For more than a year, despite the fact that they both made noises in the rear room, neither the presser nor the tailor seemed to notice one another; then one day, as though an invisible wall between them had fallen, they were at each other’s throat. Marcus, it appeared, walked in at the very birth of their venom, when, leaving a customer in the store one afternoon, he went back to get a piece of marking chalk and came on a sight that froze him. There they were in the afternoon sunlight that flooded the rear of the shop, momentarily blinding the clothier so that he had time to think he couldn’t possibly be seeing what he saw—the two at opposite corners staring stilly at one another—a live, almost hairy staring of intense hatred. The sneering Pole in one trembling hand squeezed a heavy wooden pressing block, while the livid tailor, his back like a cat’s against the wall, held aloft in his rigid fingers a pair of cutter’s shears.
“What is it?” Marcus shouted when he had recovered his voice, but neither of them would break the stone silence and remained as when he had discovered them, glaring across the shop at the other, the tailor’s lips moving and the presser breathing like a dog in heat, an eeriness about them that Marcus had never suspected.
“My God,” he cried, his body drenched in cold creeping wetness, “tell me what happened here.” But neither uttered a sound, so he shrieked through the constriction in his throat, which made the words grate awfully, “Go back to work—” hardly believing they would obey; and when they did, Bruzak turning like a lump back to the machine and the tailor stiffly to his hot iron, Marcus was softened by their compliance and, speaking as if to children, said with tears in his eyes, “Boys, remember, don’t fight.”
Afterwards the clothier stood alone in the shade of the store, staring through the glass of the front door at nothing at all; lost, in thinking of them at his very back, in a horrid world of gray grass and mottled sunlight, of moaning and blood-smell. They had made him dizzy. He lowered himself into the leather chair, praying no customer would enter until he had sufficiently recovered from his nausea. So, sighing, he shut his eyes and felt his skull liven with new terror to see them both engaged in round pursuit in his mind. One ran hot after the other, lumbering but in flight, who had stolen his box of broken buttons. Skirting the lit and smoking sands, they scrambled high up a craggy cliff, locked in two-handed struggle, teetering on the ledge, till one slipped in slime and pulled the other with him. Reaching forth empty hands, they clutched nothing in stiffened fingers, as Marcus, the watcher, shrieked without sound at their evanescence.
He sat dizzily until these thoughts had left him.
When he was again himself, remembrance made it a kind of dream. He denied any untoward incident had happened; yet, knowing it had, called it a triviality—hadn’t he, in the factory he had worked in on coming to America, often seen such fights among the men?—trivial things they all forgot, no matter how momentarily fierce.
However, on the very next day, and thereafter without skipping a day, the two in the back broke out of their hatred into thunderous quarreling that did damage to the business; in ugly voices they called each other dirty names, embarrassing the clothier so that he threw the measuring tape he wore like a garment on his shoulders once around his neck. Customer and clothier glanced nervously at each other, and Marcus quickly ran through the measurements; the customer, who as a rule liked to linger in talk of his new clothes, left hurriedly after paying cash, to escape the drone of disgusting names hurled about in the back yet clearly heard in front so that no one had privacy.
Not only would they curse and heap destruction on each other but they muttered in their respective tongues other dreadful things. The clothier understood Josip shouting he would tear off someone’s genitals and rub the bloody mess in salt; so he guessed Emilio was shrieking the same things, and was saddened and maddened at once.
He went many times to the rear, pleading with them, and they listened to his every word with interest and tolerance, because the clothier, besides being a kind man—this showed in his eyes—was also eloquent, which they both enjoyed. Yet, whatever his words, they did no good, for the minute he had finished and turned his back on them they began again. Embittered, Marcus withdrew into the store and sat nursing his misery under the yellow-faced clock ticking away yellow minutes, till it was time to stop—it was amazing they got anything done—and go home.
His urge was to bounce them out on their behinds but he couldn’t conceive where to find two others who were such skilled and, in essence, proficient workers, without having to pay a fortune in gold. Therefore, with reform uppermost in his mind, he caught Emilio one noon as he was leaving for lunch, whispered him into a corner, and said, “Listen, Emilio, you’re the smart one, tell me why do you fight? Why do you hate him and why does he hate you, and why do you use such bad words?”
Though he enjoyed the whispering and was soft in the clothier’s palms, the tailor, who liked these little attentions, lowered his eyes and blushed darkly, but either would not or could not reply.
So Marcus sat under the clock all afternoon with his fingers in his ears. And he caught the presser on his way out that evening and said to him, “Please, Josip, tell me what he did to you. Josip, why do you fight, you have a sick wife and boy?” But Josip, who also felt an affection for the clothier—he was, despite Polish, no anti-Semite—merely caught him in his hammy arms and, though he had to clutch at his trousers, which were falling and impeding his movements, hugged Marcus in a ponderous polka, then with a cackle pushed him aside and, in his beer jag, danced away.
