Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“A shvartz yur! ” Zaida clawed frantically under his yarmulke. “Such a punishment to befall me. If she won’t eat, she won’t eat. But at least cook. I die of hunger here. If not for Mamie, I would wane away to a stalk, a dry reed. Oy .”

But it was Baba, not Zaida, who became more and more wasted as the weeks of Moe’s training went by. She would surely have been taken to the Mt. Sinai Hospital — Mom told Ira — if Moe hadn’t come home on furlough when he did. Together with others of the family, Ira was at Baba’s to greet him. They had refrained from writing him about Baba’s unhappy condition while he was at camp, and now they waited grimly for him to see for himself. Under his broad khaki campaign hat, Moe looked at his repining mother with the strict stare of one accustomed to command. “What’s wrong with you, Mamaleh ?”

“They’re sending you to the slaughter. I don’t want to live.” Her tears lingered in the wasted furrows of her cheeks.

“ Azoy ? You already know I’m going to be sent into the slaughter?” Moe’s voice was ironic, and his strong hands quiet on his khaki-clad thighs, but he never took his eyes off Baba. “A Yiddish soldier truly carries a heavy load. He has two commanders. One, his mother, the other, his colonel. Fortunately he is exempt from the Torah, or God knows how he could stand it all.”

“Tell her, tell her!” Zaida urged. “Such madness has seized her that she will hear nothing. God commanded the remnant of Israel to live. Talk to a stone.”

“ Mamaleh ,” Moe said. “None of my friends should be worse off than I am. I live like a count. As I live. Like a lord.”

“Go, with your idle talk. Don’t torture me.”

“I swear to you, Mamaleh . You see this?” Moe turned his arm sideways the better for her to view the insignia on the sleeve of his uniform: three chevrons with a quarter-moon under them. “ S’heist mess sergeant,” he explained the meaning of the stripes. “The Almighty blessed me when he made me a headwaiter. Not one in the entire camp knew how to order food for so many men: how to feed so many men, how to tell the cooks what to do. And who and how was to arrange the service for such a horde of men. It’s called mess, Mamaleh . Your Moishe is in charge. Zoi vie an offizier bin ich .”

Baba looked from the sleeve to her son’s broad, light-skinned face, with the scar on the brow; she searched with sad skepticism his blue eyes.

“Believe me, Maminyoo ,” said Moe earnestly: “With these stripes I will never be sent into carnage. I could even become rich— The suppliers prod me on every side with money. If I only dared accept.”

“Moishe, child. Ai ,” Baba moaned in disbelief.

“No? Ask, ask whom you wish, a total stranger. Ask, what is a mess sergeant. Treife I must eat. But to be sent into carnage, never. Who will buy for the whole regiment? It takes a Yiddisher kupf .” Moe spoke as though he were commanding Baba to understand. “I have authority, I alone. Would I buy from this dealer, and not from the other, he nudges me with fifty dollars. Believe me. But I refuse. Not that it’s worth my life to be honest, but I do it for your sake. Not to risk my ‘rank,’ as it’s called in English. These,” he pointed to his chevrons. “You understand? You have nothing to pine about.”

Perhaps Baba wanted to believe. As long as Moe was home, her appetite perked up. She even went shopping, hovered over her firstborn son with the freshest bulkies, lox and smoked white fish, every delicacy she could think of; she baked kishka , stuffed derma ; she cooked borsht and kreplach, lintzes and lotkehs and carrot pudding, gefilte fish and chicken. Moe took precedence before Zaida, who was glad enough to yield: At last his wife was active again, dressed herself in her best black satin on the Sabbath, wore her pearls, served dinner and dined — ate, because Moe refused to eat unless she did. Her cheeks filled out, almost visibly absorbing nourishment; her blue eyes seemed to emerge from their caverns, like iris, her color returned. She wanted to believe. And again and again, her gaze rested on his Moe’s mess sergeant’s insignia, as on a talisman. Her son would be spared.

And then came the dread last hours of Moe’s furlough, the dread time when everyone except Baba knew, even Ira, and everyone had been enjoined not to betray, not to hint, that in a matter of days Moe’s division would be sent overseas — across the Atlantic where the U-boats lurked — to France, to the battlefield. The secret was well kept, the conspiracy of silence remained intact, even till the last moment: Cheerfully, Moe embraced everyone, once more hugged his weeping, clinging mother, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands groping for his chevrons. He told Max and Harry to look after her, and with Zaida and Saul, left the house. The whole family was crammed into the two front windows, waving and calling; and Moe, with upraised arm, kept returning their farewells, until at Madison Avenue, the trio rounded the corner and were out of view. A few feet behind them, scarcely noticed, the eleven-year-old Ira trailed.

A clear, temperate summer day. 1917. Pedestrians seemed more numerous on Madison Avenue, lolling at the fronts of houses or sauntering unconcernedly along. Ahead of Ira, Moe and his two escorts, Saul and Zaida, reached the corner of 116th Street and Madison, crossed to the northwest corner, and wheeled west toward Fifth Avenue. They crossed Fifth Avenue. Ahead of them in the middle of the very long block between Fifth Avenue and Lenox was the marshaling yard, the open court of P.S. 86, the very large gray-stone public school building. Buses were already parked in front of it, buses full or part full of uniformed men. An empty bus, another and still another lumbered up beside the others and double-parked. At the sight of them, Zaida and Saul, who hadn’t said a word all this time but walked as in a daze, suddenly burst out into frenzied lamentations. Howling in despair, each one hung onto Moe’s arm. And Moe, stalwart, the more so with his weeks of training, his countenance under his khaki campaign hat ruddy with effort, dragged them along like a tug between two barges. When they saw it was futile to try and hinder him, each let go. Each abandoned himself to extremity of grief: Zaida tore at his beard, tore out bunches of whiskers, wailing at the top of his voice. Saul snatched at his hair, flung himself about, screaming hysterically. Passersby stopped to watch, automobiles slowed down, people leaned out of windows.

At the very edge of the curb, Moe halted. And still filial and forebearing, “I pray you, Father, spare me,” he said. “Let me be. If not, and you too, Saul, go no further. It’s bad enough I’m a soldier. I wear a uniform. Don’t add to my trials.”

They quieted down, lapsed into suppressed groans. Scared, cringing with embarrassment, near tears, Ira watched them near the marshaling yard mingle with other servicemen and their kin walking toward the buses.

“Will yez look at them Jews,” said the cop on duty to a hanger-on beside him in front of a store, a beefy, blue-coated cop talking to a lean civilian: “Didjez ever see the loik? Ye’d think the guy was dead already.”

IX

So Moe went off to the war across the ocean. For awhile, Baba believed her family’s reiterated fabrication that Moe was still in Camp Yaphank in New Jersey; but then, as the weeks passed, and she saw no sign of him, and though the letters were full of good cheer, she recognized the letter paper was European and asked to see the envelopes. They were never shown her and she saw through the deception. “‘How long will you cajole me with falsehoods?’” Mom told Ira that Baba chided her. “‘You are all frauds. As if I didn’t know where the fighting and the killing were taking place.’” Finally Zaida told her the truth: Moe was in France.