Henry Roth - Call It Sleep

“Albert!” She had stopped eating as well and was gazing at him panic stricken. “Don’t—!” Her unsteady fingers closed her lips.

“I tell you he’ll hear from me! I’m no lamb!”

“If — if it’s that bad, Albert. If it doesn’t change, and he’s — he’s that way — why don’t you l-leave! There are other places!”

“Leave?” He repeated ominously. “Leave! So. But the first man I’ve ever trusted in this cursed land to treat me like a foe. The worst of all! Leave!” He stared at his plate bitterly, shook his head. “You’re a strange one yourself. You’ve trembled every time I had a new job — trembled for me to keep it. I could read it in your face — you pressed me to be patient. And now you urge me to leave. Well, we’ll see! We’ll see! But when I leave he’ll know it, never fear! And do me a favor. Take those plates away.” He nodded toward Luter’s place. “It’s as though someone were dead.”

XVI

TUESDAY afternoon, his mother’s drawn, distracted face was too much for him to bear. Without asking her to wait in the hallway, he had fled into the street, and without calling to her, had come up again, alone. Neither Annie, who never hobbled past without sticking out her awl-like tongue, nor Yussie’s reiterated, “Cry-baby,” nor the cellar-door at the end of the vacant hallway were half as painful to endure as the stiff anguish in his mother’s face or the numb silence of the hours of waiting for his father. Again and again, he could almost have wished that by some miracle Luter would return, would be there beside his father when the door was opened. But his mother set only three places around the table. There would be no miracle then. She knew. Luter would never return!

And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate, so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body were smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils almost engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented — so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and labored as a croak.

“Flour? Why? Two sacks of flour? Two? Under the shelf? Under the Passover dishes?”

She stared at him mutely, too bewildered, too panic-stricken to answer.

“Hanh? Are they going to wall you in? Or is the long lean year crouching?”

Her whole body before she answered quivered forward as though shaking off layers and layers of some muffling, suffocating fabric.

“Flour!” Her voice under the strain was high-pitched and hysteric. “A sale at the grocer’s. Nev-Neven’s Street! There in that market!” She trembled again, swallowed, striving desperately to calm herself. “I thought since we used so much, it would be wise to — oh!” She sprang to her feet in horror. “You mean why did I leave them under the Passover dishes! I’ll take them away! This moment!”

“No! No! Leave them! Leave them! Leave them!” (David thought the fierce crescendo of his voice would never end) “Sit down. The mice won’t get them!”

She sat down stunned. “I’ll get them later,” she said dully. “I shouldn’t have left them there. I can no longer think.” And taking a deep breath. “One is tempted to buy more than one needs these days, things are so cheap. Is there anything you’d like me to get you? Smoked salmon? Sour cream, thick almost as butter. They say they mix flour into it! Black olives?”

“My head is splitting.” His eyes were roving along the walls again. “Don’t say more than you can help.”

“Can’t I do something for you? A cold compress?”

“No.”

She shut her eyes, rocked slightly and said no more.

David would have whimpered, but dared not. The intolerable minutes unreeled from an endless spool of nightmare.…

By Wednesday afternoon, another and even more disturbing change had come over his mother. Yesterday afternoon and the day before, she had been impatient with him, unresponsive to his questions, distracted, disjointed in her answers. Now she listened to him with a fixity that made him increasingly uneasy. Wherever he walked about the kitchen, wherever he stood or sat, her eyes followed him, and there was something so fervent, so focused in her gaze that he found his own eyes not daring to meet hers. She did not chide him to-day for dawdling over his after-school bread and butter, or postponing the moment of having to go down. On the contrary, everything was reversed. This afternoon it was he who ate rapidly in order to be ready to go down sooner, and it was his mother who sought to delay him. “And what else?” She would ask. The moment he had completed narrating some incident in school. “And what else happened? What did you see then?” And always her tone had the same rapt, insistent note, and she hung on his every word with such a feverish hungered gaze that several times a curious shudder ran through him, a chill, as if the floor for a second had opened beneath him and he were plunging down a void.

“But on your way home,” she urged. “You haven’t told me. Was there nothing new?”

“No-o.” He hesitated, his eyes wandering about the kitchen avoiding that over-bright, clinging gaze. When would she be satisfied, he wondered, when would she let him go? Uneasily he rummaged among his memories, found the only thing he knew he hadn’t told her yet. “There was a man yesterday.” He began. “On the street that’s the other side of school.” He paused, hoping against hope her interest had flagged.

“Yes! Yes!” Her voice was like a prod. “Yes!”

“And the man, he was making a sidewalk. Like that.” He palmed the green sheet of oil cloth on the table. “With an iron with a handle. A new sidewalk.”

“They’re building up Brownsville!” She smiled at him with frightening intentness. “And? You unwilling, silent, beloved one! And?”

“And when the man wasn’t looking … and the sidewalk was green — it’s green when it’s new.”

“I have seen that also.”

“And a boy came and the man wasn’t looking — he was pushing the iron here. And the boy stepped on it — like that.” He slipped down from the chair, toed the linoleum, “And made a hole with his shoe. Like that—”

Her face had sagged strangely, lips parting before a slow emission of breath. The taut, pale planes of her cheeks seemed to have slipped the chin-bone, overlapped it. Under the raised brows the intent brown eyes were focused on a distance so vast it returned upon her. In dismay, David stopped speaking and blinking with dismay watched her.

“I heard you! I heard you!” She shook her head breathlessly. “Yes! Yes! I heard you!” Through long corridors of brooding her gaze skimmed toward him again. “Yes!”

“Why did you look th-that way?” He wavered between alarm and curiosity.

“Nothing! Nothing at all! I did that too when I was a girl, stepping on a road, new-made. But mine was black! Nothing! Nothing at all! And then what? What did the man do!”

“The man,” he continued uneasily, “the man didn’t see. And yesterday he did it … When I went to school after lunch yesterday. And now there aren’t any more boards on it. And it’s hard like other sidewalks. Nearly white they powder it. And — and you can jump on it. Like that. And you can’t do anything. But he made that hole. And there’s a hole now. You can even see that little red iron on his shoe — in front. It made a hole too! And there’s a piece of cigarette in it already.”