“Talk to Bader. Maybe he can give you an idea.”
“What do you want from Bader? He has his own headaches. God in heaven, Ruth, you cannot make a person come to America. A person has to want to come. You said when they had the visas they would come.”
“They wrote me that, Max. You saw the letters.”
“They never believed they would get the visas. That is what it was. They never really wanted to come. All the preparations. All the weeks and weeks of running around filling out papers. All the money they got. They never really thought the day would come when they would hold the visas in their hands.”
“They aren’t running off with the money, Max.”
“Your parents and my parents. A perfect match. Stubborn and blind. Where did you put the coffee, Ruth? They need a pogrom. They need a Hebron in Bobrek. Then they would come.”
“God forbid, Max. What are you saying? God forbid.” She made dry spitting sounds with her lips.
“They never believed they would ever have the visas. That is the reason they agreed to apply.”
“Max, they’re old. They don’t know what to do.”
“And your sisters and brothers? They are also old?”
I heard no response from my mother.
“Another Hebron,” my father said with bitterness in his voice. He was angry. My mother’s parents had wasted his time and, in a way, had defeated him. It would have been an achievement of sorts for him to have brought them from Bobrek to America: everyone knew how ill his mother-in-law had been. But indecision had been the true obstacle, not illness. He could not combat distant indecision. And so he loathed it and was angry at my mother’s parents and bitter over the way his firm and fixed and rigidly organized way of doing things had been upset. He added sarcastically, “A few dozen dead Jews in Bobrek would bring them to the Bronx in a wink.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said in a softer voice, “Anyway, Bader will be in Lemberg after Simchas Torah. I will ask him to go to Bobrek.”
She murmured words of gratitude. They sat in silence. The radio was turned on.
Early the next morning I came out of the house with my father and walked with him to the boulevard adjoining the zoo. He rode with me on the trolley to another part of the Bronx and accompanied me through alien streets to the yellow corner building that was the yeshiva. There, on the sidewalk, in a noisy crowd of students and parents, he bent down and held me to him and I heard him murmur a blessing. I felt the bony jut of his jaw against my face and saw, out of the side of my eye, the white dry line of his scar. Then he said, still holding me to him, “Be a good student, David. Do a good job and make us all proud.” I nodded. He led me up the stone staircase and through the wooden double door of the entrance and along the corridor to the classroom. At the door to the classroom he kissed me again, then turned and went away.
Late in the afternoon I came out of the school building, pushed and jostled by older students whose shouts and strident laughter rang disturbingly in my ears, and saw my father waiting for me at the foot of the stone stairway. He was talking to the man with whom he had wrestled during the picnic; the man he had ridden with in Europe; the man called Nathan Ackerman, whose nephew had been killed in Hebron. They were talking about something called warrants. I stood next to my father while he continued his conversation. The sidewalk in front of the school was thick with parents and children. The noise raised by the children mingled with the sounds of the heavy traffic on the street and thickened the dusty afternoon air. I clung to my father’s hand. The students seemed so wild, running through the crowd, chasing one another, racing up and down the stone steps. I saw my Hebrew teacher, Mrs. Rubinson, a tall, slim, middle-aged woman with graying hair which she wore in a bun and with wide warm eyes and a patient smile that would come slowly to her lips when she seemed annoyed. I noticed Joey Younger in the crowd; he charged through a knot of parents to get at a classmate he was chasing. He was in my class. I had said nothing to him all day. I waited patiently on the sidewalk next to my father and looked at the worn five-story reddish brick apartment houses that lined both sides of the wide paved main street onto which the yeshiva faced; at the dirt and soot on the sidewalks; at the large-windowed building that was the public school directly across the narrow side street from the yeshiva; at the high chain-link fence that enclosed the play yard behind the yeshiva building; at the tall crucifix on the roof of the church next to the Catholic school a block away from the yard down the side street; at the looming trestle of the elevated train that ran along a wide dark avenue one long interminable block from our yellow building in the opposite direction from the church; at the stark treelessness of all the neighborhood; I looked at the world in which was set the school I would be attending for what then seemed to me to be all the years of my life—and I felt cold and a little frightened. I tugged gently at my father’s hand. I wanted to go home to my own street and its trees. Maybe Saul would come over tonight. Maybe he would tell me a story. I thought I might like to hear the Golem of Prague story again. I had seen Saul only briefly during the day; his class was in the rear of the building on the fourth floor; mine was in the rear of the building on the first floor. He had told me he would be staying in late today to help his teacher organize the classroom. I hoped he would not stay late too often. I hoped I would see more of him during the day. And why had my teacher given me that curious smile when I had told her I already knew the Hebrew alphabet after she had showed us the letter bet on a card and asked us to pronounce it? And why had the class tittered? And why had the boy named Larry Grossman come over to me during mid-morning recess and called me a name?
