Crackpot, page 4
“To be a doctor is a great honour,” said Danile, “and a great responsibility. You must study, study, study. You must spend your whole life helping people.”
“I’ll help you,” said Hoda positively.
Rahel heard the promise with a pang of fear. Nowadays at a word, her flesh and bones could turn to fear inside of her, an ooze of sick fear that sank to her belly and solidified, adding layer on layer of cold, hard fear to whatever was growing there.
“The doctor was at our house again,” Hoda told her friends Gertie and Thelma, importantly. “My mother has something in her stomach that’s as big as a cantaloup.”
The others were impressed. “Right in her stomach?” asked Thelma.
“Yes. Right here.” Hoda laid a hand on her own rotundity, which might well have contained something of almost equivalent size.
“That’s nothing,” said Gertie, in whom the competitive instinct was strong. “My father has something that’s as big as a banana.”
“Well, my mother’s is as big as a watermelon,” challenged Hoda. “The doctor said so.”
“I saw it myself,” Gertie held her own.
“They want to take my mother to the hospital to cut it out,” said Hoda.
“My father too,” said Gertie, but from the way her voice wavered it was clear that she was not so certain.
“My mother cried.” Hoda pressed her advantage. “She doesn’t want to go. I promised I’d look after my daddy when she’s gone. I can do it easily.”
But Rahel was not yet ready to submit to the knife. Neither nature nor experience had predisposed her to optimism, and she could not accept, with Danile’s ready faith, the doctor’s assurance that all would be well. The knife will have to wait for its victim, she told herself grimly. There were arrangements to be made; she didn’t know what these arrangements were to be, but something had to be done. Something, something, but what? How to protect them? How to safeguard? There were a million dangers that neither of them knew about, that they couldn’t be warned against except at the right time, and by someone who understood them and could make herself understood. You couldn’t arm a child for life as you would send her to the grocery, with a shopping list and a change-purse in her pocket, and a warning to look both ways before she crossed the street. As it was, Hoda was apt to lose herself in a half hour’s contemplation of the candy counter, from which she would eventually return with a rope of liquorice dangling black from her mouth, bought on credit, the child having forgotten about both the list and the change-purse. And worse still, who knew whether she had looked both ways?
The more anxious Rahel grew the more she accepted as inevitable the fact that she would not survive an operation. She grew therefore the more determined not to enter the slaughterhouse. If she had not become worried over her symptoms in the first place, she reasoned, she would not be in this turmoil now. Very well, she would ignore the symptoms and pretend she had never had the doctor in to frighten her. But the only reason she had seen the doctor, she was reminded when she tried to follow the new regime of ignoring the symptoms, was that it had become an agony to work.
Whichever way she turned the trap was already sprung. She was caught. All that she could do now was beg for mercy. But whose mercy? Danile’s uncle? Rahel had no illusions about the likely outcome of throwing her dear ones on the mercy of uncle for anything more than the briefest moment of sentiment. The mercy of God, then? Faced with the question Rahel had to admit how little it meant in practical terms. If God were disposed to be merciful, all well and good; no one would be more thankful than she. But you can’t rely on what you can’t control. There had to be something that she could do, but what?
“What about a corset, doctor?” she had asked him, timidly. “They say a corselet will hold me in so it won’t hurt so much when I’m working. Do you think so, doctor?” All she wanted was a word from him that would justify the expense of a corselet.
But he had answered her explosively. “I’m trying to tell you the only thing that will help you, and you talk to me about a corset!”
“I know, I understand, doctor,” she placated. They liked to cut into you; everybody knew that. “But meanwhile,” she persisted, “till then, doctor, wouldn’t a corselet help? Meanwhile, until the operation I mean…doctor?”
“Meanwhile, doctor!” the doctor mimicked her bitterly. But she didn’t mind his rudeness. She had been warned he was not a polite man. That was his way. You had to be careful what you said to doctors. “Meanwhile you women have a way of putting things off and putting them off and afterwards your families blame us…”
“Are you trying to frighten me, doctor?” she had said, facing up to him bravely, though her voice trembled a little on the last word. Try as she might to leave off his title, to address him as person to person, she couldn’t. With every phrase his magic name slipped out, tremulously, like an incantation.
“No,” he had replied, relenting. “No, I don’t want to frighten you. But it’s no child’s play, I want you to understand. It’s just not healthy to carry things like that around.”
