The Magic Barrel

by Bernard Malamud

  Three months had gone by since Fidelman’s arrival in Rome. Should he, he many times asked himself, leave the city and this foolish search? Why not off to Florence, and there, amid the art splendors of the world, be inspired to resume his work? But the loss of his first chapter was like a spell cast over him. There were times he scorned it as a man-made thing, like all such, replaceable; other times he feared it was not the chapter per se, but that his volatile curiosity had become somehow entangled with Susskind’s strange personality – Had he repaid generosity by stealing a man’s life work? Was he so distorted? To satisfy himself, to know man, Fidelman had to know, though at what a cost in precious time and effort. Sometimes he smiled wryly at all this; ridiculous, the chapter grieved him for itself only – the precious thing he had created then lost – especially when he got to thinking of the long diligent labor, how painstakingly he had built each idea, how cleverly mastered problems of order, form, how impressive the finished product, Giotto reborn! It broke the heart. What else, if after months he was here, still seeking?

  And Fidelman was unchangingly convinced that Susskind had taken it, or why would he still be hiding? He sighed much and gained weight. Mulling over his frustrated career, on the backs of envelopes containing unanswered letters from his sister Bessie he aimlessly sketched little angels flying. Once, studying his minuscule drawings, it occurred to him that he might someday return to painting, but the thought was more painful than Fidelman could bear.

  One bright morning in mid-December, after a good night’s sleep, his first in weeks, he vowed he would have another look at the Navicella and then be off to Florence. Shortly before noon he visited the porch of St Peter’s, trying, from his remembrance of Giotto’s sketch, to see the mosaic as it had been before its many restorations. He hazarded a note or two in shaky handwriting, then left the church and was walking down the sweeping flight of stairs, when he beheld at the bottom – his heart misgave him, was he still seeing pictures, a sneaky apostle added to the overloaded boatful? – ecco, Susskind! The refugee, in beret and long green G.I. raincoat, from under whose skirts showed his black-stockinged, rooster’s ankles – indicating knickers going on above though hidden – was selling black and white rosaries to all who would buy. He held several strands of beads in one hand, while in the palm of the other a few gilded medallions glinted in the winter sun. Despite his outer clothing, Susskind looked, it must be said, unchanged, not a pound more of meat or muscle, the face though aged, ageless. Gazing at him, the student ground his teeth in remembrance. He was tempted quickly to hide, and unobserved observe the thief; but his impatience, after the long unhappy search, was too much for him. With controlled trepidation he approached Susskind on his left as the refugee was busily engaged on the right, urging a sale of beads upon a woman drenched in black.

  ‘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 was this, 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 brief case I was carrying with me around the time we met in September?’

  ‘Brief case – 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 brief case. That’s his business, no questions asked. Fair enough?’

  Susskind spied a lady tourist, including camera and guide book. ‘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 gold fish 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 brief case with a fine critical chapter in it. The place was not more than an ice-box 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 s
unlit 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 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 brief case.

  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.

  THE LOAN

  THE SWEET, THE heady smell of Lieb’s white bread drew customers in droves long before the loaves were baked. Alert behind the counter, Bessie, Lieb’s second wife, discerned a stranger among them, a frail, gnarled man with a hard hat who hung, disjoined, at the edge of the crowd. Though the stranger looked harmless enough among the aggressive purchasers of baked goods, she was at once concerned. Her glance questioned him but he signaled with a deprecatory nod of his hatted head that he would wait – glad to (forever) – though his face glittered with misery. If suffering had marked him, he no longer sought to conceal the sign; the shining was his own – him – now. So he frightened Bessie.

  She made quick hash of the customers, and when they, after her annihilating service, were gone, she returned him her stare.

  He tipped his hat. ‘Pardon me – Kobotsky. Is Lieb the baker here?’

  ‘Who Kobotsky?’

  ‘An old friend’ – frightening her further.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From long ago.’

  ‘What do you want to see him?’

  The question insulted, so Kobotsky was reluctant to say.

  As if drawn into the shop by the magic of a voice, the baker, shirtless, appeared from the rear. His pink, fleshy arms had been deep in dough. For a hat he wore jauntily a flour-covered brown paper sack. His peering glasses were dusty with flour, and the inquisitive face white with it so that he resembled a paunchy ghost; but the ghost, through the glasses, was Kobotsky, not he.

  ‘Kobotsky,’ the baker cried almost with a sob, for it was so many years gone Kobotsky reminded him of, when they were both at least young, and circumstances were – ah, different. Unable, for sentimental reasons, to refrain from smarting tears, he jabbed them away with a thrust of the hand.

  Kobotsky removed his hat – he had grown all but bald where Lieb was gray – and patted his flushed forehead with an immaculate handkerchief.

  Lieb sprang forward with a stool. ‘Sit, Kobotsky.’

  ‘Not here,’ Bessie murmured.

  ‘Customers,’ she explained to Kobotsky. ‘Soon comes the supper rush.’

