Old Men at Midnight (21 page)

In the corner store on our street, where he bought his newspaper, I’d see him sometimes counting out his money with shaking hands from the small black pocket purse he carried, the sort with the little metal knobs that snapped shut. I’d have come in on an errand for my parents and he’d acknowledge my presence with a nod and a cough—he had a nervous little cough, a kind of perpetual need to clear his throat—and he’d be standing there with his cane under one arm, slowly counting out his money. He smoked endlessly, with enormous intensity, holding the cigarettes between his thumb and forefinger and sucking in the smoke as if his life depended on it. He went about beneath a weight of darkness save for his short white beard and frayed white shirt.

I remember asking my mother, “How old is Mr. Zapiski?”

“Mr. Zapiski and your father were born two days apart.”

“Why does he look so old?”

“He went through a great deal in the war.”

In the winter my heart would go out to him whenever I saw him picking his way through the snow on our streets, stopping before a patch of ice or at a corner heaped with
snow as if to muster the strength to venture forward, while the wind lashed at his hat and coat. Once in a storm I offered to help him and he took my hand. I felt his weight as we made our way across the street in the snow and, climbing to the opposite sidewalk, he slipped and we both went down, and his cry when he fell haunted my dreams.

Some of my classmates would mockingly imitate his hobbled walk, his rasping voice, the way his face would twitch as if it had a life of its own. Most were indifferent. We all knew that he would inevitably enter our lives at a certain time and become a sort of teacher to us for a period of months.

It was inevitable that someone like Mr. Zapiski would give rise to tales and rumors. All the talk about him seemed connected to the Great War. Some claimed he had once been a Bolshevik general. Others insisted that he had served as an officer in the army of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Still others swore that he’d been a secret agent of Kaiser Wilhelm; a machine-gunner in a Polish regiment of the Austrian army; a courier in Switzerland for Lenin.

To me he was the least likely person to have qualified as a great warrior. He seemed to have been born broken.

He was, as far as I could then tell, my father’s closest friend. Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons he would eat at our table. Though he rarely spoke more than a few words to me or to my younger brother and sister, he seemed unquestionably a member of our family. I learned early on that he was the only one in his family who had left
Europe. All the others—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins—had chosen to remain behind, and for reasons I could not fathom were now unable to come to America. During our meals, there were often long periods of silence; when he and my father talked, nearly always in Yiddish—we talked Yiddish among ourselves, English on the streets—their conversation invariably turned to politics: labor strikes, socialism, communism, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Trotsky. In my presence they never spoke about the Great War. My mother served and sat in silence, listening, sighing from time to time as memories of her life in Europe returned to her.

None of the talk interested me. I’d play word games with my brother and finger-rope games with my sister. When I was young I often sat on Mr. Zapiski’s lap; but, growing older, I found him discomfiting, and I came to dislike intensely the cigarette stench in his clothes and the yellow stains in the beard around his moist lips. His mouth emitted fetid vapors.

The years went by. Eventually the time came when I was to be given over to Mr. Zapiski.

“Listen to me,” my father said after supper one evening when he and I were alone in the kitchen. “I am going to tell you something, and I don’t ever want to hear from you that you didn’t hear me say it. Mr. Zapiski and your father grew up in the same town in Europe. We served in the same regiment in the Great War. For months we lived in the same trenches. We ate together, slept together, fought together, and suffered together. No one can ever be closer
to you than the soldiers with whom you shared a trench during a war. Mr. Zapiski is my closest and dearest friend. Do not let me hear from him that you are not learning everything that he is teaching you.”

My father leaned forward across the kitchen table and put his fleshy features and dark eyes close to my face—and I had a clear image of him hunched over his worktable in the window of the shoe repair shop where he now labored as a repairer of clocks and watches, his sweaty balding head gleaming in the yellow light of his work lamp. How abruptly he had fallen from a successful dealer in antiques to an indigent fixer of timepieces!

