Leviathan by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online Page A

advantage in sports, and when he started to play basketball at thirteen or fourteen, he quickly developed into a promising player. The practical jokes and renegade antics died out then, and while his academic performance in high school was hardly outstanding (he always described himself as a lazy student, with only minimal interest in getting good grades), he read books constantly and was already beginning to think of himself as a future writer. By his own admission, his first works were awful—“romantico-absurdist soul-searchings,” he once called them, wretched little stories and poems that he kept an absolute secret from everyone. But he stuck with it, and as a sign of his growing seriousness, he went out and bought himself a pipe at the age of seventeen. This was the badge of every true writer, he thought, and during his last year of high school he spent every evening sitting at his desk, pen in one hand, pipe in the other, filling his room with smoke.
    These stories came straight from Sachs himself. They helped todefine my sense of what he had been like before I met him, but as I repeat his comments now, I realize that they could have been entirely false. Self-deprecation was an important element of his personality, and he often used himself as the butt of his own jokes. Especially when talking about the past, he liked to portray himself in the most unflattering terms. He was always the ignorant kid, the pompous fool, the mischief-maker, the bungling oaf. Perhaps that was how he wanted me to see him, or perhaps he found some perverse pleasure in pulling my leg. For the fact is that it takes a great deal of self-confidence for a person to poke fun at himself, and a person with that kind of self-confidence is rarely a fool or a bungler.
    There is only one story from that early period that I feel at all confident about. I heard it toward the end of my visit to Connecticut in 1980, and since it came as much from his mother as it did from him, it falls into a different category from the rest. In itself, this anecdote is less dramatic than some of the others Sachs told me, but looking at it now from the perspective of his whole life, it stands out in special relief—as though it were the announcement of a theme, the initial statement of a musical phrase that would go on haunting him until his last moments on earth.
    Once the table was cleared, the people who hadn’t helped with the dinner were assigned to wash-up duty in the kitchen. There were just four of us: Sachs and his mother, Fanny and myself. It was a big job, with mess and crockery jammed onto every counter, and as we took turns scraping and sudsing and rinsing and drying, we chatted about this and that, drifting aimlessly from one topic to another. After a while, we found ourselves talking about Thanksgiving, which led to a discussion of other American holidays, which in turn led to some glancing remarks about national symbols. The Statue of Liberty was mentioned, and then, almost as if the memory had returned to both of them at the same time, Sachs and his mother started reminiscingabout a trip they had made to Bedloes Island back in the early fifties. Fanny had never heard the story before, so she and I became the audience, standing there with dish towels in our hands as the two of them performed their little act.
    “Do you remember that day, Benjy?” Mrs. Sachs began.
    “Of course I remember,” Sachs said. “It was one of the turning points of my childhood.”
    “You were just a wee little man back then. No more than six or seven.”
    “It was the summer I turned six. Nineteen fifty-one.”
    “I was a few years older than that, but I’d never been to the Statue of Liberty. I figured it was about time, so one day I hustled you into the car, and off we went to New York. I don’t remember where the girls were that morning, but I’m pretty sure it was just the two of us.”
    “Just the two of us. And Mrs. Something-stein and her two sons. We met them