God's Grace

by Bernard Malamud

  The twins, their palms extended, in small voices begged for a bit of flesh; and Esau stopped chewing little Pat’s remains long enough to give them both a good tickle until they broke into excruciating laughter.

  Esau resumed eating the yummy brain after reminding those present what they already knew—that little Pat could in no way be described as a baboon girl.

  While strolling with Buz, as Cohn attempted to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics and his boy corrected his dod’s facts, they came upon four chimps silently observing a fifth voraciously feasting on the boy baboon.

  Cohn ran furiously into their midst, tore the partially eaten cadaver out of Esau’s bloody hands, and with a cry flung it deep into the bushes. Saul of Tarsus watched it in flight, and when it fell, was about to bolt for it, but seeing the other apes sitting frozen, did not move.

  “Each devours his neighbor’s flesh,” Cohn shouted from Isaiah, swearing he had begged them not to repeat this heinous crime.

  “Wouldn’t you think you owed me some consideration for how comfortable I have helped make your lives? You have work, leisure, free schooling and health care. You have survived a Disastrous Flood and live in comparative peace on an indescribably beautiful island. We have a functioning community and are on the verge of an evolutionary advance, if not breakthrough. And how do you show your appreciation of these advantages? In the murder of children!”

  He accused them of ingratitude. He called them hypocrites. “Wasn’t it only yesterday that three of you raised your hands in a solemn oath to obey the Seven Admonitions, yet hadn’t the slightest intention to do so? You’re a disgrace to decent chimpanzees wherever they may be.”

  They listened with interest as Cohn castigated them. Only Esau was restless as he rubbed the blood off his hairy fingers with oak leaves. One by one he wiped the fingers, then with a broken twig cleaned under his fingernails.

  Cohn ran on: “After all the poems and stories we discussed in class regarding the sanctity of life, and after the homily I preached at little Sara’s funeral; to wit, a child’s right to experience the awakening of sensibility, thought, the discovery of self, and afterwards to emerge in the world in the majesty of youth—despite that, you have with your hands and teeth torn their bodies apart and cannibalized them.”

  “What the hell are you—some crazy kind of vegetarian?” Esau asked, still cleaning his fingernails.

  Cohn called them corrupt and brutish evildoers, hardhearted beasts with little understanding or compassion.

  “Remember man destroyed himself by his selfishness and indifference to those who were different from, or differed with, him. He scorned himself to death. At least learn that lesson if you want to evade his fate.

  “I have no desire to punish you corporally,” he announced, “therefore by the authority vested in me as Protector of the Community, I hereby officially exile the three of you—Esau, the falsely redeemed—you fake—and Bromberg, who has no second thought after a limp first—and Esterhazy, coward and fool.”

  He said he would chastise Luke and Saul of Tarsus at a later date in a manner befitting their age.

  They both cheered.

  “Quiet,” ordered Cohn. “Now, therefore, I order you three to pack your gear and leave this end of the island. If there was another island in the neighboring waters, I would exile you there, provided there was a ferry boat to transport you —but since there isn’t another island, so far as I know, I want you to go elsewhere on this, far away and out of sight. If we lay eyes on you again, I warn you of direst consequences.”

  After he had said this, Cohn felt himself trembling.

  The three adult apes glanced uneasily at each other and then Esau rose with a bellow to his full height and advanced on Cohn with four fangs gleaming. Buz, Esterhazy, Bromberg, Luke, and Saul of Tarsus noisily scattered.

  Cohn, frozen an instant, began to back up slowly, wishing he had brought along his spear when he had started out for a walk with Buz. What can I do that Esau can’t—or doesn’t expect? If I try force against his force I won’t have much to show, if anything.

  He planned at least a quick kick in the groin, and if that worked, to take off for the cave hurriedly, and once there, to shove the defensive wall across the opening. When Esau had left the scene he would sneak out and round up Mary Madelyn and the baby.

  Yet Cohn knew that if he got close enough to kick Esau where it hurt, he was close enough to be upended by Esau’s longer reach.

  The Alpha Ape pounded his chest. “You busybody horseass, you stole my natural food out of my mouth. You possessed my betrothed and forced her to bear your half-breed child. I will break every Jewbone in your head.”

