Faithful and Other Stories Read online

  FAITHFUL

  and Other Stories

  ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 138

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Nous reconnaissons l'appui financier du gouvernement du Canada.

  FAITHFUL

  and Other Stories

  Daniel Karasik

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.) 2017

  Copyright © 2017, Daniel Karasik and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

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  infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, editor

  David Moratto, interior and cover design

  Guernica Editions Inc.

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  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017938076

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Karasik, Daniel, author

  Faithful and other stories / Daniel Karasik. -- 1st edition.

  (Essential prose series ; 138)

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77183-168-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-169-7 (EPUB).

  --ISBN 978-1-77183-170-3 (Kindle)

  I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 138

  PS8621.A6224F35 2017C813’.6C2017-902331- 4C2017-902332-2

  FAITHFUL

  and Other Stories

  Contents

  Mine

  Witness

  Sister

  A Much Loved Teacher

  The Snake Crosses the Tracks at Midnight

  An Old Friend

  All That Flies from You

  The Baker’s Apprentice

  Rhapsody

  Faithful

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Mine

  What the family does not know is that on Saul’s last night he broke his silence. Emphatically. At dusk. After four days without words, my husband said, quite loudly: Were you there? He raised his head from the pillow. Yes, he said, certainly you were there. I leaned in from my bedside chair, I took his hand, you’d think I would’ve been shaken, wouldn’t you, after so much silence, to hear his voice, but no silence can be held indefinitely, except perhaps the silence of God. I’m here, I said. My husband looked at my face, his eyes narrowed, searching. But where was my wife? he asked me. I could not think of what to say, so I said again: I’m here.

  I had been married to my husband for sixty-five years. We were well suited to each other for maybe three of them, at the beginning, and then there was a period in our fifties and sixties during which a fitful reprieve was granted; we remembered why we needed each other, if not why we had loved each other. In spite of this, or perhaps the connection is stronger than I’d care to admit, our marriage was peaceful. Consistently. I had my passions, those things I longed for, to write, to travel, I suppressed them; he had no passions — is that not fair to say? about the dead, at least, may I not tell the truth? — but in the end we were temperate people. We were unimpeachably sane. My husband’s late descent into madness was nothing to lament. It was the most original, most soulful hour of his life.

  I never told her, said Saul, and, foolish me, I said: Who? My wife, I never told my wife. Was I curious? Certainly I had no fear of what he might confess. I knew he’d cheated. We were not in love, after a point, and he was not in town. It was raining, he said, remember? The lawn was muddy, so I lifted your skirt so it wouldn’t drag. He coughed. The effort of talking exhausted him, clearly. He sat up in bed a little, leaned towards me. Clara, he whispered to me, the situation was sad, but we made a beautiful ceremony. We did, I said, because I have always liked the name Clara. And for the proper time afterwards, he said, I went to shul to say Mourner’s Kaddish. I lit a candle. You didn’t have to leave. The mistake was the result, not what caused it.

  I could feel my husband’s breath on my face. I wondered what Clara might have looked like. And whether their mistake had been a boy or a girl. I gave birth to two healthy children. I never, in sixty-five years of marriage, became pregnant by accident. I chose my life, it was not forced on me. And when I listened to Saul at that hour and touched him and was tender, it was a choice. Outside it began to rain. Drops rapped at the window. Saul turned his head and looked. When he looked back to me, his eyes were full of longing. Can we go? he asked. Will you take me? He pushed himself upright. Where are we going? I asked. The yard, he whispered, smiling. Let’s go to the yard.

  I helped him into his shoes and out of the house. The rain matted his hair into a flat white streak. He pulled me across the lawn, he opened his mouth and caught raindrops on his tongue, he said: It’s not the rain! No, no, it’s not the rain! It’s being here with you! He put his hands on my cheeks — touch doesn’t go, other things go, touch doesn’t — he touched and looked at me and saw someone else. He laughed, his shoulders rattling. A pile of bones in the flood, my husband. Even if the occasion is sad, he cried out to me, even so, I am not sad, my dear. I am not sad, my Clara. Neither am I, I said to my husband. Neither was I.

