Crackpot, p.9
Crackpot, page 9
She didn’t even know what side to have her grandfather Shem Berl fighting on any more, because Daddy’s friends all felt that the revolution served the Czar right, and her teacher at Jewish school was so happy he rushed around crazily on one spot acting out the worker’s struggle and the Red Army and freedom for all the nations of the world. At the same time wouldn’t Miss Flake feel it dreadfully disloyal of Shem Berl not to stand by his Czar unto the death? How she longed to jump up in class and comfort Miss Flake in her disappointment, by crying out that her grandfather, Shem Berl the warrior, for sure had leaped into the breach and sunk, gallantly defending his lion-hearted Czar, taking at least a dozen of the treacherous traitors with him to heaven before going back to the mending of his pots for the proud and free new army of the workers of the world.
One day Hoda asked her father what side he thought that grandfather Shem Berl would be fighting on and Daddy said he didn’t know; it depended on who forced him; and anyway it was so long since they had heard, for all he knew Shem Berl might not even be alive anymore, but even if, as he hoped, the old soldier was still alive, surely his fighting days were over. That was what the revolution was for, to see that such injustices as this dragging about of old Shem Berl and his pots from war to war should be put to an end. Well, that much was a relief, to find that she could honourably retire him from the line of battle, without having to subject him to a political choice which might upset Miss Flake. And her mother would have been happier about it too. Her mother was more right than Miss Flake, Hoda decided, about a lot of things. If her mother had lived, and she had been able to have her birthday party, in a couple of week’s time, Miss Flake would have come maybe and her mother would have told her the truth about a lot of things, and her father would have told her about a lot of things she didn’t know about either. Perhaps now it would be up to Hoda. Particularly when the kids began, so soon, to forget that they ought to be nice to her, Hoda began to wonder whether she shouldn’t enlighten them once and for all. But she hesitated, even though Daddy told her about it again a lot nowadays, and reminded her of all kinds of things she had almost forgotten. She hesitated because it was her special knowledge and it set her apart from them inside, where she could get away from them all whenever they were mean. Sometimes she thought, if they knew they’d never be mean again; but she wasn’t always so sure, and something inside her didn’t want to use it on them as a weapon, but rather, wanted someday maybe to give it to them as a gift, when she didn’t even have to, and they would always go on liking each other after that, forever.
Rich Uncle Nathan and his position on the grain exchange were something different. He belonged to the world of daily profit and loss that they all shared. So she could boast about him and show off a little about what he might give her and not even care what they said. They didn’t have to believe her, she had the whole grain exchange on her side.
She even told the gentile ladies from the blind club all about how Uncle was going to help them, and maybe even give them money to open a little basketry shop someday, that time when the ladies came to find out why Daddy hadn’t been to the basket-making class for such a long time, when he was even getting good enough to be promoted to chair bottoms.
That was a surprise visit. Danile had not expected it at all and was impressed by the courtesy of the Christian ladies. They came on a Saturday and Hoda ran to fetch him from the synagogue, where the other men were much impressed to hear that he had gentile visitors, and some of the older ones even made a point of coming over to say goodbye to him, almost as though they never expected to see him again, though they were somewhat eased in their minds when they heard that these were only two women.
When Danile, after his initial resistance, had resigned himself to venturing among strangers in order to please his wife, he had simply accepted the basketry weaving class and all it entailed as an extension of his area of living and had made himself as comfortable as possible within a situation which was even more severely limited than usual. Rahel had been surprised to discover, the first time she took him to his class, though she did not tell him, for fear of upsetting him, that the place into which she led him was the basement of a church. She sat through that first lesson with him uneasily, and with some anxiety, particularly when, for the entertainment of their little group, as the ladies explained, one of them sat down at the small organ and blew forth a hymn or two, and all those present raised voices in song. Rahel was relieved to note that her Danile did not react as though there were anything amiss in this, and even showed signs of a willingness to hum along. Since he neither complained nor asked for explanations, Rahel, who was herself made markedly uneasy by the engulfing organ tones and what struck her as rather lugubrious music, thought it best not to enlighten him about a fact which might, if Danile decided to balk, undo all her long efforts of persuasion. The main thing was that he was here at last, learning a trade, and since these people had been kind enough to accept him as a student, he might be left safely in their hands even in this place.
