God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  “I am the best,” Esau admitted. “Better than Buz or whoever.”

  Cohn pretended not to have heard “whoever.” He told him he was worried about Saul of Tarsus. “He may have been about to do real harm to little Sara, the baboon child who sits with the others on that big rock on the other side of the rice paddy. Somebody said you’ve been telling him that the baboons don’t belong here because they’re strangers.”

  Esau said he had never liked them. “They’re monkeys and ought to look like monkeys. Instead, they look like monkeys with dog-heads, I don’t go for that.”

  Cohn then recited the First Admonition, the part about cherishing life.

  Esau, after a minute’s reflection, said he would try to tolerate the baboons although he didn’t naturally take to them. He then asked Cohn if they were expecting a shipment of female chimps in the near future.

  Cohn answered it was possible that an unattached female or two—God willing—might one day wander into the neighborhood, but it was impossible to predict when.

  Esau said that masturbating gave him a headache and he would prefer something more practical.

  “Sublimation is what I advise, considering circumstances,” said Cohn. “That’s using one’s sexual energy creatively—in thought, art, or some satisfying labor.”

  Esau, after listening with a stunned expression, asked after Mary Madelyn. “How is she doing with her baby?”

  “She’s doing fine,” said Cohn, not liking to talk to him about Mary Madelyn, or the baby.

  “You’re a lucky prick,” said Esau, regarding him enviously. “I bet you get it every night.”

  Cohn told him to be careful of his language.

  Esau rose erect, and with his powerful arms lifted Cohn off the ground in hearty embrace, all but cracking four of his ribs.

  Neither of them laughed, though both were laughing.

  One day when the sun shone golden, and a summer breeze blew an armada of long white clouds through the cerulean ocean-sky, Sara hopped off the big rock, where the adult baboons had sunned themselves asleep, and Pat and Aloysius were seriously grooming each other, and she danced in the warm grass. She nosed into a patch of bare earth, pushing aside small stones in search of insects but found none.

  Sara traveled elegantly through the grass, stopping for a mouthful of dusty water in a small waterhole, then climbed a slender, fragrant, yellow sandalwood and fell asleep in the crook of two upper branches.

  Saul of Tarsus, spotting her there, pointed her out to Esau, Buz, Esterhazy, Bromberg, and Luke, who were out prospecting for chimpanzee females, although it was agreed there were none.

  Esau at once took charge. He stationed Bromberg, Esterhazy, and Luke at the trunks of three neighboring trees, and ordered Buz to go home.

  “Go home yourself,” Buz told him.

  “This hunt isn’t for an intellectual-type chimp. Your brains will get in the way.”

  “Which hunt are you referring to?”

  “You better go home before you fall on your head.”

  Buz ran off to tell Cohn what was going on, but Cohn wasn’t in the cave; he, and Mary Madelyn, carrying Rebekah nursing, were sitting at the beach, watching the waves.

  (“Suppose a boat came,” said Calvin Cohn.

  “Could I and Iwanda go with you?” she asked.

  “Go where? No boat will ever come.”)

  Annoyed because nobody was there to hear his news, Buz flung a mango pit into the cave and scampered off when the noise of glass breaking sounded inside.

  Esau, his hair thickening as he climbed the sandalwood where Sara lay sleeping on her stomach, as the chimps on the ground tensely watched, with a quick leap forward grabbed the baboon girl. Sara awoke as he touched her, screeching as if she had been set afire, but Esau had her by her hind legs.

  He held the screaming, wildly twisting, little baboon, and slammed her head against the tree until the trunk ran blood.

  When Max and Arthur, after galloping across the savanna toward Sara’s shrill screams, came upon the chimps in the wood, Esau was descending the tree with the body of Sara hanging by its tail from his mouth.

  The baboons, with a barking roar, leapt at the apes waiting at the base of the sandalwood, but the chimps, hooting, screaming, fought them off. Luke flung rocks underhand, as Bromberg belabored them with a heavy stick he had picked up. The baboons fled into the bush.

  Esau sat on a fallen dead tree, dismembering Sara, the other chimps seated in a silent semicircle, each with his hand formally extended, each getting nothing.

