The Magic Barrel

by Bernard Malamud

  ‘You can say it again.’ Freeman was deeply moved by the sublimity of the distant Alps. She named the white peaks from Mt. Rosa to the Jungfrau. Gazing at them, he felt he had grown a head taller and was inspired to accomplish a feat men would wonder at.

  ‘Isabella –’ Freeman turned to ask her to marry him; but she was standing apart from him, her face pale.

  Pointing to the snowy mountains, her hand moving in a gentle arc, she asked, ‘Don’t those peaks – those seven – look like a Menorah?’

  ‘Like a what?’ Freeman politely inquired. He had a sudden frightening remembrance of her seeing him naked as he came out of the lake and felt constrained to tell her that circumcision was de rigueur in stateside hospitals; but he didn’t dare. She may not have noticed.

  ‘Like a seven-branched candalabrum holding white candles in the sky?’ Isabella asked.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Or do you see the Virgin’s crown adorned with jewels?’

  ‘Maybe the crown,’ he faltered. ‘It all depends how you look at it.’

  They left the mountain and went down to the water. The tram ride was faster going down. At the lake front, as they were waiting for Giacobbe to come with the row-boat, Isabella, her eyes troubled, told Freeman she had a confession to make. He, still eager to propose, hoped she would finally say she loved him. Instead, she said, ‘My name is not del Dongo. It is Isabella della Seta. The del Dongos have not been on the island in years. We are the caretakers of the palace, my father, brother and I. We are poor people.’

  ‘Caretakers?’ Freeman was astonished.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ernesto is your father?’ His voice rose.

  She nodded.

  ‘Was it his idea for you to say you were somebody else?’

  ‘No, mine. He did what I asked him to. He has wanted me to go to America, but under the right circumstances.’

  ‘So you had to pretend,’ he said bitterly. He was more greatly disturbed than he could account for, as if he had been expecting just this to happen.

  She blushed and turned away. ‘I was not sure of the circumstances. I wanted you to stay until I knew you better.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘Perhaps I wasn’t serious in the beginning. I said what I thought you wanted to hear. At the same time I wished you to stay. I thought you would be clearer to me after a while.’

  ‘Clearer how?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’ Her eyes searched his, then she dropped her glance.

  ‘I’m not hiding anything,’ he said. He wanted to say more but warned himself not to.

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

  Giacobbe had come with the boat and steadied it for his sister. They were alike as the proverbial peas – two dark Italian faces, the Middle Ages looking out of their eyes. Isabella got into the boat and Giacobbe pushed off with one oar. She waved from afar.

  Freeman went back to his pensione in a turmoil, hurt where it hurts – in his dreams, thinking he should have noticed before how worn her blouse and skirt were, should have seen more than he had. It was this that irked. He called himself a damn fool for making up fairy tales – Freeman in love with the Italian aristocracy. He thought of taking off for Venice or Florence, but his heart ached for love of her, and he could not forget that he had originally come in the simple hope of finding a girl worth marrying. If the desire had developed complications, the fault was mostly his own. After an hour in his room, burdened by an overpowering loneliness, Freeman felt he must have her. She mustn’t get away from him. So what if the countess had become a caretaker? She was a natural-born queen, whether by del Dongo or any other name. So she had lied to him, but so had he to her; they were quits on that score and his conscience was calm. He felt things would be easier all around now that the air had been cleared.

  Freeman ran down to the dock; the sun had set and the boatmen were home, swallowing spaghetti. He was considering untying one of the rowboats and paying tomorrow, when he caught sight of someone sitting on a bench – Ernesto, in his hot winter hat, smoking a cheroot. He was resting his wrists on the handle on his cane, his chin on them.

  ‘You weesh a boat?’ the guide asked in a not unkindly tone.

  ‘With all my heart. Did Isabella send you?’

  ‘No.’

  He came because she was unhappy, Freeman guessed – maybe crying. There’s a father for you, a real magician despite his appearance. He waves his stick and up pops Freeman for his little girl.

  ‘Get een,’ said Ernesto.

