Light

Achmed Abdullah (given in various places also as Achmed Abd Allah
Nadir Khan, Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan al-Idrissiyeh al-Wassallah,
Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan al-Durani al-Idrissiyeh, and Alexander
Romanowski, though the last lacks something) was 1881-1945. This is
from his 1920 collection WINGS: TALES OF THE PSYCHIC. There is a
current Wildside Press book with at least one of the stories in that
book in it; don't know if this one is.

LIGHT
[by Achmed Abdullah]

BENEATH the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square
was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.

No night loungers there waiting for a bluecoat s hickory to
tickle their thin-patched soles; no wizen news vendor spreading the
remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the
difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those to be
returned; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the
high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been
able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking
the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the
foggy green isle.

For Tcmpkins Square is both the soul and the stomach possibly
interchangeable terms of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy
worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine,
those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the
American women, the native-born, the best dressed in all the world.
Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the
Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on
their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance
to earn enough to keep body and soul together and let the ward boss
and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or
less honest counting of votes.

Work, eat, sleep and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the
neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.

Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and
dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty
benches, and a shy gleam of the half-veiled moon where it struck the
fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper
receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass half hidden in a murky
puddle.

On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the
lighted window like a winking eye directly beneath the roof, high up.
The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots,
distributed irregularly over its warty facade, where the contractor
had got rid of some art balconies and carved near-stone struts left
over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick
dwellings remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken
thereabouts with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among
a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people, sick, yet conscious of
his height and the dignity that goes with it.

He saw the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south
side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.

Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his
neck muscles bunched painfully.

For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to
him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and
ridiculed and, by the same token, longed for and loved.

It meant to him, life and the reasons of life.

It meant to him humanity and the faith of humanity: which is
happiness. The right to happiness! The eternal, sacerdotal duty of
happiness!

Happiness?

He laughed. Why damn it! happiness was a lie. Happiness was
hypocrisy. It meant the dieting of man s smoldering, natural passions
into an artificial, pinchbeck, thin-blooded puritanism. It spelled the
mumming of the thinking mind, the mind that was trying to think into
the speciosities of childish fairy-tales. It was a sniveling reminder
of pap-fed infancy.

The only thing worth while in life was success which is
selfishness. Selfishness sprawling stark-contoured and unashamed,
sublimely unselfconscious, serenely brutal a five-plied Nietzscheism
on a modern business basis which acknowledges neither codified laws
nor principles.

It had been the measure and route of his life, and he whipped out
the thought like something shameful and nasty, like a nauseating drug
which his mind refused to swallow it had cheated him.

Yes, by God! It had cheated him, cheated him!

For, first, it had given him gold and power and the envy of men,
which was sweet.

Then, as a jest of Fate s own black brewing, it had taken
everything away from him overnight, in one huge financial crash, and
had made of him what he was tonight: gray, middle-aged, bitter,
joyless and a pauper. It had brought him here, to Tompkins Square, and
had chucked him, like a worn-out, useless rag, into this dusty, sticky
bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.

He wondered what was behind it, and who?

Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars his
last ten dollars in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-
house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the
warty, baroque facade.

Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working
people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o'clock
with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a
well-disciplined boarding-school.

He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and
landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the
very poor who can t be snobs since they are familiar with each other s
incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of
their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look and all he had seen
had been misery.

He checked the thought.

No! That wasn't true!

He had also seen love and friendship, and fine, sweet faith and
that was why he hated them why he pitied and despised them.

Faith, love, friendship! To the devil with the sniveling, weak-
kneed lot of 'em! They spelled happiness and happiness did not exist
and

Happiness!

The thought, the word, recurred to his brain with maddening
persistency. It would not budge.

Happiness.

"Why, happiness is behind that lighted window!" The idea came to
him almost the conviction.

But what happiness? And whose?

He speculated who might be up there, in the garret room squeezed
by the flat roof. He tried to picture to himself what might be
shimmering be hind that golden flash.

