God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  One day, as he sat in his rocker with Buz on his lap, he signaled to the chimp: “We—you and I—are alone in this world. Do you understand?”

  The chimp signaled, “Buz wants fruit.”

  Cohn signed: “I feel alone (lonely). Is Buz lonely?”

  The chimp signaled, “What is alone ?”

  Cohn, excited by the ape’s genuine question, pantomimed signs that might mean sad, unhappy, oppressed.

  Buz signed, “Play with Buz.”

  Cohn impatiently spoke aloud. “What I want to say is that the situation is getting on my nerves. I mean we’re alone on this island and can’t be said to speak to each other. We may indicate certain things but there’s no direct personal communication. I’m not referring to existential loneliness, you understand—what might be called awareness of one’s essentially subjective being, not without some sense of death-in-life, if you know what I mean. I’m talking, rather, about the loneliness one feels when he lacks companionship, or that sense of company that derives from community. Do you read me, Buz?”

  The chimp signaled, “Drink-fruit (orange or coconut) for Buz.”

  “First Buz speak to (answer) what I ask (my question).”

  The little ape yawned—a gaping pink mouth and lively tongue within a semicircle of strong teeth. His breath smelled like a fragrant mulch pile. Cohn coughed.

  Buz attempted to suckle his left nipple.

  Cohn dumped him on the ground.

  The chimp bit Cohn’s right ankle.

  He cried out, at once springing a nosebleed. When Buz saw the blood flowing down his upper lip he scampered out of the cave and knuckle-galloped into the forest.

  When he was gone two days Cohn worried about him, but on the third day he returned, not without a smirk of guilt, and Cohn forgave him.

  Some nights were lonelier than others. They sat by the fire and Buz watched the shadow of Cohn’s creaking rocker on the wall. Pointing at it, he let out a gurgling hoot.

  “Shadow,” Cohn pantomimed, casting a barking dog on the wall with his fingers.

  Buz, after studying it, hooted weirdly.

  When, as the nights grew warmer, they dispensed with the fire, Cohn, after supper, waited till it was dark, then lit the kerosene lamp if he wanted to read. He read quickly, the kerosene was going fast. When the cave was sultry he read at the table in the hut. There were no moths or mosquitoes invading the lamp. If one could invent a mosquito, Cohn would.

  “The silence bugs me.”

  Buz produced a shrill hoot.

  Cohn thanked him.

  One night he read to the chimpanzee, regretting he had nothing appropriate for an equivalent of young teenager. But he sensed Buz understood what was read to him; or he understood more than he pretended to. Cohn thought he would try a touch of Shakespeare to attune his ear to spoken English. That might wake a desire to speak the language.

  Cohn tried reading aloud from The Merchant of Venice, to no avail. Buz was bored and yawned. He studied an illustration on the page and cautiously reached forth a finger to touch Jessica, but Cohn would not let him. Buz retreated, boredom glazing his eyes.

  Cohn then switched to Genesis in his Pentateuch and read aloud the story of the first six days of Creation. The chimp listened stilly. On the seventh day, as God rested from His labors, Buz crossed himself. Cohn could not believe he had seen it. Was it a random act? Again he read aloud the Creation, and the ape again crossed himself. Most likely Dr. Bünder had Christianized him, Cohn decided. His thought was that if one of them was a Christian and the other a Jew, Cohn’s Island would never be Paradise.

  With that in mind he searched in his valise for a black yarmulke he had saved from childhood, then decided not to offer it to Buz. If he wanted to know something about Jewish experience he would have to say so. Jews did not proselytize.

  Buz, however, reached for the yarmulke and draped it on his head. That night he slept with it on his forehead, as if he were trying to determine where it would rest most comfortably. He wore it the next day when he made his usual exploratory rounds among the neighboring trees before entering the rain forest, but in the late afternoon he came back without it.

  Cohn wanted to know what he had done with it, and got no reply.

  He never saw his yarmulke again. Perhaps in some future time, Deo volente, a snake might come slithering along wearing one. Who knows the combinations, transformations, possibilities of a new future?

  He offered the chimp the silver crucifix he had been holding for him, but Buz signed for Cohn to retain it since he had no pockets of his own.

