by Yoram Kaniuk
When I returned she seemed to be deep in thought. The storm out the windows had intensified and it was raining in sheets. She said that even the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word Jew as thief. You’re all thieves. Your Talmud is packed with lies and malice. What would happen if you wanted to drink Miranda’s blood on your Jewish Easter? She looked at me again. She couldn’t understand where the nose from the illustrations in the Dickens books and the newspapers she had seen all her life had disappeared to. I was supposed to have a dirty straggly beard, a crooked nose all the way to my mouth, but I didn’t. At last she said, And where’s the nose? She said, Your Talmud is packed with agitation against Christians. She said that her best friend, Mr. Freedley, who produced the Ziegfeld Follies and was an aristocrat and an honest man, was going to send his Rolls-Royce for her to take her to New York to buy clothes, but not in the New York of the Jews; not the New York where Miranda’s parents lived with the Communists and the Jews. She’d spend a few days with Freedley, he always knew how to make a woman feel like a lady. The last of the great cavaliers in America is courting me and yet here you people come wanting to marry my rare flower, my Miranda. I sensed her defeat long before she herself sensed it. She was already actually looking at me every time she addressed me. She admitted sadly that she liked me. That was why she suddenly told me about Mr. Freedley, because he was supposed to protect her from the truth she saw on my face with her own eyes that wanted to be strong and had now become weak. She no longer spoke so passionately about her hatred of “you people.” Hatred was apparently the only intellectual virtue she had been blessed with. She waited for me to say something. I decided not to speak, not yet. I wanted to hear more from her. She asked how I intended to support Miranda and I told her that I was a partner in a factory for frozen falafel. I wanted to help her and told her that I was twenty-eight and divorced, that I was a man of no means, but like all Jews I was sure to get a windfall from one shady business or another. I thought that the frozen falafel would be sufficiently rare and mysterious for her. It was apparent that she was trying to understand what frozen falafel was without revealing her curiosity. She said, You know very well how to cheat the innocent. I saw the contempt oozing out of her eyes, you could have seen it from miles away. She didn’t want to waste any emotion on me, but she was legitimately concerned. She suffered in silence and drank more bourbon and again forgot to offer me some. When I started talking about my future as an author I saw that she viewed this in much the same way as she would smallpox or tuberculosis. She sounded concerned over the fate of her family’s chromosomes; that I had come, so she said, to pollute them. She used the most dreadful words in a kind of tranquility coupled with disinterest. She looked at me and wondered, I could tell by the furrows on her forehead, which she wanted so badly to keep smooth, that she knew—just knew—that I was misleading her. She looked as though she were singlehandedly trying to foil a Jewish conspiracy aimed at her family, and even hinted that that heathen and rapacious Rothschild might be involved.
I was surprised at how little she annoyed me. She didn’t get anywhere near the place inside me where I’m an angry Jew, my grandfather’s grandson. I was having fun. I was young. I could see that, unwillingly, and despite her meticulous planning, she was liking me more and more. She went on drinking and her look softened. We stood up and went to the bell room where we joined Miranda and where Nina was nervously waiting for us next to the gong to call us in for lunch. What the grandmother actually wanted was for me to fall in love with her like all the men in her life. All her dreadful words about the inferior Jewish race, those Jews who trample over decent people and drink all the time and take revenge against good Christians and then run back to their ghettos, about how the Jewish character was irrevocably twisted—despite these words, or perhaps because of them, she wanted to steal me away from her granddaughter. It was all she knew how to do. Throughout her life she had stolen men’s hearts left and right and then stranded her suitors at the starting line; they seldom if ever really caught her. What she had learned in the enormous house on Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia up to the age of seventeen was all she had at her disposal for the rest of her life. That was it. She’d learned nothing since. The loathing she felt toward me was too abstract for it to touch me. I had to leave revenge to luck. I thought, “Luck be a Lady Tonight.” I wasn’t sufficiently angry to know so early on how to get her back. She fought with a pathetic, ancient enthusiasm, like seltzer that had lost its bubbles. The bourbon also did its part to slow her down. She waited for the gong and Nina rang it and then we went into another room to eat lunch. She looked tired and sleepy as we started eating. Nina served eagerly. After making a huge effort to finish the meal Miranda’s grandmother stood up and went upstairs, saying that she had to rest. Miranda and I went out into the storm and were swallowed up into it. At dinner, for which she changed her dress, she drank coffee and wanted to know about my family. There was a seductive tone in her voice now. Her eyes were veiled. After a few more words about the inferior Jewish race, I said I was a descendant of Joseph. She asked who Joseph was. I told her he was Jesus’s father. She stifled a shriek of alarm and said, Yes, yes, and added that due to the distress I was causing her she would have to watch some television. I don’t watch television very much but this