Crackpot, p.3
Crackpot, page 3
Danile knew that Rahel did not entirely approve of his habit of giving the child a detailed version of these events. But once he had begun to speak it was hard for him to leave off trying to describe the way it had felt and what it had meant. If he told too much, well, those things the child wouldn’t understand anyway. They would pass her by. But because he felt a little guilty about it, he always tried, when he suspected he might have talked too much, to round off his tale with a compliment to Rahel, to smooth the edge of her disapproval. It was by way of a little gift, and as he spoke he meant it, discovering as he went along the truth in every word he said; but it was often so awkwardly dragged in, or else so triumphantly emphasized, that it managed, by its very incongruity, to make her laugh when she would have liked to scold.
Hoda herself would accept no abridgements or truncations. If he varied his description she would backtrack with him, collating the versions. Sometimes Danile had a hard time remembering what he had said last time. But the child did not forget.
“What did the sun say?” demanded Hoda.
“The sun? What did the sun say? Well now, oh yes, the sun peeked in under the canopy while the ceremony was going on and he said, ‘Look at that. He’s found himself the prettiest pair of eyes in the whole village.’”
Hoda laughed her satisfaction. “And what happened when you came home?”
“I said to your mother, ‘I’m sorry, my mother is sick.’
“And she replied, ‘Yes, I’ve heard.’ And straightaway she set to work looking after us both, as though it were meant to be and it had always been.”
“But did Bobba really die?” asked Hoda, who fought and strained through her grandmother’s illness, every time her father described it, trying to keep her alive.
“Yes. She lived long enough to make it possible for us to save the community, but when the turning point came in our fortunes she did not have the strength to climb back to life. Who would have imagined that would be possible? My beautiful mother. She was the sturdiest woman in the village. Why, even when I was fully grown, and they say I am quite a tall man, I couldn’t get both my arms all the way around her. You take after her. I can tell by the feel of you.”
“I wouldn’t die,” said Hoda.
“Of course not,” said Danile hastily. “Only in build, not in fate, please God.”
“You see what you get?” muttered Rahel.
“And the plague went away?” asked Hoda, checking off the familiar items to make sure.
“Yes, of course,” said Danile. “That was the wonder of it. Almost immediately, the plague began to disappear. Some people even got well again, and that’s a sure sign of the power of our wedding.”
“And the pogrom went away?”
“There was no pogrom. The plague left them too.”
“What happened then?” Hoda was persistent.
“Well, then we settled down. Everybody was very grateful to us, at first, anyway. They saw to it that we had food to eat. And then of course your mother is such a good housekeeper that she stretched out what we had.”
“And then?”
“And then time passed. Well, you can’t blame people entirely. While the danger is there they will do anything, be grateful to anybody. When the crisis is past they begin to forget how it felt; they have other problems and the obligation begins to seem as much of an imposition as the original danger. I don’t know; it’s hard to figure it all out. There seems to be something not quite altogether between time and place and feelings and events. The pieces don’t match up; they won’t hold still, the right time, the right place in life, the right feeling, the right length and strength for each. It never lasts long enough or it comes too late, or it doesn’t matter anymore to one and it matters too much to another; there are just too many pieces, each reaching for the others, and each being swept along in a different direction. You can’t blame people. They don’t know enough to be able to piece it all together. They can’t even hold still themselves. That’s why I want you to go to school and study. When your moment comes, I want you to be prepared to know what it means.”
“So what did you do?” asked Hoda, in a voice which, to her mother, sometimes seemed to have a kind of inexorable sternness, as though the child already knew enough to disagree, or at least to keep her own counsel.
“Do? Nothing really. We kept alive.” Danile too was sometimes made vaguely uneasy by the intensity with which the child kept after the story, though he could not resist her interest for long.
“What about my sister?” asked Hoda.
“What about her?” said Danile, stalling, for he could feel Rahel’s disapproval in the air. Why shouldn’t the child know that she had had a sister? Why shouldn’t the poor little thing have her brief existence acknowledged?
“Malka,” Hoda prompted.
“A name for my mother,” said Danile tenderly. “Who could foresee such luck? And she was perfect, absolutely perfect. I ought to know. Didn’t I hold her in my two hands with your mother buzzing at me to be careful, please be careful, as though I had to be told? Even the midwife said she was perfect. Whatever they said afterwards and for whatever reason the Almighty snatched her away again so soon, she was not a crippled child.”
Of course she wasn’t! A familiar resentment boiled up in Rahel, smarting in her eyes. Perfect, perfect.
“She was delicate, yes,” Danile went on; “too small, too thin, too exhausted with the effort of being born too soon to be able to continue to pump her own life for long. That’s what the midwife said, or something like that. When she stopped breathing, your mother and I said nothing to each other, but I knew that we both had the same thought. Perhaps it simply wasn’t meant for people like us to bring children into the world. That thought was black enough, but when our uncle came to offer his condolences, we found out that it was not such a new idea. Many people had been thinking the same thing all along.”
