Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

“But they were your mother and father.”

  “Recollection very vague now. Retrieve it all if I must one day.”

  “How can you be so sure of that, Benjamin?”

  All this—returned to memory by a felled tree limb. In their years on this property the woods had been struck by lightning five times, though this sixth time was the closest it had ever come to the house. Astonishing to have so much come hurtling back into memory, as if an electric switch had been turned on: the blasted oak, the awful war, the shattered woods; the history of the house, the resurrected headlines, the Argonne and the Ardennes, his parents, and—yes!—the trope teacher. A long cord of connection.

  He sat behind the steering wheel of his car, staring in shock at the huge tree limb that lay across the driveway and in the same moment seeing I. D. Chandal, coat and hat stained dark with rain, emerge from the woods and come hurrying toward him along the wet rear lawn.

  She said, “One of your trees took a direct hit.”

  “Which?”

  “One of the oaks. It probably saved your house.”

  “One of the oaks?” He felt dazed.

  “You’ll need a tree person.”

  “A what?” What was she saying? She seemed so calm amid this devastation: a shattered tree, splinters everywhere.

  “A specialist. To assess the damage.”

  “One of the oaks,” he said, looking toward the trees.

  “Benjamin, I’d love to stand here and talk to you, but I have to go to the bathroom. Listen, come over later for a cup of coffee, if you’re so inclined.”

  He watched her move off behind the rhododendron hedge and head toward the Tudor. He parked the car and walked over to the oak nearest the house.

  The tree was nearly one hundred years old. It stood illumined by the sodium floods. There was a faint smell of freshly splintered, charred wood. The limb had been hurled onto the driveway. And all those shards. Some like spears and swords with their points buried six inches in the earth. He shuddered at the image of a shard embedding itself in human flesh. Deep darkness lay upon the branches facing the woods.

  Very still, the woods.

  The silence chilled him. He entered the house through the back door.

  The nurse sat waiting for him in the kitchen.

  “Oh, the storm was something fierce. Mrs. Walter, the Lord bless her, is so brave. The lightning frightened her. Scared me too. Like the Last Judgment, it was. The hand of God. We thought the house was hit, but it was only a tree. I gave her a pill, and she’ll sleep four, maybe five hours.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should get a night nurse not only for when you’re away.”

  “I can tend to her.”

  “For the next time, I mean.”

  “I’ll worry about it then.”

  “I can recommend someone.”

  “If it becomes necessary.”

  “I’ll let myself out.”

  He ate cold chicken, reading and half-listening to the news on NPR. Merciless bombardment of Sarajevo. Centuries of hatred surfacing. Tenacity of memory. An image came to him and he looked up from the book: I. D. Chandal hurrying across the rear lawn in her raincoat and hat. She’d worn sandals and no socks. An odd woman.

  Upstairs, his wife lay sleeping. In his study, he removed from his briefcase books and papers and the manuscript of his memoirs. He sat down at the desk and opened the manuscript and stared at his writing. Lackluster words lay heaped on the pages: dead leaves. Amid the words he saw a man dressed out of fashion, giving off the stench of morgue and carnage; spittled lips and a diabolic grin; a blizzard of ashes and vile coiling hair. He trembled, his heart thundering. A sound from the wall on which hung the framed headlines. The house did that at times: moaned and creaked and sighed. Through the window he saw the Tudor, all its windows lit.

  A moment later—it seemed a mere instant—he was standing at the door of the Tudor, ringing the bell.

  The door opened. She stood there, small, face white, hair shoulder-length and blond, and smiled openly and warmly.

  “Why, Benjamin. How nice.”

  “That cup of coffee you so kindly offered.” His voice with a slight quiver in it; hesitant, vulnerable.

  “Your wife?”

  “She is in a deep sleep.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “The nurse gave her something.”

  “All right, then.” She stepped back, opened the door wide, motioning him in. He stepped inside and heard the door close behind him.

  “The kitchen is this way.”

  He followed her through an empty center hall with a curving carpeted stairway into a large octagon-shaped room. Walls bare; floors bare; not a chair or a table anywhere. Dull lights from naked oval-shaped bulbs in antique brazen wall sconces. Their feet on creaky oak planks.

