Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

  “A raw jade like yourself ought learn a little more before she butts into America.”

  “My cultivated American!” she drawled, drawing down the corners of her under lip in imitation of the grim curve on the face of her brother-in-law. “How long is it since you shit on the ocean?”

  “Chops like those,” he glowered warningly, “deserve to drop off.”

  “That’s what I say, but they’re not mine.”

  The ominous purple vein began to throb on his temple. “To me you can’t talk that way,” his eyelids grew heavy. “Save that fishwives’ lip for your father, the old glutton!”

  “And you, what have you—”

  “Bertha!” his mother broke in warningly. “Don’t!”

  Aunt Bertha’s lips quivered rebelliously a moment and she reddened as though she had throttled a powerful impulse to blurt out something.

  “Come, you’re all worn out,” continued his mother gently. “Why don’t you lie down for a little space while I make you some dinner.”

  “Very well,” she answered and flounced out of the room.

  IV

  “HERE is a man,” Aunt Bertha said vehemently to her sister, “who drives a milk wagon and mingles with pedlars and truckmen, who sits at a horse’s tail all morning long, and yet when I say—what! When I say nothing! Nothing at all!—he begins to tap his feet or rustle his newspaper as though an ague were upon him! Did anyone ever hear of the like? He’s as squeamish as a newly-minted nun. One is not even permitted to fart when he’s around!”

  “You’re making the most of Albert’s absence, aren’t you?” his mother asked.

  “And why not? I don’t have much opportunity to speak my mind when he’s around. And what’s more, it won’t hurt your son to know what I think of all fathers. His father he knows. A sour spirit. Gloomy. The world slapped him on both chins and so everyone he meets must suffer. But my father, the good Reb Benjamin Krollman, was this way.” And she began to shake and mumble rapidly and look furtively around and draw closer to herself a figment praying shawl. “His praying was an excuse for his laziness. As long as he prayed he didn’t have to do anything else. Let Genya or his wife take care of the store, he had to take care of God. A pious Jew with a beard—who dared ask more of him? Work? God spare him! He played the lotteries!”

  “Why do you say that?” his mother objected. “No one can blame father because he was pious. Well, he lacked business sense, but he tried to do his best.”

  “Tried? Don’t defend him. I’ve just left him and I know. If I remember grandfather he worked till the cancer stretched him out—after grandmother died. And he was seventy then. But father—God keep him from cancer—he was old at forty—Ai! Ai!” She switched with characteristic suddenness into mimicry. “Ai! Unhappy! Ai! My back, my bones! Slivers of death have lodged in me! Ai! There are dots before my eyes! Is that you, Bertha? I can’t see. Ai! Groaning about the house as though he already stank for earth—God forbid! And not a grey hair in his head. But let one of us get in his road—Ho! Ho! He was suddenly spry as a colt! And could he shower blows? Tireless! Like a bandmaster’s his stick would wave.”

  His mother sighed and then laughed acknowledging defeat.

  “It was mother’s fault too,” Aunt Bertha added warningly as if giving her an object lesson. “A wife should have driven a man like that, not coddled him, not pampered him to ruin. Soft and meek, she was.” Aunt Bertha became soft and meek. “She let herself be trampled on. Nine children she bore him beside the twins that died between your birth and mine. She’s grey now. You’d weep to see her. Bloodless as a rag in the weather. You wouldn’t know her. Still trailing after him. Still saving him the dainties—the breast and giblets of the hen, the middle of herrings, the crispest rolls! Do you remember how he would stretch out over the table, pawing each roll, pumping it in his glutton’s haste to feel how soft it was? And then hide away the new-baked cake from the rest of us? His nose was in every pot. But whenever you saw him—” she broke off, stretched out her hands in a gesture of injured innocence—“What have I eaten today? What? An age-old crust, a glass of coffee. I tremble with hunger. Bah!”

  “I sometimes don’t think he could help it. There were so many mouths to feed. It must have frightened him.”

  “Well, whose fault was it? Not mother’s certainly. Why even when she was ailing he—” And at this point she did what she often did in her speech—finish her sentence in Polish, a language David had come to hate because he couldn’t understand it.

  “Tell me, would you go back to Austria if you had the money?”

