The introductory essay, ‘Thinkability’, is polemical, but the stories that follow were written with the usual purpose in mind: that is to say, with no purpose at all – except, I suppose, to give pleasure, various kinds of complicated pleasure. Previously I had managed only four short stories in sixteen years; these five came successively over the last two years – and then they stopped. If the stories also arouse political feelings then that is all to the good. In this debate, in this crap game, I do want to get my chip on the table, however thin, however oddly coloured, however low its denomination. ‘Einstein’s Monsters’, by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein’s monsters, not fully human, not for now.
May I take the opportunity to discharge – or acknowledge – some debts? ‘Bujak and the Strong Force’ owes something to Saul Bellow; ‘Insight at Flame Lake’ to Piers and Emily Read and to Jack and Florence Phillips; ‘The Time Disease’ to J. G. Ballard; ‘The Little Puppy That Could’ to Franz Kafka and to Vladimir Nabokov; and ‘The Immortals’ to Jorge Luís Borges and to the Salman Rushdie of Grimus. And throughout I am grateful to Jonathan Schell, for ideas and for imagery. I don’t know why he is our best writer on this subject. He is not the most stylish, perhaps, nor the most knowledgeable. But he is the most decorous and, I think, the most pertinent. He has moral accuracy; he is unerring.
M.A. London 1987
Bujak? Yeah, I knew him. The whole street knew Bujak. I knew him before and I knew him after. We all knew Bujak – sixty years old, hugely slabbed and seized with muscle and tendon, smiling at a bonfire in the yard, carrying desks and sofas on his back, lifting a tea-chest full of books with one hand. Bujak, the strongman. He was also a dreamer, a reader, a babbler . . . You slept a lot sounder knowing that Bujak was on your street. This was 1980. I was living in London, West London, carnival country, what the police there call the front line. DR ALIMANTADO, SONS OF THUNDER, RACE WAR, NO FUTURE: dry thatched dreadlocks, the scarred girls in the steeped pubs. Those black guys, they talked like combative drunks, all the time. If I went up to Manchester to stay with my girlfriend, I always left a key with Bujak. Those hands of his, as hard as coal, the nails quite square and symmetrical, like his teeth. And the forearms, the Popeye forearms, hefty and tattoo-smudged and brutal, weapons of monstrous power. Large as he was, the energies seemed impacted in him, as though he were the essence of an even bigger man; he stood for solidity. I am as tall as Bujak, but half his weight. No, less. Bujak once told me that to create a man out of nothing would require the equivalent energy of a thousand-megaton explosion. Looking at Bujak, you could believe this. As for me, well, a single stick of TNT might do the job – a hand-grenade, a firecracker. In his physical dealings with me (you know, the way someone moves across a room towards you, this can be a physical event) he showed the tender condescension that the big man shows to the small. Probably he was like that with everyone. He was protective. And then, to good Bujak, thoughtful, grinning Bujak, the worst thing happened. A personal holocaust. In the days that followed I saw and felt all of Bujak’s violence.
His life went deep into the century. Warrior-caste, he fought in Warsaw in 1939. He lost his father and two brothers at Katyn. He was in the resistance – all his life he was in the resistance. In that capacity he visited (and this is a story of violence, of visitation) many neat tortures on Nazi collaborators. He rose up with Armia Kraiova and was imprisoned in December 1944. During the post-war years he worked in a touring circus, a strongman, bending bars, butting brick walls, tugging trucks with his teeth. In 1956, the year of my birth, he was there for the Polish October, and for the November in ‘Hungaria’. Then the United States, the halls, queues and cubicles of Ellis Island, with wife, mother, small daughter. His wife Monika was hospitalized in New York for a minor condition; she came down with a hospital supergerm and died overnight. Bujak worked as a longshoreman in Fort Lauderdale. He took and gave many crunchy beatings – strike-breakers, mob men, union goons. But he prospered, as you’re meant to do, in America. What brought him to England, I think, was a certain kind of (displaced) Polish nostalgia or snobbery, and a desire for peace. Bujak had lived the twentieth century. And then, one day, the twentieth century, a century like no other, came calling on him. Bookish Bujak himself, I’m sure, saw the calamity as in some sense post-nuclear, einsteinian. It was certainly the end of his existing universe. Yes, it was Bujak’s Big Crunch.
