Authors: Bernard Malamud
The Tenants (18 page)
The bridegroom, after twice thoroughly searching his pockets, says he guesses he has forgotten to bring the wedding ring. All stare in astonishment. The father breathes momentarily easily but the rabbi says it is permitted to give the bride a coin instead, so Willie passes her a warm dime out of his pants pocket which Irene holds tightly in her palm during the ceremony.
The second time round—the first he listened intently
to the words, Willie slowly recites after the rabbi, “Hare at mekudeshet li betabaat zu, kedat moshe veyisrael.”
to the words, Willie slowly recites after the rabbi, “Hare at mekudeshet li betabaat zu, kedat moshe veyisrael.”
“What am I saying?” he asks Irene.
“I told you: ‘Behold thou art betrothed to me with this ring in accordance with the Law of Moses and Israel.’”
Willie wets his dry lips. “That just for the wedding?”
“For as long as you like. You said we’d get married if we had the wedding here.”
He nods and they kiss.
The guests shout, “Ya.”
The rabbi recites the seven benedictions.
Willie, with two bangs of his boot, crushes the wine goblet.
“Mazel Tov,” says Lesser.
The musicians pat and thud their drums, lightly, gayly. A bamboo flute sings.
“Now you are man and wife,” says the rabbi. “I feel like crying, but why should I cry if the Lord says, ‘Rejoice !’
“Willie and Irene, listen to me. Oh, what a hard thing is marriage in the best of circumstances. On top of this what if one is black and the other white? All I am saying is the world is imperfect. But this is your choice and I wish you health and happiness and the best of circumstances for you and your children. My
rabbinical colleagues will criticize me strongly for performing this ceremony, I know this, but I asked myself would God let me do it, so I did it.
rabbinical colleagues will criticize me strongly for performing this ceremony, I know this, but I asked myself would God let me do it, so I did it.
“Willie and Irene, to enjoy the pleasures of the body you don’t need a college education; but to live together in love is not so easy. Besides love that which preserves marriage is that which preserves life; this is mutual trust, insight into each other, generosity, and also character, so that you will do what is not easy to do when you must do it. What else can I tell you, my children? Either you understand or you don’t.
“I also ask you to remember that a wedding is a covenant. You agree to love each other and sustain your marriage. I wish to remind you of Abraham’s covenant with God, and through him, ours. If we stay covenanted to God it is easier to stay covenanted each to the other.”
“I will,” says Irene.
“Ain’t no god been in my house or ever was,” Willie says. “Like what color is he?”
“The color of light,” says the rabbi. “Without light who sees color?”
“Except black.”
“Someday God will bring together Ishmael and Israel to live as one people. It won’t be the first miracle.”
Willie laughs, cries, then stands mute.
“Let’s dance,” says Irene.
The guests, including the notables, rise, lift their feet, and dance. Some of the youths try to imitate the newly married couples shaking their hips and shoulders but give it up and break into a stomp, shake, and whirl. The women serve a feast of chicken with sesame and tomatoes, roasted yams, and palm wine. Some of the girls, wearing flowers in their hair, dance in a circle. The black youths whoop and shout as they whirl around them.
Those who feel like crying, cry. A wedding is a wedding.
Irene asks Lesser, as they dance a last dance together, “How do you account for this, Harry?”
“It’s something I imagined, like an act of love, the end of my book, if I dared.”
“You’re not so smart,” says Irene.
THE END
Lesser lifted the lid of the garbage can and a hot ordurous blast thickened his nostrils. He stepped back as though struck in the face. “A dead rat,” he muttered, but all he could see was a mass of crumpled blue paper balls—Willie had run out of yellow. Holding his nose he approached the can. Standing away
from it, he unfolded and put together several pages from at least three pieces of writing Willie was currently working on:
from it, he unfolded and put together several pages from at least three pieces of writing Willie was currently working on:
In this story, on a hot summer evening as supper smells of cabbage and spare ribs linger in the shimmering air outside the tenements on 141st Street near the river, four black men station themselves on four soft-tar rooftops along the street—two on either side: they stand in an uneven quadrangle. The people on the stoops fold up their chairs and quickly move inside. A blue Chrysler drives up and stops at the curb. The brothers on the roof open fire from four directions at the uniformed black cop getting out of his new car. Two of the bullets strike him in the belly, one near the spine, and one in the right buttock. The cop spins around waving his arms as though trying to swim out of an undertow but is dead as he sits on the bloody sidewalk, staring without sight at a pigeon coop on a deserted rooftop. The story is called “Four Deaths of a Pig.”