Rahel could not contain herself. “You wouldn’t have thought they would take such an interest,” she burst out, “from the way they had been forgetting all their fine promises to us. For all they cared we could have starved a dozen times over. Whenever someone felt in extra need of a good deed to be recorded with the One Above to offset something he felt guilty about below, he’d throw a coin our way, or send some food from the bottom of his table. For this we were dragged through the streets to stand miserable among the dead.”
Hoda stirred as her mother spoke. Her mother seldom joined in the stories, but when she did something happened to them; new feelings came into them that made her uneasy. For some reason that she could not fathom, because her mother was the softest, safest person in the world, the stories hurt more when her mother helped to tell them.
“It’s true,” said Danile gravely. “If it were not for your mother running to the baker’s and sitting up with the dough all night while it was rising, to prevent it from spilling all over the ovens, weeks would have gone by without us tasting either a piece of bread or the bite of herring she earned in the marketplace by day.”
“And now,” Rahel continued as though to herself, so that the child had to crane to hear, “my fine uncle comes and in so many words he congratulates us for having the good sense to lose our child. In spite of hard times, he tells us, the town is willing to continue to support us. But there are some people who are grumbling that we are taking advantage of them. There are some who say that wards of the town have no right to raise a family at the town’s expense. And there are some who say that it is not fair to bring more crippled children into the world for others to take care of. Crippled! Oh of course, says uncle, he personally is not one of these people, but he can see their point. And we can see his point well enough. If the town should decide that we have forfeited the right to even the pretence that they are helping us, the burden would be his.”
“Well, we can’t entirely blame…” said Danile.
“No wonder she did not have the strength to go on breathing,” continued Rahel in a whisper, “with the weight of the disapproval of all those beautiful people lying down on her. No wonder she couldn’t breathe.”
“So I said to him,” said Danile quickly, to distract the child from the fact that her mother was weeping. “I said, ‘We are not wards of the town. We are wards of the One Above, entrusted to the town.’
“And he said, ‘Since when are you such a big philosopher? You sit and talk to the Book all day with nothing to worry about. Everything is brought to you. Has the Book begun to answer you already, that you’re splitting hairs with me?’
“Not that I can blame him entirely; what he said was true. But it was no answer. And I wanted to tell him so. I wanted to tell him that we did not need the town’s help if they chose to go so against the spirit of our covenant. But I was afraid that he would reply as he had the right to, that it was all very well for me to sit and play at being proud, for I had a frail and delicate creature, his own niece, working day and night to support me. A man like me is in no position to tell a man like Uncle anything at all. So I kept silent, and since he is not really such a harsh man through and through, he likes simply to have his own way, but wants no hard feelings if he can help it, when he left, to show that all was well between us, Uncle gave us a very generous tip.”
“We couldn’t afford to throw it in his face,” sighed Rahel.
“I’m surprised you didn’t,” said Danile. “Do you know that same rich uncle never dared say a word to your mother against her father? With your grandmother he would curse and rave, but when your quiet little mother was around, not a word about Shem Berl the soldier. Well, we too can be charitable. So we kept the money. Why should we deprive him of a generous gesture to his credit Above? Poor Uncle. If only he could have foreseen the result of his visit he might not have ended it with such an expensive flourish. He would have kept his hand in his pocket and saved the money for our travel fare. It’s a fact, if he had not come and upset us that day, you might never have been born. But that very night you began to knock on the door of life, saucy little one that you are. Had we not been so disturbed and unable to sleep we would probably never have heard you. Instead, while your mother and I lay weeping, you called out to us, and we heard you say, ‘Where is it written that the townspeople, even the most beautiful ones, can give orders to the source of life? What is meant to be will be!’ And though we were afraid to take the risk of so much disappointment again, in the end we could not resist your voice.”
“And you opened the door?” asked Hoda, beaming expectantly.
“Yes!”
“And I came?”
“And you came.”
“And Uncle was mad?”
“Mad? Mad enough to cudgel that clever head of his and do us a real favour at last. Who ever thought that blind Danile too would live to see the new world?”
“And I didn’t even die!” Hoda laughed triumphantly, her voice trumpeting out, as though her arrival and survival were a signal victory for the forces of virtue. Danile could not resist her laughter and laughed with her, with something of the same triumphant innocence in his voice. Rahel, who could not laugh so easily, was nevertheless strangely touched. Her impulse, always, was to protect these two, but at times she had the not entirely comfortable feeling that they could, in some ways, take care of themselves far better than she knew. But that was something else, something apart from the twenty-four real hours a day during which they needed her, the real life, feet-on-the-ground, world-on-your-shoulders, hours. Perhaps that was what her hump was for, to balance the world on. Rahel found herself laughing too. If that’s what it’s for I’m not complaining. Just let me lug my load around a little longer.
