Old Men at Midnight (22 page)

Often, about halfway through our hour, he would drop off into sleep. It was a strange and fearful thing to see: one moment he’d be wide awake, the next his head rolled forward onto his chest. He seemed then a helpless rag doll of a man. Wrinkled dark pants and jacket; stained white shirt,
disheveled white beard; pale pockmarked features; the bad leg lying on top of the good one as if it needed more than the floor for support. Perhaps he slipped into a trance of some sort, the way his eyes were open to slits with only the whites showing; the occasional twitching of his face as he slept; and sometimes a low, deep snoring. None of my classmates ever saw him like that; they studied with him only in the school, during recess or after classes, where he would never fall asleep. I was the only one he taught in his apartment, because of his friendship with my father.

The first time it happened I sat frightened until he woke. Then I realized he would sleep about fifteen minutes each time. I began to use those minutes to browse through his books about the Great War.

Most were too difficult for me to understand. Some were in languages other than English and Yiddish and had horrendous pictures of blasted trees and fragments of human bodies and torn-up trenches and ravaged countrysides in which nothing remained except the sky. As a result, I began to have dreams of Mr. Zapiski and waves of faceless men climbing out of their trenches and attacking over duckboards laid across knee-deep mud and machine guns rattling and cutting them down like scythes leveling fields of wheat and rye.

One day in January I asked my mother, “What happened to Mr. Zapiski during the war?”

She said, not looking up from the kitchen sink where she was peeling potatoes, “About such matters, you speak to your father.”

“Can it happen to me if I fight in a war?”

“Pooh pooh pooh! Don’t say such things. Go talk to your father.”

I asked my father.

His angry response startled me. “You little snotnose, why do you keep poking into matters that are not your concern? Turn your curiosity to more important matters. Your business is to learn Torah.”

Standing before Mr. Zapiski’s door one night in early February, I set down the bag of food my mother had told me to take to him and wondered how he climbed all those stairs. He must exhaust himself. No wonder he slept during the trope lessons.

And indeed he fell asleep that night and I turned to his books and opened a volume of photographs on the war between Austria and Russia and was leafing through it when he woke suddenly from his trancelike state and without preliminaries proceeded to speak to a point in the air behind me. He said, speaking rapidly in Yiddish, “Hear me out on this, Victor. I want you to hear me out. Not everything that sounds like music is truly music.” There was a wildness in his eyes, a hollowness to his voice, as if some unbridled creature were speaking from inside him. “The tyrant Phalaris roasted his prisoners in a huge bronze bull, in whose nostrils he had his servants place reeds in such a way that the prisoners’ shrieks were transformed into music. The sounds came out as music, but were they indeed music?”

There was a pause, a resonating silence.

“What do you think of that, Victor?”

I sat stupefied.

“Victor, what do you think?” he asked again, staring into the air behind my head and speaking now in a reasonable tone that was somehow more frightening than the previous wildness.

I didn’t know what to do or say and thought of getting up and running from there, but just then his head dropped forward onto his chest, and after two or three deep, snorting breaths he was again asleep.

Frightened and bewildered, I went quickly on tiptoe and left the apartment, my ears reverberating with the imagined screams of those burning captives. I asked myself: Should I tell my father what happened? I didn’t want to embarrass Mr. Zapiski. Besides, it would make no difference, certainly the lessons would not come to an end merely because Mr. Zapiski had experienced a bad dream in my presence. Also, in truth, I rather liked the lessons, I savored being with Mr. Zapiski, I was as intrigued by his strange behavior as I was by his books on the Great War. Indeed, as I hurried past the brewery and under the trestle of the elevated train, massive and monstrous in the night, I realized that much of my revulsion toward Mr. Zapiski had left me, and in its place had come an irresistible curiosity. Who was he? How could I find out more about him? And at that moment I sensed someone walking behind me, and I looked quickly around but saw no one.

At home that night I asked my father, “Was Mr. Zapiski a teacher in Europe?”

