Authors: Bernard Malamud
Idiots First (18 page)
He got nowhere. We were back to nothing, to sitting in silence in the heat. Sometimes, after a few minutes, I had to take off before his mood overcame mine. One afternoon I came unwillingly up the stairsâthere were times I felt momentary surges of irritation with himâand was frightened to find Oskar's door ajar. When I knocked no one
answered. As I stood there, chilled down the spine, I realized I was thinking about the possibility of his attempting suicide again. “Oskar?” I went into the apartment, looked into both rooms and the bathroom, but he wasn't there. I thought he might have drifted out to get something from a store and took the opportunity to look quickly around. There was nothing startling in the medicine chest, no pills but aspirin, no iodine. Thinking, for some reason, of a gun, I searched his desk drawer. In it I found a thin-paper airmail letter from Germany. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn't read the handwriting, but as I held it in my hand I did make out a sentence: “Ich bin dir siebenundzwanzig Jahre treu gewesen.” There was no gun in the drawer. I shut it and stopped looking. It had occurred to me if you want to kill yourself all you need is a straight pin. When Oskar returned he said he had been sitting in the public library, unable to read.
answered. As I stood there, chilled down the spine, I realized I was thinking about the possibility of his attempting suicide again. “Oskar?” I went into the apartment, looked into both rooms and the bathroom, but he wasn't there. I thought he might have drifted out to get something from a store and took the opportunity to look quickly around. There was nothing startling in the medicine chest, no pills but aspirin, no iodine. Thinking, for some reason, of a gun, I searched his desk drawer. In it I found a thin-paper airmail letter from Germany. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn't read the handwriting, but as I held it in my hand I did make out a sentence: “Ich bin dir siebenundzwanzig Jahre treu gewesen.” There was no gun in the drawer. I shut it and stopped looking. It had occurred to me if you want to kill yourself all you need is a straight pin. When Oskar returned he said he had been sitting in the public library, unable to read.
Now we are once more enacting the changeless scene, curtain rising on two speechless characters in a furnished apartment, I, in a straightback chair, Oskar in the velours armchair that smothered rather than supported him, his flesh gray, the big gray face, unfocused, sagging. I reached over to switch on the radio but he barely looked at me in a way that begged no. I then got up to leave but Oskar, clearing his throat, thickly asked me to stay. I stayed, thinking, was there more to this than I could see into? His problems, God knows, were real enough, but could there be something more than a refugee's displacement, alienation, financial insecurity, being in a strange land without friends or a speakable tongue? My speculation was the old one; not all drown in this ocean, why does he? After a while I
shaped the thought and asked him, was there something below the surface, invisible? I was full of this thing from college, and wondered if there mightn't be some unknown quantity in his depression that a psychiatrist maybe might help him with, enough to get him started on his lecture.
shaped the thought and asked him, was there something below the surface, invisible? I was full of this thing from college, and wondered if there mightn't be some unknown quantity in his depression that a psychiatrist maybe might help him with, enough to get him started on his lecture.
He meditated on this and after a few minutes haltingly said he had been psychoanalyzed in Vienna as a young man. “Just the jusual drek,” he said, “fears and fantazies that afterwaards no longer bothered me.”
“They don't now?”
“Not.”
“You've written many articles and lectures before,” I said. “What I can't understand, though I know how hard the situation is, is why you can never get past page one.”
He half lifted his hand. “It is a paralyzis of my will. The whole legture is clear in my mind but the minute I write down a single wordâor in English or in GermanâI have a terrible fear I will not be able to write the negst. As though someone has thrown a stone at a window and the whole houseâthe whole idea, zmashes. This repeats, until I am dezperate.”
He said the fear grew as he worked that he would die before he completed the lecture, or if not that, he would write it so disgracefully he would wish for death. The fear immobilized him.
“I have lozt faith. I do notânot longer possezz my former value of myself. In my life there has been too much illusion.”
I tried to believe what I was saying: “Have confidence, the feeling will pass.”
“Confidenze I have not. For this and alzo whatever elze I have lozt I thank the Nazis.”
It was by then mid-August and things were growing steadily worse wherever one looked. The Poles were mobilizing for war. Oskar hardly moved. I was full of worries though I pretended calm weather.
He sat in his massive armchair with sick eyes, breathing like a wounded animal.
“Who can write aboud Walt Whitman in such terrible times?”
“Why don't you change the subject?”
“It mages no differenze what is the subject. It is all uze-lezz.”
