...No, everything, as far as Kastnerr could see, was in order except that it was REBIRTH STORY BY DAVID STERN David Stern is a teaching fellow at Harvard University...
...So Kastnerr had quiche lorraine and was drinking dry white wine Sunday night...
...And then what happened...
...Through his devotion to time, he had defeated time...
...In the groin...
...The new leather, in the first place, was too stiff and fresh, but even that was not the reason...
...Small clusters of students passed by and gave Kastnerr odd glances...
...He watched the leopard or tiger fall into a pit which had been dug by hunters and covered with leaves...
...What about your watch...
...Kastnerr's mind raced far beyond him...
...Inexplicably, Kastnerr began to laugh loudly...
...Kastnerr walked...
...The border had been closed that same day, indefinitely, and the officials had all gone on vacation...
...He wanted to seize and throw her down...
...Often, indeed, he had dreamt of the beast whose skin it had once been...
...He could laugh, even at himself, and especially now, when he was back at home...
...So there was a whole group of revolutionaries in his office, in Kastnerr's sanctum sanctorum...
...He imagined himself sent back...
...In the course of the next hour, whenever the dancer shoved her pelvis at Kastnerr, his lips ordered another drink...
...curtains had been drawn across the windows, although a masked face occasionally peered out from within with a sinister glance...
...I'll throw you out...
...He heard the crowd cheer some slogan...
...Kastnerr, who could not leave, remained alone in Istanbul...
...he did not publicly transgress the Sabbath and its laws...
...The short, mustachioed man had departed Istanbul that very morning, on a special visa, for America...
...Kastnerr sure made a wrong turn...
...Dear Zeus, I do not mind your child, Dionysus...
...He longed for a violent struggle...
...You were mugged because you were eating quiche lorraine and drinking dry white wine while your nazi friends were bombing Vietnamese villages and innocent people...
...Now he was certain he was about to be lifted high aloft to Palisades Park...
...He closed and opened his eyes rapidly, and looked down again at the sheet of paper, but it was still blank...
...Finally, he dropped her on the ground, climbed atop one grave, cried out, "Papa...
...With your male friend, Kastnerr...
...A cold, hard grip, the hand of the club's bouncer, immediately seized Kastnerr and steered him to a stool at the bar, next to a cage in which a red-headed girl, too heavy and too old, was bouncing her breasts and gyrating to a tinny recording of some blues song...
...He was laboring over an immense, grandiose project a study of all literature as imitation but he, too, labored without any of the texts which he was analyzing...
...Kastnerr was tired, but still more furious than tired...
...Where were you last night, Kast nerr...
...He'd smear their blood over his door...
...His booksthe twenty-odd shelves of red-bound classical texts, arranged carefully in their correct chronological order had not been disturbed...
...or the voice on the telephone ordering him to smear blood on his door...
...Never, he told himself...
...I didn't give it to him...
...What do they know...
...The voice seemed to be speaking to someone else, perhaps to several other people...
...but not a single gun was to be found, even if only to commit suicide...
...Especially at times like this...
...They hadn't tampered with it...
...Hamburg, Paris, Istanbul, New York...
...He had to go somewhere...
...Holy books...
...His head sagged, his belly sagged...
...He himself had been turned into a fountain, into one of the cupids who, splashing water out of his mouth and ears onto a small circular pool, was doomed forever to stare at his own reflection...
...In France, in Turkey, and in America, and not once had he been blown away...
...then, he thought it was his father...
...though instead, it passed clear through his body...
...There was a dark, shining boy but Kastnerr did not really enjoy that...
...Yet in whatever manner he interpreted the figure, the result was invariably the same: Kastnerr could not get past the mob, the policemen, or the persons occupying the building...
...Kastnerr took one quick glance at his father, familiar in his tall opera hat and greying black beard, slammed the door in his face, and shouted out from behind it, "Too late...
...Paralysis gripped his legs...
...The rabbi, who was as proud as his son, gathered himself up, walked calmly away, and never looked back...
...Get the hell out of my office, you Revolution...
...He rushed to confess to the Herr Professor that the Bible was infinitely greater than Homer, but it was too late...
