The Naked and the Dead (72 page)

            The platoon reached the end of the jungle after five hours of cutting trail. The jungle was bordered by another stream, and on the other side yellow hills covered only with kunai grass or an occasional grove of shrubbery rolled away toward the north. The sunlight was brilliant, reflected with an incredible glare from all the bare hills and the clear blazing arch of the sky. The men, accustomed to the gloom of the jungle, blinked their eyes, were uncertain, a little afraid of the vast open spaces before them. It was all so bare, so painful.

            All that space!

The Time Machine:

JOEY GOLDSTEIN

THE COVE OF BROOKLYN

           
A sturdy man about twenty-seven, perhaps, with blond straight hair and eager blue eyes. His nose is sharp, and there are deep sad lines which extend from his nose to the corners of his mouth. If it were not for this, he would look very young. His speech is quick and sincere and a little breathless as if afraid he will not be permitted to finish.

            The candy store is small and dirty as are all the stores on the cobblestoned street. When it drizzles the cobblestones wash bare and gleaming on top, and the manhole covers puff forth their shapeless gouts of mist. The night fogs cloak the muggings, the gangs who wander raucously through the darkness, the prostitutes, and the lovers mating in the dark bedrooms with the sweating stained wallpaper of brown. The walls of the street fester in summer, are clammy in winter; there is an aged odor in this part of the city, a compact of food scraps, of shredded dung balls in the cracks of the cobblestones, of tar, smoke, the sour damp scent of city people, and the smell of coal stoves and gas stoves in the cold-water flats. All of them blend and lose identity.

            In the daytime, the peddlers stand at the curb and hawk their fruit and vegetables. Middle-aged women in black shapeless coats pluck at the food with shrewd grudging fingers, probing it to the marrow. Cautiously, the women step out from the sidewalk to avoid the water in the gutters, stare with temptation at the fish heads that the owner of the fish store has just cast into the street. The blood gives a sheen to the cobblestone at first, fades, becomes pink, and then is lost in the sewer water. Only the smell of fish remains together with the dung balls, the tar, the rich uncertain odors of the smoked meats in the delicatessen windows.

            The candy store is at the end of the street, a tiny place with grease in the ledges of the window, and rust replacing the paint. The front window slides open doubtfully to make a counter where people can buy things from the street, but the window is cracked and dust settles on the candy. Inside there is a narrow marble counter and an aisle about two feet wide for the customers who stand on the eroded oilcloth. In the summer it is sticky, and the pitch comes off on one's shoes. On the counter are two glass jars with metal covers and a bent ladling spoon containing essence of cherry, essence of orange. (Coca-Cola is not yet in vogue.) Between them is a tan moist cube of halvah on a block of wood. The flies are sluggish, and one has to prod them before they fly away.

            There is no way to keep the place clean. Mrs. Goldstein, Joey's mother, is an industrious woman, and every morning and night she sweeps out the place, washes the counter, dusts the candy, and scrubs the floor, but the grime is too ancient, it has bedded into the deepest crevices of the store, the house next door, the street beyond, it has spread into the pores and cells of everything alive and unalive. The store cannot remain clean, and every week it is a little dirtier, a little more suppurated with the caries of the street.

            The old man Moshe Sefardnick sits in the rear of the place on a camp stool. There is never any work for him to do and indeed he is too old for it, too bewildered. The old man has never been able to understand America. It is too large, too fast, the ordered suppressed castes of centuries wither here; people are always in flux. His neighbors become wealthier, move away from the East Side to Brooklyn, to the Bronx, to the upper West Side; some of them lose their little businesses, drift farther down the street to another hovel, or migrate to the country. He has been a peddler himself; in the spring before the first World War, he has carried his goods on his back, tramped the dirt roads through small New Jersey towns, selling scissors and thread and needles. But he has never understood it and now in his sixties he is prematurely senile, an old man relegated to the back of a tiny candy store, drifting in Talmudic halls of thought. (If a man hath a worm on his brain, it may be removed by laying a cabbage leaf near the orifice onto which the worm will crawl.)

