The Book of Intimate Grammar

by David Grossman

  At home she roasted the hearts and livers and gizzards, and served them to Papa on a steaming platter. “You need your strength, Mr. Kleinfeld,” she murmured, red-faced, her shyness seeming natural now, because finally, she reflected, after a twenty-five-year delay, she was becoming an adolescent.

  What? Oh no! Not again! How could she, a woman with two years of university education, a world traveler who attended the theater and surrounded herself with paintings and sculpture and books—how couldshe have missed it. Oh, Edna, she giggled, let it happen this once, what harm would it do to lose your head like a heroine in a novel and fall in love, for a while, at least, with a donkey? But it couldn’t be, she knew that. So what was this? What was happening to her all of a sudden? Edna laughed; she emitted another of those new squeals, releasing a knot in the top of her head. What a ridiculous idea, Edna! A person like you with a person like him … Why, I could toss him out of my life with a flick of my little finger, like this: but she stopped herself: Oh no you don’t, you wicked little finger!

  To her office mates she described at length the upheaval caused by renovating an apartment and the nuisance of having workmen about; they had never heard her talk so much before, some even complained to the boss, who called her in and asked solicitously if he could be of any help, and Edna with a little giggle said, Oi, Mr. Lombroso, dear, dear Mr. Lombroso, if only you could help me get rid of those workmen … But when she tried, for the fun of it, to replace him in her imagination with someone else, any other man waving a sledgehammer and grunting with exertion, she suddenly realized that the thrill was Moshe. And she was amazed. She tried to deny it. What’s happening, Edna, where’s our little finger, and the following day she made him a cheese and cucumber sandwich which he ate with indignation, even the boy stayed awake to watch, staring at her wide-eyed, in utter bafflement, as the man redoubled his blows that day, giving her to understand that at this rate he would finish the wall in no time.

  Therefore, the following day she prepared him a whole roast chicken on a bed of olives she had purchased from the one-armed vendor at the market. They were getting to know and like her there; everywhere she turned they winked at her. Welcome, Madame, they greeted her in English. If you like eat very spicy, come to me, they called after her, slapping their thighs ecstatically when they saw her winking back; Papa devoured the chicken and sucked the bones in awe and gratitude, and Edna sank down in her armchair, abandoning herself to the delightful dance of man and wall. Now and then, after a particularly stunning blow, he would turn to Edna heroically, as though dedicating a modest feat to her, which she acknowledged with a nod. His stately Roman muscles would swell and throb for her. And sometimes, in the middle of a whirl, he would throw her a special look, shy but lusty, that seemed to pinch her spine out through the nape of her neck like a fishbone, tillall she had left inside was mushy organs, sliding around in a ravenous cosmic mouth.

  Outside, a storm was brewing, and the street, though it was early still, grew dark. For a while the only sound in the apartment was the pounding of the sledgehammer against the wall. On the six-thirty newscast there was a report about flash floods in the Negev again, two soldiers swept away in the overflowing Shikma River. Papa glowered out the window. When he struck a blow, erupting with fury, the heavens trembled and the lights blinked off.

  Edna hurried to get a candle and lit it, shading the tiny flame with her hands. Papa struck another blow, his face hard as rock. Under cover of darkness Aron slinked off to the toilet, where he sat down, and shut his eyes in pain. He had to get away. Papa was out there smashing the wall, and the whole house trembled, boom, crash, boom, crash, like a relentless engine with hammers and pistons and boilers and compressors and crankshafts going up and down, banging and bashing, although maybe something was missing, he sensed vaguely through the surging waves of pain, hallucinating rods and pulleys, and iron arms to stoke the fire because there’s not enough steam from the boiler room, and he writhes in agony, wringing himself, bearing down with his hands, pressing in from the waist, help, the pain would surely split him in two, squeezing his eyeballs with his fists till the sparks flew; his little angels of light, he turned them into shining stars, chose three that exploded with a flash, he could always find the flashing stars on the pages of the newspaper announcing: One thousand prizes! Send in six wrappers, win a cruise! There was soup mix and the Ampisal knitting machine deluxe, and for a smoother shave, use Diplomat; he managed to enter that one too somehow, but didn’t win the gold watch or a ride in the glass-bottom boat in Eilat with Be Lovely as a Rose in Sabrina Hose, or even the consolation prize; three pounds he stole out of her purse each week, and again he was overcome with the pain, God knows what he had in there, what was that story in Ripley’s Believe It or Not,“Three Hundred Amazing Cases,” about the boy with the terrible stomachache, maybe he was about to give birth to something, maybe that’s what happens with this disease, at the age of fourteen you give birth to a creature just like you, but maybe he ought to talk to someone about it, like Yochi for instance, because it’s turning into a serious problem, two weeks to the day, and again he clasped his wrist to strangleit, to stop the circulation, then shook it disgustedly, no more of that, we quit for good, and he leaned back, perspiring, utterly spent.

