The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (26 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

Tags: #Fiction, #Jewish, #Short Stories (Single Author)

BOOK: The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction
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“Here it is in cold print,” Zora, her hand on her bosom, said. “Now I know I’m not going crazy.”
Dworkin took the newspaper. An article described a class-action suit organized by several citizens in the eastern part of town against the D-R Paints Company “for pollution of the atmosphere.” They cited “a persistent harrowing noise,” and one of the women interviewed complained of “a sneaky sound that goes up and down like a broken boat whistle. I hear it at night, but I sometimes hear it during the day.”
“I feel as though I have been reprieved from being thought mad,” Zora said bitterly.
“Not by me,” Dworkin insisted.
“But you never seemed to hear the whine I’ve been hearing.”
“In good faith.”
Zora began slowly to waltz on the rug in the living room. Dworkin’s cello was resting on the floor, and he sat down and plucked strings to her dancing.
 
 
One rainy night, Dworkin in pajamas, vigorously brushing his teeth, heard an insistent, weird, thrumming whistle. “What have we here?” he asked himself uneasily. He had been attempting to develop a melody that eluded him, when a keen breeze blowing from afar seemed to invade his ears. It was as though he were lying in bed and someone had poured a pitcher full of whistling wind into both ears. Dworkin forcefully shook his head to dispel the uncomfortable sound, but it refused to disappear.
As Zora lay in bed perusing the paper—she complained she couldn’t concentrate well enough to read a book—Dworkin went downstairs for a coat and rain hat and stepped out-of-doors. Facing toward the D-R Paints Company, he listened intently. Though he could not see the factory in the rainy dark, a few foggy, bluish lights were visible in the east, and he felt certain the plant was in operation. The low, thrumming wind in his ears persisted. It was possible that a machine had gone haywire in the factory and was squealing like a dying animal. Possible, but not highly likely—they
surely would have found some means to shut it off, he thought irritably. Could it be that the experience was, on his part, a form of autosuggestion out of empathy for Zora? He waited for the droning whine to thin out and crawl off, but nothing happened. Dworkin shook his fist at the foggy blue lights and hurried inside.
“Zora, has your noise been sounding different lately?”
“It isn’t only mine,” she responded. “It’s other people’s too. You read that yourself in the
Courier.”
“Granted, but would you say it has increased in volume lately—or otherwise changed?”
“It stays more or less the same but is still with me. I hear it plainly enough. I hear it this very minute.”
“In this room, or throughout the house?”
“There’s no one place. I used to feel snug here and enjoyed reading in bed. Now I’m afraid to come up at night.”
Listening affirmed it overwhelmingly—the ongoing intrusive sound—her keen wail, his thrumming whine.
Dworkin then told his wife about his own unsettling experience. He described what he was presently hearing in both ears. “It’s an insult, to say the least.”
But Zora responded jubilantly. “At least you’ve heard it. Thank God.”
He was about to ask why that should make her so gay but didn’t.
As if he had asked, she said, “If I seem relieved, it’s simply because I feel that you can now confirm that what I heard, and was trying to get you to hear, last summer, was substantial and real.”
“Whoever said it wasn’t?”
Her lips trembled. Dworkin observed her watching him. When he coughed she cleared her throat.
 
 
In the morning he went to the music room and got his cello out of its case. It was like lifting a girl gently out of bed. The music room—Ella’s name for it; she had named all the rooms in the house—was a large, white-walled room with a mellow pine floor. The eastern wall was rounded, containing four windows through
which the morning sun shone warmly. It was a cold room in winter, but Dworkin had installed a wood stove. Here he practiced, composed, sometimes taught. After nervously tuning up he began the first bars of the Prelude to the Bach Unaccompanied D-minor Suite. He had played it in his sleep last night.
Dworkin crouched over the cello, playing somberly, slowly, drawing the sensuous melody out of his instrument. He played the Bach as though pleading with God. He speaks as a man stating his fate. He says it quietly and, as he plays, deepens the argument. He sings now, almost basso, as though he were someone imprisoned in a well singing to a circle of blue sky.
The music ceased. Dworkin, with bowed head, listened. He had been struggling to obliterate the whirling whistle in his head but it had affectively dirtied every note. He could not keep the Bach pure. He could not, past the opening measures, hear himself play. Gripping the cello by its neck, he rose from the chair with a cry.
“Zora,” he called.
She arrived at once.
“What’s happening?”
He said he could not go on with the suite. It was curdled by the disgusting whine in his ears.
“Something drastic has to be done.”
She said they had already joined the class-action suit.
He threatened to abandon the accursed town if there was no quick improvement in the situation; and Zora, observing him, said that was entirely on his own head.
 
 
Away from home there was some measure of relief. Driving to Lenox for a class, he escaped the sound in his ears—certainly it diminished outside of Elmsville, but it worried him that he seemed still to be listening for its return. He couldn’t be sure he was entirely rid of it. Yet just as he thought he had begun taking the noise with him wherever he went, the situation seemed to change.
One night in winter the
Courier
announced that the malfunctioning ventilation system at the plant had been replaced by a noiseless apparatus. Zora and Dworkin, as they lay in bed bundled
in blankets, listened with two of the three windows wide open. She heard the same unhappy sound, he only the delicious country silence. But the noise had diminished a little, Zora admitted, and possibly she could stand it now.
 
