by Dara Horn
“TI-82s for sale,” Leonid called to the crowd. “Discount price.” At Leonid’s feet, Ben saw as he pushed his way through the crowd, were cartons of TI-82 calculators. Calculators were flying out of the box as students grabbed for them, and Leonid’s pockets were bursting with cash.
“Hey,” Ben said, unsure whether to try to make his voice friendly or not. He failed to control his anger; his voice trembled as he spoke. “You can’t sell those like that.”
Leonid looked down, noticed Ben, and laughed, crushing a smoldering cigarette butt on the floor. Someone elbowed Ben to the side. Ben watched for a moment, embroiled by a tangle of fascination and fury. He glanced down at the half-smoked cigarette next to Leonid’s enormous black sneakers, its paper already uncurling.
“Smoking inside the school is illegal,” Ben said as he shoved his way back toward Leonid. “People could die of lung cancer.” People like Ben’s father, for example.
Leonid, busily taking orders, managed to pull another cigarette out of his pocket, light it up, and blow the smoke in Ben’s face. “Sorry,” Leonid slurred at a hand emerging from the crowd, “I do not give change. Buy two, give one to friend.” From a boy nearby, he took three twenties.
“The math teachers are going to hear about this,” Ben said, scanning the crowd for a face of authority. But the crowd was already thinning out; first period was approaching.
“Yuri!” Leonid suddenly yelled, twisting his giant head to the right. Nearby, a boy with a belly like a forty-year-old’s, a shadow of a mustache, and fingers covered with thick rings was pinning another boy to a wall of lockers. The big boy looked up and dropped the second boy, who fell to the floor in a heap.
“You see this guy?” Leonid asked Ben as the boy with the big belly approached.
Ben started to repeat his own threat, but Leonid clearly wasn’t listening. Instead, Leonid muttered something in Russian to Yuri, who grabbed Ben by the chin and lifted him off the floor—not entirely, but enough to force him to stand on his tiptoes. Ben felt his torso stretching painfully, loosening within the steel and plastic cage.
“This is Yuri,” Leonid said as Yuri released Ben’s chin. Ben rocked back on his heels, his spine aching. “You tell people what we do, Yuri, me, we beat you up.”
Yuri turned and said something to Leonid in Russian, pointing at Ben. They both laughed, Leonid so hard that he almost choked, but he still managed to step on a wayward hand that tried to grab a calculator out of the box. Sales were tapering off. Yuri lumbered down the hall and disappeared into the boys’ bathroom, and Leonid looked down at Ben and laughed.
Ben swallowed, trying to make his voice sound lower, tougher. “What do you think this is, a bad TV show?”
Leonid grinned as he bent down to close the calculator crate. The bell for the first class had already rung. “I think this is a bad TV show,” he said in his thick, deep voice, slurring his words. “You are the star.”
LEONID SHCHARANSKY HAD only been in school for a few weeks before he succeeded in forming the very first gang Benjamin Ziskind’s high school had ever seen. Its members were exclusively Russian immigrants. Leonid was the linchpin of the group, with the aforementioned Yuri as his sidekick (with an emphasis on the kick, since one of Yuri’s favorite things to do was wander the hallways of the school, seeing how many freshly painted lockers he could kick in with his steel-tipped shoes). Besides them, there were six other boys—puny boys compared to the colossal Leonid and the bulging Yuri, all dark-haired and with long, thin noses, like a flock of ravens. There were also four girls, girls with enormous breasts who walked around with painted mouths and spiked bangs in a style American girls had stopped wearing years earlier, yet they managed to pull it all off with a sort of sleazy panache. Among themselves they spoke exclusively Russian, though sometimes, to Ben’s shock, he would pass them by and overhear, in the middle of Russian sentences, a Yiddish word. They had no official name, but the rest of the school had begun to refer to them, behind their backs, as the “Meltdown Gang.”
