The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  His evening was poisoned.

  … The dull ache in Charles Small’s right side is subsiding. A certain congestion in that region takes itself away to somewhere lower down, so that by God’s grace he can sigh and, in sighing, lift an awful weight off his breast-bone. Having sighed he thinks again …

  A lot of people aren’t so bad, if only they are left alone. But people won’t leave you alone. Oh no! They’ve got to fiddle with you, interfere with you, mess about with you. They say they love you. Well, if they love you, why can’t they let you be? What do they want to try and make you like themselves for?

  … The pain is coming back, and so is the sour taste of curds and the hopeless gurgling washiness of the whey. He punches his pillow, every feather in which seems suddenly to have become a thorn, and thinks again:

  Whose fault is it? Your own, no one’s fault but your own, if you are squeezed out of shape and made miserable by weaklings. Would they bruise their fingers on a piece of iron? No. More fool you, then, for letting yourself stay soft. More fool you, for letting your mother get a scissors-hold on you before you had wriggled clear of her womb! Oh, rottenly unfair game played by abominably matched opponents! … You weigh seven pounds; she weighs a hundred and fifty pounds. “Now you can suck me dry, on condition that later I may suck you.” Maaa-maaa-maaa! … You thought you were pretty clever to have gulped a bellyful of sour milk. Later you were reminded that it was your opponent’s turn. Then out came your heart, your brain, your guts, your liver and the marrow of your bones; whereupon she gets back with a ladylike belch and says “Good son, good son”—like a satisfied customer in a restaurant saying “Good custard.”

  Oh why was not everyone like Solly Schwartz? Charles Small loved Solly Schwartz.

  *

  Model the figure of an average man, and then, while the clay is still wet, put a heavy weight on its head and leave it to settle down and harden, and you will find yourself possessed of an oddly deformed statuette. Its head will be sessile, pushed down into its shoulders. Between the flattened cranium and the almost invisible throat you will see a queer, lowering face that seems to be nothing but a dog-like grin, an immense nose and a chin like the toe of a boot. Anything may happen to the torso, but in all probability the shoulders will come up as the head sinks down, the back will hunch itself, and the legs will become short and thick and curiously curved while the feet are splayed. Only the arms harden in their original shape, and then they appear disproportionately large. Such was Solly Schwartz. ——in fact he was even less than that. There had not been enough clay to complete his left leg, so that since it was six inches shorter than his right he wore a surgical boot with a steel frame—what they used to call an “iron foot”. His father considered him as an affliction rather than a child, and so indeed he must have appeared when the midwife, in Kutno, held him up for inspection on a towel. Every mother shuddered at the thought of Solly Schwartz newly born, and thanked God that no such monstrosity had been born to her. He, laughing heartily, used to tell his friends that when he was circumcised his father cried: “For God’s sake, keep the little piece and throw the big one away!” What was there to do with such a creature? “It gives me the sick to look at him,” said the father, who was a tailor, watching the hunch-backed child playing with an empty cotton-reel. “Gott sei dank he doesn’t get it from me!”

  “Nor from me,” said the mother, meekly. “Leave him, leave him—it’s not his fault, it’s his misfortune. Let him be, Avrum-kele, leave him…. Ah, my darling little dove! Ah, my pretty little doll! Bless him, then!”

  “Yes,” said the father, “let him sit on his tukhess and stitch, and stitch, like me. That’s all he’ll be good for. Let him be a tailor like his unlucky father.”

  So as soon as Solly Schwartz was old enough to learn how to work the child went to work. By that time his parents had emigrated. He hopped about the workshop, damping rags for the pressers and sweeping the floor until he learned how to sew. But he was clumsy. His father cursed himself for having begotten such a son, who could not even “threadle a needle”. The fact had to be faced: little Solly Schwartz was maladroit. But he was strong in the arms and had large, sinewy hands—disproportionately large, extraordinarily muscular hands, to which the tailors in the sweat-shop referred as luppes. The end of it was that he became a presser. Singing cheerful songs in a voice which was audible above the thunder of the heavy sewing machines, he hopped from the pressing-stove to the bench and back again, clownishly juggling the hot, ponderous irons. It was generally assumed that he was not in his right mind; he was happy. Malformed, hunchbacked, incurably lame, sentenced to hard labour for life with no earthly hope of earning more than thirty shillings a week, he sang. On one leg, he danced. When his father died and his colleagues offered condolence, Solly Schwartz said nothing but: “Good.”