evening it’s important, she said in a bracing voice. I already knew before we came, from Miranda’s mother, that the old lady was addicted to Scrabble and television. I told her that Miranda and I would join her. She yielded with disinterested dignity. She went upstairs with restrained enthusiasm. She switched on the television and watched her first program. She stole a glance toward Miranda and suddenly appeared childlike. It was the Jack Benny Show. She immediately laughed because she remembered what had happened at the end of the show the previous week, and told us all about it. And then she stared at me in contempt. The program gave her strength. Benny was a real person, not like me. Shedding all the Jewish problems she’d been having that day, she said, I’m crazy about him, just wait until he plays the violin. I waited a moment and said, Yes, he really is a wonderful Jew. Her face caved in a kind of twitch and she wanted to protest, but I could see that she was running out of weapons to use against me—though her anger reinvigorated her. She waited for the next program. This one was with Danny Kaye, who was her favorite, so she said, and then on another channel they were showing The Postman Always Rings Twice, with the magnificent John Garfield, as she called him, and then we went on to watch a program about the man she called her genius, Gershwin, and then a short movie with Tony Curtis, something with Lauren Bacall, an old Josef von Sternberg film, and then a late-night conversation with Irving Berlin, as she flicked from channel to channel (though there were only three in those days); hours passed, she gradually wilted like a flower in the hot sun, and I didn’t show her any mercy: a Jewish God had gone into battle this night to destroy a poor woman. It hurt me and it hurt Miranda, but I was caught up in the battle: it wasn’t me who was fighting, the Good Lord spared me that, no, it was Melvyn Douglas and Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar, and she drank one glass after another. She reeled again and again from the impact of my words, “Also a Jew.” Kirk Douglas was beneath the belt, as was Eddie Fisher. She sat defeated and stunned. And then, late at night, in her defeat, she suddenly looked cheerful—though the bourbon made her cheerfulness somewhat melancholy. I knew what she was waiting for. I had looked through the TV Guide while she waited to ambush me. There was a sad smile on her face. She smoked one cigarette after another, her blue hair speckled with light from the wall lamp, and Miranda fell asleep. Nina also fell asleep. Three of us remained—Miranda’s grandmother, me, and the God of Israel. We sat tensely. Waiting for the last movie of the night. Then, at one o’clock in the morning, hours past the time she was accustomed to retiring, the movie she was waiting for was finally shown: The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard. She wanted Leslie Howard on her side, you see, more English than the English, more British than the British, she needed him for one victory
over my loathsome race, she needed him in order to vanquish me. She said, Look at the funny Englishman. Charming. Witty. Astute. Elegant. Athletic. He was her lifeline. Her last chance. And she said in a tone saturated with compassion, Now you can’t possibly tell me that he…but I silenced her with a laugh. The blow had to be a painful one. I waited for the right moment, I didn’t want her smile to vanish at once, I wanted to see blood, and then I drew out the words, Leslie Howard Steiner, that’s right, his mother’s English, but Jewish, and his father’s a Jew from Hungary. And then the old lady burst out laughing too and Nina woke up and rushed out to fetch a glass of cold water. She switched off the television. I told her that the name Leslie comes from Laszlo and he was a distant relative of my mother’s. He wasn’t really, but I wanted to have a personal stake in the old woman’s defeat. Now, her deep sorrow was without anger. She stood up, stretched her body, and slowly and proudly went to her room. All her beloveds were Jews. One cold night the God of the Jews who hadn’t defeated Hitler managed to defeat Mrs. Anderson Elliott Brooke in Sea Bright, New Jersey. Now she is sitting in Heaven with all her beloved Jews, singing all the songs she loved so much and that were written for her by Jews. With her ancient ignorance, where else could she have gone? God probably treats her like an honored prisoner of war.
For our wedding she sent the most expensive gifts. We went to visit her. She invited us to her swimming club that refused entrance, so she said, to Grace Kelly because she was Catholic, and I swam with people who all had green-blue eyes and straw-colored hair and looked alike. She was happy that her Jew had sullied the water. Miranda swam deep in the nearby ocean and a shark came near and I yelled and she didn’t hear me and then she saw the fin and like a fish she darted to the shore. Some time later the old lady decided to go and visit one of her daughters in Switzerland. She asked us to come and see her off. She was sitting in a huge first-class cabin on the United States when we arrived. She was drinking whiskey and on one side of the room there were piles of toilet paper, hundreds of rolls, and bourbon whiskey and paper towels. She was going to visit her daughter, the sister of my wife’s mother, who had married a Swiss nobleman and lived in an eighteenth-century palace with forty rooms and a huge garden. The Swiss nobleman owned Novartis, I heard, who manufactured Ovaltine and drugs. Miranda’s grandmother told me she didn’t trust those “foreigners.” And when we moved to Israel in 1961 she sent us kerosene lamps and dozens of rolls of toilet paper and bars of soap. She wrote to Miranda that one should be careful when riding on a camel because someone had told her that camels could be dangerous.
