Son of a Smaller Hero (24 page)

Noah stared at Max. Max grinned, and Noah turned away.

Slaves we were in Egypt until Moishe got us organized and poking us with useful lies led us over that blazing desert to a fertile land that he never got to see himself the way Lenin got to. So there were kings and quarrels and hullabaloo and before you looked around there we were in chains again, but being led out this time. They spread us out, so help me God, over a fortune of countries like a fistful of dirt flung into a fast wind. So go tear your heart out. Here we stand listening to the biggest fool of all blabbing to us about eternal rewards and what a shame were the Rosenbergs.… We discovered cures and it didn’t help and we made for them philosophies and they chased us away and we invented so they’d take the invention and deport the inventor and we made beautiful pictures and books and they weren’t ours and even money – which is the cheapest of things – they wouldn’t let us keep. Always tenants, never landlords. Anyway, now newer ones are already back there in that fertile land making believe that history goes backwards. Not that I don’t wish them from the best with their tourists from Outremont and their bourgeois politicians. But you go talk to the
Goyim
. You go if you want and tell them Marx and Spinoza, tell them Trotsky too, tell them Einstein and Freud, tell them, tell them that a small man died for nothing in a fire
in a time from big, big bombs and made for us a smaller hero than we usually put up.

Itzik poked Noah.
“Kaddish,”
he said. So Noah began falteringly, “May His great name be magnified and sanctified in the world that is to be created anew, where He will quicken the dead and raise them up unto life eternal.… O may the Holy One, blessed be He, reign in His sovereignty and glory during your life and your days and during the life of all the house of Israel … and say ye, Amen.”

The others replied: “Let His great name be blessed for ever and to all eternity.”

“Blessed,” Noah said, “praised and glorified … yea, beyond all blessings and hymns, praises and consolations, which are uttered in the world; and say ye, Amen.”

A grave-digger dug his shovel impatiently into the heap of rich brown earth. Noah watched. “He – He who maketh … He who maketh peace in – in high places, may He make peace for us and for all Israel; and say ye, Amen.”

A huge basket of fruit sent by the executive of the synagogue decayed slowly but with miasmic certainty on the living-room table. First the bananas, then the grapes, pears, apples, and plums, were burned brown and pulpy by the sun. All week long the curious and the bored and several of the truly concerned filed in out of the hot night and, mopping their foreheads and shifting damply in their chairs, ladled out their slop of regrets in which platitudes floated like indigestible dumplings. The honest were mostly silent. But the others, those who were dedicated to all that was uplifting, juggled with conversation, not daring to drop a truth.

During
Shivah
, a Hebrew term that means seven days of mourning, a light is kept burning in the house in memory of the soul of
the departed. It is customary for the mourners – parents, brothers and sisters, wife and children – to wear dark, preferably black garments. Marital relations are forbidden. They sit on low stools or chairs and wear cloth slippers or sandals. All the mirrors in the house are covered and the men don’t shave.

Early every morning Harry Goldenberg arrived and gave Leah an injection. The two of them held mysterious conferences in the kitchen. Lou consumed cigars laconically. Nat, who was not allowed to tell jokes, sulked in the corner. Each morning the milkman left three quarts of milk for Max’s ulcers. On the afternoon of the second day Moore staggered drunkenly into the living-room. He wanted to speak to Melech. Max took him firmly by the arm before he had a chance to speak and led him into the bedroom. They were together for about an hour.

For the first three days Noah sat silently on his stool smoking one cigarette after another. Some thought that he was angry, others thought that he was ashamed. He showed some flicker of interest when Rabbi Fishman showed up on the evening of the second day: but the anticipated outburst didn’t develop. The next morning Melech trapped Noah in the kitchen. “You have stolen some of my papers from the box,” he said.

“Yes,” Noah said.

Melech seized Noah’s arm fiercely. “When I die,” he said, “you shouldn’t come to the funeral. That’ll be put in my will.”

Noah walked away, but not quickly enough.

Melech shouted after him: “I would not be surprised if he committed suicide because of all the shame you brought him.”

“So you don’t think he died for those scrolls either?”

Melech didn’t reply.

