The Long Run (23 page)

“Do you have to shun him even in chapel?” Bug's hand is a propeller.

“Certainly, Mr. Bradbury. Shunning takes place twenty-four hours a day. There are no exceptions. Shunning should take place
everywhere
, everywhere, especially in chapel. A thief is being punished. Where better to do justice than in the House of the Lord?”

Poor Brookes keeps staring at the floor, holding the sneakers until Brother Mansfield orders Whelan to come and retrieve them. Then he commands Brookes to stand by the exit as we pass by in single file.

“Do not look at him, boys,” he shouts. “Ignore him.
He does not exist
. He is a very bad boy. A thief. And thieves must be punished.”

As Wilson, who weighs twice as much as Brookes, approaches the exit, Brother Mansfield orders Brookes to step forward. Littlejohn walks into him, knocking him to the floor. Kavanagh, rather than step on Brookes, hops over him.

“Do not hop, Kavanagh. Walk on him. He does not exist. It is his business to get out of
your
way. Not the other way around. Remember, he is being shunned. He does not exist.” The next boy, O'Connor, walks on Brookes's leg as he squirms along the floor, moving out of the path of the steady stream of boys.

“Well done, O'Connor. That's the stuff. Extra canteen privileges for you. Carry on, boys. Do not look at him.
Shun him
. He does not exist until the end of the month. Until the end of the month, Mr. Brookes is invisible.”

As I walk by, I sneak a glance. Brookes sits on the floor with his head on his raised knees, crying.

“That's a taste of what we're in for if they find out about the wine,” Ryan whispers on the way out.

“Or the marathon,” Murphy adds.

“Shuddup!” Blackie says.

Blackie gets really upset when anyone is shunned. So does Father Cross. Oberstein hates shunning. “By mercy and truth and fear of the Lord is iniquity purged,” Oberstein says when anyone is shunned. Oberstein seems to have a Jewish saying for almost everything these days. Blackie has taken to calling him Rabbi. We learned in religion class the other day that it means “teacher.” Oberstein has really started taking his Jewish roots seriously. He's reading all kinds of Jewish stuff. He's a library prefect, so he gets to order books occasionally. He ordered
The Young People's Jewish Encyclopedia
, and he keeps it under his bed and reads it all the time. He also has books about the Second World War, the Holocaust, Auschwitz and Dresden and Bergen-Belsen, the German concentration camps, which he reads a lot because his grandfather was at Auschwitz.

“Hitler murdered six million Jews,” he reads from the big encyclopedia. “Just imagine—that's almost half of Canada. He tried to kill every one of us. He tried to kill us all.” He looks downcast and sad as his silky hair falls in front of his eyes, which are hazy with the horror of history. And you feel sad just looking at him. He purses his lips, blinking a tear, the way he did the day when Brookes was shunned. He closes the big book and flops into a chair, twisting his arms tight around himself as if constricting into a knot. His chubby face is the soundboard of silence. After a long time he says, “They've booted us out of everywhere. We were booted out of Spain and Portugal in 1497. That's when Cabot discovered Newfoundland. Maybe we came here. We wound up wandering everywhere. That's why there's the expression Wandering Jew and Wandering Gypsy. The gypsies were booted out of everywhere too. Hitler killed off a lot of gypsies in his concentration camps too. Somehow we wound up in Germany in the 1700s and began speaking German instead of Hebrew. When we were thrown out of Germany, we were scattered all over Europe. We kept the German language. But we wrote it in Hebrew characters. It's neat. It's called transliteration. It gave us a new language. Yiddish, which is German written in Hebrew. That's so amazing.” His face lights up, he is so proud of what his people have done.

And he's really taking prayer seriously. “The world exists for the sake of three things, and three things only,” he says, “charity, study of Torah, and prayer.” He says this matter-of-factly, the way you'd say the Mainline bus will take you to Victoria Park via Elizabeth Avenue and Water Street. And he's forever quoting from the Old Testament: “Whatsoever is lofty shall bow down before thee
. . .
” His favorite when he is angry: “The Lord shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.”

He prays like crazy, about everything. Before meals, before bed, before study hall. He has a Popsicle, he says a prayer. Different prayers for different occasions. Before eating, he quotes David, before a game of frozen tag, Jeremiah, before study hall, Isaiah or Job. He has prayers of thanks and prayers for good luck and bad. And before every night run he places his hands upon Blackie's head, pressing his afro ever so gently—like it's a soft sponge—and prays, “And now I'll speak as the Lord spoke out of the burning bush on Mount Sinai. Let my words enter your hearts. Give them wings, Lord, that they may fly.”

In a weird way, Oberstein's prayers seem more meaningful, more real, than the hurried litanies that pass for prayers during Mass and rosary and Benediction at chapel. Something special happens when Oberstein prays. I don't know what it is. But we all feel it. Maybe his getting religious is wearing off on us.

We were at the Bat Cave last Saturday, and Blackie asked Oberstein to tell us a story, and Oberstein started talking about creation. It wasn't really a story. It was kinda dull. It was the Jewish idea of creation, which he'd just read about. He was really excited telling us about it.

“Since God is all—
everything
—and He is
everywhere
, omnipresent and omnipotent, as it says in our catechism, he had to create a space that didn't exist in order to make something different from Himself . . . A big, special, empty space! What the Book of Genesis calls
the void
. It's like clearing off your desk in between periods. To get ready for the next class.”

Blackie looked at me and shrugged.

“It's simple,” Oberstein continued, “like cutting a circle in a piece of paper and taking that white circle and cutting it into a million tiny pieces and dropping them back into the hole. Dontcha get it?”

Blackie slouched in his chair and yawned.

