The Golden Schlemiel

So there’s a cabbie in Cairo named Deif. So he found 5,000 bucks in the back seat. So meanwhile his daughter was very sick. So he needed the money for medicine bad. So never mind. So he looked for the fare and gave it back. So then the kid died. So they fired him for doing good deeds on company time. So the President heard it on the radio. So he gave him a locally built Fiat. So I read it in the papers. So you read it here. A poor man has less than weight, has negative gravity, his life a slow explosion. Barely he makes the days meet. Like doors they burst open. Money, job, daughter fly away from him. Irony, injustice, bits of horror come close, cohere. They are with us, the poor, like the inner life which is wantless too; our souls’ white globes float somehow in the blue, levitating and bobbing gently at middle height over the bubbling fleshpots. Our effort to remake the found world as the lost reverie is desire. So, little Yasmin was sick, sick to the point of dying. She was like a garden coughing and drying. And suddenly her salvation was there, a sheepskin, yes, a satchel of money meekly baaing from the rear. A miracle in the offing? That famous retired philanthropist named God was back in business? was starting to take a hand? directing things maybe from the back seat? Maybe. Restored to its rich owner (he tipped a fig and a fart, a raspberry of plump nil), lying safely on his lap, the money was mute again, was superfluity, and root and sum and symbol, both lettuce and lump, of all evil. She too approaching that state, Yasmin, a flower, meantime, dying. For the locally assembled daughter a locally assembled Fiat. Too wantless to imagine the money his? Spurned the miracle and thwarted the grace? So loved the law he gave it his only begotten daughter? Effed and offed his own kid? Saint and monster, poor man and fool, slowly exploding, Deif all this. Yes, one melts at his meekness, scoffs at the folly, trembles for his stupor of bliss of obedience, gasps at his pride, weeps for his wantlessness, grunts when irony that twists the mouth jabs the gut. Then horror—the dark miracle—roaring, leaps into the front seat, grabs the wheel and runs you down in the street —while you sit on a café terrace innocently reading the paper or, bent above a radio, feel the news waves break against your teeth. Deif in grief. Deif in mourning. Deif bereaved. Deif in the driver’s seat. Deif without a beef. And daily in four editions and every hour on the hour, the media heap your dish with images of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. (Our real griefs in their imaginary jargons.) And you cannot touch a single sufferer, comfort one victim, or stay any murderous hand. Consumer of woes, the news confirms you in guilt, your guilt becomes complicity, your complicity paralysis, paralysis your guilt; elsewhere always, your life becomes an alibi, your best innocence a shrug, your shrug an unacknowledged rage, your rage is for reality, nothing less. Yes, you feel, murder would be better than hanging around; if only your fist could penetrate the print, you too might enter the reality of news .... You switch the radio on, hungrily turn the page of sorrows and suffering, cruelty, maiming, death. Pasha, President, playboy swing masterfully above our heads—what style! what heroes!—fling themselves over the headlines into the empyrean beyond our lowly weather—ah, there all the news is blue and blank, those soarings, those mock descents are them writing their own tickets in heaven. Fortune, true, is spiteful and fickle, and glamour itself must stalk them—but cannot shoot so high as impotence dreams, as resentment wishes. Gorgeous, limber, and free, like our consciences, a law unto themselves, a darker law to us —in their suntans our shadow. And where they fly, the lines of force accompany, the patterns of deference continue to comfort, a maggotism distracting irony. Their rods flatten others, their staffs flatter them