Old Men at Midnight Read online

  “Yes, call.”

  I gave him exercises for homework. We started down the stairs. The door to Rachel’s room was closed; she was preparing for bed. We passed through the living room. I felt the fiery evening on my face as I let him out of the house.

  My mother was coming down the stairs. I asked her what had upset Rachel.

  “Camp.”

  “I thought she loved camp.”

  “She was tired out from the camp. She’s having too much fun. She needed to go to sleep. How is your Noah?”

  “I think we’ll have our lesson in the park next Sunday afternoon.”

  “Yes? Well, take him to the zoo. Rachel says they have a new lion.”

  Inside my room, I sat at my desk and studied Noah’s drawing. It was a facade of a three-story stucco apartment house, clumsily rendered, with tall windows and wrought-iron balconies on the second and third floors. Wooden shutters hung open from the windows. An arched entranceway led to an inner courtyard and disappeared into dissolving shadows. The left corner of the drawing was still moist from the drop of sweat that had fallen onto it.

  Noah’s home in Kralov, Poland.

  From a drawer in my desk I took a pale-blue eight-and-a-half-by-eleven lined spiral notebook, of the kind commonly used in high school. Seated at my desk, I opened the notebook to the front page. There I wrote in pencil the name “Noah.”

  The next day I called Noah’s aunt and told her that I wanted to take Noah to Prospect Park that Sunday afternoon. About a ten-minute subway ride.

  She said, “Take care how you cross the streets with Noah.”

  “Mrs. Polit, can I ask you, does Noah ever draw?”

  “Draw? What do you mean, draw?”

  “Does he ever make pictures?”

  “He works in the store or he watches the children or he studies. When would he have time for pictures? Has he been making pictures?”

  “He drew a small picture for my little sister.”

  “How old is your sister?”

  “Almost six.”

  “That’s very nice. How is he getting along, my Noah?”

  “Very well.”

  “He is a good student?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are satisfied with his progress?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “So he draws a picture for your sister. Can there be harm in it?”

  I came into Rachel’s room that evening and handed her Noah’s drawing. She was playing on the floor with her dolls. “From Noah,” I said. “His house in Kralov.” She glanced at the drawing, seemed momentarily to study it. Then she put it on her bed, and went on playing.

  My mother asked me later, “What did he draw?”

  I said, “His house in Kralov.”

  That Sunday afternoon Noah showed up at my home with his notebook and pencil, and we took the subway to the park and the zoo.

  2

  The subway train swept into the station. Noah backed away from it. We entered the car and found seats. I asked him if this was his first time on a subway. He stared out the open windows at the rushing darkness and nodded.

  The train was not crowded. It entered the next station and halted with a grinding of brakes. He looked at me.

  “Two more stops,” I said.

  The doors slid shut. He stared out the windows. The air hovered on the edge of combustion. He held tight to his notebook and pencil. I could not imagine what he was seeing.

  The train pulled into our station. The ride had lasted about ten minutes. We climbed the stairs to the street.

  I was wearing a print skirt with a white blouse, and he had on dark trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt. We emerged on the edge of Grand Army Plaza. There was not much traffic on the vast sweep of street around the Civil War statuary. The air was liquid with heat. We walked past the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, crossed Flatbush Avenue, and went down the hill to the park. Families sat under trees and children raced about and there was a baseball game in one of the fields. Beyond the field was the lake, with people in rowboats. Not far from the baseball game, on this side of the field, three youngsters about Noah’s age were playing running bases. They wore white shirts and dark trousers, with skullcaps and fringes, all playing sweatily in the heat.

  We stopped to watch them play. The two playing the bases were heavyset, and the one racing against the ball was short and thin, with his right hand holding his skullcap tightly to his head. The base-players were yelling in Yiddish from their bases, and the thin one stood still, and then they got off their bases and quickly moved toward him, throwing the ball to cut down the space between them, and he suddenly swept past the one on the right and reached the base and raised his hand in triumph. One of the heavyset ones wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt, and then he spotted Noah and came over. The others noticed and joined in. A brief conversation in Yiddish followed, nothing of which I understood. We walked on.

  Noah said, “They from Hungary.”

  “When did they come to America?”

  “Not ask.”

  I looked back. They had begun another game.

  We found a bench under a tall oak and sat down. I had brought along a new reader, and he proceeded to read from it aloud. He had gained some confidence in the past weeks, and he read now with a steady voice. His dark eyes were fixed on the page, his long, pale fingers pointing to each syllable as he mouthed the words.

  In the field before us, the three boys had stopped playing and now came to the road, disheveled and sweaty, and nodded to Noah. The thin one, glancing at me, spoke to Noah and a conversation began that went on for a while. From time to time they glanced at me. Then finally they headed out of the park.

  I watched them go.

  “What did they want?”

  “They want to know name and where I from. They ask if you my sister.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I say not my sister, you teaching me English to get me into school. They say they don’t need much English for their school.”

  “Let’s finish reading the story.”

  He turned back to the book. Just then something occurred to me. I asked him how many languages he knew.

  “How many? Fier.”

  “Four?”

