God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  He lifted down from the top storage shelf the clay urn containing his former wife’s ashes, and with his shovel buried it under a palm tree. Buz, in the night-dark, dug it up with his hands and flung the urn into the dimly moonlit sea.

  Esau appeared, ghastly, one morning as Cohn was breakfasting in the cave. He rose, wildly seeking a weapon to defend his life with, then realized the dispirited ape was not well. He had lost about twenty pounds, his shaggy coat was soiled, and his left jaw swollen. His eyes were ten degrees crossed and bleary.

  Esau said he suffered from a mind-blowing toothache; the pain tore his face apart. He begged Cohn to help him or he would go mad.

  Cohn, after slipping on his glasses, administered an herb that put the chimp to sleep, and assisted by Mary Madelyn, pulled out the offending molar with a strong pair of pliers.

  Esau, when he woke, was overjoyed the pain had ceased and expressed everlasting gratitude to Cohn. He promised to reform, and volunteered to assist the common effort. And to prove his resolve, he asked to be given a productive task to perform.

  Cohn appointed him keeper of the orchard. It was his duty to report those trees that were flowering and about to come to fruit; also to look for fruit trees that hadn’t been catalogued.

  After the episode with Esau, Cohn wrote down seven Commandments he had been carrying in his head, and tried to think of a way of presenting them to the assembly of apes. He wasn’t attempting to rewrite the Pentateuch, he told himself (and God); he was simply restating, or amplifying, some principles he had been reflecting on.

  There was no nearby mountain from whose heights to come trudging down bearing two tablets in his arms, so Cohn baked each letter in white clay, assembled them into sentences, and set each up with twine, pegs, nails, and Elmer’s glue, on the eastern face of the escarpment near the waterfall, where all who passed by on their way to the rice paddy, or big dig, would see them.

  Cohn’s Admonitions—he had decided to drop Commandments—read thus:

  1. We have survived the end of the world; therefore cherish life. Thou shalt not kill.

  2. Note: God is not love, God is God. Remember Him.

  3. Love thy neighbor. If you can’t love, serve—others, the community. Remember the willing obligation.

  4. Lives as lives are equal in value but not ideas. Attend the Schooltree.

  5. Blessed are those who divide the fruit equally.

  6. Altruism is possible, if not probable. Keep trying. See 3 above.

  7. Aspiration may improve natural selection. Chimpanzees may someday be better living beings than men were. There’s no hurry but keep it in mind.

  On the day the Admonitions were fixed on the wall of the escarpment, Cohn read them aloud to the assembled apes and led a cheer for each. The response to the 7th was moderate but he did not insist on another cheer.

  The island colony prospered. All chimps worked, in fields and trees and in caves, collecting and storing food, seeding and caring for gardens, and distributing flowers to those who wanted to adorn their sleep-nests.

  The rice paddies were extended, the twins doing much of the planting and harvesting. Melchior directed and Hattie helped. Not all members of the community cared for rice—Buz called it tasteless stuff, though Melchior said it was good to rub on aching gums—but Cohn kept hundreds of sacks stored in nearby caves in case of famine. He was not fearful of famine—hadn’t dreamed of it in his dreams—was just being careful.

  The schooltree was well attended every day. Esau, his sour face sweetened, sat on a branch close to Mary Madelyn, but did not trouble her. Buz sat on an upper bough, as far from her as he could arrange. On his own, he spent days working out arithmetic puzzles. He had asked Cohn to teach him algebra so he could go on sublimating.

  Everyone enjoyed the pleasant weather—cool mornings, hot afternoons, chilly nights; and the chimps—all but the twins—tended to walk upright. George did not change; he was still the old knuckle-walking George, rather than flirt with backaches got from holding his 500-pound body erect. Buz, after chancing on the word in the dictionary, called him pariah; but the gorilla, though he might have crushed the little chimp’s skull in his hands, paid him no attention. He kept his dignity.

  On the important holidays Cohn played his father’s records on the machine, and the apes danced a square dance in the green grass. Holidays came often that year, whenever anyone thought there ought to be one.

