Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.
1953
The Mourners
Kessler, formerly an egg candler, lived alone on social security. Though past sixty-five, he might have found well-paying work with more than one butter and egg wholesaler, for he sorted and graded with speed and accuracy, but he was a quarrelsome type and considered a troublemaker, so the wholesalers did without him. Therefore, after a time he retired, living with few wants on his old-age pension. Kessler inhabited a small cheap flat on the top floor of a decrepit tenement on the East Side. Perhaps because he lived above so many stairs, no one bothered to visit him. He was much alone, as he had been most of his life. At one time he’d had a family, but unable to stand his wife or children, always in his way, he had after some years walked out on them. He never saw them thereafter because he never sought them, and they did not seek him. Thirty years had passed. He had no idea where they were, nor did he think much about it.
In the tenement, although he had lived there ten years, he was more or less unknown. The tenants on both sides of his flat on the fifth floor, an Italian family of three middle-aged sons and their wizened mother, and a sullen, childless German couple named Hoffman, never said hello to him, nor did he greet any of them on the way up or down the narrow wooden stairs. Others of the house recognized Kessler when they passed him in the street, but they thought he lived elsewhere on the block. Ignace, the small, bent-back janitor, knew him best, for they had several times played two-handed pinochle; but Ignace, usually the loser because he lacked skill at cards, had stopped going up after a time. He complained to his wife that he couldn’t stand the stink there, that the filthy flat with its junky furniture made him sick. The janitor had spread the word about Kessler to the others on the floor, and they shunned him as a dirty old man. Kessler understood this but had contempt for them all.
One day Ignace and Kessler began a quarrel over the way the egg candler piled oily bags overflowing with garbage into the dumbwaiter, instead of using a pail. One word shot off another, and they were soon calling each other savage names, when Kessler slammed the door in the janitor’s face. Ignace ran down five flights of stairs and loudly cursed out the old man to his impassive wife. It happened that Gruber, the landlord, a fat man with a consistently worried face, who wore yards of baggy clothes, was in the building, making a check of plumbing repairs, and to him the enraged Ignace related the trouble he was having with Kessler. He described, holding his nose, the smell in Kessler’s flat, and called him the dirtiest person he ever saw. Gruber knew his janitor was exaggerating, but he felt burdened by financial worries which shot his blood pressure up to astonishing heights, so he settled it quickly by saying, “Give him notice.” None of the tenants in the house had held a written lease since the war, and Gruber felt confident, in case somebody asked questions, that he could easily justify his dismissal of Kessler as an undesirable tenant. It had occurred to him that Ignace could then slap a cheap coat of paint on the walls, and the flat would be let to someone for five dollars more than the old man was paying.
That night after supper, Ignace victoriously ascended the stairs and knocked on Kessler’s door. The egg candler opened it and, seeing who stood there, immediately slammed it shut. Ignace shouted through the door, “Mr. Gruber says to give notice. We don’t want you around here. Your dirt stinks the whole house.” There was silence, but Ignace waited, relishing what he had said. Although after five minutes he still heard no sound, the janitor stayed there, picturing the old Jew trembling behind the locked door. He spoke again, “You got two weeks’ notice till the first, then you better move out or Mr. Gruber and myself will throw you out.” Ignace watched as the door slowly opened. To his surprise he found himself frightened at the old man’s appearance. He looked, in the act of opening the door, like a corpse adjusting his coffin lid. But if he appeared dead, his voice was alive. It rose terrifyingly harsh from his throat, and he sprayed curses over all the years of Ignace’s life. His eyes were reddened, his cheeks sunken, and his wisp of beard moved agitatedly. He seemed to be losing weight as he shouted. The janitor no longer had any heart for the matter, but he could not bear so many insults all at once, so he cried out, “You dirty old bum, you better get out and don’t make so much trouble.” To this the enraged Kessler swore they would first have to kill him and drag him out dead.
On the morning of the first of December, Ignace found in his letter box a soiled folded paper containing Kessler’s twenty-five dollars. He showed it to Gruber that evening when the landlord came to collect the rent money. Gruber, after a minute of absently contemplating the money, frowned disgustedly.
“I thought I told you to give notice.”
“Yes, Mr. Gruber,” Ignace agreed. “I gave him.”
“That’s a helluva chutzpah,” said Gruber. “Gimme the keys.”
Ignace brought the ring of passkeys, and Gruber, breathing heavily, began the lumbering climb up the long avenue of stairs. Although he rested on each landing, the fatigue of climbing, and his profuse flowing perspiration, heightened his irritation.
Arriving at the top floor he banged his fist on Kessler’s door. “Gruber, the landlord. Open up here.”
There was no answer, no movement within, so Gruber inserted his key into the lock and twisted. Kessler had barricaded the door with a chest and some chairs. Gruber had to put his shoulder to the door and shove before he could step into the hallway of the badly lit two-and-a-half-room flat. The old man, his face drained of blood, was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“I warned you to scram outta here,” Gruber said loudly. “Move out or I’ll telephone the city marshal.”
“Mr. Gruber—” began Kessler.
