Old Men at Midnight (27 page)

He climbed the curving stairway. The carpeted steps creaked and groaned.

All five doors on the second floor were open. He peered into each room. Four were empty. In the fifth, an old chair and dresser, an unmade bed. Towels and toiletries in a small bathroom with a white porcelain sink and an antique claw-foot tub.

At the end of the hallway, a narrow uncarpeted wooden stairway led upward into darkness. Slowly, he climbed the stairs and came to a closed wooden door. He pushed the door open and found himself inside a vast dimly lit ballroom, with stained-glass windows, a wide-planked oak floor, a vaulted ceiling lacy with lights and shadows. Antique furniture stood about as in a storeroom: floral-patterned stuffed chairs, eagles and dragons carved from their arms and legs; long tables, their tops cut with zodiacal markings; lacquered Oriental dressers; desks of Victorian design; canopied beds. On the floor lay three piles of carpets adorned with mythic bestiaries, richly plumed birds, enchanted gardens, densely treed woods. The possessions of the previous owners. Why had it all been moved to this floor?

Against the far wall, before a window, I. D. Chandal sat at a rolltop desk, clutching a pen with three fingertips of her right hand, writing. She sat about forty feet away, bathed in yellow light from the lamp on her desk, and he made out plainly her rotund features and thick lips and double chin and uncombed gray hair and face glistening with sweat. The pale-blue housecoat she wore could not conceal the buttocks and thighs that spilled over the edge of her chair and the immense breasts pushing against the desk. She paid no attention to him as he came alongside the desk. He heard her breathing, the wheezy breathing of an asthmatic, and inhaled her sweat. She was writing on one side of a large spring binder. He wrote that way, too, leaving the other side for inserts, if needed, at a later time. The heat that rose from her! He saw her lift her eyes and look out the window directly at his house and return to her writing. She moved her lips, mouthed words in silence, cocked her head this way and that. “Warum,” he heard her say, and stood cold and trembling, listening to his heart. She gazed again out the window and, following her line of vision, he saw the dark portals of his house. At the rear above the roof stood the oaks, darkly reflecting the outside lights.

A sudden bright rectangle appeared in the wall of the house. Someone had turned on the light in his study! He was able to see directly into the room: the framed headlines on the wall; his old chair and recliner; the top of his desk with books, magazines, journals, and the manuscript of the memoirs. Was Evelyn walking about?

A shadow fell across the desk. Benjamin Walter, the skin
on his scalp rising, saw a form slide slowly into his chair. It sat still a moment, then lifted its eyes and stared at him directly through the window.

Dark clothes, white shirt, dark tie, tall black skullcap, graying beard, in the moist lips a cigarette with a long gray ash arched like a melting candle.

I. D. Chandal took a wheezing breath. “Hello, Benjamin. You have a nice home.”

He was unable to respond. The pain in his arms and legs; the hammering of his heart.

“A place full of connections.”

The light in the window winked out.

Benjamin Walter stood frozen with horror.

I. D. Chandal murmured, “Causes, connections, and rams. All over the place.”

He stared at her and then at the house.

“Please go home and let me finish my work.” Her tone was sharp.

“But—”

“Go home.” Her voice had risen.

“My dear Davita—”

“I’m sorry, but now you’re interfering, Benjamin.”

“But I feel—”

“Benjamin, leave!” The lashing fury in her voice. What had he done to deserve that?

Inside his house another window abruptly ignited. His wife’s study. Everything in it—books, papers, journals, wall pictures—arranged with an English sense of order. And on her desk, the manuscript of her book on Virginia Woolf.

A shadowy form glided into view, stood over the desk.

Benjamin Walter, roaring with rage and dread, rushed from the third-floor ballroom and down the stairway and out of the Tudor. Breathing with great difficulty, a reddish luminescence flashing before his eyes, he paused at the foot of the stairs in his living room and saw only the dim night-light. Evelyn stirred when he entered the bedroom, but did not wake.

He hurried into her study. It was dark; nothing appeared to have been disturbed. In his study, he switched on the ceiling light. The manuscript of the memoirs lay on the desk where he had left it. Glancing outside, he saw I. D. Chandal still writing at the third-floor window of the Tudor. What was that? He threw open the window and saw a shadowy figure limping along the driveway toward the woods at the back of the house. A burglar! Call the police. But then he heard the whispered word “warum” and the trope chant began from the woods. Slowly rising and curling like early-morning mist, drifting. From splintered trees and barbarous graveyards; and entering through the open window and also coming from the wall of headlines behind him and the piercingly recalled apartment of Mr. Zapiski. A long moment passed before he recognized that the word and the chant had risen from him, from his own lips. And it was then that he broke through the ramparts into the illumined entry of himself and saw as he had never seen before the exposed roots and tangles of long-buried connections, and was overcome with an infinite sorrow.

Old Men
at Midnight

C
HAIM
P
OTOK

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with Chaim Potok

Daniel Walden,
Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English, and Comparative Literature, has taught “Jewish Literature,” “Literature and the Holocaust,” and “Women Writing the Holocaust” for many years at Penn State University. Author of
On Being Jewish
(1974), Walden has also published
Twentieth Century American Jewish Fiction Writer
(1984) and
Conversations with Chaim Potok
(2001), and is the longtime editor of “Studies in American Jewish Literature.”
In assembling this conversation, Daniel Walden has drawn on other conversations with Chaim Potok conducted by Harold Ribalow, S. Lillian Kremer, Marcia Zoslaw Siegel, and Michael J. Cusick. These conversations are published in
Conversations with Chaim Potok
, edited by Daniel Walden (University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

Daniel Walden: Although you have written, in
Wanderings
,
that the Korean war was a crucial experience for you, you’ve also written that “the Jew sees all his contemporary history through the ocean of blood that is the Holocaust.” When did you begin to think that you could use the Holocaust as a subject in fiction?