...He gathered, after listening to the talk of those around him, that this particular demonstration was in protest against the bombing of Cambodia, but he didn't care...
...The plate glass which formerly had filled the door's frame had been shattered, and standing outside, Kastnerr surveyed the chaos of his office...
...Kastnerr didn't answer...
...Kastnerr, you were drinking white wine and eating quiche lorraine Sunday night while they were dropping napalm on Vietnamese babies...
...Kastnerr hardly cared...
...Instead of a gladiator, a man, so tiny he could hardly be seen behind the huge bullhorn through which he spoke, walked out into the center of the playing field and told Kastnerr and his fellow aliens that, because they were not French citizens in time of war, they must remain in this football stadium until their fate was determined by higher authorities...
...Kastnerr, however, was no fool...
...Throwing his hands above his head, palms lifted to the ceiling, Kastnerr began to supplicate the gods...
...Passing a Jewish cemetary, Kastnerr dragged Ariane within and attempted unsuccessfully to embrace her...
...H e was the Revolution, Kastnerr...
...O Zeus," he prayed, "Get me out of this...
...In the pale, reddish light of the setting sun, his office appeared like the primeval chaos one moment before God had commenced upon His creation of the universe...
...It wasn't wise, he told himself again...
...Taking him by the hand, like an infant, she led him back to their room...
...Where were you mugged...
...Five times...
...Kastnerr, do you know why you were mugged...
...Poor Kastnerr's wallet...
...He hoped eventually to publish it with a facing English translation...
...When Kastnerr awoke the next morning and found her sleeping next to him, he could not even remember her name...
...He didn't care who was bombing what...
...and peed on the tombstone...
...the first twenty-five years, the caesura, the last twenty-five years...
...What did you drink with it...
...Kastnerr cried...
...Empty cigarette boxes, coke bottles, a beer can or two, sandwich and candy wrappers littered his desk, the floor, and couch...
...You went home...
...In class, Kastnerr often had difficulty distinguishing between his students, but here he could not separate the students from the workers or the professors from the non-students...
...He couldn't take his eyes off the girl...
...They rocked back and forth and chanted together...
...He slept with Ariane, with Catherine, with Anne-Marie, with others whose names he either forgot or never bothered to learn...
...the papers on his desk were still neatly stacked, as he had left them the previous morning, in three piles memoranda, correspondence, and the bills which he had not yet paid...
...There was no heavier or lighter, only an invisible magical line which distinguished between weight and no weight, and over which one could unwittingly trespass...
...Dismissing the feeling of displacement as no more than an after-effect of a forgotten dream, he pulled himself out of bed and showered...
...Kastnerr studied them carefully as they raised their nightsticks high in the air and beat them in that same pulsating rhythm...
...We miss him dearly...
...By the time he dressed and walked over to Hamilton to find it inevitably still occupied, the entire morning was gone, and Kastnerr felt himself even further behind his schedule...
...His knees buckling, his head thrown cockily back, as if he intended to stare down the sun which was just rising over Manhattan, Kastnerr stood in the center of the pavement until the cool, dry morning air had revived him...
...It was not the best possible garb in which to stand before a past that' rose before him in all the audacious, intimidating vigor of youth...
...I don't give a shit about Vietnamese babies or napalm," he screamed into the receiver...
...A smudge of dirt had lengthened into a scar-like mark which ran from his left eye to his chin...
...I don't remember...
...To Germany...
...Mug me," his face cried out, but the black only inched away, terrified that the classicist was about to attack him...
...We know they're not holy...
...Kastnerr wanted only one thing: to get to his office and to work...
...I was walking down 41st " "Alone...
...The article had made Kastnerr famous, even celebrated as the greatest member of the new generation of classicists, and had eventually merited translation back into the German in which Kastnerr had, in fact, originally composed it...
...The crowd turned and ran...
...By nine-fifteen, he was ready to go to his office...
...Then he recalled his vow, his long past vow to repent...
...The helmet, and the ruddy head inside it, swung backward...
...What are we doing...
...Kastnerr watched him, and then followed...
...And all this solely on account of a wallet, a stolen wallet...