Responsibility, Noah thought. Nights he sat up with his mother, who wasn’t sleeping, and read to her from the poems of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. “The stag at eve had drunk its fill/As danced the moon on Monan’s Rill.” Getting up each morning was a choice
that was not made without a long, tortuous struggle. He held on to sleep the way a drowning man must cling to his share of driftwood. But this particular share of wood – sleep – was waterlogged. The short, drifting spread between sleeping and full consciousness made for many dilatory journeys. Finally, each morning, there was the febrile feeling of his ship being pulled back into a whirlpool. Noah rowed madly with both oars. But the oars were broken. Always, just prior to awakening, he was with his father again in Panofsky’s. Chocolate biscuits crumbled in their mouths and insipid jokes were made and his father, having misunderstood a remark of Noah’s, accused him of having been an embarrassment to him ever since he had been a small boy. Then, just as Noah seemed on the brink of truth, of something half-heard, he was startled – rescued – by a fuller awakening. That’s when his other difficulties began. Walking, for instance, was an odd sensation. You first put one foot, then another, on the floor – there appeared to be only two – and pushing your body upwards, lifting one foot after the other cautiously, you seemed to move forward over space. Thirty-two steps were required to the toilet. Eighteen big ones were sufficient to get him to that stool in the living-room. There, people talked.

Mrs. Edelman: Wolfie dead? I still can’t believe it. I tell you I was in Ste. Agat’ when I got the news. You know Kirstein’s Hotel, Goldie? Pheh! Don’t ask. They serve you there what they call a steak and a rock would go down easier. Every day, gas pains. I got here by me on the heart a fire I walk around with all day. You know how much it cost my Moey – my Malcolm, I mean – to keep me in the hotel?
Rooms
. I got a room, I tell you, overlooking the loveliest garbage pails in Canada. You could die from the heat. After my mattress sleeping on the floor would be like floating on air. Ask me what’s next door? The Gentlemen’s Room. Listen, Abe Myerson’s father – God bless him – should live another hundred years. But how can a man with a bladder condition come to a hotel? Every fifteen minutes he’s in there flushing. Why did he rent a room? A
lease on the toilet – you should pardon the expression – would have suited him better. Anyway, Leah, time is a healer. You got a fine boy. You’re still young.…

Pincus Weintraub: City Hall Street ain’t what it used to be when Wolfie and I were young. Take a look at the greenhorns all around. They speak with accents two miles long and they never wash behind the … Aw, if they were so broke like they say you tell me how come they got the fares to go from Poland to Montreal? Another question. Do you know that some of them are moving into Outremont? Wives who still wear wigs! After all we did here to improve conditions they’d like to put us back into the middle ages.…

On the afternoon of the third day Noah wandered into the hall and heard his mother on the telephone. “For the last time,” she said, “he doesn’t want to speak to you. Besides, he’s not in.” She hung up.

“Was that for me?” Noah asked.

“No,
boyele
, of course not.”

That evening Noah locked himself up in his bedroom and drank lots of coffee. A vigour returned to his body. Looking out of the window, he realized that he hadn’t been out for three days. Miriam, he thought. Miriam. He looked into the mirror. His eyes were red. He was badly in need of a shave. Hell, he thought, I’
m
not dead. He slipped out of the house. Panofsky was delighted to see him. He hung around grinning happily while Noah shaved in the kitchen. “You’re welcome like a son here,” he said.

“What did you think of him, Mr. Panofsky?”

“Not a bad man. Scared stiff of your
Zeyda
. Of your Maw, too. But …”

“In Kirstein’s Hotel they serve you a steak and a rock would go down easier,” Noah said. “Can you lend me ten bucks?”

“I can lend you a hundred.”

“Moscow gold,” Noah said.

Outside, the heat persisted. Noah did not want to call Miriam yet. There were too many things that he wanted to think about first. He
turned up Fairmount Street whistling an air from
The Seasons
of Vivaldi. The Café Minuit, on Park Avenue corner of Mount Royal Boulevard, was not very crowded. Noah ordered a bottle of Molson’s beer and grinned broadly for no reason at all. The tall blonde who sat at the bar was quite drunk. “You can’t come up to the apartment, Harry,” she said thickly. “How do I know when he’ll turn up?” “He eats out of your hand,” Harry said grudgingly. Noah turned away from them discreetly. “He eats out of my hand, honey, as long as I keep sugar in it,” she said.