  He advanced toward Cohn, standing erect, both arms extended, hoot-barking, the ferocity of his expression fearsome.

  This is no place for me, thought Cohn, wishing for a slingshot; but he had none, so he retreated, making ugly faces and disgusting noises, but without a frightening mask they had no effect.

  “Maybe we ought to talk, Esau. Let’s reason together.”

  He turned to run as the ape pounced on him, snatching Cohn like a fierce lover, lifting him off the ground. Instead of embracing him he flung him down like a dead dog. Cohn grunted in pain and tried to roll into the brush. Esau dragged him forth by his leg and with a snarl fell on him.

  “Help—Buz,” Cohn cried.

  But there was no Buz, until Cohn caught a split-second glimpse of him sitting on an upper branch of a tree, looking down at the combat with absorbed interest, as he peeled an orange.

  Life grew dark for Cohn. Death was a white eye centered in a staring black face. That was how he saw Esau, who seemed to be choking him to death. Afterwards he would bash Cohn’s skull with a rock and eat his brain as a delicacy. Cohn hoped it poisoned the evil ape.

  He himself wandered in Paradise, trying to exit, but all portals were locked. Woe is me, he muttered, how does one get back into life? He had asked this question of the Lord and heard no answer. He heard his own rapid, choked, diminishing breathing.

  At this moment of his dying Cohn felt already dead; but Esau, as though he had heard a telephone ring and had decided to answer, loosened his hands on Cohn’s neck and fell to the side like a sack of flour. He lay utterly still.

  That was no miracle. Mary Madelyn, holding Rebekah in her arm, had sneaked up behind Esau with Cohn’s claw hammer, and as the chimps in the trees gazed in stupefaction, had bounced the tool against his head.

  That evening, a throat-bruised, hoarse-voiced Cohn bandaged Esau’s wound after sewing twenty-one stitches in his scalp; and in the morning the bandaged ape hobbled forth, with a severe headache and small borrowed suitcase, into permanent exile.

  Bromberg and Esterhazy had vanished. And Luke and Saul of Tarsus were let off with strong reprimands. Both promised to mend their ways. Buz swore he had been about to drop like Tarzan out of the tree onto Esau’s back to rescue Cohn, but Mary Madelyn had got there first.

  He did, however, say he hadn’t taken kindly to those nasty curses Cohn had laid on the race of chimpanzees.

  In a week Cohn paid a census visit to baboon rock and noticed that Aloysius was missing.

  “Where’s the little baboon boy?” he politely inquired, and the two males roused themselves with malignant roars and showed threatening fangs. The Anastasias, one pregnant, barked mournfully. Cohn hastily ended his visit.

  That evening he found little Aloysius’s half-eaten, decomposing body smelling up a fig tree full of rotting fruit, the cadaver lying athwart a branch where it had been tossed.

  Cohn felt himself a failure.

  I have failed to teach these chimpanzees a basic truth. How can they survive if they do to fellow survivors what men did to each other before the Second Flood? How will they evolve into something better than men?

  “Who did that terrible thing to Aloysius, Buz?” he asked, and the chimp, devouring a juicy mango, said he had no idea.

  “What can we do to dispel the evil rife in
this land?”

  Buz said it was Cohn’s fault for not teaching love. Cohn said he had tried to teach the good life, but it hadn’t come to much.

  Buz then advised him to remove the false Admonition he had put up on the face of the escarpment.

  “Why do you call it false?”

  “Because God is love.”

  Cohn said he wouldn’t feel secure promising a loving God. Afterwards he realized he hadn’t said that; he had quietly thought it.

  He told Buz he was discouraged and would try anything that helped the cause of peace.

  When he came out of the woodland the next day, after a count of new fruit trees, to his astonishment but not surprise, Cohn beheld Buz standing in a balconied enclosure two-thirds of the way up the escarpment, preaching to the chimpanzees assembled below, where the waterfall sometimes sprayed them, but they seemed not to mind.

  The chutzpah of that little chimp.

  Cohn discovered that Buz, without seeking his consent, had altered the second of the Seven Admonitions on the face of the escarpment. He had removed the “not,” and the Admonition read “God is love, God is God.”