  After a solitary meal, relishing every morsel, grunting over the ravishing taste of fresh meat, Esau at length distributed a leg ligament to Saul of Tarsus, a small strip of gut to Esterhazy, the bloody windpipe to Luke, who fruitlessly blew into it; and Bromberg was permitted to suck Sara’s eyeballs before Esau began to pry out the brain.

  One by one he tossed away the bone fragments of the shattered small skull until he had exposed the pulpy, pinkly-bloodied brain. He plucked it out with his fingers, bit into it, savoring it, chewing slowly, adding a mouthful of leaves Luke had brought him to make the taste of brain last longer. Luke also wanted to keep the delicacy from being too quickly devoured.

  At the end of the tastiest meal he remembered since he was a boy in the headlands, Esau handed the remains of little Sara’s skeleton to Bromberg—“a nice guy.” The other chimpanzees extended their upturned palms, but Bromberg, as he studied the possibilities of the repast, pushed all hands away.

  They sat motionless, each concentrating on Bromberg gnawing what was left of flesh on the bones. He handed a few bare bones around, the right arm to Luke, who, Esterhazy complained, had been of no earthly help on the hunt. He got both of Sara’s kneecaps. The chimps sniffed the bones, gave them a lick or two, and threw them away.

  Esau, lying in the grass, belched resonantly. “I am the Alpha of them all,” he murmured as he fell asleep.

  His companions sat on the ground studying Sara’s naked skeleton.

  Cohn, after inspecting the sack containing the remains of Sara that Buz had collected and delivered to him, was horrified, appalled, embittered, saddened.

  He thundered against the chimps who had participated in the baboon hunt, calling them depraved killers. For their evil deed he threatened painful punishment. He swore he would flay, uproot, exile them for their brutality, disrespect for the Admonitions; for their insensitivity to the welfare of the Island community, to the changed world and altered conditions of earthly survival.

  As Cohn railed against them in hoarse, terrifying tones, Buz covered both big ears with his hands, and Mary Madelyn temporarily hid the baby in the bushes.

  When he had calmed down and reflected, although grieved, tormented, still angered, Cohn felt he had to deal more subtly with the apes involved in Sara’s murder. Rage and curses would get him rage and curses.

  These apes, after all, were not the naive chimpanzees of the past, many of whose recent progenitors had performed as comedians in vaudeville, television, zoos. The island creatures were privileged characters who spoke, and thought, in a complex human tongue, chimps who had improved themselves, and, one had hoped, their lives and lot.

  In the schooltree they had heard, and daily discussed, Cohn’s lectures on history, science, and literature; and his stories, maxims, recitations, homilies, exhortations—some of which they had spontaneously applauded. And they had had before them the example of their teacher as moral being, family man, author of the Seven Admonitions. When, therefore, would their education take hold, deepen conscience, help them become better, more responsible, living beings? When would they experience that inspired insight that would wake in them what civilization might mean? Who would have thought that this chimpanzee elite would destroy and devour an innocent child?

  Cohn planned a new course of lectures, oriented around the matter of significant values. And he made it a point to talk to each chimp.

  “Why did you do it, Esterhazy?” Cohn asked the bo
okkeeperish ape.

  “Esau said to.”

  “Don’t you have a will of your own?”

  “Not yet,” said Esterhazy.

  Cohn sat shivah for a week.

  He would bury Sara’s bones.

  A funeral was in order, a ceremony of public mourning and respect for life—though they were strangers to her—for the life of the deceased, a child who would never know what it was to be other than a child. A bare few of the chimpanzee community attended, but of those implicated in Sara’s murder, only Esterhazy was present.

  Mary Madelyn was there, wearing her white dress, which she had to remove every time she nursed the baby. Hattie sat close by them, grooming Mary Madelyn’s arms and happily tickling the baby’s pink feet so that it giggled or wailed at serious moments, embarrassing its mother and disturbing Cohn.

