An Orphan's Tale (5 page)

“For land,” Dr. Fogel corrected. “For land.”

*

TUESDAY MORNING

I couldn't write anything last night about what happened yesterday because Mr. Gitelman made the night watchman check on us every 15 minutes. He must know we all know about the Home closing and the boys whispered in bed about being afraid he'll find their hideout.

Yesterday in Hebrew class Dr. Fogel made Steve show me how to put on Tephillin and he asked me questions about being Bar Mitzvahed and I answered him. Since the class ended the boys look at me in a new way because I'm the only one of them who ever spoke back to Dr. Fogel.

They might ask me to take Larry Silverberg's place but I won't do it in the way they think!

Now it's just getting light outside and I see the gate open for delivery trucks the way it is every morning. I went to the savings bank yesterday morning and closed my account. With the money left in my locker I have $72.54. When you become Bar Mitzvahed they give you a $25 Savings Bond but I won't wait for that.

I followed Dr. Fogel from the Home in the afternoon so I could see where he lives if I ever need him. He walks quickly and it doesn't bother him at all when dogs bark at him. I think the Puerto Rican boys in the neighborhood don't make fun of him because they're afraid of his arm.

When we came to a street where a group of Chasidic Jews were standing around a mobile van, he crossed to the other side. Chasidic Jews try to make Jews more Jewish by taking them into their vans and teaching them things about Judaism, but Dr. Fogel told us to beware of them. He said they were like gypsies who love to steal children! He said they worship their Rebbes more than God.

But I like to watch them move around and talk to each other anyway. When women go by the Chasidic Jews look the other way. Dr. Fogel calls them cowboys because of their big black hats and their long beards.

From where I was almost a block away I could see their eyes sparkling in their faces and I wondered what they talked about to each other when they weren't talking about God and Torah. I wanted to get near them just so I could touch their long black silk coats.

By the time I made myself stop staring at them Dr. Fogel was gone and I couldn't find him again so I came back here.

What I was thinking last night before I fell asleep: that my mind contains tunnels, boxes, corridors, caverns, mazes, layers, webs, and grids. In one second I can think something more complicated than my words can ever show, even if I had all the time in the world and I could write out all the details and relationships.

But if my mind is as complicated as I believe it is, why do I write so simply?

A good answer: My words are the other self to my thoughts!

After I took my money out I worried that the bank might telephone the Home to tell them and that Mr. Gitelman will tell everybody to be on the lookout.

I'll know tomorrow if they let me out the gate without stopping me!

*

Danny was surprised at how gently Dr. Fogel was treating him. Dr. Fogel had told the others to go outside and play and he had taken Danny to the
shul
again. He touched Danny's shoulder lightly with his good hand and asked him to put on his
tephillin
, and when Danny did things in the wrong order, Dr. Fogel did not get angry.

Danny remembered that Orthodox Jews did everything in an order, even to the point of putting the left foot out of bed in the morning before the right foot.

After Danny removed his
tephillin
and put the boxes away in his
tephillin
bag, he chanted his
Haftorah
for Dr. Fogel. Then they took out the Torah and went over the
Maftir
portion several times. Dr. Fogel told him he was doing very well, and Danny wondered if Dr. Fogel was changing because of his knowledge about the Home's closing.

When they had returned the Torah to the ark, Dr. Fogel told Danny that he was a very wealthy man.

Danny wanted to please him, so he recited from the
Pirkay Avos:
“Who is the wealthy man? He who is content with his portion.”

Dr. Fogel sat down. “No,” he said softly. “I have land. Do you know how much?”

Danny shrugged.

“Guess.”

“An acre?”

Dr. Fogel laughed. “Guess again,” he said. “You're a bright boy. Guess again—I have land enough for Leviathan.”

Danny stood in front of the ark, facing Dr. Fogel, and he imagined that he was a rabbi and that Dr. Fogel was the only other Jew left in the world. He told himself that he could say anything he wanted because, after the next day, he would never see him again.

“A hundred acres.”

