Authors: Bernard Malamud

The Tenants (19 page)

BOOK: The Tenants

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Rereading the words he sees scenes he hasn’t written, or thinks he hasn’t. Like when Willie plants a lit match in a box of oily rags in the cellar and a roaring tree of fire bursts into bloom, its flaming crown rising through each melting floor. Lesser to save his manuscript—it’s been weeks since he has deposited his new pages in the bank box—rushes to the fire escape. The window is blocked by thickly interwoven branches of crackling flames, heavy flaming fruit. Lesser flees to the roof. Around him long spark-filled plumes of smoke, horns of glowing ashes, ascend to the reddened sky. Masses of burning houses in a forest of fires. From close by, like the sound of waves breaking, rise
a muted roaring, screaming, sobbing. Who cries there? Who dies there? Riot? Pogrom? Civil War? Where can I run with my paper manuscript?

Lesser writes. He is writing this book about love. It’s his need and he must. All he has to do is imagine it to its unforeseen end as he puts the words down on paper. Irene has left for San Francisco. She wrote him a note goodbye, enclosing no address. “No book is as important as me,” she wrote. With or without her he has to finish, create love in language and see where it takes him, yes or no. That’s the secret, you follow the words. Maybe this man in the book will learn where it’s at and so will Lesser. Although if you have to make a journey to track love down maybe you’re lost to begin with. No journey will help. Yet better look for something than just not have it. The looking is the having, some say. He’ll know for sure when he finishes the book. What a shame, he had written it so well in the draft Willie burned. It seems to him he understood it better than he does now despite the double thought, double labor expended. It was a good book to its about-to-be-end. He remembers almost everything in it but can’t get it down again as he had it there. How can one write the same thing twice? It’s like trying to force your way back into yesterday. All he would have had to do was reach out a hand, the words flow out of it.
I had only to write the last scene and spring the final insight. It would have come, completed the fiction, freed it from me, freed me. Freedom favors love. I’d’ve married Irene and gone to San Francisco. It wouldn’t have been a bad life with her. She respects my work. We might have made it together.

He sees himself sitting in his room forever trying to finish his book as it should be done. If only Willie hadn’t destroyed both copies of the manuscript. If only one had survived. He sees it clearly, every word in place. Mourning his lost manuscript Lesser rose from his desk, in misery, enraged. Snatching up the ax, he ran down the stairs, two at a time. He pushed open the fire door and strode silently up the hall. Hearing Willie typing, Lesser, alternately moved and nauseated, stole into a flat across the hall. He hid there, in states of anticipation and gloom, until the black left for coffee, or maybe he had run out of blue paper. Lesser entered his room, read the sheet in the carriage—nothing memorable—ripped it out. Then blow by blow, his eyes exuding damp, he hacked up Willie’s typewriter. His blows made a clanging music. He chopped the machine till it was mangled junk. It bled black ink. The ax survived with jagged broken blade. Though Lesser shivered feverishly, he felt for a while an extraordinary relief. He did not care for what he had
done; it sickened him deeply, but for a while he thought the writing might go well thereafter.

Lesser, unable to sleep nights, from his window on the sixth floor watches Willie, at dawn, poking into the garbage cans across the street. He had day by day been putting together Lesser’s torn strips of white paper to see how his book was coming. For weeks there has been nothing in the can, but Willie still searches. Spring is coming. There is nothing in Levenspiel’s deep-dented can either, no crumpled balls of blue paper written by hand. The cans are emptied twice a week, wordless.

The landlord, ill, pale, bad-breathed, began to cover up the door frames on the first floor with sheets of tin. With long nails he hammered them down. A month after finishing the first floor he began to nail the tin over the second-floor door frames. Good, thought Lesser, I’ll soon be rid of Willie Spearmint. Either he’ll be fenced in, unable to get out; or fenced out, unable to get in. Once he stops haunting this house I’ll get my work done.

The writer was nauseated by not writing. He was nauseated when he wrote, by the words, by the thought of them.

Each morning, nevertheless, I held the fountain pen in my hand and moved it along the paper. It made lines but no words. A great sadness came on me.

They trailed each other in the halls. Each knew where the other was although the terrain had changed. The trees in Holzheimer’s room had moved off the walls onto the dank floors in the flat. Taking root, they thickened there and spread into the hall and down the stairs, growing profusely amid huge ferns, saw-toothed cactus taller than men, putrefying omnivorous plants.

One night Willie and Lesser met in a grassy clearing in the bush. The night was moonless above the moss-dripping, rope-entwined trees. Neither of them could see the other but sensed where he stood. Each heard himself scarcely breathing.

“Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater.”

“Anti-Semitic Ape.”

Their metal glinted in hidden light, perhaps starlight filtering greenly through dense trees. Willie’s eyeglass frames momentarily gleamed. They aimed at
each other accurate blows. Lesser felt his jagged ax sink through bone and brain as the groaning black’s razor-sharp saber, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut the white’s balls from the rest of him.

Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.

THE END

Mercy, the both of you, for Christ’s sake, Levenspiel cries. Hab rachmones, I beg you. Mercy on me. Mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy mercy

By Bernard Malamud

THE NATURAL
THE ASSISTANT
THE MAGIC BARREL
A NEW LIFE
IDIOTS FIRST
THE FIXER
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN
THE TENANTS
REMBRANDT’S HAT
DUBIN’S LIVES
GOD’S GRACE
THE PEOPLE AND UNCOLLECTED STORIES
THE COMPLETE STORIES

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First published in 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 2003

Portions of this book originally appealed, in somewhat different form, in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic,
and
Playboy
.

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466804975

First eBook Edition : November 2011

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003107100

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52102-8
ISBN-10: 0-374-52102-6

BOOK: The Tenants

7.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

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