God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  Always a collector, Cohn liked to take samples of grasses, herbs, leaves, and barks of various trees, some of which he boiled up in water and evaporated, to produce an extract of each substance. He sampled these concoctions, bitter and sweet, and found that one calmed his stomach if he had overeaten, and another lightened a severe headache.

  Buz complained his eyes were strained and Cohn advised him to cut down on reading, but Buz wouldn’t because he liked the stories he was becoming acquainted with. “Everything gets to be a story,” he said, and Cohn agreed. He brewed up a mimosa ointment with boric acid, a concoction that reduced his boy’s eyestrain.

  For most minor ailments Cohn prescribed a mixture of eucalyptus oil and bicarbonate of soda. Either his patients vomited up the medication and improved in health, or kept it down and got better. With the same prescription he purged Saul of Tarsus, and Luke, of “worms,” which couldn’t really have been worms because they no longer lived on earth, though they resembled worms. Whatever they were, Cohn eradicated them. He also calmed Esau’s toothache, offering to pull the offending molar with a pair of pliers, at which the Alpha Ape bristled threateningly and hooted sternly. He informed Cohn he no longer felt the toothache.

  George the gorilla still loitered in the vicinity of Cohn’s cave, usually when the cantor was singing, but he refused to enter and be treated for illness when he seemed to be ailing, though one day he suffered a severe, nose-dripping, eye-tearing, sneezy cold, for which Cohn wanted to prescribe an herb that would clear his breathing.

  George refused to accept it.

  “If you like to suffer,” Cohn said to the gorilla, “that’s your choice.”

  George sneezed seven times and Cohn uttered one “God bless.”

  Calvin Cohn had baked his early pots in midday sunlight but they hadn’t turned out well. In his last large dig in the field beyond and above the rice paddy, he had discovered a muddy vein of white hydrous aluminum silicate clay, with which he began to mold unique dishes, bowls, vases, artificial flowers, other artifacts of decoration. He fired these in a kiln he had constructed in the fireplace, a simple metal “firebox” he had fabricated out of a ship’s locker; this he heated with homemade charcoal of ebony wood that got so hot the box glowed vermilion and took hours to cool. Buz was uncomfortable in the presence of the red-hot kiln, yet as he lurked by the cave opening, he liked to watch Cohn remove the fired objects, some severely cracked because there was no temperature control.

  Cohn, to the chimp’s amusement, had lately begun to design clay masks sculpted with faces of Greek gods, former politicians, famous scientists of the past, some of whom he hung up as a mobile on a tree near the eucalyptus; and he created a few vertebrate animals the chimp had never laid eyes on. Cohn hadn’t learned how to glaze his pots, so he painted the white clay masks with features colored in black, green, red, and yellow inks.

  Buz saw his first lion’s head as a mask produced by Cohn. Afterwards the artist destroyed many of the masks, fearing that the Lord, if He got a peek at them, might accuse him of worshipping false gods.

  The island community was active and flourished beyond Cohn’s best hopes. All the chimps, even the newcomers, were gainfully employed, with the exception of Esau, who lived on the fruit of the island. “Why disturb yourself if the fruit is for free? Why spoil our natures to please a non-chimp? Who is he, for instance ?”

  Cohn wouldn’t say.

  Saul of Tarsus and Luke helped in the rice paddy, Melchior overseeing them. Sometimes he fell asleep, standing, and the twins stopped working until he awoke and then asked for a banana-beer break, a custom Melchior favored.

  Mary Madelyn assisted Cohn in collecting roots, leaves, new samples of bark. She watched him catalogue each item on a 3x5 card.

  “I wish I had a handwriting, Cawvin.”

  “Maybe someday.”

  “Wiw I someday be human?”

  “It’s a long haul.”

  “I would wike to be Juwiet in wov with Romeo.”

  Cohn was growing a brown beard as he became bald.

  Buz was, page by page, reading through the encyclopedia. His dod permitted him to use his personal reading eyeglasses, and they seemed to ease a slight strabismus.

  Hattie had for a while looked after the twins, who resisted her motherly ministrations. She then took care of Melchior and he permitted her to build a sleep-nest near his in a low live oak.