  They called themselves “men.” Esterhazy hooted, “Come on, men, let’s get cracking.” Cohn felt that evolution was peeking through them. He encouraged being healthy because it felt good, and for purposes of natural selection. He was voted teacher-for-life and honorary chimpanzee.

  Mary Madelyn had taught herself to say lwov for wov, and was in her second month of pregnancy.

  What was God doing in her womb?

  The Voice of the Prophet

  Eight baboons sat like black dogs in a circle on a large, flat, sandstone rock. One male bled from his left eye. The other had lost part of his snout and all but one right toe. If a leaf moved they screamed in alarm, their muzzles showing long mouthfuls of pointed teeth.

  Each of the three females mothered one undernourished child. When the males threat-yawned, or snarled at each other, the females rose and paced tensely and gracefully on the rock, their children riding their backs, until the males had calmed down.

  On the ground they ate tubers and fruit, and tore at dry grasses. They lapped water at the pond, often raising their heads to stare at the chimps tending the rice. When a baboon male barked in alarm the small troop galloped back to the rock, the females gracefully ascending its ledges, their children clinging to their backs.

  Saul of Tarsus had spied the baboons from the rice field, and word by slow word, informed anyone who would listen that he had seen some strange black monkeys around. Melchior said they looked to him like baboons who had lived in a pit or dirty cave. He said they all needed baths. He personally had no use for any of them, and Hattie agreed.

  At dusk the baboons were afraid of the dark. They leaped from the rock and fled across the grass to an old madrone where they built their sleep-nests. When night came they were asleep. Awaking, they seemed to fear each other until one day, after a dry season, the drenching rain washed the black out of their patchy coats, and turned them a greenish-yellow. After the rain they sat placidly on the rock, or galloped in the grass, back-flipping, tail-pulling, wrestling. The black stain—dye, mud, or ashes—washed out of their coats in the rain, had discolored the pond by the rice, and Melchior complained bitterly to Cohn, who thus learned of the presence of the baboons. For days he pondered God’s purpose.

  Mary Madelyn, after a time of doubt, when she bled and it seemed she might momentarily lose her fetus, having become securely pregnant, had one day disappeared from her favorite white acacia. Cohn had searched for her among the fruit trees in the woods, in the rain forest, and in caves in the escarpment, but could not, after several days, locate her.

  He asked Hattie to help him find her and if necessary to stay with her while she gave birth, but Hattie said no chimpanzee lady in her right mind would need a midwife.

  The next night Mary Madelyn appeared in Cohn’s cave, trailing a bloody umbilical cord, and carrying a newborn baby she timidly presented to him.

  Seeing a fuzzy white baby with human eyes, Cohn ran out of the cave because he thought he had affronted God; then he ran back because he felt he hadn’t.

  This was a different world from the one he had been born into. In a different world different things—unusual combinations—occurred. If something wasn’t kosher the Lord would have to say so. He had no trouble with words.

  The Lord said nothing.

  With a pair of small sterilized scissors Cohn snipped Mary Madelyn’s umbilical cord, washed and knotted it, then examined the new baby. She was a compact, well-formed, curious-eyed little female who looked, indeed, like a humanoid infant, or chimpanzee-human baby. She wasn’t as large as an infant chimp, acc
ording to the measurements cited by Dr. Bünder in his book, but she was healthy, spirited, and obviously bright. Cohn counted aloud to ten, and she responded by moving her lips. He was sure she would do well in school.

  “Do you wike her?”

  “A miracle,” said Cohn. “Why wouldn’t I like her?”

  “I wondered if you wanted a mawe chiwd.”

  He said the community needed all the females it could get.

  Mary Madelyn said it wasn’t that easy—chimpanzee ladies bore children only every four or five years.

  Cohn said they would solve it one way or another. The birth of the baby made him feel more optimistic than he had been since arriving on the island.

