The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  So I came once more to the conclusion that I am a man in a horse and not just a horse that happens to be able to talk. I had figured this out in my mind before; then I said, no it can’t be. I feel more like a horse bodywise; on the other hand I talk, I think, I wish to ask questions. So I am what I am. Something tells me there is no such thing as a talking horse, even though Goldberg, pointing his fat finger at me, says the opposite. He lives on his lies, it’s his nature.

  After long days of traveling, when they were in their new quarters one night, finding the rear door to his stall unlocked—Goldberg grew careless when depressed—acting on belief as well as impulse, Abramowitz cautiously backed out. Avoiding the front of Goldberg’s wagon van he trotted across the fairgrounds on which the circus was situated. Two of the circus hands who saw him trot by, perhaps because Abramowitz greeted them, “Hello, boys, marvelous evening,” did not attempt to stop him. Outside the grounds, though exhilarated to be in the open, Abramowitz began to wonder if he was doing a foolish thing. He had hoped to find a wooded spot to hide in for the time being, surrounded by fields in which he could peacefully graze; but this was the industrial edge of the city, and though he clop-clopped from street to street there were no woods nearby, not even a small park.

  Where can somebody who looks like a horse go by himself?

  Abramowitz tried to hide in an old riding-school stable but was driven out by an irate woman. In the end they caught up with him on a station platform where he had been waiting for a train. Quite foolishly, he knew. The conductor wouldn’t let him get on though Abramowitz had explained his predicament. The stationmaster ran out and pointed a pistol at his head. He held the horse there, deaf to his blandishments, until Goldberg arrived with his bamboo cane. The owner threatened to whip Abramowitz to the quick, and his description of the effects was so painfully lurid that Abramowitz felt as though he had been slashed into a bleeding pulp. A half hour later he found himself back in his locked stall, his throbbing head encrusted with dried horse blood. Goldberg ranted in deaf-mute talk, but Abramowitz, who with lowered head pretended contrition, felt none. To escape Goldberg he must first get out of the horse he was in.

  But to exit a horse as a man takes some doing. Abramowitz planned to proceed slowly and appeal to public opinion. It might take months, possibly years, to do what he must. Protest! Sabotage if necessary! Revolt! One night after they had taken their bows and the applause was subsiding, Abramowitz, raising his head as though to whinny his appreciation of the plaudits, cried out to all assembled in the circus tent, “Help! Get me out of here, somebody! I am a prisoner in this horse! Free a fellow man!”

  After a silence that grew like a dense forest, Goldberg, who was standing to the side, unaware of Abramowitz’s passionate outcry—he picked up the news later from another ringmaster—saw at once from everybody’s surprised and startled expression, not to mention Abramowitz’s undisguised look of triumph, that something had gone seriously amiss. The owner at once began to laugh heartily, as though whatever was going on was more of the same, part of the act, a bit of personal encore by the horse. The spectators laughed too, again warmly applauding.

  “It won’t do you any good,” the owner Morse-coded Abramowitz afterwards. “Because nobody is going to believe you.”

  “Then please let me out of here on your own account, master. Have some mercy.”

  “About that matter,” Goldberg rapped out sternly, “I am already on record. Our lives and livings are dependent each on the other. You got nothing substantial to complain about, Abramowitz. I’m taking care on you better than you could take care on yourself.”

  “Maybe that’s so, Mr. Goldberg, but what good is it if in my heart I am a man and not a talking horse?”

  Goldberg’s ruddy face blanched as he Morse-coded the usual NO QUESTIONS.

  “I’m not asking, I’m trying to tell you something very serious.”

  “Watch out for your hubris, Abramowitz.”

  That night the owner went out on the town, came back dreadfully drunk, as though he had been lying with his mouth open under a spigot pouring brandy; and he threatened Abramowitz with the trident spear he kept in his trunk when they traveled. This is a new torment.

  Anyway, the act goes on but definitely altered, not as before. Abramowitz, despite numerous warnings and various other painful threats, daily disturbs the routine. After Goldberg makes his idiot noises, his geee gooo gaaa gaaw, Abramowitz purposely mixes up the responses to the usual ridiculous riddles.