  ‘I’ll row,’ said Freeman. He had almost added ‘father,’ but had caught himself. As if guessing the jest, Ernesto smiled, a little sadly. But he sat at the stern of the boat, enjoying the ride.

  In the middle of the lake, seeing the mountains surrounding it lit in the last glow of daylight, Freeman thought of the ‘Menorah’ in the Alps. Where had she got the word, he wondered, and decided anywhere, a book or picture. But wherever she had, he must settle this subject once and for all tonight.

  When the boat touched the dock, the pale moon rose. Ernesto tied up, and handed Freeman a flashlight.

  ‘Een the jarden,’ he said tiredly, pointing with his cane.

  ‘Don’t wait up.’ Freeman hastened to the garden at the lake’s edge, where the roots of trees hung like hoary beards above the water; the flashlight didn’t work, but the moon and his memory were enough. Isabella, God bless her, was standing at the low wall among the moonlit statuary: stags, tigers and unicorns, poets and painters, shepherds with pipes, and playful shepherdesses, gazing at the light shimmering on the water.

  She was wearing white, the figure of a future bride; perhaps it was an altered wedding dress – he would not be surprised if a hand-me-down, the way they saved clothes in this poor country. He had pleasant thoughts of buying her some nifty outfits.

  She was motionless, her back toward him – though he could picture her bosom breathing. When he said good evening, lifting his light straw, she turned to him with a sweet smile. He tenderly kissed her lips; this she let him do, softly returning the same.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Isabella whispered.

  ‘To whom goodbye?’ Freeman affectionately mocked. ‘I have come to marry you.’

  She gazed at him with eyes moistly bright, then came the soft, inevitable thunder: ‘Are you a Jew?’

  ‘Why should I lie?’ he thought; she’s mine for the asking. But then he trembled with the fear of at the last moment losing her, so Freeman answered, though his scalp prickled, ‘How many no’s make never? Why do you persist with such foolish questions?’

  ‘Because I hoped you were.’ Slowly she unbuttoned her bodice, arousing Freeman, though he was thoroughly confused as to her intent. When she revealed her breasts – he could have wept at their beauty (now recalling a former invitation to gaze at them, but he had arrived too late on the raft) – to his horror he discerned tatooed on the soft and tender flesh a bluish line of distorted numbers.

  ‘Buchenwald,’ Isabella said, ‘when I was a little girl. The Fascists sent us there. The Nazis did it.’

  Freeman groaned, incensed at the cruelty, stunned by the desecration.

  ‘I can’t marry you. We are Jews. My past is meaningful to me. I treasure what I suffered for.’

  ‘Jews,’ he muttered, ‘– you? Oh, God, why did you keep this from me, too?’

  ‘I did not wish to tell you something you would not welcome. I thought at one time it was possible you were – I hoped but was wrong.’

  ‘Isabella –’ he cried brokenly. ‘Listen, I – I am –’

  He groped for her breasts, to clutch, kiss or suckle them; but she had stepped among the statues, and when he vainly sought her in the veiled mist that had risen from the lake, still calling her name, Freeman embraced only moonlit stone.

  A SUMMER’S READING

  GEORGE STOYONOVICH WAS a neighborhood boy who had quit high school on an impulse when he was sixteen, run out of patience, and though h
e was ashamed everytime he went looking for a job, when people asked him if he had finished and he had to say no, he never went back to school. This summer was a hard time for jobs and he had none. Having so much time on his hands, George thought of going to summer school, but the kids in his classes would be too young. He also considered registering in a night high school, only he didn’t like the idea of the teachers always telling him what to do. He felt they had not respected him. The result was he stayed off the streets and in his room most of the day. He was close to twenty and had needs with the neighborhood girls, but no money to spend, and he couldn’t get more than an occasional few cents because his father was poor, and his sister Sophie, who resembled George, a tall bony girl of twenty-three, earned very little and what she had she kept for herself. Their mother was dead, and Sophie had to take care of the house.