  The baby, as she nursed at her mother’s breast, regarded him with bright eyes, human eyes. Cohn was thinking of his role in raising the child. With a chimpanzee mother she is technically a chimp, but I will keep reminding her of her human source and quality. A lot depends on which genes have gone where. If the right genes have arranged themselves to their best advantage, she’ll be talking soon. In a month or two he would begin reading to her.

  “Shaw we caw her Juwiet?”

  Cohn suggested maybe Islanda, but when Mary Madelyn pronounced it Iwanda, he said Rebekah might be preferable.

  Mary Madelyn liked Honeybunch, a name Cohn occasionally called her, but they settled, at his suggestion, on Rebekah Islanda as her legal first and middle names.

  Yet when they talked of her, Mary Madelyn called her Iwanda and Cohn said Rebekah. He then asked Mary Madelyn if she would mind being called another name, maybe Rachel, but she preferred to keep her own name.

  That night, Cohn, making a determined effort, finished nailing together the wall of split logs he had begun to assemble when the first new chimps had appeared on the island.

  He mounted the wall on rollers he had constructed—slow, squeaky, but workable. To block the entrance, he had to shove with his shoulder to roll the creaking wall across the mouth of the cave. He had dug a narrow trench for the barrier to fit in, making it less likely to topple over if it ever was rammed from the outside. A chimp or two confronting it would have to give up and walk away. It wasn’t the most practical bulwark he had ever seen, but Cohn felt it would serve its purpose.

  Mary Madelyn wanted to know why they had to have a wall—it would keep the fresh air out that the baby needed; and Cohn replied he was just being careful. Civilization had barely recommenced.

  When the chimps arrived in a group to see the new baby, Cohn permitted them all to enter, and served them a mixture of tangerine and mango juice, which they all enjoyed; no one seemed to notice the wall he had built.

  Hattie picked up the baby, and Mary Madelyn permitted only her to do so. Melchior was allowed to pat Rebekah on the head; and Esau, to show his love of children, felt her bottom and then covered the child with her blanket, aware of Mary Madelyn’s nervousness.

  “Trust me,” the Alpha Ape assured her. “I am her good fairy.”

  Buz, on the other hand, showed only a negative interest in the baby girl, insisting on dragging his holding cage out of the cave because he didn’t want it to be used as a crib.

  “What will you use it for ?” Cohn asked.

  Buz said, “Storage.”

  “Why don’t you at least say hello to your little sister ?”

  Buz replied he had never had a relative other than the mother who had given birth to him, and his adoptive father, who had brought him up and educated him in his home in Jersey City, Dr. Walther Bünder, Ph.D., M.D.—the kindest, wisest, most loving person he had ever met in all his life.

  Cohn felt unwillingly left out—omitted, deeply disappointed.

  “Don’t think I’ve lost my affection or admiration for you, Buz, I haven’t.”

  Buz did say he would be returning for a candy bar now and then, but he seemed still angered, and Cohn felt he must give him more attention one way or another.

  When the visiting chimps had left the cave, Mary Madelyn said she hoped their own little family would stay together, and Cohn said they would indeed while Rebekah was growing up.

  “She may someday be the mother of a new race of men,” he said, “—if they are called that then and not by some other name.”

  Mary Madelyn wondered if they ought to get married. “I wov the scene that you read me wast week where Romeo and Juwiet are married by Father Wawrence.”

  Cohn said for his father’s sake he would prefer a sort of Jewish wedding.

  The baboon males on the rock groomed each other, and the three females groomed themselves and their children. Cohn had named the little girl Sara, and the boys Pat and Aloysius, after two Irish public-school chums of many years ago. Sometimes the children groomed the adult males.

  One early afternoon Sara descended the rock with an unpeeled red banana in her mouth, and climbed a lichened live oak at the far edge of the tall grass, where she sat eating her fruit.

