Old Men at Midnight Page 4

  Later, as we were going down the stairs, he said, “Why does family call you Ilana?”

  “My name is Ilana Davita. My friends call me Davita.”

  “Davita, this Sunday night Tisha B’Av. We cannot have lesson.”

  “Would you want to go to the park in the afternoon?”

  “I talk to my aunt.”

  He called the next day. “My aunt say okay.”

  “Good.”

  “I see you Sunday.”

  “I will see you Sunday.”

  “I will see you Sunday.”

  We took the train to the park. It was a grayish day, the air hot and stagnant. Leaves hung listlessly from the oak under which we sat. I listened to him read, correcting him from time to time, and after a while I closed my eyes and heard only his voice. Soft, nasal. He read on. I opened my eyes and looked around the park. Families sat about, a ball game was being played on the field, dozens of boats were on the lake.

  Later we left the park on one of the paths that went through the zoo. In front of the lions’ cage he opened his notebook and with care drew the head of the lion that had roared the week before and now lay still. He drew the mane and the mouth and the whiskers and the leather nose and the eyes nearly closed to yellow slits.

  He said, “That Reb Binyomin lion.”

  “You mean Reb Binyomin made lions like that?”

  “For ark.”

  “He made the lions for the ark.”

  “Ark in wooden shul. We make leopards, deer, eagles, lions. Bright purples and greens and golds. I give this to Rachel,” he said, indicating the drawing.

  We headed for the subway. When we got off at our stop after the ten-minute ride, it was raining heavily. We waited in the entrance of the station for it to let up, and then, in a drizzle, started across the parkway. We were on the other side when it began to rain again, and we stopped for shelter at Mr. Wolf’s newsstand.

  “Wet enough?” Mr. Wolfe said in his high voice from behind the stacks of newspapers. He was on a stool. His right arm cradled in the palm of his left.

  I said, “I’m okay, Mr. Wolf.”

  He looked at Noah. “And how are you, fella?”

  The rain turned torrential. I said, “He’s okay too.”

  An occasional car came along the street, splashing rain. The stores were closed and there were no pedestrians. Rain struck the puddles on the sidewalk and the rivulets near the curbs, forming small lakes and streams. I saw Noah gazing at the rain and rivulets. What was he seeing?

  I asked, “Mr. Wolf, do you carry notebooks without lines?”

  He reached into a shelf behind the stacks of newspapers and brought out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch unlined notebook.

  “This is what you want?”

  “Thank you.”

  Noah had continued to stare out at the rain.

  “You just come to America?” Mr. Wolf asked him.

  Noah, aware that he was being addressed, turned to me.

  “I’m his English tutor,” I said.

  Mr. Wolf looked at Noah. The rain had begun to let up.

  “Well, lots of luck,” Mr. Wolf said to Noah.

  We went up the street and crossed the trolley tracks at President Street and walked to my house. Only an occasional car made its way through the puddles. This was the first day of rain in weeks. It added to the steaminess.

  “Noah, come inside for a minute.”

  We went up the front steps. The hydrangea bushes were wet. Inside he gave me the drawing of the lion to give to Rachel, and I gave him the new notebook.

  “Draw in this,” I said. “Don’t draw in your notebook.”

  “I buy new notebook.”

  “My present to you,” I said.

  He looked at me and then after a moment nodded. He held the notebook, closed and opened and closed his fingers over it. The Hebrew notebook he folded under his left arm. The pencil was in a pocket somewhere. I let him out the door and watched him walk away under the dripping maples.

  There was no one home. I turned on the living-room fan and took Noah’s drawing upstairs and left it on Rachel’s bed. You looked at the drawing and saw only the head, but you envisioned the lion’s restlessness, his immense power, his colossal shape.

  I went to my bathroom, and then to my room and turned on the fan. I got out of my clothes and, wearing only my underwear, crossed to my desk. I took out my notebook and must have sat there a long time. I remembered my father and Jakob Daw in the room whispering and then the harp woke me and I slipped into my housecoat and Rachel was at my door.

