Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

  —Same one. But looked a little teenchy weenchy bit different. Same one though.

  But at the end of the block, uncertainty would not be dispelled. Though he conned every house on either side of the crossing, no single landmark stirred his memory. They were all alike—wooden houses and narrow sidewalks to his right and left. A shiver of dismay ran through him.

  —Thought this—? No. Maybe went two. Then, when he ran. Wasn’t looking and went two. Next one. That would be it. Find it now. Mama is waiting. Next one. Quick. And then turn. That was. He’d see. Has to be.

  He broke into a tired jog.

  —Yes, the next one. That big yellow house on the corner. He’d see it. He’d see it. Yea! How he’d holler when he saw it. There it is! There’s my street! But if—if it wasn’t there. Must be! Must be!

  He ran faster, sensing beside him the soft pad of easy-loping fear. That next corner would be haven or bay, and as he neared it, he burst into the anguished spring of a flagging quarry—

  —Where? Where was it?

  His eyes, veering in every direction, implored the stubborn street for an answer it would not yield. And suddenly terror pounced.

  “Mama!” The desolate wail split from his lips. “Mama!” The aloof houses rebuffed his woe. “Mama!” his voice trailed off in anguished abandonment. And as if they had been waiting for a signal, the streets through his tear-blurred sight began stealthily to wheel. He could feel them turning under his feet, though never a house changed place—backward to forward, side to side—a sly, inexorable carousel.

  “Mama! Mama!” he whimpered, running blindly through a street now bleak and vast as nightmare.

  A man turned the corner ahead of him and walked briskly away on clicking heels. For a tense, delirious instant, he seemed no other than his own father; he was as tall. But then the film snapped open. It was someone else. His coat was greyer, he swung his arms and he walked erect. His father always hunched forward, arms bound to his side.

  But with the last of his waning strength, he spurted after him. Maybe he would know. Maybe he could tell him.

  “Mister!” he gasped for breath, “Mister!”

  The man slackened his pace and glanced over his shoulder. At the sight of the pursuing David, he stopped and turned about in quizzical surprise. Under a long, heavy nose, he had a pointed mustache, the waxed blonde of horn.

  “What’s the matter, sonny,” he asked in loud good humor. “What’re you up to?”

  “I’m losted.” David sobbed.

  “Oh!” He chuckled sympathetically. “Losted, eh? And where do you live?”

  “On a hunnder ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt,” he answered tremulously.

  “Where?” he bent his ear down, puzzled. “What Street?”

  “On Boddeh Stritt.”

  “Bodder Street?” He screwed a tip of his mustache to a tighter pitch and regarded David with an oblique, critical eye. “Bodder Street. Can’t say that I’ve ever—Oh! Heh! Heh!” He exploded good-natured again. “You mean Potter Street. Heh! Heh! Bodder Street!”

  “Boddeh Stritt,” David reiterated weakly.

  “Yea!” he said decisively. “Now listen to me.” He took David’s shoulder. “See that street there?” He pointed to the way David had come. “That one. Now see the street after it—a little further away? That’s two. Now you go one street, two streets, but—” and his finger threatened—“don’t stop there. Go another one. See? Another one.”

  David nodded dubiously.

  “Yea!” he said reassuringly. “And as soon as you’re there, ask anybody where one twenty six is. They’ll tell you. All right?” he asked heartily, giving David a slight nudge in the desired direction.

  Not too reassured but braced with a little more hope than before, David set out, urging rebellious legs into a plodding trot. He was a big man, that man, he must know. Maybe it was Poddeh Street, like he said. Didn’t sound the same, but maybe it was. Everybody said it different anyhow. His mother said Boddeh Stritt, like that. But she couldn’t talk English. So his father told her Boddeh Street, like that. And now the man said Poddeh Street. Puh. Puh. Poddeh. Buh. Buh. Boddeh. Corner is coming … One corner. Gutter is coming … One gutter.

  Next and next, he said. Ooh, if he could only see that yellow house on the corner! Ooh, how he’d run! There was a dog in it with long white hair and he ran after a rubber ball. Here, Jack! Here, Jack! Grrrrrh! In his mouth. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew Boddeh Stritt. There was a grocery store in it and a candy store in it and a barber shop. The barber had a big mustache like that man’s, only black. And a big awning on the store. He wasn’t Jewish. In the window, he had another barber, only he wasn’t real and he had a bottle in his hand and his other fingers were like that—round. And he looked at you with the bottle in his hand wherever you went. Walk this way, that way, and he watched—Corner already. Gutter already.