  “There’s furniture on the way. But I can really make do without much furniture.”

  He thought of Evelyn’s exquisite taste in furniture, and remembered the apartment of his childhood: heavy mahogany tables and chairs; horizontal hanging mirrors nearly as long as a wall; floor lamps with tasseled shades; upholstered sofa and easy chairs; blue oilcloth on the floors, white shades on the windows; the chicken, fish, potatoes, and vegetable soup smells in the kitchen. Of all things, why was he remembering the apartment? The dismal light. His father’s penchant for low-wattage bulbs. Save money on electricity and spend it on more important things. Give an extra dollar or two to the teacher. The trope teacher.

  They went through a dim hallway lined on one side with floor-to-ceiling dark-wood cabinets and entered the kitchen.

  It was a drab space with old cherry-wood cabinets, a sink and refrigerator and stove that seemed of 1950s vintage, and an overhead light fixture that emitted a cheerless yellowish luminescence. A rectangular brown-wood table and four wooden chairs near a window. On the table two stacks of newspapers. In the sink a heap of dirty dishes. Reddish tiles covered the floor; faded light-green paint on the walls. And the walls bare—not even a calendar.

  He noticed immediately the large open writing pad and the black fountain pen on the table near the newspapers and stood watching as she quickly flipped the pad shut, smoothly scooped it up together with the pen, opened a cabinet drawer, slipped the pad and pen inside, and pushed the drawer shut.

  “I’ve interrupted your writing.”

  “No, no, I hadn’t begun.”

  “I’m so sorry. I should have called.”

  “No, really, it’s all right. Please excuse the mess. I’m not the tidiest person. One of the things my husband always complained about—the lack of tidiness, I mean. His funeral business he kept very tidy. Well, now, coffee. I have, let’s see, hazelnut, Irish cream, espresso, Swiss mocha. Regular and decaf.”

  “Espresso regular, please.”

  She busied herself at the sink. “Sit down, Benjamin. Relax. Push the newspapers to one side.”

  He sat at the table near a window that offered a view of the oaks and the woods. Looking to the right, he saw the gray fieldstone side of his house and the window of his study. He had left the lights on.

  “You want a donut, Benjamin? I love donuts.”

  “Thank you.” What am I doing here? Evelyn so sick and me in this woman’s house. Keeps herself neat and trim. No doubt dyes her hair. Good-looking woman. Seems a different person when she writes. Puts on weight somehow: window-glass distortion? But the gray hair. Didn’t she just say something?

  “Please excuse me, my mind was elsewhere.”

  “I asked, Benjamin, if you wanted a single or a double espresso. I’m having a double.”

  “A double for me too, please.”

  “Here we are. Two double espressos and two donuts.”

  She set down the tray and sat across from him, gliding lightly onto the chair. Her sudden close presence. Smooth cream-white face; long neck; the clear outline of her breasts beneath the jersey. Hungry, glittering eyes. Moist lips. He felt a momentary dizziness; heart pounding, palm
s sweating.

  The coffee hot, black, bitter; the donut stickysweet.

  “Are you all right, Benjamin?”

  “A little faint.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  “A slight vertigo. Comes and goes.”

  “You should see a doctor about that.”

  “Davita, I see many doctors. I have an illness of the bones, which medications deftly control.”

  “And the dizziness?”

  “As I said, it comes and goes. Tell me something, Davita. During supper I read an essay on your work by a noted critic who marveled at your memory, which he called, if I remember correctly, ‘the memory of a sealed well, filled with water and leaking nothing.’ A quaint metaphor. How do you do that?”

  “I can’t presume to know what he means.”

  “I am encountering a great deal of difficulty remembering certain matters.”

  “For your scholarly writing?”

  “For my memoirs.”

  She bit into a donut.

  He sipped espresso. His fingers trembling slightly, the beginning of a headache. How strange! Inside the kitchen of I. D. Chandal, drinking espresso, eating donuts. The downed limb of a lightning-struck oak across his driveway. Huge and deadly pieces of wood strewn about his property. His wife in a drugged sleep. Newspapers on the table.

