by Lev Raphael
He went to his room and sat on his bed unable to do anything. What did he say that was so bad? He wished Sasha lived right nearby, then he could have someplace to go, not run away to, just go when he didn’t want to be home, someplace that wasn’t the park. Stefan didn’t really have friends in the building—most of the kids were older—and when anyone asked if he did, he got embarrassed. He had books, and the radio, and lessons, but he knew that wasn’t friends. Once in class they’d pretended they were on a desert island and had to say who they wished would be with them from that class and why. Lots of kids said Billy, the class president, because he was smart and class president. Stefan was glad Miss Zimmer didn’t get to him because there wasn’t really anyone in class he liked enough to be alone with for lots of summers and birthdays. He thought most of the girls and the guys were snobby; someone was always getting the silent treatment or not being invited to someone’s house for lunch or to play after school. Kids were always talking about new toys and Debby’s mother had a fur coat and all sorts of stuff that was dumb. Someone once said he didn’t live in a good street (because his was too close to Harlem, whatever that was), but his was just as clean as other streets and had trees too. Mostly no one bothered him; they said he was quiet, which wasn’t as bad as being called stupid or sissy or cheat or worse.
Nobody at school knew about Sasha. A couple of kids took music lessons and one girl danced but they were always complaining they didn’t like it, so Stefan decided not to tell how much fun he had at the piano. It wasn’t even fun, fun was watching Dumbo; his playing was sort of work, but it made him happy.
Maybe Evan wanted to be his friend.…?
“Wake up,” someone was saying.
Stefan rolled over. His father stood over him.
“What did Sasha tell you?”
Stefan said, “Nothing,” and thought of Eva’s picture.
“Tell me.”
“Sasha didn’t say anything,” Stefan was shocked by his lie. He edged back to the wall away from his father.
His father reached for his arm.
“He didn’t, he didn’t! It was a girl who said it!” He knew now what his father meant. His father took him by the arm and swatted his behind.
“You’re a liar.”
“He didn’t!” Stefan screamed, hearing the next slap without feeling it.
“Stop it,” his mother ordered from the door. “How can you hit him? Stefan, it’s true? Sasha didn’t tell you about the camps?”
“It’s true.” He shook, feeling his father’s grip loosen. “He didn’t.”
His father let him go and tramped out of the room. “Max—?” His mother followed, leaving Stefan stunned and bewildered. He couldn’t understand what it all meant, why they were just by themselves or locked up. From his parents’ room he heard horrible yelling in Russian. He went to the door but didn’t close it, didn’t hide from the noise. If he listened hard enough maybe he’d understand or maybe they’d stop.
“You’re not concentrating, I think,” Sasha said at his next lesson. Stefan had been doing scales with both hands going in opposite directions, or they were supposed to be. His mother and father had hardly talked to each other all week. Usually after dinner his father went through the papers—he bought three—and read aloud terrible things that Stefan couldn’t stand. But for days his father had read nothing and Stefan almost missed hearing about dead girls and cars crashed up.
Stefan stopped playing.
“What’s wrong?” Sasha asked, touching his shoulder. Stefan flung his arms around Sasha and burst into tears; the tighter he held Sasha the more he cried. Each time he tried to stop it got worse. Sasha held him, one hand on the back of his neck, the other stroking his hair. Sasha smelled like polished wood, or maybe that was the piano. Stefan never cried with anyone but Scotty.
“You know,” Sasha said softly, “when you were very small and just beginning to talk I used to beg you to say my name but you wouldn’t. You said Ma-Ma and Da-Da but not Sa-Sa.”
“Why not?” Stefan could feel his tears going away.
“I don’t know—you just wouldn’t.”
Stefan giggled; it was funny to think of himself as a baby. “I thought you didn’t like me,” Sasha went on.
“I love you.”
“Yes, I know.”
Stefan felt very safe resting against his uncle.
“How about something bad to eat? I’ve got some fresh ladyfingers.”