  Cohn figured that when the chimp hit what might be the equivalent of thirteen years of age, he would offer him a Bar Mitzvah. Buz might accept; he might not. If he didn’t, Cohn would give him back his silver cross. I wonder if he thinks he can convert me by letting me hang onto it?

  In the meantime he would tell him stories, in particular those he remembered from Aesop, La Fontaine, Dr. Dolittle, and Tales of the Hasidim. How else educate someone who couldn’t read? Cohn hoped to alter and raise his experiential level—deepen, humanize this sentient, intelligent creature, even though he did not “speak” beyond a variety of hoots and grunts and make a few pantomimed signals.

  Besides, Cohn reflected, if I talk to him and he listens, no matter how much or little he comprehends, I hear my own voice and know I am present. And if I am, because I speak to him, maybe one of these days he will reply so that he can be present in my presence. He may get the idea.

  Cohn then began a story of his own. “I’m not so good at this,” he set it up. “My imagination has little fantasy in it—that’s why I became a digger of bones—but I am fairly good at describing what I’ve seen and lived through. So instead of inventing stories that never happen—although some do anyhow—I’d rather tell you a few items about my past. Let’s call it a bit of family history.

  “Personally, Buz, I’m the second son of a rabbi who was once a cantor. And he was the first son of a rabbi—my grandfather, alev hasholem—who was killed in a pogrom. That’s a word you probably never heard, one I imagine that Dr. Bünder gave you no sign for.”

  Buz wouldn’t say.

  “Nor for Holocaust either? That’s a total pogrom and led directly to the Day of Devastation, a tale I will tell you on the next dark day.”

  The chimp groomed himself under both arms, seeming to be waiting for the real story to commence.

  Cohn said that his father the cantor had decided to become a rabbi, and was a good one, thus fulfilling a pledge to his father, not to mention showing respect.

  “For somewhat similar reasons I attempted to go the same route, but for complex other reasons I never made it, diverted by inclinations and events I’d rather not talk about at the moment. It isn’t that I’m being evasive but there’s a time and place for everything.”

  Cohn, however, mentioned experiencing a trial of faith—losing interest in religion yet maintaining a more than ordinary interest in God Himself.

  “It’s like staying involved with First Causes but not in their theological consequences. Creation is the mystery that most affects me, so not unexpectedly I ended up in science. And that—to conclude this episode—is why you and I are sitting here listening to each other at a time when nobody else is, I am told.”

  Cohn, as the chimp yawned, cleverly asked, “And what about yourself? Can you tell me something about you? When and where, for instance, did you meet Dr. Bünder? What influence, in the long run, did he have on you? Are you American by birth, or were you born in Tanzania or Zaire? How did you get on the oceanography vessel, and were you at all aware civilization was ending when the lights banged out and scientists and crew abandoned ship without taking you along? I sense surprising gifts of communication in you and would be grateful, sooner than later, to know the facts.”

  Buz pointed to his belly button.

  “Are you saying you are, or asking that question?” Cohn, in rising excitement, wanted to know.

  The chi
mp tried to make his mouth speak. His neck tendons under the decaying cloth bulged as he strained, but no sound came forth—no word, no hoot.

  Buz grunted anticlimactically, then leaped up in anger, landing on one foot. He stamped the other, stormed, socked his chest, his body hair rising. There was no crying but he seemed on the verge.

  To calm him, Cohn wound up the portable phonograph and put on a record of his father the cantor singing a prayer of lamentation. This was a lamentor indeed; he sang from the pit of his belly, but with respect.

  The cantor noisily brayed his passion for God, pity for the world, compassion for mankind. The force of his fruity baritone seemed to shiver the cave in the rock. His voice was vibrant, youthful; though he was dead. Cohn was grateful his father had died before the Day of Devastation. For that disaster he might not have forgiven God. They had serious trouble after the Holocaust.

  “‘Sh’ma yisroel, ad-nai eloheynu, ad-nai echad—’” sang the cantor, his wavering voice climbing to the glory of God.

