Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

  The child merely ducked his head behind his mother.

  His father stared at him, shifted his gaze and glared down at the officials, and then, as though perplexity had crossed his mind he frowned absently. “How old did he say he was?”

  “The doctor? Over two years—and as I say he laughed.”

  “Well what did he enter?”

  “Seventeen months—I told you.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell them seventeen—” He broke off, shrugged violently. “Baah! You need more strength in this land.” He paused, eyed her intently and then frowned suddenly. “Did you bring his birth certificate?”

  “Why—” She seemed confused. “It may be in the trunk—there on the ship. I don’t know. Perhaps I left it behind.” Her hand wandered uncertainly to her lips. “I don’t know. Is it important? I never thought of it. But surely father could send it. We need only write.”

  “Hmm! Well, put him down.” His head jerked brusquely toward the child. “You don’t need to carry him all the way. He’s big enough to stand on his own feet.”

  She hesitated, and then reluctantly set the child down on the deck. Scared, unsteady, the little one edged over to the side opposite his father, and hidden by his mother, clung to her skirt.

  “Well, it’s all over now.” She attempted to be cheerful. “It’s all behind us now, isn’t it, Albert? Whatever mistakes I made don’t really matter any more. Do they?”

  “A fine taste of what lies before me!” He turned his back on her and leaned morosely against the rail. “A fine taste!”

  They were silent. On the dock below, the brown hawsers had been slipped over the mooring posts, and the men on the lower deck now dragged them dripping from the water. Bells clanged. The ship throbbed. Startled by the hoarse bellow of her whistle, the gulls wheeling before her prow rose with slight creaking cry from the green water, and as she churned away from the stone quay skimmed across her path on indolent, scimitar wing. Behind the ship the white wake that stretched to Ellis Island grew longer, raveling wanly into melon-green. On one side curved the low drab Jersey coast-line, the spars and masts on the waterfront fringing the sky; on the other side was Brooklyn, flat, water-towered; the horns of the harbor. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and his mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.

  The ship curved around in a long arc toward Manhattan, her bow sweeping past Brooklyn and the bridges whose cables and pillars superimposed by distance, spanned the East River in diaphanous and rigid waves. The western wind that raked the harbor into brilliant clods blew fresh and clear—a salt tang in the lull of its veerings. It whipped the polka-dot ribbons on the child’s hat straight out behind him. They caught his father’s eye.

  “Where did you find that crown?”

  Startled by his sudden question his wife looked down. “That? That was Maria’s parting gift. The old nurse. She bought it herself and then sewed the ribbons on. You don’t think it’s pretty?”

  “Pretty? Do you still ask?” His lean jaws hardly moved as he spoke. “Can’t you see that those idiots lying back there are watching us already? They’re mocking us! What will the others do on the train? He looks like a clown in it. He’s the cause of all this trouble anyway!”

  The harsh voice, the wrathful glare, the hand flung toward the child frightened him. Without knowing the cause, he knew that the stranger’s anger was directed at himself. He burst into tears and pressed closer to his mother.

  “Quiet!” the voice above him snapped.

  Cowering, the child wept all the louder.

  “Hush, darling!” His mother’s protecting hands settled on his shoulders.

  “Just when we’re about to land!” her husband said furiously “He begins this! This howling! And now we’ll have it all the way home, I suppose! Quiet! You hear?”

  “It’s you who are frightening him, Albert!” she protested.

  “Am I? Well, let him be quiet. And take that straw gear off his head.”

  “But Albert, it’s cool here.”

  “Will you take that off when I—” A snarl choked whatever else he would have uttered. While his wife looked on aghast, his long fingers scooped the hat from the child’s head. The next instant it was sailing over the ship’s side to the green waters below. The overalled men in the stern grinned at each other. The old orange-peddler shook her head and clucked.

  “Albert!” his wife caught her breath. “How could you?”

  “I could!” he rapped out. “You should have left it behind!” His teeth clicked, and he glared about the deck.

