The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (27 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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Spanning the knotted strings of glowing small fires across the night sky, he beheld, after its slow coming into sight, like a lighted ship out of fog, his personal constellation: the Cellist. Dworkin had observed it in childhood, and often since then, a seated figure playing his cello—somewhere between Cassiopeia and Lyra. Tonight he beheld Casals sitting in a chair constructed of six jeweled stars, playing gorgeously as he hoarsely sang. Dworkin watched engrossed, trying to identify the music; like Bach but not Bach. He was not able to. Casals was playing a prelude lamenting his fate. Apparently he had—for him—died young. It was hours past midnight and Zora slumbered heavily, exhausted by her lonely journey. After the stars had dimmed and the celestial cellist and
his music all but vanished, Dworkin drew on a pair of knee socks under his pajamas, and in tennis shoes he went quietly downstairs to the music room, where he lifted the dark cello out of its hand-carved casket and for a moment held it in his arms.
He dug the end pin into the pockmarked floor—he would not use a puck, he had informed both his wives. Dworkin wanted the floor to move if the cello caused it to. Embracing the instrument between his knees, the delicate curved shell against his breast, he drew his bow across the bridge, his left fingers fluttering as though they were singing. Dworkin felt the vibrations of the cello rise in his flesh to his head. He tried to clear his throat. Despite the time of night and the live pain in his shoulder, he played from the andante of Schubert’s B-flat major trio, imagining the music of the piano and violin. Schubert breaks the heart and calls it
un
poco
mosso
. That is the art of it. The longing heart forever breaks yet is gravely contained. The cello Dworkin passionately played played him.
He played for the space and solidity and shape of his house, the way it fitted together. He played for the long years of music here, and for the room in which he had practiced and composed for a quarter of a century, often looking up from his score to glance at the elms through the window of the arched wall. Here were his scores, records, books. Above his head hung portraits of Piatigorsky and Boccherini, who seemed to watch him when he entered the room.
Dworkin played for his gabled dark-gray, blue-shuttered house, built early in the century, where he had lived with both of his wives. Ella had a warm singing voice excellently placed and supported. Had she been braver she would have been a professional singer. “Ah,” she said, “if I were a brave person.” “Try,” Dworkin urged. “But I’m not,” said Ella. She had never dared. In the house she sang wherever she happened to be. She was the one who had thought of putting in the stained-glass windows of beasts and flowers. Dworkin played the allegro, and once more the andante of the heart-laden Schubert. He sang to Ella. In her house.
As he played, Zora, in a black nightgown, stood at the closed door of the music room.
After listening a moment she returned quickly to the bedroom.
When he left the music room, Dworkin detected his wife’s perfume and knew she had been standing at the door.
He searched his heart and thought he understood what she had expected to hear.
 
 
As he went along the hallway, he caught a glimpse of a fleeting figure.
“Zora,” he called.
She paused, but it was not Zora.
“Ella,” Dworkin sobbed. “My dearest wife, I have loved you always.”
She was not there to assent or ask why.
 
 
When Dworkin got back to bed, Zora was awake. “Why should I diet? It’s an unnatural act.”
“Have you been lying there thinking of dieting?”
“I’ve been listening to myself.”
“You hear something again, after being absolved in your travels?”
“I believe I am slowly going deaf,” Zora said.
“Are you still hearing the whine or wail?”
“Oho, do I hear it.”
“Is it like the sound of someone singing?”
“I would call it the sound of my utter misery.”
Dworkin then told her he was ready to move.
“I guess we ought to sell the house.”
“Why ought we?”
“It comes to me at this late date that it’s never been yours.”
“Better late than later.” Zora laughed. “It is true, I have never loved this house.”
“Because it was Ella’s?”
“Because I never loved it.”
“Is that what caused your noises, do you think?”
“The noises cause the noises,” Zora said.
 
 
Dworkin, the next day, telephoned the real estate agents, who came that night, a man and his amiable wife in their sixties.
They inspected the house from basement to attic. The man offered to buy a child’s fiddle he had seen in the attic, but Dworkin wouldn’t sell.
“You’ll get a good price for this place,” the woman said to Zora. “It’s been kept in first-rate shape.”
When they were moving out in the early spring, Dworkin said he had always loved this house, and Zora said she had never really cared for it.
 
