Skating with the Statue of Liberty

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  “Want to see what I brought?” Jean-Paul pulled Gustave into a corner behind some drapes. “My mother said not to, so don’t tell.” He pulled a rolled-up Superman comic from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. On the front, Superman was punching a cowering villain. “Pow!” it said above him in large, electric-looking letters. Gustave flipped the pages as Jean-Paul animatedly explained the stories.

  “Too bad he isn’t in the American army,” Gustave said, handing it back. “The war would be over tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Jean-Paul turned to a large picture. “Look—here he stops bad guys who are about to blow up a dam.”

  Aunt Geraldine came toward them out of the crowd of people, and Jean-Paul quickly stuffed the comic back into his suit pocket, trying to look innocent. “Gustave, viens ici!” Aunt Geraldine said. “I want to introduce you to Rabbi Blum. His family came from Paris too, some years ago. He’s tutoring Jean-Paul, and he’ll be tutoring you too. He also leads the Boy Scouts. Come, Jean-Paul, let’s let them talk.”

  The rabbi was drinking a cup of coffee. He had kind, bright eyes in a thin face and curly, graying hair. “I’ve heard a lot about you from your aunt and cousin. So you’ll be studying Torah with me. Are you looking forward to your bar mitzvah?”

  “Well, I’m a terrible singer. I don’t want to sing in front of everybody,” Gustave said.

  Rabbi Blum chuckled sympathetically. “Chanting Torah isn’t the same as singing. Don’t worry. Just be loud and clear, and you’ll do fine. We’ll practice until you can do it in your sleep.”

  Another man tapped the rabbi on the shoulder, and he started to move away.

  “Wait, can I ask you something?” Gustave blurted out.

  “Bien sûr.” Of course. The rabbi paused, looking patiently at Gustave.

  “Do you know any way to find people—Jews—in France? Ones who have disappeared?”

  The rabbi suddenly looked exhausted and much older. “That’s a lot harder than the singing problem. Have you asked the people at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society?”

  “My father did. He filled out some forms. But we haven’t heard anything.”

  “That’s probably the best thing you can do. But, Gustave…” The rabbi hesitated, looking at him sympathetically. “I know so many people here who are trying to communicate with friends and relatives in Europe without any luck. It’s just chaos over there. We may have to wait until after the war.”

  Something in the room was making Gustave dizzy. The man behind Rabbi Blum tapped him on the shoulder again, insistently, and the rabbi clasped Gustave’s hand and moved away.

  “Hey! Come on!” Jean-Paul was in a line across the room, waving at him. Gustave made his way between the groups of people. The room was too crowded and too bright, and the rapid French conversation felt too loud.

  “What took you so long?” Jean-Paul asked cheerfully. “Look, there’s challah and pastries! I saved you a spot in line.”

  A stout woman with two small children was just ahead of them. The older boy yanked her arm, swinging on her, and banged against Gustave’s shin. Gustave stepped back and rubbed it. “I asked Rabbi Blum if he could help us find Marcel.”

  “What? You asked him about…Marcel?” Jean-Paul’s voice dropped to a whisper at the last word, as if there were something shameful about talking about him.

  Rage surged up in Gustave. “Yeah. Marcel! Our best friend, remember? Who’s stuck back in Europe? Or don’t you care? Doesn’t anybody care?”

  Jean-Paul’s face flamed, and his voice got louder. “Of course I care! But you act like you don’t know anything about what’s going on. It’s dumb to talk about it. There’s just no point. Talking about it just gets everyone upset.”

  “Shut up!” Gustave shouted. “Of course there’s a point!”

  Heads turned in their direction. The boy in front of them stopped swinging on his mother’s arm and looked at them with wide eyes.

  “Don’t you get it?” Jean-Paul yelled back. “They kill Jews for no reason at all! After you left Paris and the Nazis came, I saw them beat up an old man, right in front of me. He could hardly walk. He didn’t get off the sidewalk and into the gutter fast enough for them. They kicked his cane out from under him and they beat him to death! Right there on the street!”

  The man behind them put his hand on Jean-Paul’s shoulder. “Hey! Shhh!” he said. Jean-Paul shrugged away from the man’s hand, but his voice got quieter.

