The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction (29 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

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BOOK: The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction
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Gropius stayed overnight and Alma drove him to his train to Berlin in the morning.
Gropius, holding his hat, said he was sorry for the trouble he had caused. Then he said, “When shall we meet again?”
“Never,” said Alma. “I am a happy woman. Please stay away from my life.”
“Never is
never
.”
Gropius said none but the brave deserves the fair.
He got into the train and sent her a worshipful telegram from every station it stopped at.
Gustav, that night, collapsed outside Alma’s bedroom. The candle he was holding fell to the floor and the house almost went up in flames.
Alma got him to bed; she put Gropius out of her mind, where he remained until years later, long after Mahler’s death, when she felt she could no longer stand Oskar Kokoschka’s wild fantasies and burning desires.
 
 
Mahler, leaning out of his window at the Hotel Majestic above Central Park, in New York City, heard “boom” in the street below. The boom was for a dead fireman in a horse-drawn funeral cortege.
Mahler wrote the muffled drumbeat into his Tenth Symphony: BOOM!
 
 
“I know I am lost if I go any further with the present confusion in my life.”—Kokoschka
“May I see you?” he asked.
Alma loved men of genius.
He was worldly, sensuous. He needed love and money.
He came to visit and they went to bed. She woke him and said it was time to go home. When he left her he walked till dawn.
He signed her into his name: Alma Oskar Kokoschka.
“Read this letter in the evening.”
He bought the Paris newspapers to check on the weather when she was there.
“Alma, I passed your house at one o’clock and could have cried out in anger because you see the others and leave me in the dirty street.”
The women in his paintings resemble Alma.
Remembering Gustav and fearing that she was pregnant by Oskar, Alma worried about any Jew who might see her pregnant.
In view of the Jungfrau he painted her on a balcony.
Oskar’s mother railed against his obsession. “She is like a high-society mistress, a whore without garters.”
“Shut your black mouth,” he told her.
Alma feared pregnancy. It was wrong to have had a child out of wedlock. Maria had died because Alma had become pregnant before her marriage to Mahler.
Oskar’s mother threatened to shoot her.
Kokoschka went to Alma’s house and found his mother walking around with a gun in her purse.
“Give it here.”
She crooked her finger and said, “Boom.”
“Those who sin will be punished,” Alma said one night to Mahler’s ghost.
Oskar: “I am not allowed to see you every day because you want to keep alive the memory of this Jew who is so foreign to me.”
“I must have you for my wife or else my talent will perish miserably.”
She said she would marry him only after he had created a masterwork.
“Alma, please don’t send me any money. I don’t want it.”
Die Windsbraut
is Oskar’s painting of Alma and him. She sleeps with her head on his shoulder. He gazes into the distance.
“I dreamed that Gustav was conducting. I was sitting near him and heard the music but it clearly displeased me.”
“How far behind me my life with Mahler seems.”
“I need my crazy mystique of the artist and from this I always manage to fill my head. The whole world is ultimately a dream that turns bad.”
In Kokoschka’s painting at Semmering, Alma ascends to heaven in fiery immolation. Oskar is in hell, surrounded by sexy fat serpents.
Alma was pregnant. “She will marry me now”: Kokoschka.
Gustav’s death mask arrived in the mail. Alma unpacked it and hung it on the wall. She entered the clinic for an abortion.
Austria declared war on Serbia. Alma wrote in her diary: “I imagine I have caused the whole upheaval.”
“I would like to break free from Oskar.”
“God punished me by sending this man into my life.”
“I would give up every man on earth for music.”
“Wagner means more to me than anyone. His time will come again.”
Mrs. Kokoschka picked up her clay pot and dropped it on the floor. She withdrew a blood-red string of beads she was holding for Kokoschka. Alma had given them to him as a memento of his love for her.
“Yesterday evening I ran away from Oskar.”
“What of the Jewish question
now
? They need help and direction—brains and feeling from those of us who are Christians.”
She wrote to Gropius.
“I will get him quickly. I feel this is, or will become, something important to me.”
Walter’s birthday fell on the day Mahler had died.
Alma went to see him. “Finally in the course of an hour he fell in love with me. We were where the wine and good food raised our spirits. I went to the train with him where love overpowered him so that he dragged me onto the moving train, and come what might I had no choice but to travel to Hanover with him.”
Walter had the manners of a husband. He was talented, handsome, an Aryan. He was crazily jealous of Kokoschka. Alma married him.
“So married, so free, and yet so bound.”
“I wanted to make my own music, or music about which I felt deeply, because Gustav’s was foreign to me.”
“Jews have given us spirit but have eaten our hearts.”
“My husband means nothing to me anymore. Walter has come too late.”
She had met Franz Werfel. “Werfel is a rather fat Jew with full lips and watery almond eyes. He says: ‘How can I be happy when there is someone who is suffering?’ which I have heard verbatim from another egocentric, Gustav Mahler.”
 