I first met Bujak one wintry morning in the late spring of 1980 – or of PN 35, if you use the post-nuclear calendar he sometimes favoured. Michiko’s car had something wrong with it, as usual (a flat, on this occasion), and I was down on the street grappling with the burglar tools and the spare. Compact and silent, Michiko watched me sadly. I’d managed to loosen the nuts on the collapsed wheel – but the aperture for the jack was ominously soft and sticky with rust. The long-suffering little car received the vertical spear in its chassis, and stayed stoically earthbound. Now I have to say that I am already on very bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of coffee or changing a lightbulb (or a fuse!), I think – what is it with objects? Why are they so aggressive? What’s their beef with me? Objects and I, we can’t go on like this. We must work out a compromise, a freeze, before one of us does something rash. I’ve got to meet with their people and hammer out a deal.
‘Stop it, Sam,’ said Michiko.
‘Get a real car,’ I told her.
‘Please, just stop. Stop it! I’ll call a towtruck or something.’
‘Get a real car,’ I said, and thought – yeah, or a real boyfriend. Anyway, I was throwing the tools into their pouch, dusting my palms and wiping away my tears when I saw Bujak pacing across the road toward us. Warily I monitored his approach. I had seen this hulking Bohunk or throwback Polack from my study window, busying himself down on the street, always ready to flex his primitive can-do and know-how. I wasn’t pleased to see him. I have enough of the standard-issue paranoia, or I did then. Now I’ve grown up a little and realize that I have absolutely nothing to fear, except the end of the world. Along with everybody else. At least in the next war there won’t be any special wimps, punchbags or unpopularity contests. Genocide has had its day and we’re on to something bigger now. Suicide.
‘You a Jew?’ asked Bujak in his deeply speckled voice.
‘Yup,’ I said.
‘Name?’
And number? ‘Sam,’ I told him.
‘Short for?’
I hesitated, and felt Michi’s eyes on my back.
‘Is it Samuel?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Actually it’s Samson.’
The smile he gave told me many things, most obviously that here – here was a happy man. All eyes and teeth, the smile was ridiculous in its gaiety, its candour. But then happiness is a pretty clownish condition, when you stop to think about it. I mean, round-the-clock happiness, it’s hardly an appropriate response. To me, this gave him an element of instability, of counter-strength, of violence. But Bujak here was clearly happy, in his universe. Bujak, with his happiness accessory.
‘Jews usually good up here,’ he said, and knocked a fingertip on his shaved head. ‘No good with their hands.’
Bujak was good with his hands: to prove it, he bent forward and picked up the car with them.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said. But he wasn’t. As I got to work he was already shooting the breeze with Michiko, nonchalantly asking her if she’d lost any family at Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Michi had, as it happened – a cousin of her father’s. This was news to me but I felt no surprise. It seems that everyone loses someone in the big deaths. Bujak changed stance freely, and, at one point, lifted a forgetful hand to scratch his skull. The car never wavered. I watched Bujak as I worked, and saw the strength he called on owed nothing to the shoulders or the great curved back – just the arms, the arms. It was as if he were raising the lid of a cellar door, or holding up a towel while a little girl dressed on the beach. Then he roughly took the tyre iron from my hands and knelt on one knee to rivet the bolts. As the grained slab of his head loomed upwards again Bujak’s eyes were tight and unamused, and they moved roughly too across my face. He nodded at Michi and said to me,
‘And who did you lose?’
‘Uh?’ I said. If I understood his question, then the answer was none of his business.
‘I give money to Israel every year,’ he said. ‘Not much. Some. Why? Because the Polish record on the Jews is disgraceful. After the war even,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Quite disgraceful. Look. There is a tyre-mender in Basing Street. Tell them Bujak and they will make it for you fairly.’