Indeed, Danile’s incursion into their lives was more trying by far for the ladies of the guild than it was for him. The whole enterprise in social service was a daring foray, on the part of the good ladies, into the world of the flesh, their aim being to comfort and succour the blind in this life and to catch their souls firmly in the gentle net of piety, and to save them from straying, in their early blindness and despair, in a direction which might sever them eternally from restoration of the only light which really counts in the long run. Having determined their short and their long-range ambitions, the more indomitable spirits of the guild were loath to limit them when a strange fish indeed wandered into their net, through the accident of Rahel having heard from the Christian neighbour of one of her customers something of the practical side of the project. Danile’s arrival as a member could fairly be interpreted as a test of their strength in God, and under the firm guidance of their pastor, who pointed out that after all the Son of God was one of Them, they set out, not precisely to proselytize, for that would have been difficult. As yet they had no technique for the proselytizing of a blind Jew who spoke no more than a few words of their language. No, they limited themselves to the more modest aim, for the time being, of making him feel at home in the basement of the Church of God, till such time as he might be deemed capable of further ascent.
Danile responded well to the music. It was natural to him to sing while he worked, as his father had done before him. In fact, the whole situation, in which he found himself increasingly more capable of performing a blessedly useful task with his hands, roused up in him memories of old songs not heard or even thought about for years. It even occurred to him after awhile, when he had begun to feel more at home in this place, that his companions might like to learn a new tune occasionally. Accordingly, he waited politely one day for a break in the organ music, and when he felt the appropriate time had come, he obligingly offered them a few Yiddish ditties in his not unpleasant cantorial tenor. His interpolated offerings were at first greeted by a shocked and embarrassed silence on the part of the ladies who ran the guild, though the other blind members smiled and nodded their heads in spontaneous response, and some even laid down their strips and clapped a little when he was through. The ladies were particularly uneasy about the possibly blasphemous content of the songs, about lutings too suspiciously gay, or complaints too foreign and even too sinister perhaps, to be heard in the basement of a church. Nor did they know, though wishing to be polite, whether it was the right thing to clap when his first “tumbala yahy-ti tahy-ti tahy-tums” and weird lutings of the voice had ceased. But Danile expected no particular attention as a result of his offering. He continued to hum away cheerfully, happy to imagine he was being allowed to make himself at home.
Unfortunately, some of the ladies felt that he was perhaps making himself too much at home. There was an activist faction among them which responded to his songs as though to a hostile invasion. One determined little soldier of God set herself to combat, single-handed, the possibly evil spiritual effects of the Jew’s singing, by playing a non-stop marathon of hymns on the organ during the entire period of Danile’s next visit. The campaign did not have quite the desired effect, however. Danile, who took this to be music particularly related to the blind of this country, and found it strange and sad, though sometimes full of life and spirit, and sometimes even comical in a way, was perfectly happy to sing along. It was not until the other blind got tired of singing and the little body at the organ played determinedly on, that the ladies were able to hear that Danile was fitting his own words to the music, which was, in fact, quite natural, since he did not understand theirs.
It was a lucky thing, perhaps, that Danile had no notion of the jarring effect it had on the ladies to hear their beloved hymns set to strange new lyrics. “Oiyoiyoi’s” and “ayayay’s” played themselves off against the solidly beating notes, with an occasional “Gottinyuuuu!” rising to a wail above the organ’s hum. Fearful of a further incomprehensible blasphemy, the little warrior of the organ, urged by her sisters of the guild, gave up the battle finally, and let their Jew go back to singing his strange incantations to his own native melodies. At home Danile, as he sat practising his work, would sometimes burst forth with a tune which would cause Hoda to say in surprise, “I didn’t know you knew that hymn too, Daddy. Grade four sang it at the concert.”