As a gang, they specialized in theft and resale, their stock consisting primarily of items like calculators and marijuana but also, increasingly, car radios and other auto parts from the school parking lot. The boys’ bathroom had become a veritable chop shop. But they also were not above threats. Each day as he sat behind Ben in math class, Leonid would kick Ben’s chair and then toss a small note onto his desk. The note, in a curly capitalized handwriting and with daily variations in spelling that Ben found extremely irritating, always consisted of exactly the same words:
WATCH OUT WIZKIND—SOON I BEAT YOU UP.
For the first time in his life, Benjamin Ziskind was afraid. He didn’t talk to any teachers about it, or even to his mother. Yet each morning in class when he received Leonid’s daily warning note, he felt something more than mere dread. It was as if Leonid were finally responding to all the letters Ben had sent him over the past few years, and the sick swaying of Ben’s own stomach—the nausea he felt whenever he tried not to remember how he had poured out his own guts and mailed them off to Chernobyl—made him feel as though he himself were at fault, as if he had desecrated something.
He lost interest in his schoolwork. Instead of coming home and sitting down to his physics problems, Ben now found himself wandering into the living room, where a picture of his father sat on a bookshelf. He stared at the picture for as long as he could before his mother or sister discovered him. One time, with a freshly crumpled note from Leonid in his pocket, he went into his mother’s bedroom and took out his father’s dog tags from where she had hidden them in a box in the closet. The pressed metal reminded him obscurely of the school lockers dented by Yuri’s shoes—bulging, bestial Yuri, who, he later discovered, had been the bar mitzvah twin of someone else in Ben’s math class. As he ran his fingers along the reverse side of his father’s name, he remembered his own bar mitzvah and then thought of that moment when he had first met Leonid, the way Leonid had spat and used his toe to grind his cigarette butt into the front porch.
And then the day came when Leonid decided, at long last, to beat him up.
IT WAS A winter day, and Ben liked winter days, then. He had hated them for a long time, since it had been cold the day his father died, but now he found cold days to be a relief, days when he could wear thick sweaters that covered up the cage completely. It was cold on those days, cold enough to snow, but so far there had been no snow that year. Instead, the grass had died and the ground was coated with dead leaves that eventually dissolved into a carpet of mud, thick brown mud that seemed to cover the entire town. The days shrank one by one, curling around the edges like dead leaves. Ben had stayed late at school to take a test for a math contest, and found himself faced with a long walk home alone.
But as he made his way around the side of the school, Ben had something new on his mind. His mother had just finished her own children’s book, with the ridiculous title of Young Tongue Brat, which she had shown Ben and Sara the night before. Written entirely in rhyme, it was the story of a boy—“Young Tongue Brat,” as he was apparently known in recognition of his quick answers to any grown-up’s question—who was renowned for his brilliance and courage. The poem began with a description of the town where the Young Tongue Brat lived, which despite its horses and thatched-roof houses seemed to Ben deeply similar to his own town, because the main problem with this town was that it was covered with mud.
In the story, it was the beginning of winter, but no snow had yet fallen. As a result the streets were covered with a thick autumn mud, so deep that people could be sucked into it and never be heard from again. The townspeople’s only hope was for snow to cover up the mud, but none came. On one afternoon of deep and early darkness, Young Tongue Brat and his friends were walking home from school, carrying their lanterns to guide them (here the pen-and-ink illustrations glowed, the tiny lanterns suffusing just enough light to illuminate the boys’ little faces with their terrified expressions, along with their feet held gingerly above t
he mud as they took their terrified steps). But on the next page, Young Tongue Brat tumbled into the mud, trapped, his lantern snuffed. His friends—some friends, Ben thought—ran off into the night, too horrified to help, but the Brat simply stayed in the mud, unafraid. As luck would have it, soon a nobleman on horseback discovered him and pulled him out. The nobleman asked Young Tongue Brat why he hadn’t cried, and the Brat simply said that he hadn’t been frightened at all. The nobleman was so impressed that he made the Young Tongue Brat an offer, which the Brat accepted as only he could. The nobleman began:
“I have a horse that cost me plenty
Who might as well be flame and fire!
