Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  Ten years before, Nathan’s pictures might have been brighter. The sadness and the meanness and the madness were growing. Each year the Jews in Minsk seemed to pray more and more and each year they drew further into their historic shells and each year there were more stones, more taunts, more hate. Each year old man Gutterman bent his head lower and the gleam in Garnitsky’s eye flashed more wildly and Nathan’s pictures grew blacker and blacker, until finally they made Rouault look like Van Gogh, and he would shake his head, and throw his paints away and then begin again.

  “Look, Irma, black again. Always I paint my Poland yellow and green, and it comes out looking like something from the coal bin.”

  And Irma would say, “Leave it black. I like it black, Nathan. It is like a picture of beautiful, healthy Poland, covered with ashes.”

  “But I want to get through the ashes.”

  “The ashes are truth.”

  Once Nathan had painted Irma in yellow and green. She was all lovely yellow and green when he first met her by the fountain several years before. He had set his easel there. He was painting the pigeons that came to drink. As she stood there, her loveliness swept over his canvas like pigeons soaring. He began to paint her among the pigeons. It seemed as if they were all about to take wing. Nathan would not have been surprised if suddenly, when he waved his arms, she led them winging over the roofs into the sky.

  “Please, do you mind standing just a moment longer? You see I began to paint you and …”

  Nathan walked toward her. The pigeons flew away. He didn’t notice them. He didn’t want to paint this girl any more. He wanted to kiss her. Paint was too cold, too far away. He wanted to find if those small, pink lips were as warm and alive as they looked.

  She looked at the picture.

  “You’re a painter?” she asked teasingly.

  “I try to be,” Nathan said, a little too seriously.

  “But the pigeons have gone.”

  “They will come back tomorrow. Will you?”

  She looked more closely at the canvas.

  “You’ve started well,” she said.

  Irma kept her appointment with the pigeons next day. And the next. She was like a little motorboat, the way she skirted around this big, slow, friendly artist. She could zigzag in and out through his course and leave a wake that would rock him. She had the glorious knack of loving Nathan in a matter-of-fact, motorboat sort of way. You paint well, you kiss well, you love well. She was the teacher, the best kind, learning with him. She would grade him fairly. And when she praised him, Nathan would paw her and wag his tail like an overjoyed St. Bernard.

  Irma still praised him. But now Nathan’s canvases were always black, dull and lifeless, and he didn’t know why. Only Irma knew why. She knew they were black for Gutterman and Garnitsky, black for the Jews.

  “Look, Nathan darling, they will always be black,” she would say, “always and always, unless you Jews escape from your bondage again.”

  Nathan put down his canvas in despair. “Hush, Irma, none of your socialist talk. Only in more trouble that gets us. For you it is safe. No, they will not touch a pretty young girl with a face like a madonna. But for me, a Jew, stones in the face—and finally stones in the heart.”

  Some nights they would walk down into the fields, lie in the fresh hay, and listen to the river. There were only two moments when Nathan did not feel his Jewishness would choke him to death, when he felt himself a man on this earth, when he could breathe the air without thinking, I am breathing goyische air. Those moments were when he was painting, and when he was there in the dark with Irma, the fire of her body crashing over him like tidal waves of heat.

  “Now the darkness is beautiful, Irmishka. Now it is like the walls of our home, walling out the ugliness.”

  “Poor Nathan. Always looking for walls. Most Jews look for walls, either to cry against or to hide behind. But I don’t want you like most Jews, darling.”

  “Jews, Jews.” Nathan took his hands from her as he always did when anger rushed to his head. Irma did not have to look at him to see that face, his large, soft cow-eyes fighting hurt and tears, his strange, animal mouth trying to be strong.

  When he turned to her again he did not talk. He suddenly plunged his feeling, red mouth to hers. She took him quickly, joyous in his strength.

  Later they hung their feet over the edge of the riverbank. They felt their bodies free, flowing like this water below them.

  “That’s how I want you always, strong, unafraid,” she said quietly.

  “Marry me, Irma,” he answered. “I can paint. You can help. We will manage. I want you always.”

