The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  Collage. The Flayed Ox. Rembrandt. Hanging Fowl. Soutine. Young Man with Death’s Head. Van Leyden. Funeral at Ornans. Courbet. Bishop Eaten by Worms. Murillo. Last Supper, Last Judgment, Last Inning.

  I paint with my prick. Renoir. I paint with my ulcer. Soutine. I paint with my paint. Fidelman.

  One can study nature, dissect and analyze and balance it without making paintings. Bonnard.

  Gouache. Unemployed Musician. Fiddleman.

  Painting is nothing more than the art of expressing the invisible through the visible. Fromentin. Indefinite Divisibility. Tanguy. Definite Invisibility. Fidelman.

  I’m making the last paintings which anyone can make. Reinhardt. I’ve made them. I like my paintings because anyone can do them. Warhol. Me too.

  Erased de Kooning Drawing. Rauschenberg. Erased Rauschenberg. De Kooning. Lithograph. Eraser. Fidelman.

  Modigliani climbs and falls. He tries to scale a brick wall with bleeding fingers, his eyes lit crystals of heroin, whisky, pain. He climbs and falls in silence.

  My God, what’s all that climbing and falling for?

  For art, you cretin.

  Thunder and lightning.

  Portrait of an Old Jew Seated. Rembrandt. Portrait of an Old Jew in an Armchair. Rembrandt. It beats walking.

  Then I dreamt that I woke suddenly, with an unspeakable shock, to the consciousness that someone was lying in bed beside me. I put my hand out and touched the soft naked shoulder of a woman; and a cold gentle little woman’s voice said: I have not been in bed for a hundred years. Raverat. The Rat Killer. Rembrandt.

  Elle m’a mordu aux couilles. Modigliani.

  Mosaic. Piazza Amerina, Sicily. IVth Cent. A.D. All that remains after so long a time.

  Susskind preacheth up on the mountain, a piece of green palm branch behind his head. (He has no halo, here the mosaic is broken.) Three small cactus plants groweth at his bare feet. / Tell the truth. Dont cheat. If its easy it dont mean its good. Be kind, specially to those that they got less than you. I want for everybody justice. Must also be charity. If you feel good give charity. If you feel bad give charity. Must also be mercy. Be nice, dont fight. Children, how can we live without mercy? If you have no mercy for me I shall not live. Love, mercy, charity. Its not so easy believe me.

  At the bottom of the brown hill they stand there by the huge lichenous rock that riseth above them on the top of which is a broad tree with a twisted trunk. / Ah, Master, my eyes watereth. Thou speakest true. I love thy words. I love thee more than thy words. If I could paint thee with my paints, then would my heart soar to the Gates of Heaven. I will be forever thy disciple, no ifs or buts. / This is already iffed. If you will follow me, follow. If you will follow must be for Who I Am. Also please, no paints or paintings. Remember the Law, what it says. No graven images, which is profanation and idolatry. Nobody can paint Who I Am. Not on papyrus, or make me into an idol of wood, or stone, not even in the sand. Dont try, its a sin. Here is a parable: And the Lord called unto Moses and spoke to him, Moses, come thou on this mountain and I will show Myself so thou mayst see Me, and none but thee; and Moses answered: Lord, if I see Thee, then wilt Thou become as a graven image on mine eye and I be blind. Then spake the Lord, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, and for this there is no Promised Land. / Whats the parable of that? Its more a paradox, Id say. / If you dont know its not for you. / Tell me, Master, art thou the Living God? Art thou at least the Son of God? / So we will see, its not impossible. / Art thou the Redeemer? / This could be also, Im not sure myself. Depends what happens. / Is thy fate ordained? / I act like I Am. Who knows my fate? All I know is somebody will betray me. Dont ask how I know, I know. You dont but I do. This is the difference. / It is not I, Master, I will never betray thee. Cast me out now if thou believest I speak not the TRUTH. / What happens will happen. So give up your paints and your brushes and follow me where I go, and we will see what we will see. This we will see. / Master, tis as good as done.

  Fidelman droppeth into the Dead Sea all his paints and brushes, except one. These dissolve in the salted sea. (A piece of the blue sea is faded.)