He flies by faster than an arrow,
Twelve miles a minute, if I desire.
And I have a ring of magic, too,
Just the ring for a boy like you:
Spin it seven times around
And then the snow will coat the ground!
And you yourself can be my guest
And choose which one you like the best.
Choose the ring, or choose the horse,
But just don’t think too hard, of course!”
All this alarmed our Young Tongue Brat.
The horse, or the ring? This one, or that?
He didn’t think too hard, of course:
“I’ll take the ring AND take the horse!”
Amazing things can happen, it seems, if you ignore the rules. The nobleman, impressed once more by the Brat’s courage, gladly handed over both horse and ring, and the Young Tongue Brat wasted no time in taking off into the wide world on his flying horse, scattering snow in his wake with his magic ring. A few of the final stanzas from the book were running through Ben’s head as he walked home that day, sliding in the mud along the side of the school:
Young Tongue Brat flew like an arrow!
Riding on the horse, he raced
Farther, farther from his hometown
Off to somewhere out in space.
But when, each year, from distant ways
The winter comes with rainy days
And there is still no snow to see
And snow just seems not meant to be…
Whoa! The horse stands above the ground
As Young Tongue Brat’s ring spins around:
Seven times it spins, and then
The snow falls to the ground again.
The trouble, Ben thought, was that the whole thing seemed so familiar to him. The words weren’t familiar—he couldn’t say that he had heard those silly rhymes before—but the story, there was something about the story. Where was it from? Ben was navigating the muddy path along the school’s brick wall, racking his brain for remnants of the Young Tongue Brat, when a deep voice bellowed into his ear:
“Today is the day, Wizkind.”
Ben didn’t even have time to turn around before someone grabbed him by the neck and threw him against the wall, backside first. He landed on his feet and found himself facing the male members of the Meltdown Gang, raven-boys on both sides and Leonid at the helm. Yuri grabbed Ben’s arm and pulled off his backpack, casting it in the mud.
“You think I do not mean it? I do,” Leonid said. “I beat you up myself.”
Ben glanced around at the raven-boys’ beaked noses and Leonid’s giant face, towering above him. He had had this dream before, many times. But this did not seem to be a dream. He bit his lip, tasting sweet blood as his chapped lip cracked under his teeth, his vision reeling. And then suddenly, like in those blissful moments during tapings of Beat the Wizkind between hearing the question and realizing that he knew the answer, a hushed thrill rushed through Ben’s body, carefully contained beneath his skin. He was no more frightened than the Young Tongue Brat.
“Go ahead,” he told Leonid. “I dare you.” For a second he felt anxious, the familiar panic of the game show contestant who instantly realizes his response might have been wrong. But Ben hid his panic, staring Leonid in the eye.
The Meltdown Gang exchanged puzzled glances until Leonid finally laughed. “Okay, I fight you,” he bellowed. “But Wizkind, I show I am fair. You cannot tell people you were beat by giants. I will kneel in mud for you, and I will still beat you up.”
“Be my guest,” Ben said, his voice shaking. He leaned back against the wall.
Again the Meltdown Gang paused, the flock of ravens exchanging fevered whispers. But then Yuri picked up Ben’s backpack and pulled out his trigonometry textbook, dropping it in the mud at Leonid’s enormous feet.
Leonid fell to his knees with an audible thud, the textbook sinking into the mud under his weight. As Leonid straightened his back to face him, Ben was reminded oddly of the way his father used to look during High Holiday services at their synagogue, the one time of year when he—also a tall man, but much thinner—would drop to his good knee, pause briefly before he lost his balance, catch himself on his palms, and then press his own forehead to the floor until Ben helped him up. But he quickly forgot that as he faced Leonid, whose head seemed even larger now that it was at Ben’s eye level. He noticed that Leonid’s eyelashes were the same color as his hair, drowsy red.
Leonid’s smile vanished. He lightly punched his own chest, a gesture that made Ben think of a gorilla, and then drew back his arm. Ben cringed and covered his face with his hands, spreading his fingers just slightly so that he could still see Leonid screwing up his ruddy face, drawing a deep breath, and balling his gigantic fingers into a fist.
