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

So he would envisage his initiation into realistic fiction to himself, so he would account for the transition. From then on, anything that first caught his fancy after a few pages read in the library was taken home to peruse at leisure on the kitchen table, under bluish gas mantle-light. Sometimes just the title alone was enough to base a judgment on, whether to take the volume home or leave it. And sometimes something heard about the book, that it was recommended as classic, that it was a necessary ornament of the cultivated person and ought to be read.

He once took home Marx’s Das Kapital , which brought a trace of polite amusement to the face of the librarian. . And so he came to read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables —Less Miserables — because he had somewhere seen reference made to it as being a great book, a great work of fiction, a classic; that it was his duty to read it. He had to try to like classics; he had to try to find out why they were classics, why those who were learned, those in authority, said a certain book was a classic, so that somehow, even if he didn’t fully comprehend, he would be exposed to the aura, humbly submit to sublimity. The other kids might say, nah, the book was no good. They were far more independent-minded — and smarter — than he was. He was submissive, he knew, uncertain, just trying to learn certainty, find a path to it, lacking the aggressiveness of his mates, who were so sure of the rightness of their preferences. He was dumb, and he had to hide it. So it was, in that muzzy state, with muzzy motivation, he brought home Les Misérables . And for days and days, he lived with Jean Valjean, the escaped convict who purloined the abbot’s silverware and candlesticks, the lime-streaked workmen plodding through the streets of Paris impenetrable in lowly disguise — until that act of simple heroism that saved the carter’s life furnished the first clue of his identity to the relentless police inspector, who, caught between duty and humanity, flung himself from a promontory into the sea.

Ira wept, numberless times. And he grieved over the lessening pages that brought him nearer the end of his companionship with Jean Valjean — to the end of the book that he kept under his bed in the little dark bedroom, that he woke up to on Saturday and Sunday as to a precious gift waiting for him to reclaim it. He tarried and reread, dreamed. Hundreds of new words lurked within the pages, unfamiliar words within the hundreds of pages of narrative, and yet they offered no obstacle to understanding. He had no dictionary — even the thought of owning one never entered his mind. He scarcely needed one. It was as if feeling all by itself guided him through context, and once the word’s meaning was surmised, it seemed to lodge in his mind ever after, dwell there for him to admire its luster and resonance.

And so at random he sampled books like objects of a haphazard and voracious whim: After Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild , from The Sea Wolf to Lorna Doone ; through Riders of the Purple Sage to The Three Musketeers , from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Hunchback of Notre Dame to The Count of Monte Cristo , and Poe’s ghastly tales, and H. Rider Haggard’s She , and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur , and. . how strange: In the world of print, the world between the covers of a book, in the world of “true” stories, as before in the world of myth, he submitted to being a Christian, just as the heroes of the book were — except for Ben-Hur, who was Jewish-Roman or a Roman Jew — it didn’t matter. Ira submitted to being a Christian. What else could he do when he liked and esteemed the hero? All he asked of a book was not to remind him too much that he was a Jew; the more he was taken with a book, the more he prayed that Jews would be overlooked.

And there was something else that he could sense but couldn’t define — it never occurred to him to try to define: Just as the mythic had held him before, the “true” held him now, even more strongly. But held him how? Or why? He couldn’t tell. The story had to go a certain way, not the way of a history book, or — no! — geography, or Current Events, not that way. But the way that made you want to follow, because you cared, because you wanted to share in or maybe had to share in the trials and tribulations of the central character. Ira didn’t know. He could feel the way the story had to go, without knowing just why, the way you learned to read Hebrew over and over again in cheder on the East Side, without knowing just what you read. .

There seemed no end in sight to the terrible World War that raged on in Europe. On the surface (the surface to which thus far Ira had committed his twelve-year-old character, a surface, Ira knew, could no longer be plausibly maintained), the war was a composite of Zaida’s fantastic Yiddish execrations (fantastic, it occurred to Ira, because forced, helpless, forced, hypertrophied, as a chained goose might be force-fed through ages of captivity): May those who incited wars be flayed, burned, throttled, beheaded, crushed, mangled — His stock of futile imprecations appeared to be inexhaustible.

And Baba’s repining. Her vigor returned sporadically, as if in spurts, only when accusing her kin of withholding the truth from her, that husband and children alike were lying to her: Moe was dead. “God will requite you for this — deluding me as you did when he was sent off to the slaughter.” And rocking back and forth in woe: “Mocking me with my own heart plucked out of me. You’ll see.” She wept, so terrible in Ira’s sight, her transparent tears welling up out of closed eyelids. In vain, the others tried to revive her faith that God and Moe’s chevrons with the half-moon under them would preserve him from harm. She doubted the authenticity of Moe’s letters home, disbelieved that the stippled shell casings and the iron crosses that Ira brought her as proof that Moe was alive were his.

The World War raged on. The Boche , the Hun, in hated spiked helmet stood on the edge of the trench, arms uplifted in surrender: Kamerad! he cried. But on the ground, between his bestriding legs, his fellow-Hun treacherously aimed his machine gun at the viewer. Liberty Bonds. Patriotic rallies. Ira was still a Boy Scout, had taken his oath of allegiance to observe the rules of the Boy Scouts in the basement of his beloved library on 124th Street. There also, or sometimes in the scoutmaster’s home, he learned how to tie knots, timber hitches and bowlines and sheepshanks; which knots were suitable for what purpose, and always to eschew granny knots. He studied Dan Beard’s books on the lore of the wild, how to set up a lean-to, build a campfire with only two matches, distinguish between different animal tracks in the snow; how to apply tourniquets and treat venomous snakebites; how to carry people out of a burning house and resuscitate them afterward.

He was inept at everything, even that simple role he played when the scouts staged an exhibition of their skills: The scoutmaster and his assistant sat on the edge of their chairs on the platform, while Ira clumsily demonstrated tying a bandanna into an arm-sling. But oh, he learned that sphagnum moss could filter turbid water into a clear and potable drink. He learned that the tips of pine trees pointed north, helping to orient those lost in the woods; and where to look for the Pole Star in the night sky, and why General O’Ryan’s Division wore the peculiar constellation on their shoulder patches, the constellation Orion.

On the gravelly bank of the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, after a hike down a trail from the Palisades, the troop gathered around the campfire the assistant scoutmaster had built, over which was suspended, from a notched stick, in approved scout fashion, a kettle full of stewing vegetables to whose ingredients all the Boy Scouts had contributed. In the tonic chill of the advancing autumn afternoon, with the shadows of the Palisades already encroaching, the pockmarked, affable assistant scoutmaster ladled out the concoction into his mess-cup and tasted it, with care — the stuff was hot! And then, in order not to soil his scoutmaster’s uniform, stooped over and consumed a whole mouthful. He ate it! Soup greens and all, with the very parsnip in it that Ira had contributed. Whoever ate that? And a boiled onion too! A celery stalk! At home Mom used those only to flavor the chicken soup. Nobody ate them. At home Mom strained all that out, and threw them into the garbage can: They were soup greens. But here, if you were a Boy Scout you ate them. And lo and behold, they were good.