Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  Mr. Zapiski lived in an apartment house at the top of that steep, narrow cobblestone street. The heavy metal-and-glass front door creaked as I pushed against it. I’d walk up four flights of badly lit marble stairs, voices and cooking smells—beef, cabbage, potatoes—drifting through the closed doors, and I’d cross the hall to a wooden door, one of six on that floor, and twirl the knob on the old doorbell, which made the lifeless noise of a clapper striking lead.

  Through the door I’d hear his shuffling gait as he came along his hallway. “Who is there?” he’d say, and I’d respond, “Benjie Walter,” and hear him pull back the bolt and unlock the door. His face would appear in the narrow space between the door and the jamb. “Go into the parlor,” he’d say, and I’d pass through the dimly lit narrow apartment hallway, while behind me he’d busy himself locking and bolting the door. I’d go past his kitchen—invariably, dirty dishes in the sink, a teakettle on the stove, Yiddish newspapers on the table, and often roaches on the walls—and into the parlor. There I’d sit in an easy chair: upholstery worn and grimy to the touch, springs hard against my rump and spine, an odor of dust rising from the fabric.

  The first time I went to him was a bitter-cold evening in late November. I was uneasy; my father’s words still echoed in my head. We sat in silence for some while in the dimly lit kitchen, drinking the tea he set before us. On the table lay Yiddish and German newspapers. I had the sense I was going to be put through some sort of initiation rite.

  “Tell me, Benjamin, these days what do you really like?”

  I told him I liked baseball and movies.

  He wore a tall black skullcap. His head was balding. I knew that under the skullcap a four-inch vertical scar and a two-inch horizontal scar ran across his head and intersected above the right temporal lobe. There were tiny pockmarks on the parts of his face not covered by the beard. His face was pale and gaunt, almost bloodless.

  “You still like to read, Benjamin?”

  “I like adventure stories, sea stories, war stories.”

  “Yes? Well, there are plenty of war stories in the Torah. And a big war story in the section you will learn to read.”

  That was all he said, though he kept glancing at me over the rim of his glass. He had pale-gray pupils and his eyes bulged somewhat in their sockets and were encircled by bluish shadows and webbed skin. Though I had known him for years, I understood that we were now entering upon a distinctly new relationship: I was no longer merely the son of his closest friend. He was about to become my teacher, I his student. A wall of unspoken expectations was rising between us; it would be my obligation to surmount it.

  He slurped tea from his glass, coughed, and wiped his lips with a not-very-clean handkerchief. I counted four roaches on his kitchen walls before we were done with our tea. He put the glasses into the sink and told me to follow him.

  In the doorway to Mr. Zapiski’s parlor hung worn purple portieres. On the windows were run-down curtains and shades. Cracked brown linoleum in the hallway; faded carpeting in the parlor; peeling light-green paint on the walls and ceilings. Books lay on end tables and chairs, some facedown and open. The walls were entirely bare, without even the traditional velvet picture of Jerusalem. He seemed to fit the tatterdemalion apartment perfectly: his dark clothes threadbare, his beard unkempt, his shoes cracked, with his right foot resting on the floor at an odd angle to the other.

  He motioned to an easy chair and I removed two books and took the chair, feeling myself sink deep into the seat. The chair seemed to seize me like one of those flowers that snaps shut on unwary insects. He dropped down into the sofa, from which rose little tendrils of dust. He stretched his left leg out in front of him, leaned forward with a low grunt, placed both hands on the trousers of his right leg below the knee, and swung the leg up, then lowered it so that it lay limp across the left leg.

  “Now you will begin to learn the trope,” he said in his hoarse voice, and coughed. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into an ashtray that was close to overflowing. “First, I will teach you the notes and the grammar of the notes. Then I will teach you the meaning behind the grammar. And if I see that you have truly mastered that, I will teach you the magic of this music, things few people know.”