Dr. Fogel clucked inside his mouth. “I have over three thousand acres,” he said, and smiled. Danny said nothing. “Do you want to know how I come to have so much land?”

“Do you want to tell me?” Danny answered.

Dr. Fogel patted the chair to his left with the palm of his hand. “Come. Sit next to me and I'll tell you the story.”

Danny sat next to Dr. Fogel and Dr. Fogel, his good hand touching Danny's arm occasionally, started telling him about his father, who had escaped from Poland as a boy in order to settle in Palestine. But the man to whom he had given his money had tricked him, and at the age of thirteen and a half Dr. Fogel's father had awakened one morning to find that he had arrived in America.

Danny asked no questions. He wondered if Dr. Fogel was telling him of his father's trip because he knew of Danny's own plan. And if he knows, Danny wondered, does he want me to escape or does he want to keep me here with him?

Danny felt dizzy. He pressed his fingers tightly against the seat of his wooden chair, between his knees. He did not hear everything Dr. Fogel said, but he saw Dr. Fogel's hands moving toward his own, the limp fingers of the man's right hand kneading the good fingers of the left. Danny jerked his hands upward and let them rest in his lap. Dr. Fogel was talking about a Jewish settlement his father had established on one of two large tracts of land. The settlements existed to train Jews who wanted to go to Palestine.

Danny tried to make his own mind go backward, so he could hear again about what Dr. Fogel's father had done in New York to earn enough money to buy the land, but he couldn't recapture the words. Danny thought that it had to do with buying and selling notes, and that the notes represented money. Dr. Fogel said that his father would search out wealthy Jews from New York who had come from his city in Poland—his
landsleit
—and would get them to donate money to him for his settlement.

He said his father could talk anyone into anything but that he had never been able to talk his own son into believing in the settlement. Dr. Fogel's voice remained gentle even as he insisted with his eyes that Danny pay full attention. Danny stared at Dr. Fogel's right hand and he believed that Dr. Fogel wanted him to touch it. Dr. Fogel was saying that he was certain a bright boy like Danny knew the words to the psalm: How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning….

Dr. Fogel laughed to himself, gurgling slightly, and said that he had disobeyed his father and run away when he was nineteen, but that his father had, in his bitterness, willed the land to him anyway. It was his joke, Dr. Fogel said. Danny thought that the fingers on Dr. Fogel's right hand were growing red and scaly, but he knew it was all in his imagination and so he concentrated on Charlie's face and imagined himself telling him who he was and where he had come from. He saw Charlie smiling the way he had when Danny had been looking into the store windows.

Danny looked up. Dr. Fogel was no longer sitting next to him. “Come,” Dr. Fogel said, standing at the door. “Enough. I shouldn't bother you with such tales. Come.”

Danny wanted to stand but he couldn't. Dr. Fogel asked Danny if he knew that the great Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had wanted to buy land in Argentina or Uganda for his Jewish Homeland? Did Danny know that Herzl had advocated having all Jewish children baptized?

“Why?” Danny asked.

Dr. Fogel turned away without answering.

“What will happen to your land when you die?” Danny asked.

Dr. Fogel's back passed through the doorway as Danny spoke and Danny thought Dr. Fogel felt bad because he had told more of his story than he had planned to, even though Danny didn't believe he had done anything to force him to.

He sat for a while, looking at the faded blue velvet curtains that covered the ark. How much, he wondered, would he need to know to be able to feel completely what it would have been like to have been Dr. Fogel's father when he was just past thirteen being smuggled on the wrong ship across the Atlantic Ocean?

*

WEDNESDAY (MORNING)

I never slept last night.

I thought about the end of the world.

I read in the library that the end of the world will come not from war or starvation or radiation or overpopulation but because man's creation of energy will add too much heat to the earth's atmosphere.

If you were the only Jew left on the face of the earth would you contain in your genes the entire history of all the Jews who ever lived, and if you found one Jewish woman and started all over would you be able to repeat all of past history? But if you could, wouldn't it mean that because the past is finite and you were multiplying into the future based on the past that the future would be finite also?

