God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  Who was He? You had to see His face to say in Whose image man had been fashioned; and no one could. Moses, who had come close, saw Him through fog and flame. Or from a cleft in a huge rock where the Lord had placed him. And God, approaching the rock in his own light, covered the cleft with His hand, until He had passed by, then removed His hand and Moses clearly saw the Lord’s endless back.

  Shall I someday see His face? God seemed to feel the need to talk to men. He needed worship, and even faithless men had hungered to worship Him.

  Cohn added up columns of random figures. He began and tore up a notebook journal. He trotted back and forth, for exercise, along the 152-foot deck, hurdling obstacles, the fallen mast, yards of canvas sail, instruments of observation, hauling, drilling; tons of thick ropes covered with seaweed, barnacles, starfish, sea detritus; Cohn, despite his small size and slightly bowed legs, had once been an athlete in Staten Island High School.

  The radio was dead. He talked to himself. He missed the human voice.

  “What can one expect in this life of desolation ?”

  —More life?

  “To be alive alone forever ?”

  —It takes one rib to make an Eve.

  “Do you see yourself as Adam?”

  —If the job is open.

  Wherever they were it rarely rained. The heavy rains had served, and were gone; the present weather was dry, the flood subsiding; but not Cohn’s anger at the destruction God had wrought. Why does human life mean so little to Him? Because He hadn’t lived it? If Jesus had, why didn’t he tell Him about it? Cohn thought he would bring Them to the bar of justice if he could.

  (Terrible thundering; he hid for days.)

  Drinking water was short. Part of the storage tankful had leaked into the sea, adding to the ocean water. To the bitter salt sea. Food was plentiful but he ate without appetite.

  Cohn, proficient in reading geological and biological time in the microfossilized cores drilled out of the ocean floor, could barely read the visible stars. He did not know how to navigate, and could only guess where in the wet world he was; nor could he steer Rebekah Q, though he diligently studied repair manuals of the ship’s machinery and electric system. What difference did steering make if there was no dry place to go? He went where the crippled vessel bore him, wondering whether to swim if it sank.

  One tedious, sultry day Cohn thought he was no longer in the Pacific. He couldn’t imagine where he was. What shall I do, alone of all men on this devastated earth?

  He swore he would live on despite the wrathful God who had let him out on a string and would snap him back on a string.

  Once he heard an awesome whirring of wings, and when Cohn gazed up to behold a resplendent angel, he saw a piece of torn blue sky shaped like a shrunken hand.

  Cohn prayed on his knees. No voice spoke. No wind blew.

  One moonlit night, Calvin Cohn, shivering in his sleep, sensed a presence aboard, surely not himself. He sat up thinking of his dead young wife. She had been driving, not Cohn. He mourned her among those he mourned.

  He feared that God, in His butcher’s hat, was about to knock on the door. For the ultimate reason: ““Kiddo, it’s time,”” or hinting, perhaps, to prepare Cohn? He was to be slain, God had said, though not executed. Why, therefore, hadn’t it happened in his sleep rather than out of it? You go to bed and wake up dead. Or was Cohn making much of nothing real, letting fear touch his throat?

  Or was this sense of another presence no more than anticipation of the land in the abated floodwaters; dove bearing in its beak a twig of olive leaf? Or raven croaking, “Land ahoy! Get your pants on”?

  Cohn stared out the porthole glass; moonlight flowing on the night-calm smooth sea. No other sight.

  Before reclining in his berth he drew on his green-and-blue striped sneakers and, taking along his flashlight, peeked into each cabin and lab room below the foredeck. There were creakings and crackings as he prowled from one damp room to another; but no visitors or visitations.

  He woke at the sound of a whimper, switched on his torch, and strained to hear.

  Cohn imagined it might be some broken thing creakily swaying back and forth in the night breeze, but it sounded like a mewling baby nearby. There had been none such aboard, nor baby’s mother.

  Holding a lit candle in his hand, Cohn laid his ear against each cabin door. Might it be a cat? He hadn’t encountered one on the boat. Was it, then, no more than a cry in a dream?