  Melchior, lips puckered, soberly listened to Cohn’s graveside eulogy. Buz, thinking his thoughts, was present. And George the gorilla, sitting high in a neighboring tree, looked down at the services, sobered by them. He seemed to have a natural appreciation of funerals. No official Kaddish was recited for the dead child, but Cohn, to George’s pleasure, put on a record of his father singing “El Molei Rachameem,” a simple prayer for the dead. Dead is dead, who needs more than a song of remembrance?

  Reversing his role as digger of bones, Cohn buried the child’s skeleton—he had reconstructed it as best he could—near a small natural garden of flowers not far from the schooltree. None of the baboon relatives was at the funeral although Buz had been sent to invite them. He said they hadn’t let him approach their rock, confronting him with a yapping chorus of enraged alarm-barks and threats. He hadn’t stayed to argue with them.

  “They are stupid yokels,” said Buz.

  At the schooltree the next morning, with all scholars present, the killers of Sara sitting together in a tight cluster of males high in the eucalyptus, which gave forth—after a night’s fresh rain—an expansive aromatic odor, Cohn, his face raised toward the crown of the tree, spoke directly at Esau, saying certain things. For instance: “If you depreciate lives, the worth of your own diminishes. Therefore remember the Seven Admonitions.”

  Esau coughed dryly.

  Waxing poetic, Cohn said a life gone was a gone life. A flower, or sunrise, no longer existed for it Neither did a cup of tea—if tea was your dish. The gone life knew it not any longer. No one could describe Nothing, but one’s life gone was an aspect, a mode, of nothing. Whoever lived even in Paradise—if that’s where she/he had gone—was not here where the weather was more interesting because it varied as the seasons changed.

  “Or to put in more practical terms, when you are dead, a fig or sun seed will not tickle your taste buds, and no warm hand will groom you again.”

  He said that a child—whosesoever—had an inborn, God-given right to grow up to be more than a child. “A life—to be a life—must run its course. Thus it achieves freedom of choice, within the usual limitations, but certainly the freedom to imagine the future. Having a future—or thinking you have—waters the gardens of the mind. As though one lives in two places at the same time. Therefore,” said Cohn, “it was an evil act of deprivation to destroy little Sara’s future.”

  The apes, though not unmoved, applauded moderately. Mary Madelyn gave a loud “Hurrah,” but Buz, detesting homilies—they insulted his intelligence—snorted.

  When Cohn, having expressed himself, sat down in his chair, Esau rose, expanding his chest and grabbing a bushy branch to steady himself. More and more he resembled a small gorilla, not necessarily a runt, Cohn thought, but perhaps a runt and a half. When Esau’s voice boomed forth, George, assailed by it, dropped out of his cedar and walked away. Esau called him a fat pig, and George blew him some gorilla gas.

  Esau proclaimed that every chimp he had known “in the good old days in the highland” had hunted small baboons. It was a perfectly natural, naturally selective, thing to do. The hunt was stimulating and the flesh delicious. “Also it gives me a lift to hear the sound of a crunchy skull that you have batted against something hard.

  “And besides that, those baboons are dirty, stinking, thieving monkeys, interfering into everybody’s business. They breed like rats and foul up all over the clean bush. If we don’t control their population they will squat all over this island and we will have to get off.

  “And further to that, all of us are mighty sick and tired of eating so much goddam fruit, plus moldy matzos for dessert.”

  The male chimps clapped heartily.

  “Of course,” Esau went on almost congenially, “if there was a piece of sex around instead of that horseass sublimation you are trying to trick on us, we would have something to keep our thoughts going, but the way it has turned out, only our Jewish instructor has sex whenever he might want it, with somebody who happens to be related closer to us; and the rest of us have nothing but our dongs to pull.”

  Buz stood up and clapped loudly but sat down before Cohn could say anything.

  Cohn rose and remarked that since the Day of Devastation, followed by the Late Unlamented Flood, this island had become a privileged place, a sanctuary for the few lives that remained in the world. “And it’s got to stay a sanctuary, even if that means a certain amount of food monotony and a few other minor inconveniences.”

  He asked Esau and his hunter friends to promise they would not terrorize any of the other baboon children; and Esau said if that was what the community wanted, that’s what they would get, even if it went against his personal grain.

