The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  Manischevitz’s flat, which he had moved into after the disastrous fire, was a meager one, furnished with a few sticks of chairs, a table, and bed, in one of the poorer sections of the city. There were three rooms: a small, poorly papered living room; an apology for a kitchen with a wooden icebox; and the comparatively large bedroom where Fanny lay in a sagging secondhand bed, gasping for breath. The bedroom was the warmest room in the house and it was here, after his outburst to God, that Manischevitz, by the light of two small bulbs overhead, sat reading his Jewish newspaper. He was not truly reading because his thoughts were everywhere; however the print offered a convenient resting place for his eyes, and a word or two, when he permitted himself to comprehend them, had the momentary effect of helping him forget his troubles. After a short while he discovered, to his surprise, that he was actively scanning the news, searching for an item of great interest to him. Exactly what he thought he would read he couldn’t say—until he realized, with some astonishment, that he was expecting to discover something about himself. Manischevitz put his paper down and looked up with the distinct impression that someone had come into the apartment, though he could not remember having heard the sound of the door opening. He looked around: the room was very still, Fanny sleeping, for once, quietly. Half frightened, he watched her until he was satisfied she wasn’t dead; then, still disturbed by the thought of an unannounced visitor, he stumbled into the living room and there had the shock of his life, for at the table sat a black man reading a newspaper he had folded up to fit into one hand.

  “What do you want here?” Manischevitz asked in fright.

  The Negro put down the paper and glanced up with a gentle expression. “Good evening.” He seemed not to be sure of himself, as if he had got into the wrong house. He was a large man, bonily built, with a heavy head covered by a hard derby, which he made no attempt to remove. His eyes seemed sad, but his lips, above which he wore a slight mustache, sought to smile; he was not otherwise prepossessing. The cuffs of his sleeves, Manischevitz noted, were frayed to the lining, and the dark suit was badly fitted. He had very large feet. Recovering from his fright, Manischevitz guessed he had left the door open and was being visited by a case worker from the Welfare Department—some came at night—for he had recently applied for welfare. Therefore he lowered himself into a chair opposite the Negro, trying, before the man’s uncertain smile, to feel comfortable. The former tailor sat stiffly but patiently at the table, waiting for the investigator to take out his pad and pencil and begin asking questions; but before long he became convinced the man intended to do nothing of the sort.

  “Who are you?” Manischevitz at last asked uneasily.

  “If I may, insofar as one is able to, identify myself, I bear the name of Alexander Levine.”

  In spite of his troubles Manischevitz felt a smile growing on his lips. “You said Levine?” he politely inquired.

  The Negro nodded. “That is exactly right.”

  Carrying the jest further, Manischevitz asked, “You are maybe Jewish?”

  “All my life I was, willingly.”

  The tailor hesitated. He had heard of black Jews but had never met one. It gave an unusual sensation.

  Recognizing in afterthought something odd about the tense of Levine’s remark, he said doubtfully, “You ain’t Jewish anymore?”

  Levine at this point removed his hat, revealing a very white part in his black hair, but quickly replaced it. He replied, “I have recently been disincarnated into an angel. As such, I offer you my humble assistance, if to offer is within my province and power—in the best sense.” He lowered his eyes in apology. “Which calls for added explanation: I am what I am granted to be, and at present the completion is in the future.”

  “What kind of angel is this?” Manischevitz gravely asked.

  “A bona fide angel of God, within prescribed limitations,” answered Levine, “not to be confused with the members of any particular sect, order, or organization here on earth operating under a similar name.”

  Manischevitz was thoroughly disturbed. He had been expecting something, but not this. What sort of mockery was it—provided that Levine was an angel—of a faithful servant who had from childhood lived in the synagogues, concerned with the word of God?

  To test Levine he asked, “Then where are your wings?”

  The Negro blushed as well as he could. Manischevitz understood this from his altered expression. “Under certain circumstances we lose privileges and prerogatives upon returning to earth, no matter for what purpose or endeavoring to assist whomsoever.”

  “So tell me,” Manischevitz said triumphantly, “how did you get here?”

