Shaul, our plumber, was installing new toilets that used less water, and occasionally he would pass me on the way from his truck to one of the apartments and back again. While I was sitting there, trying to concentrate on my reading, Avraham came back from school. When I saw him I set my book down. He was all dressed up in a black suit and had his black dress hat on. He was taking special classes in preparation for his bar mitzvah. As he walked toward me I noticed he had a package with him, a long clear container with two dark blue bags and a book inside. When he was adjacent to me he noticed the Tanya.
“You shouldn’t put it upside down,” he said, taking it in his hands and turning it over, then bringing his fingers up to his lips to kiss them. “It’s like God.”
“I’m just not used to reading a book backwards,” I explained to him.
We looked at each other in silence for a moment.
“You know what this is?” he asked, indicating the package he had with him.
I shook my head.
“This is my tefillin,” he said.
“Really? Did you just get it?”
“No, I’ve had it for a month.”
“When is your birthday, September?”
“September twenty-third.”
“According to the Jewish calendar, when is your birthday?”
“On the fifteenth day of Tishrei.”
“Is it always on September 23?”
Avraham shook his head. “No, next year it’s in October.”
“Really? Did you get your tefillin, or did you have to buy it, or what?”
“It’s very expensive. Mine was made in Israel. It cost eight hundred dollars. It was made by hand.”
“If I wanted to buy one—”
“You want to buy tefillin?”
“Well, I already have a yarmulke and tzitzis and a hat. And I’ve got the Mishnah. I think the tefillin’s next.”
Avraham smiled, and a dimple high on his left cheek creased. “How much,” I asked him, “would a tefillin cost at Atara’s, say, the cheapest tefillin I could get?”
Avraham thought about this for a moment. “A hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
Suddenly Dimitri started playing his violin and the strains of his music began drifting out over the street, an aural counterpoint for the afternoon, saturated as it already was with the reek of virility.
“Well, I have to go,” Avraham said and took off down the driveway, only to return a moment later. “My parents are gone,” he said, and I felt he was glad to have an excuse to be with me, but he modified that possibility with an explanation: “I don’t have a key.”
He sat down on one of the little brick partitions across from me and turned to look up the street toward the carob tree. “That tree stinks,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I like it—I think it smells good. It reminds me of sperm—the primal seed.”
Avraham smiled indulgently at me, and as we sat there looking at each other we listened to the music. It was beautiful. I’d spoken to Dimitri once and asked him what the music was that he played, and he listed a number of composers—Mozart, Bach, and Paganini—but the only piece he mentioned by name was one called “Gypsy Airs” by someone named Pablo de Sarasate.
Avraham suddenly interrupted my reverie. “Do you want to see my tefillin?”
“Sure.”
He unzipped the clear container and took out one of the dark blue bags. I asked him about the lettering on the cloth. He said it just spelled out the word tefillin in Hebrew.
From the bag he removed a square object with a case. Part of the case was a red metal box, about an inch and a half square, and inside was a small black box that looked like it was made of wood, attached to a leather apparatus with straps.
“You put that on your forehead?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “and the other one is for your arm. We have two sets of tefillin,” he explained, and then with pride, “Only we have two sets.”
“Do you put these on when you’re alone, or do you ever pray all together with your tefillin on?”
“You do it by yourself, but you also pray together.”
That image seemed very funny to me: all these black-suited Jews praying together with one little black box on their forehead and another one on their arm.
I got my Artscroll Weekday Siddur, and Avraham showed me the prayers he had to recite when he wore his tefillin, as well as the four passages that are written down and sealed inside the little boxes.
“When you wear the tefillin,” Avraham said, enticing me with its power, “it’s like God is hugging you—tight.”
Shaul passed us on the way to his truck, and on his way back he spoke to Avraham in Hebrew. He seemed to be angry, but Avraham just laughed at him. When he was gone, I asked Avraham what he’d said.
“He said for me not to talk to you. He said you’re crazy.”
Every time Shaul passed us he would say something and each time he seemed a little angrier, but Avraham wouldn’t take him seriously, and finally, in exasperation, Shaul spoke to me himself. “He sh-should go home; he n-needs to study.”
“But his parents aren’t home,” I explained.
I thought how strange it was that I should know two Jews with speech impediments—Shaul and Avi—and I wondered if there was a connection. Maybe it had something to do with the fear of God.
“Will your parents get mad if you talk to me?” I asked Avraham. “I talked to your mother.”