 
In the spring, as she approached her forty-second birthday, she was restless again. She had gone back to the gallery where she had formerly worked and was in the process of arranging a show of two women painters and a male sculptor. During the day Zora wasn’t home; Dworkin was—practicing and teaching. He was at work on a sonata for four cellos that was developing well. Four cellos gave it an organlike choral quality.
But Zora, after the gallery day, was impatient with herself, self-critical, “not with it.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind,” Dworkin said one evening after they had had dinner out.
“Nothing much.”
“Or is it the usual thing?”
“I can’t burden you with my every worry.”
She wiped her eyes but was not crying.
That night she woke Dworkin and, in a hushed, hesitant voice, begged him to listen. “I mean, just listen to what you hear in this room. What do you hear?”
He listened until he heard the cosmos, the rush of stars; otherwise he heard nothing.
“Not much, I’m afraid. Nothing I can lay a finger on.”
On earth he heard nothing.
“Don’t you hear,” she asked, slowly sitting up, “a sort of eerie whine? This is drawn out as though at the far end of someone crying. I would call it a ghostly sound.”
She held Dworkin tightly.
“Ghostly?” he said, trying to see her in the dark.
She listened keenly. “It has that quality.”
“No,” Dworkin replied after a good two minutes. “I don’t hear any wail, whine, or whatever. I emphatically don’t.”
In the morning she firmly asked, “Would you move out of this house if it came to that, Dworkin? I mean if I asked you to?”
He said he would once he felt certain he heard the noise she was hearing. She seemed to accept that as fair.
 
 
Dworkin waited by the D-R factory fence in every wind and weather. He had talked to the owner, who promised him the problem was already solved. Zora said she didn’t think so. They listened together on the bedroom deck, and Zora, pale-faced, raised a pale finger when she heard the noise especially clearly. “As though it were directly in front of our faces.”
He wondered whether what she was hearing might be psychologically inspired. Zora had wanted a child but had never had one. Might she who can’t conceive begin to hear a ghostly wailing?
Too simple, thought Dworkin.
Ella had taken her troubles in stride. Their baby was born dead, and she had not wanted another. But Zora could never conceive, though she had wanted to very much.
She agreed to have her ears tested when Dworkin suggested it. He reminded her that years ago she had had a disease of the middle ear, and she consented to see her former ear doctor.
Then Dworkin privately telephoned two of his neighbors and confirmed they no longer heard the noise Zora said she still heard.
“It’s been solved for my husband and me with the new ventilation system they put in,” Mrs. Spinker explained. “So we dropped the suit because nobody hears those noises anymore.”
“Or echo thereof?”
“Not anymore.”
Dworkin said he too would drop it.
Zora said she would try a new diet before visiting the ear doctor; but she promised to go.
 
 
The diet, after several weeks, appeared not to be working, and she was still hearing the quavering, eerie noise. “It comes up like
a flute that hangs still in the air and then flows back to its source. Then it begins to take on the quality of a moaning or mystical sound, if that’s what you can call it. Suppose it’s some distant civilization calling in, trying to get in touch with us, and for some reason I am the one person who can hear this signal, yet I can’t translate the message?”
“We all get signals we don’t necessarily pick up,” Dworkin said.
She woke him that night and said in a hushed voice, “There it goes again, a steady, clear sound, ending in a rising wail. Don’t you hear it now?”
“I tell you I don’t. Why do you still wake me?”
“I can’t help wishing you would hear it too.”
“I don’t want to. Leave me the hell out of it.”
“I hate you, Zworkin. You are a selfish beast.”
“You want to poison my ears.”
“I want you to confirm whether something I hear is real or unreal. Is that so much to ask somebody you are married to?”
“It’s your noise, Zora—don’t bang it on my head. How am I going to support us if I can’t play my cello?”
“Suppose I go deaf,” she said, but Dworkin was snoring.
 
 
“La la, la la,” she sang to herself in the looking glass. She had been gaining weight and resembled, she said, an ascending balloon.
Dworkin, returning from Lenox that evening, complained he’d had trouble in his master class because the arthritis in his shoulder was taking a harder bite.
When he came upstairs before midnight, she was reading a magazine in bed, both ears plugged with wads of cotton. Her legs snapped together when he entered the room.
“The bedroom is virtually a sound box,” Zora said. “It captures every earthly sound, not to speak of the unearthly.”
I’d better stop listening, he thought. If I hear what she does, that is the end of my music.
 
 
Zora drove off in a station wagon for three days, traveling into Vermont and New Hampshire. She had not asked Dworkin to come along. Each night she called from a different motel or country inn and sounded fine.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
“Just fine, I suppose. I confess I haven’t heard anything greatly unusual in my ears.”
“No noises from outer space?”
“Nor from inner.”
He said that was a good sign.
“What do you think we ought to do?” she asked.
“Concerning what?”
“About the house. About our lives. If I go on hearing noises when I get back.”
He said after a minute, “Zora, I would like to help you extricate yourself from this misery. I speak with love.”
“Don’t make me feel like a crippled pigeon,” she said. “I know I hear a real enough noise when I am in that house.”
“I warn you, I love this house,” he said.
 
 
On the night after her return from her trip alone, Dworkin, awakened by a burst of cello music in the sky, stood in yellow pajamas and woolen navy robe on the deck, staring at the clustered stars.

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