Miranda and I got to know one another and it was cold but in the apartment it was nice and warm. Marzani came over and was sad because Stalin, the Sun of the Nations, was dead. Like a baby, he tried once again to explain how wonderful it would be in the world of the future, and I said some nasty things about the peace movement supporting the great murderer and he smiled at me in pity and forgave my impatience and we toasted him with vodka. And things were sad at the Cellar. People still came. They celebrated Purim and yelled. But the money went to Bernie. There was nothing left. The frozen falafel had died. I wanted us to sell the place but Oved insisted on going on until we’d finished paying back our debt and so I left. Before that, at Christmas, I was drinking there on my own. Oved and Hanoch were off drinking in some club.
I called Miranda and told her I was sad on my own. She came at one o’clock in the morning. I drank beer and we talked and looked at one another and it was only later, after spending Christmas Eve with her family, that I found out that she had been compelled that night to practice a deception for the first and last time in her life. She had left a doll in her bed, under the covers, and her sister had promised to cover for her, and since she didn’t have money for a bus she walked across Central Park in the cold in the middle of the night. In my mind’s eye I saw a young woman walking in the dark among drunks and criminals and not knowing it. That part of life passes right over her, perhaps her senses understood but it didn’t get inside her, and I was touched but didn’t know how to say it right. Perhaps I was testing her. And then the betting started. Everyone knew that we would be getting married soon and so our friends tried to make some money off it. Our best friends said that we’d last a month to six weeks. Some went up to three months. The bets ranged between ten dollars and twenty. One guy, an amusing and assertive redhead from Rishon LeZion, collected all the money and handed out receipts. Two people went as far as four months, but even for the closest of our friends it was hard to imagine us lasting as long as six. Oved gave in and was planning to sell the Cellar. The wedding drew near and when it took place it was a simple affair. We got married in a charming room at a family friend’s, surrounded by a respectable collection of Wyeth and O’Keeffe paintings and a painting of a boat at sea by Ryder and above us a dome-shaped ceiling that had been painted by an Italian painter whose name I wasn’t familiar with. I wore a suit and tie. Miranda wore the wedding dress her mother had worn when she got married and together we wrote additional lines to append to the formal New York City ceremony, we quoted from the Book of Ruth, chapter one, verses sixteen and seventeen: “For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” After the short ceremony we all posed for a family photograph. Miranda and I stood in front and she was only half a head taller than me. Her twelve-year-old brother stood next to her, a little less than a head above me. And of the elegant grandmothers, one was slightly taller than me, while the other, adorned with her blue hair—the one with all her Jews—towered above me. And then there were the father and mother and several uncles, the shortest of whom was five eleven, and Uncle Moose Morehead of Gulf Oil—who didn’t know what he’d say to his sheiks in Saudi Arabia when he ate “kummus” with them—over six feet tall. The photograph looks like a badly planned city. All the proportions are off. Oved, who was my best man, is almost six feet tall, and only Miranda’s sister, who was fifteen at the time, was more-or-less my height, but stood far away from me and so gave me no support. Afterward there was a party and there was lots of laughing and singing and lots of drinking and then Miranda and her father danced the waltz. They danced together like the notes from some heavy sonata. Their arms courted each other. They touched yet didn’t touch, they hovered, everyone stopped dancing and watched them, and a silent circle formed, and only the music could be heard and they watched a father and daughter in a final moment of ceremonial ownership celebrated in absolute blindness to its significance. He didn’t lose her and she didn’t lose him, but the ceremony demanded attention to something that was not only in the blood but also in their emotions. The only person who really understood this woman was him, her father, and I, after forty-three years together, have yet to attain anything close to his understanding. Father and daughter danced as though they were blind to all who were staring at them and they sometimes deviated from the beat and the steps had to search for them, but I remembered the prayer for the Jewish New Year: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief cornerstone.” Their cornerstone and mine would be used to build a tower that would become a building of healing, fear, meaning: “God loves you,” as Miranda’s devoutly Christian brother would later say to me. Here there were two gods: this handsome, tall man, a little hesitant and drunk, with the strapping body of an officer who served two years on a warship in the Pacific, dancing like a Native Indian who’d studied Mozart, and Miranda, who went to her parents’ house for an hour in the evening, though I guess it was already night and not evening, I sat and read the Bible and realized that I wanted a daughter, that I wanted to plant a tree and die.
