Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  It turned out that I had contracted typhus.

  From the field hospital I was evacuated to an American hospital in England where I lay ill a long time. Then I was sent for convalescence to a place in the English countryside. I remember sleeping a great deal and being fed and waking once after a bad dream about Mr. Zapiski and seeing a lovely face gazing down at me with profoundly earnest concern. The face of Mr. Zapiski slowly dissolved and the face of a young English nurse took its place, creamy white skin, pink islands on her cheeks, no makeup, straight nose, full lips, and sad gray eyes. In time I discovered the reason for her sadness: she had lost her fiancé during the Ardennes offensive. She was of the English upper class, her family going back centuries. I had lost my trope teacher and fallen in love with her; she had lost her fiancé and fallen in love with me. Both of us were sick to death of the worlds from which we had come, where disgrace seemed to stare at us from nearly every human face, and so we made our own new creation. I crossed the threshold of my young life; the man deserted the boy. I did not return home, and no doubt broke my parents’ hearts. I married in England, took my degrees in England. Quite trying at times, those postwar years, everything scarce and no true acceptance of me by her family—but how happy we were! I did not return to America for the funerals of my parents, who had disowned me, had actually sat in mourning over me and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish, because Evelyn would not think of converting out of the Church of England. Finally, I returned to America to teach, and discovered, during a telephone conversation with my sister, that my father had given Mr. Zapiski’s library to a local high school. I have no idea what the school did with the many Yiddish, German, and French books. My brother has in his possession Mr. Zapiski’s Bible, the one from which he taught me the trope. He intends to use it, he says, when he teaches his two sons the trope.

  There you have it, Davita. My narrative.

  A silence followed. Benjamin Walter nibbled at a donut, sipped coffee.

  “No comments?”

  “I’m a little breathless, Benjamin. That’s a knockout story.”

  “May I use your bathroom? Among the many things ailing me these days is a swollen prostate.”

  He returned to the kitchen some minutes later to find her at the window looking out at the woods.

  “Your story will keep me awake tonight, Benjamin.”

  “My apologies.”

  “No, no. Stories that keep me awake are my life’s blood.”

  “I should go back.”

  “Did you really forget about your Mr. Zapiski?”

  “Oh, yes. Entirely.”

  “And now you’ll be able to sail right through to the end.”

  “I’ve already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn’t write.”

  “The story you just told me is part of your beginning?”

  “It is the myself that predates what I am now. And having recalled Mr. Zapiski for my memoirs, it is my intention to put him out of mind again as quickly as possible.”

  She was still looking out the window. “A pity.”

  “Mr. Zapiski? An antique, a disgrace. He should never have gone back to Europe.”

  She pointed out the window. “I meant the tree.”

  “The oak?”

  “It will have to be taken down.”

  “The oak will have to be taken down?”

  “It will be dead in two or three years. The tree surgeon said the lightning seared through it, crown, core, and root.”

  Frightful images of broken trees, shattered woods. “How very sad.”

  “Benjamin, did you leave the lights on in your study?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “There’s no one in your house?”

  “Except my wife.”

  “I thought I saw someone in your study.”

  “Not likely.”

  “I look forward to meeting your wife after her recovery.”

  “I’ll tell her. But there’s no chance of full recovery.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Benjamin. Is it cancer?”

  “No, it is, I regret to say, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, from tainted blood she received some years ago during a surgical procedure. We take it a crisis at a time.”

  “I’m truly sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes, well, we rarely get to choose our own destiny, though this borders a bit on the absurd. I should go.”

  “Come back anytime for coffee and donuts, Benjamin. An open invitation. You needn’t bring more stories.”

  “It occurs to me, Davita, that our ram has not appeared.”

  “But you say your wife is better.”

  “The future, as I told you, is bleak.”

  “A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.”

  “You know about rams.”

  She turned to look at him. “My stories are about what the world is like when there are no rams. Benjamin, as a person whose specialty is war, doesn’t the ram interest you?”

  Evelyn stirred as he entered the bedroom; she opened her eyes, raised her arms to him. He went to her bedside and held her. Frail, thin almost to emaciation, but the fever gone. She would regain much of her strength and weight; for how long, no one knew. They had been told about the hazard of a third pregnancy. The surgery and the transfusions, everyone had then thought, saved her life. Now, as it turned out—a life for a life. Roar with rage against the void. The very day of the diagnosis she’d said, “We’ve given each other the entire middle of our lives. I’ve no regrets, I’ve had a truly wonderful life with you, but one’s end, you know, belongs with one’s beginnings. We’ve little control over our beginnings and endings; we’re in the hands of others. So I ask you to promise me that you’ll send my body back to my family for burial in England.”

  He had given his word. They had trusted each other with their lives; she would trust him with her death.

