by Adam Levin
Your Student,
Ben Brodsky
Miss Pinge was peeling a spotted banana. She held it close to her face to hear the hiss of the skin tearing. In the middle waiting-chair, where I fell in love with June, a thin kid wearing tzitzit and a black fedora was chewing on the ends of his peyes. I wanted to be dressed just like him, but couldn’t for another two years and seven months, when I would become a man. My father didn’t want me to dress like a Hasid, or even wear a keepah—he didn’t say these things, but it was easy to tell—and I had to honor him. Once I was a man, I would still have to honor him, but not at the cost of breaking the Law. My father used to be Hasidic himself, and that is why I thought for a second that I knew the kid in the middle waiting chair—it was from a picture in our family room. It’s a picture of my dad, at his bar-mitzvah, sitting on a stone bench in the sun outside the Kotel in Jerusalem. He’s not chewing on his peyes in the picture, but wind from the Al Aqsa side is blowing the left one against his lips, so it looks like he’s chewing it. I missed my father, even though I just talked to him on the phone. I wanted to have lunch with him. My old schools were much closer to my house, and sometimes he’d come by with my mom and take me out for lunch. The last time was my third—my second-to-last—day at Martin Luther King Middle School. My dad was working at home and my mom had a sudden cancellation, so they took me to Foxies in Skokie. We had cheese fries and root-beer from a glass bottle and my mom was going to let me skip the rest of the day but my dad said I couldn’t and he drove me back.
I tried to snap the leaf from Brodsky’s fan-tree in half and it folded. I didn’t want it anymore. What I couldn’t break was already broken. The thin kid was looking at it, so I set it on his knee. He said the H’Adama blessing. Then he put the leaf between his lips and bit a piece off the tip, chewed.
The kid said to me, “I am Eliyahu.” He swallowed some leaf and took another bite. “So that it shouldn’t turn brown,” he said. It sounded like a question and he nodded to the leftover piece = “The leaf agrees.” He held it just under his chin, like Miss Pinge and her banana. “You’re Jewish?” he said.
I’m an Israelite, I said. I said, Does that taste good?
“You say you’re an Israelite.” His hat was tipped to the right, but not rakishly. Rakishly has to be on purpose. He put the leaf to his lips, then took it away. “It tastes green,” he said. “I’m also an Israelite.” He bit the leaf and gave it another nod. “And so it seems we’re both Israelites,” he said.
I wasn’t crazy for the whole “I’m weird, don’t you want to know why?” bit he was working with that leaf, but I hadn’t ever heard of an Orthodox kid in a public junior high school, plus I liked the way he talked.
Miss Pinge drew a hole in the air with the banana. She said, “Eli’s a new student here. He’s originally from the Big Apple.”
“It’s Eliyahu, already,” said Eliyahu. “Eliyahu is the name my parents gave me. And it’s not the Big Apple. Even if it was, what a shmaltzy thing to call a place. Would you like I said Miss Pinge from the Windy City?” He talked like an old man. He said, “I’m Eliyahu of Brooklyn.”
Miss Pinge said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say that.”
“What does it mean you don’t know how to say it? Ay Lee Yah Hoo. What’s so hard?”
“I’ll try to say it correctly,” Miss Pinge said.
I cocked my head at her = You’re being very accommodating.
But then I thought: He’s right. How hard is it to say Eliyahu?
I said, I’m Gurion.
He said, “Gurion? Your parents named you for a politician or a wild animal or what?”
Gur means cub. Like the son of a lion.
Are you good at Hebrew? I asked Eliyahu.
Miss Pinge said to me, “You better head back to the Cage.”
“What is this woman talking about?” Eliyahu said in Hebrew.
I answered in English. I said, It’s a classroom for B.D.’s. I’m attention deficient.
“People ignore you,” he said.
I told him, Ha! You’re smart. I told him, My conduct is disorderly and I’m hyper. Also I explode intermittently.
Eliyahu sat back and touched the top of his hat. “That’s not funny,” he said.
I said, You explode, too?
He said, “I asked you nicely.”
I’m sorry, I said.
I didn’t know why I was apologizing, but I didn’t want Eliyahu to be hurt by me. I liked how he seemed to assume we were friends. I thought it should always be that way among Israelites.
“It’s okay,” he said. He sucked on the leaf.
Pinge set her banana on the desk so she could write me a hall-pass. A hall-pass was one of my favorite things to have at Aptakisic. You could go almost anywhere with it. You held a hall-pass out in front of you and the guards left you alone, even if they’d seen you walk past them six times already. There were a lot of rules in the arrangement, but the guards only needed to follow one: If you have to think about a person, send him to the Office.