  Buz listened in astonishment. He orated, as though complaining. The chimp was holding the lamp above his head, peering at the floor of the cave as if he had encountered a snake. Or discovered a mystery. Was he seeking the source of the cantor’s voice? Cohn took the lamp from him and held it to the phonograph. He explained the voice was in the record. The ape, without glancing at it, rushed to the cave opening, pulled aside the vines, and stared into the humid night Buz’s head-hair bristled, his canines glowed. He growled in his throat.

  “What do you see?” Cohn held the lamp aloft.

  The chimp whimpered as a musty hot odor, like a burning tire, or someone’s stinkingly sweaty body, with a redemptive trace of mint, flowed into the cave.

  Calvin Cohn stared into the primeval night and saw nothing. An essence, unformed and ancient in the night’s ripe darkness, caused him to sense he was about to do battle with a dinosaur, if not full-fledged dragon; but he saw neither. Yet he thought he had heard an explosive grunt and had observed a shadow flit out of the hut and into the trees.

  Cohn went out in his stocking feet. No stars were visible, but a slender emerald crescent moon was rising. He stood for a while probing the night. When he returned to the cave Buz was snoring as if accompanying a dream of hot pursuit.

  In the morning, Cohn returned to his chores in the rice paddy and Buz went exploring. On the way, he played in the acacias and tumbled among the branches of a bushy eucalyptus a little farther down.

  He tore off a long leafy branch and leaped to the ground, dragging it up the rocky slope to the escarpment, and then charged down, venting a long scream as he pulled the hissing branch after him. A shower burst on his head as he plunged down the slope. Buz danced like an Indian chief in the rain.

  When the rain had let up the next morning, the little chimp went out, stopping to throw rocks at a mangrove tree he didn’t like. Before slipping into the rain forest he heaved chunks of coconut shell at two epiphytic trees in the leafy gloom, as if to drive away any lingering evil spirit.

  Then he disappeared into the forest, sometimes hooting from trees deep in the green growth. That afternoon when the chimp returned from the rain forest his face seemed gone several shades pale. He covered his shoulders with Cohn’s poncho and sat in the chair, hoo-hooting to himself. Cohn squatted, stroking his shoulders, at last quieting him. At dusk he climbed into his acacia sleep-tree and bent some branches back to make a nest for himself, but had second thoughts and slept in the cave.

  A quarter moon rose and Buz walked in his sleep. Either that, or he had been frightened as he slept and walked away from the offending sleep-cage.

  Cohn asked him if he had had a bad dream but the chimp made no reply.

  The next evening, after they had eaten a supper of yams and black beans and drunk tumblers of coconut juice, Cohn played on the phonograph a record of his father the cantor praying. The chimp yodeled along with him, and Cohn, in a sentimental mood, danced to the music of his father’s voice. He snapped his thumbs, shook his hips, and sang in Yiddish, “Ich tants far mayn tate.”

  Buz also tried a few dance steps, dangling one foot, then the other. Abruptly he stopped, his face a frozen sight. What had troubled him? He was these days a nervous chap. Puberty? Cohn wondered. Simply unfulfilled sexual desire? Certainly he was mature enough to want a female—lost cause.

  But if there was a female chimp around, Buz wasn’t responding in an attractive fashion. Standing at the cave entrance, he pitched into the night a teapot, two tablespoons, a salad bowl Cohn had sculpted with his jackknife and chisel. He had to wrestle two porcelain dishes away from Buz.

  Peering through the vines, the chimp bristled and hooted, then retreated, grumbling. Cohn wondered whether the little ape knew something he didn’t and ought to?

  It seemed to him he heard someone mumbling, or attempting to sing in a guttural voice. It came out a throaty basso aiming an aria to the night sky, possibly pledging his heart and soul to the song of the impassioned cantor. The phonograph was suddenly stilled—silent. Cohn heard nothing more outside the cave. He carried the kerosene lamp to the hut, holding it high so he could see to the edge of the forest.

  Amid the shadows wrought in the uneasy night, he had the startled impression he was gazing at a huge man in a black suit seated on the ground twenty feet beyond the hut.

  Cohn almost dropped the teetering lamp.

  “Who are you?”

  The man, rising slowly, became a gorilla lumbering away. When he stopped to look back, his deep, small, black eyes glowed in the lamplight. Cohn wanted frantically to run.

