Pictures of Fidelman Read Online Free PDF

quickly inside. He shivered—a pitch-black freezing cave. Fidelman scratched up a thick match and confirmed bed and table, also a rickety chair, but no heat or light except a drippy candle stub in a saucer on the table. He lit the yellow candle and searched all over the place. In the table drawer a few eating implements plus safety razor, though where he shaved was a mystery, probably a public toilet. On a shelf above the thin-blanketed bed stood half a flask of red wine, part of a package of spaghetti, and a hard panino. Also an unexpected little fish bowl with a bony goldfish swimming around in Arctic seas. The fish, reflecting the candle flame, gulped repeatedly, threshing its frigid tail as Fidelman watched. He loves pets, thought the student. Under the bed he found a chamber pot, but nowhere a brief case with a fine critical chapter in it. The place was not more than an ice-box someone probably had lent the refugee to come in out of the rain. Alas, Fidelman sighed. Back in the pensione,
it took a hot water bottle two hours to thaw him out; but from the visit he never fully recovered.
     
    In this latest dream of Fidelman’s he was spending the day in a cemetery all crowded with tombstones, when up out of an empty grave rose this long-nosed brown shade, Virgilio Susskind, beckoning.
    Fidelman hurried over.
    “Have you read Tolstoy?”
    “Sparingly.”
    “Why is art?” asked the shade, drifting off.
    Fidelman, willy-nilly, followed, and the ghost, as it vanished, led him up steps going through the ghetto and into a marble synagogue.
    The student, left alone, because he could not resist the impulse, lay down upon the stone floor, his shoulders keeping strangely warm as he stared at the sunlit vault above. The fresco therein revealed this saint in fading blue, the sky flowing from his head, handing an old knight in a thin red robe his gold cloak. Nearby stood a humble horse and two stone hills.
    Giotto. San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero.
    Fidelman awoke running. He stuffed his blue gabardine into a paper bag, caught a bus, and knocked early on Susskind’s heavy portal.
    “Avanti.” The refugee, already garbed in beret and raincoat (probably his pajamas), was standing at the table, lighting the candle with a flaming sheet of paper.
To Fidelman the paper looked the underside of a typewritten page. Despite himself the student recalled in letters of fire his entire chapter.
    “Here, Susskind,” he said in a trembling voice, offering the bundle, “I bring you my suit. Wear it in good health.”
    The refugee glanced at it without expression. “What do you wish for it?”
    “Nothing at all.” Fidelman laid the bag on the table, called goodbye and left.
    He soon heard footsteps clattering after him across the cobblestones.
    “Excuse me, I kept this under my mattress for you.” Susskind thrust at him the pigskin brief case.
    Fidelman savagely opened it, searching frantically in each compartment, but the bag was empty. The refugee was already in flight. With a bellow the student started after him. “You bastard, you burned my chapter!”
    “Have mercy,” cried Susskind, “I did you a favor.”
    “I’ll do you one and cut your throat.”
    “The words were there but the spirit was missing.”
    In a towering rage Fidelman forced a burst of speed, but the refugee, light as the wind in his marvelous knickers, green coattails flying, rapidly gained ground.
    The ghetto Jews, framed in amazement in their medieval windows, stared at the wild pursuit. But in the middle of it, Fidelman, stout and short of breath,
moved by all he had lately learned, had a triumphant insight.
    “Susskind, come back,” he shouted, half sobbing. “The suit is yours. All is forgiven.”
    He came to a dead halt but the refugee ran on. When last seen he was still running.

2
     
     
    Months after vainly seeking a studio on the Vie Margutta, del Babuino, della Croce, and elsewhere in that neighborhood, Arthur Fidelman settled for