SILENCE & SONG by Jerome Charyn

1.

I was always a little saddened by Saul, the Bible’s very first king, who did not have the gift of song. Saul lived in a silent universe. He was tone-deaf. Nothing he did could ever please the Lord. Young David had his lyre and his slingshot; David was the anointed one. He killed Goliath with a single stone, while Saul’s last act of grace was to fall upon his own sword. Saul was among the living dead, even while he served as king. The Lord would not look upon him and was deaf to his silent songs.

Stripped of his royal robes, Saul could have come from the South Bronx, which was also a region of silence. It was a blighted, barren landscape. There were no libraries or bookshops in my corner of the Bronx, only stationery stores with dime detective novels and Classic Comics – the tattered rags of culture we had left. I learned to read from comic books, where words loomed like quicksilver as they shifted from panel to panel and then disappeared. These were illustrated classics, of course. So we had Ivanhoe and that villainous Knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, who lusted after Jewish maidens; Michael Strogoff and the white wolves he wrestled with in the taiga; Natty Bumppo with his deer rifle that was as long as a lance. Even then, at eight, I knew that something was amiss in these tales. The art never varied, did not have its own signature or song. It was static, as if created out of a cookie cutter. The Deerslayer and all the other characters in the pantheon of Classic Comics had the identical carapace of ink and color. I had to rely on another cultural rag – the movie house – if I wanted a bit of romance.

Call it the Dover, the Zenith, the Luxor, the Earl, or the Ritz. They were all shoeboxes sandwiched into a vacant lot, cellars above ground, where a boy could spend a Saturday afternoon in the dark, attached by some invisible thread to ghosts on the wall who were much more vital than my own phantomatic self. I could have been born in any of these shoeboxes rather than at Bronx County Hospital . . .

I wrote to Alan Ladd, c/o Paramount, and received a snapshot in the mail with his personal signature. It was near the end of WW II, and the studio must have sat him down once or twice a week and had him scratch his name several thousand times, in lieu of military service. I’d seen him in The Glass Key and This Gun for Hire, both released in 1942, but such black-and-white classics didn’t arrive at the Dover until ‘44. He had sad eyes and seldom talked in This Gun for Hire. His sentences merely punctuated his long silences. He had a partner on the screen, Veronica Lake, who wore a lock of blond hair over one eye. She was either silent, or sang out a sentence or two. I followed their film careers. Ladd went on to play a gunslinger who’s forced out of retirement in Shane (1953). It was his pivotal role – sad-eyed as ever, his only bark was with his gun. Meanwhile, Veronica Lake fell into oblivion after a bout with the bottle. Living under an assumed name, she ended up as a waitress at the Martha Washington, a women’s boardinghouse-hotel in Manhattan, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 50. Ladd also died at 50, after gulping a lethal cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates. But these ghosts on the wall – and others like them – really mattered to a wild child like me. All my language and lust would come from the movies.

Public school was a waste of time. I was hopeless at spelling bees. I couldn’t master long division. The sachems at the Board of Education decided that the underprivileged dwarfs of the South Bronx should play a musical instrument. And they settled on one called the ocarina, a poor boy and girl’s hybrid harmonica and flute, made of pure plastic. I never learned to play a note. My piping on the ocarina was flat and dry, without a gob of spit. Whatever education I had, musical or not, was picked up on the sly at the Zenith or the Earl. That’s where I taught myself to rhumba, while I watched Rita Hayworth tantalize a whole cadre of men in Gilda (1946).

