Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

  —Blue corn flowers? Likes them! Corn! That was—! Inside on the wall! Gee! Look at it later! Listen! Listen now!

  “And such was the ugly plague the new road brought with it.” Aunt Bertha mused sourly. “But taking it all in all, you were fortunate, sister, fortunate that someone came to take that enemy of Israel away. If not, if, God forbid, you had married him—Pheh! How frightful! Where would you have hidden your head when the day came and he called you scabby Jew! Oy! You were better dead! So you see,” she suggested cheerfully, “the road didn’t bring evil after all. But just the same,” she concluded with meticulous piety, “may it be God’s will that the maker of the road and his sister and his brother-in-law meet with years as black and as long as that road! No?”

  —Road. Black! Black! Where did I hear it before? Black? Not now.

  His mother had paused. Now she clucked her lips in a slight sound of distaste. “Well, I’ve told you. And now that I have I don’t know whether I’m glad I did or not.”

  “Pooh!” Aunt Bertha scoffed, belligerently. “Why? I promised you I wouldn’t say anything about it. Besides, whom is there to tell? The shop-girls in the flower factory? Well, Nathan perhaps. But he wouldn’t—What are you so afraid of?” she interrupted herself. “Would Albert be jealous if he knew?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tested him. Besides, he doesn’t seem to want to know these things, and so I’m just a little afraid of your—well—rashness! But come!” she said abruptly. “Let’s talk of the living.”

  “Yes!” There was alacrity in Aunt Bertha’s voice. “My Nathan will be here soon. Has any of the powder come off my nose?”

  His mother laughed. “No. It will take longer than that.”

  “I can always smear it down from my nose to my cheeks. That’s the advantage of having plenty there. You know, Nathan is very fond of your baking?”

  “I’m happy to hear it. We’ll get some kupfel out.”

  “Too bad we haven’t any schnapps.”

  “Schnapps? Why schnapps? A Russian wants tea.”

  “Yes,” Aunt Bertha laughed. “And thank God he’s a good pliant man and a Jew. I’ll never have a heartbreak such as yours. But one never knows. And tell me,” she switched in her sudden giddy fashion. “Your husband says I do everything with my left hand now that I have an engagement ring. Is that true?”

  “Oh, no! Not at all!”

  David started. They had begun stirring about the kitchen, and here he was still squatting beside the doorway. They would see him. They would know he knew. They mustn’t. He got softly to his feet, sneaked to the furthest window and peered out intently. Pretend he had just been looking out all this time, that he hadn’t heard. Yes. But now he knew. What? Had anything changed? No. Everything was the same. Sure. Didn’t have to get scared. What had happened? She liked somebody. Who? Lud—Ludwig, she said. A goy. An organeest. Father didn’t like him, her father. And his too, maybe. Didn’t want him to know. Gee! He knew more than his father. So she married a Jew. What did she say before? Benkart, yes, benkart in belly, her father said. What did that mean? He almost knew. Somebody said—who? Where? Gee! Stop asking! Look outside before they come in.

  Realizing intuitively the necessity of having to explain his presence in the front room, his eyes swept the outdoors hastily, seeking some object prodigious enough immediately to distract curiosity from himself the moment he called his mother’s attention to it. Beyond the straggly roof-tops was the thin band of grey-green river and the smoke stacks on the further shore. Against the dusty-blue sky above the horizon, the cold, white smoke of an unseen tugboat frayed out and drifted. No. That wouldn’t do. Couldn’t ask anything about those. What then? He pressed his brow against the cold window pane and peered down into the avenue. Passersby walked more briskly now that November was here; they leaned a little in the wind, head sunken in coat-collars, hands in pockets. The breath of horse-car teams and hurrying pushcart peddlars had become visible. Getting colder … Sewers did that too … Saw them when? Could ask why. No. A Negro passed. Was his? Yes. White too. He could ask that. Why does he breathe white if he’s black? No! Dumb-ox! They’ll laugh! But something, something he had to ask, to pretend to be fascinated by or they’d guess—