They had milk and ladyfingers crusty with sugar and cinnamon, and more ladyfingers.
“Do you want me to play for you?” Sasha asked when they were done. They sat on the couch.
“Was Schubert bad? Did he hurt people?”
“What?”
“This girl said there were camps where people got hurt by Germans, and Mommy got upset when I told her about the girl saying camps and stuff.”
Sasha nodded. “Because you’re too young to hear about all that.”
“The Germans hurt people?”
“Yes, lots.”
“Why?”
“You’re young, you wouldn’t understand. Nobody understands.”
“We’re Polish. Did the Germans hurt us too?”
Sasha didn’t look at him. “The Germans were terrible, beyond terrible.”
Sasha looked at him and around the room as if he was scared someone would get them.
“Why do Mommy and Daddy yell?”
“Things happened to them. To us. It’s very hard.”
“But you don’t yell.”
“Who would I yell at?”
“Is what happened to them like being sick?”
“Yes,” Sasha agreed quickly as the doorbell rang. “Very sick.”
Sasha let his father in. Stefan hardly said good-bye or talked about the lesson. At home he thought maybe he knew something more now: his mother and father were sick, like the mumps only you couldn’t see it. His parents yelled, that’s how they were sick, and his mother acted funny sometimes, and his father got mad. And if they were sick, so was he, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t yell at anyone, not even Scotty. Maybe Sasha would tell him.
“Your father says he’s very sorry he hit you,” his mother said to him at night. His father was in the shower and Stefan was about to go off to bed. He didn’t know what to say; his mother looked like he had to answer.
Stefan pouted. “He said I was a liar.”
“I explained—”
“He said it. I’m not any liar.”
His mother fussed with her hair in a way he knew meant she was annoyed, first with one hand and then with the other; usually it was both together.
“You’re being unreasonable.”
“You are,” Stefan challenged, though he didn’t know just what the word meant. He had a sudden urge to tell her she was sick—it made him feel so nasty he fled the room.
Evan walked over to him in the yard one afternoon during lunch period. Stefan sat in his favorite spot opposite the side doors, reading The Three Musketeers (he hadn’t asked anyone yet why there was a candy bar called that). There was a wild game of touch football going on behind Evan, boys whirling and ducking, and the girls who watched shrieked now and then whether they knew what was happening or not.
“How come you’re not playing?” Evan asked him.
“How come you’re not?” Stefan countered, annoyed—nobody asked him that.
“I have some candy. You want any?”
Stefan’s mother didn’t like him to eat candy on his own, but he nodded and stuffed his book into his back pocket. Evan brought out two kinds of bars and gumdrops; it was a lot of candy, Stefan thought. He just had a pack of mint chews which he didn’t really think were that great.
“My mom says candy isn’t good for you.”
“So does mine,” Evan mumbled through some gumdrops. They stood at the gray metal fence, watching the games.
Evan suddenly launched on a long story about his teeth, and about dentists, and about his mother. There w
ere lots of long words in it, like the one his mother had said in the kitchen about diseases. Stefan didn’t get much of what Evan said except that his kind of teeth were “in the family.” Evan acted like they were special; maybe that was so, Stefan thought—he’d never seen teeth like them before.
“How do you spell your name?” he asked when Evan stopped.
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“E-V-A-N.”
Stefan said, “My aunt’s name is Eva,” feeling strangely excited.
“Is she nice?”
“She’s dead.”
“Old people are dead a lot.”
Stefan thought this was very smart.
The bell rang; Evan threw off a “Seeya” and headed back to his class.
“Hey—” Stefan ran after him. “Want my mint chews?”
“Sure.” Evan held out his hands and caught the tossed package. “Thanks.”
“Hurry up, children,” Miss Zimmer was saying in the yard. He didn’t not like her as much as he used to, but still it was good she didn’t always do yard patrol. Upstairs Stefan looked at the now-battered cover of his The Three Musketeers; Evan was like the middle one, with the same messed-up black hair.
