220
PARTISAN REVIEW
aversion to making coffins for children was not just an expression of imbe–
cilic greed, but also a hint of his hidden aversion to the death of children:
the sad melodies that issue from Bronze's violin at night are but a stam–
mering peasant version of
Kindertotenlieder.
The opening contract is misleading because the narrator deliberately
adopts the point of view of the old coffin-maker, as well as his language
and his terms of reference; in doing so, the narrator obligates the reader to
perform a task of cautious "translation": avarice is also a code word for
deep loneliness. Contempt for constructing coffins for children camou–
flages the pain of bereavement. The revulsion aroused in Bronze by the
whining melodies of Rothschild's flute is actually a defense against the
reopening of wounds. The loathing he feels for Rothschild and all the Yids
is mixed up with a clumsy, aggressive effort to suppress in himself a cer–
tain gut solidarity with the sufferers. As for the huge losses that Bronze
laments, in the course of the story they assume proportions of lamentation
for a wasted life and for the "vanity of vanities" of the human condition.
The plot is simple, even minimal: the tale of a village coffin-maker who
ekes out a living, supplementing his income by playing his fiddle at wed–
dings. He is miserly, grumpy and quarrelsome, with a heart hardened against
both death and life: all his days appear to him as a continuous accumulation
of financial losses. One day his wife becomes ill, and with silent joy accepts
her impending death as a long-awaited release from the vale of tears. Seeing
her joy, the coffin-maker feels regret for having treated her with unrelenting
harshness. He drags the sick woman to the village doctor's and begs-as
though bargaining-the doctor's helper, the only one there, to cure her. But
the hard-hearted old man shrugs and soon turns to the next patient. The
couple returns home, and the husband measures his wife and begins to make
her coffin. He enters this "loss" in his ledger.
In
her final hours, his wife tries
to remind him of their dead baby but he cannot remember. Mter her fimer–
al, he himself feels ill, and, venting his violent wrath on the Jewish piper, who
had come up to speak to him, wanders to the river, where the street boys yell
at
him.
At home he remembers the baby and sums up his entire life as a series
of deficits and losses. He wills his violin to Rothschild. Mter the coffin–
maker's death, the Jew produces ineffably sad melodies from this violin.
The four "deceptions" in the story's title (Rothschild is not the baron;
Rothschild is not a fiddler; Rothschild is not the protagonist of the story;
the fiddle is not his) are unexpectedly put to rights at the end of the story:
Rothschild is indeed made wealthy by his inheritance as he becomes the
owner of the violin; he ceases to be a piper and becomes a fiddler, carry–
ing on Bronze's melody. And so the reader first encounters the facts
enfolded in the title, then discovers that they are all false, only to find out,
at the very last moment, that they have been belatedly validated.