  Cohn stored away in dry caves full plastic bags of newly discovered sunflower seeds.

  The chimps helped plant banana groves and other fruit trees. Esterhazy and Bromberg willingly assisted.

  And everyone congregated around Buz and Cohn at their dig in the late afternoon. They sniffed and—to Cohn’s annoyance—sometimes chewed on the ancient animal bones he had unearthed. To those who retched, he had to dispense gallons of eucalyptus-bicarb medicine for their dyspepsia.

  He had occasional hopes that Buz might ask to be bar mitzvah’d since he was already the equivalent of age thirteen, but the little chimp never brought the matter up, and Cohn did not proselytize.

  Life was serene until Mary Madelyn, the jeweled pink flower of her swollen sexual skin visible from the rear, hid herself from the pursuing males by taking to the tops of tall trees, but when the wind hit her dense scent—a compound of night-blooming jasmine and raw eggs, it seemed to Cohn —and blew it around, they went hungrily seeking and could not locate her although they ran through every tree in the vicinity.

  Esau sought her relentlessly, sniffing his small-eyed way from branch to branch, breathing stertorously, restless with desire. Once after not finding her, he pounded in frustration on the trunk of the tree they had just explored.

  Esterhazy and Bromberg, on the run, were ascending and descending one or another tree where they thought they had glimpsed the tempting flower, or caught an enticing trace of her sexual perfume. One dark day they pounced on someone who turned out to be Hattie, and happily crouched, but they seemed to have lost interest.

  After catching an invigorating breath of Mary Madelyn’s scent in the headlong breeze, Buz had decided he was mature enough to be interested and had joined the apes in pursuit of her; as had the twins because the chase was fun. They were caught up in adventure, spying out Mary Madelyn and swiftly shinnying up a tree to entrap her, but she escaped, and went squealing through the treetops. They pursued her until, by virtue of her inspired speed, she outdistanced them and disappeared in a curtain of green.

  One still morning, Esau, bored with the school lesson, happened to spot her hiding in George the gorilla’s cedar; she had been secretly listening to Cohn lecturing on the fossils of the Mesozoic age. Mary Madelyn had been thus engaged for three days, apparently with the connivance or unconcern of George, in an attempt to keep up with her lessons.

  Esau, his head hair erect, stealthily climbed higher and higher in the eucalyptus and swung into the cedar on a vine. He descended in a leap and charged at Mary Madelyn as she sat absorbed in Cohn’s description of a dinosaur attempting to defend itself in a bloody swamp against a rapacious flying reptile.

  Catching sight of Esau, Mary Madelyn let out a full scream, interrupting Cohn’s lecture, and at once leaped to the ground, the males in hot pursuit. George the gorilla roared at the contretemps, and the noise seemed to paralyze the other apes in the schooltree, although it had no effect, to speak of, on Esau. Cohn bellowed at him to leave the girl alone.

  The uncooperative chimp, chasing her on the ground, caught Mary Madelyn by the arm and hurled her against a tree. She went down with the breath knocked out of her, bleeding from a wound over her left eye. Before Esau, swaggering from foot to foot, could compel her to crouch, she tore herself out of his grasp and swung into a vast baobab, immediately losing herself in it. In a minute she was brachiating like a gibbon through the rain forest, zig zagging in the foliage as Esau furiously hooted after her.

  Gaining on her, he was a moment from overtaking Mary Madelyn, when she reversed direction and dipped under him. He
grabbed for her where she no longer was, and fell half way through a tree. Esau hit the ground hard and lay motionless on his back.

  Mary Madelyn had disappeared.

  Bromberg and Esterhazy had abandoned the contest between the dinosaur and pterodactyl to see what was going on in the modern world. They stopped off to prop Esau up, who would have none of it. He rose on his knees and stomped the earth in rage.

  Cohn, after his interrupted lecture, confided to Buz that Esau had become a hazard to a free society and must reform, or they might have to consider getting rid of him.

  “Why don’t we get rid of her?”

  “I thought you were interested in Mary Madelyn?”

  “Not when she runs whenever she sees me. It says in Dr. Bünder’s book that female chimponzees seek male compony when they go into heat. Why doesn’t she do whot the book says?”

  Cohn thought she seemed to be resisting her instincts.