It wasn’t until a week later that he had the courage to ask Evan to come over after school with him. There was a lot of telephoning: his mother called Evan’s mother and Evan’s mother called twice and the day had to be changed. Stefan had a sense of a lot more being involved in Evan coming over than he could figure out.
His mother asked Evan a lot of questions about school, and his parents—too many questions—and Stefan felt embarrassed, wriggled in his chair, anxious to get his friend away from her.
“You have a radio?” Evan switched it on and they settled down for a good look at Stefan’s books and anything else there was in the room worth pawing. He dragged things out of drawers and the closet, they played and talked about school. Evan didn’t like his teacher either.
“You have neat stuff,” Evan announced, surveying the disordered room, and Stefan was proud, but he had hardly anything left to show except Scotty and he’d never show Scotty to a stranger.
Evan asked him, “What church do you go to?”
Stefan shrugged.
“You don’t know?” Evan seemed scornful, amazed.
“I guess we don’t go to church.”
“Why not? Are you a Communist?”
“I am not!” Stefan knew the word was a terrible thing, but he didn’t want to say anything else, because he didn’t understand about churches. On Sunday mornings you could hear the bells ringing from the church a few blocks up Broadway, and Stefan loved the sound. But his mother and father didn’t. It even seemed to make them upset. And when he asked them why they weren’t getting dressed up like all the people he had often seen going to church, his mother said, “That’s not for us.”
“There is no God,” his father had said, his face red. “It’s all lies.”
“Then why do people go to church?” Stefan asked.
His father sneered. “They’re idiots, that’s why.”
Stefan couldn’t tell any of this to Evan.
“Can I see your thing?” Evan was now pointing to his pants.
Stefan looked down and blushed. He almost felt his father was asking a question he couldn’t answer.
“Let’s compare,” Evan said.
“Okay.”
They went to the bathroom to look at each other. Stefan felt he was doing something nasty, but he didn’t want to stop, so he kept looking.
When they pulled their pants up, Evan said, “My brother told me that when you get older, snot comes out of them.”
They both squirmed and said, “Yuck!”
“And my brother told me that Jew-boys get the ends of theirs cut off or something.”
“Why?”
Evan snorted. “Dummy! How should I know?”
Evan’s mother came to get him soon after; she was prettier than most mothers, and younger. Also she smelled like a few ladies put together.
“Did you have fun?” his mother asked as the door closed.
Stefan nodded, but he wasn’t at all sure. He wanted Evan to like him and wanted to like Evan; they hadn’t had fun, though, or not a lot of it.
Alone, he thought about his thing, and Evan’s. It felt like a secret, looking at somebody else’s.
Lying now on his bed, listening to the radio play quiet slow harpsichord music, Stefan remembered once when he’d take a bath with his father a long time ago. Stefan had stared; his father’s thing was big and nasty, floating up in the soapy water. He hadn’t asked why his was so little because he was scared and a little sick about it. He didn’t like seeing his father without all his clothes on—his father was so dark and shiny, hairy in front and with bulging arms. Once when his daddy was fixing a chair, barefoot, in short pants only—it was a very hot day—his mother had come up behind in the living room to slap the back of his father’s neck and she laughed real low and said something about “Gypsies.” It made Stefan go all hot in the face. He wondered why now, and what everything meant; maybe he could ask Sasha.
At school the next few days there was a lot of whispering like when someone knew a bad word and no one else did and went around telling some kids and not telling some. Usually Stefan didn’t ask; he didn’t like spreading words you got in trouble for. Once he’d said a very bad one at home and his mother dragged him to the bathroom and made him wash his mouth out with soap. He’d been so scared, and he didn’t know how to do it; he choked and spit and cried with soap water dribbling down his chin.
Only this didn’t seem like it was a word somebody had just learned because no one stood around looking all smiley and secret. He finally asked Evan one recess; they hadn’t talked too much since Evan’s visit because Stefan decided he didn’t like the way Evan had said he wanted to see his thing. He hadn’t told his parents any of that; it might make his mother cry or his father might hit him and he never wanted to be hit again.