And so I began, twice a week in the evenings, to walk from our apartment to Mr. Zapiski: a gauntlet of gritty Bronx streets. Old red-brick apartment houses; scrawny cats and emaciated dogs around the garbage cans in foul alleyways. Trucks and automobiles rattling past on the cobblestones. Rectangles of yellow light behind drawn shades and sometimes a partly dressed man or woman in a window, smoking a cigarette and looking down at me as I went by, a bony, too tall kid, walking very quickly even though this was my neighborhood and I need not have been frightened; but my mother’s fears had somehow attached themselves to me, her real terrors were often my imagined ones. And under the elevated train and up the street past an enormous red-brick brewery, whose hot, pungent stench was the plague of our neighborhood.

Mr. Zapiski lived in an apartment house at the top of that steep, narrow cobblestone street. The heavy metal-and-glass
front door creaked as I pushed against it. I’d walk up four flights of badly lit marble stairs, voices and cooking smells—beef, cabbage, potatoes—drifting through the closed doors, and I’d cross the hall to a wooden door, one of six on that floor, and twirl the knob on the old doorbell, which made the lifeless noise of a clapper striking lead.

Through the door I’d hear his shuffling gait as he came along his hallway. “Who is there?” he’d say, and I’d respond, “Benjie Walter,” and hear him pull back the bolt and unlock the door. His face would appear in the narrow space between the door and the jamb. “Go into the parlor,” he’d say, and I’d pass through the dimly lit narrow apartment hallway, while behind me he’d busy himself locking and bolting the door. I’d go past his kitchen—invariably, dirty dishes in the sink, a teakettle on the stove, Yiddish newspapers on the table, and often roaches on the walls—and into the parlor. There I’d sit in an easy chair: upholstery worn and grimy to the touch, springs hard against my rump and spine, an odor of dust rising from the fabric.

The first time I went to him was a bitter-cold evening in late November. I was uneasy; my father’s words still echoed in my head. We sat in silence for some while in the dimly lit kitchen, drinking the tea he set before us. On the table lay Yiddish and German newspapers. I had the sense I was going to be put through some sort of initiation rite.

“Tell me, Benjamin, these days what do you really like?”

I told him I liked baseball and movies.

He wore a tall black skullcap. His head was balding. I knew that under the skullcap a four-inch vertical scar and a
two-inch horizontal scar ran across his head and intersected above the right temporal lobe. There were tiny pockmarks on the parts of his face not covered by the beard. His face was pale and gaunt, almost bloodless.

“You still like to read, Benjamin?”

“I like adventure stories, sea stories, war stories.”

“Yes? Well, there are plenty of war stories in the Torah. And a big war story in the section you will learn to read.”

That was all he said, though he kept glancing at me over the rim of his glass. He had pale-gray pupils and his eyes bulged somewhat in their sockets and were encircled by bluish shadows and webbed skin. Though I had known him for years, I understood that we were now entering upon a distinctly new relationship: I was no longer merely the son of his closest friend. He was about to become my teacher, I his student. A wall of unspoken expectations was rising between us; it would be my obligation to surmount it.

He slurped tea from his glass, coughed, and wiped his lips with a not-very-clean handkerchief. I counted four roaches on his kitchen walls before we were done with our tea. He put the glasses into the sink and told me to follow him.

In the doorway to Mr. Zapiski’s parlor hung worn purple portieres. On the windows were run-down curtains and shades. Cracked brown linoleum in the hallway; faded carpeting in the parlor; peeling light-green paint on the walls and ceilings. Books lay on end tables and chairs, some facedown and open. The walls were entirely bare, without
even the traditional velvet picture of Jerusalem. He seemed to fit the tatterdemalion apartment perfectly: his dark clothes threadbare, his beard unkempt, his shoes cracked, with his right foot resting on the floor at an odd angle to the other.

He motioned to an easy chair and I removed two books and took the chair, feeling myself sink deep into the seat. The chair seemed to seize me like one of those flowers that snaps shut on unwary insects. He dropped down into the sofa, from which rose little tendrils of dust. He stretched his left leg out in front of him, leaned forward with a low grunt, placed both hands on the trousers of his right leg below the knee, and swung the leg up, then lowered it so that it lay limp across the left leg.