  As he was standing in his cabin, a scream in the distance shook him. Bird screeching at ship approaching shore? Impossible—there were no living birds. In Genesis, God, at the time of the First Flood, had destroyed every living thing, had burned, drowned, or starved them, except those spared on the Ark. Yet if Cohn was alive so might a single bird or mouse be.

  In the morning he posted a message on the bulletin board in the games room. “Whoever you may be, kindly contact Calvin Cohn in A-11. No harm will befall you.”

  Afterwards, he heated up a pot of water on the gas stove and then and there gave up shaving. All supplies were short. Cohn piped out the fresh water that remained in the leaky storage tank he had unsuccessfully soldered, and let it pour into a wooden barrel he had found in the scullery. By nightfall almost an eighth of the water in the barrel was gone. That was no bird.

  Who would have drunk it? Cohn feared the question as much as any response. He nailed three boards over the head of the barrel. When he wanted to drink he pried one up, then nailed it down again.

  He was edgy in the galley as he scrambled a panful of powdered eggs that evening before dark, sensing he was being watched. A human eye? Cohn’s skin crawled. But he had been informed by an Unimpeachable Source that he was the one man left in the world, so he persuaded himself to be calm. Cohn ate his eggs with a stale bun, washing the food down with sips of water. He was reflecting on the pleasures of a cigarette when he wondered if he had detected a slight movement of the cabinet door under the galley double-sink.

  Who would that be?

  The question frightened him. Cohn looked around for a cleaver and settled on a long cooking fork hanging on the wall. Holding the instrument poised like a dagger, he strode forward and pulled open the metal door.

  The shriek of an animal sent his heart into flight. Cohn considered pursuing it in space but took an impulsive look inside the under-sink cabinet and could not believe what he beheld—a small chimpanzee with glowing, frightened eyes, sitting scrunched up amid bottles of cleaning fluid, grinning sickly as he clucked hoo-hoos. He wore a frayed cheesecloth compress around his neck.

  “Who are you?” Cohn cried, moved by his question—that he was asking it of another living being. A live chimp-child, second small error by God Himself? The Universal Machine, off by a split cosmi-second, allows a young ape also to survive?

  That being so, the realm of possibility had expanded. Cohn’s mood improved. He felt more the old Cohn.

  The chimp, swatting aside the cooking fork, bolted out of the cabinet, scampering forward on all fours to a swing-door that wouldn’t budge. Scooting behind a tin-top work table, he climbed up a wall of shelves and sat perched at the top, persistently hooting. The chimp chattered like an auctioneer encouraging bids as he awaited Cohn’s next move. At the same time he seemed to be eloquently orating: he had his rights, let him be.

  Cohn kept his distance. He guessed the chimp had belonged to Dr. Walther Bünder, had heard the scientist kept one in his cabin; but Cohn had never seen the animal and forgot it existed. He had heard the doctor walked it on the deck late at night, and the little chimp peed in the ocean.

  The ape on the shelf seemed to be signaling something—he tapped his toothy mouth with his fingers. The message was clear—Cohn offered him what was left of his own glass of water. Accepting it, the chimp drank hungrily. He wiped the inside of the glass with his long finger and sucked the juice before tossing the tumbler to Cohn. Hooting for attention, he tapped his mouth again, but Cohn advised him no more water till bedtime. />
  They were communicating!

  Sitting on a kitchen stool, Calvin Cohn carefully observed the young chimpanzee, who guardedly returned his observation. He gave the impression that he was not above serious reflection, a quite intelligent animal. Descending the shelves, he self-consciously knuckle-walked toward Cohn, nervously chattering as the other sat motionless watching him.

  Then the little animal mounted Cohn’s lap and attempted to suckle him through his T-shirt, but he, embarrassed, fended him off. “Behave yourself.” The chimp sat grooming his belly as if he had lived forever on Cohn’s lap and punctually paid the rent.

  He was a bowlegged, bright little boy with an expressive, affectionate face, now that his fear of Cohn seemed to have diminished. He weighed about seventy pounds, a large-craniumed creature with big ears, a flat nose, and bony-ridged curious dark eyes. His shaggy coat was brown. He seemed lively, optimistic, objective; did not say all he knew. He sat in Cohn’s lap as though signifying he had long ago met, and did not necessarily despise, the human race. When in his exploration of his body hair he came on a tasty morsel, he ate it with interest. One such tidbit he offered Cohn, who respectfully declined.