  (In this picture) As Susskind preacheth to the multitude, on the shore of the green Sea of Galilee where sail the little ships of the fisher men, as even the red fishes and the white fishes come to listen at the marge of the water, the black goats stand still on the hills, the painter, who hideth behind a palm tree, sketcheth with a coal on papyrus the face and figure of the Master. / If I could do a portrait of him as he is in this life I will be remembered forever in human history. Nobody can call that betrayal, I dont think, for its for the good of us all. / My child, why do you do that which I forbade you? Dont think I cant see you, I can. I wish I couldnt see what I see, but I can.

  The painter kneeleth on his knees. (A few tesserae are missing from his face, including one of the eye, and a few black stones from his beard.) / Master, forgive me. All I meant to do was preserve thy likeness for a future time. I guess it gotteth to be too much for me, the thought that I might. Forgive, forgive in thy mercy. Ill burn everything, I promise, papyrus, charcoal, a roll of canvas I have hid in my hut, also this last paintbrush although a favorite of mine. / Listen to me, there are two horses, one brown, the other black. The brown obeys his master, the black does not. Which is the better horse? / Both are the same. / How is this so? / One obeys and the other does not, but they are both thoroughbreds. / You have an easy tongue. If I cant change you I must suffer my fate. This is a fact. / Master, have no further worries on that score, I am a changed man down to my toenails, I give thee my word.

  Fidelman speaketh to himself in a solitary place in Capernaum. / This talent it is death to hide lodged in me useless. How am I ever going to make a living or win my spurs? How can I compete in this world if both my hands are tied and my eyes blindfolded? Whats so moral about that? How is a man meant to fulfill himself if he isnt allowed to paint? Its graven image versus grave damages to myself and talent. Which harms the most there is no doubt. One can take just so much. / He gnasheth his teeth. He waileth to the sky. He teareth his cheeks and pulleth out the hairs of his head and beard. He butteth his skull against the crumbling brick wall. On this spot the wall is stained red with blood. / Satan saith Ha Ha.

  As Susskind sat at meat he spoke thus. Verily I say, one of you who eats now at this table will betray me, dont ask who. / His followers blusheth. Their faces are in shades of pink. No one blusheth not. Fidelman blusheth red. / But if he knows, it cant be all that wrong to do it. What I mean is Im not doing it in any sneaky way, that is, for after all he knows. / He that has betrayed me once will betray me twice. He will betray me thrice. / Fidelman counteth on his fingers.

  He is now in the abode of the high priest Caiaphas. / (Here the mosaic is almost all destroyed. Only the painter’s short-fingered hand survives.) Fidelmans heavy hand is filled with thirty-nine pieces of silver.

  The painter runneth out to buy paints, brushes, canvas.

  On the Mount of Olives appeareth the painter amid a multitude with swords, staves, and lengths of lead pipe. Also come the chief priest, the chief of police, scribes, elders, the guards with dogs, the onlookers to look on. Fidelman goeth to the Master and kisseth him full on the lips. / Twice, saith Susskind. / He wept.

  He hath on his head a crown of rusty chain links. A guard smiteth his head and spitteth on his eye. In mockery they worship Susskind. / Its a hard life, he saith. / He draggeth the beam of the cross up a hill. Fidelman watcheth from behind a mask.

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  Fidelman painteth three canvases. The Crucifixion he painteth red on red. The Descent from the Cross he painteth white on white. For the Resurrection, on Easter morning, he leaveth the canvas blank.

  P

  t o tem

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  E

  Suss

  King

  Je vous emmerde. Modigliani.

  Oil on wood. Bottle fucking guitar? Bull impaled on pole? One-eyed carp stuffed in staring green bottle? Clown spooning dog dung out of sawdust? Staircase ascending a nude? Black-stockinged whore reading pornographic book by lamplight? Still life: three apple cores plus one long gray hair? Boy pissing on old man’s shoe? The blue disease? Balding woman dyeing her hair? Buggers of Calais? Blood oozing from ceiling on foggy night?