Perhaps it was Fedor Davidoff, the little hunch-backed Russian
tailor, with the fat, golden-haired, sloe-eyed wife. He might be
celebrating the coming of freedom to his beloved Russia. Or he might
be sitting up late to finish some piece of work to earn extra money.
For his wife was expecting a child. He had three already, curly-
haired, straight-backed. But he wanted more-"children make happiness,
eh?" he used to say.

Or wait! Perhaps it was Peter Macdonald, the artist, dreaming over
his lamp and his rank, blackened pipe, and deliberating with himself
where he would live, upper West Side or lower Fifth, when the world
should have acknowledged his genius and backed up the opinion with
solid cash. Peter had lived now for over three months in the tenement-
house. "Like the neighborhood, bully atmosphere, marvelous greens and
browns," was the reason he gave. But the other tenants smiled. They
knew that Peter lived there because his room cost him only two dollars
a week, and because he took his meals with the Leibl Finkelsteins on
the first floor for three dollars more.

Perhaps a pair of lovers. Enrique Tassetti, the squat, laughing
Sicilian, who had taken to himself a bride of his own people. They
would have spent fifty cents for a bottle of Chianti, another fifty
for bread and mushrooms and oil and pepper to turn into a dish worthy
of a Sicilian or a king.

Again it might be Donchian, the Armenian, burning the midnight
oil over the perfection of the mysterious invention of which he spoke
at times, after having worked with needle and thread since six o clock
in the morning; or old Mrs. Sarah Kempinsky, reading and rereading the
letter which her soldier son had sent her from France; or

What did it matter?

Whoever was sitting behind that lighted window was happy-happy,
and the man's imagination choked, his mind became flushed and
congested.

He was quite unconscious of his surroundings. The stillness of
the streets seemed magical, the lone liness absolute. Only from very
far came sounds: the Elevated rattling with a steely, throaty sob; a
surface-car clanking and wheezing; a hoarse Klaxon blaring snobbishly;
a stammering, alcoholic voice throwing the tail-end of a gutter song
to the moist purple veils of the night.

But he did not hear.

He was conscious only of the lighted window, high up. It seemed
to glitter nervously, to call to him, to stretch out, as if trying to
communicate to him an emotion it had borrowed by contact with
something with somebody.

That was just the trouble. He wondered who that Somebody was,
what that Something might be. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent,
clamorous. Silently clamorous. His subconsciousness grew thick with
amazement and wonder and doubt. It surged up crowded, choking,
tumultuous.

The lighted window!

What was behind it? What was its riddle?

He knew that he must find out, and so he rose, crossed the
street, entered the house, and was up the stairs three steps at the
time.

He found the room without any trouble and opened the door. He did
not knock.

He stepped inside; and there, on the bed, he saw a motionless
figure, faintly outlined beneath a plain white sheet, a tall candle
burning yellow at the foot of the bed, another at the head.

He crossed over, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked. And he
saw the face of a dead man. It was calm and serene and unutterably
happy.

Then it dawned upon him:

The man on the bed was himself.

THE END



(The reason for my absence the last few months has been much more
computer problems than health problems, though for a month or so I was
forbidden to climb the two stories to the computer. I have gone from
having both computers in the house break down to having the dial-up
not work to hitch-hiking on somebody else's wireless connection to
getting my own. I should be back regularly now.)

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:43:05 -0800 (PST), Otzchiim wrote:

>
>
>Achmed Abdullah (given in various places also as Achmed Abd Allah
>Nadir Khan, Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan al-Idrissiyeh al-Wassallah,
>Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan al-Durani al-Idrissiyeh, and Alexander
>Romanowski, though the last lacks something) was 1881-1945. This is
>from his 1920 collection WINGS: TALES OF THE PSYCHIC. There is a
>current Wildside Press book with at least one of the stories in that
>book in it; don't know if this one is.

Nice to see you post again.

--
If there's a nuclear winter, at least it'll snow.