The Rabbi (9 page)

“And can He move it?”

“Of course.”

Michael became excited. “Then can He make a rock so heavy that He can't move it Himself?”

Reb Chaim beamed, happy to have stimulated so much zeal on the part of his new pupil. “Certainly,” he said. “If He wanted to.”

He was so excited that he shouted. “But if He can't move it Himself, then He can't do everything! So He's not all-powerful!”

Reb Chaim opened his mouth and then closed it. His face grew flushed as he looked at Michael's triumphant grin.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
The rattan fell on both of the boy's shoulders in a shower of blows that must have been as exciting to watch as a tennis match, but which was terribly painful to receive. This time he did cry, but nonetheless he had become a hero to his class and Public Enemy Number One to his Hebrew teacher.

It was very discouraging. Between Stash and Reb Chaim his life became a series of nightmares. He tried playing hooky. In the afternoon when he got out of P.S. 467 he went to a bowling alley four blocks from the school and sat for three hours on a wooden bench, watching the players. It wasn't a bad place to wait. He did this for four days, and on each day he sat behind
the alley used by the same fat woman with massive breasts and great haunches. She raised the big bowling ball as though it were a bead, and she moved forward on the tips of her toes in mincing steps that caused her to shake and tremble so that you knew she could profit immensely by wearing some of his father's products. She chewed gum steadily and without expression, and when she released the ball and sent it cannoning down the alley she suspended chewing until the pins were exploded and had stopped falling. Usually this meant that she stood on one foot with her mouth open, like a statue made with too much clay by a mad sculptor. She was interesting and educational to watch, but his nerves gave out, and besides, when she sat down on the bench in front of him, her body odor nauseated him. On the fifth day he returned to Hebrew school, having forged a note from his mother saying that he had had an attack of sinus trouble, the symptoms of which he knew because his sister Ruthie suffered them vociferously most of the year around.

The pressure began to tell on him. He grew increasingly tense and nervous and he lost weight. At night he thrashed in his bed, unable to sleep. When he did sleep he dreamed of being beaten by Reb Chaim, or he dreamed that Stash waited for him outside the door, his figure rising three feet taller than his actual height.

One afternoon while he was in Hebrew class the boy behind him handed a piece of paper over his shoulder. Reb Chaim's back was turned to the class as he wrote the next day's grammar lesson on the blackboard, so Michael glanced at the paper without worry. It was a crude caricature of their teacher, unmistakable because of the beard, the glasses, and the skullcap. Grinning, Michael added a wart to his nose—he actually had one there—and drew in an arm with the hand hunting, hunting in the beard, neatly printing
Chaim Chorowitz the Chunter
beneath the picture.

The fact that the Reb was standing above him and gazing down at the paper on which he wrote was conveyed to him by the awful stillness of the classroom. It was a stillness that transcended the quiet demanded even by Reb Chaim. No pencil moved, no foot shuffled, no nose was blown. Only the ticking of the clock was heard, loud and slow and grimly portentous.

He sat and waited for the rattan to descend on his shoulders, refusing to look up into the brown eyes behind the shiny spectacles.
Reb Chaim's hand slowly came into range of his downcast eyes. It was a long-fingered, slender hand with freckles and crisp black hairs on the wrist and below the knuckles. The hand picked up the piece of paper and took it out of his sight.

And still the rattan did not strike.

“You will remain after school,” Reb Chaim told him quietly. There were eighteen minutes until the lesson was over, and each one stuck to the afternoon as if fastened with glue. Finally they were gone, however, and the class was dismissed. He could hear the other boys running and yelling as they left the building. The room was very quiet. Reb Chaim arranged some papers and put an elastic band around them and put them away in his second drawer. Then he walked out of the classroom and down the corridor to the teachers' john. He shut the door behind him but the building was so quiet that Michael could hear him urinating, a drumming like a tiny machine gun over in another sector of the front.

Michael left his seat and walked up to the teacher's desk. The rattan lay there. It was brown and varnished-looking, but he knew that the gleam was a polish that had been achieved through constant application to the tender skin of young Jewish boys. He picked up the rattan and flexed it. It took surprisingly little effort to make it cut viciously through the air, making a noise like corduroy knickers rubbing together. Suddenly he began to tremble, and to cry. He knew that he could not take any more pain either from Reb Chaim or from Stash Kwiatkowski, and he knew that he was going to quit Hebrew school. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, still holding the rattan and leaving his books on his desk. He left the building slowly and walked home, planning how he would take the rattan to his mother and pull off his shirt to show her the mottled marks on his shoulders, the way Douglas Fairbanks had lowered his shirt to show his sweetheart the marks of her father's lash in the picture he had seen the preceding Saturday afternoon.

He was relishing the way his mother would cry over him when Stash stepped from behind the billboard and blocked his way. “Hello, Mikey,” he said softly.

Michael didn't know that he meant to hit Stash until the rattan sang through the air with the sound of bees and caught him across his right cheek and his lips.

He let out an astonished yelp. “You little kike!”

He rushed blindly and Michael hit him again, reaching up to get his arms and shoulders.

“Stop that, you little bastid,” Stash screamed. Instinctively he raised his arms to protect his face. “I'm going to kill you,” he raged, but as he half turned to evade the zipping switch Michael cut the rattan across his fat, fleshy behind.

He heard the sound of someone crying and realized incredibly that it was not himself. Stash's face was screwed up until his chin looked like a wrinkled potato, and tears mingled with the blood that trickled from his lip. Every time Michael hit him he let out a little scream, and Michael hit him again and again as they ran, until finally he stopped chasing him because his arm was tired and Stash ran around a corner and was gone.