  Cohn decided he would disassemble the second Admonition altogether, except “Remember Him.” God, he thought, would not mind so long as he didn’t mess around with basics.

  It would take a while, given the present spiritual resources of the chimps, to get a new morality in place and working. Even Moses had had trouble, and Isaiah had all but blown his voice crying out against the ethical failures of the Israelites.

  At the foot of the escarpment stood the small band of chimpanzees, among them Mary Madelyn holding Rebekah, now very lively. Melchior smoked a homemade cigar rolled from some tough tobacco leaves he had stumbled on on the island. And Hattie remarked she felt she was now Mrs. Melchior, whether they were married or not, even though Melchior had no great interest in sex anymore.

  Then Esterhazy and Bromberg slithered in among the others, like escaped convicts who had been slinking around in the rain forest. Yet when they pressed their palms together and sank to their knees, Cohn considered rescinding their sentence to exile. He might give them another chance, but not Esau, because his nature was close to evil.

  And Luke, and Saul of Tarsus, were on their knees, praying, but not George the gorilla.

  George wasn’t there anymore. He had disappeared a few days ago. The rumor was he had trudged off to the headlands, and no one knew for sure if this was a temporary move or one for all time.

  Cohn, not without a pang, had watched him lumbering away in the sunset, carrying a small bundle of his belongings at the end of a stick on his shoulder.

  “Blessed are the chimpanzees,” Buz preached from the terrace of the yellow escarpment, “for they hov inherited the whole earth.”

  And the chimps below let out a resounding hearty cheer.

  Buz later told Cohn he thought that things would go better hereafter in the island community; but Cohn pessimistically reminded him that Christianity, too, hadn’t prevented the Holocaust—“the Jewish one I lectured on most recently in class”—nor had it stayed the Day of Devastation.

  Buz angrily accused Cohn of never approving anything, pragmatic or spiritual, that he was interested in or had done; and Cohn vehemently denied it.

  For an instant they faced each other in anger, right arms upraised, then turned and walked/knuckle-walked away.

  After an early supper, as Mary Madelyn was rinsing the wooden platters in the water bucket, Cohn lit the lamp, and pressing his shoulder to the wooden wall, pushed it creaking on its rollers across the mouth of the cave.

  “God is wov,” she reminded him. “Why are you shutting the cave off from daywight and fresh air?”

  Cohn said he had this feeling that evil persisted in the land, and doubted Buz’s sermon would do much to allay it. “It will take a while to get things in order; the atmosphere has been tense since those baboons appeared in the neighborhood. I’ve been wondering what God is up to.”

  She asked Cohn when they might get married, and he said they were more or less married. “We must breed daughters.”

  Cohn held Rebekah in his lap, dressed in a little white sailcloth jumper he had sewed for her; he was about to tell her a bedtime story.

  Rebekah, though a half-chimp infant, looked more than half-human. She liked to sit on the ground on her hard little behind, playing with a straw doll Cohn had made for her, whose head she had eaten.

  According to Dr. Bünder’s book, she was behind in chimp infant movements, yet ahead in speech. She said dada and mama, and counted to five on one foot and up to ten on the other. She was bright and pretty and chuckled deeply. Her eyes were intensely curious, lively, blue; Cohn was tender to her, enormously fond of his little girl.

  He often pondered her fate. Would she live her life out on the island? Was she destined to be the mother of a humanoid-chimpanzoid race if she mated with a full chimp, possibly Buz, someday, if he behaved? Cohn hoped his little girl had been created for a better than ordinary, personally fulfilling, future. At that moment there was a snap-knock on the protective wooden wall, as though someone had thrown a stone against it.

  “Open the blosted gate,” Buz called from outside. “Whot is there to fear?”

  Cohn didn’t like the question and would not move the wall.

  “Who’s out there with you?”

  “Just myself.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A condy bar,” Buz shouted in frustration, kicking the wall with his bare foot, at once wishing he hadn’t.

  “Enter,” said Cohn.

  Mary Madelyn quickly tucked the baby into the crib as Cohn shoved at the wall with his shoulder and slowly pushed it open.