...Mayb e we're crazy, but your time's up...
...Finally in 1959, the classicist received tenure and his own office in Hamilton Hall before which ne now stood...
...In his grey woolen suit, with a toothpick-thin red tie, Kastnerr had long ago passed all fashion...
...What did you eat...
...Come on, Kastnerr...
...This' the revolution...
...Get out...
...To one of his students, Kastnerr might have lopked like Ulysses, helplessly lost on some exotic island, but with none of Ulysses' determination to get back to Ithaca...
...So you gave him your wallet...
...But this time harder...
...but there was no answer and he let the phone drop to the floor...
...Do you understand, Kastnerr...
...Turkey, Kastnerr discovered on his arrival, was better than that...
...The phone clicked...
...The longer he stood there, the more inextricably he was hemmed in by the mob around him...
...Don't yell at us, Kastnerr...
...He wrote letters to several friends who had already arrived in New York, including the Herr Professor, and asked for their help in aiding him to rejoin them...
...still he could not help but feel that the latter was punishment for the former: either his father's fury had somehow pursued him in order to bring disaster down upon his head, or the gods had betrayed him because he had not given enough of himself to their cause...
...It didn't belong to the gods...
...W e touch anything, Kastnerr...
...And now it was his father's vc'ce which cried out to him these same incoherent possessed words, and drove the classicist from one room to the next, from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchenette, and back again, fleeing but never escaping the Semitic gutterals of his father's hoarse, German cry...
...On Tuesday, after he had grown tired of pacing his rooms and fidgeting for three hours, Kastnerr took a bus to the East Side and bought a new wallet in a shop on Madison Avenue, but it could not replace the one he had lost...
...In front of Columbia's gates, between the twin robed statues, he debated whether to walk over to Hamilton to see, if by chance, it was open...
...now eight o'clock and he wasa quarter hour late...
...Hamilton had been occupied late Sunday night...
...Those are pretty funny books, Kast nerr...
...What did he look like...
...The following morning, Kastnerr overslept...
...Kastnerr's fingers danced along the keys...
...The classicist did no work in Paris...
...They better not touch his typewriter...
...Back to order, to regularity...
...He supported himself well enough to live like an aristocratic emigre by selling, to various private collectors, a number of classical manuscripts and texts he had stolen from the Warburg's library and taken with him when he left Hamburg...
...All he had lost was seven or eight dollars...
...No...
...Get out...
...They were wedged and packed in so tightly he could hardly tell the males from the females...
...O Zeus," he prayed again, "If you deliver me now, I will dedicate my most valuable possession to you...
...Repentance, sin...
...He now was the model of regularity...
...What did he look like...
...Kastnerr, who knew the value of all things, knew that his Greek ball was far more precious than his wallet...
...They're not funny...
...I was mugged...
...Then, however, he realized that he didn't care...
...All demonstrations, all protests, he had long ago concluded, were indistinguishable and equally boring...
...It was too late, nearly three-thirty, to go back to sleep...
...Then a second rock flew forward, a third, a fourth, and finally a quick succession, a whole flurry of rocks and stones...
...The Revolution is coming, Kastnerr...
...Kastnerr caught the eyes of one policeman rolling in fury...
...When Kastnerr awoke the next afternoon, he could no longer recall the dream...
...It was an unfillable, absolute blank in the future...
...A conviction of utter helplessness had already overwhelmed him, and Kastnerr could only grow furious at the entire unjust world...
...Awrongturn...
...The shambles which the revolutionaries had left incomplete he himself had completed...
...So Kastnerr got kicked in the balls...
...After some hestitation, he finally walked inside, past a sign which told him he had to be 21 to enter, and into the darkness...
...Pulling the bedsheets tightly around his shoulders, he opened one eye and peered cautiously around the room...
...In front of the barricaded doors stood a line of twenty policemen...
...Sometimes, he saw a tiger...
...His own...
...Did he shoot you, Kastnerr...
...Kastnerr's old wallet had accompanied him throughout his wanderings from Hamburg to Columbia...
...He waded through the splintered remains of chairs and desks, through litter and unidentifiable garbage, to the elevator...
