by Chaim Potok
“What?” he said.
I did not respond. The horse moved slowly along, defecating onto the brownish remnants of an old snowstorm.
“That Larry Grossman is a mean kid,” I said, looking through the chain-link fence.
“Who?” Yaakov Bader said. “That fat kid over there?”
I nodded.
“Is he bothering you, Davey?”
I was quiet.
“Davey?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind. I don’t want to start any trouble.”
My father said to me at supper that night, “I will walk with you to the trolley and then pick you up at the trolley when you come back. You cannot walk the streets alone anymore.”
“But you’ll be walking the streets alone, Papa?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. I saw a strange cruel glint come into his dark eyes. “That might be interesting.”
“Max,” my mother said quietly, her eyes darting about the kitchen.
“Yes?” he said, turning to her. “What, Ruth?”
But she retreated and avoided his gaze and was silent.
“The stinking bastards,” I heard him say as I watched pain and memory crowd themselves into my mother’s nervous eyes. “They brought the poison with them to America and that German maniac now gives them the courage to spread it. They will destroy America like he is destroying Europe.”
“What will you do if they stop you, Papa?” Alex asked.
“That might be interesting,” my father said again. “I know a few things to do.”
My mother put her lower lip between her teeth and sat very quietly, rubbing her right hand back and forth across her apron. Her long dark dry hair had come partly undone from the bun into which she had combed it that morning. She looked fragile; she was now as she had been before my father’s strange illness. It pained me to look upon the taut dry skin of her face, her thin bony nervous fingers, her frightened eyes. She did the housework and wrote letters; that was her life. And she lived in caverns of fear too easily explored by her when events in America called to her mind Lemberg and Bobrek and whatever darkness she had left behind in Europe. She no longer spoke of her parents or of the farm. She wrote letters instead, long letters, in her flowing curving hand. Often I would mail them on my way to school, letters to her parents and relatives and friends in Poland and now letters to distant cousins in Palestine. Dread lay deep in her eyes that night and cast a pallor upon her face as she pondered my father’s response to my brother’s question. I do not know what she saw then.
One day on my way through the crowded corridor at school after recess, I felt a hand grasp my right buttock. I turned sharply and looked into the round fat face of Larry Grossman.
“Hello, crooked nose.” He grinned. “How are your brains today?”
“Let go of me.”
“They feel real good,” he said, squeezing very hard.
“Let go!”
“Sure,” he said, and pushed me against the wall.
None of the students rushing through the corridor had paid attention to us. I stood near the wall, listening to the deep trembling of my heart.
I avoided him carefully during the next few days, but one morning he came up unseen behind me and grabbed my buttocks with both his hands. I was in the usually deserted section of the yard near the fire stairs that ran down the rear of the building. My eyes hurt and I had wanted to be by myself awhile.
“The brains feel skinny today.” He grinned. “Your mama isn’t feeding you.”
“Get your hands off me,” I said, looking frantically around.
He squeezed and grinned. His hands were up under my coat. I wriggled and could not get out of his strong grasp. He was hurting me.
“You bastard,” I suddenly heard myself say. “Get your fat dirty hands off me.”
He released me and spun me around and grabbed the front of my jacket with both hands. “You called me a bastard.”
“Why don’t you leave me alone? I never did anything to you.”
“You called me a bastard.”
“Get your hands off me!”
“Sure,” he said, suddenly grinning. His right hand reached down beneath my jacket to the front of my pants. I felt his fingers on me, squeezing. “Where is it, brains? You got nothing there to squeeze. Such a small petzel for big brains Davey Lurie.”
Through the red haze that suddenly clouded my vision I saw his pinkish features and small eyes and the spittle on his lips. His fingers were on me. He clutched me to him tightly and I felt smothered. I pushed against him and then drew back my foot and kicked him with all my strength on his shin. I felt the metal-capped toe of my shoe strike the bone and heard him grunt with pain and surprise and suddenly I was free. “You fucking bastard!” I heard him shout as I turned. “What did you do? Oh God, you broke my leg!” I fled, terrified, to the crowded section of the yard. Moments later, I saw him limping along near the fire stairs. I leaned against the chain-link fence. The wind pierced my jacket to my bare skin. I felt my skin crawling. It was a long time before I could stop trembling. My head hurt.
I stopped going off by myself and stayed close to Yaakov Bader. From time to time I could see Larry Grossman watching me, in the corridor, in the school yard. I was grateful he did not live on my street.
Saul asked me one Shabbat afternoon in March how my work with Mr. Bader was coming along and wasn’t I afraid to walk the streets alone at night.
“My father walks with me. And the streets in Mr. Bader’s neighborhood are okay. I’m more afraid of the goyim in the yeshiva than outside.” And I told him in a quiet voice about Larry Grossman.
He stared at me through his lenses, a look of revulsion on his face.
There was a long silence. We were in his room. A truck rolled by across the red-brick paving of the street. Alex sat on a chair, reading.
“I can’t understand him, Saul. He must be sick.”
“You ought to tell the principal.”
