A Serious Man
Page 2
Fade in:
SNOWFLAKES FALLING IN BLACK
The flakes drift lazily down toward us. Our angle looks straight up.
Now an angle looking steeply down: the snow falls not quite dead away to collect on a foreground chimney pot and on the little shtetl street that lies maplike below us.
It is night, and quiet, and the street is deserted except for one man who walks away from us, his valenki squeaking in the fresh snow. He leads a horse and cart.
We cut down to street level. The man walks toward us, bearded, and bundled against the cold. Smiling, he mutters in Yiddish – the dialogue subtitled.
MAN
What a marvel … what a marvel …
HOUSE INTERIOR
The man enters.
MAN
Dora!
VOICE
Yes …
The man crosses to the stove with a bundle of wood. Dora’s voice continues:
… Can you help me with the ice?
The man dumps the wood into a box by the stove as his wife enters with an ice pick.
… I expected you hours ago.
MAN
You can’t imagine what just happened. I was coming back on the Lublin road when the wheel came off the cart – thank heavens it was the way back and I’d already sold the geese!
WIFE
How much?
MAN
Fifteen groshen, but that’s not the story. I was struggling to set the cart upright when a droshky approaches from the direction of Lvov. How lucky, you think, that someone is out this late.
WIFE
Yes, very remarkable.
MAN
But that’s the least of it! He stops to help me; we talk of this, we talk of that – it turns out this is someone you know! Traitle Groshkover!
His wife stares at him as he beams. He takes the stare as a sign that she can’t place the name.
… You know, Reb Groshkover! Pesel Bunim’s uncle! The chacham from Lodz, who studied under the Zohar reb in Krakow!
Still she stares. Then, quietly:
WIFE
God has cursed us.
MAN
What?
WIFE
Traitle Groshkover has been dead for three years.
Laughter erupts from the man but, as his wife continues to stare at him, he strangles on it.
Quiet.
Wind whistles under the eaves.
The man says quietly:
MAN
Why do you say such a thing! I saw the man! I talked to him!
WIFE
You talked to a dybbuk. Traitle Groshkover died of typhus in Pesel Bunim’s house. Pesel told me – she sat shiva for him.
They stare at each other. Outside, the wind quickens.
A rap at the door.
Neither husband nor wife immediately respond.
Finally, to her husband:
WIFE
… Who is it
MAN
I … invited him here. For some soup, to warm himself.
The wind moans.
… He helped me, Dora!
THE DOOR
We are looking in from the outside as the door unlatches and creaks in, opened by the husband in the foreground, who has arranged his face into a strained look of greeting. In the background the wife stares, hollow-eyed.
MAN
Reb Groshkover! You are welcome here!
Reverse on Reb Groshkover: a short, merry-looking fellow with a bifurcated beard. He gives a little squeal of delight.
REB GROSHKOVER
You are too kind, Velvel! Too kind!
He steps into the house and sees the wife staring at him.
… And you must be Dora! So much I have heard of you! Yes, your cheeks are pink and your legs are stout! What a wife you have!
The husband chuckles nervously.
MAN
Yes! A ray of sun, a ray of sun! Sit!
WIFE
My husband said he offered you soup.
REB GROSHKOVER
Yes, but I couldn’t possibly eat this late, or I’d have nightmares. No, no: no soup for me!
WIFE
I knew it.
Reb Groshkover laughs.
REB GROSHKOVER
I see! You think I’m fat enough already!
He settles, chuckling, into his chair, but Dora remains sober.
WIFE
No. A dybbuk doesn’t eat.
Reb Groshkover stares at her, shocked.
The wife holds his look, giving no ground.
The husband looks from wife to Reb Groshkover, apprehensive.
A heavy silence.
Reb Groshkover bursts into pealing laughter.
REB GROSHKOVER
What a wife you have!
He wipes away tears of merriment; the husband relaxes, even begins to smile.
MAN
I assure you, Reb Groshkover, it’s nothing personal; she heard a story you had died, three years ago, at Pesel Bunim’s house. This is why she thinks you are a dybbuk; I, of course, do not believe in such things. I am a rational man.
Reb Groshkover is still chuckling.
REB GROSHKOVER
Oh my. Oh my yes. What nonsense. And even if there were spirits, certainly …
He thumps his chest.
… I am not one of them!
WIFE
Pesel always worried. Your corpse was left unattended for many minutes when Pesel’s father broke shmira and left the room – it must have been then that the Evil One –
She breaks off to spit at the mention of the Evil One.
– took you!
Reb Groshkover is terribly amused:
REB GROSHKOVER
“My corpse!” Honestly! What a wife you have!
WIFE
Oh yes? Look, husband …
She steps forward to the reb, who looks enquiringly up at her.