...All the wanderings and flights of his sixty-three years focussed upon the ball, as if it were his final habitation...
...Yet even more remarkably, Kastnerr realized that, in all the years since he had left his father's house, as if through some oversight, he had unwittingly remained observant of the commandments: he had continued to keep dietary laws...
...Here I am...
...He wanted to hit someone, or be hit...
...He wanted to get away from Europe, as far distant as possible, to America, hopefully...
...he cried out...
...He even had a special cover and lock installed upon the typewriter, an IBM Selectric...
...After losing his position, Kastnerr lost his desire to remain in Hamburg...
...perhaps someone or other made a comment...
...The Revolution is going to get you...
...The entire episode seemed now afterwards no more than an amusing dream...
...He looked back at Ariane...
...If he couldn't get to his office or to work, he wanted to be Ares...
...The blow had felt as powerful as a massive statue falling atop to crush him, but Kastnerr did not stop to reflect upon the image...
...Kastnerr was mugged...
...What did you do after you finished eating...
...What were you doing on 41st be tween 7th and 8th...
...Kastnerr cherished the regularity of the Greek verb, just as he cherished the symmetry of Greek sculpture and the orderliness of Greek philosophy...
...What do you mean you didn't get home...
...Kastnerr still didn't understand...
...It was a kind of amulet, a magical periapt which protected him from the memory of the years of his caesura...
...We're going to kick you in the balls again, Kastnerr...
...It was not, therefore, merely the weight of the wallet, or its materials, that Kastnerr missed...
...He wasn't even certain he wished to, although it was, at any rate, beyond the limits of any of his wishes...
...You're sure he was black...
...He was drunk...
...Kastnerr's heart fell into another bottomless pit...
...Almost nothing: seven dollars (thankfully, he had not carried more) and his university identification card, which he intended to replace that morning...
...Hello...
...Their chests heaved, their heads reared, then, like boars in chase, they charged...
...All his life, Kastnerr had been conceiving theories, and now he conceived still another: a man either had weight or no weight...
...Kastnerr wanted to be entertained...
...Everything, Kastnerr thought, had come to this...
...At times, I am even fond of him...
...But without the ball there would be no Life of Kastnerr, and thus, the classicist guarded it with all his soul and might...
...He wrote a brief note to Ariane, towards whom he still maintained (despite everything, he told himself) affectionate feelings: "I am going to kill myself...
...Well, he had never said, I will sin and repent...
...At last...
...You should watch him more carefully...
...Kastnerr dressed, walked outside, asked directions to Saint-Mille, and, finding that it was not within walking distance, hired a taxi to take him there...
...The thick brown frames of his glasses were sliding down his nose towards his mouth...
...What are you doing in my office...
...He couldn't talk...
...He withered, and suddenly, felt himself falling into a hole which had mysteriously appeared beneath his feet, beneath the bedroom carpet, into the bowels of the earth...
...and atop the center of the desk, a bunch of roses and chrysanthemums, set in a tall Cretan vase, were turning their flowers toward the thin broken rays of sunlight which penetrated the metal gate secured across the single window on the opposite side of the room...
...But he had not heard Hebrew spoken for years, since his childhood, when his father, seated across the table in their living room, had sung to his son the wisdom of the Talmud...
...ears but they do not hear...
...He ran as if he were doomed to run forever...
...The Life of Kastnerr would never be completed, and if he could not complete it Kastnerr would not envision the possibility...
...In the midst of all the chaos, however, the typewriter, the classicist's priceless IBM Selectric, shone proudly on the desk top...
...To Paris...
...Kastnerr stood in the room's center and cried...
...Kastnerr screamed into the phone...
...A special screwdriver was necessary in order to get the top off, and they had not played with it...
...As he rose up to the sixth floor, his fingers dove into his pocket and clutched at his keyring...
...Two or three policemen stood at its doors, toy soldiers in their blue uniforms...
...And hadn't the god then delivered him...
...This girl was wearing a red bandana on her biceps...
...Her breasts alternately jiggled and strained against her blue jersey t-shirt...