  Next and ask. Next and ask. Ooh, if he saw it. Ooh!

  “Ooh, mama!” he prayed aloud. “I’m ascared to look, ooh mama, make it on de nex’ one!”

  But look he did. The moment he had reached it—up and down, as far as the eye could see: Again a street as alien as any he had ever passed, and like the others, with squat, monotonous flanks receding into vacancy, slack with risen shadow. He didn’t cry out; he didn’t sob. A moment longer he stared. All hope collapsed within him, fell, jarring in his heart. With stiff, tranced body, he groped blindly toward the vague outline of a railing before a basement, and leaning his brow against the cold iron wept in anguish too great to bear. Only the sharp rush of his breath sheared the silence.

  Minutes passed. He felt he would soon lose his grip of the iron uprights. At length, he heard behind him slow footsteps that drawing near, scuffed shortly to a halt. What good was looking up? What good was doing anything? He was locked in nightmare, and no one would ever wake him again.

  “Here! Here!” A woman’s crisp, almost piqued voice sounded above him, followed the next moment by prim tap on the shoulder. “Young man!”

  David paid no heed.

  “Do you hear me?” the voice gathered severity. “What is it?” And now the hand began forcing him away from the railing.

  He turned about, head rolling in misery.

  “Gracious me!” She raised a fending hand. “Whatever in the world has happened?”

  Quivering, he looked at her, unable to answer. She was old, dwarfish, yet curiously compact. She wore green. A dark green hat skimmed high over a crest of white hair. From her hand hung a small black shopping bag, only vaguely bulging.

  “Gracious!” she repeated, startled into scolding, “Won’t you answer?”

  “I—I’m losted,” he sobbed, finding his breath at last. “Aaa! I’m losted.”

  “There! There! There! You poor thing!” and with a quick bird-like tug at a pince-nez hanging from a little reel under her coat, she fixed him in magnified grey eyes. “Tt! Tt! Tt! Don’t you know where you live?”

  “Yea, I know,” he wept.

  “Well, tell me.”

  “A hunner ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt.”

  “Potter Street? Why you silly child, this is Potter Street. Now, stop your crying!” A little grey finger went up.

  “Id ain’d!” he moaned.

  “What isn’t?” The eyes behind the lenses contracted authoritatively.

  “Id ain’d Boddeh Stritt!” He wept doggedly.

  “Please don’t rub your eyes that way! Do you mean this isn’t Potter Street?”

  “Id ain’d Boddeh Stritt!”

  “Bodder! Bodder! Are you sure?”

  “Yeah!” his voice trailed off.

  “Bodder, Bother, Botter, try and think!”

  “It’s Boddeh Stritt!”

  “And this isn’t it?” she asked hopefully.

  “Naaaah!”

  “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What shall we do?”

  “Waa!” he wailed, “W’eas mine mama! I wan’ mine mama!”

  “Now you must stop crying,�
�� she scolded again. “You simply must! Where’s your handkerchief?”

  “Waaa!”

  “Oh, dear! How trying you are!” she exclaimed and then as if struck with a new thought, “Wait!” She brightened and began hastily rummaging in her little black bag. “I have something for you!” She brought out a large, yellow banana. “Here!” And when he refused. “Now take it!” She thrust it into his fingers. “You like bananas, don’t you?”

  “Aaa! I wan’ my mama!”

  “I’ll have to take you to—” she broke off. “I’m going to take you to your mother.”

  “You ain’d,” he wailed. “You ain’d!”

  “Yes, I am,” she said with a positive nod. “This very moment.”

  He stared at her incredulously.

  “We’re going now. Hold your banana tightly!”

  XIII

  “AND so you live by dis way and dat way and straight from the school?” Mimicking him, the policeman’s hand glided about.

  The old woman had tricked him. She had led him to a police-station and left him. He had tried to run, but they had caught him. And now he stood weeping before a bare-headed policeman with a gold badge. A helmeted one stood behind him.

  “And Boddeh Street is the name and you can’t spell it?”

  “N-no!”

  “Mmm! Boddeh? Body Street, eh? Better look at the map.” He pushed himself back from the railing. “Know it?” he inquired of the helmeted one. “Body Street—sounds like the morgue.”