  Suddenly Irma felt bent and gray. Wise, and almost condescending. Nathan was a weight tugging at her sleeve. This was not a world of riverbanks and warm bodies in the hay. This life was peasants starving, strikes in the city, greedy wars, and more Jews crucified. Irma listened to the river and recognized this rhythm.

  “Poor Nathan.”

  “Then you won’t?”

  “It isn’t won’t, it’s can’t.”

  “You don’t love me. You love those masses. It isn’t natural. A young girl like you loving a million people she’s never seen.”

  “I love you, Nathan. Too much to fool you. Too much to fool myself.”

  “But not enough to fight with me.”

  “Nathan darling, you don’t want to fight. You want to escape. You and I on an island of canvas and color. You want us to sail off on a private adventure, way, way down into ourselves, somewhere where there are no Jews, no Jew-haters, no problems.”

  “I want us.”

  “You want us on the moon, Nathan. Up and down this river tonight there are thousands of us, little Irmas and their Nathans saying ‘We want us, nothing else matters but us.’ But something else does matter. Power matters. Power that thrives on hate, power that blackens your canvas, power that we must fight.”

  “Jews always fight. Nothing is ever right for them. Jews were stoned three thousand years ago. They will be stoned three thousand years from now. Irma, all we have is this minute, today, tomorrow. For God’s sake, don’t steal this from us.”

  “I steal nothing from you, Nathan dear. I only show you what you never had.”

  “I haven’t got you?”

  “You haven’t got life.”

  “I won’t live without you.”

  “They won’t let you live with me.”

  It was true. Already village tongues were beginning to wag. Nathan could hear them, a tail of buzzing sound behind him, as he walked home with his easel slung over his shoulder. Day after day, the sound increased. Nathan would see the spiteful gentile faces in his dreams, their tongues darting out like snake-fangs. “That Jew ruins one of our Christian girls. That Jew dares. Jew, Jew, Jew.”

  It made Nathan want to laugh. Nathan Solomon. His father used to say, “You are too easy with people. You will never be a trader.”

  Nathan Solomon, artist, with a sickness for friendship, who wanted only to paint Poland yellow and green.

  It made Nathan shrug his shoulders. “No? What is to do? To fight like Irma? To get killed? Life is short enough. So you go down another street where they won’t bother you. Soon they will stop.… When they see you want to bother nobody, they will stop soon enough.”

  The next day Nathan hiked five miles up into the hills to do a landscape. It was summer and the sun was hot. The intense heat ate through his heart and into the canvas. The sun scorched his palette with gold. See, Nathan, the painter thought, life can be golden. Only you must get away from the streets, from the people who spit. Here on the mountain life is always golden. Irma is wrong. Her peasants and Jew-haters are not truth. This is truth, truth to outlive us all, truth to make my canvas light at last.

  Then he slung the easel over his shoulder, and went down the mountainside, his mountainside, with joyous unmusical songs in his throat.

  The town was strangely quiet, so he walked down the main street. He was a man, this Nathan, he
thought, not knowing that those who must think this are slightly less than men. He locked the door of his little room and sat at the window, washing rye bread down with milk.

  It is good, this being a Jew, painting good pictures and being a Jew. These goyim, they drift through life. Everything comes easy. Yes, for us life is sharpened, Nathan thought, suddenly pleased with himself. When life is hard, the flowers are redder and their fragrance sweeter. So why worry? Why fight like Irma? It was meant to be this way. He held the last gulp of milk in his mouth a moment and let it trickle slowly down his throat in a warm, satisfying stream.

  It was growing dark. Nathan gave himself up to the cool evening. The cool evening was fate. He could not fight against the dark. You take it, make the most of it, paint it perhaps, use it. That’s the Jew in me. I stand by and look at life. If I look at it well enough I catch it on my canvas.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Irma. Irma’s face. But Irma’s face in a nightmare, eyes like hot rivets, snakes in her hair. The lines in her face were hard and angry. A face free from fear but full of frenzy.

  “Nathan, hurry, get your things together.”

  “Darling, sit down, what is the matter?”