“In Europe Mr. Zapiski was both a teacher and a student.”

“Where did he go to school?”

“In a university in Vienna.”

“What did he study?”

“He studied history. Then history caught up with him. What did he teach you tonight?”

I told him.

“That was all he taught you?”

“He was tired and not feeling well.”

My father, his face stiff, turned away.

Some days later I brought Mr. Zapiski a copy of my bar mitzvah speech, which I had carefully researched and written over a period of three weeks. This, my first public address, I was to deliver before the assembled throng of celebrating relatives, friends, teachers, and classmates as an example of my maturity in years and proficiency in learning.

“I want us all to be proud of you,” my mother had said, watching me labor over the talk. “That’s all I ask.”

I read the talk to Mr. Zapiski.

“Well, my dear Davita, I do hope I am not boring you. I must tell you that many of the details of this story have been entirely forgotten by me until now, hence the story may lack the refinement of narrative and no doubt has thus far some dull and trying moments to it. But please accept my assurance that you will be recompensed,
if memory serves, by what is soon to follow. In the meantime, I must use your toilet. I shall only be a moment.”

“Where was I? Ah, yes. The talk I had written and was now reading to Mr. Zapiski. Indeed, a refill on the coffee will be appreciated.

“First, three or four sentences by way of introduction.

“My
rite de passage
was to fall on the Saturday morning when the biblical portion that is read aloud from the sacred Scroll of the Law deals with the war waged by Amalek against the fleeing Israelite slaves. Joshua organized the Israelite troops and fought off the Amalekites, aided by Moses, whose arms, raised heavenward, brought about the help of the Lord and spurred the Israelites on to victory.

“My little talk was about loyalty in war.”

I sat sunk deep in the tattered easy chair and read in a shaking voice a brief essay, which—how astonishing!—I think I will now be able to recall in detail. I began by asking: Why do people wage war? Would people kill and let themselves be killed unless there was a very convincing reason for doing so? If conquest is the only reason for a war, conquest from which only the ruler stands to gain, then people should refuse to fight. If, however, a war is to be fought for the defense of one’s family and property, then men should fight with all their heart and might. The war against the Amalekites was a war of defense. In such a
war,
all
must participate; no one has the right to refrain from taking part. And the cowards and deserters, all who would benefit from the courage of the brave, they have no right to share in the victory, and should be punished. Deserters most especially should be punished, because they run away in the face of danger, they leave it to others to fight and perhaps die in their place, they are the lowest of men, they—

My little talk, I must tell you, contained a splendid array of proof texts from sources both sacred and secular, over which I had labored long and hard. But that was as far as I got with it. For a sound had begun to emanate from Mr. Zapiski, a noise that sounded like
“What? What? What?”
in Yiddish, and I looked up and saw that his normally pallid features had turned crimson, and a blood vessel had risen and lay like a vertical ridge along the center of his forehead.

“What are you saying?” he shouted.

I stared at him.

“Who told you this? Surely not your father or mother!”

I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about.

He leaned stiffly toward me and winced with pain as his hand inadvertently struck the knee of his right leg. The pain seemed to make him angrier still. I thought he might suffer a stroke and die of rage; I had heard about such things. He rubbed the knee, grasped the trouser with both hands, raised the leg so that it hung a moment suspended, lowered it onto the left leg, adjusted it. He took a deep, tremulous breath.

“Why did you choose this subject, eh? Is this what you intend to tell the people who will come together to celebrate your entering into adulthood?
This?
What do you know about it? Go fight in a war, God forbid, and then see what speeches you make. It isn’t enough that your father suffered the way he did? Why must you now add to it with your cruel words?”

He fell silent, breathing heavily, glaring at me out of swollen eyes. He coughed and wiped his sweating face with a ragged handkerchief. The chair, the air, the room, the rage—I felt myself being stifled.

In a trembling voice I told him I did not understand what I had done wrong.

That seemed to infuriate him even more. “Don’t play the ignorant innocent with me, you smart aleck! I know you. I see right through you. Nothing escapes you. You want to wage war against your father, do it another way. Erase those sentences from your talk!”