  SARAJEVO CLASHES IMPERIL RELIEF EFFORT,

  DRAW U.S. WARNING

  LEADERS IN MUNICH WARN RIVAL FORCES

  IN BOSNIAN STRIFE

  The vertigo again. What year was this? He read:

  PLAN TO TIGHTEN EMBARGO ON IRAQ

  SUGGESTED BY U.S.

  NUCLEAR ACCORDS BRING NEW FEARS

  ON ARMS DISPOSAL

  “You see, I have no idea how to continue. I have a book without a beginning.”

  She put down her cup, patted her lips with a napkin. She gazed at him guardedly, seeming to be calculating, measuring.

  “Well, Benjamin, I start from the zero point of memory.”

  “The zero point?”

  “From the very least bit of memory.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “From the involuntary memory that comes like a bolt out of the blue. From the memory that is your aura.”

  “My what? My aura?”

  “Listen to me, Benjamin. When I say the word ‘war,’ what comes immediately into your mind?”

  “I don’t—”

  “The word ‘war,’ Benjamin. Immediately!”

  “ ‘Why?’ ”

  “Why what?”

  “The word ‘why’ comes to mind.”

  “And who speaks that word?”

  He hesitated.

  “Who, Benjamin?”

  A wildly careering search. “An old teacher.”

  “What is he doing and saying, your old teacher?”

  “I can’t—”

  “What, Benjamin?”

  Still he hesitated.

  “You’ll excuse me, Benjamin, but I see in your face that you have a story to tell. So tell me the story, get down to your zero point of memory. Or call it a night, go back to your wife, and I’ll get on with my work.”

  A desperate effort. “Let me try.”

  “Good. Another espresso? Another donut?”

  Why, I’d hear my classmates ask, did Mr. Isaac Zapiski wear those dark clothes? Fall, winter, spring, and summer: dark double-breasted suit, dark wide-brimmed hat, dark wool coat in cold weather, dark high shoes, dark tie. He wasn’t a rabbi; he wasn’t even a teacher in our school. Their somber garb accorded well with their sober calling: the handing on of an ancient tradition. But, as far as we knew, Mr. Zapiski eked out a living solely from the teaching of trope. Why, then, the dark clothes?

  And the same dark clothes at that. Weekdays, holy days, sabbaths, festivals—the same seedy suit, the same shabby coat, the same shabby hat. We were all poor—those were the ghastly years of the Great Depression—but each of our fathers owned at least two suits, two pairs of trousers, two shirts, two ties. And the same pair of high black shoes, scuffed, misshapen, bulging out at the toes and down at the heels—why did Mr. Zapiski own only one set of clothes and shoes?

  And why did he walk moving his left foot forward in a shuffle and his right foot trailing? Shuffle and scrape, shuffle and scrape, an awkward drag-footed gait. A small, bumbling, stooped man who wore his hat low over his eyes and his jacket or coat collar up, his neck squeezed into his shoulders, looking to all intents and purposes like a turtle in the act of withdrawing into its shell. He had a habit of shaking his head in a sort of nervous twitch, jerking it from side to side, as if trying to disentangle himself from some web in which he had been caught. He didn’t do that often, but when you saw it, it was frightening, because the pupils in his eyes would slide up to the top and all you saw was the white, and his lips would become flecked with spittle, and you were sure he was going to faint. But he never did, it only lasted some seconds and it was over, and he seemed never to remember what had happened.

  In the corner store on our street, where he bought his newspaper, I’d see him sometimes counting out his money with shaking hands from the small black pocket purse he carried, the sort with the little metal knobs that snapped shut. I’d have come in on an errand for my parents and he’d acknowledge my presence with a nod and a cough—he had a nervous little cough, a kind of perpetual need to clear his throat—and he’d be standing there with his cane under one arm, slowly counting out his money. He smoked endlessly, with enormous intensity, holding the cigarettes between his thumb and forefinger and sucking in the smoke as if his life depended on it. He went about beneath a weight of darkness save for his short white beard and frayed white shirt.