  An old cutter, pausing with his mouth and his scissors wide open said: “What did you say? Good? By you is good if your father dies, God rest his soul?”

  Young Solly Schwartz replied: “Certainly is good. Ain’t God good?”

  “Who’s talking about God? Honour thy father and thy mother.”

  “Who said so? Moses said so. Who said so to Moses? God. Who gave the Law to Moses? God. If you live, it’s good. If you die, all right, it’s good. Did you want he should live for ever? Let him be, he’s dead and done with. What do you care? Cry over your own father.”

  “A bladdy good hiding, that’s what he wants,” said the cutter, picking up a yardstick; for Solly Schwartz was only fifteen years old.

  “Come on, give me a good hiding. But put one finger on me and I warn you, that’s all—I warn you!” said Solly Schwartz, picking up a hot pressing-iron and holding it effortlessly like a Roman boxer with a cestus.

  “What’s the use talking? Where there’s no sense there’s no feeling. And so that’s how we go,” said the cutter going back to work; while some of the other workers in the sweat-shop glanced at Solly Schwartz and, winking at one another said: “He’s a riach, a proper devil!”

  His mother died soon after his father. He did not observe the eight days of mourning prescribed by ritual, but came back to work as soon as she was under ground, whistling a vulgar tune entitled Poppety-Poppety-Pop, and wearing a pink tie.

  The cutter, a large man of violent temper, shocked by such callousness, picked up the brass-tipped yardstick and shouted: “Look at ’im! Cossack, epicurean, murderer! His father and his mother, dead in their graves they are lying, and he’s here whistling like … like … like an Irishman, in a check jacket. Haven’t you got no respect for the dead, may they rest in peace?”

  “No!” said young Solly Schwartz. “Respect for the dead? What for?”

  “What for? Because a son should have respect! Your mother is lying dead—so you should have respect! Think, think, you … you … you humpty-dumpty, your mother, she’s lying dead! Dead!”

  “What do you want me to do? Just tell me, Mister Berkowitz, say the word. Have her stuffed? She’s dead. Well? And so?”

  “Show respect. Respect show!”

  Taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves in preparation for the day’s work Solly Schwartz said: “Mr. Berkowitz, don’t talk about her. She’s my business, not your business. She’s dead, and a good job too. Better off!”

  “Honour thy father and thy mother!” cried Berkowitz, the cutter.

  “Honour them? What for? Did they honour me? They’re gone—let them go. What d’you want me to do, cry? I’m glad they’re dead. What did I want them for? In der erde with my father. In der erde with my mother, and a good job, too! Now I’m nobody’s son. Now I’m Solomon Schwartz. Good!”

  Brandishing the yard-measure the cutter said: “What you want is——”

  “—I know what I want. Give me what you think I want,” said Solly Schwartz, clenching his fists. “Come on.”

  Then the master of the workshop came in, took the cutter aside, and said: “What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you leave the
boy alone? He’s an orphan. It’s a mitzvah, Berkowitz, to be kind to an orphan. Stop it, Berkowitz!”

  “Mr. Cohen, can you stand there and talk to me like this? Stop it? Stop what? He threatened me already with a red-hot iron. With a red-hot iron this humpty-dumpty threatened me. A nogoodnik, a rotter! His mother still twisting and turning in her grave, God forbid, and in he comes in a check coat whistling already Poppety-Poppety-Pop. Tfoo! Mr. Cohen, enough! Oder he goes, oder I go. No! What, am I here to be … be … be blackmailed by this, this scheisspot? Me?”

  “Sha!” said Mr. Cohen. “Berkowitz, sha! A cripple, an orphan—may it never happen to you—it’s written, it’s a mitzvah to do good to an orphan. Let him alone. No mother, no father, leave him be!”

  “If that rotzer stays, by my life and yours too, and may I drop down dead, then I go, Mr. Cohen.”

  Mr. Cohen said, wearily: “Oh, let it be, Berkowitz, go! What do you take me for, I should throw out into the streets orphans already into the streets, what? Go! Go, for God’s sake, leave me in peace and go!”

  Berkowitz said: “So that’s how it is. You wanted to get rid of me and you couldn’t say so like a man. Look at the way he gets himself up, that schtinker!”

  “Are you going, Berkowitz?”