“Shmucky show-off,” he had said. He was tall and wore shiny knickers and a yellow long-sleeved shirt frayed at the wrists and worn thin at the elbows. He had a round face and small eyes.
“What?” I had said.
Some of the classmates gathered around us. I saw Joey Younger. Their young faces, crowded together, looked like painted balloons. Students from other classes sauntered by; a few stopped to watch.
“I don’t like show-offs,” he said. He was playing to the faces around us. “You going to spend all year showing off?”
I looked at him in astonishment.
“I know the whole alphabet already, Mrs. Rubinson,” he mimicked. Some of the others laughed. A few stood by silently, watching.
I felt my face burning.
All around us swirled the wildness and noise of two hundred children at play.
“You know the English alphabet, too?” Larry Grossman taunted. His round face was damp with sweat. He had fat stubby fingers. “How about Chinese? You know Chinese?”
I said nothing. Someone laughed loudly.
“Ass-licker,” Larry Grossman said contemptuously in Yiddish, and stalked off, followed by Joey Younger and some of the other classmates who had stood around us.
I looked about to see if I could find Saul. But the play yard was wild with racing games and knotted with pockets of static games and with students who just stood around talking to one another.
Two of the boys who had stood by watching Larry Grossman taunt me came over to me.
“He’s a jerk,” one of them said. “He’s dumb. Don’t let him worry you.”
“Your father is Max Lurie,” the other said.
They were both taller than I. The one who had spoken first was fair-skinned with pale blond hair and dark eyes. The other was dark-skinned and had black hair and a small mole on his left cheek.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Yosef Ackerman. Nathan Ackerman is my father. This is Yaakov Bader. Mr. Shmuel Bader is his uncle. We were over at your house once or twice. You don’t remember?”
I remembered vaguely.
“We’re in second grade. You got any baseball cards? How about a game of baseball cards?”
I had plenty of baseball cards. We played all through the recess. I played with them during the midday recess, too. Toward the end of that recess, I walked over to the chain-link fenc
e and gazed out at the street and the crucifix on the church a block away. Then I turned around and looked at the frenzied play inside the paved yard. I was tired. My eyes throbbed. I sat down on the floor of the yard and leaned back against the chain-link fence. At the foot of the fence the thick wires culminated in twists with two sharp jutting ends pointing downward from each twist about an inch or so above the ground. I sat very quietly watching the activity inside the yard until the shrill sound of the whistle terminated the recess.
When the English teacher, a young, pretty, brown-haired woman in her twenties named Mrs. Bernstein, held up the card with the letter B, I raised my hand and informed her that I knew the entire English alphabet. She looked at me. The class was very quiet. She said in a soft voice, “Do you really? What is your name again? David Lurie. Yes. Well, that’s fine, David. Everyone will soon know all the letters and we’ll be able to go on together.”
My father said to me later when he came out of the trolley car,
“Now listen to me, David. Are you listening? You will be going to school with Saul from now on.”
I stared at him and my heart leaped with joy.
“I thought it might be possible for me to bring you and take you home. But I came too late to my office this morning and had to leave too early. I will call your uncle and ask if Saul can wait for you on this corner in the morning. Then you can take the trolley car together.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“In the afternoon, either you will come home with Saul or I will come for you. I do not know when Saul gets out of school.”
The following morning I met Saul on the street corner in front of the church. His old, frayed, misshapen briefcase bulged with books. I felt a little shamed by the emptiness of the new briefcase I held in my hand.
“Hello, Cousin,” he said. “That’s a nice briefcase. Use it well. Or I should say tear it well, since it’s made of leather. Is it leather? How was your first day in school?”
We were standing on the sidewalk in a large crowd of adults and other schoolchildren. Across the street from us was the zoo. I saw our trolley coming up along the boulevard.
We found two seats together. I told him about Larry Grossman.
“Stay away from him,” he advised solemnly. “In every class there are one or two or three guys like him. Stay far away from them. They’re a bunch of time-killers and stuffed heads. How did you like Ruby?”
I said I liked Mrs. Rubinson.
“She’s nice,” Saul said, and a dreamy look came into his eyes. “I liked her.”
We rode in silence for a while. It was a cloudy day. The air was bleak and chilled. I saw a dead gray cat lying like garbage along the curb of a cobblestone street.
The trolley stopped and we got off and walked along the treeless street to the yeshiva. The apartment houses were of grimy reddish brick. Around the windows and wide entrance doors were rectangles of white stone stained dark gray with dirt and age. The stoops were smooth and worn.
“What is Washington?” I asked as we hurried along the street.
“The capital of America. You don’t know that?”
“Oh, I know that, Saul. But is the street named after the capital or after the president?”
“They’re both named after the president.”
“And who was Paul?” I asked as we came to the side street.
He looked up at the street sign. “He was a very important Catholic.”
“A Catholic? Really? What do the letters in front of his name mean?”
“That’s short for saint. It means he was one of their very great people. He helped start the Catholic Church.”
“Really? What did he do?”
“I don’t know, Davey. I don’t interest myself in such matters.”
We crossed St. Paul’s Place. The public school, with its enormous enclosed paved yard, stood on our right. The play yard and the school building took up an entire block of Washington Avenue. Across the next side street stood the yellow brick building of the yeshiva. The streets were filled with students walking toward both schools. There were students in both play yards. As I crossed the side street with Saul, I looked toward the Catholic school and church and saw that the street in front of it was deserted.
“What time do they start school?” I asked Saul, indicating the Catholic school.
“They start early. Around eight thirty or quarter to nine. Come on, Davey. We’ll be late.”
We went up the stone stairway with other students. Inside the hallway, Saul stopped at the side of the wooden staircase and said, “I’ll meet you in front right after school and we’ll go home together. Right after school. Okay? Did your father tell you that on Wednesdays he’ll meet you and bring you home?”
I nodded. “Where will you be Wednesdays, Saul?”
“I’m studying Torah reading with Mr. Bader. Every Shabbos and Wednesday afternoon. Except when he has to go to Europe. He’s also going to teach me grammar. I’m going to read the Torah for my bar mitzvah. And then I’ll read it afterward too in the synagogue, for Shabbosim and holidays.”
I stared at him. “We won’t be able to go to the zoo anymore, Saul.”
“Sure we’ll go,” he said. “We’ll find time, Davey.”
A group of students surged past us, jostling me heavily. I almost dropped my briefcase.
“That big one in the blue shirt is Larry Grossman,” I said.
“Well, stay away from him, Davey.”
“What sidrah will you be reading, Saul?”
“For my bar mitzvah?”
“Yes.”
“Noah,” he said.
“I’m going to miss not going to the zoo with you, Saul.”
“We’ll go, Davey. Besides, soon you’ll be reading books and you won’t even be interested in the zoo.”
He went to his class, and I went to mine. I sat and listened to Mrs. Rubinson talk about letters I had learned to recognize and read months ago. She wrote the letters on the blackboard, printing them slowly with a long stick of white chalk that occasionally let out a nerve-chilling squeak. She told us to copy the letters, and I wrote them down in my notebook. She asked me to read a line of letters in the book she had given us the day before. I read quickly. She asked me to continue. I read on to the foot of the page. She asked me to stop and called on someone else to start again from the first line of that page. I sat very still with my eyes on the page, vaguely listening to the student read and feeling very bored and thinking with sadness that the beautiful Shabbat afternoons Saul and I had spent in the zoo were now at an end. I tried to remember some of the walks we had taken together but it was like seeing them through rain and mist. I closed my eyes. It was easier to see things you thought about if your eyes were closed. I listened to the boy reading from the book and saw myself walking with Saul beneath the trees of the zoo. There were the lions and the elephants and the tigers. The sun was on the leaves of the trees and the lions lounged in the shade of outcroppings. As we passed by, a lion raised his maned head, gazed at us out of slitted yellow eyes, and yawned. His mouth opened wide and I saw the huge, stained, pointed teeth. The dog’s teeth had been stained and dirty and pointed. He had lain against the curb like the dead cat. Did the Angel of Death carry a pointed sword? The billy goat rubbed his hot moist sandy tongue on my palm. I stroked his goatee; soft silken white hair. It curled and blew in the wind when he ran about. His hooves raised little clouds of powdered yellow earth; I could hear their soft quick sounds. But the horse my father rode had galloped soundlessly on the dew-moistened grass. And why was Saul starting so early on his bar mitzvah studies? Did it take so long to study how to read the Torah? And what did grammar mean? “Dikduk Hamikra,” he had said in Hebrew. The grammar of the Bible. What did that mean? I wished I could have a seat near one of the windows. But I had been placed by Mrs. Rubinson in the third row slightly to the left of her desk. I could look at the uncombed black head of hair in front of me, or at my worn, scarred desk top with its slots for pens and pencils
and its empty inkwell, or at the faded yellow-green walls, or at the streaked blackboard, or at the flaking white ceiling, or at the wood floor with the color pounded out of it by the feet of students, or at Mrs. Rubinson. Or I could close my eyes and listen vaguely to the class and see things I could conjure up at will.
Mrs. Rubinson had called my name. “David Lurie, please read the next line,” she had said and in the instant it took me to open my eyes, I remembered that her voice had sounded almost exactly like the contralto voice of the woman who had sung Polish songs during the picnic of the Am Kedoshim Society. I glanced over to the boy on my right and saw that the class had moved on to the following page. His finger was on the third line. I turned the page, read the line, and stopped. Mrs. Rubinson asked me to continue reading. I read to the foot of the page, and stopped. She called on another boy and asked him to read the first line of the page. He read the vowel and letter combinations haltingly. I closed my eyes, and wondered if Eddie Kulanski and Tony Savanola were in the Catholic parochial school down the block. I would have to ask Saul or my father if there was a Catholic school in our neighborhood. I spent the rest of the early morning, until recess, with my eyes closed, riding a black stallion through burning forests and firing my machine gun at charging Cossacks.
I found Saul in the yard during the recess. He was standing with a group of his friends, talking quietly. He introduced me as his cousin Davey Lurie.
“Max Lurie’s your father?” one of the boys said.
I nodded.
There were four of them. They stood around looking at me. They appeared simultaneously awed and uncomfortable.
“Saul, is there a Catholic school in our neighborhood?”
He stared at me through his glasses. “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment.
“They’re building a big school over on Tremont Avenue,” one of the boys said.
“This is the only Catholic elementary school and high school in the whole area,” one of the boys said. “I got a friend goes to that school.”
“What’s the matter, Davey?” Saul said.