  At that point, because I’d always been inclined to pry into matters that aroused my curiosity, I said, “Excuse me, is it permissible to ask a question?”

  “Without questions there is no learning.”

  “Why do you have so many books about war in your apartment?”

  In my world we sized up people by the books they read and by the libraries in their homes. Walking through the hallway to the parlor, I’d noticed bookcases filled with volumes, in Yiddish and English, about the Great War.

  His face twitched with annoyance. No doubt he’d expected a question about grammar and trope.

  “Because I was in the war, and I am trying to understand it.”

  “What did you do in the war?”

  “I was a soldier like your father.”

  I have no recollection why I put the next question to Mr. Zapiski. Remember, I was not yet thirteen years of age; why would anything about that distant war have remotely interested me? Overheard private conversations between Mr. Zapiski and my father, perhaps; or that curiosity of mine boiling over. The answer is lodged in deep memory to which I have at present no direct access. In any event, abruptly, for no clear reason, I heard myself ask Mr. Zapiski, “Whose side were you on?”

  My query startled him. His pale features turned crimson. He did not answer for a moment. Then he asked, in a tremulous tone, “Why do you ask me that question?”

  The word he used for “why” was “warum,” which is both German and Yiddish. He pronounced it “varoom.”

  I told him I was just curious.

  He said, after another silence, “Your father and I fought in the army of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, on the side of Germany, against England, France, Russia, Italy, and America.”

  On the side of Germany! They had fought on the side of the enemy! Was that something to worry about? It had never occurred to me that my father had fought against the United States. How had he and Mr. Zapiski managed to get into America if they had once fought against it? Perhaps they had been asked and had lied. What if the American government should ever find out? Would Mr. Zapiski and my father be sent back to Europe?

  Mr. Zapiski stirred and coughed. His head shook briefly from side to side and the skullcap slid from it, revealing the two intersecting scars and the curls of thinning white hair on the nearly bald scalp. How could he and my father be the same age? They looked thirty years apart. The skullcap tumbled to his lap and he put it back on his head.

  “Enough about that cursed war. That is not why you came here. Open the book and we will study what your father sent you to learn.”

  He began to chant the notes in his hoarse and rasping voice, and I followed along in the adolescent quavering that would after some years change into the baritone you now hear.

  He taught, and I learned. The weeks passed.

  Regularly, my father would test me and nod, satisfied by my progress.

  All that winter I trudged through snowstorms and frozen streets and studied trope with a man who had fought against my country in the Great War.

  He drilled me in the complicated grammar of the sacred writings: long and short vowels; open and closed syllables; soft and hard dots of emphasis; the reasons for the placement of primary and secondary accents; the meticulous rhythms and trills of the musical notations. To grind the grammar and the music into memory, I’d walk home from Mr. Zapiski singing into the icy winds of the winter, and in the darkness of my small room I’d repeat to myself rules of grammar and take apart and put together lengthy verses of sacred text. He taught me the music of the book written by the Creator God. I am not now a believer, but I was then, and felt certain that I was learning the music chanted by God Himself whenever He opened the pages of the sacred narrative. And the angels, too, us
ed that melody each time they told that story to one another. So Mr. Zapiski informed me one evening. Sweetly the celestial choir sang the sacred trope, and the music ascended through all the heavens and reached to the seventh heaven wherein was the Throne of Glory on which sat the Creator God, and the Creator God would hear the chanting and be transported with joy, and the joy would overflow and drift downward from the Divine Presence, down like an invisible benevolent rain through all the lower heavens and the fiery stars to our troubled Earth, and brush humankind with its radiance, and for a time there would be peace in the world and an abundance of happiness.