When they began the same dirty hullabaloo the next morning and drove a customer out at once, the clothier stormed into the rear and they turned from their cursing—both fatigued and green-gray to the gills—and listened to Marcus begging, shaming, weeping, but especially paid heed when he, who found screeching unsuited to him, dropped it and gave advice and little preachments in a low, becoming tone. He was a tall man and, because of his illness, quite thin. What flesh remained had wasted further in these troublesome months, and his hair was white now so that, as he stood before them, expostulating, exhorting, he was in appearance like an old hermit, if not a saint, and the workers showed respect and keen interest as he spoke.
It was a homily about his long-dead dear father, when they were all children living in a rutted village of small huts, a gaunt family of ten—nine boys and an undersized girl. Oh, they were marvelously poor: on occasion he had chewed bark and even grass, bloating his belly, and often the boys bit one another, including the sister, upon the arms and neck in rage at their hunger.
“So my poor father, who had a long beard down to here”—he stooped, reaching his hand to his knee, and at once tears sprang up in Josip’s eyes—“my father said, ’Children, we are poor people and strangers wherever we go, let us at least live in peace, or if not—’”
But the clothier was not able to finish because the presser, plumped down on the backless chair where he read his letters, swaying a little, had begun to whimper and then bawl, and the tailor, who was making odd clicking noises in his throat, had to turn away.
“Promise,” Marcus begged, “that you won’t fight anymore.”
Josip wept his promise, and Emilio, with wet eyes, gravely nodded.
This, the clothier exulted, was fellowship and, with a blessing on both their heads, departed, but even before he was altogether gone the air behind him was greased with their fury.
Twenty-four hours later he fenced them in. A carpenter came and built a thick partition, halving the presser’s and tailor’s work space, and for once there was astonished quiet between them. They were, in fact, absolutely silent for a full week. Marcus, had he had the energy, would have jumped in joy, and kicked his heels together. He noticed, of course, that the presser occasionally stopped pressing and came befuddled to the new door to see if the tailor was still there, and though the tailor did the same, it went no further than that. Thereafter Emilio Vizo no longer whispered to himself and Josip Bruzak touched no beer; and when t
he emaciated letters arrived from the other side, he took them home to read by the dirty window of his dark room; when night came, though there was electricity, he preferred to read by candlelight.
One Monday morning he opened his table drawer to get at his garlic salami and found it had been roughly broken in two. With his pointed knife, he rushed at the tailor, who, at that very moment, because someone had battered his black hat, was coming at him with his burning iron. He caught the presser along the calf of the arm and opened a smelly purple wound, just as Josip stuck him in the groin, and the knife hung there for a minute.
Roaring, wailing, the clothier ran in and, despite their wounds, sent them packing. When he had left, they locked themselves together and choked necks.
Marcus rushed in again, shouting, “No, no, please, please,” flailing his withered arms, nauseated, enervated (all he could hear in the uproar was the thundering clock), and his heart, like a fragile pitcher, toppled from the shelf and bump bumped down the stairs, cracking at the bottom, the shards flying everywhere.
Although the old Jew’s eyes were glazed as he crumpled, the assassins could plainly read in them, What did I tell you? You see?
1957
The Bill
Though the street was somewhere near a river, it was landlocked and narrow, a crooked row of aged brick tenement buildings. A child throwing a ball straight up saw a bit of pale sky. On the corner, opposite the blackened tenement where Schlegel worked as janitor, stood another like it except that this included the only store on the street—going down five stone steps into the basement, a small, dark delicatessen owned by Mr. and Mrs. F. Panessa, really a hole in the wall.
They had just bought it with the last of their money, Mrs. Panessa told the janitor’s wife, so as not to have to depend on either of their daughters, both of whom, Mrs. Schlegel understood, were married to selfish men who had badly affected their characters. To be completely independent of them, Panessa, a retired factory worker, withdrew his three thousand of savings and bought this little delicatessen store. When Mrs. Schlegel, looking around—though she knew the delicatessen quite well for the many years she and Willy had been janitors across the way—when she asked, “Why did you buy this one?” Mrs. Panessa cheerfully replied because it was a small place and they would not have to overwork; Panessa was sixty-three. They were not here to coin money but to support themselves without working too hard. After talking it over many nights and days, they had decided that the store would at least give them a living. She gazed into Etta Schlegel’s gaunt eyes and Etta said she hoped so.
She told Willy about the new people across the street who had bought out the Jew, and said to buy there if there was a chance; she meant by that they would continue to shop at the self-service, but when they had forgotten to buy something, they could go to Panessa’s. Willy did as he was told. He was tall and broad-backed, with a heavy face seamed dark from the coal and ashes he shoveled around all winter, and his hair often looked gray from the dust the wind whirled up at him out of the ashcans, when he was lining them up for the sanitation truck. Always in overalls—he complained he never stopped working—he would drift across the street and down the steps when something was needed and, lighting his pipe, would stand around talking to Mrs. Panessa as her husband, a small bent man with a fitful smile, stood behind the counter waiting for the janitor after a long interval of talk to ask, upon reflection, for a dime’s worth of this or that, the whole business never amounting to more than half a dollar. Then one day Willy got to talking about how the tenants goaded him all the time, and what the cruel and stingy landlord could think up for him to do in that smelly five-floor dungeon. He was absorbed by what he was saying and before he knew it had run up a three-dollar order, though all he had on him was fifty cents. Willy looked like a dog that had just had a licking, but Mr. Panessa, after clearing his throat, chirped up it didn’t matter, he could pay the rest whenever he wanted. He said that everything was run on credit, business and everything else, because after all what was credit but the fact that people were human beings, and if you were really a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you. That surprised Willy because he had never heard a storekeeper say it before. After a couple of days he paid the two-fifty, but when Panessa said he could trust whenever he felt like it, Willy sucked a flame into his pipe, then began to order all sorts of things.