  “It was horrible,” he said. “Blood was everywhere. Marcel is probably dead, Gustave. You’re not stupid. You know it’s true. Why won’t you just admit it? You know his family’s from Poland, and the first people the Nazis took were the Polish Jews living in France. If the Nazis got him, Marcel is probably dead.”

  The room was suddenly impossibly bright and clear. It shattered into fragments, and then the shards pulled back together dizzyingly, slightly askew.

  “It isn’t true! The Nazis might not have gotten Marcel. He isn’t dead! How can you say that? He isn’t!” Gustave backed away, knocking over a folding chair. “I’m going!” he shouted. “Tell them I’m going home!” Slipping in between groups of people, he ran toward the stairs, up, and out onto the street.

  It couldn’t be true. Marcel couldn’t be dead.

  24

  Gustave’s legs were walking. He didn’t know where they were heading, but it wasn’t home. He had started out at a run, then gradually slowed. By now, he might have been walking for hours. He wasn’t sure. The soles of his feet burned, but his legs, sore and heavy, just kept going and going, mechanically pushing against the pavement, heading down one block after another. Traffic roared by, and buildings loomed up around him. After a while he realized he was no longer in an area of clean, elegant buildings, neighborhoods full of men in hats, women pushing baby carriages, laughing girls playing jump rope. Here, the streets were almost entirely empty.

  He kept walking between buildings that looked like factories, breathing in exhaust, hearing the clang of machinery. The city seemed at once to stretch on forever ahead of his feet and to imprison him, with its tall walls, garbage-strewn streets, impersonal buildings, and relentless noise. After a long time he had to stop, because he was at a river. It had to be the East River. For a long time he watched it tumble by, dirty gray water under a somber gray sky. A bridge loomed up beside him, and he wanted to be on it, to be suspended above everything. He searched until he found the ramp to the bridge and then made his way along the pedestrian walkway, hearing the traffic honk and rumble as it crossed. When he was somewhere near the middle of the bridge, he stopped, peering through the metal barrier at the water beneath him. Far in the distance, against the pale sky, a greenish silhouette rose up. It was the Statue of Liberty. He was seeing it for the first time. Her arm was raised high, holding up her torch.

  He’s probably dead. You’re not stupid. You know it’s true. Marcel is probably dead.

  Jean-Paul’s voice in Gustave’s head was relentless. None of the noise around him could make it go away. Under his feet the girders thrummed with the weight of the traffic, which went on and on, heartlessly, as if it didn’t matter, as if the lives of Jews didn’t matter, across the ocean in Europe, out of sight and far away. Gustave took a deep breath of the polluted, foul-smelling air.

  Yes, he did know. Of course he knew. Marcel could be dead. However much he drowned it out with other thoughts, with the activities of his daily life here in America, he knew it. It was knowledge that Gustave pushed away into the darkness, but it kept coming back, lurching up, making his stomach sick. It was knowing Marcel might be dead that gave him nightmares, that woke him, gasping and sweating, in the night. That was why Jean-Paul’s eyes went flat and lifeless whenever Gustave said Marcel’s name. Gustave had known it, of course, although he hadn’t let himself say it in his head. But he did now. Marcel Landau could be dead.

  Far below Gustave’s feet the water churned, gray and turbulent. Over him the sky opened, the pale gray now streaked with white
clouds, far away, inaccessible, offering no help, no hope. His best friend might be dead. He might have died as a boy, died without ever having had the chance to grow up. “Died” was too polite a word. If he was dead, he had been murdered.

  But Gustave’s own heart still throbbed and beat inside him, powerful, pulsing. He was just a small speck in all that space, a small speck in the heartless, roaring, ignorant, insensible world. Yet inside him, energy rushed. It almost seemed wrong, how alive he felt. Why couldn’t he share it with Marcel, give him half of his own boundless life?

  But he couldn’t. And how did you go on living, how did you keep on passing through the days in a world in which such hideous things were true?