  Two small boys crossed the car tracks on Avenue D and squatted down on the curb. One of them had been carrying a round, tawny-colored object that not until it was set in the gutter against the curb did David recognize it. It was a headless, stove-in celluloid doll with an egg-shaped bottom, the kind that when they were pushed, bounced upright again. He had seen them before in the candy-stores. But what were they going to do? They looked so engrossed, so expectant. He squinted to see better. Exultantly he told himself that here was his excuse, here was the fascinating thing that had kept him there all this time. If only they would hurry up. One of them, apparently the owner, took something out of his pocket, struck it against the sidewalk—a match. Cupping it carefully, he touched it to a cracked edge of the doll—It flared up with a burst of yellow flame. They recoiled. He could hear their muffled shouts. And then one pointed to the spot where the doll had been and where now nothing remained except the char against the curbstone. The other bent down and picked up something. It glittered like a bit of metal. Both stared at it—and David did too from his height.

  Behind him he heard his mother mention his name. He turned to listen.

  “I lost him somewhere,” she said casually. “Did he go down, Bertha?”

  “That’s queer,” was the reply. “I thought I saw him go into—Why I think he must have gone down.”

  “Without a good-bye?” His mother’s voice preceded her through the doorway. “Oh!” She looked at him keenly. “Are you still here? I thought—What makes you stay in this cold room?”

  “In the street,” he answered, pointing gravely to the window. “Come here, mama, I’ll show you a trick.”

  “Oh, then he is here.” Aunt Bertha came in also. “He’s been something too quiet even for him.”

  “He’s going to show me a ‘drick’,” his mother laughed. She understood ‘drick’ to mean kick, which in Yiddish had the same sound.

  “A ‘drick’,” Aunt Bertha asked grinning. “Where? In the pants?”

  “You see downstairs?” he continued soberly. “That boy? He has a green stocking-hat. He burned a doll and he made ‘mejick’. And now he’s got a piece of iron. You see it? In his hands? Look!”

  “Do you know what the simpleton’s jabbering about?” Aunt Bertha inquired.

  “Not yet.” Smiling, his mother peered down at the two boys below. “Yes. I do see a bit of iron. What do you mean ‘mejick’?”

  “There’s a little piece of iron,” he explained. “In that kind of doll. That’s what makes it stand up when you push it over. And the doll burned. And only the iron is left.”

  “Aha!” Still smiling, she shrugged. “Well, come into the kitchen anyway. You’ll get a chill here. Do you know it’s growing cold, Bertha?”

  David followed them out of the front-room. Easy, he thought in hazy satisfaction. Easy fool them. But they didn’t fool him. Didn’t scare him either. Didn’t change … Gee! The picture! Not now, though. Look at it later, when nobody’s here … Green and blue it’s—Sh!

  BOOK III

  The Coal

  I

  TOWARD the end of February, a few weeks after Aunt Bertha had married, David’s father came home from work a little later than usual. David was already at home. The morning had been snapping cold, surprising for that time of the year; the afternoon had turned dull and sleety. With his customary brusqueness, his father flung his dripping, blue milkman’s cap on the washtub and began peeling off his rain-soaked mackinaw; then the vest beneath and the grey sweater. That sense of drowsy desolation that David had felt a long time ago when his father’s arising had wakened him, he felt again, watching him, reminded of the bitter cold and the long darkness. Puffing, his father worked his heavy rubbers loose and kicked them under a chair. They left a
slimy trail on the linoleum.

  “You’re a little late this afternoon,” his wife ventured.

  “Yes.” He dropped wearily into a chair. “That nag of mine fell on the way to the stables.”

  “The poor beast! Was she hurt?”

  “No. But I had to unharness her and fetch ashes and then harness her again. And all the while a crowd of numbskulls gawking. It took time. I shall curse tomorrow’s dawn if it freezes again.” He stretched, his jaw-muscles quivering. “It’s about time they gave me a sounder animal anyway.”

