Crackpot, page 6
“They do,” she replied weakly, for the pain had come on her again as soon as she lay down, so that she did not know which way to turn for ease. “I’ve seen them. They make beautiful baskets. They teach you.”
“How can they teach me?” he insisted, with a curiously plaintive note in his voice.
“With their hands. You learn by feel. And they explain.”
“I don’t speak English.”
“That doesn’t matter, I told you. If they have to, the lady told me, they’d get an interpreter.”
For a while he lay silent. “And they sell the baskets?” he asked finally. “And you earn the money? And they let you keep it?”
“Yes,” said Rahel. “They get the materials cheaply and once you start selling you pay for them. You won’t earn much at first, of course, but…”
“Baskets are very useful,” Danile was musing. “I remember my mother, when I could still see, she had a beautiful basket, yellow straw colour and there was red on it and green, and black. It was so big I even used to climb into it and crouch down, I remember, when I was little, and ask her to take me to market. It was a beautiful basket, now I think of it. Could a blind man have woven that?”
“I don’t know. But here it’s a thing they do to help the blind. And they teach you to fix wicker chairs too. People bring them to be fixed. They pay…not much, of course, but…”
“Not much and not much makes how much?” asked Danile, suddenly playful. “Out of much not much a man could work himself into a living. You really want me to go, Rahel?”
There was a pitiful note, still, a plea behind the question. She felt herself harden in her pain. “Yes, you must. Not because I want you to, but in case, in case something happens to me…”
“No,” said Danile, quickly, refusing as always to recognize this argument. “I will go, but only on condition that nothing happens to you. Once and for all that’s final. All right?”
“Oi, Danile.”
“All right. It’s settled. Here is coming into the world the first great basket magnate of the West. I will make baskets of every shape and pattern. My fingers will nip in and out among the straw as though they had a seeing eye at the tip of every one. My baskets will be so finely made, so strong, so perfectly woven that people will speak of them with wonder. ‘Danile’s baskets?’ they’ll say. ‘There’s something magical about them. They are the first authentic bottomless baskets. Why, they could contain the entire universe without straining a fibre. Not only that, they’ll even hold water!’”
Rahel, for the first time since she had initiated those obsessive, interminable arguments over whether or not he would consent to go out and become a weaver of baskets, found herself relaxing a little, and even smiling at his nonsense. He was such a child. How little he understood. She allowed herself a momentary doubt. Was she right to force him out into the world? But where there is no choice doubt is a luxury.
Danile was making plans; “…and those few cents I earn will give you that much more time at home, to rest. Comes a time I’ll earn more, you’ll stay home and rest more. Someday, maybe, you’ll stay home altogether and I’ll earn our bread all by myself. Or else I can have a shop of my own and you will take care of the customers, and when business is slow you can sit all day in one of my wicker chairs and let my skill comfort your beauty.”
He had lowered his voice to a whisper as he allowed himself this playful coarseness by way of a prelude to intimacy. As he waited for a response he became aware of the faint whisper of a groan in her breathing, and aware also of the fact that she often breathed this way nowadays; in fact, that it had been a long time since he could recall a night that was entirely free of these sounds. They were what he had fought against with his blind and stubborn panic of “no’s” to all her long arguments. And now he began to realize that even by acquiescing to her wishes he had not been able to exorcise these illicit, impersonal groans that rasped out a ragged, insistent rhythm, counter to the rhythm of her life. Something was there; Danile could hear it now with his preternatural ear; whatever it was, it was comfortable, counter and alive, feeding on the life beside him, inextricably involved; who knew what you were touching when you put out your hand to caress? For one sickening moment he understood completely, in his flesh, what he could not bear to know. His flesh shuddered. Rahel mistook his spasm for another expression of his fear of the world into which she was forcing him. She wanted, with all her heart, to comfort him. But when he felt the gentle pressure of her hand creeping along his arm, in response to the sudden convulsive griping and recoil of his own, it was a long moment before he was able, in his horror, to turn to comfort her.
