The Tenants
Page 16
Lesser found a protest Blues song Willie had knocked off apparently in one draft, “Goldberg’s Last Days,” also called “The Goldberg Blues”:
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye All your life you been cheatin us poor black Now we gon take that gold pack off your back.
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye Your day is gone past You better run fast.
Goldberg, and Mrs. Goldberg, goodbye goodbye Comin a big U.S. Pogrom Well, I’m gonna sing and hum.
He had signed it “Blind Willie Shakespear.”
Related to this was a piece called “The First Pogrom in the U.S. of A.” In it a group of ghetto guerrillas in black leather jackets and caps decide it will help the cause of the Revolution to show that a pogrom can happen in the U.S. of A. So they barricade both ends of a business block, 127th Street between Lenox Avenue and Seventh, by parking hijacked trucks perpendicularly across both ends of the street. Working quickly from lists prepared in advance, they drag out of a laundromat, shoe store, pawnbroker’s shop, and several other kinds of establishments owned by them on both sides of the street, every Zionist they can find, male, female, and in-between. There is none of that Hitler shit of smashing store windows, forcing Zionists to scrub sidewalks, or rubbing their faces in dog crap. Working quickly in small squads, the guerrillas round up and line up a dozen wailing, hand-wringing Zionists, Goldberg among them, in front of his Liquor Emporium, and shoot them dead with pistols. The guerrillas are gone before the sirens of the pigs can be heard.
Willie had rewritten the pogrom twelve times, Lesser gave up searching for more of it. In one draft, some of the black clerks try to protect their former bosses but are warned off by shots fired in the air. One of them who persists is killed along with the Zionists. As a warning to Uncle Toms he is shot in the face.
There was a penciled note at the bottom of the last page of the story, in Willie’s handwriting. “It isn’t that I hate the Jews. But if I do any, it’s not because I invented it myself but I was born in the good old U.S. of A. and there’s a lot of that going on that gets under your skin. And it’s also from knowing the Jews, which I do. The way to black freedom is against them.”
Fog seeped into the building, filling each empty floor, each freezing room, with deadwater smell. A beach stank at low tide. A flock of gulls, wind-driven in a storm, had bloodied the cliff and lay rotting at the foot of it. The hall lights, except on Lesser’s floor, were out, bulbs smashed, stolen, screwed out of their sockets. The dirty stairs were lit at descending intervals by bulbs shedding watery light. Lesser replaced the burned-out ones but they did not last long. They shone like lamps on an ocean front on a wet night. No one replaced the dead bulbs on Willie’s floor.
One night Lesser, hearing footsteps as he trod down the stairs, glanced into the stairwell. In the dim light he caught sight of a black man with a thick full beard, wearing a spiky Afro like a dangerous plant on his head. Or helmet of Achilles. He looked for a moment like an iron statue moving down the stairs. Lesser’s heart misgave him and he stopped in his tracks. When he gazed with eyes carefully focused the man was gone. Frightened imagination? Optical illusion? Could it have been Willie? Lesser hadn’t got a good view of his face but was certain the black had held in his hand a glittering instrument. Razor? Knife? Civil War saber? Against what atavistic foe? Not me: if it was Willie he’s had his revenge—more than revenge —destroyed my best creation. Reversing direction, Lesser hurried up to his room, hastily unlocked three locks with three keys, checked his dusty manuscript as a matter of course, then searched for something to protect himself with if he had to. He opened the closet door, the ax hung on its hook. He laid it on his desk by the typewriter.
Agitated, hungering to know was it Willie or was another black living in the house—a gang of them? —he crept stealthily down to Willie’s floor. His door was open, a shaft of shadowed yellow light falling into the pitch-dark hallway. Who’s he expecting? Elijah? Inspiration? Pok pok pok. Son of a bitch, what’s he writing now? Boy murdering his mother? Or who dies in what pogrom?
Willie, in six-inch Afro, his bulky green sweater pulled on over patched overalls—Ecce Homo!—his thick back to the door, sat on an apple box, furiously typing on the L. C. Smith atop an upended egg crate.
Hey Bill, Lesser thought in the hallway, moved by the sight of a man writing, how’s it going?
You couldn’t say that aloud to someone who had deliberately destroyed the almost completed manuscript of your most promising novel, product of ten years’ labor. You understood his history and possibly yours, but you could say nothing to him.
Lesser said nothing.
He tiptoes away.
