The Laughter of Adam and Eve

Gunga Din

20 Gunga Din A sudden formal turn, the last hours of a visit, my father calls me in to sit across from him and asks that if I write again from stories he’s told me would I honor the memory of the man who carried water for their detachment of slave-laborers who fed scrap into the hell’s mouth smelter— like something out of Dante—anyway, did I remember what he’d told me about that faithful man, my father wants to know? I remembered that he hadn’t so much told me as I’d been allowed to overhear since he knew better than to speak to me directly then, into the adolescent fumarole I iced over in irony, my constant mode with him as much as I dared— to guard against my tendency to believe— and wound him when I could for things that I was given to remember without prompt, the times he’d roared and struck, the heavy-handed absences, the stories of privation depriving me, locked in with him inside that closed economy with almost all the space for story taken, and still more room required to have his life squeeze through again and again some narrow passage to survival. I believed him a type of deceiver, charmer, at least of others, which seemed the equivalent to me, who believed I’d seen his truest face in rage. Jealousy also whatever else it was. 21 I listened closely then, though, from the edge of audience—New Rochelle, new people, all except my mother and me—a lawyer’s house, the open-plan downstairs our whole Bronx apartment would have fit into twice over: my father’s head-waggle signifies modesty. For himself, he claims just luck, although he sometimes calls it providence, but virtue for the little man who humped the buckets, a yoke made of his own bowed shoulders, stiffened arms, on a stooping scurry of a run from the pump, and running always, one thing shining in his head: to do, do— water for thirsty brothers—this to do and done well all may yet be well. Ferrying into the circle of the smelter’s heat, he waits for the men who serve the molten roiling: lifting together rafts of checker plate, engine casings, lengths of rail, pieces of locomotive wheels. Anyone’s slacking a moment, or stumble, might mean deadfall of iron on everyone. The motherly smile he offers each with the ladle, as if he had prepared a meal—in this, too, as in his frantic service, he’s made to seem to me idiotic. 22 My father says he never knew the man’s real name. They always called him Gunga Din out of that crazy film inflated from the Kipling poem, where Sam Jaffe, Sam pretty, yaffe the Hebrew for it, pock-marked simian Jew plays Indian, Hindu or Sikh, as Jews played cavalry-fodder Indians in Westerns—other, other, their faces merely other, and once other they might be any kind of other; and this man other to my father surely and to his fellow slaves: a simpleton reduced to that simple thing, as selfless as if he understood he was and assented to being a minor character in someone else’s story. Amid hard labor, the harder labor of the rest, no matter how hard he’d made his own, wouldn’t he be a comic figure often, the butt of jokes, water boy in the company of men? Wasn’t the name itself a sort of joke? I ask my father what I’d always thought. No no, he says, we loved him, drawing himself up and back in his chair, looking at me surprised, and I see for the moment I believe him what he means for me to see: a whole world beyond irony, full of unintricate acts, and love there simple as slaked thirst. ...