  ‘Better in the back,’ nodded Kobotsky.

  So that was where they went, happier for the privacy. But it happened that no customers came so Bessie went in to hear.

  Kobotsky sat enthroned on a tall stool in a corner of the room, stoop-shouldered, his black coat and hat on, the stiff, gray-veined hands drooping over thin thighs. Lieb, peering through full moons, eased his bones on a flour sack. Bessie lent an attentive ear, but the visitor was dumb. Embarrassed, Lieb did the talking: ah, of old times. The world was new. We were, Kobotsky, young. Do you remember how both together, immigrants out of steerage, we registered in night school?

  ‘Haben, hatte, gehabt.’ He cackled at the sound of it.

  No word from the gaunt one on the stool. Bessie fluttered around an impatient duster. She shot a glance into the shop: empty.

  Lieb, acting the life of the party, recited, to cheer his friend: ‘“Come,” said the wind to the trees one day, “Come over the meadow with me and play.” Remember, Kobotsky?’

  Bessie sniffed aloud. ‘Lieb, the bread!’

  The baker bounced up, strode over to the gas oven and pulled one of the tiered doors down. Just in time he yanked out the trays of brown breads in hot pans, and set them on the tin-top worktable.

  Bessie clucked at the narrow escape.

  Lieb peered into the shop. ‘Customers,’ he said triumphantly. Flushed, she went in. Kobotsky, with wetted lips, watched her go. Lieb set to work molding the risen dough in a bowl into two trays of pans. Soon the bread was baking, but Bessie was back.

  The honey odor of the new loaves distracted Kobotsky. He breathed the sweet fragrance as if this were the first air he was tasting, and even beat his fist against his chest at the delicious smell.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he all but wept. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘With tears,’ Lieb said humbly, pointing to the large pot of dough.

  Kobotsky nodded.

  For thirty years, the baker explained, he was never with a penny to his name. One day, out of misery, he had wept into the dough. Thereafter his bread was such it brought customers in from everywhere.

  ‘My cakes they don’t like so much, but my bread and rolls they run miles to buy.’

  Kobotsky blew his nose, then peeked into the shop: three customers.

  ‘Lieb’ – a whisper.

  Despite himself the baker stiffened.

  The visitor’s eyes swept back to Bessie out front, then, under raised brows, questioned the baker.

  Lieb, however, remained mute.

  Kobotsky coughed clear his throat. ‘Lieb, I need two hundred dollars.’ His voice broke.

  Lieb slowly sank onto the sack. He knew – had known. From the minute of Kobotsky’s appearance he had weighed in his thoughts the possibility of this against the remembrance of the lost and bitter hundred, fifteen years ago. Kobotsky swore he had repaid it, Lieb said no. Afterwards a broken friendship. It took years to blot out of the system the memoried outrage.

  Kobotsky bowed his head.

  At least admit you were wrong, Lieb thought, waiting a cruelly long time.

  Kobotsky stared at his crippled hands. Once a cutter of furs, driven by arthritis out of the business.

  Lieb gazed too. The button of a truss bit into his belly. Both eyes were cloudy with cataracts. Though the doctor swore he would see after the operation, he feared otherwise.

  He sighed. The wrong was in the past. Forgiven: forgiven at the dim sight of him.

  ‘For myself, positively, but she’ – Lieb nodded towards the shop – ‘is a second wife. Everything is in her name.’ He held up empty hands.

  Kobotsky’s eyes were shut.

  ‘But I will ask her –’ Lieb looked doubtful.


  ‘My wife needs –’

  The baker raised a palm. ‘Don’t speak.’

  ‘Tell her –’

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  He seized the broom and circled the room, raising clouds of white dust.

  When Bessie, breathless, got back she threw one look at them, and with tightened lips, waited adamant.

  Lieb hastily scoured the pots in the iron sink, stored the bread pans under the table and stacked the fragrant loaves. He put one eye to the slot of the oven: baking, all baking.

  Facing Bessie, he broke into a sweat so hot it momentarily stunned him.

  Kobotsky squirmed atop the stool.

  ‘Bessie,’ said the baker at last, ‘this is my old friend.’

  She nodded gravely.

  Kobotsky lifted his hat.

  ‘His mother – God bless her – gave me many times a plate hot soup. Also when I came to this country, for years I ate at his table. His wife is a very fine person – Dora – you will someday meet her –’

  Kobotsky softly groaned.

  ‘So why I didn’t meet her yet?’ Bessie said, after a dozen years, still jealous of the first wife’s prerogatives.

  ‘You will.’

  ‘Why didn’t I?’

  ‘Lieb –’ pleaded Kobotsky.

  ‘Because I didn’t see her myself fifteen years,’ Lieb admitted.

  ‘Why not?’ she pounced.

  Lieb paused. ‘A mistake.’

  Kobotsky turned away.

  ‘My fault,’ said Lieb.