Not long afterward, however, he received an invitation from Cohen to attend Stuart’s bar mitzvah. At the bottom a note was added: “At the exact moment my son is being bar mitzvahed in America, a Jewish boy in Russia will be having his ceremony over there. It has been arranged. I hope you can come. This is solidarity, Mr. Blum.” Peter hated to be ill-mannered, but enough was enough. He threw the card in the trash without another glance. A few weeks later, when he was frantically searching the trash can for an important form he had misplaced, he came up with the invitation instead. It had stuck to the gummy bottom. This time he noticed Cohen had also written something on the back: To Leningrad in winter—December 2.
Peter dropped the card as if bitten, then picked it up and stared hard to make sure the words were really there. To Leningrad in winter. The expression was one his grandfather had always used. The old man said it whenever misfortune struck the family. Peter vaguely understood its intention to be inspirational: a Jewish “I have not yet begun to fight!” or “Give me liberty or give me death!”—except not that insistent. The difference was the emphasis on winter. Being Jews, they would do things the difficult way—hope to win, pray for freedom, but not so fast. In winter, that’s when they would all enter the city to live in peace, winter, the eternal season for the long-suffering Jews. Sometime in winter they would finally succeed.
His grandfather had whispered the phrase when Peter came home from school one day with his face streaked in blood and a permanent tooth gone from the bottom row. He’d fought a boy on the bus, after turning around to the oversized eighth grader and offering him a stick of gum. “Drop dead, Jew,” the kid had responded. Peter turned back around, thought about it for a moment, and felt the shame quicken and burn his neck purple as an eggplant. During a momentary lapse of concern for self-preservation, he exploded in a frenzied assault on the larger boy, standing on his seat and slugging down for a violent minute, then picking up his heavy geography book and batting the kid’s ear. When they got off the bus, Peter took his beating. His brother, Rudy, wheezing and cheering him on, using an inhaler for his asthma, stood firmly on Peter’s side, the only person. On the way home, he held up Peter’s chin, letting him bleed on his sleeve, assuring Peter he wouldn’t get punished for losing the tooth. It was later that night, after Peter came back from an emergency visit to the dentist and was lying in bed with a wad of cotton in his mouth, listening to Rudy heap praise on him for his courage, that their grandfather tiptoed into the dark room to offer his sympathy: “To Leningrad in winter,” he whispered warmly in Peter’s ear, stroking the boy’s arm with his fingers that worked invisible threads all day long. Then he crept out again, as if not expecting the brothers to notice him.
Peter always thought he detected some mockery in his grandfather’s voice, aside from the old man’s regular screwiness. Perhaps he had just interpreted it that way when Rudy died from pneumonia and his grandfather mixed the phrase in with the rest of the prayers for the dead. There seemed little wisdom in continuing to believe the long trip was worth it then. The old man’s saying pointed less to a superior truth than to a covenant embarrassing in its one-sidedness. Only one promise ever went unbroken. Death would want you as a Christian, as a Jew, from families with or without blood or mezuzahs on their doors—why make the journey any more painful than necessary? Who was there to fool that it would ever be any other place than Leningrad in winter?
•
Peter pushed his coffee cup aside and watched as Cohen stepped into the office now, polite but determined. What more could the man ask of him? He’d flatly refused to consider the study group; he’d eaten Cohen’s food with haughty ingratitude; he’d ignored Stuart’s bar mitzvah. How much rejection could even Cohen stand?
“Mr. Blum, I have stopped in to remind you of the race this Sunday.” Cohen laid a flier on the desk. On December 2, a group of refuseniks would be running ten kilometers in Leningrad to protest the harsh emigration policies. Jews in America could show support by running an equal distance at the same time. “Leningrad is very cold in the winter, but we will be warm running together. Will you join us, Mr. Blum?”
“Not at all.” The plaintive note in Cohen’s voice angered Peter. “Have you thought about the forces you’re dealing with here? Can you actually believe that the Soviet Union, with an arsenal of nuclear weapons that can destroy the world twenty times over, will do anything but yawn and roll over at this feeble protest?”