Noah drank. He laid out the photographs and letters and receipts on the table and considered them thoughtfully. The blonde girl in the photographs was plump with small eyes and a silly smile. In that yellowed picture, probably taken at a village fair, Melech held her in his arms with some embarrassment. Noah could almost hear the girl’s giggling echoing through the years. Who is she? A mistress? The photographs had been smudged by excessive handling. What does Melech think of when he looks at her? Noah was suddenly struck by his own obscene manners in meddling with Melech’s past. Hell, he thought. My father died for the contents of this box. But he immediately recognized the falseness of his rage and it was some time before he could bring himself to go through the letters and receipts. The receipts, from the post office, were for monthly money orders to Miss Helga Kubalski, Sadowa Ulica, Lodz, Poland. The first receipt was dated June 18, 1911, and was for twelve dollars. Payments increased through the years. Thirty dollars, eighteen dollars, twenty-five dollars. The last receipt was dated July 12, 1939. Imagine keeping this to himself all these years, Noah thought. But how does my father come into this?
Did he know?
The letters were in Polish. That’s merciful, Noah thought. I wouldn’t have been able to resist reading them. There were photographs enclosed in many of the letters. The blond boy with curly locks did not resemble Melech. The last picture showed him in an army uniform. He was smiling. It was the kind of picture a man sent to his sweetheart. That last letter
that had come from Poland was dated August 22, 1939. Melech’s letters continued through the war years and after. But, of course, none of them had been posted. The last one was dated August 25, 1953. That had been three days before the fire. It was difficult to see the relationship between the righteous and God-fearing Jew and the young lover embracing a giggling girl at a village fair. Oh, Melech, Noah thought. My poor, suffering
Zeyda
. Still, he thought, you did wrong to punish us.

The other blonde, the one at the bar, staggered towards the door with Harry. “I never did learn how to say no to you,” she said. Harry squeezed her arm.

Noah wandered back absently. He was shocked out of his reveries when he noticed the Ford parked opposite the house on City Hall Street.
Miriam
. He bounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The living-room was dark, but the light was on in his bedroom. He absorbed the scene instantaneously and with horror. His mother, his mistress. Leah was crumpled up in her chair, a soggy handkerchief clenched in her fist. Miriam sat tensely on the edge of Noah’s bed. Her quick, red-tipped hands flipped through the pages of an old copy of
Life
magazine. She puffed swiftly on the cigarette that dangled from her scarlet mouth. She was wearing that green silk scarf that he had last seen when she had come to stay with him at Mrs. Mahoney’s. I love you best when you are angry, he had said. The scarf still accentuated the vulnerability of her throat.

Noah grinned. He couldn’t help it. “Hello, Miriam.”

“Hullo.”

“You two have a nice chat?”

“Mrs
. Hall and I …”

“Noah, did you know that I phoned
eight
times in the last three days?”

“No. I had no idea. Honest.”

Noah turned to his mother. She fumbled with her handkerchief.

“Max wouldn’t let,
boyele
. He said that after the
Shivah
, but …”

“Max doesn’t run my life, Maw. You know better than that.”

“She answered the phone. Not Max. She said that you didn’t want to speak to me, darling.”

“Maw, did you …”

“I hardly know what I’m doing these days, I …” Leah’s fist tightened around her handkerchief. She seemed to have difficulty in breathing. “I made a mistake? I was trying to protect you,
boyele
. Wouldn’t I do anything for you? I …”

“All right, Maw. Take it easy.”

Miriam leaped up and squashed her cigarette on the floor. “I came to get you, Noah. I’m all alone in Ste. Adele. I want you to …”

“Miriam, I …”

“I want you to come back with me – now – tonight.”

Noah smacked his hands together and rubbed his jaw anxiously.

“When a Jew dies,” Leah began softly, “the son is supposed to sit
Shivah
for a week. My
boyele’s
father died a … We Jews, you know … When …”

“Noah is not a Jew that way, Mrs. Adler. He’s broken with the – the dark ages. He told me that himself. Besides, I understand that you and your husband didn’t exactly …”

“Christ, Miriam.”