  “Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German. I learn German to-to”—he was searching for a word—“to not be killed, to—”

  “Survive?”

  “Yes. Survive.”

  “Where did they send you from Kralov?”

  “To Auschwitz.”

  “You studied German in Auschwitz?”

  “When Germans came to Kralov, Papa got me teacher for German. Papa said my life—how you say—my life—”

  “Depended on it.”

  “Yes. Depended.”

  “What did you do in Auschwitz?”

  “I made drawings.”

  “Drawings? What sorts of drawings?”

  A shiver turned his face away. “Please, we continue lesson. Please.”

  He continued reading aloud from the book until he was done, and then we reviewed the vocabulary I had given him the previous Wednesday. Looking for an empty page in the notebook, I glimpsed a new drawing. I did not say anything.

  I asked him if he wanted to go past the zoo. He said he had never been to a zoo before. We walked past the baseball game and the families lying on blankets under the trees and the expanse of lake and then beyond into the natural habitat where about half a dozen elephants stood in the baking heat. One elephant, immense and dusty, ears flapping indolently, huge trunk moist and curling, eyes small, was searching for peanuts along the moat surrounding the compound.

  Noah said to me, “First time I see.” He could not stop looking at the elephants.

  We passed tigers and leopards and cheetahs. Before the aviary we stopped, and I watched him looking for a long time at the flying multicolored birds, doves, lorikeets, macaws, kingfishers, and even a kookaburra alighting in an old gum tree and laughing. The
y flew before his eyes, and on his face was a slowly growing rapture and I heard, as if subtly beneath the crowd, “Reb Binyomin? Reb Binyomin?”

  Just then my eye was caught by a form in the nearby cage: a lion rising lazily and stretching. He stood there for a moment gazing out of yellow slitted eyes at the crowd of about a dozen people in front of his cage. Flies buzzed around his tawny form. Then I saw him amble to the front of the cage and he began to move his huge jaws and maned head back and forth, and he suddenly roared in a deep-chested moaning that seemed to unsettle the air. Noah, startled, looked at the lion, who roared a second time, shivering the air of the cage. People leaned against the railing, laughing and applauding. The lion raised his head and roared again and a kind of quiet spread itself slowly upon the crowd. A child let out a wail and was hushed by a father. The crowd waited hesitantly. There was a brief low-throated roar. Then the lion turned and ambled away, settling indolently among the other lions in the rear of the cage.

  A dimness came over Noah’s eyes. He looked around furtively. He seemed to be waiting for someone.

  The primate house stood just inside a large rotunda. We entered the house and found ourselves in a huge, echoing area. Along both sides of the house were floor-to-ceiling cages with chimpanzees, orangutans, monkeys. It was very crowded. At the far end of the house in the gorilla cage a female was tossing feces at a male to force him away from her. A raging din of noise came from the exasperated male.

  Noah stood inside the entrance to the primate house. I saw his eyes widen. From the far end of the house the female was cheered by the crowd as she chased the male around the cage. Noah suddenly put both hands to his nose with such force that the pencil scraped against his cheek. He turned and stumbled out. I followed quickly.

  We found a bench and sat down. His hands trembled. I put out my hand to steady him. His skin was hot.

  “There’s a fountain,” I suggested.

  I walked with him, then watched as he drank. His mouth was dripping water and the front of his shirt was wet. He wiped his lips with the palms of his hands.

  I asked, “Are you okay?”

  “I think yes.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked away. “We go home now.”

  We walked along the street to the subway.

  The train was not crowded. He opened his notebook and carefully tore the new drawing out of it.

  “Give Rachel. First drawing not good.”

  The train entered the station and we climbed the stairs to the street. Mr. Wolf nodded to me from his newsstand as we went by, looking curiously at Noah. Noah accompanied me to the house. “I will see you Wednesday.” He turned and went along under the trees, the only one now walking in the heat on President Street.

  I looked at the drawing.

  It was the same house he had drawn earlier, but the lines of the entranceway and the windows were clearer, laid out now by a ruler. One could see cobblestones on the street and a small park across from the homes set nearby, the road going off into a stone bridge across a river, and in the distance a courtyard with an odd-shaped synagogue, and beyond that the tall spires of a church.

  I let myself into the house. A low voice came from the radio in the den. Something about boats diverted to Cyprus. I went upstairs and knocked on Rachel’s door. There was no one inside, so I left the drawing on her bed. Then I went to my room and closed the door and turned on the fan.

  I sat at my desk, looking down at my notebook. Noah. I felt myself alone and scorched by the heat. On the wall, partially hidden by shadows, were the photographs of my father and Jakob Daw. After a while I took off my clothes and stayed at my desk in my underwear. How unbearably hot it was! I started to write. Minutes went by. I closed my notebook and put it in the desk drawer.

  Showering, I thought of Noah’s drawing. I didn’t know very much about drawing, but it seemed to me marvelously well done: the proportions of the house, the cobblestone road, the bridge across the river, the road leading through a courtyard to the synagogue, the strange-looking synagogue itself—more a barn than a synagogue—and then the spires of the church beyond. How had he learned to draw that well?

  I dressed and went down to supper.

