An Orphan's Tale (29 page)

The boy was about to return the letter to its envelope when a thin slip of a paper fluttered out of it. He caught it in the air as if it were a frail butterfly. On it was 1 sentence, in the same handwriting as that on the letter, except that the script was very shaky as if it had been written by a much older man than the one who had written the letter. Trembling, the boy read: “If my grandchildren are not in the world, I pray that you will use this letter with your mind and with your heart, so that you, my dear friend Daniel, can tell the generations of the Story of New Zion!”

Amen. Selah.

LATER

What I learned today from writing a story: Not to be fooled by the deceptive power of my own imagination. Even if I could write things like this forever, filling myself with myself, the answer is still no.

If I created enough people like Dr. Fogel's father, from the way I see people the way I described today, would they be able to keep each other busy and happy after a certain point, or would they still need me?

Remember this: There were no Jews before Abraham.

Also: Never never show this to Dr. Fogel.

Why did I love my story while I was writing it and despise it now that it's finished?

My decision: If Charlie comes tomorrow I'll reveal myself!

MONDAY

This morning I found a tree that had a hollow and a spider web over the hollow and I wondered if I ever saw it before I wrote my story or if writing my story made me notice it. I don't know enough about Nature to know how long the spider's web could have been there, or if he could have spun it overnight.

Once when King Saul was chasing David with his soldiers to kill him, David hid in the hollow of a tree and a spider spun a web over the hollow so that David's life was saved.

I stuck my hand through the web and inside the tree trunk was nothing but pieces of wood like sponge.

I woke up feeling better and I walked in some new directions on the property but didn't find any artifacts of the old settlement or any traces that anyone ever lived in any other part. There were some flat stretches that might have been farming land.

If Charlie marries Anita and I go to live with them, what will happen between Hannah and myself, living in the same house? What do brothers and sisters who are close to the same age feel toward each other and if they think unhealthy thoughts, what do they do about them?

I practiced music for an hour this morning, before lunch.

After lunch I walked outside on the roads all around the property, to make sure there are no other ways' of getting inside, so that I won't miss him if he comes again.

While I was walking outside and looking in across the fence at the trees I saw the 2nd story I'm going to write down now. I knew football practice started by then and that he wouldn't be coming today. I was imagining horses and wagons of Jews going in and out of the property and speaking to each other and to their horses in Yiddish and Polish and Russian and Hebrew when something made my mind see an opposite scene, from the future, and this is what it was:

Twenty years had passed from the time when the 2 friends had last seen one another. The visitor, a tall blond man in his early thirties, with strangely restful hazel eyes, was passing through the town in which he had once spent several crucial months of his life, and out of curiosity he had driven along the road he knew to see if the house he had once known so well was still there.

He had walked up to the door, and, seeing that the name was the same as that of his childhood friend, he had knocked.

When the door opened, the visitor and his friend needed to look at each other for only the briefest instant before the flash of recognition entered their mutual eyes and all of the changes of the 20 years which had passed were obliterated.

They embraced like brothers and held one another tightly and then stood back.

“I don't believe it,” said the tall handsome man in the doorway, who was as dark as his friend was fair. “It is too good to be true!”

“No,” said the visitor. “It is true!”

“You're Daniel Ginsberg!”

“And you are,” said Daniel, “by the nameplate on your door, Ephraim Mendelsohn!”

They now shook hands, somewhat awkwardly, since they had grown used to covering up their strongest emotions in their regular lives, and Ephraim invited his dear friend to come into his house.

Daniel looked around the kitchen, once so familiar to him, and it seemed that it had been only yesterday that he had been sitting there and that the 2 of them had been boys, each lost in his own world. How much, really, had they known of one another's inner thoughts back then? And yet, how close they had been, in a way that could never be repeated!

“The kitchen is the same,” Daniel said, and then, without warning, he felt a rush of tears flood his eyes and he was holding his friend by both shoulders and staring into his warm eyes and saying, “Oh Ephraim—there's so much I want to know, don't you see? There are so many questions, so many thoughts!”

“I know how you feel,” Ephraim said, and he too was crying, from a mixture of joy and sadness. “I have questions also, though for the moment it seems enough to have you here with me.”

“I thought the same thing,” Daniel said. “And even if I should turn around now and leave, without talking with you or ever seeing you again, the moment that has just passed would be enough, wouldn't it?”

“Yes!” Ephraim said, and he took his friend by the arm. “But come,” he said. “Let me offer you a drink, or some nourishment.”