… They were preparing the body. Pesel’s father shaved one cheek …
As his eyes roll down to look at her hand, she draws it across his smooth right cheek.
… Then he left the room. He came back, and shaved the other …
She reaches across to the other cheek, Reb Groshkover’s eyes following her hand –
… You were already gone!
– and drags her fingers across. A bristly sound.
Reb Groshkover laughs.
REB GROSHKOVER
I shaved hastily this morning and missed a bit – by you this makes me a dybbuk?
He appeals to the husband:
… It’s true, I was sick with typhus when I stayed with Pesel, but I recovered, as you can plainly see, and now I – hungh!
The wife steps back.
Reb Groshkover looks slowly down at his own chest in which the wife has just planted an ice pick.
Reb Groshkover stares at the ice pick.
The wife stares.
The husband stares.
Reb Groshkover bursts out laughing:
… What a wife you have!
The husband can manage only a shocked whisper:
MAN
Woman, what have you done?
Reb Groshkover looks down again at the ice pick in his chest, the sight refreshing his laughter. He shakes his head.
REB GROSHKOVER
Yes, what have you done?
He looks at the husband.
… I ask you, Velvel, as a rational man: which of us is possessed?
WIFE
What do you say now about spirits? He is unharmed!
REB GROSHKOVER
On the contrary! I don’t feel at all well.
And indeed, blood has begun to soak through his vest.
He chuckles with less energy.
… One does a mitzvah and this is the thanks one gets?
MAN
Dora! Woe, woe! How can such a thing be!
REB GROSHKOVER
Perhaps I will have some soup. I am feeling weak …
He rises to his feet bu
t totters.
… Or perhaps I should go …
He smiles weakly at Dora.
… One knows when one isn’t wanted
He walks unsteadily to the door, opens it with effort, and staggers out into the moaning wind and snow to be swallowed by the night.
The wife and husband stare at the door banging in the wind.
Finally:
MAN
Dear wife. We are ruined. Tomorrow they will discover the body. All is lost.
WIFE
Nonsense, Velvel.
She walks to the door …
Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.
… and shuts it against the wind.
BLACK
A drumbeat thumps in black.
Music: Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick’s voice enters:
“When the truth is found to be lies And all the joy within you dies Don’t you want somebody to love …”
An image fades in slowly, but even full up it is dim: a round, dull white shape with a black pinhole center. This white half-globe is a plug set in a flesh-toned field. The flesh tone glows translucently, backlit. We are drifting toward the white plug and, as we do so, the music grows louder still.
AN EARPIECE
A pull back – a reverse of the preceding push in – from the white plastic earpiece of a transistor radio. The Jefferson Airplane continues over the cut but becomes extremely compressed. The pull back reveals that the earpiece, lodged in someone’s ear, trails a white cord.
We drift down the cord to find the radio at its other end. As we do so we hear, live in the room, many voices speaking a foreign language in unison. A classroom, apparently.
The radio, on a desktop, is hidden from in front by a book held open before it. The book is written in non-Roman characters.
We are in Hebrew school.
The boy who is listening to the transistor radio – Danny Gopnik – sits at a hinge-topped desk in a cinder block classroom whose rows of desks are occupied by other boys and girls of about twelve years of age. It is dusk and the room is fluorescent-lit.
At the front of the room an elderly teacher performs a soporific verb conjugation.
Danny straightens one leg so that he may dig into a pocket. With an eye on the teacher to make sure he isn’t being watched, he eases something out:
A twenty-dollar bill.
TEACHER
Mee yodayah? Reuven? Rifkah? Mah zeh, “anakim”?
BLINDING LIGHT
The light resolves into a flared image of a blinking eye.
Reverse: the inside of a human ear – fleshy whorls finely veined, a cavity receding to dark.
Objective on the doctor’s office: the doctor is peering through a lightscope into the ear of an early-middle-aged man, Larry Gopnik.
DOCTOR
Uh-huh.
HEBREW SCHOOL
Close on Hebrew characters being scribbled onto the blackboard as the teacher talks.
The teacher, talking.
A bored child, staring off.
His point-of-view: a blacktopped parking lot with a few orange school buses; beyond it a marshy field and distant suburban tract housing.
Close on another child staring through drooping eyelids.
His point-of-view: very close on the face of a classroom clock. We hear its electrical hum. Its red sweep second hand crawls around the dial very, very slowly.
Danny Gopnik hisses:
DANNY
Fagle! …
The teacher drones on, writing on the blackboard. Danny’s eyes flit from the teacher to the student sitting kitty-corner in front of him – a husky youth with shaggy hair. He hasn’t heard Danny.
…. Fagle!
The teacher turns from the blackboard and Danny leans back, eyes front, folding the twenty up small behind his book.