  She lifted the sobbing child to her breast, pressed him against her. With a vacant stunned expression, her gaze wandered from the grim smouldering face of her husband to the stern of the ship. In the silvery-green wake that curved trumpet-wise through the water, the blue hat still bobbed and rolled, ribbon stretched out on the waves. Tears sprang to her eyes. She brushed them away quickly, shook her head as if shaking off the memory, and looked toward the bow. Before her the grimy cupolas and towering square walls of the city loomed up. Above the jagged roof tops, the white smoke, whitened and suffused by the slanting sun, faded into the slots and wedges of the sky. She pressed her brow against her child’s, hushed him with whispers. This was that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, of immense opportunity, that Golden Land. Again she tried to smile.

  “Albert,” she said timidly, “Albert.”

  “Hm?”

  “Gehen vir voinen du? In Nev York?”

  “Nein. Bronzeville. Ich hud dir schoin geschriben.”

  She nodded uncertainly, sighed …

  Screws threshing, backing water, the Peter Stuyvesant neared her dock—drifting slowly and with canceled momentum as if reluctant.

  BOOK I

  The Cellar

  I

  STANDING before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again became aware that this world had been created without thought of him. He was thirsty, but the iron hip of the sink rested on legs tall almost as his own body, and by no stretch of arm, no leap, could he ever reach the distant tap. Where did the water come from that lurked so secretly in the curve of the brass? Where did it go, gurgling in the drain? What a strange world must be hidden behind the walls of a house! But he was thirsty.

  “Mama!” he called, his voice rising above the hiss of sweeping in the frontroom. “Mama, I want a drink.”

  The unseen broom stopped to listen. “I’ll be there in a moment,” his mother answered. A chair squealed on its castors; a window chuckled down; his mother’s approaching tread.

  Standing in the doorway on the top step (two steps led up into the frontroom) his mother smilingly surveyed him. She looked as tall as a tower. The old grey dress she wore rose straight from strong bare ankle to waist, curved round the deep bosom and over the wide shoulders, and set her full throat in a frame of frayed lace. Her smooth, sloping face was flushed now with her work, but faintly so, diffused, the color of a hand beneath wax. She had mild, full lips, brown hair. A vague, fugitive darkness blurred the hollow above her cheekbone, giving to her face and to her large brown eyes, set in their white ovals, a reserved and almost mournful air.

  “I want a drink, mama,” he repeated.

  “I know,” she answered, coming down the stairs. “I heard you.” And casting a quick, sidelong glance at him, she went over to the sink and turned the tap. The water spouted noisily down. She stood there a moment, smiling obscurely, one fin
ger parting the turbulent jet, waiting for the water to cool. Then filling a glass, she handed it down to him.

  “When am I going to be big enough?” he asked resentfully as he took the glass in both hands.

  “There will come a time,” she answered, smiling. She rarely smiled broadly; instead the thin furrow along her upper lip would deepen. “Have little fear.”

  With eyes still fixed on his mother, he drank the water in breathless, uneven gulps, then returned the glass to her, surprised to see its contents scarcely diminished.

  “Why can’t I talk with my mouth in the water?”

  “No one would hear you. Have you had your fill?”

  He nodded, murmuring contentedly.

  “And is that all?” she asked. Her voice held a faint challenge.

  “Yes,” he said hesitantly, meanwhile scanning her face for some clue.

  “I thought so,” she drew her head back in droll disappointment.

  “What?”

  “It is summer,” she pointed to the window, “the weather grows warm. Whom will you refresh with the icy lips the water lent you?”

  “Oh!” he lifted his smiling face.

  “You remember nothing,” she reproached him, and with a throaty chuckle, lifted him in her arms.

  Sinking his fingers in her hair, David kissed her brow. The faint familiar warmth and odor of her skin and hair.

  “There!” she laughed, nuzzling his cheek, “but you’ve waited too long; the sweet chill has dulled. Lips for me,” she reminded him, “must always be cool as the water that wet them.” She put him down.