            His grandson, Joey, now seven, comes home from school weeping, a bruise on his face. Ma, they beat me up, they beat me up, they called me sheenie.

            Who did, who was it?

            It was the Italian kids, a whole gang, they beat me up.

            The sounds move in the old man's mind, alter his thought stream. The Italians. He shrugs. An undependable people; in the Inquisition they let the Jews in at Genoa, but at Naples. . . Naples.

            He shrugs, watches the mother wash the blood away, fit a patch of adhesive to the cut. Oh, mein Joey.

            The old man laughs to himself, the delicate filtered laughter of a pessimist who is reassured that things have turned out badly. Nu, this America is not so different. The old man sees the goy faces staring at the victims.

            Joey, he calls in a harsh cracked voice.

            What is it, zaydee?

            The goyim, what did they call you?

            Sheenie.

            The grandfather shrugs again. Another name. For a moment an ancient buried anger moves him. He stares at the unformed features of the boy, the bright blond hair. In America even the Juden look like goyim. Blond hair. The old man rouses himself to speech, talks in Yiddish. They beat you because you're a Jew, he says. Do you know what a Jew is?

            Yes.

            The grandfather feels a spasm of warmth for his grandchild. So handsome. So good. He is an old man and he will die soon, and the child is too young to understand him. There is so much wisdom he could give.

            It's a difficult question, the meaning of a Jew. It's not a race, he says, it's not even a religion any more, maybe it will never be a nation. Dimly, he knows he has lost the child already, but he continues talking, musing aloud.

            What is it, then? Yehudah Halevy said Israel is the heart of all nations. What attacks the body attacks the heart. And the heart is also the conscience, which suffers for the sins of the nations. He shrugs once more, does not differentiate between saying aloud what he thinks or merely moving his lips. It's an interesting problem, but personally I think a Jew is a Jew because he suffers. Olla Juden suffer.

            Why?

            So we will deserve the Messiah? The old man no longer knows. It makes us better and worse than the goyim, he thinks.

            But the child must always be given an answer. He rouses himself, concentrates and says without certainty, It is so we will last. He speaks again, wholly lucid for a moment. We are a harried people, beset by oppressors. We must always journey from disaster to disaster, and it makes us stronger and weaker than other men, makes us love and hate the other Juden more than other men. We have suffered so much that we know how to endure. We will always endure.

            The boy understands almost nothing of this, but he has heard the words and they engrave a memory which perhaps he will exhume later. He looks at his grandfather, at the wrinkled corded hands and the anger, the febrile intelligence, in his pale old-man's eyes. Suffer. It is the only word Joey Goldstein absorbs. Already he has forgotten most of the shame and fear of his beating. He fingers the plaster on his temple, wonders if he can go out to play.

            The poor are the great voyagers. There are always new businesses, new jobs, new places to live, new expectations evolving into old familiar failures.

            There is the candy store in the East Side, which fails, and another which fails, and still another. There are movements: to the Bronx, back to Manhattan, to candy stores in Brooklyn. The grandfather dies, and the mother is alone with Joey, settles at last in a candy store in Brownsville with the same front window that slides open painfully, the same dust on the candy.

            By the time he is eight and nine and ten, Joey is up at five in the morning, sells the papers, the cigarettes, to the men going to work, leaves at seven-thirty himself for school, and is back in the candy store again until it is almost time for bed. And his mother is in the store almost all day long.

            The years pass slowly in the work-vacuum, the lonely life. He is an odd boy, so adult, the relatives tell his mother. And he is eager to please, a fine salesman on the honest side, but there are no potentialities for the big operator, the con man. It is all work, and the peculiar intimate union between his mother and himself of people who work together for many years.

