Idiots First (17 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: Idiots First
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Florence.
[after a pause] How can you love a son of a bitch?
Feuer. Don't poison me with my words. I have enough poison in me already. I say what I don't mean.
Florence.
What do you mean?
Feuer.
I say that too.
Florence.
[still half stunned] How can anyone love a son of a bitch?
Feuer.
[savagely striking his chest] I am the son of a bitch.
Florence.
[musing] It's my fault. I shouldn't fight with you. I don't know why I do it. Maybe it's change of life. What am I changing? Where is my life? It's true, I neglected her, she's the one who suffered. I still feel terrible
about those days. But you left me. I had to work. I was out all day. At night I was afraid to be alone. I began to look for company. I was ashamed to let her see me so I sent her away. There was nobody to send her to so I sent her to strangers.
Feuer.
[unable to restrain it] To friends of your lovers. To their relatives too.
Florence.
Have mercy on me, Feuer. My lovers I buried long ago. They're all dead. Don't dig them out of their graves. For what I did to my child I still suffer. You don't have to hurt me more. I know how to hurt myself. [She cries quietly.]
[The ACTOR approaches her chair and stands behind her.]
Feuer.
I was a fool. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand my own nature. I talked big but accomplished nothing. Even as an actor I wasn't one of the best. Thomashefsky, Jacob Adler, Schwartz—all were better than me. Their names are famous. Two years off the stage and my name is dead. This is what I deserve—I don't fool myself.
Florence.
You were a good actor.
Feuer.
I wasn't a good actor and I am not a good man.
[She rises and they embrace.]
Florence.
I forgave you but you don't forgive me.
Feuer.
I don't forgive myself.
Florence.
[again remembering] Three times you left me.
Feuer.
I always came back.
Florence.
It took so long. I hurt her so much. [She wipes her eyes with her fingers.]
Feuer.
Enough now. It was my fault too. I hurt her and I hurt you. Why did I hurt you?—because you were there
to hurt. You were the only one [he pauses—there was another but he doesn't say so]—the only one who could stand me.
Florence.
You try to be good.
Feuer.
No.
Florence.
Yes. [after a minute] Please do me a favor, Feuer, and I won't ask for anything else—let Leon alone. Let Adele alone. Let them find their life together. It's all I ask you. For her sake—or there will be terrible trouble.
[The door opens and ADELE enters, discovering them in each other's arms.]
Adele.
[sadly] Ah, you've been fighting again. [She shuts the door.]
[FLORENCE goes to the sink, washes her eyes with cold water and dries them with a kitchen towel. FEUER, after kissing ADELE, goes to the bathroom.]
Adele.
[putting her purse and a paper down on the table] What were you fighting about?
Florence.
We weren't fighting. It was a disagreement. Leon was here.
Adele.
Leon? When?
Florence.
He came to surprise you. He wants you to eat dinner with him. Please, darling, go. He'll be right back in a few minutes.
Adele.
Where is he now?
Florence.
I don't know. I wasn't here. Papa told me. I think they were playing rummy and he said something to Leon.
Adele.
Nasty?
Florence.
Papa got sarcastic and Leon didn't like it. But he said he would come back soon.
Adele.
I wasn't expecting him tonight.
Florence.
It was a surprise.
Adele.
I wish he had at least called me. I already promised Ben I would go for a walk with him tonight.
Florence.
A walk is nothing.
Adele.
I promised.
Florence.
Adele, you're an engaged girl. Leon came all the way from Newark to take you to dinner. You ought to go.
Adele.
Being engaged doesn't mean I'm not entitled to a free minute to myself.
Florence.
Who said that? All I said was Leon was here. You can tell this boy upstairs you'll see him some other time.
Adele.
He called me up and I said yes.
Florence.
It isn't such a big promise.
Adele.
I can't understand why Leon didn't call.
Florence.
Call or not call, it's not nice to say no when he's already here. Adele, mamale, please see him tonight. I don't want you to walk with that boy. It's dangerous.
[She hadn't meant to say quite that.]
Adele.
A walk isn't a wedding, Mama.
Florence.
It could be worse than a wedding.
Adele.
For God's sake, what do you mean?
Florence.
[Cracking her knuckles on her bosom] You can walk to your grave with a little walk.
[FEUER comes out of the bathroom, looks at himself earnestly in the mirror, mutters something derogatory, and enters the kitchen.]