“What did she say?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“She told me I shouldn’t talk to you,” he said. “Not because of you but because it causes trouble with the beit midrash.”
I was touched. I’m sure that is not the case with Dovid and Yossi’s mother. I bet she tells them outright that I am stupid or crazy or sick and not to talk to me just because she says so.
Shaul passed by us again and again said something to Avraham, more vehement this time, but Avraham still just laughed.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said you’re stupid.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
It was a beautiful day, and in the silence between us we could hear the sound of the violin scaling the heights of some ultimate pain and beauty, and I wondered if Dimitri could possibly comprehend the emotion his music seemed to be expressing.
“You know what I think of when I hear him playing?” I asked Avraham rhetorically. “Little Jewish kisses being blown to me from across the street.”
Avraham laughed and I was suddenly very happy: we two together—there in the shade of the eucalyptus tree, seminal effusion in the air about us. It seemed like some kind of perfection, as if the world were coalescing around us.
And then, in contemplation of this juncture in time, I asked Avraham, “Do you really think the Messiah is going to come this year?”
“We hope so,” he said. “We think it might be Rabbi Schneerson.”
“You think Rabbi Schneerson is going to be the Messiah? But he’s an old man.”
“If he is the Messiah he will become like twenty again. When Moshiach comes everybody will be twenty forever.”
“Oh, Avraham, that’s horrible,” I said. “You’ll suddenly be twenty years old and you’ll never get to know what it’s like to be a teenager.”
Avraham laughed. “No, I’ll keep on growing until I’m twenty and then I’ll stop.”
I nodded my understanding.
He looked away across the street, subsiding into reflection— the sound of the violin tracing some line of thought in his mind—and a stillness overcame him until he was motionless, staring. It was lovely to look on him in that tranquillity, with his peyos curving back around his ears and his black hat emblematic of emulation: all dressed up and adorned for devotion.
When a few minutes had passed, he suddenly turned back to me. “You know what’s going to happen when the Messiah comes?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“
When the Messiah comes, all the bad goyim—you know what that is?”
“Goyim? Gentiles, non-Jews—right?”
Avraham nodded and then continued, “When the Messiah comes, all the bad goyim are going to be killed, but all the good goyim are going to become our slaves.”
“Oh, well,” I mused, “I’ll probably go up in a lightning bolt right here,” and then I had an idea. “But if I don’t—could I be your slave?” The idea appealed to me. “You would feed me, right? And maybe you could hitch me to a cart and I could take you for rides, and afterward you could rub me down. Like a pony. I’d love to be your slave! And if I was bad you could hit me!”
Avraham smiled at me, the dimple high on his cheek appearing for little moments and disappearing again. He knew I was kidding him, but he could also see that I really would enjoy being his slave and doing whatever he wanted me to do. “You know,” he said, “if you’re my slave, you’ll have to give me all your money.”
“But you would feed me, right?” I asked, just to make sure.
Avraham straightened himself, his dignity offended. “Of course I’ll feed you!”
“Then I would love to be your slave and you can have my money. The next time you put your tefillin on—when you daven—ask God if it would be okay. Even though I’m a bad goyim I promise I’ll be a good slave. I’ll do whatever you want and even if I’m good you can hit me! It’ll be fun!”
Avraham considered me for a moment and then said rather hesitantly, “I don’t think slaves are supposed to have fun.”
I sighed and shrugged my shoulders: What are you going to do?
35 / epilogue
At night, when I’m here in my apartment, I’ll suddenly hear the sound of the gate clanging across the street and then I’ll get up and go outside and invariably I’ll be able to see one or more of the Jewish boys, either going into the compound or walking down the street.
Sometimes I recognize them as characters in my book, and then the idea of these people I have created—moving about as though they have their own three-dimensional autonomy— overwhelms me with proprietary warmth.
I think what I feel is love.
“In a very real sense [a] major character [in the novel] is the street which divides [the] believers from the non-believer, the Jews from the Gentile, the virgins from the man who claims to have slept with two thousand men, and most significantly the (presumed) heteros from the homo. What unites the two sides of this chasm? In addition to their estrangement from mainstream American culture, Rick and the boys also share a need to belong to something, someone, and a deep curiosity—a seemingly innate desire for truth and knowledge.”
— FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY CRAIG LUCAS AUTHOR OF PRELUDE TO A KISS
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The Boys Across the Street Page 25