  “Near the school on Winston Place? Boddeh? Pother? Say, I know where he lives! Barhdee Street! Sure, Barhdee! That’s near Parker and Oriol—Alex’s beat. Ain’t that it?”

  “Y-yes.” Hope stirred faintly. The other names sounded familiar. “Boddeh Stritt.”

  “Barhdee Street!” The helmeted one barked good-naturedly. “Be-gob, he’ll be havin’ me talk like a Jew. Sure!”

  “Well!” The bareheaded one sighed. “You were just kiddin’ us, weren’t ye? But look, we ain’t mad. We’ll get your mama in a jiffy.” He nodded to the helmeted one. “See if he wants to do number one or somethin’? The mess that—last—one made—” His voice trailed off as he moved to the telephone.

  “Yep!” The helmeted one patted David on the shoulder. “We could use a matron.” And heartily. “C’mon, me boy, yer all roit.” And led him under a low archway, past a flight of stairs and into a bleak, bare, high-ceilinged room. Chairs lined the walls. Bars ribbed the tall windows. They stopped before a white door, went into a tiled-floor toilet that reeked with nostril-searing cleanliness. Beside the doorless alcoves, stretched a drab grey slab, corrugated by a dark trickle of water that splashed into the trough below.

  “Step up close an’ do yer dooty, sonny me boy.” He propelled the reluctant David toward the urinal. “C’mon, now. It’s recess time. Sure, I’ve a lad of me own in school.” He turned on the faucet in the wash bowl. “And ye do it with yer mittens on! Say, yer all roit! That’s the way! Git a good one out o’ ye. What would yer mama be sayin, if she found ye were after wetthin yer drawz? This is a divil of a joint, she’d say. What kind of cops are yiz at all? Sure!” He shut off the faucet. “No more’n three shakes, mind ye!”

  And David was led out again into the bleak room.

  “Any seat in the house, me lad—the winder there—tha-a-ts it. Yer a quiet kid. And we’ll page ye the minute yer mother comes. Ther-r-r!” He turned and went out.

  Drearily, David gazed about him. The loneliness of the huge room, made ten-fold lonelier by the bare, steep walls, the long rows of vacant chairs sunken in shadow, the barred windows barring in vacancy, oppressed him with a despair so heavy, so final, it numbed him like a drug or a drowsiness. His listless eyes turned toward the window, looked out. Back yards … grey scabs of ice … on the dead grass … ended in a wall of low frame houses, all built of clapboards, all painted a mud-brown, all sawing the sky with a rip-tooth slant of gabled roofs. Shades were half drawn. From all their chimneys smoke unwreathed into the wintry blue.

  Time was despair, despair beyond tears.… He understood it now, understood it all, irrevocably, indelibly. Desolation had fused into a touchstone, a crystalline, bitter, burred reagent that would never be blunted, never dissolved. Trust nothing. Trust nothing. Trust nothing. Wherever you look, never believe. Whatever anything was or did or said, it pretended. Never believe. If you played hide’n’-go-seek, it wasn’t hide’n’-go-seek, it was something else, something sinister. If you played follow the leader, the world turned upside down and an evil face passed through it. Don’t play; never believe. The man who had directed him; the old woman who had left him here; the policeman; all had tricked him. They would never call his mother, never. He knew. They would keep him there. That rat cellar underneath. That rat cellar! That boy he had pushed was still. Coffin-box still. They knew it. And they knew about Annie. They made believe they didn’t, but they knew. Never believe. Never play. Never believe. Not anything. Everything shifted. Everything changed. Even words. Words, you said. Wanna, you said. I wanna. Yea. I wanna. What? You know what. They were something else, something horrible! Trust nothing. Even sidewalks, even streets, houses, you looked at them. You knew where you were and they turned. You watched them and they turned. That way. Slow, cunning. Trust noth—

  On the stairs outside, heavy feet tramped down, accompanied by a rhythmic clacking as if some hollow metal were bouncing against the uprights under the bannister rail—

  “C’mon, Steve!” A loud voice dwindled into the room beyond. “Kick in fer a change!”

  And a blurred reply met blurred rejoinders and laughter. Then the stalwart rap of dense heels approached. The helmeted one switched on the lights, revealing another beside him, a man in plain clothes, thick-set, lipless and impassive, who swung in his hand a large tin dinner-pail. The new-comer turned quizzically to the helmeted one.