“Don’t bother me with your lousy excuses, just beat it.” He gazed around. “It looks like a junk shop and it smells like a toilet. It’ll take me a month to clean up here.”
“This smell is only cabbage that I am cooking for my supper. Wait, I’ll open a window and it will go away.”
“When you go away, it’ll go away.” Gruber took out his bulky wallet, counted out twelve dollars, added fifty cents, and plunked the money on top of the chest. “You got two more weeks till the fifteenth, then you gotta be out or I will get a dispossess. Don’t talk back talk. Get outta here and go somewhere that they don’t know you and maybe you’ll get a place.”
“No, Mr. Gruber,” Kessler cried passionately. “I didn’t do nothing, and I will stay here.”
“Don’t monkey with my blood pressure,” said Gruber. “If you’re not out by the fifteenth, I will personally throw you on your bony ass.”
Then he left and walked heavily down the stairs.
The fifteenth came and Ignace found the twelve-fifty in his letter box. He telephoned Gruber and told him.
“I’ll get a dispossess,” Gruber shouted. He instructed the janitor to write out a note saying to Kessler that his money was refused, and to stick it under his door. This Ignace did. Kessler returned the money to the letter box, but again Ignace wrote a note and slipped it, with the money, under the old man’s door.
After another day Kessler received a copy of his eviction notice. It said to appear in court on Friday at 10 a.m. to show cause why he should not be evicted for continued neglect and destruction of rental property. The official notice filled Kessler with great fright because he had never in his life been to court. He did not appear on the day he had been ordered to.
That same afternoon the marshal came with two brawny assistants. Ignace opened Kessler’s lock for them, and as they pushed their way into the flat, the janitor hastily ran down the stairs to hide in the cellar. Despite Kessler’s wailing and carrying on, the two assistants methodically removed his meager furniture and set it out on the sidewalk. After that they got Kessler out, though they had to break open the bathroom door because the old man had locked himself in there. He shouted, struggled, pleaded with his neighbors to help him, but they looked on in a silent group
outside the door. The two assistants, holding the old man tightly by the arms and skinny legs, carried him, kicking and moaning, down the stairs. They sat him in the street on a chair amid his junk. Upstairs, the marshal bolted the door with a lock Ignace had supplied, signed a paper which he handed to the janitor’s wife, and then drove off in an automobile with his assistants.
Kessler sat on a split chair on the sidewalk. It was raining and the rain soon turned to sleet, but he still sat there. People passing by skirted the pile of his belongings. They stared at Kessler and he stared at nothing. He wore no hat or coat, and the snow fell on him, making him look like a piece of his dispossessed goods. Soon the wizened Italian woman from the top floor returned to the house with two of her sons, each carrying a loaded shopping bag. When she recognized Kessler sitting amid his furniture, she began to shriek. She shrieked in Italian at Kessler although he paid no attention to her. She stood on the stoop, shrunken, gesticulating with thin arms, her loose mouth working angrily. Her sons tried to calm her, but still she shrieked. Several of the neighbors came down to see who was making the racket. Finally, the two sons, unable to think what else to do, set down their shopping bags, lifted Kessler out of the chair, and carried him up the stairs. Hoffman, Kessler’s other neighbor, working with a small triangular file, cut open the padlock, and Kessler was carried into the flat from which he had been evicted. Ignace screeched at everybody, calling them filthy names, but the three men went downstairs and hauled up Kessler’s chairs, his broken table, chest, and ancient metal bed. They piled all the furniture into the bedroom. Kessler sat on the edge of the bed and wept. After a while, after the old Italian woman had sent in a soup plate full of hot macaroni seasoned with tomato sauce and grated cheese, they left.
Ignace phoned Gruber. The landlord was eating and the food turned to lumps in his throat. “I’ll throw them all out, the bastards,” he yelled. He put on his hat, got into his car, and drove through the slush to the tenement. All the time he was thinking of his worries: high repair costs; it was hard to keep the place together; maybe the building would someday collapse. He had read of such things. All of a sudden the front of the building parted from the rest and fell like a breaking wave into the street. Gruber cursed the old man for taking him from his supper. When he got to the house, he snatched Ignace’s keys and ascended the sagging stairs. Ignace tried to follow, but Gruber told him to stay the hell in his hole. When the landlord was not looking, Ignace crept up after him.
Gruber turned the key and let himself into Kessler’s dark flat. He pulled the light chain and found the old man sitting limply on the side of the bed. On the floor at his feet lay a plate of stiffened macaroni.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” Gruber thundered.
The old man sat motionless.
“Don’t you know it’s against the law? This is trespassing and you’re breaking the law. Answer me.”
Kessler remained mute.
Gruber mopped his brow with a large yellowed handkerchief.
“Listen, my friend, you’re gonna make lots of trouble for yourself. If they catch you in here you might go to the workhouse. I’m only trying to advise you.”
To his surprise Kessler looked at him with wet, brimming eyes.
“What did I did to you?” he bitterly wept. “Who throws out of his house a man that he lived there ten years and pays every month on time his rent? What did I do, tell me? Who hurts a man without a reason? Are you Hitler or a Jew?” He was hitting his chest with his fist.
