The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  “Zworkin,” she said in a tense whisper, “do you hear this wretched noise I’ve been referring to?”

  “Is that a reason to wake me again, Zora, to ask such a goddamn question? Is that what we’ve come to at this time in our lives? Let me sleep, I beg you. I have my arthritis to think of.”

  “You’re my husband—who else will I ask? I’ve already spoken to the people next door. Mrs. Duvivier says the noise originates in a paint factory across town, but of that I’m not so sure.”

  She spoke in hesitation and doubt. She had been an uncertain young woman when he met her. She wasn’t heavy then but had always been solid, she called it, yet with a figure and a lovely face, not fat. Ella, on the other hand, who could be a restless type, was always on the slim side of slender. Both had been good wives, yet neither would have guessed the other as his wife. As Zora gained weight her uneasiness seemed to grow. Sometimes she aroused in Dworkin an anguished affection.

  He leaned on his arm and strained to listen, wanting to hear what she heard. The Milky Way crackling? A great wash of cosmic static filled his ears and diminished to a hush of silence. As he listened the hum renewed itself, seeming to become an earthly buzz—a bouquet of mosquitoes and grasshoppers on the lawn, rasping away. Occasionally he heard the call of a night bird. Then the insects vanished, and he heard nothing: no more than the sound of both ears listening.

  That was all, though Dworkin sometimes heard music when he woke at night—the music woke him. Lately he had heard Rostropovich, as though he were a living element of a ghostly constellation in the sky, sawing away on the D-major Haydn cello concerto. His rich cello sound might be conceived of as a pineapple, if fruit was your metaphor. Dworkin lived on fruit, but his own playing sounded more like small bittersweet apples. Listening now, he only heard the town asleep.

  “I don’t hear anything that could be characterized as the whining or wailing you mention,” he said. “Nothing of that particular quality.”

  “No steady, prolonged, hateful, complaining noise?”

  He listened until his ears ached. “Nothing that I hear or have heard,” he confessed.

  “Thank you, and good night, my dear.”

  “Good night,” Dworkin said. “I hope we both sleep now.”

  “I hope so.” She was still assiduously listening.

  One night she rose out of dizzying sleep, seemed to contemplate her blanket in the dark, and then hopped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, where she threw up. Dworkin heard her crying as she stepped into the shower.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked, popping his head into the steaming room.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Something I can do for you?”

  “Not just now.”

  He returned to bed and after a few troubled minutes drew on his trousers and a shirt, and in sneakers descended into the street. Except for a barking dog at the end of the block he heard only summer night sounds, and in the distance a rumble that sounded like traffic and might be. But if he concentrated, he could make out the whomp-whomp of machinery, indeed from the direction of the paint factory on the eastern edge of town. Zora and Dworkin hadn’t been inconvenienced by the factory or its legendary smells until she began to hear her noise. Still, what she said she heard she no doubt heard, though it was hard to explain anything like a whine.

  He circled the house to hear if one or another noise, by some freak of acoustics, was louder on the back lawn, but it wasn’t. In the rear he saw Zora on the upstairs deck, pudgy in her short nightdress, staring into the moonlit distance.

  “What are you doing outside in a nightgown at this time of night, Zora?” Dworkin asked in a loud whisper.

  “Listening,” she said vaguely.

  “At least why don’t you put on a robe after your hot shower? The night air is chilly.”

  “Dworkin, do you hear the awful whining that I do? That’s what made me puke.”

  “It’s not whining I hear, Zora. What I hear is more like a rumble that could be originating in the paint factory. Sometimes it throbs, or whomps, or clanks a little. Maybe there’s a kind of a hum, but I can’t make out anything else or anything more unusual.”

  “No, I’m talking about a different sound than you mention. How I hate factories in neighborhoods that should be residential.”

  Dworkin trotted up the stairs to bed. “It would be interesting to know what some of the other people on this street besides the Duviviers have to say about the sounds you are hearing.”

  “I’ve talked to them all,” said Zora, “and also to the Cunliffes and the Spinkers.”

  Dworkin hadn’t known. “What did they say?”

  “Some hear something”—she hesitated—“but different things than I do. Mrs. Spinker hears a sort of drone. Mrs. Cunliffe hears something else, but not what I hear.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “I wouldn’t want to afflict you.”

  “Just to hear it,” he said.

  “Don’t you believe me, Dworky?”

  He nodded seriously.

  “It might have to come to our moving someday,” Zora reflected. “Not only is there that zonky noise I have to contend with, which made me throw up, but the price of heating oil is way up. On the other hand, the real estate market is good, and maybe we ought to put the house up for sale.”

  “To live where?” Dworkin asked.

  She said she might like to get back to city life sometime.

  “That’s news to me. I assumed you didn’t care for city life anymore.”

  “I do and I don’t. I’m forty-one and have been thinking I ought to be making changes. I think I’d like to get back into the art world. I’d like to be near a neighborhood of museums and galleries. That appalling noise all summer has made me honestly wonder if we shouldn’t seriously be looking into the possibility of selling this house.”

  “Over my dead body. I love this house,” Dworkin shouted.