1985
HECHT WAS a born late bloomer.
One night he woke hearing rain on his windows and thought of his young wife in her wet grave. This was something new, because he hadn’t thought of her in too many years to be comfortable about. He saw her in her uncovered grave, rivulets of water streaming in every direction, and Celia, whom he had married when they were of unequal ages, lying alone in the deepening wet. Not so much as a flower grew on her grave, though he could have sworn he had arranged perpetual care.
He stepped into his thoughts perhaps to cover her with a plastic sheet, and though he searched in the cemetery under dripping trees and among many wet plots, he was unable to locate her. The dream he was into offered no tombstone name, row, or plot number, and though he searched for hours, he had nothing to show for it but his wet self. The grave had taken off. How can you cover a woman who isn’t where she is supposed to be? That’s Celia.
The next morning, Hecht eventually got himself out of bed and into a subway train to Jamaica to see where she was buried. He hadn’t been to the cemetery in many years, no particular surprise to anybody considering past circumstances. Life with Celia wasn’t exactly predictable. Yet things change in a lifetime, or seem to. Hecht had lately been remembering his life more vividly, for whatever reason. After you hit sixty-five, some things that have two distinguishable sides seem to pick up another
that complicates the picture as you look or count. Hecht counted.
Now, though Hecht had been more or less in business all his life, he kept few personal papers, and though he had riffled through a small pile of them that morning, he had found nothing to help him establish Celia’s present whereabouts; and after a random looking at gravestones for an hour he felt the need to call it off and spend another hour with a young secretary in the main office, who fruitlessly tapped his name and Celia’s into a computer and came up with a scramble of interment dates, grave plots and counter plots, that exasperated him.
“Look, my dear,” Hecht said to the flustered young secretary, “if that’s how far you can go on this machine, we have to find another way to go further, or I will run out of patience. This grave is lost territory as far as I am concerned, and we have to do something practical to find it.”
“What do you think I’m doing, if I might ask?”
“Whatever you are doing doesn’t seem to be much help. This computer is supposed to have a good mechanical memory, but it’s either out of order or rusty in its parts. I admit I didn’t bring any papers with me, but so far the only thing your computer has informed us is that it has nothing much to inform us.”
“It has informed us it is having trouble locating the information you want.”
“Which adds up to zero minus zero,” Hecht said. “I wish to remind you that a lost grave isn’t a missing wedding ring we are talking about. It is a lost cemetery plot of the lady who was once my wife that I wish to recover.”
The pretty young woman he was dealing with had a tight-lipped conversation with an unknown person, then the buzzer on her desk sounded and Hecht was given permission to go into the director’s office.
“Mr. Goodman will now see you.”
He resisted “Good for Mr. Goodman.” Hecht only nodded, and followed the young woman to an inner office. She knocked once and disappeared, as a friendly voice talked through the door.
“Come in, come in.”
“Why should I worry if it’s not my fault?” Hecht told himself.
Mr. Goodman pointed to a chair in front of his desk and Hecht was soon seated, watching him pour orange juice from a quart container into a small green glass.
“Will you join me in a sweet mouthful?” he asked, nodding at the container. “I usually take refreshment this time of the morning. It keeps me balanced.”
“Thanks,” said Hecht, meaning he had more serious problems. “Why I am here is that I am looking for my wife’s grave, so far with no success.” He cleared his throat, surprised at the emotion that had gathered there.
Mr. Goodman observed Hecht with interest.
“Your outside secretary couldn’t find it,” Hecht went on, regretting he hadn’t found the necessary documents that would identify the grave site. “Your young lady tried her computer in every combination but couldn’t produce anything. What was lost is still lost, in other words, a woman’s grave.”
“Lost is premature,” Goodman offered. “
Displaced
might be better. In my twenty-eight years in my present capacity, I don’t believe we have lost a single grave.”
The director tapped lightly on the keys of his desk computer, studied the screen with a squint, and shrugged. “I am afraid that we now draw a blank. The letter
H
