THE
LAST MOHICAN
195
table. He found no address on wall or door, nor, to his surprise, any
door lock. This for a moment depressed him. It meant Susskind had
nothing worth stealing. Of
his
own, that is. The student promised
himself
to return tomorrow, when the occupant was elsewhere.
Return he did, in the morning, while the entrepreneur was out
selling religious articles, glanced around once and was quickly in–
side. He shivered-a pitch black freezing cave. Fidelman scratched
up a thick match and confirmed bed and table, also a rickety chair,
but no heat or light except a drippy candle stub in a saucer on the
table. He lit the yellow candle and searched all over the place. In the
table drawer a few eating implements plus safety razor, though where
he shaved was a mystery, probably a public toilet. On a shelf above
the thin-blanketed bed stood half a flask of red wine, part of a
package of spaghetti, and a hard panino. Also an unexpected little
fish
bowl with a bony gold fish swimming around in Arctic seas. The
fISh, reflecting the candle flame, gulped repeatedly, thrashing its
frigid tail as Fidelman watched. He loves pets, thought the student.
Under the bed he found a chamber pot, but nowhere a brief case
with a fine critical chapter in it. The place was not more than an
ice-box someone probably had lent the refugee to come in out of
the rain. Alas, Fidelman sighed. Back in the pensione, it took a hot
water bottle two hours to thaw him out; but from the visit he never
fully recovered.
In
this
latest dream of Fidelman's he was spending the day in
a cemetery all crowded with tombstones, when up out of an empty
grave rose this long-nosed brown shade, Virgilio Susskind, beckoning.
Fidelman hurried over.
"Have you read Tolstoy?"
"Sparingly."
"Why is art?" asked the shade, drifting off.
Fidelman, willy nilly, followed, and the ghost, as it vanished, led
him
up steps going through the ghetto and into a marble synagogue.
The student, left alone, for no reason he could think of lay down
upon the stone floor,
his
shoulders keeping strangely warm as he
ltared at the sunlit vault above. The fresco therein revealed
this
llint in fading blue, the sky flowing from
his
head, handing an old
knight in a thin red robe his gold cloak. Nearby stood a humble
horse and two stone
hills.