Adele.
Doesn't anyone trust me?
Feuer.
I trust you.
Florence.
[to ADELE] Is this what you want all your life? [indicating the apartment.]
Adele.
I don't see the relationship.
Florence.
[deeply troubled] For my sake don't go out with this writer. Don't make any more complications in your life. Life is complicated enough.
[There is a knock on the door.]
Florence.
Come in.
[LEON enters, carrying a large bouquet of flowers.]
Florence.
Leon!
Leon.
Hello, everybody. [to ADELE] This is for you, honey.
Adele.
Hello, darling.
[He hands her the flowers and they kiss.]
Leon.
Hello, Mrs. Feuer. Good evening, Mr. Feuer.
[He bears no grudges.]
Feuer.
Good evening.
[ADELE hands the bouquet to her mother, who hunts for something to put it into. While she is doing that, FEUER takes up his newspaper, excuses himself, and after drawing the curtain separating the rooms, sits on the day bed, reading. FLORENCE, disapproving the drawn curtain but glad to have FEUER out of the way, attends first to the flowers, then fixes her cold supper. LEON has seated himself at the table, and ADELE, after setting the vase of new flowers on the window sill, is sitting near him.]
Florence.
Leon, would you like to eat with us? It's not much—just a salad with smoked white fish. Also a few potato pancakes, though not for Feuer—he can't eat them.
Leon.
Thanks very much but I was thinking of asking Adele to go out and eat Chinese tonight.
[He looks at her.]
Adele.
I'm sorry Leon, if I had known you were coming I would have said yes. That is if you had called before Ben asked me. He's that friend of Papa's who writes. You met him.
Leon.
[disappointed] Couldn't you break it with him, honey?
Adele.
[hesitantly] I'd rather not.
Leon.
What's so special about this guy? I mean that you gave him the date? Is it because he's a writer?
Adele.
[defensively] You said I could go out once in a while if I felt like it.
Leon.
I said it and I stick by it. All I want to know is why you're going out with him?
Adele.
I guess I have the feeling he's gone through a lot.
Florence.
Everybody goes through a lot—
Adele.
I like him, he's interesting. I like to talk to him.
Leon.
I appreciate his problems but the fact of it is I've come all the way from Newark, New Jersey, to be with the girl I'm engaged to—
Florence.
Mamale—
Adele.
Please, Mama—
[FLORENCE removes her apron and retires behind the curtain. FEUER, who has been listening, raises his paper as she enters and pretends he's reading. FLORENCE, not sure she has made the right move, lights a cigarette and sits in the armchair, flipping through the pages of a magazine.]
Leon.
[lowering his voice] Honey, I don't dig it. I thought you'd surely be happy to have this kind of a surprise from me.
Adele.
[gently] I am. It's a nice surprise. But all I'm saying
is I feel committed tonight. [aware of his concern] Don't worry, it's not serious. Don't make anything serious out of it. It's just that he's a lonely person, I guess. You feel that when you're with him.
Leon.
I'm lonely too. Couldn't you postpone it till tomorrow night?
Adele.
He's off tonight. Tomorrow he works.
Leon.
Then till the next time he's off? I'll exchange him tonight for then. [again lowering his voice] You haven't forgotten our plan to spend a week in the country together in September?
Adele.
[a little cold] I don't see what the relationship of this is with that.
Leon.
Well, maybe there isn't but why don't you think it over? I mean about tonight.
Adele.
I feel I ought to keep my word with him.
Leon.
[edgy] What's the matter, Adele—you don't seem cordial at all. What is it, the atmosphere here?
Adele.
If you don't like the atmosphere, why do you come here?
Leon.
I don't want to fight with you.
Adele.
I don't want to fight with you.
Leon.
[after a minute] Maybe you're right. Give me a kiss and I'll call it quits.
Adele.
I'll kiss you because I like you.
[They kiss.]
Adele.
[gently] I'll postpone it with him if you really want me to.
Feuer.
[from behind the curtain] Do what
you
want.
Florence.
[hushed whisper] Please, for God's sake, Feuer.
Leon.
[as though he had heard nothing] Let's make a compromise. What time is he showing up here?
Adele.
I don't know, around eight, I suppose. He didn't say exactly.
Leon.
