Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  And I saw illustrations of Jews in the fifteenth century wearing Jew badges; a medieval ghetto set on fire by a mob; Jews before the tribunal of the Inquisition; a synagogue in Palestine looted by Arabs; a middle-aged, balding Jew forced to walk the streets of a Nazi city, wearing a sign that said Ich bin Jude; he looked a little like Mr. Zapiski. Was that the world to which Mr. Zapiski had returned? What a confusion rose in me upon reading those two books! And immediately upon graduating from high school, I enlisted in the army. Oh, yes, I could have applied to a rabbinical school and received a draft deferment; or, failing that, waited to be drafted; it might have given me added months with my family. But I was a little berserk by then, decidedly out of control, in flaring rebellion against my parochial-school world, which I felt stifling me, and bloated with manly visions of fighting the armies of Hitler. And also, somewhere along the margin of my thoughts and feelings, was the insane notion that in Europe I might meet Mr. Zapiski! My decision to enlist in the army was met with grim and silent resignation from my father and a cry of dread from my mother. And from then on Mr. Zapiski became a sort of talisman to me—a creature of magic and enchantment. But that, Davita, is another story. Thank you for the coffee and donuts. I must now bid you good night and look in upon my wife.

  Benjamin Walter returned home, climbed the stairs, and found his wife asleep. She awakened some time later, sweating and shivering, and he tended to her.

  When the coughing subsided, she could speak again. “Is it very difficult for you, Benjamin?”

  “I do love you, Evelyn.”

  “If things become very bad—”

  “My darling—”

  “—you should get a night nurse.”

  “Things need not become bad for quite a while. You’ll come round this time as you did before.”

  “But if things do, Benjamin.”

  “You are going on about it a bit much, my dear.”

  “Am I? All right. My mind keeps jumping back and forth. Earlier, I was remembering our week in Prague.”

  “Isn’t it strenuous for you to talk?”

  “Yes. But I’ll talk anyway. How remarkable.”

  “What?”

  “I remember those Peruvian street musicians in front of our hotel on the square.”

  “Oh, yes, those musicians.”

  “Their red headbands and red-and-black ponchos and their guitars and little drums and odd wind instruments and the Indian music they played.”

  “They kept us awake until three in the morning.”

  “And remember those booths selling Russian military caps and medals? Such an inglorious end to that awful empire.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t talk, my dear.”

  “Wasn’t it in that lovely restaurant, not far from the little house where Kafka once lived, that I was terribly ill for the first time?”

  “You’re tiring yourself.”

  “Was I coughing then?”

  “The coughing began in Amsterdam.”

  “Those Prague doctors hadn’t a clue as to what was the matter, did they? The thrush on my tongue, the seborrhea in my eyebrows. Imagine, all of them leaving the hospital at one o’clock in the afternoon and going home for the day, and locking the patients in their rooms. A quite inefficient system, don’t you think? One wonders what they saw in it for so many years.”

  “Countries get sidetracked, just as people do.”

  “I suppose. Do you think you might wipe my face?”

  “Of course.”

  She said, after a brief while, “I find that I miss the children.”

  “Shall I ask them to come? They’ll come immediately.”

  “Do you want them to?”

  “I think not.”

  “You are in no mood for sentimentality. Am I right, Benjamin?”

  “I don’t want to share you with anyone else now.”

  “In some ways, you are more English than I am. Or at least you play at it well.”

  He was quiet.

  She said, “How my mind jumps about. Do you know what I’m remembering? The song I made up and sang to you the second or third night you asked me out.”

  She sang weakly to a familiar tune:

  Oh, when you Yanks came marching in,

  You mucked our language, drank our gin;

  You wooed our girls, and all the while

  You gave your lives for the English isle.

  He listened and was quiet. And then said, “You were the best thing that happened to me in the army. You were my very dearest friend.”

  She murmured, “I would so very much like to complete my book on Virginia Woolf. Do you think I might live long enough to accomplish that? Do leave me alone now, Benjamin. I am so bloody, bloody tired.”