Yet human beings are, after all, able to comfort not only each other, but themselves as well. Danile flung himself into his new career of basket-making magnate. He learned, at his own insistence, to tap his way alone to the streetcar stop several blocks away. He learned to change cars twice before he descended finally at his destination, and after his lessons, he learned to find his way back. The streetcar conductors learned to expect him, and before long he was travelling through the city with hardly any anxiety about losing his way at all. The only thing that caused him consistent anxiety was his feeling that he must learn and succeed in a tremendous hurry, for only so would he enable Rahel to ease up on her own work. If she had enough rest, and perhaps, at the very worst, that operation that the doctor had talked about, well then, probably that was all that would be needed. In fact, rest itself would probably suffice to stifle the groan which he fancied was now far less audible than when it had first forced itself on his attention. The very fact of his own activity was beginning to have its effect around him. Danile blamed himself for having resisted for so long. Coward that he had been, afraid to venture forth. Why, he could probably have had three basketry shops by now. Where had he spent his life? But he would make up for all that. He had begun to make up for it already. There was not a single one among the elderly men with whom he used to spend a great part of his days at the synagogue, who was not impressed by the first basket he brought to show them. He knew they could hardly believe that a man like him could do such work. Danile was not used to the compliments he felt were simply pouring over him. He was overcome with gratitude and with the desire to give them something in return for those rare and lovely words of praise.
“I’ll make you all baskets,” he promised fervently. “First thing my good friends. I’ll make a beautiful basket for each and every one of you. Tell your wives, tell your daughters, you can even choose your own colours. Yes, you think I can’t tell the colours apart?” Danile laughed delightedly. “Every profession has its secrets. Never mind, just tell me the colours you want and leave the rest to me. With God’s help I’ll blunder along.”
Never did he look or feel less like a blunderer than when Hoda, through force of habit and because she enjoyed talking to the grandfathers, for Danile knew his own way home, came to fetch him for supper from the synagogue that evening. He strode along, tapping the sidewalk smartly with his cane, more out of habit than out of any need to feel his way. In fact he knew exactly, to the fraction of an instant, when to swing his cane with a debonair flourish and tap each elm affectionately across the bark, as he passed. And like a little boy he ran his cane rattlingly across the slats of the wooden fence in front of Thelma’s house. Some of the stranger kids from the other blocks thought he was doing crazy magic things, if they happened to come by when he was striding so actively along. They skipped hastily across the street, and, because they were afraid of his magic, hardly ever threw stones.
This evening he let Hoda carry the sample basket. He had made it for Rahel, to replace the tattered kerchief in which she still carried her effects to work. “But the next one’s for you, Hodaleh, to carry your books to school in.” He could hardly wait to tell his wife of the compliments he had received in the synagogue. Right through supper he talked of it, repeating every word every one of the old men had said, imitating their accents, and describing how he had had a hard time maintaining the pose of modesty which it was only right for him to assume when what he had really wanted to do was dance and sing and cavort about for sheer pleasure.
“You say you have orders for baskets from every one of them?” asked Rahel. “How much are you going to charge them?”
“How do you mean, charge them?” said Danile, puzzled.
“For the baskets you’re going to make for them.”
“I can’t charge them,” Danile explained. “They’re presents. For my friends. When could I ever afford to give gifts to my friends before? And…and…and…besides, it was right in the synagogue. They were admiring my work. I can’t do business on holy ground.”
“But Danile!”
“And they liked my work so much, I told them, because we’re brothers in the same congregation, and they’re poor men too, most of them, so I said I’d make them little gifts, since none of them knows how to weave. That’s why it’s called a gift, Rahel; when you discover you have a gift, it means you have been given a gift, and it also means that you should give your gift. The whole idea of a gift, by its very nature, implies something that should not be hung on to but can only be kept alive by being passed on.” Danile was thinking and speaking very quickly, and finding his train of thought so felicitous that he knew his wife could not fail to follow.
“But what about making a living?” Rahel interrupted.
“Thank God I’ll be able to now. The more people see my handiwork, the more will come to me for more. After all, you don’t think I promised a basket to every single member of the entire congregation, do you? Not all of them by any means.” Danile laughed. “Just a few I pray with all the time, only about eight or ten, yes, well, make it ten. It might as well be a minyan. That’s a good sign before God.”
“Only ten!” Rahel groaned a healthy groan. “And with coloured straw yet too, so it should be more expensive. Oi Danile, who will look after you?”
“We have nothing to worry about, now that I am becoming an artisan. My father, bless him, always said, ‘No matter how learned a man is, he is an ignoramus who doesn’t have a trade. A hungry scholar is as helpless as a hungry idiot.’ Unfortunately, in the old country we were too ignorant to know that there was something even a man like I could learn to do, besides beg in the streets. But don’t you worry, once I get going, once I’ve started my little business, my wife is not going to crawl on floors any longer. I will learn to do very fancy work. The rich will come to us with special orders. We will be very well known. I may have to take an apprentice. I could even teach you; it’s not strenuous. Ah Rahel, what would I do without you and that head of yours full of ideas?”
