God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  “Well, that’s the end of that story,” he told Buz, “except that the Talmudists say Isaac returned from Paradise after three years, to his father’s house, and soon began to look for a bride. According to the commentators, he was thirty-seven years old when the incident of the burnt offering occurred—and even given the evidence, that’s an astonishment.”

  The chimp, after sitting a moment in silence, asked, “When will I get morried, Dod?”

  Cohn, genuinely moved, said he didn’t see how that could happen just then. “I’m afraid there’s nobody on this island you can marry.”

  “Con’t I morry you?”

  Cohn, though he appreciated the sentiment, said it wouldn’t work. But he admitted, “We are sort of married in the sense that we are living together and sharing a similar fate.”

  Buz was disappointed.

  Cohn said he hoped Buz had anyway enjoyed his retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac, though it seemed to get more involved every time he retold it.

  Buz said he thought it was a pretty simple story.

  During the season of rains, confined to the cave for days, they were often bored. Cohn continued to relate stories of his father—peace on his head. When the old Cohn was seventy-five, he cut into his long white beard to have a better look at his lifelong face. The chimp got a pair of scissors out of the toolbox and began to snip at his own skimpy beard, but Cohn took them away.

  On wet days Cohn would sometimes dim the kerosene lamp and, in the shadowy cave, as it windily poured outside, would play records on the wind-up portable phonograph. Despite the force of the gale, George the gorilla sat under a dripping acacia, soaked to the skin, his drenched head bent to his chest as he listened through the wind to the vibrant bray of Cohn’s father the cantor.

  But when the gorilla, as the downpour lightened, or momentarily ceased, attempted to edge closer to the cave, Buz, who often peeked through the curtain of vines to follow George’s movements when he was in the vicinity, flung stones, spoons, bamboo sticks at him. And when he ran out of ammunition, he threw cups and saucers and carved wooden figurines, despite Cohn’s ringing disapproval.

  Cohn, when the rain let up long enough for him to venture forth in his orange oilskins, occasionally came upon George as they were seeking tubers, or fruit, in the woodland. One day as they stood a short distance apart, Cohn tried to express his apologies to George for the chimp’s immature behavior. He said he hoped Buz would soon get used to George; he was a little on the fearful side—despite his intelligence—having been traumatized as a child by being separated from his mother by a scientist who had cut into his neck for reasons of experiment. George raised his hand to touch his throat, then turned and plunged off. That was as much direct communication as they had experienced up to then, but Cohn was not disheartened.

  Having George nearby, however, had certain disadvantages. The gorilla, who lived on grasses, roots, bark, bamboo pith, also seemed to relish fruit for dessert, and some of the fruit trees, when he was in residence, were all but denuded after George had been out collecting. He was a connoisseur and would fling aside fifty bitter mangoes to find one sweet one. Cohn couldn’t stand the waste.

  Yet he felt sorry for the animal—gorillas were polygamous family types, and George had no one to go home to. He was a wanderer in the forest and wandered alone; Cohn could hear him swishing through the vegetation. He often thought, when they passed each other in a clearing, of asking him to the cave for an occasional meal, but when he tried in sign language—pointing to his mouth with his finger—to convey an invitation that George return with him for a fruit-salad dessert plus a cup of banana beer, the wary great ape, his dark brown eyes lonelily observing Cohn, made mournful growling noises.

  Cohn had more than once attempted to follow George in the forest, but the gorilla screamed and trumpeted his displeasure, and Cohn hastened away. One day he decided to hold his ground when he encountered the great ape, and for an uneasy moment he watched George approach bi-pedally. Cohn, as advised in Dr. Bünder’s book, lowered his eyes and stared at his toes as George came forward and noisily sniffed Cohn’s head and ears, then slunk away as if affronted by the odor.

  But he was back as though by appointment, rain or shine, when the cantor was singing in the phonograph. The chimp, after an initial lively response to the old man praying, now stuffed his fingers into his ears and orated against the noise. George, on the other hand, listening outside the cave, after a magnificent Kaddish, rose to his full height and pounded his chest as if it were a kettledrum.