Twenty-four real hours, a hundred little things an hour. If she hadn’t been attentive to what was happening in the real world, and quick to react, she might still be going from one grocery store to another, trying to find a nugget of camphor like the one that she was even now sewing a little bag for, to hang around Hoda’s neck. The minute she had heard talk of the danger of an epidemic of infantile paralysis in the city she had known what to do. Straight to the grocer! She had paid a whole dollar! And even so the grocer had told her she was lucky that he still had a few cubes left. There had been a rush on camphor in drug and grocery stores all over the city. Well, thank goodness; far-flung and strange in its ways though it was, the new world was not so entirely barbaric as to be without some acquaintance with the life-preserving medicaments.
TWO
The house was small, grey shingle with a tumbledown porch, the only house on the avenue that was set well back from the street. Spooky, the stranger kids from further down the block used to call it, when they ventured this far from their own territory and hurried by hopeful and yet fearful of catching a glimpse of the hunchbacked witch and her husband the scary blind man. They were afraid, too, of the fat kid, only not so much afraid because, though she chased you down the street and swore at you when you called her names, she couldn’t run very fast, and if you doubled back and forth very quickly you could get her charging and hollering without having to do much running yourself at all. But the danger was that she might call her parents out of the haunted house, and you couldn’t escape if they caught you in their spells.
Even before they had moved in, the house, often vacant for long periods of time, had been considered a pretty creepy place by the children of the neighbourhood, so much so that even in the daytime only the nerviest would venture far into the yard in spite of the temptation of big old trees to be climbed. They were not surprised, therefore, that really spooky people had come to haunt it openly. The grown-ups of the district made a more mundane mystery of the uneasiness they felt in the presence of gratuitous misfortune. “I don’t know what they live on. How can they get by on what she earns? They must get something from that rich uncle. You never see him come around though. Well, the child doesn’t starve.”
But there are subtle shades of well-being that perhaps only the truly misfortunate can experience. To Rahel and Danile the very decrepit condition of the house was a positive virtue. Rent was cheap for a place where the tree roots had grown under the verandah and were year by year heaving it more eccentrically askew. The whole verandah was like a wooden wave, in the process of a long, slow-motion undulation. Danile, who was inordinately proud of his cat-footedness in his perpetual dark, actually claimed he could feel the verandah heaving ever so slowly beneath his feet, and always tapped his way across it with his legs somewhat astraddle, as though he were on the deck of a ship. “You understand, Hodaleh,” he told his daughter, “how living things must stand before secondary creation. A porch is a very fine thing, but can it gainsay a tree?”
Hoda was rather proud of her tumble up and down porch and the tree that was giving it a ride. She too could feel it, if she stood very still beside her father while he was talking, with one foot on a lower plank and another on a higher. She showed it off to her friends, too, the kids from next door and across the street, but sourpuss Gertie, who didn’t know anything anyway, said that her daddy had told her ma that this whole house was falling apart and it ought to be condemned by the city, and anyway she lived in a newer house with green paint on it. Well so what! And that dumb Thelma didn’t have to laugh that way at what Gertie said, as if they had other secrets about you too. First she was your friend and then she went over to Gertie’s side. But they weren’t so mean when they wanted to come in the yard to play, the boys especially. You could have a lot of fun in Hoda’s yard. It was rank and weed-grown and full of trees you could hide behind and climb and jump from.
Sometimes Hoda’s friends came into the house too, but they didn’t like that much because they didn’t know how to answer Hoda’s father who talked to them in Yiddish and told them to study, study all the time, when he couldn’t even see them–or could he? Suppose he was really watching you very carefully from inside his eyes all the time?
But nobody else had a shed like Hoda’s, made of boards and old tin plate advertisements for soft drinks and a partly collapsed corrugated tin roof. Once a stable for somebody’s horse, and now piled with rusty and interesting junk and smelling damply, enticingly foul of mouldy old things you could poke about in and pretend with, the children would play and explore here for hours, with Hoda as the bossy hostess of their revels.
There are things you can do and things you shouldn’t do and things you mustn’t get caught doing. If you got caught they were likely to become things you absolutely shouldn’t do. A lot of things you liked got spoiled that way. Not that Hoda wanted to keep secrets from her parents. She didn’t, as a matter of fact, because that weighed on her stomach and made her feel bad. She usually ended up by half-confessing what she was afraid her parents might not approve, and she was usually right, they didn’t. But occasionally she was relieved when it turned out they didn’t object to a game she really liked, that some of the kids thought was bad, like Doctors and Nurses.
“What were you doing in the shed all that time?” Rahel asked over supper.
“We were playing a game,” said Hoda. “It’s called Doctors and Nurses. I like it.”
“Doctors and Nurses?” Danile was delighted. “You want to be a doctor or a nurse when you grow up?”
“Or a patient,” said Hoda.
Rahel shuddered, “Heaven forbid!” Children are funny. “You eat up your supper and drink your milk and you’ll never have to be a patient, please God.”
Parents are funny. Hoda liked being a patient. She liked taking her clothes off and letting the other children examine her. She liked being touched, she enjoyed fumbling in the shed. “Sometimes I’m a doctor,” she said obligingly.