A hall-pass was the only thing that would prevent thinking in a guard if they saw you in the hall and it wasn’t lunch or a passing-period; even if you were throwing up or bleeding out of the head, they would send you to the Office if you didn’t have one. The guards were like fingers, like robots. Like the Angel of Death that spread the tenth plague in Egypt. God sent it to kill the first-born sons of Egyptians so that the Israelites would be freed from bondage, but the Israelites still had to put sheep’s blood on their doors so that the angel would pass over their houses. If there was no sheep’s blood on the door, the angel would kill your first-born son even if you were an Israelite because even though it was one of God’s fingers, it was still just a finger, and a finger’s just a robot, and all the robot knew was to kill first-borns where there isn’t sheep’s blood.
Miss Pinge held the pass out to me between her pointer and swear. Her fingers were trembling, and hands remind me of dinosaurs when I stare at them, so I snatched the pass and looked away. It smelled like banana. I could go anywhere in the building. No one could touch me.
I asked Miss Pinge to change a dollar. She gave me three quarters and a stack of five nickels. Eliyahu chomped up the rest of the leaf. “Shalom,” he said. I said it back. It made me warm to say it. I zipped my hoodie anyway, and pulled the hood on.
Then I left to retrieve my weapon and smash the face of the gym clock for June.
Floyd the Chewer was the guard of the side entrance. When Floyd was young, he played a season of football for the Chicago Bears. He got cut fast and now he wore a Bears iron-on next to the security patch on his shirt and carried a plastic cheering cone from Notre Dame, where he went to college. The cone had a loop of skinny rope laced through a bracket near its mouth-hole and was attached to Floyd’s wrist at all times. Jelly Rothstein’s sister Ruth had interviewed Floyd in the “Pow-Wow” section of the Aptakisic News that October. She asked him why he always talked to students through the cone, and Floyd told her he hoped to one day get a job in the crowd-control profession and that the cone helped him practice. “Like how you got a wiffle-bat for wiffleball to practice baseball,” he said, “my cheering cone is like a wiffle-megaphone for Aptakisic, but to practice for a riot.” Then Ruth asked him if he minded that people called him the Chewer, and Floyd said that the only thing he loved more than being called the Chewer was the flavor of the cubes of the tasty grape gum he always kept packed in his cheek. But Floyd was a robot and a liar. If you called him the Chewer he’d give you the finger. It was against the rules, so he’d scratch his nose with it, or his chin. And his dream of crowd-control masked another dream: spit-control. Floyd talked through the cone because he couldn’t manage his saliva. He sprayed whenever he made p and b sounds. You could hear the spit buzz the cone’s plastic when it slapped against the insides. You could see it drip fakegrape purple out the widehole when the cone was dangling off his wrist and you were following him to the Office after he just finishe
d yelling at you for a while.
But I didn’t need to see Floyd, anyway. I didn’t need to go past the side entrance to get to my locker. I needed to go past the front entrance, and that was guarded by Jerry the Deaf Sentinel, who wasn’t deaf, but never listened. He just sat on a stool in a glass booth and kept a pencil he didn’t use in the space between his head and his hat-band. I disliked Jerry a fraction less than I disliked Floyd, but it wasn’t so easy to figure out why.
Both of them had a condition my mom taught me to recognize as the pogromface = their faces expressed whatever emotion the most conspicuously powerful guy in the room was expressing, and this expression would remain on their faces until another conspicuously powerful guy entered the room feeling a different emotion than the first. My mother’s beliefs about the pogromfaced, though, differed from mine, however slightly. Whereas she thought them cowards filled with bloodlust, and useful only for the commission of atrocities, I, while I also thought of them as cowards, believed the pogromfaced empty of lust, available to accomplish any number of objectives at which men in power might choose to aim them. Still, we both agreed you couldn’t pogrom without them. But that isn’t to say they’d be able to execute pogroms on their own: though often incited, they never incited. And it isn’t to say they were all the same, either—at least not exactly. The distinction, for example, between even the first man to brick a shop window and the second—or the distinction between either of them and the ones who, having grown bored with bricks, make Molotov cocktails; let alone that between any of the above and the ones who impede, however briefly, their friends’ ignitions of the Molotov cocktails in order to prevent the marring of the sheen of the loot not yet taken—is no doubt relevant to Adonai, for all distinctions are relevant to Adonai, minute as they may seem, even if their relevance is totally lost on me and my mother, or any other human being. And when I looked at Floyd I could see him in Ukraine, stuffing fish into the flies of a murdered fishmonger’s pants, and when I looked at Jerry I could see him right beside Floyd, stuffing fish into the mouth of the same murdered fishmonger, and I didn’t know which deed was worse, though one of them surely had to be worse, at least by a fraction, but I did know I disliked Jerry a fraction less than I disliked Floyd, and I was all but certain that neither of them had ever been to Ukraine. So this is what I finally decided: It’s better to be able to write something down than it is to amplify your spitty voice = if you have to have a prop, better a pencil than a Notre Dame cheering cone. And Floyd had the cheering cone, and Jerry the pencil. And that is why I disliked Jerry a little bit less.
I showed him my pass and said, This is my sheep’s blood.
