The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  Now he starts to hate Solly Schwartz, whom, in his self-pity, he begins to think of as his evil genius. Flash little hunchback! In his mind’s eye Charles Small sees Schwartz over the sights of a shotgun. He has never handled a shotgun, but remembers having seen one in the window of a shop near Charing Cross Hospital—a tremendous thing designed to be screwed with a swivel to a punt, for the butchery of ducks. He dreamed, then, of beautiful bitter mornings in the Norfolk marshes … dawn rises, day breaks, and over come the big grey wild ducks in V-formation. Bang! goes the duck-gun, and—ploppety-plop—down comes the whole bloody lot. (The old man was looking with yearning at a brass blunderbuss: then a taxicab back-fired, and the two dreamers jumped out of their skins.) That was when, having slipped on a banana skin, Charles Small was taken to Charing Cross with a sprained wrist.

  A sprain—oi!—a sprain! On the whole, he enjoyed it. The bandages made him feel important. He exaggerated the pain, which, when his wrist was tied up, was inconsiderable. But he made the most of it, of course; he cashed in on it. He had already developed quite a histrionic knack. The old man and the old woman were almost out of their minds with worry—they were always almost out of their minds with worry—and, to comfort him, took him to Mme. Tussaud’s Waxworks Show in the Marylebone Road, where I. Small, having made a laughing-stock of himself, asking questions of a wax policeman, and saying “Hoxcuse me” when he passed a wax doorman, became erudite. In Mme. Tussaud’s I. Small positively spouted information. He pointed out the image of Henry VIII, saying: “Khatzkele, Charley, boychik, take a lesson! He married nine hundred wives, so they chopped his head off.” Looking up at the model of the Russian Giant, he said: “See? He ate up all his cebbage!” Mrs. Small, who—God knows why—was gazing fondly at a waxen image of Mr. Gladstone, rejoined them at a moment when I. Small became silent, gazing at a representation of Alexander Pope. The hunchbacked poet, his head wrapped in a kind of turban, glared angrily into space.

  “He’s here again with his humps,” said Millie Small.

  Coming out of a reverie, I. Small said: “Humpbacks, schmump-backs! A Yid is a Yid!”

  Millie Small said: “Shhh! You’re not in Cracow now. No more humpy angels—let’s go to the Chamber of Horrors.”

  And so they went downstairs into the depths.

  Charles Small remembers that he was fascinated by the Coiners’ Den, and had to be dragged away, while his mother muttered: “That’s all I’m short of—a coiner he wants to be!” I. Small, also fascinated, said: “Bled——” and then shut up, because Mrs. Small was standing, open-mouthed, looking at Dr. Crippen, who murdered, chopped up, and concealed under a stone the body of his wife whom he had poisoned with hyoscin—this drug being anaphrodisiac—so that he could enjoy his mistress with an easy conscience. She decided that Dr. Crippen was a harmless-looking man. If he had turned up his moustaches and had a little more chin there might even have been some resemblance between him and … brrr! … she didn’t like to think of it. I. Small and Charles were looking at the loathsome countenances of Burke and Hare, the body-snatchers. I. Small (he had developed a mania for cabbage) said: “So you see? Sis what comes of not eating up your cebbage. It should be a lesson.” He might have gone on in this vein but he saw Mrs. Dyer, the Baby Farmer, who had been hanged for several atrocious murders, and said: “Beggary!”—and turned his attention to the Original Electric Chair. Having keenly scrutinised this hideous apparatus I. Small said: “See? Electricity! Sis good for rheumatism!” After that his attention was caught by some extraordinarily horrid prints of Turkish tortures. In one of them a man with a moustache was portrayed, hanging by the chin on a hook. This was a little more than he could stomach. He said: “See? He didn’t eat his bleddy cebbage!” So they left the Chamber of Horrors—but not before I. Small, pretending that he had lost his handkerchief, slipped back for a last lingering look at the Coiners’ Den, to which he had taken a fancy.

  On the way out he made a detour so that they passed Alexander Pope. Millie had to drag him away. Muttering something about “Yiddisher boys should eat their cebbage,” and … “be a good boy and please God you’ll end up in the Chamber of Horror”—he probably meant the Chamber of Commerce—the old man conducted them to a tea shop in Baker Street, where they ate pastries. For a change there were no scenes—except once, when Millie told him not to make such a noise drinking tea.