  Buz asked why.

  He wasn’t sure. “Something in her. She’s an unusual person—which is to say, chimpanzee.”

  Buz thought she was mad. “How om I supposed to experience sex if she won’t stond still for holf a minute?”

  Cohn suggested he seek out and persuade her. “My sense of it is she would like to be courted, not gunned down from the rear by an ambitious phallus. Talk to her about Romeo and Juliet. She admires the play.”

  Buz said he disliked it. “They are both goons and so is Mary Modelyn.”

  “She’s a sensitive, empathic, intelligent creature.”

  That night he was awakened by the rustling of his ivy curtain. Cohn struck a match and held the flickering flame above his head.

  “Who’s there?”

  Mary Madelyn squatted amid the shadows on the floor of the cave.

  “I have no safe pwace to go. May I pwease stay the night?”

  “Why don’t you make yourself a nest in a tree? The males should be sleeping now.”

  “No, they aren’t.” She was fatigued, forlorn, disquieted.

  “Turn your head till I get my pants on,” Cohn told her.

  When he had drawn them on he said she could stay, and lit the lamp.

  She wanted to rest on some branches on the cave floor, but he said she could have Buz’s cage. “He almost never uses it.”

  Mary Madelyn promised to leave before the sun was up.

  He offered her a drink of coconut juice. As he poured, Cohn observed her flabby, wilted flower, and the sight of it made him slightly ill.

  “It wiw go away soon,” she said apologetically.

  “I can’t understand why you resist every male who approaches you.”

  She said it was in part his fault. “You wanted us to wearn your wanguage. Now that I have, I am different than I used to be. If I hadn’t wearned to speak and understand human speech, I would have awready presented mysewf to every mawe on the iwand.”

  She asked Cohn if he would mate with her.

  “It is not permitted. I am a man. I am not allowed to copulate with animals.”

  “You told us you were proud to be an animal.”

  “Of course. Generically speaking.”

  “You would be mistaken to think of me only as a beast,” Mary Madelyn said.

  She said she had decided to sleep elsewhere.

  Hairy Esau, lugging a knobby log four feet long and three inches thick, lurched into Cohn’s cave the next morning. “Where’s the bitch hiding?”

  He let out a roar, his yellowed fangs repulsively visible, and raised the log as though to bash Cohn’s mind in.

  He rose hastily from his unfinished breakfast. “You’re mistaken, she’s not here.”

  “Saul of Tarsus saw her sneak in last night.”

  Cohn swore she had left. His scalp stung as if his hair had turned into needles. How does one reason with a mad chimp who confuses himself with a gorilla? Fearing for his life, Cohn had backed toward the storage shelves—the breakfast table the only barrier between him and the grossly angered ape.

  “Don’t be overhasty, Esau. This is a desperately serious situation. The world has been destroyed by fire and water. You heard my recent lecture on the subject. I have reason to believe that those of us left on this island are the only survivors of life on the planet. If we expect to go on living we’ve got to live as brothers. Why don’t you put that nasty log down and let’s discuss the matter peaceably.”

  Esau, breathing noisily, his small eyes restlessly roaming the cave, called Cohn an idiot. “Your stupid schooltree has made her too proud to dip her butt for friends.”

  He swung his log at Cohn, who ducked, barely escaping having his head crushed. Stealthily he felt behind him for his 30.06 Winchester, at the same panicky instant thinking, I mustn’t use it.

  If he could tease the French saber out of its sheath, the sight of it might scare the beast away. Esau kept his brutal log raised as he inched toward Cohn, who was then assailed by a more frightening thought: Is he the Lord’s messenger who has this day come to slay me?

  Without waiting for a formal response, he overturned the table between them. Esau was scalded by a pot of hot mint tea.

  The ape let out a quavering cry that rose to a scream when he dropped the log on his burnt foot. His mouth dribbled and eyes bled tears of rage.

  Cohn, instead of taking up a weapon, grabbed a witch’s mask from the shelf and held it over his face, at the same time ululating and grunting.

  It was a contorted white mask with watery red eyes, a nose like a bent bone, and wet black mouth. The mouth moved obscenely as Cohn howled.

