An Orphan's Tale (34 page)

“God bless the state of Israel!” replied Uncle Sol, and he spoke about the Second World War and of how the nations of the world, before and after, refused to allow Jews to come upon their shores. If the Jews had a Homeland before 1940 and did not have to rely on others, millions of them would have been spared the gas chamber! He challenged Dr. Fogel to prove why it was a good thing that, homeless, the Jews should be forced to wander and be massacred forever. Didn't God command His children to love life? “Never again!” he proclaimed.

Then, before Dr. Fogel could reply, Daniel heard the voice he had been hoping to hear, that of his dear friend, CHARLES SAPISTEIN, himself a former orphan from the Home and a man who was different from all other men in ways which they did not perceive. “Why don't you just let the kid live with me?” he asked, simply.

There was a silence for several seconds, during which Daniel heard the sounds of chairs moving, and of his own excited heartbeat.

When the other men did not answer him, Charles spoke again. “Come on,” he said. “Talk to me. It's my life, isn't it? It was given to me to do with what I want, right? So why can't I let him stay with me?”

“Oh Charlie,” came the sound of a female voice, that of Ephraim's mother, ANITA MENDELSOHN, who was then, just recently widowed, an attractive young mother whom Daniel suspected of wanting to marry Charles. “You're such a sucker, aren't you, Charlie?” she asked.

Then Charles laughed. “Me? Why should you think that? You don't understand anything. I've lived with the boy already and do you know what? I like having him with me. You think I'm doing it just to be noble and to pay back some invisible thing for what was done for me once upon a time by the Home and Uncle Sol and everybody, but it's not that at all!”

“What is it then?” Anita questioned.

“You have to be willing to take chances,” Charles retorted. “To step into people's lives if you have to!”

“I don't see why,” said Anita.

Daniel's heart fell when he heard what it was that Charles next said: “What would you propose then?” Charles asked.

Daniel felt true despair! “Why don't we pool our money—you certainly have enough—and send him to Israel, since he loves Jewish things so much,” said Anita Mendelsohn. “On the Kibbutzim lots of children grow up without real mothers and fathers. He'd be quite happy there. I've looked into the matter.”

“But that's the easy way out for all of us,” he heard Charles say. “Don't you see that?”

Daniel had to fight to hold himself back, to keep from crawling out from under the building and bursting into the room, but even as he heard them argue with Charles he sensed that the solution was in sight. “Where there's a will there's a way, right?” he heard Charles say to them, and he sensed how important this was for the completion of Charles's own most strange and interesting life. He believed that his friends above him were becoming angry, for he heard the sounds of much scraping, and then the slow steady sound of something quite heavy, like iron beating steadily against wood, which he at first believed

*

Danny stopped writing and listened; the sound he had been writing about in his story was coming up the metal staircase to the dormitory.
No!
he cried to himself.
Not yet! I'm not ready!

He pressed his fingers against the inside corners of his eyes, to make his dizziness go away. Then he blew out the candles, stuffed his notebook into his sack, and rose from the floor. The sound was louder. He stood rigid in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his body trembling. He was so angry he didn't know what to do. Why was somebody coming
now?

He heard steps clicking along the hallway, toward him. For the briefest instant his anger flowed down and out of him and his heart suddenly flared; he saw the door open, with Charlie standing there, his arms spread wide for him to run to….

His imagination did not fool him. He picked up his sack and moved quickly across the floor, opened the door at the end that led to the game room, ran through the empty chamber and then down the stairs at the far end of the wing. The footsteps followed him.

Outside, in the moonlight, the courtyard was white. Danny stood in a doorway. The snow had stopped falling and had not stuck to the ground. He felt cold. He thought of Larry's hideout, but remembered that they had never given him a key.

“Stop where you are.”

Danny turned but saw no one.

“This is a policeman talking to you. In the name of the law I'm ordering you to stop where you are, drop what you have, and put your hands over your head.”

