Idiots First

by Bernard Malamud

  “He’s no trouble at all,” she told Cohen, “and besides his appetite is very small.”

  “What’ll you do when he makes dirty?”

  “He flies across the street in a tree when he makes dirty, and if nobody passes below, who notices?”

  “So all right,” said Cohen, “but I’m dead set against it. I warn you he ain’t gonna stay here long.”

  “What have you got against the poor bird?”

  “Poor bird, my ass. He’s a foxy bastard. He thinks he’s a Jew.”

  “What difference does it make what he thinks?”

  “A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he’s out on his drumsticks.”

  At Cohen’s insistence Schwartz lived out on the balcony in a new wooden birdhouse Edie had bought him.

  “With many thanks,” said Schwartz, “though I would rather have a human roof over my head. You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God. But whatever you give me, you won’t hear complaints.”

  However, when Cohen brought home a bird feeder full of dried corn, Schwartz said, “Impossible.”

  Cohen was annoyed. “What’s the matter, crosseyes, is your life getting too good for you? Are you forgetting what it means to be migratory? I’ll bet a helluva lot of crows you happen to be acquainted with, Jews or otherwise, would give their eyeteeth to eat this corn.”

  Schwartz did not answer. What can you say to a grubber yung?

  “Not for my digestion,” he later explained to Edie. “Cramps. Herring is better even if it makes you thirsty. At least rainwater don’t cost anything.” He laughed sadly in breathy caws.

  And herring, thanks to Edie, who knew where to shop, was what Schwartz got, with an occasional piece of potato pancake, and even a bit of soupmeat when Cohen wasn’t looking.

  When school began in September, before Cohen would once again suggest giving the bird the boot, Edie prevailed on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusted.

  “To deprive him right now might hurt his school work, and you know what trouble we had last year.”

  “So okay, but sooner or later the bird goes. That I promise you.”

  Schwartz, though nobody had asked him, took on full responsibility for Maurie’s performance in school. In return for favors granted, when he was let in for an hour or two at night, he spent most of his time overseeing the boy’s lessons. He sat on top of the dresser near Maurie’s desk as he laboriously wrote out his homework. Maurie was a restless type and Schwartz gently kept him to his studies. He also listened to him practice his screechy violin, taking a few minutes off now and then to rest his ears in the bathroom. And they afterwards played dominoes. The boy was an indifferent checker player and it was impossible to teach him chess. When he was sick, Schwartz read him comic books though he personally disliked them. But Maurie’s work improved in school and even his violin teacher admitted his playing was better. Edie gave Schwartz credit for these improvements though the bird pooh-poohed them.

  Yet he was proud there was nothing lower then C minuses on Maurie’s report card, and on Edie’s insistence celebrated with a little schnapps.

  “If he keeps up like this,” Cohen said, “I’ll get him in an Ivy League college for sure.”

  “Oh I hope so,” sighed Edie.

  But Schwartz shook his head. “He’s a good boy—you don’t have to worry. He won’t be a shicker or a wifebeater, God forbid, but a scholar he’ll never be, if you know what I mean, although maybe a good mechanic. It’s no disgrace in these times.”

  “If I were you,” Cohen said, angered, “I’d keep my big snoot out of other people’s private business.”

  “Harry, please,” said Edie.

  “My goddamn patience is wearing out. That crosseyes butts into everything.”

  Though he wasn’t exactly a welcome guest in the house, Schwartz gained a few ounces although he did not improve in appearance. He looked bedraggled as ever, his feathers unkempt, as though he had just flown out of a snowstorm. He spent, he admitted, little time taking care of himself. Too much to think about. “Also outside plumbing,” he told Edie. Still there was more glow to his eyes so that though Cohen went on calling him crosseyes he said it less emphatically.

  Liking his situation, Schwartz tried tactfully to stay out of Cohen’s way, but one night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a hot shower, the frozen foods salesman began a quarrel with the bird.

  “For Christ sake, why don’t you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?”

