God's Grace (9 page)

Read God's Grace Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

Tags: #Fiction, #Dystopian, #Science Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #Religious

BOOK: God's Grace
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“Why in Christ’s name didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t wont you to swear ot me.”
Cohn denied it in exasperation. “Have I ever sworn at you?”
“I heard you curse thot gorilla.”
“There’s a difference between curse and curse out,” Cohn explained, but the chimp seemed doubtful.
They shouldered arms and began the long trek across the island to their cave.
From time to time Cohn stopped to shoot a rifle bullet in practice. Whenever he fell on his knee to fire, Buz ran for shelter.
 
The night they arrived at the cave, Buz sat on Cohn’s lap and asked for a story.
Cohn told him he thought that the story one heard most probably became the one he would live out.
Buz then said he didn’t want to hear one.
But Cohn, in a mood for talk, told Buz that a philosopher by the name of Ortega y Gasset once said that the difference between a man and a chimp is that the chimp wakes every morning as if no other chimpanzee had existed before him.
Buz didn’t like that philosopher. “I think of my mother, and I think of Dr. Bünder.”
“He was no chimp,” Cohn said.
Buz said he could have been one.
Cohn said he was curious about how Buz had managed to escape death on the Day of Devastation.
“I hid in the toilet”
“Why didn’t Dr. Bünder take you with him?”
The chimp’s voice wavered. “He said in my ear thot he didn’t wont me to drown in the ocean.”
“So he left you on the ship and took to a lifeboat?”
Buz reminded Cohn that he was the one who was alive and not Dr. Bünder. “But I am grateful for whot he did for me.” He said he thought they ought to change the name of the island to Dr. Walther Bünder Island, but Cohn did not favor the idea.
He said he would rather call it Survivor’s Island. “Survive is what we have to do. Thus we protest our fate to God and at the same time imitate Him.”
“Whot for?”
“My father said survival was one way we shared God’s purpose.”
Buz, vaguely fingering his pink phallus, said his opinion was that the true purpose of life was to have as much fun as one could.
Cohn separated his hand from his organ. “Leave it alone, let it breathe.”
Buz bristled, hair thickening.
“Leave it alone,” Cohn insisted, “until you know what to do with it, sexually speaking.”
“Why don’t you tell me, instead of twisting my arm?”
Cohn apologized. “Sex ties up with survival,” he explained, “not to speak of certain pleasures of creation. For survival the participants need someone of the opposite sex and neither of us is that. Given the nature of things, that limits possibility.”
Buz stealthily tried to slip his fingers between Cohn’s
thighs, and though his dod knew it was meant benignly he would not allow his boy to touch his testicles.
Buz snuggled close and was soon sucking Cohn’s nipple through Dr. Bünder’s white silk shirt. The tug of the chimp’s insistent lips on his dry nipple hurt, but Cohn let him suck.
Outside the cave, George, peeking through the ivy curtain, stared at the sight, but when Cohn looked up he let go of the ivy and scampered off.
Jealous? Shocked? Outraged? Cohn wondered. He gazed down at the little chimp at his breast.
If you had suckled the lad, could you marry him?
God was silent.
Cohn tried to squeeze out a small assurance. That had its dangers: Would He respond to preserve me, or would that remind Him to knock me off?
Why would He do that? Cohn thought. I’m the only man left—no serious threat to Him. Why don’t I simply give notice I’m still around, and hope it helps because He enjoys the attention I give Him?
On the other hand, I could forget the whole business and pray He forgets me.
(I could also ask, if He responds, “Why does God permit evil?”
““How could I not?””
Touché.)
Cohn tried prayer to establish contact but no vibrations occurred, and in muddled desperation he flung a coconut at the night sky.
The fruit ascended and never descended, not as fruit. Something happened on high—perhaps the coconut struck an astral body or itself became one?
Whatever caused what, Cohn couldn’t say, but a contained
cosmic bang occurred from whose center a flaring stream of flame shot forth. Watching in wonder, Cohn concluded this was no meteor in flight, but a twisting hard fire with his initials on it—for Curse Cohn? Clobber or Castrate Cohn?
He hurried to his protective cave, and though a long day passed as he lay hidden under a rock ledge, Cohn heard no punitive spat of electric, no hiss of flame, boom of thunder, or driving rain. The hidden man imagined the coconut had whizzed past God’s good ear, Who wrote in icy letters in the sky, ““Don’t make waves!”” Then more gently, ““Don’t call anything to my attention; I will call it to yours.””
Cohn remembered: God was Torah. He was made of words.
 