“He’ll deny it.”
“The principal will believe you, Davey.”
“I don’t want to make trouble, Saul. I just keep away from him. He won’t bother me when I’m near Yaakov.”
“It’s disgusting,” Saul muttered.
I sat down on his bed. There was the familiar pain inside my eyes. But I did not feel feverish. I covered my eyes with my arms.
“Are you feeling all right, Davey?” I heard Saul ask.
“My eyes hurt a little.”
“Why don’t you lie down for a while?”
“I can’t understand why he hates me, Saul. I never did anything to him.”
“The world is full of people like that, Davey.”
“Eddie Kulanski at least hates me because I’m Jewish.”
“Should I tell your mother you don’t feel well?”
“It’s a strange feeling to know there’s someone who hates you and is waiting to hurt you and you never did anything to him.” I looked into the darkness inside my eyes. “I can’t understand it, Saul.”
“You better let me get your mother.”
“Saul?” I said after a moment from the darkness inside my eyes.
“Yes, Davey?”
“Why is my father sending your father traveling all over?”
He was silent.
“He went to Washington and Detroit and Chicago. He even took an airplane.”
“It’s for the organization, Davey.”
I was quiet. A flash of pain traveled from my eyes down across my right cheek. “I don’t understand it,” I heard myself say as if from a great distance away. “I never did a thing to him and he hates me. And I don’t know what to do.”
I was ill for a few days after that. When I returned to school I thought I would find out about Larry Grossman and I asked around. He lived about half a mile away on Bathgate Avenue in a welter of shops and pushcarts. His father owned the fish concession in a small market. His mother cooked, did housework, and took care of six children, one of wh
om, a girl, was rumored to be retarded. Larry Grossman had barely made it through each of his years in the yeshiva and had recently been warned he might have to repeat this entire year. He was undisciplined in class; and in the yard, as I watched him during recesses through the next few days, he seemed a wild charging animal, horned and eager to gore. I had no wish to be gored by him. I stayed very close to Yaakov Bader.
But it was impossible to be with Yaakov Bader all the time. I came into the building from the yard one afternoon and went over to the drinking fountain near the students’ bathroom. I was bent over the fountain when I sensed someone behind me. The skin prickled on the back of my neck. I turned and saw Larry Grossman. He had come in from the yard and I had heard nothing. He stood in front of me, blocking the way to the yard door. The corridor was deserted.
“You’re asking questions about me,” he said. He wore a winter cap with the ear flaps up and tied together. His heavy jacket was unbuttoned and I could see the soiled and crumpled collar of his white shirt beneath the dark blue sweater. “Why are you asking questions?”
“Please get out of my way.”
“I don’t like you asking about me.”
“You’re bothering me. Why do you keep bothering me? Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“You know what you are?” he said. “You’re a piece of shit.” He used the Yiddish word.
God in heaven, I thought. Please, please, make him go away.
“I don’t like you because you’re always walking around like such a big shot with your brains.”
I stared at him.
“Lurie with his nose in the air because he’s got a big brain. How about the petzel, Lurie? Is the petzel big, too?” He reached toward me, grinning. “Let’s see the petzel, Lurie.”
I backed away, trembling.
“Who asked you to come into the class, Lurie? You said ‘Hey’ to Joey Younger and right away everyone in the class makes Joey Younger a hero. Because Lurie with the big brain said ‘Hey’ to him. Joey Younger the shmuck. Who asked you?”
The empty corridor echoed faintly with his words.
He moved closer to me, pressing me against the wall near the bathroom. “You piece of shit,” he said, speaking Yiddish. There was white spittle on his lips and his small eyes seemed inflamed. “My father works his behind off to keep me in this yeshiva and I have to sweat like a dog just to pass an exam and you sit in class and don’t even hear what’s going on and you know everything. Even the teachers are afraid of you and your brain. What did you come into the room for? Couldn’t you have talked to him in the yard? Just because he got kicked in the balls by some bastard goy you have to go and make that shmuck Joey Younger a big hero?”
I stared at him and could not fully grasp what he was saying.
“He was my friend,” I said. “We grew up together.”
“You haven’t said two words to him in years. You did it to get even with me.”
“What?”
“You went in and right away everyone said, ‘Even Davey Lurie, Max Lurie’s son, says Joey is a hero.’ You did it to get even with me after all these years, you piece of shit. That’s what you are, Lurie. I know you.”
God in heaven, I thought. Please get me out of here.
The outside door opened and Yaakov Bader stepped into the corridor. Larry Grossman turned his head, suddenly frightened, stepped quickly aside, then crossed the corridor to his room, opposite the bathroom.
“Davey, are you okay?” Yaakov Bader asked.
I came outside with him and leaned my head against the cold bricks of the building. The winter air cooled my burning face.
“Was he bothering you?” Yaakov Bader asked.
“He’s crazy,” I said. Who had spoken to me like that once before? I could not remember. Back in the past. Had it been beneath trees or in the dimness of an apartment? Why would anyone say that to me? Had it been in the zoo or the meadow or the wood? A long time ago. Yes. But I could not remember. “He scares me,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Let me take care of him for you, Davey. I’ll get some of the guys together and we’ll do it today.”