  “Mr. Cohen, if you’ll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers.”

  “Who’s obligated to feed you anything at all? You’re lucky to get herring.”

  “Excuse me, I’m not complaining,” said the bird. “You’re complaining.”

  “What’s more,” said Cohen, “even from out on the balcony I can hear you snoring away like a pig. It keeps me awake at night.”

  “Snoring,” said Schwartz, “isn’t a crime, thanks God.”

  “All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you’ll want to sleep in bed next to my wife.”

  “Mr. Cohen,” said Schwartz, “on this rest assured. A bird is a bird.”

  “So you say, but how do I know you’re a bird and not some kind of a goddamn devil?”

  “If I was a devil you would know already. And I don’t mean because your son’s good marks.”

  “Shut up, you bastard bird,” shouted Cohen.

  “Grubber yung,” cawed Schwartz, rising to the tips of his talons, his long wings outstretched.

  Cohen was about to lunge for the bird’s scrawny neck but Maurie came out of the bathroom, and for the rest of the evening until Schwartz’s bedtime on the balcony, there was pretended peace.

  But the quarrel had deeply disturbed Schwartz and he slept badly. His snoring woke him, and awake, he was fearful of what would become of him. Wanting to stay out of Cohen’s way, he kept to the birdhouse as much as possible. Cramped by it, he paced back and forth on the balcony ledge, or sat on the birdhouse roof, staring into space. In the evenings, while overseeing Maurie’s lessons, he often fell asleep. Awakening, he nervously hopped around exploring the four corners of the room. He spent much time in Maurie’s closet, and carefully examined his bureau drawers when they were left open. And once when he found a large paper bag on the floor, Schwartz poked his way into it to investigate what possibilities were. The boy was amused to see the bird in the paper bag.

  “He wants to build a nest,” he said to his mother.

  Edie, sensing Schwartz’s unhappiness, spoke to him quietly.

  “Maybe if you did some of the things my husband wants you, you would get along better with him.”

  “Give me a for instance,” Schwartz said.

  “Like take a bath, for instance.”

  “I’m too old for baths,” said the bird. “My feathers fall out without baths.”

  “He says you have a bad smell.”

  “Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?”

  “I better not ask him or it might make him mad,” said Edie.

  In late November Schwartz froze on the balcony in the fog and cold, and especially on rainy days he woke with stiff joints and could barely move his wings. Already he felt twinges of rheumatism. He would have liked to spend more time in the warm house, particularly when Maurie was in school and Cohen at work. But though Edie was good-hearted and might have sneaked him in in the morning, just to thaw out, he was afraid to ask her. In the meantime Cohen, who had been reading articles about the migration of birds, came out on the balcony one night after work when Edie was in the kitchen preparing pot
roast, and peeking into the birdhouse, warned Schwartz to be on his way soon if he knew what was good for him. “Time to hit the flyways.”

  “Mr. Cohen, why do you hate me so much?” asked the bird. “What did I do to you?”

  “Because you’re an A-number-one trouble maker, that’s why. What’s more, whoever heard of a Jewbird? Now scat or it’s open war.”

  But Schwartz stubbornly refused to depart so Cohen embarked on a campaign of harrassing him, meanwhile hiding it from Edie and Maurie. Maurie hated violence and Cohen didn’t want to leave a bad impression. He thought maybe if he played dirty tricks on the bird he would fly off without being physically kicked out. The vacation was over, let him make his easy living off the fat of somebody else’s land. Cohen worried about the effect of the bird’s departure on Maurie’s schooling but decided to take the chance, first, because the boy now seemed to have the knack of studying—give the black bird-bastard credit—and second, because Schwartz was driving him bats by being there always, even in his dreams.