  Buz knuckle-limped in. On the way to the candy box on the shelf he peered at Rebekah in her crib. “I hov forgiven her.”

  Cohn said he was pleased to hear it, especially since the baby had nothing against him.

  “We all feel good will to you, Buz, although we rarely see you except in the schooltree or at public ceremonies.”

  Buz swallowed a vanilla coconut bar and began chewing a chocolate. He said, with mouth full, it wasn’t a kind thing Cohn had done to evict him from his long-standing home.

  Cohn reminded him that he had left the cave willingly. “You said you didn’t want to live with a squalling brat—you had your private thoughts to think.”

  Buz seemed to be thinking them. He was, as he ate the candy, staring at Mary Madelyn’s bosom in a way that made her blush. She covered the baby with a second blanket.

  Cohn got Buz’s silver crucifix out of his valise and offered it to him. “You’ve taken all your worldly goods out of the cave—do you want the cross I’ve been holding for you?”

  “Not now,” Buz said. “I hov no pockets on me.”

  “You can put it around your neck.”

  “My neck is bigger than it was, the chain wouldn’t fit.”

  Cohn told him to try it.

  Buz said no.

  Cohn was on the qui vive, when a sulphurous odor assailed his nostrils—nothing like George’s, this was a dreadfully foul smell—and his heart sank as he beheld Esau, smirking like the Devil himself, standing in the cave.

  Cohn cursed himself for having neglected to roll back the protective wall after Buz had entered. “You knew all the time he hadn’t gone into exile,” Cohn accused his boy.

  Buz said he had heard a rumor but wasn’t sure. Cohn was angered and fearful.

  With Esau, Esterhazy appeared; and Bromberg, Luke, and Saul of Tarsus entered the cave, wearing clay masks stolen from Cohn’s collection, all holding sharp rocks aimed at his head.

  Esau, his soiled bandage wrapped around his thick skull, had become heavy-bodied, his face bloated. He looked as if he had spent his time in hiding drinking banana beer. His glazed, reddened eyes were mean-looking.

  Mary Madelyn, letting out a cry, snatched the baby from her crib and tried to get out of the cave, but Esterhazy, raising the s
aber he had found hanging on a hook on the wall, barred her way.

  Cohn warned Esterhazy to watch where he pointed the weapon or he would be docked a month’s fruit rations.

  He then said to Esau, “I have treated you well since you appeared at this end of the island. I pulled a painful tooth and bandaged your wounded head. Be merciful, Esau.”

  Not mentioning who had wounded the head he had bandaged, Cohn tried to move toward Mary Madelyn and Rebekah and found that his wrists were tightly held by each twin.

  Esau, with a sneaky deft movement, snatched Rebekah out of her whimpering mother’s arms, and tossed the baby to Bromberg. Rebekah gurgled as she went sailing through the air.

  Cohn flung the twins aside and sprang forward to recover the child, as Bromberg threw her to Esterhazy. The bookkeeperish ape caught her in one large hand as Mary Madelyn came rushing at him.

  He flipped her to Saul of Tarsus, who passed her to Luke, who scuttled out of the cave.

  Mary Madelyn made choking noises of grief as she beat off the twins and burst out of the cave on her fours in pursuit of her daughter.

  Cohn prayed for Esau’s destruction where he stood—let him drop enormously dead—but nothing came of it. The Alpha Ape lived on in the best of health.

  Esau and the other chimps scurried out of the cave, Buz carrying the saber in his teeth. They had left Cohn lying on the ground with a mound of rocks piled on his chest.

  “Et tu, Buz?” Cohn was heartbroken beyond his anguish for Rebekah.

  He lifted aside one rock after another, not without pressing pain, then rising shakily from the floor, grabbed his iron spear from its rack and charged after the evildoers in the gathering dusk.

  The apes met in the gorilla’s abandoned cedar near the schooltree and curiously inspected little Rebekah. Esau sat on a high branch, tickling her little pink feet and peeking under the skirt of her jumper to see what was there.

  The chimps surrounding him looked on with absorbed interest until Mary Madelyn appeared, distraught, and mumbling to herself. She begged them in heartbroken tones to return her innocent baby and she would give them anything they wanted, promising never again to flee at their approach when she was in heat.