Gruber removed his hat. He listened carefully, at first at a loss what to say, but then answered: “Listen, Kessler, it’s not personal. I own this house and it’s falling apart. My bills are sky-high. If the tenants don’t take care they have to go. You don’t take care and you fight with my janitor, so you have to go. Leave in the morning, and I won’t say another word. But if you don’t leave the flat, you’ll get the heave-ho again. I’ll call the marshal.”
“Mr. Gruber,” said Kessler, “I won’t go. Kill me if you want it, but I won’t go.”
Ignace hurried away from the door as Gruber left in anger. The next morning, after a restless night of worries, the landlord set out to drive to the city marshal’s office. On the way he stopped at a candy store for a pack of cigarettes and there decided once more to speak to Kessler. A thought had occurred to him: he would offer to get the old man into a public home.
He drove to the tenement and knocked on Ignace’s door.
“Is the old gink still up there?”
“I don’t know if so, Mr. Gruber.” The janitor was ill at ease.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I didn’t see him go out. Before, I looked in his keyhole but nothing moves.”
“So why didn’t you open the door with your key?”
“I was afraid,” Ignace answered nervously.
“What are you afraid?”
Ignace wouldn’t say.
A fright went through Gruber but he didn’t show it. He grabbed the keys and walked ponderously up the stairs, hurrying every so often.
No one answered his knock. As he unlocked the door he broke into heavy sweat.
But the old man was there, alive, sitting without shoes on the bedroom floor.
“Listen, Kessler,” said the landlord, relieved although his head pounded. “I got an idea that, if you do it the way I say, your troubles are over.”
He explained his proposal to Kessler, but the egg candler was not listening. His eyes were downcast, and his body swayed slowly sideways. As the landlord talked on, the old man was thinking of what had whirled through his mind as he had sat out on the sidewalk in the falling snow. He had thought through his miserable life, remembering how, as a young man, he had abandoned his family, walking out on his wife and three innocent children, without even in some way attempting to provide for them; without, in all the intervening years—so God help him—once trying to discover if they were alive or dead. How, in so short a life, could a man do so much wrong? This thought smote him to the heart and he recalled the past without end and moaned and tore at his flesh with his nails.
Gruber was frightened at the extent of Kessler’s suffering. Maybe I should let him stay, he thought. Then as he watched the old man, he realized he was bunched up there on the floor engaged in an act of mourning. There he sat, white from fasting, rocking back and forth, his beard dwindled to a shade of itself.
Something’s wrong here—Gruber tried to imagine what and found it all oppressive. He felt he ought to run out, get away, but then saw himself fall and go tumbling down the five flights of stairs; he groaned at the broken picture of himself lying at the bottom. Only he was still there in Kessler’s bedroom, listening to the old man praying. Somebody’s dead, Gruber muttered. He figured Kessler had got bad news, yet instinctively he knew he hadn’t. Then it struck him with a terrible force that the mourner was mourning him: it was he who was dead.
The landlord was agonized. Sweating brutally, he felt an enormous constricted weight in him that forced itself up until his head was at the point of bursting. For a full minute he awaited a stroke; but the feeling painfully passed, leaving him miserable.
When after a while, he gazed around the room, it was clean, drenched in daylight, and fragrant. Gruber then suffered unbearable remorse for the way he had treated the old man. With a cry of shame he pulled the sheet off Kessler’s bed and, wrapping it around himself, sank to the floor and became a mourner.
1955
Angel Levine
Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities. Previously a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had when his establishment caught fire, after a metal container of cleaning fluid exploded, and burned to the ground. Although Manischevitz was insured against fire, damage suits by two customers who had been hurt in the flames deprived him of every penny he had saved. At almost the same time, his son, of much promise, was killed in the war, and his daughter, without so
much as a word of warning, married a lout and disappeared with him as off the face of the earth. Thereafter Manischevitz was victimized by excruciating backaches and found himself unable to work even as a presser—the only kind of work available to him—for more than an hour or two daily, because beyond that the pain from standing was maddening. His Fanny, a good wife and mother, who had taken in washing and sewing, began before his eyes to waste away. Suffering shortness of breath, she at last became seriously ill and took to her bed. The doctor, a former customer of Manischevitz, who out of pity treated them, at first had difficulty diagnosing her ailment, but later put it down as hardening of the arteries at an advanced stage. He took Manischevitz aside, prescribed complete rest for her, and in whispers gave him to know there was little hope.
Throughout his trials Manischevitz had remained somewhat stoic, almost unbelieving that all this had descended on his head, as if it were happening, let us say, to an acquaintance or some distant relative; it was, in sheer quantity of woe, incomprehensible. It was also ridiculous, unjust, and because he had always been a religious man, an affront to God. Manischevitz believed this in all his suffering. When his burden had grown too crushingly heavy to be borne he prayed in his chair with shut hollow eyes: “My dear God, sweetheart, did I deserve that this should happen to me?” Then recognizing the worthlessness of it, he set aside the complaint and prayed humbly for assistance: “Give Fanny back her health, and to me for myself that I shouldn’t feel pain in every step. Help now or tomorrow is too late.” And Manischevitz wept.
The Complete Stories Page 19