  After a year of working as a milkman, that was the only thing his father consistently grumbled about—the horse he drove. And David, who saw the grey angular beast almost every day, had to admit that his father’s complaint was just. Tilly, she was called, and she had one eye the cloudy color of singed celluloid, or a drop of oil on a sunless puddle. She would stand patiently, even when children were pulling the hairs out of her tail to plait rings with. And yet she seemed no weaker and no worse than most of the horses who passed through Ninth Street. It was just one of his father’s fixations, David had concluded, to want tremendous power in the beast he handled just as he himself seemed possessed of tremendous power. Though he pitied poor Tilly immensely, David hoped that for his father’s sake, the milk company would soon replace her with a livelier beast.

  “Will you get out that old blanket,” his father resumed, “so if it does freeze tomorrow, I’ll have something to wrap my knees in. This sudden cold seems to crack one’s bones open to the marrow.”

  “Yes, of course,” solicitously. “Don’t you want to take your shoes off?”

  “No.”

  It was curious to David what a subtle difference there was between his father’s brusqueness as a milkman and his brusqueness as a printer. The former seemed to be merely the result of weariness on a naturally high-strung temperament; the latter, the result of strain, of inner maladjustment. His brusqueness now was infinitely less dangerous to those about him.

  “This corn-meal is ready,” said his mother. “And after that some tea?”

  He grunted, threw his arms back over the shoulder of his chair and watched her ladle out the boiled cornmeal into a bowl.

  “Some jam.”

  “I’m bringing it.” She set a jar of home-made strawberry preserves on the table.

  “This is what I ate,” he smeared the deep, red jam on the corn-meal, “when I was a boy.”

  David was waiting to hear his father say just that. He always said it when he ate corn-meal mush, and that was one of the few facts that David had ever learnt of his father’s boyhood.

  “I was thinking,” he continued between cooling gusts at the smoking spoon. “It came to me while I was crossing a roof.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to cross them!”

  “Don’t fret about what you know nothing of,” he waved his hand at her curtly. “I don’t pretend to be a mountain-goat. I merely climb over walls, I don’t leap alleyways. Besides, it isn’t the roofs that trouble me, it’s who may be on them. And now that I’ve told you this for the tenth time, where was I?” He put down his spoon and looked at her perplexed. “There’s nothing like good, womanly worry to beat the thought out of your head— Yes! I remember now.” He stared at David. “The prayer. I was thinking should anything happen to me—Now I don’t mean the roofs— Anything! It would be a comfort to me to know that whatever else he becomes—and God only knows what he may become—at least he shan’t be an utter pagan because I didn’t try.”

  “You mean?”

  “I mean I’m little enough a Jew myself. But I want to make sure he’ll become at least something of a Jew also. I want you to find a cheder for him and a rabbi who isn’t too exorbitant. I would have entered him long ago if that red-headed sister of yours hadn’t thought it her place to advise me.”

  David remembered the incident. His father had told her to mind her own business.

  His mother shook her head doubtfully. “A cheder? Couldn’t he start a little later. Children in America often do.”

  “Do they? I’m not so sure. Anyway, it will keep him busy and out of the house. And it won’t hurt him to learn what it means to be a Jew.”

  “He really isn’t home as often as he used to be.” She smiled at David. “He leaves me quite forlorn. And as for learning what it means to be a Jew, I think he knows how hard that is already.”

  His father nodded curtly—in token that his decree had been passed. “You would do well to seek out a stern one—a rabbi I mean. He needs a little curbing since I don’t do it. It might redeem him. A lout of eight and all he’s ever known is pampering.”

  David was still only seven. But that foible his father had of increasing his age to magnify his guilt had long ago become familiar to him. He had even stopped wondering about it.

  “Where’s the tea?” he concluded.

  II

  ONE edge shining in the vanishing sunlight, the little white-washed house of the cheder lay before them. It was only one story high, the windows quite close to the ground. Its bulkier neighbors, the tall tenements that surrounded it, seemed to puff out their littered fire-escapes in scorn. Smoke curled from a little, black chimney in the middle of its roof, and overhead myriads of wash-lines criss-crossed intricately, snaring the sky in a dark net. Most of the lines were bare, but here and there was one sagging with white and colored wash, from which now and again a flurry of rinsings splashed into the yard or drummed on the cheder roof.