  When the chimp heard the gorilla booming his breast he hid in the rear of the cave and covered his head with dirty laundry.

  George also liked to be present when Cohn, preferably in the hut, but also in the cave, from which his voice could be heard, was reading aloud to Buz or telling him stories. The gorilla listened as though he understood every word—though sometimes his eyes expressed puzzlement—of Cohn’s tales, particularly those about his father the rabbi. George would grunt, perhaps was affected by an act of mercy the old man had engaged in, as when he had labored up the stairs of a cold tenement to deliver a pail of coal to an old woman in a freezing flat.

  And Cohn could hear the gorilla breathing in suspense as he read aloud, for instance, of the escape of the Israelites across the parted Red Sea, pursued furiously by hordes of Egyptian charioteers. When the waves of the sea crashed on their heads, and horses and men drowned embracing, George cried out as though in woe. Cohn felt that the gorilla was on the verge of speech even if he hadn’t yet learned sign language. There was no saying what the future might bring. Cohn hoped someday to ask George how he had been saved from the Devastation. Had God appeared to him, and if He had, in what language had they conversed?

  As the windy, lashing rains diminished, the soaked earth gave forth miniature gold orchids, lilies, poinsettias. And mimosas, acacias, jacarandas burst into yellow, red, purple blossoms. After the rain they listened to water dripping from leaf to leaf in the trees. The chimp sat on Cohn’s lap after a sit-wrestle, which was work. Buz was a big lad now, growing taller, stronger. Cohn had begun to build him a rocker of his own to sit in as he listened to stories.

  Now Cohn was quietly talking about the gorilla to his boy. He asked Buz to be nice to him. “He’s gentle and does no harm to anybody. He hangs around this cave because he’s lonely. He’s a family type, it says in the ape book.”

  “He looks mean to me,” Buz said. “If he ever cotches me in the forest on a dark night, he will eat me up.”

  “He wouldn’t eat a cockroach. Gorillas are herbivores.”

  “I don’t like his name either.”

  “What would you have suggested?” Cohn had stiffened a little.

  “Adolph.”

  “Over my dead body.” Cohn said he had named the gorilla after a fine dentist he knew, but also after George Washington; and he told Buz the story of the cherry tree. He warned the chimp that the more sticks and stones he flung at George, the more Buz’s fear of him would grow.

  “Try a little love,” Cohn suggested.

  “I don’t see what love hos to do with thot fot gorilla. You said thot if it didn’t work before the Flood why should it work ofter ?”

  “These are different times,” Cohn explained. “As we progress, what didn’t work in the past may work hereafter.”

  “I know thot,” Buz answered, “but does thot stupid gorilla?”

  Someone close by coughed, and they discovered George outside, sitting against the wall of the escarpment. Seeing himself discovered, the embarrassed gorilla rose and knuckle-lumbered away.

  The chimp, hopping on both legs, cried murder. “He’s a fot, stupid pig, and besides thot, he stinks.”

  Cohn warned him not to start that kind of talk. “How often must I tell you of the Devastation that destroyed the world and every living being except you, me, and George? If we expect to go on living we have to be kind to each other.”

  The chimp, in disgust, climbed the
wall shelves and sat on the top, as far from Cohn as he could. He spent most of the day in his hammock outside the cave.

  On his return from the rice paddies the next afternoon, Cohn hunted for a record whose melody he had been humming that morning.

  He found the carton of records where he kept them, high on the wooden shelves, but couldn’t locate the one he wanted. Counting them, Cohn, to his dismay, found that one was missing—there were nine instead of ten.

  Had Buz taken it to punish his dod for something? Disturbed, Cohn rushed out of the cave looking for the chimp. Instead of Buz he spied George the gorilla seated in a eucalyptus, in mid-tree, steadying himself by holding onto an overhead branch, as he chewed on the phonograph record he held in his hand. He had taken a large bite and was trying to savor it as he crackingly chewed. Then George spat it out and flung the record away. It sailed in the air like a frisbee and struck the escarpment, breaking into bits.

  Cohn uttered a brokenhearted sob. “Bastard-fool,” he shouted, “I’ll shoot you dead if you ever again enter the cave without my permission.”