All right, whatever time. [He looks at his wrist watch.] It's ten to six. We can still go out, have our Chinese meal and I'll have you back in the car at fifteen after eight. Then you can go for a short walk and when you come back I'll be waiting and we can drive down to Coney Island.
Adele.
For the first suggestion, okay. I'll go to the Chinese restaurant with you. But I don't want to rush him, while we're walking, to get back for the drive. It's not that kind of date.
Leon.
[annoyed] What kind of date is it?
Adele.
A very innocent one.
[There's a knock on the door. ADELE gets up and opens it. Both FLORENCE and FEUER are attentive. BEN enters with a small bouquet of daffodils.]
Ben.
Am I too early?
[No one answers as the curtain goes down.]
Oskar Gassner sits in his cotton-mesh undershirt and summer bathrobe at the window of his stuffy, hot, dark hotel room on West Tenth Street while I cautiously knock. Outside, across the sky, a late-June green twilight fades in darkness. The refugee fumbles for the light and stares at me, hiding despair but not pain.
I was in those days a poor student and would brashly attempt to teach anybody anything for a buck an hour, although I have since learned better. Mostly I gave English lessons to recently-arrived refugees. The college sent me, I had acquired a little experience. Already a few of my students were trying their broken English, theirs and mine, in the American market place. I was then just twenty, on my way into my senior year in college, a skinny, life hungry kid, eating himself waiting for the next world war to start. It was a goddamn cheat. Here I was palpitating to get going, and across the ocean Adolph Hitler, in black boots and a square mustache, was tearing up and spitting out all the flowers. Will I ever forget what went on with Danzig that summer?
Times were still hard from the Depression but anyway I
made a little living from the poor refugees. They were all over uptown Broadway in 1939. 1 had four I tutored—Karl Otto Alp, the former film star; Wolfgang Novak, once a brilliant economist; Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, who had taught medieval history at Heidelberg; and after the night I met him in his disordered cheap hotel room, Oskar Gassner, the Berlin critic and journalist, at one time on the
Acht Uhr Abenblatt.
They were accomplished men. I had my nerve associating with them, but that's what a world crisis does for people, they get educated.
Oskar was maybe fifty, his thick hair turning gray. He had a big face and heavy hands. His shoulders sagged. His eyes, too, were heavy, a clouded blue; and as he stared at me after I had-identified myself, doubt spread in them like underwater currents. It was as if, on seeing me, he had again been defeated. I had to wait until he came to. I stayed at the door in silence. In such cases I would rather be elsewhere but I had to make a living. Finally he opened the door and I entered. Rather, he released it and I was in. “Bitte,” he offered me a seat and didn't know where to sit himself. He would attempt to say something and then stop, as though it could not possibly be said. The room was cluttered with clothing, boxes of books he had managed to get out of Germany, and some paintings. Oskar sat on a box and attempted to fan himself with his meaty hand. “Zis heat,” he muttered, forcing his mind to the deed. “Impozzible. I do not know such heat.” It was bad enough for me but terrible for him. He had difficulty breathing. He tried to speak, lifted a hand, and let it drop like a dead duck. He breathed as though he were fighting a battle; and
maybe he won because after ten minutes we sat and slowly talked.
Like most educated Germans Oskar had at one time studied English. Although he was certain he couldn't say a word he managed to put together a fairly decent, if sometimes comical, English sentence. He misplaced consonants, mixed up nouns and verbs, and mangled idioms, yet we were able at once to communicate. We conversed in English, with an occasional assist by me in pidgin-German or Yiddish, what he called “Jiddish.” He had been to America before, last year for a short visit. He had come a month before Kristallnacht, when the Nazis shattered the Jewish store windows and burnt all the synagogues, to see if he could find a job for himself; he had no relatives in America and getting a job would permit him quickly to enter the country. He had been promised something, not in journalism, but with the help of a foundation, as a lecturer. Then he returned to Berlin, and after a frightening delay of six months was permitted to emigrate. He had sold whatever he could, managed to get some paintings, gifts of Bauhaus friends, and some boxes of books out by bribing two Dutch border guards; he had said goodbye to his wife and left the accursed country. He gazed at me with cloudy eyes. “We parted amicably,” he said in German, “my wife was gentile. Her mother was an appalling anti-Semite. They returned to live in Stettin.” I asked no questions. Gentile is gentile, Germany is Germany.
