The Houseguest by Kim Brooks Read Free Book Online

how someone like Shmuel could evolve in memory, how someone who was a decent enough friend at the time now seemed like an intimate, a person of great importance, allowed to slip away. You couldn’t trip on a cobblestone in Heidelberg without tumbling into the arms of a leftist or agitator or revolutionary of some stripe—stripes that often changed color by the season or by the week. They met at a cafe swollen with Trotskyites and the next time they saw each other it was in the same setting but the Trotskyites had reincorporated as Mensheviks; later they became adherents of a Dadaist offshoot and espoused public nudity. For Max, these constantly mutating organizations and their central role in one’s identity were disorienting, but Shmuel seemed to have no trouble shapeshifting in stride. Max could recall seeing Shmuel charm packs of unrehabilitated Boers and devout anarchists on the same evening. It was like watching a lion tamer who could also train elephants.
    Their time in Heidelberg had only overlapped for a brief period. Just on the edge of tipping into something greater, both were lured away from the university, Max by Paris, his determination to write a novel no matter how badly it might turn out, his unexpected friendship with a few artistic types he’d discovered during a week in Biarritz, some British communists and Rhodesians and a stray German namedHans who’d invited him into their enclave. This luring, he now knew, was a symptom of his habitual tendency to flight, but at the time it felt very much like its own singular event with specific tensions and unearned seriousness. In Paris, he’d set his mind to write a novel and he’d done it. He’d written a very bad novel, shamefully bad. He did not even need the scorn of an editor to tell him how bad it was. He accepted that he was not a writer but a scholar. But by then it was too late to return to Heidelberg.
    What snagged Shmuel away from those classrooms in Heidelberg, Max later found out, was Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s radical revisionist Zionism. The journalist turned revolutionary had come to give a talk one evening to a group of Zionist youth. People who knew him told Max the transformation was nearly instantaneous, Shmuel moving from gadfly to a man inhabited by purpose. No one could recall what Jabotinsky talked about that night. If anyone remembered the evening, it was for what it did to Shmuel Spiro. A few weeks later he returned to Palestine. A few months after that he was a pleasant, inarticulate shape in Hoffman’s memory. After that, a name only evoked by the title of a book or the name of a philosopher.
    â€œHeidelberg,” Spiro said. “Surely that was a former life, no?”
    â€œIt feels that way. Where are you calling from?”
    â€œNew York, as a matter of fact.”
    â€œCity?”
    Max cringed at the stupidity of the question immediately, but Shmuel somehow intimidated him, made him nervous. Shmuel let it go by without mention or even a change in tone.
    â€œThat’s right. Been pulling together some good men here, trying to organize from solid ground. We’re working to pressure the Americans about the crisis.”
    He paused for a moment. Hoffman thought was going to say more about what it was exactly he was organizing for, but instead he said, “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have found you, Max. When I heardyou’d left the city, I thought, this man has set off for something grand. Perhaps you’d gone to the woods to become the Jewish Thoreau. Maybe the mighty and mysterious minds of the US government had found a purpose for you. Never did I think of Utica, New York. What is there, Max? I can only conceive of two reasons: one is a very fertile woman of extraordinary wealth, the other is that you’ve founded some sort of radical theological institute where no one can bother you.”
    â€œI took a position at a synagogue in town. Nothing