Lesser found a protest Blues song Willie had knocked off apparently in one draft, “Goldberg’s Last Days,” also called “The Goldberg Blues”:
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye All your life you been cheatin us poor black Now we gon take that gold pack off your back.
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye Your day is gone past You better run fast.
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye Comin a big U.S. Pogrom Well, I’m gonna sing and hum.
He had signed it “Blind Willie Shakespear.”
Related to this was a piece called “The First Pogrom in the U.S. of A.” In it a group of ghetto guerrillas in black leather jackets and caps decide it will help the cause of the Revolution to show that a pogrom can happen in the U.S. of A. So they barricade both ends of a business block, 127th Street between Lenox Avenue and Seventh, by parking hijacked trucks perpendicularly across both ends of the street. Working quickly from lists prepared in advance, they drag out of a laundromat, shoe store, pawnbroker’s shop, and several other kinds of establishments owned by them on both sides of the street, every Zionist they can find, male, female, and in-between. There is none of that Hitler shit of smashing store windows, forcing Zionists to scrub sidewalks, or rubbing their faces in dog crap. Working quickly in small squads, the guerrillas round up and line up a dozen wailing, hand-wringing Zionists, Goldberg among them, in front of his Liquor Emporium, and shoot them dead with pistols.
The guerrillas are gone before the sirens of the pigs can be heard.
The guerrillas are gone before the sirens of the pigs can be heard.
Willie had rewritten the pogrom twelve times, Lesser gave up searching for more of it. In one draft, some of the black clerks try to protect their former bosses but are warned off by shots fired in the air. One of them who persists is killed along with the Zionists. As a warning to Uncle Toms he is shot in the face.
There was a penciled note at the bottom of the last page of the story, in Willie’s handwriting. “It isn’t that I hate the Jews. But if I do any, it’s not because I invented it myself but I was born in the good old U.S. of A. and there’s a lot of that going on that gets under your skin. And it’s also from knowing the Jews, which I do. The way to black freedom is against them.”
Fog seeped into the building, filling each empty floor, each freezing room, with deadwater smell. A beach stank at low tide. A flock of gulls, wind-driven in a storm, had bloodied the cliff and lay rotting at the foot of it. The hall lights, except on Lesser’s floor, were out, bulbs smashed, stolen, screwed out of their sockets. The dirty stairs were lit at descending intervals by bulbs shedding watery light. Lesser replaced the burned-out ones but they did not last long. They
shone like lamps on an ocean front on a wet night. No one replaced the dead bulbs on Willie’s floor.
shone like lamps on an ocean front on a wet night. No one replaced the dead bulbs on Willie’s floor.
One night Lesser, hearing footsteps as he trod down the stairs, glanced into the stairwell. In the dim light he caught sight of a black man with a thick full beard, wearing a spiky Afro like a dangerous plant on his head. Or helmet of Achilles. He looked for a moment like an iron statue moving down the stairs. Lesser’s heart misgave him and he stopped in his tracks. When he gazed with eyes carefully focused the man was gone. Frightened imagination? Optical illusion? Could it have been Willie? Lesser hadn’t got a good view of his face but was certain the black had held in his hand a glittering instrument. Razor? Knife? Civil War saber? Against what atavistic foe? Not me: if it was Willie he’s had his revenge—more than revenge —destroyed my best creation. Reversing direction, Lesser hurried up to his room, hastily unlocked three locks with three keys, checked his dusty manuscript as a matter of course, then searched for something to protect himself with if he had to. He opened the closet door, the ax hung on its hook. He laid it on his desk by the typewriter.
Agitated, hungering to know was it Willie or was another black living in the house—a gang of them? —he crept stealthily down to Willie’s floor. His door was open, a shaft of shadowed yellow light falling into the pitch-dark hallway. Who’s he expecting? Elijah?
Inspiration? Pok pok pok. Son of a bitch, what’s he writing now? Boy murdering his mother? Or who dies in what pogrom?
Inspiration? Pok pok pok. Son of a bitch, what’s he writing now? Boy murdering his mother? Or who dies in what pogrom?
Willie, in six-inch Afro, his bulky green sweater pulled on over patched overalls—Ecce Homo!—his thick back to the door, sat on an apple box, furiously typing on the L. C. Smith atop an upended egg crate.
