I Am the Clay

by Chaim Potok

  During the time of plowing a new house was quickly built along the perimeter of the village and four young women moved into it. They lounged about in the courtyard and the boy passed them on his way to the compound and returning to the village, each time feeling the new stiffness in his groin, and at night foreigners came to the house and the boy heard their music and laughter. All the villagers knew this was the end to their village, and the old man and the carpenter knew this was the end to the power of the boy, his power could not defeat the power of the foreigners.

  One day during the time of planting the old man looked up and saw flatbed trucks carrying huge machines across the fields of wild grass between the battalion and the hill, and soon bulldozers with big tracks and blades and tractors with claws that dug ditches were cutting and grading the hill. They come with their machines and their iron hearts, the foreigners, and change the face of the world. Change and death and more change and more death. Do the spirits change? Is there new death and new life and new death and new life among the spirits as well?

  In the weeks that followed, the machines changed the shape of the hill: the shoulder was broadened and flattened; a wide road appeared; and deep drainage ditches and new long low white buildings with red crosses on the roofs.

  When the first rains came the drainage ditches flooded and some of the houses slid off the hill but the machines pulled the houses back up and then dug the ditches deeper and soldiers lined them with stones. New houses appeared in the village too, and more girls, and men who were strangers opened little shanty shops that sold food and clothes, and uniforms and boots stolen from the foreigners.

  One morning in the early fall the teenage boy entered the battalion compound and came over to the boy.

  “Listen,” he said, “soon we going to move to that hill. Either you’re with me or you’re my enemy. If you’re my enemy you won’t work in the new place. If you’re with me you’ll tell me where the officer keeps his camera. I’ve heard about that camera, it is something very special.”

  The boy did not respond and the teenager went away. But he returned in the afternoon.

  “Listen, when we move to the hill I’m going to let you help me bring the foreigners to that new house in the village, because I hear you’re smart and I need your English. It’s my house, I run it. The most money is made from that and I’ll see you get your share. If you don’t want to do it, tell me and I’ll get someone else. What do you say? Think about it.”

  He went away and was back the next morning.

  “It’s bad for my business if word gets out that one of my boys won’t listen to me. I can’t let that happen, because then others won’t listen. You understand? I want you to think about that.”

  Later that afternoon the boy spoke to one of the doctors. The doctor told him he was tired, he had been up half the night with emergencies, the boy should go see the chaplain.

  The chaplain was in Japan on a religious retreat. The boy talked to the chaplain’s assistant, a man in his early twenties, light-skinned, blond-haired, cheerful. He didn’t know anything about jobs in Seoul. Why did the boy want to go to Seoul, for heaven’s sake? Seoul was an awful place. The boy would have to wait until the chaplain returned in a couple of days.

  That night the teenage boy moved into the village, into the house with the four young women. The next morning he appeared in the doorway of the chaplain’s Jamesway as the boy was sweeping the floor. He watched for a while and said, “You want to do this the rest of your life, work for the foreigners like a woman, get old working for the foreigners? You work for me, you make money fast. You’re a smart boy, I watch you all the time, speak English, learn quick, you’ll make lots of money. What do you say?”

  The boy was quiet.

  “Listen. Are you listening? An ox can die. One minute alive, the next minute dead. You know that? And houses burn. You know houses burn.”

  The boy said, “The foreigner took the camera with him. When he comes back I’ll tell you where he keeps it.”

  The teenager grinned. “Smart boy, smart boy.”

  The morning after the chaplain returned, the boy came quietly into the Jamesway and lit the stove and set out the water basin and woke him.

  “I speak to you, sah?”

  The chaplain rose to one elbow. “What time is it?”

  “Time to get up, sah. I speak to you? You man know the spirits, sah.”

  “What?”

  “You have power, sah, more power than anyone else. You help?”

  The chaplain put his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up, staring at the boy.

