Crackpot, page 45
He was silent for a long time, silent while she wept, and he was right to be. What did he know? What did he know?
Finally he said, very quietly, “Should I have died then?”
“What do you mean?” she said, snuffling still over her private ache.
“Should I not have dragged myself out from under them? Should I not have crawled over them, clawing and grasping their jaws and their hair and their bullet-ridden flesh? Yes, my fingers sank into bloody holes, and I gripped and tore and pulled myself over them. Should I have remained with them in the pit until morning, when the others returned and poured the lye? Yes.” Lazar laughed coldly. “They gave the lye to the whole of my life, wife, mother, children, village. I watched them the next morning from where I lay in the bushes, waiting for someone to notice my marks on the ground and track me down. I was lucky. They were too busy, and in a hurry to be through. And they hadn’t brought the dogs back. Should I have died, Hodaleh? I often think so. What am I doing, alive? What can I do, alive? At first I didn’t understand you people, and the names you gave us that I thought were in your foreign language; ‘Maw-kee.’ But finally I recognized the word; it was a word I knew very well, and I understood too why you called us ‘Ma-kés,’ curses, plagues, the cursed ones. Why had we clawed our way free to come and squat in imitation of life among you? You really want to cherish the past, Hodaleh? All right. Help me to bring my dead flowers to life from under a field of lye. But they are dead. And I left them. Yes, you were right in what you said before. That’s what you can expect from a ma-kéh.”
“But that’s not what I meant. That’s not what I was talking about! That’s not what it means. It’s not ma-kéh, it’s mocky, mocky. It’s just a name, a joke. I don’t know what it means, maybe to mock, to make mock, to make fun of. It’s not a nice expression. I didn’t mean it.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Make fun of the curses. If I were in your place I would do the same. When the time came I was just like everyone else. Flesh of my father, flesh of my sister, flesh of my whole world, I gripped them and I crawled over them and I can still feel the feel of them in my fingers and my elbows and my knees, and I have to remind myself, that’s all that became of them, that’s all my past amounts to, a horrid, jellied, fleshy consistency in the terrain over which I will crawl for the rest of my life. How can you remember what can never become the past? Help me, Hodaleh. I will not ask you to feel it or to share it. Just be with me.”
He was crying! “I’m sorry, look, I’m sorry. Honest. I didn’t know what you meant, honest. I didn’t mean anything. I just meant about me, that’s all, only not…I didn’t understand, like…Let’s forget it, like you say. We’ll both just start with each other. I’ll help you, honest I will, all I can. Look Lazar, it’s so silly; two broken-down old crocks like us, rolling down the street in the middle of the night and leaking our insides out. I didn’t mean that, about not forgetting the past, the way it sounded. All I meant was what happened, happened. It’s no use crying, I mean I won’t cry if you won’t cry. I didn’t mean to blow off at you that way before, either. It’s just the way the guys were teasing me at work, and you didn’t even know about it, and you came waltzing along, so cheery beery beem. Listen, if we’re supposed to be engaged, how come I haven’t even got a ring? If you’d have slipped a ring on my finger I’d have probably said yes long ago! Then the guys would shut up, too.”
It came out so easily she didn’t have time to stop it. Well, so what? It was the least she could do after upsetting him that way. So she plunged right on. “At least I think we’re supposed to be engaged, with all the proposals I’ve been getting, but so far a ring I haven’t got. Proposals yes, but no little carats on the finger; sure, proposals are cheap.” Why did he have to go and call her Hodaleh, just like Daddy did? It was her own fault. She had wanted to know what had happened to him and now she knew. Had she thought she would escape the responsibility of knowing?
“You’ll have your ring,” said Lazar quietly.
Now she had done it. Who gave a damn about his ring? Who needed his ring? He could have his watch back, too, for all she cared. They’d been doing all right, she and her daddy. What did she need the worry of another world in her life for? What did husbands do, anyway? They took care of things. Sure, how many husbands had she had crying into her boos about how they took care of everything.