The teacher, not finding the source of the noise, turns back to the board and resumes the droning lesson.
The clock-watching child, eyelids sinking, is beginning to drool out of one side of his mouth.
DOCTOR’S OFFICE
The light again flares.
Reverse: looking into a pupil.
Objective: the doctor looking through his scope into Larry’s eye.
DOCTOR
Mm-hmm.
HEBREW SCHOOL
The teacher drones on at the blackboard.
A bored child excavates a booger from his nose.
DANNY
Fagle!
The teacher interrupts himself briefly to make a couple of phlegm- hawking sounds, then resumes.
DOCTOR’S OFFICE
The doctor palpates Larry’s midriff, digging his fingers into the hairy, baggy flesh.
DOCTOR’S VOICE
Uh-huh. We’ll do some routine X-rays.
HEBREW SCHOOL
A young girl holds a hank of her bangs in front of her face, separating out individual hairs to examine them for split ends.
The teacher turns from the board and begins to pace the desk aisles, looking back and forth among the students, posing questions.
The booger-seeker, having successfully withdrawn a specimen, drapes it carefully over the sharp end of his pencil, to what end we cannot know.
Danny, apprehensively eyeing the teacher, slides the twenty into the transistor radio’s cover-sleeve.
X-RAY CONE
A huge white rubberized cone, pointed directly at us.
We hear a rush of static and the doctor’s voice filtered through a talk- back:
DOCTOR’S VOICE
Hold still.
Wider: Larry is in his shorts lying on his back on an examining table that is covered by a sheet of tissue paper. The X-ray cone is pointed at the middle of his body.
There is a brief sci-fi-like machine hum. It clicks off.
HEBREW SCHOOL
The clock-watching student’s head is bobbing slowly toward his chest.
The teacher’s circuit of the classroom has taken him around behind Danny. Danny’s book lies face-down on the desk, covering the radio, but the white cord snakes out from under it up to his ear. The teacher’s questions and perambulation stop short as he notices the cord.
TEACHER
Mah zeh?
He yanks at the cord.
The cord pops out of its jack and Jefferson Airplane blares tinnily from beneath the book of Torah stories.
The teacher lifts the book to expose the jangling radio.
Outraged, the teacher projects above the music:
… Mah zeh?! Mah zeh?!
Some of the students sing along with the music; some beat rhythm on their desks.
… Sheket, talmidim! Sheket bivakasha!
Three students join in a chorus:
STUDENTS
Sheket! Sheket bivakasha!
The nodding student’s head droops ever lower.
Other students join in the chant:
CHORUS
SHAH! SHAH! SHEKET BIVAKASHA!
The nodding student’s chin finally reaches, and settles upon, his chest as a long clattering inhale signals his surrender to sleep.
DOCTOR’S OFFICE
Larry, now fully clothed, is seated across from the doctor.
The doctor examines his file. He absently taps a cigarette out of a pack and lights up. He nods as he smokes, looking at the file.
DOCTOR
Well, I – sorry.
He holds the pack toward Larry.
LARRY
No thanks.
DOCTOR
Well, you’re in good health. How’re Judith and the kids?
LARRY
Good. Everyone’s good. You know.
The doctor takes a long suck.
DOCTOR
Good. Daniel must be – what? About to be bar mitzvah?
LARRY
Two weeks.
DOCTOR
Well, mazel tov. They grow up fast, don’t they?
TINTED PHOTO PORTRAIT
The portrait, old, in an ornate g
ilt frame, is of a middle-aged rabbi with a small neat moustache and round spectacles. He wears a tallis hood-style and has a phylactery box strapped to his forehead. A plaque set into the picture frame identifies the man as Rabbi Marshak.
Wider shows that the portrait hangs in the Hebrew school principal’s office, a white cinderblock room. It is quiet. The only sound is a deep electrical hum.
Just visible behind the principal’s desk, upon which is a low stack of books and a name plate identifying the occupant as MAR TURCHIK, is the top of a man’s head – an old man, with a few wispy white hairs where his yarmulka is not.
Danny, seated opposite, pushes up from his slouch to better see across the desk.
We boom up to show more of the principal. He is short. He wears a white shirt and hoist-up pants that come to just below his armpits. He has thick eyeglasses. He fiddles with the transistor radio, muttering:
PRINCIPAL
Hmm … eh … nu?
He experiments with different dials on the radio.
DANNY
You put the –
The old man holds up one hand.
PRINCIPAL
B’ivrit.
DANNY
Um …
The old man looks down at the little earpiece pinched between two fingers. He examines the contrivance like a superstitious native handling an unfamiliar fetish.
We cut to the source of the electrical hum: a wall clock whose red sweep second hand crawls around the dial very, very slowly.
The reb continues to squint at the earpiece.