  “I hope,” said his mother, as they went down the wooden stairs that led into the yard, “that you’ll prove more gifted in the ancient tongue than I was. When I went to cheder, my rabbi was always wagging his head at me and swearing I had a calf’s brain.” And she laughed. “But I think the reason I was such a dunce was that I could never wrench my nose far enough away to escape his breath. Pray this one is not so fond of onions!”

  They crossed the short space of the yard and his mother opened the cheder door. A billow of drowsy air rolled out at them. It seemed dark inside. On their entrance, the hum of voices ceased.

  The rabbi, a man in a skull cap, who had been sitting near the window beside one of his pupils, looked up when he saw them and rose. Against the window, he looked short and bulbous, oddly round beneath the square outline of the skull cap.

  “Good day,” he ambled toward them. “I’m Reb Yidel Pankower. You wish—?” He ran large, hairy fingers through a glossy, crinkled beard.

  David’s mother introduced herself and then went on to explain her mission.

  “And this is he?”

  “Yes. The only one I have.”

  “Only one such pretty star?” He chuckled and reaching out, caught David’s cheek in a tobacco-reeking pinch. David shied slightly.

  While his mother and the rabbi were discussing the hours and the price and the manner of David’s tuition, David scanned his future teacher more closely. He was not at all like the teachers at school, but David had seen rabbis before and knew he wouldn’t be. He appeared old and was certainly untidy. He wore soft leather shoes like house-slippers, that had no place for either laces or buttons. His trousers were baggy and stained, a great area of striped and crumpled shirt intervened between his belt and his bulging vest. The knot of his tie, which was nearer one ear than the other, hung away from his soiled collar. What features were visible were large and had an oily gleam. Beneath his skull cap, his black hair was closely cropped. Though full of misgivings about his future relations with the rabbi, David felt that he must accept his fate. Was it not his father’s decree that he attend a cheder?

  From the rabbi his eyes wandered about the room. Bare walls, the brown paint on it full of long wavering cracks. Against one wall, stood a round-bellied stove whose shape reminded him of his rabbi, except that it was heated a dull red and his rabbi’s apparel was black. Against the other wall a long line of benches ran to the rabbi’s table. Boys of varying ages were seated upon them, jabbering, disputing, gambling for various things, sc
uffling over what looked to David like a few sticks. Seated upon the bench before the rabbi’s table were several others obviously waiting their turn at the book lying open in front of the rabbi’s cushioned chair.

  What had been, when he and his mother had entered, a low hum of voices, had now swollen to a roar. It looked as though half of the boys in the room had engaged the other half in some verbal or physical conflict. The rabbi, excusing himself to David’s mother, turned toward them, and with a thunderous rap of his fist against the door, uttered a ferocious, “Shah!” The noise subsided somewhat. He swept the room with angry, glittering eyes, then softening into a smile again returned to David’s mother.

  At last it was arranged and the rabbi wrote down his new pupil’s name and address. David gathered that he was to receive his instruction somewhere between the hours of three and six, that he was to come to the cheder shortly after three, and that the fee for his education would be twenty-five cents a week. Moreover he was to begin that afternoon. This was something of an unpleasant surprise and at first he protested, but when his mother urged him and the rabbi assured him that his first lesson would not take long, he consented, and mournfully received his mother’s parting kiss.

  “Sit down over there,” said the rabbi curtly as soon as his mother had left. “And don’t forget,” he brought a crooked knuckle to his lips. “In a cheder one must be quiet.”

  David sat down, and the rabbi walked back to his seat beside the window. Instead of sitting down however, he reached under his chair, and bringing out a short-thonged cat-o’-nine tails, struck the table loudly with the butt-end and pronounced in a menacing voice: “Let there be a hush among you!” And a scared silence instantly locking all mouths, he seated himself. He then picked up a little stick lying on the table and pointed to the book, whereupon a boy sitting next to him began droning out sounds in a strange and secret tongue.