  I remember asking my mother, “How old is Mr. Zapiski?”

  “Mr. Zapiski and your father were born two days apart.”

  “Why does he look so old?”

  “He went through a great deal in the war.”

  In the winter my heart would go out to him whenever I saw him picking his way through the snow on our streets, stopping before a patch of ice or at a corner heaped with snow as if to muster the strength to venture forward, while the wind lashed at his hat and coat. Once in a storm I offered to help him and he took my hand. I felt his weight as we made our way across the street in the snow and, climbing to the opposite sidewalk, he slipped and we both went down, and his cry when he fell haunted my dreams.

  Some of my classmates would mockingly imitate his hobbled walk, his rasping voice, the way his face would twitch as if it had a life of its own. Most were indifferent. We all knew that he would inevitably enter our lives at a certain time and become a sort of teacher to us for a period of months.

  It was inevitable that someone like Mr. Zapiski would give rise to tales and rumors. All the talk about him seemed connected to the Great War. Some claimed he had once been a Bolshevik general. Others insisted that he had served as an officer in the army of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Still others swore that he’d been a secret agent of Kaiser Wilhelm; a machine-gunner in a Polish regiment of the Austrian army; a courier in Switzerland for Lenin.

  To me he was the least likely person to have qualified as a great warrior. He seemed to have been born broken.

  He was, as far as I could then tell, my father’s closest friend. Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons he would eat at our table. Though he rarely spoke more than a few words to me or to my younger brother and sister, he seemed unquestionably a member of our family. I learned early on that he was the only one in his family who had left Europe. All the others—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins—had chosen to remain behind, and for reasons I could not fathom were now unable to come to America. During our meals, there were often long periods of silence; when he and my father talked, nearly always in Yiddish—we talked Yiddish among ourselves, English on the streets—their conversation invariably turned to politics: labor strikes, socialism, communism, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Trotsky. In my presence they never
spoke about the Great War. My mother served and sat in silence, listening, sighing from time to time as memories of her life in Europe returned to her.

  None of the talk interested me. I’d play word games with my brother and finger-rope games with my sister. When I was young I often sat on Mr. Zapiski’s lap; but, growing older, I found him discomfiting, and I came to dislike intensely the cigarette stench in his clothes and the yellow stains in the beard around his moist lips. His mouth emitted fetid vapors.

  The years went by. Eventually the time came when I was to be given over to Mr. Zapiski.

  “Listen to me,” my father said after supper one evening when he and I were alone in the kitchen. “I am going to tell you something, and I don’t ever want to hear from you that you didn’t hear me say it. Mr. Zapiski and your father grew up in the same town in Europe. We served in the same regiment in the Great War. For months we lived in the same trenches. We ate together, slept together, fought together, and suffered together. No one can ever be closer to you than the soldiers with whom you shared a trench during a war. Mr. Zapiski is my closest and dearest friend. Do not let me hear from him that you are not learning everything that he is teaching you.”

  My father leaned forward across the kitchen table and put his fleshy features and dark eyes close to my face—and I had a clear image of him hunched over his worktable in the window of the shoe repair shop where he now labored as a repairer of clocks and watches, his sweaty balding head gleaming in the yellow light of his work lamp. How abruptly he had fallen from a successful dealer in antiques to an indigent fixer of timepieces!

  And so I began, twice a week in the evenings, to walk from our apartment to Mr. Zapiski: a gauntlet of gritty Bronx streets. Old red-brick apartment houses; scrawny cats and emaciated dogs around the garbage cans in foul alleyways. Trucks and automobiles rattling past on the cobblestones. Rectangles of yellow light behind drawn shades and sometimes a partly dressed man or woman in a window, smoking a cigarette and looking down at me as I went by, a bony, too tall kid, walking very quickly even though this was my neighborhood and I need not have been frightened; but my mother’s fears had somehow attached themselves to me, her real terrors were often my imagined ones. And under the elevated train and up the street past an enormous red-brick brewery, whose hot, pungent stench was the plague of our neighborhood.