Cohen tucked in his chin. His eyes, for the first time, seemed tired. “Mr. Blum. In the middle of the night a man is taken from his home. For three hours his kidneys are punched. When he must come back for a second visit, what is put in his mouth is worse than dirt. When he continues asking permission to go to Israel, he is sent instead to Siberia. For five, for ten years hard labor. The muscles in his back bulge out like grapefruit. At night the cold eats him up alive. All this happens for just asking. Mr. Blum. I ask you. What is our alternative?”
“I have no alternative, Mr. Cohen. I admit that without shame.” He wasn’t being blunt enough, that was the problem. He had to make Cohen understand he had the wrong man: that he had absolutely no right to expect this of him. “I also confess to not pretending that I have a solution—or caring if I do.” He waited for these last words to get through. Cohen continued standing respectfully, meeting Peter’s eyes with unnatural hope, his back rigid with patience. “You’ll excuse me now, please. I’m very busy today.” He picked up his appointment log.
Cohen replaced his hat and apologized. Without another word, he left. Peter resisted the urge to call him back. He wouldn’t get trapped by Cohen’s abject humility, not today. Today he was too busy to chase butterflies to Leningrad.
At six o’clock, he was finally able to go home. He took the flier from his shirt pocket, glancing at it as he drove. The Russian runners were sketched with awesome physiques: comic book characters with shoulders cut from the same tread as tractor tires—the women with each breast a boxing glove! The sinews in their legs could have squeezed a tugboat to death. Then he noticed the signature at the bottom of the illustration. Cohen’s son, Stuart, had done the drawing, making the refuseniks as heroic in their musculature as his little mind could imagine. Peter tried to picture his grandfather as a muscle-bound refusenik jogging into Leningrad. He could smell the old man’s sweet breath (he ate Passover jellies all year long). His grandfather would rub his slack, rough cheek against Peter’s smooth one. Suddenly the tears would start and the crazy muttering and he’d clutch the boy fearfully, not daring to let him go. Peter would squirm out from his grip, leaving the old man trembling and weeping softly, and he’d run outside to play.
He brushed the wetness from his face, already making up an excuse to Gail that his eyes were red because of working without his glasses again. When he drove up, she was setting the table. It was a big maple table they’d bought at an auction seven years ago, much too big for the two of them, although neither of them had ever wanted to mention this. After they had married, they’d tried to have children. When a year went by without success, they went in for tests—first Gail, then Peter. The doctor assured them they were both fertile. He gave Gail some pills to help her along. Nothing happened. They visited other doctors, and all agreed that conception was not only possible but likely; they were a young, eager, healthy couple in their twenties, with no congenital or developmental impairments, with good hearts and lungs, with determined genes and capable organs. Nature had prepared them ideally. “The situation,” one doctor said, giving them a phrase they could use comfortably, “looks most promising.”
Then the visits started: to an herbalist; to a naturopath; to a hypnotist; and even to a psychic. “Maybe we should stop trying so hard,” Gail suggested. “We’re getting in our own way,” and they had tried hard not to try.
One night, years later, while they were watching television (in the commercial a man was shouting at them to buy a suit), an unmistakable glance had been exchanged. The next day Peter came home f
rom work and said they should withdraw their applications from the adoption agencies. Gail agreed. She, too, could no longer take the accusatory looks—the irrational blame each felt from the other. They could stop punishing themselves if they wanted. They could agree to stop. They could live with the decision. Perhaps they had even wanted this all along. They would never know. What they did know is that they were finished if they continued. It would have to end.
When the phone woke them early Sunday morning, Peter thought it was an alarm being sounded by charging troops. He’d been riding over the snow in a carriage, with hundreds of cheering men behind who kept following him and wouldn’t leave him alone. And there was someone else, a pathetic figure in an overcoat, with his feet wrapped in rags and ice dripping from his gray beard.
“Mr. Blum. It is a fine winter morning.”
Cohen, it had been Cohen. Even in dreams he got through.
“Once,” said Peter. “Just this once. That’s all.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” Cohen said breathlessly. “I’ll pick you up.”