 
Alma married Werfel. He was a Jew who looked like a Jew, yet passable. She had had half a Jew in Mahler, and Werfel made the other half. They had a lot to learn, these Jews. They needed a Christian quality. Gropius was a true Aryan, a fine gentleman,
passionate in his way, though she had never loved him. She had given him up for Werfel. She often thought of Kokoschka but hated him. “He wants to annihilate me.”
Werfel needed her. He lived in dirty rooms, his clothes uncared for, cigarette butts on the floor. He needed a wife. He already had fathered a son Gropius thought was his child. Walter guessed that out and departed. He had tried to keep their daughter, Manon, but Alma had fought him for her. Gropius retreated like a gentleman. Manon died and was buried next to her half sister, Maria Mahler.
Alma lived with Franz Werfel through her best days. He wrote
Verdi
,
The Song of Bernadette, and The Star of the Unborn.
He made money and they spent it freely. The only really bad time was when they were trying to find their way out of Europe as the Nazis sought them in Spain. Then an American diplomat assisted them and they got out of Portugal on a Portuguese ship and afterward lived in Beverly Hills, U.S.A. Alma was feeling happy again.
But there is no beating out illness and bad health. Werfel died in his sixties. Alma did not attend his funeral though the guests had assembled and were awaiting her. Bruno Walter thrice played a Schubert impromptu as they waited for Alma to appear, but she had had it with funerals of three husbands. She was drinking Benedictine and never got to Werfel’s funeral. She often felt that Kokoschka had been her best lover.
 
 
“Mahler had a long white face. He sat with his coat buttoned up to his ears. He looked like death masquerading as a monk. I told him this, hoping to exorcise my ghostly pangs of dread.”
“Why do I fancy I am free when my character contracts me like a prison?”: Mahler.
“Where is
my
truth?”: Alma.
“He was always stopping on a walk to feel his pulse. I had always known his heart was diseased.”
“The Jews are at once an unprecedented danger and the greatest good luck to humanity.”
“I see Hitler as a genuine German idealist, something that is unthinkable to Jews.”
“But fortunately he was stupid.”
“Oh, my God, my God, why do you so love evil?”
“Werfel believed in the world revolution through Bolshevism. I believed that Fascism would solve the problems of the world.”
Alma wore long necklaces with earrings and used dark lipstick. She drank Benedictine and ate little.
“Death is a contagious disease. That is the reason,” Alma wrote in her diary, “why I will not place a photograph of a living person next to someone who is dead.”
She thought she had met Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria on a mountaintop and he asked Alma to bear his child.
One night Mahler’s ghost appeared, momentarily freezing her fingers.
“Alma, aren’t you yet moved by my classically beautiful music? One can hear eternity in it.”
“How can one love Mahler if she best loves Wagner?”
“My time will come.”
Mahler diminished as he faded.
Alma felt he had handled her badly in her youth.
Yet there were moments she thought she still loved Mahler. She pictured him in a cemetery surrounded by his grave.
Alma favored cremation.
She was eighty-five when she died in 1964, older than King Lear.
 
 
Alma redeemed.
 
1984
THE NATURAL
THE ASSISTANT
THE MAGIC BARREL
A NEW LIFE
IDIOTS FIRST
THE FIXER
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE TENANTS
REMBRANDT’S HAT
DUBIN’S LIVES
GOD’S GRACE
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
“Armistice”: Written in Washington in 1940; published here for the first time.
“Spring Rain”: Written in 1942 and published here for the first time.
“The Literary Life of Laban Goldman”: First published in
Assembly
, vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1943), pp. 24–27.
“The Grocery Store”: Written in 1943 and published here for the first time.
“Benefit Performance”: First published in
Threshold
, no. 3 (February 1943), pp. 20–22.
“The Place Is Different Now”: First published in
American Prefaces
, no. 3 (Spring 1943), pp. 230–42.
“An Apology”: First published in
Commentary
, vol. 12, no. 5 (November 1957), pp. 460–64.
“Riding Pants”: Written in 1953 and published here for the first time.
“A Confession of Murder”: The first section of the unpublished novella
The Man Nobody Could Lift.
See introduction, p. vii. Published here for the first time.
“The Elevator”: Written in Italy in 1957; first published in
The Paris Review
, vol. 31, no. 112 (Fall 1989).
“An Exorcism”: First published in
Harper’s,
vol. 237, no. 1423 (December 1968), pp. 76–89. The text used here was revised by the author for
The Stories of Bernard Malamud
but was not included in that book.
“A Wig”: First published in
The Atlantic,
vol. 245, no. 1 (January 1980), pp. 33-36.
“Zora’s Noise”: First published in
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
[GQ] (January 1985), pp. 124-26; 164-68.
“A Lost Grave”: First published in
Esquire
, vol. 103, no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 204–6, but written a year or so earlier.
“In Kew Gardens”: First published in
Partisan
Review, vol. 51, no. 4 (1984) and vol. 52, no. 1 (1985), pp. 536–40.
“Alma Redeemed”: First published in
Commentary
, vol. 78, no. 1 (July 1984), pp. 30–34. See comments on this and the previous story in the introduction, p. vii.
1
The autobiographical quotations are from “Long Work, Short Life,” the seventh Ben Belitt Lecture, given by Bernard Malamud at Bennington College on October 30, 1984.
Copyright © 1989 by Ann Malamud
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Robert Giroux
All rights reserved
 
 
Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
 
 
Designed by Jack Harrison
 
 
eISBN 9781466805477
First eBook Edition : November 2011
 
 
First printing, 1989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malamud, Bernard.
The people, and uncollected stories / Bernard Malamud;
edited and introduced by Robert Giroux.
p. cm.
I. Giroux, Robert. II. Title.
PS3563.A4P4 1990 89-11764
813’.54—dc20

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