Crackpot Read online

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  BY ADELE WISEMAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  A

  Kaddish

  for

  Esther

  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.

  ONE

  Out of Shew. Bed and Golda came Rahel. Out of Malka and Benyamin came Danile. Out of Danile and Rahel came Hoda. Out of Hoda, Pipick came, Pipick born in secrecy and mystery and terror, for what did Hoda know?

  In the daytime her frail and ever-so-slightly humpbacked mother, or so they described her to blind Danile before they rushed them off to be married, used to take Hoda along with her to the houses where she cleaned. And partly to keep her quiet, and partly because of an ever-present fear, for she felt that she would never have another child, Rahel carried always with her, in a large, cotton kerchief, tied into a peasant-style sack, a magically endless supply of food. All day long, at the least sign of disquiet, she fed the child, for Hoda even then was big-voiced and forward, and sometimes said naughty things to people. Rather than risk having an employer forbid her the privilege of bringing the little girl to work, Rahel forestalled trouble. Things can’t go in and out of the same little mouth simultaneously.

  Hoda for her part enjoyed eating. She was on the whole a good-natured child. Even in the moments when her jaws were unwillingly at rest she was content to let her flecked ash-grey eyes linger contemplatively on the yellow and white dotted kerchief sack for what she felt were long periods of time while she restrained herself from disturbing her mother at her work. When at last she could refrain no longer, for she was only a child after all, Hoda would give vent to a surprisingly chesty contralto. “Ma-a-a,” she would rumble, “Maa-a-a-a-ah!”

  Rahel would rise quickly from her knees, wipe her hands, untie the kerchief, and give her daughter another little something to chew on. It amused some of her employers to see this continuous process, and they entertained themselves by feeding the child too, just to be able to comment, in what Rahel mistook for admiration, on how much she could put away. Hoda herself never refused these gifts of food, though there was something of aloofness, even of condescension, in her acceptance, as there is with some zoo animals that people feed for their own amusement. It was as though in allowing them to play their game she was not necessarily accepting their terms of reference. Occasionally a woman with kindly intentions would scold Rahel for letting her little girl get so fat. Rahel misinterpreted the kindly intentions and resented these critics who wanted her to deny her child. She saw in it simply another sign that it is the way of the rich to deny the poor, and continued to make sure that her child was bigger and more beautiful every day. Why else does a mother crawl on her knees in the houses of strangers?

  Still others of the women whose homes she cleaned took advantage of the presence of the sack and allowed themselves to assume that since she had brought her own food they didn’t have to provide any lunch for Rahel. Such days were hard for her, for she was too embarrassed to remind her employer that lunch had been agreed on between them when they discussed terms. At the same time she would rather starve than take food from her daughter’s mouth, of which she considered the yellow sack to be a simple extension, as her own breasts had been once. So she worked through the long day of cramping hunger pains, tasting only her distaste, but still feeding Hoda all the while, automatically and without resentment.

  Work was not easy to find, for she did not look very strong, and besides people did not like the idea of a Jewish woman hiring herself out to do what they considered to be demeaning tasks. On the other hand people felt sorry for her, hump-backed, with a blind husband sitting at home and a fat child to lug about. And they knew, for such things get around, though Danile and Rahel never spoke of it in public, how badly Danile’s wealthy uncle had treated them when he had discovered that he had been tricked into sponsoring the immigration to the new world of the skeletons in the family closet. “Whaddaya want from me?” he told his wife, as they argued the matter night after night in bed. “Nobody told me they were cripples. Duds!” And he cursed his opposite number, Rahel’s rich uncle in the old country, who had negotiated the affair with him so handsomely, and had, it turned out, at small expense rid himself of a chronic burden. “No wonder he’s rich,” raged the uncle of Danile, with a fine mixture of chagrin and admiration.

  In effect, Uncle Nate had thrown them out, though he hadn’t actually had to go that far, for Rahel, gentle always in her actions, though not necessarily in her judgments, had not waited for him to behave as badly as he gave indication that he was capable of doing. Gauging very quickly the temper of the uncle’s household she had gone out, found and rented the shack, and moved her family into it. Then, since she had no other skill, she went among the neighbours and offered herself as a charwoman. In this at least she had plenty of experience. At home in the old country, before her unexpected marriage, she had been the one who had cleaned house and looked after the long line of little sisters her mother had conceived of her soldier father when he sent word he was in the vicinity and she made her periodic visits to the woods and fields near the camps where he was stationed.

  At first, only the enemies of Uncle Nate took her in to clean for them, as a way of embarrassing the big man. But these people wanted at one and the same time to show that they were made of finer stuff than Nate and to make sure that Rahel did not expect special treatment, just because she was a Jew and related to wealth. Consequently they were the hardest to please, and Rahel ended up by doing most of her cleaning for people who were not much richer than herself and who would occasionally hire her, perhaps once or twice a year, when they needed a thorough turning out of their homes.