  Cohn did not suggest a voice vote, although tempted to; he wasn’t sure he had the votes to win—but he told Esau to raise his right arm and pledge “I will not kill. I will obey the Seven Admonitions.”

  Esau raised his left arm and solemnly swore he would never again “quote, never again”—kill an innocent female baboon child, and Esterhazy and Bromberg swore along with him.

  Pat and Aloysius, groomed immaculate by their mothers, went with them for a root-dig and soon outdistanced and lost the ladies. Climbing a tree to see where they were, they found themselves staring through some branches at Esterhazy, he as astonished as they.

  His fur risen, Esterhazy let out a long distress-hoot.

  The baboon boys, not waiting to hear the end of it, leaped to the ground and discovered they were being chased by the chimps who had immediately responded to Esterhazy’s call —Bromberg, Luke, Saul of Tarsus, and after several minutes, Esau himself. Esterhazy also pursued the baboon boys. Nobody mentioned a pledge of any sort. Besides, that was a pledge not to interfere with a female, and these madly running boys were no girls. Girls couldn’t run that fast.

  Twisting and darting amid a grove of palms a short distance from the sea, Pat and Aloysius, unable to contend with the speed and agility of the adult chimps racing after them, scuttered up a nut palm, Aloysius behind Pat, both emitting screams as they hastened into the crown.

  Esau stationed his men at the base of the bearded date palms nearest the one the boy baboons had gone up, and hand over hand, he climbed the tree after them.

  Aloysius, seeing him coming up, flung himself into an adjoining, shorter, broad-crowned palm; and Pat, making a similar large leap, stayed on Aloysius’s tail, still scream-barking.

  Because Bromberg was stationed at the trunk of this tree, without stopping they jumped into the top of the nearest stout palm—at the bottom of which, they discovered, Esterhazy stood guard.

  Esau had plunged after them into the broad-crowned palm.

  The baboon children leaped at the trunk of a long palm arced like a scimitar, held tight, and quickly raced up to its feathery small crown. At that moment Max and Arthur, the adult baboons, came roaring into the palm grove with ferocious barking and fangs bared.

  They simultaneously attacked Bromberg, who tried fending them off with sharp barks and both arms flailing, but the baboons penetrated his defense and tore at his legs and pink scrotum. Bromberg, shrilly screaming, snarled, and in a moment of pause
, hobbled off, then ran, bleeding down his legs.

  The adult baboons fought fiercely with Esterhazy, who ran up the long arced palm pursued by Max.

  Arthur, noisily jabbing at Luke and Saul of Tarsus protecting each other back to back, snapped at them in feinting leaps, but was afraid to charge two male chimpanzees. They hooted, barked, showed their teeth, and pawed at the jumping baboon, holding him off.

  Esau had catapulted himself into the slender curved palm the little boys were in now, both screeching as they peered down at the baboon males on the ground.

  Aloysius jumped back onto the shorter palm, lost his grip on a swishing branch, grabbed and lost another, and tumbled twenty feet to the ground, hitting Luke and knocking him out. Aloysius escaped into the bushes, followed by Arthur. Max soon scampered after them.

  Little Pat, still in the palms, hopped into a live oak at the edge of the palm grove, and as Esau swung in after him, jumped again into the grove, still chased by the Alpha Ape. Pat, taking a desperate chance, dove into the bushes below, and as he lay gasping on the ground on his belly, trying to breathe, was pounced on by Saul of Tarsus and Bromberg.

  Max and Arthur returned on the run, searching for Pat, but Esau, who had snatched the squirming, terrified boy away from his captors, standing erect, his body hair heavily full, swung the screaming baboon by his legs at the adult baboons. They drew back, snarling, and were at once savaged by Luke and Esterhazy. Max and Arthur rushed into the bushes.

  Esau, whirling the boy baboon over his head, slammed him hard against a rock. The breaking skull made the sound of a small explosion. Pat now hung limp in Esau’s hand.

  Squatting on the ground, facing his hungry companions, he began to peel the bone fragments off the baboon’s bloody skull to dig at once for the brain.

  Bromberg, still bleeding from wounds on both legs, timidly requested the testicles, and Esau promised him one if he behaved while he ate his meal.