  Very early in the morning George’s father got up to go to work in a fish market. Sophie left at about eight for her long ride in the subway to a cafeteria in the Bronx. George had his coffee by himself, then hung around in the house. When the house, a five-room railroad flat above a butcher store, got on his nerves he cleaned it up – mopped the floors with a wet mop and put things away. But most of the time he sat in his room. In the afternoons he listened to the ball game. Otherwise he had a couple of old copies of the World Almanac he had bought long ago, and he liked to read in them and also the magazines and newspapers that Sophie brought home, that had been left on the tables in the cafeteria. They were mostly picture magazines about movie stars and sports figures, also usually the News and Mirror. Sophie herself read whatever fell into her hands, although she sometimes read good books.

  She once asked George what he did in his room all day and he said he read a lot too.

  ‘Of what besides what I bring home? Do you ever read any worthwhile books?’

  ‘Some,’ George answered, although he really didn’t. He had tried to read a book or two that Sophie had in the house but found he was in no mood for them. Lately he couldn’t stand made-up stories, they got on his nerves. He wished he had some hobby to work at – as a kid he was good in carpentry, but where could he work at it? Sometimes during the day he went for walks, but mostly he did his walking after the hot sun had gone down and it was cooler in the streets.

  In the evening after supper George left the house and wandered in the neighborhood. During the sultry days some of the storekeepers and their wives sat in chairs on the thick, broken sidewalks in front of their shops, fanning themselves, and George walked past them and the guys hanging out on the candy store corner. A couple of them he had known his whole life, but nobody recognized each other. He had no place special to go, but generally, saving it till the last, he left the neighborhood and walked for blocks till he came to a darkly lit little park with benches and trees and an iron railing, giving it a feeling of privacy. He sat on a bench here, watching the leafy trees and the flowers blooming on the inside of the railing, thinking of a better life for himself. He thought of the jobs he had had since he had quit school – delivery boy, stock clerk, runner, lately working in a factory – and he was dissatisfied with all of them. He felt he would someday like to have a good job and live in a private house with a porch, on a street with trees. He wanted to have some dough in his pocket to buy things with, and a girl to go with, so as not to be so lonely, especially on Saturday nights. He wanted people to like and respect him. He thought about these things often but mostly when he was alone at night. Around midnight he got up and drifted back to his hot and stony neighborhood.

  One time while on his walk George met Mr Cattanzara coming home very late from work. He wondered if he was drunk but then could tell he wasn’t. Mr Cattanzara, a stocky, bald-headed man who worked in a change booth on an IRT station, lived on the next block after George’s, above a shoe repair store. Nights, during the hot weather, he sat on his stoop in an undershirt, reading the New York Times in the light of the shoemaker’s window. He read it from the first page to the last, then went up to sleep. And all the time he was reading the paper, his wife, a fat woman with a white face, leaned out of the window, gazing into the street, her thick white arms folded under her loose breast, on the window ledge.

  Once in a while Mr Cattanzara came home drunk, but it was a quiet drunk. He never made any trouble, only walked stiffly up the street and slowly climbed the stairs into the hall. Though drunk, he looked the same as always, except for his tight walk, the quietness, and that his eyes were wet. George liked Mr Cattanzara because he remembered him giving him nickels to buy lemon ice with when he was a squirt. Mr Cattanzara was a different type than those in the neighborhood. He asked different questions than the others when he met you, and he seemed to know what went on in all the newspapers. He read them, as his fat sick wife watched from the window.

  ‘What are you doing with yourself this summer, George?’ Mr Cattanzara asked. ‘I see you walkin’ around at nights.’

  George felt embarrassed. ‘I like to walk.’

  ‘What are you doin’ in the day now?’

  ‘Nothing much just right now. I’m waiting for a job.’ Since it shamed him to admit he wasn’t working, George said, ‘I’m staying home – but I’m reading a lot to pick up my education.’

  Mr Cattanzara looked interested. He mopped his hot face with a red handkerchief.

  ‘What are you readin’?’

  George hesitated, then said, ‘I got a list of books in the library once, and now I’m gonna read them this summer.’ He felt strange and a little unhappy saying this, but he wanted

  Mr Cattanzara to respect him.

  ‘How many books are there on it?’

  ‘I never counted them. Maybe around a hundred.’

  Mr Cattanzara whistled through his teeth.