  As she was preparing a salmon soufflé for supper, the newsboy came to collect for the paper. After she had glanced at the first page, Zora uttered a short cry of surprise and sat down. Dworkin, who had been practicing in the living room, quickly laid down his cello and went to her.

  “Here it is in cold print,” Zora, her hand on her bosom, said. “Now I know I’m not going crazy.”

  Dworkin took the newspaper. An article described a class-action suit organized by several citizens in the eastern part of town against the D-R Paints Company “for pollution of the atmosphere.” They cited “a persistent harrowing noise,” and one of the women interviewed complained of “a sneaky sound that goes up and down like a broken boat whistle. I hear it at night, but I sometimes hear it during the day.”

  “I feel as though I have been reprieved from being thought mad,” Zora said bitterly.

  “Not by me,” Dworkin insisted.

  “But you never seemed to hear the whine I’ve been hearing.”

  “In good faith.”

  Zora began slowly to waltz on the rug in the living room. Dworkin’s cello was resting on the floor, and he sat down and plucked strings to her dancing.

  One rainy night, Dworkin in pajamas, vigorously brushing his teeth, heard an insistent, weird, thrumming whistle. “What have we here?” he asked himself uneasily. He had been attempting to develop a melody that eluded him, when a keen breeze blowing from afar seemed to invade his ears. It was as though he were lying in bed and someone had poured a pitcher full of whistling wind into both ears. Dworkin forcefully shook his head to dispel the uncomfortable sound, but it refused to disappear.

  As Zora lay in bed perusing the paper—she complained she couldn’t concentrate well enough to read a book—Dworkin went downstairs for a coat and rain hat and stepped out-of-doors. Facing toward the D-R Paints Company, he listened intently. Though he could not see the factory in the rainy dark, a few foggy, bluish lights were visible in the east, and he felt certain the plant was in operation. The low, thrumming wind in his ears persisted. It was poss
ible that a machine had gone haywire in the factory and was squealing like a dying animal. Possible, but not highly likely—they surely would have found some means to shut it off, he thought irritably. Could it be that the experience was, on his part, a form of autosuggestion out of empathy for Zora? He waited for the droning whine to thin out and crawl off, but nothing happened. Dworkin shook his fist at the foggy blue lights and hurried inside.

  “Zora, has your noise been sounding different lately?”

  “It isn’t only mine,” she responded. “It’s other people’s too. You read that yourself in the Courier.”

  “Granted, but would you say it has increased in volume lately—or otherwise changed?”

  “It stays more or less the same but is still with me. I hear it plainly enough. I hear it this very minute.”

  “In this room, or throughout the house?”

  “There’s no one place. I used to feel snug here and enjoyed reading in bed. Now I’m afraid to come up at night.”

  Listening affirmed it overwhelmingly—the ongoing intrusive sound—her keen wail, his thrumming whine.

  Dworkin then told his wife about his own unsettling experience. He described what he was presently hearing in both ears. “It’s an insult, to say the least.”

  But Zora responded jubilantly. “At least you’ve heard it. Thank God.”

  He was about to ask why that should make her so gay but didn’t.

  As if he had asked, she said, “If I seem relieved, it’s simply because I feel that you can now confirm that what I heard, and was trying to get you to hear, last summer, was substantial and real.”

  “Whoever said it wasn’t?”

  Her lips trembled. Dworkin observed her watching him. When he coughed she cleared her throat.

  In the morning he went to the music room and got his cello out of its case. It was like lifting a girl gently out of bed. The music room—Ella’s name for it; she had named all the rooms in the house—was a large, white-walled room with a mellow pine floor. The eastern wall was rounded, containing four windows through which the morning sun shone warmly. It was a cold room in winter, but Dworkin had installed a wood stove. Here he practiced, composed, sometimes taught. After nervously tuning up he began the first bars of the Prelude to the Bach Unaccompanied D-minor Suite. He had played it in his sleep last night.

  Dworkin crouched over the cello, playing somberly, slowly, drawing the sensuous melody out of his instrument. He played the Bach as though pleading with God. He speaks as a man stating his fate. He says it quietly and, as he plays, deepens the argument. He sings now, almost basso, as though he were someone imprisoned in a well singing to a circle of blue sky.

  The music ceased. Dworkin, with bowed head, listened. He had been struggling to obliterate the whirling whistle in his head but it had effectively dirtied every note. He could not keep the Bach pure. He could not, past the opening measures, hear himself play. Gripping the cello by its neck, he rose from the chair with a cry.

  “Zora,” he called.

  She arrived at once.

  “What’s happening?”

  He said he could not go on with the suite. It was curdled by the disgusting whine in his ears.

  “Something drastic has to be done.”

  She said they had already joined the class-action suit.

  He threatened to abandon the accursed town if there was no quick improvement in the situation; and Zora, observing him, said that was entirely on his own head.

  Away from home there was some measure of relief. Driving to Lenox for a class, he escaped the sound in his ears—certainly it diminished outside of Elmsville, but it worried him that he seemed still to be listening for its return. He couldn’t be sure he was entirely rid of it. Yet just as he thought he had begun taking the noise with him wherever he went, the situation seemed to change.