I had little need of a notebook or lead pencil in the dark. I imitated whatever I saw on the screen with some primitive pantomime inside my skull. I discovered that people actually talked at dinnertime, as I watched Irene Dunne hold several conversations while she gathered peas with a knife and fork. At home, we grabbed with our hands and gobbled our food in silence. I can’t say if it was part of some Talmudic law handed down to my parents, both of whom were born inside the Pale of Settlement decreed by the czar and his clever band of plunderers and scribes. Was silence during meals considered some sacred ritual, both a blessing and a curse? I’m not sure. We never spoke – not about politics, or Bronx culture, or my daily misdeeds. My father did grunt and groan. My very existence seemed to bother him. He could not bear to look at me. Was it out of some primordial jealousy? He was abandoned as a boy, left within the Pale, because he had conjunctivitis – pinkeye – and couldn’t travel to the New World with his mother, brother, and sister in the bowels of an ocean liner sailing out of Bremen. He was presented with a violin to console him. And that is the most treasured photo I have of my father – with his fiddle. He must have scratched plenty of sad tunes on its strings. His pinkeye cleared up after seventeen months and he sailed out of Bremen before his sixteenth birthday. All families must have been toxic to him after that – soon as I got up from the table he would call me in his Polish jargon a “house-wolf” who fattened himself on my own father’s flesh. It was the insane idea of someone who’d been left to fiddle all alone.

Perhaps I was a house-wolf, but I still wasn’t clever enough to realize that he suffered from a lifelong depression. Besides, he was desperately in love with my mother, Faigele, a dark-eyed Aphrodite who had an uncanny resemblance to Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, and Gene Tierney, depending on the sunlight and the time of day. I’m pretty certain she didn’t love him back. I had become her confidant long before I started kindergarten. And the Zenith soon made me precocious about the arcane rituals of love.

Faigele would mimic her own disgust at the very thought of my father touching her. Why, oh why, did my mother ever marry him? It wasn’t a simple tale. Faigele’s own mother had died when she was two. Her father had already gone to America to seek his fortune. And when my mother arrived fifteen years later, she had to deal with a stepmother and her father’s second family. “Faigele,” which means “little bird” in Yiddish, didn’t have much of a nest in the New World. She went to night school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she met Samuel Charyn, a young machine operator in a fur factory who could cut mink collars with all the art of Michelangelo, despite the forlorn, half-crazed look in his eye. He followed Faigele home from night school. “A furrier is like a doctor,” Faigele’s stepmother whispered like a poison pellet in her ear – it served as a brutal shove out the door. My mother and father were married and moved to the South Bronx, where my older brother, Harvey, was born in 1934. He was “a colic baby,” who cried all the time, my mother told me. Perhaps my father read his old abandonment and bitter fate in my brother’s cries. Harve was no rival. And then I was born three years later. I never cried once from the moment I left the womb, according to my mother’s testimony. I must have seemed like a sinister cherub to Sam, put there as a permanent travail to test my mother’s devotion to him. I do not remember being pampered. I slept in a crib. I fed myself like an infant prodigy, while my mother had to stuff food into Harvey’s mouth until he was eight. What I do remember are my father’s rumblings, and that look of rage.

My brother had rickets and had to sit in the sun, but rickets couldn’t hobble him. He loped about his domain. He was fearless from the age of five. He could be cruel, like any battler and young king of the block, but he seldom allied himself with my father against me. I was Harve’s kid brother, and that bestowed a certain bounty on me that was almost like an invisible letter of transit. I could trot into any neighborhood and was never hassled. “Hey,” some local chieftain would announce to his vassals, “that’s Charyn’s kid brother. Leave him alone.”

Harve never backed away from a fight. He would become a bodybuilder and enter the Mr. New York City contest at the age of fifteen. It was in the golden age of bodybuilding – the 1950s – when every sand dune had its own contingent of barbells and mats for somersaults and handstands. The mecca of all bodybuilders was the south side of Santa Monica Pier, with its mythic Muscle Beach, the home and training ground of past, present, and future Mr. Americas. As a kid I didn’t quite understand the erotic charge of men gazing at other men, or the mystery of male photographers who ran after Harve. I dreamt of becoming Mr. America, like John Grimek, George Eiferman, and Clarence Ross (mostly unremembered now); Grimek had one glass eye and a godlike physique. I didn’t have his classic lines or his lineaments. My biceps were more like sweet peas than ostrich eggs.

