Nemesis n-4

by Philip Roth

  "'In that small café,'" she sang, her voice thin and whispery, "'the park across the way…'"

  Amid the island's little forest of leaning birches, their soft wood bent, as Marcia had explained, from the pounding they took in the hard Pocono winters, the two clung to each other with their unparalyzed arms, swaying together to the music on their unparalyzed legs, pressing together their unparalyzed trunks, and able now to hear the words only intermittently — "…everything that's light and gay…think of you… when night is new… seeing you" — before the song stopped. Someone across the lake had lifted the arm of the record player and switched it off, and the lights in the rec hall went out one at a time, and they could hear kids calling to one another, "Night! Good night!" Then the flashlights came on, and from the dance floor of the island ballroom, he and Marcia could see points of light flickering here and there as each of the kids — safe, healthy, unafraid, unharmed — traced a path back to the cabins.

  "We have each other," Marcia whispered, removing his glasses and hungrily kissing his face. "No matter what happens in the world, we have each other's love. Bucky, I promise, you'll always have me singing to you and loving you and, whatever happens, I'll always be standing at your side."

  "We do," he said to her, "we have each other's love." Yet what difference does that make, he thought, to Billy and Erwin and Ronnie? What difference does that make to their families? Hugging and kissing and dancing like lovesick teenagers ignorant of everything — what could that do for anyone?

  WHEN HE GOT BACK to the cabin — everyone there in the deep sleep induced by a day full of hiking and swimming and playing ball — he found a note on his bed from Donald. "Call your grandmother," it said. Call her? But he'd spoken to her only a couple of hours earlier. He sped out the door and raced down to the phone booth wondering what had happened to her and thinking he should never have left her alone to come to camp. Of course she couldn't manage by herself, not when she had those pains in her chest every time she tried to carry anything up the stairs. He'd left her alone and now something had happened.

  "Grandma, it's Eugene. What's wrong? Are you all right?"

  "I'm all right. I have some news. That's why I called the camp. I didn't want to alarm you, but I thought you would want to know right away. It's not good news, Eugene. I wouldn't have called long distance otherwise. It's more tragedy. Mrs. Garonzik phoned from Elizabeth a few minutes ago. To speak to you."

  "Jake," Bucky said.

  "Yes," she said. "Jake is dead."

  "How? How?"

  "In action in France."

  "I don't believe it. He was indestructible. He was a brick wall. He was six feet three inches tall and two hundred and fifteen pounds. He was a powerhouse. He can't be dead!"

  "I'm afraid it's true, darling. His mother said he was killed in action. In a town whose name I can't remember now. I should have written it down. Eileen is there with the family."

  The mention of Eileen shocked him anew. Jake had met Eileen McCurdy in high school, and she'd been Jake's girl throughout his years at Panzer. The two were to marry and set up house in Elizabeth as soon as he returned from the war.

  "He was so big and with such good manners," his grandmother was saying. "Jake was one of the nicest boys you ever brought around. I can see him now, eating right in the kitchen here that first night he came home with you for dinner. Dave came too. Jake wanted 'Jewish food.' He ate sixteen latkes."

  "He did. Yes, I remember. And we laughed, all of us laughed." Tears were coursing down Bucky's face now. "Dave's alive, though. Dave Jacobs is alive."

  "I can't say that I know, darling. There's no way I would know. I assume so. I hope so. I haven't heard anything. But according to tonight's news, the war in France is not going well. They said on the radio that there are many dead. Terrible battles with the Germans. Many dead and many wounded."

  "I can't lose both my friends," Bucky replied weakly, and when he hung up he headed not back to the cabin but down to the waterfront. There, despite the new rush of cold air pushing in, he sat on the diving dock and stared into the darkness, repeating to himself the lionizing epithets by which Jake was known on the sports page of the campus paper — Bruiser Jake, Big Jake, Man Mountain Jake… He could no more imagine Jake dead than he could imagine himself dead, which didn't serve, however, to stop his tears.

