The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  “Beads, rosaries, say your prayers with holy beads.”

  “Greetings, Susskind,” Fidelman said, coming shakily down the stairs, dissembling the Unified Man, all peace and contentment. “One looks for you everywhere and finds you here. Wie gehts?”

  Susskind, though his eyes flickered, showed no surprise to speak of. For a moment his expression seemed to say he had no idea who this was, had forgotten Fidelman’s existence, but then at last remembered —somebody long ago from another country, whom you smiled on, then forgot.

  “Still here?” he perhaps ironically joked.

  “Still.” Fidelman was embarrassed at his voice slipping.

  “Rome holds you?”

  “Rome,” faltered Fidelman, “—the air.” He breathed deep and exhaled with emotion.

  Noticing the refugee was not truly attentive, his eyes roving upon potential customers, Fidelman, girding himself, remarked, “By the way, Susskind, you didn’t happen to notice—did you?—the briefcase I was carrying with me around the time we met in September?”

  “Briefcase—what kind?” This he said absently, his eyes on the church doors.

  “Pigskin. I had in it”—here Fidelman’s voice could be heard cracking—“a chapter of a critical work on Giotto I was writing. You know, I’m sure, the Trecento painter?”

  “Who doesn’t know Giotto?”

  “Do you happen to recall whether you saw, if, that is—” He stopped, at a loss for words other than accusatory.

  “Excuse me—business.” Susskind broke away and bounced up the steps two at a time. A man he approached shied away. He had beads, didn’t need others.

  Fidelman had followed the refugee. “Reward,” he muttered up close to his ear. “Fifteen thousand for the chapter, and who has it can keep the brand-new briefcase. That’s his business, no questions asked. Fair enough?”

  Susskind spied a lady tourist, including camera and guidebook. “Beads—holy beads.” He held up both hands but she was just a Lutheran, passing through.

  “Slow today,” Susskind complained as they walked down the stairs, “but maybe it’s the items. Everybody has the same. If I had some big ceramics of the Holy Mother, they go like hot cakes—a good investment for somebody with a little cash.”

  “Use the reward for that,” Fidelman cagily whispered, “buy Holy Mothers.”

  If he heard, Susskind gave no sign. At the sight of a family of nine emerging from the main portal above, the refugee, calling addio over his shoulder, fairly flew up the steps. But Fidelman uttered no response. I’ll get the rat yet. He went off to hide behind a high fountain in the square. But the flying spume raised by the wind wet him, so he retreated behind a massive column and peeked out at short intervals to keep the peddler in sight.

  At two o’clock, when St. Peter’s closed to visitors, Susskind dumped his goods into his raincoat pockets and locked up shop. Fidelman followed him all the way home, indeed the ghetto, although along a street he had not consciously been on before, which led into an alley where the refugee pulled open a left-handed door and, without transition, was “home.” Fidelman, sneaking up close, caught a dim glimpse of an overgrown closet containing bed and table. He found no address on wall or door, nor, to his surprise, any door lock. This for a moment depressed him. It meant Susskind had nothing worth stealing. Of his own, that is. The student promised himself to return tomorrow, when the occupant was elsewhere.

  Return he did, in the morning, while the entrepreneur was out selling religious articles, glanced around once, and was quickly inside. He shivered—a pitch-black freezing cave. Fidelman scratched up a thick match and confirmed bed and table, also a rickety chair, but no heat or light except a drippy candle stub in a saucer on the table. He lit the yellow candle and searched all over the place. In the table drawer a few eating implements plus safety razor, though where he shaved was a mystery, probably a public toilet. On a shelf above the thin-blanketed bed stood half a flask of red wine, part of a package of spaghetti, and a hard panino. Also an unexpected little fish bowl with a bony goldfish swimming around in arctic seas. The fish, reflecting the candle flame, gulped repeatedly, threshing its frigid tail as Fidelman watched. He loves pets, thought the student. Under the bed he found a chamber pot, but nowhere a briefcase with a fine critical chapter in it. The place was not more than an icebox someone probably had lent the refugee to come in out of the rain. Alas, Fidelman sighed. Back in the pensione, it took a hot-water bottle two hours to thaw him out; but from the visit he never fully recovered.