Danny smiled and ducked back inside the building, running as fast as he could, feeling a strength in his legs he had never suspected was there. He pushed through swinging doors and ran down the corridor in which the photos and trophies had been, and he felt as if he were in one of his own dreams, when, running fast, he would suddenly find himself taking off and flying above the heads of the other boys from the Home.

He plunged down a staircase, into the kitchen. The stoves and sinks were already gone. He passed through the kitchen to the laundry room, and from the laundry room into the boiler room. He heard steps, slow and steady, walking from the kitchen into the laundry room, and he couldn't understand how the policeman, without even running, was staying so close behind him.

A beam of light shone in under the door. “I'm giving you your last chance. Come out now with your hands up. This is a warning.”

Danny burst through the door and up the stairs.
The shul!
If he could make it there, even though he himself might not be saved, his notebooks would. He could leave them in the
Genizah
, wrapped in a
talis
. Even if the building were torn down, Danny knew, the Federation would never allow holy books to be destroyed, not only because it would be a sin, but because the old books were probably worth money and could be sold to some Yeshiva or library.

Going up, he took the stairs two at a time, thrilled by his anger and the ability it gave him to move so swiftly in the dark. The courtyard was beautiful and peaceful in the moonlight, but he knew that he hated it. He hated the courtyard and the buildings and the Home and his years in it and the people he'd lived with, and he wished only—to make the experience complete—to see his face in a mirror, to see what he looked like when he was smiling with hatred.

He walked to the
shul
, down the steps, and entered. The room, without chairs or the table in front, seemed larger than he had remembered it. The ark, built into the east wall, had been stripped of its worn velvet curtain. Across the courtyard a door closed, but Danny did not hear footsteps.

The
Genizah
was locked. Did Dr. Fogel still have the key? Did he have Danny's receipt? Danny saw that he might be able to use the
tephillin
and receipt someday as evidence, if necessary, to prove he had existed and had been a boy in the Home.

A shaft of moonlight shone through the door. Danny smiled, remembering the shaft of light that had led to Dr. Fogel's father's letter, and as he stared at the fluttering motes of dust he saw that the light was shining on a small scrap of paper, no larger than the palm of his own hand. It lay folded, in a sitting position, half on the floor, half against a side wall.

Danny picked it up and before he had read the words he recognized the handwriting—it was a piece from one of Charlie's lists! Then Charlie
had
come for him! He read: “check Fed of JP again/ buy T notes/ Call Zond/Lil/Fgl/ Gtlmn/cityman/ buy sh crm bids/ 25 G for DG/ oil chang cr/ mk new list.”

Danny slipped the piece of paper into his pocket and climbed up and into the ark, sliding the doors closed behind him but leaving a slight opening so he could peer out. He felt calm. The inside of the ark was smaller than he had expected it to be, and in it he could neither stand nor sit. His nose itched.

A few seconds later he saw the policeman standing in the doorway, silhouetted by moonlight, and without seeing his face, Danny knew it was the same man he had seen in the cafeteria.

He saw the long silver cylinder of the policeman's gun barrel, raised in the air. He thought he smelled parchment. A tiny spider crawled across his left shoe and out the crack between the doors. The policeman yawned, stretched, and sat down in the doorway, facing the courtyard. Below ground level, he would not have been seen by anyone in front of him.

“I can wait as long as you can,” the policeman said. “I can wait forever. Your best chance is to come forward now.”

Danny let his body dip backward slowly, so that the right side of his head rested against the back wall of the ark. He was amazed at how easy it was becoming, second by second, for him to stay still in such an awkward position—his neck crooked to one side, his knees slightly bent, one foot directly in front of the other, his back hunched over, the knuckles of his left hand pressed between his left cheek and the door.

The spider's underside passed in front of him, going from one door to the other, then back again. He remembered when Charlie had told him about how in this room, as a boy, and before anyone had known of his reading problem, Dr. Fogel had picked him up in his arms every Saturday morning when the Torah was taken from the ark so that Charlie could kiss it with his lips. We kiss the Torah and we dance with it and we decorate it with beautiful velvet covers embroidered with gold and silver thread, Danny thought. We hang silver jewelry on it and put silver crowns and bells upon it and we kiss the fringes of our
talises
where they have touched its words.