  After that (one does not sprain one’s wrist every day) they took Charles to the Zoo. I. Small laid out twopence for monkey-nuts, or peanuts as they are called now, and they went to look at the unhappy beasts in captivity. Now, Charles Small wonders who was on which side of the bars. They went to the Lion House. Charles tried to give the tiger a monkey-nut. The beast uttered a low growl—at which I. Small leaped into the air and, dragging his wife and child out into the open air, growled—much more fiercely than the tiger—“Bleddy ruffian.” After that they went to the Monkey House. Now this was charming. Charles Small and the old man were enchanted. A Rhesus monkey took monkey-nuts, shelled them, and ate them. I. Small rumbled: “Take a lesson, Charley—sis … sis … economics, boozology. We are all equal, see?” He was remembering the pronunciamentoes of Lizzard, the atheistic cobbler. “Monkeys, people—you got nothing but your chains to lose. Liberty, equality, eternity, or (God forbid) death!”

  The monkey masturbated.

  On the way home I. Small was pensive. Charles was quite happy. He had had a good day. Looking at the old man, one might have imagined that he was a philosopher—at least, a military theoretician like von Clausewitz, or Falkenhayn. His brows came down to meet his moustache, which he twirled with one hand while he plucked at his hair with the other. After some cogitation he twisted a bus ticket into the form of a propeller, impaled it on a pin, and held it over the rail of the bus-top, so that it spun round and round. He had intended this for the diversion of Charles Small; but somehow he could not part with it. After thirty seconds the pin broke loose and, flying backwards, stuck in Mrs. Small’s left breast. After a few whispered bleddy beggaries the affair was hushed up, and the old man became pensive again. What could he be thinking of? Charles Small found out when they got home, when I. Small, in an undertone that sounded like the flushing of a lavatory, said: “Boychik, you saw? Take a lesson. Do like monkeys, they put you in a zoo. But the other one, eh? A hump, bandages on the head, eh? You saw? A humpback, a Yiddisher boy, and he Worked his way up to be Pope!”

  All this is very fine and large, excruciatingly funny, a perfect scream—yet all the same, Charles Small would give a good deal for one crack at the hunchback, Solly Schwartz, with that cannon of a duck-gun. Much as he loves and admires that awe-inspiring, iron-footed creature, it would please him no end to see him disappear in a red shower. He owes Solly Schwartz more than he can ever repay … both good and evil….

  *

  While he appreciates the great benefits that have come to him through Solly Schwartz—his nice house in Highgate, his car, his clothes at ten pounds a suit, his well-filled refrigerator and American kitchen unit—something rankles, so that now his stomach feels like a flytrap full of angry wasps.

  This dates back to the time when he, Charles Small, went into open revolt against the old man and Mrs. Small. It was a dramatic passage. Having won his little Scholarship, he was entitled to several years free education, with a grant of money, at a Secondary School. Now there was some thumb-biting as to the advisability of this. Millie—her voice was like Pibroch of Donuil Dhu, the Gathering Song of Donald the Black—filled her bag and skirled to summon the Clan. There was no gainsaying her, no ignoring that Call. They left the sheep unattended, the bride at the altar … left the deer, left the steer, left nets and barges; came in their fighting gear, broadswords and targes. They foregathered at the Mosses’ house, where, until after dinner, the men talked of trade, politics, and war, while the women, sagely nodding, discussed the private affairs of the Royal Family—whereupon Lily asked when Millie was last in Buckingham Palace. The Pibroch of Millie Small k
nelled for the onset, and all the women cried out at once, while the men with one voice roared for silence. Out of this brouhaha came the slow, deliberate voice of Nathan, the Photographer, saying: “Let us be reasonable.”

  It was understood that the meeting had been called to decide whether Charles Small should go to school until he was sixteen, or be apprenticed forthwith to a tradesman.

  I. Small—it was inevitable—made a perfect ass of himself. He drew himself up in his chair, shook out a handkerchief, and made such a noise with his nose that Old Man Moss choked on a glass of tea and had to be banged on the back. Then he lit a little cheroot, blew out the match with an air, shot his cuffs, pushed up his military moustachios, and, remembering that confounded atheistic cobbler again, said: “Education, education is the opium of the pipple! Through religion you lose your chains! A trade! But! …” Then he looked silly again, and said in a much smaller voice: “Eh, Nathan?”—and paused for a reply.

