408
PARTISAN REVIEW
were his brothers and his sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured him–
self, but what difference did that make
if
he was united with them
by this blaze of love? And as he walked he began to say, "Oh my
brothers-my brothers and my sisters," blessing them all as well as
himself.
So what did it matter how many languages there were, or how
hard it was to describe a glass of water? Or matter that a few minutes
later he didn't feel like a brother toward the man who sold him the
tickets?
On that very same afternoon he didn't hold so high an opinion
of this same onrush of loving kindness. What did it come to? As they
had the capacity and must use it once in a while, people were bound
to have such involuntary feelings. It was only another one of those
subway things. Like having a hard-on at random. But today, his day
of reckoning, he consultcd his memory again and thought, 'I must go
back to that. That's the right clue and may do me the most good.
Something very big. Truth-like.'
The old fellow on the right, Mr. Rappaport, was nearly blind and
kept asking Wilhelm, "What's the new figure on November wheat?
Give me July soybeans too." When you told him he didn't say thank
you. He said okay, instead, or check, and turned away until he needed
you again. He was very old, older even than Dr. Adler, and if you
believed Tamkin he had once been the Rockefeller of the chicken busi–
ness and had retired with a large fortune.
Wilhelm had a queer feeling about the chicken industry, th:1t it
was sinister. On the road, he frequently passed chicken farms. Those
big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected fields; they were
like prisons. The lights burned all night in them to cheat the poor hens
into laying. Then the slaughter. Pile all the coops of the slaughtered on
end, and in one week they'd go higher than Mount Everest or Mount
Serenity. The blood filling the Gulf of Mexico. The chicken shit, acid,
burning the earth.
How old--old this Mr. Rappaport was! Purple stains were buried
in the flesh of his nose and the cartilage of his ear was twisted like
a cabbage heart. Beyond remedy by glasses, his eyes were smoky and
faded.
"Read me that soybean figure now, boy," he said, and Wilhelm
did. H e thought perhaps the old man might give him a tip, or some
useful advice or information about Tamkin. But no. He only wrote
memoranda on a pad, and put the pad in his pocket. He let no one
see what he had written. And Wilhelm thought this was the way a man
who had grown rich by the murder of millions of animals, little chickens,
would act.
If
there was a life to come he might have to answer for
the killing of all those chickens. What if they all were waiting? But
if there was a life to come, everybody would have to answer. But if
there was a life to come, the chickens themselves would be all right.
Well! What stupid ideas he was having this morning. Phooey!
Finally old Rappaport did address a few remarks to Wilhelm. He