“No. I don’t want anyone to be hurt. No.”
He started to argue with me but the whistle blew and we did not talk of it again because Larry Grossman no longer came near me.
Then, in the middle of that March, Hitler suddenly created a new German army of half a million men, and Mr. Bader told me he would be going to Europe again soon.
“For my job, as your father would put it,” he said quietly and soberly.
“But who will I study with?” I asked, unable to control the sudden childish petulance in my voice. I did not want him to go away now. Not to Germany. Not to the land of the Angel of Death.
“Study by yourself, David,” he said gently.
“But who will answer my questions?”
“Find the answers by yourself. Ask your teachers in school.”
“I don’t like my teachers too much.”
“David, I traveled back and forth very often when I taught Saul.”
“But I thought you would be staying here now for a long time.”
“Yes,” he said. “So did everyone else. But no one thought to ask Hitler and the German General Staff.”
He would be leaving before the summer, he said. In the meantime we would continue to study as always. The hours together with him became precious to me as the months of spring turned the trees on his street green with young life. I walked beneath the trees and thought often of the zoo now, for I began to feel it incredible that I had not seen it again in all the time I had been studying with Mr. Bader. And one Sunday afternoon I took the trolley two hours earlier than usual and rode through the sunny streets to the stop where Saul and I used to get off. I entered the zoo and walked its winding paths and stopped for a drink at one of its fountains. There was a brackish, metallic taste to the water. The paths were narrower than I had remembered them, the asphalt pitted, the edges crumbling here and there into the soft shoulders of earth. Inside the lion pavilion the odor of straw and dung thickened the air and clutched at my throat. The giant cats lounged sleepily behind their bars. They seemed old and weary. I circled the elephant pen and watched a baby elephant huddle close to its mother. I walked on past the deer and camels and came up to the goat pen and saw no young billy goats. Beyond the pen lay the length of path that led to the meadow and the pond and the pine wood and the clearing. The meadow was spotted with patches of dead brown grass; a grayish film clouded the water of the pond. Inside the pine wood I stopped briefly at a fallen tree that lay across the vague curving path; it crawled with ants and looked as if a slight touch of my fingers would cause it to crumble. Tall wild grass grew in the clearing. I turned and went quickly back through the wood and the meadow and the zoo and walked to Mr. Bader’s apartment.
I asked him during the course of the afternoon why he had so many German books in his library.
“Those are books by great scholars,” he said.
“But the Germans are the enemies of the Jews,” I said.
“Not much more than the French and a lot less than the Poles and Russians,” he said. “Until Hitler.”
Were some of the German books about the Bible? I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But they study it differently from the way we do.”
Had he studied them in a college or a university?
“Yes,” he said.
There was a silence. He peered at me curiously from behind his desk.
“What’s the matter, David?”
I was quiet.
“Are you becoming ill?”
I said I did not think I was becoming ill. “Did you ever know my dead uncle?”
His eyes indicated surprise at the question. “No,” he said.
“I want to know who he was,” I said. “I’m named after him. He was killed by goyim in a pogrom.”
“I heard he was a very gentle person with a very brilliant mind. That
’s all I know, David. Why don’t you ask your parents?”
I said nothing. There was a pause.
“You’re in a strange mood today,” he said.
“Are you going to Germany soon?” I asked.
“I am not able to enter Germany,” he said. “I will be going to Switzerland. Yes, soon.”
“Is Europe dangerous for you, Mr. Bader? Can you be—hurt?”
He smiled soberly. “I will not be in the dangerous parts of Europe, David.”
“Will your organization get all the Jews out of Germany?”
“I don’t know, David. We’ll help as best we can.”
“Where will they all go?”
“Europe and England will take in a few. So will America. But no country will want many of them.”
“What do they want from us? Why don’t they leave us alone? They must think we’re some kind of monsters.”
“Yes,” he said. “Many do think that. There is a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that describes us as scheming to take over the world.”
“I know about that book,” I said, suddenly remembering.
“Yes? I’m told it’s the second biggest selling book in the world. The first is the Bible.” He was silent a moment. Then he said, with a pale smile, “Sometimes I think we ought to start a rumor that the book was written and published by those so-called elders of Zion and that all the royalties go to them and help finance their operation. Wouldn’t that be a diabolical idea? Jews financing their takeover of the world by the money that they make from gentiles who buy books that warn about Jews planning to take over the world.” He chuckled softly. “It’s a thought I had recently while shaving. Millions would immediately believe it. It might even kill the sales of the Protocols. Ah, well, it’s a thought.”
“Mr. Bader?”
“Yes, David?”
“What does my father’s organization do?”
“You’ll have to ask your father, David.”
“Does my father have people who don’t like him?”
He said, very quietly, after a moment, “We all have people who dislike us, David. Anyone who knows very clearly what he’s doing with his life will have people who dislike him.”
“I don’t know what I want to do with my life and still there are people who hate me.”