  ‘I figure if I did that,’ George went on earnestly, ‘it would help me in my education. I don’t mean the kind they give you in high school. I want to know different things than they learn there, if you know what I mean.’

  The change maker nodded. ‘Still and all, one hundred books is a pretty big load for one summer.’

  ‘It might take longer.’

  ‘After you’re finished with some, maybe you and I can shoot the breeze about them?’ said Mr Cattanzara.

  ‘When I’m finished,’ George answered.

  Mr Cattanzara went home and George continued on his walk. After that, though he had the urge to, George did nothing different from usual. He still took his walks at night, ending up in the little park. But one evening the shoemaker on the next block stopped George to say he was a good boy, and George figured that Mr Cattanzara had told him all about the books he was reading. From the shoemaker it must have gone down the street, because George saw a couple of people smiling kindly at him, though nobody spoke to him personally. He felt a little better around the neighborhood and liked it more, though not so much he would want to live in it forever. He had never exactly disliked the people in it, yet he had never liked them very much either. It was the fault of the neighborhood. To his surprise, George found out that his father and Sophie knew about his reading too. His father was too shy to say anything about it – he was never much of a talker in his whole life – but Sophie was softer to George, and she showed him in other ways she was proud of him.

  As the summer went on George felt in a good mood about things. He cleaned the house every day, as a favor to Sophie, and he enjoyed the ball games more. Sophie gave him a buck a week allowance, and though it still wasn’t enough and he had to use it carefully, it was a helluva lot better than just having two bits now and then. What he bought with the money – cigarettes mostly, an occasional beer or movie ticket – he got a big kick out of. Life wasn’t so bad if you knew how to appreciate it. Occasionally he bought a paperback book from the news-stand, but he never got around to reading it, though he was glad to have a couple of books in his room. But he read thoroughly Sophie’s magazines and newspapers. And at night was the most enjoyable time, because when he passed the storekeepers
sitting outside their stores, he could tell they regarded him highly. He walked erect, and though he did not say much to them, or they to him, he could feel approval on all sides. A couple of nights he felt so good that he skipped the park at the end of the evening. He just wandered in the neighborhood, where people had known him from the time he was a kid playing punchball whenever there was a game of it going; he wandered there, then came home and got undressed for bed, feeling fine.

  For a few weeks he had talked only once with Mr Cattanzara, and though the change maker had said nothing more about the books, asked no questions, his silence made George a little uneasy. For a while George didn’t pass in front of Mr Cattanzara’s house anymore, until one night, forgetting himself, he approached it from a different direction than he usually did when he did. It was already past midnight. The street, except for one or two people, was deserted, and George was surprised when he saw Mr Cattanzara still reading his newspaper by the light of the street lamp overhead. His impulse was to stop at the stoop and talk to him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, though he felt the words would come when he began to talk; but the more he thought about it, the more the idea scared him, and he decided he’d better not. He even considered beating it home by another street, but he was too near Mr Cattanzara, and the change maker might see him as he ran, and get annoyed. So George unobtrusively crossed the street, trying to make it seem as if he had to look in a store window on the other side, which he did, and then went on, uncomfortable at what he was doing. He feared Mr Cattanzara would glance up from his paper and call him a dirty rat for walking on the other side of the street, but all he did was sit there, sweating through his undershirt, his bald head shining in the dim light as he read his Times, and upstairs his fat wife leaned out of the window, seeming to read the paper along with him. George thought she would spy him and yell out to Mr Cattanzara, but she never moved her eyes off her husband.

  George made up his mind to stay away from the change maker until he had got some of his softback books read, but when he started them and saw they were mostly story books, he lost his interest and didn’t bother to finish them. He lost his interest in reading other things too. Sophie’s magazines and newspapers went unread. She saw them piling up on a chair in his room and asked why he was no longer looking at them, and George told her it was because of all the other reading he had to do. Sophie said she had guessed that was it. So for most of the day, George had the radio on, turning to music when he was sick of the human voice. He kept the house fairly neat, and Sophie said nothing on the days when he neglected it. She was still kind and gave him his extra buck, though things weren’t so good for him as they had been before.