  Often, about halfway through our hour, he would drop off into sleep. It was a strange and fearful thing to see: one moment he’d be wide awake, the next his head rolled forward onto his chest. He seemed then a helpless rag doll of a man. Wrinkled dark pants and jacket; stained white shirt, disheveled white beard; pale pockmarked features; the bad leg lying on top of the good one as if it needed more than the floor for support. Perhaps he slipped into a trance of some sort, the way his eyes were open to slits with only the whites showing; the occasional twitching of his face as he slept; and sometimes a low, deep snoring. None of my classmates ever saw him like that; they studied with him only in the school, during recess or after classes, where he would never fall asleep. I was the only one he taught in his apartment, because of his friendship with my father.

  The first time it happened I sat frightened until he woke. Then I realized he would sleep about fifteen minutes each time. I began to use those minutes to browse through his books about the Great War.

  Most were too difficult for me to understand. Some were in languages other than English and Yiddish and had horrendous pictures of blasted trees and fragments of human bodies and torn-up trenches and ravaged countrysides in which nothing remained except the sky. As a result, I began to have dreams of Mr. Zapiski and waves of faceless men climbing out of their trenches and attacking over duckboards laid across knee-deep mud and machine guns rattling and cutting them down like scythes leveling fields of wheat and rye.

  One day in January I asked my mother, “What happened to Mr. Zapiski during the war?”

  She said, not looking up from the kitchen sink where she was peeling potatoes, “About such matters, you speak to your father.”

  “Can it happen to me if I fight in a war?”

  “Pooh pooh pooh! Don’t say such things. Go talk to your father.”

  I asked my father.

  His angry response startled me. “You little snotnose, why do you keep poking into matters that are not your concern? Turn your curiosity to more important matters. Your business is to learn Torah.”

  Standing before Mr. Zapiski’s door one night in early February, I set down the bag of food my mother had told me to take to him and wondered how he climbed all those stairs. He must exhaust himself. No wonder he slept during the trope lessons.

  And indeed he fell asleep that night and I turned to his books and opened a volume of photographs on the war between Austria and Russia and was leafing through it when he woke suddenly from his trancelike state and without preliminaries proceeded to speak to a point in the air behind me. He said, speaking rapidly in Yiddish, “Hear me out on this, Victor. I want you to hear me out. Not everything that sounds like music is truly music.” There was a wildness in his eyes, a hollowness to his voice, as if some unbridled creature were speaking from inside him. “The tyrant Phalaris roasted his prisoners in a huge bronze bull, in whose nostrils he had his servants place reeds in such a way that the prisoners’ shrieks were transformed into music. The sounds came out as music, but were they indeed music?”

  There was a pause, a resonating silence.

  “What do you think of that, Victor?”

  I sat stupefied.

  “Victor, what do you think?” he asked again, staring into the air behind my head and speaking now in a reasonable tone that was somehow more frightening than the previous wildness.

  I didn’t know what to do or say and thought of getting up and running from there, but just then his head dropped forward onto his chest, and after two or three deep, snorting breaths he was again asleep.

  Frightened and bewildered, I went quickly on tiptoe and left the apartment, my ears reverberating with the imagined screams of those burning captives. I asked myself: Should I tell my father what happened? I didn’t want to embarrass Mr. Zapiski. Besides, it would make no difference, certainly the lessons would not come to an end merely because Mr. Zapiski had experienced a bad dream in my presence. Also, in truth, I rather liked the lessons, I savored being with Mr. Zapiski, I was as intrigued by his strange behavior as I was by his books on the Great War. Indeed, as I hurried past the brewery and under the trestle of the elevated train, massive and monstrous in the night, I realized that much of my revulsion toward Mr. Zapiski had left me, and in its place had come an irresistible curiosity. Who was he? How could I find out more about him? And at that moment I sensed someone walking behind me, and I looked quickly around but saw no one.

  At home that night I asked my father, “Was Mr. Zapiski a teacher in Europe?”

  “In Europe Mr. Zapiski was both a teacher and a student.”

  “Where did he go to school?”

  “In a university in Vienna.”

  “What did he study?”

  “He studied history. Then history caught up with him. What did he teach you tonight?”

  I told him.