  And she closed her eyes.

  Now he sat gazing out his study window at I. D. Chandal, who was at a window of her kitchen, wearing a pale-blue housecoat and half-moon eyeglasses. She sat at a table, writing intently and looking preposterously bloated, the yellow light falling cruelly upon her pudgy features and gray hair. A trick of the light? Fatigue? The medication affecting my vision?

  After a long moment he felt himself a voyeur and looked away.

  The next morning he emerged from the house and walked to the edge of the woods, where he gazed up into the branches and leaves of the huge oak: green and blue shadows and the golden wash of early sunlight and the stunned faltering aftermath of a serious wounding. Lightning, he remembered, traveled at one-third the speed of light; its force at the point of impact quite unimaginable. The lightning bolt had struck the oak, seared the crown, spiraled downward along the contour of the trunk, and cut deeply into the bark, sending chips and huge slabs of wood flying in all directions. He shivered, having suddenly remembered a battlefield bombardment. But the smell was different here.

  He turned away.

  I. D. Chandal stood near her newly turned patch of soil, at a small bed of firethorns, trowel in hand, watching him. She wore her tight jeans and jersey. Small, trim, clear-eyed, cheerful.

  “Quite a night in my kitchen, Benjamin.”

  “The coffee and donuts were splendid.”

  “You’ll finish telling me your story?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then I’ll get us some more donuts for tonight.”

  Her lips shaped a buoyant smile. She looked at the oak. “You’ll need a tree surgeon. I know someone.”

  “Please ask him to clear away the debris but do nothing to the tree until I talk to him. Oh, yes, and ask him to check the woods for a ram.”

  She stood watching as he went to the garage and slid his lean frame into the old Saab, started the engine, and backed slowly down the driveway. Just before his rear tires reached the street he caught a glimpse of her through his front window standing on the lawn and staring up at the stricken tree, and was chilled by the look of rage he saw on her face. A fury so palpable he thought he heard her shouting. Angry at whom? At what? A very strange woman. Standing there at the edge of the woods with a trowel in her hand, and apparently screaming. Perhaps calling for the ram?

  3

  That night his wife woke and he calmed her and brought her a fresh nightgown and changed her pillowcase and sheets. Later he sat working on his memoirs and from time to time turned to gaze at I. D. Chandal in a second-floor window of the Tudor. An odd-looking creature when she sits writing. Some kind of biological anomaly? An alteration in her body chemistry? Absurd! More likely a poorly manufactured windowpane.

  In the morning he left the house and, striding past the stricken oak, entered the woods. Two or three times a week he took a walk through the woods to the cemetery. Cool bluish pools of shade that morning; a cloying moisture in the air; the crowns kindled to golden light by the sun. East of the woods lay the cemetery, stately acres of green meadow rising gracefully to a mound at the far end, on which had been built the mausoleum of a noted local family, one of whose sons, William Henry Bullock, had perished at Winfrey field in the battle of Chicka
mauga during the Civil War, and another, Robert William Bullock, in the Ardennes Forest during the last German offensive of the Second World War; the garrulous real estate agent had delivered the somber details in response to Benjamin Walter’s probing. Near the edge of the cemetery, he stopped and stood gazing at the length of sunlit meadow. Insect life in the air and the rich scent of warming grass. Rows of stones: many old, weathered, leaning; others polished, straight, names and dates still clear. Generations of life, casualties of battles fought as far back as the Revolutionary War, and many children; but most appeared to have lived the conventional span of years. He returned after a while, walking slowly through sun-spangled shade along the leafy, unexhausted earth and the tangled roots. How calming, these woods; trees living and dying as nature intended.

  Later that morning he sat in his university office reading the manuscript of the memoirs. After a while he rang for his secretary. She stood before him, a dark-haired woman in her early forties. He handed her the manuscript, wishing to be rid of it for a time.