Hey Bill, Lesser thought in the hallway, moved by the sight of a man writing, how’s it going?
You couldn’t say that aloud to someone who had deliberately destroyed the almost completed manuscript of your most promising novel, product of ten years’ labor. You understood his history and possibly yours, but you could say nothing to him.
Lesser said nothing.
He tiptoes away.
Maybe Willie ascends to his locked door and listens to him at work. This is no rat listening to food, this is a man, a writer himself, best at stories, Bill Spear. What’s he listening for? To find out if I have survived? He listens for the end of my book. To hear it. To learn that I have, despite certain misfortunes, impediments, real tragedy, finally achieved it. He wants to believe I have—has to—so he can go on with his pockitying. Finish a book of his own—whatever. He lacks belief in his work and listens to mine for the
promised end. If Lesser can make it, then so can he.
promised end. If Lesser can make it, then so can he.
But what he listens for I am unable to construct. If his ear is sensitive he hears degrees of failure. Maybe he listens with evil ear, fingers crossed, to hinder me doing what he can’t? He could be witching my nail cuttings or crooked hairs caught in a broken comb he found in the garbage can. He wills I crack, fall apart, wither. He listens for, imagines, craves to create, my ultimate irreversible failure.
One winter’s night they meet on the frigid stairs. Darkness seeps up from the lower floors. It’s Willie all right, though he looks taller, thinner, his face knobby, his kinky hair standing on end. It’s Lesser, growing a limp Leninesque goatee crawling with fright. Willie’s going up, Lesser, ready to spring if he is sprung at, on his way down. They stare at the other, listening to him breathe, their discrete white breaths rising in the cold. Willie’s swollen eyes are the color of black paint, his sensual lips hidden by thick mustache and finely woven beard. His stubby, heavy-jointed fingers ball into huge fists.
Lesser, raising his coat collar, intends to squeeze by the black in silence, sees them, mutually repelled, drawing aside to let each other pass.
Instead, suppressing hatred, he makes a breathy effort:
“I forgive you, Willie, for what you did to me.”
“I forgive you for forgivin me.”
“For burning my book—”
“For stealin my bitch I love—”
“She made her free choice. I made mine. I treated you like any other man.”
“No Jew can treat me like a man—male or female. You think you are the Chosen People. Well, you are wrong on that.
We
are the Chosen People from as of now on. You gonna find that out soon enough, you gonna lose your fuckn pride.”
We
are the Chosen People from as of now on. You gonna find that out soon enough, you gonna lose your fuckn pride.”
“For God’s sake, Willie, we’re writers. Let’s talk to one another like men who write.”
“I dig a different drum than you do, Lesser. None of that fuckn form for me. You hurt my inside confidence with that word. On account of you I can’t write the way I used to any more.”
Eyes glowing, he rushes headlong down the stairs.
Lesser goes up and tries to write.
Nothing comes of it. A faint unpleasant odor rises from the paper.
Lesser is afraid of the house, really afraid. Familiar things are touched with strangeness. Green mould on
a pencil. A broken pitcher, standing, breaks apart. A dry flower falls to the floor. The floor tilts. A cup he drinks from he cannot recognize. A door opens and bangs, opens and bangs. He tries half the morning to find it and can’t. Levenspiel banging? As though the house has grown larger, leavened a couple of useless floors, made more empty rooms. The wind, weird sad sea music, lives in them, moving through the walls as through trees in the woods. It sings above his head. He listens as he writes. Lesser writes “the wind is gone” but hears it still. He is afraid to leave his room, though sick of it, lest he never return. He goes out rarely, once a week for a bag of groceries. Sometimes when he dozes over his work he gets up to trot in the hall for exercise. Otherwise he writes.
a pencil. A broken pitcher, standing, breaks apart. A dry flower falls to the floor. The floor tilts. A cup he drinks from he cannot recognize. A door opens and bangs, opens and bangs. He tries half the morning to find it and can’t. Levenspiel banging? As though the house has grown larger, leavened a couple of useless floors, made more empty rooms. The wind, weird sad sea music, lives in them, moving through the walls as through trees in the woods. It sings above his head. He listens as he writes. Lesser writes “the wind is gone” but hears it still. He is afraid to leave his room, though sick of it, lest he never return. He goes out rarely, once a week for a bag of groceries. Sometimes when he dozes over his work he gets up to trot in the hall for exercise. Otherwise he writes.
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