The Complete Stories (46 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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But he finished the picture on Saturday night, Angelo’s gun pressed to his head. Then the Venus was taken from him and Scarpio and Angelo baked, smoked, stippled, and varnished, stretched and framed Fidelman’s masterwork as the artist lay on his bed in his room in a state of collapse.
“The Venus of Urbino, c’est moi.”
“What about my three hundred and fifty?” Fidelman asked Angelo during a card game in the padrone’s stuffy office several days later. After completing the painting the copyist was again back on janitorial duty.
“You’ll collect when we’ve got the Tiziano.”
“I did my part.”
“Don’t question decisions.”
“What about my passport?”
“Give it to him, Scarpio.”
Scarpio handed him the passport. Fidelman flipped through the booklet and saw all the pages were intact.
“If you skiddoo now,” Angelo warned him, “you’ll get spit.”
“Who’s skiddooing?”
“So the plan is this: You and Scarpio will row out to the castello after midnight. The caretaker is an old man and half deaf. You hang our picture and breeze off with the other.”
“If you wish,” Fidelman suggested, “I’ll gladly do the job myself. Alone, that is.”
“Why alone?” said Scarpio suspiciously.
“Don’t be foolish,” Angelo said. “With the frame it weighs half a ton. Now listen to directions and don’t give any. One reason I detest Americans is they never know their place.”
Fidelman apologized.
“I’ll follow in the putt-putt and wait for you halfway between
Isola Bella and Stresa in case we need a little extra speed at the last minute.”
“Do you expect trouble?”
“Not a bit. If there’s any trouble it’ll be your fault. In that case watch out.”
“Off with his head,” said Scarpio. He played a deuce and took the pot.
Fidelman laughed politely.
The next night, Scarpio rowed a huge weatherbeaten rowboat, both oars muffled. It was a moonless night with touches of Alpine lightning in the distant sky. Fidelman sat on the stern, holding with both hands and balancing against his knees the large framed painting, heavily wrapped in monk’s cloth and cellophane, and tied around with rope.
At the island the majordomo docked the boat and secured it. Fidelman, peering around in the dark, tried to memorize where they were. They carried the picture up two hundred steps, both puffing when they got to the formal gardens on top.
The castello was black except for a square of yellow light from the caretaker’s turret window high above. As Scarpio snapped the lock of an embossed heavy wooden door with a strip of celluloid, the yellow window slowly opened and an old man peered down. They froze against the wall until the window was drawn shut.
“Fast,” Scarpio hissed. “If anyone sees us they’ll wake the whole island.”
Pushing open the creaking door, they quickly carried the painting, growing heavier as they hurried, through an enormous room cluttered with cheap statuary and, by the light of the majordomo’s flashlight, ascended a narrow flight of spiral stairs. They hastened in sneakers down a deep-shadowed, tapestried hall into the picture gallery, Fidelman stopping in his tracks when he beheld the Venus, the true and magnificent image of his counterfeit creation.
“Let’s get to work.” Scarpio quickly unknotted the rope and they unwrapped Fidelman’s painting and leaned it against the wall. They were taking down the Titian when footsteps sounded unmistakably in the hall. Scarpio’s flashlight went out.
“Sh, it’s the caretaker. If he comes in I’ll have to conk him.”
“That’ll destroy Angelo’s plan—deceit, not force.”
“I’ll think of that when we’re out of here.”
They pressed their backs to the wall, Fidelman’s clammy, as the old man’s steps drew nearer. The copyist had anguished visions of losing the picture and made helter-skelter plans somehow to reclaim it. Then
the footsteps faltered, came to a stop, and, after a moment of intense hesitation, moved in another direction. A door slammed and the sound was gone.
It took Fidelman several seconds to breathe. They waited in the dark without moving until Scarpio shone his light. Both Venuses were resting against the same wall. The major domo closely inspected each canvas with one eye shut, then signaled the painting on the left. “That’s the one, let’s wrap it up.”
Fidelman broke into profuse sweat.
“Are you crazy? That’s mine. Don’t you know a work of art when you see it?” He pointed to the other picture.
“Art?” said Scarpio, removing his hat and turning pale. “Are you sure?” He peered at the painting.
“Without a doubt.”
“Don’t try to confuse me.” He tapped the dagger under his coat.
“The lighter one is the Titian,” Fidelman said through a dry throat. “You smoked mine a shade darker.”
“I could have sworn yours was the lighter.”
“No, Titian’s. He used light varnishes. It’s a historical fact.”
“Of course.” Scarpio mopped his brow with a soiled handkerchief. “The trouble is with my eyes. One is in bad shape and I overuse the other.”
“Tst-tst,” clucked Fidelman.
“Anyway, hurry up. Angelo’s waiting on the lake. Remember, if there’s any mistake he’ll cut your throat first.”
They hung the darker painting on the wall, quickly wrapped the lighter, and hastily carried it through the long hall and down the stairs, Fidelman leading the way with Scarpio’s light.
At the dock the majordomo nervously turned to Fidelman. “Are you absolutely sure we have the right one?”
“I give you my word.”
“I accept it but under the circumstances I’d better have another look. Shine the flashlight through your fingers.”
Scarpio knelt to undo the wrapping once more, and Fidelman, trembling, brought the flashlight down hard on Scarpio’s straw hat, the light shattering in his hand. The majordomo, pulling at his dagger, collapsed.
Fidelman had trouble loading the painting into the rowboat but finally got it in and settled, and quickly took off. In ten minutes he had rowed out of sight of the dark castled island. Not long afterwards he thought he heard Angelo’s putt-putt behind him, and his heart beat
erratically, but the padrone did not appear. He rowed as the waves deepened.
Locarno, sixty kilometers.
A wavering flash of lightning pierced the broken sky, lighting the agitated lake all the way to the Alps, as a dreadful thought assailed Fidelman: had he the right painting, after all? After a minute he pulled in his oars, listened once more for Angelo, and, hearing nothing, stepped to the stern of the rowboat, letting it drift as he frantically unwrapped the Venus.
In the pitch black, on the lake’s choppy waters, he saw she was indeed his, and by the light of numerous matches adored his handiwork.
1963
O
skar Gassner sits in his cotton-mesh undershirt and summer bathrobe at the window of his stuffy, hot, dark hotel room on West Tenth Street as 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 marketplace. 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 miserable cheat. Here I was panting to get going, and across the ocean Adolf Hitler, in black boots and a square mustache, was tearing up and spitting at all the flowers. Will I ever forget what went on with Danzig that summer?
Times were still hard from the Depression but I made a little living from the poor refugees. They were all over uptown Broadway in 1939. I 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 Abendblatt.
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. He breathed as though he was fighting a war; 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 appetite. 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 Eighty-fifth Street, near the Drive, we met three times a week at fourthirty, worked an hour and a half, then, since it was too hot to cook, had supper at the Seventy-second 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 not 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 velour armchair, hot enough to broil in, and through tall windows stared at the colorless sky above Eighty-fifth 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 early 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 make it to the bottom.
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 cannot 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 tell 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 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, 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, and eloquence beyond the words he spoke. He became silent again. I wanted to hear more about his wife but decided not to ask.

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