Cohn suggested a census to Buz, “Of every bug, to see if any are present.”
Though they roamed the breadth of the island, poking into mounds, webs, combs, and dry holes, they located no ants, spiders, roaches—no flies or bedbugs either.
The Lord had wiped the island clean of insects—no buzzing except Buz, who groomed himself under both arms and discovered no single louse or flea.
Meandering homeward, they explored a moist deep cave one would think might harbor a waterbug or two; but it contained no more than a network of labyrinthine galleries, narrow and broad, which led crookedly to others where stalactites hung like icicles from stone ceilings, dripping glowing drops on the limestone stumps rising from sweating floors.
After a long descent through shadowy corridors lit by Cohn’s white candle stub in his wax-stippled hand, they discovered that this mountainful of twisting chambers at last opened on a sparkling sand beach by the restless, booming sea.
Buz hopped with joy at the sight, and Cohn fell to his knees in the white sand, ravished by the view of purple waves breaking and spilling over a line of black rocks along the shore, and flowing as lit foam up the beach.
They swam in the refreshing water and afterwards ascended the mountain into a long cave crowded with crystalline columns. The walls gave forth mysterious noises, as though of voices whispering, or muted singing in the rocks; but no living creatures, not even a small fish, dwelt anywhere they could see or hear.
 
“I say a hundred,” Buz swore, panting like an exhausted messenger.
Cohn, cleaning a fossilized spinal column of a small ancient horse, possibly Eohippus, that he had dug up in a rocky field beyond the rice paddy, suggested maybe a dozen?
“Droves,” Buz swore, swaggering from foot to foot.
“Would you say ten?”
The ape jumped two feet in annoyance, hitting the ground on his fours.
Cohn, abandoning skepticism, cast aside his leather apron and hurried after Buz into the trees below the cave. These were separated by a grassy sward from the edge of the rain forest.
There in the woodland, halfway up a massive, scarred
baobab that looked like a ruined tree crossed with an abandoned tenement house of a former world, appeared—great heavens!—five unknown chimpanzees huddled together on a bough whose girth was that of an ordinary tree trunk. The five apes had been exploring the baobab, but when Cohn approached, a warning hoot drove them together.
The tree, whose top looked like an arthritic human hand, seemed to have been stripped of its fruit, leaves, yards of bark, by the famished, hyperactive, shabby apes, who looked as if they had been recently released from a prison pit, and had spent their first hours of freedom devouring the baobab. Their bellies had popped out—but their faces were gaunt. On the ground around its trunk lay piles of hard-shelled green fruits spilling their mucilaginous pulp.
Calvin Cohn stared at the strangers in the tree, momentarily stunned. He found the sight, real as it was, difficult to believe. If there was no single live insect on the island, where did five living chimps come from?
Studying them, Cohn discovered a young female holding a pendulous white flower; and a graybeard male with rheumy eyes and a chest cold; also a gorilla-like, sour-faced, youthful male, who bristled at Cohn—and two squatting, skinny male children, apparently younger than Buz, with relatively large heads, low-lying eyes, and short extremities. Both peered stilly at Cohn as he observed them. They were surely twins. He could hear them rhythmically breathing.
“Where are you from?” Cohn asked, and the five startled apes, as if they had been whistled to, broke their huddle and disappeared into the forest.
Cohn, considering hot pursuit, paused to reflect. He must find out where they had come from and how escaped Devastation and Flood. Suppose—as the five chimps unexpectedly were—another human being, possibly female, was also alive on the island? Though Cohn believed that only he, of all men, had been more or less spared—who, on this further evidence of the Lord’s occasional inattentiveness to events on earth, could be certain?
If he pursued, they would easily outdistance him. Better he woo them with bananas. Cohn hurried to the cave for a ripe basketful—this was the best red-banana season ever—and then hastened into the forest, trailing Buz. The little ape, having watched Cohn’s encounter with the newly arrived chimps, from a discreet distance, now swung on lianas from tree to tree, as his dod, carrying the banana basket, plowed through the vegetation below, depending on Buz to alert him when he sighted the apes.
Within minutes they came upon the newcomers, now dispersed on five limbs of an ebony tree. They were a genuinely tired lot, the female an attractive but wilted creature, the males grubby, their unkempt coats missing patches of hair, their eyes listless, still showing hunger. Only the barrel-chested male seemed energetic. Seeing Cohn, he rose threateningly, but was immediately affected by the banana basket, at whose contents he stared greedily.
Cohn set the basket down under the ebony tree and though the two boys came to life, whimpering in anticipation, none of the apes descended the tree to get at the bananas.
“Eat if you please,” Cohn announced, and nobody moved.
Buz tried an encouraging food grunt or two but the apes remained stationary.
Cohn thought they might eat if he left. “Tell them there’s more where this came from,” he said to Buz. “But please also say we’ll have to be careful with distribution because the supply isn’t endless. The way they stripped the baobab isn’t advisable behavior. In fact, I urge them to be careful how much they eat once they get over their present pangs.”
He reminded Buz to bring the basket back with him. He seemed to be admiring the young lady chimp, who now sat timidly at the very top of the tree.
Cohn, on leaving them, stepped behind a tall fern and peeked through it to watch the five chimpanzees climb down the tree in a single line and make for the basket with grunts, squeals, congratulatory back slappings and embraces. While four of them were hugging, the energetic male grabbed the basket and began to devour the red bananas. The rheumy old chimp approached him with extended palm, but the youthful ape, clutching the basket, would not part with even a banana skin.
Cohn was about to come thundering back but decided to let them work it out themselves. The husky one was obviously the dominant male and had certain privileges. Cohn would keep his eye on him to see that none of the others went hungry.
He returned to the cave and ate supper alone, a rice pudding with slices of tangerine baked into it. The food situation worried him. Would there be enough for all? Counting
George, the island company now made eight. If eight, why not nine soon, or ten, enough for a hungry minyan?
He unfolded and examined his map of fruit trees. Bananas and figs were doing well; the figs would last at least eight weeks if the chimps were careful. Oranges and coconuts were plentiful, and so were dates, mangoes, and passion fruit. There was enough for all. Cohn thought he might apportion fruit trees so that each chimp would share what was available without trespassing on the rights of others.
And he was concerned what the unexpected appearance of five ape strangers might signify regarding God’s decisive intent toward Calvin Cohn. Apparently He had slipped again, or was it His nature to be unable to count? Why should He have to if He contained all numbers, all possible combinations thereof? Or had He planned to develop it thus, individual animals appearing on the island, dribbling in one by one? For what purpose, if there was purpose?
After he had stopped posing himself unanswerable questions, Cohn stepped out of his cave, holding his kerosene lamp, to read in the evening cool. To his surprise, the visiting chimps—Buz among them—were sitting on the rocky ground in an untidy semicircle, as if expecting Cohn to walk over and officially greet them.
He wanted to, this was his chance to become acquainted. And he would take the occasion, after a word of welcome, to say how they could best get along together on this island.
“My dear primate brothers and sister,” he began hoarsely. Cohn blew his nose before going on, when George the gorilla, his head helmeted with cockleburs, making him
look like Mars himself if not a militant Moses or Joshua, emerged from the forest and cautiously beheld the assembled chimpanzees.
They, catching sight of the gorilla and the gigantic shadow he dragged after him, rose with excited hoots and shrieks and ran up the nearest trees.
When George observed Cohn’s exasperated disappointment, he plunged into an empty cave and did not emerge for two days.
 