Jerry nodded. The nod dispatched me.
When I opened my locker, I blocked it with my body and fished my pennygun from the spy-pocket of my IDF fatigue jacket, which used to be my mom’s. The gun was a new design. Instead of making it with the sawed-off top of a regular-mouthed soda bottle, I sawed off a wide-mouthed soda bottle. Also, I reinforced the balloon-skin that covered the pouring hole in order to prevent any slippage or tearing the extra circumference might foment.
I was pretty sure the new gun could project quarters, but I couldn’t be certain because it was still a virgin. I’d only made it that morning, and the el-train was so late the schoolbus came thirty seconds after I got to the Frontier, where I would have otherwise conducted field tests while I waited. And that is why I hadn’t changed the name of it from pennygun to quartergun yet, because I didn’t want to risk disappointment. I figured I’d mostly use it for pennies anyway. Quarters cost more.
To get to the gym, I had to walk past the Deaf Sentinel again.
I held out my pass and held out a quarter and I said to him in Hebrew, I’m gonna break the glass on the gym clock, Sentinel. I said, I’m gonna use this currency to bring down the time-teller.
Jerry nodded.
Sent: June 9, 2006, 6:09 AM Central-Standard Time
Subject: RE: Fwd: Important
From: [email protected] (Avel Salt, Solomon Schechter School)
To: [email protected] (me)
So maybe, for effect, I exaggerated a little. Good Shabbos.
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Important
Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 6:05 AM CST
Well, I didn’t cry THAT much, though. Good Shabbos.
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Important
Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 5:59 AM CST
I wrote only the truth.
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Important
Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 5:57 AM CST
Rabbi Salt,
I won’t change my mind, but thank you for writing so many nice things about me. I will not forget. And I’ll see you in a week.
Your Student,
Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
----Original Message Follows----
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Important
Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 12:11 AM CST
Boychic,
Following is what I sent them. If you change your mind, I’ll post it on every listserv in the world.
In other news, I’m leaving town for a conference on Sunday morning, but I’ll make sure to be back for your party. 10 years old, kiddo! That’s a decade. That’s big.
Your Friend,
Avel
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Avel Salt
To: Alan Kalisch of Northside Hebrew Day School
Richard Feldman of Northbrook Hebrew Day School
Date: Friday, 9 June 2006 12:03 AM Central-Standard Time
Subject: RE: Fwd: Important
Headmaster Rabbi Kalisch:
It is a shameful thing for a man, among colleagues, to slander a nine-year-old boy. It is doubly shameful when the man and his colleagues are teachers, and the boy the man’s student; triply shameful when the teachers are rabbis and the student a Jew. And it is infinitely shameful, Headmaster, it is infamously shameful, it is Herodianly repugnant when the result of a rabbi’s slander, let alone its very aim, is to prevent a Jewish student from properly studying Torah. But for you to have slandered Gurion Maccabee, a student already ten times the teacher you’ll ever be and ten-thousand times the scholar—that is unforgivable, beyond shame, beyond repugnance. It is a travesty.
I would like to see harm come to you, Rabbi, and this troubles my soul because I know you must be damaged, for only the damaged can act as you have acted, and the damaged need our mercy, not our contempt.
It is with mercy, then, however strained, that I advise you to put aside your goyische equestrianism in favor of studying dogs. If you study with any rigor, you will surely come across those, like you, who are damaged; and you’ll note these damaged dogs keep their heads down whenever they’re aware that you’re seeing them. Will you know why that is, Alan? why it is that a damaged dog keeps its head down when you watch it? why it lowers its eyes when it passes you on the street? A damaged dog lowers its eyes when it sees you coming, Alan, because it mistakes you for a man, and a damaged dog, unlike a broken-legged horse, knows of man’s capacity for mercy. A damaged dog lowers its eyes among men lest it provoke the mercy men exercise on damaged animals. Forget your horses, Kalisch. Horses can’t teach you what you need to learn.
/>
The rest of you:
There’s at least one of you who isn’t wondering how the email in question got leaked. Being but a lowly, however tenured, principal of Judaic Studies, I don’t know how to find out which one. I do know that the email was sent to me by my friend Michael Schloss, who received it off a listserv whose manager is based in Jerusalem. As you will see below, the Fwd “originated” from [email protected] and then passed through two other listservs before getting to Michael. Apparently, one of you possesses this FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL account and you cut-and-pasted the original to cover your tracks. I know it wasn’t Kalisch, for although a mamzer, it was clearly not his intention to commit a worldwide tarnishing-by-association of the names of the other boys mentioned (an assured outcome, that tarnishing, by the way, as well as its worldwideness, for how many Fwd’s must the email have been through by now? how many people on either of the listservs to which it has been posted?). As for you, Unger, you’re vindictive enough, true, and I’m sure you’re raucously celebrating the takedown of the nine-year-old in question, but you’re at once prideful and naked of anything that even resembles savvyness and I doubt you’d have thought to hide your identity.