Thanks, we both said. Off he went, measuring the road with his strides. Later, from my study window, I saw him pruning roses in the small front garden. A little girl, his granddaughter, was crawling all over his back. I saw him often, from my study window. In those days, in 1980, I was trying to be a writer. No longer. I can’t take the study life, the life of the study. This is the only story I’ll ever tell, and this story is true . . . Michiko was sold on Bujak right away and dropped a thankyou note through his door that same afternoon. But it took a while before I was really on terms with Bujak.
I asked around about this character, as you will when you’re playing at writing. Like I said, everybody knew Bujak. In the streets, the pubs, the shops, they spoke of him as a fixer and handyman, omnicompetent: all the systems that keep a house going, that keep it alive – Bujak could handle them, the veins, the linings, the glands and the bowels. He was also marked down as a definite eccentric, a stargazer, a ‘philosopher’ – not, I gathered, a valued calling in these parts – and on occasion as an out-and-out nutter (one of those words that never sound right on American lips, like quid and bloody). People gave Bujak his due as a family man: once Michi and I glimpsed him quite far afield, outside the Russian church on the junction of St Petersburgh Place and Moscow Road, erect in his suit, with his mother, his daughter and his granddaughter; I remember thinking that even huge Bujak could show the fussed delicacy you get from living in a house full of ladies. But most eagerly and vehemently, of course, they spoke of Bujak the peacekeeper, the vigilante, the rough-justice artist. They spoke of skirmishes, vendettas, one-man wars, preemptive strikes. Standing there in the pub, the shoulderless and bespectacled American with beermug awkwardly poised, or peering over a counter, or standing on a corner with milk-carton and newspaper under my arm, I was indulged with tales of Bujak and the strong force.
The time he caught two black kids prying at a neighbour’s basement window and sent them twirling into the street with two flicks of his wrist, like someone mucking out a trench. Or what he did to their big brothers when they jumped him in Golborne Road the following night. Any brawler or burglar nabbed by Bujak soon wished himself under the hosepipe in some nice safe slammer. He took on all-comers. Feuding with the council, he once dragged a skip full of rubbish a hundred yards from his front door. He went out one night and upended a truck after a row about a generator with some local building contractors. The Bujak women could walk the All Saints Road at any hour and expect no bother. And Bujak himself could silence a pub just by walking past it. He was popular, though. He was the community man, and such community as the street had devolved upon Bujak. He was our deterrent.
And it wasn’t enough . . . Now, in 1985, it is hard for me to believe that a city is anything more or other than the sum of its streets, as I sit here with the Upper West Side blatting at my window and fingering my heart. Sometimes in my dreams of New York danger I stare down over the city – and it looks half made, half wrecked, one half (the base perhaps) of something larger torn in two, frayed, twangy, moist with rain or solder. And you mean to tell me, I say to myself, that this is supposed to be a community? . . . My wife and daughter move around among all this, among the violations, the life-trashers, the innocent murderers. Michiko takes our little girl to the day-care centre where she works. Day-care – that’s good. But what about dawn-care, dusk-care, what about night-care? If I just had a force I could enfold them with, oh, if I just had the strong force . . . Bujak was right. In the city now there are loose components, accelerated particles – something has come loose, something is wriggling, lassooing, spinning towards the edge of its groove. Something must give and it isn’t safe. You ought to be terribly careful. Because safety has left our lives. It’s gone for ever. And what do animals do when you give them only danger? They make more danger, more, much more.