He spent the rest of the walk home thinking about how he should have handled the situation better, how he should have stopped hitting him long enough to make him say that Jews didn't kill Christ or gobble shit or cut off their pricks and eat them in stew on Saturday night.

When he got home he hid the rattan behind the furnace in the apartment house basement instead of taking it up to his mother. The following morning he took it from its hiding place and brought it to school. Miss Landers, his teacher at P.S. 467, noticed it and asked him what it was, and he told her it was a pointer his mother had borrowed from the Hebrew school. She stared at it and opened her mouth, but then she closed it again as if she had changed her mind. After public school he ran to Hebrew school until he was out of breath and had a stitch in his side, and then he walked as fast as he could.

He got there fifteen minutes before class. Reb Chaim was alone in the classroom, correcting papers. He kept his eyes on Michael as he walked toward him holding the rattan. Michael handed it to him.

“I'm sorry I borrowed it without your permission.”

The Reb turned it over in his hands, as if seeing it for the first time. “Why would you borrow it?”

“I used it. On an anti-Semite.”

Michael could swear that his lips twitched behind the camouflage of beard. But he was not a man to be diverted from the business at hand. “Bend over,” he said.

Reb hit him six times across the behind. It hurt a lot and
he cried, but all the while he was thinking that he had hit Stash Kwiatkowski a lot harder than Reb Chaim was hitting him.

By the time the rest of the class came in and sat down he wasn't crying any more, and a week later he was moved out of the front seat and Robbie Feingold took permanent possession because he was a silly kid who always got the giggles during recitation. Reb Chaim never hit him again.

 

6

At 3
A.M
. on the day he was to be
bar mitzvah
, nervous and unable to sleep, he sat in the kitchen of the apartment in Queens and touched the imaginary fringes of an imaginary
tallis
to an imaginary Torah and then to his lips.

“
Borchu es adonoi hamvoroch
,” he whispered. “
Boruch adonoi hamvoroch l'olom voed
.”

“Michael?” his mother shuffled groggily into the kitchen, her eyes slitted against the light, one small white hand to her hair. She wore a blue flannel robe over pink cotton pajamas that were too short. She had recently begun to have her hair dyed a passion-red that made her look like a fat female clown, and even through his nervousness he felt embarrassment and love wash over him in successive waves as he looked at her.

“Are you sick?” she asked anxiously.

“I wasn't sleepy.”

The truth was that while lying awake in his bed he had run through his part in the
bar mitzvah
ceremonies, as he had been doing at least fifty times a day for the past few months, and he had found to his horror that he could not say the
brocha
, the short blessing that preceded the longer Torah reading called the
haftorah
. He knew the
brocha
as well as he knew his own name, but some part of his mind, tired of being hammered at by a single set of sounds, had rebelled and had wiped his memory clean of the words.

“You've got to get up in a few hours,” she whispered fiercely. “Go to bed.”

More asleep than awake, she turned and shuffled back to her mattress. He heard his father question her as the spring creaked under her descending weight.

“What's the matter?”

“Your son is crazy. A real
mishugineh
.”

“Why doesn't he sleep?”

“Go and ask him.”

Abe did, walking barefoot into the kitchen, his uncombed black hair dropping over his forehead. He wore only pajama bottoms, as he did throughout the year because he was proud of his body. Michael noticed for the first time that the curling hair on his chest was beginning to be frizzled with gray.

“What the hell?” he said. He sat down on a kitchen chair and dug into his scalp with both hands. “How do you expect to be
bar mitzvah
tomorrow?”

“I can't remember the
brocha
.”

“You mean you can't remember the
haftorah
?”

“No, the
brocha
. If I remember the
brocha
the
haftorah
comes out fine. But I can't remember the first line of the
brocha
.”

“Jesus Christ, son, you knew the damn
brocha
when you were nine years old.”

“I can't remember it now.”

“Look. You don't have to remember it. It will be up there in the book. All you have to do is read it.”

Michael knew that this was true, but he didn't feel any better. “Maybe I won't be able to find the place,” he said weakly.

“There'll be more old men on the platform with you than you'll want to look at. They'll show you the place.” His voice grew crisp. “You get to bed, now. That's enough of this
mishugahss
.”

Michael went back to bed but he lay awake until the shades on his window were rimmed with gray light. Then he closed his eyes and drifted off, only to be awakened by his mother after what seemed a split second of sleep. She peered at him anxiously.

“Are you all right?”

“I guess so,” he said. He stumbled off to the bathroom and threw cold water on his face. He was so tired he hardly knew
what was happening as he dressed, ate a hasty breakfast, and accompanied his parents to the synagogue.

His mother kissed him good-by at the door and hurried upstairs to the women's section. She looked frightened. He accompanied his father to a place in the second row. The synagogue was crowded with their friends and relatives. His father had few kinfolks, but his mother came from a great and sprawling clan, and it seemed as though they were all there. Many men whispered hello as they walked to their bench. His lips moved in response, but his voice said nothing. He was encased in a suit of fright that moved with his body when he moved and from which there was no escape.

Time passed. Dimly he was aware that his father had been called to the
bema
, and from far away he heard Abe's voice reciting in Hebrew. Then his own name was called in Hebrew—Mi-cha-el ben Avrahom—and on legs that had no feeling he mounted the platform. He touched his
tallis
to the Torah and kissed the fringes, and then he stared at the Hebrew letters on the yellowed parchment. They wriggled like snakes before his eyes.