  Esau, erect in fright, stared wide-eyed at Cohn’s horrid mask. He let out a whine, as if he had lost control of his bodily functions. Bolting out of the cave, he ran groaning into the forest. No one saw him for months afterwards.

  After two days, Mary Madelyn, looking her neat, attractive self, returned to the schooltree to resume her education.

  None of the male apes approached, or even seemed to notice her presence, but Cohn, on greeting her, had kissed her fingertips.

  He thought he had handled Esau badly and would have to do better in the future, assuming the chimp returned. Esau must be patiently talked to and counseled until he understood what was required of him for the common good.

  Cohn sent Buz into the forest to locate the rebellious Alpha Ape and ask him to return to the community, but Buz, after a full day’s search, saw no sign of him and figured he had made for the headlands.

  He told Cohn, in unconcealed trepidation, that an albino ape seemed to be in the woodland trees again.

  “I saw him but he didn’t see me.”

  “Who is this type and is he for real?” Cohn wanted to know.

  “A white ape, they can be nasty people.”

  “Have you ever known one?”

  “Dr. Bünder has a long porogroph on them in his book. Sometimes they get schizoid, or like thot.”

  “He’d better stay out of here.”

  But on the next dark night the albino, grown a few feet since Cohn had last laid eyes on him, appeared in his cave. Either dawn broke then, or he lit the cave with his white presence.

  Cohn hastily retreated to the rear.

  Rising on his legs, the albino pantomimed flinging a spear at Cohn, or someone like him.

  “That was like in a dream,” Cohn explained. “I was attempting to defend myself, not hurt anybody.”

  To get rid of the ape, he reached for a black witch’s mask hanging on a peg on the wall.

  The ape tore the mask from Cohn’s hand and held it in front of his face, becoming a white ape with a black face, pierced by a red witch’s eye. The sight sent a chill through Cohn and he bolted the cave.

  In the forest, in an instant, he encountered a black-faced white ape. Cohn squared off in the circling crouch of a grunting Japanese wrestler, to hold the ape off as best he could; but the fierce creature grabbed his arm and yanked him over his shoulder, his large paw grasping both of Cohn’s hands, his long ape-arm pinning his kicking
legs.

  “Let’s talk about this,” begged Cohn.

  The white ape, bumpily running with a struggling Cohn on his shoulders, leaped for a low bough of an ebony tree, and with his free hand, both legs, and a grunt, swung himself and his victim into the tree.

  He’ll destroy me up there. Should I try prayer, or is the white ape God’s messenger come to execute His purpose?

  “Are you God’s messenger?”

  If the ape knew he wouldn’t say. He had with a vibrant roar stopped in his tracks.

  Above them, holding to an upper branch, stood George the gorilla, his right hand aiming a large black coconut—if not a rock—at the head of the white ape carrying Cohn.

  The tree began to shake as if it had conceived a mad thought, but the swaying gorilla held tight to his black object.

  The ape released his hold on him and Cohn, freed, felt himself falling through the thick-leaved swaying ebony, bumping his head till it sickened him. He landed, with a swooshing thud, in a bouquet of giant ferns at the foot of the tree.

  In the bright sunlight that broke through the forest canopy, the white ape seemed to dissolve, and the ebony stopped its frightful shaking. The forest was hushed.

  Buz appeared in the undergrowth wearing a Japanese general’s cap and blasting a long tin horn.

  The nervous gorilla high in the tree thrust two fingers into each ear as Cohn tried to shake himself awake; but how could you if you hadn’t slept?

  A disturbing desire possessed him, fortunately yielding affection, not so easy to come upon these days. And affection grew against his will—a difficult way to love.

  After the schooltree class they strolled amid the dappled palm trees lining the sea. Cohn walked at ease, Mary Madelyn standing upright or knuckle-walking by his side. When they rested she groomed his balding head. In turn, he groomed her breasts and belly. They talked as friends.

  And Buz, forgetting his manners, persistently trailed them, and neither of them could convince him to leave them to their privacy. He hung around, eavesdropping, hiding behind the trunks of trees, or pretending to be asleep as they sat on the ground. Sometimes he brachiated quietly above them, observing their actions. Cohn, when he spotted him, recalled the serpent licentiously regarding Adam and Eve in intercourse.