The Old Religion Read online

  Saying, yet not saying them, to himself, as he listed the lesser-known works. But the effort preoccupied him. He was anxious lest he lose those bonus titles, as he thought of them, as he made his list. And this anxiety limited his ability to range freely. As a man carrying the armful of kindling cannot bend to pick up the one more stick.

  He felt these bonus titles impeded his effort to swell his total.

  And, if he were to count them at the end, had he not, efficiently, in “saving” them counted them already?

  And, indeed, he felt, each time he employed the device, that it would be better to enroll at the outset these better-known books in his list and get on with it.

  But he never did. And he felt that it was a stupid exercise, as the effort, designed to distract him—this making-of-a-list—rendered him worried and that much less disposed to sleep.

  For there were forty-seven of Trollope’s novels in the prison library. And over the months he had read them all, but he never could remember more than thirty, and he strove for these, and, at the end of his memory, berated himself.

  The verbs were better. For he told himself there was some purpose in their re-enumeration.

  But even with the verbs, he rehearsed them not to impress them on his mind, but to distract himself.

  If he did not so muse, evenings, his mind recurred regularly to the moments at the trial when he’d felt most humiliated.

  And he could not discharge these memories from, as it were, attendance on him.

  Like a scab at which he picked.

  He could not help the exercise of his obsessed recitals, nor could he forgive himself for what he felt was his shame in being humiliated.

  But work would help, and time would help, and the Rabbi told him the Torah would help.

  His other exercise was philosophy.

  He wondered, in those nights, if the Torah was given man to serve man or if man was, to the contrary, put upon earth to serve God, and our comfort or even compliance of no account thereto whatever.

  And what was strength, finally, but ability formed through repetition—in the fields, with the books, in his memory, in his mind?

  He rejoiced when he read: “What is he who conquers a city compared to him who conquers his own nature?”

  The despised Jew. The Kike.

  The stories that they told about the Jew in prison, on the streets, and in the novels. In each of his books there was the Jew, the moneylender, the Shylock, the figure of fun.

  Was it worthwhile to throw the book away at that inevitable gibe, or could one not shrug and say, “For the sake of the ten I will spare the town”? And, so, read on, and obtain the amusement or diversion one contracted for? As in the book before him now “recoiled at the touch of the greasy moneylender’s hand, as he counted the bills, one by one, into Phillip’s possession—the smile on his face a presumption barely to be borne.”

  He thought again of the men at the Coffee Corner, in the morning. Eating their roll, their fresh bread roll, and drinking their coffee with chicory.

  Thick men, freckled forearms, wide faces, smiling at each other. Smiling. Good, slow smiles, full of that sweetness of the South.

  It was not false. It was real.

  He’d seen it. Though he’d never felt it directed toward him.

  Like circumcision itself, his appearance debarred him from any option of mistake on their part.

  He was The Jew, and that was the end of it.

  And had he decried it? He had not. At the Coffee Corner, in the court?

  At home? At no time.

  Then was he so weak as to expect a reward? For the mere performance of his duty, in forbearing? Forbearing what? There was no choice in it.

  Well: man was weak. But it was his task, now, to overcome weakness.

  No. No. It was not his job to have been born with that capacity.

  It was his duty to repeat his efforts in spite of his inabilities. And time would give strength to his operations, but it would not feel like strength. And when he looked back, to compare today with the past, he would feel not pride but sadness. It was this feeling, the Rabbi said, which was called wisdom.

  He read the novels, he studied the verbs, he ruminated on philosophy, in prison, where he was awaiting execution for the crime of murder.

  The tea

  He remembered the tea had tasted like salt.

  As he sat at his desk that last Saturday.

  The tea had tasted like salt. And he had ruminated on it.

  What could be the cause of that? he had wondered. Salt in the water, salt in the cup, salt in the tea?

  Would they adulterate the tea with salt? Why would they do that? Perhaps they “cured” it, somehow, he thought, with that which contained, or would, when put in contact with some other substance, “create” … (Not “create,” he thought, “precipitate.” Could one “create” salt? If the two components were brought into contact and some agent used to fuse them, had one “created” the salt? What other word, he wondered, could I use? “Facilitate”? Certainly not. Am I not, am I not—yes, he thought, I can reason scientifically. Yes. If others can, then I can. Why not?) Am I not, then (and nothing but) a “catalyst”—which is that agent which brings about, but does not participate in, combination?

  This is what Man is.

  The very act of drinking tea.

  The very fact of checking ledgers; the fact of ordering raw stock, as ordering the cedar blocks, in which I cause others to perform certain actions, as they, in turn, surely cause me. …

  What a joke. What folly—for now does my tea taste, after all, any the less like salt?

  What a shithole.

  Oppose me who can, for, in the keep of my mind, he thought, I am, if not free, then … then, he thought, less limited than I am outside its confines.

  “Miz Scholz,” he then called, “could we try once again with this tea? In fact, please, could I have coffee?”

  “Well, we must advertise, and that’s an end to it,” he thought.