To which Danile would reply, “Oh yes, it’s a song of the blind. They play it all the time at our school.”
And occasionally, as these things are wont to turn out, one of the more musically suggestible evangelical ladies would also burst forth in her own home with an exotic melody, accompanied by tentative vocables, daringly spun from her tongue: “die yay ti tie ein shneider-ing dee yoi yoi yoi yoi Gottinyu!” She would catch herself at it uneasily, uncomfortable in some vague apprehension that she and hers were not alone in heaven and on earth, and might even be seduced to make themselves at home anyway. She would remind herself again of what the pastor had said, about the Son of God having been one of Them. In some ways it was a good thing it had all happened so long ago, and the foreignness had had time to wear off.
It was therefore a relief to some when Danile didn’t turn up at the guild for several meetings consecutively, but after a while some of the ladies on the follow-up committee became a little uncomfortable about his absence, almost to the point where they actually missed him and realized that they would miss him in the way of unfinished business until at least they knew what had happened to him. Perhaps the poor man was ill. Some gesture should be made. And so one Saturday two of their members adventured forth into the unknown north-end of town, pushed their way up a weedy path, mounted four rickety steps and picked their way across a skew-warped verandah to rouse from within the old shack a grossly fat adolescent with a fresh and eager face who invited them into the dark interior enthusiastically, then excused herself and thudded past them out the open door, across the creaking verandah boards, leaped, like some briefly airborne dirigible down the four steps, to land with surprisingly no crash on the path below, and trundled off with unexpected speed out the yard and down the street, to return very shortly with their familiar blind man in tow.
It was Hoda’s first experience as hostess to total strangers. They were rather odd old ladies, stiff and unfamiliar, who spoke to you with squared-off words, like teachers, and with the foreignness of the majority, a little fearsome in that you could never rely on any balance of its shifting elements of ingratiation, condescension, confidence, contempt, and what sometimes even felt like fear. Maybe they were a little afraid, like some kids were, of coming into a blind man’s house. But Hoda wasn’t going to be afraid of them. They must be nice; they had come. Maybe they were hungry. She offered them some stuffed spleen and potatoes she had cooked up for supper. When they had refused several times, politely, without even allowing her to coax them over to the pot to show them how good it looked and smelled, she was disappointed. Nevertheless she told them all about her mother’s ailment, and when they showed they were really interested she went into detail, including all the speculations she had overheard from the old ladies, for no one had bothered to explain to Danile what Rahel had actually died of. As far as they knew she had died of the operation. But the story of her illness was an impressive one, as Hoda told it, enough to have killed five women. The old wives had been free with their diagnoses. Hoda laid before her visitors, besides the old tumour big as a watermelon, the possibilities of a pustulent liver, a gangrenous gall-bladder, a suppurating spleen, and a digestive system which had turned utterly to stone, too much stone to be chopped away, alas, when they finally opened her mumma up. Hoda told all this in an eager, positive voice. The information was impressively mystifying to the ladies, since Hoda didn’t know the English words for many of the hidden parts of the body she was naming, so she named them in Yiddish, the very foreignness of which gave the whole rendition, to the ladies, a medically authentic, if ominous sound. Hoda was not, in fact, quite sure of what some of the names referred to anyway, although when she got to the story of the disintegrating spleen she had an inspiration and this time succeeded in dragging them over to the pot on the stove to show them what she meant, at the same time contriving to reveal in a sufficiently offhand way, that she actually did know how to cook, in case they really were hungry and too polite to say so. She was unaware of the effect which the sight of the grey skinful of spongy, stringy purple stuff in the pot, well spiced-up, of which she was so proud, following hard on her medical revelations, had on her father’s guests, for she was not much more than a child, after all, and was genuinely disappointed when they, even now, refused to sample her cooking.
Perhaps they’d have some tea, then?
Again the ladies, after an exchange of ambiguous glances, refused, on the grounds that they must be running along soon.
