Crackpot, page 25
It was admitted, however, that as usual there was something sound in Limprig’s reasoning, at least to a point, and the board voted to hire the poor woman, who could do with the few extra cents, as a wet nurse to provide for at least a part of the boy’s nutritional needs. No matter who the child was, the community had no intention of scanting its responsibilities.
So it was that, what with rumination, consultation, and the occasional pithy altercation, some months were allowed to pass, during which time the half-expected missive from the mysterious mother who was presumed to have left the child, did not materialize. No note, no cheque. What then had the note meant? Now that the excitement had died down, and more heads cooled, more people began to consider other possibilities. As the most glamorous possibility lost its categorical force, so too did potential foster parents lose their enthusiasm. It was, after all, a great responsibility to take on.
While these problems were being debated on the administrative level, others were being pursued in the religious sphere, though decisions here had of necessity to be reached more quickly. Chief among them was the urgent question, was the boy to be circumcised as a child of the Jewish faith? The theological considerations behind this apparently simple question were of a complexity far too intricate for even an attempt to be made to trace them here in full. Suffice to say that the first requirement, that the mother of the child must be a Jew, under the circumstances might logically be assumed to have been met. Further, what little information was at hand implied that the father was not a Jew, so that, though the child would also appear to have been born out of wedlock, and was therefore presumably a bastard, he was nevertheless not the worst type of bastard, and could, according to Maimonedes, be admitted unreservedly as a member of the Hebrew faith. Had there been any reason to suspect that the putative father was a Jew, who had, knowing better, sinned against his covenant, the judgment on the child would have been far more severe, as a child of disgrace. But since the gentile knows no better, his responsibility is less, and why should mother and child be doubly penalized for what his lawless appetites have no doubt forced on them? So the child, though a bastard, was declared no momzer, and as close to the seventh day of his birth as could be ascertained, he underwent the small operation which ushered him formally into the ranks of the responsible. He acquitted himself like a man. He squawked.
The assembled company of some of the town’s finest, saluted him approvingly, drank wine and ate chick peas, and remarked that the birth of Moses had also been a very mysterious event. At another ceremony the child was, in fact, given the formal name of David Ben Zion, David Son of Zion, to signify his acceptance by a community which had royal names of its own to bestow. But the curious, knotted little tail which had been hanging from his navel when he was found, and which, though since dried away, had left an odd little lump, had already won him another name, the one by which, to the mortification of his boyhood, he would henceforth be known. Because of his odd little navel, they nicknamed him Pipick.
SEVEN
It would be unfair to suggest that during the years that followed, Hoda tried to erase all memory of her black night and of the existence of a living issue. True, other pains and other pleasures dulled the intensity of recall; gradually a shadow formed over the area in her memory, a shadow that gained in opacity with time, so that, like the craters of the moon, from a distance the dark spot seemed more like a smudge on an unbroken surface than like the pit into which she knew she could fall if she allowed herself to venture too close. But she could not pretend the smudge wasn’t there. What had happened had happened, and Hoda was not capable of forgetting entirely. But she allowed herself to temporize with memory, promising herself, as time passed, that one day, as soon as she had a chance, tomorrow, maybe, or the day after, she would sit down and try to figure out what meaning that distant night and the living souvenir which it was sometimes so difficult to believe really existed, had in her life. She still walked blocks out of her way when the occasion arose, rather than pass anywhere near the Orphanage, which was for her the geographic incarnation of the shadow pit in her mind which she dared not approach too closely. With time, the shadowed area did appear to shrink, for Hoda had many other things to think about. Those few forbidden blocks around the Orphanage also shrank, as Hoda grew more familiar with the wide expanse of the city which existed beyond the bounds which had had meaning for her in childhood. But she could not simply forget, and though she now had a proper contempt for silly, impractical, childish fantasies, Hoda still believed that in the endless folds of time that were yet to unwrinkle before her, were hidden all the correct solutions to all her problems, and she promised herself that she would make good all her errors, the minute the proper shape of her destiny was revealed to her.
Meanwhile she continued to do her best, and became, in time, well enough known for it in the district to have earned for herself a fairly regular flow of clientele and a certain degree of notoriety among decent folk. Of the latter Hoda was to some extent aware, and when it was, occasionally, underlined for her attention, she expressed a large, contemptuous willingness to be tolerant of public opinion if the public would, on its side, keep its opinion to itself and not bother her and her daddy with it. Among themselves, if people wanted to talk about her, let them. Her touchy spot was, of course, her daddy. For herself Hoda didn’t give a damn what any bunch of old busybodies thought. What did they know about her life? And what did they care, either, about the important things? But close to the surface of her defiance was always the fear that someday, someone would bludgeon his or her way through her father’s innocence. It would take a bludgeon, it seemed to her sometimes, to break its way through that amazingly tough shell of softness, in which the most obvious revelation of the truth lost its shape and disappeared. But someday, nevertheless, it might happen, perhaps in the jigsaw way she used to think babies were put together in the dark. Danile would submit to endless violations in his darkness, but one day a final clue would be left that would, though he struggled against it, force the fullness of knowledge on him, and even to Danile the blind, the ugly truth would be born. Oddly enough it was only in relation to her father that Hoda saw it as an ugly truth. For the rest, as she did not tire of asserting, when she discussed it with her friends, she didn’t give a damn what they thought; they were all hypocrites anyway.
