Dreidels on the Brain (18 page)

“What happened to you?” said Brian during recess as we ate our cookies. “All during class I was trying to tell you about the new blue Corvette Stingray I saw, and you didn't say a thing! It's like you're a zombie! You limp around like one, and your glasses are all bent up. And what happened to your hand? Did you get into a fight?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of.”

“Cool! Who was it? Just tell me, I'll beat the tar out of 'em.”

“God.”

“God?” he said, shaking his head. “Are you crazy? Big mistake. You can't pick a fight with God. You're on your own.”

“I didn't pick a fight—God did.”

“Doesn't matter. You're never gonna win. What's it about?”

“My dad's in the hospital,” I said.

“Again?” he said. “Wasn't he just there a couple months ago? What are they doing? Did they forget something?”

“They're not doing anything.”

“Then why did he go?”

“He was supposed to have an operation. To get his hip bones coated in gold, which would have been great. But then he went to sleep and didn't wake up.”

There was a long pause as Brian considered this. “You mean he's dead?”

“Not quite. He's in a coma, but we're not supposed to say the word.”

“A coma? Oh, man, comas are bad! I saw this news program about a guy who was in a coma for twelve years! And then, when he finally woke up, he died!”

“Thanks, Brian.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“They think my dad will wake up sooner than that.”

“Maybe it'll be like Rip Van Winkle, and when he wakes up, he'll have a beard to the floor and grandchildren!” Then
Brian got this serious look on his face. “Wait a minute. If your dad's in a coma, what are you doing here?”

“I don't know.”

“Shouldn't you be at the hospital, waiting for him to wake up? Or die?”

“Probably,” I said. “I don't know what to do.”

“Wow. Total bummer.”

Brian's loyal, but not very reassuring. The bell rang and I went off to math class.

My math teacher, Mr. DeGuerre, is a square. Really. I don't just mean the kind of square that hippies talk about—though he's that too. But Mr. DeGuerre is
actually
a square, or at least his head is. He has hardly any chin, making the bottom of his face square, and a perfect flat-top haircut. Not a crew cut, like the one I got stuck with, but a little longer in some parts, so it's perfectly level. You could rest a platter on his head and it would stay. In fact, you could probably turn him on his head and balance him that way, with no hands. Then the thin black tie he always wears—with a white short-sleeved shirt—would hang down in front of his face, bisecting it, as they say in math, into two rectangles. Today, though, he was wearing a Santa hat, which stuck up like an isosceles triangle, turning his head into an irregular pentagon—with a pom-pom on top.

“All right, class,” he said, standing in front of us as he shook a cup filled with dice. “As you all know, today is Thursday. If this were a normal Thursday, we would be reviewing for the test on Friday. Given, however, that this is not a normal Thursday . . .”

That's how he talks, like a machine, if a machine could talk. The whole class was looking at the cup in his hand, and we knew what was going to happen: math dice. That's this game he invented that we usually play on Fridays after the test.

“. . . and because it is so close to vacation, and it is no longer possible to get you to do any work, and because someone decided that we would have school on Monday . . .”

Even though he sounds like a robot, I like him. And I like math. I guess I like him
because
I like math. That's because math is easier than everything else. You follow a bunch of rules and you get answers that are either right or wrong. If you get a wrong answer, you figure out what mistake you made, then fix it and get the right answer. The rules don't change, like they do in spelling. Nor does it boil down to opinion or propaganda, like social studies.

Best of all, math doesn't depend on God's mood. It's not like God wakes up and says “I'm tired of twenty-three and thirty-eight adding together to make sixty-one. Today, just to mess with Joel and his family, I'm going to mix it up,
make twenty-three and thirty-eight add up to
seventy
-one. Let's see how they deal with it.”

Nope. Math is straightforward, and so is math dice. Mr. DeGuerre divides us into teams, and we take turns answering questions. Before each round he rolls the dice; the higher the number, the harder the question. When we get to a question that no one can answer, Mr. DeGuerre always says, “Any more guesses? Or shall we ask the Computer Who Wears Tennis Shoes?” That's his nickname for me. It's from a movie a couple years back about this guy who had a super-fast brain. As nicknames go, it's not bad—and a
lot
better than my last name. But Mr. DeGuerre is the only one who uses it, so it doesn't help much. When I answer the question, my team gets the points, which is exactly the opposite of what happens in basketball. And that's why I love math dice. Usually.

But today, as he stood there shaking the dice in the cup, my mind wandered to this poster I once saw of Albert Einstein—who was, of course, Jewish. He was also really funny-looking, with hair sticking up all over the place like he didn't care. But somehow it all worked for him. Maybe that's because he was a super-genius. In the poster, though, he looked even crazier than usual, staring right at the camera, sticking out his tongue. Printed at the bottom was something he'd said: “God does not play dice with the universe.”

I liked that idea as soon as I saw the poster. I thought it meant that there was an order to things, that they don't just happen randomly. If Albert Einstein said that, and he was so smart, it must be true.

Now, though, as Mr. DeGuerre rolled the dice and asked math questions, I thought about my dad in the hospital and began to wonder: What if that's
not
what Einstein meant? What if he meant that God is actually playing some
other
game?

I had already tried playing dreidel with God—that didn't work. Maybe checkers? Or One, Two—Bango? Scrabble? Or Parcheesi, which isn't that fun to play, but is fun to say.