“Did they tell you?” he asked Evan in the yard.
Evan kept his hands in his jacket pockets, not accepting the stick of gum Stefan offered him.
“Who wants to know?” Evan challenged.
“I heard it already,” Stefan said, amazed at his lie; he looked down at his book.
“Who told you?”
Stefan turned a page. “Nobody.”
“Was it Billy?”
“Maybe.”
Evan stamped his foot. “He’s a cheat, he said he was gonna wait until he told anybody else.”
“I don’t care.”
Evan ran off.
Stefan found out from Debby, who was not asked to join, but knew anyway, that the whispering was about “The No-Jew Club.” In a few days everyone knew including the teachers and parents. Stefan didn’t mention it to his mother and father but they found out anyway. His father yelled and swore and wanted to take him out of school. His mother just looked disgusted. The principal had a special assembly and the little twisty-faced man had never scared Stefan more than on the warm afternoon he addressed the whole second grade about how all men were brothers. Stefan didn’t listen because no matter what anyone said Evan was not his brother; Evan and the club people were mean. On purpose, too. He didn’t want to be anybody’s brother who was in a club like that.
Billy and the other two club members in class got the silent treatment for a whole day, which made Stefan very nervous and feel sorry for the three boys, but he was too angry to talk to them. Also, if he did everyone would get annoyed at him. Lots of kids in that class, he found out, were Jewish.
“So this is the land of freedom,” his father went around saying for days.
“Please,” his mother asked weakly. “Don’t get so upset.”
“They’re all the same, Nazis, Poles, Americans. Full of hate and murder! We came here to be free of all that!”
Stefan was stunned by the things his father said after the No-Jew Club was sto
pped. They didn’t make sense. How could his father say Poles were so bad when they were Polish? It all scared him. He didn’t understand who it was besides the nasty kids who didn’t like Jews. Debby was a Jew. He liked her.
Sasha was over at their house a few times that week; mostly he talked to Stefan’s father in Russian, trying to make his father feel better, Stefan guessed. He thought it was his mother who needed to be helped, though he didn’t know what there was to do. He heard her sniffling in the bathroom once as she was washing the sink. He wanted to go to her but he didn’t: he remembered how she had backed away from him that time. The way she walked around the house was like someone was sick.
Because Sasha came by all that week Stefan was not surprised that Sasha opened the door for him Friday afternoon.
“Where’s Mommy?”
Sasha hesitated and the look on his face was so weird Stefan knew there was trouble. He dropped his book bag and rushed to the kitchen, but it was empty. “Mommy?” He went down the hall to their bedroom, Sasha following. Not there—he tried the bathroom. That was empty too. He stood in the middle of his room, glaring at Sasha, who hovered in the doorway.
“Where is she?”
“Stefan—”
“Where is she?” he screamed.
Sasha didn’t move. “She had to go away for a while.”
It wasn’t a dream—his mother had left him. She was gone—she was gone. Stefan gasped and gasped, wanting to cry for her. Sasha crouched down next to him.
“She didn’t leave you. She was upset. She had to go away.” Stefan watched Sasha’s wide mouth open and close, and he heard words, but all he understood was that she had left him. And when Sasha held out his arms Stefan couldn’t move. He didn’t want to; he wanted to be dead. He wondered at the strange chokey sound he heard—was it coming from him?
“It’s best you stay with me for now, your father—” Sasha didn’t finish and Stefan didn’t care. He watched Sasha find a bag and begin to pack his clothes in it.
“Do you want this? This?” Sasha pointed and Stefan nodded or shook his head. When Sasha finished Stefan rose and silently added The Three Musketeers and Scotty, whose other eye was gone now.
They rode in a cab to Sasha’s. Stefan didn’t answer anything Sasha said to him. Inside him was a blare of word-music: She’s gone, she’s gone. He couldn’t make the ugly sounds go away.