  Rembrandt was the first great master whose sitters sometimes dreaded seeing their portraits. Malraux. I is another. Rimbaud.

  1. Watercolor. Tree growing in all directions. Nothing namable taxonomically speaking, like weeping willow with stiff spotted leaves, some rotted brown-green. Otherwise stylized apple-green-to-gold leaves. Not maple or sycamore same though resembling both, enlarged, painted to cover whole tree from roots to topmost spotted leaf. The leaves are the tree. Branches like black veins, thins to thicks, visible behind or through leaves. No birds in tree, not rook or raven. Impression is of mystery. Nothing more is seen at first but if viewer keeps looking tree is cleverly a human face. Leaves and branches delineate strained features, also lonely hollow anguished eyes. What is this horror I am or represent? Painter can think of none, for portrait is of a child and he remembers happy childhood, or so it seems. Exactly what face has done, or where has been, or knows, or wants to know, or is or isn’t experiencing, isn’t visible, nor can be explained as tone, memory, feeling; or something that happened in later life that painter can’t recall. Maybe it never happened. It’s as though this face is hiding in a tree or pretending to be one while waiting for something to happen in life and that something when it happened was nothing. Nothing much. 2. Triptych. Woodcut. It’s about forbidden love. In the first black-and-white panel this guy is taking his sister in her black-and-white bathrobe. She squirms but loves it. Can be done in white-and-black for contrast. Man Seducing Sister or Vice Versa. The second panel is about the shame of the first, where he takes to masturbating in the cellar. It’s dark so you can’t see much of his face but there’s just enough light to see what he’s up to. Man Spilling Seed on Damp Cellar Floor. Then here in this third panel, two men doing it, each with his three-fingered hand on the other’s maulstick. This can be inked darkly because they wouldn’t want to be seen. 3. Then having prepared it for painting he began to think what he would paint upon it that would frighten everyone that saw it, having the effect of the head of Medusa. So he brought for that purpose to his room, which no one entered but himself, lizards, grasshoppers, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats, and other strange animals of the kind, and from them all he produced a great animal so horrible and fearful that it seemed to poison the air with its fiery breath. This he represented coming out of some dark rocks with venom issuing from its open jaws, fire from its eyes, and smoke from its nostrils, a monstrous and horrible thing indeed. Lives of the Painters: Leonardo. 4. Figure; wood, string, and found objects. Picasso.

  Incisore. The cylinder, the sphere, the cone. Cézanne. The impact of an acute angle of a triangle on a circle promises an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo. Kandinsky.

  Fidelman, etcher, left a single engraving of the series called A Painter’s Progress. Originally there were six copper plates, drypoint, all with their prints destroyed, how or why is not known. Only a single imperfect artist’s proof entitled “The Cave” survives. This etching represents a painter at work, resemblance to whom may easily be guessed. Each night, according to a tattered diary he had kept for a while, he entered the cave in question through a cellar he had the key to, when all the lights in the old clapboard house, several boards missing, were out, curtains thickly drawn over each narrow window. The painter in the etching worked all night, night after night, inch by slow inch covering the rough limestone surface of the voluminous cave at the end of a labyrinth under the cellar, with intricate designs of geometric figures; and he left before dawn, his coming and going unknown to his sister, who lived in the house alone. The walls and part of the roof of the huge cave that he had been decorating for years and years, and estimated at least two more to go before his labors were ended, were painted in an extraordinary tapestry of simple figures in black, salmon, gold-yellow, sea-green, and apricot, although the colors cannot of course be discerned in the three-toned engraving—a rich design of circles and triangles, discrete or interlocking, of salmon triangles encompassed within apricot circles, and sea-green circles within pale gold-yellow triangles, blown like masses of autumn leaves over the firmament of the cave.