  “It’s an early draft of the first chapter. You may run into some blurry patches here and there.”

  “Professor Walter, have I ever had any trouble reading your handwriting?”

  After she left he sat gazing out the window at the trees. There was a knock on the door.

  A young man stood uneasily in the doorway, dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie. Handsome and muscular; long blond hair gathered in a ponytail, the lobe of one ear ornamented with a gold ring. He remained in the doorway, awkward and hesitant, then stepped into the office and closed the door.

  “I just got back,” he said in a low voice.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The funeral was yesterday.”

  Benjamin Walter suddenly remembered: Yale. Someone sick. “My sympathies.”

  The young man jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers, hunched his shoulders. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “He used to get depressed. They’d give him pills so he could stay level, but it made him sleepy and he couldn’t do his work. Whenever he went off the pills he just, like, well, folded up into himself. He was a really great guy, good family, never did drugs, worried about AIDS, wouldn’t screw around, just me and him, okay? And two days ago he flew back home, walked over to the bridge near his house, and stepped off. Two women saw him. He climbed up on the rail and just stepped off.”

  A suicide, thought Benjamin Walter, and suddenly recalled his years at Oxford, where one student jumped out of a fourth-floor window and another took cyanide crystals. He’d read Dante one spring and remembered now the passage on the Seventh Circle of Hell. The Woods of the Suicides. Their souls encased in the thorny trees; the leaves being devoured by the frightful Harpies. As the Harpies ate, blood poured out of the suicides’ wounds, which enabled the souls in the trees to speak. The souls within the trees speaking only as the blood of the suicides gushed forth! Like Mr. Zapiski’s shrill tale of the treatment of prisoners by the tyrant Phalaris: roasting them alive inside that huge bronze bull. The screams of the prisoners turning to music; the blood of the suicides turning to speech. Connections?

  Listen to him, this sad young man, he seems unable to stop talking.

  “Once I found him in his room with a loaded gun between his legs. His father’s gun. I talked him into putting it away and didn’t tell anyone about it. I’d go up to Yale some weekends and we’d hang out and he’d ask me to watch out for him if he ever had too much to drink. The signal that he was drunk was when he started to sing, Whiskey after beer, have no fear. Beer after whiskey, mighty risky.’ Sometimes when he’d come out of one of his depressions, he’d think he could dodge bullets. I had to watch him real close then. I loved him, and he just walked off the bridge, like he thought he could fly.”

  Benjamin Walter felt pain in his fingers and saw himself tumbling head over heels toward a forest very far below. Tall trees waiting.

  “You know, this is the third person I’ve gone to high school with who’s committed suicide. Something out there is killing my friends.”

  “There are people here who can help you.”

  He shuffled his feet, blinked. “I’m ready for the exam.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said you’d give me a makeup exam.”

  “Perhaps you should wait a day or two.”

  The young man removed his hands from his pockets and fixed his eyes upon a point behind the head of Benjamin Walter. “Allan, you sonofabitch!” he suddenly roared. “You were my best friend! Why’d you do that? You said you’d never do that!” His shouted words reverberated inside the office. He choked back a cry. “Sorry, sorry, it’s making me a little crazy.” He turned and strode out of the room, closing the door.

  Benjamin Walter stood staring at the door. He thrust his hands under his armpits to still their trembling. Assaulted by a rush of images: Evelyn in her bed and I. D. Chandal at the window and the newly turned earth of the garden and the scarred oak and the eerie sounds of voices from afar and a uniformed man lunging at him with a bayonet. A shadow fell across the window. When he looked he saw only the cool blue sky and sunlight on the spring trees.

  He lunched with Robert Helman in a small second-floor restaurant near the university, staring without appetite at the feta cheese in his Greek salad. Robert Helman, in a gray tweed jacket, red bow tie, and dark rumpled slacks, sat over his vegetable soup, looking fretful and displeased.

  “You seem tired, Benjamin. Is it Evelyn?”