The reputation which she had among some, for being a little bit crazy in the head, just like her old man, was gained at least in part by the lengths to which she would go to maintain a decorous attitude among her clientele when her father was anywhere in the vicinity. Hoda insisted that there was to be no rough and tumble loud-mouth swearing in Danile’s hearing, though he understood little enough English. If the boys wanted they could go out in the back lane behind the shed and roll the smut around. But the green young lads for whom it was a daring adventure to be awaiting their turns to shag the district whore found it difficult to conduct themselves as though they were sitting in a dentist’s anteroom. They were keyed up; the quarters and nickels and dimes had been scraped together with some difficulty. These were festive moments, and the especially exciting quality of their joint venture in exploration of the sink of flesh was heightened by the peculiarities of this particular whore and her father. For Danile still called encouragement from the other room, and his interpolations of “Study, study, pig, pig!” were apt to send the novices, who had been warned to expect this, into fits of laughter. But if they became too rambunctious while they awaited their turns in the kitchen, Hoda’s voice would be raised in threatening warning from the bedroom. Whereupon her father, as though to temper the sternness of Hoda’s words, would raise his voice again and shout even more encouragingly from his room for them to apply themselves, for study is sweet; knowledge is good.
The younger boys looked forward to this as part of the entertainment of a visit to Hoda. They knew, of course, that there was a point beyond which it was dangerous to go in revealing their enjoyment of the fringe benefits of her favours. It was dangerous to laugh too loudly, dangerous to comment or make snide remarks, dangerous to try to tease forth a display. Nevertheless they half hoped that one of them, though each prayed it wouldn’t be him, might accidentally cut across Hoda’s sensibilities and raise her ire, the result of which was reputed to be almost as much fun as the moment of intimacy with her masses of playful flesh. On one memorable hot summer’s evening, when Hoda had, on request and out of sheer good nature, taken two of them into the shed with her at once, the rest of them had wandered out into the front yard, where, totally ignoring the fact that Danile was sitting on the front steps quietly weaving his basket, they discussed noisily what was likely to be going on in the shed. One joker in particular kept loudly calling obscene encouragement back to his buddies. His raillery was cut short very suddenly, when the shed door flew violently open, and Hoda lumbered out, stark naked, and came raging toward him in an avalanche of flapping pink flesh. The boy, quailing before the fury of her expression, took to his heels, and luckily for him, was able to make it out the gate before her. Legend has it that she chased him halfway down the block, hurling imprecations all the way. But legend exaggerates. She stopped short at the gate, and in a whirl of arms and belly and breasts strode back to confront the other two gaping offenders with an absolute decree that they too would have to get the hell out if they did not learn how to behave themselves decently. And to her father, whose grasp of English smut was still thankfully negligible, she explained briefly, as he had raised his head enquiringly from his work, that she had chased the boy home because he lacked respect. Glaring another warning at the two chastened adolescents, she strode back to the shed to complete her business, while the boy who had been banished made his way cautiously back along the fence to the gate, where he discussed with his friends, in tones that fluctuated between laughter and chagrin, whether he dared enter again, since after all he had chipped in too, and he ought to get his money’s worth.
People tend to get the stories confused. Hoda did actually chase someone out the gate and down the street, but that was on another occasion, and then she was fully and decently dressed. This time she wasn’t chasing a customer, either. It happened as a result of her habit of putting pressure on her clients, to make them buy her daddy’s handiwork. Originally this had been a very useful and reasonably profitable way to prevent the house from being entirely overrun by the products of Daddy’s indefatigable industry. And it enabled her customers too to balance whatever uneasy feelings they might have had about having digressed to indulge in a little vice, with a pretty counterweight of virtue, in the form of a totally unexpected and apparently gratuitous bonus of affection for their wives. But once the professional nature of Hoda’s activities had become common knowledge, the women began to ask themselves what their men had been doing in that place where baskets also happened to be for sale. The possession of one of Danile’s pretty, sturdy bags or baskets gradually became, perhaps unfairly, tantamount to an open admission that a husband or a son had strayed. The feline, “What a pretty straw bag! Is it new? Did your husband buy you a gift?” was more than once to needle an aching, humiliated heart, and receive reply from behind a tight-lipped smile, “No, I’ve had it for a long time. I bought it myself as a matter of fact from that poor foolish blind man. I feel so sorry for him. He can’t help it if his daughter’s a whore.” And the deft attacker would counter with some delicately ironic comment on what a tragedy it was to be blind. During those transitional days when Hoda’s function was first becoming widely recognized in the district, more than one guilty husband was to curse the expansive moment when he had submitted to the temptation to give his wife some pleasure too.
