His eyebrows went up. “Hate you?” he said. “Why do you think anyone hates you?”
“Two boys I know really hate me. One is a Catholic and the other is in my yeshiva. I don’t understand how I look to them or why they hate me.”
“Did you have a fight with someone in school?” Mr. Bader asked quietly, and when I would not respond, he said, “You are in a mood today, David. I think the best thing I can do for you is stop here and let you go home.”
In the days that followed I began to sense that there were matters I needed desperately to know. I said to my father one Shabbat afternoon as we were reviewing what I had learned in Bible and Talmud that week, “How old was Uncle David when he was killed?”
My mother was asleep in her bed; my brother was out playing somewhere with his friends.
“Twenty-three,” my father said.
“What was he?”
“What do you mean what was he?”
“A lawyer? A doctor?”
“He was studying to become a teacher of history.”
“Polish history?”
“No. Of—what do they call it? Old history. Ancient history.”
“He wanted to teach in a Polish school?”
“No, not in a Polish school. In a German university.”
“Was he smart?”
“Yes, he was smart. He was like—he was very smart.”
“Papa?”
“Enough, now. Enough. On Shabbos afternoons I ask you the questions. Now, explain to me again why you think the Ibn Ezra on this passage is clearer than Rashi.”
I came into the kitchen one night for a glass of milk. Our meager supper, the result of a difficult two weeks my father had had with his watch repair service, had left me hungry. My mother was in the kitchen writing letters. Her Waterman’s pen scratched softly upon the sheet of paper beneath her hand.
“Mama?” I said very quietly.
“Yes,” she said almost inaudibly, and continued writing.
“Which one is Uncle David in the photograph?”
She seemed not to have heard me. She went on writing a moment longer. Then she stopped and slowly looked up at me. I knew from her eyes that she was not seeing me but was focused beyond me upon an image of her own making. A sudden darkness came across her features as if shadows had leaped upon her from the dim corners of the kitchen. Faint tremors moved across the weak line of her lips. I heard her say, almost in a moan, “What will the end be, David? We cannot do everything. We are only flesh and bones.” She blinked and her eyes were moist behind her glasses. Then she looked directly at me and smiled vaguely. “Did you come in for milk, darling? Take some milk.” She returned to her letter. I walked out in shuddering dread and was afraid to speak to her again about my Uncle David.
When I asked my father how my Uncle David had been killed he said, “A stinking bastard of a Polak did it,” and would say no more. I feared asking him about the photograph. My Uncle Meyer simply said, “He was killed in a pogrom, David.”
But I continued going into the kitchen at night on one pretext or another, and one night my mother was not there and the letter she had been writing before she had gone to the bathroom lay on the table. I stood at the table with a glass of milk in my hand and let my eyes run quickly across her flowing Yiddish hand.
“My dear and precious parents,” she had written. “I am well and pray to the Master of the Universe that you too are in good health and that your community responsibilities are not overly burdensome. How it hurts my heart to be able to speak to you only through letters but how good it is to hear from you the things you are able to do for Jews in Bobrek. David, my precious David, would have been proud of your work. My own little David grows slowly into a giant though he cannot see it nor can most others around him. He is still so thin and small in size but he swallows worlds with his mind and is not even aware of what he does. His teachers tell me they have affection for him though they admit they are sometimes uncomfortable with him in their classes. His history teacher said she does not appreciate being caught in an occasional error by a sneering twelve-year-old boy. But I think she exaggerates. How fortunate we are to have Mr. Bader here to teach him privately. Do you remember how David used to study privately with that enlightened Hebraist who moved to Lemberg from Warsaw? I look at my little David sitting over his books and—what can I tell you? How I wish his health were better. How I pray I could take his illnesses upon me. He is often ill and in pain and his bad dreams continue though the doctor assures me that it is not abnormal for a child his age to have such dreams. I remember the dreams my David used to have. Men who are minds dream; men who are bodies sleep soundly. Is that another of your daughter’s silly ideas? But I think it is true. Max tells me the business has improved and in these black times that is such joyous news that I thank the Master of the Universe for having sent me such a husband as Max. He is strong again and able to work very hard once an idea is given him. I do my best to think as David might have thought. But it is wearying and the memories often carry with them pain and tears far into the night. Max is the kindest of souls in his own way. Alex will be like him. He will soon be as tall as David and is—”
I heard the toilet flushing. I finished the milk, washed the glass, and went hurriedly from the kitchen.