Maybe Willie ascends to his locked door and listens to him at work. This is no rat listening to food, this is a man, a writer himself, best at stories, Bill Spear. What’s he listening for? To find out if I have survived? He listens for the end of my book. To hear it. To learn that I have, despite certain misfortunes, impediments, real tragedy, finally achieved it. He wants to believe I have—has to—so he can go on with his pockitying. Finish a book of his own—whatever. He lacks belief in his work and listens to mine for the promised end. If Lesser can make it, then so can he.
But what he listens for I am unable to construct. If his ear is sensitive he hears degrees of failure. Maybe he listens with evil ear, fingers crossed, to hinder me doing what he can’t? He could be witching my nail cuttings or crooked hairs caught in a broken comb he found in the garbage can. He wills I crack, fall apart, wither. He listens for, imagines, craves to create, my ultimate irreversible failure.
One winter’s night they meet on the frigid stairs. Darkness seeps up from the lower floors. It’s Willie all right, though he looks taller, thinner, his face knobby, his kinky hair standing on end. It’s Lesser, growing a limp Leninesque goatee crawling with fright. Willie’s going up, Lesser, ready to spring if he is sprung at, on his way down. They stare at the other, listening to him breathe, their discrete white breaths rising in the cold. Willie’s swollen eyes are the color of black paint, his sensual lips hidden by thick mustache and finely woven beard. His stubby, heavy-jointed fingers ball into huge fists.
Lesser, raising his coat collar, intends to squeeze by the black in silence, sees them, mutually repelled, drawing aside to let each other pass.
Instead, suppressing hatred, he makes a breathy effort:
“I forgive you, Willie, for what you did to me.”
“I forgive you for forgivin me.”
“For burning my book—”
“For stealin my bitch I love—”
“She made her free choice. I made mine. I treated you like any other man.”
“No Jew can treat me like a man—male or female. You think you are the Chosen People. Well, you are wrong on that. We are the Chosen People from as of now on. You gonna find that out soon enough, you gonna lose your fuckn pride.”
“For God’s sake, Willie, we’re writers. Let’s talk to one another like men who write.”
“I dig a different drum than you do, Lesser. None of that fuckn form for me. You hurt my inside confidence with that word. On account of you I can’t write the way I used to any more.”
Eyes glowing, he rushes headlong down the stairs.
Lesser goes up and tries to write.
Nothing comes of it. A faint unpleasant odor rises from the paper.
Lesser is afraid of the house, really afraid. Familiar things are touched with strangeness. Green mould on a pencil. A broken pitcher, standing, breaks apart. A dry flower falls to the floor. The floor tilts. A cup he drinks from he cannot recognize. A door opens and bangs, opens and bangs. He tries half the morning to find it and can’t. Levenspiel banging? As though the house has grown larger, leavened a couple of useless floors, made more empty rooms. The wind, weird sad sea music, lives in them, moving through the walls as through trees in the woods. It sings above his head. He listens as he writes. Lesser writes “the wind is gone” but hears it still. He is a
fraid to leave his room, though sick of it, lest he never return. He goes out rarely, once a week for a bag of groceries. Sometimes when he dozes over his work he gets up to trot in the hall for exercise. Otherwise he writes.
Rereading the words he sees scenes he hasn’t written, or thinks he hasn’t. Like when Willie plants a lit match in a box of oily rags in the cellar and a roaring tree of fire bursts into bloom, its flaming crown rising through each melting floor. Lesser to save his manuscript—it’s been weeks since he has deposited his new pages in the bank box—rushes to the fire escape. The window is blocked by thickly interwoven branches of crackling flames, heavy flaming fruit. Lesser flees to the roof. Around him long spark-filled plumes of smoke, horns of glowing ashes, ascend to the reddened sky. Masses of burning houses in a forest of fires. From close by, like the sound of waves breaking, rise a muted roaring, screaming, sobbing. Who cries there? Who dies there? Riot? Pogrom? Civil War? Where can I run with my paper manuscript?