  Rachel ate quietly and busied herself with her drawing. Her long dark hair was pulled back from her face and pinned with a barrette, and her tongue worked furiously.

  My mother said to me, “How is your Noah coming along?”

  “We went to the park and the zoo. Everything was fine until we got to the primate house.”

  “What happened at the primate house?” my stepfather said. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and light-gray summer trousers.

  “He ran out.”

  “What do you mean, he ran out?”

  “He put his hands to his nose and stumbled out.”

  “Ah,” my stepfather said. “Of course, of course. He remembered the latrine smells of his concentration camp.”

  That was unnerving to me. I had not linked the two together, primate house and concentration camp.

  “His next hurdle will be Tisha B’Av,” my stepfather said. “I wonder if Noah will be strong enough to observe a daylong fast. Especially one that commemorates a national destruction.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. But we can have the lesson here in the afternoon. Are you going to be home?”

  “No.”

  “His aunt won’t like him studying alone with me. Maybe we’ll go back to the park.”

  “I wonder where he was last Tisha B’Av,” my stepfather said. “And the one before that.”

  Rachel suddenly interrupted, “Ilana, would you give this to Noah when you see him?” She had made a drawing of herself standing between her parents, holding their hands. They were stick figures, drawn in black, all on a barren plain. But from one edge of the page to the other the sky was passionate with brilliant colors.

  “It’s a rainbow,” Rachel said.

  “That’s very nice,” said my mother.

  “For his drawing.”

  “What drawing is that?” asked my stepfather.

  “The drawing that he made for me.”

  “Oh?” said my mother.

  “I’ll bring it down,” said Rachel. She slid off her chair and went out of the kitchen.

  “Last Wednesday,” I said. “When he came in. She went by with some colored pencils, and he asked if she could draw, and one thing led to another. He drew her the house he lived in in Kralov, and today he gave me a better version of it to give to her.”

  We sat there eating. I looked at Rachel’s drawing. The stick figures were cutely drawn, my stepfather with a bow tie and dark hair and a mustache, my mother with short dark hair and a yellow skirt, Rachel with long dark hair and sunglasses. I was not in the drawing.

  She came back into the kitchen with Noah’s drawing in her hand and showed it to my mother, who first glanced at it, then gazed at it with interest. She then handed it to my stepfather, who studied it thoughtfully.

  “How old is he?”

  “Going on seventeen,” I said.

  “Where did he learn to do this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It is a measure of that night that I can remember going to a concert with friends, but I can’t recall anything about it. What I do remember is falling into a half-sleep and waking into the darkness of my room from a dream. My father and I were trying to rescue Noah and Jakob Daw from screeching apes.

  When he arrived at seven-thirty I was in my room, and Rachel let him into the house. I was reading and didn’t know he was there. It was nearly ten minutes later when I glanced at my watch and hurried out of the room.

  As I came down the stairs, I heard Rachel say, “Was it a big park?” and Noah’s response, “No, not like yours, but big for us.” Rachel said, “You didn’t have a zoo?” Noah said, “No zoo.” Rachel said, “Then how did you know about animals?” Noah said, “From pictures in books and synagogue.” Rachel said, “Synagogue?” Noah said, “On wa
lls in synagogue, pictures of birds and animals. Me and my brother, we help Reb Binyomin paint.”

  “You had a brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he older?”

  “We—how you say—born same time. Twins.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Noah turned away. “He not here anymore.”

  I came into the living room. They were sitting on the couch, Rachel in a pink-and-red dress and Noah in his white long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers. On his knees was his drawing of his Kralov neighborhood. Under it was another sheet of paper, which I assumed was Rachel’s drawing.

  Noah said, “I drew church and gave to Janos.”

  Rachel said, “Who is Janos?”

  “He Polish friend.”

  They were so at ease together on the couch, she leaning into him and pointing at the drawing, elbows on his thighs, her head poking through the opening made by his hands over the paper.

  She said, “And the stone bridge. I like that.”

  Noah closed his eyes for a moment.

  I said, “Noah has a lesson now, Rachel.”

  Noah rose from the couch. Rachel grimaced. They exchanged drawings. We went upstairs.

  It was hot in the room. The floor fan quietly whirred. From the wall the pictures of my father and Jakob Daw looked across the room, and over my headboard the three stallions galloped across the empty beach at Prince Edward Island against a tranquil sea. I saw my open notebook on the desk and reached over and closed it and put it inside its drawer.

  We sat at the desk and worked on the lesson. I gave him an additional fifteen minutes to make up for the time he had spent with Rachel. I told him to go on reading and I stood up and went to the window.

  Rachel was on the lawn soaring on the swing. Long black hair, brown-eyed, quite beautiful. Her mouth a pastel contouring of the gentlest of Cupid’s bows. And the bronzed skin of her face rounding into the soft smoothness of her chin.

  Noah went on with his reading. I returned to the desk. He struggled over a pronunciation and I helped him get the word out. We were both perspiring. Tiny beads of sweat lay on his forehead. His moist cheeks, I noticed, were filling out, his face losing its angular quality, though his dark eyes still held that doleful gaze.