  One night in winter the Courier announced that the malfunctioning ventilation system at the plant had been replaced by a noiseless apparatus. Zora and Dworkin, as they lay in bed bundled in blankets, listened with two of the three windows wide open. She heard the same unhappy sound, he only the delicious country silence. But the noise had diminished a little, Zora admitted, and possibly she could stand it now.

  In the spring, as she approached her forty-second birthday, she was restless again. She had gone back to the gallery where she had formerly worked and was in the process of arranging a show of two women painters and a male sculptor. During the day Zora wasn’t home; Dworkin was—practicing and teaching. He was at work on a sonata for four cellos that was developing well. Four cellos gave it an organlike choral quality.

  But Zora, after the gallery day, was impatient with herself, selfcritical, “not with it.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind,” Dworkin said one evening after they had had dinner out.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Or is it the usual thing?”

  “I can’t burden you with my every worry.”

  She wiped her eyes but was not crying.

  That night she woke Dworkin and, in a hushed, hesitant voice, begged him to listen. “I mean, just listen to what you hear in this room. What do you hear?”

  He listened until he heard the cosmos, the rush of stars; otherwise he heard nothing.

  “Not much, I’m afraid. Nothing I can lay a finger on.”

  On earth he heard nothing.

  “Don’t you hear,” she asked, slowly sitting up, “a sort of eerie whine? This is drawn out as though at the far end of someone crying. I would call it a ghostly sound.”

  She held Dworkin tightly.

  “Ghostly?” he said, trying to see her in the dark.

  She listened keenly. “It has that quality.”

  “No,” Dworkin replied after a good two minutes. “I don’t hear any wail, whine, or whatever. I emphatically don’t.”

  In the morning she firmly asked, “Would you move out of this house if it came to that, Dworkin? I mean if I asked you to?”

  He said he would once he felt certain he heard the noise she was hearing. She seemed to accept that as fair.

  Dworkin waited by the D-R factory fence in every wind and weather. He had talked to the owner, who promised him the problem was already solved. Zora said she didn’t think so. They listened together on the bedroom deck, and Zora, pale-faced, raised a pale finger when she heard the noise especially clearly. “As though it were directly in front of our faces.”

  He wondered whether what she was hearing might be psychologically inspired. Zora had wanted a child but had never had one. Might she who can’t conceive begin to hear a ghostly wailing?

  Too simple, thought Dworkin.

  Ella had taken her troubles in stride. Their baby was born dead, and she had not wanted another. But Zora could never conceive, though she had wanted to very much.

  She agreed to have her ears tested when Dworkin suggested it. He reminded her that years ago she had had a disease of the middle ear, and she consented to see her former ear doctor.

  Then Dworkin privately telephoned two of his neighbors and confirmed they no longer heard the noise Zora said she still heard.

  “It’s been solved for my husband and me with the new ventilation system they put in,” Mrs. Spinker explained. “So we dropped the suit because nobody hears those noises anymore.”

  “Or echo thereof?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Dworkin said he too would drop it.

  Zora said she would try a new diet before visiting the ear doctor; but she promised to go.

  The diet, after several weeks, appeared not to be working, and she was still hearing the quavering, eerie noise. “It comes up like a flute that hangs still in the air and then flows back to its source. Then it begins to take on the quality of a moaning or mystical sound, if that’s what you can call it. Suppose it’s some distant civilization calling in, trying to get in touch with us, and for some reason I am the one person who can hear this signal, yet I can’t translate the message?�
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  “We all get signals we don’t necessarily pick up,” Dworkin said.

  She woke him that night and said in a hushed voice, “There it goes again, a steady, clear sound, ending in a rising wail. Don’t you hear it now?”

  “I tell you I don’t. Why do you still wake me?”

  “I can’t help wishing you would hear it too.”

  “I don’t want to. Leave me the hell out of it.”

  “I hate you, Zworkin. You are a selfish beast.”

  “You want to poison my ears.”

  “I want you to confirm whether something I hear is real or unreal. Is that so much to ask somebody you are married to?”

  “It’s your noise, Zora—don’t bang it on my head. How am I going to support us if I can’t play my cello?”

  “Suppose I go deaf,” she said, but Dworkin was snoring.

  “La la, la la,” she sang to herself in the looking glass. She had been gaining weight and resembled, she said, an ascending balloon.

  Dworkin, returning from Lenox that evening, complained he’d had trouble in his master class because the arthritis in his shoulder was taking a harder bite.

  When he came upstairs before midnight, she was reading a magazine in bed, both ears plugged with wads of cotton. Her legs snapped together when he entered the room.

  “The bedroom is virtually a sound box,” Zora said. “It captures every earthly sound, not to speak of the unearthly.”

  I’d better stop listening, he thought. If I hear what she does, that is the end of my music.

  Zora drove off in a station wagon for three days, traveling into Vermont and New Hampshire. She had not asked Dworkin to come along. Each night she called from a different motel or country inn and sounded fine.

  “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  “Just fine, I suppose. I confess I haven’t heard anything greatly unusual in my ears.”