  “Sometime I’m going to eat some ice,” he said warningly, “then you’ll like it.”

  She laughed. And then soberly, “Aren’t you ever going down into the street? The morning grows old.”

  “Aaa!”

  “You’d better go. Just for a little while. I’m going to sweep here, you know.”

  “I want my calendar first,” he pouted, invoking his privilege against the evil hour.

  “Get it then. But you’ve got to go down afterwards.”

  He dragged a chair over beneath the calendar on the wall, clambered up, plucked off the outworn leaf, and fingered the remaining ones to see how far off the next red day was. Red days were Sundays, days his father was home. It always gave David a little qualm of dread to watch them draw near.

  “Now you have your leaf,” his mother reminded him. “Come.” She stretched out her arms.

  He held back. “Show me where my birthday is.”

  “Woe is me!” She exclaimed with an impatient chuckle. “I’ve shown it to you every day for weeks now.”

  “Show me again.”

  She rumpled the pad, lifted a thin plaque of leaves. “July—” she murmured, “July 12th … There!” She found it. “July 12th, 1911. You’ll be six then.”

  David regarded the strange figures gravely. “Lots of pages still,” he informed her.

  “Yes.”

  “And a black day too.”

  “On the calendar,” she laughed, “only on the calendar. Now do come down!”

  Grasping her arm, he jumped down from the chair. “I must hide it now.” He explained.

  “So you must. I see I’ll never finish my work today.”

  Too absorbed in his own affairs to pay much heed to hers, he went over to the pantry beneath the cupboard, opened the door and drew out a shoe-box, his treasure chest.

  “See how many I’ve got already?” he pointed proudly to the fat sheaf of rumpled leaves inside the box.

  “Wonderful!” She glanced at the box in perfunctory admiration. “You peel off the year as one might a cabbage. Are you ready for your journey?”

  “Yes.” He put away the box without a trace of alacrity.

  “Where is your sailor blouse?” she murmured looking about. “With the white strings in it? What have I—?” She found it. “There is still a little wind.”

  David held up his arms for her to slip the blouse over his head.

  “Now, my own,” she said, kissing his reemerging face. “Go down and play.” She led him toward the door and opened it. “Not too far. And remember if I don’t call you, wait until the whistle blows.”

  He went out into the hallway. Behind him, like an eyelid shutting, the soft closing of the door winked out the light. He assayed the stairs, lapsing below him into darkness, and grasping one by one each slender upright to the banister, went down. David never found himself alone on these stairs, but he wished there were no carpet covering them. How could you hear the sound of your own feet in the dark if a carpet muffled every step you took? And if you couldn’t hear the sound of your own feet and couldn’t see anything either, how could you be sure you were actually there and not dreaming? A few steps from the bottom landing, he paused and stared rigidly at the cellar door. It bulged with darkness. Would it hold?… It held! He jumped from the last steps and raced through the narrow hallway to the light of the street. Flying through the doorway was like butting a wave. A dazzling breaker of sunlight burst over his head, swamped him in reeling blur of brilliance, and then receded … A row of frame houses half in thin shade, a pitted gutter, a yawning ashcan, flotsam on the shore, his street.

  Blinking and almost shaken, he waited on the low stoop a moment, until his whirling vision steadied. Then for the first time, he noticed that seated on the curbstone near the house was a boy, whom an instant later, he recognized. It was Yussie who had just moved into David’s house and who lived on the floor above. Yussie had a very red, fat face. His big sister walked with a limp and wore strange iron slats on one of her legs. What was he doing, David wondered, what did he have in his hands? Stepping down from the stoop, he drew near, and totally disregarded, stood beside him.

  Yussie had stripped off the outer shell of an alarm-clock. Exposed, the brassy, geometric vitals ticked when prodded, whirred and jingled falteringly.