  A. “To get to the other side.”

  Q. “Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?”

  A. “From playing marbles.”

  Q. “Why do elephants have long trunks?”

  And he adds dangerous A.’s and Q.’s without permission despite the inevitability of punishment.

  A. “A talking horse.”

  Q. “What has four legs and wishes to be free?”

  At that nobody laughed.

  He also mocked Goldberg when the owner wasn’t attentively reading his lips; called him “deaf-mute,” “stupid ears,” “lock mouth”; and whenever possible addressed the public, requesting, urging, begging their assistance.

  “Gevalt! Get me out of here! I am one of you! This is slavery! I wish to be free!”

  Now and then when Goldberg’s back was turned, or when he was too lethargic with melancholy to be much attentive, Abramowitz clowned around and in other ways ridiculed the owner. He heehawed at his appearance, brayed at his “talk,” stupidity, arrogance. Sometimes he made up little songs of freedom as he jigged on his hind legs, exposing his private parts. And at times Goldberg, to mock the mocker, danced gracelessly with him—a clown with a glum-painted smile, waltzing with a horse. Those who had seen the act last season were astounded, stunned by the change, uneasy, as though the future threatened.

  “Help! Help, somebody help me!” Abramowitz pleaded. Nobody moved.

  Sensing the tension in and around the ring, the audience sometimes booed the performers, causing Goldberg, in his red-and-white polka-dot suit and white clown’s cap, great embarrassment, though on the whole he kept his cool during the act and never used the ringmaster’s whip. In fact he smiled as he was insulted, whether he “listened” or not. He heard what he saw. A sly smile was fixed on his face and his lips twitched. And though his fleshy ears flared like torches at the gibes and mockeries he endured, Goldberg laughed to the verge of tears at Abramowitz’s sallies and shenanigans; many in the big tent laughed along with him. Abramowitz was furious.

  Afterwards Goldberg, once he had stepped out of his clown suit, threatened him to the point of collapse, or flayed him viciously with his cane; and the next day fed him pep pills and painted his hide black before the performance so that people wouldn’t see his wounds.

  “You bastard horse, you’ll lose us our living.”

  “I wish to be free.”

  “To be free you got to know when you are free. Considering your type, Abramowitz, you’ll be free in the glue factory.”

  One night when Goldberg, after a day of profound depression, was listless and logy in the ring, could not evoke so much as a limp snap out of his whip, Abramowitz, thinking that where the future was concerned, glue factory or his present condition of life made little difference, determined to escape either fate; he gave a solo performance for freedom, the best of his career. Though desperate, he entertained, made up hilarious riddles: A. “By jumping through the window.” Q. “How do you end the pane?”; he recited poems he had heard on Goldberg’s radio, which sometimes stayed on all night after the owner had fallen asleep; he also told stories and ended the evening with a moving speech.

  He told sad stories of the lot of horses, one, for instance, beaten to death by his cruel owner, his brains battered with a log because he was too weakened by hunger to pull a wagonload of wood. Another concerned a racehorse of fabulous speed, a sure winner in the Kentucky Derby, had he not in his very first race been doped by his avaricious master, who had placed
a fortune in bets on the next-best horse. A third was about a fabulous flying horse shot down by a hunter who couldn’t believe his eyes. And then Abramowitz told a story of a youth of great promise who, out for a stroll one spring day, came upon a goddess bathing naked in a stream. As he gazed at her beauty in amazement and longing, she let out a piercing scream to the sky. The youth took off at a fast gallop, realizing from the snorting and sound of pounding hooves as he ran that he was no longer a youth of great promise, but a horse running.

  Abramowitz then cried out to the faces that surrounded him, “I also am a man in a horse. Is there a doctor in the house?”

  Dead silence.

  “Maybe a magician?”

  No response but nervous tittering.