  Saul of Tarsus, working the far edge of the rice paddy, spied her from the other side of the shallow pond that ran off from the rice, between the growing grain and the grass, and after a few minutes he waded through the pond—pausing from time to time as though he were simply soaking his feet—yet stealthily moving toward the oak tree where Sara sat. He slowly shinnied up the oak, stopping whenever she peered down at him, till she went on nibbling her banana. Saul of Tarsus felt amorous and he felt hungry, yet not at all sure which desire grabbed him most.

  The little girl nervously peered at the chimp ascending and at first did not move because he was not in motion, but when he seemed suddenly to be much too close to her, she dropped the remains of the banana and made shrill little cries, showing her teeth in a frightened grin.

  Sara climbed into the crown of the oak, Saul of Tarsus sneakily following her, pretending he wasn’t. But now she screeched excitedly until the two adult males across the field leaped off the rock and came charging through the heavy grass to the trees.

  Hearing their raucous alarm-barks, Saul of Tarsus hastily slid down the oak tree and knuckle-galloped back to the rice paddy, pursued by the barking baboons. The young chimp waded through the pond to the other side, where he sought the protective company of Melchior, Hattie, and his less adventurous brother.

  Melchior testily demanded to know where he had been.

  Saul of Tarsus swore he had been attacked by some vicious creatures. The old ape cursed out the two baboons at the edge of the water. “You stupid, dog-face monkeys, go back where you came from.”

  The male baboons barked raucously at the chimps, then scuttled back to the big rock, where little Sara sat among the adult females, grooming her mother. The mother had swatted her hard when she came back from the oak tree, and the child had yelped, but afterwards calmly chewed a tuber.

  Cohn had visited the baboon rock, and though his hopes of communicating with these animals were dim, he had asked where they had come from and how they had survived the Flood. The baboons appeared not to be disturbed by his presence, whether they understood him or not, and went on eating and ignoring him as he questioned them at length. Cohn left, feeling he had accomplished little, and was almost certain that Buz, no matter who had faith, would not be able to teach them anything resembling a spoken language.

  It was on this occasion that he named the adult males Max —the one with the bleeding eye, and Arthur—the one with the torn snout; and the look-alike females he named the three Anastasias.

  Afterwards Cohn spoke sternly to Luke. “Hattie tells me you were working up a sneak-attack on Sara, the little baboon.”

  Luke said that Hattie didn’t know her mouth from a waterhole. “That wasn’t me, that was Saul of Tarsus.”

  “Was that you stalking the little baboon girl?” Cohn asked Saul of Tarsus, and the chimp breathily replied he thought it was his brother who had stalked her.

  “Whoever it was,” warned Cohn, “I don’t want anybody attempting to terrorize her again.”

  Saul of Tarsus said all he had wanted to
do was play tickle with her.

  “Playing with her is one thing, scaring her half to death is something else again. If you want to play, play nice—no harm or threats of harm to an innocent child.”

  “Not me,” said Saul of Tarsus.

  “What about you?” Cohn asked Luke.

  “Not me either.”

  Cohn smiled through his grizzled beard. “Why would anyone want to harm a little female baboon?” he asked. “This is a peaceful island. Besides, we’re moving into the next civilization.”

  “Esau told us that baboons don’t belong to our tribe,” Luke said. “He said that all they are is goddam strangers. That’s what he told us both.”

  “Never mind Esau. Strangers are people God expects us to welcome and live with.”

  “What for?”

  “So we stop being strangers.”

  “Then why does he make strangers in the first place ?”

  “To see what we might do about it. What you do right improves you. That’s the kind of conditions the Lord has imposed on us. You have to think He means well.”

  He listened vaguely for a whirlwind from the north and heard only a clear blue sky over a sunlit island of massed trees and multitudes of blooming flowers surrounded by a warm, fragrant sea.

  Cohn also spoke to Esau.

  “I’m talking to you because you’re a chimp of more than ordinary potential, not to speak of unusual physical resources and other useful endowments and attributes. It’s not for nothing you’re the ranking ape on this island, and since your recent reformation, one of the best workers in the vineyard.”

  “Which vineyard is that?”

  “I use the word metaphorically—this fruitful island as vineyard.”