  Sometimes, for all that her mother tried to prevent it, Hoda would get into trouble. There was one woman, for instance, who made fun of the child’s chesty call of “Maaaa-a!” by counterpointing it with a nasal “Baaa-aaa!” like that of a catarrhal sheep. She repeated the game several times during the day. Each time the child turned unblinking eyes on her, with a solemnity that made her laugh, and continued to contemplate her ruminatively over her snack. Finally, the tease made the mistake of coming too close, and making her noise right in the little girl’s face. With a lunge surprisingly swift in one who was almost wider than she was tall, Hoda clamped her teeth on her tormentor’s nose, producing immediately a sharp improvement, if not in the pitch, at least in the sincerity of her utterance, an improvement which the child acknowledged at once with a hearty, wicked chuckle.

  That was bad enough, but what was worse as far as Rahel was concerned was that she couldn’t extract an apology from her normally tractable daughter. Hoda watched silently, growling in her throat behind her crust, her grey eyes smouldering, while her mother apologized and placated. She submitted passively while her mother spanked her to assuage the wounded nose of her employer, and even let out a theatrical bellow during the process, though all conce
rned knew that Rahel’s hand landed very lightly, and the employer’s humour had anyway taken a magnanimous turn by now and she was just as theatrically begging her cleaning woman not to beat the child on her account. She even brought a cookie as a peace offering, in token of forgiveness, and Hoda was pragmatic enough to accept the offer, with an ambiguous grunt which might have been taken to indicate forgiveness too.

  When night came and Hoda was put to bed her blind father told her the good stories. These were real life, not yes and no and hush and shame shame say sorry. Daddy told her who she was and where she came from and what had happened. Real things.

  “No,” said Danile, “you wouldn’t believe our luck, for on the surface aren’t we the unluckiest people in the world? But study things, study and you’ll see. God only seems to punish.”

  Listening from the kitchen, where she was cleaning up the supper dishes, Rahel argued in her mind as she would never do out loud.

  God only seems to punish but your suffering is real, Danile.

  “By the time I was seven years old,” continued Danile, in that voice of his that was filled with awe, so that one thought he was about to reveal some wondrous accomplishment, “yes, when I was not much older than you are now my little Hodaleh, I was already going blind.”

  Hoda snuggled closer. Danile rejoiced, holding her, his child, a big, soft, tangible circumference, all warmth and movement.

  “I would stumble over things; the world shrank; there was fog everywhere. My mother said, ‘Danile, what’s the matter with you child, can’t you see where you’re going?’ And I said, ‘No, Mamma.’”

  Hoda shuddered. Her father’s voice always sounded strange when he said that part. “No, Mamma,” not like a daddy voice at all.

  “Danile, what’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know, Mamma.”

  Why do you talk about it so much? thought Rahel. Why does she have to know such things? She’s strong and healthy. Nothing will happen to her, while I live. But Rahel shuddered, too, sensing her own fragility.

  “When my mother understood that I really couldn’t see, she was furious, not so much with me as with herself. She said it was her own fault for not having watched over me carefully enough. She cursed the negligent moment when she must have left me long enough for me to turn my innocent eyes upward and look too boldly at the sun. Only a child or a fool will be bold enough to try to see into the sun, and for this the sun with his pitiless stare must have punished me. ‘Why did you have to stare at the sun?’ she used to ask, after all the journeys and medicines and incantations had failed to help me. ‘What did you think you would find there? Foolish boy.’

  “And I used to ask myself the same thing. I didn’t know why I had stared at the sun, or when, even, though I knew I must have done as my mother said. Why then had I wanted to see into the sun? And what did I see? And why am I punished for it? Even now I sometimes think that if I knew what I had seen I wouldn’t mind the punishment so much, though of course I know it’s a nonsensical thought. God blinded me for reasons of His own, and the loss is nothing to the gain. For if I had not been blind and your mother had not been a little crooked many wonderful things would not have happened and you would probably never have been born. Shouldn’t I call that luck?”

  Hoda chuckled a happy assent.

  Rahel had carefully placed another split log in the stove. Now she slammed the full kettle noisily on the hottest part so that it splashed and hissed. Only a child or a fool…All her life, all her childhood and all her girlhood she had prayed, at times with an almost demented intensity, for that deformity to disappear. For years she had gone nightly to bed, forcing herself every night to picture and to believe in the picture of herself arising the next morning and simply, luxuriously, stretching herself straight as everyone else did. That skew of her body wasn’t really hers; she wasn’t really that way. If they hadn’t done that to her when they were in such a hurry to drag her into the world she would have been just like anyone else. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, perversely, her prayers had been granted. But instead of the miraculous disappearance of her deformity the humiliating miracle of her marriage had taken place, marriage to a man who would never be able to see her twisted body. Why then did he insist on crying it forth as a source of pride, as her particular, lucky charm? This was what exasperated Rahel, this and the fact that he wasn’t even accurate about it. To listen to him you’d think she had God knows what between her shoulders, with his little crookedness and his humps and his lumps. And then there was also the highhanded way he had of dismissing it sometimes. There is a difference between having your deformity minimized and having it belittled. Rationally, she knew Danile was trying to do neither, knew and reproached herself because her objections were in themselves often contradictory. Still, it wasn’t a hump on her back; it wasn’t, properly speaking, really on her back at all. It was her right shoulder that was hiked up, but it didn’t hunch her over. It just threw her somewhat out of kilter. Actually, it wasn’t a hump at all. If she hadn’t happened to be so small in build it might not even have been so noticeable, or so her mother had often said. A tall woman can carry these things off. But it was no use trying to point all this out to Danile. He wasn’t interested in the anatomical fact. And in a way, if you followed his way of thinking, exclusive of all the other ways which the world knew and accepted, he was right. You can’t hedge a miracle.