  “Hm! For such a little loafer, for such scheisspots I should take away my living, is that what you want? A krenk on the——”

  “—Berkowitz, no curses in my workshop! May the man be paralysed with a rotten fit and take a black cholera who makes curses in this place! Is that clear?” said Mr. Cohen, in Yiddish. “May worms devour him and a fire in his kishges! And a week’s notice. No cursing, Berkowitz, or may my hands drop off…. What, are you making me rich with your dribbing and drabbing? Look at you, stuck narr, look at you, stuck ochs, you … you … whatever you are, go, work, you stuck pferd!” Mr. Cohen was getting angry, and enjoying it. “Parkh!” he cried. That meant scab. “Lozerducke bund! Herod! Lazybones! Pisstank, loafer, aristocrat, go back to work—a grown-up man fighting with boychiks!”

  Berkowitz, pale with anger, went back to work, but thereafter he tried to make himself offensive to Solly Schwartz. He did not dare physically to threaten this ugly boy who had the arms of a weight-lifter and the eyes of a detective-inspector: he used his tongue.

  “Look at the way it dresses, that thing,” he said to the assistant cutter. “Hm! Look at humpty-dumpty! Shepherd’s plaid he’s got to wear, with a hoika on his back like Primrose Hill. Pink shirts, give him. Patent boots, to button up; nothing is too good for it…. They’ve got no khine, Pressburger, no bloody khine. How comes for a presser to dress himself up like a … a … door-knocker? There you are, that’s what it is. They want to make a show of themselves, these pressers. What can you do with people like that? Eh, Pressburger? Ask yourself the question. Answer me.”

  Pressburger, a good-natured man, whispered: “Ah, come on, Mr. Berkowitz, be nice, please! What do you want to hurt his feelings for? If it gives him pleasure, why shouldn’t he wear a check suit with a pink shirt? What’s the matter with you, Mr. Berkowitz? When I was a boy all I could think about was I should have a moustache with a fancy weskit.” Pressburger laughed. “Well, so I got a moustache—look, feel the quality, all hair, a nice shade of grey. By me, this was ambition. You can have it for eighteenpence.” Pressburger was trying to sweeten the atmosphere of the workshop; to cleanse it of acrimony and spite.

  But Berkowitz went on and on until Solly Schwartz said: “Achtung, stuck schneider. Listen!”

  Now this was fighting talk. It is always dangerous to call a man what he is—it is insulting because in doing so you imply that you are different, and therefore somehow superior. It must be because most men are ashamed of what they are. There is a tacit understanding that one is superior to one’s trade, however respectable it may be. Call a plumber an idle thievish, incompetent dog, and he will reason with you; shout: “You plumber!” and he will hit you with a wrench. Tell your bank manager that he is a heartless robber, a parasitic bourgeois, and a rotten cheat, and he will try to explain matters: call him a banker and he will probably have you thrown out of his office. There is no surer way to irritate a man than to tell him coldly that he is what he ought to be proud to be. It must be because men have lost their pride in their work. Perhaps they have been listening to too many fairy stories about Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, or reading too many columns of Society Gossip and looking at too many shiny rotogravure supplements in the weekly magazines. The fact remains that for fifty years, now, all anyone has needed to do, if he wanted a punch in the face, has been, in effect, to say to any man: “You are what you are.”

  Berkowitz, passionately angry, said: “What did you call me, what?”

  “Schneider. Tailor. Well? What are you? Schneider. Go on schneid, you schneider.”

  “Did you heard what he said?” screamed Berkowitz, picking up his terrible cutting-shears. “Apologise, or——”

  “Or what? Are you trying to frighten me, schneider-tukhess, you with your little pair of scissors? Put them down,” said Solly Schwartz. “What d’you think you’re going to do with them? Cut my head off? Hit me with them? Do you want a fight with me?”

  “Why can’t we have peace in the workshop?” said Pressburger. “Berkowtiz, Mr. Berkowitz, leave the boy alone for God’s sake. An orphan, a …”

  He was going to add a cripple, but stopped himself. Solly Schwartz, quick as a woman, said:

  “All right, Pressburger. A hump on my back, a funny leg. Say it. What do I care? A hump, a limp, I’m no beauty. Eh? Is that it? All right. Look at him, this Berkowitz, this stuck elephant! You want a fight, Berkowitz? Touch me and you’ll get it, you and your scissors and all. Start something, I want you to start, schneider-tukhess!”

  “You dare say that word again!” said Berkowitz.

  “Schneider-tukhess. And listen to me, if this bloody hump on my back was as big as a camel, I’d still wear a jacket like the King of England, you lump, you rubbish. Come on, fight, have a go!”

  Berkowitz was afraid of this terrible little hunchback, but he had his pride, so he put down his great shears and advanced.

