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

Everyone stood or sat about watching him, avid for him to imbibe, to enjoy. “L’chaim ,” he raised the tumbler to his lips, swallowed — one mouthful: His teeth clamped the rim of the glass, crunched, as if it were some kind of brittle food. He pitched back in his chair. His campaign hat snapped away from his cropped, blond head and fell behind him to the floor. The hand — holding a broken glass — dropped to his lap, staining the khaki-covered thigh. He had bitten a great piece out of the tumbler, and now its jagged edge gleamed between clenched teeth.

“ Gevald! Gevald! Moishe! You hear me? Wake up!” Zaida fanned his son’s face with his yarmulke. “Moishe! Moishe!” Zaida lashed Moe’s cheek with his yarmulke. “ Gevald! Help, someone! Don’t let him swallow! Saul! Max! Before he’s destroyed!”

Mamie screamed hysterically. So did Ella and Sadie. Ira wept, Stella sobbed. Saul tore at his cheek, screaming, “Moe! Moe! Come back!” Baba seemed about to faint, her eyes shut, and would have pitched out of her chair were it not for Mom, who seized her swaying mother and called hoarsely to Harry to run for a doctor. Only Max kept silent. His face pale, the lobes of his nostrils distended and oily, he kept his brown eyes fixed on the edge of glass between his brother’s teeth. Moe’s tongue arched, his jaw dropped. Deftly, as if they were forceps, Max jabbed two fingers between his brother’s lips, and extracted the shard of glass.

“I’ll give you ten seconds to get up that fuckin’ hill, you sonofabitch.” Snarling, Moe glared at his brother with glazed eyes, at the same time drawing the broken tumbler as if it were an imaginary weapon against his thigh. Then he dropped the glass and slumped.

“Oh, woe is me, out to perish before our very eyes,” Baba moaned. “Oh, I die.”

“No, no, he’s coming to himself,” Mom assured her. “Mama, listen to me. Open your eyes. See! See! He breathes. He moves. Your son is saved.”

Moe revived. He looked at the spreading water stain on his khaki breeches — and smiled, his old smile, simple and stolidly arch, as if he were a youth on the East Side again, saying: “Ich khom mikh bepisht?”

“You didn’t bepiss yourself, brother,” Mamie brought her face almost against his. “It’s only seltzer water. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing it isn’t,” Moe smiled. “ Seltzer cust gelt .” He laughed weakly. “ Noo, Mamaleh , I’m home. I’m your Moishe.”

“My poor child,” Baba wept.

“Don’t fall on his neck, all of you!” Zaida shouted. “Leave him alone!”

“I’m all right, Father,” said Moe, and smiled at Baba: “ Mamaleh, don’t weep. I’m a soldier no longer: Ich bin aus-soldat, aus-sergeant .” And to Mamie: “ Noo, Shwester , where’s the seltzer?”

“I’m afraid to give you any more,” said Mamie. “Shall I give him more?” She asked for advice.

“No. Don’t!” Everyone else concurred. “Wait. Wait till he’s come to himself entirely.”

Moe chuckled indulgently. “Try me with the siphon, sister. The spout—” he chuckled again, sought his campaign hat behind him. “I haven’t teeth enough to break the spout. Ah, azoy .”

So, although the Great War had ended months ago, for Ira, watching his uncle in khaki uniform gulping seltzer water directly from the dull metal spigot of the siphon and belching afterward with beatific grin, it was only then the Great War ended.

I

“

I want to be a soldier, Uncle Louie,” Ira said, when Louie in postman’s uniform next gladdened the house with a visit. “I want to go to West Point and learn to be an officer.”

Uncle Louie smiled his gold-crowned smile, and shook his head: “They don’t like Jews at West Point.”

“They don’t?” His disappointment spread within him like some sort of mildew, vitiating his dreams irrevocably. Uncle Louie wouldn’t lie; Uncle Louie knew; he had been a soldier himself. “They don’t, Uncle?” Ira repeated. He seemed to look at something stricken within himself.

The shake of Uncle Louie’s head was slight, his sympathetic smile full of consolation. “No.”

“And where do they like Jews? Where?” Mom bantered.

“He can’t wipe his butt properly, and he’s going to be an officer,” said Pop.

“No, Chaim, he’s only a boy,” Uncle Louie demurred. “A child. I was a soldier, too. It’s natural for a child here in America to want to be a soldier. My two boys also want to be soldiers. It isn’t Galitzia where they cut off a Jewish boy’s toe so he won’t be conscripted—”

“Didn’t they do that to Ben Zion, my father?” said Mom.

“What else?” said Louie. “We Jews did that to a thousand, thousand infant boys to keep them out of the military, that they won’t have to eat pork, worst victuals, or, treife of all, to go into battle — and who knew? at times against other Jews, fellow-Jews in the opposing army. Why? We had no country, no?”

“And here we have?” Mom challenged.

“No, I mean only there was a time, in old times, when we did go into battle for a country that was ours: in Eretz Israel. We fought the Canaanites. We fought the Philistines. We fought the Romans. It wasn’t always this way, cutting off a toe to avoid conscription. Before we were Jews, we were Hebrews. You know that yourself, Chaim.”

“Oh, that was long ago.”

“True, but we still celebrate Chanukah, no? I’m a free-thinker, but I celebrate it, too. And the Bundists in Russia? Jews who had the courage to oppose the Black Hundreds — with weapons. Noo? ”

“Well, should I let him grow up to be a soldier?” Mom asked ironically.

“No. But it’s America. Why did we come here? It’s capitalist America — we know that — and we have our quota of anti-Semites here. But let it become socialist America and you would see: It would become the country of all creeds, all people. Jews as well — and those with no creeds at all, like myself. Such a land all would be willing and ready to defend.”

Mom grimaced in skepticism, then wagged her head.

“Just wait,” Louie emphasized. “It has already happened in Russia. And who leads the Red Army? Trotsky, a Jew.”

“Do you know I waited on him more than once in a restaurant on Second Avenue. I still see him, with his little beard—”

“Uncle Moe was a soldier!” Ira burst out. “He was a sergeant. He had a stripe more than a sergeant. You were a soldier, Uncle Louie. So why can’t I be an officer if I want to?”

“I told you, Yingle , they don’t like Jews. A soldier — well. But not an officer, they want an officer to be like themselves, people they think they can trust.”

“Go, stop nagging,” said Pop.

“With Jews for cannon fodder they’re satisfied,” said Mom. “Czar Kolki , may he rot, abhorred Jews too. But to be soldiers, ah, that delighted him. The Bolsheviki have my wholehearted support.”

“Well, would you consent to his being an officer for the Bolsheviki?” Louie asked.

“Who knows?” said Mom. “In the meantime one thing pleases me. If they don’t like to train Jews to be officers, I am obliged to them.”

“Have no fear,” Pop scoffed. “An officer. He’s meant to be a malamut .”

“You never spoke to him about the Dreyfus case, Chaim?” Uncle Louie addressed Pop.

“Go, expound with him,” said Pop.

“I told him about Dreyfus,” said Mom. “He knows. The Jewish officer they disgraced. You don’t remember?”