  At about midnight, he walked back to the pier, but instead of going up the hill to the cabin, he turned and went out again along the wooden walkway to the diving dock. He proceeded to pace the length of the walkway until a dim light began to illuminate the lake, and he remembered that in just such a light another of the dearly beloved dead, his grandfather, would drink hot tea out of a glass — tea spiked in winter with a shot of schnapps — before heading off to buy his day's produce at the Mulberry Street market. When school was out Bucky sometimes went with him.

  He was still struggling to bring himself under control so as to return to the cabin before anyone awoke, when the birds in the woods started singing. It was dawn at Camp Indian Hill. Soon there'd be the murmur of young voices from the cabins and then the happy shouting would begin.

  ONCE A WEEK, Indian Night was celebrated separately in the boys' and girls' camps. At eight, all the boys came together at the campfire circle in a wide clearing high above the lake. At the center of the circle was a pit lined with flat stones. The logs there were stacked horizontally and laid crisscross in log-cabin style, tapering upward some three feet from the two large, heavy logs at the base. The fire logs were ringed by a stone barrier of small, picturesquely irregular boulders. Some eight or ten feet back from the stone barrier the circle of benches began. The seats were made of split logs and the bases of stone, and they extended concentrically outward until there were four rows in all, divided into three sections. The woods began some twenty feet back of the last row of benches. Mr. Blomback called the structure the Council Ring and the weekly gathering there the Grand Council.

  At the edge of the Council Ring there was a teepee, larger and more elaborately embellished than the teepee at the camp entrance. That was the Council Tent, decorated at the top with bands of red, green, yellow, blue, and black, and with a border at the bottom of red and black. There was also a totem pole, whose crest was carved with the head of an eagle, and below that with a large unfurled wing jutting stiffly out to either side. The dominant colors of the totem pole were black, white, and red, the last two being the colors for the camp's color war. The totem pole stood about fifteen feet high and could be seen by anyone looking up from a boat on the lake. To the west, across the lake, where the girls were holding their own Indian Night, the sun was beginning to set, and full darkness would come by the time the Grand Council was over. Only faintly could you hear the post-dinner kitchen clatter from the dining lodge, while beyond the lake a striated sky drama, a long lava flow of burnt orange and bright pink and bloody crimson, registered the lingering end of the day. An iridescent, slow-moving summer twilight was creeping over Indian Hill, a splashy gift from the god of the horizon, if there was such a deity in the Indian pantheon.

  The boys and their counselors — each designated a "brave" for the evening — arrived at Grand Council dressed in outfits that in large part came out of the crafts shop. All wore beaded headbands, fringed tunics that were originally ordinary shirts, and leggings that were trousers stitched with fringe at the outside seam. On their feet they wore moccasins, some cut from leather in the crafts shop and a good many of which were high-top sneakers that had been wrapped like moccasins at the ankle with bead and fringe. A number of the boys had feathers in their headbands — dropped bird plumage that they'd found in the woods — some wore beaded armbands tied inches above the elbow, and many carried canoe paddles that were painted with symbols colored, like the totem pole, in red, black, and white. Others had bows borrowed from the archery shack slung over their shoulders — bows without the arrows — and a few carried simulated tom-toms of tightly drawn calfskin and drum beaters with beaded han
dles that they made in crafts. Several held in their hands rattles that were decorated baking-powder cans filled with pebbles. The youngest campers used their own bed blankets wrapped around them as Indian robes, which also served to keep them warm as the evening temperature dropped.

  Bucky's Indian outfit had been gathered together for him by the crafts counselor. Like the faces of the others, his had been darkened with cocoa powder to simulate an Indian's skin tone, and he had two diagonal stripes — "war paint" — applied to either cheek, one of black drawn with charcoal and the other of red drawn with lipstick. He sat next to Donald Kaplow and with the rest of the Comanche boys, who were seated farther down along the bench. Everywhere the boys loudly talked and joked until two campers carrying calfskin drums got up from the benches and walked to the stone surround of the campfire logs and, facing each other, began to solemnly bang on the drums while those carrying rattles shook them, no two in the same rhythm.