“Now you will begin to learn the trope,” he said in his hoarse voice, and coughed. He lit a cigarette and tossed the match into an ashtray that was close to overflowing. “First, I will teach you the notes and the grammar of the notes. Then I will teach you the meaning behind the grammar. And if I see that you have truly mastered that, I will teach you the magic of this music, things few people know.”

At that point, because I’d always been inclined to pry into matters that aroused my curiosity, I said, “Excuse me, is it permissible to ask a question?”

“Without questions there is no learning.”

“Why do you have so many books about war in your apartment?”

In my world we sized up people by the books they read
and by the libraries in their homes. Walking through the hallway to the parlor, I’d noticed bookcases filled with volumes, in Yiddish and English, about the Great War.

His face twitched with annoyance. No doubt he’d expected a question about grammar and trope.

“Because I was in the war, and I am trying to understand it.”

“What did you do in the war?”

“I was a soldier like your father.”

I have no recollection why I put the next question to Mr. Zapiski. Remember, I was not yet thirteen years of age; why would anything about that distant war have remotely interested me? Overheard private conversations between Mr. Zapiski and my father, perhaps; or that curiosity of mine boiling over. The answer is lodged in deep memory to which I have at present no direct access. In any event, abruptly, for no clear reason, I heard myself ask Mr. Zapiski, “Whose side were you on?”

My query startled him. His pale features turned crimson. He did not answer for a moment. Then he asked, in a tremulous tone, “Why do you ask me that question?”

The word he used for “why” was “warum,” which is both German and Yiddish. He pronounced it “varoom.”

I told him I was just curious.

He said, after another silence, “Your father and I fought in the army of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, on the side of Germany, against England, France, Russia, Italy, and America.”

On the side of Germany! They had fought on the side of
the enemy! Was that something to worry about? It had never occurred to me that my father had fought against the United States. How had he and Mr. Zapiski managed to get into America if they had once fought against it? Perhaps they had been asked and had lied. What if the American government should ever find out? Would Mr. Zapiski and my father be sent back to Europe?

Mr. Zapiski stirred and coughed. His head shook briefly from side to side and the skullcap slid from it, revealing the two intersecting scars and the curls of thinning white hair on the nearly bald scalp. How could he and my father be the same age? They looked thirty years apart. The skullcap tumbled to his lap and he put it back on his head.

“Enough about that cursed war. That is not why you came here. Open the book and we will study what your father sent you to learn.”

He began to chant the notes in his hoarse and rasping voice, and I followed along in the adolescent quavering that would after some years change into the baritone you now hear.

He taught, and I learned. The weeks passed.

Regularly, my father would test me and nod, satisfied by my progress.

All that winter I trudged through snowstorms and frozen streets and studied trope with a man who had fought against my country in the Great War.

He drilled me in the complicated grammar of the sacred writings: long and short vowels; open and closed syllables; soft and hard dots of emphasis; the reasons for
the placement of primary and secondary accents; the meticulous rhythms and trills of the musical notations. To grind the grammar and the music into memory, I’d walk home from Mr. Zapiski singing into the icy winds of the winter, and in the darkness of my small room I’d repeat to myself rules of grammar and take apart and put together lengthy verses of sacred text. He taught me the music of the book written by the Creator God. I am not now a believer, but I was then, and felt certain that I was learning the music chanted by God Himself whenever He opened the pages of the sacred narrative. And the angels, too, used that melody each time they told that story to one another. So Mr. Zapiski informed me one evening. Sweetly the celestial choir sang the sacred trope, and the music ascended through all the heavens and reached to the seventh heaven wherein was the Throne of Glory on which sat the Creator God, and the Creator God would hear the chanting and be transported with joy, and the joy would overflow and drift downward from the Divine Presence, down like an invisible benevolent rain through all the lower heavens and the fiery stars to our troubled Earth, and brush humankind with its radiance, and for a time there would be peace in the world and an abundance of happiness.