Ending the Pane

By John Skow

REMBRANDT'S HAT by BERNARD MALAMUD 204 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

Never mind the current vogue for short-story writers who prove by incoherence that the world is crazy (a child's discovery). Never mind the other sort of story writer who leaves you after seven pages with a little stone of irony to hold in your cupped hands. Bernard Malamud writes to understand, and what he writes about and understands is suffering, which is to say the human condition.

His stories seem less fierce than his novels. There is nothing in the current collection, for instance, quite so passionate in its lamentation as his novel The Fixer (1966). Still, four or five of the eight stories in Rembrandt's Hat are outstanding for the clarity and intensity with which the characters feel the predicament of being human.

This intensity has nothing to do with "sensitivity," a small virtue sometimes thought praiseworthy in small fiction.

Malamud's people seem to be engaged in a constant shouted argument with God, and even when the shouts are inaudible, the reader hears muttered the maddening central question, "Why me?" The answer rolls in like thunder --"Never mind why: You!"

This is primal stuff, and Malamud's great talent is for melding it with the most mundane sort of everyday life:

turn a corner, God jostles you on the sidewalk, and the argument starts. Here is Harvitz, for instance, a freelance writer from the U.S., wandering through Moscow on a vacation visit. Of all the taxis in town, he has to hail one driven by Levitansky, a writer who cannot get his stories published by the Soviets.

Levitansky strikes up a conversation, and with the horrible directness of the desperate, implores Harvitz to smuggle a short-story collection to the West and have it published.

Harvitz is scared; tourists get into bad trouble this way. He is also furious; why me? He reads four of the stories, which have been translated by the cab driver's wife, and thinks they are fairly good. But is it right that he should be asked to risk his freedom merely to add some fairly good stories to the hundreds published each year? Is Harvitz responsible for Levitansky? For the Soviet repression? The answer, of course, is "Yes, and never mind why." But Harvitz does not want to hear it. He writhes.

Levitansky presses.

As Harvitz makes and unmakes his decision, Malamud gives us a fragment of one of Levitansky's stories, which happens to be about a Soviet writer who cannot get his work published: "He took out the stories, and after reading through one, burned it, page by page, in the kitchen sink. His nine-year-old son, returning from school, said 'Popa, what are you burning in the sink? That's no place for a fire.' 'I am burning my integrity,' said the writer. Then he said, 'My talent. My heritage.' " Fable. To suggest the nature of one story is to suggest very little, because al though the elemental questions are repeated, no story of Malamud's really resembles another. A light and rather unsettling few pages tell of a man who is flirted with at a dinner party by his pretty, mad hostess. A stark recitation by a loving father shows a hideous division between father and son. Finally, there is a wonderful, funny fable in which the author mocks his own truth that suffering defines the man.

The hero of the fable is Abramovitz, a talking horse, who is convinced that there is a man inside him. Abramovitz's keeper, a surly mute named Goldberg, tells the horse (by tapping on his forehead in Morse code) not to ask questions, that being a talking horse is not so bad. But Abramovitz is anguished.

He sneaks despairing jokes into his circus act (How do you end the pane? By jumping through the window), and asks his audiences if there is a doctor or magician present who will help free the man inside him.

The ending is happy: Goldberg and Abramovitz wrestle, Abramovitz's horse head is wrenched away, and there underneath is the head and trunk of a 40-year-old man wearing a pince-nez.

He gallops off into a nearby wood, free now, a Jewish centaur.

John Skow

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