The Magic Barrel

by Bernard Malamud

  Then one afternoon Max came in and asked for his shoes. The shoemaker took them down from the shelf where he had placed them, apart from the other pairs. He had done the work himself and the soles and heels were well built and firm. The shoes had been highly polished and somehow looked better than new. Max’s Adam’s apple went up once when he saw them, and his eyes had little lights in them.

  ‘How much?’ he asked, without directly looking at the shoemaker.

  ‘Like I told you before,’ Feld answered sadly. ‘One dollar fifty cents.’

  Max handed him two crumpled bills and received in return a newly-minted silver half dollar.

  He left. Miriam had not been mentioned. That night the shoemaker discovered that his new assistant had been all the while stealing from him, and he suffered a heart attack.

  Though the attack was very mild, he lay in bed for three weeks. Miriam spoke of going for Sobel, but sick as he was Feld rose in wrath against the idea. Yet in his heart he knew there was no other way, and the first weary day back in the shop thoroughly convinced him, so that night after supper he dragged himself to Sobel’s rooming house.

  He toiled up the stairs, though he knew it was bad for him, and at the top knocked at the door. Sobel opened it and the shoemaker entered. The room was a small, poor one, with a single window facing the street. It contained a narrow cot, a low table and several stacks of books piled haphazardly around on the floor along the wall, which made him think how queer Sobel was, to be uneducated and read so much. He had once asked him, Sobel, why you read so much? and the assistant could not answer him. Did you ever study in a college someplace? he had asked, but Sobel shook his head. He read, he said, to know. But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know, why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read much because he was queer.

  Feld sat down to recover his breath. The assistant was resting on his bed with his heavy back to the wall. His shirt and trousers were clean, and his stubby fingers, away from the shoemaker’s bench, were strangely pallid. His face was thin and pale, as if he had been shut in this room since the day he had bolted from the store.

  ‘So when you will come back to work?’ Feld asked him.

  To his surprise, Sobel burst out, ‘Never.’

  Jumping up, he strode over to the window that looked out upon the miserable street. ‘Why should I come back?’ he cried.

  ‘I will raise your wages.’

  ‘Who cares for your wages!’

  The shoemaker, knowing he didn’t care, was at a loss what else to say.

  ‘What do you want from me, Sobel?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I always treated you like you was my son.’

  Sobel vehemently denied it. ‘So why you look for strange boys in the street they should go out with Miriam? Why you don’t think of me?’

  The shoemaker’s hands and feet turned freezing cold. His voice became so hoarse he couldn’t speak. At last he cleared his throat and croaked, ‘So what has my daughter got to do with a shoemaker thirty-five years old who works for me?’

  ‘Why do you think I worked so long for you?’ Sobel cried out. ‘For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life so you could have to eat and drink and where to sleep?’

  ‘Then for what?’ shouted the shoemaker.

  ‘For Miriam,’ he blurted – ‘for her.’

  The shoemaker, after a time, managed to say, ‘I pay wages in cash, Sobel,’ and lapsed into silence. Though he was seething with excitement, his mind was coldly clear, and he had to admit to himself he had sensed all along that Sobel felt this way. He had never so much as thought it consciously, but he had felt it and was afraid.

  ‘Miriam knows?’ he muttered hoarsely.

  ‘She knows.’

  ‘You told her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how does she know?’

  ‘How does she know?’ Sobel said, ‘because she knows. She knows who I am and what is in my heart.’

  Feld had a sudden insight. In some devious way, with his books and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he loved her. The shoemaker felt a terrible anger at him for his deceit.

  ‘Sobel, you are crazy,’ he said bitterly. ‘She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you.’

  Sobel turned black with rage. He cursed the shoemaker, but then, though he trembled to hold it in, his eyes filled with tears and he broke into deep sobs. With his back to Feld, he stood at the window, fists clenched, and his shoulders shook with his choked sobbing.

  Watching him, the shoemaker’s anger diminished. His teeth were on edge with pity for the man, and his eyes grew moist. How strange and sad that a refugee, a grown man, bald and old with his miseries, who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler’s incinerators, should fall in love, when he had got to America, with a girl less than half his age. Day after day, for five years he had sat at his bench, cutting and hammering away, waiting for the girl to become a woman, unable to ease his heart with speech, knowing no protest but desperation.

  ‘Ugly I didn’t mean,’ he said half aloud.

  Then he realized that what he had called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel’s bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother had had. And all his dreams for her – why he had slaved and destroyed his heart with anxiety and labor – all these dreams of a better life were dead.

  The room was quiet. Sobel was standing by the window reading, and it was curious that when he read he looked young.

  ‘She is only nineteen,’ Feld said brokenly. ‘This is too young yet to get married. Don’t ask her for two years more, till she is twenty-one, then you can talk to her.’

  Sobel didn’t answer. Feld rose and left. He went slowly down the stairs but once outside, though it was an icy night and the crisp falling snow whitened the street, he walked with a stronger stride.

  But the next morning, when the shoemaker arrived, heavyhearted, to open the store, he saw he needn’t have come, for his assistant was already seated at the last, pounding leather for his love.

  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 trouble maker, 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 dumb-waiter, 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 had ever seen. 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 chuzpah,’ said Gruber. ‘Gimme the keys.’

  Ignace brought the ring of pass keys, 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 the 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 outa 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 outa 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 appeared 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 a 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.’