The five apes, perhaps tracking another basket of bananas, appeared at the cave again the next morning, but when Cohn came out in his lab apron, holding a leg bone of a fossilized ape he had been cleaning—screeching, the chimps galloped off and were at once in flight along arboreal ways.
Only the young female remained an instant, as if to satisfy a curiosity about the white-skinned ape before turning tail and flying off with the others.
Cohn was disappointed at not being able to establish contact with them. He looked forward to feeding them at his table. He hoped soon to set up rules and regulations for apportioning and distributing fruit. To have order you had to plan order. He had mentioned this to Buz and explained the American Constitution to him, asking him to convey his thoughts to the visiting apes. He wasn’t sure of the range of ape comprehension, but given Buz’s recent language experiences, held high hopes for them.
Buz assured him the chimps would understand more than he thought. “They know more thon you think they do. You
hov to hov faith.” Cohn decided to look further into the matter, so he changed into field boots and protective outer clothing, then pushed off into the rain forest in search of the newcomers.
After an unsuccessful morning, Cohn, on inspiration, came back to the woodland where some mango trees in full fruit grew, and there he found the migrant apes ensconced on a glossy-leaved tree, eating the sweet orange-yellow fruit, after trial bites having discarded dozens of stringy sour ones.
He was disappointed to see, as he approached them, that four of the six mango trees were already denuded of fruit, and the others would soon be. The ground was strewn with rotting fruit and yellow pits.
Cohn, standing under the mango where the apes squatted, addressed them in a cordial voice. “Brother and sister primates, welcome to this island; and if this is your native land, welcome anyway to our corner of this beautiful island.
“I hope you get the gist of what I am saying. If I didn’t think that was possible, I wouldn’t be standing here. In other words, I have faith.”
He listened for a smattering of applause but heard none.
“What I would hope you understand is the necessity of making a determined effort to learn a common tongue so that we can communicate with each other. Only if one knows the word, you might say, can he spread the word.”
The chimps had stopped chewing and seemed to be absorbed in listening.
Cohn said he would like them to enjoy their stay, but if they intended to make this their place of permanent habitation,
he sincerely hoped they would not mind a few observations concerning how certain matters might be arranged for everyone’s mutual benefit.
“Calvin Cohn’s my name, and I guess you can think of me as your protector, if you like the thought. I want you all to know I am not in the least interested in personal power; simply I would like to give the common effort a certain amount of reasonable direction.”

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