Rahel was silent, wondering too, but he continued enthusiastically. “Wait wait, when we’re on our feet, the things we’ll do! We’ll take the child to the beach in summer, like other people. We’ll invite our uncle to dinner on Friday night and show him that we too can spare meat from our table on the Sabbath. We’ll begin to live!”
She listened uneasily while her husband dreamed on. Yes yes, let a half of it come to pass and it would be enough, for now. She had begun, finally, to think of the operation as the only alternative to attacks of pain which she could no longer bear. There were now long moments during which, as she afterwards realized with horror, she no longer cared, not only about what happened to her, but about what happened to these two, her only link with life. And if she no longer cared then what did it matter? The knife was as good a way as any, and more final than those lingering spasms, to cut short a state which horrified her.
But it wasn’t true that she didn’t care, she told herself as she listened to him now. Indifference was a kind of sickness imposed by physical pain, which was itself an indifferent and inhuman thing. It was alien and disappeared with the pain, and left the nerve of caring so rawly exposed that she could hardly bear to realize now, for the first time, by the very fervour of his reaction to his new career, that her husband was not, as she had often imagined, a stranger to humiliation. She recognized it now and wondered greatly at the species of pride, or the species of ignorance, that had endured without naming, had submitted without surrendering, to the kind of indignity which had embittered so much of her own life.
“When I come back from the hospital,” she said, not resisting the strong desire she often had of late simply to lay her hands on him, “we’ll make plans. As soon as that’s over with we’ll really plan, won’t we, Danile?” She moved her hand over his hair and down his face and against the flesh and bone and sinew of his neck with a kind of searching eagerness, as though she were the blind one and he an unknown dearness.
“That’s right,” said Danile. “The sooner the better.” He took her moving hand and held it against the nap of his cheek. “Go and come, you hear me? And no loitering.”
“No loitering,” murmured Rahel.
But in the end they had to take her, to carry her roiling on a stretcher, in a screaming ambulance down the street into which Danile had stumbled, in the middle of the night, to call out to their neighbours for help. They pushed Danile up into the ambulance with her, and he crouched, his hand paralysed in her grip, whispering her name over and over again.
One of the neighbours had run to fetch the doctor. He and his wife and another neighbour, who complained he was a light sleeper, stood for a few moments in the dark, after the ambulance siren had faded away, shaking their heads and muttering sombrely. Then they dispersed, eyes downcast and yawning discreetly.
They forgot about Hoda. The child had been wakened some time before by her mother’s screams. The house was partitioned off so that directly you entered, to the right, was the little cubbyhole that was the master bedroom, with a window onto the verandah. Next to it, straight ahead, was the bathroom, and just beyond the bathroom, also to the right was the cubbyhole that served as a bedroom for Hoda, with a window looking out to a neighbour’s plank fence. Beyond Hoda’s bedroom door and directly facing the front door, was the back door of the house, which led onto the lean-to shack which they called the summer kitchen. The rest of the house, to the left, was one large room, which served as kitchen and living room. Hoda had been given the room at the back because it was partially insulated by the summer kitchen, and also because it was closest to the wood stove which stood at the back of the kitchen, and was supposed to heat the entire house. Usually, if she awakened, it was still early evening, and she was comforted by the murmurs of her parents as they took their late evening tea or sat and warmed themselves by the stove. Her mother always left her door open a crack so that she could see the friendly streak of light slipping through the door and lying on her bed and climbing up the wall. But now it was pitch dark when she awoke and an animal was screaming in her mother’s voice.
She lay rigid in her cot, straining to hear. The screams came again. It was her mother. No it wasn’t. It was. “Mama?” she whispered, afraid to be heard. But the voice was worse than a stranger’s, impersonal, inhuman. Indistinctly, she made out another voice, her daddy’s, but he also sounded funny, less frightening than frightened, and so almost more frightening still. There were movements, scuffing, bumping sounds. She waited in the darkness for the lights to go on, but the darkness remained. Only Daddy was moving about. She heard his familiar step in the kitchen.
“Daddy?” she called. “Daddy?”
“What?” his voice came, distracted. “What? Go to bed, Hodaleh, sleep; it’s nothing.”
He was interrupted by sounds of suffering from the other room. “Sleep, child,” he whispered hurriedly, and shut her bedroom door.