            He has ambitions. During the time he is in high school there are impossible dreams about college, of being an engineer or a scientist. In his little spare time he reads technical books, dreams of leaving the candy store. But of course when he does it is to work in a warehouse as a shipping clerk while his mother employs a kid to do the work he has done formerly.

            And there are no contacts. His speech is different, quite different from that of the men with whom he works, the few boys he knows on the block. There is virtually nothing of the hoarse rough compassionate accent of Brooklyn. It is like his mother's speech, slightly formal, almost with an accent, a loving use of bigger words than are really necessary. And when at night he sits on one of the stoops and talks to the youths with whom he grew up, whom he has watched play stick ball and touch football on the streets for many years, there is a difference between them and him.

            Look at the knockers on her, Murray says.

            A dish, Benny says.

            Joey smiles uncomfortably, sits among the dozen other youths on the stoop, watches the foliage of the Brooklyn trees rustle in contented bourgeois rhythms over his head.

            She got a rich father, Riesel says.

            Marry her.

            And two steps farther down, they are arguing about batting averages. Whadeya mean? I know, ya wanta bet on it? Listen, that was the day I woulda made sixteen bucks if Brooklyn won. I had Hack Wilson picked for two for five to bring him up to .281 and Brooklyn to win, and he did three for four only they dropped it to the Cubs 7-2 and I lost. Whadeya handing me ya want to bet on it?

            Goldstein's cheek muscles are tired from the stupid outsider grin.

            Murray nudges him. How come you didn't go with us to the Giant doubleheader?

            Oh, I don't know, somehow I never can concern myself properly with baseball.

            Another girl wiggles by in the Brooklyn gloaming, and Riesel, the card, stalks after her, moving like an ape. Wheeeeeeh, he whistles, and her heels tap in the coquettish mating sounds of the bird flying away for only this night.

            What bumpers on her.

            You don't belong to the Panthers, do you, Joey? says the girl sitting next to him at the party.

            No, but I'm familiar with them all, nice fellows, he says. In this year, his nineteenth, out of high school, he is cultivating a blond mustache which will not take.

            I heard Larry is getting married.

            And Evelyn too, Joey says.

            Yeah, to a lawyer.

            In the middle of the cellar, in the cleared place, they are dancing sharpy style, their backsides out, their shoulders moving insolently. IS IN THE STAR DUST OF A SONG.

            You dance, Joey?

            No. A momentary anger toward all the others. They have time to dance, time to become lawyers, time to become smooth. But it passes, is uncharacteristic, and he is merely uncomfortable again.

            Excuse me, Lucille, he says to the hostess, but I have to go now, got to get up early, convey my fondest apologies to your mother.

            And back inside his house at the socially rejected hour of ten-thirty, he sits with his mother, drinks a glass of hot tea on the eroded white porcelain table, is obviously moody.

            What's the matter, Joey?

            Nothing. And it is unbearable that she knows. Tomorrow I got a lot of work, he says.

            At the shoe factory they should appreciate you more, all the work you do.

            He tilts the carton off the floor, gets his knee back of it, and zooms it up over his head, lofting it onto the top of the seven-foot pile. Beside him the new man is wrestling it up clumsily.

            Here, let me show you, Joey says. You have to combat the inertia of it, get it in momentum. It's very important to know how to lift these things or you get a rupture, all kinds of physical breakdowns. I've made a study of this. His powerful back muscles contract only slightly as he flips up another carton. You'll get the hang of it, he says cheerfully. There are lots of things in this kind of work you have to study about.

            A lonely deal. Sad things, like leafing through the annual catalogues sent out by MIT, Sheffield School of Engineering, NYU, and so on.

            But there is a party at last, a girl to whom he can talk, a pretty dark-haired little girl with a soft shy voice and an attractive mole on her chin of which she is self-conscious. A year or two younger than he, just out of high school, and she wants to be an actress or a poetess. She makes him listen to the symphonies of Tchaikovsky (the Fifth is her favorite) and she is reading
Look Homeward, Angel,
works as a salesgirl in a woman's store.