Harve placed third, I think, at the Mr. New York City pageant, and won the consolation prize of Most Muscular Man. He abandoned bodybuilding after that, and so did I, but I couldn’t have preserved my sanity without his presence. My father had remained a stunted child, lost in imaginary ailments, suffering from an ulcer that never revealed itself in any barium X‑ray. I remember sitting with him on the Seventh Avenue Local when I was nine, because he worried that he might faint on the ride to a prominent stomach specialist and didn’t want to die all alone in a subway car. It was the first time I’d entered the maze of Manhattan. We had to board the 42nd Street Shuttle, a curious train that seemed to arrive out of nowhere and stop on a platform that had retracting metal claws. This Shuttle brought us into the bowels of Grand Central Station. My father and I had to walk half a mile to leave that underground labyrinth.

The specialist, who had an office near the Chrysler Building, and looked like a savant with bushy eyebrows and dandruff on his white gown, could not find the least trace of an ulcer. To celebrate, my father purchased a car – a green Plymouth – right after the war and never learned to drive. He was in mortal terror as he sat behind the wheel, with me, his little hostage, in the back seat, watching him shiver as he approached the George Washington Bridge. A friend from the fur market served as his instructor.

“Sam, Sam, it’s not a gondola. You have to stick to one lane.”

Fear – and rage – defined him. He would lock me in the closet for no reason, slap me, or spit in my face if I refused to listen to one of his irrational demands. And even though I dreamt, Hamlet-like, of his destruction, with the fantasy of a house-wolf growing large enough, and fat enough, to swallow him alive, the murder within my bones was mingled with pity. I must have internalized his pain and his silent song.

I went to Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art, where I wore muscle tee-shirts, and quickly grasped that my chiseled pectorals and tough-guy looks would get me nowhere with the luscious middle-class maidens of Central Park West. I got rid of my chartreuse saddle-stitch trousers, a Bronx staple, and wore white bucks and khakis, like all the Manhattan swains. I was an art student who painted in bold colors – the Gauguin of Boston Road – but didn’t have the rudest gifts of a draftsman. I couldn’t draw a cow or a human thumb with my piece of charcoal. The images wouldn’t flow out of my head. I wanted to paint with words. Yet I had little language other than what I had appropriated from the Classic Comics. Other students at M & A read J. D. Salinger with a religious zeal and could talk of Tolstoy and Herman Hesse. They were also moviegoers. But I was lost around them, since Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini never got to the Ritz.

I went to a fancy barber. Wore a crew cut and looked like an Apache on the run. I didn’t have my classmates’ glibness, their gift of gab. They had talked at the dinner table all their lives, while I hungered for words. The movies had made me into an excellent mime. I memorized the musical rhythms and speech patterns of Riverside Drive and Central Park West. I felt like a spy among modern Knights Templar, a burglar breaking into an exclusive clan. I tried to write. But all I had was cunning and a reclusive silence. I didn’t even have a reading list except for what I could burgle from class discussions.

I took a creative writing class with the chairman of the English Department, a Scotsman named Dr. McCloud. He asked us all to hand something in – a page, a paragraph, a line of poetry or prose – every class. I scribbled the diary of a house-wolf, with all its limits and lamentations. I couldn’t summon up a lexicon I didn’t have. All I could offer were my Bronx horizons. While Ramona S – , the class poet and future valedictorian, discussed the prominent artists and writers who had visited her mother’s Central Park West salon, I described the feral cats in the backyard of my Bronx tenement. I had spent hours observing these cats and their routines, how they had their own royal retinue, a king and queen with battle scars. But I couldn’t compete with the artists and writers in Ramona’s galaxy. I wasn’t a conjurer or a poet. I had no silky words hidden in my sleeve. The other students didn’t have my monk-like devotion to the page. A senior class in creative writing couldn’t affect the barometric rise and fall of their college boards. They had Yale and Vassar to think about. But Ramona basked in the glory of her ochre-colored report card. Dr. McCloud had given her the grade of 99 – a pinch short of perfection. I was startled when I snuck a glance at my own card. Some clerk must have made a grievous error. My final grade in McCloud’s class was a flat 100. I ran to his office like a little thief.