  He then delivered an impassioned speech on freedom for all. Abramowitz talked his brains blue, ending once more with a personal appeal. “Help me to recover my original form. It’s not what I am but what I wish to be. I wish to be what I really am, which is a man.”

  At the end of the act many people in the tent were standing wet-eyed and the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Goldberg, who had been dozing in a sawdust pile for a good part of Abramowitz’s solo act, roused himself in time to join the horse in a bow. Afterwards, on the enthusiastic advice of the new circus manager, he changed the name of the act from “Ask Me Another” to “Goldberg’s Varieties.” And wept himself for unknown reasons.

  Back in the stall after the failure of his most passionate, most inspired, pleas for assistance, Abramowitz butted his head in frustration against the stall gate until his nostrils bled into the feedbag. He thought he would drown in the blood and didn’t much care. Goldberg found him lying on the floor in the dirty straw, in a deep faint, and revived him with aromatic spirits of ammonia. He bandaged his nose and spoke to him in a fatherly fashion.

  “That’s how the mop flops,” he Morse-coded with his blunt fingertip, “but things could be worse. Take my advice and settle for a talking horse, it’s not without distinction.”

  “Make me either into a man or make me into a horse,” Abramowitz pleaded. “It’s in your power, Goldberg.”

  “You got the wrong party, my friend.”

  “Why do you always say lies?”

  “Why do you always ask questions you can’t ask?”

  “I ask because I am. Because I wish to be free.”

  “So who’s free, tell me?” Goldberg mocked.

  “If so,” said Abramowitz, “what’s to be done?”

  DON’T ASK, I WARNED YOU.

  He warned he would punch his nose; it bled again.

  Abramowitz later that day began a hunger strike which he carried on for the better part of a week; but Goldberg threatened force-feeding with thick rubber tubes in both nostrils, and that ended that. Abramowitz almost choked to death at the thought of it. The act went on as before, and the owner changed its name back to “Ask Me Another.” When the season was over the circus headed south, Abramowitz trotting along in a cloud of dust with the other horses.

  Anyway I got my own thoughts.

  One fine autumn, after a long hard summer, Goldberg washed his big feet in the kitchen sink and hung his smelly socks to dry on the gate of Abramowitz’s stall before sitting down to watch astronomy on ETV. To see better he placed a lit candle on top of the color set. But he had carelessly left the stall gate open, and Abramowitz hopped up three steps and trotted through the messy kitchen, his eyes flaring. Confronting Goldberg staring in awe at the universe on the screen, he reared with a bray of rage, to bring his hooves down on the owner’s head. Goldberg, seeing him out of the corner of his eye, rose to protect himself. Instantly jumping up on the chair, he managed with a grunt to grab Abramowitz by both big ears as though to lift him by them, and the horse’s head and neck, up to an old wound, came off in his hands. Amid the stench of blood and bowel a man’s pale head popped out of the hole in the horse. He was in his early forties, with fogged pince-nez, intense dark eyes, and a black mustache. Pulling his arms free, he grabbed Goldberg around his thick neck with both bare arms and held on for dear life. As they tugged and struggled, Abramowitz, straining to the point of madness, slowly pulled himself out of the horse up to his navel. At that moment Goldberg broke his frantic grip and, though the astronomy lesson was still going on in a blaze of light, disappeared. Abramowitz later made a few discreet inquiries, but no one could say where.

  Departing the circus grounds, he cantered across a grassy soft field into a dark wood, a free centaur.

  1972

  The Letter

  At the gate stands Teddy holding his letter.

  On Sunday afternoons Newman sat with his father on a white bench in the open ward. The son had brought a pineapple tart but the old man wouldn’t eat it.

  Twice during the two and a half hours he spent in the ward with his father, Newman said, “Do you want me to come back next Sunday or don’t you? Do you want to have next Sunday off?”

  The old man said nothing. Nothing meant yes or it meant no. If you pressed him to say which he wept.

  “All right, I’ll see you next Sunday. But if you want a week off sometime, let me know. I want a Sunday off myself.”