Daniel had walked to an old cabinet and opened the glass doors without asking his friend's leave. He took out a beautiful antique Tsumin box and held it in his hands and shook it gently so that the bells tinkled. “When did you recover this?” he asked. “It is the same one—the one which was lost 20 years ago, in the week in which your father died, is it not?”

Ephraim looked down for a brief second, and then looked up and smiled, and Daniel wondered about the shadow which had flickered across his friend's eyes, in the moment before he spoke. “It was an accident. I was purchasing a Talis for my son Moshe—”

“A son?” Daniel exclaimed. “How wonderful!”

“I have 3 sons,” Ephraim said. “But let me continue.”

“Please do.”

“I was purchasing a Talis for my son Moshe, named after my father, as I know you must realize, for his coming Bar Mitzvah—this was less than 10 days ago—when, in the store of the old Jew from whom I often buy objects of Jewish interest, I saw it in the corner of a shelf behind him, and I recognized it at once!”

“How curious,” Daniel said. “That you should find it in the same week in which I should be passing through!”

The 2 friends laughed, and Ephraim asked Daniel if he would write down the coincidental experience in his diary, but Daniel only sighed. “I have long since given up such foolishness,” he said. “I think it was my way back then of keeping myself from having to live in the real world and communicating with real people.”

“I thought so at the time,” Ephraim said. “But I didn't dare say so, for I knew how much it meant to you!”

Daniel nodded and a dark look came across his brow. “In a way, it was my writing things down that sustained me, you know. I'm not sure I would have survived without it.”

“Of course you would,” Ephraim said, and he clapped his friend on the back. “Why, just look at you now!”

The 2 friends talked like this for a long while and then they retreated to Ephraim's living room and talked to one another about their lives and their families and all the intervening years and books they'd read and people they had known and what had become of them.

Ephraim was now a widower whose wife had died 4 years before, after giving birth to their 3rd son. Ephraim did not think he would ever remarry, so intimate had he and his wife been to one another! But Daniel had to wonder secretly as to the real reason, for he remembered how affected his friend had been when his friend's father had died and his mother had cared for the family of 4 brothers and 2 sisters by herself. All this happened many years ago.

Daniel thought of a saying from Rabbi Akiba which he loved very much: “When a husband and wife have merit, God's presence may be found in their midst. When they lack merit, a fire consumes them.”

Ephraim showed his friend the laboratory he had built in his basement and the hothouses he had added on to the house in back, where he did his botanical research, for he had become a highly successful consultant to scientific firms. “By working at home,” he explained, “I am able to be with the children more—and that is the most important thing.”

Daniel, walking through the hothouses and admiring the plants, said laughingly, “Murray the Mower.”

Ephraim puffed on his pipe and laughed also. “I know,” he said. “It's very strange, isn't it, how these things work themselves out in life? But now, Daniel, tell me about yourself.”

Daniel and his friend adjourned to Ephraim's office and, smiling at the coincidence, Daniel told his friend that he too was a research scientist, and about his work in Biomedical Engineering. Daniel also revealed that, under the pseudonym of Charles Fogelstein, which name Ephraim at once recognized, he was also a highly successful writer of science-fiction books for children.

“Why, I read them to my sons all the time!” Ephraim exclaimed. “And in all the years I never thought to see anything special in the name of the author!”

As the afternoon wore on and was subdued into dusk, the friends talked as if time had had a stop.

This is what Daniel learned:

Ephraim's sister, Hannah, had become a lawyer, and was married to a Jewish lawyer and lived in New York City and had 2 lovely children of her own.

Dov had moved to California, where he was a highly regarded brain surgeon, and went on camping trips with his family of a wife and 4 children.

Rivka lived in Washington, D.C. and was married to a Congressman whose name Daniel recognized. She had 3 beautiful children.

Eli had emigrated to Israel at the age of 16, and at the age of 17 he had been killed in a guerrilla attack on his border settlement.

The youngest child, Murray, whom Daniel had never seen, was a student at Harvard University.

“Just think,” Daniel said, “of all the things I would feel if I were to meet him, and of how he would not understand. Isn't that the difference, my friend?”

Ephraim's mother, Anita, had moved to Florida, where she was an educational consultant and was receiving continual offers of marriage, though she had never accepted any. “Please give them all my love when you see them,” Daniel said.

“They'll be so happy to know about how your life has turned out,” Ephraim said. “We have talked about you often through the years.” Then Ephraim paused meaningfully. “You heard about Charlie, didn't you?”

Daniel said he had, though he did not explain how. Charlie had died of a malignant brain tumor, just before his 40th birthday.