But those are just board games. What if God is going for bigger stakes? Maybe basketball? Toss the universe in, sometimes you make it, sometimes it hits the rim and bounces out—and sometimes it's an air ball, and we go flying through space forever. Or how about mumblety-peg? Kenny showed me that game. You play it with a pocketknife that you throw down, trying to get the point to stick in the ground. If you're crazy, like Kenny's friend Danny Jarlsberg, you throw it at your bare foot, trying to get as close as you can to your toes without hitting them. Once Danny got right between his big toe and his second toe—thwack!

I know that sounds like a crazy game for God to play with the universe, but if you look around, you've got to wonder.

I suspect this is one of those truths you learn when you
grow up. Because Howard is three years older than me, I get a preview of everything that's coming up. It's not like a preview on TV, where they say “Will Batman and Robin escape from the Joker's Spinning Wheel of Death? Tune in next week—same Bat-time! Same Bat-channel!” With Howard, everything he learns becomes a secret that he won't tell Kenny or me. But unlike TV, where you have to wait until next week, we can usually trick Howard into telling us right then.

That's how I found out what happens after you
become
a bar mitzvah and are ready to learn about certain forbidden topics. I used to think that sounded really cool, until one day a couple years ago, just after Howard's bar mitzvah. Kenny and I were working on making armpit farts, and Howard walked in, all grumpy. He's always grumpy, but this was worse than usual. We ignored him and went on making armpit farts and laughing until Howard couldn't take it anymore.

“I don't think you'd be laughing if you knew what the Nazis did to the Jews,” he said.

We stopped the armpit farting.

“What?” I asked.

“When?” said Kenny.

“During The War.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

“I can't tell you about it,” said Howard. “You're too young. But if you knew, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be laughing.”

And he stood there, silent. But Kenny and I had figured out that the way to get Howard to tell us a secret is to pretend we already know.

“Oh, yeah,” said Kenny, “I heard all about the Nazis. They killed a lot of Jews.”

“Yes,” said Howard. “But
how
did they kill us?”

“With machine guns?” I asked.

“Yes, but that's not all. It was much worse than that.”

“I know,” said Kenny. “There were showers.”

“Showers?” I asked. “What?” That made no sense to me, as I had just switched from taking baths to showers, which I liked.

“That's right,” said Howard. “Showers. With poison gas. And when you're older, you'll learn all about it in Hebrew school. Then you won't be laughing.”

There was one of those awkward pauses, the kind that seem to fill my entire life, and then Kenny said, “So it
was
showers, right?”

Howard nodded. “All the Jews were rounded up and they had to stand in a long line. They were hungry and dirty and the guards pointed machine guns at them and shot them if they stepped out of the line. But the guards said, ‘It's okay. After this, you'll get a nice, warm shower!' When everyone went into the shower room, the Nazis locked the doors. But instead of water coming out, there was poison gas!”

“Hey!” I said. “That's what Grandma's always saying! So it's true!”

“No,” Howard said. “Grandma wasn't in Nazi Germany. She was in Poland, years before, where they had pogroms. That's another way they killed the Jews, dragging them through the streets by their beards. But they didn't have poison gas.”

Now I was all confused. And upset. I didn't want to hear any more about the Nazis killing the Jews. But now Howard was on a roll, and there was no stopping him.

“But I wasn't talking about the pogroms,” Howard continued. “I was talking about the Holocaust, and you interrupted me. We saw a movie today. It's one the Nazis made. They actually filmed what they were doing to the Jews! They were going to make a museum about how there used to be Jewish people before they became extinct!

“And in the film you can see all the things they took from the Jews. There was this huge pile of eyeglasses and another big pile of teeth they pulled out because they wanted the gold fillings. The people who were still alive looked like skeletons. There were also dead bodies—and some of them were our relatives!”

“Which ones?” I asked. “Who?”

Howard shook his head. “You don't know them. I don't either. And we never will. Because they're dead.”

That was too horrible to think about.

“But, like I say,” said Howard, “you're too young to know about all this. I shouldn't have even told you, but I had to, because you and Kenny were laughing all the time.”

It was hard to know what to say to that. I felt like I should apologize, but I wasn't sure why or to whom.

“It's okay,” he said to me. “You didn't know. Because you haven't become a bar mitzvah yet. So you don't have to worry about it. You can go on being a happy kid.” And to Kenny, he said, “And your bar mitzvah isn't for another year, so don't worry.”

Howard left, and Kenny and I stood staring at each other, not knowing what to do. Somehow, it didn't seem right to go back to armpit farting, given what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

Until then, I had been looking forward to my bar mitzvah, even though it meant meeting with Cantor Grubnitz. I thought that it would all build up to a party where I'd get checks—and tons of gifts!

But Howard had tipped his cards, something a good magician never does. Now I understood. Your bar mitzvah was the end of your childhood. I could picture the scene with Cantor Grubnitz standing in front of us bar mitzvah kids. “I hope you all enjoyed being children,” he would say, “because that's over. And now it's time to tell you about the horror and suffering of the Jewish people.”

Then he would turn off the lights and play the film. And I would watch relatives I had never known—and would never meet—standing in line to take showers of poison gas, thinking,
Wow, childhood was awful! And that was the good part?

So maybe it's not dice or board games or basketball that God plays with the universe. Maybe it's
bowling
—and we're the pins. God steps up to the line, rolls the ball down the lane, and then . . .

“So, we've finally stumped the computer?”

Everyone was staring at me, waiting.