  Gustave stood on the bridge, clutching the cold metal railing with his worn gloves, staring down at the river, watching the water flow on and on, for what might have been hours. Gradually, he realized that he could no longer see the water clearly. He looked around. The sky was darkening. Traffic continued to pass, rumbling, over the bridge. In the buildings on either side of the river, lights were starting to come on. The lights along the next bridge lit up suddenly, swirling up and down like a strand of pearls wrapped around a woman’s fingers. The bright edge of the moon was rising on the Brooklyn side of the river, slowly gliding up into the sky. It hung there, huge and luminous and yellow, reflected across the dark ripples of the water. Gustave watched it moving above the horizon, getting smaller and smaller. He wished that he could understand what the moon was trying to tell him. He couldn’t. But somehow, slowly, his grief quieted. The night air was cold and clear. He walked down off the bridge and started toward home.

  25

  “You can’t just disappear like that! What were you thinking, wandering all over the city?” Papa looked angrier than he had in a long time.

  “I told Jean-Paul to tell you I was leaving,” Gustave said.

  “Your mother was so worried she cried! You’ve been gone for hours. That’s not acceptable. You need to be punished. No Boy Scouts this week. No fun activities. You just go to school, to Hebrew lessons with the rabbi, and to your job. The rest of the time you come straight home, you hear me?”

  “Fine,” Gustave said dully. Papa didn’t understand anything. Gustave didn’t want to go to Boy Scouts anyway. If he did, he’d have to see Jean-Paul.

  “Are you all right? Why did you run out of the synagogue?” Maman asked, twisting her hands. Her eyes were red, and Gustave felt a pang of guilt.

  But talking about Marcel out loud would make it more real. “I just wanted to get out of there,” he muttered.

  —

  All week Gustave felt slow and heavy, clumsy, and strangely numb. On Sunday he had his first lesson with Rabbi Blum, who gave him prayers to practice afterward, so he had more homework than usual to do in the afternoons. Understanding English felt harder, as if he had sunk under murky water and couldn’t push himself back up to the top. Even riding around doing laundry deliveries for Mr. Quong made his knees ache and his calves feel heavy. And after he got home, eating dinner felt like work, all that chewing, and nothing tasted good enough to be worth the effort. In his last class on Friday afternoon, Gustave ignored Mrs. McAdams droning on about sonnet structure and focused on running the tip of his pencil around and around the long, oval-shaped pencil groove at the top of the desk. He watched as the groove got darker and darker. It was strangely satisfying.

  “Gustave…Gustave!” a voice whispered insistently. “I said, do you want to walk Chiquita with me today?”

  His head jerked up. September Rose was standing in front of him in her red coat, fidgeting impatiently. Everyone else was gone, even the teacher.

  “The bell rang! Class is over! What’s going on with you? It’s like you’ve been sleepwalking all week. Are you worried about that oral report or something?”

  Gustave shook his head. He had forgotten all about it.

  “Is something wrong in your family? Is somebody sick?”

  “No.”

  “Is it about France? You’re worried about the war? Or about someone in France?”

  He blinked, and for the first time that afternoon, his eyes focused, and he really looked at her, startled that she had guessed. “Yes. A friend.”

  “Oh,” she said, suddenly looking awkward. “I didn’t want to be right. Did you get some bad news or something?”

  “No. No news. Nobody knows where my friend Marcel is. It’s like he disappeared from the earth.” Gustave was surprised to hear himself telling her about it.

  “That’s really rough. I worry about my dad too. But at least I get letters.” She zipped and unzipped her bag several times, looking at him nervously, as if she didn’t know what to say.

  Then a smile came over her face. “In my dad’s last letter he talked about hot dogs. Do you know how they cook hot dogs in the army? They deep-fry them! Isn’t that revolting? My dad said they were dripping with grease, and the ketchup slid right off!” She laughed. “He writes a lot about the disgusting food. But do you want to meet me in Central Park later? I’ll go home and get Chiquita, and we can walk her together.”

  “I can’t. I’m being punished. I can do my laundry deliveries, but then I have to go right home.” He felt a jab of frustration.

  “Ooh—what did you do?” September Rose’s eyes gleamed.