  He waited until she was asleep and went into his study. The halogen lamp on the desk was on; it sent a focused light onto the area where the manuscript lay and left the rest of the room dim. He stared at the framed headlines on the walls, barely able to make out the words, and remembered, with a lucidity that forced upon him a sharp intake of breath, Mr. Zapiski’s stumbling walk and rasping voice and dusty war library. He noticed that the kitchen in the Tudor was dark, the house itself, exterior lights off, seeming to fade into the night. He leaned across his desk to open the window. A light came on in a third-floor window of the Tudor and he saw I. D. Chandal at a table, writing. He glanced at the clock on the wall over his desk—a few minutes after eleven.

  He found himself at the ornate wooden front door of her house. The old-fashioned doorbell echoed dully inside.

  There was no answer.

  Above the doorbell was an antique knocker. He used it a number of times and stood listening.

  No one came to the door.

  He walked to the side of his house and looked up. There she was, visible through the closed third-floor window. How attract her attention? A shout might be overheard and bring the police.

  He walked to the rear door that led to the kitchen and tried the knob. The door swung open.

  Inside he stood still until his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He moved through the dining room and living room. At the foot of the stairway, in the entrance hall, he called, “Davita,” and listened as her name rose, echoing.

  How could she not have heard? Possibly the door to the third floor was closed. He could go to his own house and telephone her from there. But he didn’t know her number. Certainly the operator would give it to him. But he craved to see her as she sat at her desk. A craving beyond lust. A view of the act of creation, the forging of connections.

  He climbed the curving stairway. The carpeted steps creaked and groaned.

  All five doors on the second floor were open. He peered into each room. Four were empty. In the fifth, an old chair and dresser, an unmade bed.
Towels and toiletries in a small bathroom with a white porcelain sink and an antique claw-foot tub.

  At the end of the hallway, a narrow uncarpeted wooden stairway led upward into darkness. Slowly, he climbed the stairs and came to a closed wooden door. He pushed the door open and found himself inside a vast dimly lit ballroom, with stained-glass windows, a wide-planked oak floor, a vaulted ceiling lacy with lights and shadows. Antique furniture stood about as in a storeroom: floral-patterned stuffed chairs, eagles and dragons carved from their arms and legs; long tables, their tops cut with zodiacal markings; lacquered Oriental dressers; desks of Victorian design; canopied beds. On the floor lay three piles of carpets adorned with mythic bestiaries, richly plumed birds, enchanted gardens, densely treed woods. The possessions of the previous owners. Why had it all been moved to this floor?

  Against the far wall, before a window, I. D. Chandal sat at a rolltop desk, clutching a pen with three fingertips of her right hand, writing. She sat about forty feet away, bathed in yellow light from the lamp on her desk, and he made out plainly her rotund features and thick lips and double chin and uncombed gray hair and face glistening with sweat. The pale-blue housecoat she wore could not conceal the buttocks and thighs that spilled over the edge of her chair and the immense breasts pushing against the desk. She paid no attention to him as he came alongside the desk. He heard her breathing, the wheezy breathing of an asthmatic, and inhaled her sweat. She was writing on one side of a large spring binder. He wrote that way, too, leaving the other side for inserts, if needed, at a later time. The heat that rose from her! He saw her lift her eyes and look out the window directly at his house and return to her writing. She moved her lips, mouthed words in silence, cocked her head this way and that. “Warum,” he heard her say, and stood cold and trembling, listening to his heart. She gazed again out the window and, following her line of vision, he saw the dark portals of his house. At the rear above the roof stood the oaks, darkly reflecting the outside lights.

  A sudden bright rectangle appeared in the wall of the house. Someone had turned on the light in his study! He was able to see directly into the room: the framed headlines on the wall; his old chair and recliner; the top of his desk with books, magazines, journals, and the manuscript of the memoirs. Was Evelyn walking about?

  A shadow fell across the desk. Benjamin Walter, the skin on his scalp rising, saw a form slide slowly into his chair. It sat still a moment, then lifted its eyes and stared at him directly through the window.

  Dark clothes, white shirt, dark tie, tall black skullcap, graying beard, in the moist lips a cigarette with a long gray ash arched like a melting candle.

  I. D. Chandal took a wheezing breath. “Hello, Benjamin. You have a nice home.”

  He was unable to respond. The pain in his arms and legs; the hammering of his heart.

  “A place full of connections.”

  The light in the window winked out.

  Benjamin Walter stood frozen with horror.

  I. D. Chandal murmured, “Causes, connections, and rams. All over the place.”

  He stared at her and then at the house.

  “Please go home and let me finish my work.” Her tone was sharp.

  “But—”

  “Go home.” Her voice had risen.

  “My dear Davita—”

  “I’m sorry, but now you’re interfering, Benjamin.”

  “But I feel—”

  “Benjamin, leave!” The lashing fury in her voice. What had he done to deserve that?

  Inside his house another window abruptly ignited. His wife’s study. Everything in it—books, papers, journals, wall pictures—arranged with an English sense of order. And on her desk, the manuscript of her book on Virginia Woolf.