  Lightning slashed the somber sky. Thunder roared, and Papa retaliated with more pounding and smashing; Aron was out, asleep, unconscious, while deep inside him stalked the heavy giant, the lonely giant who ran after the children crying, Children, come back, come back to my garden, stumbling in his heavy boots, pounding his head in despair, and suddenly: What’s this under the leafless tree, a little bundle. Why, it’s a boy, the boy who didn’t get away, lying in a faint, at the giant’s mercy, and the giant bends down and gently lifts him in his arms; but suddenly Aron came to, sat up. Did you hear that, that hammering, it sounds different now. What do you mean different? It’s hard to say, but Aron had learned to distinguish, and this was something new, maybe because of the storm outside, it was the first stormy day all winter, or maybe because of the roast chicken she served for his dinner, did you see the way he stuffed it into his mouth with both hands and gobbled it like a tiger; listen carefully, the rhythm is different, the tempo, the dynamics, and he leaned out the better to listen, and suddenly—what was that?—like someone tapping him on the shoulder as he slept, shaking him and whispering, Get up, it’s starting, and now he was wide-awake; he pulled his pants on and ran quickly out to Edna, who sank deeper in her armchair, sucking her thumb, her eyes round with wonder, like a child listening to a bedtime story, he thought on the way to his seat by the window, fighting the heaviness that weighed on his lids—I am not falling asleep—he curled up under the blanket trying to get warm. Oh, why did I come, I decided to keep out of Papa’s way, and how long can you sit here watching him tear down a wall, but will you listen to that; he listens: the hammering, the grunting, the hammering, the groaning, uh-huh, uh-huh, the hammering, the grunting, the hammering, the groaning, and Aron’s head drooped down as though an invisible hypnotist had snapped his fingers, not sleeping, just dozing, mustering the strength to return, to return. Edna noticed him: What’s happened to the child, he falls into a stupor, it’s strange, a little worrisome, the way he has to struggle to stay awake, as soon as he gets here and curls up on the carpet, with all the noise, he falls asleep. The hammering grows louder, compelling, demanding. Me, me, it calls her, listen to me, but the sight of Aron troubles her, sleeping feverishly, whatever could have exhausted him so, and why here of all places, inher apartment, as though he only came for this, a kind of hypnotherapy, an operation performed under a general anesthetic … But the hammering. Listen, Edna, the grunting, the hammering, the groaning, the hammering, pay attention, there’s something different there; it’s driven, exasperated, running for shelter. She sat up in her armchair, nodding her head like an anxious bird, and Papa’s hammer cried to her, cleaved to her: sometimes it struck despairingly, as though caught in a storm, calling SOS like a telegr
aph key; sometimes it was more like a prisoner tapping to find out if there was anyone in the neighboring cell. Oh yes, she nodded vigorously, oh yes, oh yes, there is, and then a mild shudder trickled through her, like a drop of aphrodisiac, even Aron heaved a sigh in his sleep, and she cocked an ear: Oh no, it can’t be, but it was, it was addressed to her, intended for her, the hidden signs, the invisible writing, the secret letter smuggled in, and she stretched and listened, closing her eyes, throbbing and shivering like a delicate salamander from her head to her toes.