  Then everyone turned to look toward the teepee. Mr. Blomback emerged from the oval doorway in a feather headdress, white feathers with brown tips all around his head and trailing behind in a tail down to below his waist. His tunic, his leggings, even his moccasins were elaborately decorated with leather fringe and bands of beadwork and long tufts of what looked like human hair but was probably a woman's hairpiece from the five-and-ten. In one hand he carried a club — "Great Chief Blomback's war club," Donald whispered — that was replete with feathers, and in the other hand a peace pipe, consisting of a long wooden stem ending in a clay bowl and strung along the stem with still more feathers.

  All the campers stood until Mr. Blomback stolidly made his way from the teepee to the center of the Council Ring. The drumming and the rattling stopped, and the campers took their seats.

  Mr. Blomback handed his war club and peace pipe to the two drummers and, dramatically folding his arms over his chest, looked around at all the campers on the encircling benches. His heavy application of cocoa powder did not altogether cover his prominent Adam's apple, but otherwise he looked astonishingly like a real chief. In years gone by he had saluted the braves Indian fashion — using an upraised right arm with the palm forward — and they would collectively return the salute, simultaneously grunting "Ugh!" But this greeting had to be abandoned with the arrival on the world scene of the Nazis, who employed that salute to signify "Heil Hitler!"

  "When first the brutal anthropoid stood up and walked erect," Mr. Blomback began, " — there was man! The great event was symbolized and marked by the lighting of the first campfire."

  Donald turned to Bucky and whispered, "We get this every week. The little kids don't understand a word. No worse, I guess, than what happens in shul."

  "For millions of years," Mr. Blomback continued, "our race has seen in this blessed fire the means and emblem of light, warmth, protection, friendly gathering, council."

  He paused as the roar of an airplane engine passed over the camp. This happened now round the clock. An army air corps base had opened at the beginning of the war some seventy miles to the north, and Indian Hill was on its flyway.

  "All the hallow of the ancient thoughts," Mr. Blomback said, "of hearth, fireside, home, is centered on its glow, and the home tie itself is weakened with the waning of the home fire. Only the ancient sacred fire of wood has power to touch and thrill the chords of primitive remembrance. Your campfire partner wins your love, and having camped in peace together — having marveled together at the morning sun, the evening light, the stars, the moon, the storms, the sunset, the dark of night — yours is a lasting bond of union, however wide your worlds may be apart."

  Unfolding his two fringed arms, he extended them toward the assembly, and in unison the campers retorted to the stream of grandiloquence: "The campfire is the focal center of all primitive brotherhood. We shall not fail to use its magic."

  The drummers now took up their tom-tom beat, and Donald whispered to Bucky, "An Indian historian. Somebody Seton. That's his god. Those are his words. Mr. Blomback uses the same Indian name as Seton: Black Wolf. He doesn't think any of this is nonsense."

  Next a figure wearing the mask of a big-beaked bird stood in the front row and approached the ready-laid fire. He bowed his head to Mr. Blomback and then addressed the campers.

  "Meetah Kola nayhoon-po omnicheeyay nee-chopi."

  "It's our medicine man," whispered Donald. "It's Barry Feinberg."

  "Hear me, my friends," the medicine man continued, translating his Indian sentence into English. "We are about to hold a council."

  A boy stepped forward from the first row carrying several pieces of wood in his hand, one shaped like a bow, another a stick about a foot long with a sharpened end, and several smaller pieces. He set them on the ground near the medicine man.

  "Now light we the council fire," the medicine man said, "after the manner of the forest children, not in the way of the white man, but — even as Wa-konda himself doth light his fire — by the rubbing together of two trees in the storm, so cometh forth the sacred fire from the wood of the forest."

  The medicine man knelt, and many of the campers stood to watch as he used the bow and the long, pointed drill and the other odd bits of wood to attempt to ignite a fire.

  Donald whispered to Bucky, "This can take a while."

  "Can it even be done?" Bucky whispered back.

  "Chief Black Wolf can do it in thirty-one seconds. For the campers it's harder. They sometimes have to give in and do it in the way of the helpless white man, by striking a match."

  Some of the campers were standing on their benches to get a better look. After a few minutes, Mr. Blomback sidled over to the medicine man and, gesturing as he spoke, quietly gave him some tips.