...So the Revolution even knew the Old Testament, Kastnerr thought to himself...
...But Kastnerr did his best...
...Near your balls...
...The classicist got off the subway at 42nd Street and walked upstairs to Times Square...
...He tired of his irregular life, but was unable to find his way back to any semblance of regularity...
...Everything's our business...
...I don't want to repent," he shouted back to the voice...
...Kastnerr walked back to his bedroom and switched on the light...
...Kastnerr, who had already devoted himself in spirit to the pagan gods, was determined not to permit minor incidents to impede the path of his career...
...He suddenly remembered his typewriter...
...Through his desk and drawers, under the couch, behind the bookcase, and through the garbage on the floor...
...finally, Kastnerr realized that it was only himself...
...Who believed in sin or repentance...
...Fi nally, he washed his face, dressed, and, sitting down in the living-room, sat down to read the twelfth book of the Odyssey, but even Homer could not settle his restless thoughts...
...Kastnerr dressed and ate his breakfast...
...About seventy yards distant, Kastnerr's brown hat lay in the dust...
...hat night, Kastnerr tried but could not fall asleep...
...The next morning, and the one after that, he again overslept...
...The ball was his...
...He stared at himself in the mirror...
...Once he had completed it, he opened his eyes, looked down at the paper, and found it blank...
...He calmly stood up, made his way to the exit, and, back in Paris, departed France for Spain...
...While he washed himself, as was his habit, he conjugated the Greek verb in its four moods, and while he dried himself, he declined the Greek noun in its three declensions, singing the paradigms to himself in rhyming couplets he had learned in his youth...
...His mind raced, his fingers worked furiously at the tiny screws...
...A dry white wine...
...I " he didn't want to tell them about the mugging...
...On his every side, others were running and falling, stumbling and sprawling, with cries of pain and surrender, but Kastnerr only ran harder...
...He no longer felt weightless or more accurately, he had grown accustomed to the displacement of weightlessness but, in its stead, he felt perpetually late...
...Once downstairs in the station and in front of the token booth, Kastnerr reached back for his wallet and discovered that his pocket was again empty...
...Thus, for the next three days, as long as Hamilton was occupied, Kastnerr did nothing...
...the voice calmly continued...
...For the second time in three days, his wallet had been stolen...
...He lived riotously...
...He despaired, and after he had tired of despair, the war finally ended...
...Part of us...
...How was it...
...Rabbinic arguments on top of everything...
...Kastnerr had a sense of humor...
...Male, but it's none of your business who I ate with...
...You know what, Kastnerr," it answered...
...Or if he did, he dismissed them as a lacuna between the two sets of twenty-five years, or as a caesura, like those caesuras found in the middle of any one of Homer's precious lines...
...If he shot me, how could I talk to you...
...While he worked, he hummed to himself a melody which his father had sung on Saturday evening to celebrate the separation between the holy and the profane...
...I ate quiche lorraine...
...Yes, he was black...
...Don't smart-ass, Kastnerr...
...Although he had never closed his eyes all the time he was running, they now seemed mysteriously opened upon a world which, in all his sixty-three years, he had never before glimpsed...
...Or if not to curse, then to threaten him...
...Kastnerr wanted to be Ares...
...He stole it...
...Don't touch them...
...Yes, he hit me...
...I didn't get home...
...Go d almighty, what does that have to do with what I eat...
...but it was nowhere to be found...
...Nothing and yet he felt so insubstantial he had to force his legs down on the pavement...
...He'd smash the ball before he gave it to them, but Kastnerr knew better...
...Because we don't like you...
...And by the time he came to this realization, the entire day was gone...
...Yes, alone, and a man stepped out from between two buildings with a gun, and told me to give him my wallet...
...He had grown paunchy and flabby...
...What were they doing in his office...
...it came up occasionally in his research...
...No, I went home alone...
...Once the sun had set, Ariane and Kastnerr dressed and went out for dinner...
...Goodbye...
...The two returned to the hotel room and, both slightly drunk, copulated again...
...More stones flew, more glass shattered...
...eyes but they do not see...
...however, he had entirely forgotten the incident by the time he awakened the following morning...