  “Never!”

  “No?”

  “Money I’d send them,” Aunt Bertha asserted flatly. “But go home—never! I’m too glad I escaped. And why should I go home? To quarrel?”

  “Not even to see mother?”

  “God pity her more than any. But what good would my seeing her do her? Or me? It would only give me grief. No! Neither her, nor father, nor Yetta, nor Adolf, nor Herman, nor even Saul, the baby, though God knows I was fond of him. You see I’m one who doesn’t yearn for the home land.”

  “You haven’t been here long enough,” said his mother. “One grapples this land at first closer to one’s self than it’s worth.”

  “Closer than it’s worth? Why? True I work like a horse and I stink like one with my own sweat. But there’s life here, isn’t there? There’s a stir here always. Listen! The street! The cars! High laughter! Ha, good! Veljish was still as a fart in company. Who could endure it? Trees! Fields! Again trees! Who can talk to trees? Here at least I can find other pastimes than sliding down the gable on a roof!”

  “I suppose you’re right,” his mother laughed at her vehemence. “It appears to me that you’ll grow from green to yellow in this land years before I do. Yes, there are other pastimes here than—” She broke off, flinched even though she laughed. “That sliver of wood in your flesh! Dear God you were rash!”

  “It was nothing! Nothing!” Aunt Bertha chuckled lightly. “My rump has forgotten it long ago! But that should prove to you that I’m better off here than I was there. Anyone is! That quiet was enough to spring the brain!”

  His mother shook her head non-committally.

  “What? No?” Aunt Bertha mistook her gesture. “Can you say no?” She began counting on her fingers. “Ha-a-d A-Adolf come here as a boy, would he have to run away to the lumber camps and gotten a rupture that big? Ha? A-And Yetta-a. She could have found a better husband than that idiot tailor she’s married to. He finds diamonds in the road, I tell you, and loses them before he gets home. He sees children falling into the frozen river and not a child in the village is missing. Awful! Awful! And Herman and that peasant wench. And the peasant looking for him with an ax. You don’t see that in this land! Fortunate for him anyway that he fled to Strij in time, and fortunate too that it wasn’t Russia. There might have been a pogrom! There was nothing to do and so they went mad, and because they were mad they did whatever came into their heads. That’s how I was, and if you want to know, my dear, close-mouthed sister, as quiet and gentle as you were,” her tone became sly—“there was still, well a rumor of some sort. Someone, something-er-done. But only a rumor!” she added hastily. “A lie of course!”

  His mother turned abruptly toward the window, and her own irrelevant words crossed her sister’s before the other and finished—“Look, Bertha! That new automobile. What a pretty blue! Wouldn’t you like to be rich enough to own one?”

  Aunt Bertha made a face, but came over and looked down. “Yes. What a grinder it has in front of it. Like a hand-organ, no? Do you remember when we saw our first one on the new road in Veljish—the black one?” The least bit of resentment crept into her voice. “You eternal, close-mouth, when will that secret be weaned?”

  Something about their tones and expressions, so curiously guarded in both stirred David’s curiosity. But since their conversation on that score went no further, he could only wonder in a vague and transient way what his moth
er had done, and hope that another time would reveal the meaning.

  V

  HOSTILITIES between Aunt Bertha and David’s father were rapidly reaching the breaking point. David was sure that something would happen soon if Aunt Bertha did not curb her over-ready tongue. He marveled at her rashness.

  On that Saturday night Aunt Bertha had arrived home bearing a large cardboard box. She was later tonight than usual and had delayed the supper almost an hour. The fast had not helped to put David’s father in an amiable frame of mind. He had been grumbling before she came, and now, though she was washing her face and hands with as great dispatch as possible, he could not restrain a testy—

  “Hurry up. You’ll never wash that stench off!”

  To which Aunt Bertha made no other reply than to bob her ample buttocks in his general direction. Glaring furiously at her back, he said nothing, but savagely toyed with the table knife in his hands.

  Aunt Bertha at length straightened up, and apparently unconscious of the rage she had put him in, began drying herself.

  “I suppose you’ve been shopping,” said her sister amiably, setting the food on the table.