“I changed my mind,” she said. “I don’t want a ring. We can’t afford it if we’re going to put a payment on a house, and I’d rather have a bedroom set first. For the master bedroom I want all white furniture with an antique gold effect.” What was she babbling about? “If we can’t afford the whole set all at once maybe we can get it on payments. Me and my ma we always had good credit. We always paid our debts, ask anyone. Or if not we can get it piece by piece, like I always used to do business.” She laughed extravagantly at her own wit. Instant by instant her mood kept changing as she prattled on. One minute she was thinking, so what does it matter, any of it? It’s just a game, and I’ve picked up another hand to play. What did it matter, win or lose? Almost simultaneously she wanted to send peal on peal of triumphant laughter trumpeting through the streets of the town. And then she was suddenly full of determination, and tenderness, and love? Is that what it was? Love? “I think I’ve got the makings of a good wife,” she said. “You haven’t even kissed me!” She nuzzled into him with elephantine coyness. What would it be like? Would she be able to please him? Would she be able to mediate between him and his dead? No wonder he had been so unsympathetic that time when she had finally confided to him how she felt about paying her last respects at people’s funerals. “If you have to,” he had said, so coldly. “But we will try to find pleasanter places to picnic in the time we have left.” I will help you, I will, she vowed silently, fervently, and felt her spirit gathering itself up, her soul preparing to heave itself into the task.
Not until much later that night, it was really the next morning, and the first time in her entire career that she hadn’t hustled her companion out before dawn–what the hell, they were engaged, weren’t they? He might as well hang around so they could break it to Daddy together–did she feel it was safe enough to venture the question that had been at the back of her mind all night. “How did you get away from there in the end, the way you were wounded?”
“Oh well, I was wrong when I imagined that no one had noticed. One of the neighbouring peasants they had rounded up to pour the lye and cover the pit did notice the track I’d left. I didn’t realize it at the time but he was very busy shuffling about while he worked, trying to cover up the traces. He came back later on that evening. I didn’t know about it. When I woke up a few days later, they had me in the attic.”
“And they looked after you? That was very fine of them!” she exclaimed. “There are some human beings!”
“Yes. He had it all figured out. He explained it to me. They’re hard-headed, these peasants. He said that in the past he had often wished the devil would come and take all the Jews in the town. Well, the devil came along finally and did as he had been asked. But you had to be careful when you were dealing with the devil, especially if you were still a good Christian. So he was looking after me to prove that the devil couldn’t do a perfect job, because only God is perfect, and he was of course on the side of God. The rest of the war he spent wishing the devil would do as good a job on the Germans as he had done on the Jews, as a man of God he himself would gladly do what he was doing for me if there happened to be a wounded German left over. You can’t fathom these peasants sometimes, but he took risks. And his wife was good. At least, thank God, she never tried to explain herself.”
“Was he trying to be funny? He knew that your whole life was in that pit,” said Hoda. “Why couldn’t he just shut up?”
“Perhaps that’s why. You have to be very careful and impartial and hedge your position precisely when you’re on God’s side and still want to get some mileage out of the devil,” Lazar explained dryly.
