God's Grace (21 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

Tags: #Fiction, #Dystopian, #Science Fiction, #Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, #Religious

BOOK: God's Grace
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Esau laughed to himself in the deepening dark.
He slung the baby sideways to Esterhazy, who shifted her from one arm to the other and pitched her in an arc over Mary Madelyn’s head to Bromberg. Rebekah, for a while wailing faintly, had now ceased crying. In the early evening light she sailed in slow motion through the air, soundlessly in every direction.
It seemed to Cohn that the apes in the trees had become tired or bored; yet their game went on in the dark, and he felt his last hope for his child fall apart.
“Oh, you barbarian beasts! Who but the heartless would tear a little girl from her parents’ arms, and not for a minute respond to their piteous pleading—tearful cries, begging—yet relentlessly go on playing a harrowing game of toss-the-baby, without in the least being moved by their distress?
“A curse on your souls, if you have any, and may the Almighty God forever punish you for your wickedness. I pray there’s a Third Flood, higher and deeper than the others.”
Then Cohn sank to his knees and prayed to God to save his child’s life—but after a while rose, thinking, maybe He doesn’t like fifty-percent chimps who are fifty-percent human. Or maybe He can’t recall the sound of my voice?
Night had descended. The last of light had disappeared in the palm grove, but he could still make out the small white bundle floating through the air from tree to tree, pursued by a fatigued, desolated, brachiating figure approaching closer to the child in motion—until, as darkness grew profound, Rebekah fell, or was pitched at a glowing boulder below; and the two male baboons, Max and Arthur, waiting in the bush, made off with her bloody remains.
It was Cohn’s heartbroken impression that no one had willed the event; it had happened because “it was prepared for this,” Rashi had said, “from the first six days of creation.”
 
When the half-moon rose, Cohn found his spear where he had abandoned it. (Would having hurled it at Esau have changed the course of events and saved Rebekah? Would Mary Madelyn, for instance, have caught the baby in her arms if Esterhazy or Bromberg, seeing the spear split Esau’s hairy chest, had dropped it in malice or fright?)
Cohn hunted Satan in the nightwood.
He beheld a white bandaged head in the shadowy trees, took aim, and flung the spear with shuddering force. There was a terrible, groaning cry of an ape unwilling to give up
life; and a body toppled out of the tree and plummeted to earth.
When Cohn, after spending most of the night searching for Mary Madelyn, came back to bury Esau at daybreak, the ape clutching the spear in his chest, who had bled to death from the massive wound, was not Esau but an albino chimpanzee. Not a god-like mysterious creature—simply a soiled white ape from the headlands, turning black in death; but Cohn felt as though he had murdered a man.
 
He sought Buz and found him sleeping soundly in a nest in the schooltree. He had forbidden the apes to sleep there, and only Buz had disobeyed. Cohn silently climbed the tree and did what he felt he must.
Buz, awaking with a hoot of fright, found that both his legs had been caught in a noose of vines, and his body trussed to the bough he had built his sleep-nest on. He bared his teeth at Cohn, and Cohn, startled, slapped his face.
“Wot hov I done?” asked the ape. “I om innocent.”
Cohn told him he must punish him for betraying his dod, stepmother, and half-sister; he would do it by snapping the wires of his artificial voice-box, depriving him of speech.
Buz, in agitation, begged him not to do
thot,
and Cohn, though grieved, answered he had no choice.
“You betrayed us to those murderous apes. Because of you I unblocked the barrier, and now the child is dead. You were jealous of her and conspired with Esau and the others to kidnap her.”
Buz blamed Cohn. “I came for a condy bar for my sweet tooth. You forgot to close the blosted gate.”
“You let them lay rocks on my chest. I could barely take a breath, but you did nothing to help me. You left me there in pain. You could have come back but didn’t.”
Buz swore he had joined their game to spy on them. “I plonned to warn you if they plotted to kill you.”
Cohn drew the wire clippers from his pants pocket.
“Please don’t take my speech away,” Buz begged. “Take anything but thot. Dr. Bünder wouldn’t commit thot nosty crime on his worst enemy. He loved me as a father loves his child.”
“I was a father and loved my child. The Lord giveth and taketh away.”
Pong pong. Cohn clipped the knotted rusty wires through the hairs on his neck, but not before Buz had groaned, “I om not Buz, my name ist Gottlob.”
 