  A shadowy form glided into view, stood over the desk.

  Benjamin Walter, roaring with rage and dread, rushed from the third-floor ballroom and down the stairway and out of the Tudor. Breathing with great difficulty, a reddish luminescence flashing before his eyes, he paused at the foot of the stairs in his living room and saw only the dim night-light. Evelyn stirred when he entered the bedroom, but did not wake.

  He hurried into her study. It was dark; nothing appeared to have been disturbed. In his study, he switched on the ceiling light. The manuscript of the memoirs lay on the desk where he had left it. Glancing outside, he saw I. D. Chandal still writing at the third-floor window of the Tudor. What was that? He threw open the window and saw a shadowy figure limping along the driveway toward the woods at the back of the house. A burglar! Call the police. But then he heard the whispered word “warum” and the trope chant began from the woods. Slowly rising and curling like early-morning mist, drifting. From splintered trees and barbarous graveyards; and entering through the open window and also coming from the wall of headlines behind him and the piercingly recalled apartment of Mr. Zapiski. A long moment passed before he recognized that the word and the chant had risen from him, from his own lips. And it was then that he broke through the ramparts into the illumined entry of himself and saw as he had never seen before the exposed roots and tangles of long-buried connections, and was overcome with an infinite sorrow.

  Old Men

  at Midnight

  CHAIM POTOK

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Chaim Potok

  Daniel Walden, Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English, and Comparative Literature, has taught “Jewish Literature,” “Literature and the Holocaust,” and “Women Writing the Holocaust” for many years at Penn State University. Author of On Being Jewish (1974), Walden has also published Twentieth Century American Jewish Fiction Writer (1984) and Conversations with Chaim Potok (2001), and is the longtime editor of “Studies in American Jewish Literature.” In assembling this conversation, Daniel Walden has drawn on other conversations with Chaim Potok conducted by Harold Ribalow, S. Lillian Kremer, Marcia Zoslaw Siegel, and Michael J. Cusick. These conversations are published in Conversations with Chaim Potok, edited by Daniel Walden (University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

  Daniel Walden: Although you have written, in Wanderings, that the Korean war was a crucial experience for you, you’ve also written that “the Jew sees all his contemporary history through the ocean of blood that is the Holocaust.” When did you begin to think that you could use the Holocaust as a subject in fiction?

  Chaim Potok: I began to think of the Holocaust as a subject in the late 1940s, that early. It was prevalent in my family. There were a lot of people who died in the Holocaust in my family.

  During the Great Depression there was a period when we were on welfare. My father had been quite wealthy in the 1920s—he had been in real estate before the crash—and he spent the next decade rebuilding his life—by opening a jewelry and watch repair store in those days.

  You had Father Coughlin from Detroit yelling anti-Semitic diatribes at you from the radio on Sunday afternoons. Did I listen to him? Absolutely! You wanted to know what the enemy was saying so you could respond. And if you didn’t listen, the anti-Semitic neighbors would turn up their radios so you would hear him when you walked down the street.

  And then, of course, there was the ranting and raving of Hitler, which I would get on the radio—with a lot of static—from time to time.

  I wanted to milk everything for what it was worth, because you never knew if there would be another minute.

  I still remember the day my father received a letter from Europe telling me that not one relative had survived. He sat down and told my mother, and she just fell to pieces. She kept saying, ‘Nobody? Nobody? I can’t believe nobody.’ ”

  Once I talked about the Holocaust with my father. He told me that we had lost 103 aunts, uncles, second cousins, whole families. Then he turned away.

  DW: In The Chosen, the Holocaust was in the background. In The Promise and in In the Beginning, it became more and then more prominent. Was this accidental or deliberately done? Was this due to a change in circumstances around you, in your thinking?
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br />   CP: Yes it began with The Chosen, but really, the real lollapalooza was The Promise, with Reb Kalman. It came out of the material and it came out of the character, simultaneously.

  Yes, I think that the whole people feels that and probably the American Jew feels it in a special way; he is quite guilt-ridden in all probability. For whatever reason, he never did enough at a crucial point in time by way of an effort to get the thing stopped, or to protest it. Wrong or right, spoken or unspoken, that is the general feeling. And that sense of guilt is triggered from time to time, especially when Israel is involved in a war, and you get that extraordinary reaction on the part of the American Jewish public in defense of that country. A good deal of that reaction comes from a sense of the guilt we all have regarding the Holocaust. I don’t see how it is possible to think the world through Jewish eyes without having the blood-screen of the Holocaust in front of your eyes as part of the filtering. I’ll go even further and say that for thinking people, Jew or non-Jew, I don’t think it is possible to think the world anymore in this century without thinking Holocaust.

  DW: In an interview with Lillian Kremer, in 1981, you said that you were “very hesitant to write a novel about the Holocaust because I don’t know how to handle the material.” When did you begin to feel confident about handling the material, about writing stories or novellas?