  “No time. Pogrom. The Jews in the next village stoned a bully. The crowd is crazy. They’re coming this way. Killing every Jew. Nathan, hurry, they’ll kill you.”

  “Irma—for God’s sake—where will we go?”

  “You go, Nathan. I am staying. Hurry, hurry.”

  Nathan threw his few clothes into a bag, grabbed his thumbed copy of Plato, tied them to his easel. So a pogrom. A pogrom rolls over the land like lava, human eruption of hate. So Irma was right. “You want us on the moon.” It was all so foolish. Even at this moment, Nathan could not help thinking it was foolish. Some men want power, money, castles built with bones of fellow men. What do I want?—Irma, a room to paint in, milk and rye bread. I want the cheapest thing in the world, life—and they won’t let me have it.

  “Hurry, Nathan, hurry.”

  “Then you won’t come with me?”

  “No.”

  “Your people?”

  “Yes. Don’t you see, Nathan, there is still a chance. Some of these peasants and village workers—they learn their class. They begin to learn these anti-Jewish raids are but the first attack on them. There is still time.”

  “I will stay with you. I will try to fight.”

  “No. Not you. Without conviction a gun in your hand is like a water pistol. It is too late. You can only watch and paint. Hurry.”

  Nathan hated her for saying that. Because it was true.

  “I will go to my uncle in Warsaw. Will you meet me?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “When?”

  “When I can.”

  “Good-bye, Irmishka.”

  “Good-bye, Nathan.”

  She stood there loving him and despising him. She stood there so right he wanted to hurl himself at her and beat her with his fists. He ran over and kissed her. She held the back of his head, pressing his mouth against hers. For a moment he forgot the Jews, the pogroms, as their mouths held each other. Then, suddenly, she pushed him away.

  “I must go, Nathan. Good luck. Some day you will know I was right.”

  She ran down the stairs. He could hear her strong little feet taking them three at a time. He tried to say over and over, “This is the last time. That sound on the step is the end of her.”

  But he could not take it seriously.

  So many times, there by the river, Irma had warned him. But their bodies had clung then, and nothing had seemed true except their love. Now she was gone, and it was too casual. She had gone to join her revolutionary peasants as young girls skip off to meet their beaux. It takes only courage to face catastrophes. It takes a genius for living to take them in stride. Irma had that genius. She could risk her life with the same ease and spontaneity that marked her graceful dive into the river in the spring. Nathan loved her for that. That made him laugh too. He loved Irma because she could run off to help the peasants when she should have been with him. Nathan laughed too long. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He was many miles from Minsk, safe and very sad.

  But not far enough to be free from the pain of stones flung with the force of prejudice, free from the mad faces, the sadistic havoc of self-righteousness, the broken windows, the broken heads, the broken vows. No distance was great enough. No time. He was held forever to this torture and torment by some umbilical cord. He could never cut it. He could only tug.

  When Nathan reached his uncle’s room in Warsaw, the old man was praying. It seemed to Nathan that he had never seen Uncle Max when he was not praying. Uncle Max was a tailor, one of Warsaw’s million little tailors. The room was cold and disorderly. The tablecloth was spotted with crumbs and stained with red wine. Furniture was sparse. The rug was gone. For in Warsaw it is slow death. Jews come to market to sell each other things they can’t buy. There is a strict boycott against the Jews. They live on an island of fear.

  Nathan sat down and waited patiently for his uncle to finish his one-sided conversation with Jehovah. When he was finished Max turned toward him wearily. He was a spindly little man, tubercular, with shoulders hunched by half a century of sewing. Nathan felt his uncle’s small hand in his. It was soft and wet.

  “So, Nathan, my boy, you have come to the big city.”

  He could not make his voice glad. The room was too small for another. It was hot now, and there was not enough tea. But Max was lonely and his damp white face was splotched with darkness, like the blackness that streaked Nathan’s yellows and greens. Slowly the old heat of family affection began to tingle in his old body.

  “Nathan, you grow like a weed. Praise God, you are in good health, you are a man now, twenty-two, yes?”

  “Twenty-seven, Uncle Max. How is everything, how is your health?”

  Max shook his head sadly.