  “I was translated.”

  Still troubled, the tailor said, “If you are a Jew, say the blessing for bread.”

  Levine recited it in sonorous Hebrew.

  Although moved by the familiar words Manischevitz still felt doubt he was dealing with an angel.

  “If you are an angel,” he demanded somewhat angrily, “give me the proof.”

  Levine wet his lips. “Frankly, I cannot perform either miracles or near-miracles, due to the fact that I am in a condition of probation. How long that will persist or even consist depends on the outcome.”

  Manischevitz racked his brains for some means of causing Levine positively to reveal his true identity, when the Negro spoke again:

  “It was given me to understand that both your wife and you require assistance of a salubrious nature?”

  The tailor could not rid himself of the feeling that he was the butt of a jokester. Is this what a Jewish angel looks like? he asked himself. This I am not convinced.

  He asked a last question. “So if God sends to me an angel, why a black? Why not a white that there are so many of them?”

  “It was my turn to go next,” Levine explained.

  Manischevitz could not be persuaded. “I think you are a faker.”

  Levine slowly rose. His eyes indicated disappointment and worry. “Mr. Manischevitz,” he said tonelessly, “if you should desire me to be of assistance to you any time in the near future, or possibly before, I can be found”—he glanced at his fingernails—“in Harlem.”

  He was by then gone.

  The next day Manischevitz felt some relief from his backache and was able to work four hours at pressing. The day after, he put in six hours; and the third day four again. Fanny sat up a little and asked for some halvah to suck. But after the fourth day the stabbing, breaking ache afflicted his back, and Fanny again lay supine, breathing with blue-lipped difficulty.

  Manischevitz was profoundly disappointed at the return of his active pain and suffering. He had hoped for a longer interval of easement, long enough to have a thought other than of himself and his troubles. Day by day, minute after minute, he lived in pain, pain his only memory, questioning the necessity of it, inveighing, though with affection, against God. Why so much, Gottenyu? If He wanted to teach His servant a lesson for some reason, some cause—the nature of His nature—to teach him, say, for reasons of his weakness, his pride, perhaps, during his years of prosperity, his frequent neglect of God—to give him a little lesson, why then any of the tragedies that had happened to him, any one would have sufficed to chasten him. But all together—the loss of both his children, his means of livelihood, Fanny’s health and his—that was too much to ask one frail-boned man to endure. Who, after all, was Manischevitz that he had been given so much to suffer? A tailor. Certainly not a man of talent. Upon him suffering was largely wasted. It went nowhere, into nothing: into more suffering. His pain did not earn him bread, nor fill the cracks in the wall, nor lift, in the middle of the night, the kitchen table; only lay upon him, sleepless, so sharply oppressive that he could many times have cried out yet not heard himself this misery.

  In this mood he gave no thought to Mr. Alexander Levine, but at moments when the pain wavered, slightly diminishing, he sometimes wondered if he had been mistaken to dismiss him. A black Jew and angel to boot—very hard to belie
ve, but suppose he had been sent to succor him, and he, Manischevitz, was in his blindness too blind to understand? It was this thought that put him on the knife-point of agony.

  Therefore the tailor, after much self-questioning and continuing doubt, decided he would seek the self-styled angel in Harlem. Of course he had great difficulty because he had not asked for specific directions, and movement was tedious to him. The subway took him to 116th Street, and from there he wandered in the open dark world. It was vast and its lights lit nothing. Everywhere were shadows, often moving. Manischevitz hobbled along with the aid of a cane and, not knowing where to seek in the blackened tenement buildings, would look fruitlessly through store windows. In the stores he saw people and everybody was black. It was an amazing thing to observe. When he was too tired, too unhappy to go farther, Manischevitz stopped in front of a tailor’s shop. Out of familiarity with the appearance of it, with some sadness he entered. The tailor, an old skinny man with a mop of woolly gray hair, was sitting cross-legged on his workbench, sewing a pair of tuxedo pants that had a razor slit all the way down the seat.

