Idiots First by Bernard Malamud Page B

penance on yourself. To help him, the best thing you can do is take up your normal life. Otherwise he will continue to suffer doubly, once for something he was guilty of, and the second time for the unfair burden your denial of life imposes on him.”
    â€œI am repenting my sins, not punishing him.” She was too disturbed to say more, considered walking home wordless, then slamming the front door in his face; but she heard herself hastily saying, “If we became intimate it would be like adultery. We would both be betraying the dead.”
    â€œWhy is it you see everything in reverse?”
    Cesare had stopped under a tree and almost jumped as he spoke. “They— they betrayed us. If you’ll pardon me, Signora, the truth is my wife was a pig. Your husband was a pig. We mourn because we hate them. Let’s have the dignity to face the facts.”
    â€œNo more,” she moaned, hastily walking on. “Don’t say anything else, I don’t want to hear it.”
    â€œEtta,” said Cesare passionately, walking after her, “this
is my last word and then I’ll nail my tongue to my jaw. Just remember this. If Our Lord Himself this minute let Armando rise from the dead to take up his life on earth, tonight—he would be lying in his cousin’s bed.”
    She began to cry, Etta walked on, crying, realizing the truth of his remark. Cesare seemed to have said all he had wanted to, gently held her arm, breathing heavily as he escorted her back to her apartment. At the outer door, as she was trying to think how to get rid of him, how to end this, without waiting a minute he tipped his hat and walked off.
    For more than a week Etta went through many torments. She felt a passionate desire to sleep with Cesare. Overnight her body became a torch. Her dreams were erotic. She saw Armando naked in bed with Laura, and in the same bed she saw herself with Cesare, clasping his small body to hers. But she resisted—prayed, confessed her most lustful thoughts, and stayed for hours at Armando’s grave to calm her mind.
    Cesare knocked at her door one night, and because she was repelled when he suggested the marriage bed, went with him to his rooms. Though she felt guilty afterwards she continued to visit Armando’s grave, though less frequently, and she didn’t tell Cesare that she had been to the cemetery when she went to his flat afterwards. Nor did he ask her, nor talk about his wife or Armando.
    At first her uneasiness was intense. Etta felt as though she had committed adultery against the memory of her husband, but when she told herself over and over—there was no husband, he was dead; there was no husband, she was alone; she began to believe it. There was no husband, there
was only his memory. She was not committing adultery. She was a lonely woman and had a lover, a widower, a gentle and affectionate man.
    One night as they were lying in bed she asked Cesare about the possibility of marriage and he said that love was more important. They both knew how marriage destroyed love.
    And when two months later, she found she was pregnant and hurried that morning to Cesare’s rooms to tell him, the journalist, in his pajamas, calmed her. “Let’s not regret human life.”
    â€œIt’s your child,” said Etta.
    â€œI’ll acknowledge it as mine,” Cesare said, and Etta went home happy.
    The next day, when she returned at her usual hour, after having told Armando at his grave that she was at last going to have a baby, Cesare was gone.
    â€œMoved,” the landlady said, with a poof of her hand, and she didn’t know where.
    Though Etta’s heart hurt and she deeply mourned the loss of Cesare, try as she would she could not, even with the life in her belly, escape thinking of herself as an adulteress, and she never returned to the cemetery to stand again at Armando’s grave.

THE JEWBIRD
    The window was open so the skinny bird flew in.