I could not study that night. My eyes would not focus through my lenses onto the pages of my books. I looked at Alex sitting at the discarded kitchen table my father had rescued from the alleyway and rebuilt into a low small desk. His thick shoulders were bent over a writing book. He worked intently, his features tight with concentration. He labored with enormous difficulty to obtain his good grades. I looked down at the Talmud that lay open on my desk and the letters swam off into the margins and gutter of the folio volume. Quietly I undressed and got into bed.
Alex looked up from his desk. “Are you all right, Davey?”
“I’m tired.”
“Are you sick?”
“No. I’m tired. Can’t I just be tired?”
He seemed puzzled for a moment, then returned to his work.
I closed my eyes but could not sleep. Later I heard Alex and my parents go to bed. The room was dark. Whispers and the cold black sounds of the night kept me awake until an ash-gray dawn lighted the alleyway and I smelled the warm odor of baking bread. Then I slept and was awakened by my father to go to school.
I sensed throughout the following days that I needed still other eyes on the matters I hungered to know but I could not begin to think how to find them; for I knew no Catholics and of the two Catholics I had briefly known, one, Tony Savanola, had been gone from my life for years, and the other, Eddie Kulanski, had hated me and probably hated me still, though he no longer showed awareness that I was alive. Mr. Donello, the shoemaker in whose store my father had put up his workbench, no longer had children of school age. I did not know what to do.
Then I thought I would ask the librarian. At the end of school on a Friday afternoon I walked along 170th Street, crossed beneath the Third Avenue Elevated just as a train rushed by overhead with a crashing clatter of wheels, went up the long hill past the sour stench of the brewery, and entered the two-story white stone building that was the local branch of the public library.
The librarian I spoke to was a middle-aged woman with rimless glasses and a courteous manner. No, she said. They had none of the textbooks on Catholicism that were used in the junior high schools or high schools in our neighborhood. They had many books on Catholic thought. Did I want one of those?
“I want a textbook,” I said. Then I asked her where I could find a copy of the Christian Bible.
She was not Jewish and knew who I was, had in fact known me for all the years I had been coming to this library.
She smiled and said, “The scope of your reading is becoming quite broad, David. Come, I’ll get you a New Testament.”
I sat in the reference room reading Matthew in the Christian Bible. I had taken with me my small English dictionary but I used it less
often than I had thought would be necessary. I looked up the words “gospel” and “baptize.” Then I looked up the words “jot” and “tittle,” reread the passage, and did not understand it. There were ideas and images in many of the subsequent passages which I could not grasp, but I understood more than I had come prepared thinking I would; I understood about the Pharisees telling Jesus that his followers were doing “that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day.” I understood the words of Jesus about the sick man and the sheep. I read with a cold tingling sensation the account of the blind and dumb man possessed by a devil. Then I began to scan the verses very quickly, looking for the word “Jew.” I saw the name Moses near the beginning of a chapter and read the chapter slowly, feeling bewildered at the rage and scorn directed at the scribes and Pharisees. The Rabbis of the Talmud were being called hypocrites! Then I scanned very quickly and saw the word “Jews” in the account of the crucifixion in chapter twenty-seven. I went back to the beginning of the chapter and read all of it very slowly. I read verses twenty-four and twenty-five, then read them again. I completed Matthew and closed my eyes and sat very still for a long time. I could hear around me the carefully guarded silences of the library. After a while I began to read Mark and I found the word “Jews” in chapter seven and read the chapter slowly. How he despised the Pharisees! Then I realized it was late; I had to be home before the lighting of the Shabbat candles. I turned to the end of Mark and worked backward, verse by verse. I realized that, again, the account of the crucifixion was in the next to last chapter. I read it slowly. Then I turned to the next to the last chapter in Luke and read that. Finally, I read the chapter on the crucifixion and the one prior to that in John. I closed the book and sat in the silent reading room feeling the coldness in my hands and legs. After a few minutes I replaced the book, thanked the librarian, and walked home through late afternoon streets that seemed to swarm with darkness and hate. I was home in plenty of time for Shabbat.