  20

  Once, at Komi, at the end of the day’s work in the quarry, a stranger turned to Papa and asked to speak to him later that night, outside the barracks. Papa had qualms about him, but the man looked so puny, he figured he could beat him if it came to that.

  The man’s name was Molochinko, and he was one of the Urkas, the criminal element, who were brutal as animals, the only prisoners ever to attempt an escape across the frozen steppes. When a group of them broke out, they would take along a couple of lucky “politicals,” this being—Papa traced a bitter smile across the wall—a political’s only hope of leaving the camp alive. Molochinko informed Papa that a couple of Urkas were planning to break out the following night, and he had been chosen to go with them, since he looked strong enough to carry the provisions they would need on such an arduous trek. Papa was terror-stricken, but he agreed to join them. He had managed to survive two winters in Komi; a third, he knew, would kill him, and he would die again each day till then regretting the lost opportunity. That’s how I was. Papa hacked at the wall, arching the muscles of his back like steel!

  Crowds of big black clouds peeked into Edna’s window, their cheeks swelling furiously over childish mouths. And one moonlit night the Urkas made their getaway. They had lavishly bribed the guards, who in any case did not believe they would survive in the taiga. After a few hours’ march by the light of the icy moon, Molochinko sprained hisankle and had to stop. The Urkas huddled together and quietly conferred while the three politicals stood apart, in vague trepidation. At last the Urka chief, a murderer from Lithuania, announced that they would abandon Molochinko there. No one protested, and they set off again, but a little farther on Papa dropped out and sneaked back to the casualty: What could I do, I felt sorry for the mutt.

  Molochinko was staggered to see him and wept in gratitude, clutching Papa’s hands with his iron claws. The taiga wolves had caught his scent and were prowling nearby in the darkness. Papa lifted Molochinko onto his shoulders and carried him for days. After almost a week without any food, Papa cut himself with a knife and let Molochinko lick his blood. Molochinko sucked his arm, gazing up like an overgrown calf. When he finished he blurted out that the Urkas took politicals along to use for meat on the journey, and fell to his knees, begging Papa’s forgiveness for having tricked him into joining the escape, with the excuse that he hadn’t really known him at the time.

  Now the hammer boomed to a heavy cadence, louder than the storm outside. And so, for weeks—or was it months, who knows—Papa and Molochinko roamed the taiga. They lost their way, and the howling wolves that trailed them expectantly drove them half insane. Once they came across a skeleton with the cap of a political lying beside it. Molochinko crossed himself and peered at Papa anxiously. The sledgehammer reverberated, hard and dull, pausing each time like a cannon saluting the dead. There was nothing but pine forest and tundra as far as the eye could see. They slogged around in circles, up to their knees in the snow, stranded on the vast palm of Nature, terrified of disappearing without a trace in these infinite expanses. If not for Molochinko, said Papa, I would have sunk in the snow and waited for the Angel of Death.

  Ai, Molochinko. Papa struck again, while Edna cringed in anticipation of what she read on his rippling back. Molochinko was a petty thief, a sardine from Odessa. He was arrested for stealing a consignment of streetlamps, so they sent him to the Hotel Komi for the rest of his life. Papa chuckled to himself, and Edna saw Molochinko on the wall, sketched with a few crude strokes as a shapeless but sprightly man full of merriment and chatter. Uh-huh, nodded Papa, that’s him all right.

  Molochinko spouted witty anecdotes, hollow abstractions; he joked obscenely, flattered Papa, and exasperated him, working hard to maintaina kind of standard of human emotion in the heart of the ice. Together they learned to hunt birds with a slingshot and eat them raw, those brightly feathered birds, Miss Bloom, that sang so prettily, it was a shame to eat them, and once they had to fight a pack of dogs off a deer carcass. And there were herds of wild horses, small and lithe, galloping fleetly over the horizon. At night he and Molochinko would sleep in a tree, tying themselves to the trunk by a rope like criminals hanging from the gallows. One night Papa awoke with a feverish start, and saw that the taiga, glowing pale in the moonlight, was aswarm with crouching wolves that gazed patiently up at him like masked humans with cold, indifferent eyes, the faceless members of a thousand committees, who sent the likes of him to die in the taiga, and he began to beg them for mercy, he was a man like them, he wanted to live, to love a woman, but then he woke out of the trance, realizing he was delirious. Actually I was more afraid of Molochinko than I was of the wolves, because if he’d seen how weak I was, he would have butchered me on the spot, that’s right.

