‘Mitka?’ It was Madeleine.
‘Speaking.’
‘Mitka, do you know why I’m calling?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I’m half drunk on wine.’
‘Save it till later.’
‘Because I am afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘I do so love your letters and would hate to lose them. Do we have to meet?’
‘Yes,’ he hissed.
‘Suppose I am not what you expect?’
‘Leave that to me.’
She sighed. ‘All right then –’
‘You’ll be there?’
No sound from her.
‘For God’s sake, don’t frustrate me now.’
‘Yes, Mitka.’ She hung up.
Sensitive kid. He plucked his very last buck out of the drawer and quickly left the room, to hurry to the library before she could change her mind and leave. But Mrs Lutz, in flannel bathrobe, caught him at the bottom of the stairs. Her gray hair wild, her voice broken. ‘Mitka, why have you shunned me so long? I have waited months for a single word. How can you be so cruel?’
‘Please.’ He shoved her aside and ran out of the house. Nutty dame. The balmy current in the air swept away the unpleasantness, carried a sob to his throat. He walked briskly, more alive than for many a season.
The library was an old stone structure. He searched in circulation amid rows of books on sagging floors but found only the yawning librarian. The children’s room was dark. In reference, a lone middle-aged female sat at a long table, reading; on the table stood her bulky market bag. Mitka searched the room and was turning to look elsewhere when a monstrous insight tore at his scalp: this was she. He stared unbelievingly, his heart a dishrag. Rage possessed him. Hefty she was but yes, eyeglassed, and marvelously plain; Christ, didn’t know color even – the babushka a sickly running orange. Ah, colossal trickery – was ever man so cruelly defrauded? His impulse was to escape into breathable air but she held him there by serenely reading the printed page – (sly one, she knew the tiger in the room). Had she for a split second gazed up with wavering lids he’d have bolted sure; instead she buttoned her eyes to the book and let him duck if he so willed. This infuriated him further. Who wanted charity from the old girl? Mitka strode (in misery) toward her table.
‘Madeleine?’ He mocked the name. (Writer maims bird in flight. Enough not enough.)
She looked up with a shy and stricken smile. ‘Mitka?’
‘The same –’ He cynically bowed.
‘Madeleine is my daughter’s name, which I borrowed for my story. Mine is Olga really.’
A pox on her lies – yet he hopefully asked, ‘Did she send you?’
She smiled sadly. ‘No, I am the one. Sit, Mitka.’
He sat sullenly, harboring murderous thoughts: to hack her to pieces and incinerate the remains in Mrs Lutz’s barrel.
‘They’ll be closing soon,’ she said. ‘Where shall we go?’
He was motionless, stunned.
‘I know a beer place around the corner where we can refresh ourselves,’ Olga suggested.
She buttoned a drab coat over a gray sweater. At length he rose. She got up too and followed him, hauling her market bag down the stone steps.
In the street he took the bag – it felt full of rocks – and trailed her around the corner into the beer joint.
Along the wall opposite the beat-up bar ran a row of dark booths. Olga sought one in the rear.
‘For peace and privacy.’
He laid the bag on the table. ‘The place smells.’
They sat facing each other. He grew increasingly depressed at the thought of spending the evening with her. The irony of it – immured for months in a rat hole, to come forth for this. He’d go back now and entomb himself forever.
She removed her coat. ‘You’d have liked me when I was young, Mitka. I had a sylphlike figure and glorious hair. I was much sought after by men. I was not what you would call sexy but they knew I had it.’
Mitka looked away.
‘I had verve and a quality of wholeness. I loved life. In many ways I was too rich for my husband. He couldn’t understand my nature and this caused him to leave me – mind you, with two small children.’
She saw he wasn’t listening. Olga sighed and burst into tears.
The waiter came.
‘One beer. Bring the lady whiskey.’
She used two handkerchiefs, one to blow her nose in, the other to dry her eyes.
‘You see, Mitka, I told you so.’
Her humility touched him. ‘I see.’ Why hadn’t he, fool, not listened?
She gazed at him with sadly smiling eyes. Without glasses she looked better.
‘You’re exactly the way I pictured you, except for your thinness which surprises me.’
Olga reached into her market bag and brought out several packages. She unwrapped bread, sausage, herring, Italian cheese, soft salami, pickles and a large turkey drumstick.
‘Sometimes I favor myself with these little treats. Eat, Mitka.’
Another landlady. Set Mitka adrift and he enticed somebody’s Mama. But he ate, grateful she had provided an occupation.
The waiter brought the drinks. ‘What’s going on here, a picnic?’
‘We’re writers,’ Olga explained.
‘The boss will be pleased.’
‘Never mind him, eat, Mitka.’
He ate listlessly. A man had to live. Or did he? When had he felt this low? Probably never.
Olga sipped her whiskey. ‘Eat, it’s self-expression.’
He expressed himself by finishing off the salami, also half the loaf of bread, cheese, and herring. His appetite grew. Searching within the bag Olga brought out a package of sliced corned beef and a ripe pear. He made a sandwich of the meat. On top of that the cold beer was tasty.
‘How is the writing going now, Mitka?’
He lowered the glass but changed his mind and gulped the rest.
‘Don’t speak of it.’
‘Be uphearted, not down. Work every day.’
He gnawed the turkey drumstick.
