The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

So, without speaking of it, they met again in the library. That they were meeting among books relieved her doubt, as if she believed, what possible wrong can I do among books, what possible harm can come to me here?

She’s not yours till she gives it to you, he thought. That’s the way they all are. It wasn’t always true, but it was true enough.

Ida at last raised her tear-stained face and said in despair, “Why do I cry? I cry for the world. I cry for my life that it went away wasted. I cry for you.”

Twenty-three or -four was a dangerous age for a single girl. At that age she would not get younger; at that age even a goy looked good.

From now on he would keep his mind on tomorrow, and tomorrow take up the kind of life that he saw he valued more than how he had been living. He would change and live in a worthwhile way.

She pushed him away, angered. “It’s gone, I’ve forgotten. If you’re so much of a gentleman, Nat, you ought to forget it too. Was a couple of times in bed a mortgage on my future?”

Her answer was ice.

Every man she drew to her dirtied her. How could she have encouraged him? She felt a violent self-hatred for trusting him, when from the very beginning she had sensed he was un-trustable.

She let him stay. If you were so poor where was your choice?

He felt, after she had left, that hopelessness was his punishment. He had expected that punishment to be drastic, swift; instead it came slowly—it never came, yet was there.

Whenever he waited at the stairs, she passed without a word, as if he didn’t exist. He didn’t.

Weeks were nothing but it might as well be nothing because to do what he had to do he needed years.

The wooden flower reminded Helen of her unhappiness. She lived in hatred of herself for having loved the clerk against her better judgment. She had fallen in love, she thought, to escape her predicament.

To Ida he privately said, “He has to rest, I don’t mean maybe.” Seeing her fright he explained, “Sixty isn’t sixteen.”

He was filled with melancholy and spent hours dreaming of his boyhood. He remembered the green fields. Where a boy runs he never forgets.

Before leaving, Frank wrote a note to Helen, once more saying he was sorry for the wrong he had done her. He wrote she was the finest girl he had ever met. He had bitched up his life. Helen wept over the note but had no thought of answering.

“For what I worked so hard for? Where is my youth, where did it go?”

Life was meager, the world changed for the worse. America had become too complicated. One man counted for nothing.

Everything to him who has.

“Those books you once gave me to read,” he said, “did you understand them yourself?”

She had despised him for the evil he had done, without understanding the why or aftermath, or admitting there could be an end to the bad and a beginning of good.

To keep from getting nervous he took out a book he was reading. It was the Bible and he sometimes thought there were parts of it he could have written himself.

One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised. For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.