  To whom could he be thankful? And for what? Who aided us? They persecuted us. We strove and have endured in spite of them. Did they not persecute us?

  Does that deserve out thanks?

  And if, in an atmosphere of possibility, in a land of plenty, we thrived; if, free of persecution, one has managed, two have managed, and thrived, was this not the principle upon which the country was built? To let the individual thrive, to let him pursue his goals of peace and, should it be, prosperity? Was this not the purpose of the founding of the country? So I say: If you have succeeded, you have done so through efforts of your own. If you were not impeded, those who ignored you did no more than was their duty as men.

  If you were aided, why should you not have been? Were you not entitled to it, as were those who aided you?

  This country is not God. You need not worship it. It was established to free men from the tyranny of kings, and it is our right here to pursue happiness and live in peace. Our right. Should a child prostrate itself in thanks that its parents have not beaten it?

  And was that child an orphan, how much more were they beholden to treat it with care.

  Am I in error? Show me where.

  The work clothes

  One never got wholly free of the stench in the prison clothes. Even when washed—perhaps especially then—they assaulted him with the stink of cheap soap and dirty rinse water, as if the stink was not washed out but fixed by the weekly ablution.

  He tried to school himself to identify that new-washed odor as “clean,” but he could not do it. The clothes were filthy. The stench was geometrically compounded by the effort to hide rather than remove it.

  “I am too sensitive,” he thought. “Most live with bad unpleasant odors all their lives. Why should I moan because I, for a time, escaped it?”

  Pleased with his philosophic construction, he shook out the ash-blue clothes and laid them on the bed.

  They were stiff with the laundry starch. He thought, as he did every week, “
If I could only wash the starch out, and hang them to dry in the sun …”

  His blue clothes … “Not blue,” he thought, “not blue.” White. Not grey. Ash white. Ash grey. Blue only by courtesy. Washed-out blue grey. Ash grey. Perhaps the color of stones on some far-off beach. Uninteresting stones—not those the traveler would remark, but those he overlooked.

  “People with eyes this color must be killers,” he thought. “There is such a thing as ‘killers’ eyes,’ that’s true. That’s certainly true. We must not credit the things we read in books. They all are advertisements. We must only trust the things which we have learned.

  “Does it always come through pain?” he thought. “Well, those lessons—there may be others, but those lessons are incontrovertibly our education. Those lessons exist beyond the power of anyone to talk us out of them. Like a stumbling against a hot stove.

  “Who, however deranged, would do that again willingly? Perhaps nothing less mechanical than this is education.

  “But what, now, would I do differently?

  “Believe in no one. Trust no one. Do nothing to set myself above the crowd. Confide in no one. Hope for nothing at all; arm myself, kill those who would torture me. Why must I submit to their obscenities in the name of some law? What is the law to me? I thought that it was my shield. When it protected me I ‘believed’ in it. What can that have meant? That I voted for myself.”

  He looked at the work clothes laid out on the bunk.

  “Not the ‘Negro’ smell,” he thought, “not the fresh washing mixed with sweat. Not the heat of the iron, but clothes as if they’d been boiled in shit.” Exactly as if they’d been boiled in shit.

  He shook his head.

  Nothing, he thought, will be defended as vehemently as a lie.

  The food

  Someone of his friends had something of a diet in which he refrained from a few foods and lost the weight he’d wanted without effort.

  “I simply eliminated alcohol and dairy and sweets and bread,” he’d said, “and I shed the weight. Eleven pounds in two months, although during the time, I had been traveling in Europe.”

  Well, it was an issue, Frank thought. His wife was fat. As was her mother. And his father was fat. And his grandfather.

  His uncle, who had told the story, had been traveling in Britain, which, Frank thought, lessened the merit of his fast, as who had ever praised Britain for food?

  He thought about his uncle’s pride, and wondered how much of it had to do with action contrary to what, for want of a better word, he thought of as “Jewishness.”

  And, if the people were gross, if they so thought of themselves, was it not caused, this condition—if the condition was the thought or if obesity—by their displacedness?

  Aha, he thought.

  Though slim himself, though slender, though disposed to equate it with royalty, and though disposed to feel superior to his relatives, over those he knew, Jew and Gentile alike, who fretted over their weight, he fought the urge to consider himself chosen; and he wondered: might it not be a fear of the outcast? Might it not be the self-loathing, he thought, of the displaced—that their very metabolism would not function to allow them to assimilate food in a foreign land?

  “The very foods we eat,” he thought.

  The jailer scraped his key along the bars as he came down the gallery.

  “Yes, All right,” Frank thought—and there was something comforting in the sound.

  “‘Royally slim,’” he thought, “although I know they called me sickly. And turned on me for it. Slim. Slight. Slender. Girlish.” He shuddered.

  “Or, in Arctic climes,” he thought, “there it would be a disadvantage definitely. Where the body’s urge to put on flesh would serve one. And the opposite not do one well. But in the South …”

  Down the row, there was a quick conversation in undertones. The guard and a prisoner down the row, talking.