I came every day, as a friend, neglecting my other students and therefore my livelihood. I had a panicky feeling that if things went on as they were going they would end in Oskar's suicide; and I felt a frenzied desire to prevent that. What's more, I was sometimes afraid I was myself becoming melancholy, a new talent, call it, of taking less pleasure in my little pleasures. And the heat continued, oppressive, relentless. We thought of escape into the country but neither of us had the money. One day I bought Oskar a second-hand fanâwondering why we hadn't thought of that beforeâand he sat in the breeze for hours each day, until after a week, shortly after the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact was signed, the motor gave out. He could not sleep at night and sat at his desk with a wet towel on his head, still attempting to write his lecture. He wrote
reams on a treadmill, it came out nothing. When he slept out of exhaustion he had fantastic frightening dreams of the Nazis inflicting tortures on him, sometimes forcing him to look upon the corpses of those they had slain. In one dream he told me about, he had gone back to Germany to visit his wife. She wasn't home and he had been directed to a cemetery. There, though the tombstone read another name, her blood seeped out of the earth above her shallow grave. He groaned aloud at the memory.
reams on a treadmill, it came out nothing. When he slept out of exhaustion he had fantastic frightening dreams of the Nazis inflicting tortures on him, sometimes forcing him to look upon the corpses of those they had slain. In one dream he told me about, he had gone back to Germany to visit his wife. She wasn't home and he had been directed to a cemetery. There, though the tombstone read another name, her blood seeped out of the earth above her shallow grave. He groaned aloud at the memory.
Afterwards he told me something about her. They had met as students, lived together, and were married at twenty-three. It wasn't a very happy marriage. She had turned into a sickly woman, physically unable to have children. “Something was wrong with her interior strug-ture.”
Though I asked no questions, Oscar said, “I offered her to come with me here but she refused this.”
“For what reason?”
“She did not think I wished her to come.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Not,” he said.
He explained he had lived with her for almost twenty-seven years under difficult circumstances. She had been ambivalent about their Jewish friends and his relatives, though outwardly she seemed not a prejudiced person. But her mother was always a violent anti-Semite.
“I have nothing to blame myself,” Oskar said.
He took to his bed. I took to the New York Public Library. I read some of the German poets he was trying to write about, in English translation. Then I read Leaves of
Grass
and wrote down what I thought one or two of them
had got from Whitman. One day, towards the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written. It was in good part guessing but my idea wasn't to write the lecture for him. He lay on his back, motionless, and listened utterly sadly to what I had written. Then he said, no, it wasn't the love of death they had got from Whitmanâthat ran through German poetryâbut it was most of all his feeling for Brudermensch, his humanity.
Grass
and wrote down what I thought one or two of them
had got from Whitman. One day, towards the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written. It was in good part guessing but my idea wasn't to write the lecture for him. He lay on his back, motionless, and listened utterly sadly to what I had written. Then he said, no, it wasn't the love of death they had got from Whitmanâthat ran through German poetryâbut it was most of all his feeling for Brudermensch, his humanity.
“But this does not grow long on German earth,” he said, “and is soon deztroyed.”
I said I was sorry I had got it wrong, but he thanked me anyway.
I left, defeated, and as I was going down the stairs, heard the sound of someone sobbing. I will quit this, I thought, it has gotten to be too much for me. I can't drown with him.
I stayed home the next day, tasting a new kind of private misery too old for somebody my age, but that same night Oskar called me on the phone, blessing me wildly for having read those notes to him. He had got up to write me a letter to say what I had missed, and it ended by his having written half the lecture. He had slept all day and tonight intended to finish it up.
“I thank you,” he said, “for much, alzo including your faith in me.”
“Thank God,” I said, not telling him I had just about lost it.
Oskar completed his lectureâwrote and rewrote itâduring the first week in September. The Nazis had invaded Poland, and though we were greatly troubled, there was some sense of release; maybe the brave Poles would beat them. It took another week to translate the lecture, but here we had the assistance of Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, the historian, a gentle, erudite man, who liked translating and promised his help with future lectures. We then had about two weeks to work on Oskar's delivery. The weather had changed, and so, slowly, had he. He had awakened from defeat, battered, after a wearying battle. He had lost close to twenty pounds. His complexion was still gray; when I looked at his face I expected to see scars, but it had lost its flabby unfocused quality. His blue eyes had returned to life and he walked with quick steps, as though to pick up a few for all the steps he hadn't taken during those long hot days he had lain torpid in his room.
We went back to our former routine, meeting three late afternoons a week for diction, grammar, and the other exercises. I taught him the phonetic alphabet and transcribed long lists of words he was mispronouncing. He worked many hours trying to fit each sound into place, holding half a matchstick between his teeth to keep his jaws apart as he exercised his tongue. All this can be a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future. Looking at him I realized what's meant when somebody is called “another man.”