My father said to me the next morning as we walked together to the yeshiva synagogue, “What did you dream last night? Your mother told me she heard you cry out in your sleep.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I didn’t hear Davey cry out,” said Alex.
“You?” my father said. “When you sleep you wouldn’t hear a Cossack if he screamed in your ear.”
We prayed in the large ground-floor synagogue of the yeshiva. My father had not succeeded in organizing a separate service. I remember sitting in my seat that Shabbat, following the Torah reading in my Chumash and seeing the words and images of the Christian Bible in my eyes. During lunch my mother asked me if I was getting ill again. I said no, I didn’t think I was. But I spent the afternoon on my bed with my eyes closed, still seeing those words and images.
That Monday I came out of my school in the late afternoon after dismissal and, instead of crossing the street and going home, I turned up the side street, went past the chain-link fence bordering our yard and continued walking until I was a few yards from the Catholic church and parochial school. The school stood beyond the church. On the other side of the school was a large yard, paved in asphalt and rimmed by a tall iron fence. I hesitated for a moment as I approached the church, then walked on past it. I slowed as I went by the school, then stopped near the yard. A double-hung iron gate led into the yard. The gate was open. Inside the yard, eight teen-age boys were playing basketball. I noticed their schoolbags and books on the ground near the wall of the school building. I watched them for a few minutes and went home.
For the next three weeks I returned to that yard every afternoon. Twice it was deserted. Shadows slanted across its paved surface. The gate was open. On the first of the two times I found the yard deserted, I saw a briefcase near the school building deep inside the yard. The second time, I saw nothing; the paved ground looked swept clean. The gate was open.
I walked there late one evening after supper and found it crowded with teen-agers. I went quickly by, crossed the street, and walked back home. On a Thursday afternoon in May I went along the street and stopped and stared through the iron fence at a pack of books that lay in the shadows near the wall of the school that stood perpendicular to the fence. They lay only a few inches from the corner of the ninety-degree angle formed by the juncture of fence and wall, five books held together by a dark brown leather belt. I glanced quickly up and down the block and felt the blood beating inside my head. I knew I could never do it, I could never reach into the dark blood-filled horror that the Catholic world conjured up in my mind. Then I stood on the sidewalk holding the books, feeling the weight of the books in my hand. They seemed heavy as stones. My arms and legs tingled and a chill sweat formed on my forehead. Down the block stood the church, tall, angular, menacing. A black coupe turned into the street from Park Avenue and started toward me. I stood very still, watching with paralyzed dread as it came along the gutter. It went on by, rattling loudly. I opened my schoolbag, loosened the leather belt, separated the books, glancing quickly at the titles, and stuffed them in among my own. I walked stiffly, rapidly, past the church. I was trembling.
In front of the yeshiva I sat down on the stone staircase and took a deep quivering breath. I felt strangely nerveless, yet all of me was quivering and tingling and trembling. I opened my schoolbag and took out one of the books. On the title page I read Religion: Doctrine and Practice by Francis B. Cassilly, S.J. I did not understand what “S.J.” meant. Opposite the title page was a picture in color of a man, a woman, and a little child. Four people were gazing at the child, an old man, a young woman, and two youths who looked to be shepherds. They were all inside a barn. Bright yellow circles of light surrounded the heads of the man, the woman, and the little child.