  “He did?”

  “He did so.”

  “Well!” ominously.

  “A banana that size! And if I hadn’t winked me oiyes quicker than a flash, he’d have poked it in like a spoon into a stew!”

  “A cop-fighter, hunh?”

  “And a bad one, I’m tellin’ ye! Me peepers are still watherin’! And he’s afther kickin’ me in the brisket till I’m blue as me own coat!”

  “Hmm! Maybe we better not git ’im any o’ dat chawklit cake.”

  “Well, now!” The helmeted one levered up his helmet to scratch his smoky red hair. “What d’ ye think? He’s been a good boy, since.”

  “Iz zat so?”

  “Mmm! Quiet as a mouse!”

  “Well, ’at makes it different. D’ye like chawklit cake? W’at’s ’is name?”

  “David. David—er— David himself.”

  “D’ye like chawklit cake, I ast ye?”

  “N-no,” fearfully.

  “W-a-a-t?” He growled, his eyes narrowing incredulously. “Yuh—don’—like chawklit—cake? Owoo! We gotta keep ye hea den! Dere’s no two ways about it!” He uttered a series of terrifying hissing noises by pinching his air-puffed nostrils.

  David cringed.

  “He don’ like chawk—”

  “Whisht!” The helmeted one kicked the other’s heel. “Sure he does! It’s nothin’ but a bit o’ shoiness that’s kaipin’ him from—”

  “I wan’ my mama!” David had begun to whimper. “I wan’ my mama! Mama!”

  “Arrh!” The helmeted one exploded. “Now look what yev started, ye divil of a flat-foot! Torturin’ ’im for nothin’ at all. Froitinin’ him out of his wits the way he’ll never know his own mother when he see’s ’er!”

  “Who me?” Faint amusement puffed his lip out. “W’y I hardly looked at ’im cock-eyed. Wat’re yuh talkin’ about!”

  “It’s yer ugly mug that does it! Go on with ye! None o’ yer guff!” He pushed the other man out of the room. “Don’t mind him me lad! He’s nothin but a harmless bull bellowin’ t’ hear himself bellow! God mend ’im! We’ll get ye yer mother an’ yer chawkl
it cake too! Never fear! Now you be quiet like a good lad!” He grinned, followed the other man out.

  “Mama!” He moaned. “Mama! Mama!”

  It was true! All that he feared was true. They would keep him there—Keep him there always! They would never call his mother! And now that he knew, it was too late. He had learned never to trust too late. He lowered his head and sobbed.

  We-e-e-e-e-e!

  From somewhere a whistle began blowing—a remote, thin blast that suddenly opened into a swooping screech and as suddenly died away.

  Whistles? He raised his head. Factory whistles! The others? None! Too far! So far she was. So far away!—But she heard them—she heard the other whistles that he couldn’t hear. The whistles he heard in the summer time. She heard them now. Maybe she looked out of the window—now—this moment! Looked down into the street, up and down the street, searched, called. There he was—outside—on the curb. Be two Davids, be two! One here, one outside on the curb. Now watch! Wait till she looks out! Now watch! See? There she is behind the curtain. Yes, that thick lace curtain—only in the winter it was there. Now she parts them—two hands like that—stoops. See? Her face close to the pane. Cold. And, wrrrr! Up! Bet a shawl is on her. David! David! Come up! Why do you wait? Because! Why? She would have forgotten. That—that door, mama. Oh, she’d laugh. Silly one! Come up! I’ll wait! And then he’d stand on the stoop. One-two-three. Till she crossed the frontroom. One. Two. Three and the kitchen. And then go in. Mama? Yes, I’m here, she’d call down, Yes, come on! Run past the door. Bing! No. Not run if she’s there. Be there too quick. One step and one step. Two steps and two steps. Three steps and—

  “Hurhmm!”

  Chuckling the helmeted one butted through the mist of dreaming. “Is it the mounted pollies y’are with that leg up?”

  David gaped at him without answering. About him vision tumbled into chaos.

  “Or a fly-cop on his wheel?” He continued, manipulating imaginary handle-bars. “What were ye chasin’? One o’ thim noo Stootzes? But look what oiv got fer ye.” He uncurled beefy red paws—a square of brown chocolate cake in one and a red apple in the other. “How does that suit ye?”