...There remained no complete phrases or sentences, and what he could make out on the faded parchment seemed hopelessly corrupt, beyond even the corrective powers of his own abilities as an emender of texts...
...He again thirsted for blood...
...Was he, Leo Kastnerr, sixty-three years old, a tenured professor of Greek at Columbia University, afraid of his father...
...The artisan had worked on the ball for nearly half a year, cursed the work, cursed himself for having undertaken it, cursed Kastnerr, and vowed that he would never cast another...
...Nothing could help now...
...Months dragged by until he received his first reply...
...Dear Y-hw-h (for he also knew better than to write the Tetragrammaton) Kastnerr has come home...
...Kastnerr resolved, if he should survive, to repent and to return to the faith...
...The drunk tottered across the street and entered a bar...
...That, however, was all Kastnerr could make of it...
...Curiously, the letters were all inscribed in Hebrew that, indeed, was the sole clue Kastnerr possessed with which to date the manuscript back to his own youth, the last time he had read or studied any Hebrew text...
...W e already told you once, Kastnerr...
...He had almost returned Kastnerr thought, amused at the idea to his dead father's piety...
...Was he black...
...Between 7th and 8th...
...The Revolution...
...Hadn't he once already dedicated himself to the god...
...The wallet was neither his most precious nor valuable possession...
...The war dragged on, and he forgot more of his Greek and Latin...
...Kastnerr couldn't believe the voice he heard on the other end...
...Until late one night, after the two had spent hours arguing over the merits of the Bible and Homer as species of imitation Kastnerr supporting Homer, while his friend argued for the Bible the short moustachioed man confessed to Kastnerr that he would never have dared to begin his work unless he had been absolutely assured that the texts were wholly inaccessible to him...
...From the dock, through an uninteresting round of bureaucratic shuffles, he made his way to Columbia...
...A CLASSICAL REBIRTH A STORY BY DAVID STERN Kastnerr, a professor of Greek at Columbia University, had been mugged the night before...
...You're not going to throw anybody out over the phone...
...This is yours...
...At first, they reminded him of the Spanish guards at the border who had fixed in him so much ineffaceable terror one eventful day far in the past...
...Kastnerrfelt strangly rejuvenated, almost a youth...
...A. ill his life, Kastnerr had been walking against the wind, both real and metaphorical...
...Papa, where are you...
...He hummed and laughed gently to himself, amused at the originality of his letter...
...Soon...
...On the double...
...Without his wallet, Kastnerr felt weightless, so light as no longer to be ruled by the laws of gravity...
...Papa...
...He knew now, for one thing, the difference between the gods...
...for a second, he was completely bewildered: the vision of the ferris wheel in Palisades Park whirled through his head...
...Kastnerr, do you know who he was...
...He was part of the Revolution...
...Vanished was the bold, foreign face of France and Turkey, and in its stead, an earlier one half absentmindedness, half simplemindedness, the countenance of innocence, beguiling and beguiled innocence...
...In his mood, anything seemed possible to the classicist...
...His real home was his office...
...Those thirteen years had, in turn, absolved him of the regularity of the first twenty-five years of his life...
...We're in your office...
...He knew a demonstration when he saw one, and especially if, as now, he was caught in its center...
...The vision dazzled Kastnerr and threw him into a cold, abrupt tremor...
...The crowd, in turn, even if they could not hear the girl, nevertheless responded to her words, as if under a magical spell...
...Kastnerr suddenly thought he saw, through the metal gate across his front window, his father, or a phantom of his father, walking away, across Riverside Drive, in his grey beard and opera hat and in the same measured steps he remembered so vividly...
...Good, a little dry, but good...
...Closing his fist tightly about the ball, he walked back to the typewriter, inserted the ball into its prong, and began to type again...
...Don't God us, and don't worry what that has to do with what you eat, Kastnerr...
...To journey...
...Kastnerr jumped up frantically, threw his chair over, and searched furiously through his desk drawers for the screwdriver...
...Kastnerr yelled into the receiver, "Are you still there...
...Now Kastnerr had mysteriously recalled the tune, as if out of nowhere...