Chaim Potok: I began to think of the Holocaust as a subject in the late 1940s, that early. It was prevalent in my family. There were a lot of people who died in the Holocaust in my family.

During the Great Depression there was a period when we were on welfare. My father had been quite wealthy in the 1920s—he had been in real estate before the crash—and he spent the next decade rebuilding his life—by opening a jewelry and watch repair store in those days.

You had Father Coughlin from Detroit yelling anti-Semitic diatribes at you from the radio on Sunday afternoons. Did I listen to him? Absolutely! You wanted to know what the enemy was saying so you could respond. And if you didn’t listen, the anti-Semitic neighbors would turn up their radios so you would hear him when you walked down the street.

And then, of course, there was the ranting and raving of Hitler, which I would get on the radio—with a lot of static—from time to time.

I wanted to milk everything for what it was worth, because you never knew if there would be another minute.

I still remember the day my father received a letter from Europe telling me that not one relative had survived. He sat down and told my mother, and she just fell to pieces. She kept saying, ‘Nobody?
Nobody?
I can’t believe
nobody
.’ ”

Once I talked about the Holocaust with my father. He told me that we had lost 103 aunts, uncles, second cousins, whole families. Then he turned away.

DW: In
The Chosen
,
the Holocaust was in the background. In
The Promise
and in
In the Beginning
,
it became
more and then more prominent. Was this accidental or deliberately done? Was this due to a change in circumstances around you, in your thinking?

CP: Yes it began with
The Chosen
, but really, the real lollapalooza was
The Promise
, with Reb Kalman. It came out of the material and it came out of the character, simultaneously.

Yes, I think that the whole people feels that and probably the American Jew feels it in a special way; he is quite guilt-ridden in all probability. For whatever reason, he never did enough at a crucial point in time by way of an effort to get the thing stopped, or to protest it. Wrong or right, spoken or unspoken, that is the general feeling. And that sense of guilt is triggered from time to time, especially when Israel is involved in a war, and you get that extraordinary reaction on the part of the American Jewish public in defense of that country. A good deal of that reaction comes from a sense of the guilt we all have regarding the Holocaust. I don’t see how it is possible to think the world through Jewish eyes without having the blood-screen of the Holocaust in front of your eyes as part of the filtering. I’ll go even further and say that for thinking people, Jew or non-Jew, I don’t think it is possible to think the world anymore in this century without thinking Holocaust.

DW: In an interview with Lillian Kremer, in 1981, you said that you were “very hesitant to write a novel
about the Holocaust because I don’t know how to handle the material.” When did you begin to feel confident about handling the material, about writing stories or novellas?

CP: I still can’t really handle the material. I feel unnerved by all the material and I don’t know how a Jew can really handle it. I wasn’t involved with it in terms of my own flesh, although we lost the whole European branch of the family. I don’t know whether or not I can write a Holocaust novel. I don’t know whether I can get the distance needed to handle it aesthetically. It seems to me to be so anaesthetic an experience that I don’t quite know what thread of it to grab hold of so that I could weave it into some sort of aesthetics.

DW: In
Davita’s Harp
,
you wrote about a young girl clearly identified, as you’ve said, with your wife. In
Old Men at Midnight
is Ilana Davita Chandal a continuation or outgrowth of that Davita? Is she a new creation? A fusion?

CP: A harp is a bunch of strings, and it is nothing unless someone is playing it. It is the melody of the harp that is the mystery. Sometimes if you leave a harp out in a strong wind, the wind will make the melody.

In Jerusalem somewhere, there is a harp that is a sculpture which reacts to winds. The harp is physical, even though we can’t see its music. The music—what’s the music? The music is the relationship between the harp and the wind. The writing is the relationship between the writer and the piece of paper. Worship is the relationship between the worshiper and the text.

Davita’s Harp
was in part based on the experiences of my wife. Davita, in
Old Men at Midnight
, is a continuation, and I hope to continue with her. But she is going her own way now.

DW:
Old Men at Midnight
is on one level a series of three novellas about the tensions Jews faced in their transition from a war-torn Europe and an emerging American society. Is this a new way of viewing your longtime interest in a core-to-core cultural confrontation?

CP: Absolutely, it is fundamental to that core-to-core cultural confrontation. I will decide, or rather people will decide whether I subscribe to that core or fall by the wayside. I don’t know yet. But I intend to be more specific.

I think I have inadvertently stumbled across a cultural dynamic that I didn’t quite see clearly myself until sometime toward the end of the writing of
The Chosen
. I think what I am really writing about is culture war. The overarching culture in which we all live is the culture we call Western secular humanism, the culture that Peter Gay of Columbia University calls modern paganism. Within this culture there is a whole spectrum of subcultures. The basic characteristic of the over-arching culture is what I call the open-ended hypothesis; that is to say, nothing is absolute in any kind of permanent way. A model is a shifting or temporary absolute on the assumption that additional data will be discovered that will impinge upon a given model. That model must be altered. So there is a constant search for new knowledge that is built into the civilization that we live in, this overarching civilization. But embedded inside this civilization we have a whole series of cultures which come into this world with
givens
, with models that are fixed absolutes. If they are alterable, they are alterable only under inordinate pressure. What happens is that these subcultures clash in a variety of ways with the overarching culture, as somebody from this subculture grows up and encounters elements from the outside model.