  In this latest dream of Fidelman’s he was spending the day in a cemetery all crowded with tombstones, when up out of an empty grave rose this long-nosed brown shade, Virgilio Susskind, beckoning.

  Fidelman hurried over.

  “Have you read Tolstoy?”

  “Sparingly.”

  “Why is art?” asked the shade, drifting off.

  Fidelman, willy-nilly, followed, and the ghost, as it vanished, led him up steps going through the ghetto and into a marble synagogue.

  The student, left alone, for no reason he could think of lay down upon the stone floor, his shoulders keeping strangely warm as he stared at the sunlit vault above. The fresco therein revealed this saint in fading blue, the sky flowing from his head, handing an old knight in a thin red robe his gold cloak. Nearby stood a humble horse and two stone hills.

  Giotto. San Francesco dona le vesti al cavaliere povero.

  Fidelman awoke running. He stuffed his blue gabardine into a paper bag, caught a bus, and knocked early on Susskind’s heavy portal.

  “Avanti.” The refugee, already garbed in beret and raincoat (probably his pajamas), was standing at the table, lighting the candle with a flaming sheet of paper. To Fidelman the paper looked like the underside of a typewritten page. Despite himself, the student recalled in letters of fire his entire chapter.

  “Here, Susskind,” he said in a trembling voice, offering the bundle, “I bring you my suit. Wear it in good health.”

  The refugee glanced at it without expression. “What do you wish for it?”

  “Nothing at all.” Fidelman laid the bag on the table, called goodbye, and left.

  He soon heard footsteps clattering after him across the cobblestones.

  “Excuse me, I kept this under my mattress for you.” Susskind thrust at him the pigskin briefcase.

  Fidelman savagely opened it, searching frenziedly in each compartment, but the bag was empty. The refugee was already in flight. With a bellow the student started after him. “You bastard, you burned my chapter!”

  “Have mercy,” cried Susskind, “I did you a favor.”

  “I’ll do you one and cut your throat.”

  “The words were there but the spirit was missing.”

  In a towering rage, Fidelman forced a burst of speed, but the refugee, light as the wind in his marvelous knickers, his green coattails flying, rapidly gained ground.

  The ghetto Jews, framed in amazement in their medieval windows, stared at the wild pursuit. But in the middle of it, Fidelman, stout and short of breath, moved by all he had lately learned, had a triumphant insight.

  “Susskind, come back,” he shouted, half sobbing. “The suit is yours. All is forgiven.”

  He came to a dead halt but the refugee ran on. When last seen he was still running.

  1958

  The Lady of the Lake

  Henry Levin, an ambitious, handsome thirty, who walked the floors in Macy’s book department wearing a white flower in his lapel, having recently come into a small inheritance, quit, and went abroad seeking romance. In Paris, for no reason he was sure of, except that he was tired of the past—tired of the limitations it had imposed upon him; although he had signed the hotel register with his right name, Levin took to calling himself Henry R. Freeman. Freeman lived for a short while in a little hotel on a narrow gas lamp—lit street near the Luxembourg Gardens. In the beginning he liked the sense of foreignness of the city—of things different, anything likely to happen. He
liked, he said to himself, the possible combinations. But not much did happen; he met no one he particularly cared for (he had sometimes in the past deceived himself about women, they had come to less than he had expected); and since the heat was hot and tourists underfoot, he felt he must flee. He boarded the Milan express and, after Dijon, developed a painful, palpitating anxiety. This grew so troublesome that he had serious visions of leaping off the train, but reason prevailed and he rode on. However, he did not get to Milan. Nearing Stresa, after a quick, astonished look at Lake Maggiore, Freeman, a nature lover from early childhood, pulled his suitcase off the rack and hurriedly left the train. He at once felt better.