“Sir, Ramona has much more finesse. I had to scratch and scratch for every word.”

He smiled behind his Scottish mustache. “Yes, and she hardly scratched at all.”

2.

I whistled my way into Columbia College without racking up supersonic scores on my college boards. Perhaps I was admitted from within the Pale of the South Bronx through some extraordinary quota – a provision for the poorest Jews on the planet. My father hadn’t worked in years. There was turmoil in the fur market. It was during the McCarthy witch hunts. Communists had been discovered within the ranks of my father’s union, and the Justice Department had to weed them out. This was a slow process. Besides, my father’s imaginary illnesses had multiplied. He barely left the house for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, I was discovering a wonderland of books – it was like plunging deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole.

I remember teachers and students whispering about an arcane writer in a bowler hat, with big ears, Franz Kafka, who worked at an insurance company in Prague and scribbled novels and tales at night about a hunger artist, or a beetle with a beetle’s legs and a human brain, or his own mysterious double, Josef K., who went from one bureaucratic nightmare to the next, looking for the least sign of sanity. Reading Kafka was charged with erotic bewilderment, like some primal scream of love.

I began to build my own castle of Modern Library classics, with one bookcase piled upon another. I fingered every book with a rabbinical devotion, scanned every word, groped about with a blind king called Oedipus, shared Philoctetes’ festering wound and his magic bow, became an ax murderer like Raskolnikov, struggled against the Lilliputians with Gulliver, until I had my own plastic presence, could shift from shape to shape, gender to gender. Anna Karenina one moment, Gregor Samsa the next. There was a holiness to the written word, and a danger. It was filled with a fire that could sear your guts and scar your soul. There was no other route than surrendering to this danger zone. I imagined a lifelong apprenticeship, as I learned and relearned my craft. I would become a poor man’s Spinoza, a polisher of words. I sought ways and means to support my apprenticeship.

I decided to become an intelligence officer in the Air Force. I imagined that I would sit at some secret airbase for twenty years and study the path of Russian stealth bombers, while I wrote at night. I had Kafka’s big ears. What else did I need? I could collect my pension and continue my apprenticeship, retire to some secluded village in the south of France and live off my monthly allotment of dollars.

I was sent to an airbase on Long Island. I had to spend the night, and I was given a room in the officers’ dorm. I remember the narrow bed and the tiny bureau – it was like a monk’s cell. I met with a little jury of captains and colonels. It felt like an inquisition. I wanted to catch Russian spies and spy planes. I assumed these savants would evaluate my rudimentary knowledge of tradecraft, like a bunch of chess wizards. I would match my skills with theirs. Pawn to King 4 . . .

These savants weren’t interested in tradecraft, or any craft at all. They concerned themselves with my ardor for the military. I was asked to name the current Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I didn’t have a clue.

I had to seek another source of income.

I entered a Teacher Ed program at Hunter College and became a substitute in the city’s high schools. Success or failure depended upon a particular knack. I registered with one school, my alma mater, Music and Art. Hence, I was always available, and the school clerk would call me first when another English teacher was ill. It was a much better plan than looking for stealth bombers. I taught once or twice a week and earned enough to survive. My home was a closet in Washington Heights, with a hotplate, a fridge, a toilet, and a desk that faced a brick wall. I didn’t feel deprived in the least, but how would I learn my tradecraft? I read Nabokov and James Joyce, and shuddered at the musicality of their lines. Lolita was like one endless song, and all I had were memories of my ocarina. I did not possess a magic flute. I would never have the absolute pitch of that half-blind Irish wayfarer, or Nabokov’s ability to bend and twist my own native tongue. Nor was I an adventurer, like Isaac Babel, who rode with the Red Cavalry, and scribbled tales about Jewish gangsters in Odessa. Benya Krik’s orange pantaloons were as sensuous as musical notes. Nothing can stab the human heart like a period put in the right place, Babel wrote in a story about his own escapades as a young Jewish writer living in Petersburg without a residence permit. And all I had was the Bronx . . .