  George hastily lowered himself to the bottom limb and dropped to the ground. He ran into the rain forest like a runaway locomotive.

  During the spring they explored the far end of the island, after beaching the rubber raft near a stunted palm.

  “Tie it up,” Cohn ordered. “There’s nothing in sight, but one never knows.”

  He was wearing his poncho and rain-repellent fur hat after a chest cold two weeks before. His voice was hoarse. Cohn carried a 30.06 Winchester 70 rifle he had discovered on the last trip to the Rebekah Q. Why he had brought it along on his present jaunt into the far country, he wasn’t sure. He had overoiled the weapon, and the dripping barrel smelled.

  It was a large gun and Cohn was uneasy about leaving it behind just anywhere, as they were exploring. A stupid fear, really atavistic. It should have gone out with the Devastation, but somehow persisted.

  Buz wore a Venetian gondolier’s red-ribboned straw hat he had found in Dr. Bünder’s clothes closet, and was otherwise unclothed. He had recently tried on a pair of Cohn’s winter drawers but they did not fit well. In fact, he had burst through two pairs before giving up.

  He carried along an aluminum oar, at times resting it on his shoulder in the same military fashion Cohn held the Winchester. As they were exploring a low sandstone outcropping about two miles from shore, Cohn stopped, speechless, his throat constricted, and pointed to a blob of semi-liquid dark matter he had almost stepped into.

  Buz raised his oar to kill the creature, but Cohn, gone fearfully pale, grabbed the ape’s arm, hoarsely crying, “Don’t, it will splatter us. It’s an animal spoor.”

  “Whot’s thot?”

  “In this case, animal droppings—excrement.”

  “Shit?”

  “More or less, though I don’t care for that word on this island.”

  “It’s the gorilla!”

  Cohn didn’t think so. “A gorilla’s dung tends to be a dry, fibrous, three-lobed dropping. This is semi-liquid without sign of fiber.”

  “I say it’s thot stupid gorilla. It smells like him.”

  “What would he be doing up here in the headlands?”

  “He’s spying on us.”

  “What in the world for?”

  “Because he’s a spy and thot’s whot they do. He follows us and hears whot we say.”

  “Whatever animal this derived from,” Cohn said uneasily, “I don’t want to think about. Let’s get out of here and head back to the cave.”

  “Suppose it’s a lady?”

  Cohn, on reexamining the turd, said he hadn’t thought of that.

  When they returned to the stunted palm at the beach where they had moored the raft, to their dismay and stupefaction it was gone. Cohn, shading his eyes, saw a yellow speck on the distant water, floating away. Buz lamented he had left a bag of dried figs in it.

  “I was depending on that raft to get us off this island someday,” Cohn muttered. “There has to be another island, maybe a piece of what was once African coast floating around. Given the few tools we have, it will take us months to construct a usable boat.”

  He turned in annoyance to Buz. “How did it happen? I told you to tie the raft to the palm tree.”

  Buz confessed he hadn’t learned to tie a decent knot. “My fingers don’t know how to make one.”

  “Why in Christ’s name didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t wont you to swear ot me.”

  Cohn denied it in exasperation. “Have I ever sworn at you?”

  “I heard you curse thot gorilla.”

  “There’s a difference between curse and curse out,” Cohn explained, but the chimp seemed doubtful.

  They shouldered arms and began the long trek across the island to their cave.

  From time to time Cohn stopped to shoot a rifle bullet in practice. Whenever he fell on his knee to fire, Buz ran for shelter.

  The night they arrived at the cave, Buz sat on Cohn’s lap and asked for a story.

  Cohn told him he thought that the story one heard most probably became the one he would live out.

  Buz then said he didn’t want to hear one.

  But Cohn, in a mood for talk, told Buz that a philosopher by the name of Ortega y Gasset once said that the difference between a man and a chimp is that the chimp wakes every morning as if no other chimpanzee had existed before him.

  Buz didn’t like that philosopher. “I think of my mother, and I think of Dr. Bünder.”

  “He was no chimp,” Cohn said.

  Buz said he could have been one.