She had to laugh. That’s what they were like. Crazy. All of them, the whole world. What more could you expect? What could you ever expect? Even themselves, what of themselves, what were they to expect from one another? What did she expect from anyone at all any more? What would he expect from her? That was the thing. Did he realize that this was all she was, this person? She took up a lot of space, and maybe he thought there was more to her than actually was there inside. Or did he care? Maybe he wouldn’t even notice. She couldn’t say that he had shown much interest in her inside so far. Look how he’d fallen asleep and left her to be entertained by the bubbles and wheezes and snorts of his breathing. Some company, when they’d only just got engaged, and she was lying there so bloody uncomfortable, half on the mattress, and half flowing over onto the floor, half asleep and yet unable to sleep, afraid to move though she itched and ached, lest she disturb him, and so tired she couldn’t even think of what was worrying her. Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t worrying him. Maybe he was too far gone to worry. She listened a moment, anxiously. He had managed to wedge himself with proprietary intimacy so that his breath fought its way noisily and ticklingly in snortings and whistlings and flubby purklings, in and out under the flop of her right breast. Could you be had up for manslaughter if a guy got asphyxiated under there? Silly. What could possibly come of this ridiculous idea of theirs of getting together? What could she possibly do for him? “Help me, Hodaleh!” He had said that. Sure. How? The answer came suddenly, brilliantly, on the back of the sleep bearing steed. “I’ve got to remember this when I wake up,” she thought joyously, and to make sure she would remember she repeated it to herself, the dazzling simplicity of it. You could solve any problem in your sleep. No wonder they always said to just sleep on it. If only a person could remember afterwards. She would remember, though. “We’ll get a wall-to-wall mattress,” she would tell him first thing in the morning. He would be astonished at the brilliance of her solution. “I’m glad I found you, Hodaleh,” he would say humbly, “I thought of it in my sleep,” she would admit modestly. He would look at her with wonder. “You have solved the problem of my life,” he would say. “Thank you for asking me,” she would reply, and even in her sleep she could feel her eyes spilling over with grateful tears as she and small Danny stood watching the wreckers at work. She was astonished to see the inside of the orphanage for the first and last time as it was pulled apart, like a movie set. “But I love here!” she cried, weeping because Danile was dead and gone the gift of knowing, no matter what he didn’t. “Cherish your corpses!” she cried out passionately to his name by her side. “They give your life body.”
“Almost a real mother!” Lazar swam towards her. “CONDOMS,” she affirmed with energy. “PRURIENCE,” she held out her arms, a true bride. “INCESTRY,” she sobbed, as she reeled him in by his umbilicus. “Sons!” cried Danile. “Lovers!” she confessed, weeping extravagantly.
“Crackpot Hoda,” she heard them laughing. “Have respect,” she cuffed the child who persisted at her side. Contrite, she tried to kiss him, grew frantic when she couldn’t draw him near. “You’re squashing me!” she wriggled madly to lift the cot off her back, and heard repeated, “You’re squashing me, Hoda.” Lazar struggled loose from her grip.
Hoda awoke, horribly embarrassed: “I’m sorry, I…never slept with anyone before.” Hearing herself, she giggled, foolishly, but he was asleep again. Drifting off, she remembered miserably that she had dreamed her daddy dead, and dreamed a child with his name. “I don’t want you to die,” she apologized to Daddy. “He doesn’t have to take your name.” Pregnant, she turned to Pipick firmly, “I’m moving in.”
“Backwards,” David explained eagerly to the class. “She occupies her past; she inhabits her life.”
Hoda curtseyed deep, arose. With a magnanimous gesture she drew the magic circle around them, showing all she knew. Soon, she promised extravagantly, in the ardour of her vision, they would all be stirring the muddy waters in the brimming pot together.
AFTERWORD
BY MARGARET LAURENCE
Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot–earthy, bawdy, wisecracking Hoda–is a prostitute. But Adele Wiseman’s novel is no more a story simply about a whore than her first novel, The Sacrifice, in which the patriarchal Abraham finds himself killing a woman in an agonized parody of a sacrificial act, is a story about a murderer. Crackpot, like the earlier novel, takes us deeply into a whole complex world of personal and social relationships in which the tragic misunderstandings and distances between people are both pointed up and to a degree alleviated in a way that art can sometimes accomplish, by allowing us truly to see and feel the pain and the inter-connectedness of humankind, with our burden and necessity of ancestors and gods.
In a sense the novel’s title expresses in one word the novel’s themes, for, like all totally fitting and appropriate titles, it contains meanings and allusions which reverberate through the book. Crackpot is, at one level, Hoda herself, the idiomatic word referring to the neighbourhood’s opinon of her, a view both humorous and cruel. By extension, it is also Hoda’s father, Danile, whose wise innocence can be mistaken by the clumsy-hearted for simple-mindedness. At another level, the title speaks of some of the underlying concepts and the life-view of the novel itself. The epigraph is this:
He stored the Divine Light in a Vessel, but the Vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered through the Universe.
Ari: Kabbalistic legends of creation.