  Stumbling, coughing, he led me around the side of the house, by the ruined flower bed that Shayna came to tend with me years ago, by the detached garage where Mark would lift his weights when he was in high school, to the backyard, where our apple tree grew, where it still grows, half its limbs missing where they used to hang over the neighbour’s property. He stopped under the apple tree and looked at me in a way I hadn’t seen him look at anybody, not even the pretty nurses, in years. He pulled me down to the ground with him, it took a minute or two, but he pulled me down, and we lay in the sodden grass with our mouths wide open to the rain. He never let go of my hand. I’m so happy, he said. And he rolled over and kissed me on the mouth. He kissed me like a young man kisses. It filled me with excitement and with shame. And even then I realized how foolish I was to be ashamed, I wasn’t pretending, I didn’t forget that I’m no longer young, but there’s the lie, there’s the great lie, that youth dies, youth doesn’t die, youth gets tired and goes to sleep. And why should anyone be ashamed to wake a sleeper who has slept too long and had no one’s permission to absent herself from the world? I kissed him back. A chill from the wet spread through me. His bony hips dug into my stomach, like they’d done when he was a young man. Clara, he whispered, a name I’d always liked, and I thought: what difference could a name possibly make? On the night he died, my husband was a man in love. And a name should put the lie to it? And if the time was wrong, the place, even the person, I should refuse him? Clara, my husband said to me, as soon as my kids are grown — but I put a finger to his lips, I said: Shh. It’s not important now. He took me in his arms, when he didn’t have the strength to hold me I took him in my arms, and after a time his body began to shake, an endless shudder
took him, his teeth began to chatter, I pressed him to the warmth of my body. I did not ask him if he wanted to go back inside. My husband was cold to the touch, all of him was cold, but as long as he shook I held him and pressed him to the warmth of my body.

  The family has been told he died in the hospital, but they’re mistaken, he died under the apple tree in our yard. When I went into the house to call the ambulance, I had neither the strength nor the inclination to drag him with me. The men from the ambulance found me holding him in the rain. When they asked me my name I was so tempted to say someone else’s. I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I’m a reasonable woman, I know the difference between real and pretend. And I know that the arms that held him in the end were mine.

  Witness

  I can pinpoint the moment exactly. I was twenty years old. In the basement of my parents’ house, I had just finished watching a film. I noticed it was late, according to the clock by the TV it was 2:43 AM, and I stood to make my way towards bed. And it was as I stood that I realized with a shock, for the very first time, that I might never in my life publish a novel.

  As a child I’d been certain I would one day publish a novel. Every action I took, no matter how banal, was directed towards that end. When I picked my nose, or ate a bagel, and even when I was absolutely devoted to these endeavours (and who’s to say the picking of one’s nose and the eating of one’s bagel aren’t acts worthy of a reverent concentration?), still a part of me always considered how such acts supported the eventual publication of my novel. To pick my nose was to fill time until I was ready to publish. To eat my bagel was to promote my survival until then. And to “pick and eat,” so to speak, assisted in the latter way as well. I wrote novels as a child, novels that were always publishable until they were written, novels most often set in the future, because the future, I thought at the age of thirteen, I could craft however I saw fit. And so it was a shock to realize palpably, for the first time, that I might never in that malleable future publish a novel.

  I’ll tell you what I did, shocked in my parents’ basement at 2:43 AM. I went upstairs, put on my socks, put on my shoes, put on my coat, took off my shoes, went into the bathroom, peed, put on my shoes, and left the house. It was springtime, a cool spring. I walked. My parents lived, and continue to live, in the suburbs. When I was twenty I had an apartment downtown, close to the university, an apartment I shared with a roommate I knew little and liked less than that, a roommate with such terror of silence that she felt the need to fill every moment with pounding punk rock or the drone of a TV, as though noise for its own sake might provide some comfort in the absence of consoling words or anyone to say them; and each time I returned to my parents’ house, the nighttime quiet struck me as almost miraculous, and I was filled with a deep, radiating joy.

  It was in this condition of deep, radiating joy, tempered by my deep, radiating distress, that I set forth into my parents’ neighbourhood at a trot. I walked without direction, thinking: it’s so dangerous to accept the slowness of certain processes: the writing process, the publication process, the process of finding a mate or choosing an occupation. The danger, it seemed to me as I hurried on, is that you may begin to write off time, to wait in time as though only certain moments, separated by interminable periods of absence, have significance. You say: Oh well, it’s only a month till then, till I’m happy, till I can leave, till I arrive — which is a betrayal of the child you were, for whom a month was without end, the child at once immortal and without any firm belief that there would be a future. And then you say, to your own surprise: Oh well, it’s only a year, I can tolerate this madness, this pain, this horror, for a year, or two, or five, and then I’ll be finished, I’ll be ready, I’ll publish — until one day you hear yourself say: Oh well … it’s just a life. Oh well, I won’t publish a novel this year; oh well, maybe not next; and if it should never happen, if it should happen for others and not for me, if I should turn out to be no more than a spectator to the actions of other, perhaps lesser, perhaps greater persons: oh well. And I walked faster, faster, chilled by the horror in patience.