3.

I filled that desolate void with my imagination. There were plenty of gangsters in the South Bronx, though none with Benya’s orange pants or his eloquence. Silence reigned here, the silence of Saul. My brother Harvey had become a homicide detective in the wilds of Brooklyn. I remember his personal Calvary in order to be a cop. He was a quarter of an inch too short, and he had to stretch for hours at a time against a board to reach the requisite height of five-foot-eight. He’d also had a few run-ins with the law – a near arrest, speeding tickets, stuff like that. He was given an investigator, who carried a file with esoteric scribbles on its dun-colored jacket that could have come straight out of Kafka. I met this investigator, who had gray hair and wore gray – gray socks, gray tie, and a gray complexion. He poked around, tried to get me to squeal on my own brother.

“Come on, kid. Was Harve involved in any local robberies?”

“He didn’t have the time,” I said. “He was building up his biceps and studying to be an exemplary cop.”

This gray man curled his eyebrows with curiosity. “And what did he study?”

“How to protect old people and blind people in the South Bronx,” I said, with all the panache of my favorite delinquent, Huckleberry Finn. Harve got through the investigation and was shipped off to the Police Academy, where he graduated with a trophy as the best marksman in his class. He was a motorcycle cop for a while, and was now with Brooklyn homicide. He had the same sadness in his eyes he’d had as a child. He didn’t have my rabbinical lust for words. As a Jewish cop in a land of Irishers, he was the first to break through the door during an arrest. He carried a shotgun in a shopping bag. Meanwhile, I searched and searched for my own song, a melody that would have my imprint, and mine alone. I didn’t believe in metaphysics – meaning, for me, existed in the invisible web between silence and song. Benya Krik had his orange pants, but his long silences as Odessa’s king of crime were often far more persuasive than the shots he fired in the air to frighten fellow gangsters. There was also violence in his movements and in his verbs. Language, I had always believed, was a violent activity. The first scratch on a page was a kind of violation, breaking through a void of white. And then the music begins, that internal, twisting rhyme of word upon word.

What is Huck Finn’s tale other than a song of isolation and sadness, of growing up in a world of untruths? Huck’s truths are the lies he tells, to protect a runaway slave and keep up his own moral courage against a host of swindlers, connivers, and thieves. He has to steal language, like bolts of thunder, in order to survive.

But thunder bolts are hard to find. I wrote a story about an idiot girl, called her Faigele, as a coded message to my mother. This idiotke had one ambition – she wanted to fly. I imposed myself upon her tale, became her narrator, a young scrivener who leaves home and serves his apprenticeship on the Lower East Side, where Faigele haunts the rooftops and tumbles to her death when her flapping arms fail her as necessary wings. But in my own psyche, her need to fly was akin to the writer’s art – the desire to overreach, to move beyond the limits of language itself.

The story was published, and I became a local celebrity for a month or so. Faigele the Idiotke was noticed by the principal of Music and Art. I’d been teaching there, steadily, religiously, for two years, like a samurai warrior on long stints. If a tenured English teacher suffered a heart attack, I was called in and might teach in his stead for months at a time. It was ideal, almost. I could sit in the faculty lunchroom with former teachers of mine. Few other graduates had ever come back to teach. I could create my own syllabus, talk about the politics of art – how language could wound or heal, often in the same wind of words.