  “It still c’n go,” Yussie gravely enlightened him. David sat down. Fascinated, he stared at the shining cogs that moved without moving their hearts of light. “So wot makes id?” he asked. In the street David spoke English.

  “Kentcha see? Id’s coz id’s a machine.”

  “Oh!”

  “It wakes op mine fodder in de mawning.”

  “It wakes op mine fodder too.”

  “It tells yuh w’en yuh sh’d eat an’ w’en yuh have tuh go tuh sleep. It shows yuh w’en, but I tooked it off.”

  “I god a calenduh opstai’s.” David informed him.

  “Puh! Who ain’ god a calenduh?”

  “I save mine. I godda big book outa dem, wit numbuhs on id.”

  “Who can’t do dat?”

  “But mine fodder made it,” David drove home the one unique point about it all.

  “Wot’s your fodder?”

  “Mine fodder is a printer.”

  “Mine fodder woiks inna joolery shop. In Brooklyn. Didja ever live in Brooklyn?”

  “No.” David shook his head.

  “We usetuh—right near my fodder’s joolery shop on Rainey Avenyuh. W’ea does your fodder woik?”

  David tried to think. “I don’t know.” He finally confessed, hoping that Yussie would not pursue the subject further.

  He didn’t. Instead “I don’ like Brownsville,” he said. “I like Brooklyn bedder.”

  David felt relieved.

  “We usetuh find cigahs innuh gudduh,” Yussie continued. “An we usetuh t’row ’em on de ladies, and we usetuh run. Who you like bedder, ladies or gents?”

  “Ladies.”

  “I like mine fodder bedder,” said Yussie. “My mudder always holluhs on me.” He pried a nail between two wheels. A bright yellow gear suddenly snapped off and fell to the gutter at his feet. He picked it up, blew the dust off, and rose. “Yuh want?”

  “Yea,” David reached for it.

  Yussie was about to drop it into his outstretched palm, but on second thought, drew back. “No. Id’s liddle like a penny. Maybe I c’n pud id inna slod machi
ne ’n’ gid gum. Hea, yuh c’n take dis one.” He fished a larger gear out of his pocket, gave it to David. “Id’s a quarter. Yuh wanna come?”

  David hesitated. “I godduh waid hea till duh wissle blows.”

  “W’a wissle?”

  “By de fectory. All togedder.”

  “So?”

  “So den I c’n go opstai’s.”

  “So w’y?”

  “Cuz dey blow on twelve a’clock an’ den dey blow on five a’clock. Den I c’n go op.”

  Yussie eyed him curiously. “I’m gonna gid gum,” he said, shrugging off his perplexity. “In duh slod machine.” And he ambled off in the direction of the candy store on the corner.

  Holding the little wheel in his hand, David wondered again why it was that every boy on the street knew where his father worked except himself. His father had so many jobs. No sooner did you learn where he was working than he was working somewhere else. And why was he always saying, “They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can a man endure? May the fire of God consume them!” A terrifying picture rose in David’s mind—the memory of how once at the supper table his mother had dared to say that perhaps the men weren’t really looking at him crookedly, perhaps he was only imagining it. His father had snarled then. And with one sudden sweep of his arm had sent food and dishes crashing to the floor. And other pictures came in its train, pictures of the door being kicked open and his father coming in looking pale and savage and sitting down like old men sit down, one trembling hand behind him groping for the chair. He wouldn’t speak. His jaws, and even his joints, seemed to have become fused together by a withering rage. David often dreamed of his father’s footsteps booming on the stairs, of the glistening doorknob turning, and of himself clutching at knives he couldn’t lift from the table.

  Brooding, engrossed in his thoughts, engrossed in the rhythmic, accurate teeth of the yellow cog in his hand, the thin bright circles whirling restlessly without motion, David was unaware that a little group of girls had gathered in the gutter some distance away. But when they began to sing, he started and looked up. Their faces were sober, their hands locked in one another; circling slowly in a ring they chanted in a plaintive nasal chorus: