In the Beginning

  “Turn around?” I heard myself say. “Rashi means to change around the words?”

  “Rashi means exactly what Rashi says. To turn it around.” He used the word sorais, “transpose.” “It is written one way, but when we explain it we turn around the verse.” He paused ominously. “Is it clear to you?”

  I told him it was clear to me. Across the street, the public school mid-morning recess was beginning. Waves of students rolled onto the vast yard through the outside double doors of the building. I saw a touch football game form up. Small handball games had already begun, one of them with a small black ball. It was a new flood and no one seemed to know it. Everything was about to be swept away and no one believed it. Couldn’t they feel the earth trembling and the ground moving? I looked away from the window and closed my eyes and immediately saw my father seated at the kitchen table, unshaven in a collarless shirt. “What is there to go to, Ruth? The office is a tomb.”

  “Go anyway, Max.”

  “Go anyway, go anyway. You want me out of the house? Is that what you want?”

  “Max.”

  “I am in your way? What is it? To David you would also have spoken like this?”

  “Max, listen to what you are saying. Please.”

  “I will go. Of course I will go. But it is like a tomb in that office now.”

  And he had sat staring down at the kitchen table, his eyes puffy with lack of sleep, his shoulders sagging. He had still been sitting like that when I left for school.

  I opened my eyes. The teacher was explaining the verse that told of Moses being pulled from the river. I could not understand what Rashi had meant by transpose the verse. How can you change the order of words in a verse in the Torah?

  My father came home with a bad cold one day in late December and two days later it became bronchitis. I could never remember his being ill before. Now he was in bed with a cough that racked his body. He was out of bed in two weeks and returned to his office. But he would come home in the early afternoon now and I would find him in the apartment when I came back from school. He sat around the house in his maroon robe and tall black skullcap, reading the newspaper or staring down at the floor. One evening he was in the living room when the canary began to sing. He looked up from his paper, startled. Then he rose and went into the kitchen. A moment later I heard the smooth voice of a news announcer. The canary continued to sing, an eerie counterpoint to what was being said on the radio.

  I said to my mother that night when she came into my room, “Is Papa all right?”

  “No. He is unhappy because business is very bad. But we will all help him. He helped others, now others will help him.”

  “I hate to see Papa this way.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “It’s not a pleasant thing to see.”

  “My nose hurts a little, Mama.”

  “Go to sleep,” she said. “And please try not to get sick, David. I have enough with your father on my hands.”

  But two days later I came home from school with a very high fever. My mother called Dr. Weidman. He sat on the edge of my bed, looking pink and cheerful, tapped my chest and back, listened to my lungs, and put some kind of instrument with a light into my nostrils. He patted my shoulder and went out of the room with my mother. I lay very still in my bed and settled into my familiar world of pain and fever. I almost welcomed that now. Outside it was dark and cold and the Angel of Death thrust about mercilessly and his huge wings beat the air and sent icy gusts through the streets. I closed my eyes. A moment later I sensed someone entering my room and coming slowly toward me and I opened my eyes and it was my father. He stood for a long moment near my bed and gazed down at me. He had on his maroon robe and tall black skullcap.

  “Papa.”

  He said nothing. His eyes were dark.

  “I’m sick again, Papa. I’m sorry to be sick again now. I tried to stay well.”

  He sat down slowly at the edge of my bed. I felt the mattress tip sideways as his full weight settled into it.

  “No one blames you for being sick, David. Not for a minute should you ever think we blame you for that.”

  “Are you still sick, Papa?”

  He was silent a moment. “The bronchitis is gone,” he said finally.

  “Is it like Lemberg now in the war?” I said, and I did not know why I had said it; I had not even thought to say it.

  “What?” he said.

  “Is it like everything moving and changing every day and we can’t stop and fix anything and keep it from going away from us?”

  He was staring at me.

  “I hate it, Papa. There are so many dead people everywhere. How can God do such a thing? I see them from the trolley, Papa. Dead people on the street corners. Don’t become a dead person, Papa.”

  “What are you saying, David? What do you mean?”

  I saw my mother and Dr. Weidman standing now in the doorway to my room.

  “It’s in Rashi, Papa. I saw it in Rashi.”

  “What Rashi? What are you talking about? You are studying Rashi?”

  “I taught it to myself, Papa. But it hurts my eyes to read the small letters. Rashi says Dathan and Abiram didn’t really die but they became poor and a poor man is just like a dead person. I read it, Papa.” I wished I could stop talking. It was the fever. I could not control my tongue. “Rashi says things I don’t understand sometimes, Papa. I feel angry at Rashi sometimes. The teacher says Rashi is holy, but I feel angry at him. He puts things into the Torah which aren’t there. But why does it have to be Lemberg all over again here, Papa? Wasn’t it enough once?”

  My voice broke. In his bed, Alex stirred, sighed, turned over, and was quiet. My father bent toward me and kissed my forehead. He smelled strongly of coffee. “My Rashi-reader,” he murmured. “And I did not even know. You taught yourself Rashi?”

  My mother came over to the bed. “You should rest now, David. I will bring you medicine in a little while.”

  “You’ll be back in school in a few days, David,” said Dr. Weidman cheerfully.

  “Is it the same black year?” my father asked him.

  Dr. Weidman nodded.

  They went from the room. I slid beneath my covers. The dead won’t get me here, I thought.

  Later that night I thought I heard the voice of my aunt and uncle in the living room. Then they stood around my bed, the four of them, but I would not open my eyes.

  “The child is burning with fever,” I heard my aunt say.

  “It’s like looking at David,” my uncle said.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Yes.”

  “I told you about Rashi?” said my father.

  “You told me,” my uncle said.

  “I have never seen him so hot,” said my aunt.

  “How many times have you seen him sick?” asked my mother. “In a few days he will be in school.”

  “The nose will grow crooked from now on?” asked my uncle.

  “Yes.”

  “I see it already,” said my aunt.

  “It is David,” said my uncle. “It is like the resurrection of the dead.”

  That January my father gave up his real estate business and took a job in a wholesale stationery store run by one of the members of the Am Kedoshim Society. He would return home in the evenings exhausted. He left that job and went to work in a candy store in the West Bronx. He worked late into the nights. After a few weeks he took another job. He had many jobs in succession that year and I do not remember any of the others. Suddenly, in the summer, he was not working at all, though he would leave the house every morning searching for a job. There were no more meetings of the Am Kedoshim Society.

  I spent the summer reading in my room and reveling in my newfound sight. A trip to an eye clinic, at the recommendation of Dr. Weidman, had solved my problem with the small letters of the commentary of Rashi. I wore steel-rimmed glasses now. I read in my room at night and in the sunlight outside the house during the day. And I watched my brother, whose wild wanderings through
the street had become subject matter for the gossip of neighbors. There was the summer day he disappeared and the janitor found him in the basement playing with the valves of the furnace. He ran into the street after a ball and escaped the wheels of a car by inches. The old man with palsied hands was on his chair in the sunlight that day. There was the sudden shriek of brakes and the scream of a neighbor. The old man slid from his chair in a dead faint as my brother returned triumphantly to the sidewalk, his brown hair wild, his face beaming, for he had successfully retrieved his ball. He ran wild, he chased cats, he fought with boys his age, he raced about on my old tricycle as if propelled by an engine, he was in constant motion. He seemed immune to accidents. He reminded me of Joey Younger.

  One afternoon my mother brought a chair outside and sat in the sun near our stoop reading a book. After a while she put it down and closed her eyes. I saw a weight of sadness on her thin face. I had been sitting nearby with a Chumash. I moved my chair over to her and asked her to read to me from her book.

  She opened her eyes and slowly shook her head.

  “Are you too tired, Mama?”

  “The book is in German, David.”

  “Please read it to me, Mama.”

  She gave me a queer startled look as if she had suddenly remembered a long forgotten event of the past.

  “I will read a page or two, David. It makes no sense to read something you do not understand.”

  “And you’ll show me the letters, Mama.”

  “Yes, David. I’ll show you the letters.”

  She read to me often after that. I could not really understand most of what she was reading. But I liked listening to the words. It was always exciting to hear new words. It was what I had instead of good friends.

  One morning as she sat reading to me in the sunlight I closed my eyes. And there, suddenly, was the cottage and the beach and the lake and my mother under the elm and my father galloping on the stallion through the tall grass. I sat in my chair listening to her and tasted the sharp, clear, tangible reality of our cottage summers. And when I opened my eyes and saw the street and the traffic and Alex playing on the sidewalk and my mother reading to me on her chair near the stoop, I had a sense of sudden cold overwhelming loss and dread. I never closed my eyes again when she read to me that summer. And one afternoon, when she dozed off while reading, I took the book from her hands and opened it and began, painstakingly, to read it to myself.

  Early in September a moving van pulled up to our house and men began to empty out Eddie Kulanski’s apartment. We heard them over our heads and saw them coming down the stairway with the barrels and the heavy furniture. The van had come very early in the morning. I saw my parents glance at each other each time the men went down the stairs. We could hear them giving one another instructions. After breakfast I came outside with my schoolbag and saw Eddie Kulanski standing on the sidewalk next to the van. He held his schoolbag in his hand. He was bareheaded. His light blond hair blew in the wind. I stood on the sidewalk and felt relieved that I would finally be rid of him. He was watching the two men load a small dresser and parts of a small bed into the back of the van. Then he must have sensed someone looking at him for he turned and saw me standing near the stoop. The pointed features, the small mouth, the sleepy gray eyes had not changed in the years since that summer of sunlight and nightmare. Now the eyes, always expressionless in the past, seemed glazed with sadness. His shoulders drooped. He looked away from me and watched the men place the last pieces of the bed inside the van.

  Then I found myself standing beside him. “Hey, Eddie.”

  He looked at me again, vaguely startled.

  “I’m sorry you have to move away. I know you don’t like me because I’m a Jew and you think I killed Jesus and we have a strong organization that wants to run the world. That’s all lies, Eddie. But even if you believe it, still I’m sorry you have to move and I hope you don’t have a bad time in your new place. Goodbye, Eddie.”

  He looked at me and said nothing. His mouth opened slightly, but his eyes did not alter their sleepy gaze.

  I walked quickly away, my heart beating loudly. I could feel him looking at me. I turned the corner and halfway along the block saw my cousin waiting for me at the trolley car stop.

  That afternoon I sat in my English class and noticed a moving van come down Washington Avenue and stop in front of one of the five-story, red-brick apartment houses across the street from the public school. Two men climbed out. One of them went into the apartment house and came out a few minutes later with a short barrel-chested man in overalls. The three of them talked for a few minutes on the sidewalk. Then the man in the overalls did something to the entrance doors that left them permanently open. He went back inside and the two men began to move the furniture from the van into the apartment house. They were not nearly done unloading the van when the students from the Catholic school came up the block. I saw Eddie Kulanski go along Washington Avenue, cross the street in the middle of the block, stop near the van. He gazed at the men unloading the van. Then he went into the apartment house. At that point my English teacher, a small, intense, elderly woman with a rouged face and a brassy voice that reminded me of Mrs. Horowitz, inquired whether or not I believed the education I was receiving by staring out the window was superior to what I might be receiving by paying attention to her, and would I please be so kind as to give the class the benefit of my unusual mind and do the problem in fractions which she had written on the blackboard. I went up to the blackboard, did the problem, rubbed my hands together to rid my fingers of the gritty feel of the chalk, sat back down in my chair, and stared out the window at the moving van. Later that afternoon I climbed the stairs to my apartment, feeling light-headed with the knowledge that I would no longer be encountering Eddie Kulanski. I did not think I would have any difficulty at all forgetting Eddie Kulanski and the fear and shame in which I had lived for so many years.

  Mr. Bader returned from Europe the week before Rosh Hashanah, looking tired and strangely grim. My father and uncle went to see him a number of times and he came over to our house once. On Yom Kippur I sat in our little synagogue during the Additional Service, listening to the mournful chanting of “Eleh Ezkerah,” the liturgical poem that depicts the martyrdom of ten great sages at the hands of the Romans in punishment for their defiance of the ban against teaching the Torah. Mr. Bader was leading the service. He stood in front of the podium, his back to the congregation, chanting softly the words of the poem. I heard him chant, “And they took out Rabbi Akiva, who had expounded upon every letter of the Torah. And they tore his flesh with metal combs.” Then he faltered and stopped. The thirty or so congregants in the room continued to the end of the poem, and waited. Mr. Bader stood very stiffly at the podium, his eyes closed. Earlier in the day, before the Memorial Service, he had stood facing the congregation and had told us of an occurrence he had witnessed in Europe. From the window of a passing cab he had seen, on a dark Berlin street, three uniformed Nazis beating a man with their fists and boots; the driver, fearful of involvement, had refused to stop, and the man, a Jew, was found dead the next morning in an alley near a bookstore. The incident typified for him, he had said, what was now beginning to take place in Germany. He had spoken in his usual calm and controlled manner. But now, suddenly, he could not continue the service. Sensing the cause of his inability to go on, the group of worshipers grew very still and waited. I had never before witnessed a display of deep feeling by Mr. Bader; he had always seemed to me the essence of controlled urbanity. But somewhere on a Berlin street a Jew he had not known had been beaten to death by followers of the man whose name I heard often in the news now, and the poem about the death of the Sages had brought the death of that lone Jew sharply to mind; and now Mr. Bader stood in silence before the podium, his shoulders slightly bowed, his craggy face reflecting his efforts to control his emotions. The silence inside the room deepened. To my left, Saul sat in his chair, looking fixedly at his prayer book. I could not see my father’s fac
e; he always covered his head with his tallit when he chanted this poem.

  Mr. Bader straightened. His tall form seemed to expand as he took a deep breath. After a moment he resumed his chanting of the service.

  I asked Saul later that day if he had been able to see Mr. Bader since his return from Europe.

  “Twice,” he said proudly.

  Had he studied with Mr. Bader?

  “Of course.”

  Had Mr. Bader said anything about his trip to Europe?

  “We never talk about his work in Europe, Davey. That’s not why I go to him.”

  “Are you still studying Torah reading? You know all of Noah by heart.”

  “We’re studying grammar.”

  “All the time you just study grammar? What grammar are you going to have left to study in the yeshiva high school?”

  “You don’t study grammar in that high school, Davey. You study Talmud. That’s what I really want to study. Talmud and midrash.”

  “Where did Mr. Bader learn grammar?”

  He did not know. He had never thought to ask him.

  “Is he really in the export-import business, Saul?”

  He regarded me solemnly through his shell-rimmed glasses. “That’s what everyone says he’s in.” Then he said, as if deliberately moving the conversation away from Mr. Bader, “How are your glasses, Davey? Do they fit all right?”

  “They hurt my ears sometimes.”

  “Mine kill my ears. But if I loosen them they slide down my nose.”

  “I don’t like wearing glasses.”

  “Can you see without them?”

  “No. I see blurs and shadows and I get scared. I don’t like it when I can’t see things very sharp.”

  “Sharply,” he said. “You could stand learning some English grammar, too.”

  “Saul, how many mistakes do you think you’ll make when you read Noah on your bar mitzvah?”

  “None,” he said. “With God’s help.”

  God helped. He made not a single error the Shabbat morning he stood before the podium in our little synagogue and read the Torah. He read slowly, with meticulous care. I followed him in my Chumash. The crowded synagogue—more than one hundred of the people who were there had walked on that brisk fall day from distant parts of the city out of regard for my uncle and my father—the synagogue was silent as his thin voice chanted the account of the Flood and its aftermath. My uncle and my father sat together to my right. They followed the reading intently. At the sides of the podium stood two congregants who also followed the reading. Next to Saul stood Mr. Bader, who had just been called to the Torah; and next to Mr. Bader stood Nathan Ackerman, ruddy-faced and mustached, who had been the previous person called to the Torah. Dwarfed by the adults around him, Saul’s thin figure swayed slowly back and forth over the open scroll on the podium. He was reading the words of God that had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai: the Torah, the most sacred teaching, dictated by the Master of the Universe to His servant during the awesome time of the Revelation. The words had to be read without errors.