  She held the drawing. “Is this Noah’s?”

  I nodded.

  “I like it.”

  “It’s a lion.”

  “I know what it is, Ilana.”

  “Rachel, go find something to do, please.”

  “I’ll make another drawing for Noah.”

  I could hear her singing along the hallway and down the stairs.

  She brought the drawings to supper.

  “That’s Noah’s,” she said.

  My mother said admiringly, “That’s a lovely drawing.”

  “He’s very good,” my stepfather said.

  “Look what I’m giving him,” Rachel said.

  She displayed a drawing of three figures in a flower-studded field. The picture had been made with crayons, the figures drawn in bold colors, a green dress for my mother, a bow tie and a dark suit for my stepfather, a pink dress for Rachel. Over the figures was a blue sky with a yellow sun.

  “That’s very nice, Rachel,” my mother said.

  My stepfather, my mother, and I attended synagogue on Tisha B’Av. The day was inexhaustibly hot; the synagogue was packed. We read Lamentations and chanted about the fall of the Temples.

  Noah’s aunt called me Tuesday evening.

  “Noah is sick and won’t be able to come tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “The doctor says he will be okay by Sunday.”

  “Is he running a fever?”

  “It is not a fever. The doctor says he needs rest.”

  I told Rachel when I picked her up from summer camp.

  She said, “Then I’ll give him the drawing on Sunday.”

  His aunt called me Friday morning. Noah was better and would be here on Sunday. I was very relieved. But then she called me Sunday morning and told me he could not be there after all.

  “He has had a relapse.”

  “You said he didn’t have a fever.”

  “Not fever. He is trying to remember.” A wail of pain wafted over the telephone line. “Another of my children is sick. With fever.”

  I told my mother.

  “Well, see if she’ll let you go to him.”

  I telephoned his aunt.

  “It is not a good idea,” she said immediately.

  “Please ask him.”

  “I will call you back.”

  When she called again, she said, “Come at three o’clock.”

  I told Rachel. She said, “Ilana, you give him my drawing as a get-well present.”

  On Sunday afternoon I left the house. I wore a short-sleeved white cotton blouse and a blue skirt. My shoulder-length blond hair lay parted on the right side, caught in a tortoiseshell barrette. Blistering heat waves stretched across the neighborhood. I could feel them ripple against my legs. The street seemed ancient, primordial. I walked in the burning shadows of the green maples.

  3

  I turned onto Eastern Parkway. The sun was bright and hot. No one was on the street. I looked at the numbers on the buildings. The Polits lived in a four-story brownstone, with an off-white entrance hall and a reddish floor linoleum. I walked up to the fourth floor and rang the bell of the apartment nearest the stairs. The door was opened by a bearded man in his early forties wearing a round skullcap, a short-sleeved white shirt, and brown trousers.

  “Hello. I’m Davita Dinn.”

  He looked at me carefully. He was some inches taller than I, with dark eyes and
dark hair, the hairline beginning to recede. “Come in,” he said, and closed the door. “Would you like some tea? A glass of water?”

  “Water, please.”

  He brought me into the kitchen, filled a glass from a bottle in the refrigerator, and gave it to me. I drank it quickly.

  He put the glass in the drain and led me through the hallway to the right of the kitchen and then into the space that was a living room and dining room, with sofa and easy chairs near one wall and a mahogany table set with six dining room chairs against the other. A rug and two end tables were near the sofa, and two rotating floor fans.

  “Please sit down. My wife will be in soon. One of the children is sick.”

  I took one of the easy chairs. He took the other. He looked embarrassed.

  “You’re very young to be teaching English.”

  “I’m a graduate of Tilden High School.”

  “But still—”

  “And I’m going to Barnard College in the fall.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In Manhattan. It’s the women’s college of Columbia University.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “Noah was doing very well.”