  “A fine thing to ask. All day we sew for two zlotys. Thank God it is soon over.”

  Max took the tea from the stove, and poured it into a glass. Then he poured some into a saucer and sipped it noisily through his skimpy beard.

  “So why have you come, Nathan, you have something to sell?”

  “I ran from the village. Pogrom.”

  “Ugh, ugh,” Max groaned painfully, raising his shoulders in a gesture of futility. “Don’t tell me.”

  They sat in silence. Don’t tell Uncle Max about pogroms. Let him squirm further up into his shell. Let him cry five minutes longer to Jehovah. Let him try to forget the word that splits his simple heart.

  They sat in silence. The poverty seemed to gag them both. Everywhere it was the same, sweat all day, pray all night, starve and hide from hooligans screaming “Jew,” then die, a good Jewish funeral, everybody sobbing for their own misfortunes.

  Uncle Max rocked awhile. Then he put on his little yarmulke and threw a shawl around his shoulders.

  “Come, it is time to go to schul.”

  The schul was a cellar, one small room, where the poor Jews tried to forget their hunger and the bad air as they made their peace with God. Nathan shuddered to see these old men, their sons, and their pasty-faced grandchildren swaying together and droning in unison their mournful incantations. The air was soggy with sweat and heavy breaths. The faces were pinched, yellow, pockmarked with poverty, yet flooded with faith. Nathan wanted to laugh. He always wanted to laugh at the wrong time. But it seemed so obvious, so horribly obvious that God was not in this place.

  Max rushed home after the service. He had to have a pair of pants mended by morning. Nathan walked along slowly through the ghetto. A barefoot beggar boy followed him for a block, burdening him with an involved tale of misfortune. Too timid to order him away, Nathan gave him five kronen to get rid of him.

  “And what will you do with it?” he asked, hoping for some spark of warmth (“bread for momma”) seeking the human touch.

  “Vodka,” said the brat and ran away.

  As Nathan tu
rned the corner, the wind sprang up. The shrill, rasping tones of a woman’s voice came to his ears. A moment later a policeman passed, dragging a smeary-faced woman. Nathan had heard stuck pigs howl like that in the village, when they were dragged along for the blood to spill out.

  “Let me go, you fat ape, you stuffed pig—I won’t—I won’t any more, I promise.”

  And Nathan had to laugh again.

  Here was Warsaw, squirming with lies, every gutter gushing depravity, great swindles, misused power, the filth of corruption. And all the police could do was arrest this woman, this mascara-madonna, willing to sell the only thing she owned.

  Nathan spent six days in Warsaw, sleeping on the floor of his uncle’s room. Every day Max grunted a heartless good morning, prayed, drank his tea, sewed all day, grunting only, “Ugh, how it goes with us! Better we should all be dead.”

  Nathan was anxious to hear from Irma, anxious to get away.

  He felt he was dying, here in the slums of the Jews. He looked into the pale faces of little boys shadowed with TB, smelled the horrible grime of the crowded market place, walked through this prison without bars and felt he would die.

  On the sixth day a note came from Minsk. It was signed by one of Irma’s comrades.

  She had asked for him, at the end, it said.

  “Tell him not to wait for me,” it said.

  “Bad news,” nodded Uncle Max complacently, not looking around from his sewing machine. Here in the ghetto Uncle Max had heard bad news for sixty years, and his father before him and his father’s father. All news is bad news in Warsaw and also no news is bad news.

  Nathan folded the note and slowly put it in his inside pocket.

  “Mind if I paint here, Uncle, just today? Then I’ll be gone.”

  Max shrugged his shoulders and went on sewing.

  Nu, a painter, a loafer, making pictures when he could be sewing.

  Nathan set up his easel in the middle of the room and sketched quickly. It was Irma, Irma on every inch of the canvas, Irma standing with the pigeons, Irma laughing, Irma holding him to her in the dark, Irma talking to the river, Irma singing, Irma saying, “They won’t let you live with me,” Irma fierce, leading the peasants with her hair flying, Irma telling him to go, Irma on the stairs, Irma in his heart, Irma in the sky.