  “Someone can hurt me, sah. He bad man and can hurt me and also hurt abuji papa-san, he live in our village now, sah, I no tell you his name, because he can hurt me very bad, and and he want your camera, but I not give him where it is and and he can hurt me and abuji papa-san and I afraid and and and I want go somewhere, far away maybe, to Seoul maybe, to work to study, Grandfather big scholar and poet, want me go study and and and you help me, sah, you man of strong power and know the spirits, please, sah.”

  The chaplain sat very still, looking at the boy.

  “Please,” said the boy.

  The chaplain said, “I’ll have him arrested.”

  The boy trembled visibly. “Ah no, sah.”

  “Why not?”

  “He have many friends, sah. They can hurt me very bad. They can hurt abuji papa-san. He say they kill ox and burn house. Fire, sah.” Village burning and earth in the old man’s eyes and mouth.

  The chaplain got to his feet. “You say your father was a scholar?”

  “Grandfather. Big scholar, big poet.”

  “What does that mean here, a scholar?”

  They talked while the chaplain washed and dressed. The boy wondered again about the six-pointed-star double-tablet insignia he wore. They walked together to the white building with the cross on the tower.

  That night the old man listened to the boy and finally cried out, “Selfish boy! You go away now to study? I am an old man. Who will cook for me? Who will wash and mend my clothes? And and how will I end my days alone? And where where where is your loyalty and thanks after all I have done to save you? And what will the spirit of the woman say to this? Who will tend her grave?”

  The boy did not respond. Shall I tell him they will kill his ox and burn down his house if I stay? He will shout “A knife to them!” and “Death to them!” and perhaps tell the old carpenter and a war will begin between the old ones and the young gangs. And if I stay where will I work? Perhaps I can find work somewhere and make myself small so they will not find me. Will I live all my life small? Small when they burned the village. Small in the cave and on the plain. Small in front of the machine that sees inside the body lights and shadows. Small and again small and and again and and and again. No! Small I left behind in the smoke and fires on the plain. No more small.

  He woke early the next morning and dressed and walked through the village and climbed the hill. Cold soft clean sunlit air. Silent buildings of the new compound waiting for occupants. Guards with dogs along the perimeter. Skirting the compound, he went on to the rear of the hill, boulder-strewn and thick with tall grass, and came to the grave of the old woman, a small mound with a simple stone marker. Birds played in the grass and in the sky overhead. A tree of crooked timber grew not far away, shedding the last of its leaves. He pulled away weeds that had grown on the grave and placed upon it the wild flowers he had picked on his way up the hill. He stood in front of the grave and saw before his eyes a single face that was the face of the old woman and his mother and his grandfather and his father. One face that was all their faces. Eyes and noses and mouths one to another fused. And be with me forever and guard me from evil spirits and protect me from bad people and and bring me safely to a better place and and and … His voice high and thin in the hushed morning air, he softly sang the song of the old woman. Have thine own way Lord have thine own way thou art the potter I am the clay.

  He fel
t no response. There seemed a sadness about the grave, a desolation in the spirits residing there. Are the spirits as helpless as men? Perhaps there are no spirits anymore, perhaps the spirits were all killed by the war, and only emptiness is left for us to fill. Emptiness. Menacing as the cave, towering as the mountains, broad and icy as the plain. Is it toward that emptiness that I am being led? Like the girl and her mother leaving the shanty on the plain and walking toward the narrow opening beyond the bodies—to where? Fill the emptiness—with what? Help me, my dead village. Be a strength to me, my forlorn grave.

  After a while he started slowly down the hill. Some yards down he turned and climbed back up to the grave and scooped up two handfuls of its earth, which he put into the pockets of his jacket. He returned to the house and in the kitchen emptied his pockets into a clean jar that had once contained food given him by the cook on the American compound. He screwed the cap back on and left the jar on a shelf in the kitchen.

  On the day before the officers of the battalion were to move to new quarters on the shoulder of the hill, the old man and the carpenter and the boy walked together to the train station in the nearby town. The boy carried a bag containing some meager belongings and his jacket and the lined leather gloves the old man had reminded him to take along and the jar of earth from the grave.

  “Perhaps your power will return to you in the city,” the old man said, squinting in the sunlight. He did not have the words to tell the boy his feelings and he kept looking up at the blue autumn sky.