The apes assembled by habit in the empty schooltree the next morning and threw sun seeds and stones at Cohn’s head as he sat on his teaching stool.
He had searched in vain for Mary Madelyn, but she was nowhere to be found. Neither was Esau present, nor had Cohn seen Gottlob again.
As he began to talk the twins booed. Hattie shrilly hooted at him. It sounded like “Hoity-toity.”
Cohn was moved to talk about Rebekah, tell stories of what she was like—for a moment attempt to undo in language what had been done to her; to bring her back to life. They listened in silence but when he stopped talking, overcome by grief for his little girl, the twins mocked him. They tore out bunches of eucalyptus leaves and, hoo-hooting,
showered them on him, together with some sharp small rocks they had carried up the tree in a sack. Hattie and Melchior flung palm nuts at Cohn. He begged them all to fast for the future, and got boos and gurgles in response. It was then he realized the chimpanzees had lost their speech. He hadn’t planned it thus. That it had worked out so burdened Cohn’s heart.
He hurried to the cave to hide behind his bulwark till things settled down and he figured out what to do next. Was there a way to escape the island? He planned to build a raft on the shore. High tide would float it out.
What if it drifted in the ocean forever? Suppose Cohn and his beard had to live forever on a raft?
As he hastened to the cave, he caught sight of Mary Madelyn in the field beyond the waterfall, this side the rice paddy, her sexual flower risen like a stiff red flag, her white sail dress torn into rags on the grass. She crouched as Esau, eating a bruised banana, mounted her. He pumped once, dismounted carefully, peeled himself another banana.
Then Gottlob, who had been looking on studiously, entered Mary Madelyn twice. Shutting both eyes he concentrated, as he pumped vigorously and dismounted; then he reentered, pumped eight hard deliberate times, and proudly descended. He seemed to have shamed Esau, who had stopped chewing his small banana and would not look him in the eye.
Gottlob pounded his chest and indicated by raising his fist that he was the Alpha Ape.
Esau did not contest the matter.
“Mary Madelyn,” Cohn heartbrokenly called to her. “Here I am!”
Sighting him, the three chimpanzees knuckle-ran for the trees.
“Don’t forget Romeo and Juliet,” he called. “Love, Wov, Lwov!”
He waited for her response but heard nothing. Cohn wondered for a minute if he had gone deaf. Or hadn’t she wanted to hear him? She was lost without words.
 