  “Come on, bring your scissors,” said Solly Schwartz, standing on tiptoe to shout right into the big man’s face.

  Somebody moaned: “For God’s sake, can’t somebody stop them?”

  “Genug, enough,” said Pressburger. “Shame, shame, Mr. Berkowitz, shame!”

  The sewing machines had stopped so that the whole place was still and everyone’s ears were ringing with the silence of it. The tailoresses had turned on their stools, and were watching. One of them, an anæmic girl, came near to fainting, and had to be supported by another girl. Mr. Cohen, who was breakfasting in a back room, feeling the impact of the silence, came into the workshop with a buttered roll in his right hand and stood, inarticulate, gagged by a mouthful which he was trying to swallow. He heard several voices say: “Shush! Here’s Mr. Cohen! Stop it!”

  Then Solly Schwartz said: “I’ll shush when I want to shush, and one of these days I’ll put you all in a sack, you stinkers, and tie you up…. Pressburger, I don’t mean you; you’re a nice man. But you, Berkowitz, you I’ll smash! Leave me alone, big as you are.”

  “What’s the matter, what?” asked Mr. Cohen, who had swallowed his mouthful. “No fighting! Make friends, shake hands, do you hear?”

  Solly Schwartz offered his hand. Reluctantly obedient to the master of the workshop Berkowitz took it. Everyone sighed with relief. Then Berkowitz screamed: “Let go! Let go!”

  The hunchback seemed to have squeezed up the cutter’s hand like an empty glove, in his powerful fist.

  “That feels nice, Berkowitz?” he said. “My head you’ll knock off? How do you like that, eh? I got a funny leg. Do you think I want to run races with you? I got a hump back, yes? Eh?”

  “Let go. You’re breaking my hand.”

  “What’s the matter? A great big man like you, begging of a schnip like me I should let go his hand? W
hat are we coming to?”

  “Mr. Cohen,” said Berkowitz, in agony, “tell him he should leave go.”

  “Schwartz, leave go!”

  “With pleasure, Mr. Cohen. Just a minute … I tell you, Berkowitz, I got more than what you got. You got no hump. I got a hump. You ain’t got a funny leg. I got a funny leg. And I got a hand, here, feel it?”

  “Enough, enough!”

  “Then say you’re sorry.”

  “Say it, say it,” said Mr. Cohen to Berkowitz.

  “If Mr. Cohen says ‘Say it,’ I’ll say it: I’m sorry.”

  “Who talks like that? Say: ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Schwartz!’”

  “All right. I’m sorry, Mr. Schwartz. Let go.”

  “Na, then, take your hand back,” said Solly Schwartz releasing his grip. Berkowitz’s right hand was squeezed white and wrinkled. “… You told me to shake hands, Mr. Cohen, so I shook hands.”

  Berkowitz went and put his hand in one of the buckets of cold water in which the pressers moistened their linen pressing-rags, saying: “I can’t work to-day. My hand is broken.”

  Cohen’s first impulse, then, was to tell Berkowitz and Schwartz to go to the devil, but that would have been inconvenient. Berkowitz was a first-rate cutter, and in dealing with cutters one must take the rough with the smooth, because they are, in their way, artists, and rather temperamental. Little Schwartz, too, was an excellent workman, and a cripple, and an orphan as well. So Mr. Cohen said nothing more. Berkowitz, in awful silence, picked up his shears and wrapped them up in brown paper. This meant that he was sending in his resignation. But Pressburger, the man of peace, Pressburger, the diplomat of the sweat-shop, took him aside and persuaded him to stay. “… A fine man like you, Mr. Berkowitz, a lion! Why should you run away from a little boy, an orphan, a cripple? A man like you, Mr. Berkowitz! Have pity on him, the poor boy.”

  So Berkowitz unwrapped his shears and shouted: “Just this once—but never no more again!” and went back to his table. The tailoresses pedalled out their thunder while, in clouds of malodorous steam, the pressers banged the sweat that dripped from their foreheads into the finished and the half-finished clothes. Old Mr. Cohen listened to the din. He heard the uproarious machines, the raucous scrape of the iron gooses sliding out of the slotted stove, the heavy clangour of their return, the hiss of wet linen under hot iron, the voices of men screaming in order to be heard, Quick, lazybones, damp me a rag! … Fill me up with water this basin, stinkpot, or else … Sometimes, in some coincidental lull, he heard the chirping and snapping of busy scissors; at which he smiled as some men smile when they hear birds singing. He was happy. He asked for nothing but a little peace in the workshop.