  An hour later he was established in a pensione in a villa not far from the line of assorted hotels fronting the Stresa shore. The padrona, a talkative woman, much interested in her guests, complained that June and July had been lost in unseasonable cold and wet. Many had cancelled; there were few Americans around. This didn’t exactly disturb Freeman, who had had his full share of Coney Island. He lived in an airy, French-windowed room, including soft bed and spacious bath, and though personally the shower type, was glad of the change. He was very fond of the balcony at his window, where he loved to read, or study Italian, glancing up often to gaze at the water. The long blue lake, sometimes green, sometimes gold, went out of sight among distant mountains. He liked the red-roofed town of Pallanza on the opposite shore, and especially the four beautiful islands in the water, tiny but teeming with palazzi, tall trees, gardens, visible statuary. The sight of these islands aroused in Freeman a deep emotion; each a universe—how often do we come across one in a lifetime?—filled him with expectancy. Of what, he wasn’t sure. Freeman still hoped for what he hadn’t, what few got in the world and many dared not think of; to wit, love, adventure, freedom. Alas, the words by now sounded slightly comical. Yet there were times, when he was staring at the islands, if you pushed him a little he could almost cry. Ah, what names of beauty: Isola Bella, dei Pescatori, Madre, and del Dongo. Travel is truly broadening, he thought; who ever got emotional over Welfare Island?

  But the islands, the two he visited, let him down. Freeman walked off the vaporetto at Isola Bella amid a crowd of late-season tourists in all languages, especially German, who were at once beset by many vendors of cheap trinkets. And he discovered there were guided tours only—strictly no unsupervised wandering—the pink palazzo full of old junk, surrounded by artificial formal gardens, including grottoes made of seashells, the stone statuary a tasteless laugh. And although Isola dei Pescatori had some honest atmosphere, old houses hugging crooked streets, thick nets drying in piles near fishermen’s dories drawn up among trees; again there were tourists snapping all in pictures, and the whole town catering to them. Everybody had something to sell you could buy better in Macy’s basement. Freeman returned to his pensione, disappointed. The islands, beautiful from afar, up close were so much stage scenery. He complained thus to the padrona and she urged him to visit Isola del Dongo. “More natural,” she persuaded him. “You never saw such unusual gardens. And the palazzo is historical, full of the tombs of famous men of the region, including a cardinal who became a saint. Napoleon, the emperor, slept there. The French have always loved this island. Their writers have wept at its beauty.”

  However, Freeman showed little interest. “Gardens I’ve seen in my time.” So, when restive, he wandered in the back streets of Stresa, watching the men playing at boccia, avoiding the laden store windows. Drifting by devious routes back to the lake, he sat at a bench in the small park, watching the lingering sunset over the dark mountains and thinking of a life of adventure. He watched alone, talked now and then to stray Italians—almost everybody spoke a good broken English—and lived too much on himself. On weekends, there was, however, a buzz of merriment in the streets. Excursionists from around Milan arrived in busloads. All day they hurried to their picnics; at night one of them pulled an accordion out of the bus and played sad Venetian or happy Neapolitan songs. Then the young Italians and their girls got up and danced in tight embrace in the public square; but not Freeman.

  One evening at sunset, the calm waters so marvelously painted they drew him from inactivity, he hired a rowboat, and for want of anyplace more exciting to go, rowed toward the Isola del Dongo. He had no intention other than reaching it, then turning back, a round trip completed. Two-thirds of the way there, he began to row with growing uneasiness which soon became dread, because a stiff breeze had risen, driving the sucking waves against the side of the boat. It was a warm wind, but a wind was a wind and the water was wet. Freeman didn’t row well—had learned late in his twenties, despite the nearness of Central Park—and he swam poorly, always swallowing water, never enough breath to get anywhere; clearly a landlubber from the word go. He strongly considered returning to Stresa—it was at least a half mile to the island, then a mile and a half in return—but chided himself for his timidity. He had, after all, hired the boat for an hour; so he kept rowing though he feared the risk. However, the waves were not too bad and he had discovered the trick of letting them hit the prow head-on. Although he handled his oars awkwardly, Freeman, to his surprise, made good time. The wind now helped rather than hindered; and daylight—reassuring—still lingered in the sky among streaks of red.