  The frozen foods salesman began his campaign against the bird by mixing watery cat food with the herring slices in Schwartz’s dish. He also blew up and popped numerous paper bags outside the birdhouse as the bird slept, and when he had got Schwartz good and nervous, though not enough to leave, he brought a full-grown cat into the house, supposedly a gift for little Maurie, who had always wanted a pussy. The cat never stopped springing up at Schwartz whenever he saw him, one day managing to claw out several of his tailfeathers. And even at lesson time, when the cat was usually excluded from Maurie’s room, though somehow or other he quickly found his way in at the end of the lesson, Schwartz was desperately fearful of his life and flew from pinnacle to pinnacle—light fixture to clothes-tree to door-top—In order to elude the beast’s wet jaws.

  Once when the bird complained to Edie how hazardous his existence was, she said, “Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won’t try to catch you any more.”

  “When he stops trying we will both be in Paradise,” Schwartz answered. “Do me a favor and get rid of him. He makes my whole life worry. I’m losing feathers like a tree loses leaves.”

  “I’m awfully sorry but Maurie likes the pussy and sleeps with it.”

  What could Schwartz do? He worried but came to no decision, being afraid to leave. So he ate the herring garnished with cat food, tried hard not to hear the paper bags bursting like fire crackers outside the birdhouse at night, and lived terror-stricken closer to the ceiling than the floor, as the cat, his tail flicking, endlessly watched him.

  Weeks went by. Then on the day after Cohen’s mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmetic test, Cohen, enraged, waited until Edie had taken the boy to his violin lesson, then openly attacked the bird. He chased him with a broom on the balcony and Schwartz frantically flew back and forth, finally escaping into his birdhouse. Cohen triumphantly reached in, and grabbing both skinny legs, dragged the bird out, cawing loudly, his wings wildly beating. He whirled the bird around and around his head. But Schwartz, as he moved in circles, managed to swoop down and catch Cohen’s nose in his beak, and hung on for dear life. Cohen cried out in great pain, punched the bird with his fist, and tugging at its legs with all his might, pulled his nose free. Again he swung the yawking Schwartz around until the bird grew dizzy, then with a furious heave, flung him into the night. Schwartz sank like stone into the street. Cohen then tossed the birdhouse and feeder after him, listening at the ledge until they crashed on the sidewalk below. For a full hour, broom in hand, his heart palpitating and nose throbbing with pain, Cohen waited for Schwartz to return but the brokenhearted bird didn’t.

  That’s the end of that dirty bastard, the salesman thought and went in. Edie and Maurie had come home.

  “Look,” said Cohen, pointing to his bloody nose swollen three times its normal size, “what that sonofabitchy bird did. It’s a permanent scar.”

  “Where is he now?” Edie asked, frightened.

  “I threw him out and he flew away. Good riddance.”

  Nobody said no, though Edie touched a handkerchief to her eyes and Maurie rapidly tried the nine times table and found he knew approximately half.

  In the spring when the winter’s snow had melted, the boy, moved by a memory, wandered in the neighborhood, looking for Schwartz. He found a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean.

  “Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?” Maurie wept.

  “Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later.

  NAKED NUDE

  Fidelman listlessly doodled all over a sheet of yellow paper. Odd indecipherable designs, ink-spotted blotched words, esoteric ideographs, tormented figures in a steaming sulfurous lake, including a stylish nude rising newborn from the water. Not bad at all, though more mannequin than Kni-dean Aphrodite. Scarpio, sharp-nosed on the former art student’s gaunt left, looking up from his cards inspected her with his good eye.

  “Not bad, who is she?”

  “Nobody I really know.”

  “You must be hard up.”

  “It happens in art.”

  “Quiet,” rumbled Angelo, the padrone, on Fidelman’s fat right, his two-chinned face molded in lard. He flipped the top card.

  Scarpio then turned up a deuce, making eight and a half and out. He cursed his Sainted Mother, Angelo wheezing. Fidelman showed four and his last hundred lire. He picked a cautious ace and sighed. Angelo, with seven showing, chose that passionate moment to get up and relieve himself.

  “Wait for me,” he ordered. “Watch the money, Scarpio.”

  “Who’s that hanging?” Scarpio pointed to a long-coated figure loosely dangling from a gallows rope amid Fidelman’s other drawings.