It was 1980, the birth-year of Solidarity, and Bujak was Polish. This combination of circumstances led me to assume that Bujak was liberal in his sentiments. Actually it didn’t follow. As I proudly strolled with him to the timber yard or the home-improvement stores off the Portobello Road, Bujak would fume against the blacks, the czarnuchy, as they strutted and gabbled round about us. The blacks were fine, he grinningly argued, in a context of sun, surf and plentiful bananas; but in a Western city they were just children – understandably angry children too. Once he stopped dead to marvel at two gay punks in NO FUTURE T-shirts, with hair like old ladies’ bonnets, as they walked towards us hand in hand. ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it,’ he said, rolling the r. With the faggots, Bujak saw their plight, and their profusion, as an einsteinian matter also. He confessed to the fantasy of leading a cavalry charge against the streets and their strange ensembles – the sound of the hooves, the twirling cutlasses. ‘A desire which I suppress of course. But if I could just press a button,’ he added, greedily eyeing the pedaly, the czarnuchy, the street-dwellers as they turned and gesticulated and reshuffled and moved on.
Violence in a man is usually the overspill of something else. You know how it is. You see these guys. I appear to have an almost disabling sensitivity to violence in other men, a fallout detector for those spots of waste or exorbitance that spill over into force. Like a canary in a prewar coalmine, I check out early when there is violence, when there is poison in the air. What is this propensity? Call it fear, if you like. Fear will do fine. The raised voice in the restaurant and its sour tang of brutality and booze, the look a man will give his wife which demotes her on the human scale, which prepares her for the human disgrace of violence, the pumping leg, the fizzing eye, the public bar at ten fifty-five. I see all this – my body sees it, and gives me adrenalin, gives me sweat. I faint at the sight of blood. I faint at the sight of a band-aid, an aspirin. This sense of critical fragility (myself, my wife, my daughter, even the poor planet, baby-blue in its shawls), it drove me from my study in the end. The study life is all thought and anxiety and I cannot take the study life any more.
Late at night, over at Bujak’s large, aromatic, icon-infested apartment (the blue glow of saints, candles, vigils), I scanned the big Pole for the excrescences of violence. His mother, old Roa, made the tea. The old woman (‘rouge’ with an a on the end), she calmed me with her iconic presence, the moist hair grained like silver, as Bujak talked about the strong force, the energy locked in matter. Grinning in the gloom, Bujak told me what he had done to the Nazi collaborator in Warsaw, in 1943. Boy, I thought; I bet the guy didn’t do much collaborating after that. However, I couldn’t conceal my distaste. ‘But aren’t you glad?’ urged Bujak. No, I said, why should I be? ‘You lost two grandparents to these people.’ Yeah, I said. So? That doesn’t change anything. ‘Revenge,’ said Bujak simply. Revenge is overrated, I told him. And out of date. He looked at me with violent contempt. He opened his hands in an explanatory gesture: the hands, the arms, the policemen of his will. Bujak was a big fan of revenge. He had a lot of time for revenge.
I once saw him use those hands, those arms. I saw it all from my study window, the four-panelled screen (moon-spotted, with refracting crossbar) through which the world came in at me then. I saw the four guys climb from the two cars and steady themselves in front of Bujak’s stoop. Did I hear a scream from within, a cry of warning or yearning? . . . Bujak’s daughter gave the old man a lot of grief. Her first name was Leokadia. Her second name was trouble. Rural-looking yet glamorous also, thirty-three, tall, plump, fierce and tearful, she was the unstable element in Bujak’s nucleus. She had, I noticed, two voices, one for truth, and one for nonsense, one for lies. Against the brown and shiny surface of her old-style dresses, the convex and the concave were interestingly disposed. Her daughter, little Boguslawa, was the byblow of some chaotic twelve-hour romance. It was well known on the street that Leokadia had round heels: the sort of girl (we used to say) who went into a hot flush every time she saw an army personnel carrier. She even made a pitch at me, here at the flat one time. Needless to say I failed to come across. I had my reasons: fear of reprisals from Michiko and Bujak himself (they both loomed in my mind, incongruously equal in size); also, more basically, I’m by no means sure I could handle someone like Leokadia in the cot. All that breast and haunch. All those freckles and tears . . . For six months she had been living with a man who beat her, lithe little Pat, sinewy, angular, wired very tight. I think she beat him too, a bit. But violence is finally a masculine accomplishment. Violence – now that’s man’s work. Leokadia kept going back to Pat, don’t ask me why. I don’t know. They don’t know. There she goes again, ticking back to him on her heels, with black eye, grazed cheek, wrenched hair. Nobody knows why. Not even they know. Bujak, surprisingly, stayed out of it, held his distance, remained solid – though he did try to keep the little girl, Boguslawa, safely at home, out of the turbulence. You would often see old Roa ferrying the kid from one flat to the other. After her second spell in hospital (cracked ribs this time) Leokadia called it a day and went home for good. Then Pat showed up with his pals, and found Bujak waiting.