  “You’ll excuse me, please, gentleman,” said Manischevitz, admiring the tailor’s deft thimbled fingerwork, “but you know maybe somebody by the name Alexander Levine?”

  The tailor, who, Manischevitz thought, seemed a little antagonistic to him, scratched his scalp.

  “Cain’t say I ever heared dat name.”

  “Alex-ander Lev-ine,” Manischevitz repeated it.

  The man shook his head. “Cain’t say I heared.”

  Manischevitz remembered to say: “He is an angel, maybe.”

  “Oh, him,” said the tailor, clucking. “He hang out in dat honkytonk down here a ways.” He pointed with his skinny finger and returned to sewing the pants.

  Manischevitz crossed the street against a red light and was almost run down by a taxi. On the block after the next, the sixth store from the corner was a cabaret, and the name in sparkling lights was Bella’s. Ashamed to go in, Manischevitz gazed through the neon-lit window, and when the dancing couples had parted and drifted away, he discovered at a table on the side, toward the rear, Alexander Levine.

  He was sitting alone, a cigarette butt hanging from the corner of his mouth, playing solitaire with a dirty pack of cards, and Manischevitz felt a touch of pity for him, because Levine had deteriorated in appearance. His derby hat was dented and had a gray smudge. His ill-fitting suit was shabbier, as if he had been sleeping in it. His shoes and trouser cuffs were muddy, and his face covered with an impenetrable stubble the color of licorice. Manischevitz, though deeply disappointed, was about to enter, when a big-breasted Negress in a purple evening gown appeared before Levine’s table and, with much laughter through many white teeth, broke into a vigorous shimmy. Levine looked at Manischevitz with a haunted expression, but the tailor was too paralyzed to move or acknowledge it. As Bella’s gyrations continued Levine rose, his eyes lit in excitement. She embraced him with vigor, both his hands clasped around her restless buttocks, and they tangoed together across the floor, loudly applauded by the customers. She seemed to have lifted Levine off his feet and his large shoes hung limp as they danced. They slid past the windows where Manischevitz, white-faced, stood staring in. Levine winked slyly and the tailor left for home.

  Fanny lay at death’s door. Through shrunken lips she muttered concerning her childhood, the sorrows of the marriage bed, the loss of her children; yet wept to live. Manischevitz tried not to listen, but even without ears he would have heard. It was not a gift. The doctor panted up the stairs, a broad but bland, unshaven man (it was Sunday), and soon shook his head. A day at most, or two. He left at once to spare himself Manischevitz’s multiplied sorrow; the man who never stopped hurting. He would someday get him into a public home.

  Manischevitz visited a synagogue and there spoke to God, but God had absented Himself. The tailor searched his heart and found no hope. When she died, he would live dead. He considered taking his life although he knew he wouldn’t. Yet it was something to consider. Considering, you existed. He railed against God—Can you love a rock, a broom, an emptiness? Baring his chest, he smote the naked bones, cursing himself for having, beyond belief, believed.

  Asleep in a chair that afternoon, he dreamed of Levine. He was standing before a faded mirror, preening small decaying opalescent wings. “This means,” mumbled Manischevitz, as he broke out of sleep, “that it is possible he could be an angel.” Begging a neighbor lady to look in on Fanny and occasionally wet her lips with water, he drew on his thin coat, gripped his walking stick, exchanged some pennies for a subway token, and rode to Harlem. He knew this act was the last desperate one of his woe: to go seeking a black magician to restore his wife to invalidism. Yet if there was no choice, he did at least what was chosen.

  He hobbled to Bella’s, but the place seemed to have changed hands. It was now, as he breathed, a synagogue in a store. In the front, toward him, were several rows of empty wooden benches. In the rear stood the Ark, its portals of rough wood covered with rainbows of sequins; under it a long table on which lay the sacred scroll unrolled, illuminated by the dim light from a bulb on a chain overhead. Around the table, as if frozen to it and the scroll, which they all touched with their fingers, sat four Negroes wearing skullcaps. Now as they read the Holy Word, Manischevitz could, through the plate-glass window, hear the singsong chant of their voices. One of them was old, with a gray beard. One was bubble-eyed. One was humpbacked. The fourth was a boy, no older than thirteen. Their heads moved in rhythmic swaying. Touched by this sight from his childhood and youth, Manischevitz entered and stood silent in the rear.