  Millie Small looked daggers and kicked I. Small in the ankle. The old man started to bleddy, but said: “Bl—arhem”—pretending to cough, for which no one blamed him, considering the quality of his cheroots.

  “Education——” began Nathan, the Photographer, portentously.

  I. Small’s rosy face was glowing. He said: “I made a mistake. Not religion, education, sis the opium of the pipple!” It was observed, at this point, that his face was set in a fierce expression, and that he pinched Charles’s cheek and gave him a puff of his little stinking cheroot. Charles Small remembers the odour of the smoke to this day. It is almost comical. Where did the old man find such things? People shied away from him on all sides. He was blowing out fumes compounded of ammonia and dung.

  “Education,” said Nathan, the Photographer, “is a good thing, but you must afford it—you must afford it. Only people of, of, of brilliance want education. So, the boy is brilliant. Bear all this in mind. He goes to school till sixteen. Then, what? A clerk in a city office? It’s an honest living, let us not argue about that. But … education, proper education, takes money. Where is it to come from? What comes after? What are you going to do when the boy leaves school? Eh, Millie? Make a doctor of him? Make a dentist of him? A lawyer of him? No, put him into business, let him learn a trade.”

  He spoke. Millie, through snot and tears, said: “You see? … You see what I told you?”

  I. Small’s cheroot had burned down, and there was a smell of burnt hair. Nevertheless, he inflated his chest, and in that moment became magnificent. He had conducted young Charles to the grammar school where the Preliminary Examinations were to be held and there he had seen scholastic-looking men sweeping through the cold corridors in black gowns; and this had made a deep impression on him. Brushing the charcoal out of his moustache he shouted:

  “Nathan, beggar your bleddy trade! Give me opium or give me death! School! Not another word!”

  There were many more words. Catching something like a sardonic smile on Lily’s face, Millie—on one of the few recorded occasions in family history—took sides with her husband, and so with much emotion the sisters and brothers-in-law parted not without sidelong looks.

  Thus, Charles Small went to Secondary School.

  Recapitulating, those years in school were the most wretched of his life because, as a Parthian shot, kissing Millie on the cheek and patting her comfortingly on the shoulder, Lily said: “Cheer up, Millie. He’ll do the best he can. Our Stanley’s going to go in for the Dentistry.”

  After this, it was education or bust.

  May dogs lift their legs against the chaste gravestones of I. and Millie Small, tastefully inscribed with GOD TOOK YOU FROM US ONLY BECAUSE THE ANGELS GREW LONELY and DEEPLY MOURNED BY THEIR HEARTBROKEN SON, CHARLES, DAUGHTER, PRISCILLA, RELATIVES AND FRIENDS—a list as long as your arm!

  Now it was expected of Charles Small that he should grow up to be a Scholar and a Dentist, a Gentleman, fighting duels with stinking breath at two feet while he foully poked nicotine-stained fingers into the mouths of hapless opponents, for which (glad to be rid of him) they would throw him ten shillings before scuttling downstairs moaning in unendurable agony, never to return.

  From now on at all hours, I. Small brought up the subject of Teeth. “Charley, boychik, you see?” he would say at tea-time when the boy was biting into a buttered crumpet, “without teet, where are you? Cruffins, mumpets you got to suck like grandfather at his mother’s chest. Everybody’s got to have teet. Sis the Facts of Life. Teet you got to have!”

  Charles Small, who was breaking out in pimples and found it impossible to look anyone in the face—but was nevertheless getting cocky—muttered: “What about boots?”

  I. Small was tolerant on this occasion. He merely said: “Boots—boots—boots—boots——” in the manner of Kipling, managing somehow to flip a teaspoon over his shoulder. But he said at last: “Charley, I’m older than you; take it from me—boots don’t ache.”

  And for once Millie Small did not put her oar in.

  She asked him: “What did you learn to-day, Charley?”

  Now how, Charles Small wonders, how is it possible for a boy to give an honest answer to such a question? Is he to say that he has learned almost nothing at all? That he has learned a couple of naughty stories which will stick to his memory like pitch as long as memory exists? That he was called a congenital idiot because he could not grasp the inwardness of the Present Indicative of the Verb, To Be, in the recitation of which he did not get beyond Je? (Later he remembered suis, but that was l’esprit d’escalier.) That he had successfully recited Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”? That the history master had called him a beast and said that he had better be in a pigsty because, overwhelmed by the Saxon kings, he had made a disgusting smell in class? That arithmetically he was already foredoomed to the bottom of the Form?