  He, feeling an amicable need to confide in somebody, told the little ape they had both been abandoned on this crippled ship, to an unknown fate.

  At that the chimp beat his chest with the fist of one pink-palmed hand, and Cohn wondered at the response; protest, mourning—both? Whatever he meant meant meaning, comprehension. The thought of cultivating that aptitude in the animal pleased the man.

  What would you tell me if you could?

  The young chimp’s stomach rumbled. Hopping off Cohn’s lap, he reached for his hand, and tugging as he knuckle-walked, led him to a cabin in the foredeck, about thirty feet up the passage from Cohn’s.

  Cohn had cleaned up and dried his own room; this was a soggy mess. Scattered over the floor were pieces of a man’s wearing apparel, silk shirts, striped jockey shorts, knee-length black socks, and dozens of blurred typewritten pages of what might have been a book in progress adhering to the waterlogged green rug. Among the clothes lay several damp notebooks, a damaged microscope, two rusted surgical instruments. Many swollen-paged damp books were strewn over the floor. Cohn, out of respect, placed them in the bookcase shelves, assisted by the chimp, who seemed to like doing what Cohn did. Several of the books dealt with modern and prehistoric apes; one was a fat textbook on the great apes, by Dr. Bünder. The subject of others was paleoichthyology.

  As he inspected the framed pictures on the white walls, Cohn came upon a mottled color photograph of Walther Bünder, a round-faced man with a rectilinear view of life. Wearing a hard straw hat, the famous scientist sat in an armchair holding a baby chimp in diapers, recognizably the lad now standing by Cohn’s side. In the photograph the baby chimp wore a small silver crucifix on a thin chain around his neck. Cohn wondered what the doctor supposed it meant to the little ape. He then tried peeking under the boy’s bandage, but the chimp pushed his hand away. When Cohn was a child his mother wrapped a compress around his neck whenever his tonsils were swollen.

  Cohn had talked to Dr. Bünder rarely, because he was not an accessible person. Yet once into conversation he reacted amiably, though he complained how little people had to say to each other. He had been a student of Konrad Lorenz and had written a classic text on the great apes before concerning himself with prehistoric fish. He said he had divorced his wife because she had produced three daughters and never a son. “She did not look to my needs.” He argued she was just as responsible as he for the sex-type of their children. And he had not remarried because he did not “in ezzence” trust women. He called himself a natural philosopher.

  Cohn “had to say” that he had studied for the rabbinate, but was not moved by his calling—as he was by his father’s calling—so he had become instead a paleologist. The doctor offered Cohn a Cuban cigar he had imported from Zurich.

  Why the doctor had not taken his little chimp with him at the very end, Cohn couldn’t say, unless the chimpanzee had hidden in panic when the alarm bells rang, and could not be located by his master. Or the doctor, out of fear for his own life, had abandoned his little boy.

  What’s his loss may be my gain, Cohn reflected.

  Close by Dr. Bünder’s berth stood a barred, wooden holding cage four feet high. In it lay a small, damp Oriental rug and two rusted tin platters. The chimp, as though to demonstrate the good life he had lived, stepped into the cage, swinging the door shut, and then impulsively snapped the lock that had been hanging open on the hasp. A moment later he gazed at Cohn in embarrassed surprise, as though he had, indeed, done something stupid. Seizing the wooden bars with both hands, he fiercely rattled them.

  Get me out of here.

  “Think first,” Cohn advised him.

  Cohn went through the doctor’s pockets, in his wet garments, but could not find a key to the cage. He pantomimed he would have to break the door in.

  The chimp rose upright, displaying; he swaggered from foot to foot. It did him no good, so he tried sign language, but Cohn shook his head—he did not comprehend. The animal angrily orated; this was his home and he loved it.

  “Either I bang the door in, or you stay there for the rest of your natural life,” Cohn told him.

  The chimpanzee kicked at the cage and grunted in pain. He held his foot to show where it hurt.

  Cohn, for the first time since the Day of Devastation, laughed heartily.