  At last Freeman neared the island. Like Isola Bella, it rose in terraces through hedged gardens crowded with statuary, to a palazzo on top. But the padrona had told the truth—this island looked more interesting than the others, the vegetation lush, wilder, exotic birds flying around. By now the place was bathed in mist, and despite the thickening dark, Freeman recaptured the sense of awe and beauty he had felt upon first beholding the islands. At the same time he recalled a sad memory of unlived life, his own, of all that had slipped through his fingers. Amid these thoughts he was startled by a movement in the garden by the water’s edge. It had momentarily seemed as though a statue had come to life, but Freeman quickly realized a woman was standing this side of a low marble wall, watching the water. He could not, of course, make out her face, though he sensed she was young; only the skirt of her white dress moved in the breeze. He imagined someone waiting for her lover, and was tempted to speak to her, but then the wind blew up strongly and the waves rocked his rowboat. Freeman hastily turned the boat with one oar and, pulling hard, took off. The wind drenched him with spray, the rowboat bobbed among nasty waves, the going grew frighteningly rough. He had visions of drowning, the rowboat swamped, poor Freeman slowly sinking to the bottom, striving fruitlessly to reach the top. But as he rowed, his heart like a metal disk in his mouth, and still rowed on, gradually he overcame his fears; also the waves and wind. Although the lake was by now black, though the sky still dimly reflected white, turning from time to time to peer ahead, he guided himself by the flickering lights of the Stresa shore. It rained hard as he landed, but Freeman, as he beached the boat, considered his adventure an accomplishment and ate a hearty supper at an expensive restaurant.

  The curtains billowing in his sunny room the next morning woke him. Freeman rose, shaved, bathed, and after breakfast got a haircut. Wearing his bathing trunks under slacks, he sneaked onto the Hotel Excelsior beach for a dip, short but refreshing. In the early afternoon he read his Italian lesson on the balcony, then snatched a snooze. At fourthirty—he felt he really hadn’t made up his mind until then—Freeman boarded the vaporetto making its hourly tour of the islands. After touching at Isola Madre, the boat headed for the Isola del Dongo. As they were approaching the island, coming from the direction opposite that which Freeman had taken last night, he observed a lanky boy in bathing trunks sunning himself on a raft in the lake—nobody he recognized. When the vaporetto landed at the dock on the southern side of the island, to Freeman’s surprise and deep regret, the area was crowded with the usual stalls piled high with tourist gewgaws. And though he had hoped otherwise, inspection of the island was strictly in the guide’s footsteps, and vietato trying to go anywhere alone. You paid a hundred lire for a ticket, then tr
ailed behind this unshaven, sad-looking clown, who stabbed a jaunty cane at the sky as he announced in three languages to the tourists who followed him: “Please not stray nor wander. The family del Dongo, one of the most illustrious of Italy, so requests. Only thus ees eet able to remain open thees magnificent eestorical palatz and supreme jardens for the inspection by the members of all nations.”

  They tailed the guide at a fast clip through the palace, through long halls hung with tapestries and elaborate mirrors, enormous rooms filled with antique furniture, old books, paintings, statuary—a lot of it in better taste than the stuff he had seen on the other island; and he visited where Napoleon had slept—a bed. Yet Freeman secretly touched the counterpane, though not quickly enough to escape the allseeing eye of the Italian guide, who wrathfully raised his cane to the level of Freeman’s heart and explosively shouted, “Basta!” This embarrassed Freeman and two British ladies carrying parasols. He felt bad until the group—about twenty—were led into the garden. Gazing from here, the highest point of the island, at the panorama of the golden-blue lake, Freeman gasped. And the luxuriant vegetation of the island was daring, voluptuous. They went among orange and lemon trees (he had never known that lemon was a perfume), magnolia, oleander—the guide called out the names. Everywhere were flowers in great profusion, huge camellias, rhododendron, jasmine, roses in innumerable colors and varieties, all bathed in intoxicating floral fragrance. Freeman’s head swam; he felt dizzy, slightly off his rocker at this extraordinary assailment of his senses. At the same time, though it was an “underground” reaction, he experienced a painful, contracting remembrance —more like a warning—of personal poverty. This he had difficulty accounting for, because he usually held a decent opinion of himself. When the comical guide bounced forward, with his cane indicating cedars, eucalyptus, camphor, and pepper trees, the former floorwalker, overcome by all he was for the first time seeing, at the same moment choked by almost breathless excitement, fell behind the group of tourists, and pretended to inspect the berries of a pepper tree. As the guide hurried forward, Freeman, although not positive he had planned it so, ducked behind the pepper tree, ran along a path beside a tall laurel shrub and down two flights of stairs; he hopped over a marble wall and went hastily through a small wood, expectant, seeking, he thought only God knew what.