  He looked for no understanding here, and buried his lip in another crumpet, smearing his acneous face with the best fresh butter, while I. Small whispered: “Shhh! He’s t’inking.”

  Those years were nightmarish. They were full of lies and deceit—and terror. At the end of the school year he received a Report which had to be returned with his parents’ signatures at the foot. Charles Small forged them, and was kept down in class in his second year. Much they knew about it! And all the time I. Small went on about teeth, teeth, teeth. The old man had excellent teeth and was conscious of the fact that few other men had—let alone women. Charles Small remembers, with distaste, a Dissertation on Teeth, which was as follows: “Teet. Who goes about widout teet? Charley, you’re a good-looking boychik. A good-looking boy should concentrate miv teet! Because? Listen, an old man, so he can go fsss—fsss—fsss—and who cares? But a young woman mivout teet, she’s a dud. Take my advice, Khatzkele. Who to does a woman go? To a nice-looking feller. Keep you bleddy mind on teet!”

  Young Charles Small struggled like a rabbit in a bag, but, for the life of him, he could not even matriculate. Before he left in the morning to sit for the first examinations Millie filled him with eggs, standing over him and saying: “Remember! The most important thing is Mathematics!”

  It was hopeless. He concealed half Euclid up his sleeve, and still he got only six per cent of marks under the very nose of a blind examiner.

  When the results of the examination came out, I. Small shouted: “Matriculation, schmatriculation! Let the bleddy beggar learn a trade!”

  Now Millie Small had read in the Sunday papers of boys who, having failed their examinations, hanged themselves; and she was afraid.

  “A trade, a trade!” screamed I. Small.

  Giving Charles gooseberry pie, to which he was exceptionally partial, his mother said, with one of her rare caresses: “You’ve got to have a trade, Charley. What trade? Tell us?”

  Charles Small, tearful and humiliated, brought the house down. Drawing himself up proudly, he said: “I am going to be an actor!”

  *

  Then (to paraphrase the humpbacked Mr. Pope in the manner of Silas Wegg), then flashed the l
iving lightning from I. Small’s eyes, while screams of terror rent the affrighted skies. As for Mrs. Small: no louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast when husbands—God forbid—or lap-dogs breathe their last.

  Thinking of hunchbacks and mock-heroics, it is inevitable that Charles Small should hark back to that earth-shaking moment when Belinda lost her lock of hair. “No louder shrieks …”

  Mrs. Small was a perfect treat, and she tore out with her own hand a small lock of her own hair, and threw it at her husband, crying: “You see? What did I tell you?”

  The lock—twelve or fifteen hairs—clung to I. Small’s moustache, so that all of a sudden he had two moustaches, one going up and the other going down. He had to pick it away before he could speak and then, his nostrils having been tickled, he sneezed one of his famous sneezes: “Ah, Russia!—Ah, Tooshka!—Ah, Rash-Ho!”—and made a noise like a bull seal as he used his handkerchief—which later he opened, as was his habit, and carefully consulted. What with the honking, barking, and bellowing of the old man, and the screaming of the good lady, the Smalls’ house must have sounded like Pribilov Island in the mating season, when men go out armed with clubs to knock frustrated holluschickies on the head. (Charles Small, who is well read in the romantic literature of daring endeavour, and has a sneaking nostalgia for the Great White Silences, wishes to God that some hairy-arsed sealer had knocked the pair of them on the head before he was born or thought of.)

  It was Charles Small, however, who was knocked on the head, with the fourth edition of the Star—the one that had the racing results; for I. Small, influenced by Lizzard, the atheistic cobbler, had taken to playing the horses—sixpence each way, a shilling to win, even sixpenny Doubles, Cross-Doubles, Up-and-Down: God knows what, for I. Small did not. The silly old sod pinned his faith in Lizzard—his belief was in the Unbeliever. He always lost, poor fool, as much as three-and-sixpence a week; but to see him poring over the fourth Star, a visitor from a foreign country might have said: “I saw the Distinguished Professor Small. His great brow was wrinkled as his keen but weary eyes scrutinised a closely printed sheet. Between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand he held a pin. As I watched, he closed his eyes, described a circle with a pin, and drove it down, puncturing the paper, exclaiming: ‘Bleddy beggary! Mayflower, Newmarket, 130!’ Obviously this man is a genius, and should be invited to make a lecture tour.”