He had hugged the Cohen figure in his dream, a sudden burst of concern and pity for the man—Cohen half frozen, with a tattered band of fur for a hat—wetting each of Cohen’s cheeks with his tears. His pillow had still been damp this morning when the phone rang.
Gail came back into the room, wrapped in a blanket. “Who was that?”
“Cohen,” said Peter, embarrassed at having to bring up the man’s name so often. “I told him I’d run.”
Her shoulders sagged beneath the blanket. “I thought we were going to lunch and a movie this afternoon?”
“Nyet,” Peter said. “Race today. Must get samovar boiling.” He folded his robe around him like a heavy fur coat and marched into the bathroom.
A half-hour later, Cohen pulled into the driveway. One side of his long Plymouth was painted with a thick, black swastika.
Gail screamed from the upstairs window. Peter, running in place outside, leaped back into the doorway.
“You see,” said Cohen, “how bad it is getting.”
The robustness Peter had been feeling drained from his legs. Cohen unlocked the door from inside and pushed it open, slicing the giant swastika in half. From the back of the car, the muffler thumped, and when Cohen revved the engine, the pungent exhaust fumes stung Peter’s eyes. Gail tapped at the window, concern on her face. Peter raised his hand not to worry and slowly got into the car.
“Keep alert,” was all Cohen said to him on the way over. Peter felt calmer once he was inside the chugging vehicle, the heater generous with its warmth, set permanently on high as a result of missing all its knobs. He closed his eyes to relax but suddenly jerked forward when something groaned in the back seat. It was Stuart. The boy had been curled under his coat asleep. He awoke now, rubbing his eyes. As soon as he noticed Peter, he glared savagely at him. Peter turned back around, taking a deep breath and wondering how Cohen had ever snuck into his dreams as a trusted comrade.
Four men were huddled together at the park where the race was to start. They broke from their circle and came puffing over in single file, all of them looking older than Cohen, who seemed sixty himself.
“They got you,” said one of them. He wore a small yarmulke and clutched a knit stocking cap. “Maybe one of us should stay behind with the cars.”
“I, myself, can live with the damage,” said Cohen. “I think it is more important that we all participate.” The men nodded. “Are we ready?” Cohen asked.
Peter looked around. This was it? Seven people? No one else was coming?
“We begin at nine o’clock on the dot,” said Cohen, unfolding a map of the route. “At least one of us must finish the race by ten o’clock—the same time the refuseniks will stop on the steps of the emigration ministry in Leningrad. Is this understood?”
“Why’s the time matter?” Peter said, and then realized by the sharp looks that he had asked the wrong question. He added quickly, “Shouldn’t we stick together in case there’s trouble?”
Cohen paused to study each of their faces. It struck Peter that Cohen must be the town’s rabbi. Everything in his manner presumed a congregation in front of him. “We are here to race together,” he began, “to run alongside one another, to support each other when we tire, to go on even when we think we can’t. Together our feet will pound. Together our hearts will beat. Together Jews will be running all over the globe. If none of us here finishes the race, no one will know—no one in Moscow, no one in Leningrad, no one in Jerusalem. No one. Except us.” Cohen stopped dramatically and walked over to his car, patting the swastika tenderly. “And them.” He checked his watch. “It is time, my friends. Let us jog.”
They lined up where the path began, the man with the yarmulke looking around, then all of them glancing over their shoulders, up at the cold sky and the bare trees, back at their cars, down at the stiff soles of their sneakers. “Let’s go already!” Stuart snapped. He was on his mark next to Peter.
“To Leningrad!” Cohen shouted, and they were off, huffing and grunting, asking each other if they’d gone a mile yet. A white-haired man in an electric-blue jogging suit, with the sales tag still on the sleeve and the whole uniform sparkling with zippers, shuffled along beside Peter. “So let me tell you, young man,” he said, “I’m glad it’s not the real winter what’s doing in Russia.” Then he suddenly fell to one knee, grabbed his side, and screamed out as if being chewed by all his zippers, “The bacon! The bacon!”