  “He did his lessons every night after working for me during the day. We have him going to a yeshiva in Lakewood, New Jersey, this coming September.”

  Noah’s aunt entered the living room. She looked exhausted.

  “Hello, Davita,” she said. “I have a child who is sick and asleep, and the others are out of the house. Noah has been having nightmares again.”

  I looked at the two of them.

  “I came just to give him a lesson,” I said.

  “You have a good relationship with him,” his aunt said.

  “Anything you do, anything, we’ll be grateful for,” his uncle said.

  I accompanied her to the bedroom at the end of the hallway. She knocked on the closed door, then waited. She knocked again. I felt the apprehension stirring within her. She knocked a third time. Still there was no answer. She opened the door.

  The room was baking hot. It faced the back of the house, its two windows giving out on clotheslines and fire escapes.

  “Noah,” she said.

  He lay in the bed and looked out the windows.

  “It’s Davita,” she said.

  “Davita,” he murmured. He turned his head slightly and looked at me.

  She pushed me gently into the room and closed the door.

  The room was furnished with a bed, a dresser, and a desk and chair to the left of the bed. To the right were two windows.

  “I’ll open the windows,” I said.

  I raised the shade and opened the window on the right side of the room. Afternoon sunlight fell upon him. He looked ashen. Heat moved into the room and I closed the window. I had put Rachel’s drawing on the desk.

  “Rachel gave me something for you.”

  He took the drawing and let it lie face up on the bed for a moment. He seemed reluctant to look at it. Then he did, taking in its splash of colors.

  “Tell Rachel thanks you,” he said.

  He reached under his sheet and brought out the notebook I had gotten him. But he could not open it. He lay with head against the pillow and with the notebook on his chest, and he said, “Thanks for you came.”

  “Thanks for coming. Where’s your Hebrew notebook?”

  “It here somewhere.”

  “We’ll need it to write in.”

  He turned his face to the ceiling. “Tisha B’Av bring memories. From Tisha B’Av to first day Rosh Hashana, memories.”

  He lifted his head and looked at me. “I wanting to tell you about Reb Binyomin.”

  He put his head back on the pillow and spoke again to the ceiling. Nothing came out. He tried to push up on his elbows, and raising his sleeves to adjust the sheet, he exposed his left arm, the arm that bore the concentration camp number. He sat up, covered by the sheet. I took the chair near the desk and brought it to the bed and sat down on it. He was talking again, in a rush of language. Now I hear him again over the years, talking slowly about it, thinking what he and his brother had done.

  “It began with my brother,” he said. “We were ten years old. I told you my father was a bookseller. We had our store on the market square and one day I found a book of drawings. I copied some of the drawings in the book and then I drew my apartment house and the courtyard. I gave the drawings to my brother.”

  He stopped and took a deep breath. Then he continued.

  “My father said to me during supper, holding up my drawings, You did these? And I nodded, wondering where he had gotten them and thinking a good scolding was in store for me. He was religious, though not one of the fanatics; tall and trim, he wore a skullcap inside the house and a hat outside, wore modern clothes, and had a short dark beard, a pince-nez, and a refined manner. He spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German. He said to my mother, What do you think of this? She said, looking at the drawings, He’s only ten. My little sister, six years old, asked if she could see the drawings, and my father showed them to her, twelve sheets of paper, and my sister went oooh! Then my father asked me if he could show the pictures to Reb Binyomin.

  “Reb Binyomin was the caretaker of our synagogue. A man in his late sixties. Stocky, white-bearded, dark, burning eyes, skin furrowed deep on his forehead, his face frozen with remorse. A non-Jew, about my father’s age, and his boy, about my age, swept and cleaned, prepared wood for the stove. Reb Binyomin cared for the books and the coverlets for the stands on the bimah in the middle of the synagogue and for the parochet on the ark, the wine-colored curtains with the lions on them.