  “That was all he taught you?”

  “He was tired and not feeling well.”

  My father, his face stiff, turned away.

  Some days later I brought Mr. Zapiski a copy of my bar mitzvah speech, which I had carefully researched and written over a period of three weeks. This, my first public address, I was to deliver before the assembled throng of celebrating relatives, friends, teachers, and classmates as an example of my maturity in years and proficiency in learning.

  “I want us all to be proud of you,” my mother had said, watching me labor over the talk. “That’s all I ask.”

  I read the talk to Mr. Zapiski.

  “Well, my dear Davita, I do hope I am not boring you. I must tell you that many of the details of this story have been entirely forgotten by me until now, hence the story may lack the refinement of narrative and no doubt has thus far some dull and trying moments to it. But please accept my assurance that you will be recompensed, if memory serves, by what is soon to follow. In the meantime, I must use your toilet. I shall only be a moment.”

  “Where was I? Ah, yes. The talk I had written and was now reading to Mr. Zapiski. Indeed, a refill on the coffee will be appreciated.

  “First, three or four sentences by way of introduction.

  “My rite de passage was to fall on the Saturday morning when the biblical portion that is read aloud from the sacred Scroll of the Law deals with the war waged by Amalek against the fleeing Israelite slaves. Joshua organized the Israelite troops and fought off the Amalekites, aided by Moses, whose arms, raised heavenward, brought about the help of the Lord and spurred the Israelites on to victory.

  “My little talk was about loyalty in war.”

  I sat sunk deep in the tattered easy chair and read in a shaking voice a brief essay, which—how astonishing!—I think I will now be able to recall in detail. I began by asking: Why do people wage war? Would people kill and let themselves be killed unless there was a very convincing reason for doing so? If conquest is the only reason for a war, conquest from which only the ruler stands to gain, then people should refuse to fight. If, however, a war is to be fought for the defense of one’s family and property, then men should fight with all their heart and might. The war against the Amalekites was a war of defense. In such a war, all must participate; no one has the right to refrain from taking part. And the cowards and deserters, all who would benefit from the courage of the brave, they have no right to share in the victory, and should be punished. Deserters most especially should be punished, because they run away in the
face of danger, they leave it to others to fight and perhaps die in their place, they are the lowest of men, they—

  My little talk, I must tell you, contained a splendid array of proof texts from sources both sacred and secular, over which I had labored long and hard. But that was as far as I got with it. For a sound had begun to emanate from Mr. Zapiski, a noise that sounded like “What? What? What?” in Yiddish, and I looked up and saw that his normally pallid features had turned crimson, and a blood vessel had risen and lay like a vertical ridge along the center of his forehead.

  “What are you saying?” he shouted.

  I stared at him.

  “Who told you this? Surely not your father or mother!”

  I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about.

  He leaned stiffly toward me and winced with pain as his hand inadvertently struck the knee of his right leg. The pain seemed to make him angrier still. I thought he might suffer a stroke and die of rage; I had heard about such things. He rubbed the knee, grasped the trouser with both hands, raised the leg so that it hung a moment suspended, lowered it onto the left leg, adjusted it. He took a deep, tremulous breath.

  “Why did you choose this subject, eh? Is this what you intend to tell the people who will come together to celebrate your entering into adulthood? This? What do you know about it? Go fight in a war, God forbid, and then see what speeches you make. It isn’t enough that your father suffered the way he did? Why must you now add to it with your cruel words?”

  He fell silent, breathing heavily, glaring at me out of swollen eyes. He coughed and wiped his sweating face with a ragged handkerchief. The chair, the air, the room, the rage—I felt myself being stifled.

  In a trembling voice I told him I did not understand what I had done wrong.

  That seemed to infuriate him even more. “Don’t play the ignorant innocent with me, you smart aleck! I know you. I see right through you. Nothing escapes you. You want to wage war against your father, do it another way. Erase those sentences from your talk!”