That night, as he was stuffing his gear into duffel bags, a gang of chimps rammed down his protective wall with a huge log they carried, and poured into the cave, Gottlob leading the way. Cohn had hidden under the bed.
The chimps feasted on fresh and dried fruit, and on cans of food banged open with a hammer or thrown against the wall—tuna, olives, spaghetti, and beans. They tore apart Cohn’s threadbare underwear, patched trousers, poncho, and other wearing apparel; destroyed his writing instruments, platters and tumblers, clay masks and flower vases, books and paper. They broke his saber at the hilt, hitting it on the fireplace ledge, and smashed the stock of the 30.06 Winchester by batting it against the rock wall. All the beer they couldn’t drink they poured on the ground and sloshed around in. Gottlob put on Cohn’s galoshes and waded in the banana beer.
The apes then pulled down, and shattered with the iron spear, the wooden storage shelves Cohn had built on first arriving on the island.
Esau, with the claw hammer that had bloodied his head, smashed all the cantor’s old records, and in three savage strokes demolished the portable phonograph. Its insides hung out.
The apes apprehended Cohn, binding his arms with a metal chain he had once tied a trunk with, and they looped a rope around his neck. As they tightly tied him up—his arms behind his back, his legs, on Gottlob’s insistence, trussed together—they laughed, screamed, barked, hooted, filling the echoing cave with impossible noise. But in the place where the wrecked phonograph stood, a rabbinic voice recited the law.
In the day they ascended in sunlight, and at night through a cloud of stars drenching the mountainside.
Cohn’s wrists were bound by leather thongs; he carried a bundle of split wood against his chest. A noose hung loose around his skinny neck, its frayed rope trailing behind him as he plodded up the stone mountain. He wore his white kitl, not a warm garment this cold night.
Buz trailed behind him, walking erect, a terry-cloth turban on his head and a pair of Cohn’s old sandals on his feet.
At a turn in the narrow road they met a beggar, a surprise to all.
He stretched forth his bony seven-fingered hand, but Cohn said he couldn’t possibly reach into his pocket because his hands were bound.
“So say it in words.”
“My words are questions.”
“Ask.”
“For instance, are you the Lord’s Messenger? Or possibly the Messiah?”
“I am a beggar who begs.”
“Begs what?”
“A blessing.”
“I wish I had one to give.”
“Oho,” said the beggar, disappearing in a cloud of mist as deep as an avalanche of snow.
Cohn had heard of such encounters on mountain roads.
“Who was that?” he asked anyway. “Pong,” was all Buz said.
Cohn wondered what would happen if he tried running down the mountain, but Buz ran faster than he and if by chance he stepped on Cohn’s trailing rope it could break his neck.
So he climbed the stone mountain in his bare feet, holding the split wood against his chest.
“Buz,” said Cohn, “you are my beloved son, tell me where we are going. I think I know but would like you to say so.”
“Pong.”
At an altitude where five evergreens grew in a bunch they came upon an open cave with an altar gleaming within.
Cohn dropped the wood on the ground and relieved himself against the mountain before gathering up the pieces and approaching the altar.
Buz seemed to look at a watch he didn’t have and pointed it was time.
“Where’s this ram in the thicket?” asked Cohn with a bleat.
Buz wagged his finger at his dod.
Though he had known, Cohn turned icy cold. “Am I to be the burnt offering?”
“Pong.”
Buz laid the wood in an orderly row on the altar and
applied a match to the dried logs. He poured spices and myrrh into the smoke. The flames sprang up, crackling in a foreign tongue.
“Untie my hands and I won’t move, I promise you. I shan’t blemish the sacrifice. If that’s what I am, that’s what I am.”
Buz indicated Cohn kneel. He bent his knees to show how.
“I wouldn’t do this if you weren’t my beloved son.”
Cohn knelt before the fire, waiting for a naysaying angel who never appeared. Unless one had come and gone? You can’t depend on angels.
Buz pulled his father’s head back by his long hair, exposing his neck, aiming at his throat with a stone knife.
Blood, to their astonishment, spurted forth an instant before the knife touched Cohn’s flesh.
“Poong,” said Buz, but it came to nothing. Who could tell whether it meant yes, no, or maybe.
Cohn lay still on the floor of the cave waiting to be lifted onto the flames. By the golden dark-light of the fire he could see that his long white beard was flecked with spots of blood.
“Merciful God,” he said, “I am an old man. The Lord has let me live my life out.”
He wept at the thought. Maybe tomorrow the world to come?
In a tall tree in the valley below, George the gorilla, wearing a mud-stained white yarmulke he had one day found in the woods, chanted, “Sh’ma, Yisroel, the Lord our God is one.”
In his throaty, gruff voice he began a long Kaddish for Calvin Cohn.
I’m grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for gifts of time and hospitality; and to Carol Bain, Del Powers, and Deanna Dejan for secretarial and word-processing assistance; and to Eleanor Moore, who typed early drafts of this story in Bennington, Vermont.
I read many books to write this but am particularly indebted to Shalom Spiegel’s
The Last Trial
, and Jane Goodall’s
In the Shadow of Man.

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