  “Indeed I have,” she seated herself. “I’m coming up in the world.”

  “What did you buy?”

  “Bargains of course!” his father broke in contemptuously. He seemed to have been waiting for just this opportunity. “The storekeeper who couldn’t lift the head from her shoulders without her knowing it might as well close up shop!”

  “Is that so?” she retorted sarcastically. “Speak for yourself! I don’t spend my life hunting for rusty horseshoes. That gramophone you bought in the summer—Ha! Ha! Mute and motionless as the day before creation.”

  “Hold your tongue!”

  “Your noodles and cheese are growing cold,” said David’s mother. “Both of you!”

  There was a pause while everyone ate. From time to time, Aunt Bertha cast her eyes happily at the cardboard box resting on the chair.

  “Apparel?” asked his mother discreetly.

  “What else? Half the country’s goods!”

  His mother smiled at his aunt’s fervor.

  “Blessed is this golden land,” she let herself be carried away by enthusiasm. “Such beautiful things to wear!”

  “Much good that does you,” said his father over a forkful of noodles.

  “Albert!” his wife protested.

  Aunt Bertha abruptly stopped eating. “Who was speaking to you? Go snarl up your own wits! You’re one person I don’t have to please.”

  “To please me, the Lord need grant you a new soul.”

  “To spite you, I’d stay just as I am!” She tossed her head scornfully, “I’d sooner have a pig admire me.”

  “No doubt he would.”

  “Tell me, dear Bertha,” said her sister desperately. “What did you buy?”

  “Oh, a parcel of rags! With what I earn what else can I buy?” Then brightening a little. “I’ll show them to you.”

  Casting a hasty glance at her husband, David’s mother put up a restraining hand, but too late. Aunt Bertha had seized a table knife and was already cutting the strings off the box.

  “Are we having dinner or going to a fair?” he asked.

  “Perhaps a little later—” suggested his mother.

  “Not at all,” Aunt Bertha said with vindictive cheerfulness. “Let him gorge himself if he wants to. My appetite can wait.” And she whipped open the box.

  Lifting out first one article of woman’s wear and then another—a corset cover, a petticoat, stockings—she commented blithely on each and quoted its price. Finally, she brought into view a pair of large white drawers and turned them over admiringly in her hands. David’s father abruptly shoved his chair around to cut them from his field of vision.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” she chattered on. “See the lace at the bottom. And so cheap. Only twenty cents. I saw such small ones in the store. Some poor women have no buttocks at all!” Then she giggled, “when I hold them at a distance upside down this way they look like peaks in Austria.”

  “Yes, yes,” said his mother apprehensively.

  “Ha! Ha!” She went on entirely enchanted by the charm of her purchase. “But what can I do? I am fat below. But isn’t it a miracle? Twenty cents, and I can wear what only a baroness in Austria could wear. And so convenient and so neatly cut—these buttons here. See how this drops down! The newest style, he told me. Do you remember the drawers we wore in Austria—into the stockings? Winter and summer my legs looked like a gypsy’s accordion.”

  But David’s father could restrain himself no longer. “Put those things away!” he rapped out.

  Aunt Bertha drew back startled. Then narrowed her eyes and thrust out stubborn lips. “Don’t shout at me!”

  “Put those away!” He banged his fist on the table so that the dishes danced and the yellow noodles cast their long necks over the rim of the platters.

  “Please, Bertha!” her sister implored, “You know how—”

  “Do you side with him too?” She interrupted her. “I’ll put them away when I please! I’m not his slave!”

  “Are you going to do what I say?”

  Aunt Bertha clapped one hand to her hip, “When I please! It’s time you knew what women wore on their bottoms.”

  “I’ll ask you once more, you vile slut,” he shoved his chair back and rose in slow wrath.

  David began to cry.

  “Let me go!” Aunt Bertha pushed back her sister who had interposed herself. “Is he so pious, he can’t bear to look at a pair of drawers? Does he piss water as mortals do, or only the purest of vegetable oil?”

  His father advanced on her. “I’m pleading with you as with Death!” He always said that at moments of intense anger. His voice had taken on that thin terrific hardness that meant he was about to strike. “Will you put them away?”

  “Make me!” she screamed and waved the drawers like a goad in his very eyes.