“I understand, doctor,” said Rahel humbly, fearing that she understood too well. Nevertheless she culled from the consultation some small, scarcely justifiable relief. He had not outright said that she needed the operation immediately. It was not yet an emergency. She might be permitted to carry on a while longer, if she packed her pain tightly into a corset. And maybe meanwhile she would think of something. She was grateful to the doctor for this, in spite of the fact that when she thanked him on taking her leave he muttered gloomily, “Don’t thank me, listen to me.” It made her feel a little sorry for him. Even doctors have their troubles. But at the same time even doctors can’t have things all their own way, cutting you open whenever they feel like it. Maybe the time would come when he would really have to some day. All right; what must come must come. But meanwhile? She had lived with a hump on her back all her life. No doubt she could also support a lump in her stomach. It was not as though she were an ordinary woman, unused to special pain. Perhaps, it occurred to Rahel now for the first time, perhaps pain and deformity are given to special people who have the strength to bear them. Normally, she would have rejected the idea outright, for she saw no special virtue in suffering, and the idea of God’s favour being the result of a kind of competition in which the winner received the privilege of extraordinary suffering was repellent to her, since she was not one of those genuinely talented unfortunates who enjoy their misery. But now she took a certain grim satisfaction in the thought, for it enabled her to shift her mind somewhat from the doctor’s terrifying simplification, and to repeat to herself with something of the savour of righteousness, that she could be equal to her pain, and bear it a while longer. After all, there were more important things; the child, for instance.
Hoda was growing up. Hoda went to two schools. One was the poor people’s Yiddish school. After four o’clock, when English school was over, she went to the Worker’s school to learn to read and write Yiddish, so that she would be able to read to her father when her mother was too tired. And she learned the things a Jewish child should know, all about the history of the Jews, and Judaism, and socialism, which was the next best thing. Then on Sunday mornings there were gym and tumbling and ballet and art classes. Hoda lined up for a couple of Sundays, together with a whole row of other little girls who, with their hands clutching the backs of folding chairs, tried to hoist their legs gracefully into unnatural positions, in imitation of the tightly muscled little woman who was the teacher and who called out interminable instructions from the head of the line in a sharp, crackly voice. But the titters from the other children, particularly the boy spectators who were waiting for the hall so they could get on with their tumbling class, and the outright hilarity when her folding chair collapsed, combined with something deep inside herself which told Hoda that she could be if she really wanted to, but she just didn’t want to be a ballerina anyway. She turned then, from ballet to the art class, where she found, as she told her father happily when she brought her drawings home to describe to him, that even though the teacher hadn’t actually said so, she was maybe even the best in the class.
On the whole Hoda didn’t mind Yiddish school so much because it wasn’t hard and you could be pretty bad and make noise and you weren’t afraid of the teacher. He was just a human Jew like everybody else. Every day he would come in and wait till the class got quiet by itself because he said children should want to study. And then, when they had wasted as much time as they could and were finally made uncomfortable by the rapid blinking of his eyes behind his spectacles while he pretended to wait indifferently–what would he do if they never stopped?–they would quieten down and he would begin to speak. He always began very quietly, with a soft and lovely voice, and talked to you just as if you were grown-up and would understand everything he said and would naturally agree with him. And his hands would throw you out and draw you in like a yo-yo he was doing tricks with. And gradually his voice would get louder and more and more excited and he would talk faster and faster, all about workers and suffering and heritage and responsibility, and the tricks with his hands would get more and more complicated, and he would do about ten perfect “round the worlds” with both hands, and he would run around a little, to and fro, and sometimes even standing in one spot. And finally, when there was a great roaring and yelling and declaiming and waving going on and filling up the whole room ready to burst, he would stop suddenly, and silence would rush in and stun the class, and he would grab his books from the desk and turn and rush out without another word.
Once a month, when he came to collect payment for the school, he would sit and drink his glass of tea and tell her parents that Hoda was getting along very well; but there was something shy and miserable about him then, and he never showed her parents what he could really do. Hoda felt a little sorry for him inside of herself, particularly when she remembered the time he had rushed from class, and big, hairy Ralph the orangutan had run up to the desk and climbed right on top of it and started to yell and rave and wave his arms about and jump up and down, and in the middle of it all the teacher had come rushing back in to pick up his notebook, and he had stopped and looked around him, blinking in such a funny way at all of their frozen laughing faces, as though they were all his enemies, and his wire-rimmed glasses had got all clouded up and he had closed up his face and grabbed his book and rushed out again without even punishing Ralph or saying anything at all, and Hoda always remembered that she had been laughing, and was always afraid that he remembered too.
English school was quite different. Here you daren’t talk, and the teachers had droughty faces and crisp, unloving voices that told proudly how westerners had beaten down the wild Indians and crushed the treacherous half-breeds and made the great new continent a place fit to live in. Now our boys had to go back to clean up Europe. They would beat down the Kaiser and crush the Germans and make the old countries fit to live in too, and it was about time, after all the noble little island had suffered.
Hoda always told her father what she was learning at school.
“Yes, yes,” said Danile. “England. I’ve heard of England, and Scotland too. In fact I think we passed it on our way here. You probably saw it yourself only you were a baby then and didn’t know it.”
And Hoda, proud to be maybe the only one in the whole class who had actually seen the ruler of the waves, came to school and told her teacher about it. Teacher smiled and said “Yes?” But she didn’t tell the class as Hoda had hoped she would, so Hoda had to tell them herself, at recess.