  Cohn said he was curious about how Buz had managed to escape death on the Day of Devastation.

  “I hid in the toilet”

  “Why didn’t Dr. Bünder take you with him?”

  The chimp’s voice wavered. “He said in my ear thot he didn’t wont me to drown in the ocean.”

  “So he left you on the ship and took to a lifeboat?”

  Buz reminded Cohn that he was the one who was alive and not Dr. Bünder. “But I am grateful for whot he did for me.” He said he thought they ought to change the name of the island to Dr. Walther Bünder Island, but Cohn did not favor the idea.

  He said he would rather call it Survivor’s Island. “Survive is what we have to do. Thus we protest our fate to God and at the same time imitate Him.”

  “Whot for?”

  “My father said survival was one way we shared God’s purpose.”

  Buz, vaguely fingering his pink phallus, said his opinion was that the true purpose of life was to have as much fun as one could.

  Cohn separated his hand from his organ. “Leave it alone, let it breathe.”

  Buz bristled, hair thickening.

  “Leave it alone,” Cohn insisted, “until you know what to do with it, sexually speaking.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, instead of twisting my arm?”

  Cohn apologized. “Sex ties up with survival,” he explained, “not to speak of certain pleasures of creation. For survival the participants need someone of the opposite sex and neither of us is that. Given the nature of things, that limits possibility.”

  Buz stealthily tried to slip his fingers between Cohn’s thighs, and though his dod knew it was meant benignly he would not allow his boy to touch his testicles.

  Buz snuggled close and was soon sucking Cohn’s nipple through Dr. Bünder’s white silk shirt. The tug of the chimp’s insistent lips on his dry nipple hurt, but Cohn let him suck.

  Outside the cave, George, peeking through the ivy curtain, stared at the sight, but when Cohn looked up he let go of the ivy and scampered off.

  Jealous? Shocked? Outraged? Cohn wondered. He gazed down at the little chimp at his breast.

  If you had suckled the lad, could you marry him?

  The Schooltree

  God was silent.

  Cohn tried to squeeze out a small assurance. That had its dangers: Would He respond to preserve me, or w
ould that remind Him to knock me off?

  Why would He do that? Cohn thought. I’m the only man left—no serious threat to Him. Why don’t I simply give notice I’m still around, and hope it helps because He enjoys the attention I give Him?

  On the other hand, I could forget the whole business and pray He forgets me.

  (I could also ask, if He responds, “Why does God permit evil?”

  ““How could I not?””

  Touché.)

  Cohn tried prayer to establish contact but no vibrations occurred, and in muddled desperation he flung a coconut at the night sky.

  The fruit ascended and never descended, not as fruit. Something happened on high—perhaps the coconut struck an astral body or itself became one?

  Whatever caused what, Cohn couldn’t say, but a contained cosmic bang occurred from whose center a flaring stream of flame shot forth. Watching in wonder, Cohn concluded this was no meteor in flight, but a twisting hard fire with his initials on it—for Curse Cohn? Clobber or Castrate Cohn?

  He hurried to his protective cave, and though a long day passed as he lay hidden under a rock ledge, Cohn heard no punitive spat of electric, no hiss of flame, boom of thunder, or driving rain. The hidden man imagined the coconut had whizzed past God’s good ear, Who wrote in icy letters in the sky, ““Don’t make waves!”” Then more gently, ““Don’t call anything to my attention; I will call it to yours.””

  Cohn remembered: God was Torah. He was made of words.

  Cohn suggested a census to Buz, “Of every bug, to see if any are present.”

  Though they roamed the breadth of the island, poking into mounds, webs, combs, and dry holes, they located no ants, spiders, roaches—no flies or bedbugs either.

  The Lord had wiped the island clean of insects—no buzzing except Buz, who groomed himself under both arms and discovered no single louse or flea.

  Meandering homeward, they explored a moist deep cave one would think might harbor a waterbug or two; but it contained no more than a network of labyrinthine galleries, narrow and broad, which led crookedly to others where stalactites hung like icicles from stone ceilings, dripping glowing drops on the limestone stumps rising from sweating floors.