The lecture, which I now knew by heart, went off well. The director of the Institute had invited a number of
prominent people. Oskar was the first refugee they had employed and there was a move to make the public cognizant of what was then a new ingredient in American life. Two reporters had come with a lady photographer. The auditorium of the Institute was crowded. I sat in the last row, promising to put up my hand if he couldn't be heard, but it wasn't necessary. Oskar, in a blue suit, his hair cut, was of course nervous, but you couldn't see it unless you studied him. When he stepped up to the lectern, spread out his manuscript, and spoke his first English sentence in public, my heart hesitated; only he and I, of everybody there, had any idea of the anguish he had been through. His enunciation wasn't at all badâa few s's for th's, and he once said bag for back, but otherwise he did all right. He read poetry wellâin both languagesâand though Walt Whitman, in his mouth, sounded a little as though he had come to the shores of Long Island as a German immigrant, still the poetry read as poetry:
prominent people. Oskar was the first refugee they had employed and there was a move to make the public cognizant of what was then a new ingredient in American life. Two reporters had come with a lady photographer. The auditorium of the Institute was crowded. I sat in the last row, promising to put up my hand if he couldn't be heard, but it wasn't necessary. Oskar, in a blue suit, his hair cut, was of course nervous, but you couldn't see it unless you studied him. When he stepped up to the lectern, spread out his manuscript, and spoke his first English sentence in public, my heart hesitated; only he and I, of everybody there, had any idea of the anguish he had been through. His enunciation wasn't at all badâa few s's for th's, and he once said bag for back, but otherwise he did all right. He read poetry wellâin both languagesâand though Walt Whitman, in his mouth, sounded a little as though he had come to the shores of Long Island as a German immigrant, still the poetry read as poetry:
“And I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that the kelson of creation is love ⦓
Oskar read it as though he believed it. Warsaw had fallen but the verses were somehow protective. I sat back conscious of two things: how easy it is to hide the deepest wounds; and the pride I felt in the job I had done.
Two days later I came up the stairs into Oskar's apartment to find a crowd there. The refugee, his face beet-red, lips bluish, a trace of froth in the corners of his mouth, lay on
the floor in his limp pajamas, two firemen on their knees, working over him with an inhalator. The windows were open and the air stank.
the floor in his limp pajamas, two firemen on their knees, working over him with an inhalator. The windows were open and the air stank.
A policeman asked me who I was and I couldn't answer.
“No, oh no.”
I said no but it was unchangeably yes. He had taken his lifeâgasâI hadn't even thought of the stove in the kitchen.
“Why?” I asked myself. “Why did he do it?” Maybe it was the fate of Poland on top of everything else, but the only answer anyone could come up with was Oskar's scribbled note that he wasn't well, and had left Martin Goldberg all his possessions. I am Martin Goldberg.
I was sick for a week, had no desire either to inherit or investigate, but I thought I ought to look through his things before the court impounded them, so I spent a morning sitting in the depths of Oskar's armchair, trying to read his correspondence. I had found in the top drawer a thin packet of letters from his wife and an airmail letter of recent date from his anti-Semitic mother-in-law.
She writes in a tight script it takes me hours to decipher, that her daughter, after Oskar abandons her, against her own mother's fervent pleas and anguish, is converted to Judaism by a vengeful rabbi. One night the Brown Shirts appear, and though the mother wildly waves her bronze crucifix in their faces, they drag Frau Gassner, together with the other Jews, out of the apartment house, and transport them in lorries to a small border town in conquered Poland. There, it is rumored, she is shot in the head and topples into an open tank ditch, with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers, and a handful of gypsies.
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD
GOD'S GRACE
DUBIN'S LIVES
REMBRANDT'S HAT
THE TENANTS
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE FIXER
IDIOTS FIRST
A NEW LIFE
THE MAGIC BARREL
THE ASSISTANT
THE NATURAL
GOD'S GRACE
DUBIN'S LIVES
REMBRANDT'S HAT
THE TENANTS
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE FIXER
IDIOTS FIRST
A NEW LIFE
THE MAGIC BARREL
THE ASSISTANT
THE NATURAL
Copyright © 1950, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963 by Bernard Malamud Renewal copyright
©
1977 by Bernard Malamud All rights reserved
©
1977 by Bernard Malamud All rights reserved
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Published in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
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eISBN 9781466805910
First eBook Edition : November 2011
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First edition, 1963 Ninth printing, 1986 Library of Congress catalog card number: 63-19562
The stories in this book, all slightly revised, appeared in the following magazines:
Commentary, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, The Reporter,
and
World Review
(London).
Commentary, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Partisan Review, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, The Reporter,
and
World Review
(London).
An excerpt from the scene from “Suppose a Wedding” appeared in
New Statesman.
New Statesman.
PLEASE NOTE: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the scene from “Suppose a Wedding” is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States and all foreign countries, and is subject to royalty. Permission for performances and readings, in any medium, must be secured from the author's agent, Timothy Seldes, Russell & Volkening, Inc., 50 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001.
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