Lesser writes. He is writing this book about love. It’s his need and he must. All he has to do is imagine it to its unforeseen end as he puts the words down on paper. Irene has left for San Francisco. She wrote him a note goodbye, enclosing no address. “No book is as important as me,” she wrote. With or without her he has to finish, create love in language and see where it takes him, yes or no. That’s the secret, you follow the words. Maybe this man in the book will learn where it’s at and so will Lesser. Although if you have to make a journey to track love down maybe you’re lost to begin with. No journey will help. Yet better look for something than just not have it. The looking is the having, some say. He’ll know for sure when he finishes the book. What a shame, he had written it so well in the draft Willie burned. It seems to him he understood it better than he does now despite the double thought, double labor expended. It was a good book to its about-to-be-end. He remembers almost everything in it but can’t get it down again as he had it there. How can one write the same thing twice? It’s like trying to force your way back into yesterday. All he would have had to do was reach out a hand, the words flow out of it. I had only to write the last scene and spring the final insight. It would have come, completed the fiction, freed it from me, freed me. Freedom favors love. I’d’ve married Irene and gone to San Francisco. It wouldn’t have been a bad life with her. She respects my work. We might have made it together.
He sees himself sitting in his room forever trying to finish his book as it should be done. If only Willie hadn’t destroyed both copies of the manuscript. If only one had survived. He sees it clearly, every word in place. Mourning his lost manuscript Lesser rose from his desk, in misery, enraged. Snatching up the ax, he ran down the stairs, two at a time. He pushed open the fire door and strode silently up the hall. Hearing Willie typing, Lesser, alternately moved and nauseated, stole into a flat across the hall. He hid there, in states of anticipation and gloom, until the black left for coffee, or maybe he had run out of blue paper. Lesser entered his room, read the sheet in the carriage—nothing memorable—ripped it out. Then blow by blow, his eyes exuding damp, he hacked up Willie’s typewriter. His blows made a clanging music. He chopped the machine till it was mangled junk. It bled black ink. The ax survived with jagged broken blade. Though Lesser shivered feverishly, he felt for a while an extraordinary relief. He did not care for what he had done; it sickened him deeply, but for a while he thought the writing might go well thereafter.
Lesser, unable to sleep nights, from his window on the sixth floor watches Willie, at dawn, poking into the garbage cans across the street. He had day by day been putting together Lesser’s torn strips of white paper to see how his book was coming. For weeks there has been nothing in the can, but Willie still searches. Spring is coming. There is nothing in Levenspiel’s deep-dented can either, no crumpled balls of blue paper written by hand. The cans are emptied twice a week, wordless.
The landlord, ill, pale, bad-breathed, began to cover up the door frames on the first floor with sheets of tin. With long nails he hammered them down. A month after finishing the first floor he began to nail the tin over the second-floor door frames. Good, thought Lesser, I’ll soon be rid of Willie Spearmint. Either he’ll be fenced in, unable to get out; or fenced out, unable to get in. Once he stops haunting this house I’ll get my work done.
The writer was nauseated by not writing. He was nauseated when he wrote, by the words, by the thought of them.
Each morning, nevertheless, I held the fountain pen in my hand and moved it along the paper. It made lines but no words. A great sadness came on me.
They trailed each other in the halls. Each knew where the other was although the terrain had changed. The trees in Holzheimer’s room had moved off the walls onto the dank floors in the flat. Taking root, they thickened there and spread into the hall and down the stairs, growing profusely amid huge ferns, saw-toothed cactus taller than men, putrefying omnivorous plants.
One night Willie and Lesser met in a grassy clearing in the bush. The night was moonless above the moss-dripping, rope-entwined trees. Neither of them could see the other but sensed where he stood. Each heard himself scarcely breathing.
“Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater.”
“Anti-Semitic Ape.”
Their metal glinted in hidden light, perhaps starlight filtering greenly through dense trees. Willie’s eyeglass frames momentarily gleamed. They aimed at each other accurate blows. Lesser felt his jagged ax sink through bone and brain as the groaning black’s razor-sharp saber, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut the white’s balls from the rest of him.
Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.
THE END
Mercy, the both of you, for Christ’s sake, Levenspiel cries. Hab rachmones, I beg you. Mercy on me. Mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy
By Bernard Malamud
THE NATURAL
THE ASSISTANT
THE MAGIC BARREL
A NEW LIFE
IDIOTS FIRST
THE FIXER
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE TENANTS
REMBRANDT’S HAT
DUBIN’S LIVES
GOD’S GRACE
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
THE COMPLETE STORIES
Copyright © 1971 by Bernard Malamud, renewed 1999 by Ann D. Malamud
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Aleksandar Hemon
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
First published in 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2003
Portions of this book originally appealed, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Playboy.
www.fsgbooks.com
eISBN 9781466804975
First eBook Edition : November 2011
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003107100
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52102-8
ISBN-10: 0-374-52102-6
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