Afterwards he told me something about her. They had met as students, lived together, and were married at twenty-three. It wasn’t a very happy marriage. She had turned into a sickly woman, physically unable to have children. “Something was wrong with her interior strug-ture.”
Though I asked no questions, Oscar said, “I offered her to come with me here but she refused this.”
“For what reason?”
“She did not think I wished her to come.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Not,” he said.
He explained he had lived with her for almost twenty-seven years under difficult circumstances. She had been ambivalent about their Jewish friends and his relatives, though outwardly she seemed not a prejudiced person. But her mother was always a violent anti-Semite.
“I have nothing to blame myself,” Oskar said.
He took to his bed. I took to the New York Public Library. I read some of the German poets he was trying to write about, in English translation. Then I read Leaves of Grass and wrote down what I thought one or two of them had got from Whitman. One day, towards the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written. It was in good part guessing but my idea wasn’t to write the lecture for him. He lay on his back, motionless, and listened utterly sadly to what I had written. Then he said, no, it wasn’t the love of death they had got from Whitman—that ran through German poetry—but it was most of all his feeling for Brudermensch, his humanity.
“But this does not grow long on German earth,” he said, “and is soon deztroyed.”
I said I was sorry I had got it wrong, but he thanked me anyway.
I left, defeated, and as I was going down the stairs, heard the sound of someone sobbing. I will quit this, I thought, it has gotten to be too much for me. I can’t drown with him.
I stayed home the next day, tasting a new kind of private misery too old for somebody my age, but that same night Oskar called me on the phone, blessing me wildly for having read those notes to him. He had got up to write me a letter to say what I had missed, and it ended by his having written half the lecture. He had slept all day and tonight intended to finish it up.
“I thank you,” he said, “for much, alzo including your faith in me.”
“Thank God,” I said, not telling him I had just about lost it.
6.
Oskar completed his lecture—wrote and rewrote it—during the first week in September. The Nazis had invaded Poland, and though we were greatly troubled, there was some sense of release; maybe the brave Poles would beat them. It took another week to translate the lecture, but here we had the assistance of Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, the historian, a gentle, erudite man, who liked translating and promised his help with future lectures. We then had about two weeks to work on Oskar’s delivery. The weather had changed, and so, slowly, had he. He had awakened from defeat, battered, after a wearying battle. He had lost close to twenty pounds. His complexion was still gray; when I looked at his face I expected to see scars, but it had lost its flabby unfocused quality. His blue eyes had returned to life and he walked with quick steps, as though to pick up a few for all the steps he hadn’t taken during those long hot days he had lain torpid in his room.
We went back to our former routine, meeting three late afternoons a week for diction, grammar, and the other exercises. I taught him the phonetic alphabet and transcribed long lists of words he was mispronouncing. He worked many hours trying to fit each sound into place, holding half a matchstick between his teeth to keep his jaws apart as he exercised his tongue. All this can be a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future. Looking at him I realized what’s meant when somebody is called “another man.”
The lecture, which I now knew by heart, went off well. The director of the Institute had invited a number of prominent people. Oskar was the first refugee they had employed and there was a move to make the public cognizant of what was then a new ingredient in American life. Two reporters had come with a lady photographer. The auditorium of the Institute was crowded. I sat in the last row, promising to put up my hand if he couldn’t be heard, but it wasn’t necessary. Oskar, in a blue suit, his hair cut, was of course nervous, but you couldn’t see it unless you studied him. When he stepped up to the lectern, spread out his manuscript, and spoke his first English sentence in public, my heart hesitated; only he and I, of everybody there, had any idea of the anguish he had been through. His enunciation wasn’t at all bad—a few s’s for th’s, and he once said bag for back, but otherwise he did all right. He read poetry well—in both languages—and though Walt Whitman, in his mouth, sounded a little as though he had come to the shores of Long Island as a German immigrant, still the poetry read as poetry:
“And I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that the kelson of creation is love …“
Oskar read it as though he believed it. Warsaw had fallen but the verses were somehow protective. I sat back conscious of two things: how easy it is to hide the deepest wounds; and the pride I felt in the job I had done.
7.
Two days later I came up the stairs into Oskar’s apartment to find a crowd there. The refugee, his face beet-red, lips bluish, a trace of froth in the corners of his mouth, lay on the floor in his limp pajamas, two firemen on their knees, working over him with an inhalator. The windows were open and the air stank.
A policeman asked me who I was and I couldn’t answer.
“No, oh no.”
I said no but it was unchangeably yes. He had taken his life—gas—I hadn’t even thought of the stove in the kitchen.
“Why?” I asked myself. “Why did he do it?” Maybe it was the fate of Poland on top of everything else, but the only answer anyone could come up with was Oskar’s scribbled note that he wasn’t well, and had left Martin Goldberg all his possessions. I am Martin Goldberg.
I was sick for a week, had no desire either to inherit or investigate, but I thought I ought to look through his things before the court impounded them, so I spent a morning sitting in the depths of Oskar’s armchair, trying to read his correspondence. I had found in the top drawer a thin packet of letters from his wife and an airmail letter of recent date from his anti-Semitic mother-in-law.
She writes in a tight script it takes me hours to decipher, that her daughter, after Oskar abandons her, against her own mother’s fervent pleas and anguish, is converted to Judaism by a vengeful rabbi. One night the Brown Shirts appear, and though the mother wildly waves her bronze crucifix in their faces, they drag Frau Gassner, together with the other Jews, out of the apartment house, and transport them in lorries to a small border town in conquered Poland. There, it is rumored, she is shot in the head and topples into an open tank ditch, with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers, and a handful of gypsies.
Books by Bernard Malamud
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD
GOD’S GRACE
DUBIN’S LIVES
REMBRANDT’S HAT
THE TENANTS
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE FIXER
IDIOTS FIRST
A NEW LIFE
THE MAGIC BARREL
THE ASSISTANT
THE NATURAL
Copyright © 1950, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963 by Bernard Malamud Renewal copyright © 1977 by Bernard Malamud All rights reserved
Published in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
eISBN 9781466805910
First eBook Edition : November 2011
First edition, 1963 Ninth printing, 1986 Library of Congress catalog card number: 63-19562
The stories in this book, all slightly revised, appeared in the following magazines: Commentary, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Partisan Review, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, The Reporter, and World Review (London).
An excerpt from the scene from “Suppose a Wedding” appeared i
n New Statesman.
PLEASE NOTE: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the scene from “Suppose a Wedding” is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States and all foreign countries, and is subject to royalty. Permission for performances and readings, in any medium, must be secured from the author’s agent, Timothy Seldes, Russell & Volkening, Inc., 50 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001.
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