They had funny manners. Even when her mother used to beg her, when they went to visit, not to eat everything in sight as soon as it was offered, there was always a point at which it was the right thing to do to gratify your hostess, and almost worth all that hard self-control. So Hoda pressed them, again and again, to have tea, redoubling her pleas the more they refused, bringing out everything in the house, and realizing as she did so, that it was little enough to tempt a guest. Nevertheless it made her feel hungry, but she knew that she mustn’t eat unless they did and she couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t touch anything, not even one little thing, and she began to worry that maybe they had noticed that one of her fingernails was dirtier than the rest, which she had only just now noticed herself. She tried to bury her hands in her lap and worked at the dirty fingernail with the thumbnail of her other hand. Meanwhile Daddy was urging her to tell them what a good student she was and how she liked to study. So she translated for him, modestly, and then with a certain resentful boastfulness in response to their too polite little ohs and ahs. Why wouldn’t they take something to eat anyway?
“Ah, study, study!” Danile beamed as Hoda translated the pregnant words and he heard their undecipherable murmurs in response. How well she spoke their language. She could hold her own with them all. Clearly they were as impressed as he was proud, for the child was doing most of the talking.
If the ladies were, in fact, somewhat unpleasantly impressed, they were certainly too polite, as far as they knew, to show it. At a certain point they simply began to concentrate their combined longings and even the direction of their movements in their chairs toward the grey front door. They waited, with scarce concealed impatience, for Hoda’s chattering hospitality to flag, signalling each other with minimal gestures but with increasing frequency, that the moment was now, in which to rise in unison and make their retreat. Their movements did not escape their young hostess, and perhaps it was as much her reaction to her own relief at the imminent removal of these ungiving presences, as it was her desire to draw from them some unequivocal acknowledgment of their value, hers and her daddy’s, that compelled her to renew her gestures of hospitality and redouble her anecdotal flow every time they made a move to go.
Mixed though her feelings were towards these stranger ladies, they didn’t crystallize to the point where Hoda consciously knew that her guests were recoiling from her. The simple fact would have been too hard to assimilate, for she did not know what else she could have done to make them feel at home.
As for the ladies, even had they been more analytically inclined, or perhaps less determined in their charity, they would have been unable, until the end, to put their fingers on any one precise reason for their uneasiness which they could comfortably accept. Hoda herself unwittingly supplied them finally with a formal shape for their discomfort. One of the kindly souls had actually just had the splendid idea of suggesting to the other members of the church guild that they ought to make some Samaritan gesture, such as perhaps fixing up a food hamper of decent, civilized food, to send these poor strange people. She was thinking warmly in this vein, that this was the first thing she would say to her companion if they ever managed to get out of here, when Hoda made the mistake of answering some polite inquiry with a vigorous and daring expression of her youthful sophistication. “Oh hell, no!” she said, in a grown-up, woman-to-woman way. Her ejaculation brought the charitable guest sharply back from the edge of the abyss which separates the saved from all those others. The visitors glanced horrified epistles and exhortations at each other. Hoda prattled blithely on, neither aware that she had shocked and offended them by referring with such blasphemous familiarity to the residence of the immortal enemy, nor that, in doing so, she had in fact put them finally at their ease. It is a relief to the righteous to know that their repugnance is God-given. They knew now why they wanted to escape. And they managed it now, firmly, but with a new spurt of cordiality, so that Hoda was assured that the visit really was a social triumph, and that she had acquitted herself very well, even though the funny ladies still hadn’t eaten anything. They were especially effusive in their invitations to Danile to come and visit the class sometime, urging him not to make a stranger of himself, and of course to bring his daughter, too. There was much to be learned in their little centre, besides the weaving of baskets, much that could help give meaning to a young girl’s life, for God is everywhere. Salvation awaits. The lost will be found. So much the ladies could still promise, courageously, even as they retreated from the abyss. Hoda, on her part, promised with enthusiastic and only partly recognized insincerity, that she and her father would certainly return the friendly visit. If people were nice, but they still made you feel uncomfortable, well, maybe it was because you weren’t used to them that the things they said sometimes sounded creepy.