His new job was in the Institute for Public Studies, in New York. He was to give a lecture a week in the fall term, and during next spring, a course, in English translation,
in “The Literature of the Weimar Republic.” He had never taught before and was afraid to. He was in that way to be introduced to the public, but the thought of giving the lecture in English just about paralyzed him. He didn't see how he could do it. “How is it pozzible? I cannot say two words. I cannot pronounziate. I will make a fool of myself.” His melancholy deepened. Already in the two months since his arrival, and a round of diminishingly expensive hotel rooms, he had had two English tutors, and I was the third. The others had given him up, he said, because his progress was so poor, and he thought he also depressed them. He asked me whether I felt I could do something for him, or should he go to a speech specialist, someone, say, who charged five dollars an hour, and beg his assistance? “You could try him,” I said, “and then come back to me.” In those days I figured what I knew, I knew. At that he managed a smile. Still, I wanted him to make up his mind or it would be no confidence down the line. He said, after a while, he would stay with me. If he went to the five-dollar professor it might help his tongue but not his stomach. He would have no money left to eat with. The Institute had paid him in advance for the summer but it was only three hundred dollars and all he had.
He looked at me dully. “Ich weiss nicht wie ich weiter machen soll.”
I figured it was time to move past the first step. Either we did that quickly or it would be like drilling rock for a long time.
“Let's stand at the mirror,” I said.
He rose with a sigh and stood there beside me, I thin, elongated, red-headed, praying for success, his and mine;
Oskar, uneasy, fearful, finding it hard to face either of us in the faded round glass above his dresser.
“Please,” I said to him, “could you say ‘right'?”
“Ghight,” he gargled.
“No—right. You put your tongue here.” I showed him where as he tensely watched the mirror. I tensely watched him. “The tip of it curls behind the ridge on top, like this.”
He placed his tongue where I showed him.
“Please,” I said, “now say right.”
Oskar's tongue fluttered. “Rright.”
“That's good. Now say ‘treasure'—that's harder.”
“Tgheasure.”
“The tongue goes up in front, not in the back of the mouth. Look.”
He tried, his brow wet, eyes straining, “Trreasure.”
“That's it.”
“A miracle,” Oskar murmured.
I said if he had done that he could do the rest.
We went for a bus ride up Fifth Avenue and then walked for a while around Central Park Lake. He had put on his German hat, with its hatband bow at the back, a broad-lapeled wool suit, a necktie twice as wide as the one I was wearing, and walked with a small-footed waddle. The night wasn't bad, it had got a bit cooler. There were a few large stars in the sky and they made me sad.
“Do you sink I will succezz?”
“Why not?” I asked.
Later he bought me a bottle of beer.
To many of these people, articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of language—that they could not say what was in them to say. You have some subtle thought and it comes out like a piece of broken bottle. They could, of course, manage to communicate but just to communicate was frustrating. As Karl Otto Alp, the ex-film star who became a buyer for Macy's, put it years later, “I felt like a child, or worse, often like a moron. I am left with myself unexpressed. What I know, indeed, what I am, becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.” The same with Oskar it figures. There was a terrible sense of useless tongue, and I think the reason for his trouble with his other tutors was that to keep from drowning in things unsaid he wanted to swallow the ocean in a gulp: Today he would learn English and tomorrow wow them with an impeccable Fourth of July speech, followed by a successful lecture at the Institute for Public Studies.
We performed our lessons slowly, step by step, everything in its place. After Oskar moved to a two-room apartment in a house on West 85th Street, near the Drive, we met three times a week at four-thirty, worked an hour and a half, then, since it was too hot to cook, had supper at the 72nd Street Automat and conversed on my time. The lessons we divided into three parts: diction exercises and reading aloud; then grammar, because Oskar felt the necessity of it, and composition correction; with conversation, as I said, thrown in at supper. So far as I could see, he was coming along. None of these exercises was giving
him as much trouble as they apparently had in the past. He seemed to be learning and his mood lightened. There were moments of elation as he heard his accent flying off. For instance when sink became think. He stopped calling himself “hopelezz,” and I became his “bezt teacher,” a little joke I liked.