...Oh, he whined to himself, why can't I get to work...
...although he was now entirely convinced that his friend had been cor rect all along...
...So don't bullshit us...
...They sat elegantly on the Champs Elysee, shared a plate of clams, and sipped Chablis...
...Kastnerr raised his head over the shoulders, glimpsed Hamilton, and realized that the building had been occupied: its doors were barricaded with chairs, tables, and filing cabinets...
...A gust of wind arose and blew it another ten yards away...
...Gathering his books and papers into his briefcase, he put on his jacket and checked, as he habitually did before stepping out the front door, first his right pocket for his keys (a silver keyring upon which he had hung his four keys two for his apartment and two for his office), then his left pocket for change (whatever he had, just so long as he had something), and finally, his back pocket for his wallet, which he now found disconcertingly empty: the wallet was missing...
...The cluster of intersections was empty and desolate, as abandoned and foreign as either Istanbul or Paris at 4 A. M. Kastnerr walked over to the corner of Broadway and 41st and peered up the street where he had been mugged...
...Your obedient worshipper, etc...
...Kastnerr knew that the connection between the two events his father's visit and the loss of his job was wholly fortuitous...
...He couldn't hear her words, but then he had no interest in them...
...From Germany, he had gone to France, and in Paris, all manner of strange and wonderful things had happened to the young classicist...
...Kastnerr, however, had paid the man well for his trouble, and with the ball inserted into the prong of his advanced machine, he was now composing his autobiography...
...O n 41st...
...Who's there...
...Kastnerr got up, put on his nightrobe, went to the door, and looked out through the peephole...
...For an instant, Kastnerr was again seized by an overwhelming sensation of displacement and stood paralyzed, his right hand on the brass doorknob, the palm of his left upon his posteriorsimilar to the statue of the Greek athlete whose discus has slipped from his grip at the precise moment he is about to hurl ituntil he recalled that the previous night his wallet had been stolen...
...He crawled frantically, his hand shot out into the darkness, and he seized the engraved surface of his Greek ball...
...There was nothing mad in this...
...The Greek ball was gone, and the classicist began to search madly for it...
...The phone suddenly rang...
...He had spoken or rather, written too early...
...The Revolution has already thrown you out...
...We're everywhere, black, white, bloodshot...
...The Revolution ain't moving one step, Kastnerr...
...What had he to repent for, anyhow...
...A massive orgy, arranged by a friend, also from Hamburg...
...The bar, he discovered, was actually a striptease club...
...I don't wear a watch...
...I told you...
...That was ridiculous, he told himself...
...He didn't miss the new wallet anyhow...
...Succour me...
...Before he could remember having been mugged the night before, Kastnerr's right hand shot back to feel himself and, feeling nothing, was seized by paralysis...
...Smear blood on your door, or else we'll take your apartment also...
...Kastnerr was convinced that his story could be told in classical Greek alone...
...The three together had sealed into his own life regularity, symmetry, and order...
...He turned and ran as he had never before run in all his life...
...if anything, he had only promised to repent and then had gone ahead and sinned some more...
...He saw himself dangling upside down, his coat caught in the spoke of the ferris wheel as it turned round and round in its revolutions...
...He had long since foregone all time...
...This ain't no Papa, Kastnerr...
...And without it, how would he ever get back onto the other side of the line...
...Now...
...Perhaps he was younger, perhaps older, maybe even timeless...
...Kastnerr lifted the ball higher, towards the moon, in the line between his eyes and the lunar planet in the distance...
...With love, Kastnerr," and mailed it...
...Next door to Kastnerr, in the same hotel in which he stayed, there was a short, moustachioed Jew from Berlin, also an emigrant with no destination...
...No longer protected from them, Kastnerr stood naked before his past and Kastnerr, naked, was neither the most pleasant nor invigorating sight to behold...
...The revolution of what...
...Kastnerr looked up...
...On a cloudy September morning, Kastnerr embarked from Istanbul, and on a rainy October afternoon, he disembarked at New York...
...The two tufts of thin hair on either side of his head sprouted forth like young birds too weak to fly off into the blue heavens and already despairing of life...