‘That’s what I do. I’ve been writing for over twenty years and sometimes – for one reason or another – it gets so bad that I don’t feel like going on. But what I do then is relax for a short while and then change to another story. After my juices are flowing again I go back to the other and usually that starts off once more. Or sometimes I discover that it isn’t worth bothering over. After you’ve been writing so long as I you’ll learn a system to keep yourself going. It depends on your view of life. If you’re mature you’ll find out how to work.’
‘My writing is a mess,’ he sighed, ‘a fog, a blot.’
‘You’ll invent your way out,’ said Olga, ‘if you only keep trying.’
They sat a while longer. Olga told him of her childhood and when she was a girl. She would have talked longer but Mitka was restless. He was wondering, what after this? Where would he drag that dead cat, his soul?
Olga put what was left of the food into the market bag.
In the street he asked where to.
‘The bus I guess. I live on the other side of the river with my son, his vinegary wife and their little daughter.’
He took her bag – a lightened load – and walked with it in one hand, a cigarette in the other, toward the bus terminal.
‘I wish you’d known my daughter, Mitka.’
‘So why not?’ he asked hopefully, surprised he hadn’t brought up this before, because she was all the time in the back of his mind.
‘She had flowing hair and a sweet hourglass figure. Her nature was beyond compare. You’d have loved her.’
‘What’s the matter, is she married?’
‘She died at twenty – at the fount of life. All my stories are actually about her. Someday I’ll collect the best and see if I can get them published.’
He all but crumpled, then walked unsteadily on. For Madeleine he had this night c
ome out of his burrow, to hold her against his lonely heart, but she had burst into fragments, a meteor in reverse, scattered in the far-flung sky, as he stood below, a man mourning.
They came at last to the terminal and Mitka put Olga on the bus.
‘Will we meet again, Mitka?’
‘Better no,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘It makes me sad.’
‘Won’t you write either? You’ll never know what your letters meant to me. I was like a young girl waiting for the mailman.’
‘Who knows?’ He got off the bus.
She called him to the window. ‘Don’t worry about your work, and get more fresh air. Build up your body. Good health will help your writing.’
His face showed nothing but he pitied her, her daughter, the world. Who not?
‘Character is what counts in the pinches, of course properly mixed with talent. When you saw me in the library and stayed I thought, there is a man of character.’
‘Good night,’ Mitka said.
‘Good night, my dear. Write soon.’
She sat back in her seat and the bus roared out of the depot. As it turned the corner she waved from the window.
Mitka walked the other way. He was momentarily uneasy, until he realized he felt no pangs of hunger. On what he had eaten tonight he could live for a week. Mitka, the camel.
Spring. It gripped and held him. Though he fought the intimacy he was the night’s prisoner as he moved toward Mrs Lutz’s.
He thought of the old girl. He’d go home now and drape her from head to foot in flowing white. They would jounce together up the stairs, then (strictly a one-marriage man) he would swing her across the threshold, holding her where the fat overflowed her corset as they waltzed around his writing chamber.
ANGEL LEVINE
MANISCHEVITZ, A TAILOR, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities. Previously a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had, when his establishment caught fire and, after a metal container of cleaning fluid exploded, burned to the ground. Although Manischevitz was insured against fire, damage suits by two customers who had been hurt in the flames deprived him of every penny he had collected. At almost the same time, his son, of much promise, was killed in the war, and his daughter, without so much as a word of warning, married a lout and disappeared with him as off the face of the earth. Thereafter Manischevitz was victimized by excruciating backaches and found himself unable to work even as a presser – the only kind of work available to him – for more than an hour or two daily, because beyond that the pain from standing became maddening. His Fanny, a good wife and mother, who had taken in washing and sewing, began before his eyes to waste away. Suffering shortness of breath, she at last became seriously ill and took to her bed. The doctor, a former customer of Manischevitz, who out of pity treated them, at first had difficulty diagnosing her ailment but later put it down as hardening of the arteries at an advanced stage. He took Manischevitz aside, prescribed complete rest for her, and in whispers gave him to know there was little hope.
Throughout his trials Manischevitz had remained somewhat stoic, almost unbelieving that all this had descended upon his head, as if it were happening, let us say, to an acquaintance or some distant relative; it was in sheer quantity of woe incomprehensible. It was also ridiculous, unjust, and because he had always been a religious man, it was in a way an affront to God. Manischevitz believed this in all his suffering. When his burden had grown too crushingly heavy to be borne he prayed in his chair with shut hollow eyes: ‘My dear God, sweetheart, did I deserve that this should happen to me?’ Then recognizing the worthlessness of it, he put aside the complaint and prayed humbly for assistance: ‘Give Fanny back her health, and to me for myself that I shouldn’t feel pain in every step. Help now or tomorrow is too late. This I don’t have to tell you.’ And Manischevitz wept.
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 of 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 entered 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 Negro 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 relief. 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 all 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 farther, 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 ability – 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 mocke
ry was it – provided Levine was an angel – of a faithful servant who had from childhood lived in the synagogues, always concerned with the word of God?
To test Levine he asked, ‘Then where are your wings?’
The Negro blushed as well as he was able. Manischevitz understood this from his changed expression. ‘Under certain circumstances we lose privileges and prerogatives upon returning to earth, no matter for what purpose, or endeavoring to assist whosoever.’
‘So tell me,’ Manischevitz said triumphantly, ‘how did you get here?’
‘I was transmitted.’
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 that 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, I admit, 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 showed 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 on the fourth day the stabbing, breaking ache afflicted his back, and Fanny again lay supine, breathing with blue-lipped difficulty.
The Magic Barrel Page 4