  At last, after endless days of wandering, they reached the outskirts of a tiny village. Edna Bloom took her thumb out of her mouth and listened intently. Papa’s chest heaved like a bellows, and Aron cocked his eye: the low clouds overhanging the window seemed to have rallied to a secret cry; they puffed their cheeks and spat, as if trying to put out a forbidden flame. Papa and Molochinko lay low: the villagers were ignorant serfs who subsisted by growing beets and stealing the logs that floated down the river. Papa smashed the wall, tucking his head between his shoulders to hide from the resounding boom: the entire building groaned like a ship ramming into an iceberg, the naked plane tree screeched like a topmast; three days later, Papa and the robber of streetlamps discovered a woman locked up in the farthermost hut of the village. The captive’s husband worked outside the village and forbade his wife to leave their home. Twice a day some old crone would pass her a bowl of pottage through a hatch at the back. The two men ogled the slender arm reaching out to take the dish. Go to him now, murmured Edna all of a sudden. Go to him, wipe the sweat from his brow, bring him a glass of water. Without ulterior motives. Just to let him know there’s another human being in the room.

  The following night Papa kneeled down on the frozen ground, and Molochinko climbed on his back and slipped in through the hatch. Papacould hear a muffled cry of surprise inside. Then a thud and a curse. Then silence, panting, and a startled groan. And silence again. And gentle weeping. Papa crouched in the darkness, in the shadow of the hut. Then, after a pause, he heard a harmonica tweedling inside, slowly and shyly at first, then mounting and bursting with life—Aron’s eyes were opened now: Come on, it’s time to go, I have homework to do, what’s taking so long? In the early dawn Molochinko shook his shoulder to wake him and they hurried back to the forest. In his hands he held a quarter of a sausage, a whole potato, and a chicken egg. A smile of pride spread over his lips. He held his fingers under Papa’s nose. Papa sniffed the fingers and shivered, then grabbed them and licked them and sucked them, unconscious that his feet were taking him back to the hut: Molochinko had to hit him over the head to bring him to his senses. And that’s the truth, Miss Bloom, I’m sorry to say.

  Molochinko babbled frenziedly, explaining that the door was latched shut and the serf had the key. That the hatch was too small for Papa to climb through. But inside, he told him, there was fresh food and enough provisions to keep them going for days, and the woman, aiaiai,he drew two undulating curves in the air. Papa hung on to the robber’s every word and asked a thousand times if there might not be some way of getting him into the hut. Again the taiga seemed to him like a massive prison where his youth would wither in the bud.

  Papa gulped hard, as though swallowing the bitter me
mory. Then he started hammering again. Edna listened, but the blows sounded hollow, reluctant somehow. Why did he have to break his story off? Pale and pouting, Edna stood up. She paced the room, nearly tripping over Aron, advancing toward Papa, then stumbling backward, till suddenly she was sitting at the piano; not bothering to wipe the dust away, her fingers flitted over the keyboard, searching for something, scanning her repertoire. Aron listened with his mouth open: what a strange, wispy melody. A slow, disorderly tinkling that burst wildly into song. He had heard it before. Papa too stood motionless, then nodded his heavy head as he followed the slippery tune with his lips, lighting after it, amazed at how it spurted out of the piano, and suddenly he could feel it hovering over his face, twisting and frolicking; he stuck out his tongue and snatched it up and licked it, beaming as it clung to his puffy lips, and he flourished his hammer and struck again with a silent whistle, the one that irritates Mama, and even kept time with his foot till Ednasmiled to herself and slowly shut the piano: We don’t need you anymore, we found what we were looking for …