Cohen ran up and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You got a stitch, Morris?” The man nodded guiltily, confessing that he had eaten seven strips of bacon for breakfast, fearing that he would need the extra protein.
“I’ll run behind with him,” the man in the yarmulke offered. Cohen waved his hand and the rest of them moved forward again.
Peter ran out in front with Stuart, gradually lengthening the distance between himself and the other men. When he glanced back a while later, the three were taking tiny steps, slowing to a halt. One of them indicated he needed to pee and stepped into the bushes; another sat down on a log, his head between his knees. After a mile more, Cohen dropped out, dragging one foot lamely behind the other in an exhausted gait. “Go!” he cried, shooing Peter and Stuart away with his hat. “I’ll be all right…GO!”
Peter hurried ahead, not looking back, as if fleeing a burning city. Stuart kept a few competitive steps in front of him, speeding up whenever Peter got too close. They passed underneath a winding canopy of apple trees, the branches frozen sharp and heavy without blossom. “Take it easy,” Peter called. “We’re supposed to be running together. You’re going to wear yourself out.”
“Eat my dust!” Stuart spit back, his bony arms slashing the air at his sides. What a mouth. And a rabbi’s son, yet. The kid would be hiding around the bend, waiting to bite his ankles if he didn’t watch out. And where was his mother? Was Cohen a widower or abandoned? Maybe that was the source of the child’s hostility.
Peter circled the pond, slowing down a little. He’d have to be careful not to stretch his muscles too fast in the cold. The air bit into his lungs, and even when he exhaled on his hands, the breath chilled before it could bounce back to warm his face. Along the path, he began seeing the first evidence of trouble: a swastika painted over the slats of a bench. And farther down, carved deep into the soft bark of a birch, were the letters KKK, with an arrow pointing around the scarred trunk. The initials translated into a column with a three word message:
KILL
KIKE
KIDS
What kind of a sick mind would think of such things? It began to anger him, make his toes curl—make him wish they would dare show their faces. He would spring up as he had years ago on the bus and smash the sneering faces back into their holes. Like diseased rats. Like nothing fit to live. Carbuncles. Slop. He stretched out his legs.
His mouth pulled back at the corners. He lunged forward across the frozen ground—past bales of barbed wire; past men in tren
ch coats, hissing to each other over their two-way radios; past a gleaming white missile, nearly invisible in the snow and dragged on rails as high as a two-story building. He ran past—knocking tanks and roadblocks out of the way, galloping over the heads of soldiers, flicking rifles off their shoulders with a tap of his hooves. Tiny capillaries burst in his throat and he tasted blood. Someone called from behind and he raced on, each foot cracking down on the solid earth.
“Stop, please!”
It was Stuart. Peter had left him a hundred yards behind, floundering to catch up. He hopped over to Peter, dangling one foot in the air. “I stepped in some dog shit.” He lifted the soiled foot higher, as if to show it were permanently ruined. “I can’t go anymore. My sides hurt.” Peter was bent over, squeezing his own sides to keep his lungs from exploding. He looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes left to finish the race. “Come on, we’ll go slower.”
“You go,” Stuart said, scraping his shoe with a stick. “I can’t do any more.”
“Are you letting a little tiredness stop you?”
“It hurts.”
“Look, you can’t stay here alone. You see all the remarks around here? The people who wrote this stuff are sick, sick! Now come on. We’ll do an easy pace.” He checked his watch. He could carry the little bastard and still make it. He could do it. He could do it if they moved right away.
“I’m waiting for my dad.”
“Who knows where he is! Let’s go. You’re coming, understand?” And he reached for Stuart’s arm. The boy immediately collapsed on the ground, shrieked, and grabbed hold of a fence nearby. Peter began methodically peeling Stuart’s fingers off, dragging him out of reach of the fence. He almost had him clear when Stuart yanked at his hair, making Peter look up and see in the distance a water tank painted with the most childish slur yet. A memory slowly rolled past him, turned and started back, gathered momentum, and finally smacked the center of his forehead with such icy force that he sunk to his knees like a slain elephant. Emblazoned on the water tank in bright yellow paint,
Madagascar Page 11