Neither of us said much about the lecture he had to give early in October, and I kept my fingers crossed. It was somehow to come out of what we were doing daily, I think I felt, but exactly how, I had no idea; and to tell the truth, though I didn't say so to Oskar, the lecture frightened me. That and the ten more to follow during the fall term. Later, when I learned that he had been attempting with the help of the dictionary, to write in English and had produced “a complete disahster,” I suggested maybe he ought to stick to German and we could afterwards both try to put it into passable English. I was cheating when I said that because my German is meager, enough to read simple stuff but certainly not good enough for serious translation; anyway, the idea was to get Oskar into production and worry about translating later. He sweated with it, from enervating morning to exhausted night, but no matter what language he tried, though he had been a professional writer for a generation and knew his subject cold, the lecture refused to move past page one.
It was a sticky, hot July and the heat didn't help at all.
I had met Oskar at the end of June and by the seventeenth of July we were no longer doing lessons. They had
foundered on the “impozzible” lecture. He had worked on it each day in frenzy and growing despair. After writing more than a hundred opening pages he furiously flung his pen against the wall, shouting he could no longer write in that filthy tongue. He cursed the German language. He hated the damned country and the damned people. After that what was bad became worse. When he gave up attempting to write the lecture, he stopped making progress in English. He seemed to forget what he already knew. His tongue thickened and the accent returned in all its fruitiness. The little he had to say was in handcuffed and tortured English. The only German I heard him speak was in a whisper to himself. I doubt he knew he was talking it. That ended our formal work together, though I did drop in every other day or so to sit with him. For hours he sat motionless in a large green velours armchair, hot enough to broil in, and through tall windows stared at the colorless sky above 85th Street, with a wet depressed eye.
Then once he said to me, “If I do not this legture prepare, I will take my life.”
“Let's begin, Oskar,” I said. “You dictate and I'll write. The ideas count, not the spelling.”
He didn't answer so I stopped talking.
He had plunged into an involved melancholy. We sat for hours, often in profound silence. This was alarming to me, though I had already had some experience with such depression. Wolfgang Novak, the economist, though English came more easily to him, was another. His problems arose mainly, I think, from physical illness. And he felt a greater sense of the lost country than Oskar. Sometimes in the eatly evening I persuaded Oskar to come with
me for a short walk on the Drive. The tail end of sunsets over the Palisades seemed to appeal to him. At least he looked. He would put on full regalia—hat, suit coat, tie, no matter how hot or what I suggested—and we went slowly down the stairs, I wondering whether he would ever make it to the bottom. He seemed to me always suspended between two floors.
We walked slowly uptown, stopping to sit on a bench and watch night rise above the Hudson. When we returned to his room, if I sensed he had loosened up a bit, we listened to music on the radio; but if I tried to sneak in a news broadcast, he said to me, “Please, I can not more stand of world misery.” I shut off the radio. He was right, it was a time of no good news. I squeezed my brain. What could I sell him? Was it good news to be alive? Who could argue the point? Sometimes I read aloud to him—I remember he liked the first part of
Life on the Mississippi.
We still went to the Automat once or twice a week, he perhaps out of habit, because he didn't feel like going anywhere—I to get him out of his room. Oskar ate little, he toyed with a spoon. His dull eyes looked as though they had been squirted with a dark dye.
Once after a momentary cooling rainstorm we sat on newspapers on a wet bench overlooking the river and Oskar at last began to talk. In tormented English he conveyed his intense and everlasting hatred of the Nazis for destroying his career, uprooting his life after half a century, and flinging him like a piece of bleeding meat to the hawks. He cursed them thickly, the German nation, an inhuman, conscienceless, merciless people. “They are pigs mazquerading as peacogs,” he said. “I feel certain that
my wife, in her heart, was a Jew hater.” It was a terrible bitterness, an eloquence almost without vocabulary. He became silent again. I hoped to hear more about his wife but decided not to ask.
Afterwards in the dark Oskar confessed that he had attempted suicide during his first week in America. He was living, at the end of May, in a small hotel, and had one night filled himself with barbiturates; but his phone had fallen off the table and the hotel operator had sent up the elevator boy who found him unconscious and called the police. He was revived in the hospital.
“I did not mean to do it,” he said, “it was a mistage.”
“Don't ever think of it again,” I said, “it's total defeat.”
“I don't,” he said wearily, “because it is so arduouz to come back to life.”
“Please, for any reason whatever.”
Afterwards when we were walking, he surprised me by saying, “Maybe we ought to try now the legture onze more.”
We trudged back to the house and he sat at his hot desk, I trying to read as he slowly began to reconstruct the first page of his lecture. He wrote, of course, in German.

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