  Who but Susskind, surely, a figure out of the far-off past.

  “Just a friend.”

  “Which one?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “It better not be.”

  Scarpio picked up the yellow paper for a closer squint.

  “But whose head?” he asked with interest. A long-nosed severed head bounced down the steps of the guillotine platform.

  A man’s head or his sex? Fidelman wondered. In either case a terrible wound.

  “Looks a little like mine,” he confessed. “At least the long jaw.”

  Scarpio pointed to a street scene. In front of American Express here’s this starving white Negro pursued by a hooting mob of cowboys on horses.

  Embarrassed by the recent past Fidelman blushed.

  It was long after midnight. They sat motionless in Angelo’s stuffy office, a small lit bulb hanging down over a square wooden table on which lay a pack of puffy cards, Fidelman’s naked hundred lire note, and a green bottle of Munich beer that the padrone of the Hotel du Ville, Milano, swilled from, between hands or games. Scarpio, his major domo and secretary-lover, sipped an espresso, and Fidelman only watched, being without privileges. Each night they played sette e mezzo, jeenrummy or baccarar and Fidelman lost the day’s earnings, the few meager tips he had garnered from the whores for little services rendered. Angelo said nothing and took all.

  Scarpio, snickering, understood the street scene. Fidelman, adrift penniless in the stony gray Milanese streets, had picked his first pocket, of an American tourist staring into a store window. The Texan, feeling the tug, and missing his wallet, had bellowed murder. A carabiniere looked wildly at Fidelman, who broke into a run, another well-dressed carabiniere on a horse clattering after him down the street, waving his sword. Angelo, cleaning his fingernails with his penknife in front of his hotel, saw Fidelman coming and ducked him around a corner, through a cellar door, into the Hotel du Ville, a joint for prostitutes who split their fees with the padrone for the use of a room. Angelo registered the former art student, gave him a tiny dark room, and, pointing a gun, relieved him of his passport, recently renewed, and the contents of the Texan’s wallet. He warned him that if
he so much as peeped to anybody, he would at once report him to the questura, where his brother presided, as a dangerous alien thief. The former art student, desperate to escape, needed money to travel, so he sneaked into Angelo’s room one morning and from the strapped suitcase under the bed, extracted fistfuls of lire, stuffing all his pockets. Scarpio, happening in, caught him at it and held a pointed dagger to Fidelman’s ribs—who fruitlessly pleaded they could both make a living from the suitcase—until the padrone appeared.

  “A hunchback is straight only in the grave.” Angelo slapped Fidelman’s face first with one fat hand, then with the other, till it turned red and the tears freely flowed. He chained him to the bed in his room for a week. When Fidelman promised to behave he was released and appointed “mastro delle latrine,” having to clean thirty toilets every day with a stiff brush, for room and board. He also assisted Teresa, the asthmatic, hairy-legged chambermaid, and ran errands for the whores. The former art student hoped to escape but the portiere or his assistant was at the door twenty-four hours a day. And thanks to the card games and his impassioned gambling Fidelman was without sufficient funds to go anywhere, if there was anywhere to go. And without passport, so he stayed put.

  Scarpio secretly felt Fidelman’s thigh.

  “Let go or I’ll tell the padrone.”

  Angelo returned and flipped up a card. Queen. Seven and a half on the button. He pocketed Fidelman’s last hundred lire.

  “Go to bed,” Angelo commanded. “It’s a long day tomorrow.”

  Fidelman climbed up to his room on the fifth floor and stared out the window into the dark street to see how far down was death. Too far, so he undressed for bed. He looked every night and sometimes during the day. Teresa, screaming, had once held onto both his legs as Fidelman dangled half out of the window until one of the girls’ naked customers, a barrel-chested man, rushed into the room and dragged him back in. Sometimes Fidelman wept in his sleep.

  He awoke, cringing. Angelo and Scarpio had entered his room but nobody hit him.