Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Shirley turned to look at Greenspahn.

“Out,” he said. “Get out, you podler . I don’t want you coming in here any more. You’re a thief,” he shouted. “A thief.”

Frank came rushing up. “Jake, what is it? What is it?”

“Her. That one. A crook. She tore the bread. I seen her.”

The woman looked at him defiantly. “I don’t have to take that,” she said. “I can make plenty of trouble for you. You’re crazy. I’m not going to be insulted by somebody like you.”

“Get out of here,” Greenspahn shouted, “before I have you locked up.”

The woman backed away from him, and when he stepped forward she turned and fled.

“Jake,” Frank said, putting his hand on Greenspahn’s shoulder. “That was a big order. So she tried to get away with a few pennies. What does it mean? You want me to find her and apologize?”

“Look,” Greenspahn said, “she comes in again I want to know about it. I don’t care what I’m doing. I want to know about it. She’s going to pay me for that bread.”

“Jake,” Frank said.

“No,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Jake, it’s ten cents.”

“ My ten cents. No more,” he said. “I’m going to shul .”

He waved Frank away and went into the street. Already the sun was going down. He felt urgency. He had to get there before the sun went down.

That night Greenspahn had the dream for the first time.

He was in the synagogue waiting to say prayers for his son. Around him were the old men, the minion , their faces brittle and pale. He recognized them from his youth. They had been old even then. One man stood by the window and watched the sun. At a signal from him the others would begin. There was always some place in the world where the prayers were being said, he thought, some place where the sun had just come up or just gone down, and he supposed there was always a minion to watch it and to mark its progress, the prayers following God’s bright bird, going up in sunlight or in darkness, always, everywhere. He knew the men never left the shul . It was the way they kept from dying. They didn’t even eat, but there was about the room the foul lemony smell of urine. Sure, Greenspahn thought in the dream, stay in the shul . That’s right. Give the podlers a wide berth. All they have to worry about is God. Some worry, Greenspahn thought. The man at the window gave the signal and they all started to mourn for Greenspahn’s son, their ancient voices betraying the queer melody of the prayers. The rabbi looked at Greenspahn and Greenspahn, imitating the old men, began to rock back and forth on his heels. He tried to sway faster than they did. I’m younger, he thought. When he was swaying so quickly that he thought he would be sick were he to go any faster, the rabbi smiled at him approvingly. The man at the window shouted that the sun was approaching the danger point in the sky and that Greenspahn had better begin as soon as he was ready.

He looked at the strange thick letters in the prayer book. “Go ahead,” the rabbi said, “think of Harold and tell God.”

He tried then to think of his son, but he could recall him only as he was when he was a baby standing in his crib. It was unreal, like a photograph. The others knew what he was thinking and frowned. “Go ahead,” the rabbi said.

Then he saw him as a boy on a bicycle, as once he had seen him at dusk as he looked out from his apartment, riding the gray sidewalks, slapping his buttocks as though he were on a horse. The others were not satisfied.

He tried to imagine him older but nothing came of it. The rabbi said, “Please, Greenspahn, the sun is almost down. You’re wasting time. Faster. Faster.”

All right, Greenspahn thought. All right. Only let me think. The others stopped their chanting.

Desperately he thought of the store. He thought of the woman with the coffee, incredibly old, older than the old men who prayed with him, her wig fatuously red, the head beneath it shaking crazily as though even the weight and painted fire of the thick, bright hair were not enough to warm it.

The rabbi grinned.

He thought of the schvartze , imagining him on an old cot, on a damp and sheetless mattress, twisting in a fearful dream. He saw him bent under the huge side of red, raw meat he carried to Arnold.

The others were still grinning, but the rabbi was beginning to look a little bored. He thought of Arnold, seeming to watch him through the schvartze’s own red, mad eyes, as Arnold chopped at the fresh flesh with his butcher’s axe.

He saw the men in the restaurant. The criers, ignorant of hope, the kibitzers , ignorant of despair. Each with his pitiful piece broken from the whole of life, confidently extending only half of what there was to give.

He saw the cheats with their ten dollars and their stolen nickels and their luncheon lusts and their torn breads.

All right, Greenspahn thought. He saw Shirley naked but for her brassiere. It was evening and the store was closed. She lay with Arnold on the butcher’s block.

“The boy,” the rabbi said impatiently, “ the boy .”

He concentrated for a long moment while all of them stood by silently. Gradually, with difficulty, he began to make something out. It was Harold’s face in the coffin, his expression at the very moment of death itself, before the undertakers had had time to tamper with it. He saw it clearly. It was soft, puffy with grief; a sneer curled the lips. It was Harold, twenty-three years old, wifeless, jobless, sacrificing nothing even in the act of death, leaving the world with his life not started.

The rabbi smiled at Greenspahn and turned away as though he now had other business.

“No,” Greenspahn called, “wait. Wait.”

The rabbi turned and with the others looked at him.

He saw it now. They all saw it. The helpless face, the sly wink, the embarrassed, slow smug smile of guilt that must, volitionless as the palpitation of a nerve, have crossed Harold’s face when he had turned, his hand in the register, to see Frank watching him.

He was an orphan, and, to himself, he seemed like one, looked like one. His orphan’s features were as true of himself as are their pale, pinched faces to the blind. At twenty-seven he was a neat, thin young man in white shirts and light suits with lintless pockets. Something about him suggested the ruthless isolation, the hard self-sufficiency of the orphaned, the peculiar dignity of men seen eating alone in restaurants on national holidays. Yet it was this perhaps which shamed him chiefly, for there was a suggestion, too, that his impregnability was a myth, a smell not of the furnished room which he did not inhabit, but of the three-room apartment on a good street which he did. The very excellence of his taste, conditioned by need and lack, lent to him the odd, maidenly primness of the lonely.

He saved the photographs of strangers and imprisoned them behind clear plastic windows in his wallet. In the sound of his own voice he detected the accent of the night school and the correspondence course, and nothing of the fat, sunny ring of the word’s casually afternooned. He strove against himself, a supererogatory enemy, and sought by a kind of helpless abrasion, as one rubs wood, the gleaming self beneath. An orphan’s thinness, he thought, was no accident.

Returning from lunch, he entered the office building where he worked. It was an old building, squat and gargoyled, brightly patched where sandblasters had once worked and then, for some reason, quit before they had finished. He entered the lobby, which smelled always of disinfectant, and walked past the wide, dirty glass of the cigarette-and-candy counter to the single elevator, as thickly barred as a cell.