volume of our ledgers that we used before we were computerized seems to be missing. I assure you this can’t be more than a temporary condition.”
“That’s what your young lady already informed me.”
“She’s not my young lady, she’s my secretarial assistant.”
“I stand corrected,” Hecht said. “This meant no offense.”
“Likewise,” said Goodman. “But we will go on looking. Could you kindly tell me, if you don’t mind, what was the status of your relationship to your wife at the time of her death?” He peered over half-moon glasses to check the computer reading.
“There was no status. We were separated. What has that got to do with her burial plot?”
“The reason I inquire is, I thought it might refresh your memory. For example, is this the correct cemetery, the one you are looking
in—Mount Jereboam? Some people confuse us with Mount Hebron.”
“I guarantee you it was Mount Jereboam.”
Hecht, after a hesitant moment, gave these facts: “My wife wasn’t the most stable woman. She left me twice and disappeared for months. Although I took her back twice, we weren’t together at the time of her death. Once she threatened to take her life, though eventually she didn’t. In the end she died of a normal sickness, not cancer. This was years later, when we weren’t living together anymore, but I carried out her burial, to the best of my knowledge, in this exact cemetery. I also heard she had lived for a short time with some guy she met somewhere, but when she died, I was the one who buried her. Now I am sixty-five and lately I have had this urge to visit the grave of someone who lived with me when I was a young man. This is a grave which everybody now tells me they can’t locate.”
Goodman rose at his desk, a short man, five feet tall. “I will institute a careful research.”
“The quicker, the better,” Hecht replied. “I am still curious what happened to her grave.”
Goodman almost guffawed, but caught himself and thrust out his hand. “I will keep you well informed, don’t worry.”
Hecht left, irritated. On the train back to the city he thought of Celia and her various unhappinesses. He wished he had told Goodman she had spoiled his life.
That night it rained. To his surprise he found a wet spot on his pillow.
The next day Hecht again went to the graveyard. “What did I forget that I ought to remember?” he asked himself. Obviously the grave plot, row, and number. Though he sought it diligently he could not find it. Who can remember something he has once and for all put out of his mind? It’s like trying to grow beans out of a bag of birdseed.
“But I must be patient and I will find out. As time goes by I am bound to recall. When my memory says yes I won’t argue no.”
But weeks passed and Hecht still could not remember what he was trying to. “Maybe I have reached a dead end?”
Another month went by and at last the cemetery called him. It was Mr. Goodman, clearing his throat. Hecht pictured him at his desk sipping orange juice.
“Mr. Hecht?”
“The same.”
“This is Mr. Goodman. A happy Rosh Hashanah.”
“A happy Rosh Hashanah to you.”
“Mr. Hecht, I wish to report progress. Are you prepared for an insight?”
“You name it,” Hecht said.
“So let me use a better word. We have tracked your wife and it turns out she isn’t in the grave there where the computer couldn’t find her. To be frank, we found her in a grave with another gentleman.”
“What kind of gentleman? Who in God’s name is he? I am her legal husband.”
“This one, if you will pardon me, is the man who lived with your wife after she left you. They lived together on and off, so don’t blame yourself too much. After she died he got a court order, and they removed her to a different grave, where we also laid him after his death. The judge gave him the court order because he convinced him that he had loved her for many years.”
Hecht was embarrassed. “What are you talking about? How could he transfer her grave anywhere if it wasn’t his legal property? Her grave belonged to me. I paid cash for it.”
“That grave is still there,” Goodman explained, “but the names were mixed up. His name was Kaplan but the workmen buried her under Caplan. Your grave is still in the cemetery, though we had it under Kaplan and not Hecht. I apologize to you for this inconvenience but I think we now have got the mystery cleared up.”
“So thanks,” said Hecht. He felt he had lost a wife but was no longer a widower.
“Also,” Goodman reminded him, “don’t forget you gained an
empty grave for future use. Nobody is there and you own the plot.”
Hecht said that was obviously true.
The story had astounded him. Yet whenever he thought of telling it to someone he knew, or had just met, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
 
1984

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