  “I went to the synagogue on Sabbaths and holidays and sat with my father and my brother and our friends, and saw Reb Binyomin moving about on the bimah or reading from the Torah scroll or sometimes opening the ark doors to replace the Torah scrolls and closing them and standing a moment or two longer than anyone else facing the ark after the final swaying of the curtains and lions.

  “He lived across the courtyard from us; we had to pass his apartment before we left our house. Later that week my father gave him the drawings. The next day Reb Binyomin asked to see me in his apartment.

  “My father went with me after we had eaten supper. It was a freezing winter evening. We walked on the sidewalk skirting the courtyard and rang Reb Binyomin’s bell, and he answered and brought us inside.

  “It was a dark apartment. Two rooms and a kitchen. We sat at the kitchen table and his wife served us tea and cinnamon sugar cookies. I copied one of the drawings.

  “Reb Binyomin cleared his throat, and wanted to know how long I had been drawing. I said the first drawing just appeared when I saw the book in my father’s bookshop. Reb Binyomin asked if I had heard of Bezalel, builder of the tabernacle during the wilderness wandering? Of course I had heard of Bezalel. Then, asking my father to be so kind as to stay behind, he sent me home.

  “My father arrived about a half hour later. He said that Reb Binyomin liked the drawings. Why it took half an hour for Reb Binyomin to say that, I never found out.

  “And that was where it ended.”

  Noah lay back. I could actually see movements of flesh and bone chase themselves across the contours of his face. In a near-empty voice he asked for a glass of water, and I went to the bathroom across the hall. The cabinet was full of over-the-counter drugs. I filled a glass and brought it to him and he drank the water slowly and I put the empty glass on the desk. He gazed out the window, then looked at me. He moved his spindly legs under the sheet.

  “I very tired,” he said. “But I glad you came.”

  “I am glad you came.”

  “Better you should give me a lesson now so Aunt Sarah will not think you do not earn money.”

  “Your Aunt Sarah thought I would have to listen much more than I would have to talk.”

  “Maybe you should give me very short lesson.”

  I smiled at that.

  We worked on his gramma
r. When we were done I asked him for a drawing for Rachel. He opened and closed his left arm and drew two deer asleep in front of a bed of some primitive flowers.

  “Thanks you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. Then, “Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday, yes,” he said.

  I left the door open and went down the hallway to the kitchen. His aunt and uncle were seated at the table.

  “I gave him his lesson,” I said. “He’s coming to me on Wednesday.”

  His aunt said, “There was nothing else?”

  “He gave me a drawing for my sister.”

  “What did he say to you?” his uncle asked.

  “He told me about his family, about Reb Binyomin, and his drawings.”

  “My sister wrote us about that,” his aunt said. “But he doesn’t talk about … anything.”

  “You should know how he carried on,” the uncle said. “From Tisha B’Av and on. He cries.”

  “Please,” I said. “If he wants to tell you anything at all, he will.”

  Noah’s aunt accompanied me to the door.

  “Something happened to him on Tisha B’Av.”

  I did not say anything.

  There was a hopelessness about her. “Well, good-bye.”

  I went down the stairs and to the street.

  The sky was bright with searing heat. Pigeons scratched in fallen leaves. A few old people sprawled on the parkway benches. I went along past Schenectady Avenue and then Troy and Albany and Kingston. I realized that I had long gone past the street I would normally have turned up to go home, and was brought up short by Mr. Wolf and his newsstand. He saw me and waved his good arm. I waved back.

  My parents and Rachel were not home. I left the drawing on Rachel’s bed and went to my room, where I switched on the electric fan and stood for a moment, letting the blades blow air over me. Then I undressed and went to the bathroom for a shower. I was in the shower a long time. Back in my room, I put on my light bathrobe and sat at my desk.

  There was a pull on the doorknob. I looked at my watch. I’d been writing for over an hour. I started for the door, turned the key and opened the door. The harp sounded. It was Rachel. She was carrying Noah’s new drawing.

  “This drawing is for me? Two deer.”

  “From Noah.”