It was all a heroic struggle and we were all in it together and we were going to win because destiny was on our side. Hoda was not surprised to be on the right side of destiny. She knew that one day soon everything was going to be good all over. Still, even though they were all supposed to be on the same side something always spoiled it. In the service of destiny Hoda was given two knitting needles and a blob of tightly wound wool that had been unravelled from somebody’s old sweater. She discovered that somehow she could not work the same modest miracles with the needles that she could with a pencil and a sheet of paper. With fat, fumbling fingers she painstakingly knitted, nevertheless, in proof of her patriotism and to gain competition points for the row in which she sat in class, some hopelessly crooked squares that were to be sewn together as afghans and sent, with affectionate little notes from the girls in grades three to nine, to keep the boys warm in their trenches and show them that the children back home were thinking of them.
Hoda took a long time at her knitting, and sat shame-facedly through many a tart reminder to slowpokes, reminders directed, she was convinced, solely at herself. She dreaded the moment when the strength of her patriotism would be equated, for all the class to see, with these grubby, twisted woollen rags, hopelessly tightly knotted in some places and with great, loose loops in others, which were to be her contribution to the class afghan. Nor was she disappointed in her dread. Her squares, when she at last turned them in, after no amount of stretching and pulling had succeeded in making them look more like squares, were received by her teacher at fingertip’s length and there allowed to dangle almost indecent in their limpness, like living creatures only recently deceased. There was that subtle something in her teacher’s expression that Hoda had learned to know so well, a certain sucking in and holding away of the self which showed, more clearly than words, that some immigrant children imposed a considerable strain on western hospitality.
“Two more squares for row four, from Hoda.” Teacher held them up for all to see. “Honestly,” she had a nice, friendly way of saying things that were going to make you feel bad, “honestly I don’t know whether to add or subtract these from your score, row four. Perhaps it might help the war effort more if some people simply stopped knitting. The war might end sooner and our boys come home!”
The class tittered. Teacher waited a moment, then she said sadly, “It’s not funny.” The class was silent. Everyone knew that like many other teachers she had lost her sweetheart in a war. That was why she was the way she was. Not that she had ever taken any known generation of children into her confidence, but she didn’t have to. They could tell. Her boy would never come home again. The only uncertain thing was what war he would not come home from. In past years it had been, according to class legend, the Boer war in which her sweetheart had fallen gallantly defending his king. For future generations it would be the First Great World War which had buried him, deep in poppies. One of the boys Hoda was in love with, who talked to her sometimes, a wiry, bright little fellow, had passed on to her, behind his hand in history class one day, the theory that teacher’s sweetheart must have been plucked from her in the wars of the roses, and was happy now wherever he was, to have been spared a fate worse than death. But on the whole the children were inclined to reverence in this serious matter. Hoda knew how she would feel if she lost any one of her three boy friends, and they didn’t even know they were her sweethearts. How much worse it must be to have lost your only real true love, who loved you too, as no one would ever love you again. That was why you couldn’t entirely blame teacher, when you were out of her reach.
But Hoda was well within reach, and aware now of a prolonged silence, with herself pinned at its centre. She had let the team down again. “I d-didn’t kn-kn-know how to kn-kn-kn-it,” she quavered finally, unable to look up.
“Neither did many others in the class,” replied the teacher reasonably. “But they felt it was their duty to learn. And I suppose you don’t know how to wash your hands, either? You were given a clean ball of wool. I can’t even tell what colour these rags are. Class, can anyone tell me what colour this is?”
Yes they can, yes they can! Hoda knew they could. But no one spoke.
“No? Well, never mind.” Teacher let out a mock little sigh.
“I do so wash my hands.” The words were very deep and low from the effort of climbing past the tears in Hoda’s throat. “Only,” there was genuine anguish in her voice, “things get dirty anyway.”
“So I see,” said the teacher gently, and smiled. This time the class laughed louder and craned to look at the fat girl who sat squirming in her rumpled, stained tunic and already grubby white blouse. Hoda opened up her quivering mouth and tried to pretend she was laughing too. The effect was grotesque and somehow irritated the teacher. She turned away abruptly. “All right, class, we’ve wasted enough time.”
Helplessly, Hoda suffered, knowing herself to be lovable but in this place unloved and misjudged. It wasn’t true, what her teacher had suggested, that she wasn’t patriotic. She sang “God Save Our Gracious King” better than anybody else in class, and with a good feeling in her, because more than anyone else she secretly loved the young prince they called the Prince of Wales who was maybe even to be king some day, and anyway could marry anyone he liked and make her a princess. That was why her voice got loud sometimes, when she was singing, because her heart got so big in her when she thought of him. Only then the teacher always said “Somebody’s booming again,” and looked straight at her, so that she had to catch the music, suddenly, as it was coming out of her, and hold it back in her mouth, and just move her lips and pretend she was singing. Sometimes it was as though she would never be able to do anything right. That was why she hardly ever liked English school much. It was not hard to learn things, but something always made you feel bad. When they said nasty things that wasn’t even the worst part. You could always talk back and get into trouble and Ma would have to come and talk to the principal again, or you could say hot things like “fuck you” under your breath, or “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” But how could you look back their looks when you didn’t have the awful looking feelings that were in the faces they looked at you with? Some people didn’t like you. No matter what you did they wouldn’t like you. You couldn’t be what they would like you to be because they didn’t like you to be at all. How was the world ever going to be perfect then?
