‘The only relative I’ve got in this world is art ĄX ‘ he said, ‘and I’m the poorest relative art ever had.’ He didn’t mean he was impoverished. He meant he was a bad painter. He had plenty of money, he told me. He’d sold his business in Indianapolis, he said, for a very good price.
‘Chess ĄX ‘ he said, ‘you said something about Chess?’
I had the chessmen I’d whittled, in a shoebox. I showed them to him. ‘I just made these,’ I said, ‘and now I’ve got a terrific yen to play with them.’
‘Pride yourself on your game, do you?’ he said.
I haven’t played for a good while,’ I said.
Almost all the chess I’d played had been with Werner Noth, my father-in-law, the Chief of Police of Berlin. I used to beat Noth pretty consistently ĄX on Sunday afternoons when my Helga and I went calling on him. The only tournament I ever played in was an intramural thing in the German Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I finished eleventh in a field of sixty-five.
In ping-pong I did a good deal better. I was ping-pong champion of the Ministry for four years running, singles and doubles. My doubles partner was Heinz Schildknecht, an expert at propagandizing Australians and New Zealanders. One time Heinz and I took on a doubles team composed of Reichsleiter Goebbels and Oberdienstleiter Karl Hederich. We sat them down 21-2, 21-1, 21-0.
History often goes hand-in-hand with sports.
Kraft had a chessboard. We set up my men on it, and we began to play.
And the thick, bristly, olive-drab cocoon I had built for myself was frayed a little, was weakened enough to let some pale light in.
I enjoyed the game, was able to come up with enough intuitively interesting moves to give my new friend entertainment while he beat me.
After that, Kraft and I played at least three games a day, every day for a year. And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned.
One particularly touching thing between us was the matter of wines. Kraft knew a lot more than I did about wines, and he often brought home cobwebby treasures to go with a meal. But, even though Kraft always had a filled glass before him when we sat down to eat, the wine was all for me. Kraft was an alcoholic. He could not take so much as a sip of wine without starting on a bender that could last a month.
That much of what he told me about himself was true. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, had been for sixteen years. While he used AA. meetings as spy drops, his appetite for what the meetings offered spiritually was real. He once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.
It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he would use an institution he so admired for purposes of espionage.
It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he should also be a true friend of mine, and that he should eventually think of a way to use me cruelly in advancing the Russian cause.
12: Strange Things in My Mailbox …
For a little while I lied to Kraft about who I was and what I’d done. But the friendship deepened so much, so fast, that I soon told him everything.
‘It’s so unjust!’ he said. ‘It makes me ashamed to be an American! Why can’t the Government step forward and say, “Here! This man you’ve been spitting on is a hero!”’ He was indignant, and, for all I know, he was sincere in his indignation.
‘Nobody spits on me,’ I said. ‘Nobody even knows I’m alive any more.’
He was eager to see my plays. When I told him I didn’t have copies of any of them, he made me tell him about them, scene by scene ĄX had me performing them for him.
He said he thought they were marvelous. Maybe he was sincere. I don’t know. My plays seemed rapid to me, but it’s possible he liked them.
What excited him, I think, was the idea of art, and not what I’d done with it
‘The arts, the arts, the arts ĄX ‘ he said to me one night ‘I don’t know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep.’
It was late autumn. Oysters had come back in season, and we were feasting on a dozen apiece. I’d known Kraft about a year then.
‘Howard ĄX ‘ he said to me, ‘future civilizations ĄX better civilizations than this one, are going to judge all men by the extent to which they’ve been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.’
‘Umm’ I said.
‘You’ve got to write again,’ he said. ‘Just as daisies bloom as daisies and roses bloom as roses ĄX you must bloom as a writer and I must bloom as a painter. Everything else about us is uninteresting.’
‘Dead men don’t usually write very well,’ I said.
‘You’re not dead!’ he said. ‘You’re full of ideas. You can talk for hours on end.’
‘Blather,’ I said.
‘Not blather!’ he said hotly. ‘All you need in this world to get writing again, writing better than ever before, is a woman.’
‘A what?’ I said.
‘A woman,’ he said.
‘Where did you get this peculiar idea ĄX ‘ I said, ‘from eating oysters? If you’ll get one, I’ll get one,’ I said. ‘How’s that?’
‘I’m too old for one to do me any good,’ he said, ‘but you’re not.’ Again, trying to separate the real from the fake, I have to declare this conviction of the real. He was really earnest about wanting me to write again, was convinced that a woman could do the trick. ‘I would almost go through the humiliation of trying to be a man to a woman,’ he said, ‘if you would take a woman, too.’
‘I’ve got one,’ I said.
‘You had one once,’ he said. ‘There’s a world of difference.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.
‘I’m going to talk about it all the same,’ he said.
‘Then talk away,’ I said, getting up from the table. ‘Be a matchmaker to your heart’s content. I’m going down to see what goodies came in the mail today.’
He’d annoyed me, and I went down the stairs to my mailbox, simply to walk oft my annoyance. I wasn’t eager to see the mail I often went a week or more without seeing if I had any. The only things that were ever in my mailbox were dividend checks, notices of stockholders’ meetings, trash mail addressed to ‘Boxholder,’ and advertising flyers for books and apparatus said to be useful in the field of education.
How did I happen to receive advertisements for educational materials? One time I applied for a job as a teacher of German in a private school in New York. That was in 1950 or so.
I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either. I applied, I think, simply to demonstrate to myself that there really was such a person as me.
The application form I filled out was necessarily full of lies, was such a fabric of mendacity that the school did not even bother to tell me that I was unacceptable. Be that as it may, my name somehow found its way onto a list of those supposedly in teaching. Thereafter, flyers without end flew in.
I opened my mailbox on an accumulation of three or four days.
There was a check from Coca-Cola, a notice of a General Motors stockholders’ meeting, a request from Standard Oil of New Jersey that I approve a new stock-option plan for my executives, and an ad for an eight-pound weight disguised to look like a schoolbook.
Object of the weight was to give schoolchildren something to exercise with, in between classes. The ad pointed out that the physical fitness of American children was below that of the children of almost every land on earth.
But the ad for that queer weight wasn’t the queerest thing in my mailbox. There were some things a lot queerer than that
One was from the Francis X. Donovan Post of the American Legion in Brookline, Massachusetts, a letter in a legal-size envelope.