At first Hoda was disturbed to find the bags she had sold the evening before were being abandoned in the yard and along the back lane the morning after. She cursed her customers for the insult to her father’s craft, and cursing, gathered the pretty straw and wicker things up again, hating the meanness and obtuseness of people who could take something so nice and throw it away just like that. Not until some time had passed and her customers had even come out and openly offered to pay her the extra money, as long as she didn’t try to make them take home the baskets, did she realize fully that her major area of sales was really drying up. So she settled for a token basket-selling transaction, which at least maintained her income, and once again began to cudgel her brains for ways to reduce their stockpile.
But she was still able, once in a while, to really sell a basket to an innocent customer. It was the morning after a brief visit from one such customer, a new friend, that the occasion of the great chase took place. Daddy, thank God! was still at morning prayers in the synagogue and Hoda was making his bed, when she heard the woman screaming outside. The voice drew rapidly nearer till she had no difficulty in making out the Yiddish words, “Where’s the whore? Where is she, the whore?” Hoda went to the window. Neighbours across the way had already opened their front doors and were peering down the street. The vocalist, still shouting in a high-pitched, overwrought voice, appeared, waving a wicker basket and banging it against the fence. She must have begun her shouting a good way down the street, because there were people already following her. “Where is she, the husband eater?” she screamed, and planted herself before their gate, a wizening, overworked woman, whom Hoda knew only by sight as someone who lived around here somewhere. The stranger announced loudly now that she had come to have it out with the strumpet, that she meant to shame her before the whole neighbourhood, the fat cat who lay and lapped cream while decent women slaved themselves into the grave, and for what? So their husbands should sneak money from the till and go swim in polluted beds. “A present he had to bring me? I gave him a present! I’ll give her a present too! Where is she the whore, the Delilah, the outcast? I’ll make her such a scandal she’ll be ashamed to show her face before people again! I’ll tell that old blind fool such a story his fingers will curl up and he’ll never be able to weave rubbish again! Come out! Where are you hiding, you prostitute you!”
At first Hoda could hardly believe that the stranger was actually calling her. She went to the door fully intending to go out like anybody else and see what the name-calling was all about. But when the woman remained by the gate and continued to shout she realized, uneasily, that the dame was actually after her. Hoda was astonished, and listened unbelievingly. She had never given much thought to the wives and girl friends of her customers before, except, occasionally, when she developed a crush on one of her clients, and wondered wistfully what it was like to really exist for a man. She had never imagined that she would be blamed and screamed at, in front of the whole street, by someone she’d never even said a word to before in her life. Surely how that old lady reconciled herself to what her husband did had nothing to do with Hoda.
But what if Daddy were to hear her screaming, and in Yiddish, so he could make no mistake about what he was hearing? There were all kinds of people outside there already. Soon someone would let them know in the synagogue that something was happening so close by and then they might all hurry their prayers and come rushing out to see. They mustn’t! What right did she have to yell and scream about her daddy and his baskets anyway? Who did she think she was, to come and try to spoil things? What did she know about Hoda and about Danile and about anything? Hoda didn’t even know who her husband was, but if he wanted to come and be her customer she wasn’t going to stop him either, for someone who yelled and screamed in front of the whole block, and called her names and insulted her daddy!
Gone was that first impulse to lock the door and hide behind it until the stranger had gone away. Hoda would meet fire with fire! She flung open the door and went storming down the steps and thundering up the path. “Who you calling names?” she bellowed. “I’ll show you to smash my daddy’s baskets!” For in truth, the basket the woman held was beginning to jar loose, from being repeatedly slammed with force against the fencepost. Hoda did not pause as she raved, but charged like a youthful amazon at first blooding. “Call me names, I’ll break your neck! Nobody calls me names!” She thudded to a halt just inside the gate, eyes smouldering sparks, fists clenched, towering over the little, old-looking lady, who had taken a few hasty steps back from the fence at her turbulent approach. For a moment they were both silent, confronting each other, and Hoda was dismayed to be standing here thus, threatening a little old lady who was half her size, whose face was shaking and who kept blinking her eyes. Why didn’t she just go away, quickly, before Daddy came? And the rest of them too, the damn nosey-parker busybodies whom she could see out of the corners of her eyes, grinning and enjoying themselves because somebody was miserable.
