David Grossman - The Book of Intimate Grammar

Papa returned in his checkered blue-and-white, his hair slicked down with water. Mama’s face was unchanged; Edna Bloom seated herself daintily on the edge of the Bordeaux sofa, clasping her rosy fingers and shaking her head with giggly coruscations as though in the midst of some deeply discomfiting inner dialogue, which only her blushing cheeks evinced. Papa sat down facing her on Methuselah, clenching the armrests with his powerful hands. You see, Miss Bloom, he began ineptly, trying in vain to hide his bulky legs, even in winter I wear shorts around the house; and he smiled at her foolishly. I get hot from inside, I’m like an oven, summer and winter both. Edna gazed up in bewildered silence. Mama cleared her throat and waited. Again the silence enveloped them. Aron coughed. Such a cough he’s developed, Mama threw him an angry glance, everything has to be a chendelach with that boy, but he did have to cough, really, he coughed with all his heart, maybe he was ill. Maybe he would die.

Edna Bloom leaned over, accidentally touching the lemon in the bowl on the coffee table, and then sharply withdrew her hand as though guilty of unspeakable rudeness. The family wriggled in their seats; Arongave another nervous cough, the prelude to an imminent storm; who knows, with a little effort he might even spit blood, and you can’t argue with blood. But he knew it was hopeless. These were his last moments among them. No explanation would convince them of what he was doing at her house, and anyway, they’d probably been preparing themselves for someone to come in and break the terrible news about him. Suddenly the words burst out of her in a high, strained voice, and she recoiled into herself with a shudder. Aron stopped coughing and gaped at her.

“But I don’t … I’m not a workman that knows how to … no …” Papa laughed in surprise. “What you need is a real professional. Me, I’m just a handyman.” He was embarrassed and fell silent. “I really believe, Mr. Kleinfeld, in fact I’m almost certain, that you would do it as it should be done.” She blinked and giggled and craned her neck like a bird shaking off a drop of water. “I heard how you fixed the electricity at the Atiases’ and the kitchen pipes at Mrs. Botenero’s. I’m sure you will succeed, Mr. Kleinfeld.” “But those were small jobs,” murmured Papa, carefully gauging Mama out of the corner of his eye, did she see how hard he was trying to refuse the offer? But her face remained impassive; though she wavered, studying the anemic complexion of Edna Bloom, her swollen red eyelids and her teeth; forty, she decided, not one day less, with a wasp waist Moshe could easily fit his hands around, and her untried womb and unsuckled breasts … “It’s true, Moshe is a good worker,” she weighed the pros and cons. “Only he’s not much of an expert in what you want, and he has a little trouble with his back in winter, so I don’t know what to tell you, Miss Bloom, maybe you should look for someone else? Everyone is replaceable, no?”

Aron watched Edna’s eyes grow wide. “Not exactly, Mrs. Kleinfeld.” She shook her head. “I wonder if anyone is truly replaceable.” His heart went out to her for speaking so well, even though the conversation was about something ordinary and boring. But Mama too was alert to the strange scintillation in Edna Bloom’s voice: she shook her head and no longer smiled.

“I will pay generously,” said the visitor.

“We’re not talking about money yet,” muttered Papa.

“Just how much are you prepared to pay, Miss Bloom?” asked Mama, appraising her coolly with a broker’s eye.

“Why up to … fifty pounds,” blurted Edna Bloom; you could seethat she herself was staggered by the offer, but she continued to nod insistently. Red blotches spread over her throat. You could feel how damp her delicate pink fingers were, the fingers which had tinkled over the piano that day. Papa groaned, and the big blue vein on the side of his neck began to throb. Fifty pounds was enough to close off the balcony, to start redecorating the kitchen, to buy a secondhand mo-torscooter he could ride to work in the morning … Mama leaned back and gulped. Papa mumbled, That really is too much, Miss Bloom, but he too fell silent and studied his hands. Mama hadn’t yet uttered a word. Her eyes were darting around in her head, her chin was quivering. A shadow like a slinky martin fluttered under her lips. So — a dog wouldn’t stick his snout out in this storm, yet she leaves her nice warm flat and comes here? The ravishing Miss Bloom couldn’t wait? Edna twisted under Mama’s invidious eye; that look, thought Yochi despondently, poking and probing everywhere. Edna raised her heavy lids and searched Mama’s eyes for a verdict; she and Papa seemed to await Mama’s blessings over something infinitely more complex than tearing down a wall between the bedroom and salon.

“And when do you intend to pay?” Mama’s crassness shocked him; suddenly he saw that there was something not quite honorable here that made polite behavior superfluous, and his heart melted for Edna Bloom and what she had endured here, in their home. Because some people can tolerate vulgarity, he felt, while others get used to it little by little, but Edna Bloom was far too vulnerable. He was astounded at how fast she grew inured to Mama’s tone: why didn’t she just leave and slam the door behind her; but her long thin neck continued to writhe in agony, as though she had swallowed the rusks of her pride. “If Mr. Kleinfeld agrees to take the job, I will pay half the sum immediately and the other half when the job is completed,” she said, using the language she learned at work, in the office of a notary public named Lombroso.

“Mr. Kleinfeld will work for you three hours every afternoon until he finishes,” decided Mama. “And either I or the boy or Yocheved will be there to assist him at all times.”

Edna bowed her head in surrender. The tiny bracelets jingling on her rosy wrists disturbed her equanimity. She clasped them with her fingertips and tried to hide them: Aron’s heart went out to her again, calling her over and over like a cuckoo clock.

Then she opened her red leather purse, fumbled with the zipper, giggled with embarrassment, blushed crimson, and took out several bills. She waved them limply in the air, and when she saw that Mama wasn’t going to reach out for them, she set them on the edge of the coffee table, from where they instantly flew off.

“You’ll tear down her wall and we’ll buy a new Friedman heater, the old one stinks, and then we’ll forget about it. Tfu on her,” said Mama afterward, furiously scrambling eggs in the frying pan, livid at having been conned by the money of that Hungarian. Notice how she walks, like the living dead, and the way she talks, ta ta ta ta, rasped Mama, maliciously mimicking the cranelike ways of Edna Bloom, but even this outburst failed to relieve her: she always said she was no pigeon, yet this time she felt an itch in her navel that told her she’d made a big mistake.

One gray Monday Papa left to tear down the wall that separated Edna’s bedroom from her salon. The job was expected to take two days. He arrived at four-thirty, after a shift at the Jerusalem Workers’ Council, a proper meal at home, and a siesta. Wearing the blue shirt from his days at the Angel bakery, he picked up his toolbox, watched closely by Aron, who made sure no stray Roxanas slipped out; then he went down to the furnace room to fetch Og, the giant ladder he’d made with his own hands in 1948, when he and Mama first set up housekeeping, and plodded over to Entrance A and up four flights of stairs to Edna Bloom’s. Yochi trailed behind him, her arms full of old newspapers for collecting the rubble of the soon-to-be-demolished wall; after Yochi came Aron, lugging Papa’s sledgehammer; yes, he was back in her house again, this time in broad daylight and with permission, maybe he would even do it in there, with Mama and Papa around, who knows; and last in line, at Aron’s heels, stepped Mama, wearing her dreary brown cassock, grim as a brooding hen, with her hair in a stiff topknot and her knitting bag under her arm, carrying a thermos full of tea, because, she forked her tongue, you won’t be getting anything to drink from that cuckoo.