I loved the students, and I suspect they loved me. I was a dynamiter, unlike the career teachers they had. I was there to shake them up, rouse them, to shift their sensibilities and points of view. But I had a bit of a problem. I couldn’t work on a novel while I was part of the full-time faculty. I had to grade 150 compositions every other week, rewrite entire paragraphs, like some magical scribe. I was relieved when the teacher whose slot I was filling recovered from his heart attack. I could then return to my old stint as a samurai and get back to writing. But the damage had already been done.

The principal called me into his office. He was the only member of the administration who had his own private toilet, like a little king on a porcelain throne. He had a copy of Faigele on his desk.

“Where does it all come from?” he asked. “How did you manage to make up a girl with imaginary wings?”

The wings were real, I wanted to say. They just happened to fail her. But I didn’t want to be a smart aleck. “I guess I have a hyperbolic imagination,” I said.

His eyes shone with the clarity of a prince.

“That’s my whole point,” he said, slapping his desk with a tiny fist that looked like a bird’s skull. “It’s exactly what we need at this school. I’m willing to make an exception and open up a line.”

He was a bit surly at my silence. This principal with his own toilet had to repeat himself. “Didn’t you hear me? Open up a line.”

I was still confused.

“You’re a sub,” he said. “You have no claims on us. You haven’t been offered a permanent contract. And I’m opening up a line to put you on a tenure track. Shall I tell you how many teachers have applied for a position at M & A?”

He dug into his top drawer and pulled out a file as fat as a dictionary, stuffed with letters that had begun to ripen with age. “I don’t even bother to read them anymore. I could run a Lonely Hearts club with what they write. There are no jobs, and I’m offering you one.”

“Why?” I asked, with my own quirky defiance. It was his porcelain throne that bothered me, his sense of privilege. No, it wasn’t that. I was frightened to death of his offer. I would have devoted myself to these kids, proved to them that Hamlet was a psychopath, a killer who believed in ghosts, and that Richard III was a hunchback who climbed his way to a kingdom on nothing else than a rickety ladder of words. And “Mr. C,” as I was known at this castle on a hill, after thirty years of tenure at Music and Art behind him, would have remained bone dry, a writer who couldn’t write.

“Why? It’s impertinent to ask such a question. We want you, and I’m willing to rip up all the other letters and create a line.”

His face turned dark and bitter when I refused him.

“Think,” he said, like a man issuing a summons.

I still said no.

“Think again.”

He left me there and went into his private throne room. He could have scratched me off the substitute list. But I was still the samurai, first to be called. He was even gallant whenever we met in the halls, with a slightly mocking tone.

“Our Mr. C,” he said.

I returned to my closet in Washington Heights. It had once been an examining room attached to a doctor’s office on the ground floor at 333 Fort Washington Avenue, across from a playground and a little park that led to the George Washington Bridge. I was burgled after I’d been at this address for a year. The burglar broke in by climbing over a gate with metal spears in the back yard. He must have been desperate. I had nothing but rags and a notebook. He took all the clothes out of my armoire, except for one corduroy jacket, as if he were leaving me my last bit of panoply as a samurai.

The doctor, who was about eighty years old and also my landlord, had iron bars installed outside my window to protect me from other intruders. And that’s how I lived, on cans of tuna fish. I didn’t have one painting on the wall, not even a mirror. But I felt privileged, without a single encumbrance.

Friends of mine from college got married, finished graduate school, became scholars or students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They studied with Philip Roth, or another mentor, who whisked them off to Manhattan publishing houses like paper airplanes, while I had to settle in with a novice dentist at the Columbia Dental College, a first-year student in the teeth of his own apprenticeship. I was sort of a charity case with a blue card that said I didn’t earn enough to pay for the care of my gums. The dental college was on the eighth floor of Vanderbilt Clinic, a few blocks from where I lived. I occupied a dental chair among an endless maze of chairs. The novices wore blue gowns and were supervised by their own savants. My novice was from Newark. His name was Phil. And he was on a mission that wasn’t so removed from mine. He wanted to master the art of dentistry and remain at the college until he was a dental wizard. His father was also a dentist and paid a fortune to keep Phil at the clinic, but Phil had no desire to join his father’s practice, or any practice at all.