“Which sentences?”

“I told you not to play the dummy with me! You should know that I was once a candidate for a doctoral degree in a great European university.”

“But I don’t know which—”

“Read it quietly to yourself and then read it to me again!”

I stared at my notebook, swiftly searching through the talk. Which words was I to omit?

And here, Davita, we come to a moment of memory that is still unclear to me. Hastily scanning my words, I
decided to drop all mention of desertion, and I cannot remember why I did that—perhaps because it was the only part of the talk that had come from my own being. Everything else I’d borrowed from other sources.

I read the talk once again to Mr. Zapiski. It seemed a shadow of its former version, the heart gone from it. Mr. Zapiski listened intently. He took deep breaths, he grew calm, he wiped his face and lips, he nodded approval. Then he lit another cigarette and ordered me to repeat by heart some matters of grammar—and promptly fell asleep.

I removed the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the end table. I had no stomach that night for books about war. Silently, I slipped out of the apartment and started home in the winter night and, as I hurried past the brewery, suddenly sensed alongside me a terrifying presence that set my knees shaking and prickled my skin, but, turning, I saw only the vacant street and patches of snow yellow-lit from the streetlamps.

A night of dread and sleeplessness followed. I tossed, I turned. I stared wide-eyed into the darkness and heard Mr. Zapiski saying,
“What? What? What?”
I gazed out my window at the concrete back yard and saw Mr. Zapiski in its deepest shadows. Why had he become so incensed? Had someone close to him deserted during the Great War? I’d read in one of his books that deserters, when apprehended, were executed. Perhaps
he
had deserted? Suppose—my agitated heart churned out the fearful possibilities—suppose he had bolted from his guard post in the trenches one night and my father had furtively gone
after him and brought him back? Or maybe, just maybe,
it was my father who had deserted
, and Mr. Zapinski had forced
him
back—and on returning had been badly wounded by an exploding shell? Would that account for his missing leg, the marks on his face, the scars on his head, his wretched health, his grown-old look?

And then a horrifying thought occurred to me. What if my father had indeed been a deserter? And what if the American government ever discovered that he’d fought on the enemy side and determined to send him back to his old country, would he then be executed for desertion?

Fear-ridden days and nights followed. I grew irritable, couldn’t eat, lost weight. My mother became concerned, kept glancing at me with worry in her eyes. I began to wonder if one day a newspaper headline might announce the presence in America of soldiers who had fought on the German side in the Great War.
ENEMIES DISCOVERED IN OUR MIDST
. Would the entire family be sent back? I found myself cringing at the sight of the newspapers on our kitchen table, dreaded looking at the headlines. I would not go into our kitchen or living room when I saw my father there reading his newspaper. Once I spotted a crumpled newspaper in our garbage can and thought I saw the words “Great War” in a headline and removed it with trembling hands and straightened it out on the table and saw with relief that it had nothing to do with the enemies of America but was about a statesman who was predicting another great war, one much more terrible than the Great War itself.

One evening during that awful time, I climbed the stairs to Mr. Zapiski’s apartment, carrying the usual shopping bag of food, and found a note on the doorbell that read, “Benjamin, I am sick. The door is open. Please put the food in the icebox and return in two days.”

Yielding to my diffident push, the door opened wide and I stepped inside.

How stifling the apartment was—a steamy inferno of radiator heat. The wooden floor of the hallway groaned; the linoleum wobbled and buckled. In the kitchen food-encrusted pots and dishes cluttered the counter and filled the sink, and old newspapers lay on the table and chairs. Roaches rushed crazily across the floor and walls and vanished into drawers and appliances. I imagined rats moving stealthily in the spaces between the walls.

I put the food in the icebox—a nearly vacant and malodorous white cavern—and had turned to leave when I heard a cry from beyond the portieres that separated the hallway from the rest of the apartment. Someone had called my name in a high-pitched voice I could not recognize.