  The little chimp chattered as if begging for a fast favor, but Cohn aimed his boot at the locked wooden door and bashed it in.

  The chimp, his shaggy hair bristling, charged out of the cage, caught Cohn’s right thumb between his canines and bit.

  Cohn, responding with a hoarse cry, slapped his face—at once regretting it. But it ended there because, although his thumb bled, he apologized.

  The ape presented his rump to Cohn, who instinctively patted it. He seemed to signal he would like to do the same for Cohn, and he presented his right buttock and was touched by the animal. Civilized, Cohn thought.

  In one of the damp notebooks whose pages had to be carefully teased apart, the writing barely legible because the purple fountain-pen ink had run—not to speak of the doctor’s difficult Gothic script—was his record of the little ape’s progress in learning the Ameslan sign language for the deaf. “He knows already all the important signs. He mages egzellent progress.” The accent played in Cohn’s head as he read the doctor’s words. He could hear him mumbling to himself as he scratched out his sentences.

  Calvin Cohn searched for a list of illustrated language signs but could not find them. Trying another soggy notebook, he came across additional entries concerning Dr. Bünder’s experiment in teaching the boy to speak with him. On the last page he found a note in the scientist’s tormented handwriting to the effect that he was becoming bored with the sign-language exercises, “although Gottlob gobbles it up. I must try something more daring. I think he ist now ready for it. He ist quite a fellow.”

  Gotllob!

  That was the last entry in this notebook, dated a week before the Day of Devastation.

  Cohn was not fond of the name Dr. Bünder had hung on the unsuspecting chimp; it did not seem true to type, flapped loose in the breeze. Was he patronizing his boy or attempting to convert him? Leading the ape by his hairy hand to his cabin, Cohn got out his old Pentateuch, his Torah in Hebrew and English which he had recently baked out in the hot sun, flipped open a wrinkled page at random and put his finger on it. He then informed the little chimp that he now had a more fitting name, one that went harmoniously with the self he presented. In other words he was Buz.

  Cohn told him that Buz was one of the descendants of Nahor, the brother of Abraham the Patriarch, therefore a name of sterling worth and a more suitable one than the doctor had imposed on him.

  To his surprise the chimp seemed to disagree. He reacted in anger, beat his chest, jumped up and down in breathy protest. Buz
was obviously temperamental.

  But his nature was essentially unspoiled. Since his objections had done him no great good, he moodily yawned and climbed up on the top berth where, after counting his fingers and toes, he fell soundly asleep on his back.

  His mouth twitched in sleep and his eye movements indicated he was dreaming. Somebody he was hitting on the head with a rock? Except that his expression was innocent.

  Cohn felt they could become fast friends, possibly like brothers.

  Who else do I have?

  He locked Buz in the doctor’s cabin, and let him out in the morning to have breakfast with him in the galley.

  Cohn observed that the chimp had done his business in his tin dish in the cage. Clever fellow, he suited himself to circumstance. Afterwards they played hide-and-seek and Cohn swung him in circles by his long skinny arms on the sunny, slightly listing deck. Buz shut his eyes and opened his mouth as he sailed through the air.

  Cohn enjoyed playing with him but worried about diminishing food supplies. Canned goods, except for five cases of sardines, twelve of vegetarian baked beans and three of tuna fish, plus two cases of sliced peach halves in heavy syrup, were about gone; but there was plenty of rice and flour in large bins. The frightening thing was the disappearing drinking water. There were only a few gallons in the barrel. Cohn doled it out a tablespoon at a time.

  What if they went on drifting on the vast ocean without ever landing? The worst was yet to come. Wait till God discovered His second little error—that Buz, too, had momentarily escaped his final fate. Not that he was alive when he shouldn’t be, but that he hadn’t expired when he was supposed to. Or had He already discovered it and was making plans? The Lord was mysterious. His speech was silence, His presence, mystery. He made life a mystery, problematic for anyone attempting to survive.

  In a week the water supply was all but depleted. Cohn considered attempting to distill sea water but hadn’t the equipment. Besides, the gas was low. Simply cooking salt water all day and trying to collect its steam would be an impossible task. Still, if they had to they would try.