  Once only Rahel had tried to argue with her husband over his interpretation of their fate. And he had explained to her, as though it were the key to all enigmas, that it stands to reason that God’s open hand can be as terrible as his fist. Unconvinced, she had nevertheless felt petty and ashamed of the peevishness of her nature as compared with the generous innocence of his own.

  “My father,” he was saying now, “though he was only a tailor by trade, was a wise man. He used to say, ‘It’s God’s will. You have a fine memory. Not many could have picked up so much by ear as you. And if you can’t see the Holy Work you can hold it at least, feel it, keep it close to you, live with it. Even so you can be blessed.’

  “I often ask myself, How did he know? For didn’t the Book lead us past the barriers into the new world? Have I ever told you that story?”

  “No,” lied Hoda promptly.

  “Danile,” called Rahel. “Enough already. Put her to bed.”

  “No, Ma!” bawled Hoda.

  “Just a minute more,” said Danile. “I’m in the middle of a story. You and your mother were really the heroines of that one,” he continued to the child, but speaking with transparent cunning, loudly enough to make Rahel smile in spite of herself.

  “We had come all that long way, right to the edge of the big ocean I was telling you about, and one day your mother was talking to some woman, another immigrant, and this woman says to her, ‘You don’t think they’re going to let you into the new world, you and your husband? They want only whole people in America.’ An ordinary man, you understand, travelling with a child and a woman with a slight hump, well maybe. But a blind man too? No. You see my child, the new world is almost like heaven. They want you to be perfect before you get there, at least on the outside. In heaven of course they are more interested in what you are inside.

  “Anyway, what did your mother do? From the day of our marriage, when they brought us home from the graveyard and we talked together for the first time, she had insisted that I was to go about like a modern Jew, beardless. Every day she shaved me herself. Now she comes running to the hut where we men slept, and she says to me, ‘Danile, you must grow a beard. When our turn comes for the immigration examinations you must look like a serious scholar.’

  “What’s this about a beard? I ask myself. Why all of a sudden a beard? A beard she wants? All right, I’ll grow her a beard. So I grew my beard. And while we waited for our summons she lectured me, over and over.

  “‘Remember, Danile,’” he imitated his wife’s voice, to the delight of the child. “‘Remember, Danile, the child on one arm,
the Book in the other hand, and held up to your face, as if you can’t be pulled away from it for such trifling things as examinations and interrogations.’

  “And when the time came at last I did exactly what she said, because when your mother says, she says. But I was so nervous I kept asking her, ‘Is it all right, Rahel? Does it look all right?’

  “And she would whisper back, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, only turn the page sometimes.’

  “Well, that’s all very easy when you’re sitting down. But after awhile we had to get up and move with the line, from one crowded room to another, each one more crowded and hotter than the last, and in each one my little daughter was growing bigger and heavier. Would you believe it, I could actually feel you grow? I knew my little girl was going to grow up but I didn’t expect I would actually catch her in a growing moment. Let me tell you my juicy one it wasn’t so easy to hold you that way, nonchalantly in one arm, growing as you were right there and then into such a sturdy little vessel. We had to wait a long time. My arm began to ache. I began to ache all the way down one side. I had to shift and heave you every time your mother reminded me to turn the page. Finally, I couldn’t hang on to you with one arm any longer. You had simply grown too heavy. So I tried to slide you over so both arms would take some of the weight. Just then they called our names.

  “Your mother grabs me under the arm to guide me, but pretending it’s because she’s frightened to leave my side, and also a little bit, probably, from the way she’s pressing against me, to try to hide her shape. So she’s dragging my tired arm one way, you’re sliding the other way, and the book I’m supposed to hold in front of my face is sitting on my hand under your little behind. When I finally struggle it out and poke it up on the other side of you I hear your mother’s voice whispering, ‘It’s upside down, Danile!’

  “By this time I’m in such a sweat I don’t know if she means the book is upside down or my daughter. So I begin to feel you around surreptitiously, and that’s when you decide to let us all know which side is up. I must have wakened you with all that shifting and sliding, because suddenly you begin to roar out, blood-curdling bellows, like it seems to me I’ve never heard you cry before. That doctor couldn’t believe it. ‘Only nine months old?’ he says. ‘She’s going to be a healthy citizen.’ My heart jumps when I hear this. We’re already citizens together. And while I’m soothing you and bouncing you with new strength and you, thank goodness, won’t stop yelling, your mother deals with the officials. On their part they are in such a hurry to get rid of us they become even blinder than I am.