  Before she could recoil, his long arm had swept out, and with a bark of rage, he plucked the drawers from her. A moment later, he had ripped them in two. “Here, you slut!” he roared. “Here are your peaks!” And he flung them in her face.

  Raging with fury, Aunt Bertha leapt at him with clawing fingers. The flat thrust of his palm against her bosom sent her reeling to the wall. He turned on his heel, and his eyeballs glaring in demonic rage, he tore his hat and coat from a peg near the door and stalked out.

  Aunt Bertha dropped into a chair and began weeping loudly and hysterically. Her sister, her own eyes filling with tears, tried to comfort her.

  “Madman! Mad!” came his aunt’s stifled words. “Savage beast!” She picked up the drawers at her feet and wrung them in the frenzy of her anguish. “My new drawers! What did he have against them? May his head be cloven as they are! Oh!” The tears streamed down her cheeks. Stray strands of her red hair parted on her clammy brow and nose.

  David’s mother stroked her shoulders soothingly. “Hush, dear sister! Don’t weep so, child! You’ll break your heart!”

  Aunt Bertha only lamented the more, “Why did I ever set foot on this stinking land? Why did I ever come here? Ten hours a day in a smothering shop—paper flowers! Rag flowers! Ten long hours, afraid to pee too often because the foreman might think I was shirking. And now when I’ve bought with the sweat of my brow a little of what my heart desires, that butcher rends it. Ai!”

  “I tried to save you, sister. You must know what he’s like by now. Listen to me, I have some money. I’ll buy you a new pair.”

  “Oh! Woe is me!”

  “And even the ones you have there may be mended.”

  “May his heart be broken as mine is, they’ll never be mended.”

  “Look, they’re torn exactly at the seam.”

  “What?” Aunt Bertha opened grief stricken eyes. She stared at the drawers a moment and then jumped frenziedly from her chair. “He threw them at me too, dashed them in my face. He flung me to the
wall! I’m not going to stay here another minute! I’ll not endure it another minute. I’m going to pack my things! I’m going!” She made for the door.

  David’s mother hastened after her. “Wait,” she pleaded, “where will you run at this time of night? Please, I beg you!”

  “I’ll go anywhere! What did I leave Europe for if not to escape that tyrant of a father. And this is what I came to—a madman! May a trolley-car crack his bones! Slaughter him, Almighty God!” And she ran weeping loudly into her bedroom.

  David’s mother followed her sadly.…

  * * *

  Although Aunt Bertha did not move out of their house as she had threatened to do, the next day and the next, there was no exchange of communication between her and David’s father. Dinners at night were eaten in silence, and if either of them required anything of the other, David or his mother were impressed as intermediaries. However after several nights of this embarrassing constraint, Aunt Bertha’s self-imposed shackles grew too much for her. Quite suddenly one evening, she broke them.

  “Pass me the herring jar,” she muttered—this time directly at her brother-in-law.

  His face darkened when she spoke, but sullenly though he did it, he nevertheless did push the herring jar toward her.

  Thus an armistice was signed and relations, if not cordial, were at least established. And thereafter, as much as it was possible for her, Aunt Bertha kept her peace.

  “He’s a mad dog,” she told her sister. “He has to run. There’s nothing to do but keep out of his way.”

  And she did for many months.

  VI

  “A HEART full of pity!” said Aunt Bertha derisively. “Yes! Yes, indeed! For plucking a tooth out, he asks only fifty cents. You understand what that means? What will hurt me most is only fifty cents. After my teeth are gone, and I look like my grandmother, God rest her where she lies, then his price stiffens. I can see through these bandits, never fear!”

  Aunt Bertha had been indulging herself in enormous quantities of sugary, vanilla “bum bonnies” as she called them, “pinnit brettlich” and “turra frurra” ice-cream. Severe toothaches had followed. Aunt Bertha had claimed that during the last few nights she had felt her mouth expand to the size of half a watermelon. Whether it had actually grown that large, David didn’t know, but looking at her green teeth and red mouth he could see a certain resemblance. After much urging, her sister had finally succeeded in getting her to go to the dentist. Tomorrow night he would draw several of her teeth.