  The painter of the cave, wearing a leafy loincloth as he labored, varied the patterns of the geometric design. He was at that time of his life engaged in developing a more intricate conception of circles within circles of various hues and shades including copper red and light olive; and to extend his art further, of triangles within triangles within concentric circles. He drove himself at his work, intending when his labor was done to climb the dark stairs ascending to his sister’s first floor and tell her what he had accomplished in the cave below. Bessie, long a widow, all her children married and scattered across the continent, her oldest daughter in Montreal, lived, except for occasional visitors, mostly the doctor, alone in the old frame house she had come to as a young bride, in Newark, New Jersey. She was, at this time, ill and possibly dying. Nobody he could think of had told her artist-brother, but he figured he somehow knew. Call it intuition. It was his hope she would remain alive until he had completed his artwork of the cave and she could at last see how it had turned out.

  Bessie, he would say, I did this for you and you know why. Fidelman worked by the light of a single dusty 100-watt bulb, the old-fashioned kind with a glass spicule at the bottom, dangling from a wire from the ceiling of the cave, that he had installed when he first came there to paint. For a long time he had distrusted the bulb because he had never had to replace it, and sometimes it glowed like a waning moon after he had switched it off, making him feel slightly uneasy and a little lumpy in the chest. He suspected a presence, immanent or otherwise, around; though who or why, and under what circumstances, he could not say. Nothing or nobody substantial. Anyway, he didn’t care for the bulb. He knew why when it began, one night, to speak to him. How does a bulb speak? With the sound of light. Fidelman for a while did not respond, first because he couldn’t, his throat constricted; and second, because he suspected this might be he talking to himself; yet when it spoke again, this time he answered.

  Fidelman, said the voice of, or from within, the bulb, why are you here such a long time in this cave? Painting—this we know—but why do you paint so long a whole cave? What kind of business is this?

  Leaving my mark is what. For the ages to see. This place will someday be crowded with visitors at a dollar a throw. Mark my words.

  But why in this way if there are better?

  What would you suggest, for instance?

  Whatever I suggest is too late now, but why don’t you go at least upstairs and say hello to your sister who hasn’t seen you in years? Go before it is too late, because she is now dying.

  Not quite just yet I can’t go, said the painter. I can’t until my work is finished because I want to show her what I’ve accomplished once it’s done.

  Go up to her now, this is the last chance. Your work in this cave will take years yet. Tell her at least hello. What have you got to lose? To her it will be a wonderful thing.

  No, I can’t. It’s all too complicated. I can’t go till I’ve finished the job. The truth is I hate the past. It caught me unawares. I’d rather not see her just yet. Maybe next week or so.

  It’s a short trip up the stairs to say hello to her. What can you lose if it’s only fourteen steps and then you’re there?

  It’s too complicated, like I said. I hate the past.

  So why do you blame her for this?

  I don’t blame anybody at all. I just don’t w
ant to see her. At least not just yet.

  If she dies she’s dead. You can talk all you want then but she won’t answer you.

  It’s no fault of mine if people die. There’s nothing I can do about it.

  Nobody is talking about fault or not fault. All we are talking about is to go upstairs.

  I can’t I told you, it’s too complicated, I hate the past, it caught me unawares. If there’s anything to blame I don’t blame her. I just don’t want to see her is all, at least not just yet until my work here is done.

  Don’t be so proud, my friend. Pride ain’t spinach. You can’t eat it, so it won’t make you grow. Remember what happened to the Greeks.

  Praxiteles? He who first showed Aphrodite naked? Phidias, whose centaur’s head is thought to be a self-portrait? Who have you got in mind?

  No, the one that he tore out his eyes. Watch out for hubris. It’s poison ivy. Trouble you got enough, you want also blisters? Also an electric bulb don’t give so often advice so listen with care. When did you hear last that an electric bulb gave advice? Did I advise Napoleon? Did I advise Van Gogh? This is like a miracle, so why don’t you take advantage and go upstairs?

  Well, you’ve got a point there. There’s some truth to it, I suppose. I might at that, come to think of it. As you say, it’s not everybody who gets advice in this way. There’s something biblical about it, if I may say. Furthermore, I’m not getting any younger and I haven’t seen Bessie in years. Plus I do owe her something, after all. Be my Virgil, which way to up the stairs?

  I will show you which way but I can’t go with you. Up to a point but not further if you know what I mean. A bulb is a bulb. Light I got but not feet. After all, this is the Universe, everything is laws.