  “Neshoma,” said bubble eyes, pointing to the word with a stubby finger. “Now what dat mean?”

  “That’s the word that means soul,” said the boy. He wore eyeglasses.

  “Let’s git on wid de commentary,” said the old man.

  “Ain’t necessary,” said the humpback. “Souls is immaterial substance. That’s all. The soul is derived in that manner. The immateriality is derived from the substance, and they both, causally an otherwise, derived from the soul. There can be no higher.”

  “That’s the highest.”

  “Over de top.”

  “Wait a minute,” said bubble eyes. “I don’t see what is dat immaterial substance. How come de one gits hitched up to de odder?” He addressed the humpback.

  “Ask me somethin hard. Because it is substanceless immateriality. It couldn’t be closer together, like all the parts of the body under one skin—closer.”

  “Hear now,” said the old man.

  “All you done is switched de words.”

  “It’s the primum mobile, the substanceless substance from which comes all things that were incepted in the idea—you, me, and everything and -body else.”

  “Now how did all dat happen? Make it sound simple.”

  “It de speerit,” said the old man. “On de face of de water moved de speerit. An dat was good. It say so in de Book. From de speerit ariz de man.”

  “But now listen here. How come it become substance if it all de time a spirit?”

  “God alone done dat.”

  “Holy! Holy! Praise His Name.”

  “But has dis spirit got some kind of a shade or color?” asked bubble eyes, deadpan.

  “Man, of course not. A spirit is a spirit.”

  “Then how come we is colored?” he said with a triumphant glare.

  “Ain’t got nothing to do wid dat.”

  “I still like to know.”

  “God put the spirit in all things,” answered the boy. “He put it in the green leaves and the yellow flowers. He put it with the gold in the fishes and the blue in the sky. That’s how come it came to us.”

  “Amen.”

  “Praise Lawd and utter loud His speechless Name.”

  “Blow de bugle till it bust the sky.”

  They fell silent, intent upon the next word. Manischevitz, with doubt, approached them.

  “Yo
u’ll excuse me,” he said. “I am looking for Alexander Levine. You know him maybe?”

  “That’s the angel,” said the boy.

  “Oh, him,” snuffed bubble eyes.

  “You’ll find him at Bella’s. It’s the establishment right down the street,” the humpback said.

  Manischevitz said he was sorry that he could not stay, thanked them, and limped across the street. It was already night. The city was dark and he could barely find his way.

  But Bella’s was bursting with jazz and the blues. Through the window Manischevitz recognized the dancing crowd and among them sought Levine. He was sitting loose-lipped at Bella’s side table. They were tippling from an almost empty whiskey fifth. Levine had shed his old clothes, wore a shiny new checkered suit, pearl-gray derby hat, cigar, and big, two-tone, button shoes. To the tailor’s dismay, a drunken look had settled upon his formerly dignified face. He leaned toward Bella, tickled her earlobe with his pinky while whispering words that sent her into gales of raucous laughter. She fondled his knee.

  Manischevitz, girding himself, pushed open the door and was not welcomed.

  “This place reserved.”

  “Beat it, pale puss.”

  “Exit, Yankel, Semitic trash.”

  But he moved toward the table where Levine sat, the crowd breaking before him as he hobbled forward.

  “Mr. Levine,” he spoke in a trembly voice. “Is here Manischevitz.”

  Levine glared blearily. “Speak yo piece, son.”

  Manischevitz shivered. His back plagued him. Tremors tormented his legs. He looked around, everybody was all ears.

  “You’ll excuse me. I would like to talk to you in a private place.”

  “Speak, Ah is a private pusson.”

  Bella laughed piercingly. “Stop it, boy, you killin me.”

  Manischevitz, no end disturbed, considered fleeing, but Levine addressed him:

  “Kindly state the pu’pose of yo communication with yo’s truly.”