  The chimp at the cave stood hooting at the giant ape, preaching against his kind. He shrieked as the gorilla, reversing direction, moved toward him, halting, staring with blank gaze all the more frightening because it seemed to be his only expression.

  Cohn ducked into the cave, set down the lamp, and instinctively grabbed a shovel. As though he had touched hot metal, he tossed it aside and reached for an orange.

  Buz, sounding more like monkey than ape, retreated as the gorilla loomed up at the cave entrance. A musty, rank, yet heavy herbal odor filled the cave.

  Cohn in a quick whisper warned Buz to quiet down, but the half-hysterical animal, scooping a coconut off the shelf, pitched it at the gorilla. It bounced with a thud off his sloping skull, yet his eyes did not flicker in the lamplight as he stared at the two frightened inhabitants of the cave.

  Cohn, sotto voce, informed Buz that the gorilla would not attack if he did not bother him. “But he will rend you limb from limb if you act like a hysteric.”

  The chimp protested this strategy, but the gorilla, as if he had decided he would never make a home in this cave, mercifully fell back, turning again to cast an impassive stare at them. Or was it a depressive type they were contending with? As he knuckle-walked to the rain forest he expelled a burst of gorilla gas and was gone.

  Cohn wondered how many more apes, large or small, he must confront if the Lord’s computer had stopped telling Him the numerical truth.

  The next morning the gorilla sat alone under a bearded palm tree fifty feet from the cave.

  He seems a peaceful gent, Cohn thought, and I’ll pretend he isn’t there unless he gives me a sign to the contrary.

  He was a burly beast, almost ugly, with a shaggy blue-black head and heavy brow ridges. His nostrils were highlighted like polished black stones, and his mouth, when he yawned, was cavernous. The gorilla’s black coat was graying on his massive shoulders. Still, if he was frightening, he was not frightful. Despite his size and implied strength—perhaps because he seemed to have a talented ear for devotional music—there was something gentle about him. His dark brown eyes seemed experienced, saddened—after the Flood? —in a way Buz’s weren’t. Cohn respected the giant ape.

  All morning he had remained nearby, as though listening, waiting perhaps to hear the cantor singing. No doubt he was looking for company. Cohn asked Buz not to disturb him. A large friend in a small world had
its advantages. But Buz, though he listened obediently, at least respectfully, on catching sight of the gorilla sitting under his favorite white acacia, persistently banged an aluminum frying pan against the escarpment until it howled like a metal drum. He orated at length, growing hoarse, and barking like a baboon. But the gorilla sat motionlessly watching.

  Cohn figured he might put on a phonograph record to test his theory; instead he ventured forth and sat in the grass about ten feet from the gorilla, his heart pounding. One false move—for instance, threatening the beast by staring into his eyes—and goodbye Cohn.

  Calvin Cohn then experienced an extraordinary insight: I know this one. I know his scent. We’ve met before.

  “Are you the one,” he asked humbly, “who fed me when I was sick? If so, please accept heartfelt thanks.”

  The gorilla blinked as though he wasn’t sure he understood the question. He stared at Cohn as if he might have helped him, or he might not; he had his mystery.

  Cohn cautiously approached the huge animal—he weighed a good five hundred pounds—with extended hand, his gaze on the ground.

  The gorilla rose on his short legs, as he watched the man coming toward him, and modestly raised his own right arm. But Buz, spying the gesture, ran between them, screeching, before the extended arms could become a handclasp.

  Although Cohn tried to restrain the jealous chimp, Buz chattered at the gorilla, taunting him.

  The chimp pretend-charged, backed off, lunged forward as if to attack, but the gorilla patiently fended him off with his meaty long arm. Grunting at the chimp, he knuckle-walked away. He lifted himself into an acacia tree and sat on a low bough in the dappled sunlight, peacefully observing the scene below.

  A true gentleman, Cohn thought.

  “If it’s all right with you,” he addressed the gorilla in gratitude, “I’d like to call you George, after my late wife’s father, who was an accomplished dentist, a wonderful man. He often fixed people’s teeth for nothing.”

  He told the gorilla they three were alone in the world and must look after each other.