  His father said nothing. Then his mouth moved and after a while he said, “Your mother didn’t talk to me like that. She didn’t like to leave any dead chickens in the bathtub. When is she coming to see me here?”

  “Pa, she’s been dead since before you got sick and tried to take your life. Try to keep that in your memory.”

  “Don’t ask me to believe that one,” his father said, and Newman got up to go to the station where he took the Long Island Rail Road train to New York City.

  He said, “Get better, Pa,” when he left, and his father answered, “Don’t tell me that, I am better.”

  Sundays after he left his father in Ward 12 of Building B and walked across the hospital grounds, that spring and dry summer, at the arched iron-barred gate between brick posts under a towering oak that shadowed the raw red brick wall, he met Teddy standing there with his letter in his hand. Newman could have got out through the main entrance of Building B of the hospital complex, but this way to the railroad station was shorter. The gate was open to visitors on Sundays only.

  Teddy was a stout soft man in loose gray institutional clothes and canvas slippers. He was fifty or more and maybe so was his letter. He held it as he always held it, as though he had held it always, a thick squarish finger-soiled blue envelope with unsealed flap. Inside were four sheets of cream paper with nothing written on them. After he had looked at the paper the first time, Newman had handed the envelope back to Teddy, and the green-uniformed guard had let him out the gate. Sometimes there were other patients standing by the gate who wanted to walk out with Newman but the guard said they couldn’t.

  “What about mailing my letter,” Teddy said on Sundays.

  He handed Newman the finger-smudged envelope. It was easier to take, then hand back, than to refuse to take it.

  The mailbox hung on a short cement pole just outside the iron gate on the other side of the road, a few feet from the oak tree. Teddy would throw a right jab in its direction. Once it had been painted red and was now painted blue. There was also a mailbox in the doctor’s office in each ward. Newman had reminded him, but Teddy said he didn’t want the doctor reading his letter.

  “You bring it to the office and so they read it.”

  “That’s his job,” Newman answered.

  “Not on my head,” said Teddy. “Why don’t you mail it? It won’t do you any good if you don’t.”

  “There’s nothing in it to mail.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  His heavy head was set on a short sunburned neck, the coarse grizzled hair cropped an inch from the skull. One of his eyes was a fleshy gray, the other was walleyed. He stared beyond Newman when he talked to him, sometimes through his shoulder. And Newman noticed he never so much as glanced at the blue envelope when it was momentarily ou
t of his hand, when Newman was holding it. Once in a while he pointed a short finger at something but said nothing. When he said nothing he rose a little on the balls of his toes. The guard did not interfere when Teddy handed Newman the letter every Sunday.

  Newman gave it back.

  “It’s your mistake,” said Teddy. Then he said, “I got my walking privileges. I’m almost sane. I fought in Guadalcanal.”

  Newman said he knew that.

  “Where did you fight?”

  “Nowhere yet.”

  “Why don’t you mail my letter out?”

  “It’s for your own good the doctor reads it.”

  “That’s a hot one.” Teddy stared at the mailbox through Newman’s shoulder.

  “The letter isn’t addressed to anybody and there’s no stamp on it.”

  “Put one on. They won’t let me buy one three or three ones.”

  “It’s eight cents now. I’ll put one on if you address the envelope.”

  “Not me,” said Teddy.

  Newman no longer asked why.

  “It’s not that kind of a letter.”

  He asked what kind it was.

  “Blue with white paper inside of it.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Shame on you,” said Teddy.

  Newman left on the four o’clock train. The ride home was not so bad as the ride there, though Sundays were murderous.

  Teddy holds his letter.

  “No luck?”

  “No luck,” said Newman.

  “It’s off your noodle.”

  He handed the envelope to Newman anyway and after a while Newman gave it back.

  Teddy stared at his shoulder.

  Ralph holds the finger-soiled blue envelope.

  On Sunday a tall lean grim old man, clean-shaven, faded-eyed, wearing a worn-thin World War I overseas cap on his yellowed white head, stood at the gate with Teddy. He looked eighty.

  The guard in the green uniform told him to step back, he was blocking the gate.