"Deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man." Jacob rolled his head, facing the wall, and closed his eyes once more. Noah got up from his chair and went over to the bed and pulled the blankets up closer around his father's throat. But there was no sign from Jacob that he noticed any of this. Noah stared down at him for a moment, listening to the heavy breathing. Then he turned and went to the window. He opened the window and sniffed at the dank, rolling mist, freighted with the heavy smell of the sea. A car sped dangerously down the street between the straggling palms, and there was the sound of a horn blown in celebration, lost in the mist.
What a place, Noah thought irrelevantly, what a place to celebrate New Year's Eve! He shivered a little in the influx of cold air, but he kept the window open. He had been working in a mail-order house in Chicago as a filing clerk, and, being honest with himself, the excuse to come to California, even if it was to watch his father die, had been a welcome one. The sunny coast, the warm beaches, he had thought, the orchards tossing their leaves in the sun, the pretty girls… He grinned sourly as he looked around him. It had rained for a week and his father was prolonging his death-scene interminably. Noah was down to his last seven dollars and he had found out that creditors had a lien on his father's photographic studio. Even under the best of circumstances, even if everything were sold at high prices, they could only hope to recover thirty cents on the dollar. Noah had gone down to the shabby little studio near the sea and had peered in through the locked, plate-glass door. His father had specialized in very artistic, very terrible retouched portraits of young women. A hundred heavy-lidded local beauties draped in black velvet, with startling high-lights and slumberous eyes, had peered back at him through the dusty, neglected glass. It was the sort of business his father had had again and again, from one end of the country to another, the sort of business that had driven Noah's mother to an early death, the sort of business that appears and disappears in down-at-heel buildings for a season, makes a ragged little flourish for a few months then vanishes, leaving behind it only some inconclusive, tattered books, a smattering of debts, a stock of ageing photographs and advertising signs that are finally burned in a back alley when the next tenant arrives.
In his day Jacob had also sold cemetery lots, contraceptive devices, real estate, sacramental wine, advertising space, second-hand furniture, bridal clothing, and had even once, improbably, set himself up in a ship chandler's store in Baltimore, Maryland. And at no one of these professions had he ever made a living. And in all of them, with his deft, rolling tongue, his archaic rhetoric, loaded with Biblical quotations, with his intense, handsome face and vital, broad-handed movements, he had always found women who made up for him the difference in what he secured by his own efforts from the economic battlefield around him and what it took to keep him alive. Noah was his only child, and Noah's life had been wandering and disordered. Often he had been deserted, often left for long periods with vague, distant relatives, or, lonely and persecuted, in shabby military schools.
"They are burning my brother Israel in the furnace of the heathen."
Noah sighed and closed the window. Jacob was lying rigid now, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide open. Noah put on the single light, which he had shaded with pink paper that was a little singed now in spots and added its small smell to the general sick-room atmosphere when the light was on.
"Is there anything I can do for you, Father?" Noah asked.
"I can see the flames," Jacob said. "I can smell the burning flesh. I can see my brother's bones crumbling in the fire. I deserted him and he is dying tonight among the foreigners."
Noah couldn't help being annoyed with his father. Jacob hadn't seen his brother for thirty-five years, had, in fact, left him in Russia to support their mother and father when Jacob had made his way to America. ›From everything that Noah had heard, Jacob had despised his brother, and they had parted enemies. But two years before, somehow, a letter from his brother had reached him from Hamburg, where Jacob's brother had gone in 1919. The letter had been desperate and pleading. Noah had to admit that Jacob had done everything he could – had written countless letters to the Immigration Bureau, had gone to Washington and haunted the corridors of the State Department buildings, an improbable, bearded, anachronistic, holy vision, half rabbi, half river-gambler, among the soft-spoken, impervious young men from Princeton and Harvard who shuffled the papers vaguely and disdainfully on their polished desks. But nothing had come of it, and after the single, wild cry for help, there had been the dreadful silence of official Germany, and Jacob had returned to his sun and his photographic studio and his plump, widowed Mrs Morton in Santa Monica and had said no more about it. But tonight, with the red-tinted fog sighing at the window, and the new year standing at the gate, and death, according to the doctor, a matter of hours, the deserted brother, caught in the welter of Europe, cried piercingly through the clouding brain.
"Flesh," Jacob said, his voice still rolling and deep, even on his last pillow, "flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, you are being punished for the sins of my body and the sins of my soul."
O God, Noah thought, looking down at his father, why must he always speak like a blank-verse shepherd giving dictation to a secretary on a hill in Judea?
"Don't smile." Jacob peered sharply at him, his eyes surprisingly bright and knowing in the dark hollows of his face.
"Don't smile, my son, my brother is burning for you."
"I'm not smiling, Father." Noah touched Jacob's forehead soothingly. The skin was hot and sandy and Noah could feel a small, twitching revulsion in his fingertips.
Jacob's face was contorted in oratorical scorn. "You stand there in your cheap American clothes and you think, 'What has he to do with me? He is a stranger to me. I have never seen him and if he dies, in the furnace in Europe, what of it? People die every minute all over the world.' He is not a stranger to you. He is a Jew and the world is hunting him, and you are a Jew and the world is hunting you."
He closed his eyes in exhaustion and Noah thought, if he only talked in simple, honest language, you would be moved, affected. After all, a father dying, obsessed with the thought of a murdered brother five thousand miles away, a single man at his loneliest moment, feeling the ghost insecure and fleeting in his throat, mourning for the fate of his people all over the world, was a touching and tragic thing. And while it was true that to him, Noah, there was no sense of immediacy or personal tragedy in what was happening in Europe, intellectually and rationally he could feel the sombre weight of it. But long years of his father's rhetoric, his father's stagey gesturing for effect, had robbed Noah of all ability to be moved by him. All he could think of as he stood there looking at the grey face, listening to the heaving breath, was, Good God, the old man is going to keep it up to the end.
"When I left him," his father said, without opening his eyes, "when I left Odessa in 1903, Israel gave me eighteen roubles and he said to me, 'You're no good. Congratulations. Take my advice. Stick to women. America can't be that different from the rest of the world. Women will be idiots there too. They will support you.' We didn't shake hands, and I left. He should have shaken my hand, no matter what, don't you think, Noah?" Suddenly his father's voice was changed. It was small and without timbre and it did not remind Noah of a stage performance.
"Noah…"
"Yes, Father?"
"Don't you think he should have shaken my hand?"
"Yes, Father."
"Noah…"
"Yes, Father…"
"Shake my hand, Noah."
After a moment, Noah leaned over and picked up his father's dry, broad hand. The skin was flaked, and the nails, usually exquisitely cared for, pared and polished, were long and jagged and had crescents of dirt under them. They shook hands. Noah could feel the thin, restless, uneven pressure of the fingers.