  Soon I found myself in the playground of my old elementary school, where I swung on the swings. Once the futility of such swinging struck me — I was going nowhere, and slowly — I climbed into a sort of treehouse that exists in the playground, a “treehouse” though it is connected to no tree, which leads me to think I’d best call it simply a “house,” though that’s even further from the truth. I peered out at the neighbourhood as though I were a near-sighted sentry, unarmed and with bad balance. I was reminded of the last time I’d sought refuge in this “treehouse,” five years earlier. I’d had a rough night — I’d been angry, I can’t remember what about — and had fled my parents’ house, ascended to the “treehouse,” made sure no one was around, and cried. I hadn’t cried in ages, it was as if I’d forgotten how, so this was an event of some historical significance. It felt as though I were finding my way around the strings of a long-abandoned instrument. As I descended from my perch after the crying, a gang of tough youths watched me from beneath the gazebo that faces the playground. I was nervous that some sort of confrontation would ensue, but we just stared at each other. Their gaze said: We, dissolute and scrappy, are among others. You, puffy-eyed, are alone. This is how it’ll go for you always, all your life. You’ll stand exposed in the brightness of streetlamps, turned to gape at the others sheltered together in the dark.

  And so I sat in that familiar “treehouse,” on the night when I realized for the first time that I might never publish a novel, and wondered if anyone, ideally a girl, would arrive. And behold: a big black dog appeared on the sand beneath me, wagged its tail, looked up at me, and barked. This dog, I noticed right away, had a peculiar tail: it curled forward over his rear, so that he looked like a question mark with a dog attached. When it wagged, sometimes with vigour, sometimes as though despondent, it didn’t lose its shape. It always asked a question. What’s more, this dog had the most arresting face I’ve ever in my life seen on a dog. This dog — whose name, I would learn, was Othello — had the face of a man. His eyes, deep-set, were spaced far apart, his nose protruded and jolted slightly to the right, his mouth was delicate and set in a frown, and he appeared, from where I sat, to have cheekbones.

  I stared down at this excellent dog, our gazes locked. He wagged his interrogative tail. What do you want? I asked. He barked. I hopped down from my “treehouse” and wobbled. He saw me wobble; when I regained my footing, I looked at him and saw him look away, as if to spare me embarrassment. He was much shorter than me, a fact that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but did. Had he been taller I think we might have danced, provided no one were there to see us. Instead I found a stick, gauged its weight, wrenched my arm back nearly out of its socket, and brought it forward with devastating force. The dog gave chase as soon as my stick took flight. When he arrived at its landing spot, he circled around it, unsure what was expected of him. Perhaps no one had ever thrown a stick in his company before, or had thrown sticks for other reasons, reasons in which he was not implicated. Or perhaps the face he had — the face, as I’ve said, of a man, as much as that can be said of anyone’s face — revealed a second nature in him that warred with the canine, that contained something of the human, as much as that can be said of anyone’s nature. And a dog with half a man’s nature could hardly be expected to know to take a stick into his mouth.

  I’m embarrassed, or really overwhelmed with shame, to admit that I clapped my hands twice, a sort of “comehither” gesture that I’d seen others in superficially similar situations perform with their dogs. Had the dog been stupid, or stupid-looking, had he possessed floppy ears and a leering grin, I wouldn’t have blushed at the less dignified customs of modern dog-man relations, I would have clapped, whistled, jeered, and petted without the slightest discomfort, as I do in the company of many humans. Yet the solemnity of Othello’s face made me feel that such crassness would be a disgrace, a betrayal. I walked to my stick’s l
anding spot, by which the dog sat, puzzled. I’m sorry, I said. Let’s go.

  And so we set off from the playground together. How lively was the start of our voyage through the neighbourhood! We met cats, birds, a leaf that I mistook for a frog, a mailbox that Othello mistook for a bitch, and a man watering his lawn in the dark. Unnoticed, we stood across the street and watched him for fifteen minutes, mesmerized. But nothing came of it.

  We approached the running track, its surface composed of small pinkish stones, in the field behind my old high school. As a teenager I had run on this track with endless optimism, not yet aware that I might never publish a novel, still convinced that it was only a matter of time before my inability to run along the track with much grace or speed would be overshadowed by the deftness of characterization, the rigour of plot, the primordial resonance of symbol and theme that would mark my sprawling, epic, but very human novels. The track stood in my memory as a place of exultation. Which made it even harder to understand what I saw when I arrived there with Othello.

  A dark shape sped over the stones. I couldn’t tell what it was — too big to be a man, yet also not a machine — and neither could Othello come to any conclusions, if I may judge by the way his tail beat against my leg. We crept closer, crouched behind bushes; I got a clearer look. It was a horse. Yes, a horse and more than that: men, five or six of them, dangled from its flanks. One man, the apparent leader of the group, was mounted atop the horse, a leg on either side, his hands around the horse’s neck. The others clung to it wherever they could find room. The horse bucked and reared; the men hung on. They beat it — drove their fists into its sides, rammed their elbows into its neck. I was stunned to realize that this was happening in silence, that neither the men nor the horse cried out. The horse faltered, rocked from side to side, and fell. Vomit rose in my throat as I watched the men stomp on its head.