“Sounds like
Alice in Wonderland
,” I said, having just finished the comic.

“It is!” Oberstein shouted. “It's like we learned in science about the stars. A star collapses in on itself. That's what God did. Only he blew back some of himself. What the Bible calls
light
, into the void.”

“Come off it, Oberstein,” I said. “We don't know for certain that's what happened.”

“We don't know for certain that's what happened,” he mimics sarcastically. He rolls his eyes mockingly and sneers. “Maybe it's not scientific, but what's amazing is that the Jewish rabbis thought all about this thousands of years ago.
Thousands of years
, Carmichael.”

Blackie yawned and closed his eyes.

“It's so simple. An idiot could understand. God created the world by stepping back from himself and making a void and then pouring himself into the darkness.

I looked at Blackie, expecting a sarcastic comment, but he was asleep.

“I dunno, Oberstein,” I said. “That sounds pretty crazy to me. It isn't like the questions and answers in our catechism. It's more like Rod Serling's
Twilight Zone
.”

He just laughed and said, “What can you expect from a Gentile?”

And he's taken to wearing a yarmulke. Father Cross made it for him out of black crepe. If he forgets to wear it, Bug always drawls, “Forget yer yam-ah-kah?” Once Oberstein lost it and paid a crier to announce a canteen reward if anyone found it. And it worked. Brother McCann calls it his beanie. “Take that beanie off in class, Oberstein,” McCann says.

He's learning an awful lot about the Talmud. There's all kinds of stuff about it in the
Encyclopedia
. The Talmud has really big pages, and in a little square in the corner of the page is the original Talmud. There's an L-shaped margin, and all around this square are comments written by different people. Really smart Jewish guys. It's a really important book. It has been passed down through the ages and discussed to death. Oberstein says he wishes there was a synagogue, that's a Jewish church, so he could go there and talk Talmud with the rabbis. There are no modern comments on the Talmud. The comments stopped in the olden days, the Middle Ages. It sounds like a wonderful book. Oberstein would love to get his hands on a copy. It contains hundreds of questions on lots of topics, even meaningless stuff. And it has really wise sayings, like “Better blind of eye than blind of heart.” But the Talmud has never been completely translated, which is strange for such an important book. Oberstein was really surprised to find out that it hasn't been fully translated. He's trying to find the address of a rabbi, so he can write a letter asking why. He says he'd love to meet a rabbi and talk Talmud.

“I'd love to add a question or two,” he says.

“Like what, Oberstein?” I say. “You're just a kid. What could you possibly add to the Jewish holy book?”

“Well, let's talk Talmud. For one thing, it says we should not work on the Sabbath, the day of rest. I would like to know if playing frozen tag or going fishing is considered work. And if it is, what if I got you to hold my fishing pole, would that be the same as me working?”

“Would I bait the hook?”

“Yes.”

“Would I cast the line?”

“Yes.”

“Would I reel in the fish when we caught one?”

“'Course,” Oberstein says, “but it would be my fish.”

“Then I don't know why it would be considered work for you if I'm doing the baiting and casting and reeling in the fish when we catch one.”

But Oberstein says it's not that easy. That's why his people have the Talmud. He says it's a question of
ethics
.

“What's ethics?” I ask.

“Right and wrong,” Oberstein says. “Is it right for a person to pay another person to do something wrong for him? Would it be right for you to hire Murphy to steal something from Ryan for you, for example?”

“No. That wouldn't be right. That would be wrong. It would definitely be wrong.”

“Then why would it be right for you to work my fishing pole to catch my fish and for me not to consider it working on the Sabbath? Work was done. A fish was caught.”

“Because I was working the pole, Oberstein. Not you
. . .
”

“But it was my pole and my fish,” Oberstein says. “I would gain from your work the same as if I had done the work. Which would make it my work, wouldn't it?”

It doesn't matter what I say, Oberstein makes minced meat of my words. I think I am being very logical, and
wham
, he lowers the boom. He starts arguing like he's been writing commentaries for the Talmud down through the centuries. So I give up and say, “Oberstein, you're right. I might be holding the pole, and I might be catching the fish, but you're getting the reward, which is why we work for the fish in the first place. So I agree. It would be considered work.” Then Oberstein pushes back his little black yarmulke and says, “Not necessarily.” And he begins with the opposite argument.

It's nerve-wracking. You can't win for losing when Oberstein gets into one of his Talmud moods.

It's a cold morning as we wait for Blackie out by the incinerator, longing to fire it up. We're like breathing dragons. The air is so cold you can reach out and touch the next guy's breath. Soon we will be running through snow-covered fields. The sun is about an hour from rising, and the feeling of first light is a force that draws us together. Murphy lights a cigarette and passes it around. We all take a puff even though Blackie has forbidden smoking during training. There is little difference between the cigarette smoke and our breathing out the morning air. Murphy passes around a blob of Vaseline he has stolen from the infirmary. We all scoop a few fingers full and rub it on the insides of our thighs to prevent chafing. We huddle together smoking as Ryan cracks a few jokes. He's in a good mood, which is rare for him at this hour. Perhaps it's his new canvas sneakers. Blackie appears in the distance, a shadow swimming toward us, waving his arms, telling us the coast is clear. Murphy flicks the cigarette into the incinerator, and we begin the morning running ritual. As we break into our groups, Blackie hands Brookes a bit of hardtack. Everyone's being extra nice to Brookes now that he's being shunned.

Shorty Richardson takes out the coil of rope, and we position ourselves for stringing. Blackie takes a flashlight and the lead. We begin lurching along, eyes intent upon the worn path, searching for holes or other obstacles beneath the light dusting of snow.