Why?

Danny's left eye bulged, looking through the crack. He saw silk lines glistening—the spider was actually spinning a web across the opening and Danny could hardly believe it. He stared, hypnotized, as the insect trailed a moonlit thread back and forth, and he tried to imagine the pattern of that part of the web which he could not see. He smiled and felt his cheek rub wood.

The policeman approached the ark and stood directly in front of it, watching the spider. Danny held his breath and could not, in the shadows, see the policeman's eyes.

He tried to imagine endings to his life. He saw Charlie finding him, asleep in the ark, and carrying him across the courtyard in his arms, out the gate, and into his car. On the way to the hospital, Charlie driving recklessly and turning toward the rear to curse at Danny for having played the fool, the car swerved and crashed. Charlie was dead.

If the policeman went out and locked the door to the
shul
, what would Danny do then?

The policeman had his gun raised above his shoulder, the barrel in his right fist. Danny closed his eyes and, as the gun butt came crashing down against the ark, just below Danny's nose, he held his breath.

“Got 'im.”

Danny's mouth was open but he was not screaming because he knew that if he did the policeman might fire at him. He was pleased with his ability to control his body and his mind—to stay awake without moving and to continue to see epilogues in his head, even with his eyes open.

He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel and Mr. Mittleman and Mrs. Mittleman and Sol and Ephraim and Hannah and Larry and Anita and Mr. Gitelman walking away from the cabin and getting into cars. Their faces were drawn. He followed them along highways and over bridges until they came to the hospital and walked up the stairs and stood around Danny's bed, to see how well his bullet wound was healing. The policeman was there also, his hat in his hand, telling Danny that he had only been doing his job. He said he admired the Jews because they had finally learned to fight back.

The policeman and Sol talked about great Jewish boxers they'd seen—Benny Leonard and Barney Ross and Abe Attel and Gus Lesnevich and Jackie “Kid” Berg, and Danny watched them go out through the hospital door with Sol's arm around the policeman's shoulder.

“If you come forward now I won't hurt you,” the policeman called. “After this I shoot first and ask questions second. I got a wife and five kids. You got three minutes.”

To keep himself awake Danny thought of the evil great men from the Bible had committed. Moses had murdered an Egyptian overseer and David had had Bathsheba's husband killed and Saul had tried to have David killed and Cain had killed Abel and Abraham had been willing to kill Isaac and had sent Ishmael into the desert and Joseph's brothers had sold him into slavery and Esau had been robbed of his birthright by Jacob and Noah had slept with his daughters.…

He heard a clicking sound and knew it was the gun. He believed the man, about waiting, and about shooting. If the man killed him, he wondered how anyone would ever know it had happened, or who he was. If the policeman examined his notebooks and discovered the truth—if he knew what to believe and what not to believe—he would realize the complications, and the publicity that would come for having shot a defenseless child who was also an orphan and a Jew.

Danny saw that he had no choice left, but he didn't understand why this was so. Where had he gone wrong? What had he done to cause the policeman to follow him? And did what he was about to do mean that he should never have run away from the Home in the first place?

He couldn't believe that. For what, he asked, would his life have become had he stayed there and never known Charlie?

He breathed in, as lightly as possible, through his nose, and decided to stop trying to imagine any life other than the one he had lived. He didn't question the choices he had made, or even the mistakes, for they still didn't seem to him, despite where he was now, to have been wrong choices.

He was not responsible for the policeman, he concluded, just as he was not responsible for being an orphan. The thought pleased him, but at the same time he saw that he was liable, at any instant, to move or to make noise or to fall asleep, and that if he did…

“All right,” he said, sliding open the doors to the ark. “I'll come peacefully, Officer. I have no choice. Please don't shoot. I'm only a boy. My name is…”