...Male or female...
...Hi s eyes were bloodshot...
...He himself no longer thought about them...
...Did you see his arms...
...Real quick...
...Leo Kastnerr, in his grey woolen suit, made his way up College Walk towards Hamilton, as he did and had done every day since his arrival in America in 1946...
...Kastnerr's happiness was even greater because he was certain no one would ever talk back to him...
...The revolution...
...The agent did not appear especially sym pathetic...
...The realization was so abrupt, it threw Kastnerr into a state of shock, out of which he did not awaken for two weeks until, on July 6, 1933, he was fired, along with his other Jewish colleagues, from his position at the Warburg Institute...
...He has published stories and reviews in RESPONSE and COMMENTARY...
...He did not know what he typed...
...He did not even bother to turn on the light, for he had no desire to see what he was typing...
...Turkey was next best to nothing...
...Yet what did it matter even if he had said it...
...Kastnerr never wrote again to Ariane, but when he awoke the next morning with a stiff neck and a cramped back, he discovered that the threatening, burly soldiers had vanished and that the customs officials, all meek-looking humiliated souls, were back at their stations...
...Leopard or tiger, it didn't make a difference to him...
...Except that the Germans, when translating it, regularly misspelled Kastnerr's name and left out the second "r...
...I was at home, why...
...Kastnerr stared impatiently at him, "Mu g me...
...The night before...
...Get out...
...Ariane watched him in as tonishment and concluded that he was so drunk he had gone mad...
...In a dream that night, God, wearing a black beard and a high opera hat, very similar, in fact, to the classicist's recollection of his own father, appeared to Kastnerr and angrily berated him for having claimed the superiority of a pagan song over the revelation of divine wisdom...
...Your office, Kastnerr...
...Did he hit you...
...And whatever happened to Apollo...
...Kastnerr lacked the courage to bribe the soldiers who stood in their place, especially since they appeared to him truly threatening...
...You people are crazy...
...Kastnerr caught himself and lowered his voice...
...For one instant, Kastnerr could not move...
...Kastnerr did not hear...
...He wasn't even certain they had left it in the room...
...The emptiness of his back pocket, the weightlessness of his body, and the morning's sensation of displacement suddenly returned...
...He had to have it back...
...he observed the prohibitions against sexual indulgence prior to marriage...
...But why me...
...The gun had vanished...
...He wondered where it was now...
...He was so drunk he was back in all three cities simultaneously...
...Oh you can't give it to me hard enough," Kastnerr heard the bartender ask him what he wanted to drink...
...Nor was it the fact that he had carried it with him for so long...
...Kastnerr began to hunt for a gun...
...The typewriter was untouched...
...The ball, a sphere of gold, was the only one of its kind in the world, and Kastnerr had searched for two weeks during a hot summer thirteen years ago until he had finally found, near the harbor of Piraeus, on a narrow street cluttered with garbage and naked children, the goldsmith willing to build it...
...He crawled out, surfaced, and running to the window, for the office was now sunk in shadow, held the ball in the palm of his hand...
...but before he could stop himself, Kastnerr, keyring and new wallet in pocket, had walked out of his apartment, up 116th Street, and down into the subway...
...I didn't look at him...
...The gold sphere shone like a tiny idol in the moonlight...
...N o use yelling, Kastnerr...
...I went home...
...He could see nothing...
...Let it die out and go away...
...His own, or another's, it didn't matter to him...
...Therefore Kastnerr says he was a junkie...
...He should have waited until he had found a gun...
...Le <eo Kastnerr, classicist, stood dead still upon his grassy knoll and surveyed the new world he had chanced upon...
...As he stood and cried, his glance fell, by chance, upon one spot in the rug that rose in a slight mound...
...Then he too began to run...
...Liquor and hashish, even an attempt at opium smoking...
...He especially enjoyed talking to himself in Attic, as well as in the less common dialects of Ionic and Sapphic, even if he knew no one with whom he might hold a conversation...
...He couldn't sleep even if he tried...
...Hi s eyes were bloodshot...
...What, Kastnerr...
Vol. 1 • May 1975 • No. 1