  Everyone waited several minutes more before a whoop went up from the campers, as first there was smoke and then a spark, which when blown upon, ignited a small flame in the tinder of dry pine needles and birch bark shavings. The tinder in turn ignited the kindling at the base of the logs, and the campers chanted in unison, "Fire, fire, fire, burn! Flames, flames, flames, turn! Smoke, smoke, smoke, rise!"

  Then, with the mournful loud-soft-soft-soft beat of the two tom-toms, the dancing began: the Mohawks did the snake dance, the Senecas the caribou dance, the Oneidas the dog dance, the Hopis the corn dance, the Sioux the grass dance. In one dance the braves jumped strenuously about with their heads high in the air, in another they did a skipping step on the balls of their feet with a double hop on each foot, in a third they carried deer antlers before them, made of crooked tree limbs bound together. Sometimes they howled like wolves and sometimes they yapped like dogs, and in the end, when it was fully dark and the burning fire alone lit the Council Ring, twenty of the campers, each armed with a war club and wearing necklaces of beads and claws, set out by the light of the fire to hunt Mishi-Mokwa, the Big Bear. Mishi-Mokwa was impersonated by the largest boy in camp, Jerome Hochberger, who slept across the aisle from Bucky. Jerome was wrapped in somebody's mother's old fur coat that he'd pulled up over his head.

  "I am fearless Mishi-Mokwa," Jerome growled from within the coat. "I, the mighty mountain grizzly, king of all the western prairies."

  The hunters had a leader who was also from Bucky's cabin, Shelly Schreiber. With the drums beating loudly behind him and light from the fire flashing on his painted face, Shelly said, "These are all my chosen warriors. We go hunting Mishi-Mokwa, he the Big Bear of the mountains, he that ravages our borders. We will surely seek and slay him."

  Here a lot of the little kids began to call, "Slay him! Slay him! Slay Mishi-Mokwa!"

  The hunters gave a war whoop, dancing as though they were bears on their hind legs. Then they set out looking for the trail of the Big Bear by conspicuously smelling the ground. When they reached him, he rose with a loud snarl, eliciting screams of fright from the small boys on the nearby benches.

  "Ho, Mishi-Mokwa," said the leader of the hunters, "we have found you. If you do not come before I count to a hundred, I will brand you a coward wherever I go
."

  Suddenly, the bear sprang up at them, and as the campers cheered, the hunters proceeded to club him senseless with war clubs of straw wrapped in burlap. When he was stretched across the ground in the fur coat, the hunters danced around Mishi-Mokwa, each in turn grasping his lifeless paw and shouting, "How! How! How!" The campers' cheering continued, the delight enormous at finding themselves encompassed by murder and death.

  Next, two counselors, a small one and a tall one, identified as Short Feather and Long Feather, told a series of animal tales that made the younger children scream with feigned horror, and then Mr. Blomback, having removed his feather headdress and set it down alongside his peace pipe and war club, led the boys in singing familiar camp songs for some twenty minutes, thus bringing them down to earth from the excitement of playing Indian. This was followed by his saying, "And here's the important war news from last week. Here's what's been happening beyond Indian Hill. In Italy, the British army broke across the Arno River into Florence. In the Pacific, United States assault forces invaded Guam, and Tojo —"

  "Boo! Boo, Tojo!" a group of older boys called out.

  "Tojo, the premier of Japan," Mr. Blomback resumed, "was ousted as chief of the Japanese army staff. In England, Prime Minister Churchill —"

  "Yay, Churchill!"

  "— predicted that the war against Germany could come to end earlier than expected. And right here in Chicago, Illinois, as many of you know by now, President Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term by the Democratic National Convention."

  Here a good half of the campers came to their feet, shouting, "Hurray! Hurray, President Roosevelt!" while somebody beat wildly on one of the tom-toms and somebody else shook a rattle.

  "And now," said Mr. Blomback when it was quiet again, "bearing in mind the American troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific, and bearing in mind all of you boys who, like me, have relatives in the service, the next-to-last song to end the campfire will be 'God Bless America.' We dedicate it to all of those who are overseas tonight, fighting for our country."