When he brought home two large bagfuls of stuff, Etta shouted he must be crazy. Willy answered he had charged everything and paid no cash.
“But we have to pay sometime, don’t we?” Etta shouted. “And we have to pay higher prices than in the self-service.” She said then what she always said, “We’re poor people, Willy. We can’t afford too much.”
Though Willy saw the justice of her remarks, despite her scolding he still went across the street and trusted. Once he had a crumpled ten-dollar bill in his pants pocket and the amount came to less than four, but he didn’t offer to pay, and let Panessa write it in the book. Etta knew he had the money so she screamed when he admitted he had bought on credit.
“Why are you doing it for? Why don’t you pay if you have the money?”
He didn’t answer, but after a time he said there were other things he had to buy once in a while. He went into the furnace room and came out with a wrapped package which he opened, and it contained a beaded black dress.
Etta cried over the dress and said she would never wear it because the only time he ever brought her anything was when he had done something wrong. Thereafter she let him do all the grocery shopping and she did not speak when he bought on trust.
Willy continued to buy at Panessa’s. It seemed they were always waiting for him to come in. They lived in three tiny rooms on the floor above the store, and when Mrs. Panessa saw him out of her window, she ran down to the store. Willy came up from his basement, crossed the street, and went down the steps into the delicatessen, looming large as he opened the door. Every time he bought, it was never less than two dollars’ worth, and sometimes it would go as high as five. Mrs. Panessa would pack everything into a deep double bag, after Panessa had called off each item and written the price with a smeary black pencil into his looseleaf notebook. Whenever Willy walked in, Panessa would open the book, wet his fingertip, and flip through a number of blank pages till he found Willy’s account in the center of the book. After the order was packed and tied up, Panessa added the amount, touching each figure with his pencil, hissing to himself as he added, and Mrs. Panessa’s bird eyes would follow the figuring until Panessa wrote down a sum, and the new total sum (after Panessa had glanced up at Willy and saw that Willy was looking) was twice underscored and then Panessa shut the book. Willy, with his loose unlit pipe in his mouth, did not move until the book was put away under the counter; then he roused himself and embracing the bundles—with which they offered to help him across the street though he always refused—plunged out of the store.
One day when the sum total came to eighty-three dollars and some cents, Panessa, lifting his head and smiling, asked Willy when he could pay something on the account. The very next day Willy stopped buying at Panessa’s and after that Etta, with her cord market bag, began to shop again at the self-service, and neither of them went across the street for as much as a pound of prunes or a box of salt they had meant to buy but had forgotten.
Etta, when she returned from shopping at the self-service, scraped the wall on her side of the street to get as far away as possible from Panessa’s.
Later she asked Willy if he had paid them anything.
He said no.
“When will you?”
He said he didn’t know.
A month went by, then Etta met Mrs. Panessa around the corner, and though Mrs. Panessa, looking unhappy, said nothing about the bill, Etta came home and reminded Willy.
“Leave me alone,” he said, “I got enough trouble of my own.”
“What kind of trouble have you got, Willy?”
“The goddamn tenants a
nd the goddamn landlord,” he shouted and slammed the door.
When he returned he said, “What have I got that I can pay? Ain’t I a poor man every day of my life?”
She was sitting at the table and lowered her arms and put her head down on them and wept.
“With what?” he shouted, his face lit dark and webbed. “With the meat off of my bones? With the ashes in my eyes. With the piss I mop up on the floors. With the cold in my lungs when I sleep.”
He felt for Panessa and his wife a grating hatred and vowed never to pay because he hated them so much, especially the humpback behind the counter. If he ever smiled at him again with those goddamn eyes he would lift him off the floor and crack his bent bones.
That night he went out and got drunk and lay till morning in the gutter. When he returned, with filthy clothes and bloodied eyes, Etta held up to him the picture of their four-year-old son who had died of diphtheria, and Willy, weeping splashy tears, swore he would never touch another drop.
Each morning he went out to line up the ashcans he never looked the full way across the street.
“Give credit,” he mimicked, “give credit.”
Hard times set in. The landlord ordered cut down on heat, cut down on hot water. He cut down on Willy’s expense money and wages. The tenants were angered. All day they pestered Willy like clusters of flies and he told them what the landlord had ordered. Then they cursed Willy and Willy cursed them. They telephoned the Board of Health, but when the inspectors arrived they said the temperature was within the legal minimum though the house was drafty. However, the tenants still complained they were cold and goaded Willy about it all day, but he said he was cold too. He said he was freezing but no one believed him.
The Complete Stories Page 11