In an article in Waves (Vol. 3, No. 1), Kenneth Sherman pointed out that Ari was “Ashkenazi Reb Isaac, also known as Isaac Luria (1534–1572), a Jewish mystic born in Jerusalem who developed an extremely significant strain of Kabbalistic theosophy.” Sherman went on to say, “In Luria’s Kabbalistic work is his creation myth which is divided into three major experiences: Tsimtsum–the self-limitation or exile of God; Shevirah– the breaking of the vessels; Tikkun–harmonious correction and mending of the flaw.” Without overemphasizing the ways in which the novel reflects in structure and content this creation myth, it is fascinating to see how Crackpot draws upon and is nourished by ancestral creation myths and finally becomes in a contemporary sense its own legend of creation, growth, and reconciliation–the long journey through pain, a journey relieved by joy and accompanied by a survival humour, into a final sense of wholeness and completion. The novel seems to me to be a profoundly religious work, in the very broadest sense, ultimately a celebration of life and of the mystery that is at the heart of life.
Hoda learns the story of her beginnings when she is a child, just before the First World War, in the North Winnipeg hovel where she lives with her parents. Her gentle, unworldly father Danile gives her a birthright of pride and love which, told differently, could have been a horror story. In the Old Country, Russia, he and Hoda’s mother, Rahel, were more or less forcibly married–in a graveyard, to ward off a plague. The villagers, following ancient superstition, sought among the Jewish community to find the most witless or crippled male and female whose union would magically appease the fates. Hoda’s parents were not witless, but Rahel was hunch-backed and Danile was blind. In Danile’s skilled and tender telling, the story becomes to the child Hoda a legend, a marvel, with her parents in heroic roles. It is only as the legend weaves its way through Hoda’s life that she realized the true pain and courage of her parents. By this time she has known her own anguish, and is able to understand what an incredible gift her father has given her: out of demeanment, pride; out of the depths, hope. He had, both consciously and intuitively, handed on to her a heritage of strength and belonging.
The portrayal of Danile is done with such sureness of touch, such understanding, that this blind and frail man emerges as enormously wise and strong. In some ways he is a fool of God (and despite Saint Paul’s well-known use of this term, it is far from being an exclusively Christian concept; it extends to many faiths and cultures), a person who is not understood in the slightest by most of the society in which he lives, for he is hearing the pulsing of a different drum, a man whose wisdom and spiritual power come from love, from contemplation, from faith, and yet whose naivete is also real and can be unwittingly damaging. One of Danile’s literary antecedents seems to me to be Myshkin, in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot; one of his contemporaries is Okolo, in The Voice, by the Nigerian novelist Gabriel Okara.
Rahel, Hoda’s mother, doing domestic work in the houses of middle-class Jewish families, is also portrayed with great depth and complexity. Worrying constantly about her adored child, wanting to do not only well for Hoda but superbly well, Rahel constantly feeds Hoda scraps of food, partly, of course, to keep her quiet while Rahel is cleaning houses, and partly to express the love which, unlike Danile, she cannot express verbally. Rahel’s death is one of the most moving parts of the novel. She knows she is leaving her child unprepared for life; she knows it in a way in which Danile does not. Her grief is not only grief for her own early death but the unbearable anguish of having to leave too soon.
By the time Hoda gets to school, she is already grossly overweight. The other children make fun of her size, her poverty, her strange parents. The teachers are no better, not so much out of malice as out of sheer ignorance or–in the case of Miss Bolthomsup, a pathetic and unwittingly cruel WASP–because they are embarrassed and terrified by their often unruly charges.
Hoda is bewildered by the treatment she gets at school. She longs for affection and, romantically, for love, the real thing. What she finds is fumbling sex with the neighbourhood boys. Her sense of shame at her own appearance, her loud-mouthed bravado as a young teenager, her tenderness towards the boys, such as big dumb Morgan who initiates her into sex–these are shown with an intricate ambiguity. Hoda is trusting and naïve; Hoda is also learning that not everyone is to be trusted, and yet, because of Danile’s early teaching, she does not easily give up that faith in human creatures. In fact, she never gives it up, even though she ultimately comes to see the fact of evil in the world. Life and society hurt her a great deal. She reacts with puzzlement, anger, pain, humour, and ultimately, with determination to survive and to retain a faith in life itself.