  The carpenter handed the boy a piece of paper with the names and addresses of two people he knew in Seoul. “In a strange city it can be of help to know someone,” he said.

  “I wish to say something to you,” said the old man to the boy. “I speak to you as if I were your father, though I am not your father, you are not of my blood. Seoul is very big and it is easy to lose one’s way there. You should go straight to the place the foreigner told you. In that place you should work hard and obey those who are above you. Stay away from women of the street and from women in houses like the one in our village; such women will bring you illness and misfortune. Eat meat as often as you can, it will cause what lies between your legs to grow large and firm. This I learned from my uncle, who as I told you was a great hunter in the North. That is all I wish to say to you.”

  The station was crowded. People chatted and stood about waiting reasonably for the train. The old man watched the traffic on the main road. Machines and machines and machines. Better to be old and soon dead.

  The train pulled slowly into the station, wheels and brakes grinding.

  The boy bowed deeply to the old man and the carpenter. The old man turned his head away so the boy could not see his eyes.

  The boy climbed aboard. It was morning and the train was not crowded. He found a window seat and put his bag on the rack over his head. The window was coated with yellow dust.

  Sitting in the train, the boy looked through the window at the old man and the carpenter. They stood on the earthen platform, gazing at him solemnly. He waved and they waved back. Two men, old and ugly. Yet more comforting than the emptiness ahead. Be a help to me, little jar of earth.

  Creaking and jerking, the train left the station.

  The old man and the carpenter started back toward the village.

  They crossed over the drainage ditch on the side of the main road. Walking along the road, the old man saw a bird high against the blue sky. Huge wings. Circling. In the marketplace he bought a piece of beef he thought he would try to cook for himself that night. And afterward rice wine in the town with the carpenter. He would soon forget the boy. Too many memories very bad. The bird still circling. A hawk. Wheeling and gliding and circling. Uncle’s hawk a swift gray shadow crossing the narrow valley. Guide the boy through the brown land, hawk. From anger of spirits deliver him. Circling. And now soaring higher and and still higher. And and and too soon and too quickly vanished.

  to

  PHIL MUYSSON

  whose gentle and

  persistent urging

  brought

  this book

  to life

  and to

  ADENA

  who read it

  first

  A number of people were of considerable help to me in the research for this book: Millicent and Mario Materassi of Florence, Italy; James Stovall of Havertown, Pennsylvania; and Kyung-Ae Lim of Seoul, Korea. I offer them my deepest thanks.

  —CHAIM POTOK

  Also by Chaim Potok

  Published by Fawcett Books:

  THE CHOSEN

  THE PROMISE

  MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

  IN THE BEGINNING

  WANDERINGS

  THE BOOK OF LIGHTS

  DAVITA’S HARP

  THE GIFT OF ASHER LEV

  MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

  THE STUNNING CLASSIC BY CHAIM POTOK

  Here is the moving story of Asher Lev, the religious boy with an overwhelming need to express his pain through art. He must paint and draw to communicate with the world.

  Asher, a loner, has an extraordinary gift that possesses a spirit all its own. But he must master it without relinquishing his Judaism, for he cannot bring shame to his people. Although he knows it will not be easy, his heritage gives him no choice.

  MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

  by Chaim Potok

  Published by Fawcett Books.

  Available in your local bookstore.

  DAVITA’S HARP

  THE ENCHANTING CLASSIC BY CHAIM POTOK

  For Davita Chandal, growing up in New York in the 1930s and ’40s is an experience of indescribable joy—and unfathomable sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope for a new, better world. But the deprivations of war and the Depression take their ruthless toll.

  Davita, unexpectedly, finds in the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned both a solace to her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence. To her, life’s elusive possibilities for happiness, for fulfillment, for decency, become as real and resonant as the music of the small harp that hangs on her door, welcoming all guests with its sweet, gentle tones.

  DAVITA’S HARP

  by Chaim Potok

  Published by Fawcett Books.

  Available in your local bookstore.