  The guard responded, not unkindly, from the tone, to the request, whatever it was. Then Frank heard another brief exchange—almost an exchange of pleasantries—between the two, and then the guard moved on, dragging his key on the bars as he moved from cell to cell for the evening lockdown.

  “But in the South you would think it was an advantage,” Frank thought. “I always found it so—not to be disposed, for example, to sweat.”

  The guard was at his cell, and he heard the key rasping on the bars, and then the quick tack-thik, as the key went into the lock. And then he was locked down for the night.

  “No. I will not think of fire,” he thought. “In fact, its opposite is Cold of the North, and the Eskimos I have just fortuitously touched upon. Though they themselves are slight. But muscled. And disposed, I think, to brawn. To a brawn tempered by cold—so that, perhaps, it’s accurate to call them slight.

  “I would think they’re of a type similar to their dogs, as both have been bred both by the climate in which they live and by their exertions in that climate.”

  He tried to think whether any species fell outside of this description, and could only offer himself, transplanted.

  They were late with his food.

  “All right,” he thought. “I have to learn the difference between defending my position and promoting my interests.”

  “I am entitled to my food, and a case could be made for demanding it on time this time, to ensure compliance in the future. And that would be an attempt—for who can say it would succeed?—to defend my position.

  “But would it promote my interest?

  “First,” he thought, “Is it worth fighting for? And, then, is it worth … No. No,” he thought. “It is all contained in the first question. That is the question: ‘Is it worth fighting for?’

  “That is the question of the philosopher who is not afraid to seem foolish. Who is not afraid to be thought weak. Who can rest content with his own opinion of himself—for it is myself I must conquer, and he who conquers himself is due more praise than he who takes a city. For if I can still my longing to be thought well of, then …

  “And I am not hungry,” he thought. “Finally, I don’t want the food now. I do not require it. I require to be thought well of.

  “Then what kind of beast am I—for they have kidnapped me and will surely kill me, who would strive to defend his—no, I will not say it,” he thought—“manhood by demanding the food be brought him at the appointed time.

  “Are all quests for recognition similarly vain?” he thought; and, as he did, they brought the food.

  One man opened the cell, while the other man stood back with the pump shotgun. The man with the tray came in and set it on the bench. As he bent down, he flicked his eyes up to look at the prisoner. Then he backed out, and the cell was locked. Frank heard the two men walk away.

  “He smells of cabbage,” he thought.

  “The cell still smells of cabbage, and it’s from that fellow. Looks like a sausage. And where is it written I must love my neighbor?”

  He looked at the tray. He picked the small bench up and put it next to his bunk. He sat on the bunk and began to eat.

  “No. Where do we find we must love our neighbor? No. We must treat them well,” he thought, and found that he was pointing, as if in a disputation. And he wondered if it was a “Jewish” gesture, and a “Jewish” trait. And he wondered, “What does that mean?” And he thought, “You know what that means.”

  He ate his meal, happy to find he was hungry for it.

  His books

  “And what can it mean that he gave his only begotten son? If he had a son, where was his wife? And is that not idolatry? Where is his wife? No. I’m sorry.

  “And the difference is here: Abraham did not kill his son. Their God did. And the difference is ‘God so loved the world,’ where we are not told ‘God loved the world’; we are told to love God.

  “And we are not told we should love the world. And perhaps it is the love of the world which leads to murder, where the love of God …

  “‘Abracadabra,’” he
thought. “‘I create as I speak.’

  “It did not ward the plague off. And in Les Misérables, we see it in their chain letter: ‘Little White Paternoster, save me from …’

  “‘But if I am to have wisdom I must pass beyond hate,’ one voice said. And the next said, ‘Why?’

  “Is it an advance to be told to ‘love our enemies’? Who does so?”

  He looked down at his plate.

  “And some food goes slowly and some goes fast. But if you leave it on your plate it will rot, and the more complex the organism, the quicker it will rot and the worse it will stink. What does that tell us?” he thought, and, “How many processes were used to stamp this metal tray?” He examined it.

  “Only two,” he pronounced, and nodded. “And the name of the maker part of the second.

  “No. I lie. For the initial stamping makes one, to gain the shape, and I would not venture to combine it either with the impression to give the depth nor with turning the rim. So say three, and the stamping of the name part of the second. What is business but forethought?”

  He mopped up the sauce with his bread. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief taken from the back pocket of his dungarees.

  He rose and sighed and moved the small bench back to the wall.

  He took the tray and its utensils and placed them on the floor near the bars.

  He turned and looked at his books.

  There was the Hebrew primer. There was Les Misérables.

  There was the Torah, in Hebrew and English. There were three novels by Anthony Trollope. There was the notepaper and, there, the several pencils.

  Behind him were the bars.

  “Abraham refrained,” he thought. “I’m sorry, but that’s true.”

  He picked up a piece of notepaper, folded it double, and used the corner to clean a space between two teeth. Then he sat on his bed.