“Don’t close my door, Daddy!” She was too late. Now the darkness was closed in with her, but the screams, when they came again, were not shut out. They seemed even louder, perhaps because she was listening so hard for them. Then she heard her father’s voice again, calling out, distractedly, “Wait wait, I’m coming! I’ll be right back. Wait. Don’t cry. I’m coming!” But he wasn’t calling to her. The front door slammed. Terrified, she lay in the darkness, waiting, listening for the intermittent madness of her mother’s voice. For ages she waited. Once, she almost screwed up her courage to the point where she was ready to creep out of bed and stand by her bedroom door to try to hear why it had grown so frighteningly silent beyond, but the animal sounds broke out again, to her terror and relief.
At last she heard outside noises: the front door, strangers’ voices, calm, low-pitched; her father’s voice. She could not make out any of their words. They were in her mother’s room now. Hoda jumped out of bed, held her hands before her in the dimness, till she was pressed against the closed door, wanting to open it, but afraid, afraid of looking, of seeing, of finding out. Once again her mother’s voice rose, riding high on a scream, and toppling crazily off. It was the last scream she heard. After that, murmurs, brisk voices, movements, a light stabbing at her nightgown through the keyhole, instructions being called back and forth, shuffling, the front door opening, more movements, the front door closing, then the front door opening again and a stranger’s voice calling out, chillingly, “Just a sec, I’d better turn off the lights in here.” Brisk footsteps now, the stiletto of light suddenly withdrawn, like a part of her, from her nightgown, while she stood, unable to call out; the front door closing again, and silence, silence, and the sudden shattering of silence by the wild, shrill, impersonal keening of a siren.
“Don’t go away!” Hoda screamed, wrenching the door open at last and flinging herself into the larger darkness of the living room. It was true; they were gone; she could feel it in the darkness. The house was empty, they had taken Mommy, this much she understood, from the fragments of conversation she had heard through the door. They had carried her out, calling out to each other to be careful, to step this way, through the door. But where did Daddy go? He was helping them. He would come back in a minute. She shouldn’t be afraid. But why didn’t he come? That was a long time ago. Why didn’t he come then? Where was he? She stood very still in the darkness and moved her head slowly about on the axis of her neck. Almost, in the thickness of the silence, she could hear her neck creaking. Afraid, she stopped moving it, holding her head stiffly at an awkward angle, while her dilated eyes craned into the void and ominous darkness of her mother’s room. Darkness and silence; silence that was different from simple quiet; darkness of predators, there, in her mommy’s bedroom, and straining at the latch of the summer kitchen door behind her, where she daren’t turn to look, and there too behind the stove. Hoda turned and flung herself back through her bedroom door, slamming it shut and flattening herself against it, while the whole house echoed with feet running to get her. It wasn’t enough to push against the door this way. She could never keep them out, all against one. Hide. In the bed. No no. They would rip the covers off her. Where then? She daren’t look up. They were outside the window too. If she stood very still…but they could hear her, could hear her heart, thunking wildly in the stillness. A sudden creaking from somewhere close by sent her, with a crazy little moan of fear, down onto her hands and knees. Under the bed! There, in the farthest corner of darkness to escape them. Sobbing, she scuttled, flattened herself and turned her head sideways, scraping her ear on the floor, in order to get her head under the iron tube that braced the cot. Head in safety, she wriggled and bumped and scraped her shoulders on the iron, hurting them. It pressed down tighter on her shoulder blades, but in spite of the pain, gasping and panting, she wrenched them through. Now the bar was pressed down on her back and her stomach was squashed and she couldn’t move. She could hardly breathe. She lay for a moment, very still, gathering breath, then, flattening herself as far down as she could, she pulled, strained and tugged, frantically. But it was no use. She was jammed. She jutted out too much behind. Her stomach was too big. The rod had pinned her down, half under the couch, half exposed to what was fumbling at the doorknob. Panicky, she tried to raise herself up, lift the bed, but it was too heavy for her to budge. She tried to wriggle out again backwards, the horror of entrapment driving other fears for a moment from her head. But that part of her stomach which had managed to squeeze under the bar had somehow swelled up again on the other side. She was stuck. “Daddy! Mommy! Help me!” she screamed. “Mommy! Please! It hurts! It hurts! Help me!” she sobbed, wriggling her nether half frantically and trying to squeeze it small so that the killers might miss it when they came to get her. She could no longer keep silent or try to control her sobs, though that brought them closer and closer. “Please, please Mommy! Come back! Don’t go away! Don’t leave me! Daddy! It hurts! Please!”
