A New Life by Bernard Malamud Page A

next block—walk one more and meet your fate among strangers—a bag of thousand-dollar bills dropped at your feet, or a wise and beautiful woman waiting for you at the corner. In Easchester, an hour after supper, although lines of cars were parked tight along the downtown curbs, the streets were weirdly deserted. Sadek and Levin met almost no one unless they entered a beer tavern or movie; these were usually two-thirds empty, more lonely than the streets. Levin had heard that the fraternal lodges were crowded, but at ten P.M., the town, from river to hills, except for a few scattered lights signifying human existence, was dead. Still they wandered, Sadek regretting that “a poor scholarship student” could not afford a car, Levin, who couldn’t drive, not planning to learn. For want of something more exciting to do they walked out into the country; nature, except for the luminous furniture in the sky, hiding in the dark. Peering into the night, Sadek restlessly sniffing, they sought something it never seemed to offer. They were, Levin knew, on the prowl for a woman, who if she miraculously appeared, would run if she saw them—the bug-eyed Syrian who had smelled her out with his conjuror’s nose, and the black-hatted, bearded Levin, unwed instructor, famished for love and willing to marry.
    Several days before registration the college students began to arrive in town. Levin, though excited by their coming, was a little afraid of them for their looks and youth, whereas he was old at thirty and knew too much they didn’t. The girls were mildly attractive, often hefty, not many truly pretty ones but the few who were, could make him ache. More could than could not. On Friday night before Registration Week Levin
sat with Sadek in a booth in a tavern they had taken to coming to at the end of the evening. The tavern was barnlike, with a short blunt bar at which a few men with inexpressive faces dawdled. They drank with little talk, or quietly played shuffleboard. It surprised the new instructor how vast yet still the place could be. Most of the students left before eleven except for a married couple or two who sat around till midnight. This night Sadek and Levin were sitting in the rear booth, close to where the waitress stationed herself when she had nothing to do. She was a big-boned girl with a thinly pretty face. Her frame lacked flesh but her legs were good and her small hard breasts tantalized Levin.
    She had served beers in a booth up front and was presently leaning against the wall, Sadek engaged in wooing her in a manner that had caused Levin astonishment and embarrassment the night before, when the Syrian had first demonstrated his attack. His method—was this the lore of the Levant? —was to turn his face to the girl’s hips, where she was standing at rest, lean forward and address an incantation directly to the confluence of her anatomy. He crooned in an unknown tongue, his sensitive nose not more than a inch from her body. The waitress, after an amazed stare, squirmed, but then found it funny and broken into a nervous giggle, although she blushed when her eye caught Levin’s. When she left to take an order, Sadek, as if his performance were nothing out of the ordinary, pared his nails with a small penknife, unmoved by Levin’s sharp warning to behave. After the girl returned and took up her relaxed position against the wall, he again directed his plaint, or crooning, to her midpart. This occurred once more before they left the tavern. Tonight, as the Syrian repeated the ritual—it took less than thirty seconds and no one but Levin seemed to notice—the girl looked into the far distance but her eyes were tender.
    As her affection for Sadek visibly bloomed, Levin, although irritated by the odd lovemaking, fought a growing jealousy of him, for the Syrian had developed a system that the new
instructor envied. When Sadek left the table to relieve himself in the back alley—the toilet facilities of the tavern