It happened so fast that Ben didn’t even feel the punch. All he saw, an instant later, were the large eyes rolling backward as Goliath blacked out and fell to the ground, having shattered five different bones in his hand and wrist from the impact of slamming his fist directly into the cage.
BEN WAS SURPRISED the following day to find that Leonid’s apartment, which Leonid shared with his mother and also with an unrelated elderly Russian woman and the elderly woman’s seven-year-old granddaughter, was hardly bigger than Ben’s parents’ bedroom. His mother had forced him to go there to apologize, no matter how many times he had tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault. When Sara insisted on going with him, he found himself feeling a mixture of embarrassment and relief.
The elderly woman who answered the door at Number Sixteen—whom Ben first assumed must be Leonid’s grandmother, though he later learned otherwise—opened it only a few inches, stretching the chain lock. She didn’t speak.
“Hi, I’m Ben Ziskind,” Ben said, trying to make his voice sound lower. “I came here to—”
The woman slammed the door shut. Ben turned around to look at Sara, but then they both heard shouting behind the door. Ben recognized Leonid’s thick voice, firing in rapid Russian. The old woman unlatched the door, pulled it open, then stepped aside. Ben tried to thank her, but she quickly disappeared, retreating into a room that, in the brief glance Ben caught before she closed the door, looked more like a large closet, its tiny space filled almost completely by a double bed.
Inside the apartment there were just two small rooms, as Ben could see from the open door next to the one the old woman had entered, which revealed a closet crushed full of broken boxes. The kitchen was entirely contained in a small counter next to the door. The door to the tiny bathroom had also been left open, exposing a jungle of women’s underwear stretched along crisscrossing laundry lines. A person would have to duck to use the toilet, Ben thought. The main room, where Ben and Sara found themselves standing, was filled with packing crates and stacks of photo albums and, between two tall columns of boxes, a cheap foam cushion of the kind that opens out into a mattress. A blanket lay in a pile on the ground beside it, covered with a sheet of clear plastic. On top of the plastic was a full ashtray. In a small stack beside it were a notebook and a worn Russian-English dictionary, along with the same edition that Ben had from their English class of The Pathfinder. Ben realized with a jolt of shame that this must be where Leonid slept, and maybe his mother, too. The mattress probably wasn’t even long enough for Leonid. The air in t
he room was full and thick with strange smells, sandpaper smells of burnt ash and old books and something sickly sweet that Ben could not identify until he noticed a browning apple core on the floor in the corner. Ben removed his coat and placed it on a nearby crate. His sweat dripped underneath the brace, a slow water torture.
Leonid was sitting propped up on the mattress cushion, leaning against the wall with his long legs stretched out on the floor in front of him. His club of an arm, encased in yellow fiberglass, rested in a canvas sling. His droopy blue eyes focused on a small TV set a few feet away, where a game show was playing softly. He didn’t look up.
“I’m here to apologize, Leonid,” Ben said. He had rehearsed his lines with Sara on the way over, practicing not being enraged. “I’m really sorry about your hand. If there’s anything I can do for you, like carry your books or help you take notes in class or something, I, uh…”
Leonid remained silent, his dull eyes focused on the screen. Ben’s glance wandered to the TV set, where a game of Jeopardy! was on. The volume was so low that Ben could hardly hear it. His eye caught a question as it was blinking off the screen, asking for the scientist who introduced the periodic table.
“Mendeleyev,” Ben and Leonid said together.
Ben jolted. Taking a careful step forward between the packing crates, he angled his body closer to the TV. The next question asked for the capital of Uzbekistan.
“Tashkent,” Leonid and Ben said in unison, Ben a few notes above Leonid.
Ben felt his blood pumping through his body, the way it often did when the competition became tight, his skin sweating profusely under the cage. Leonid had leaned forward, doubled over his cast. Ben was barely prepared when the next question appeared: “The composer of the New World Symphony.”