  “Actually, I expect Evelyn will be on her feet again soon. Tell me, have you ever read anything by the fiction writer I. D. Chandal?”

  “I don’t read fiction. I have no patience with plots and narratives.”

  “I’m intrigued by the clever ways she connects things.”

  “No doubt a nineteenth-century pen working on twentieth-century horrors.”

  “Why are you so testy today, Robert?”

  “I have a nineteenth-century story for you, Benjamin.”

  “Not especially interested.”

  “It was told to me by a boy in Theresienstadt.”

  “Theresienstadt?”

  “I was teaching him the section in the Torah about the binding of Isaac, so he could read it in celebration of his bar mitzvah.”

  “Excuse me, you taught trope in Theresienstadt?”

  “Why are you surprised?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I never told you, so you didn’t know. I was sixteen at the time. In Theresienstadt there were all kinds of classes during the day, and concerts, operas, lectures, and cabarets at night. Hunger, dysentery, disease, and culture. And in the early mornings—transports to Auschwitz. That’s how we lived. Anyway, I was teaching this boy, I didn’t even know his name at first, he came to me one day and said he’d heard I knew trope, would I teach him—I can see him clearly, pale, thin like a stick, big dark eyes—he wanted to learn the section about the binding of Isaac so he could read it to his family on his bar mitzvah, and I said I would be happy to teach him, so we found a corner somewhere under a staircase and I was teaching him the section sentence by sentence, he had a sweet tenor voice, not loud, with a beautiful vibrato. One day he broke into tears. We were crouched under the stairs, I remember there was a children’s art class nearby, and four people were sitting on the stairs discussing Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and the boy was crying uncontrollably. I asked him why he was crying, and he said he remembered a story his Uncle Jakob had once told him about the ram.”

  “The what?”

  “The animal sacrificed in place of Isaac. The ram.”

  Benjamin Walter had the distinct sensation that someone had placed heavy hands upon his shoulders and was propelling him in every direction.

  “I asked him what his uncle had told him that could make him cry so, and he said, ‘The ram was from the heavenly Garden of Eden, a beautiful animal, golden skin, magnificent
head. Uncle Jakob said that just as there was a Garden of Eden in this world, so is there one in heaven, where angels and animals live in peace, and that day everyone in the Garden was watching Abraham binding Isaac to the killing place on Earth, it was as if the future depended on the events of the next moment—surely all Creation would be transformed with the death of Isaac and the end of the Jewish people—and suddenly the ram pleaded to take Isaac’s place. But the ram was beloved by the angels, who refused to let it go, and the ram cried out, “The future must be saved!” and in a single leap it bounded from the Garden and vaulted off a bridge of stars and hurtled through space to the mountaintop near Abraham, and called to him in a human voice not to slaughter his son. Three angels flew after the ram to bring it back, but the ram deliberately entangled its horns in a thicket and they couldn’t release it and it called again to Abraham, who unbound Isaac and managed to free the horns and sacrificed the ram in his stead.’

  “The boy was crying for the ram?”

  “And because he thought that he was the ram.”

  “He?”

  “He, we, all of us were the ram.”

  “Where did he get such an idea?”

  “He was a very clever boy.”

  “If all of you were the ram, who was Isaac?”

  “I asked him that.”

  “And he said?”

  “The civilized people of the world.”

  “He said that?”

  “I told you, he was a very clever boy.”

  “And who was Abraham?”

  “I asked him that, too.”

  “And?”

  “For a long time he wouldn’t answer. When I asked him again, he said, ‘Maybe the ones who are holding the knife.’ ”

  After a moment, Benjamin Walter said, “What happened to the boy?”

  “He read splendidly for his bar mitzvah and gave a talk describing the ram, its beauty and wisdom, its self-sacrifice to save the future of Creation. A crowded room, a clandestine gathering. Everyone cried. Four days later, he was shipped to Auschwitz, where they killed him right away. There you have it, Benjamin. The sacrifice of the ram. A nineteenth-century story. Connections, yes?”