  Just then the classroom door opened, and Mrs. McAdams walked in. September Rose jumped back to her desk and zipped her bag closed. “What are you two still doing here?” Mrs. McAdams asked suspiciously. “September Rose, you know better. GUS, CHILDREN NOT ALLOWED AFTER SCHOOL. NO! NO! NO!” She wagged her finger at them.

  “Sorry, Mrs. McAdams. I just left something under my desk. I had to come back and get it,” said September Rose. She left the room immediately. Gustave pulled his schoolbag onto his shoulder and followed her out the door.

  —

  That weekend, Gustave had his second lesson with Rabbi Blum. He sat at the kitchen table in the rabbi’s apartment, repeating the Hebrew prayers, chanting them sluggishly. Long ago, back in Paris, in the old synagogue gleaming with polished wood, those prayers had pulled at him like music, rising and falling, mysterious, half understood. Now they felt lifeless.

  “Arrête!” Stop! Rabbi Blum burst out.

  “I told you,” Gustave said flatly. “I can’t sing or even chant. I know what it’s supposed to sound like, but I can’t make it come out like that.”

  Rabbi Blum peered at him through his glasses. “We need to talk. Your heart isn’t in what you are doing.”

  “I practiced.” He had gone over the prayers the night before—for a few minutes, anyway.

  “I’m going to ask you a big question,” the rabbi said. “An important question. Do you believe in the existence of Adonai?” Rabbi Blum’s voice was reverent as he pronounced the Hebrew name for God.

  Gustave shrugged. The floor of the rabbi’s kitchen was made of buckled brown-and-white linoleum.

  Rabbi Blum banged the table sharply, spilling some tea out of his cup. “Look at me, Gustave! Pay attention!”

  Gustave looked up, startled.

  “I mean it. Tell me honestly. Do you believe that Adonai exists?”

  “No. I don’t.” He had said it out loud, and the floor hadn’t collapsed under them, the apartment building splintering into fragments, furniture and people falling down through the air. He had said it out loud, and nothing had happened at all.

  The rabbi looked at him quizzically. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Of course I’m sure.” Gustave looked at him furiously. “How could He? How could Adonai let such awful things happen in Europe? Adonai can’t exist.”

  “Mmmm.” Rabbi Blum sat back in his chair. “Yes. It’s easy to think that.”

  “Easy? It isn’t easy!”

  Rabbi Blum nodded slowly. He rubbed his scalp, making a tuft of his curly, graying hair stick up. “There’s something I find useful when I feel doubtful about the existence of Adonai,” Rabbi Blum said, looking
at him intently.

  Gustave stared. The rabbi sometimes doubted the existence of God?

  “A wise American philosopher once wrote that when there is no way of knowing which of two possibilities is true, when there isn’t enough evidence to know, either way, it is reasonable just to choose one or the other. And he thought we should choose the belief that has better consequences.”

  Gustave stared at him angrily. “What does that even mean?”

  “We should believe the thing that makes better things happen. For example, if I don’t believe in Adonai, I might despair. But if I believe in Adonai, even though there is no way to prove or disprove his existence, it has good consequences. I feel stronger, more connected to the world, more connected to other Jews.”

  “But it’s your job to say that, right? And if you believe in Adonai, you get to keep your job,” Gustave said bluntly. He didn’t mean to be rude, but right now he just didn’t have the energy not to say what he thought.

  “Well, yes. It does have that good consequence too.” The rabbi smiled and reached out, tousling Gustave’s hair. “I think you’ve had enough religious instruction for this afternoon. Go on home and eat your dinner.”

  Gustave had his coat on and was at the door when Rabbi Blum stopped him. “I know you’re worried about your missing friend, and I’m very sorry,” he said softly. “Many, many of us are also worried about friends and family members in Europe. But you need to go on. There’s no alternative. I don’t mean to say that you should forget. But you have one life to live, one infinitely precious life. You must live it. You must live it with all your heart, with all your energy.”

  Right now it didn’t feel as if he had any energy at all. But the rabbi meant well. Gustave nodded.

  Rabbi Blum put his hand on the door, holding it open as Gustave stood in the hallway. “I notice you missed the Boy Scout meeting this week,” he said, lingering in the doorway. “But you’re surely going to come on the camping trip, aren’t you?”