I spent my last evening in the Home watching TV with the other boys. Years from now will I become somebody so that they'll want to say they knew me now? Will they remember what I looked like today?

Nobody will be able to explain me.

DANIEL GINSBERG HEREBY DECLARES THAT THE MAIMONIDES HOME FOR JEWISH BOYS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS ACTIONS. ANYTHING WHICH MAY BEFALL HIM, GOOD OR ILL, IS DUE TO THE EXERCISE OF HIS OWN FREE WILL.

I am grateful to the Home for having fed, clothed, and educated me for the past 5½ years of my life.

Possessions left in my locker if and when it is opened shall be divided among the other boys with 100% orphans getting 1st choice and those with 1 living parent 2nd choice.

I forgive my mother.

Yesterday Dr. Fogel told me about land he inherited from his father who was a Zionist. He said that he and his father agreed on only one thing about land, that it was the only thing God wasn't creating more of!

What I'd like to do: learn to play a musical instrument, either the flute or the violin. I don't think I'm too old to start. Years ago they used to have bands in the Home but I didn't see Charlie's picture in any of their photos.

I was born near the spot where I 1st saw him but I've never been outside of New York City in my entire life as far as I know.

Remember to look up: Herzl and baptism.

Now that I'm leaving I can say what my great desire is someday: to have friends who will be like brothers! Since my stay here was only temporary and the Home itself will soon be gone, it's a good thing I didn't become attached to anyone here who I might not see again for years and years. It got easier to say nothing to them as the years went by.

If I was a real genius it wouldn't be so hard for me to memorize things.

It's easy for me to figure out why I want friends like brothers, but the reasons don't matter to me. I believe that my chance will come soon and that when it does I will have a great deal more to offer another person because of the way I've been saving myself.

DANNY GINSBERG WILL SAY NOW THIS 1 TRUTH THAT EVERYTHING HE TELLS YOU IS A LIE.

From where the boy sat, on the hill above the playing fields, the grass appeared to be black. There was, he knew, a physical explanation: the sun, setting in the west, was in his eyes so that he squinted, and the breeze, coming from behind him, was blowing the blades of grass away, in shadows, all down the slope of the hill. The soft blackness, coming after lush green, comforted him.

Beyond the playing fields, upon which boys were working out in football uniforms and girls were playing field hockey, the school itself seemed cold and beautiful to him. There were no turrets, no towers, no old stone, no shadowy recesses: it was all rectangular and shining, and this pleased him. He imagined that he was sitting just inside the rim of an enormous plastic dome, his back grazed by its hard smoothness; the frantic yelling of the girls and the chants of the boys, rising to him, were buffered by the enclosure so that, reaching his ears, the sharpness of each isolated cry was gone. The dome seemed to be protecting them all from harm.

He thought he could hear the panting and feel the warm breath of each individual girl. They wore blue skirts and white blouses; those who sat on the sidelines, or watched the boys practicing, wore blue blazers with red and silver emblems on the left breast pockets.

Some of the boys were pushing blocking tackles, grunting like cattle. Other boys stood along the sidelines, and on the edges of the fields, away from the games, he saw boys and girls with each other, lounging on the grass. He wondered if they would kiss in front of their teachers.

He heard a rustling and his heart thumped. He didn't want to be caught or questioned before he had done things his way. He stood and lifted his green sack, shielding his eyes with his left hand. He saw her skirt first, and then her thigh—the knee was lifted and bent slightly. She had her back against a thick birch tree and the boy held on to the tree with both hands as he pressed into her. Their blazers were folded into one another like rich drapery, and he saw the boy's hand move underneath her school emblem. Behind the calf her ankle gripped the boy's leg. Their school-books were scattered around them among the ferns.

He watched them for a while, mesmerized by the rotating motion of their heads as they kissed one another. His heartbeats came more slowly, and he felt calm again. He didn't, he realized, even feel jealous of them. They seemed to kiss so quietly that he actually felt that he wanted to be able to tell them how happy he was for them….