“Most dentists are crooks,” he claimed.

“What about your dad?” I mumbled, with one of Phil’s instruments in my mouth, ripping away at all the plaque.

“The biggest crook of all – pulls teeth that don’t have to be pulled, charges a king’s ransom for mundane root canal work.”

“Phil, he’s your father.”

“He’s still a crook.”

Phil’s grand scheme was to remain at the clinic and hold onto this chair for as long as he could. It was curious, because his teeth were quite yellow. But I had faith in Phil, despite his megalomania – he wanted to be the most prodigious dental student on the planet, with his point of service limited to one chair. It was no more insane than my own desires. I struggled at my craft. I wondered if words themselves induced madness, if the tundra and the turbulence inside Hamlet’s head shaped him into a destroyer of civilizations and social order. Left to his own devises, he would have killed, killed, killed, found other ghosts in a closet, stabbed through other curtains. He was no less bloody than the king’s hired assassins, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And all his delusions were wrapped in a cloak of language.

I wasn’t Hamlet. I wasn’t even Huck Finn. I was a manchild in a rented room. And I was prepared to stay there for the rest of my life, lost in the belief that I could crack my own language code, create melodies from strings of sentences. Language itself was like a lance – or a hatchet, murderous with all its music.

I might have ended up at Bellevue. But Faigele the Idiotke had brought me seductive missals from half a dozen publishers. And I slipped into the role of a published novelist rather than a true pioneer. I had to give up my apprenticeship, my closet in Washington Heights, and my renegade dental student, and I rode across the continent to Palo Alto and Stanford University as a visiting professor. It was only the beginning of my wanderlust. I spent half a year in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, eating black paella – made from the juicy ink of squid – and listening to the sound of medieval stones. The Gothic Quarter had its own mournful music . . .

I lived in Houston for a while, rode the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, survived a tempest that ripped out every other roof on my quiet street near Rice University, where I was still a samurai, teaching for a semester. I moved to Paris, sat next to Sartre at the Coupole, a landmark brasserie in Montparnasse; half-blind, he scribbled words as large as a child’s building blocks with his golden pen. He was the maître, our Voltaire; the Coupole’s staff spun around him while he worked in noble silence.

I visited Bonn and the house where Beethoven was born, his bed no larger than a crib. He must have slept all curled up, in a fetal position half his life. And that’s how I saw myself, an enormous baby bursting through the roof of that dollhouse in Bonn. It did not matter where I went, or what I did. My psyche and the thump, thump inside my skull were still in that rented room on Fort Washington Avenue.

It’s rather curious that I received an award from the Shomrim Society of Jewish Policemen as Person of the Year, when all I ever wrote about were corrupt and crazy cops in my crime novels. But perhaps the Shomrim Society was far shrewder than I. I did, after all, sing the plangent song of most policemen, Jewish or not – none of them had the poetry to match the rough poetry of the streets. They were gunslingers, like Alan Ladd in Shane, but without the romantic chill of the Wild West. And so I’m left with the silence of my brother – he died of a damaged heart in 2015. And I roam the landscape without him, unable to mourn. I couldn’t even commemorate him at his funeral; everyone, even family and friends, felt like a stranger. The love we shared was much too private. That’s why I’m so drawn to Saul, the king who did not have a musical ear, who could not recite the simplest tune. A warrior abandoned by God, he did have a gift as great as David’s lyre. Silence was his song.

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Jerome Charyn is the author of nearly 50 published books covering a 50‑year span in multiple genres. The three most recent are A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century (Bellevue Literary Press, 2016), Jerzy: A Novel (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017), and Winter Warning: An Isaac Sidel Novel (Pegasus Books, 2017).