The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza Read Online Free PDF Page A

paranoia.
     
    Abel’s living room, richly paneled in dark woods and lined with bookshelves, looks westward over Riverside Park and the Hudson River to New Jersey. Almost a year earlier, on the Fourth of July, the three of us had watched the Macy’s fireworks display from Abel’s windows, listening to a radio broadcast of classical music with which the fireworks were presumably coordinated and putting away vast quantities of pastry.
    We were seated in the same fashion now, Carolyn and I with glasses of Scotch, Abel with a mug of espresso topped with fresh whipped cream. WNCN was playing a Haydn string quartet for us, and outside there was nothing more spectacular to watch than the cars on the West Side Highway and the joggers circumvolving the park. No doubt some of the latter had shoes just like mine.
    When Haydn gave way to Vivaldi, Abel set his empty mug aside and leaned back in his chair with his pink hands folded over his ample abdomen. Only his midsection was fat; his hands and arms were lean, and there was not much spare flesh on his face. But he had a Santa Claus belly and upper thighs that bulged in his blue gabardine trousers, attributes quite consistent with his boundless enthusiasm for rich desserts.
    According to him, he had never been fat until after the war. “When I was in the camps,” he had told me once, “I thought constantly of meat and potatoes. I dreamed of fat sausages and great barons of beef. Crown roasts of pork. Kids roasted whole on a spit. Meanwhile I grew gaunt and my skin shrank on my bones like leather left to dry in the sun. When the American forces liberated the camps they weighed us. God knows why. Most fat men claim to be large-boned. Doubtless some of them are. I have small bones, Bernard. I tipped the scales, as they say, at ninety-two pounds.
    “I left Dachau clinging to one certainty. I was going to eat and grow fat. And then I discovered, to my considerable astonishment, that I had no interest in the meat and potatoes I had grown up on. That SS rifle butts had relieved me of my own teeth was only a partial explanation, for I had for meat itself a positiveaversion—I could not eat a sausage without feeling I was biting into a plump Teutonic finger. And yet I had an appetite, a bottomless one, but it was a most selective and specific appetite. I wanted sugar. I craved sweetness. Is there anything half so satisfying as knowing precisely what one wishes and being able to obtain it? If I could afford it, Bernard, I would engage a live-in pastry cook and keep him occupied around the clock.”
    He’d had a piece of Linzer torte with his coffee and had offered us a choice of half a dozen decadently rich pastries, all of which we’d passed for the time being while we tended to our drinks.
    “Ah, Bernard,” he said now. “And the lovely Carolyn. It is so very good to see you both. But the night is growing old, isn’t it? You have brought me something, Bernard?”
    My attaché case was close at hand. I opened it and drew out a compact volume of Spinoza’s Ethics, an English edition printed in London in 1707 and bound in blue calf. I passed it to Abel and he turned it over and over in his hands, stroking the smooth old leather with his long and slender fingers, studying the title page at some length, flipping through the pages.
    He said, “Regard this, if you will. ‘It is the part of the wise man to feed himself with moderate pleasant food and drink, and to take pleasure with perfumes, with the beauty of living plants, dress, music, sport andtheaters, and other places of this sort which man may use without any injury to his fellows.’ If Baruch Spinoza were in this room I’d cut him a generous piece of Linzer torte, and I don’t doubt he’d relish it.” He returned to the title page. “This is quite nice,” he allowed. “1707. I have an early edition in Latin, printed in Amsterdam. The first edition was when, 1675?”
    “1677.”
    “My own copy is dated 1683, I believe.