The three men (I saw it all) had an unmistakable look about them, with that English badboy build, proud guts and tapering legs which bent backwards from the knee down, sparse-haired with old-young faces, as if they had done their ageing a lot quicker than one year at a time. I don’t know whether these guys would have frightened anybody much on the American circuit, but I guess they were big enough and their intention was plain. (Did you read about the Yablonsky murders? In the States these days, if you’re on the list, they come in and do the whole family. Yes, they just nuke you now.) Anyway, they frightened me. I sat writhing at my desk as Pat led them through the garden gate. I hated the flares of his jeans, the compact running shoes, the tight Fred Perry. Then the front door opened: bespectacled Bujak, wearing braces over his vest, old, huge. In a reflex that spelt seriousness and scorn, the men loosened their shoulders and let their hands dangle in readiness. Words were exchanged – demand, denial. They moved forward.
Now I must have blinked, or shut my eyes, or ducked (or fainted). I heard three blows on a regular second-beat, clean, direct, and atrocious, each one like an axe splitting frozen wood. When I looked up, Pat and one of his friends were lying on the steps; the other guys were backing away, backing away from the site of this incident, this demonstration. Expressionlessly, Bujak knelt to do something extra to Pat on the floor. As I watched, he tugged back the hair and carefully poked a neutronium fist into Pat’s upturned face. I had to go and lie down after that. But a couple of weeks later I saw Pat sitting alone in the London Apprentice; he was shivering remorsefully in the corner behind the jukebox; the pleated welt on his cheek bore all the colours of flame, and he was drinking his beer through a straw. In that one blow he had taken payment for everything he had given Leokadia.
With Bujak, I was always edging into friendship. I don’t know if I ever really made it. Differences of age aren’t easy. Differences of strength aren’t easy. Friendship isn’t easy. When Bujak’s own holocaust came calling, I was some help to him; I was better than nothing. I went to the court. I went to the cemetery. I took my share of the strong force, what little I could take . . . Perhaps a dozen times during that summer, before the catastrophe came (it was heading toward him slowly, gathering speed), I sat up late on his back porch when all the women had gone to bed. Bujak stargazed. He talked and drank his tea. ‘Travelling at the speed of light,’ he said one time, ‘You could cross the whole universe in less than a second. Time and distance would be annihilated, and all futures possible.’ No shit? I thought. Or again: ‘If you could linger on the brink of a singularity, time would be so slow that a night would pass in forty-five seconds, and there would be three American elections in the space of seven days.’ Three American elections, I said to myself. Whew, what a boring week. And why is he the dreamer, while I am bound to the low earth? Feeling mean, I often despised the dreaming Bujak, but I entertained late-night warmth for him too, for the accretions of experience (time having worked on his face like a sculptor, awful slow), and I feared him – I feared the energy coiled, seized and locked in Bujak. Staring up at our little disc of stars (and perhaps there are better residential galaxies than our own: cleaner, safer, more gentrified), I sensed only the false stillness of the black nightmap, its beauty concealing great and routine violence, the fleeing universe, with matter racing apart, exploding to the limits of space and time, all tugs and curves, all hubble and doppler, infinitely and eternally hostile . . . This evening, as I write, the New York sky is also full of stars – the same stars. There. There is Michiko coming down the street, hand in hand with our little girl. They made it. Home at last. Above them the gods shoot crap with their black dice: threes and fives and ones. The Plough has just rolled a four and a two. But who throws the six, the six, the six?