I turned to the Preface and read swiftly: “The widespread popularity enjoyed by this text since its appearance in 1926 is evidence that our Catholic schools consider the fundamental truths of Faith essential to the high-school course in religion.” I stopped, turned to the index at the back of the book, and looked for “Jews.” Along Washington Avenue people and traffic moved normally. No one paid any attention to a skinny, near-sighted, twelve-year-old Jewish boy searching through a Catholic textbook for mention of Jews. He found it and read at his normal very rapid speed. “The Jews as a nation refused to accept Christ, and since His time they have been wanderers on the earth without a temple or a sacrifice, and without the Messias.” A car honked and the Jewish boy looked up briefly, then returned to his Catholic book, read on for a few lines, and then saw these words: “The Jews rejected Christ mainly because they expected Him to found a never-ending kingdom, as was foretold in the prophecies. This He really did, but the kingdom He founded—the Church—was a spiritual one, not a temporal one such as the carnal Jews were hoping for.”
I closed the book, removed from my schoolbag the others I had found with it, tied around them once again the brown belt, first making certain I had placed each one on top of the other in the same order they had been in when I had first picked them up in the yard. I left them lying near me on the stoop, reached into my schoolbag, and got out my dictionary. I looked up the word “carnal.” I replaced the dictionary in my bag and got to my feet. Then I looked curiously up and down the street and wondered why I could not hear noises of the afternoon. Sound seemed to have been sucked from the street, funneled out of a hole somewhere in the fabric that enclosed us. All the sound I heard, the thin rushing cry that pressed upon my ears, came from within me. I sat down again and stared at the worn and pitted stone of a step. I saw its dull sheen and its tiny cracks. There seemed strange comfort in the sight of that old, dirt-veined stone step. I picked up my schoolbag and the books, stood up, and went down the steps. I crossed the street and paused for a moment at the newsstand in front of the candy store. There I waited until the trembling stopped and the cry was gone and the drab street returned to normalcy. Then I went into the store of the Italian shoemaker where my father had his watch repair service.
The little bell ov
er the door tinkled softly when the door opened and when I pushed it shut. My father and Mr. Donello looked up simultaneously from where they sat behind their workbenches. Mr. Donello waved at me cheerfully with his left hand. In his right hand he held a hammer. The nails protruding from between his lips prevented him from speaking but I could see the line of his lips go up into a warm smile. He placed a nail on the sole of the shoe on his workbench and struck it with the hammer. He worked very expertly. I returned his greeting with a nod.
My father took the jeweler’s glass from his eye and sat back for a moment. He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger and said, “What time is it?” Then he laughed softly and turned to look at the two full panels of repaired watches on the wall behind him. As he turned I saw clearly the balding of his brown hair on the back of his head.
“Does Mama need anything in the grocery store?”
“She did not tell me. How was school?”
“I got a ninety-eight in the algebra test.”
Mr. Donello’s hammer banged loudly upon the shoe. Then he gave the shoe a few rapid finishing taps and removed it from the iron shoe form on his workbench. He stood up, wiping his hands on his blue denim apron. He was completely bald save for a fringe of white hair near his ears and around the back of his head. Often he hummed a song as he worked. His voice was high and reedy. “I could have been in opera,” he had told me once cheerfully. “I could have sung in La Scala. I had one small problem. No voice.” And he had laughed gaily.
“A ninety-eight in you test,” Mr. Donello said now. “That’s a very good mark, David.” He looked at the shoes on a shelf near one of the lathes, selected a pair, and put them on his workbench. “My boy used to come home from school with terrible marks and I used to say to him why you can’t get good marks like the Jewish boys? He never want to work hard to get good marks. Now he drive a truck in Cleveland. Now he work hard. Max, you got a good boy here, a fine boy. David, you be honest like you father and smart like Mr. Einstein and you no have to drive trucks. What?”