Herzog by Saul Bellow Page A

grand in about a year. Everything I inherited. Now we've got this rotten hole on Lake Park with the I. c. trains passing all night. The pipes stink. The house is all trash and garbage and Russian books and the kid's unwashed clothes. And there I am, returning Coke bottles and vacuuming, burning paper and picking up veal bones."
        "The bitch is testing you. You're an important professor, invited to conferences, with an international correspondence. She wants you to admit her importance. You're a jerimmter mensch."
        Moses, to save his soul, could not let this pass.
        He said quietly, "Berimmter."
        "Fe - be, who cares. Maybe it's not so much your reputation as your egotism. You could be a real mensch.
        You've got it in you. But you're effing it up with all this egotistical shit. It's a big deal-such a valuable person dying for love. Grief. It's a lot of bull!"
        Dealing with Valentine was like dealing with a king. He had a thick grip. He might have held a scepter.
        He was a king, an emotional king, and the depth of his heart was his kingdom. He appropriated all the emotions about him, as if by divine or spiritual right.
        He could do more with them, and therefore he simply took them over. He was a big man, too big for anything but the truth. (again, the truth!) Herzog had a weakness for grandeur, and even bogus grandeur (was it ever entirely bogus?).
        They went out to clear their heads in the fresh winter air. Gersbach in his great storm coat, belted, bareheaded, exhaling vapor, kicking through the snow with the all-battering leg. Moses held down the brim of his dead-green velours hat. His eyes couldn't bear the glitter.
        Valentine spoke as a man who had risen from terrible defeat, the survivor of sufferings few could comprehend. His father had died of sclerosis. He'd get it, too, and expected to die of it. He spoke of death majestically-there was no other word for it-his eyes amazingly spirited, large, rich, keen, or, thought Herzog, like the broth of his soul, hot and shining.
        "Why when I lost my leg," said Gersbach.
        "Seven years old, in Saratoga Springs, running after the balloon man; he blew his little fifel.
        When I took that short cut through the freight yards, crawling under cars. Lucky the brakeman found me as soon as the wheel took off my leg. Wrapped me in his coat and rushed me to the hospital. When I came to, my nose was bleeding. Alone in the room." Moses listened, white, the frost did not change his color. "I leaned over," Gersbach went on, as if relating a miracle. "A drop of blood fell on the floor, and as it splashed I saw a little mouse under the bed who seemed to be staring at the splash. It backed away, it moved its tail and whiskers. And the room was just full of bright sunlight...." (there are storms on the sun itself, but here all is peaceful and temperate, thought Moses.) "It was a little world, underneath the bed.
        Then I realized that my leg was gone."
        Valentine would have denied that the tears in his eyes were for himself. No, curse that, he'd have said.
        Not for him. They were for that little kid. There were stories about himself, too, that Moses had told a hundred times, so he couldn't complain of Gersbach's repetitiveness. Each man has his own batch of poems. But Gersbach almost always cried, and it was strange, because his long curling coppery lashes stuck together; he was tender but he looked rough, his face broad and rugged, heavy-bristled, and his chin positively brutal. And Moses recognized that under his own rules the man who had suffered more was more special, and he conceded willingly that Gersbach had suffered harder, that his agony under the wheels of the boxcar must have been far deeper than anything Moses had ever suffered. Gersbach's tormented face was stony white, pierced by the radiant bristles of his red beard. His lower lip had almost disappeared beneath the